The news that employees at AIG are on the verge of being rewarded $165 million in bonuses at a time when the insurance giant is on the verge of collapse is rightly shocking to taxpayers who have pumped billions into the company to keep it afloat. Of course, the Obama administration was wrong to initially defend the bonuses as contractually obligated. In 1990, I was asked to assume the CEO position at the management consulting firm Bain & Co., then in acute financial distress. The need to restructure was paramount or else the company would fail, leaving 1,000 employees without a job. We renegotiated debt with bankers. We rewrote leases with landlords. We designed a whole new governing system. We also had to convince the founding partners to turn back profits they had already taken out of the company. Of course, we had no legal basis for making such a request, but without a shared sacrifice we couldn’t keep the company alive. Generously, the founders returned the money, putting us on a path to stabilizing the firm and turning it over to new leadership. It’s difficult to understand why the same lesson about shared sacrifice is lost on AIG’s executive team and their government overseers.