William D. Cohan Quotes

Less than a year after loading the company up with debt, Romney and Bain gave themselves bonuses four times bigger than the $8 million they had put into the deal.

CEO pay is ridiculously out of line with performance.

CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn't so messed up, guys like me wouldn't make this kind of money.

Sometimes I hear news about the huge dollars involved with CEO pay and corporate-management salaries, and I'm mystified at how someone can justify taking that much at the cost of other people's livelihoods. In a bizarre way, I'm almost kind of curious, like "How can they absolve themselves and enjoy their wealth?" I don't understand it.

Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.

Business people get many undeserved prizes - golden parachutes and bonuses even when companies fail. I don't think people should get rewarded for screwing up.

I could have closed down bits of British Home Stores to make more money but it's not my style. I want to make my money as a retailer, not by putting people out of work.

We've got some real greedy hogs who own no interest in the company they're running, whose sole interest is in whatever it takes to be able to get to the point to fly out on their golden parachute and milk the shareholder and take risks that they shouldn't take.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa.

The average member of the public thinks of 'business' as an impersonal corporate entity, owned by the very rich and managed by over-paid executives.

As long as perverse compensation systems for financial executives exist, the United States financial problems will remain nearly, if not completely, intractable.

Excessive pay and rewards for failure are bad for shareholders, the economy and society.

I don't like what's going on with the executive compensation.

I just don't understand, if they see numbers [of CEO salaries]that represent people, how they can somehow skirt around that and morally justify taking or ruining those lives and leaving them with nothing. That, to me, is violent crime. It's certainly more violent than selling grams of pot to other adults.

When top executives get huge pay hikes at the same time as middle-level and hourly workers lose their jobs and retirement savings, or have to accept negligible pay raises and cuts in health and pension benefits, company morale plummets. I hear it all the time from employees: This company, they say, is being run only for the benefit of the people at the top. So why should we put in extra effort, commit extra hours, take on extra responsibilities? We'll do the minimum, even cut corners. This is often the death knell of a company.

I don't believe corporations are people.

We're making a lot of changes at Gap Inc., but as our Social Responsibility Report demonstrates, doing business the right way is still extremely important to us.

I'm pro-business! But business ought to make its own money.

If corporations are to remain a legitimate instrument of collective action, they must concern themselves directly with the well-being of those party to, and affected by, their actions.

In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

There are remuneration packages that will no longer be tolerated because they bear no relation to merit. That those who create jobs and wealth may earn a lot of money is not shocking. But that those who contribute to destroying jobs and wealth also earn a lot of money is morally indefensible.

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

I think it is inflationary. I think it actually is counterproductive in many ways. You end up costing jobs from people who are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

What's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.