Oh, the boards are wise to it.

Pick your favorite publicly-traded board and take a look at its composition.

Then start drawing links to *other* boards those board members sit on or have sat on in the past. Start mapping out where and when each board member attended B-school. Map out where each board member previously served as a CEO. Start looking at commonalities.

By the time you have linked and jumped to a handful of other boards, you'll be seeing the same names over and over again. You'll see links that go back to college. You'll also see a lot of CEO's who sit on or chair their *own* boards. (Fox, please guard the henhouse.)

None of this is illegal...although there's a lot of shareholder activism related to the whole combined CEO/chair thing... But no boards are remotely in the dark about what the CEO is making: in fact, usually they have a committee dedicated to C-level compensation.

(Oops, kinda OT... )