I consider this from two viewpoints: that of a CEO of my own manufacturing company, and that of a stockholder of publicly owned Companies. First as a CEO. The manufacturing company began as a startup in a garage with two employees and grew to more than one hundred employees with two facilities, one in New England and one in the Midwest. My motivation at the beginning was simply to make the company sufficiently profitable to give my employees and myself a comfortable living wage.

 As the owner-manager, I did not expect to make a fortune or to earn too much more than the workers.  However, after several years as the company prospered, my income grew to ten times that of our average worker. I felt it was justified based on the fact that, beyond the hard work and long hours I devoted to the business, I was the one who took all the risk. Indeed, had I failed, I would have lost my home and car which had been put up as collateral for a business bank loan.

As the company grew I discovered unanticipated compensations beyond Money. In fact, over time, they became secondary to money. One was personal; the other you might say was a self-imposed mission.

The personal involved my pride in having created something of value, something that others, such as our employees and all those with whom we did business, could benefit by. And the fact that I did it skillfully, as proven by the healthy bottom line and our negligible employee turnover, validated my sense of self worth.

The mission that I took on had two parts: one was to make our company, not necessarily the biggest, but the best in our industry. The second part was to create an organizational culture in which employees would be part of a team and would take pride in their productivity and would reap commensurate financial reward. In other words, building and maintaining a smoothly running, efficient and profitable organization became a creative challenge beyond anything I had imagined when I had started out. The need to inflate my own salary had no part in this; and, indeed, would’ve been a destructive act. I learned that self-respect and a sense of pride in who we are and what we do are the real bottom line as we pass through our allotted time on Earth.

This brings me to my role as a stockholder in other companies, a role that I assumed in retirement. It offends me when I see the top brass in most of those companies receive compensation fifty or a hundred times that of their average worker. Not that I'm offended because they deprive me of increased dividends, although they are doing that, I'm offended because their compensation bears no relation to their companies’ long term performance as indicated by their company's profits and growth. Furthermore, many highly paid CEOs are simply caretakers, serving as public relations representatives, rarely responsible for promoting core improvements to enhance their company's earnings. In fact, when I employed a few former corporate Executives in my business, in time I had to fire them because they simply couldn't get things done.

Worthy of note, most of the outrageously paid executives of these companies are employed by American corporations. By contrast, executives in Japanese corporations, many of whom are highly creative and successful, are paid only a fraction of what American CEOs receive. How do American corporations justify such excessive compensation? The materialism of our culture stems from the idea that the prime motivator for success is founded on money. This idea, this pursuit, so typically American, has gotten us and the rest of the world into the current economic mess we're in. Directors on corporate boards, corporate stockholders, young graduates of business schools, lawyers just out of law school, investment managers, and bankers, all subscribe to the idea that making money and making it quickly is the supreme goal in life.

Interestingly, this is not true for all people. Some are content with making just enough money in order to live comfortably; instead of seeking monetary wealth they enrich their lives by becoming expert at a particular skill. Take artists for example: their reward is in the act of creating. In the case of scientists, the reward is found in the quest for discovery. Watch these in action:  they are intensely absorbed in the creative process, unaware of anything but the work itself. They have no idea whether their work will succeed or fail.  Nor does it matter, because the very act of creation is an end in itself.      

Compare these people with the corporate executives who demand exorbitant levels of compensation with no thought given to the possibility of their own failure. And who establishes such compensation? The boards of directors, of course, who, by rewarding so exorbitantly assume guaranteed spectacular performance. Listen to them and their chosen executives protest when the enormity of their compensation is questioned. Once monetary compensation becomes the overriding goal, the work is diminished and often fails. Its falseness ultimately shines through. Stockholders are finally discovering that compensation is unrelated to performance. Unfortunately stockholders have little clout against the inherent conspiracy between hired executives and their boards. Rectifying this situation is becoming increasingly addressed.

Regardless of our cultural imperative, I submit there are plenty of capable, motivated executives in our society who would jump at the chance to run companies for reasonable compensation. They would do so simply for the joy and challenge of not only improving a company's performance, but in making a contribution to their communities, their nation, and the world. They are like the artists and scientists. They would take pride and say of their lives that what they have done will endure beyond them. What could be more valuable than that? Try hiring such people, you boards of directors, and be surprised.