What’s funny is given that most of my career in software has been cleaning up other people’s messes who DID fall upward, I think you’re just doing it wrong. I am too, which is why I haven’t fallen upward, but that’s another story.
The real fix for all this would be that people who get paid to clean up messes of any kind should just get paid MORE than anyone. Period.
Now now, let’s not bring common sense into this. 
And walk away from pension and environmental liabilities.
Of course they have to give huge bonuses, otherwise they won’t be able to attract the “good people”.
Good deal: company does well, get a bonus; company does poorly, get a bigger bonus! You literally can’t lose!
Like the song says: “Nice work if you can get it. If you get it, won’t you tell me how.”
What happened to the employees?
What happened to the retirees?
What happened to the suppliers chain?
What happened to the community?
Some people view these as externalities, i.e. not my problem.
Part of the problem was being raised to be too honest. Not lying, my mom one time told me it’s okay to lie a little bit on an application (can’t remember if it was for a job or something else) which shocked me. At most, I tell the silly white lies (yes you look good in that outfit/dress/whatever…) sometimes but even then I have to do it consciously otherwise I’ll just say the dumb thing which will hurt someone’s feelings.
The guys they hired to do the turn around were hired in 2015; the owners of Toys R US bought it in 2005. They aren’t the same people.
Were you ever given a bonus while you were bankrupting the company? That’s SOP in the private equity business.
A lot of big bankruptcies are strategic. If you know you are headed to bankruptcy, then you might as well take on lots of debt and transfer it to stakeholders. File for chapter 11 and negotiate to have a big chunk lot of that debt written off. What might seem like a failure by the TRU execs might actually be a big success.
If the executives were promised big money by the board to scam investment bankers, then they might be entitled to it. I’m not going to cry for them if they don’t get it though.
It’s non-trivial to avoid ditching your environmental liabilities in bankruptcy.
See, e.g., http://www.gdldlaw.com/site/rte_uploads/files/Treatment-of-Environmental-Liabilities-in-Bankruptcy.pdf . – it’s an interesting topic, but if it really was an easy way out of, say, CERCLA liability, every dry cleaner in the country would have gone bankrupt a thousand times over.
“Turn-around” and “restructuring” are still different specialties.
the adult children running the company maybe, actual children get peddled plastic crap while their company shovels money out of the poor parents pockets.
very few highly paid CEOs do anything to remotely justify the gross wage discrepancies between themselves and their workers. they aren’t getting paid disgusting amounts because they earn or deserve it…lol. That is a classist fable. There is a difference between reasonably more compensation, and exponentially more when your workers struggle to make a living wage.
also remember these are the bozos that created the exact situation they are in, which is the worst situation the company has ever been in. What exactly makes them the most qualified to get them out? How much they charge?
exactly. this sort of parasitic corporatism leaves a swath of community destruction in its wake while the people in charge live high off the horse without consequence. why would it change? 
Of course they will blame Amazon for the death of Toys R Us, just as they have for Sears, K-Mart, etc.
AI and automation are going to cause a lot of disruption in the world, but that will be compensated for by the utter elimination of lawyers.
Any correlation exists only in the minds of the CEOs and other executives. Boardroom tables are essentially butcher blocks for cutting off huge chunks of profit.
Yup.
OTOH…
