I despise it because it's arbitrary. It's a corporate fiefdom. Meritocracy is dead outside of start-ups (shaky argument) and the HF-sector. My brother was the COO of a start-up who made something like $400MM in telecom. Perhaps $100MM was secured during the late vcap stage and the remainder when the co went public. You can argue that the $100MM was arbitrary, but made legitimate through public demand in the common. If elasticity of demand results in $400MM in holdings, so be it. Of course the initial share allocation is arbitrary... and therein lies the argument against. $800k to $400MM? CEO pay should be inexorably tied/leveraged to earnings with some fall-back minimum should the market perform poorly. Or simply use an XYZ Corp/SP500 ratio to derive the gearing. Give the CEO $1MM for every 100bp on relative performance. The current practice of striking options at 90% under share price is sanctioned corporate embezzlement.
I like meritocracy too. It is only people who have a passion for their subject that do well through meritocracy though. There are not many.
Comanpies are not democracies. Buying a share is not buying a voting block in reality. The most you own besides a piece of paper is the free corn muffin at quArterly reports.
It has been argued that corporate governance regulations & practices in the US give comparatively more power to executives and less to the board of directors and shareholders, when compared with those in other countries.
Carl Ichan has been doing pretty well showing the useless executives in the companies he targets how useless and overpaid they really are. He just can't get around to many at the same time.