Walter Isaacson Quotes

My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand.

I really believe that all CEO pay should be voted on by shareholders ahead of time. Mine was.

Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars.

The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons - including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay - but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

While we are clear that it is right that those who work hard, generate wealth and create jobs for our country are rewarded, where failure is rewarded or people award themselves huge pay rises that bear no relation to performance or what their companies can bear, trust is severely undermined.

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

Benefits are rarely made public in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, where companies must report the pay and options that their five highest-paid executives receive.

If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.

I'm in a different position than most CEO's. I'm a founder. I'm not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO's are hired by the board.

The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.

CEO compensation seems at time excessive but it should be up to the shareholders and boards of directors.

Directors should be paid for promising impossible things.

It's not reasonable for companies that have chief executives and board members who are paid very considerable sums to subsidise low pay through in-work benefits.

It's important to understand the compensation equation that a CEO and a founder has with his or her employees.

The days of CEOs getting rich while shareholders lose has got to end. Management must be accountable.

When you face the shareholders, then you can feel the heat is on you. For 20 years I got to answer to my shareholders. It's not easy.

The role of a board of directors is to be a sounding board for the vision of the company - to hold executives accountable in executing that vision and to ensure a management succession plan is in place.

I don't like what's going on with the executive compensation.

The typical large company has a compensation committee, They don't look for Dobermans on that committee, they look for chihuahuas.

CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn't so messed up, guys like me wouldn't make this kind of money.

CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.

When top executives get huge pay hikes at the same time as middle-level and hourly workers lose their jobs and retirement savings, or have to accept negligible pay raises and cuts in health and pension benefits, company morale plummets. I hear it all the time from employees: This company, they say, is being run only for the benefit of the people at the top. So why should we put in extra effort, commit extra hours, take on extra responsibilities? We'll do the minimum, even cut corners. This is often the death knell of a company.

Getting fired can produce a particularly bountiful payday for a CEO. Indeed, he can 'earn' more in that single day, while cleaning out his desk, than an American worker earns in a lifetime of cleaning toilets. Forget the old maxim about nothing succeeding like success: Today, in the executive suite, the all-too-prevalent rule is that nothing succeeds like failure.

A company does better the less it pays the CEO.