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Space Flights To Alpha Centauri
A disgusted reader recently sent me this link regarding yet another textbook example of corpo scam artistry: “Bwin.party proposes new bonus plan for top execs as share price languishes“. Since the board of directors at a borg is usually a hand picked crew of yes-men by the “senior leadership team“, the article headline should probably read: “Bwin.party executives propose new bonus plan for themselves as share price languishes.”
When pay for performance under the current set of “KPI“s (Key Performance Indicators) stops the money from flowing into the pockets of the head shed aristocracy, the answer is always the same no-brainer. Simply get your board-of-derelicts to lower the bar and champion a new set of bogus KPIs to the powerless and fragmented shareholdership. Ka-ching!
With the old bonus benchmarks now akin to launching manned space flights to Alpha Centauri, Bwin.party is proposing a new scheme that more accurately reflects the company’s lowered expectations. Under this plan, CEO Norbert Teufelberger would pick up a maximum bonus of 550% of his annual base salary of £500k, while chief financial officer Martin Weigold would receive 435% of his £446k annual pay packet. – Steven Stradbrooke
When borgs perform brazen acts of inequity like Bwin.party (“party” is literally true for the execs), the rationalizations they spew to the public are mostly hilarious repetitions recycled from the past:
- Bwin.party says the paydays are necessary because the US market is beginning to open up, and the hordes of US gaming companies looking to move online lack senior management with online know-how.
- The potential for US companies to poach senior execs from experienced European companies represents “the single biggest threat to Bwin.party’s ability to retain its senior management.”
- Bwin.party also suggests its top execs deserve danger pay due to “aggressive enforcement of national laws against senior executives within the industry.”
Danger pay? Bwaaahahhah and WTF! That excuse certainly wasn’t dug up from the past. Ya gotta give the clever board-of-derelicts bonus points for such creative genius: “If ya break the law and damage the company, don’t worry. We’ve got ya covered.” Why not go one step further and give Bwin.party’s employees hazard pay for having to work under such a cast of potentially criminal bozeltines?
To determine if executive compensation has any correlation to company performance, BD00 performed 30 seconds worth of intensive research and plotted the results of his arduous effort for your viewing pleasure:
So, whadya think? Is executive compensation tied to performance over the long haul? Regardless of how you answer the question, ya gotta love capitalism because after all is said, it’s the worst “ism” except for all the other “isms“.
Take A Guess
Take a guess at which CEO recently made all these inspirational statements:
- “Overall I am very pleased with the progress we have made, but we still have a lot of work to do to drive consistent execution and navigate a rapidly shifting marketplace.”
- “We saw improved sales in our mainstream XXXXX business, but we need to improve our pricing discipline and profitability,”
- “We saw improved sales execution, a strong hyper-scale quarter, and stabilization in XXXXX complimented by revenue growth in YYYYYYY”
- “We improved our share position in all three regions”
- “We continue to manage the end-to-end cost structure of our XXXXX business with profitability very much in mind.”
- “Looking forward we will stay committed to smart capital allocation and profitable growth.”
- “As we said at our security analyst meeting last month, we believe we can grow both margin and share over the longer term. We’ll continue to be aggressive in targeted cases, but we have more opportunity to improve our profitability”
If you’re expecting an answer from BD00, then fuggedaboud it. You can pick any CEO because the vast majority of C-execs speak in this same tongue. But ya know what? Despite the standard BD00 sarcasm oozing from this post, the “system” demands that somebody do it; and I’m thankful that those who do it, do do it. I wouldn’t want to do it. In addition to not fitting into the physical and psychological profiles required by the C-level community, it’s not my cup of tea.
Still Only One
In early September, I noted in a post that Oracle Inc. CEO Larry Ellison had broadcast his first and only tweet on June 6th. Out of curiosity, I moseyed on over to his twitter home page to check up on his “status“:
Bummer! Still no more tweets since then, but at least Legendary Larry picked up almost 3000 new followers in the interim.
Just One Measly Tweet?
I just found out from this article, “The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work“, that Oracle’s mercurial CEO, Larry Ellison, has tweeted one, and only one, message out onto the ether. And a nasty one it is:
The Fast Company article’s author, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, also states an interesting fact:
Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom. Within the C-suite, perceptions remain that social media is at best a soft PR tool and at worst a time sink for already distracted employees. Without a push from the top, many of the biggest companies have been slow to take the social media plunge.
Ryan goes on to speculate that the status quo may change because of the findings in a report from the McKinsey Global Institute:
According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. At the high end, that approaches Australia’s annual GDP. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises”.
BD00 hopes that Mr. Holmes is right, but there’s a lot of inertia and outdated tradition motivating the mute behavior in the head shed. There’s paranoia about giving away too much information to competitors and there’s a fear that the penthouse occupants might say something that destroys the illustrious image of infallibility unconsciously burned into the minds of themselves and their minions.
Just cutting email out of the picture in favor of social sharing translates to a productivity windfall as “more enterprise information becomes accessible and searchable, rather than locked up as ‘dark matter’ in inboxes.”
