Human Capital: Page 207

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    Will Temps Get Organized?

    A National Labor Relations Board decision in late August makes it somewhat easier for the nation’s 3.1 million temporary employees to join the unions of their permanent co-workers. But don’t expect to see masses of temps rushing to the picket lines. The decision allows temporary employees to join...

    By Alix Stuart • Oct. 1, 2000
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    A Question of Quality

    A CFO would have to be in a deep coma not to notice the skyrocketing cost of health benefits, which are expected to jump another 9.8 percent this year, according to a recent survey by Watson Wyatt Worldwide. Having plucked all the low-hanging cost-cutting opportunities through health maintenance ...

    By Kris Frieswick • Oct. 1, 2000
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    Grapevine

    Coincidence? Probably. Some might see more than coincidence in the resignation of Perot Systems Corp.’s CFO Terry M. Ashwill, 55, just one week before heir-apparent Ross Perot Jr. took over the CEO seat from his father, Ross Sr., at the Dallas-based IT services firm. Replacing Ashwill is Russell ...

    By CFO Editorial Staff • Oct. 1, 2000
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    A Costly Revolving Door

    If your company’s employee turnover rate is soaring, you may just have to start answering to your shareholders about it. A new study claims that employee turnover replacement costs have had a dramatic impact on company stock price, especially in high-turnover industries such as specialty retail, ...

    By Kris Frieswick • Oct. 1, 2000
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    Can’t Let Go

    Stephen Aday, controller of Cellular One of San Francisco, has managed to hold the turnover rate in his finance department to about 21 percent. Too high, you say? It could be much worse, according to Aday.After all, Cellular One, a digital wireless service provider that began as a joint venture b...

    By Kris Frieswick • Sept. 1, 2000
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    Class Acts

    After 15 years as chief financial officer of $5 billion 3Com Corp., Chris Paisley faced a simple decision last year: take a lucrative job heading finance for the promising Palm Inc. hand-held computer spin-off, or teach school instead. Simple indeed. The 47-year-old starts this winter at Santa Cl...

    By Roy Harris • Sept. 1, 2000
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    Awaken the Valley Within

    Six years ago, at the height of the reengineering revolution, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad informed Corporate America that it was headed in the wrong direction. In Competing for the Future–perhaps the most influential book on strategy of the 1990s– they argued that innovation, not efficiency, was...

    By A CFO Interview • Sept. 1, 2000
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    Getting It in Writing

    The offer letter from DoveBid Inc., promising a sign-on bonus and three years of salary rises, wasn’t quite enough for Cory Ravid. Sure, he’d hit it off with CEO Ross Dove in interviews for the CFO post. And Ravid had great confidence in the Foster City, California, clicks-and-mortar auction hous...

    By Alix Stuart • Sept. 1, 2000
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    Options on Steroids

    “super stock option” bill moving through the U.S. House of Representatives is designed to make stock option plans more ubiquitous than ever. Introduced by Rep. John Boehner (R­Ohio), the super stock option will allow employers to deduct the cost of the options when the employees exercise them whi...

    By Steve Bergsman • Aug. 1, 2000
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    A Matter of Policy

    In the movie Gladiator, things really heat up when the Roman soldier Maximus utters the battle cry, “At my signal, unleash hell!” When Chris Jones, the CFO of S.W. Rodgers Co., found out that his company’s 401(k) plan was underperforming in a raging bull market, he uttered a similar cry.The resul...

    By Meg Glinska • Aug. 1, 2000
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    Evaluating Dot.come-ons

    Larry Stranghoener was never an “Internet kind of guy,” he says. Indeed, when the former Honeywell Corp. CFO was squeezed out of his position in the AlliedSignal Corp. merger last December, he barely considered the dot-com propositions streaming in. It took months for a friend, an original invest...

    By Alix Stuart • Aug. 1, 2000
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    Underwater Life

    Pity the legion of stock-option holders whose dreams of sudden wealth have sunk to the bottom of the sea. Their pain is exceeded only by that of the shareholders, who saw the value of their actual stock in hand fade away. Is there a way to create new incentives for employees without jarring share...

