Tag Archives: overpaid executives

Giving Executives 40% of Revenue is Insane

I have previous written on my belief that excessive executive compensation had reached the level of a deadly disease of western management (building on the W. Edwards Deming’s list of 7 deadly diseases). I named excessive executive pay and a broken “intellectual property” system as new deadly diseases in 2007.

Here is a graphic from, It’s Twitter’s birthday, and its executives are getting huge stock-based gifts, showing the massive executive give-away at Twitter.

chart showing how much Twitter gave to executives as percent of total revenue

Twitter has given executives $2,000,000,000 in just stock based compensation from 2011 through 2015. Twitter’s revenue for those 4 years was only $4,709,000,000. So Twitter gave executives 42.5% of revenue. This is of revenue, not earnings, Twitter isn’t even profitable.

Granted this is an extremely bad case but this pattern of giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to executives is common. It is destructive. It is disrespectful. It is a stain on those participating in the looting of companies for the benefit of the executive bureaucrats – those that enable them to siphon off the returns generated by companies into their pockets.

Related: Toyota Post Record Profit: Splits $15 million in Pay and Bonus for top 21 Executives (2014)Business 901 Podcast: Two New Deadly Diseases for Business (2013)Massive Bonuses Encourage Executives to Take Massive Risks (leverage etc.)

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Toyota Posts Record Profit: Splits $15 million in Pay and Bonus for top 21 Executives

After posting record profits of $17.9 billion Toyota proposes to increase the pay and bonus for the top 21 executives to $14.9 million. That is not as you might expect just the increase in the bonus to the CEO. That is the entire pay and bonus for the top 21 executives. That places all 21 together below the top 50 CEO paydays in the USA.

Toyota’s net income for the year surged 89.5%. While the profits are partially due to good management at Toyota the decline in value of the yen also greatly aided results.

Management Pockets A 19% Raise As Toyota Racks Up Records Profits

Toyota proposed 1.52 billion yen ($14.9 million) in combined compensation and bonuses to 21 directors, including President Akio Toyoda, in a notice to shareholders Tuesday. The Toyota City, Japan-based company paid 1.28 billion yen the previous fiscal year.

By comparison, total pay for union workers increased 8.2 percent [this was linked to an article as a source but the link was broken, so I removed it] on average from last fiscal year. The carmaker granted the union’s request for workers’ average bonus to rise to 2.44 million yen, the equivalent of 6.8 months of salary.

The company forecasts a 2% slip in net profit to $17.5 billion for 2015.

Toyota continues to generate cash flow extremely well and has over $20 billion in cash at the end of their 2014 FY. They are also increasing the dividend to stockholders and buying back more stock.

Less than a handful of USA CEOs that is took more from their companies treasuries than all 21 off the Toyota leaders take together led their company to greater earnings than Toyota (only a few companies earned more: Apple, Google, Exxon…). The thievery practiced by senior executives in the USA is immoral and incredibly disrespectful to the other workers at the company and the stockholders.

ExxonMobil did earn more and their CEO took $28.1 million. I think Chevron and Wells Fargo may have earned more than Toyota with a CEOs taking $20.2 and $19.3 million respectively.

Alan Mulally, Ford CEO, took $23.2 million while the company earned $7 billion. If you can ignore his massive and disrespectful taking what he doesn’t deserve he has been an acceptable CEO in other ways.

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More Evidence of the Damage Done by Kleptocrat CEO Pay

I have been writing about the problems of overpaid executives that has lately become so bad that verbiage understand the nature of the problem. Today I see many CEO’s are acting as kleptocrats do – taking food out of others mouths to build their castles. The damage done to everyone else involved is of no concern. Both groups love bankers that flood them with cash for new and larger castles at the expense of the futures of their company (or country).

This paper does a very good job of providing more evidence of the damage done by these kleptocrat CEOs and their apologists.

