Chief Executive (U.S.) articles from November 2002

Chief Executive (U.S.) archives from November 2002

Feedback.(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2002... Take Control of Earnings Releases Shareholders may influence corporate reputation, as described in July's "Can CEOs Defend Corporate America's Image?," but many companies cede control of their investment message to Wall Street analysts....

Chief Executive Officerss behaving badly -- or not. (Editor's Note).(Editorial)
November 1, 2002... One of the perverse byproducts of the media's current fascination with CEOs--call the coverage "CEOs Behaving Badly"--is that despite gallons of ink devoted to executive debacles, reporters and the public know less about the roles and...

Corporate loan conundrum. (Governance).
November 1, 2002... Any hopes borrowers may have nursed that their corporate loans would eventually be forgiven, like the $96,000 gift from Harken Energy to President Bush in the late '80s, died July 30 when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act went into effect, leaving dozens...

New HealthSouth Corp. boss inherits old issues. (Arrivals).(Brief Article)
November 1, 2002... LONGTIME HEALTHSOUTH insider William Owens, 43, replaced CEO Richard Scrushy, 50, at a challenging time. His promotion was announced alongside disclosures of changes in Medicare reimbursements that could lower EBITDA earnings by $175 million....

How to mix business with the Bible: what they didn't teach in biz school. (CEO Watch).
November 1, 2002... Chris Hobgood's work varies weekly. On any given day, his job may take him to a hospital, a courtroom or a jail. He often goes to weddings or funerals during work hours. At other times he's at HomeBanc Mortgage, a private mortgage lending...

United Way chief pledges reform, resigns. (Departures).(Brief Article)
November 1, 2002... NORMAN O. TAYLOR RETIRED as CEO of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the United Way in September, having spent the past year defending the charity against charges of fiscal mismanagement. Robert Egger, a former restaurant and nightclub owner who...

Stock options, behold the sea change. (Survey Says!).(Brief Article)
November 1, 2002... ATTITUDES TOWARD expensing stock options have been tranformed. At least 70 companies began voluntarily expensing options this summer and 87 percent of 200 large U.S. companies surveyed in August now consider it inevitable that option expensing...

The etymology of disruption. (Author Interview).(Brief Article)
November 1, 2002... In France, the word "disruption" is a registered trademark of TBWA\Paris, a unit of the New York ad agency TBWA\Worldwide, thanks to its French president and CEO, Jean-Marie Dru. Dru introduced the word in France in 1996 with the publication of...

7-Eleven's lessons from Japan. (Strategies of the Fittest).
November 1, 2002... Two finance stories obsessed the business press in the late '80s: the burgeoning pace of leveraged buyouts and the rash of Japanese takeovers of American icons like Columbia Pictures and Rockefeller Center. A frequent headliner was Southland,...

Norway's new femme quotas. (Market Horizons).
November 1, 2002... A profusion of initiatives have come and gone. Appropriate sounding targets have been set for distant dates. Networks, development programs and old-fashioned exhortation have all been tried. And still women are conspicuous by their absence from...

Intangible assets: A ticking time bomb. (Chief Concern).
November 1, 2002... The dust hasn't settled yet from the Enron and WoridCom scan dais, and already a new financial reporting time bomb is ticking away on the corporate horizon--this time over the SEC's new rules on accounting for "intangible assets." Depending...

U.S. should cultivate friendly oil. (Competing Interests).
November 1, 2002... Why are we importing oil from countries that are exporting lethal terrorism by groups who hate our freedoms and despise our way of life?" Senator Conrad Burns wondered out loud. In a September speech at the National Press Club in Washington,...

CEOs to Bush: keep your eye on the ball. (Capitol Ideas).
November 1, 2002... World War II saved Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The talk of battle--and then war itself--turned the country's mind away from a decade of depression and the slow slog of the New Deal and led to a burst of economic activity that created one of...

High earnings, low ethics: pressure to generate steady profits has been intense and destructive. But if history repeats, our current cataclysm presages a moral rebirth. (Essay).(Column)
November 1, 2002... By today's standards, David Rockefeller, America's corporate icon during the l960s and early '70s, was a poor businessman. The 87-year-old former chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank (now J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.) had been producing mediocre...

Enemies of a CEO? From muckrakers to fraud examiners to independent directors, corporate chiefs face pitched battles on many fronts. Here's how to deal with nine of the most common. (Crisis Management).
November 1, 2002... If personal investing was America's passion in the high-flying '90s, CEO bashing has surely supplanted it at a time of plunging stock prices and appalling scandals. Never before have corporate chiefs faced so much criticism on so many fronts....

The greatest show on earth: Ringling Brothers' Ken Feld takes a stand against cause-driven activists. Would you? (Crisis Management).
November 1, 2002... For years he endured the attacks of activists, but as he sat in a San Jose, Calif., courtroom last December, Kenneth Feld, head of the world-renowned Ringling Bros. And Barnum & Bailey Circus, decided the time had come to take a stand. His...

From cement to services: Cemex's Lorenzo Zambrano revolutionized the low-tech cement business by investing in technology; now companies want to buy that expertise. (Strategy).(Interview)
November 1, 2002... When Lorenzo Zambrano became chairman and CEO of Cemex in the 1980s, he made a decision that today is protecting the giant cement maker from the Latin American debt crisis humbling other Mexican companies: He pushed into foreign markets. Now...

Born-again annual reports: this once-treasured corporate communique has become a relic. This could be the year CEOs make it relevant again. (Investor Relations).
November 1, 2002... "A gorgeous woman slinks up to a CEO at a party," begins the characteristically tasteless joke in Warren Buffett's 2001 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, "and through moist lips purrs, 'I'll do anything -- anything -- you want. Just...

Rules for a new capitalism: you don't have to be the CEO of WorldCom to know the game has changed. The question is, can you change with it? (Roundtable).
November 1, 2002... Does your chair feel warm? As one high-profile leader after another resigns in the face of public scrutiny or succumbs to charges of securities fraud or obstruction of justice, it's clear that CEOs are in the hot seat, now more than ever...

Mussolini slept here: Hotel legend Bob Burns was rich unemployed, so he returned to the hospitality business--this time for fun. (Disposable Income).(Interview)
November 1, 2002... The good news is you're rich," Bob Bums' wife told him just after Burns sold his 65 percent stake in Regent International Hotels for around $300 million back in 1992. "The bad news is, you're unemployed." Bums was 63 at the time, and while his...

One man's dreary is another's divine. (Flip Side).
November 1, 2002... This past summer, an article in The Wall Street Journal bluntly told investors to stop expecting the stock market to finance their retirements. With the market approaching free-fall, after the phantom recovery of early 2002, the customarily...

Outsourcing: The path to achieving business transformation goals. (Advertisement: CEO Survey).
November 1, 2002... CEOs rely on business process outsourcing for many important transactional functions, but their focus is shifting to strategic functions in future outsourcing plans. Profitability and business growth are top-of-mind among chief executives...