Reuters can take a well-earned bow for its coverage of Chesapeake Energy and its CEO, Aubrey McClendon. The news service has broken several major stories in the past three weeks that brought to light McClendon’s questionable financial dealings, including his borrowings against stakes in the company’s wells and investments in a hedge fund. The reports […]
We don’t yet know how much Bob Diamond was paid for running Barclays last year. We do know the bank will cap cash bonuses at £65,000 (about $100,000), joining a growing list of banks that have bowed to shareholder and public pressure to curb payouts. Barclays could have reported Diamond’s compensation yesterday, but it decided […]
I was catching up on holiday reading and came across this excellent New York Times piece on Ernest Shackleton written by Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. Shackleton’s ambitious journey to reach the South Pole ended in failure but became a triumph of leadership, courage and determination as he brought his entire crew safely home […]
Tom Glocer today became the latest CEO to be fired, in a year that has seen a score of corporate chiefs get the boot. Glocer, who has led Thomson Reuters since 2001, lost the confidence of the Thomson family, the company’s largest shareholder. Although billed as a retirement, it’s clear that Glocer was forced out […]
The hole is getting deeper for Olympus and its chairman, Tsuyoshi Kikukawa. And his outside auditor, Ernst & Young, might find itself alongside him. A day after denying allegations by its former CEO, Michael Woodford, that it paid advisory fees of $687 million on a $2 billion acquisition, the company reversed itself and acknowledged that […]
The messy firing of Olympus CEO Michael Woodford provides another example of the challenges in communicating an executive exit. The Japanese camera and medical-imaging company last week fired Woodford, its first non-Japanese CEO, after less than a year. In announcing his dismissal, Olympus cited Woodford’s inability to work effectively with Japanese managers and chairman Tsuyoshi […]
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about risk and corporate cultures. Some cultures produce disasters, like the massive, concealed trading loss at UBS – the most recent in a long streak of debacles for the bank. Other environments, however, seem consistently to produce good things – valued products and great experiences. Apple of course comes […]
Today’s New York Times spotlights the rich payouts to failed CEOs, drawing special attention to three CEOs who recently were fired: Carol Bartz of Yahoo, Léo Apotheker of HP and Bob Kelly of Bank of New York Mellon. (See my earlier posts on how these departures were communicated.) While it may spark outrage, these payouts […]
Technology giant HP is demonstrating still another way to fire the CEO – by leaking your intentions to the media. The New York Times and other media outlets, citing anonymous sources “with knowledge of the board’s actions,” are reporting that the board is preparing to oust CEO Léo Apotheker, who has been in the post […]
Thanks to Yahoo’s dismissal of Carol Bartz, we have a fresh example of how CEO firings are communicated. Instead of a well-crafted joint news release, Bartz herself trumped the company’s announcement by sending a terse, firm-wide email that quickly found its way to the press. And before everyone else had it, Kara Swisher at Dow […]