Pay and the boardroom benchmark
Warren Buffett once described control of executive compensation as the "acid test" of US corporate reform. If only such a scientific proof of good practice were available. One of the problems with measuring progress in the field of executive pay is that the gauges used are at best crude, at worst open to dispute. That is not surprising, given that many of the mechanisms designed to bring pay into line with performance are either outmoded or untried.
Last week, in a speech to the annual conference of the International Corporate Governance Network in Washington, Ira Millstein, the lawyer and guru of good practice in the US boardroom, again drew attention to the differential between the pay of top managers and the average worker, which some shareholder activists have calculated at more than 300 to 1. Just down the road and on the same day, the Business Roundtable, the trade body for top US chief executives, poured scorn on such comparisons and published data that showed a close correlation between increases in executive pay and improved shareholder returns.
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Judged by their own standards, the activists do seem to be making progress. Take four reforms of executive pay proposed by Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, at a symposium held in 2004 at Columbia University: mandatory treatment of stock options as expenses in company accounts; better disclosure; increased independence of independent directors; and empowerment of shareholders.
Since that symposium, the US accounting standard-setter has made it compulsory for US companies to treat stock options as expenses. As a result, options have continued to fall out of favour as a means of rewarding top executives. Shareholder pressure has played its part but companies have also found option awards to be a less efficient incentive now that the cost has to be docked from annual financial results. The website
www.savestockoptions.org, once a focal point for lobbying against option expensing, seems moribund. Recent scrutiny of options back-dating - less than two weeks ago, Apple, the computer company, became the highest-profile US group to announce it had detected irregularities in some stock-option grants - has dealt a further blow. Options will not go away (many executives still sit on enormous unexercised option grants) but as the dominant form of executive compensation, they seem so 1990s.
Progress is also being made in the US on Mr Levitt's second reform, greater transparency. The SEC has proposed that public companies should reveal the total annual compensation paid to their top five executives. Such a reform is necessary. It would hand to shareholders a tool that many boards increasingly use to tally the total possible rewards available to their chief executives - and give those investors a better means of judging if directors are doing the right thing when they determine compensation. That would complete the virtuous circle of Mr Levitt's 2004 proposals.
Yet the SEC rule has its critics. US employers worry that insisting on a single "total" figure may mix apples and oranges, by combining pay that was actually received with unrealised incentives. Others are even more fierce. The plan would "destroy a company's ability to attract talent, create new disclosure burdens and costs, and force companies to avoid disclosure by paying new talent 'off the books'", says one comment filed to the watchdog by Anthony Welch, who describes himself as chairman of a public company. "Your agency is about to destroy yet another tiny portion of the marketplace."
The reality, however, is that there is no clear mechanism for monitoring the marketplace for corporate executives. Limited supply of the best candidates and strong demand for their services are cited by boards - and sometimes by corporate chieftains themselves - to justify large rewards and incentives. In reality, when it comes to assessing the worth of their chief executive, boards still fall back too often on one of the simplest mechanisms of all - the ratchet. Directors who benchmark chief executives against their peers are naturally reluctant to concede that their choice of top manager is lagging behind the pack: Jack is better than Joe, so he should also be paid more.
There seem to be surprisingly few antidotes to this endemic boardroom condition - known as Lake Wobegon syndrome, after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where all the children are above average. Ethan S. Burger, adjunct professor at the Washington College of Law, made a modest proposal in a letter to the Financial Times last month. Given the lack of evidence linking performance and the rate or manner of executive compensation, he wrote, managers should simply be invited to bid for top jobs. Such a solution would have the virtue of establishing a market price for chief executives, just as contract tenders establish a market price for, say, maintaining an oil rig.
Until then, however, the Business Roundtable has performed a service by endorsing an "official" benchmark for chief executive pay. If you run one of America's top companies and you earned much more than last year's median compensation of $6.83m (￡3.7m), you had better be ready to explain why.
