In a surprise move Britannia, the biscuit company, sacked 42 executives in one fell swoop. TOI, December 9. The company says that staff performance parameters have been sharpened this year and employees are now being graded as " great, good and gone ". How brutal is that? George Monbiot in The Guardian Weekly, November 18 quotes Danial Kahneman, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, who studied 25 wealth advisers over 8 years and found that their performance had zero consistency. " The results resembled what you would expect from dice-rolling, not a game of skill," he said. Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses and compared the results with patients at high security Broadmoor mental hospital. On certain indicators of psychopathy the business bosses matched or exceeded the scores of the patients. Published in the journal Psychology, Crime and Law. Seems that people who are successful executives reach the top by a mixture of sycophancy, egomania and ruthless exploitation of others. We are told repeatedly that chief executives of companies have to be paid astronomical sums of money because they are the best but that is not true. What is worse is that chief executives take the credit and vast sums in bonuses when companies make profits but are not held responsible for losses. John Thain was paid $ 83 million even as Merrill Lynch was bankrupt and Fred Goodwin was allowed to depart with a pension of 1 million pounds when RBS was rescued. CEOs must be made to pay back money for losses and banned if the company fails. That would be just.