Sure, CEO:s have a much greater impact on the company than the average employee. And they should get paid "lots," I don't disagree on that. But that's not the scale we are on here, we're talking 1000 times more productive. It's a larger difference than between peasants and the kings of feudal Europe.
Google either gets 1000 extra engineers or gets this probably really smart guy. I guess we just have to agree to disagree since there is no way to measure how valuable a CEO is. I do think that the burden of proof is upon those that think those salary differences is justifiable since "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
> A real world example would be Stephen Elop at Nokia: some say that he > has made Nokia lose billions of dollars, when another CEO might have > made Nokia save that money.
Not a good example since Symbian has been a dead end for years and Nokia has failed to make desirable smart phones. Putting all the blame on him ignores all the bad decisions all the other people at Nokia did.
Yes! My problem with the "CEOs make big decisions so they should get paid a lot" thing is that it encourages CEOs to set up companies where they make all the big decisions. And of course to draw all the attention to themselves. And to focus everybody on trying to figure out what the CEO wants, rather than what the customers want.
Contrast that with, say, 3M. The Post-it Note was a bottom-up invention. One guy came up with the adhesive. Another person figure out what to do with it. They've sold billions of dollars worth of the stuff. As far as I'm concerned, that makes the 3M CEOs much smarter than the hands-on ones. Instead of treating the company like a giant prosthesis, they created an ecology.
Google either gets 1000 extra engineers or gets this probably really smart guy. I guess we just have to agree to disagree since there is no way to measure how valuable a CEO is. I do think that the burden of proof is upon those that think those salary differences is justifiable since "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
> A real world example would be Stephen Elop at Nokia: some say that he > has made Nokia lose billions of dollars, when another CEO might have > made Nokia save that money.
Not a good example since Symbian has been a dead end for years and Nokia has failed to make desirable smart phones. Putting all the blame on him ignores all the bad decisions all the other people at Nokia did.