高管薪酬有多高
沃
伦?巴菲特(Warren Buffett)曾将控制高管薪酬形容为美国公司改革所面临的“酸性测试”(acid test，寓意“严峻考验”)。要是真能对那种良好做法进行科学试验就好了。衡量高管薪酬方面的进展所面临的问题之一便是，我们所使用的衡量标准往好里说是较为粗率的，而往坏里说则是存在很大争议的。这并不令人感到奇怪，因为许多旨在使薪酬与业绩相符的机制要么是过时的，要么是未经证实的。
上周，在华盛顿召开的国际公司治理网络(International Corporate Governance Network)的年会上，律师及深谙美国公司高层良好做法的艾拉?米尔斯坦(Ira Millstein)再度引起了人们对于高管与普通员工收入差距的关注。据一些股东维权人士计算，这一差距超过300倍。就在同一天，美国顶级首席执行官们的行业机构商业圆桌会议(Business Roundtable)大肆嘲笑上述对比，并公布有关数据，表明高管薪酬增加和股东回报改善之间存在紧密的相关性。
用他们自己的标准判断，股东维权人士似乎正取得进展。比如，在2004年，前美国证券交易委员会(SEC)主席阿瑟?莱维特(Arthur Levitt)在哥伦比亚大学举办的研讨会上提议对高管薪酬进行4项改革：强制要求公司在会计处理上将股票期权计入支出；改善信息披露；增强独立董事的独立性；将权利授予股东。
那次研讨会之后，美国会计标准的制订者们已强制美国企业将股票期权计入支出。其结果是，作为一种奖励高层管理人士的方式，期权继续逐渐失去了宠爱。来自股东的压力起到了作用，但企业也发现，既然成本必须从年度业绩中扣除，期权的激励作用也就不那么有效了。曾一度作为反对期权费用化游说行动焦点的网站
www.savestockoptions.org似乎正濒临末日。最近，对于以往期权授予情况的详细审查带来了更大的打击。不到2周之前，电脑公司苹果(Apple)就因此成为最引人注目的美国企业，该公司声称在从前授予期权的操作中发现了违规行为。奖励期权的做法不会消失（首先，许多高管仍坐拥大量尚未行使的股票期权），但作为高管薪酬的主要形式，它现在似乎回到了上世纪90年代的水平。
莱维特所提议的第二项改革措施，即增强透明度，在美国也取得了进展。美国证交会已经提议，上市公司应披露每年向级别最高的5位高管所支付的薪酬数额。此项改革十分必要。这将赋予股东们一种计算薪资的工具，许多董事会越来越多地运用此种工具，来计算可能发放给其高层主管的薪酬总额，这同时给那些投资者提供了一种更好的途径，以判断董事们在决定薪酬时行为是否恰当。这将完善莱维特2004年提议中所涉及的道德循环。
不过，美国证交会此项规定也遭到了一些人的批评。美国的雇主担心，坚持单一薪酬“总数”的做法，将实际拿到的薪资与没有实现的激励混为一体，可能无法体现差别。其它批评则更为猛烈。自称某家上市公司董事长的安东尼?韦尔奇(Anthony Welch)，在向证交会呈交的一份意见书中表示，该计划会“破坏企业吸引人才的能力，造成新的信息披露负担和成本，并迫使企业为避免信息披露，而以‘账外方式’向新人才支付薪酬”。“贵机构将对市场的另外一个微小部分构成破坏。”
然而，现实情况是，目前并没有一种明确的机制来监控企业高管这块市场。董事会认为（有时企业首席执行官自己也这么认为），优秀的首席执行官人选有限，而企业对他们的服务又存在强劲需求，这是薪酬和激励手段居高不下的原因。在现实中，在评估其首席执行官的价值时，董事会仍然过于频繁地求助于一种最为简单的机制：“棘轮机制”(ratchet)。董事们拿自己的首席执行官与其它企业进行比较时，自然不愿承认，自己选择的高管不如其它企业：杰克(Jack)比乔(Joe)优秀，所以他也应该拿到更高的薪资。
令人奇怪的是，似乎没什么办法能够医治这种董事会“传染病”――沃比根湖综合症(Lake Wobegon syndrome) 。这一名称源自盖瑞森?凯勒(Garrison Keillor)小说中虚构的小镇，那里所有儿童的智商都高于平均水平。华盛顿法学院(Washington College of Law)副教授伊桑?S.?伯格(Ethan S.Burger)上月写信给英国《金融时报》，提出了一条中肯的建议。他指出，鉴于缺乏证据表明绩效与高管薪资数额或方式之间的联系，应该让管理者竞争高级职位。这种解决办法的优点，是能够确立首席执行官的市场价格，就像合同竞标可以确定市场价格一样，例如确立维护石油钻探平台的市场价格。
不过，在采取上述做法之前，商业圆桌会议已发挥了一种作用，那就是核准首席执行官薪资的“官方”基准。如果你管理着一家美国顶级企业，而你赚到的钱比去年683万美元的薪资中值高出很多，那你要准备解释个中原因了。
