More on Executive Compensation
It’s Labor Day here in the States and I’m working rather than participating in the Labor Parade like I should be. I read through a draft sent to me by Mark Van Clieaf. (“Executive Accountability and Excessive Compensation: A New Test For Director Liability”) Mark and Co. have done a study of 700 Fortune 500 companies (representing 80% of the US stock market) and found some troubling things about CEO compensation. Heck, about the entire executive team and board levels. It should be posted on the new compensation standards website now, and on the MVC Associates International website sometime this week or next. You know how it is. (MVC is Mark’s company, which he says are “Consultants in Organization Design, Leadership & Stakeholder Value”.) Corporate Governance Advisor will publish it in November of this year. For those of you who want to be entirely accurate, it’s “forthcoming” or “scheduled”. This stuff should really get more press. It’s great data and strong recommendations that can be implemented. If not easily, at least doable. Go forth and read more.
He also raises an issue in the email to me that I’d love to talk more about sometime, except I’m not sure I have any qualifications whatsoever:
we also need to distinguish between
Time-span for planning and
Time-span for decision discretion ( accountability )
two separate measures
I have a lot of trouble with this. I know that Jaques said that delegating the planning function was anathema (OK, he just said it was stupid and shouldn’t be done) but I know that it is not entirely agreed upon by others. Solaas, in his article “Why Is RO So Hard to Learn?” talks about Jaques comments to him during the late 1990s about this issue.
Also, just to put it somewhere, this lovely story from “Engineers as Soothsayers” by Bob Colwell in this month’s IEEE Computer:
During a meeting with an [Intel] executive in 1996, he siad, “You hired an extra 10 heads [who were experts in the terrible problems that other companies had in implementing multiple processor (MP) architectures in their chips] for the MP feature on P6, and it came out right.” I thought, Yes, that’s right, you should praise my foresight. I saved you a lot of money, and you’re lucky you have me on your team.
But then he said, “Looks like you didn’t need them after all.” I was staggered. What? No! They are the reason it came out right! He just smiled. I wasn’t smiling.
Why is it that you have to create crises on projects to prove that the steps that you took to be able to respond to them are paying off? I remember getting very low marks as a project manager by my direct bosses because I never had any crises and others did. They were seen as heroes. I was seen as getting lucky each time. Luck I made myself by getting the right people in the right place. My projects were always within budget and ontime. Always. Of course, having to plan for someone else to take over the project always gives me lots of room to manuever…
I thougth that the quote was relevant. It’s an interesting article and worth reading if you’re a computer nerd.
