Nexon’s CFO, Owen Mahoney, talks to the Wall Street Journal about online gaming monet

Why the antagonism?

Stating what I believe to be the gap in your knowledge is not antagonistic. I said you were ignorant of something, not that you yourself are an innately ignorant or stupid person.

Wouldn't he also be at least partially responsible for human resources of his own branch, at least for hiring those in the ranks directly below his? If he's the company's CFO wouldn't he also be responsible for how much money goes to a certain branch (I.E. the tech branch might be underfunded while the financial branch may be overfunded)? This is the core of where I'm getting at.

He's responsible, at most, for approving the budget projections for overall departments and deciding how much overall the company can afford to invest in various areas. It'd still be the middle managers arguing over why their budget needs to be what they've requested with other middle managers under him trying to meet his issued goals for the most part. He'd be the one to suggest adding or dropping a new venture based on performance or projected performance, but making a struggling venture perform better would be the responsibility of the team over that venture, as would requesting the budget and showing why that budget will bring a better return than they're currently experiencing and pay for itself.

Well yes, the middle managers are probably sitting on their asses doing nothing or seem to hire incompetent, untrained, or underprepared individuals. But who is responsible for hiring the middle managers? It's their own supervisors and/or directors. Who is responsible for hiring those supervisors/directors which are negligent enough to let the middle managers do a crappy job and look away? It's those ranked above them. Maybe the incompetence is seen from the top down and they still do not care. Hence this guy and his cohorts to me aren't completely excluded from blame even if they are on a different planet from a separate branch.

You're thinking too fuzzy, at that level they think more numerically. Are they making money? Are they profiting? Are the losing money? Where are they losing money? They're going to address losses and "new ways to make more" and they're going to address those losses with either cutting costs or by pumping what they can get more out of. "Ways to make existing streams even better" comes in third if it's lucky and is generally left to the people managing those areas. As one of those managers can you prove spending an extra 10K a year on customer service to increase perception of good customer service will recover that 10K AND make more profit? Can you prove that putting in another $1.99 piece of crap that cost them nothing to make but will sell thousands will make a profit? Ding ding, profit wins, why worry about fixing anything if you're already doing good enough?

Upper Management calls the navigation, middle management does the steering, the peons paddle.