CEO COMP

CEO COMP

I just read a blip on my MSN homepage about how Congress trumped Obama and wrote in additional sanctions on limiting CEO pay. I guess we are also putting limits on how successful people can become? Isn’t that what their really saying?

Now I’m not for all of the high-priced payouts that have occurred on Wall Street and with the financial sector as a whole especially when companies have under performed or gone completely belly up. It makes my blood boil to hear all of the disproportionate compensation packages failed CEO’s have garnered. I’ve spent most of my adult life in some sort of sales capacity and know first hand that if you didn’t “make your numbers” you didn’t get rewarded. And as painful as that can be in some cases, I’m ok with it because for the most part the burden of failure or lack of sufficient achievement somehow rested with me. (Oh I guess that means that I have to take accountability for my actions or lack thereof…how novel). The up side though was that the opportunity to get there was available! Having managed sales teams all over the country, I know for a fact that the “kiss of death” on performance is capping potential earnings.

When that occurs you get just what you asked for…people perform only up to the levels set forth and not one point higher. Its human nature you know. We all want to feel rewarded for our efforts even if they’re sometimes unattainable.

I can understand what I think they are trying to do and in some cases it does make sense. But it’s a thin line they tread. This country was built on people feeling that they had the opportunity to achieve and succeed with no restrictions on how far they could grow. Why now is it viewed as a crime to be successful? It’s almost like there is an all-out assault on anybody who’s achieved anything more than anybody else and they have to feel guilty for it. What they fail to realize is that these “successful” people are the ones who have created companies that create jobs that create livelihoods for the “vanishing middle-class”. I don’t remember seeing any job ads placed by Sammy the Crack-head for his burgeoning pharmaceutical supply company!

I guess the lesson here is that we need to start teaching our children that aspiring to achieve is the wrong path and that believe it or not even when the sky looks wide open they’ll soon bang their heads on the ceiling they can’t see! You see in this world controlled by big government, being better than anybody else is a crime.

Instead of teaching the down-trodden masses to be more self sufficient or attempt to better themselves by working their way out of their lowly situations, I guess it makes more sense to bring down the ones that have achieved so that everyone is equally suffering. Now what page of the handbook did that come from?

Anyway, as President of my own company, I am worried that I too might be targeted as having too much and fall under these limits of CEO compensation. I am fearful that my tennis shoe collection may be viewed as disproportionate compensation and therefore distributed to those only wearing flip-flops! They’re mostly size 10-1/2 so let me know your size so that I may be able to do my part as the “good soldier”!