Why offer an incentive plan based on stock price as opposed to our own performance?
When it was created in 1996, ShareValue Trust was intended to engage employees in the company’s longer-term stock performance and help them become shareholder “owners” in the process. In reality, though, ShareValue Trust hasn’t worked out they way we wanted it to. As we’re seeing now and have seen in prior periods, events beyond our control can affect the payout — even when we are performing extremely well. That wasn’t the idea, and it’s one of the reasons why we adopted other programs that directly reward employees’ contributions to our operational and financial performance, including the Employee Incentive Plan, gain sharing and other programs that are linked to team productivity and performance improvement over periods of one year or less.
