We helped the CEO and SVPs figure out how much to pay the company's top ~100. That meant we were hands on with performance bonuses, equity packages, hiring negotiations, promotions, and more.
> I suspect successful 20% time projects are the ones where permission is not required, and don't need someone else to implement?
Part of my proposal was that they bring me on to help them run their fledgling music blog, so it wasn't so much that they needed to execute much themselves -- more that they needed to decide the music blog was worth having a dedicated employee. At the time I think they were more focused on trying to get all their licensing ducks in a row.
The executive compensation team is really interesting – if you read this and have a moment, I'd love to hear anything that you're up for sharing such as:
* Was the purview of the team to craft a compensation "system," or to handle specific decisions / one-offs for exec comp?
* Was there a technical/quantitative aspect to this, ie were you all trying to make data-driven decisions on how to pay executives based upon pulling data, testing what comp packages worked etc, or was it more of a general analyze-the-market-and-make-recommendations process?
* To what extent were you advising CEOs/SVPs vs. actually making a call on what their reports would make comp-wise?
I didn't realize that teams like this (specialized comp analysis for top executives) existed, I always figured that it was baked into existing compensation-focused teams.
Some of this, for the top 5 to 7, is public in the annual proxy; not just at Google but everywhere. Due to the principal agent problem the public data conforms homogeneously due to the retention of consultants to “benchmark”. However it would be fascinating to hear the OPs answer.
Many many years ago I started as a junior employee in a big company together with a close friend. I was in finance, she was in HR. From time to time we had a drink to catch up and while I was doing unglamorous grunt work she was dealing with things like compensation packages for VPs, a short-list for a new regional CEO, the yearly ranking of all employees, etc. From time to time she gave me morsels of confidential information (like the salary a VP was getting or where they were planning to move the offices).It was a totally different ball game. That's why (among other things) it is very very unwise to cross off or even to confess stuff to HR, they are at a different level.
A petty thing I noticed with the years is that in HR, even very junior people will treat you with condescension and a sort of disdain. They know your salary and know where you were in the corporate ladder,they deal with the CEO packages so you are just a mediocre fish in the pond for them.
Skillful HR people also create a pretty solid network so if they leave the company they usually land sweet gigs in other companies or they can start a consulting agency. Out all the places of a corporation HR must be one of the best to be. (Cue hundreds of actual HR managers refuting me)
It's kind of interesting that the ~100 people would have a whole full-time support team just for assisting the decisions (not even making them) of their compensation.
Legally, you’d hire consultants anyways, so the cost basis is irrelevant. If you are required to have insurance or a specific license but you could avoid it through a costly self education process, you end up in the same place.
Going back, let’s say the top is $100M, let’s say the bottom is....(not sure how to guess this)....
Ok, so, the 7th executive made $20M based on this dated public doc (1). So let’s say the top slate is $250M. Going from $20M to $1M for everyone else is ... $900M? Anyways so $1.15B.
The real thing though it’s probably not the cash expenditure part. It’s probably the GROWTH you can get by designing it correct. You’d be okay to spend for results.
Anyways at a high level, let’s say you have 5 FTEs at $200k, plus overhead at 100%, that’s $2M on $1B or 0.5%? Meh, it’s a transaction cost.
What exactly does that work entail?
> A few senior leaders agreed to let me pitch my ideas, and after a fair bit of head-nodding, nothing actually happened.
I suspect successful 20% time projects are the ones where permission is not required, and don't need someone else to implement?