Advanced Micro Shareholder Sues Over New CEO’s Stock Grant

An Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) investor accused company directors of violating an executive-compensation plan by giving new Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su more than 6 million shares as part of her pay package.

Su, tapped to run the troubled computer chipmaker last month, was awarded more than 6.4 million AMD shares in violation of the company’s pay plan, which limits such awards to 3 million shares per year, shareholder Thuan Hong said today in a Delaware Chancery Court lawsuit.

By Jef Feeley  Nov 24, 2014 9:07 PM, Bloomberg

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What’s a CEO Really Worth? Too Many Companies Simply Don’t Know

The pay that CEOs and other executives receive is not aligned well with company performance, primarily because companies and boards lack the tools to accurately measure how much success executives are actually having in their jobs, a new study concludes.

The new report, from the nonprofit Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute and consultancy Organizational Capital Partners, set out to determine how well executive compensation among S&P 1500 companies was aligned with company performance and shareholder returns. “The expectation was that the analysis could usefully serve as a marker in the ground,” the firms wrote in its report, “and yet what it uncovered was unexpected.”

IRRCi is a research firm that was formed after its parent was sold to Institutional Shareholder Services. OCP is a corporate consultancy operating in the U.S. and Europe. You can read the full report here.

By PAUL VIGNA, The Wall Street Journal

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More Transparency, More Pay for C.E.O.s

“It’s very seldom that publishing compensation accomplishes much for the shareholders. No C.E.O. looks at a proxy statement and comes away saying, ‘I should be paid less.’ ”

Warren Buffett made that contrarian argument earlier this year, at the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, about the steady push for companies to disclose compensation in increasingly specific detail in the name of transparency.

It was an intriguing, counterintuitive point, but largely anecdotal.

Now, a study by three professors at the University of Cambridgemay help prove Mr. Buffett’s assertion.

The study shows in devastating detail how compensation consultants — which use the increasingly available public data on compensation to advise boards on how much to pay chief executives — are helping to ratchet up the pay for the nation’s top executives.

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, 

NOVEMBER 10, 2014, New york times

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The Best-Performing CEOs in the World

The knock on most business leaders is that they don’t take the long view—that they’re fixated on achieving short-term goals to lift their pay. So which global CEOs actually delivered solid results over the long run? Our 2014 list of top performers provides an objective answer.- Adi Ignatius, Harvard Business Review

See the list here.