
And, if you did a quantitative analysis of CEO compensation versus stakeholder satisfaction, I suspect you'd find a bell curve similar to that of any other job or profession.I recently purchased a Bern Carbon Watts helmet after looking for a new helmet for quite some time. Moreover, I generally think that companies get what they pay for. Indeed, in some cases, CEO pay is out of control and corporate governance is dysfunctional at best. We only know what we read, and that's pretty hyperbolic, if you ask me.īottom line. And like any job we've never had, most of us know very little about what it entails. While that's understandable, it's not logical. It's obscene, it's corrupt, and it stinks to high heaven.Īs the pinnacle of the business world, people tend to either glamorize or trash CEOs. So no, I'm not going to sit here and defend what top executives on Wall Street make. It's also part of a dysfunctional system that includes the Treasury, the Fed, Congress, and federal regulators, i.e. The truth is that Wall Street is a narrow sliver of corporate America. These days everybody's talking about Wall Street versus Main Street, whatever that means.Just look at a few recent failed or failing turnaround attempts: Jonathan Schwartz at Sun, Dan Hesse at Sprint, Michael Dell at Dell, Jerry Yang at Yahoo, Mike Zafirovski at Nortel. Just so you know, I certainly don't think every CEO is worth it.CEOs of most private companies, which are much smaller, probably make about half that. Sure, his stock and option grants were valued at $1.1M, but only because the stock went up.


Is Steve Jobs "worth it" to Apple's shareholders, customers, and employees? I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who would say "no." Likewise, was Bill Gates worth it to Microsoft's stakeholders? How about Richard Branson and the Virgin Group? Sure, they're founders / entrepreneurs.And since most people don't have a clue what a CEO actually does or how much the average CEO actually makes, it certainly deserves and answer. That said, I think "Are CEOs Worth It?" is a very intriguing question.
