And, in a final grand but sad irony, the real principals (the people who put their money into mutual funds and pension plans, sometimes through yet another layer of agents) are frequently the very individuals whose long-term employment is jeopardized when the focus on short-term EPS acts to restrict investments in innovative growth opportunities. We suggest that the principal-agent theory is obsolete in this context. What we really have is an agent-agent problem, where the desires and goals of the agent for the share owners compete with the desires and goals of the agents running the company. The incentives are still misaligned, but managers should not capitulate on the basis of an obsolete paradigm.