When Ricoh Co. Ltd. agreed to buy Ikon Office Solutions Inc. for $1.6 billion earlier this week, one thing that was clear was that Ikon management was going to stay on to run the big office equipment distribution business based in Malvern.

They have a million reasons to do so.

Under executive retention agreements, CEO Matthew J. Espe and five other senior executives would receive some hefty payments if they stay a full two years following the sealing of the deal.

The maximum Espe could receive is $8,630,400 over two years. He could stay as little as six months following the closing of the acquisition and get $1,294,560. The agreement is structured in a way that escalates payments the longer Espe stays. So $1,726,080 after 12 months, $2,157,600 after 18 months, and $3,452,160 after 24 months.

Retention bonuses are common in big deals like this, because often the last thing an acquirer wants is to be handed the keys and watch the top management wave good-bye.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ikon says these retention agreements replace severance pay the executives would have been entitled to receive. So they turned severance pay into incentive pay.

Here are the maximum payouts for other Ikon executives:

* Robert F. Woods, Ikon's chief financial officer, $2,122,375;

* Jeffrey Hickling, its senior vice president of operations,$1,850,625;

* David Mills, president of Ikon Europe, 906,144 pound sterling.

The retention agreements for Mark A. Hershey, Ikon's general counsel, and Mark Bottini, senior vice president of US field sales, were not attached to today's filing.

Most of us will have a four-day workweek with Labor Day closing many workplaces Monday.

But there has been a lot of discussion whether the high price of gasoline will prod more employers to make a four-day workweek the norm.

The human resources profession calls it the “condensed workweek,” in which an employee works four 10-hour days. Many municipal and state governments have adopted the four-day week. (New Jersey and Pennsylvania don’t plan to do it.)

Many offices offer flexible work schedules. Coatesville’s Aerzen USA Corp. is one of the few manufacturers I’ve come across that does so for many of its 51 workers.

Aerzen makes industrial machinery, including positive displacement blowers, compressors, and vacuum pumps. The firm says nine of its production workers have opted to put in 10-hour days Monday through Thursday and take Friday off.

It works because the production department operates as a team and the number of people working each day is consistent from week to week, said Aerzen HR director Jean McAllister.

In the office, 12 employees have opted for the program. Because their duties are more individualized, office personnel need to “stagger their off-days,” she said, with Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays tending to be the days they choose.

Those in sales and customer support don’t participate in the program, and some employees cannot because family or other commitments prevent them from working a 10-hour day.

Aerzen’s not doing this just to save workers gas money. The firm says flexible schedules improve the work- life balance of its workforce. And it also fits into a corporate mission to be “greener.”

I’d be surprised if shorter workweeks make a dent in the 24/7 workaholic American business world. If they do, it’s hard to believe that the U.S. economy could remain as productive as it has been.

But the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said 23 percent of the 100 employers it surveyed in May are now offering them.

We’ll see if four-day workweeks have more staying power than casual Fridays.

It’s exciting to watch as new industries catch fire.

Think of the dot-com sector. In the late ’90s, hundreds of companies formed as usage of the Internet spread and capital chased ideas.

The euphoria over the disruptive power of the Web prompted lots of predictions: Car dealerships were doomed. Malls would close. Who needs bank branches?

Of course, when it became apparent that too much capital was dumped into too many enterprises like Pets.com that had no hope of making money, the crash came fast and hard.

I was reminded of the tech bubble froth when I read Gov. Rendell’s speech to the Democratic National Convention.

The phrase that caught my attention was when Rendell said that Barack Obama and Joe Biden “offer the change America needs to create a future free of foreign oil.”

According to Rendell, the U.S. must require that 25 percent of our electricity comes from alternative energy by 2025. And the federal government must spend $150 billion on solar farms, clean coal gasification and geothermal plants over the next decade.

The private sector is already responding. Dozens of venture capital firms have been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into “clean-tech” or “green-tech” companies. T. Boone Pickens has recast his image from oil-driller to wind-miller.

Perhaps the entrepreneurial ferment will one day develop the magic molecule that produces more energy than oil and at a lower price.

But venture capitalists often say that everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you initially project. They’re happy if one or two investments out of 20 are home runs.

Just as in oil drilling, a lot of these efforts will fail.

While politicians can intend for this country to end its dependence on foreign oil, the reality is the best we can hope for is to reduce it from the current 66 percent.

So embrace energy innovation, America. But remembering the hype behind superconductivity and cold fusion, be prepared to endure a lot of failure before we start turning away the supertankers from our ports.

Unisys Corp. is a clear loser coming out of the summerlong fight to put a sign on Two Liberty Place.

The Blue Bell company has put itself into a ridiculous jam: Will it really drop plans to move its corporate headquarters over a sign?

Unisys spokesman Jim Kerr wasn’t taking the bait dangled by reporters Tuesday. We don’t know if the information technology company will quietly go ahead and move 225 people and its headquarters into the city.

