DISQUS

AMERICAblog: US investors continue to support CEO pay

  • Indigo · 8 months ago
    I think it's important to clean out the dead wood, as the expression goes, and I'm confident that the "dead wood" is easily identified. They're the ones who threaten to leave if their wishes are not met. Fine. Let them go. No one is ever irreplaceable, nostalgia and romantic reaganism aside.

    I admired a former administrator I worked with many years ago who, at a faculty meeting, confronted with an uncooperative faculty member who insisted on having his way over a divisive issue, when the faculty member threatened to resign if his wishes were not met, that former administrator said, "The university administration is used to conducting job searches and is not inconvenienced by the possiblity of another one."

    Ah . . . the joys of faculty meetings!
  • GDAEman · 8 months ago
    Establishment investors supporting establishment CEOs. They're all about the status quo.
  • Zorba · 8 months ago
    Very true. And the Boards of Directors are even worse. It's incestuous- they're all on each others' Boards, so they won't do anything to upset the status quo. "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours."
  • Father_Time · 8 months ago
    The whole premis of American business is to cheat others out of as much as possible. Ronnie Raygun called it; "magic of the market place". Because calling it what it is would destroy the mystique.

    We could bring back the terminology: "Ethical profit Margin" within our business schools, but that would be ethical. You cannot have ethics in business because that would bring into question unethical pay, which now only applies to the working unwashed masses.
  • Zorba · 8 months ago
    I think that part of the problem may be that so many shares of so many companies are held by large pension funds, mutual funds, and other institutional investors. Until the managers of these funds step up and vote for change, the individual shareholders probably can't make much of a difference (those who bother to vote). Shareholders, including fund managers, need to wake up. (And fund managers are shirking their responsibilities to their clients by not voting against these bloated pay plans.)
  • Donald S Warner · 8 months ago
    In the course of a long career as a business consultant, I have seen a fair amount of preening CEO's who are fawned over by other executives, directors, and managers as well as the public. It's from God's lips to the CEO's ears. On a few occasions, I a knee-jerk guffaw at the preposterous adulation shown these men -- and they were all men -- and didn't matter how much they'd screwed up the companies. So far as I can see, this is a societal sickness that persists. Investors continuing to support outrageous CED compensation packages? I would be happily astronished if they didn't.
  • frank · 8 months ago
    most investors are big mutual funds. they are part of the problem, not the solution