Executive Compensation Quotes

People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi.

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.

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.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

Congress has all sorts of rules, hedge fund managers, private equity managers, executives, movie stars, fall into that allow them to escape or defer into the future not paying their taxes. And if you can defer your tax into the future, it's the best deal in the world, because you don't just get to eat your cake and have it too. You get to eat your cake and have a bigger cake.

I mean, you may be very mad at some guy that walked away with a huge golden parachute, but that really isn't the important thing.

A company does better the less it pays the CEO.

We invited HP executives to participate in the management and in the board. HCL had this concept of corporate officers since inception in 1999. We had a remuneration committee. Now everyone is talking about nomination and remuneration committee. We had this from 1999.

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with the 2008 crisis. And in fact, it gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken.

The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

You hear entertainers all the time, saying, 'If I couldn't get paid for this, I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say, 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I'd do it for free'?

Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures. Yes, the top managers of those companies have lost their jobs - but with a fat pension and mostly with a handsome severance payment.

The relationship between executive CEO pay, stock performance is tenuous and not easily unscrambled, just one of myriad factors that affect the price of a stock.

Sometimes I hear news about the huge dollars involved with CEO pay and corporate-management salaries, and I'm mystified at how someone can justify taking that much at the cost of other people's livelihoods. In a bizarre way, I'm almost kind of curious, like "How can they absolve themselves and enjoy their wealth?" I don't understand it.

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

What we're going to do is redouble our efforts on financial regulatory reform, because that has in it sensible things like say on pay, so at least the shareholders are minding the store, sensible things like saying, for heaven's sakes, compensation should be focused on - on long term, so that you don't have rewards for short-term risk-taking.

If the government has any courage, it will punish those at the top of failed banks. Accountability is critical in every area of human endeavour - there has to be a penalty for failure; otherwise, it's only a matter of time before the economic pain our banks have caused to so many innocent businesses and homeowners is forgotten.

You want to balance the budget in this country? We change the salary structure for Congress and the President. Every year they don't balance the budget, we don't pay them.

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.

I think from a moral issue, CEOs should not be making - whether it's 270 or 300 times more than their workers are making.

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.

Some shareholders believe it is all about price and a few people's pockets.

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.