Without reference to this particular CEO, since I don't know him from Adam, much has been made of Japanese CEOs being compensated modestly and it is mostly an accounting fiction. For example, the CEO at a particular Japanese company might not be able to afford a dhh-style automobile, but if he desires to drive one, one will be made available for him from the corporate fleet. He lives, like many of his employees, in company housing, but his company-provided housing is decidedly not in the dorms with the 22 year old trainees. He will, like many of his employees, spend the majority of his meals working officially or unofficially on company business, and most of these will end up on the expense account of either his firm or one of his business partners'. etc, etc

Compare it to being President: you may be cash-poor by the standards of the rich, but that is not a meaningful barrier to desired consumption.

Speaking of which: I recently filed my taxes in Japan. The Japanese equivalent of the Schedule C (small business tax return form) has, like the Schedule C, an entry for meals & entertainment. Mine read 0 yen. A helpful person informed me that that was anomalously low, and that, wink wink, the routine practice is to claim that the company paid for every meal because, wink wink, we all know how being a salaryman works.

Now I understand why CEO pay got so high so quickly: corporate job security plumneting. It corresponded with the rise of CEOs bouncing from one company to another and being executives for hire.

If you know you're set for life as an executive of a company, who needs a huge amount of personal wealth? But if you could be cut loose from your comfortable SVP gig due to circumstances beyond your control, you have a much greater need to be personally really comfortable. The company's not going to pay your country club dues for the rest of your life, after all.

I can't believe I didn't understand this before, but then I suppose I don't think about the realities of being a senior executive at a huge company.

The unfortunate part about this is that replacing cultural security with individual economic security almost always introduces inefficiencies. In this case, giving big company execs the incentives of a founder or entrepreneur doesn't give them the attitude of one.

Honestly though, I'm MUCH more impressed with the accessibility -- knocked down the walls of his office, eats lunch in the regular cafeteria, etc. I know very little of Japanese culture, but he at least gives the impression that it's sincere, and as I mentioned, my initial expectation was quite cynical.

Offtopic (bearing in mind my Japan-ignorance), having an excess of meals and entertainment on your business tax returns is an invitation to be audited here in the states. You might want to speak with someone who can give you legal advice without winking. ;-)

One commands respect, while the other sounds powerful and possibly evokes stereotypes of evil, rich guys.

I mean, there's no hiding it if you're a top executive at a big company, but putting the other title first gives off a certain impression to most normal folk. No?

Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin, walked up from the front of the plane and surprised me by asking if he could sit in the empty seat next to me and chat for a few minutes about my experience with Virgin Atlantic and how it could be improved.

I got the impression that he was genuinely interested in listening to my feedback and that he cared passionately about his airline. It made a huge impression on me and set the standard by which I have judged senior executives ever since.

Back in 2002 I sent them a letter because I was frustrated with the kiosks at the Virgin Mega Stores and suggested some improvements (you'd scan the barcode on a CD and it'd pull up a 30-second samples of songs on the album that you could listen to. Good idea in concept, but the implementation was horrible.)

I got a letter back several weeks later saying my feedback had been passed on to the appropriate parties and they'd get in touch.

A couple weeks later I got a phone call (!) from the VP of Product of the Virgin Mega Stores thanking me for my feedback and explaining that he knew the kiosks were sub-par, but their hands were tied by licensing arrangements.

I can't begin to explain how impressed I was that

a) Branson's address was on the Virgin website,

b) his office responded by mail to my letter,

c) they passed on my feedback to the relevant party, and

d) the relevant person himself called me to explain the situation and thank me for caring enough to write

I was pretty damn impressed by the experience, and Virgin has been a great example of a company that focuses on great products, and customer and employee happiness as I build my company.

    Japan Air filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.

That is quite damaging for a company of such degree and the family of all those employees.

I think the lesson here is that it's important to be close to your employees, regardless of how rich you _can_ be.

Not saying you have to choose, of course. But being competent at management doesn't require you to be loved by all your employees.

Airlines have been having a rough time in recent years. Against a background of people bashing them on environmental grounds and promoting alternative modes of transport, often hypocritically, they have seen major costs such as fuel going way up, their market suffering because a lot of air travel is a luxury that people aren't so willing to pay for in a depressed economy, and in many cases significant staffing problems due partly to the same economic conditions.

We can't say whether Japan Air failed because of its CEO's apparently folksy style of management. For all we know, it would have gone to the wall two years earlier if he'd been claiming millions and not so aware of what was really happening from his customers' and staff's points of view.