Are Top Executives Paid Enough? An Evidence-Based Review by Philippe Jacquart and J. Scott Armstrong

Our review of the evidence found that the notion that higher pay leads to the selection of better executives is undermined by the prevalence of poor recruiting methods. Moreover, higher pay fails to promote better performance. Instead, it undermines the intrinsic motivation of executives, inhibits their learning, leads them to ignore other stakeholders, and discourages them from considering the long-term effects of their decisions on stakeholders. Relating incentive payments to executives’ actions in an effective manner is not possible. Incentives also encourage unethical behaviour. Organizations would benefit from using validated methods to hire top executives, reducing compensation, eliminating incentive plans, and strengthening stockholder governance related to the hiring and compensation of executives.

Many of the problems with the poor thinking around executive pay stem from the failure to grasp ideas Dr. Deming wrote about decades ago.

Executives are often evaluated on the basis of the success or failure of the business units for which they are responsible. In practice, many internal and external factors influence outcomes for firms, and assessing the role played by a given executive is not possible. For example, should a manager get credit for a firm’s success when the economy is booming or blame for the firm’s losses during a recession? When answering such questions, evaluators are biased toward ignoring contextual factors and overly attributing outcomes to leaders. This bias was illustrated in a laboratory experiment in which groups of participants had to solve a coordination task. In the experiment, group size varied, and participants could perceive that the task was harder when the group was larger. Despite this, participants credited group leaders for the success of small groups and blamed them for the failure of large groups (Weber et al. 2001).

The quote from their paper show a failure to understand variation (attributing variation to those near the variation at the time – good marks when the variation is good, bad marks when it is bad). And a failure to understand the organization as a system (the results of any subsystem are greatly influenced by the whole system and the conditions outside the system (the economy, the macro-economic conditions for the industry…). And a failure to understand the theory of knowledge: people should know our brains leap to causation explanations when the evidence doesn’t support it. Then confirmation bias and psychology lead us to accept the data that supports our biases.

Nonexperimental studies also find that increases in CEO compensation occur following increases in firm performance that result from factors beyond the CEO’s control—CEOs are paid for being lucky. For example, CEOs in the oil industry were compensated for increased profits resulting from fluctuations in the price of crude oil—a factor beyond their control (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2001).

You see this just looking at the money heaped onto executives (in addition to the already huge payments taken) in industries whenever those industries (not individual companies, the entire industry) have macro-economic windfalls.

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Toyota Understands Robots are Best Used to Enhance the Value Employees Provide

Toyota has always seen robotics as a way to enhance what staff can do. Many USA executives think of robotics as a way to reduce personnel. Toyota wants to use the brainpower of employees to continually improve the organization. Toyota wants to free people for monotonous or dangerous work to let them use their minds.

Humans Steal Jobs From Robots at Toyota

Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across Japan so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.

“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” Kawai said. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”

Kawai, 65, started with Toyota during the era of Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System envied by the auto industry for decades with its combination of efficiency and quality. That means Kawai has been living most of his life adhering to principles of kaizen, or continuous improvement, and monozukuri, which translates to the art of making things.

“Fully automated machines don’t evolve on their own,” said Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Manufacturing Management Research Center. “Mechanization itself doesn’t harm, but sticking to a specific mechanization may lead to omission of kaizen and improvement.”

We need more companies to learn from the executives at Toyota. They show real respect for people. They are not focused on how much they can extract from the corporate treasury to build themselves castles at the expense of other employees, customers and stockholders as far too many USA executives are.

Toyota has been extremely innovative in investing in robotics as human assistants (partially this is due to the extreme demographic problems Japan faces): Toyota Develops Thought-controlled WheelchairToyota’s Partner RobotToyota Winglet – Personal Transportation Assistance.

Related: Webcast on the Toyota Development ProcessDon’t Hide Problems in ComputersAkio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership

Kleptocrat CEOs and Their Apologists

I am disgusted by the lack of ethical and moral fiber of CEO’s (along with their cronies and apologists) in the USA. This lack comes out in many ways (see all the scandals at the too-big-to-fail banks etc.) but the problem I am upset about now is the increasingly commonplace kleptocrat behavior.

CEOs, and their cronies, were well paid decades ago. As their greed about their pay got to be unethical Peter Drucker started to speak out against their ethical failures. As those abuses became more extreme he increased his objections.

