All the people who keep saying Iwata took a temporary pay cut to avoid mass layoffs for his staff, I have to ask, how much was he getting paid? It's an incredible gesture unlikely to be done by any Western CEO, no doubt, but isn't it more of an apology and a gesture than an actual economic miracle to prevent mass layoffs? Unless he was being paid an outrageous amount in the first place.
Anyway, to the C-level people, the thousands of staff at the bottom are just numbers in a spreadsheet. They don't want to reward the masses too well if the company is succeeding either, in case they leave and form their own competing companies, yet they believe themselves and people at their level should be paid outrageous amounts because it's important to retain talent, like EA paying Patrick Soderlund $20M after some fuckups and before firing/pushing him out, and he's already set up a company to poach staff from DICE.
