CFO, The Magazine for Senior Financial Executives articles from November 2006

CFO, The Magazine for Senior Financial Executives archives from November 2006

Career fare.(from the editor)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... IF THERE IS A GENERAL WAR for talent, finance is fighting on the frontlines. The number of students on the CPA track fell to its lowest level in 20 years during the 2001-2002 school year, before Sarbanes-Oxley ratcheted up the demand for...

Sticky topics.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... "Pay Dirt" (October) addresses the sticky topics of executive compensation and new regulatory demands. As leaders of Corporate America, we must recognize that new regulation is a direct result of abuse of privilege. Financial executives...

Seeing the benefits of sarbox.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... I found your discussion on the cost-benefit constructs around Sarbox very interesting ("Numbers Crunch," September). The results of your CFO survey ("Progress Report") align with my own experience, with a majority of public-company CFOs...

Trick or treat in business reporting?(letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... The article on fair value ("Will Fair Value Fly?" September) is timely, and Ronald Fink has done a thorough job in reviewing the pros and cons of traditional accounting-based reporting and fair-value reporting, warts and all. It shows the...

A Valuable perspective.(letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... While I always find the articles in CFO on Sarbanes-Oxley--and governance in general--interesting and relevant, I wanted to commend you particularly on "The Case for Clarity" in September's special section on the future of reporting. While...

Losing touch.(letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... This letter is in response to "The AICPA: Heading South?" (Topline, July). For starters, Anthony Pugliese, the AICPA's senior vice president of finance and operations, recently sent its members a letter stating that the AICPA had experienced a...

The best surveys.(letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... Great article on surveying the world of surveys and using technology to register customers' opinions ("Angry and Bored? You Must Be a Customer," July). I completely agree that surveys are not a panacea for improving customer perceptions. Seldom...

Please don't feed the politicians.(CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS)
November 1, 2006... NEXT ELECTI0N CYCLE, when an employee makes a personal political contribution, beware: it could harm a company's ability to win government contracts. Many municipalities and some states are passing so-called pay-to-play rules that are...

When robots write the news.(FINANCIAL REPORTING)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] AS IF HAVING THEIR JOBS OUTSOURCED to India weren't bad enough, finance journalists now face a new threat: software programs that can write stories in less than a second. Thomson Financial has developed a...

In stable condition?(HEALTH CARE)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] FIRST. THE GOOD NEWS: In 2007, employers could enjoy the smallest health-care cost increase since 2000. Now the bad news: that increase is still likely to be much higher than the rate of inflation. Health-care...

Accountants: going once, going twice.(STAFFING)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WHAT IF COMPANIES could bid for temporary accounting help on the Web as easily as Bruce Springsteen fans chase concert tickets on eBay? Now they can. Slated to launch this month, GreenBrim.com provides an auction...

Backdating fallout: D&O coverage.(INSURANCE)
November 1, 2006... THE WAVE OF SCANDALS involving stock-option backdating threatens to push directors' and officers' insurance premiums higher in anticipation of a surge in class-action suits. So far, restatements related to backdating have led to 19...

Beyond cash management.(TREASURY)
November 1, 2006... COMPANIES ARE CALLING ON TREASURY DEPARTMENTS to do more than analyze cash and manage risk. In a survey conducted by the Association for Financial Professionals, 91 percent of respondents said the rote of the treasury department is expanding....

Verbatim.
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATIION OMITTED] "We are at a crossroads where malfeasance in Corporate America has reached an all-time high. This type of Conduct simply cannot be tolerated in our society." --U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE SAM CUMMINGS, UPON SENTENCING...

You're fired! but Why?(topline)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] DONALD TRUMP may be good at firing his apprentices, but most companies do a poor job of terminating employees. A recent survey by The Five O'clock Club, a New York-based job-outplacement firm, found that in many...

So say HR managers and former employees disagree about dismissal practices.
November 1, 2006... Was the employee informed of reasons for dismissal? HR managers who said yes 94% Employees who said yes 74% Could the dismissal have been handled better? HR managers who said yes 63% Employees who said yes ...

Material whirl.(ACCOUNTING)
November 1, 2006... THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION has issued guidance on how to correct errors that have built up on the books over time. In the past, companies dealt with such errors--ones that are too small to fix in any given time period but...

Back office for sale.(OUTSOURCING)
November 1, 2006... COMPANIES THAT have opted to build wholly owned shared-service centers instead of outsourcing back-office functions may be sitting on gold mines. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Eager to gain scale in a consolidating industry, service providers...

Rule Britannia.(MARKET WATCH)
November 1, 2006... SARBANES-OXLEY is one American creation the British are taking pains not to import. UK Economic Secretary to the Treasury Ed BaLls made that point clear when he recently proposed granting new powers to Britain's financial regulator, the...

work/life: please don't thank me.
November 1, 2006... A recent survey found that 81% of executives say they are connected to work through mobile devices (cell phone, PDA, laptop, or pager) all of the time. The survey, conducted by Korn/Ferry International, also found that 38% of executives say...

