What if all CEOs/CTOs/CFOs/Upper Management were required to present a proof of work to justify their salaries, or even have their salaries be a function of the proof of work?
Using a similar concept to the proof of work in a block chain, you could require higher level positions to author papers that in a quantifiable way justify that their decisions led to the company profiting.
These papers, much like any academic paper, would need to be peer-reviewed by orthogonal entities that are not tied to the organization, e.g. it would have to be submitted and reviewed by an anonymous committee. The paper would need to be either exclusively authored by the person in question, or if multiple contributors are present (presuming all are within the org) their corresponding work would reduce the perceived contribution of the individual in question.
For ground-level employees, this has long been the case, but I have never seen a CTO/CFO/CEO ever prove that they were worth what they were paid for. An acquisition that brought revenue could be nothing more than gambling without any kind of sound quantitative analysis behind it, while performing an obvious duty should not be rewarded anymore than the lowest tier of employee.
The company I worked for had a person who interfaced with the customer and created sub-optimal solutions, so that he didn't have to do much work, despite the underlings having much better ideas that the customer would prefer, our ideas were stifled and his salary kept growing while ours stagnated.
Even in the case of something less technical, what about private companies that consist of one completely clueless person who just happens to have a truck-load of money paying far below minimum wage to turn a profit, because he can't automate his own processes, or do his own accounting?
You could extend this further to people renting out land, or any other high return investment involving an inelastic good that doesn't require any big kind of reasoning.
Naturally the above places emphasis on mental ability, but we could also tweak this to account for physical exertion as well. The sky is literally the limit, since everything we do in our daily lives can be described as some kind of function with inputs and outputs.
The problems of capitalism could be rectified with such an approach…. but more than likely it would be manipulated to the degree that the proof of work for a CEO/CTO would be converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.
TLDR: I hypothesize that the current inequities in a capitalistic society would be rectified if all individuals in high-paying jobs were required to show work justifying their salaries, i.e. pay should be normalized according to a uniform metric dependent on verifiable work.