As executive officers return from their summer vacations, many may be suffering from the “Compensation Blues.” No, this isn’t a new “love-gone-bad” heartache captured by Billy Holiday in a ballad you somehow missed. This is a real-life corporate heartache, as painful as any about which Lady Day sang, arising from the ever-widening stock option backdating scandal, and related developments.
The story of backdating stock option grant dates started out badly, but keeps getting even worse. What began as an academic observation about the statistically improbable “luck” of many senior executive officers when it came to stock option grant dates has become ...