After a year of bad publicity, hundreds of millions in lost consumer-drug sales and numerous product recalls, Johnson & Johnson's ($JNJ) board has cut CEO Bill Weldon's (photo) bonus by 45 percent. He also got marginally fewer stock options than in the previous year. But he still takes home $1.98 million in bonus pay, and he won a three percent raise in base salary for 2011, to $1.9 million.
The company announced Weldon's pay numbers in a statement, but the details won't be available until J&J's proxy statement hits. In the meantime, J&J's board issued a vague explanation: "The Board's Compensation & Benefits Committee evaluates Mr. Weldon and all the executive officers against a set of both financial and strategic objectives. These objectives...are consistent with our long-standing pay-for-performance philosophy."
It'll be interesting to see what performance metrics Weldon hit. The steady drumbeat of recalls from J&J send a message of lax compliance and poor management oversight. Weldon has promised to fix the problems, and he's made some management changes to that end, but as many industry observers have pointed out, top management at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the unit responsible for most of the recalls, seems to have remained intact.
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