It looks like this could be the week when Barclays reveals the compensation package for CEO Bob Diamond, according to reports in the press. The reports speculate on the likely amount he’ll be paid, while revisiting all the negative themes about bank pay, performance and risk. Unfortunately for Barclay’s, there is little it can do […]
Win Neuger was hastily shown the door yesterday, ending his tenure as CEO of PineBridge Investments, the former asset management group at AIG. Neuger joined AIG from Bankers Trust Company in 1995. This news didn’t make many waves, but it’s odd in several ways. Neuger’s last day as CEO was yesterday, the same day the […]
Somewhere inside Goldman Sachs a managing director in human resources is anxiously leafing through a stack of resumes looking for a candidate to replace PR chief Lucas van Praag, who retires at the end of March. There’s been little news since Lucas’s departure leaked a month ago and a former Treasury staffer was tipped as […]
We don’t yet know how much Bob Diamond was paid for running Barclays last year. We do know the bank will cap cash bonuses at £65,000 (about $100,000), joining a growing list of banks that have bowed to shareholder and public pressure to curb payouts. Barclays could have reported Diamond’s compensation yesterday, but it decided […]
Insurance company earnings calls are normally staid affairs. But Hartford Financial Group had a sudden burst of excitement yesterday as its largest shareholder, hedge fund titan John Paulson, joined the call. He hammered CEO Liam McGee for not being more specific about his plans for increasing shareholder value at the company, which saw its shares […]
Lucas van Praag, the longtime communications chief at Goldman Sachs, is stepping down. To those of us in the PR trade, this news yesterday was much more significant than Facebook’s IPO filing and the legion of twentysomething millionaires it will spawn. Van Praag has done a brilliant job of defending Goldman and handling the outsized […]
David Rubenstein wants to have it both ways. He’d like us to believe that he’s a reasonable fellow, ready to pay more tax if Congress would only change the law, according to a New York Times report:. “If you change the law, we’ll pay the taxes,” Mr. Rubenstein said to scattered applause during a debate […]
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook column profiles Paul Levy, a PE manager who makes a good defense of private equity: “We want to build businesses,” Mr. Levy said earnestly. “Nobody wants to fire people. We want to retain all of the value-added, high-quality people that work at these companies. But it’s like any other endeavor. If […]
There’s long been a debate about whether a company’s culture makes any difference in how it performs. Culture often is derided as the “soft stuff” that is nice to have but not really essential to a company’s success. Indeed, Sandy Weill once famously quipped that culture was “something they put in yogurt.” (Of course, we […]
You know your company is in trouble when the chief marketing officer gets more press than the CEO. And it’s in really, really deep trouble when the CMO is seen distancing herself from the company’s strategic blunders. That’s what we saw over the weekend in the New York Times piece on Anne Finucane, “chief image […]