Executive Compensation

It took the abuses of the takeover era to wake up the institutional investors, and almost before they got started, the takeover era ended. By that time, however, there was a new issue to provoke outrage: excessive CEO compensation. In some ways, this was an ideal corporate governance issue for the new activists. Complaints about compensation could be made in a sound bite, with political and economic appeal, to say nothing of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” gossip value. This was the first corporate governance issue to go from the financial pages to the front pages to the editorial pages to the comic pages – even “Doonesbury” got in a few digs. This was not just some Capra-esque populist movement. No one complained about the money B....Forbes²¹