Making exceptions for exceptional people

This is in response to my post here http://blog.kirigin.com/10x

I love hearing about how people have tried this out. My conclusion is that judging output is already hard, and it is now even harder because it needs to take into account the whole picture. It isn't just that person's effect on the codebase, but whether they are acting appropriately if they are a leader. In his example, I don't think a CTO should ever be part time.

Having hard conversations about performance might suck, but how else are we going to get better without negative feedback? Quietly giving top performers more stock doesn't solve the personal decision of whether working full time is a good idea, and it certainly doesn't help worse performers get better.

I like privately pushing people to be better while publicly thanking those having a big impact.