Thanks Gnangarra.
I'm familiar with Bridgespan, and when I worked as a strategy consultant, I used the "starvation cycle" myself. It's a way of framing the need for improvement differently from simply insisting that 5% is saved each year, and instead using more meaningful strategic goals.
This piece in no way explains why the WMF is in the habit of paying its CEO twice what the UK Government pays its Prime Minister. I doubt anyone believes that the WMF job is twice as stressful, delivers twice the value, is twice as accountable or twice as hard.
If we were to bring some hard numbers into the WMF board to /benchmark/ the CEO salary decision making process, compare the WMF CEO package to that of charities of the same size to the WMF. Here's a few facts from a survey of UK charities:[1] * In the 100 highest paying charities, CEOs are paid a median of $235,000. * Cancer Research UK have an income of $770m and pay its CEO, Sir Harpal Kumar, $330,000. * Barnardo's have an income of $400m and pay Peter Brook a salary of $215,000. * Scope has over 3,500 employees, an income of $140m, and pay Richard Hawkes a salary of $200,000.
Probably the best comparative example from this handful is Cancer Research UK (CRUK) as they are both in the technology and science/academic sector and pay an almost identical CEO salary as the WMF does. Their strategic goal is to find new cures for cancer applying leading edge science, and run a massive programme of public communication and education (including improving Wikipedia articles, which I was lucky enough to help out with!). Their direct spend on scientific research projects is over $165m,[2] more than a magnitude larger than the WMF's spend on software development and with far, far greater technical and ethical challenges.
The reason that the WMF rewards its CEO at the same prestigious level as CRUK, is because they are trapped in the Silicon Valley bubble and fixed in the belief that they must pay top executive salaries competing with commercial Silicon Valley IT companies, rather than comparing themselves to charities or educational institutions. If the WMF board really want to shake up their strategy, they should start planning to have some development and management teams in cities other than San Francisco, if only to unlock themselves from their current unrealistic group-think, and start behaving like a leading edge professional educational charity, rather than a for-profit "breaking everything is good" Silicon Valley dot com.
Links: 1. http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/charity-pay-study-highest-earners/management/ar... 2. http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/our-organisation/annual-report-and-...
Fae
On 6 June 2016 at 04:10, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
this is worth reading http://www.fastcoexist.com/3060455/future-of-philanthropy/demanding-that-non...
On 5 June 2016 at 16:23, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
On 5 June 2016 at 02:28, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
On Sunday, 5 June 2016, Greg Varnum gvarnum@wikimedia.org wrote:
...
Not to put too fine a point on it... But are you saying that Sue remained the most highly paid contractor to the WMF, and at a significantly higher rate than when she was the actual ED, until FIVE DAYS ago? That is, well beyond any 'transition period' (and in fact longer than the employment of the person who replaced her)?
Yes, this jumped out for me. I can understand paying out a 12 month golden handshake on the way out, and paying a previous CEO for a few days or weeks support during handover, but continuing to pay out at an eye-watering equivalent salary of $300,000 per annum, was a super-duper bonus for Sue.
However this is wrapped up in the normal "nothing to see here, move-along" WMF PR speak, these lottery prize level payouts have been a terrible, terrible deal in terms of the WMF delivering on its goals and values. I certainly did not see Sue saying anything in public to help avoid or repair any of the WMF board's strategic disasters in its highly public annus horribilis. I doubt that in truth she did much more in private, sorry, it's just not credible that the WMF has all its strategic manipulators hidden away in private rooms as if this were a court for the Borgia family.
I am utterly convinced that the WMF would do exactly as well, and possibly even better, by paying a CEO slightly less than it currently pays it's head of legal, certainly it would be rather stupid to pump up the interim CEO's salary by three times to match the celebrity CEO salaries that the WMF seems to have locked itself into.
Fae
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