My perennial near-hero Mark Cuban recently examined the issue of CEO pay, over on his handy soapbox, The Blog Maverick. In his blog post titled "My 2 Cents on CEO Pay," Mr. Cuban outlined his position on the subject and tossed some ideas around. The post makes a good read, and the author makes some good points. Additionally, the 65 or so comments by the readers are well worth the time to cruise them.

I'd like to discuss and expand upon an idea someone presented in addition to those discussed by Mark Cuban. It's actually a reverse scenario to what Mr. Cuban describes as moving chief executive officers into "the cash zone." In the Cuban scenario, the CEO would be paid cash, without additional compensation through stock grants, in order to make their pay more tangible and visible as a business expenditure. Mr. Cuban also asserts that this might more closely align CEO compensation with company performance. It's an admirable idea, but I doubt that it will ever happen.

In this alternate approach, we give the CEO all the stock certificates he or she can swallow. Then we provide an equal number to be divided among all other employees of the company. In this manner of compensation, all employees have their hands on the ball. The concept of laboring to line the pockets of someone else with gold would become extinct. The CEO would suddenly become a real person in the eyes of the rank-and-file laborers. Likewise, the labor force would be inextricably linked to the financial success of the CEO. If labor is to share the risk, they should also share the reward.

A further stop-gap to this scenario would be if upper management deemed that labor cuts were needed to create profitability, or for any reason other than "cause," they and the CEO would be required to surrender share holdings equal to the holdings of the displaced workers. These surrendered shares would then be distributed to the pink-slipped workforce members, with the company paying all applicable taxes on the transfer. Additionally, no party would be allowed to liquidate more than 5% of their holdings in any one year, as long as they were employed by the company, and upper management would be required to maintain holdings at least equal to those of the workforce.

I know it's a lofty scenario, but it sure would beat the heck out of what we have going on now.

I often spend a little time over at Blogmaverick.com, where Mark Cuban recently sought to give the world of blogging a little of his insightful perspective. It seems that Mr. Cuban finds little to respect in the world of blogging, or at least in the world of slipshod ,cookie-cutter blogging. Though I found Mark's blog entry a trifle difficult to read, which is quite unusual coming from him, I nonetheless agree with most of the body of his post. I especially agree with his assertion that just because a blog is backed by the name of a well-known media organization does not in itself render that blog worthy of special notice.

Mark Cuban wrote, "...newspapers having 'bloggers' is easily one of the many bad decisions that newspapers have made over the past 10 years." If newspapers are going in a wrong direction by producing blogs, perhaps they need to reinstall the title reporter and drop the title blogger to give a different perspective to the reader. If newspapers are using the term blog simply as a culture hook, then they have it all wrong and they're just selling their reporters short. I believe that I'm in agreement with Mark Cuban when I say that true reporters should be releasing content within some format other than blogs. Blogging is what I do, and I'll be the first to tell you that I'm no reporter. The titles are absolutely not interchangeable, though they may sometimes be used correctly in tandem.