Global CIO: Should CIO Compensation Be Capped By The Government?

And the media's reflexive lurch toward the greasy slope of compensation "fairness" pulls some readers along in its wake -- here's one of the comments to my blog post about BusinessWeek's asinine question, "Do you think limits should be set for CIO pay?":

Here's another:

One of the things I want to know is this: Who are these comp-cappers, and by what standards would they attempt to regulate and limit and cap CIO compensation? The second letter writer above seems to feel that Mott -- who devised and executed transformative strategies that have saved Hewlett-Packard many hundreds of millions of dollars -- isn't worth $24 million, but perhaps would be worth $20 million. Well heck -- why stop at $20 million? Why not $10 million? Or $5 million? Why not just give this everyman CIO $1,000,000 and tell him that, as an added bonus as described by the other letter writer, he won't have to go to prison if the company kills someone? With enticement like that, just imagine the caliber of candidate you'll get!

Here's what my always-perceptive colleague Rob Preston had to say about pay packages a couple of years ago, before the latest round of get-the-rich-guys sentiment was whipped up:

I can't improve on that argument, so let me close with this thought: You are deluding yourself if you think this is all just the latest bunch of Beltway echo-chamber policy-wonking that will never see the light of day. It has become fashionable to attack success, to attack achievement, to attack risk-taking, to attack high performance, to attack financial rewards that track above someone's -- anyone's -- sense of "fairness."

Well I say the hell with that nonsense. Randy Mott's IT-transformation plan at HP included the consolidation of 85 data centers down to six -- so, if you're among the people who believe humans are broiling the Earth (I am not among them), then you should be advocating an even bigger pay package for Mott for eliminating 79 heat-belching, polar-ice-melting, electricity-sucking data centers. Oh, but wait -- including an analysis of performance like that undermines the whole fairness fairy tale. So the nanny-state compensation police would like you to forget that. And they'd like you to forget that Mott cut HP's IT budget as a percentage of overall revenue from 4% to 2% -- and at a company with revenue of more than $100 billion, that's a savings of $2 billion per year.

And they'd really like you to forget about how that translated into jobs for HP, and innovation for HP and its customers, and purchases made by HP from companies that could hire more workers, and funding for R&D that will see lots more people hired in the future.

This isn't a dream, folks, so you don't need to wake up. But you do need to think very long and hard about how you feel about the question posed by BusinessWeek and all of its ramifications: "Do you think limits should be set for CIO pay?"