> In the private sector, there's a slightly more direct link between job underperformance and being fired.
Not in my experience. Connections are most important than competence in big corporations. The bigger the company the most is works like the old Soviet Union.
In most big companies you don’t really get fired for bad performance (as long as you try to do your job).
In my experience you only really get fired when the command from top comes to cut X% of the workforce (sometimes this is yearly due to stack ranking systems) but even then the best way to keep your job is not doing a good job. In actuality it is connections (being good friends with your boss)
Remember a lot of large mulinational companies are larger than many small countries so if you have a very large multinational company you're gonna have the same type of corruption and inefficiency as in countries and governments. Of course if you have a small startup with 10 people and the owners are very involved in the day-to-day business they can probably spot when there is underperformance but in a multinational company where you can barely know who is responsible for what probably not.
And if your strategy fails, you (usually) can't raise taxes to make up for lost revenue. So there is an even more direct link between underperformance and losing money.
I don't get such incomplete, selective, comparisons.
The country can't go bankrupt and you just found another one.
Yes, when a country messes up they have to actually fix things, there is no way around it. Except getting merged into another country - like my birth country, the GDR, ended up as West Germany's problem (but its people still had to do the work).
Also, if big enough companies (and banks) fail, it is the same. Not having a string government would not help either, in such cases the companies would be the government, as we saw in even wilder times of huge companies and much less state in the US some century or two ago.
At some point in the hierarchy you have to live with not having omniscience and accept that sometimes things don't work out, and that you can't just walk away from the consequences of those failures.
Oh boy. Haven't watched much US news since, like, Reagan, have we? Dumping the debt of your failures on future generations has become somewhat of a competitive sport in politics. Can't really do that in the private sector.
If your strategy fails the government bails you out, or you float away from the burning wreckage on your golden parachute until you land in a new job at another company which you can then ruin without meaningful consequences or you just retire with the millions you got in your severance package and live the rest of your life carefree.
But nobody gets fired to spend money on stuff made by giants such as IBM, Oracle or Microsoft, regardless of the issues than can arise, while choosing a less known competitor is a liability for the decision maker, even if the impact is much smaller.
Nope. That correlation disappears completely for enterprises of larger size. I have more often than not seen the least (or even negative) productive climb the promotional ladder in those environments.
