New GM CEO to receive $1.7 million cash salary

[newtothegame]

Source: Reuteres

DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co's (GM.UL) new chief executive, Dan Akerson, will receive a $1.7 million cash salary as well as stock grants, the U.S. government-owned automaker said on Friday.

Akerson, who succeeded Ed Whitacre as CEO on September 1, will receive $5.3 million of stock per year to be parceled out over three years starting next September, and $2 million of restricted stock in addition to the cash salary.

Whitacre, who remains chairman through the end of 2010, will be paid $300,000 for his work on the board for the last four months of the year, GM said.

As a recipient of government funds, GM's executive pay remains under the oversight of a federal watchdog. The automaker said the federal regulator had approved the proposed terms of Akerson's compensation on Wednesday.

Read more: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/New-GM-CEO-to-receive-17-rb-2627549734.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=7&asset=&ccode=

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$5.3m of stock per year, plus $1.7m cash.

Ahh, the fresh smell of change...

[NoNothing]

1. Highest paid government employee?

I say pay him on the GS scale.

[customerserviceguy]

2. How about paying him what the top union worker makes

until he actually can drag GM to being genuinely profitable again? I don't mind the stock options, if he fails, they'll be worthless anyway.

[daylan b]

3. A CEO that can do the job there will bring back 100x that for the government pretty easily

There are plenty of things to make snarky "fresh smell of change" comments about but that's not one of them.

[PassingFair]

4. And this stud has a pedigree!

http://www.carlyle.com/Team/item5812.html

Is THIS worthy of snark?

The fucking foxes are slaughtering in the hen house
and you're defending CEO salaries.

Smell it yet?

[primavera]

6. Rubbish

CEOs with impressive-sounding credentials and obscene salaries fail to deliver on promises just as often as they succeed. There's no correlation between how obscenely overpaid a CEO is and how well the company will perform. The conditions which cause a company to perform well or poorly are too varied for any one individual to take credit for. The moral of the story: pay CEOs an honest salary and invest your money instead in the kind of infrastructural improvements that will ensure performance.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

8. and this is the guy for the job?

Robert Nardelli wasn't available?

[Gecko6400]

9. How's about he does this first and

then get compensated (in these amounts) for his performance?

[Igel]

10. Defining what "excellence performance" is, and

the various gradations of performance from there down to "terminated for cause."

My story is this: There was a CEO who made the organization a lot of money in the mid-'80s to the early-mid '90s. He was utterly incompetent, ran the place into the ground, had lackeys and lick-spittles in management positions, corrupted the board and divided it. The board loved him and his bribes, their only point of near agreement; the community the organization served loved him.

During boom years he raked in the cash and doled it out as bribes. He set none aside; he made few repairs; he didn't train or hire good staff. Prosperity was easy. We fired him the year the recession hit the area in the early-mid '90s and his plan was to cover it up to save his ass. He'd retire the following fall. We fired him months shy of his retirement.

The interim CEO we hired and his replacement were competent. Good, even. For 4 years they lost us between $3 million and $500k each year on sales of $80 million.

It was hard to convince people that losing $3 million in a year constituted better performance than making $1 million, but it did. They fired managers, reduced staff, cancelled raises, created internal chaos for a while, raised prices, closed enterprises that were popular but lost money, cut off everybody that we had donated money to and put the board in its place; by nearly every public standard the new guys were losers. Yet we lost less money each year, and in year 5 we made something like $8 so we were in the black; we had a smaller, leaner, much more efficient organization bringing in increased revenue from a diversified portfolio of enterprises per a revised and vetted business model; they had trained and hired competent staff, instituted reporting systems that gave managers very current, very accurate information. Most people thought they did a really, really sucky job. Their performance was at least an A-. Maybe A. That's leaving room for doubt, somebody perhaps could have done better and gotten an A+.

It was crucial that the CEOs realized that if they did things that looked really, really bad, screwing up short-term goals they would still be evaluated yearly almost entirely on how they progressed towards 10-year objectives, esp. given hostility that was shown to their actions in many quarters and the attempts to politicize the jobs. Everybody said that the CEOs should be paid for their performance, but few agreed on what that meant. The board certainly had a fairly clear idea, and we were completely at odds with everybody else outside the organization.

[Dawson Leery]

5. $1.7 million in cash is good pay, if he does a good job.

Now, raise the capital gains tax on those stock options.

[bvar22]

7. Now, now.

Don't "begrudge their success".

He is just a "savvy businessman".

"Look at all the baseball players"

"Its the Free Market".