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subject to these stock ownership requirements must own a certain dollar value amount of stock before
they are permitted to sell shares (other than shares sold to pay option exercise prices or shares sold or
surrendered to cover taxes). Executives who sell shares in violation of these requirements may be
ineligible for future long‐term incentive awards. The stock ownership policy requires the following
levels of ownership:
Position
Ownership Required as
Multiple of Base Salary
Chief Executive Officer
5x
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer
3x
Other Executive Officers
1x
Each of our NEOs are in compliance with this policy either because they own the target value of
stock or because they have not sold shares.
Policy Against Hedging Transactions
We have adopted a policy prohibiting our employees, including our NEOs, and our directors
from trading in puts, calls and other derivative securities relating to our common stock. The prohibition
includes the purchase of any financial instruments designed to hedge or offset any decrease in the
market value of our common stock, whether or not such instruments are classified as derivative
securities.
Severance and Change in Control Benefits
We have no employment agreements with any of our NEOs that provide benefits prior to a
change in control of our company. However, we have entered into change in control and termination
agreements with Messrs. Gliebe, Hinrichs, Schlemmer, Underwood and Colvin.
The Committee believes the change in control and termination benefits under the change in
control and termination agreements and our equity incentive plans are consistent with the Committee’s
overall objective of building shareholder value and contain terms that are similar to those offered to
executives of comparable companies.
The purpose of the benefits is to focus our NEOs on taking actions that are in the best interests
of our shareholders without regard to whether such action may ultimately have an impact on their job
security, and to avoid the loss of key managers that may occur in connection with an anticipated or
actual change in control.
All of our change in control agreements contain “double trigger” provisions, which means that,
for an executive officer to receive severance benefits under the agreement, in addition to the change in
control there must be some adverse change in the circumstances of the executive officer’s employment.
The Committee selected the triggering events for change in control and termination benefits to our
NEOs based on its judgment that these events were likely to result in the job security distractions and
retention concerns described earlier in this paragraph.