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Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

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31–40 of 153 posts

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#31
post #27

Silly publicity stunt and unbecoming of the principles of the free market. He could have created a lot more value by investing the money in a high-powered startup; not passing handouts to janitors and secretaries.

People doing what they want to do with their own money is "unbecoming of the principles of the free market"? WTF?

Hey, ease up. It must be terrible to be enslaved to a worldview that has accumulation of wealth as its ultimate goal.

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#33
Cynical wondering: Is this real, or a clever way to package company-wide bonuses for PR? Seems like if your company just had a great year and you wanted to boost morale with 300$ bonuses, this is a way to do it and maximize press and positive attention in the process.

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#34
post #25

This is great, but this statement from the author is a pretty terrible assumption: "It's nice to see an executive giving away a huge chunk of money to the employees that had as much to do with Lenovo's successful year as any executive within the company"

Why? Here in the US we have a cultural flaw where we irrationally conflate equilibria in the supply/demand of labor with distribution of credit for a company's success. The CEO gets paid a lot more because there is a much smaller supply of people who have the pedigree/qualifications to be CEO than to be a line worker. There is no chain of logic that can take you from there to the conclusion that he's more important t…

I would take 10,000 Nokia staff over Elop any day of the week.

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#35

I don't really think all that much about somebody who is fantastically rich giving away money that they won't miss. Although it's still somewhat cool because other fantastically rich people wouldn't do this and seem more concerned with increasing their own wealth to an obscene amount.

Now there's a backhanded compliment!

Dude, it doesn't matter how rich he is. He gave away his own money to the people who are making him rich as a gesture of thanks and goodwill. WTF would you find anything to belittle that?

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#36
post #3

That's nice. I wonder what the tax consequences were.

They should have been zero for him and an increase of $314 USD in revenue per employee.

Not necessarily. I don't know the tax code in Taiwan at all. In the US, he might have received the $3 million, paid income tax on it, and then gifted it to each employee, who would not have to pay tax on it. Or he could have asked the Board of Directors to not pay him the money at all, in which case he would not pay taxes on it, but each recipient would have to count it as income for tax purposes.

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#37
post #25

This is great, but this statement from the author is a pretty terrible assumption: "It's nice to see an executive giving away a huge chunk of money to the employees that had as much to do with Lenovo's successful year as any executive within the company"

Why? Here in the US we have a cultural flaw where we irrationally conflate equilibria in the supply/demand of labor with distribution of credit for a company's success. The CEO gets paid a lot more because there is a much smaller supply of people who have the pedigree/qualifications to be CEO than to be a line worker. There is no chain of logic that can take you from there to the conclusion that he's more important t…

I'd say it's exactly the other way round: the CEO definitely has to make decisions that impact the company far more than what 10,000 line workers do, for better or for worse. The open question is whether the commonly used pedigree/qualifications that decide who gets to be CEO actually enable people to make substantially better decisions.

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#38

Silly publicity stunt and unbecoming of the principles of the free market. He could have created a lot more value by investing the money in a high-powered startup; not passing handouts to janitors and secretaries.

I'm not allowed to downvote, but I'd like to. There's a huge problem with the conflation of rational principles with ethical principles.

When we say the "law of gravity" it's a way to understand how the world works, not an edict from some moral authority.

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#39
post #32

One of my old bosses thought that all Lenovos possessed BIOS-level malware that could be activated at a moment's notice by the Chinese government should the US ever got to war with them. He was a weird dude.

Would coreboot reassure the gentleman? Or would that be dismissed as an anarchist conspiracy?

Seriously: are there any laptops/PCs still manufactured within the national borders of the US?

Re: Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Employees

#40

This is great, but this statement from the author is a pretty terrible assumption: "It's nice to see an executive giving away a huge chunk of money to the employees that had as much to do with Lenovo's successful year as any executive within the company"

Hardly. A captain steers the ship, but it's the rest of the crew that sails the boat. You can steer to your hearts content, but without the right team and culture, you aren't going anywhere.

But with the right team and culture and a drunk dimwit at the helm, you'll still going to crash.
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