191–200 of 306 posts
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I've actually helped manage a company in financial distress. Here's reality: - First, most executives have little impact on the specific event that put the firm under. (I was a senior marketing person; the building burned down. Fire safety was most assuredly NOT within my purview or even something I could ask about) - Running a business in financial distress basically sucks. Take your job and make it 10 X harder. You…
So what you're trying to say is that execs getting these kind of bonuses in a financially distressed company is not unlike vultures feeding on a carcass, except that in this case the vultures were nurtured by the same "person" that's now the carcass, for years and probably decades, AND, it's part of the job of the vulture to keep the "person" from becoming the carcass. Note-to-self: Stay away from vulture-minded exec…
If their market value elsewhere and their replacement’s demand here is $X and the company’s current projected comp is $X/2, that’s only tenable for a very short time.
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I guess the real answer here is I'm not cut out to be an exec and I don't understand the mindset of people who are because I'm fine getting payed $100k a year (modulo inflation) for the rest of my life and I've lived most of my career at $30k, and I would never fire anyone to increase my own salary. I would sooner go broke at a company I ran than hang people out to dry who depended on me for a livelihood.
> and I would never fire anyone to increase my own salary How about this instead? Your company is overstaffed due to a massive drop in sales. You will run out of money and will have to fire everyone including yourself in one month. Your other choice is to cut 80% of the staff immediately and your business will make enough to pay everyone’s salary who remains. The better choice for everyone is the surviving business,…
But that doesn't mean it's ethical to then throw money at your executives just to keep them around. If the business is viable with the smaller market and smaller workforce, then the executives should either stick around based on the company's future prospects, or leave. If they want to leave, then perhaps executives of their caliber aren't required to run the company given its new reality. Getting them to stick around by showering them with more money just increases wage inequality.
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There's also Price's Law: half the value is produced by the square root of the number of people.
If you have a calculator on hand, could you post the n such that these two rules are equivalent? It’s wrinkling my brain.
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I don’t understand what your point is. You think I don’t get this? This is a thread about giving executives bonuses when the company is going bankrupt.
No, it’s a thread about rewarding executives for managing to keep any semblance of a company alive. A company that comes out of bankruptcy is much more valuable than one that doesn’t. The shareholders have to compensate the execs enough to entice them to go through that rather than leave for greener pastures where their shares won’t be worthless and they won’t have to fire people.
While it looks immoral if you don't understand the mechanics, people are simply responding to incentives around bankruptcy laws. Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary (with their old RSU's and options now worthless). The real question is, should Chapter 11's even be allowed for corporations (as opposed to Chapter 7)? Shareholders vote for these because they know that in a Chapter 7…
"Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary (with their old RSU's and options now worthless)." So they quit, and the company goes bankrupt on a different timeline. Why should either society or shareholders accept new bonus declarations?
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Perhaps it would make more sense to you if the headline were phrased: "On eve of bankruptcy, US firms restore a fraction of executives' previous salaries with retention bonuses, now that their options and RSU's are worthless, which of course made up most of their salaries." But that doesn't sell clicks as well to people who already have their minds made up.
I don't see why people who speculated on options should be be compensated for their loss. That whole argument doesn't make sense to me at all. They could have negotiated less options and more salary, if they were the risk-averse type, could they not? Or worked a job with less risk. It's just buddies taking as much as possible before they lose control. And everybody knows this. It's weird to read these invented reason…
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There is no denying that it takes skill and hard work to keep a business afloat in these times, or that it is stressful, or that it is easier to walk away than deal with the situation. On the other hand, very few businesses are the product of a small subset of its people. In many businesses, such as some of the businesses mentioned in this article, it isn't a question of whether those other people can afford to send…
> What I am suggesting is that it is immoral to take more when others are given less. You mean like how America takes more than the rest of the world? I think the underlying problem here is that executive salaries and bonuses are at too higher multiples. Much higher than historical norms. Not many would complain about an exec getting a bonus during this time if it was actually reasonable in the first place.
It is interesting how these discussions about "inequality" play out within America. I've traveled a small amount outside of the US/EU and have many close friends from poor countries and it strikes me that a real move towards equality would likely result in a step downward for nearly all Americans, even those who consider themselves poor and disadvantaged by American standards.
I'm not saying this isn't something to pursue within a country on its own merit, but some of the absolutist moralistic rhetoric used in these discussions definitely betrays living in a bubble.
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Perhaps it would make more sense to you if the headline were phrased: "On eve of bankruptcy, US firms restore a fraction of executives' previous salaries with retention bonuses, now that their options and RSU's are worthless, which of course made up most of their salaries." But that doesn't sell clicks as well to people who already have their minds made up.
Whenever I see people complain about C level exec's salaries I see one of two arguments used in favour of it. First, people will say that their compensation is tied to performance either through bonuses for milestones or stocks. Second, people will say it's compensation for risk. If you still get most of the money after running the company into bankruptcy then neither of the two applies. The only reason I can see pay…
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> Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary (with their old RSU's and options now worthless). Why not? These executives are paid considerably more than rank-and-file employees under normal circumstances, yet still manage to get bonuses when things turn sour. In contrast, that rank-and-file will be expected to take a pay cut, work more, or lose their livelihood. It flies in the face of…
I've actually helped manage a company in financial distress. Here's reality: - First, most executives have little impact on the specific event that put the firm under. (I was a senior marketing person; the building burned down. Fire safety was most assuredly NOT within my purview or even something I could ask about) - Running a business in financial distress basically sucks. Take your job and make it 10 X harder. You…
That's perhaps reasonable for you, but business succession planning and disaster contingency planning is the job of the board and executive team. They made a choice to discount the possibility of a building fire taking out the business, and that's a failure they should be accountable for. Or, worse, they didn't make a choice, and didn't even think of that risk. And yet now they're being "rewarded" with a bonus so they'll stick around to fix their mistake after it's too late?
At the end of the day you have a company full of people, and you're going to lay most of them off. Given the financial distress the company is in, they're not going to get much of a severance package, especially since you "need" to throw much of the remaining money at the executive team to keep them around. And for what, really? So a bunch of high-paid executives can pat themselves on the back that they "heroically" brought a company back from the brink? That's little comfort to the people who got laid off and struggled to find a new job before their severance ran out.