> I'm fairly sure I could achieve the same results for considerably less.

I'm highly skeptical of that. Not driving the company value to zero is worth a significant amount of money; anyone who has worked under a bad executive or CEO can tell the difference between one that didn't accomplish aggressive goals and one that's objectively bad. If you have a bunch of executive experience, maybe you'd be able to replicate that CEO's performance, but absent that it's more likely you'd cause more harm than just not making the goal.

> If you have a bunch of executive experience, maybe you'd be able to replicate that CEO's performance, but absent that it's more likely you'd cause more harm than just not making the goal.

I doubt this is true. Organisations have inertia, and getting one to change direction or do something different is remarkably difficult. (source: I have been hired as a CEO to change the direction of an organisation. It was difficult).

I strongly suspect that an average person being put into the CEO role would do fine as long as the organisation was basically OK. They'd make mistakes, sure, but everyone makes mistakes. The organisation has ways of limiting the damage of mistakes.

The hard bit about being CEO is taking full responsibility for your decisions with no feedback. You can deal with this in a wide variety of ways; arrogance, narcissism, authoritarianism, or humility, honesty, and teamwork. We tend to see the first three because those kinds of personalities cope well with this kind of difficulty. But that doesn't mean this is the best way to deal with it.

The CEO here is the least likely to be responsible for the increase/decrease in profits/value in that one year. The best you can hope for is a pr boost. Whatever strategy change would not be visible in the short period. Key hires there is not enough time for an impact. Whatever value increase is going to come from vps and everyone down the line. Why not give them the upside on the value they create?

well the CEO's been set a target share price, and he did not reach it. Dunno if you could consider that as failing.

It's zero of the bonus, of which the CEO had assigned a prior that made him choose that job over other offers he likely had.

Performance based bonuses exist at virtually all levels of skill in companies. What you see as a catalyst for fraud could also be framed as a catalyst for incentivizing an outcome most likely achieved via hard/smart work.

$1.5M is not nothing, but it's less than 1% of the CEOs potential compensation.

What percentage of Walamrt's employee base probably has a significant part of their pay tied to performance?

Home Depot? UPS? Amazon's 1.6M, not just those in Seattle making well into the six figures? Kroger? Albertsons? Target? Starbucks? You really think a bagger or cart grabber or barista is getting a performance-based bonus? These are some of the largest employers in the US.

The vast majority of the US workforce probably has less than 10% of their income (probably close to 0%) directly tied to performance. A massive chunk is entirely how many hours they get on the clock, that's it.

> Performance based bonuses exist at virtually all levels of skill in companies

This really sounds like the perspective from someone who's never punched a clock.

When I picked groceries in a freezer for Target, my pay was based on my performance relative to the baseline performance as measured by engineers. If I picked at a higher rate than 120%, I was granted incentive pay. If I picked below 80%, I was on my way to termination. It was meaningful on a $13.50/hr job.

>Performance based bonuses exist at virtually all levels of skill in companies

lol. Any data on that? In tech maybe, but I'm fairly confident(also an unsourced opinion) that the vast majority of workers in the US receive zero bonus, skill based or otherwise