Or since it can’t have its scarlet letters on Two Liberty, Unisys may just take its marbles and go home - or stay home - in Montgomery County.

But let me suggest that the bigger loser is the city of Philadelphia, and Unisys’ intransigence really put the city into a no-win situation.

Philadelphia once again looks like a hostile place to do business - the City of No.

Commerce Director Andrew Altman can say the administration backed Unisys’ position on its sign.

But there’s no way he could deliver on this deal when the city’s own laws were clear.

The Zoning Board of Adjustment did what it always should do: follow the law. The law says no signs bigger than 100 square feet and none above the second story of a building.

So why did we need to be treated to the spectacle of not one, not two, but three public floggings before this agency did what should have done the day Unisys’ request landed in the in box?

Stamp “Rejected” on it.

There are many qualities about this city that should be attractive to new employers, but our penchant for delay, decry and deny is not one them.

Wheeling and dealing will always be a part of business and politics. But rules do matter. Many small-business people gripe to me that they’re sick of the special deals that are cut for select big businesses while they remain bedeviled by layers of city bureaucracy and high taxes.

You might argue that the system worked in denying Unisys’ sign.

But it is a system more akin to a slaughterhouse than a hospital surgical suite. And I don’t think the patient is doing very well at all.

In a sign that banking industry is still working through the credit crisis, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. added 27 banks to its list of "problem" institutions this afternoon, but don't look for a list of names.

The government agency that insures deposits only provides aggregate information on banks that are in a squeeze. For the quarter ended June 30, the FDIC said the number of banks on the problem list rose to 117 from 90. It was the seventh quarter that the list expanded since it reached a low of 47 as of the third quarter of 2006.

Even more troubling is that the ones added to the list appear to be large. The FDIC said assets of "problem" institutions rose from $26.3 billion to $78.3 billion.

As bad as all that sounds, we're far from the carnage that was inflicted by the savings and loan crisis. For some perspective look at this chart on the FDIC site.

It shows how the nation's banks have seen bleaker days since 1990.

But for anyone hoping the yearlong credit crunch was nearing the end, this quarterly report shows the stresses migrating from the banks on Wall Street to the ones on Main Street.

The largest mutual fund groups keep losing assets this year, according to Financial Research Corp., which has released data for July.

Assets of the 25 largest fund families were $7.67 trillion as of the end of July, compared with $8.41 trillion for the same month of 2007.

Vanguard Group, of Malvern, had assets of $1.04 trillion as of the end of July. That's flat from a year ago.

And Vanguard remains the second-biggest fund group behind American Funds, which had assets of $1.05 billion. Fidelity's assets were $819.9 billion.

The best-selling mutual fund so far for 2008 is the Pimco Total Return Fund, which has attracted $15.7 billion this year. Vanguard Total Stock Market Index is No. 2 pulling in $10.8 billion.

Those who run area companies have been concerned about a shortage of mid-level professionals and managers.

CEO Council for Growth, which tackles issues related to the economic competitiveness of the Philadelphia region, on Tuesday will issue a set of recommendations to address that problem.

UPDATE: Read the report online here.

Anthony J. Conti, who chairs the CEO Council’s Human Capital Working Group, said the answer boils down to retaining your talented employees by encouraging them to get a needed certification or college degree - and paying for it.

“There’s a body of academic information that makes a persuasive argument that companies that invest in continuing education,” Conti said, “appear to create a return to the company that’s positive.”

The 20-page report provides examples of how six large companies do it. For example, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals L.P. provides a reimbursement tuition assistance plan with an annual $10,000 cap for any business-related course.

“When you talk to companies, what you find is that if you give employees flexibility around their personal development and facilitate it, people will stay longer, they’re happier and the companies are getting better results,” said Conti, Philadelphia market managing partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers L.L.P.

Given their druthers, employers probably would rather not front their money for you to learn low-fat cooking or the history of Abstract Expressionism. And if you don’t get at least a “C” in the course, the company often won’t pay for a poor grade.

I wonder whether this kind of effort has a chance of moving forward when the U.S. economy is sputtering. But I’ll take Conti at his word when he says that CEOs are concerned enough about their talent management strategies to make this a priority.

So if your boss wants to you to hit the books and is willing to pay for it, I’d say sharpen your pencils.

Congress and patient advocacy groups have long wanted to know how much money the pharmaceutical industry gives to various health-related institutions. Money, after all, can buy influence.

Now a local drug company says it will disclose all of its educational and charitable grants in the United States on a quarterly basis, starting in February.

GlaxoSmithKline PLC, which has a U.S. headquarters in Philadelphia, provides grants to hospitals, teaching institutions, managed care organizations, professional associations, patient advocacy groups, and continuing medical education companies.

