Charlie Munger has often said "show me the incentives and I'll...

Charlie Munger has often said "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes".
When I look at PPT's 2022 annual report it is glaringly obvious why shareholders have done so poorly over the long term.
Look at pg40 (screenshot beneath) and you can see that the entire management team has very little personally invested in the stock.
This is despite each of them being paid very healthy levels of remuneration ranging between circa $800k to $2.7M annually.

In fact, if you look at pgs 54-55 of the 2022 annual report, one can even see that of the measly $700k in shares owned by the CEO, a bit over 40% of these were given to him by the company during the past 2 years. The CEO is a veteran of financial services (Colonial, Challenger, Janus Henderson) and I would suspect is a person of significant means (wasn't his father also a director of perpetual at some point?)...it is wildly disappointing that he sees it fit to own so little of the company he manages. Ditto the rest of the management team.
What they do with their own money is up to them I suppose, but nothing beats a management team with real skin in the game, who actively put their hands in their pockets and buy meaningful amounts of their own company's equity and then drive shareholder returns because of the strong alignment of interest. Throwing them free equity every year isn't the same thing as seeing them stump up some capital.

The long term performance of PPT is abysmal. People rightly ask why they pushed so hard for the merger with Pendal, despite questionable merit and much pushback from professional investors. People wonder why their previous M&A attempts have fared so poorly as well. Well, let's not assume that these highly paid people are merely lacking in competence...perhaps it's something else.

Perhaps it's because the management team aren't actually managing the business for optimal shareholder return...maybe they're managing it to optimise their own career prospects. After all, building a bigger empire via buying more FUM means managing more money and more staff...so the hired help can then justify bigger salaries for themselves. Who cares about shareholder returns? Shareholders with skin in the game, not this management team.

Buyer beware, PPT is a ship of fools living on past glories, managed by a rent seeking management team with little to no skin in the game...and smarter, hungrier, more aligned management teams are going to continue to run rings around them.