(Mark Lennihan/AP)At Merck, the retirement age isn’t what it used to be — for the CEO, at least. In doing so, the company added to a long downward trend in companies that have mandatory retirement ages for their top executives, said experts on corporate governance and executive succession. Yet in the Conference Board’s 2017 report of CEO succession practices, just 19 percent of manufacturing companies, 23 percent of financial services companies and 7 percent of the non-financial, non-manufacturing public companies that were surveyed required their CEOs to retire at a certain age. Sometimes a mandatory retirement age is lifted to give the current chief executive a little more time in the job, potentially clearing the way for a successor to prepare. In Merck’s case, he said, “the reality is they want to keep him on because the company is doing well.

Source: Washington Post September 27, 2018 20:53 UTC