Bounties in the National Football League (NFL)? Most fans were appalled when former professional basketball player, Charles Barkley, disclosed on The Dan Patrick Show that players will pool money, called a bounty, which goes to the player who hits an opponent hard enough to intimidate him. With a group competing for the bounty, the opposing player is in for rough time.

“You have to be a punk to snitch that out,” said Barkley, now a sports analyst since retiring from the National Basketball Association (NBA). Athletes are upset not at the prospect of losing their pool but at the “snitches” and “punks” who gave the information to the NFL. I bet if their money was invested with Bernie Madoff, the admitted operator of the largest financial fraud in U.S. history, they would have appreciated a few punks around.

Unfortunately, Madoff wasn’t the only rotten CEO of an American organization. L. Dennis Kozlowski, John Rigas, Joseph Nacchio, Bernard Ebbers, Kenneth Lay, and Jeffrey Skilling come to mind, too. In some cases, one brave soul came forward and said, “Something is wrong here.” A snitch or a hero? It takes some nerve to challenge the hierarchy in American organizations.

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