Merger of the Minds

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, finance chiefs can never have too much information.Just ask Danny Gampe, CFO of assisted living service provider LivHome Inc. The company’s first acquisition in February, says Gampe, he owes in part to being inundated with useful information at the UCLA ...

By Craig Schneider • Aug. 1, 2003

Good, and Good for You

Executives at Fairchild Semiconductor declared last month that the company would “get the lead out” — literally. The high-tech manufacturer is converting all its product-package coatings to lead-free finishes. Such measures “foster a clean environment and provide superior customer service,” said ...

By Marie Leone • Aug. 1, 2003

Going with the Flow

“Not knowing the cost of production is like not knowing your way to work,” bristles Alan Dunn, a lead instructor at the Industrial Relations Center for the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Dunn, a proponent of activity based costing, says that a heavy reliance on profit measures is b...

By Marie Leone • Aug. 1, 2003

Custom-Tailored SOX

Despite the 40,000 or so words that make up the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the language of the 130-page law can be maddeningly spare.Take Sec. 404, “Management Assessment of Internal Controls.” Corporations will spend more to comply with Sec. 404 that with any other section of SOX, according to Pa...

By David Katz • Aug. 1, 2003

Lasting Advice

The chief influence on Clayton Daley’s career was his dad. During evening walks as a teenager, Daley Jr. got an earful about the tribulations of the business world. His father’s frustration with the snack-food distributor he worked for — namely, its willingness to hire and fire so frequently that...

By Alix Stuart • Aug. 1, 2003

Ways and Means of Relieving Underfunded Pensions

On the heels of another report about underfunded pension funds, good news from Washington would be welcome — even at the expense of a little name-calling.First, the report. Among companies that sponsor traditional defined benefit plans, deferred costs — defined as costs not yet reflected in the i...

By Stephen Taub • July 21, 2003

Employers Look to Trim Fat

As any CFO knows, healthcare costs these days are pretty much detrimental to a company’s financial health. And as many employees know, companies have been asking workers to shoulder increasingly more of the bills. But lately, some employers are looking to workforce downsizing as a way to trim eve...

By Lisa Yoon • July 17, 2003

Command and Controllers

Ah, the delicious irony of it all.In the early Nineties, with the arrival of powerful financial and enterprise software, CFOs began shucking their roles as numbers cop. During that period, enlightened boards of directors began insisting that finance chiefs focus less on closing the books, less on...

By Marie Leone • July 14, 2003

Pigging Out?

Think Social Security sets up intergenerational conflict? Try deferred compensation for top corporate managers. At financially strapped Delta Air Lines, in fact, a much-publicized dispute over the funding of special retirement plans for highly paid executives pits the company’s retired CFO agains...

By Ronald Fink • July 1, 2003

What Employers Are Looking For

Ivy leaguers of the world, take note.A recent survey by Society of Human Resource Managers asked 286 randomly selected human resource professionals to rate the influence of a number of attributes in deciding who gets hired for jobs. The results seem to turn the adage “it’s not what you know, it’s...

By Ronald Fink • July 1, 2003

You’ve Got a Great Employer

In 1914, The Ford Motor Co. made an announcement that shook the industrial world. Henry Ford, inventor of the Model T and the company’s eponymous chairman, was going to start paying Ford factory workers the unheard of sum of $5 dollars a day. That daily rate was more than double the minimum wage ...

By Lisa Yoon • July 1, 2003

Write On

Glenn Schaeffer, president and CFO of Mandalay Resort Group, came to corporate finance only after testing his fiction-writing skills in the MFA program at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in 1976. But in a class with such budding stars as T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, Rita Dove, and Jane ...

By Alix Stuart and Ronald Fink • July 1, 2003

Expensing Options: Better Now Than Later

If you can’t beat ’em, expense ’em.That’s probably good advice for the anti-options-expensing set. In the days of FAS 123, when stock-options expensing was optional, companies and accounting experts engaged in vociferous debates over whether to expense or not to expense. But with the Financial Ac...

