Watching Citigroup mishandle a shareholder revolt over executive pay brings to mind one of history’s most colorful parables about chief executive hubris and recovery.
The year was 483 B.C.; Persian emperor Xerxes was bent on sending a vast army to attack Athens and its allies. But the pontoons his engineers hastily assembled and sent across the narrow waters of the Hellespont broke apart in a storm. Outraged at what he saw as the channel’s defiance, Xerxes ordered soldiers to flay the Hellespont with whips, shackle its waters, and hurl curses and insults at the waves. What Xerxes eventually learned, though, was that success would come thanks not to futile gestures and top down dictates, but to the methodical work of Persian engineers, who erected what they should have in the first place: a working bridge.
