My pet theory: - To make it to the top, you need an aura around your persona. How often do you see an anointed one or two, among thousands? It's corporate reli

My pet theory: - To make it to the top, you need an aura around your persona. How often do you see an anointed one or two, among thousands? It's corporate religion essentially, the politics reduces the field unnecessarily to the level where there's just a handful of crown princes. - Similar to sports, people try to split hairs about who is good enough and who isn't. Nobody's ever heard of randomness and serendipity. Add to that a total lack of controllable evidence, and you get stories about just how amazing this it that prince is. - Most CEOs don't get a lot of chances as captain. It's like running for president, once you've lost your aura suffers. Someone did a study of this, I forget where. - Since it's magic the cards are in the hands of the candidate who is chosen. They can really push up the price, and they need to before it wears off. - Why has this happened more and more in recent decades? Generation of people who've grown up believing in magic. More TV news, more credit given to the boss, more people believe in magic. - The boards-are-friends theory is not bad either, but boards have always been a bunch of business people who knew each other. More likely globalisation has provided a excuses for higher compensation: market is bigger and more complex, we're making more money. - These are excuses, we can tell because how often does comp go up when perf is down? How often is perf relative to the index? How often is risk taken into account? - Other things that don't make sense in the naive model of compensation: big business is like oil tankers, next quarter has already happened. Why would you pay a guy for the previous guy's performance? Why do you pay mega severance?