[JabrZer0]

You're getting at the heart of it here, I think. The CEO's job in this case was to gather the information necessary to make a good decision about which robot to purchase, then use her (hopefully) experienced judgement to make the best possible decision for the value of the company. There's definitely some value to that process, but I think most people would agree that it's not worth the multi-million dollar bonus she'd probably get from the 5x productivity increase.

Executive pay being tied to company performance is a good thing for the health of the company (no comment on whether that's "good" or "bad" overall) as long as the metrics are defined correctly, but at some point the absolute amount of compensation lost its relationship with the actual effect the CEO has on the company. But that makes sense... I mean what do you expect to happen when people essentially set their own pay? The "in" club of board membership is very much a real thing, and responsible behavior at the expense of other board members is easy enough to punish at another company's board meeting where the pecking order is reversed.

[sokoloff]

Depending on the scale of the increase, I have no problem with her multi-million dollar bonus as a result of superior business outcomes generated under her leadership. Hell, I don’t even care if she was originally opposed to buying the robots and only decided to after a compelling presentation from the COO. The buck stops with her and if she generates superior results in 8-10 figures, multi-million payouts aren’t hard for me to swallow as a shareholder, employee, or customer.

[lovich]

That would make sense if CEOs had some downside to failure, but they don't anymore. All though CEOs who have golden parachutes to cover their failure, and massive salaries to cover their successes mean there is no connection between performance and pay. They just get a lot all of the time