Oct
18
Washington Post Corporate Ethics Page
Filed Under Other Business Ethics Sites, Resources | Leave a Comment
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/business/specials/corporateethics/
You may have to register to get access, but it’s a good site.
Oct
13
What if C.E.O. Pay Is Fair?
Tags: Compensation
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New York Times
Joe Nocera
Read the article here.
Excerpt:
“I really don’t want to answer that question,” said Ira T. Kay, flashing me some combination of half-grin and half-grimace. “I have clients.”
Does he ever. Mr. Kay, 57, heads the executive compensation practice at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, which is one of the country’s leading compensation consulting firms. He is a funny, gregarious man, quick with a clever retort, and utterly without guilt about what he does for a living — not only enabling big-time chief executives to make oodles of money, but defending most of the practices that allow corporate chieftains to reap their millions.
For years, Mr. Kay has overseen an annual Wyatt Watson executive compensation survey, which the firm describes as an effort to provide “perspective on the executive pay model in general, pay for performance, stock ownership and share usage.” The Ira Kay perspective, not surprisingly, is that while there may be a few problems here and there (about which more later), the model is a darn good one.
A few months ago, Mr. Kay wrote a book entitled “Myths and Realities of Executive Pay” (Cambridge University Press), with Steven Van Putten, a Watson Wyatt colleague, that goes even further. “It is not a coincidence that the Dow Jones industrial average, which stood at 5,000 in 1996, is now well above 13,000,” the authors write. “While U.S. executive pay practices do not entirely explain this rise, there is little doubt that it would not have occurred without them.” I’ve heard Mr. Kay make this point before — and even debated him on it. He really does seem to believe that all of the great economic benefits we’ve enjoyed in this country during the past two decades or so can be traced back, in no small part, to the way we pay our chief executives. I, on the other hand, believe he’s got the cause and effect exactly backward: that it was the rising market that made the lucky fellas running America’s corporations look like geniuses — and made them richer than they’d ever imagined, thanks to the shift to stock options as the primary way to reward executives.
Oct
8
New York Times
Eric Lipton
Read the article here.
Excerpt:
Dr. Friedel was the latest victim of a product whose dangers had become known months earlier to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the companies that made and sold it. Before Dr. Friedel bought Stand ’n Seal, at least 80 people had been sickened using it, two of them fatally.
But even then, with the threat well-documented, the manufacturer, retailer and the commission had failed to remove the hazard from the shelves.
The task of getting dangerous products out of consumers’ reach is perhaps the most pressing challenge the Consumer Product Safety Commission faces in this era of surging recalls, particularly of products from China. It is an essential part of the agency’s mission, because premarket testing is not required for consumer products in the United States.
[...]
Court documents show that, as the case unfolded, the product’s maker, BRTT, appeared at times to be more concerned with protecting its bottom line than with taking steps to ensure that the hazard was removed. That meant that hazardous cans of Stand ’n Seal remained on the shelves for more than a year after the 2005 recall.And the product that BRTT initially rushed to put in its place — and which Dr. Friedel and others bought — contained the same chemical that had apparently caused injuries in the first place, the company and Home Depot now acknowledge.