Quotes & Sayings About Bonuses

My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand. — Henry Mintzberg

The mismanagement of American newspapering is quite remarkable. But all of the fellows responsible are now on a golf course in Hilton Head or some such (place), having secured their bonuses and golden-parachute buyouts. — David Simon

When incomes and bonuses decrease, revenues falter, and businesses stumble, it's more important than ever to give - not necessarily more, but in a way that matters more. When incomes are down and wallets are stretched, the effectiveness of our giving is what really counts. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

Not only deprives workers of the fruits of their labour by paying them 1/200th of the salary that goes to their CEO (the international average as of this writing, not including bonuses and stock options); it deprives workers of the very meaning of labour itself — Susan Neiman

In the military, they give medals for people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may survive. In business, we give bonuses to people who sacrifice others. — Simon Sinek

In a Bloomberg poll, 88% of respondents said that Wall Street bonuses should either be banned outright or taxed at 50%. Just 7% said they should remain an incentive. To put that 7% figure in perspective, 6% of Americans believe the moon landings were a hoax; 7% believe Elvis lives; 24% believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim; 41% believe in ESP; and 48% believe in creationism. Americans will believe anything, it seems-except the idea that incentivizing bankers at systemically important institutions to take big risks makes any sense at all. — Felix Salmon

I don't like bonuses for public services employees who do great jobs, like prosecutors or judges. — Trey Gowdy

To get started, track your expenses for a couple of months. Then you should be able to start filling in your estimated debits and deposits for the next few months. Once you get it rolling for a while, you will be able to see your budget for the upcoming months reflected in the estimated totals. You can even notice year-to-year trends, like bonuses, tax bills, etc. that come up routinely and it will help you budget accordingly. — Michelle Singletary

The picture of bankers slavering after bonuses soon after they had been rescued by government bailouts was not only outrageous but also pitiable - pitiable because they were clamoring for their primary measure of self-worth and status to be restored — Raghuram G. Rajan

few simple questions can tell you if your program is heading in the right direction: Is your incentive program kept separate from base compensation and benefit programs, including such variable compensation as cash bonuses? Do your program awards meet the key test: "I could not or would not acquire this on my own"? Are you tailoring the awards to the participant so that each participant group is likely to view their award as offering perceived value? A second flat-screen television does not offer perceived value to — Robert S. Dawson

Self-awareness: it is one of the chief bonuses of advancing age. It is our consolation prize. — Louise Doughty

It is sadly true that most institutions and nations admire and reward sins of the "spirit," and various forms of arrogance and greed often lead to promotions and praise. But pride, ambition, and vanity are still pride, ambition, and vanity; they do not stop being capital sins because someone is pope or president. "Greed is good" in America, extravagant bonuses are envied and imitated, and careerism is rampant among the clergy ... Sins of the flesh, however, carry shame and guilt and can always be used to bring anybody down in church, culture, or the state. — Richard Rohr

The total amount of money that Wall Street handed out in bonuses last year was double the total income of ALL full-time minimum wage workers. That's obscene. — Elizabeth Warren

I have a very simple rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors, pay them more than they were earning, and give them bonuses and incentives based on their performance. That's how you build a first-class operation. — Donald J. Trump

If bankers can push the loans and make more profits for the bank, they get paid higher bonuses. They often also get stock options. If the bank goes under, they get to keep all of these salaries and options - and the government will bail out the bank. These guys will take their money and run, which is pretty much what they're doing now. — Michael Hudson

Joe Lauzon is not seen as the top guy in his division, He's not the champion. Do you know how many people go f
crazy when I saw Joe Lauzon is on the card? Because people love to watch him fight. Joe Lauzon has won more fighter bonuses than I think anybody. If you are that guy, the system works for you. But if you are not that guy, then boo f
hoo, you don't matter. — Dana White

General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free sex and a free lay church in a free lay state. — James Joyce

People are pretty simple: they do what they are rewarded for doing. If they get multimillion-dollar bonuses by taking huge risks with other people's money - as they still do - then they will continue to take those huge risks, and not give it another thought. — William D. Cohan

Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off. — Thomas Frank

One of the great bonuses of being a film actor is that I get to go to different places, meet inspiring people and learn different things. So all those details add up. — Nicolas Cage

Movie stars today are as greedy for additional kids as bankers are for bonuses. It's the new badge of authenticity. — Tina Brown

Sent him to the Harvard Business School to study the minds of the movers and shakers who were screwing up our economy for their own immediate benefit, taking money earmarked for research and development and new machinery and so on, and putting it into monumental retirement plans and year-end bonuses for themselves. — Kurt Vonnegut

Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products - known as "Mr. Credit-Default Swap" - led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees - including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment. Neither — Sebastian Junger

Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses. — Michael Robotham

The dangling of promotions, the promise of raises and bonuses, chair massages, and yoga classes, all can elicit a general sense of compliance, more or less. We still reach goals. We get hard work - which is not the same as great work. But these tactics don't give you what you really want. What you want is a feeling - the same feeling that every leader who has ever lived craves: "They've got this. I can relax." Why don't any of these tactics get us to that place? It's because they all have something in common. Can you see it? It's that they all start with the needs of the business, and put the needs of the individuals second, usually a distant second. This — Jonathan Raymond

Fire and hope are connected, just so you know.
The way the Greek told it, Zeus put Prometheus and Epimetheus in charge of creating life on earth. Epimetheus made the animals, giving out bonuses like swiftness and strenght and fur and wings.
By the time Prometheus made man, all the best qualities had been given out. He settled for making them walk upright, and he gave them fire.
Zeus, pissed off, took it away. But prometheus saw his pride and joy shivering and unable to cook. He lit a torch from the sun and brought it to man again.
To punish Prometheus, Zeus had him chained to a rock, where an eagle fed on his liver. To punish man, Zeus created the first woman-Pandora-and gave her a gift, a box she was forbidden to open.
Pandora's curiosity got the best of her, and one day she opened that box. Out came plagues and misery and mischief. She managed to shut the lid tight before hope escaped.
It's the only weapon we have left to fight the others. — Jodi Picoult

CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it. — Noam Chomsky

Hoffa and his Strawberry Boys' victory in 1932 was a rare labor victory in those days. In that same year a group of World War I veterans and their plight came to symbolize the powerlessness of the working man in the Depression. In 1932 thousands of veterans, tired of broken promises, marched on Washington and refused to leave the Mall until their promised bonuses, not due until 1945, were granted by Congress now when they needed them most. — Charles Brandt

But on most days, especially the warm ones, life exhausts him; the worsening traffic and graffiti and company politics, everyone grousing about bonuses, benefits, overtime. Sometimes in the slow heat of summer, long before dawn, Volkheimer paces in the harsh dazzle of the billboard light and feels his loneliness on him like a disease. — Anthony Doerr

Cucikaya offers a wide range of online casino games with fresh bonuses for players. Where you can play the best casino games. Join now with our 100% welcome bonus! — Parveen Kumar

Enron followed the unwise practice of paying bonuses based on forecasted profits, not actual cash flows, a system that posed a problem remarkably similar to the R&D issues Gluck and his colleagues had solved at Northern Electric years earlier. In short: You can forecast anything. Delivering actual results is a different story. The emphasis on forecasts also neutralized Enron's so-called risk-management group, which became a shrinking violet in the face of ever more outrageous estimates. — Duff McDonald

Again and again workers told me that they are under tremendous pressure not to report injuries. The annual bonuses of plant foremen and supervisors are often based in part on the injury rate of their workers. Instead of crating a safer workplace, these bonus schemes encourage slaughterhouse managers to make sure that accidents and injuries go unreported. Missing fingers, broken bones, deep lacerations and amputated limbs are difficult to conceal from authorities. But the dramatic and catastrophic injuries in a slaughterhouse are greatly outnumbered by less visible, though no less debilitating, ailments: torn muscles, slipped disks, pinched nerves. — Eric Schlosser

Sloanes aren't cafe society or NYLON hedge-funders with million-pound bonuses, or London Eurotrash wearing upgraded style anglais. Ann Barr's and my original picture of them in 'The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook,' published in 1982, was of an upper-middle-class world, conservative and fairly homogeneous, united by old attitudes and institutions. — Peter York

