« Engagement: The Good Stuff | Main | To Lag, or Lead, or Lead-Lag: Examining the Question in the Real World »

10/06/2010

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Thanks for the post Jim.

I did a presentation yesterday and one of my fellow panelists decried "activists" for complaining that Walmart's CEO made $30Mil last year (no, I have not verified the numbers, this is simply what was said) and that the majority of Walmart's staff was underpaid. This panelist asked the audience:

"Is $30Mil really too much for the CEO at Walmart? I think that, compared to the CEOs at other firms, he makes too little."

The audience did not publicly disagree.

I think you are right. This does require multiple discussions. Pay is a scorecard and we have created few others that have had similar staying power. The question then becomes how to handle the comparison of scorecards? Will there ever be some objective (evidence-based) way to determine how much is too much, in an agreed to manner?

The discussions must continue because the issue will not go away...ever.

Dan: Agree. What is "underpaid?" What is "too much" and "too little?" Those are just more relative questions. Sort of depends on what you want to believe, and what your standard of comparison (your scorecard) is, doesn't it?

The comments to this entry are closed.