Apple cuts Tim Cook's pay 15% for missing sales goals
Like others I don&#x27;t shed a lot of tears when an exec makes only 89% of their multi-million dollar target bonus :-) I asked an exec at Oracle once about how it was even motivating. For much of my career I&#x27;ve had some sort of bonus associated with my salary, at Sun, NetApp, Google all had bonus programs (with different tweaks). And for an engineer it could be a huge thing. At Google with all the multipliers in place you could get your entire salary paid <i>again</i> in just bonus money if you were a superstar. For an engineer that can be hugely motivating because they need their salary to live on, so bonus money is &quot;extra&quot;.<p>But when you&#x27;re an executive and the different in bonus is $8M vs $5M? Sure its a huge number that you didn&#x27;t get an extra three million dollars but what can you do differently with $8M that you can&#x27;t do with $5M? So my question to the Oracle exec was &quot;Does it really motivate you to work harder, smarter, etc if the difference between hitting it out of the park and not doing so has no impact on your lifestyle?&quot; And his answer was that most of the people that he worked with were &quot;score&quot; motivated, it wasn&#x27;t the money it was that they had a bigger score than their competitive exec.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I really believe that. I mean could Oracle just have Brownie Points as their bonus metric and still get the same performance effort? But it really did surprise me that the number was important even though the effect of the number on their lifestyle was probably not noticeable.<p>I think Tim needs to avoid being painted like Steve Ballmer, an exec that led Microsoft to higher growth, profit, and sales, and into the swamp. And for that reason, not the size of his bonus this year, he needs to pay attention to the changing forces in the market.