The best way for CEOs to keep bonuses in a downturn: Lower expectations
- In today’s CEO Daily: How CEOs are protecting their pay packages by lowering their goals
- The big leadership story: Whether Meta’s reported 20% layoffs will encourage a new wave of job cuts
- The markets: A big Asia rebound
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Call it the Hall of Blame. One time-honored tradition in business is to take credit for what goes well, blame disappointing results on factors beyond your control and lower the bar in tough times to be able to clear it so that your pay package remains intact.
When Apple set performance targets for fiscal 2025 for CEO Tim Cook and his executive team last year, the board set goals at or below the prior year’s result, citing “trade policy” and an “uncertain macroeconomic outlook.” As my colleague Amanda Gerut points out, that essentially guaranteed that Cook would take home a $12 million bonus, no matter how well he did. (Apple handily surpassed the modest targets.)
With wobbly markets, rising oil prices, war and fears of a global recession, keep an eye on compensation packages. What I look for:
Reduced targets—In an analysis of 50 public companies by Compensation Advisory Partners (CAP), published Friday, researchers found that boards set lower targets, wider performance curves and flatter payout ranges to protect CEO pay last year. The result: Pay rose 8% and bonuses were up 4% in the group while revenue rose slightly and earnings were down. CEOs collected 87% of their target bonuses, up from 77% in 2024.
Selfless rhetoric—While good times are ‘me’ time, bad times are all about ‘we.’ When taxpayers rescued big banks during the 2008 financial crisis, some characterized this as privatizing the gains and socializing the pain. But in bad times, few are above turning to the government for support. If you’re not too big to fail, you might be mission-critical, a social good or a bulwark against China. Masters of the universe become ordinary people blown by the winds of fate when those winds are in their face.
Blame—Dexin Zhou of Emory University published a fascinating study in 2014 called The Blame Game, in which he analyzed 70,000 earnings transcripts to track leaders who blamed factors in the economy or their industry for poor results. Those who blamed external factors deflected attention from themselves were less likely to be fired than those who held themselves accountable for the results. When times are bad, it seems, the pain doesn’t start at the top.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com