Golden handcuffs are the unvested equity, deferred compensation and retention awards that make leaving a company expensive. For pharma and biotech executives, they rarely arrive all at once. They build award by award over years of good performance, until staying is no longer fully voluntary. A useful check is to ask whether you would still choose to stay if none of this compensation were at risk.

Equity compensation tends to enter an executive’s life as compensation and stay there in the mind long after it has become something else.

An executive can begin January with a concentrated stock position that has been sitting in the portfolio for years.

A senior biotech executive can leave a company on Friday and begin somewhere new a few weeks later. Financially, the separation can take much longer.