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I agree and disagree with your point. It's incredibly hard to determine how much good a new CEO has done, and how much is inertia. I think that's a strong argum
by andrewvc 11y ago
I agree and disagree with your point. It's incredibly hard to determine how much good a new CEO has done, and how much is inertia. I think that's a strong argument against the incredibly high CEO pay in contemporary companies, it dramatically underestimates the importance of the work of the rank and file.
That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? And of the set of people who could have done better, how many would take an offer to fix yahoo contingent on performance? I think the answer is probably zero.
The whole system is rigged, companies feel like they have to pick someone out of a relatively narrow talent pool, and since they are (wrongly) in such demand, they can all command extremely high salaries.
- jkot 11y agoI think the question is not if CEO is good, but if CEO is worth her/his salary.
- vinceguidry 11y agoHmm, I would think salary would be one of the smaller considerations when choosing a CEO at that level. It's generally going to be a drop in the budget compared to annual revenue. A negotiation point for sure, but more of a side show to other concerns.
- sandworm101 11y ago158 million is never a drop in the bucket. Just because a company is worth billions doesn't mean they are willing to throw away millions. There are still lawyers out there looking to bring derivative actions.
- hkmurakami 11y agoMaybe if the company were profitable and minting tens of billions of dollars in revenue a year. But we're talking about $YHOO, which for years has had negative core enterprise value. In such a situation it's not really a drop in a bucket.
- vinceguidry 11y agoThen it's even less important. When you need Superman to save the world, you don't quibble over his price. Okay, maybe a little, but everybody's a professional here.
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- namelezz 11y agoI wonder the same thing. Why do CEOs get paid too much?
- heurist 11y agoIt was explained to me this way: in the US executive boards are unevenly weighted toward CO interests. In countries where wage experts and workers are more likely to sit on boards the ratio isn't absurd because boards are less likely to vote for higher executive wages (Japan and Europe have reasonable CEO wages).
- spitfire 11y agoIn Japan at least a large fraction of the compensation comes in non-monetary "perks". Ex: Company car, use of company plane, etc. Similar things happen in Europe. Though I'm sure it isn't as insane as it is in the US.
- pkaye 11y agoThe corporate boards members tend to be CEOs of other companies so they have a tendency to give each other raises because it is in their best interest.
- jfoutz 11y agoIn a global economy it's winner take all. .05% better might matter.
- endtime 11y agoNo board wants to admit they have a below average CEO, so they all have to pay them above average, which of course raises the average.
- eru 11y agoCoincidentally, CEO pay has really started exploding after publishing it became mandatory.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
- sremani 11y agoIf no one could have gotten better results, I can think of many capable people who could have gotten similar results for a lot cheap. Yahoo! is almost paying MM $400 million and the $110 million exec who stayed about 11 months she fired. For all the Meritocracy talk about general foot soldiers, the SV execs seem to get a lot of "Participation Trophies".
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoI would have run the company into the ground for as little as ten million.
- negamax 11y agoShe's making more than Tim Cook? No way
- w1ntermute 11y ago> That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. In reality, they should've brought in an ex-consultant or ex-banker who could chop off pieces of the business and sell them to the highest bidder (essentially, what's going to happen now). The second mistake they made was that they decided the right person to execute on a product strategy was Marissa Mayer, when in reality that isn't her strong suit.
- rms_returns 11y ago> The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. If they had given some proper direction to their innovation, perhaps that could have saved them. One stupid decision they made back in 2006 was to shutdown geo-cities. The data hype hadn't even begun at that time and with some vision they could have turned geo-cities into a thing similar to what cloud-hosted services like aws are doing today. Again, yui and yii were (and to some extent still are) great frameworks created by Yahoo. They should have tried to capitalize on that front, maybe offered paid support or created CMSs on top of them like eCommerce and/or web-based CRM systems. I know there is competition in this field, but a high quality web-based product coming from Yahoo Inc. would have been very well-received by the industry.
- taurath 11y agoThey got rid of all the visionary people a while ago.
- frik 11y agoThe biggest mistake was to shutdown their own search engine, and pay for Bing search results. And their Ads-deal with MSFT wasn't that long-term successful. Yahoo had the biggest Hadoop cluster back in 2009, the were at the forefront of big data and contributed to many open source projects. Then everything went downhill. Now Yahoo has what? Flickr, Tumblr, Mail, ...? Right, they own a stack of Alibaba (China), and now close or sell everything else. Sad, hopefully Flickr, Tumblr and some other good services survive.
- venomsnake 11y ago>That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? Could anyone possibly done worse? She makes Elop look competent.
- venomsnake 11y ago>That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? Could anyone possibly done worse? She makes Elop look competent.