Company: ISRG
Filing Date: 2025-03-14
Form Type: DEF 14A
Source: 0001035267-25-000098
Chunk: 95

Company: INTUITIVE SURGICAL INC
Filing Date: 2025-03-14
Form: DEF 14A
Chunk 95
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 our NEOs, must demonstrate exceptional performance to remain a part of our executive team. We believe that executives who underperform should be removed from our executive team and have their compensation adjusted accordingly or be dismissed from the Company.

• Executives, including our NEOs, must contribute as members of the executive team to our overall success rather than merely achieve specific objectives within their respective areas of responsibility.

Informed by this team-based approach, the Compensation Committee, a committee of the Board, carefully considers the relative compensation levels among all members of the executive team. Accordingly, our executive compensation program is designed to be internally consistent and equitable to further the Company’s success.

The Compensation Committee receives support from our Human Resources Department in designing the executive compensation program and analyzing competitive market practices. In 2024, the Compensation Committee directly retained the services of a global executive compensation consulting firm, Aon plc, to assist it in fulfilling its duties and responsibilities, including through conducting a robust external benchmarking of our compensation peer group and assessing the competitiveness of our executive compensation program in 2024.

We are focused on a total compensation program that directly links pay to performance. Accordingly, a majority of the annual total direct compensation opportunity awarded to our executive officers is performance-based and directly tied, through the use of RSUs and PSUs, to the value of our common stock. In addition, our executive compensation practices are tailored to account for each executives’ experience, responsibilities, and performance and differing market practices.

We believe our multi-faceted compensation-setting process helps promote retention and our executives’ continuous commitment to our mission and the achievement of our operating goals. We believe that this proposal would interfere with this carefully designed and executed executive compensation program, which we believe is not only effective but has been integral to our success.

In addition to interfering with our carefully designed and executed executive compensation program, we believe that this proposal, if adopted, would introduce uncertainty into our executive compensation program and could interfere with our ability to effectively retain and incentivize participants insofar as it is difficult to determine with reasonable certainty exactly what actions or measures the proposal requires.

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Stockholders have overwhelmingly supported our executive compensation practices.

We value the opinions and feedback of our stockholders, and our Compensation Committee regularly discusses our stockholders’ feedback and considers such feedback when making compensation decisions. Importantly, in conversations with investors in recent years, in which stockholders were generally supportive of the Company’s executive compensation program, there has not been significant focus on the incorporation of CEO pay ratio as a factor in the Company’s