Telecom Investors: Can You Hear Us Now?

Telecom executives certainly haven't had it easy over the better part of the last decade. They had to deal with the tech bubble's burst in 2001, followed by consolidation and declining revenue in the sector, as they contended with the challenge of finding ways to grow as wireless phone usage grew and leveled out.

As a result, some telecom CEOs may have been more concerned with meeting short-term metrics and targets in order to ensure bonus payments, further hindering stock price and company growth, Hodgson says.

"It's possible that if these companies concentrated more on the long term in the first place, they wouldn't be so concerned over the short term," he says. "They need to turn things around now before they can think of a long-term strategy. When many of the compensation policies were originally planned out, it looked like the sector would ride high for years. There were a lot of fixed-pay policies and it's difficult for boards to turn backwards and get rid of it all."

In the years following the WorldCom debacle, in which CEO Bernie Ebbers fraudulently covered up the company's performance by falsely inflating revenues in order to boost share prices, telecom shareholders failed to unite and attack perceived problems.

"One of the issues is that shareholders don't have many tools to do much about pay," says Dan Konigsburg, corporate governance analyst with Standard & Poor's. "They have a pretty blunt instrument -- to vote out someone they don't like -- but that is not used too often."