To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course society - here the retirees - has the exact opposite payoff since they finance bankers and chief executives. Retirees get less upside than downside. Society pays for the losses of the bankers, but gets no bonuses from them. If you don't see this transfer of antifragility as theft, you certainly have a problem. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism. — Frederic Bastiat

Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees. — Ron Suskind

To pay out millions upon millions of dollars in bonuses for incomplete work, poor performance, and unacceptable products is the height of government waste and mismanagement. — Jim Gibbons

Everybody thinks the Government should be doing more about everything but just think how many of the bonuses which are quite rightly being dragged off certain people, just think to what good causes they could be put - wouldn't that be a lovely thought'? — Terry Pratchett

On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved. — Vince Cable

When you can't lend or trade - and you can't invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses - how exactly are you going to make money? — Andrew Ross Sorkin

They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building? — Sara Sheridan

In 1997 Clinton pushed to double the number of children being adopted by the year of 2002 (Altstein et al. 11). He said that bonuses would be given to the state of $4000.00 for every child adopted over the desired quota and another $2000.00 for any child that has disabilities or older children — Keelie Smith

If you were charged with fixing the U.S. auto industry, how would you do it?

The guys who run the auto companies are out of touch with their customers and their employees. They ride to work in their limousines. They go up in their elevators and lock themselves in their offices. They don't walk out into the plants. They wouldn't even drive in the neighborhoods where their employees live. They give themselves big bonuses when the company isn't making any money. I'd make them get involved with the people who are building the cars. They've got to become real people. — Ken Hendricks

Yes
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out - no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening. — William Stafford

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it. — Mordecai Richler

The more you progress, the more you learn. I try to pay attention to ticket counts, draws, guarantees and bonuses. I look at my deals closely these days and try to come up with other projects and ideas, since this business [comedy] is about creating content. — Hannibal Buress

If you get married, you lose all your benefits. That's insane! We should give people bonuses for getting married, and sending signals and talking about it to the society. — Sam Brownback

In the subprime mortgage industry, bankers handed out iffy loans like candy at a parade because such loans meant revenue and, hence, bonuses for executives in the here-and-now. — Thomas Frank

The company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers. — Akio Morita

So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, "I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses."
This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying "piss off, I'm not interested." You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you've been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn't buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 per cent of the time, so you need to charge yourself out at 2.5 times your payroll rate, or 1000 a day in order to meet your target. Not interested in the job? Pitch unrealistically high. You never know ...
"Done," says Mr. Pin-Stripe, staring at you expressionlessly. And it is at that point that you realize you are well and truly fucked. — Charles Stross

I am not a believer in large salaries. I hold that every man should be paid for personal production. Our big men at Bethlehem seldom get salaries of over one hundred dollars a week; but all of them receive bonuses computed entirely on the efficiencies and the economies registered in their departments. — Charles M. Schwab

I'm inspired to write songs in many different ways - it can come from a melody, a word or phrase or something I have seen on my travels around the world. It's one of the great bonuses of my job in that I get to meet so many people and experience different cultures and it would be hard not to be inspired. — Chris De Burgh

In the NFL, you have a short shelf life. As a running back, if you're the first pick, and you're NFL life expectancy is only 3.5-6 years, your first big contract might not come until three years in - well, you might never get there. They need to get those signing bonuses up front because nothing is guaranteed. — Eric Dickerson

Billion dollar bonuses turned rules into polite suggestions. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

One of the bonuses about loving yourself is that you get to feel good. — Louise Hay

Don't you know there's another bubble as well? An expectations bubble. Bigger houses, private planes, yachts ... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well, as all bubbles do. — Edward Rutherfurd

I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed, and that's why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits. — Frans De Waal

When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and financial stability are usually the issues. Is it moral for rich countries to use such a high proportion of the world's resources or for investment bankers to earn large bonuses? — Edmund Phelps

In London, Washington, and Paris people talk of bonuses or no bonuses. In parts of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food. — Robert Zoellick

