'Failure' Parachutes for Fired CEOs Are Falling Out of Favor - Sort Of

VW's $32 million payout to its ousted CEO is neither an exception - nor does it necessarily prove the rule.

Since many boards are made up of other companies' CEOs, the interest to help someone who may one day help them remains strong.

But as the following article explains, investors are growing increasingly impatient with compensation policies that reward individuals for poor performance - at investors' expense. JL

Joann Lublin reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Despite investors’ growing pique over CEO rewards for poor performance, paying dismissed chiefs remains common. Nearly 60% of publicly held companies have policies or agreements to pay cash severance to top bosses ousted. Boards don’t want to have severance pay practices that are problematic in the eyes of investors.

Everyone Takes a Piece: Ad Tech Was Supposed To Save Money, But Does It Really?

Tech has entered a new phase about which those promoting technological solutions are understandably ambivalent: everyone who thought they could grab a piece of the action is discovering that they, themselves, may be disintermediated by clients more concerned with managing costs than celebrating innovation. JL

Alexandra Bruell reports in Advertising Age:

Ad tech does offer marketers nearly magical new powers. But getting useful ads more cheaply than in traditional buying is not one of them. Marketers expect programmatic buying to be 10 times cheaper than traditional means because they think only about the ad inventory itself and don't anticipate the surrounding expenses,

A Toxic World of Work

The conditions through which advancement and career success are possible may no longer be amenable to the realities of most members of the work force.

This is due, as the following article explains, to the demands placed on those expected to perform the necessary tasks by those who control the capital through which compensation and promotion are determined.

The cause is common - every greater insistence on escalating returns from capital - but the outcome may be reinforcing the downward pressure on financial capabilities that may ultimately render the system economically - and thus politically and socially - unsustainable. JL,

Anne-Marie Slaughter comments in the New York Times:

The key human resources problem (is) not gender, as management believe(s) but rather a culture of overwork.The people who can compete and succeed in this culture are an ever-narrower slice of American society: largely young people who are healthy, and wealthy enough not to have to care for family members.

Judge Rules" Happy Birthday To You" Copyright Invalid

Oh yeah, the lyrics...JL

Sarah Pruitt reports in History:

In his 43-page decision, Judge King ruled the copyright invalid, finding that though Summy Co. may have owned the copyright to “Good Morning to All,” it never had proper rights to the “Happy Birthday” lyrics. It was not  clear that the Hill sisters had written the original song, but they never asserted a claim for the lyrics, though they did sue for rights for the original melody.

In Ten Years Banking Will Look Like a Sci-Fi Film

It kinda does already, but this time it won't be primarily because of bankers' behavior. JL

Tim Wallace reports in The Telegraph:

Future technologies could lead to personalised shopping assistance, highly specific help building your business, and the type of financial advice currently only available to billionaires

How Come Spammers Are Flooding Google With Fake IP Complaints?

Using the rules to skirt the rules. JL

Fletcher Babb reports in Venture Beat:

Spammers are using takedown notices to (very ironically) promote their own stolen and/or bootlegged wares — like sunglasses, handbags, software, and designer clothes. Not to mention spammers’ bread and butter: male enhancement pills.

The Smartphone State: Is Digital Government Really Going To Be Better?

Democracy is inherently messy. Which means that when efficiency is imposed  the results are not necessarily what anyone intends - or wants. JL

Michael Rundle reports in Wired:

The ongoing transition to 'digital government' is a phrase that, like 'cutting red tape', has been used in the past to justify more or less anything -- from introducing new services to shrinking existing ones. But it has also resulted in real benefits.