Question: “My company is looking for a better way to evaluate the performance of our CEO. It seems like “stock value” has been the primary way to do so, at least historically. Is it still the best performance measure of a CEO’s efforts to increase the value of a company?” Answer: It is the “common measure” historically, but far from the “best!” A company’s stock market value is affected by many “psychological factors” that influence stock prices in general. For example, in th

Are executives paid too much? Maybe, maybe not! A student of mine once made a presentation about the appropriateness of executive pay levels. As the ever-Socratic Instructor, probing for the truth, always testing his students’ ability to defend their positions on various topics in the classroom, I asked him for his best view as to why executive pay levels are justifiable? Sweating just a bit, he replied “because that’s the way companies pay them.” He knew, and I knew, that th