What Peter Drucker railed against was minor compared to the ethical meltdowns we allow in those serving in executive positions today.

Bloomberg study on What CEOs are Taking From Corporate Treasuries

Across the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of companies, the average multiple of CEO compensation to that of rank-and-file workers is 204, up 20 percent since 2009

The average ratio for the S&P 500 companies is up from 170 in 2009, when the financial crisis reduced many compensation packages. Estimates by academics and trade-union groups put the number at 20-to-1 in the 1950s, rising to 42-to-1 in 1980 and 120-to-1 by 2000.

These CEOs act like kleptocrat dictators, taking what they can and challenging anyone to do anything about it. As with the kleptocrats they surround themselves with apologists and spread around the looting (from corporate treasuries for the CEO and the countries for the dictators) to those that support their kleptocrat ways.

Extremely Excessive Executive pay is so critical I classify it as a New Deadly Disease. I have discussed the problems created by allowing such morally and ethically bankrupt people in leadership positions: CEO’s Taking What They Don’t Deserve (2011)CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers (2008)Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay (2007). In 2005 I spelled out some of the problems we face when we have kleptocrats running our companies:

The excesses are so great now they will either force companies to:

  1. take huge risks to justify such pay and then go bankrupt when such risks fail (and some will succeed making it appear, to some, that the pay was deserved rather than just the random chance of taking a large risk and getting lucky)
  2. make it impossible to compete with companies that don’t allow such excesses and slowly go out of business to those companies that don’t act so irresponsibly
  3. hope that competitors adopt your bad practice of excessive pay (this does have potential as most people are corrupted by power, even across cultural boundaries). However, my expectation is the competitive forces of capitalism going forward are going to make such a hope unrealistic. People will see the opportunity provided by such poor management and compete with them.

As long as the pay packages were merely large, and didn’t effect the ability of a company to prosper that could continue (slicing up the benefits between the stakeholders is not an exact science). The excesses recently have become so obscene as to become unsustainable.

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Business 901 Podcast: Two New Deadly Diseases for Business

I continue to record podcasts as I promote my new book – Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. In this podcast I discuss the 2 new deadly diseases facing companies. The second part of the Business 901 podcast will be posted soon.

Links to more information on items discussed in the podcast: Dr. Deming’s 7 Deadly Diseases + 2

Executive pay:

Copyright and Patents

I have created a new subreddit for posting links to interesting items about the new deadly diseases for business.

Related: Interviews for Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capabilityprevious business 901 podcastLeanPub podcast on Management MattersBusiness 901 blog post on the podcast

Leanpub Podcast on My Book – Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability

image of the cover of Managmenet Matters by John Hunter

Management Matters by John Hunter

I recently was interviewed for a podcast by Len Epp with Leanpub: Leanpub Podcast Interview #9: John Hunter. I hope you enjoy the podcast (download the mp3 of the podcast).

In the podcast we cover quite a bit of ground quickly, so the details are limited (transcript of the interview). These links provide more details on items I mention in the podcast. They are listed below in the same order as they are raised in the podcast:

The last 15 minutes of the podcast I talk about some details of working with Leanpub; I used Leanpub to publish Management Matters. I recommend Leanpub for other authors. They don’t just have lean in their name, they actual apply lean principles (focusing on the value chain, eliminating complexity, customer focus, etc.) to operating Leanpub. It is extremely easy to get started and publish your book.

Leanpub also offers an excellent royalty plan: authors take home 90% of the revenue minus 50 cents per book. They publish without “digital rights management” crippling purchasers use of the books. Buyers have access to pdf, kindle (mobi) and epub (iPad, nook) format books and get access to all updates to the book. All purchases include a 45 day full money back guaranty.

Related: Business 901 Podcast with John Hunter: Deming’s Management Ideas TodayInterviews for Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability

New Deadly Diseases

Management and the economy keep evolving. Many good things happen. In the last decade the best things are probably the increased deep adoption of lean thinking in many organizations and the adoption of lean and Deming methods in software development (agile software development, kanban and lean startup [which I do realize isn’t limited to software development]).

