Many companies are quickly discovering that limiting executive pay may be easy, but keeping these limits in place is a whole separate issue. The WSJ ran a story today citing an example of this: Whole Food Markets Inc. The grocer limited compensation for its top executives to a multiple of the average Whole Foods workers' pay. The cap started at eight times average pay when the copany was private in the 80s, but quickly grew to 14 times in the early 90s after the company went public. Last year, the cap hit 19 times average pay. Why the raise? there is a strong conflict between the board and management. The board needs to keep compensation low enough to keep shareholders happy while keeping it high enough to retain quality management. The average pay of a CEO in a large American corporation grew to $11.6 million in 2005, or 411 times the typical US worker. This sets the standards to retain quality executives quite high, which has led to the shareholder rebellion that we have been seeing recently. Whether or not this problem will settle down again remains to be seen; however, it is important to realize the struggle that the board has to put up with before anyone can complain about executive compensation growing too high.