Well, it’s one of the ways change happens.
The Boston Globe’s Brian McGrory has been on a tear for the past 3 weeks, penning (pixeling?) a series of columns notable for their in-depth reporting, damning details and no-holds-barred scorn directed at Liberty Mutual’s board of directors and top executives for their outrageous, uncontrolled executive compensation policies.
Having exhausted (for the moment?) the store of revelations about Liberty’s executive pay ($50 million a year to CEO Ted Kelly), compliant board members (paid $200,000 annually), and corporate perks (a five plane “air force” with regular flights to senior executives’ vacation homes and favorite resort destinations), McGrory asked the next logical question: does anyone else do this?
Lo and behold, they do. Today’s column is based on McGrory’s use of that new-fangled internet the kids are all talking about. (Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?) More specifically, the Wall Street Journal’s Jet Tracker site, a searchable database that uses FAA records to track the flights of corporate planes.
It turns out that Springfield-based Mass Mutual has its own “air force” which regularly flies to business centers like Fort Lauderdale, Naples, Stuart and West Palm Beach, Florida—as well as Cancun, Grand Cayman and the Bahamas. Mass Mutual’s CEOs are, however, paid a mere fraction of their counterparts at Liberty—only $10 – 12 million a year.
“When you open up a can of worms, you should expect to see things that crawl. I just wasn’t prepared for the extent,” writes McGrory. Ain’t that always the way.
Opening up the can of worms (i.e., realizing what’s actually happening) is the first, and arguably most difficult, step in creating change. It’s never easy having our established notions of how the world operates challenged.
But asking whether anyone else is “doing it” is the next step. Discover that the outrage (whatever it may be) isn’t an exception, but rather the established norm, and you’re well on the way to changing the world “as it is” to look more like the world “as it should be”.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/