222. What *really* motivates our CEO?

This season, every episode of OMG focuses on a question that directors really need to answer. OMG is written, produced, narrated and scored by Matt Fullbrook.   TRANSCRIPT: Question #20:  What *really* motivates our CEO? If you have the patience to follow me on LinkedIn, you may have noticed me complaining loudly about executive compensation a couple of times in the past year. I think it’s totally broken, and nobody seems to have any interest in fixing it. The fact is, we have no idea what a CEO is actually worth to a firm and we have no idea how different compensation approaches and amounts cause CEOs to behave. And in the meantime, the obsession with benchmarking CEO pay against other CEOs is designed specifically to cause pay to go up forever, thus exacerbating the wealth gap…which we actually DO know is provably bad for everybody. And part of the reason why I find this so infuriating is that the core of the solution to these problems starts with a really simple question, which happens to be the subject of today’s episode. Let’s imagine that it turns out that our CEO likes money. Likes it A LOT! And that’s convenient, because we happen to be paying them in money and not, say, salamanders. So that’s great. Except what if there’s something that might motivate our CEO even more than money (or salamanders). What if it turns out that if we gave them Friday afternoons off they would jump out of bed every morning and work 10x harder, even if we paid them half as much money? Or what if they would literally give up EVERYTHING to dance the Macarena with Taylor Swift? We could craft some huge and ambitious 5-year operational goals and spend that time convincing Tay Tay to get to work on jumping and turning 90 degrees to her left. People are complicated, and so are their interests and motivations. What could you learn by exploring this question?