The First 90 Days

Once, while discussing his post-Velvet Revolution rise to power in the Czech Republic, former Czech president Vaclav Havel described “a sensation of the absurd, what Sisyphus might have felt if one day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down.”A CFO who’s finally l...

By Lisa Yoon • March 12, 2003

Exec Comp: Location, Location, Location

For big paychecks, the big city offers big money to big executives, according to a new study by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.That’s no surprise, given the higher cost of living in cities like New York and San Francisco. But Mercer’s 2003 Geographic Salary Differentials Survey suggests that, i...

By Lisa Yoon • March 11, 2003

Hiring Managers Upbeat

How high will the unemployment tide rise?On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the jobless rate jumped to 5.8 percent, as companies cut an unexpected 300,000 jobs in February. That was the biggest drop in hiring since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.In a survey completed j...

By Stephen Taub • March 10, 2003

Minority Report

According to a recent CareerBuilder poll, only 55 percent of managers expect to hire new employees this year. But despite the grim outlook for the hiring scene, companies are still striving to field diverse workforces. According to a recent New York Times job market study, two-thirds of companies...

By Lisa Yoon • March 10, 2003

Rising Medical Costs: Pass ‘Em On

Health-care costs in 2002 jumped more than many companies projected.Although health-care benefit costs have soared for several years now, nearly half (45 percent) of employers reported that their health-care costs exceeded their budgets in 2002, according The Eighth Annual Watson Wyatt/WBGH Surve...

By Stephen Taub • March 7, 2003

Survey: CEOs Getting Younger

CFOs have a demanding job, no question. But for what it’s worth, the boss’s job is no cake walk either. In fact, according to a new survey by Chief Executive Magazine and executive-search firm Spencer Stuart, CEOs today have a tougher job than ever.Several factors are making the chief executive’s...

By Lisa Yoon • March 6, 2003

Recruiters Are People, Too

Looking for a job in a weak economy can be a daunting undertaking. In addition to the usual challenges — creating a compelling resume, preparing for interviews, negotiating a salary — just finding an opening often requires inside information.While all that seems like a lot, an executive recruiter...

By Lisa Yoon • March 5, 2003

Exec Hiring to Pick Up, Says Survey

For executives and recruiters alike, hope apparently prevails that the sour job market will start to improve. Or at least, that appears to be the take away from two new surveys by ExecuNet, an executive-career resource.In one survey of 1,185 executives, 79 percent said they think the economy is g...

By Lisa Yoon • March 4, 2003

Going Native

The globalization of a company might seem like a straightforward exercise when the grand, over-arching ideas are scribbled out on flip charts and flashed up on PowerPoint presentations at corporate headquarters. But that’s deceptive. In practice, it’s never as simple as it sounds.Recently a finan...

By Blythe McGarvie • March 1, 2003

Avoiding Overtime Losses

Think all of your salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay? Think again. Aided by the Fair Labor Standards Act’s tricky and outmoded language, salaried managers and even executives are joining class-action lawsuits that insist their companies have denied them millions of dollars in overtime ...

By Joseph McCafferty and Alix Stuart • March 1, 2003

Deconstructing E-Learning

No sooner had Luis Sanchez Navarrete, director of training and knowledge management at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), launched a bold training initiative using web-based technologies, when things started to take a turn for the worse. In 2000, a E10m project dubbed Plan Conecta was greete...

By Jason Karaian • March 1, 2003

Is This Really a Community Service?

What sorts of punishments await way-ward CFOs in this new era of corporate reform? For Richard K. Halford, former CFO of Kansas City, Missouri-based Owl Securities and Investments, it was not hard time, but public soul-baring.Halford pleaded guilty last fall to violating the Foreign Corrupt Pract...

By Tim Reason and Kris Frieswick • March 1, 2003

Cost of Perks Piling Up

With salaries stagnating and health-care expenses booming, benefits are becoming an increasing portion of the total cost of employment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported in January that employee benefits made up 39 percent of total payroll costs in 2001, up slightly from 37.5 percent the prio...

