Top executives do not work eight-hour days. They and the managers below them, who aspire to reach the peak of the corporate pile one day themselves, have punishing schedules of meetings and, most essential to their role, a constant flow of strategic and tactical decisions to make on an almost daily basis.

They are supported by personal assistants who organize their diaries. They work with deputies to whom they delegate key parts of the business, but in the end, in the normal course of events, the buck stops with them. Failure can and does cost them their jobs. The average tenure of a corporate chief is less than four years. Company boards are apparently impatient with any leader who damages the mighty mantra of modern management “shareholder value”.

The problem is that “shareholder value” can refer to a whole raft of different benchmarks from the day-to-day movement of a share price to the acquisition of assets for long-term investment and development, this last being typical of oil companies searching for reserves around the world.

However, given the relatively short period most chief executives can expect to hold the job, the focus turns inevitably to short-term gains that can boost immediate performance and thus the share price. “Picking the low fruit,” as it is called, typically slashing costs, firing people and driving down the money paid to suppliers, is a far easier task than positioning a company for the medium and longer term, when statistically, the person currently running it is most unlikely to still be in the job.

A classic way to boost growth is the acquisition of a rival or of another business that may or may not fit into the main company’s activities. Thirty years ago there arose a corporate fashion for conglomerates. The argument was that a company controlling a diverse range of businesses was likely to be in a stronger position when markets weakened because not all the different parts of the portfolio were likely to suffer the same degree of downturn at the same time. Yet the reality is, as most MBA courses now warn, that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) more often than not destroy rather than enhance shareholder value, because of the generally underestimated costs of melding two different enterprises with different corporate cultures and often incompatible ICT systems.

Yet in the short-term, market enthusiasm often pushes up the shares of both businesses. And this matters to top executives whose remuneration packages generally include share options.

However, there is a malign quality to the present huge pay deals. With the best will in the world, can chief executives be worth multi-million dollar salaries, many thousand times more than the earnings of a worker at the very bottom of the company wage-scale?

Institutional investors are currently making a fuss about the stellar salaries demanded and paid to chief executives. But these same institutions have their own top men who are pocketing remuneration that is hardly less generous. Criticizing a few chief executives for their obscene rewards actually serves to conceal the general upward trend in top salaries. The immediate losers are the little people, both investors in mammoth funds and the ordinary workers. The long-term loser could be the corporate system itself, which is already held in considerable contempt.