CP,
I respect you and your opinions and am thankful for your input. However, I disagree with your position on awarding options.
First, I don't believe they have any great need to hire in the next few months. We don't have a great need because our big trial is winding down and the whole Bavi PIII is in doubt so I don't see us needing to increase spending in the near future. Options are IMO to attract big time people and not lower level workers who tend to have the higher turn over rates. We have all the big time people we need. If we need money for workers its for the lower level ones that turn over more frequently and voting for options isn't going to help that.
When this issue clears up (or not and we start relying on other trial data) we'll get any money from another financing effort or partnering. No need for shareholders to keep taking it on the chin when the ONLY clear winners will be the senior management team and the workers already there who have had a chance to collect options over the years. All these people may or may not have some responsibility for this latest fiasco. Why would you want to award them now. There is no proven performance indicator to justify it. In fact its quite the opposite. What I see is a ton of money spent and total ambiguity as to whether we can salvage anything out of it or not.
I don't see the most important people walking away because they already have a boatload of options and they were starting to get wealthy there for a short period of time (just as I was too). Its my experience that only senior managers place a lot of significance on option awards because they are the only ones who are granted significant amounts to make it worth considering. Its our senior managers that have some splaining to do.
I think it irresponsible not not hold them accountable for a major fiasco if they will not, and yes even if they cannot (because they led us to this condition), provide information as to why they shouldn't be held accountable
It emboldens them not to improve their processes, self checking and forward thinking to prevent such events in the future. I laid out a fine reason in a previous post why they are not off the hook on this mess by any means and it is obvious that a lot of people have rose colored glasses on to blindly give them a pass now.
Yes I use "blindly" as an insult just like people are insulting with the "moronic" and "doesn't look like the smartest thing to do" and "everyone is entitled to hurt himself" statements. I don't hide it using the smarmy ways employed by the people who don't agree with those of us to try to make a statement that big improvements in communication and management processes need to occur.
Why do we need improvement in these areas? It should be obvious; we are at standstill - as far as the market is concerned we are at a standstill - after having spent tens of millions of dollars on our break out trial and we have had no information for 3 weeks not to mention the loss of the hard fought for and even more difficult to win back credibility factor. We now have to wait for pancreatic cancer trials to get us back on track. Do we even have a history of pancreatic cancer treatments to provide us with a modicum of confidence regarding the possibility of positive results. No. We have to rely on our belief in the MOA of Bavi. I have that faith, that's why I'm still here.
Yes it does give me some satisfaction in sticking it to the uncommunicative senior managers. They should be expecting it if they have half a brain. But hey its business and they have to ask for the options; its their job. Its our job to hold them accountable and say no until this is cleared up and they convince us that they deserve money at the expense of the value of our shares.
I don't know for sure but I'm fairly certain there are means to grant the option awards at a later date with special meetings and votes. Yes it will cost more to hold special meetings and votes but the way the money may have been wasted on this latest trial fiasco, I would say its a drop in the bucket compared to that.
I've given senior management a pass for years because they have always progressed. Now they haven't (big time stoppage and ambiguity here). Let's not even get into the failure to progress with Cotara. I never really gave much of a hoot about Cotara with the Bavi trials progressing the way they seemed to be but they (senior management) should have; its their job. It would certainly have been a good contingency by this time to have progressed that to PIII.
