my thoughts exactly
From TMF: This Week’s 5 Dumbest Stock Moves.
Item #4 is the relevant one. These paragraphs jumped out at me:
Hurd’s new squeeze? Salaries. He will be taking a 20% cut in his base salary, slashing executive pay by 15% to 20%, and sticking with a more modest 5% cut for most of HP’s workforce. It’s always refreshing to see a CEO take the biggest hit, but HP makes this week’s dumb list because the cuts apply only to base salary.
Like most tech CEOs, Hurd relies more on stock options and bonuses than his base actual wages. Who cares about a 20% chop off the $1.45 million base salary he collected last year, when Hurd’s total compensation was a whopping $42.5 million?
Right.
2009
20
Feb
- Posted by alex at 11:44 am
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Exactly. We had this discussion here yesterday. While it is better than what the axe-swinging Harpy would have done, it is really just a token notion. 80% of a crapload of money is still a crapload of money (and that is still a drop in the bucket of his total compensation)
And, oh yeah. “At least we still have jobs”, “5% is better than 100%”
Am I the only one getting sick of hearing that?
It’s nothing more than lipstick on a rich pig. The sounds of what HP (and this CEO) has done amounts to the Jack Welch syndrome. Cut R&D, gross margin is king, etc etc. The focus on long term strategy/investment becomes less important and these CEO’s look like geniuses for a while and walk away with huge bonuses and parachutes looking like a hero only to have that company collapse in their wake because of the lack of focus on long-term R&D programs in lieu of margin and short-term stockholder press releases and metrics. It’s not just the CEO’s either, it’s due to this culture of short-term stock investment and trading instead of the big picture.