At As You Sow, Roseanna Weaver points out that the Darden board found a way to give the CEO a bonus even though COVID-19 has meant decreased revenues for the restaurant businesses. The Compensation Committee “approved modifications to the performance goals for fiscal 2020 annual incentives” because of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lowering…
Tag: ceo compensation
Corporate Insiders Pocket $1 Billion in Rush for Coronavirus Vaccine – The New York Times
Yet another reason insiders should not be allowed to sell stock until 3-5 years after leaving the company. And yet another reason that boards of directors should be more careful in setting incentive compensation benchmarks to avoid short-term profit-taking. They are making millions of dollars after announcing positive developments, including support from the government, in…
Wanted: CEO to fight income inequality by cutting executive pay – HoustonChronicle.com
General Motors CEO Mary Barra condemns discrimination against LGBT people, while Apple CEO Tim Cook defends immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. More and more business leaders are joining activists to address society’s most divisive issues. Where are the top executives, though, taking concrete steps to address income inequality? Who is taking…
Pay guaranteed, performance optional – How CEO pay in America got out of whack | Business | The Economist
Too often, executive compensation in the us is ridiculously out of line with performance…The deck is stacked against investors.” It was with these words that in 2006 Warren Buffett, a legendary investor and red-blooded capitalist, challenged the received wisdom in corporate America about ceo pay. This maintains that bosses deserve generous rewards because these are…
Comp Committees Lower Performance Benchmarks to Award Bonuses
According to Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants: Although most companies have seen their operating plans upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, compensation committees have largely declined to announce changes in the midst of the crisis to annual incentive plans for the year. Now, however, as the impact of the pandemic is coming into focus, some companies are…
The Insidious Vocabulary of CEO Compensation
As you can imagine, a lot of energy and creativity is going into figuring out how to make sure executives do not lose their bonuses because of COVID-19 economic uncertainty. We are watching this closely as it subverts the entire concept of incentive compensation if it is all upside and no downside. Incentive compensation is…
Media CEO Salaries Will Be Hard To Justify In A COVID-19 Economy – Deadline
“The proxies we are looking now at seem like a message from a time capsule. They don’t seem to have a lot of relevance,” says Nell Minow, vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, a corporate governance advisory firm for institutional investors. “But I am very concerned about what’s happening now.” She’s focused on potentially “big grants…
CalPERS: 5-Year Horizon for Pay Plan Reviews and No Votes on Comp Committee Members in Extreme Cases
CalPERS, which cast “against” votes at 43 percent of its portfolio companies in its Say-on-Pay voting during the 2018 proxy season and against 53 percent in 2019, is continuing to adjust its methodology for evaluating pay plans. CalPERS Adopts New Say-on-Pay Methodology – JOHN ELLERMAN compensation consultants. That same year, CalPERS announced a significant change…
Study: CEO Pay Rise is Attributable to Company Size
A new study concludes that the rise in CEO pay is attributable to market capitalization. Of course, it is supposed to be attributable to performance. So what we learn from this is that there is a perverse incentive for CEOs to make companies bigger instead of better. In recent decades at least, the size of…
Performance Metrics: Accelerating the Stakeholder Model
When the Business Roundtable announced their “new” commitment to “stakeholders,” we said it was not meaningful unless we saw incentive compensation aligned to specific stakeholder goals. At the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Equilar research analyst Connor Doyle looks at current incentive plans tied to goals other than the traditional…