By Lisa Yoon • June 27, 2003

Eleven Commandments for Smart Negotiating

When the economy is strong, job seekers feel not only that they can negotiate, but that it would be foolish not to. When the economy is weak, however, many candidates wrongly feel that they have to accept what’s offered or risk losing the offer. Whatever the economic climate, what matters is how ...

By Lee Berton • June 25, 2003

Exec Comp Formulas Rejiggered

A number of companies — including General Electric, Delta Air Lines, and Verizon Communications — have started removing pension effects from executive compensation formulas. The reason? To ensure that executive bonuses don’t suffer because of a decline in plan returns, according to an article in ...

By Jennifer Caplan • June 19, 2003

Precious Resources

“People are our most important asset.” How many times have you heard that? More important, how many times, upon hearing it, have you nodded politely and then changed the subject to something more, ah, important?Human resources receives far more lip service than respect, but it may be about to get...

By Peter Krass • June 15, 2003

The Nascar Parallel

Looking for the perfect Father’s Day present? Dale Earnhardt Inc., the racing team founded by the late Nascar champion, has an idea: the Dale Earnhardt Tribute Concert at the Daytona International Speedway. The Web site is offering two-for-one tickets in honor of the old man.Whether or not you ta...

By Lisa Yoon • June 13, 2003

Needed: $36 Billion in Pension Contributions

Underfunded defined-benefit pension plans sponsored by Standard & Poor’s 500 companies could require a boost of about $36 billion in the next 16 months.This according to a study of defined-benefit plan disclosures in the 10-K filings of the constituent companies of the S&P index. The rese...

By David Katz • June 11, 2003

Balancing Cash-Balance Plans

Much to the chagrin of some big employers, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has agreed to look again at a proposal made by its Emerging Issues Task Force (EITF). The proposal would change the way cash-balance pension plans are valued, according to Reuters.Cash-balance plans, which are bac...

By David Katz • June 2, 2003

Big Dig to Baghdad?

Andrew Natsios walked into a fiscal nightmare when he left his job as Secretary for Administration and Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to take the helm at the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, aka the Big Dig. But the Big Dig now looks like the farm team for his new gig — administrator...

By CFO Editorial Staff • June 1, 2003

Split Personality

In the wake of the spectacular bankruptcies of Enron, United Airlines, and Polaroid, employee stock ownership plans have come under intense media scrutiny during the past year. The staggering losses of employees’ retirement savings have prompted pundits to predict the demise of ESOPs, and politic...

By Kris Frieswick • June 1, 2003

Coming Clean

Few companies commanded greater trust or respect. In business for well over a century, and with a reputation built on a bedrock of Swiss impartiality, by the 1990s Société Général de Surveillance (SGS) had become easily the world’s largest cargo inspection company. Governments and companies the w...

By Justin Wood • June 1, 2003

Survey: Workers May Bolt When Economy Recovers

A workforce study released this week by human-resource consultancy Towers Perrin offers good news and bad news for employers. Actually, it’s more like pretty good news with a big caveat (admittedly, that doesn’t have the same punch as “good news, bad news”).Anyway, the good news is that according...

By Lisa Yoon • May 30, 2003

Separate but Equal

Where’s Ally McBeal when you need her?A new study on executive lives may put to rest a question debated since the rise of women’s lib: Can women have it all?Apparently, the answer is yes. The Families and Work Institute, Catalyst, and Boston College looked at 1,200 “very senior” women and men exe...

By Lisa Yoon and Joan Urdang • May 16, 2003

Pension Woes Worrying CFOs, Survey Finds

Pension shortfalls, pension regulations, and pension accounting are high on CFOs’ lists of concerns these days, according to a new study by global outsourcing and consulting firm Hewitt Associates,More than half of the CFOs and treasurers at the 174 mid-sized to large companies in the survey said...

By Jennifer Caplan • May 13, 2003