Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Internalizing, Externalizing, and Compensation

There’s a great post at Naked Capitalism skewering Robert Rubin for his unwillingness to take responsibility for his role in Citigroup’s troubles. Rubin is an externalizer – bad things happened as a result of external forces and other people beyond his control (the opposite is an internalizer, who, when bad things happen, attribute the cause to themselves).

As Yves points out, it’s a little hard to justify paying someone $115M if, when things go badly, they claim they couldn’t have influenced events.