Chris Viehbacher, president of GlaxoSmithKline’s North American Pharmaceuticals business unit, said by publishing who gets grants “we transparently identify the support we offer” to educational activities.

GlaxoSmithKline’s not the first to do this. Eli Lilly Co. has been disclosing its grants for each quarter since January 2007.

Lilly is actually the poster company for Sen. Charles Grassley, who’s been campaigning for the industry to publish this kind of information a couple of years now.

Who wants to read 41 pages of listings like “Children’s Hospital - Denver, Outreach Pediatric Endocrine Lecture Series, $3,300”?

Well, the Senate Finance Committee, for one. Led by chairman Sen. Max Baucus and Grassley, the committee says the industry often used educational grants as a way to increase the market for their products.

It’s easy to see why the companies do it. They’re in the business of developing new medicines that nearly always cost more than older therapies. So by supporting educational programs that discuss the benefits of those new drugs, the company have a vehicle to encourage doctors to prescribe them.

And these grants aren’t insignificant amounts. The Senate Finance Committee staff surveyed 23 drugs companies and found most spend tens of millions of dollars each year to fund thousands of educational grants and educational programs.

In February, Grassley sent a letter to the CEOs of 15 drug companies asking why they haven’t followed Lilly’s lead. (GlaxoSmithKline wasn’t one of the companies.)

Nearly all of them said they were looking into how best to disclose the information. In May, Pfizer Inc. posted online its first list of grants and charitable contributions made through the first quarter of 2008. Pfizer’s biggest grant was $3.4 million to the California Academy of Family Physicians as part of a three-year anti-smoking campaign.

Locally, AstraZeneca PLC, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. Inc. and Wyeth are in various stages of their “efforts to promote increased transparency,” as Merck CEO Richard T. Clark put it in his response to Grassley.

GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman Sarah Alspach said the company’s quarterly reports will include the company’s charitable giving as well as grants for continuing medical education.

She said the disclosure will help “dispel some of the confusion over what kinds of things we support.”

Philly Ticker

Shares of Innovative Solutions & Support Inc. fell 32 percent last week, making it the biggest moving local stock. Shares closed Friday at $5.85.

The Exton maker of avionics systems revised downward its revenues for its fourth fiscal quarter, which ends Sept. 30. The company said revenues will be between $10 million and $12 million, rather than the $14 million it projected during a July 31 conference call.

CEO Ray Wilson said in a statement that “issues at a major customer” have caused orders to be lower than expected.

Innovative Solutions wasn’t naming the customer. But Boenning & Scattergood analyst Michael F. Ciarmoli identified it as Eclipse Aviation Corp., which is apparently cutting production of its Eclipse 500 jet for the rest of 2008 and the first half of 2009.

On Aug. 11, the Federal Aviation Administration began a 30-day safety review of the Eclipse 500 jet. In June, one of the jets experienced an “uncontrollable increase” in thrust on a landing in Chicago, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Earnings

Wednesday: Charming Shoppes, eGames

Thursday: Dollar Financial.

Quotable

With both wages and home prices falling, and savings rates close to zero, families are being squeezed in a way that is likely to depress consumption spending in the months ahead.

- Mark Price, economist with the Keystone Research Center from its State of Working Pennsylvania 2008 report.

I pay attention to fast-growing companies because they’re great consumers:

They consume capital, office space, labor, and any number of professional services you can think of.

Fast growth is normally associated with very small firms, because it’s much easier to double in size when you’re pulling in $2 million in sales than $200 million.

I took another look at the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies and was surprised to see some of the 158 local firms weren’t so small.

L.F. Driscoll Co., the Bala Cynwyd construction management firm, made the list with a three-year revenue growth rate of 124.5 percent. Its 2007 revenues were $780 million.

AmeriQuest Transportation Services, a Cherry Hill logistics firm, had revenues of $563 million, while Intech Construction, of Philadelphia, reported $285 million. Those are some big companies growing at a triple-digit rate.

As for what these companies have in common, 26 of them provide information technology services. There were 14 construction firms and, surprise, 13 manufacturers that made the list.

Where will you find these companies? The suburbs are home to most of them, but 19 of these gazelles are based in the city. The most popular suburban addresses were King of Prussia (14 companies), Wilmington (10), and Malvern (7). Blue Bell, Cherry Hill, Conshohocken, Fort Washington, and Newark, Del. each had five.

Finally, I added up the employment and revenues of all the local companies on the Inc. 5000 list. Combined, they employed 14,046 people and reported revenue of $4.46 billion for 2007.

For some perspective, Charming Shoppes Inc. had about 30,200 employees and revenue of $3 billion for its most recent fiscal year.

Quotable

All of the things that are undermining consumer confidence are still there. We’re one bad, unexpected event from really taking out the consumer confidence in a very serious way beyond where we are today.

- New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, in an interview on Bloomberg Television.