[andreilys]

The CEO making 100k+ could likely be making 400k+ in the private sector.

They've already taken a 75% paycut, at a certain point you're not going to attract the talent necessary to do great work. The difference between an A-player and a C-player is vast, and sometimes you need to compensate higher to attract the A-players that will have a transformative impact on the charity.

[robocat]

Plenty of studies show there may be no correlation between CEO pay and their performance! Have a look through the results of: https://www.google.com/search?q=ceo+pay+correlation

Another example was the guy that built a successful baseball team from low paid players (what was the book called?) which showed low pay did not mean low performance in a discipline where outcomes could be measured (much easier than CEO, so you would expect better correlation of pay with performance for sports).

Edit: Moneyball (baseball is as foreign to me as rugby is to Americans?).

[cannonedhamster]

Baseball also has verifiable, long term data on specific metrics with a guaranteed minimum rate of pay for entry level people. You're comparing different things.

You're comparing executive pay, which isn't based on verifiable public data. It's not the same thing.

While your assertion that pay doesn't correlate to performance is correct that's based on the idea that the wrong tools and metrics are being used to measure CEO performance. At a certain point you're not going to attract talented people for the task with 25% of the pay unless they've already made their money. There aren't a lot of those types of executives with this experience available unfortunately.