Step aside Wall Street, small pharma CEO pay reaches for the sky

An examination of biopharma company CEO salaries shows that many are paid like a hybrid of entrepreneurs and blue chip company CEOs, giving these executives the best of both worlds.

They may not be running too big to fail firms, but the CEOs of many small biopharmaceutical companies are being paid like they are unquestionably indispensable, In fact, many are making more than Wall Street’s chief executives and the CEOs of their much larger pharmaceutical peers.

• Paul Hodgson, Fortune

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Target Chief's $47 Million Retirement and America's 401(k) Gap

The gap in the U.S. workplace between the highest and lowest paid has been growing for years. Far less noticed has been the growing gulf in retirement pay.

While the very top often continue to receive executive pensions as well as other benefits, most workers are left only with their 401(k) plans.

By Carol Hymowitz and Margaret Collins, Bloomberg 

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Pay package swells for Jabil CEO Mark Mondello

Jabil Circuit Inc.'s board of directors boosted compensation for CEO Mark Mondello in an effort similar to keeping up with the Jones'.

Mondello got a 40 percent boost in pay in fiscal 2014, ended Aug. 31, and received total compensation of $6.5 million for the year, according to a proxy filed with theU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He received $4.7 million in total compensation in the previous year.

Margie Manning, Print Editor, Tampa Bay Business Journal

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Microsoft Shareholders OK Huge CEO Pay Package

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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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