Compensation, Alignment, Long Term Company Building

I have been watching the much publicised exodus of senior leadership at so called brillaint new age dot com, silicon valley company. At a cursory glance it strikes me that "the management team" at such companies come together for a bull ride and bail out at the first sign of trouble. By definition a "great team" is supposed to be measured on how they solve problems when they hit a rough patch. I am beginning to derive that it all depends on for what reasons they come together and the motivations with which they perform.

If the reason for coming together is more based on "Stock Options" and less on the challenge of the opportunity, then when the stock gets valued down from $700 to $400, it is very hard to motivate the so called top class management team. Whereas if the team comes together to address a big challenge, under challenging times they forego the opulence of perks to meet the challenge. The targets are self set and motivation is self driven for such a team and more challenging the circumstances, the more the motivation.

By the very nature of capitalism and economic cycles ... "challenging business times " at some point during the lifecycle of a corporation are a given.

May be long term sustained value creation needs a different breed of managers and compensation alignment may be a must for consistent value creation in good and bad times.....