Incompetent management
Once again, Tom Vanderwell here with some thoughts about moral hazard....Barry Ritholz at The Big Picture had these two comics that brought to the forefront again the issue of moral hazard. Check out the comics and then we'll talk "on...
This is the first straightforward thing I’ve seen from Steve Case in the whole should-AOL-breakup discussion: We tried to establish a business relationship between AOL and Time Warner Cable in the late 90s. It was hard to do. I thought...
While many people are applauding Google’s decision to open up Urchin to all-comers, some Urchin customers are less pleased. Matter of fact, they’re downright angry. I’ll quote one such Urchin customer to demonstrate. He had to change log-ins, is now...
This is allegedly writer Michael Kinsley talking about writer Bob Novak, but in my experience it’s much more widely applicable: Beneath the asshole is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole. This kinda “assholes...
With news today that Google has added Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman to its board of directors, the company has entered a rarefied class. Tilghman will serve alongside Stanford University president John Hennessy, making Google almost certainly the only public...
From a post on Fury.com today: “We realize you had a choice betwen several bankrupt airlines to fly today, and we thank you for choosing our bankrupt airline." -- my Delta Airlines pilot this morning...
Niall Fitzgerald at Reuters says something about leadership today in an FT piece that is a hard-learned truth for most CEOs: It’s when you don’t deal with the truth that you run into trouble. The first responsibility of any leader...
Further to my prior post about managerial incompetence and my cargo cult theory, I was shelf-surfing in a bookstore recently and ran across a new book by Mark Burnett (of Survivor and The Apprentice fame) called "Jump In". While I'm...
I'm in the estimable Jared Sandberg's Cubicle Culture column in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The subject? Managerial incompetence, a subject of which I have made careful study over the years. [Insert self-deprecating joke here.] Among other explanations for...
Daniel Loeb of Third Point LLP is known for writing, well, somewhat over-the-top letters to underperforming CEOs of firms in which he has an equity position. That said, his letter to Star Gas Partners CEO Irik Sevin is a classic...
From a ProMED mailing today:Emmpak Foods, Inc., Milwaukee, Wis., establishment, is voluntarily recalling approximately 123 000 pounds of ground beef that may be contaminated with hydraulic fluid, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced today. [Emphasis...
Well, that is now settled. Amazing:Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in American business, was ousted as chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co. on Wednesday after disagreements over strategy at the computer and printer maker. People are...
I've long said that anyone with a pulse can get an MBA, and it turns out it's relatively easy even if you have four legs and fur:Undercover agents contacted [Trinity Westerrn University] online to obtain a $299 bachelor's degree in...
While Chris Pirillo's review of MSN Messenger 7.0 is worth reading just for its lip-smacking savagery, there are some serious points here. Reading this, Microsoft increasingly reminds me of one of those out-of-it kids you met in high school who, tired...
From search firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a list of the most popular evasions, obfuscations, and lies in job-seekers' CVs. Perhaps I'm naive that way, but I'm puzzled why people lie most about the stuff that's easily checked -- education...
Following up on my preceding note, the current Fast Company also contains an interesting interview with Jim "Built to Last" Collins. In it he tries to dance around the whole subject of whether he can be legitimately criticized for lapses...
Management consultant & all-around organizational gadfly-guy Tom Peters has taken to criticizing Jim "Built to Last" Collins in speeches. Peters says that organizations are not built to last (the title of Collins' best-selling management book); they are built to take...
The Deal has a car-crash fascinating insider-y piece on the behind-the-scenes machinations in Michael Eisner's decision to dump Mike Ovitz back in 1996. The most bizarre part is this:According to Sid Bass, who was then Disney's largest shareholder, Eisner didn't...
While correlation ain't causality, I've long been entertained by the relationship between a CEO's golf handicap and their company's return to shareholder. As Graef Crystal reminds us again this year, low-handicap CEOs turn in higher returns than higher handicap CEOs....
According to today's NY Times, I spent part of my time in Enron-by-the-Sea, which is what the paper has annointed San Diego. Much to the satisfaction of perennially SD-skeptical San Diego Reader columnist Don Bauder, the Times is catching up...
There is a fun and contrarian piece on Always-On by Bob Sternhill speaking to why venture folks obsess about hiring star CEOs, and why that often leads awry. Fair enough, and too often venture firms do confuse risk reduction with...
Sigh, those Google guys. While I'll stick to my view that the SEC quiet period rules are nonsensical, and, what's more, that giving an interview before the quiet period began doesn't (technically) violate those nonsensical rules, Sergey and Larry really...
Reuters is running a story today on how Toys R Us may sell its toy business. It feels a little like a zen question, but what would a toy-less Toys R Us actually be? Just "R Us"? Or maybe just...
Interesting-sounding new book out about how copier technologies changed the world. Among other things, it tells a story of how IBM turned down a chance to enter into a joint venture with then-unknown Xerox in 1958:Arthur D. Little concluded that...
Siemens Business Services has done a survey on how much time people spend on the phone with their information technology support people per week:More than a third -- 36 percent -- of the U.S. white-collar workers surveyed said that they...
Geoffrey Moore's piece in the current Harvard Business Review has a great title: "Darwin and the Demon". While it may not have been the intent -- and it wasn't even really the subject -- the article did get me thinking...
Most marketing sorts (now there's a not-so-august group) argue that the greatest marketing mistake in business history was not New Coke, it was Apple's decision in the late 1980s not to widely license its Macintosh operating system. The company's dumb...
According to the Corporate Library, as of March 2004:377 CEOs now chair their own boards (a 4% decrease) 71 former CEOs now chair their boards 16 Chairs are either former or current executives of the firm 25 Board chairs are...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
American Airlines Names Beer as New CFO (Reuters) Reuters - American Airlines said on Friday James Beer, a vice president for Europe and Asia at the world's largest airline, will be its new chief financial officer....
From an Windows > A Sit-Down With Steve Ballmer > April 25, 2003" href="http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=9300013">Information Week interview with Steve Ballmer, "We don't do much in the way of forecasting." That has to rank as one of the most thoroughly implausible comments...
I love this these press-release tiffs between hedge fund managers and management. This time around we have a New York hedge fund calling management at Potlatch "smug", "bewildering", "insouciant", and "unrepentant" -- and that's just the opening salvo....
