Public companies are losing execs to deep-pocketed private firms.
Want to know how badly corporate directors are hurting their shareholders by bungling CEO pay? Consider a story that has captured the fancy of the business press: the tale of Dave Calhoun, America's hottest executive and a man who should be the highly paid CEO of a U.S. public company, but isn't.
Calhoun was a GE (Charts) vice chairman and the most lusted-after managerial star who wasn't already a CEO, as we told you earlier this year (see "Star Power"). Headhunters couldn't leave him alone. Only he knows how many offers of top-tier CEO jobs he turned down, but they were numerous and included Boeing's (Charts). Finally, inevitably, he got an offer worth taking and in mid-August said yes.
But here's what didn't happen. He didn't take the helm of a giant publicly traded company, which is what everyone expected him to do. Instead he left the world's most admired corporation, where he was running businesses with $40 billion of revenue, to become CEO of a privately held Dutch outfit called VNU, which owns the A.C. Nielsen research business, Billboard magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, and other media properties. Total revenues: about $4 billion.
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