In my interview with Michael Zielenziger about his new book on Japan, Shutting out the Sun, we discussed the role of such business mavericks as management consultant Kenichi Ohmae, tech mogul Masayoshi Son, and blogger/investor/Gnome Mage Joi Ito. Michael’s take was that they remain marginalized. Joi e-mailed me this morning to say he …
My first visit to Japan came in the sticky late summer of 1998. Fortune had sent me across the Pacific to figure out whether there was any end in sight for the island nation’s long economic nightmare. That’s not really the kind of question you can answer in a week of interviews in a country where you don’t speak the language, but I had …
Do CEOs really matter? Back in 1972, an article by Stanley Lieberson and James O’Connor in the American Sociological Review contended that the identity of the chief executive mattered far less to corporate performance than which company he ran and which industry it happened to be in.
Ever since then, management scholars have been arguing …
Corey Rosen of the National Center for Employee Ownership sent me a comment on my options backdating posts that I figure deserves a post of its own. Take it away, Corey:
Justin Fox’s suspicion about backdated options being more common for top executives is backed up by broader data. In a July study of 53 companies that were being
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Let me tell you about the nefarious scheme in place at some major American corporations until this year. Employees were allowed pick the lesser of the current stock price and the price a year before, then buy stock at a 15% discount from that lower price. The companies failed to report this clear transfer of value on their income …
Several of the commenters to my post Monday about options backdating portrayed it as a case of top executives changing the rules to enrich themselves. But most of the companies caught up in the scandal so far are in the tech industry, which is known for lavishing options on employees far below the CEO paygrade.
Out of curiosity, I did a …
Almost every day there’s another one, a top executive thrown out of his job for backdating options. These are some otherwise perfectly respectable people we’re talking about: William McGuire at United Health, Shelby Bonnie at CNET, Andrew McKelvey at Monster. Even Apple‘s Steve Jobs has gotten tangled in the backdating web, although …
Telekom Austria CEO Boris Nemsic paid a visit to Fortune yesterday afternoon. He’s a straight-talking engineer, originally from Sarajevo, who sports the only display of Don-Johnson-in-Miami-Vice scruff that I’ve ever seen on the CEO of a major corporation. (For some reason he shaved it for the photo that accompanies his official bio …
It’s important these days for journalists to own up to their biases, so let me just say up front that I’m a card carrying member of Athletics Nation. I’ve been an A’s fan since 1971, not counting a brief and shameful dalliance with the Giants in the late 1970s (when Charlie Finley let his team go to seed, and my parents had friends with …
The population of the United States will pass 300 million this month, says the Census Bureau. Only about 220 more years, according to my deeply unscientific extrapolations of United Nations population projections, and we’ll pass China!
China will start losing population towards the middle of this century, predicts the UN’s Population …
I have no idea what the media landscape will look like a few years down the road. But I do know that blogs–or some even better means of self-publishing that hasn’t been named yet–will only grow in importance. Not because I’m writing one, but because there are so many examples of the genre that fill now-obvious needs that weren’t being …
Sheldon Adelson is really into lists. On a visit to Fortune yesterday, he spent several minutes reeling off the (impressive) academic and other accomplishments of his two daughters–much to the embarrassment of one of them, Sivan, who was sitting next to him.
Before that Adelson (the “ad” is pronounced like advertising, not lemonade) had …
