Power Point: Pay for performance
“Clearly, the performance of Merrill’s top executives throughout Merrill’s abysmal year in no way justifies significant bonuses for its top executives, including the CEO.”
– New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, in a letter to Merrill Lynch’s (MER) board of directors, regarding CEO John Thain’s request for a $10 million year-end bonus.
It worked. The top brass at Merrill agreed today to forgo bonuses. The money-losing brokerage, whose acquisition by Bank of America (BAC) was approved by shareholders last Friday, joins a growing crop of financial giants responding to a record-level uproar over executive compensation. Also giving up bonus pay this year: the top execs at Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), Barclays (BCS), and Deutsche Bank. At Citigroup (C), the biggest recipient of the government’s crisis-time largess, top executives have indicated that they’re prepared to follow suit–meaning that they’d give up bonuses for the second year in a row. Can you imagine if they didn’t join the no-bonus club? As Pattie notes in today’s post on CEO apologies and other true confessions, the Citi brass is creeping toward acknowledgement of their disastrous missteps. – Jessica Shambora
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Patricia Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Can Meg Whitman Save California?", Melinda Gates ("The $100 Billion Woman"), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). And she has broken ground with insightful pieces on career management issues such as ego ("Get Over Yourself!"), and "Charisma: Do You Need It? Can You Get It?" Pattie chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. And she has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" cover package since its launch in 1998. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big consumer brand companies.
