``Our offices have been overwhelmed with calls every day from local companies calling us to ask about them,'' says Daniel Marc, executive director of Towers Perrin Argentina. Oil company YPF, Argentina's largest company, has led the way by tying pay to return on capital. Others have followed: At Argentinean property development company IRSA, chairman Eduardo Elsztain gets a modest salary of more than $200,000, but is getting 13 million shares at $1 each, a steep discount to the stock's recent trading price of $3.72. These are restricted forseven years.

In Germany, the typical chief executive of a blue-chip company such as Siemens earns $550,000 in salary and bonus, according to Geneva-based Corporate Resources Group, a consulting outfit. That's modest by US standards, but it doesn't include options. Last year, 10 per cent of German companies listed on the DAX, Germany's equivalent of the Dow Jones industrials, offered option-type packages to executives. This year, with companies such as Lufthansa and Schering joining Daimler-Benz and Hoechst in the options parade, the number is up to nearly one out of three.

``The point is clear in the German boardrooms. They need to have long-term incentives to compete globally,'' says Rainer J Schdtzle, senior consultant at Towers Perrin Germany. ``There's no way back.''

Last May, Japan legalised stock options. Since then, at least 40 of the more than 3,000 registered companies have registered stock option programmes. Car manufacturer Toyota, financial services company Orix and arcade game vendor Namcoare among them.

Call it globalisation of talent. In an era when big business seeks talent wherever it can find it, companies no longer restrict their search to their own nationals. Ford Motor is today headed by an Australian, Compaq Computer by a German. Hartford Insurance's chief executive, Ramani Ayer, was born in India. With this internationalising of the executive talent market, companies everywhere must pay international scales. And they are: UK-based Glaxo Wellcome's chairman, Sir Richard Sykes, actually earned more last year than US-based Merck's chairman, Raymond Gilmartin. Sykes' pay package last year was $2.9 million; Gilmartin's, $2.6 million.

Market dips may fuddle young fund managers

FUND managers of recent years have been handling stock options, but the market has been on the up for the past 15 years. So what is worrying investors is what will happen when all of those aging money managers fade away into the sunset? For, says Forbes magazine, the trillions of dollars that Americanshave pumped into the stock market over the last 15 years will now be handled by young Turks -- most of whom have never seen a down cycle.

For the last 15 years, the market has done just one thing -- go up. Only a handful of brief dips have muddied this bull market's run. The rough stretches in the late 1970s and early 1980s are likely to be meaningless to many fund managers. And the depths of 1973-74 are nothing but folklore to all but a handful of today's stock pickers. Fund managers have had plenty of opportunity to get experience buying stocks, but only in good times.

Here are thousand of mutual fund managers working hard to give you market-beating returns. Most are competent and know the basics of their job -- fundamental research, evaluating management and economic analysis, among others. Given that very few of these managers are able to beat the market year after year shows that the job isn't easy. But there is something that can make the difference between a good manager and a great manager. It'scalled experience.

Sure, education at top business schools, in-house training programmes and guidance from more seasoned mentors will help. But only so far.

And with fewer and fewer experienced managers around, the hundreds of young managers working their way up the ranks of seniority in America's mutual fund industry may be in desperate need of a steady hand if the market really turns ugly.