Tag Archives: executive pay

Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year

Posted on November 25, 2008 by John Hunter

Engineers Rule, 2006 Longtime auto analyst John Casesa, who now runs a consulting company, says, “There’s not a company on earth that better understands the culture of engineering.” The strategy has worked thus far. Honda has never had an unprofitable year. It has never had to lay off employees. … The lean and compact Fukui, like all of his predecessors, is an engineer who started in R&D and later ran the subsidiary. While other auto chief-executives-to-be were punching keyboards in … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Respect | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?

Posted on November 21, 2008 by John Hunter

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? by Dan Ariely To look at this question, three colleagues and I conducted an experiment. We presented 87 participants with an array of tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for instance, to fit pieces of metal puzzle into a plastic frame, to play a memory game that required them to reproduce a string of numbers and to throw tennis balls at a target. We promised them payment if … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , ,

Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008

Posted on November 10, 2008 by John Hunter

I continue to tilt at the robber barron CEO pay packages (2007 post on CEO pay abuses). 2007 pay rank Company CEO Pay 5 Year Pay CEO % of 2007 Earnings 1 Apple Steve Jobs $646,600,000 $650,170,000 18.5% 2 Occidental Petroleum Ray Irani $321,640,000 $509,530,000 5.9% 3 IAC Barry Diller $295,140,000 $512,270,000 Company Lost Money 4 Fidelity National Financial William Folley $179,560,000 NA 138.4% 5 Yahoo! Terry Semel $174,200,000 $432,490,000 26.4% 7 Countrywide Financial Angelo Mozilo $141,980,000 $295,730,000 Company Lost … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Economics, Management, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers

Posted on October 22, 2008 by John Hunter

Pointy haired bosses broke the code they provided on their site for embedding a Dilbert comic, so I removed the broken code. Dogbert: “I am stepping down as CEO so I can spend more time with the money I stole from this hellhole.” Unfortunately we still have far too few people that see the obscene behavior of CEOs and their brooks brother bureaucrats as unacceptable. The behavior of many of them has been similar to that of dictators looting the … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

Unconscionable Executive Pay

Posted on March 19, 2008 by John Hunter

WaMu: Skip customers; save the execs [the broken link was removed] Since last summer, the company’s shares have lost nearly 80% of their value. But the bank is a softy when it comes to bonus pay for top brass. After CEO Kerry Killinger and other top executives missed all or a big part of their bonus pay last year, Washington Mutual wasted little time taking steps to apparently make sure it won’t happen again — even if the mortgage market … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Respect | Tagged | 6 Comments

No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota

Posted on June 23, 2007 by John Hunter

Toyota Boosts Executives’ Bonuses on Record Earnings (link broken by Bloomberg has been removed – why can’t companies with huge IT budgets follow even basic web usability rules like not breaking urls?): Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s biggest automaker by market value, will increase the total amount of executives’ bonuses by 33 percent for the year ended in March after the company posted record earnings. The automaker will pay a total of 970.5 million yen ($7.8 million) in bonuses to … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Psychology, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay

Posted on June 11, 2007 by John Hunter

I continue to tilt at the robber barron CEO pay packages. Hopefully, at some point, the people approving these obscene pay packages can be shamed into stopping or replaced by people with some sense of decency. I was taught in the days of robber barrons the business world was seen as an amoral place (morality did not belong in this area of human endeavor) but that over time society decided that in fact morality did apply there. It is hard … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Economics, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Exposing CEO Pay Excesses

Posted on March 23, 2007 by John Hunter

The politics of pay from The Economist: Although barely one-tenth of the 2,000 biggest American companies have yet reported under the new rules, the tally of negative headlines is already mounting. “There are already plenty of examples of firms reporting chief-executive pay packages of millions of dollars more than expected,” says Paul Hodgson of the Corporate Library, a research firm. He reckons that the firms that have already reported are a representative sample likely to provide a good indication of … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Compensation at Whole Foods

Posted on February 6, 2007 by John Hunter

Compensation at Whole Foods Market [the link that Whole Foods broke was removed] Most large companies also pay their executives large amounts of stock options in addition to large salaries and cash bonuses. However, this is not the case at Whole Foods Market. As the chart below indicates, the average large corporation in the United States distributes 75% of their total stock options to only 5 top executives with the remaining 25% going to everyone else in the company (actually … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

More on Overpaid CEO’s

Posted on October 4, 2006 by John Hunter

CEO pay up big – but not performance: The Corporate Library analyzed the compensation of nearly 1,400 chiefs for its annual report on CEO pay. The group’s median total compensation rose 16 percent between 2004 and 2005. A year earlier, CEOs got a bump of 30 percent in total compensation, which includes salary, bonus, perks, exercised stock options and other long-term incentive pay. This is more bad news. As Drucker, Buffet and many others have said CEO overpayment is bad … Continue reading →

Posted in Management | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

More on Obscene CEO Pay

Posted on June 22, 2006 by John Hunter

Study site: CEO-worker pay imbalance grows [the broken link has been removed] includes the graph above. Unfortunately this reverse robin hood (steal from the workers, stock holder, customers…) and give to the CEO tale continues. Hopefully someday soon we can at least turn the momentum in the right direction (stopping these incredibly excessive “pay” packages). Even then it will take quite a deal of reducing these ridiculous “pay” packages to reach some sense of decency. CNN article based on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Management | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Drucker Opinion Essays from the WSJ

Posted on December 10, 2005 by John Hunter

The Wall Street Journal has posted selected opinion essays by Peter Drucker [the broken link was removed] along with several tributes to Drucker. The Five Deadly Business Sins (article removed so link removed), 1993: the worship of high profit margins and of “premium pricing” mispricing a new product by charging “what the market will bear cost-driven pricing slaughtering tomorrow’s opportunity on the altar of yesterday feeding problems and starving opportunities Is Executive Pay Excessive?, 1977. In 1977, his answer was, … Continue reading →

Posted in Management | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Excessive Executive Pay

Posted on December 4, 2005 by John Hunter

Topic: Management Improvement Via Christian Sarkar [the broken link was removed], Too Many Turkeys, The Economist: Executive compensation in America – already far ahead of the rest of the world, despite the best efforts of overseas managers to catch up – is now rising inexorably again. In fiscal year 2004 the total compensation of the median American company boss rose in every industry… according to a new report by the Conference Board, a research organisation. In the big companies that … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Toyota Manufacturing Powerhouse

Posted on November 28, 2005 by John Hunter

Great required reading [the broken link was removed] via Evolving Excellence, Relentless [the broken link was removed], Detroit News: As Toyota expands rapidly, it is also grappling with a shortage of skilled managers and engineers. When it decided in June to build its seventh North American assembly plant in Woodstock, Ontario, officials said one reason they chose that site was because the new factory could be overseen by the team running its nearby Cambridge plant. Last month, the normally acquisition-shy … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management Articles, Manufacturing, Psychology, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , | 3 Comments