Here’s some free advice for Mitt Romney: Release your income tax returns now. Right now. Don’t wait “until April” as you’ve said in the past, or give a vague estimate of your effective tax rate, as you did earlier today. Do it now so you can address facts, instead of conjecture and speculation. According to […]
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook column profiles Paul Levy, a PE manager who makes a good defense of private equity: “We want to build businesses,” Mr. Levy said earnestly. “Nobody wants to fire people. We want to retain all of the value-added, high-quality people that work at these companies. But it’s like any other endeavor. If […]
There’s long been a debate about whether a company’s culture makes any difference in how it performs. Culture often is derided as the “soft stuff” that is nice to have but not really essential to a company’s success. Indeed, Sandy Weill once famously quipped that culture was “something they put in yogurt.” (Of course, we […]
You know your company is in trouble when the chief marketing officer gets more press than the CEO. And it’s in really, really deep trouble when the CMO is seen distancing herself from the company’s strategic blunders. That’s what we saw over the weekend in the New York Times piece on Anne Finucane, “chief image […]
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 […]
As reported today, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has introduced guidance for financial firms related to reporting of their European debt exposure. The SEC issued its recommendations to address the inconsistent approach firms have used to disclose their risk to sovereign and private borrowers: “In response to our comments on their disclosure documents, registrants […]
Years after its collapse, Refco continues to make news. Yesterday, an appeals court overturned the conviction of an attorney, Joseph P. Collins, who had been the chief outside counsel for the futures brokerage and was found guilty of aiding the company’s scheme to hide millions in debt and mask its true financial condition. When the […]
As 2011 disappears in the rear-view mirror, here’s my list of noteworthy risk-takers over the past year. These are the people and institutions that took risks intelligently and won. The list of risk-bumblers – those who mishandled critical situations – is certainly longer (UBS, Olympus, Yahoo, MF Global, I could go on) but their woes […]
For every troubled company that’s trying to restructure and eyeing a trip through bankruptcy to get a fresh start, Kodak is a case study on what not to do. For several days now, media headlines have reported on Kodak’s plans to file for bankruptcy protection, with no comment from the company. It’s the wrong strategy. […]
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday sued Life Partners (NASDAQ: LPHI), a major dealer in the secondary market for life insurance policies. Life Partners and other financial firms have been at the forefront of the “life settlements” industry, which purchases life insurance policies from individuals, usually seniors, for a lump-sum and collects the […]