Re: Capita is "too complex"?
Still I completely agree with Tiggity that all CEO bonuses should be delayed by 5-10 years to ensure some long term thinking.
If all the bonus is delayed for that timescale, then crap managers benefit from remedial actions by competent successors (if any, natch), and at the individual level, chances are that your bonus this year comes from the last job you did, or the one before that. Effectively, that would encourage MORE seagull managers, not less - why work hard, stay in the same job for bloody years, when the rewards are the same for flitting around doing not much, and never staying long enough to take either decisions or flak?
What would be much more effective than managing the bonus structure would be retrospective bonus clawback going back up to ten years. So if Crapita, Carillion or whoever end up in the shit, the Insolvency Service should go back and publicly recover money from those senior managers who ran the business as the problems were built up. Even if they've squirrelled it away or spent it, at least they'd be publicly humiliated, but in most cases they will have extensive pension promises that could be reduced to if they haven't got the cash. If those rules had been in place a decade ago, Fred the Shred and his pocket-picking cronies could have been held partially to account for the mismanagement of RBS, instead of retiring on a million quid a year pension paid for by the bank we all had to bail out.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
