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Divorce in the Workplace

Although divorce is primarily a personal tragedy, it can also spill into the workplace, even costing you your job -- not to mention a good portion of your wealth and reputation. In recent years, a number of very public divorces involving CEOs have done just that. This article analyzes a few of these cases and presents what lessons can be extracted.

Productivity of the Mind

Ceos Say Bay State Health Care Plan Is Doa

Despite higher energy costs and rising interest rates, business leaders remain positive. The CEO Confidence Index rose 5.9 points this month to 173.4. The gains in May were driven mainly by increases in the Current Confidence and Employment Confidence components, which rose by 9.1 points and 8.4 points respectively. Other concerns included rising energy costs, currently unstable due to the war on terror, and the recent spate of energy resource nationalizations in South America. Asked about th...

Here Comes Natural Gas

In an interview, Don Felsinger, CEO, Sempra Energy, talked about the need for more energy infrastructure projects to help contain natural gas prices. In North America, companies have been able to satisfy their own demands for natural gas from internal production. As global economy develops and as countries become more dependent on the revenue from selling natural resources, the world becomes a more civilized place. Anytime you are building large infrastructure projects, there are people who o...

Why Ceos Don't Get Good Pr Counsel

Most CEOs are not receiving the quality of PR counsel they need, largely because they do not recognize its value and do not have confidence in their communications executives. The crucial communications strategy invariably -- and mistakenly -- falls to the lawyers. However, lawyers are invariably more focused on protecting the company from lawsuits than on matters that can affect its reputation. They often counsel silence in times of crises. But there are times when such silence can have a de...

Are Boards Fixing Ceo Pay?

The increasingly complex and rapidly changing landscape of executive pay requires substantial, active and ongoing board member engagement -- and most boards are so engaged at unprecedented levels. The fundamental objective of compensation committee meetings continues to be straightforward: Programs need to attract, retain and motivate management talent and to be aligned with the interests of shareholders. But the current environment has complicated this task. Shareholders take an external vie...

The New Look of American Manufacturing

American manufacturing CEOs are learning how to remain players in a world that is now awash in low-cost goods made virtually everywhere else. These manufacturing CEOs are striving to create business models that can survive, both for purposes of the bottom line and for what they call a concern for the US's future. Dismantling much of its domestic manufacturing was at the center of a turnaround strategy that Xerox launched in 2000 after reporting a fiscal-year net loss of $257 million. Yet Anne...

The Tragedy of Enronicus Rex

With the conviction of Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the CEOs who guided Enron through its meteoric rise and even more spectacular implosion of fraud and conspiracy, an era has come to an end. For Lay, the end must seem personally tragic. It is commonly believed that Enron -- or Lay and Skilling -- failed because of fraud, imaginative accounting, poor oversight and a criminal CFO who over-reached himself with a few too many off-balance-sheet special purpose entities. The firm's use of mark-to...

Building a Stellar Cellar

A newly minted CEO of a high tech company wanted some advice on stocking a new wine cellar. The CEO needed to figure out how much wine he wanted to store and then choose between building a dedicated room where he could have "visitation rights" to his wine or using a free-standing unit that can look like an ultramodern refrigerator. The author suggested allocating 85% of his inventory to everyday and weekend wines and 15% for fine and rare wines. Next, they discussed the three "Cs" of wine sto...

Back From the Brink

An excerpt of an interview done with Computer Associates CEO John Swainson is presented. On the massive accounting malpractice at Computer Associates, he said that the board found the source of the problems and remedied them, including leading all the negotiations with the government regarding the deferred prosecution agreement. The board fired 15 people out of the top 35 senior leadership team. When Swainson got at the company, it had no CFO. On how he drives cultural change, he said you mod...

Winning in a Multicultural Market

In a roundtable discussion, several executives shared their views on how to win in a multicultural market. While "multicultural markets" encompass segments ranging from ethnicity and race to sexual orientation and geographic dispersion, the sector getting the most play today is the rapidly swelling Hispanic-American market. Known as the majority minority, this booming segment -- expected to surpass $1 trillion in buying power in a few years -- is spawning many multicultural marketing initiati...

Making Innovation Work

In a round table discussion, several CEOs and experts talked about making innovation work. Robert Suh, chief technology strategist for Accenture, said that innovation is the responsibility of the whole organization. Believing that all employees must and can innovate for their customers, CDW CEO John Edwardson insists on having his people get out and visit other people as often as possible. He also has asked a few CEOs at different companies to mentor younger people at his company. Roundtable ...

Staying a Step Ahead of the Rest

Modern-day competitive intelligence is the ability to do far more than simply collect and digest published data on the competition. It requires special insights in order to see outside your own business and stay ahead of disruptions, distortions, rumors and smokescreens. There are nearly as many ways to express the competitive intelligence competency as there are CEOs. Daniel Vasella has a reputation as a demanding, direct CEO who overhauled the once-staid culture of Novartis's Swiss Sandoz/C...

The Coo: Friend or Foe?

The COO role is a useful one, but one recent study found that firms led by a CEO-COO duo underperformed firms without a COO and that in poorly performing firms the presence of a COO increased the likelihood the CEO would be dismissed. Granted, it would be a mistake to conclude -- on the basis of a single study -- either that the CEO-COO structure is a poor way to lead or that CEOs should be afraid of replacement by their COO. The key to understanding the COO role is to recognize it is an amor...

Picking the Right Charter

While chartering a plane might be a good business decision in one sense, if the charter plane crashes and burns with your company's top management team aboard or your CEO suffers a heart attack and there is no defibrillator aboard, it probably was not the best business decision. While many air charter carriers boast safety records and procedures better than those of scheduled airlines, unfortunately, there are many operators who do not adhere to the highest safety standards. There may be seve...

Csr and Big Pharma

An excerpt of an interview done with Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell is presented. A Gallup survey asked the public about who they respected. Large organizations like Pfizer came in very low. McKinnell's view is that unless the company rebuilds public respect, regulation and litigation will affect all aspects of the business. Pfizer is starting to use what little legislative muscle it has to improve the situation by working on the Medicare prescription benefit package. In terms of social responsibi...