The biggest dichotomy of the working world is one you could drive a truck through

We’ve all seen these charts, right? They are published almost hourly. CEOs are often quoted as pretending to care, when in reality they deeply lip service all these issues. To make ourselves feel better, we pretend that executives care about all these types of issues, when in fact they often don’t, and their own incentive structures are predicated on cost containment and cooked-books growth numbers.

In terms of “fair compensation,” well, their own compensation is quite fair, so it’s not really a personal issue. They might throw some solid coin to their lieutenants, the best sales guys, and the best engineers. Everyone else? Utter scraps. That’s the modern white-collar landscape.

In short, we spend a lot of time having to deify our executives for business acumen and supposed intelligence, right? So we want to often believe that they’re nice, compassionate people who understand what other tiers go through. That’s largely a smokescreen.

The best executives do care about people. Most executives care about themselves, and are often telling consultants they “don’t understand why these people (their employees) are struggling.” Empathy is hard, and empathy is harder in work settings, where it’s often seen as a sign of weakness. Why am I gonna care about how Martha…