Chapter 5

Groupthink

As board member Harvey Jackson prepared for the upcoming meeting of the board of Altonerics Inc., he was a little uneasy. One of the topics on the agenda for this meeting was a proposed option exchange program, originally designed by the company’s head of human resources, Martha Radcliffe, at the request of the Altonerics’s CEO. The program offered all Altonerics employees and directors the option of exchanging their underwater options for an equal number of shares of new options with a strike price equal to the closing price on Altonerics stock on June 2. The new options would have a vesting schedule that added 12 months to the original vesting schedule. The total number of options that would be exchanged in this program ...

Get Blind Spots, Biases and Other Pathologies in the Boardroom now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.