All Posts Tagged With: "Whole Foods"
Excessive Executive Compensation Derails Excellence
I’m certainly no expert on executive compensation, but I believe there are two reasons that paying executives exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and stock options is bad for business. The first is ethical. The second is cultural.
An article online at the Wall Street Journal today stated that “pensions for top executives rose an average of 19% in 2008, with more than 200 executives seeing pensions increase more than 50%.” Yet, as Ellen E. Schultz and Tom McGinty write in “Pensions for Executives on Rise,” “Executive pensions rose even as the share prices at the companies declined an average of 37% in 2008 and many firms froze employee pensions and suspended retirement-plan contributions.” And cut employee benefits. And laid people off.
That’s an ethical issue. It’s a moral issue. The Economic Policy Institute stated that the average CEO of a company with at least $1 billion in annual revenue makes 262 times what the average worker makes. I’ve heard all the rationalizations for this but they miss the point: Companies pay their CEOs these outrageous amounts because they have passive investors and servile directors who rarely question the conventional wisdom of paying a leader 262 times more than other employees. Very few have the courage to break…
4Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
