If you start spending company time devising instead some new computer software, you will be fired. That is the difference with faculty: they themselves set the agendum; it is not a part of the contract, whereas in industry it is.
Management compensation is an instance of contracts, the normative aspects of which are very difficult and only currently being developed. (Papers in finance and case studies a la Harvard --- including the one you cited earlier --- tend to be empirical, telling us, with variable success, what's out there and not what should be there.) That is the essential point you miss entirely: people did not ignore the issue of CEO compensation, this is where the state of the art is; the boards are doing the best they can with limited knowledge and resources, just like the rest. You could not have known that: observing the CEOs while growing up does not help to advance, and probably distorts, one's knowledge of management. You can watch cars on a highway all your life and not get a clue about engineering. If you want to read on compensation, read up on contracts (the work of Lazear is probably more along the lines of your interest, but he too is rather soft). By that I mean normative aspects: the structure of the opitmal contract under which efficiency and risk-sharing are best, under conditions of asymmetric information that lead to moral hazard and adverse selection (you cannot understand options as a conpensation device without the latter, for instance).
Given that this is an academic question, as you yourself have construed, perhaps you should address it to true academics: having been uncovered by you as a mere cheerleader for the CEOs, I do not feel qualified to be useful any further.