The country’s pension system — both public and private plans — faces trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities. This special report examines what General Motor’s historic bankruptcy has to teach about the looming pension crisis, while pointing to alarming parallels between GM and cash-strapped California, whose pension crisis may already have arrived.
Archive for March 10th, 2010
Newsfeeds
AIG’s Rankings Will Weigh on Pay
American International Group Inc. is basing its upcoming round of bonuses and incentive pay on its new “forced ranking” system that measures the performances of about 10,000 employees, according to people familiar with the matter.
Expert Perspective
Those Who Can, DO!
Expert Perspective by Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
Recently, The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University’s Camelia Kuhnen addressed several pressing issues in executive compensation. Grahall’s editorial Board thought it would be interesting to canvas our team of Top Consultants to provide our thoughts in addressing the same questions posed by Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com’s Patricia O’Connell on the subject of “Executive Compensation and Public Outrage” (Business Week February 24, 2009).
The questions below have been selected from O’Connell’s interview with Ms. Kuhnen, but the answers are from Grahall consultants with a total of combined experience of more than 200 years designing executive compensation programs for literally thousands of public and private U.S. companies in various stages of development.
Q – “What do you think about the state of exec comp? It was a big issue a year ago, and people were expecting a lot of reform.”
In our authoritative research of top named officers in 1,000 public companies there is a significant correlation of pay to the size of the company and to performance measured over seven different variables in 95% of companies. This strongly suggests what we’ve long suspected – that typically, executive compensation programs are generally very effective and appropriately linked to financial performance.
Continue reading “Those Who Can, DO!” »
Expert Perspective
Health care spending – use it, don’t abuse it
Expert Perspective by Grahall’s OmniMedia Editorial Board
As the heath care debate continues so does the press coverage. Reed Abelson says in his February 26th 2009 article in The New York Times (“The Cost of Doing Nothing on Health Care”) “…health policy analysts and economists of nearly every ideological persuasion agree [that without health care reform] …The unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly.”
The cost of health care is high and going higher without reform.
Continue reading “Health care spending – use it, don’t abuse it” »