“It’s official: Apple’s Board of Directors and executive team, led by Tim Cook, clearly never had or have completely lost any real respect for Steve Jobs,” Rocco Pendola writes for TheStreet.
“…The company’s decision to tie the size (hence, value) of upper management’s stock option packages to S&P 500 performance is so tragic,” Pendola writes. “This is not only a rebuke of Steve Jobs and the Apple way — the very essence of what made Apple the world’s greatest company — it’s a perverse validation of Wall Street and the stock market. As if Wall Street should play any role whatsoever in determining how much anybody from the CEO to the cleaning crew at Apple makes.”
“It’s an easy move to make when you’re already rich beyond comprehension,” Pendola writes. “You’re putting compensation at risk that’s little more than icing on an already badass cake… It’s all lip service. Something we’re seeing more and more of from Apple under Cook’s leadership… These guys are recklessly and multi-handedly desecrating Steve Jobs’s legacy. This is just another example of Apple losing its way, operating like every other company.”
Pendola asks, “If Tim Cook really wants to tie his pay to performance, why doesn’t he use unit sales of Apple’s next big piece of hardware as the benchmark, not a market index that’s coming off of one of history’s biggest bull runs?”
Read more in the full article here.
Tim Worstall writes for Forbes, “The performance metric is surprisingly strong: ‘The relative TSR criteria will be applied to each 80,000 RSU tranche scheduled to vest on each anniversary of the original August 24, 2011 grant date, and will compare Apple’s TSR to the TSR of the companies in the S&P 500 using public data derived from Standard and Poor’s. If Apple’s performance is within the top third of that group, the RSUs in the tranche for that year will vest in full. If its performance is in the middle third, the RSUs in the tranche for that year will be reduced by 25%, and if its performance is in the bottom third, the RSUs in that tranche will be reduced by 50%.’
“TSR is Total Stockholder Return and is, essentially, stock price appreciation plus dividends in any one period,” Worstall explains.
“I can imagine any number of other CEOs spitting with rage at this. For Cook has voluntarily come forward and demanded (hmm, asked? insisted?) that he should be held to a performance target and that also it should be a stringent one. And finally, that he can only lose money for failing it, not gain any more for beating it. And I’d expect some of those CEOs to be spitting with rage because this might wake up some of the more supine boards out there and become a template for stock awards that are rather more stringent than those usual at present,” Worstall writes. “I would have to say that it’s full marks to Mr. Cook on this.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Apple tumbles below $400 – June 24, 2013
After precipitous stock slide, Apple Board puts 40 percent of Tim Cook’s pay package at risk – June 21, 2013
