ESOPs

Adam Lashinsky debates the role of employee stock options in Fortune:

Stock options were invented as a way to align the interests of employees with shareholders.
...the system began to crack... in the 1990s, when companies with falling stock prices began to re-price their stock options in order to retain their employees.
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the system of awarding options has gone from an incentive program to an entitlement. Companies that can't or don't offer rich options are at a disadvantage to those that do. Executives - with the complicity of their accountants, lawyers, compensation consultants and boards of directors - game the system to ensure not that employees are working for the shareholders, but rather that employees will make extra money in all but the gravest of circumstances. Options were considered so sacrosanct that Silicon Valley bigwigs fought tooth and nail to avoid having them accounted for as a compensation expense.
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So here's a radical proposal: Scrap the whole system...
True entrepreneurs, by the way, the kind that drop out of school, max out their credit cards, eat ramen noodles and risk everything for a dream, won't mind this at all. They don't need stock options to get stinking rich. They have the stock of the companies they start.
True entrepreneurs don't need to play games to become wealthy. It's the executives - the people the shareholders hire to look after their interests - who've been reaping entrepreneurial returns that need to be stopped.