Compensation should be tied to performance

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer could leave the struggling company with severance benefits valued at $54.9 million.

Looks like she was paid for showing up and trying hard, not for performance. Granted, she was given a tough gig to turn around. David Graska

Another reason U.S. companies fail. CEOs get paid for nonperformance, but their underlings only get pay increases when stock price or revenues go up. Terrell Catania

They hired her because she worked at Google, which wasn’t a bad hire on paper. The dirty secret is that sometimes people from well-funded, well-governed, solid companies are not the best to guide businesses that do not have that structure. They take for granted all the people who helped to make their job easy and have no clue how to create a similar environment. Patrick Shaw

None of those CEOs who pay themselves as low as $1 a year is starving. Many have taken their compensation in the form of stock in the company. Some of those CEOs also have company credit cards and they expense travel, meals and entertainment back to the company.

Don’t go thinking your CEO is some kind of hero because he or she takes a low cash salary. They get plenty of bonuses and live very comfortably.

Running companies is not easy, and answering to Wall Street is something I wouldn’t want to do at all.

Those CEOs who don’t take a cash salary have bet on themselves that they will do a good enough job to keep the stock price from dropping.

Their risk is in their compensation packages. Jim Alba