Sadly all the deadly diseases Dr. Deming described remain. And, as I said in 2007, I think 2 new diseases have become so widespread and so harmful they have earned their place alongside the 7 deadly diseases (which started as the 5 deadly diseases). The new deadly diseases are:

  • extremely excessive executive pay
  • systemic impediments to innovation

In my view these 2 diseases are more deadly to the overall economy than all but the broken USA health system. The systemic impediments to innovation are directly critical to small percentage (5%?) of organizations. But the huge costs of the blocks to innovation and the huge “taxes” (extorted by those using the current system to do the opposite of what it should be doing) are paid by everyone. The costs come from several areas: huge “taxes” on products (easily much greater than all the taxes that go to fund our governments), the huge waste companies have to go through due to the current system (legal fees, documentation, delayed introduction, cross border issues…) and the denial of the ability to use products and services that would improve our quality of life.

The problems with extremely excessive executive pay are well known. Today, few sensible people see the current executive pay packages as anything but the result of an extremely corrupt process. Though if their personal pocketbook is helped by justifying the current practices, some people find a way to make a case for it. But excluding those with an incentive to be blind, it is accepted as a critical problem.

More people understand the huge problems with our patent and copyright systems everyday, but the understanding is still quite limited. Originally copyright and patents were created to provide a government granted monopoly to a creator in order to reward that creator for contributing to the development of society. Copyrights and patents are government granted interventions in the free market. They are useful. They are wise policy.

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Massively Unjust Executive Compensation Damages Companies and Investments

For years I have believed the massively unjust executive compensation packages have been doing great harm to American businesses. As an investor, one of the big risks that has to be evaluated is how much of the business profits executives will divert to their personal bank accounts. And investors also have to worry about the risks executives take to reach huge incentives which then greatly damage your investment.

In 2007, I added two of my own deadly diseases to Dr. Deming’s list. These deadly diseases have emerged since Dr. Deming created the list of 7 deadly diseases (which started out at 5 deadly diseases- he added 2 more later). Excessive executive compensation is one of those new deadly diseases. Our outdated and harmful laws, regulation and tolerated behavior relating to patents, copyright and “intellectual property” is the other.

The Incentive Bubble by Mihir Desai, Harvard Business Review

Mature corporations without large shareholders may become bloated with perquisites or preoccupied by empire building that satisfies managers rather than shareholders—the classic principal-agent problem.

In order for these pay mechanisms to be successful, managers and investors should be rewarded only for success beyond what would normally be generated. Said another way, there are returns that one can generate by doing little, and managers and investors shouldn’t be compensated for those returns.

A very important point to consider in calculating “excess” returns is an understanding of variation. This core component of Dr. Deming’s management system is not understood by most executives today and leads to mis-assigning credit and blame. In addition, an appreciation of systems thinking shows the fallacy of assigning individual causal credit or blame when in reality much of the result is systemic in nature (result of the system with little ability to sensibly assign individual cause – not that those wishing to have huge transfers of corporate wealth deposited in their bank account won’t pay lots of money to people that will create fancy formulas to try and justify such payments).

The rapid spread of stock options over the past two decades resulted in large windfalls for managers because no effort was made to subtract average performance during a period of remarkable returns in asset markets. Moreover, wide varieties of misbehavior have been traced to incentives created by the “cliffs” in most compensation packages: strike prices and vesting dates. Reaching for extra earnings by cutting small corners when such large amounts were at stake was inevitable. The corporate governance crises of the past 15 years had many roots; large stock option grants and the distorted incentives they provide loom large among them.

