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You could reward them in the same way that executives are increasingly remunerated for their performance-based pay - in shares or other financial instruments with an enforced holding period that are linked to the health of the business / business unit as appropriate.

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While that's an interesting approach for compensation which might mitigate knowingly bad/irresponsible decisions, it doesn't look like it would address the core issue here of having to choose a metric to base compensation on.

Maybe the gaming effect would be lessened by that compensation approach, but at a very large scale org, I doubt that it would. Although, it would be interesting to see real life studies of this, in case such practices have already been tried out.

Does exec give a damn if they earn 5 or 10 million?

It’s only true if you believe that the average human being is not opportunistic.

If they don't, why are managers choosing to pay them $10m?

Yes. Pay is partially a means of keeping score.

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