Oh man, despite the risk of being served with a cease-and-desist order and/or being slapped with a slander lawsuit, I couldn’t resist the urge to do this:
Besides our buddy Larry, can you name all the faymoose people in this dastardly mugshot collage without using Google? I’d offer up a BD00.com T-shirt to the winner, but I’m all sold out.
Related articles
- CEOs and Social Media (web2.sys-con.com)
- Do Non Tweeting CEOs and Brands Leave Money on the Table? (radian6.com)
- How is Social Media Affecting Your Business? (elocal.com)
- Fortune 500 Increased Use of Social Media in 2012 – Twitter #1 (customerthink.com)
- Social Media’s Productivity Payoff (blogs.hbr.org)
Watch And Learn
Vineet Nayar (HCL Technologies), Jim Goodnight (SAS Institute), Ricardo Semler (Semco), Terri Kelly (W. L. Gore), Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com), and John Mackey (Whole Foods Market). I try to follow and listen to what these CEOs say because they’re different, refreshing, authentic, and most importantly, eminently tweetable.
I’m happy to announce that I’ve just added Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst to my CEO “watch and learn” list:
The quotes were plucked from “Management Tips From Red Hat’s Crazy Culture Every Company Should Steal”.
BMs Of The Year
Since BD00 is a bombastic and boisterous blasphemer of the “B” word, I just HAD to meta-blog about this infoworld blog post after I stumbled upon it: “The tech industry’s biggest bozos of 2011”.
And the winners are…..
- Léo Apotheker: former HP CEO
- Mark Zuckerberg: current Facebook CEO
- Reed Hastings: current Netflix CEO
- Jim Basillie & Mike Lazardis: current co-CEOs of RIM
Because Netflix is one of the companies on my faves list (and I’m a stockholder!), I’m really bummed about the Hastings-Netflix fiasco. Since I think Mr. Hastings and Netflix will recover from the faux pas, I’m keeping them on the list.
Watch And Learn List
After watching Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst talk about “cultivating trust” in this refreshing 5 minute MIX video, I put him on my “watch and learn list“. Here are some priceless sound bytes from Jim’s passionate schpeel:
- You truly have to have no consequences.
- Says easy, does hard.
- The biggest insult is to have somebody throw out a comment or idea, and have nobody respond to it.
- Meritocracy does not equal democracy.
- Being called an idiot is not a bad thing. I encourage it and I celebrate it.
- If the senior leadership team isn’t posting on the site, isn’t responding to comments that are being made, then it’s nothing more than an “HR program“.
So, who’s on your watch and learn list?
Humility Follwed By Hubris
In contrast to yesterday’s post on CEO humility, this post about the opposite – CEO (and board of directors) hubris.
In the usatoday.com article, “CEOs reap huge payouts in 2011, corporate filings show“, the following stats are printed:
U.S. workers averaged $46,742 in 2010, up 2.6% from 2009. A June GovernanceMetrics analysis found average compensation among S&P 500 CEOs rose to $12 million in 2010, up 18% from 2009 — and that’s not counting the potential multimillion-dollar value of stock or stock options, which are granted at set prices and provide holders profits as stock values rise.
So, let’s see. The average “Board Of Directors” thinks that the average CEO is worth $12M/$47K = 255 DICs. Oh well. Who am I to judge what “Boards of Direlectors” decide they pay CEOs? Nevertheless, others do pass judgment:
“It’s insane,” says the Value Alliance’s Eleanor Bloxham. “Corporate boards have bought into the idea that they have to pay up for performance. There’ll be more of the same until institutional investors decide CEOs aren’t worth what they’re being paid.”
Alas, I don’t see the day arriving soon where “institutional investors decide CEOs aren’t worth what they’re being paid“. Do you?
Concrete Crown
This is a rare sighting, so ya gotta check it out: The Humility Imperative: CEOs, Keep Your Arrogance in Check. Reformed CEOcaholic Dave Balter starts out his plea with:
This is a message to every entrepreneur, CEO, and leader: Dig a hole, throw your ego into it, and pour concrete on top. Find humility instead. – Dave Balter
Generalizations
To function semi-sanely in this world, we all have to make generalizations so that we can make sense of the world and to at least try to be able to predict future outcomes that result from our actions. It’s OK to make them as long as one realizes that there are exceptions to every generalization. There are very few, if any, absolutes in the world. Assuming that one’s personally concocted generalizations are absolutely 100% true all of the time invites “suffering“, no?
Take the mercurial CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, for example. He seems to be at least one exception to my personal generalization that “dictator” bosses can’t be successful in the long term (Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is another exception). Check out these blurbs that I pulled from cyberspace:
I think that one reason why Jobs and Apple achieve the stellar product and financial success that they do is because, even at the lofty CEO level, Mr. Jobs gets his hands dirty – and that endears him to the technical and creative talent that he does retain at the company. Contrast this to a Stalinist brute like “chainsaw” Al Dunlap, who lived in a separate world “above” his people.
How about you? Do you think that my “dictators can’t be successful leaders in the long run” generalization is valid in most cases? What’s your equivalent generalization?
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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