His luck is having an incredibly generous/complicit board of directors.
His compensation is WAY out of line with industry standards. I think it’s a payoff for all the legal offshoring Blizz is doing in the Caribbean.
They certainly wouldn’t be either if their golden goose wasn’t laying eggs.
Jesus.
Forget it.
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Blizzard handles classic in the exact same manner as gamigos business strategy, just much slower
I agree that theoretically you should trust the board to make a sound decision. The problem is that humans seem to have a cognitive bias towards narrative explanations to explain complicated phenomenon, even if (or especially when) these explanations are only superficially plausible. “We had a good year, and Bobby is CEO. Therefore, Bobby is the reason we had a good year and we should reward him.”
There’s a reason why Alex Malley, author of The Naked CEO, is no longer in business. He had a lucky streak, wrote a book claiming causal explanations, and now he’s trash. But millions of people - including himself - believed there was some lesson to be learnt. It’s easy to tut-tut him now and claim we always knew he was nothing special, but seven years ago executives everywhere were clamouring to learn the “lessons” from this man.
In the long run, there wasn’t anything to learn except a lesson in statistics. And with the exception of a very few select individuals, most CEOs who rise to prominence follow this same pattern. So while it is plausible that Bobby is God’s gift to executive leadership, it’s much more likely that the board has significantly overvalued Bobby’s worth and that over time he will inevitably yield much more mundane results as Activision regresses to the mean.
In light of that, go figure if you think he still deserves that $200m.
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Lol, Bobby isn’t even a billionaire, trust me, there’s a load of people that do much, much better than him and are far more unscrupulous when dealing with employees, Amazon comes to mind.
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In that light, you deserve it, don’t you. So, why not just go get it?
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I mean, the guy bought out Activision when it was legally bankrupted and at the brink of liquidation and he managed to make it what it is today, unscrupulous or not, he took the risks, he reaps the rewards. That’s how the world works.
And also, it’s weird to me that people pretend that Blizzard was forcibly taken over by Kotick. Morhaime knew very well who they were letting through the door and he happily cashed out and became really wealthy out of this whole merger debacle.
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Was it Morhaime’s choice? I’m not very familiar with this at all, but I was under the impression that Blizzard was owned by Vivendi or something like that, prior to the Activision deal.
I never said CEOs don’t work hard. It takes immense dedication and sacrifice.
I’m just saying that, if Bobby and the CEO of, say, an airline were to have swapped places 15 months ago, Activision almost certainly would have performed the same and the airline almost certainly would have still gone bankrupt due to COVID (or escaped by the skin of its teeth).
It’s Activision’s money at the end of the day and they can spend it how they choose.
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I think what you’re doing is looking at statistical averages and trying to apply them to specific individuals and circumstances. That seems like a dangerous way to gamble.
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On the contrary, ignoring base rates is a dangerous way to gamble.
Certainly. However, I wouldn’t consider this to be dichotomous.
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Also true. I don’t doubt that Bobby is a very capable CEO. He wouldn’t have stayed in his position for so long if he weren’t.
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Bobby didn’t accomplish anything by ANYONE’S standards that’s worthy of 200 million. I mean, seriously, what did he do? He’s getting this while they’re laying people off.
Meanwhile, bots run rampant in retail and classic. Tickets sit in a queue for days and weeks. The CS is beyond unqualified and understaffed. And players claim they can’t afford to do any better.
As long as someone’s TAXED fairly and respects the customers and the product (neither apply to Bobby) I couldn’t care less. But I’m not going to agree that he’s worked hard enough to earn 200 million dollars. The advantages of the pandemic fell in his lap.
NURSES have worked harder. DOCTORS and SCIENTIST have worked harder. TEACHERS and SANITATION WORKERS and FOOD PROCESSORS have worked harder.
They’re laying off close to 200 people instead of retraining them and moving them to other positions, say, oh I dunno’ . . . CS or GM? These are people who will lose their livelihood - their ability to pay for food, rent, utilities and take care of their children.
Excuse me if I don’t give Bobby Kotick a standing ovation for his “accomplishments.”
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This is a big part of it for me. Not only is Bobby helping Blizz abuse the tax systems of multiple countries, you know he isn’t paying his fair share of taxes.
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Are the layoffs and bonuses related? I don’t really know much about the financial workings of an entertainment company like acti-blizz, but my understanding is that it takes a lot more CS professionals to develop a game than to maintain one, and that in a product’s life-cycle it is fairly common to lay off employees as games move past the development stage. Perhaps the recent layoffs were related to multiple projects moving past the development stage and were simply a normal course of business? That being said, the optics of the timing are pretty bad.
Btw, in case anyone doesn’t realize it, the C-Suite of any large corporation typically has multiple tools to shift money between revenue, profits, and share-price. That is, an unethical CEO and CFO, if their contracts tie bonuses to share price, can maximize share price at the expense of profitability, and vice versa. The value and profitability of the company don’t really change, only on paper.
Maybe the CEO and Board of directors should run their decisions past the janitor after they are done absorbing your input.
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Implying that no one ever can call out something unethical.
Absolutely ridiculous.
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Night elf check
Druid also check