The Generous CEO

Corporate greed, shareholder mistrust, and CEOs with golden parachutes have filled our news for quite a long time now so it's always refreshing when you hear a nice story about a CEO who does the right thing. Enter Lenovo CEO, Yang Yuanqing, who did something extraordinary. From engadget:

Yuanqing....received a sizable $3 million bonus for actually being good at his job. The additional bonus was a reward for steering the company to record shipments and profits despite a weakening PC market. And what did Mr. Yuanqing do with that money? He gave it back to his employees. That second bonus was broken down into 10,000 discrete chunks and dispersed to line workers, assistants and other lower-level employees. 

Going back to the original CNN article, you can see that each employee got $314, which, while looking small to us, goes a long way for some of these junior-level employees--especially to show them that the corporate tone starts at the top and that their value is seen in the job done by the company. 

This is not to say that every CEO should go around giving out their money to their employees (Yuanqing made $14 million according to the article so it's not like he will be lining up at the soup kitchen after giving away $3 million), but it does show that some executives in this world are not the greedy SOBs that the news makes them out to be--and those that aren't should always be rewarded with good press like this.