Lowering the bar: how market beta can make hurdle rates look artificially low.(by the numbers)
November 1, 2006... DURING THE LATE 1990s, something odd happened to businesses outside of the roaring tech and media industries. They saw their cost of capital decline by as much as two or three percentage points. The lower cost of capital seemed to suggest that...

Harry Potter and the corner office: management lessons from unusual sources.(insight)
November 1, 2006... WHO WOULD make a better CEO, Harry Potter or Moses? Should you run your company like the New York Yankees, even though the team just failed again in the clutch? What can Formula 1 racing teach you about developing talent? Does Attila the Hun...

Pop ten.(insight)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Everything I Know about Business I Learned from Monopoly. By Alan Axelrod Running Press Book Publishers, 2002 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If Harry Potter Ran General Electric: Leadership Wisdom from the World of...

This year's batch of annual reports speaks volumes about the confusing state of corporate reporting.(VIEW FROM EUROPE)
November 1, 2006... IT WASN'T ALL POLITICS AS USUAL AT THE UK Labour Party's annual conference in Manchester in late September. On the afternoon that Chancellor Gordon Brown was giving his why-I'd-make-a-good-prime-minister speech, Industry Minister Margaret...

Buena Vista? After countless delays, microsoft finally unveils its new computer operating system.(in tech)
November 1, 2006... MICROSOFT engineers know a thing or two about operating systems. Co-founder Bill Gates transformed the fledgling software publisher into a business powerhouse by buying the Disk Operating System, then shrewdly licensing the program to IBM....

The password is: "annoying".(NETWORK SECURITY)
November 1, 2006... WHEN IT COMES TO COMPUTER passwords, employees aren't the cleverest bunch. Most network administrators will gladly regale you with lists of actual passwords chosen by actual employees that don't exactly qualify as brain-benders. Indeed, hackers...

Buying big: when looking for an acquisition target, sometimes it pays to pick on someone not your own size.(deals)
November 1, 2006... WITH 148 PROPerties, Extra Space Storage Inc. was a small player in the self-storage business. But it had big dreams. In July 2005, it plunked down $2.3 billion cash for Storage USA, a company with 458 properties in 34 states. In a stroke,...

McClatchy Co.(Front-page News)
November 1, 2006... When McClatchy Co. emerged as the surprise buyer of Knight-Ridder Inc., McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt described it as a deal coming "perhaps once in a company's lifetime." That was also true of the challenge of paying for the much-larger newspaper...

Toll Brothers' Joel Rassman.(ON THE RECORD)(Interview)
November 1, 2006... THE RECENT DOWNTURN IN HOUSING has potentially wide-ranging implications for the U.S. economy. To get some perspective on where this bellwether industry is headed, CFO turned to Joel Rassman, CFO of Toll Brothers, a publicly traded builder of...

A perpect fit: the demand for finance talent may be soaring, but candidates refuse to settle for just any job. Instead, they want ...(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... IT'S THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST and former Thomasville Furniture Industries CFO Paul Dascoli, 45, is riding a 300-foot roller coaster at Cedar Point Park with his two fearless teenagers. But his mind is on a roller-coaster journey of its own,...

Hire callings: leaving a finance career doesn't necessarily mean leaving finance.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... THIS YEAR, NEARLY 2,400 public-company CFOs are expected to leave their current jobs. Most will move on to other finance positions, often at larger companies. A few (think Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo) will move into the coveted corner office. But a...

Become a restaurateur.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] TO THOSE WHO KNOW HER, SUSAN FRASCA has simply fulfilled her childhood dream. Even as a nine-year-old, she whipped up crepes and Baked Alaska in her family's kitchen. "My mom used to think I would be a cook when I...

Teach the next generation.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... CALL IT SERENDIPITY. The day after Christopher B. Paisley, the former CFO of 3Com, said in a press release that he would be retiring at the end of the year and hoped to teach, he got a call from Santa Clara (California) University. Six months...

Open a B&B.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... TRAVEL TO THE ANNABELLE Inn, in Aspen, Colorado, and you'll find plenty of evidence of owner Dennis Chookaszian. Scattered throughout the one-story bed-and-breakfast are the ski boots and poles his family has used over the past So years. Even...

Grow a nonprofit.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THERE SHOULD BE PLENTY of reasons Lyn Jensen would want to leave finance altogether. After all, the former CFO of Napster was put through the wringer as the online-music pioneer was bombarded by lawsuits and...

Return to your roots.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... TOM SAGER GREW UP in a family-business environment. His father, Howard, ran a milk-delivery business with a heavy emphasis on customer service and small-town values--the very values that Sager, who worked at six different companies, including...

Start a winery.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... ASK DENNIS GROTH to order a 2003 cabernet sauvignon and you'll probably make out OK. The onetime Arthur Young partner became a wine connoisseur during his time in the company's San Francisco office, partly because of the time he spent...

Spread the word.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... BLYTHE J. McGARVIE REMEMBERS the trigger very well It was August 2002, and she was a shocked bystander as former accounting giant Arthur Andersen--the firm where she had spent her formative work years--was dismantled, almost overnight. ...

