Chief Executive (U.S.) articles from March 2006

Chief Executive (U.S.) archives from March 2006

Is Washington listening?(EDITOR'S NOTE)
March 1, 2006... It was pretty stunning to hear President George W. Bush tackle the subject of U.S. competitiveness in his State of the Union address. That was the theme of our CEO Leadership Summit described in our January-February issue, and also the theme of...

Ford begs to differ.(FEEDBACK)
March 1, 2006... It's breathtaking to see how many mistakes you were able to cram into such a short article. We can't tell if your piece, "GM Has A Better Chance Than Ford" (January-February 2006), was malicious or sloppy. Either way, it was wrong. If you had...

Best companies for leaders.(FEEDBACK)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... I just want to express my appreciation, on behalf of myself and the entire organization, for having been selected for the first time in a recent issue highlighting best companies for leaders ("Best Companies for Leaders," November 2005). It's a...

China's President matters.(FEEDBACK)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... A terrific report on the CEO Leadership Summit (January/February 2006), at once substantive, insightful, prescriptive, energetic. The China article ("Relationships on the Ground are Key to Winning China Strategies") is spot on, giving a...

Spitzer's agenda.(FEEDBACK)
March 1, 2006... Thank you for laying bare the real agenda of Mr. Spitzer ("Final Word," January/February 2006). No one in memory has caused, through his own political ambition alone, the loss of so much shareholder value. The baseless and trumped-up charges...

Crusading against CEO pay.(GOVERNANCE)(Chief Executive Officer)(Interview)
March 1, 2006... CORPORATE AMERICA has made some progress in cleaning up its governance, but overly high compensation levels for CEOs show that much remains to be done, says Nell Minow, editor and chairman of The Corporate Library, a research group based in...

Darts & roses.(CEO WATCH)
March 1, 2006... DART... * PHIL KNIGHT, the Nike nutso. Cutting the throat of CEO William Perez was pretty Hitchcock. Someone should pull down the shades on Knight! ROSE... * STEVE JOBS. The next Walt Disney? That's crazy enough that it might...

Darts & roses.(CEO WATCH)
March 1, 2006... ROSE... * BILL WELDON at Johnson & Johnson, for not getting sucked into the Guidant miasma. He let other fools rush in. DART... * CHRIS COX at the SEC. Your first big move was targeting CEO compensation. It wasn't supposed to be...

CEO mood swings.(CEO CONFIDENCE)
March 1, 2006... DECIPHERING the mood in the corner office this month is particularly tricky. Overall CEO Confidence declined about 10 points to 172.5. That's still at historically high levels, compared with a starting point of 100 in October 2002. But the...

The fight for science and math: new ways of teaching these subjects are key.(THOUGHT LEADER)
March 1, 2006... The decline in the number of American students interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is a threat to our competitiveness in today's global markets, a fact well understood by university presidents and business leaders....

Zander the Motovator: for Ed Zander and other CEOs, building a management team is critical. But how to do it right?(ROUTE TO THE TOP)
March 1, 2006... Ed Zander was a Silicon Valley star, having been president of Sun Microsystems before joining a private equity firm. So in January 2004 when he arrived at Motorola, which was seen as a sleepy inward-looking company that had been late to the...

For Iger, the team is key: the new Disney chief built a management team that was ready for action.(ROUTH TO THE TOP)
March 1, 2006... It takes a pretty confident CEO to engineer a deal that puts Steve Jobs on his board--where Jobs could emerge as chairman. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But part of the reason Bob Iger may have felt so self-assured was the faith he had in his...

Have stem cells finally arrived? Despite fraud and controversy, signs point to an emerging, money-making industry.(BIOTECHNOLOGY)
March 1, 2006... Before the end of 2006, a Silicon Valley biotech company called Geron hopes to start human trials of a new treatment to replace the missing insulation around nerve fibers that plays a crucial role in spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis....

The bonding of HSBC: John Bond turned a local bank into a global institution. Now his era is passing.(FINANCE)(Company overview)
March 1, 2006... From Singapore to Sao Paolo, peripatetic John Bond, chairman of "the world's local bank," feels at home. In Kuala Lumpur, he stops to admire a fiery painting of a roaring lion, the symbol of HSBC, the banking behemoth he has led for nearly nine...

Future of the KKR 'Barbarians': the world's most famous buyout duo has adapted more slowly than their rivals.(FINANCE)(Kohlberg Kravis Roberts)
March 1, 2006... From a conference room near his office overlooking New York's Central Park, Henry Kravis offers an appropriately expansive insight into how he views his place in Wall Street history. People have long "bought assets by putting up a dollar and...

Vive Le French connection: backlash over the Iraq war damaged business ties. Here's how CEOs mended them.(GLOBAL)
March 1, 2006... It was a tense and angry period after the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003--and France was highly critical. U.S. tourism to France tanked. Angry Americans eschewed French champagne and wines, and even publicly dumped them. Cheddar was...

How forgetting leads to innovation: in creating new lines of business from within, companies must rethink their old practices.(BOOK EXCERPT)
March 1, 2006... Those who most readily capture imaginations are entrepreneurs--innovators with a vision who create something from nothing. Large corporations, by contrast, are easily cast as the villains. They thwart aspiring entrepreneurs in every possible...

Is your laptop telling secrets? In a WiFi world, logging into your computer on the road is risky business.(TECHNOLOGY)
March 1, 2006... Every day, at conventions or in hotel rooms, your company's executives routinely open their laptops, log on and check their email. They assume if no one is looking, or their room door is locked, the information on their computers' hard drives...

Can technology heal the health care industry? What's needed are common standards, privacy assurances.(ROUNDTABLE)
March 1, 2006... It seems like such a no-brainer: Introduce more information technology into the relatively primitive U.S. health care system to drive out huge amounts of waste, thereby lowering costs and improving the quality of care. [ILLUSTRATION...

BMW M5: from exotic race car to elegant car about town.(WHEELS)(Bavarian Motor Works)
March 1, 2006... Editor's Note: Two auto manufacturers, BMW and the Chevrolet division of General Motors, responded to our ranking of the "Top 10 Cars for CEOs" in the October 2005 issue by asking us to sample their 2006 wares. It's hard work, but someone has...

Managing CEO wealth: why do so many otherwise-capable executives make mistakes with their own personal finances?(NET WORTH)
March 1, 2006... Chief executives are charged with growing wealth for thousands of stakeholders, and personally sign their names to just about every major company decision. It seems only natural that they would transfer a little of that expertise to their own...

The skills of Skilling: his public displays of humility could backfire.(FLIP SIDE)
March 1, 2006... From the moment a high-profile trial begins, pundits, academics and legal experts begin to fashion theories as to where the prosecution or the defense went wrong. In the Martha Stewart case, it is generally agreed that the "I'm too smart to...

Less regulation, more competitiveness.(EDITORIAL)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH has put the word "competitiveness" on the national agenda. So what are our readers saying about how the U.S. government regulates them, and what impact that has on their competitiveness? Specifically, is the...

Debunking the bashers.(FINALWORD)
March 1, 2006... NELL MINOW of the Corporate Library is one of the leading crusaders against CEO compensation and we have published an interview with her (page 12) so that the CEO community can better defend itself. There are several flaws in her logic. She...