[knewter]

I'm always surprised at this sort of feeling. The collective actions of everyone else at the company, if the company is not run pathologically, exist solely to pursue the goals of the CEO. The CEO sets the goals: describes what it is that this group of people does, what value they offer to the world at large.

You may not like that that's the way it works, but I think it's impossible for the CEO to fail to have a huge impact unless the company's run terribly. I also think it should be trivial to see that, given that the CEO has such a huge impact on the direction the output of this large number of employees takes, that the CEO's actions have an enormous impact on the value the company provides, and consequently the profit the company derives.

If the CEO of Yahoo decided that their best move was to pursue 1990s era AltaVista style search, combined with the idea of 'being a homepage' (which afaict is their current strategy, plus destroying good products), I think it'd be hard for you to NOT recognize that they would be destroying value in the company at a much higher rate than $150M/year. The CEO, personally, would have that impact. If the employees were more efficient at their jobs, or less efficient, it would have little impact (rounding error) in the overall impact of this policy pursuit.

CEOs are the company, for many purposes. Why shouldn't they be paid accordingly?

[BHSPitMonkey]

What if all the great ideas in a company are coming from the non-CEOs? If these ideas are instrumental in the company's success, then wouldn't the CEO be receiving wildly disproportionate credit for said success? (Regardless of the fact that the CEO is the one who allows the ideas to come to pass, the fact remains that the people with the ideas/talent are the ones providing the real value.)

[knewter]

I think that your point is legitimate but that you overvalue the value of it. Yes, in that hypothetical situation, the CEO would be receiving disproportionate credit for the success. I even think this might happen quite a bit. But things don't happen in a vacuum. I think that Meego was a fantastic product, the N9 a brilliant piece of hardware, and I think that no matter how much that's true Stephen Elop truly and royally ruined any value Nokia had a chance of creating by pulling a helluvan "Osborne Computer." The ideas and talent were all there in spades, and the execution by the guy responsible for handling the organization's execution COMPLETELY trumped all of that.

Ergo, CEOs actually do have quite a bit of value.

[eli_gottlieb]

if the company is not run pathologically, exist solely to pursue the goals of the CEO.

Only the CEOs and their hangers-on actually believe that.