themaude .. I never felt I could step in and reward myself before my efforts for my company came to fruition. I waited for my rewards and got them when my insight and efforts paid off, not before.
You are certainly to be commended for your compensation philosophy that you should be the last in line when it came to being rewarded for your efforts. I wish there were many more like you in the CEO and COB positions, but realistically it is not the case and if used as a standard to measure the fairness of the compensation of such individuals throughout Corporate America most are going to come up well short. (BTW, I'd like to think I had a similar approach when I was in your position.)
Therefore, it does not mean that it is a given that it is in the best interest of IDCC shareholders to vote Harry out now just because he appears (I say appears because we really don't know) to have a polar opposite view on who gets what first. Nor does it mean that he has been grossly overcompensated for his efforts and insights many of which might be intangible, immeasurable and long in coming to fruition as you have pointed out was the case for you.
There is a terrific ad that has appeared recently on TV that suggests what businesses need most now is a Chief Courage Officer. I submit that the contributions of the holder of that office defy bottom line measurement, particularly by outsiders who have no day-to-day contact with the company. Moreover, the line between "fact and fiction" is about as blurry as it gets. Most importantly, Chief Courage Officers who remain true to their job titles through thick and thin are pretty rare in my experience and therefore invaluable to the companies lucky enough to have them.
Now, do I know if Harry is IDCC's Chief Courage Officer? Of course not. For all I know he might be the company's Chief Cowardice Officer. But the fact is I don't know where Harry fits on the Courage/Cowardice scale, and nobody else here does either. Nor do any of us have any tools to measure it from the outside other than what our gut feel tells us. My gut feel, and it appears those of Loop and others, tells me that Harry is a lot closer to being a Chief Courage Officer than he is to being a Chief Cowardice Officer and that is why I can look past his compensation and when he got it to vote for him to stay. The "bottom liners" as Loop refers to them deal only in tangibles and therefore some of them reach an opposite conclusion.
I have a VERY healthy respect for the courage, "gut feel" and insights of Senior Management when it comes to what ultimately drives the success of a company. I also know that the level of each characteristic, as well as the synergistic effect to the organization of the three taken as a whole, can't be determined from the outside. I also know that the effect those characteristics have on the company's success is not even acknowledged by the "bottom liners" and that is why I get very concerned when they periodically become very vocal and pro-active on this board, as well as outside, for a management change.
Regards,
Danny
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