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?
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.