Travel the world.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... CHRISTINE MEAD got the travel bug early. By the time she was 25 she had lived in three countries, including Zambia. So it wasn't a total surprise 11 months ago when she left her CFO post at Seattle-based Safeco to bicycle around the world. ...

Write the great American novel.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... THERE MAY NOT SEEM TO BE much common ground between serving in Vietnam and serving as a CFO. But don't tell that to Christopher Joyce, a retired divisional CFO at AT&T Corp. and a marine veteran, who weaves both experiences into the plot of his...

Save the environment.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... JOY COVEY looks back at her time as CFO of Amazon.com as "180 percent intensity on one narrow slice of life." When she left in 2000, at age 37, she says, "it was time to think about the rest." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Not "rest" as in...

Mix it up.(CAREERS '06)
November 1, 2006... THE SIMPLE LIFE IS NOT IN Thomas J. Meredith's nature. If he were "etymologically based," the 56-year-old former Dell Computer CFO laughs, "I would be a compound complex sentence." On the one hand, there's his private-equity investing....

Pay up: with finance talent in high demand, companies are boosting compensation--and making some demands of their own.(COMPENSATION: PART 2 OF 3)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The past few years have been good for Occidental Petroleum CFO Stephen Chazen. In 2005, he earned nearly $33 million, including gains on options he exercised and long-term incentive-plan payouts. That puts him at the...

Designs of intelligence: as companies extend business-intelligence software to the masses, they should think before they deploy.(in practice)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Companies go to enormous trouble to capture and store data, and then go to even more trouble (and expense) when they attempt to extract and use it. The systems for accomplishing the latter task go by various...

Can you have your stock and sell it, too? Critics contend that something is amiss when companies buy back stock at the same time executives are selling.(buybacks)
November 1, 2006... ADD A NEW wrinkle to the longstanding debate about the wisdom of share-repurchase programs: claims of a conflict of interest. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Companies cite many good reasons for buying back shares: the practice boosts earnings...

Passing the bucks: want to share your nest egg across the generations? A disclaimer gives a surviving spouse the right to play dead so that IRA assets can be transferred to others.(your money)
November 1, 2006... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] VALTER DOLLARD was never one to procrastinate--until he retired. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During a 37-year career at Westinghouse Electric, the mechanical and nuclear-power engineer was able to accumulate a...

Look before you sit: a seat on a corporate board can be a great opportunity, but choose carefully.(your move)
November 1, 2006... WHEN HOWARD Atkins, CFO of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, was asked to join the board of Ingram Micro, a $30 billion technology distribution and sales company, he asked himself many questions and did plenty of homework before accepting the...

Rodney Carter.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Rodney Carter, former CFO of Petco Animal Supplies, is making tracks over to Zales, where he will be group SVP and CFO....

Cathy Smith is remodeling her career with a jump to home-builder Centex from Kennametal, a toot and constructionproducts manufacturer.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Cathy Smith is remodeling her career with a jump to home-builder Centex from Kennametal, a toot and constructionproducts manufacturer. She replaces Lel Echols, who left in June....

Gregory Deavens.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Gregory Deavens must have had it with the Yankees. He's trading his post as SVP of financial analysis and budgets at New York Life Insurance for the CFO role at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance....

Linda Dimopoulos has had her fill as CFO of Darden Restaurants.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Linda Dimopoulos has had her fill as CFO of Darden Restaurants. She will retire next month and will be replaced by the company's controller, Brad Richmond....

Morris "Sam" Smith.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Morris "Sam" Smith is sticking to his knitting, switching from Stroud Oil Properties to Cano Petroleum, an oil-and-gas producer....

Insurance group Progressive has named Brian Domeck.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Insurance group Progressive has named Brian Domeck to succeed CFO Tom Forrester, who is retiring....

Wayne Lee won't have to go far to fill the CFO post at Travetzoo.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Wayne Lee won't have to go far to fill the CFO post at Travetzoo. The former VP of finance there succeeds Ralph Bartel, who remains chairman and CEO....

Jody Feragen will continue to mix it up at Hormel Foods.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Jody Feragen will continue to mix it up at Hormel Foods, succeeding the retiring Michael McCoy as CFO....

Michael Brodeur.(CFOs ON THE MOVE)
November 1, 2006... Bixby Energy has renewed its finance team with the addition of Michael Brodeur. He joins the company from McKessen Medication Management.

Former Apple CFO bitten by backdating?(grapevine)
November 1, 2006... THE SILENCE AT APPLE COMPUTER about the fate of former director and CFO Fred Anderson was deafening after the company's October 4, announcement that it had uncovered 15 instances of possible stock-options backdating between 1997 and 2002. ...

HP-gate goes to Washington.(grapevine)
November 1, 2006... ACCUSATIONS ARE FLYING AT HEWLETT-PACKARD. The investigation into the pretexting scandal that has shaken the computer giant took an unexpected turn when former chair Patricia Dunn suggested that CFO Robert Wayman played a larger role in the...