    By George Donnelly • July 1, 2000
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    Reality Checks In

    Of course, everyone wants to be a millionaire. But joining an Internet start-up clearly has lost some of its luster as the preferred path.In fact, caution rules when it comes to joining a new venture, according to a recent survey. When asked last February, 43 percent of workers said they would no...

    By George Donnelly • July 1, 2000
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    Riding the Bull

    If you believe traditional stock options align management’s interests with those of shareholders, then CFOs increasingly are on the same page as their ultimate paymasters.So finds the biennial CFO Compensation Survey, undertaken by the consulting firm of Towers Perrin.According to the survey of 6...

    By Ronald Fink • June 1, 2000
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    Advice with a Price

    The idea of offering online investment advice to its 401(k) participants grabbed 3Com Corp. from the moment it was frrst suggested two years ago. For one thing, there was the appeal of the exciting little start-up that was behind the proposal — Financial Engines Inc. The company was founded by tw...

    By Robert Stowe England • May 1, 2000
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    Do-It-Yourself HR

    In 1908, Henry Ford rolled out the first Model T from the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. At the time, most people didn’t give Ford’s idea of a car for the multitudes much chance of catching on. Until then, cars were considered a plaything for the rich and famous, an expensive toy for Vanderbil...

    By George Donnelly • April 15, 2000
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    All for One and One for All

    When industry deregulation reared its competitive head in the mid- 1990s, the board of San Francisco­ based Pacific Gas & Electric Co. looked for a way to refocus the priorities of executives and senior managers. “The company needed to change the game, from climbing the corporate ladder to cr...

    By Ian Springsteel • April 1, 2000
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    A Good Deal Too Much

    By all rights, Rollin Dick should be contemplating a comfortable retirement about now. During much of his 14-year career at Conseco Inc., the 68-year-old CFO helped the fast-growing insurer achieve celebrity status on Wall Street. Together with CEO Stephen Hilbert, Dick steered the Carmel, Indian...

    By Andrew Osterland • April 1, 2000
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    You’re Fired

    Eric Mattson seemed to like nothing better than schmoozing analysts and meeting with big shareholders. But as CFO of $4.5 billion Baker Hughes Inc., the story he had to tell was wearing thin, as the Houston oil-and-gas-services company consistently lagged behind its peers and struggled to digest ...

    By Stephen Barr • April 1, 2000
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    Team Teaching

    Dell Computer Corp. decided last year that its in-house executive training programs weren’t doing enough to teach the financial significance of Dell’s unusual business model. So it went direct — to the Graduate School of Business at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin.The company and the schoo...

    By Kris Frieswick • April 1, 2000
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    Defending Your 401(k)

    John Eskew won’t be caught napping in the woods when the bear arrives.The CFO of Windermere Real Estate Services Co., a residential real estate brokerage firm based in Seattle, put together a comprehensive fiduciary liability program to reduce the company’s — and his own — exposure to lawsuits al...

    By Russ Banham • April 1, 2000
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    Labor to Revisit Advice Rules

    Doling out investment advice can be risky business for the sponsors and providers of 401(k) plans. But the U.S. Department of Labor is planning to reduce that risk.The DoL has stated it wants to reevaluate its position on the advice issue, although what form that reevaluation may take remains amb...

    By John P. Mello Jr. • March 1, 2000
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    Looking Over Your Shoulder

    Insiders sold $42.3 billion in stock in 1999, up 12 percent from 1998, according to an insider- trading research firm. CFOs certainly cashed in, but they usually had to do so while walking on eggshells.The officers of Microsoft Corp. accounted for a whopping 10 percent of the total insider sales ...

    By Kris Frieswick • March 1, 2000
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    Recruiting, Retention, and Returns

    Like most employees at Southwest Airlines, Libby Sartain is not prone to formality. Her title, after all, is vice president of people. The company ditched what it considers the slightly pompous human-resources name a long time ago. What it won’t relinquish is its tight grip on its high-spirited, ...

    By George Donnelly • March 1, 2000
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    Premium Pay (Up)

    One digit crisis has passed, but another looms. This time it’s the double-digit growth in the cost of health care, a sector that defies the economy’s low-inflation trend. But employers are not rushing to share the burden with employees as they have in the past, for fear of risking a worse headach...

    By Joe McCafferty • Feb. 1, 2000