With what has been going on in Corporate America these days you might wonder why they are paid at all.

The financial books are being "cooked" to make things look better than they are. Yet the executives of these large companies sometimes walk away with millions in their pockets. This not only affects the people associated with these ill-run companies. As you may have noticed, the worldwide stock markets have also been affected and are going up and down like giant yo-yos to historical lows.

Maybe you have lost some money due to some of these slick deals. We have. In the media there are figures of sixty Billion (yes Billion!) lost to investors because of faulty actions by some of these top "executives." Perhaps President Bush has the answer with the threat of real jail time for these bad-guy executives. But this is after the fact and after they have done damage. And the real criminals are rarely deterred by threat of consequences. If they really understood consequences they would not be criminals.

What are we coming to? And who can we really trust? There are answers -- read on.

KEITH: Well, there are some changes needed but the sky is not falling. Executives of companies must be responsible for how their companies do in real terms, not in "cooked up" terms. This means then that executives will have to really take a look at what is going on and not just trust the information they are given as to how things are going. They must look and see the evidence that something in fact exists. They must take responsibility for everything that is below them organizationally and if they sit on top then that means everything.

They must have cross checks in place to verify the information they receive and this of course includes the books. Taking responsibility is a major part of the top executive position and responsibility is what must be taken if one takes this position. This is one of the reasons they are paid as they are.

DAVID: Yes, and having personally held senior executive positions and served on boards of directors, I can lend some understanding to the pressures and problems that have led some executives off the deep end and make some suggestions for dealing with these.

In working with hundreds of executives I have found that they are rarely trained to personally go and look at things in their organizations. The stellar ones do this despite the lack of training; the ones who don't learn to do this often crash. If corporate executives insist on remaining in an ivory tower and don't go personally inspect their organizations they are sitting ducks. If they inspect alertly and are in good communication with their organization, they can usually detect and handle things before something bad happens.

KEITH: People may get upset when they see some top executives and then learn what they are paid. How about the top executive at Disney, does he deserve his large salary?

One has to only look at what he does and understand, too, that he doesn't make nearly as much when the company doesn't do well (if the company does not meet certain financial goals then they may not receive any bonuses and only their base salary). The top executives at this level are paid well even as a base salary but you have to understand something about a lot of the people at this level. The thing to know is that they are rare.

Because they are rare, like a diamond they are valuable and so are paid well. In the Disney example before the current top executives came in, the company wasn't doing so well. Then these new executives came in and the company did very well. The stockholders were happy to pay their new top executives handsomely as they created much more viability for the company and the shareholders than what they had before. Employees benefited from more stable employment and the public got more products it liked.

DAVID: Why are they rare? Why is it that though management schools turn out graduates by the tens of thousands and very few of them become top level executives? The answer is simply that there is a lack of administrative know-how and technology that has been worked out and taught at our current business schools, even the best of them. The most glaring example that shows this to be true are all of the management consultants of the big accounting firms that have been tied in with major faults in the solvency debacle of some of the major corporations across the U.S.

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