>>I am outraged by all this support for a man who walked away with $5M in addition to his salary, benefits, and other compensation for less than three years work. Especially when hundreds of employees, many of them (I assume) were there before Hill, were laid off.
I am also assumming that $5M must seem like small change to most of the people that defend Hill. But, that aside, there has to be some relationship between what a man is compensated for and his output. Just what did he do and when did he do it?
1. Did he have some engineering background to help in the design of the Zip or the Jaz?
2. Did he know something about the technology and foresaw the market develop with respect to the Internet and the developments of Windows 95 that necessitated high capacity removable disk storage?
3. What did he do besides taking orders from Kim Edwards and help get rid of Iomega employees that were there before Kim Edwards? Just what did he do that was clearly his own doing and that did not come from Kim Edwards?
4. Could anyone clearly tell me that Kim Edwards could not have done the job and that Iomega would be a different company today without the contributions of Tim Hill?<<
Mary -
First, I don't really know the minute details of Tim Hill's contribution to Iomega. And I don't think you do either. I only know that he's the VP of Marketing, and that their marketing has been extremely effective.
Second, apparently Kim Edwards thought that Hill was worth hiring, and he had personal experience working above him. Maybe Kim Edwards himself can answer your fourth question.
Let me ask you a couple of questions. Who made the decision to lay off all those workers? Was it the VP of Marketing who made the call? I doubt it. Surely, that decision was made by KE himself.
You're furious that Hill sold all those shares while knowing all those people would be laid off. That may or may not be true. The decision to lay off those workers was announced at the end of December. Hill last sold shares in November, unless I'm mistaken. So the decision could have been made AFTER he had sold his shares.
Moreover, there's no reason to assume that all the employees who are being laid off were there before KE and TH were hired. Considering that the throughput of that factory rose dramatically in the last two years, chances are that they were hiring new people all that time. So the laid off workers might have been around a relatively short time. I'm not stating this as a fact, but unless you know for certain that the reverse is true, there's no reason to assume it as the basis of an opinion.
Now I must say that I agree with you that compensating executives with fat options while laying off workers is reprehensible. But those policies are determined by Kim Edwards, not Tim Hill.
Lastly, I can assure you that five million dollars is a LOT of money to me. I am fortunate enough to be employed in a field where there is a skilled labor shortage, but I am still just a working stiff. While I am not thrilled about Hill's actions with respect to his large stock sales, I don't see him as quite the villain you make him out to be.
- Allen |
