The decision to join a family business can be difficult because once you're in, you're in for the long haul. You can leave IBM with two-weeks notice. But mixing blood and money means you are committing big time to Johnson's Distributors or Jones and Sons Auto Repair. ...
There was Microsoft. Then Carl Ichan. Then the vindication at a shareholders meeting. Isn't it time for Yahoo to get a break? Apparently, not. It now turns out that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock did not get the resounding affirmation rates of of 85.4...
When tough times come, too many CEOs knee jerk themselves into cost-cutting mode. Big mistake, write two Booz & Co. consultants. What's needed instead is a smart, targeted investment strategy, say Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand in a recent Booz report. By making an intelligent study of...
One of the books on my summer reading desk is a page-turner about the mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin back in 1905. After taking over by force, more than 700 sailors roamed the Black Sea spreading terror for nearly two weeks. What caused the mutiny? Cheap pursers aboard the...
The cold war among proxy service companies has been getting a lot hotter lately. Proxy Governance, a proxy service firm based in Vienna, Va., has gone on the offensive by pushing for a "code of ethics" among its group which includes Glass Lewis & Company and Egan...
All of you Lou Dobbs fans out there might be curious about what happened to one of the greatest travesties in American economic history -- a proxy fight by an English hedge fund over board seats on CSX, an American railroad. Apparently, The Children's Investment Fund, the...
Seems like it's Cosmopolitan Day here at BNET. Over at the Corner Office, Peter Galuszka notes that U.S. companies are, in increasing numbers, tapping executives and board members from abroad, notably China and India (Or, as the kids are calling it, Chindia.) Meanwhile, BNET1's...
The Find: Governance advisory firms claim they can predict the future performance of a public company by analyzing public data, but new research claims the value of their ratings is dubious at best. ...
Maybe I've missed it, but I have been waiting for CNN pundit Lou Dobbs to weigh in on the foreign invasion of an American icon -- Budweiser beer. After finding its initial $65 a share bid for Anheuser-Busch Companies rebuffed, InBev SA, the Belgian-Brazilian brewer of such...
Let's say your board is being challenged by dissident shareholders to bring in directors on a minority slate. Who should pay for it? That's question that the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission has asked the Delaware Supreme Court to answer. The SEC is doing so because about...
Angelo Mozilo fits central casting's version of the modern CEO. Always tanned, his white hair contrasting against dark business suits, the co-founder and chief executive of Countrywide Financial has been powerful and domineering. Yet, his behavior and that of his board has led to what corporate governance experts believe is...
It's time for another CEO pay survey. This one, by the Associated Press, shows that "fireman CEOs" -- those hired from the outside to pull a big corporation through a crisis -- get a lot of money. The AP came to its conclusions after surveying documents from...
I don't know about you, but I find CNN's Lou Dobbs viscerally repellent. His flag-waving bombast against hard-working immigrants raises my blood pressure. Now, he's showing his ignorance of American history in a bizarre proxy contest at railroad CSX. Dobbs is joining a handful of senators in...
Think the venerated Robert's Rules of Order are the last word for running meetings? If you're not satisfied that you're getting everyone on the same page, maybe it's time to ditch parliamentary procedure and try a different approach. Lawrence Susskind, who wrote "Breaking Roberts Rules," says parliamentary...
Following the historic 9 percent run up in oil futures June 6, expect your customers to be more concerned than ever about prices. But it's not just customers you have to worry about -- you need to be thinking right now about how to manage your business through the deepening...
Executive off-sites fail when they feel like canned affairs cooked-up by HR. You know: team-building ropes courses, faith-fall exersizes, the endless "interactive" PowerPoint presentation in a beige-colored hotel conference room where the only one interacting is the one blathering endlessly on, slide after slide after slide. ...
The Find: An analysis of 2,500 public companies over the last ten years shows that the rate at which CEOs get fired for poor short term financial performance is just 2.1 percent. The Source: The seventh annual CEO succession report from Booz & Company which will be...
If you think that poor-performing CEOs face a better chance these days of getting the ax, think again. That's the conclusion of a new Booz & Co. (formerly Booz, Allen, Hamilton) report that examined the behavior of 2,500 companies in 1995, 1998 and from 2000 to 2007....
The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- Albert Einstein This is the first thing that popped into my head when I read about Deutsche Telekom, the German phone giant, getting itself embroiled in a scandal for...
The single most valuable player in almost any company is its chief executive officer. Given that, most firms surely have succession plans ready to go when Mrs. CEO steps off to another opportunity or the Board decides to go in another leadership direction. Right? Um, not so...
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