Posted on 01/03/2007 3:49:14 PM PST by seacapn
(AP) Dogged by criticism of his hefty pay and his company's poor stock performance, Bob Nardelli abruptly resigned as chairman and chief executive of The Home Depot Inc. after six years at the helm of the world's largest home improvement store chain, the company said Wednesday.
But he didn't leave empty-handed: the Atlanta-based company said Nardelli would receive a severance package worth roughly $210 million, an amount decried by some lawmakers as a golden parachute that sends the wrong message to investors.
"It's a sign of being totally out of touch," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. "They don't understand the extent to which they make the American public angry."
Frank said he would push for legislation requiring public companies to allow shareholders to have a say in compensation and severance for senior executives. At Home Depot's annual meeting last May, shareholder proposals to give investors a say on the CEO's pay and to restrict retirement benefits for senior executives were rejected.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Same goes for Hollywood actors. I think there should be a cap on how much an actor makes per picture.
Home Depot is alot like its hometown Atlanta: Sprawling, bland, and overrated.
Ace is the place for me. ;-)
These outfits like Home Depot are OK - just OK, not great - for stuff you can just carry home yourself. For actual home improvements, they are a disaster. I am in that business and I hear it all the time from my clients. If anybody has ever had any work done by them, they will never do it again.
Good, Bawney can show them how to run their busisnesses as efficiently as the gummit. What does Bawney's retirement package look like??
Pray for W and Our Troops
The sales of companies would be greater and cheaper for consumers if they would quit throwing money down the toilet with these CEO's.
I'll give you CEO's a great severence package."YOUR FIRED"!
If you think HD is tough to deal with as a customer, be glad you're not one of their suppliers.
I agree, however, in no way do I want Barney Frank or any other politicians telling people how much money they can make.
Stockholders can vote with their feet on this fiasco if they want.
At what point does a nominally conservative poster believe that private enterprises cannot conduct business in a manner they see fit without interference from outside interests?
All of your points are correct...and obvious. Maybe the way many publicly held entities operate is news to you, but not to others. Either way, it's not your business - unless you're an investor or other stakeholder.
The HD down the road from me is what it must be like early Friday night in San Francisco. I went there once, for paint (big sale), trying to convince myself I was mistaken about what kind of customers were cruising around. The straw that broke the camel's back was, while I was over at the paint samples, one old fairy whining to his petit ami with a wandering eye: "Will you stop that and help me pick out a color to paint the kitchen?"
He was holding a couple of gray paint chips. I don't know why I still remember that so clearly...(cue the Twilight Zone music)
How hard is it for a CEO to walk through a couple of stores and discover employees milling about not helping customers and long lines at the checkout counters???
LOL. When I lived in Miami, the local Homo, er, Home Depots were major crusing spots for gays. I know this because it was ranked so by the local "alternative" rag.
I am an investor. I'm also a lawyer, so I have an idea how bad the disconnect is between shareholders and the companies. Free enterprise depends on the assumption that the owners of a business control it. Unfortunately, that is not how it works for the most part, though, at least in big companies.
I don't see how you can portray my suggestion as government presenting interference from outside interests, though. It's the government that set up the corporate laws in the first place. Unfortunately, they fixed them so that they favor managerial control over stockholder control. You could just as easily claim that the present situation is the result of government interference.
Nardelli oversaw several morale boosting changes at The Home Depot. These included cutting the tution benefit program, only allowing full timers to be eligable for tution benefits, and getting rid of the merit system where an employee could trade in 5 merit awards for 100.00.
It's absurd and I'm a pro-capitalist libertarian. Part of the problem is there is NO WAY shareholders would approve of giving these packages to boss who are being FIRED. It's something that the directors do so that when they get THEIR turn to run a company into the ground, they get a cool severance package.
The company would have been better served from pretty much every aspect to have doled out the same quarter billion to all non-executive workers.
Bring back Arthur and Bernie. In the 6 years I've been there (part-time) much has been lost, but Home Depot is still an OUTSTANDING part-time job.
Proof reading might help. But if I get your drift you are comparing apples to oranges and getting a pear.
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