General readers have no idea why people should care about what executives are paid and why they are paid the way they are. That's the reason that The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, and other popular and practitioner publications have regular coverage on them. This book not only proposes a reason - executives need incentives in order to maximize firm value (economists call this agency theory) - it also describes the nature and design of executive compensation practices. Those incentives can take the form of benefits (salary, stock options), or prerquisites (reflecting the status of the executive within the organizational culture.

The definitive guide for anyone involved in designing and approving executive salaries—revised for new laws and attitudes about salaries and performance The Complete Guide to Executive Compensation, Third Edition, helps you evaluate your company’s culture, organization, and strategy to create the best compensation package for the organization’s interest. It contains new strategies based on recent changes regarding venture capitalism, boards of director’s core responsibilities, changes in director’s pay, shifts in stakeholder power, and laws like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and healthcare reform. Bruce R. Ellig served at Pfizer Inc. for over 35 years, and spent his last 25 years as secretary of the Board of Directors' Executive Compensation Committee. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Society of Human Resource Management and WorldatWork. Ellig was elected to the National Academy of Human Resources in 1993 and served as a fellow of the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the Wharton Aresty Institute.

When it comes to creating an executive compensation program, it can feel like there’s little gray area between giving top performers too shiny a golden parachute, with exorbitant perks, and providing the company’s leaders with the incentive they need to continue doing their best. This book gives readers the techniques and understanding they need to design a rewards strategy that will motivate performers while benefiting the entire organization. Taking a careful look at the complicated state of executive rewards, this no-nonsense, practical guide provides readers with a complete methodology for motivating management to accomplish critical business goals. Eschewing a one-size-fits-all approach, the book uses case studies and examples to illustrate what factors should be considered—including environment, key stakeholders, people strategy, business strategy, and organizational capabilities—when designing a program that will benefit both their company and the people who fuel its success.

Executive Compensation is an invaluable legal guide through the maze of rules, regulations and practices that govern corporate financial compensation for executive employees.

The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.

ANSWERS TO EXCESSIVE EXECUTIVE PAY Charges of excessive executive compensation have filled the business press for a number of years, yet few understand why pay plans trigger such results.This desktop reference book is an easy-to-access, invaluable guide to structuring appropriate executive pay plans. Properly used, it will help avoid excessive executive pay resulting from poorly designed plans. Written by renowned compensation expert Bruce Ellig, this book is a must read for the designers, approvers, and recipients of executive compensation, as well as those who write about the subject. Consultants and in-house pay designers will find detailed examples (supplemented with over 400 figures and tables) to trigger their own creativity. Compensation committees and other approvers of executive pay plans will value the definitions and descriptions of various pay plans and the conditions under which they would be appropriate. Executives themselves will find the book useful. Not only in better understanding their own plans, but learning more about other plans, both those they may only have heard about, as well as many that have not yet caught their attention. And those who write about the subject will be able to put their comments in a better perspective.. The Complete Guide to Executive Compensation takes an in-depth look at each of the executive pay elements: salary, executive benefits and incentives (both short and long term). This review also includes the role of the board of directors (and its compensation committee) along with the influence of the major stakeholders (most notably the shareholder). And a complete chapter is devoted to various measurements of executive performance. This book also contains a compendium of selected key information on executive compensation, including laws, Internal Revenue Code sections, IRS revenue rulings, accounting interpretations, and SEC actions. No other book has such a complete resource section. In addition, it includes both a historical review of key developments and a look ahead, as well as a glossary with more than 2,000 definitions.