Robert Samuelson chipped in another gratuitous defense of
outrageously high CEO pay in his column on WashingtonPost.com a few days ago.
He cited one of the standard rationales for sky-high
executive pay: companies are forever and feverishly "...competing for
managerial talent..." This is of course true, but Samuelsson took pains to
sustain the myth that there is a bona fide linkage between top talent and top
pay.
In fact, there is no hard data of any kind that suggests or
confirms that paying a CEO less will cause him/her to seek other employment. In
any event, there is no hard data measuring the comparative "talent"
of CEOs. Not only is it true that no one knows how much you have to pay to get
top talent, it’s also true that no one knows how little you can pay and still
recruit and retain top talent.
The mantra "we have to pay top dollar to get top
talent" is deliberately deceptive. It doesn’t describe any measurable,
repeatable course of action that corporate directors do or could do to obtain
and keep really superior managers in the top executive slots.
David Zaslav, as CEO of Discovery Communications, was paid
$156.1 million last year. I wonder what he would have done differently if he
had been paid a mere $137.8 million?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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