CEO Pay too high? Crowdsource Management!

I was in the middle of a run this past weekend with a friend who works for a large tech company.  He was commenting on the fact that there are going to be layoffs coming up for his company and that despite all of this the CEO might still be making in the range of 10 million dollars.   We did some quick calculations, but figured that the average R&D/ General & Administrative employee probably made in the range of 100-150k.  That means that the CEO was making in the range of 100x to 66x more than the average US college educated fairly experienced employee.   What could you do with 66-100 employees?  You could crowdsource the job of CEO…

It’s still an idea, but you’d have to put some controls around it. 

A) The group would have to be sufficiently diverse.  This way the CEO crowd would have more overall experience than any one man would have.  Being diverse, they’d sidestep some of the groupthink issues as well.

B) It would have to be sufficiently large, but in order to pitch this to boards, you’d have to show some improvement in cost savings.  Is 25 enough, 30?

C) There would have to be some thought into how to enable some forms of communication between the CEOs, and how to disable some others.  My concern here is that we’d turn the CEO job into a mini-Senate/House with factions and partisanship, which destroys the “independent” nature of the crowd.

D) A couple of those CEOs might have to be in charge of maintaining the communication process, ensuring no funny business is going on.  They would assemble the information and pass it up to board, or down to the operating divisions. This would be an overhead cost, but somebody’s got to do it.

I admit that this was dreamt up while in a somewhat oxygen deprived state, but I think going through why this might or might not work would be valuable into understanding what can be done in an informal open communication-based system vs. what could be done in the traditional way of doing things.