Cristiano Ronaldo celebrates goals with a leap and a pose — arms extended downwards, chest thrust forward — that enrage the footballer’s critics. Suggest, however, that his self-regard or pay are unmerited and you are likely to be laughed off the terraces — especially after last week’s hat-trick for Real Madrid that won the team a place in the Champions League semi-finals.
Chief executives’ assertions of their skills is even more vexing. As last week’s shareholder revolt against Bob Dudley’s 20 per cent pay rise at BP showed, tolerance for their posing is paper-thin. Investors’ impatience may erupt again at Anglo American’s meeting this week and at other FTSE 100 groups later this spring. CEOs may be paid as much as, or more than, Ronaldo, but, with vanishingly few exceptions, they are not in his league.
Excessive pay is the biggest obstacle to restoration of trust in business. This was true in 2010, when Sir Richard Lambert, then head of the CBI business association, warned it was so out of line that CEOs “risked being treated as aliens”. It is even truer now, when they have long since left our galaxy and are heading at nanocraft-speed towards the next.