Absent regulators, irresponsible intermediaries, and oblivious homeowners were all important agents in creating the financial crisis, but the transformation of investment banks into risk-hungry institutions was central to it—and that transformation is connected to the growth of financial-markets-based compensation. At a basic level, the appetite for risk by managers of investment banks can be linked to the rise of compensation structures that provided them with highly asymmetrical incentives

Second, it is tempting to diminish the role of the skewed incentives identified above and reorient the debate toward ethics and morality: If only we hadn’t lost our sense of right and wrong. Such complaints may be well-grounded, but they obscure just how important these high-powered incentives are. More can be achieved by understanding incentive structures and the ideas that underpin them than by bemoaning a decline in character or promoting the virtues of professionalism. And moving away from shareholder-centered capitalism toward stakeholder capitalism risks overcorrecting the excesses of the past three decades. Indeed, capitalism appears to be serving managers and investment managers at the expense of shareholders.

Well said. From a Deming management perspective I see the huge problems created by the deadly disease of unjustly outsized executive compensation. And as an investor I see great risk in executives destroying investment returns as they try and extract hugely excessive amounts of the profits the organization makes to their personal treasuries.

Related: Taking What You Don’t Deserve, CEO StyleObscene CEO Pay, 2005 dataExecutives Again Treating Corporate Treasuries as Their Money“Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance” Warren BuffettLeverage, Complex Deals and ManiaThe soaring executive pay in the 1990’s turned Drucker into a leading critic of unjust pay (and those levels were tiny compared to what executives are taking from treasuries today) – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at ToyotaBrooks Brother BureaucratsLosses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses

Taking What You Don’t Deserve, CEO Style

The excesses to which CEO’s and their board buddies go to in taking from corporate treasuries what they don’t deserve continues to amaze me. The level to which the bad behavior is accepted is apparent in the lack of progress at dealing with those that are taking what they have no moral right to. As shouldn’t have to be explained (but maybe does) leadership isn’t about avoiding being indicted. The levels to which these people take from the organization they are suppose to be leading is a very sad commentary on our leaders. They act as though the corporation exists to enrich them, and their friends, personally: and all the other stakeholders are just leeches on the system.

CEO’s deserve to be paid well. As they were in 1970. As their abuses (with the support of subservient boards) became greater and greater the outrage increased. Peter Drucker moved from defending highly paid CEOs (say 20 or even 30 times the median employee pay) to expressing dismay at the massively excessive pay packages in the 1990s (which were much lower than that taken by the current crop of self important leeches).

Taking such excessive amounts from the corporate treasury is innately dis-respectful to all other employees (though usually they through large amounts of cash at those they have to see often which bring them into the camp of those taking instead of the masses being taken from). Whatever nice words they use to try and give an illusion that they respect those they work with (or their stockholders, suppliers, customers, communities…) doesn’t change their disrespectful actions.

Company CEO 2010 Pay
   
5 year pay CEO % of 2010 Earnings total employees
UnitedHealth Group Stephen Hemsley $101,960,000 $120,470,000 2.2% 87,000
Qwest Communications Edward Mueller $65,800,000 $75,000,000 company lost $55 million *
Walt Disney Robert Iger $53,320,000 $147,080,000 1.3% 156,000
Express Scripts George Paz $51,520,000 $100,210,000 4.4% 13,170
Coach Lew Frankfort $49,450,000 $137,870,000 6.7% 8,200
Polo Ralph Lauren Ralph Lauren $43,000,000 $155,250,000 9.0% 24,000
Gilead Sciences John Martin $42,720,000 $204,240,000 1.5% 4,000

Executive pay from Fortune, annual earnings from Google Finance, employee totals from Yahoo Finance. * Quest was merged into CenturyTel and I can’t find Quest employee data.

This problem is far worse in the USA than anywhere else. Some CEO’s have become jealous and urged that they be allowed to take more so they can not feel so sad about how much less they make. And so companies from other countries are moving in the wrong direction. The USA continues to move so quickly away from any sense of propriety however that they seem to be gaining on the rest of the world for how badly we can do in this area. There are of course, companies in the USA that don’t believe in letting the CEO treat themselves to whatever they want. Costco is a great example of this. That CEO respects his fellow employees and customers. We need more outrage at those CEOs that refuse to lead and instead just seek to take whatever loot they can before they leave.

Related: Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay (2007)CEO’s Castles and Company PerformanceHonda’s top 36 employees received $13 million total (2006)

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