WHO
GETS WHAT

Topics: Ambition; Comparisons; Competition; Contentment; Coveting; Desires; Envy; Greed; Human Nature; Jealousy; Money; Pride; Prosperity; Riches; Service

References: Proverbs 14:30; 27:4; Luke 9:25; 12:15; 17:18; 2 Corinthians 10:12–18; Galatians 5:26; 1 Timothy 6:6

I am talking with the head of a mighty American corporation. We’re in his window-lined office, high in midtown Manhattan. The view—silver skyscrapers stacked one against another, dense, fine-lined, sparkling in the sun—is so perfect, so theatrical. It’s like a scrim, like a fake backdrop for a 1930s movie about people in tuxes and tails. Edward Everett Horton could shake his cocktail shaker here; Fred and Ginger could banter on the phone.

The CEO tells me it is “annual report time,” and he is looking forward to reading the reports of his competitors.

Why? I ask. I wonder what he looks for when he reads the reports of the competition.

He says he always flips to the back to see what the other CEOs got as part of their deal—corporate jets, private helicopters, whatever. “We all do that,” he says. “We all want to see who has what.”

The CEO is a talented and exceptional man, and I think afterward that he might, in an odd way, be telling me this about himself so I won’t be unduly impressed by him. But what I think, instead, is that it must be hard for him to keep some simple things in mind each day as he works, such as a job creates a livelihood, a livelihood creates a family, a family creates a civilization. Ultimately this CEO is in the civilization-producing business. Does he know it? Does that give him joy? Does he understand that is probably why he is there?

This man creates the jobs that create the world in which we live. And yet he can’t help it; his mind is on the jet.

—Peggy Noonan, John Paul the Great (Viking, 2005)