SiliconBeat

Hansen Medical sweetened its severance agreements with several top executives last week as part of its efforts to retain them. That’s right, in order to keep them around, Hansen increased how much cash it would pay “in the  event of a covered termination of employment”, lengthened the period after their termination during which it would pay for their COBRA medical benefits and significantly increased the accelerated vesting of their equity.

Under its previous agreement with its top brass, Hansen Medical agreed to Read the rest of this entry »

Less than two years after a policy was approved to reimburse him for the use of his private aircraft on business trips, JDS Uniphase Chief Executive Kevin Kennedy sold his plane, according to the company’s proxy issued in advance of its Nov. 12 annual meeting.

The audit committee of the company’s board of directors approved the policy in June 2006. The policy limited the reimbursement to $2,100 per flight hour plus a 12.5% fuel surcharge rate. The policy limited the amount of reimbursement to $800,000 per year. The rates were established “following review of fair market rates applicable to the rental and use of similar aircraft.”

We could find no Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another take on executive compensation and the bailout from someone that I really respect, Graef Crystal. For many years, Crystal wrote a column on executive compensation for Bloomberg. Now he’s launched his own Web site where he’s providing some in-depth analysis on issues that touch on executive compensation.

Crystal just posted his view on the debate on the bailout and executive compensation. In sum: Crystal things the bailout and limiting executive pay are both bad ideas:

“How about this for a deal: We don’t bail out the banks to the tune of $700 billion. And we don’t have pay controls on executives, either.”

His concern is that without the proper incentives, the banks won’t be able to attract the talented managers they need to turn themselves around. He also worries that companies will still find loopholes in any new restrictions, and the result will be unintended consequences. Read the rest of this entry »

Cisco Systems, the San Jose networking giant, said Thursday that the compensation committee of its board of directors approved its “fiscal 2009 merit-based granting” to eligible employees of restricted stock units good for about 28 million shares. The committee also approved “merit-based right to receive future grants of performance-based restricted stock units for certain employees, based on Cisco’s financial performance in fiscal 2009, in a target amount of approximately 3 million restricted stock units.”

That adds up to approximately 31 million shares, which had a combined value of about Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past decade of covering business in Silicon Valley, I’ve periodically written about the annual study of executive compensation conducted by United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies. For most of its 15 years, that report has focused on the gap between the income of the average worker and CEOs.

Today, the groups are changing direction a bit on their report to focus on the amount taxpayers are subsidizing executive compensation. In a report called, “Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay,” the groups put our annual price tag at $20 billion.

On Friday, I spoke with Sarah Anderson, director of the global economy project at IPS, about the reason for the new focus. Anderson said the groups felt there was a new opportunity to influence the political debate in Washington about executive compensation. She noted that both Barack Obama and John McCain have at times bashed overpaid CEOs on the campaign stump this year.

So to move the debate forward, the groups looked at several pieces of pending legislation in Congress that address executive compensation either directly or indirectly by closing various loopholes. The groups culled through piles of documents amassed by various Congressional committees and other federal agencies to calculate the bill for taxpayers.

The report examines the impact of five different subsidies: Read the rest of this entry »

When Alfred Amoroso was named chief executive of Macrovision in June 2005, he was given an option to buy 500,000 shares and was guaranteed future option awards good for 125,000 shares each that were to be granted twice a year in each of 2006, 2007 and 2008.

A year later, however, Amoroso and/or Macrovision’s compensation committee evidently had second thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

Symantec’s chief executive, John Thompson, joined an exclusive group of Silicon Valley chief executives whose companies now use aircraft they own or control for business use, according to the company’s proxy filed with the SEC Monday.

In May, Symantec entered into a “”dry-lease agreement” for an aircraft with a company owned by Thompson, under which it will pay Read the rest of this entry »