Don't you know that there's another bubble as well An expectations bubble. Bigger houses private planes yachts ... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well as all bubbles do.
Come to my gallery and I will sell you beautiful things at a more reasonable price. But the point is that they will have value. Things of real beauty things of the spirit. — Edward Rutherfurd

I don't think bonuses are always bad. — Andrew Cuomo

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

In the moral calculus of currently prevailing state capitalism, profits and bonuses in the next quarter greatly outweigh concern for the welfare of one's grandchildren, and since these are institutional maladies, they will not be easy to overcome. While much remains uncertain, we can assure ourselves, with fair confidence, that future generations will not forgive us our silence and apathy. — Noam Chomsky

Use these scientifically rubber-stamped pointers to make better, brighter decisions: (a) Avoid negative things that you cannot grow accustomed to, such as commuting, noise, or chronic stress. (b) Expect only short-term happiness from material things, such as cars, houses, lottery winnings, bonuses, and prizes. (c) Aim for as much free time and autonomy as possible since long-lasting positive effects generally come from what you actively do. Follow your passions even if you must forfeit a portion of your income for them. Invest in friendships. — Rolf Dobelli

After the September 11th tragedy in New York City, people began to tell others what their loved ones, who had been trapped in the twin towers in New York, had said to them in frantic telephone conversations or email messages. Those who received calls from mobile phones from the doomed planes also told their stories. Some re-listened to messages left on answerphones. And as they shared their experiences, it was immediately evident that the same three words kept coming up time and time again. Those words did not refer to size of salary or bonuses, nor to the type of car recently purchased or expensive holidays taken. No. Lovers said them to lovers, husbands to wives, friends to friends and parents to kids: 'I love you.' 'Tell Suzanne, I love her. — Rob Parsons

Less than a year after loading the company up with debt, Romney and Bain gave themselves bonuses four times bigger than the $8 million they had put into the deal. — Jennifer Granholm

But I think what we're coming to grips with is the fact that we actually have a mercenary Army, and it doesn't have a nice ring to it. We call it 'volunteers', but we're basically paying people to serve their country. And if you're going to pay people and have a mercenary Army, you're going to have to pay the market rate. And so the bounties are going up - more money for tuition, higher enlistment bonuses - and I think it's appropriate. — Eleanor Clift

At a dinner party in north London, I listened to friends bragging about buying Porsches with their bonuses and sending out from their offices for pizzas and clean shirts because they were clinching a deal and could not leave their desks. I wanted to tell them of a place where every family had lost a son or a husband or had a leg blown off, almost every child seen someone die in a rocket attack and where a small boy had told me his dream was to have a brightly coloured ball. But, when I began to talk about Afghanistan, I watched eyes glaze and felt as if I was trying to have a conversation about a movie no one else had seen. — Christina Lamb

One of the bonuses of being a Christian is the glorious hope that extends out beyond the grave into the glory of God's tomorrow. — Billy Graham

Bonuses balance my budget in New York City. The bigger the bonuses on Wall Street, the more money I had to spend on poor people. The New York City budget is determined greatly by the bonuses given on Wall Street. — Rudy Giuliani

Business people get many undeserved prizes - golden parachutes and bonuses even when companies fail. I don't think people should get rewarded for screwing up. — Mo Ibrahim

And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple. — Maureen Dowd

Although traditional incentives such as bonuses or recognition can prod people to better performance, no external motivators can get people to perform at their absolute best ... Wherever people gravitate within their work roles, indicates where their real pleasure lies - and that pleasure is itself motivating. — Daniel Goleman

Working with an incredibly strong script is the thing that gives you the most confidence. If you go into an episode knowing the script is strong, I just feel like that's where it all starts. All collaborations that happen, in addition to that, are just bonuses, at that point. — Ty Burrell

I always am a firm believer in you compensate people for their job, and so I did give them bonuses. We accomplished a lot in Congress, we passed health care reform. There were threats against their lives; they had a tough two years. They'd forgone any cost-of-living increase or any bonus before. — John Salazar

If you want people to perform better, you reward them, right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them ... But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. — Daniel H. Pink