Any other business | 19 February 2011

Another reason to cut bankers’ pay: the softer the product, the easier the job

Is it harder to run a country or a global company? Variations of this dinner- party gambit cropped up wherever I went last week, offering a way of drawing together half a dozen business stories and political arguments. So here’s this week’s Any Other Business competition. Place the following in descending order of the difficulty of their jobs: David Cameron, George Osborne, Bob Dudley, Stephen Elop, Marius Kloppers, António Horta-Osório and Gerald Jones.

Bob Dudley is the American who was recently promoted to chief executive of BP and is now dug in on the Russian front. You also need to know that Elop is the Canad-ian head of the Finnish phone maker Nokia; Kloppers is a South African who runs BHP Billiton, the Anglo-Australian mining giant; and Horta-Osório, from Lisbon, takes over shortly as chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, having previously run the British arm of Santander of Spain.

Smart readers will have spotted the odd man out. Gerald Jones is the former chief executive of Wandsworth borough, which is neither a country not a company. But he deserves mention because in his final year in this none-too-testing post, he earned more than double the salary of the Prime Minister, who I think we can agree has a very difficult job indeed. Jones is one of more than 200 local government chiefs who have been trousering more than the PM — underlining that, whatever selection of leaders we choose to compare, the degree of challenge and level of pay are unlikely to show a logical relationship. So let me leave that strand aside until I come to the bankers at the end.

Feet up at No 11