By Joseph McCafferty • March 1, 2003

Avoiding Overtime Losses

Think all of your salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay? Think again. Aided by the Fair Labor Standards Act’s tricky and outmoded language, salaried managers and even executives are joining class-action lawsuits that insist their companies have denied them millions of dollars in overtime ...

By Alix Stuart • March 1, 2003

The Holes in Black-Scholes

Does the Black-Scholes option-pricing model — the most common method for valuing stock-option grants — accurately forecast how much an option will be worth? Not even close, says a study by Sibson Consulting. “Black-Scholes is not a good predictor of actual gains,” says senior vice president Blair...

By Tim Reason • March 1, 2003

Tempting

Add the temporary-staffing industry to the roster of businesses benefiting from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. With companies barred from using their auditors to bring internal controls up to speed and reluctant to add to head count, finance-staffing firms say they’re seeing a spike in business ...

By Alix Stuart • March 1, 2003

Hello, I Must Be Going

At a time when a few down quarters can lead to a forced resignation, Paul Coghlan, 57, is an anomaly. He’s been sitting at the same Formica-topped desk as CFO of Milpitas, California-based Linear Technology Corp. for 17 years, as revenues have gone from $22 million to $1 billion and back down to ...

By Alix Stuart • March 1, 2003

Coming Clean (Sorta)

What sorts of punishments await way-ward CFOs in this new era of corporate reform? For Richard K. Halford, former CFO of Kansas City, Missouri-based Owl Securities and Investments, it was not hard time, but public soul-baring.Halford pleaded guilty last fall to violating the Foreign Corrupt Pract...

By Tim Reason • March 1, 2003

Interviews: Defending Your Life

It used to be that preparing for a job interview was like studying for an exam. Armed with hard knowledge of all the pertinent facts (company history, products, stock performance, competitors), a candidate could face the interview with reasonable confidence.Such a scenario may soon be a distant m...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 27, 2003

Shore Up Those Shortcomings

Unfortunately, positive thinking only goes so far.Take careers, for instance. Blindly playing up strengths while downplaying weaknesses may look great on a resume, but it can prove troublesome down the road. For executives, ignoring weak spots can actually be a career-buster.That’s the contention...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 26, 2003

Dropped by Ahold: More on Meurs Resignation

Michael Meurs resigned Monday as CFO of Royal Ahold NV, along with chairman and chief executive Cees van der Hoeven. The two are stepping down because of accounting irregularities that resulted in Ahold’s earnings being inflated by at least $500 million between 2001 and 2002.Henny de Ruiter, chai...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 25, 2003

GE Comes Up With New Formula

General Electric Co. is changing the way it pays top executives by disregarding pension income, according to Friday’s Wall Street Journal.Currently, GE calculates the pay of senior executives based on several factors, including earnings per share. This model lets the conglomerate include any inco...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 24, 2003

Are You Experienced?

These days, there’s no shortage of advice for out-of-work executives. Indeed, in the past six months alone, CFO.com has run scores of articles exhorting the unemployed to beef up their skills by going back to school, starting a company, or enlisting at a not-for-profit.But what about managers who...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 20, 2003

More on the Melodrama at Universal Health

As CFO.com reported Tuesday, hospital operator Universal Health Services Inc. ousted CFO Kirk Gorman and replaced him with controller Steve Filton.The company maintained that the integrity of its financial statements was not a problem. But investors appeared alarmed, sending the stock price plung...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 19, 2003

Leticia Baldridge Was Right

The devil, they say, is in the details.In no other endeavor is this more true than in the job-search process. For instance, you can submit the killer resume and ace all the interviews, but did you remember to write a thank-you note to the interviewer? If so, did you send it promptly?Such a slip-u...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 18, 2003