A recent article in London’s, The Telegraph “Overhaul the role of pay advisers, urges Lord Myners”, pushes for more accountability on the part of the advice provided by executive compensation and remuneration consultations. At issue are recent pay packages that met with shareholder ire, including those at Barclays and Cookson Group. At both companies, CEOs...
Even with the explosion in performance-based equity, most equity compensation plans look very much like they did almost twenty years ago. Stock options, restricted stock unit and employee stock purchase plans would be familiar to a time-traveler from 1995. The biggest differences are in the size of the payouts and that many participants receive equity...
During the month of November I’m going to focus on my equity compensation roots. With both the IPO and M&A markets once again starting to gain attention, we can start by discussing a recent survey on equity compensation at private companies. The National Center for Employee Ownership, (www.nceo.org) just released their 2011 Private Company Equity...
In a world of swirling regulations, opposing forces of needs versus budgets and increasingly pressing deadlines, it is far too common to get caught up in the tornado that is our everyday work. Generally, when a tornado comes the best plan is to get out of its way. When that is not possible and the...
How does compensation interact with reputation? Let me count the millions of ways. The calculus of reputational damage can be more intertwined than we account for in our current severance agreements. Recent news articles have discussed comments by Yahoo’s departing CEO, Carol Bartz. Famously, or infamously, she declared in a media interview that she disagreed...
My 16-month old nephew inspires today’s posting. The other day, while watching a video of him, I couldn’t help be amazed at the vastness o f his world. This is true both in physical space and size relative to his little body. He lives in a small town in Nebraska, but it couldn’t seem larger...
I once had a colleague who was an acronym addict. His philosophy was anything more than a TLA (three letter acronym) was inefficient and confusing. If the name of a product or service required more than a TLA, he would insist it be changed to something shorter (not my strong suit). I have been doing a...
