Microsoft's decision to give shares instead of share options to their employees appears very sensible. And they even say that they're going to cost them properly, which will be real innovation. ;-)
This comes a day after it was announced that BT would pay its chief in shares, not cash (though, amazingly, now that I look I can't find this reported anywhere on the web). This is fine too, but senior managers have more direct short-term control over the share price than those lower down the ranks, so to truly align their interests with mainstream shareholders, they also need restrictions on how quickly they can dispose of them. Otherwise they have a perverse incentive to engineer boom-and-bust share price movements and dump their shares at the top.
Posted by timo at July 9, 2003 11:07 PM | TrackBack