The payouts – £172m of which are retention packages for 73 staff, including Davis – are the highest ever seen to secure staff during a takeover in Britain and are likely to rankle with shareholders at a time of increased activism over top pay.
In the case of a patient with an illness not commonly regarded as terminal, securing staff compliance may be even more difficult.
He secured a staff job as a computer programmer at the University of Chicago, and relegated music to a mere hobby for the next decade and a half.
In 1949, at the age of 32, she secured a staff job at the New Yorker where she had the great good fortune to be edited by William Maxwell, who became a loyal friend.
But once firms have secured the staff they want, the next challenge is to try to hold on to them, eliminating the cost of both finding and then training new staff.
This month the chief executive of G4S, Nick Buckles, acknowledged in a parliamentary committee hearing that his company's failure to secure a guaranteed security staff of 10,400 had constituted a "humiliating shambles".
But lawmakers who interrogated the head of the huge, global security company, G4S, which has failed to meet contractual obligations to secure a guaranteed security staff of 10,400, drew different conclusions, and even the chief executive himself, Nick Buckles, acknowledged that his company's performance had been a "humiliating shambles".
Prison education is a fundamental component of any reform strategy and needs creativity, imagination and a motivated, competent, decently rewarded and dedicated and secure staff, but if it continues to be driven as a commercial venture based on marketing, intimidation, target culture and a casual and cowed workforce with poor leadership it will continue to fail the prisoners.
Instead, the surveys point to a currently poisoned atmosphere, with the Delivering Quality First programme of cuts now compounded with stresses feeding through from a frozen licence fee and cuts, squeezing programme budgets and leading to greater stress, fears of redundancy, over work and even fewer secure staff jobs.
Lewis left the Times after a failure to secure a staff position at the paper.
