The thing I find so interesting is that here in the US, our corporate definition of "long term" or "long range", relative to planning, is "through next Thursday", whereas in many other countries, most notably, Japan, their "long term" is just that... Looooong. With that in mind, we seem to accept that our CEO's and senior management of companies, are entitled to as much compensation as they can ring out of the board of directors, who, themselves are members of that very same elite club. In Japan, CEO's of major corporations usually earn some multiplier of their lowest paid employee, and it's not a lot of Yen. I believe most Japanese CEO's earn less than 3 million dollars.

All that said, regardless of what Fred Smith earns, he's the right guy to be running FedEx, and as long as he can provide the appropriate leadership and vision, in my mind anyway, he's worth every penny he gets.

JJ