Human Capital: Page

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    Manners Maketh the Businessman

    When Andrew Chadwick-Jones, a management consultant with Oliver Wyman in London, went to pitch to a private-equity firm late last year, he expected the usual: about 20 minutes and a brisk attitude. He was surprised to find the private-equity people instead explaining their strategy, offering intr...

    By Economist Staff • Feb. 17, 2009
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    Media Chiefs Ask CFOs Where to Wield the Axe

    Chief executive officers in the media and entertainment industry are looking to their chief financial officers to show them how to cut costs, according to a survey released today by Ernst & Young.Of 27 M&E corporate chieftains responding to the survey, 30 percent said they are demanding “...

    By David Katz • Feb. 17, 2009
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    Over Here, Over There, Job Cuts Everywhere

    There was the usual round of sizable layoffs this week, but this time, most of the headline-grabbing cuts were made by overseas companies, led by automakers.The biggest U.S. workforce reduction was also announced by a car company: General Motors said it will shed 10,000 white-collar jobs.The Wall...

    By Stephen Taub • Feb. 13, 2009
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    CFOs on the Move: Week Ending February 13

    Textron CFO Ted French has left after nearly nine years at the defense company. Textron Financial Corporation now reports to the company’s COO and president Scott C. Donnelly. French was chairman and CEO of TFC as well as the parent company’s finance chief. Senior vice president and controller Ri...

    By John Zhu and Kate Plourd • Feb. 12, 2009
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    Is It the End for Big Director Pay Raises?

    With executive compensation being thoroughly vetted — and not just at companies that take federal bailout money — will closer scrutiny of directors’ pay be far behind?Maybe not, though until recently, few shareholders have objected to board compensation, despite the fact that it has risen steadil...

    By • Feb. 10, 2009
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    Paying the Piper

    Creating political theatre by cracking down on executive pay may prove to be the easy part for Barack Obama. Coming up with a sensible and effective way to compensate senior managers at companies bailed out by the American taxpayer will be far trickier-and the new president’s first effort, unveil...

    By Economist Staff • Feb. 9, 2009
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    Job Market Goes from Bad to Worse

    The jobs picture is not only growing uglier by the week, it is worsening more than experts have been anticipating.The Labor Department reported Friday that 598,000 nonfarm jobs were lost in January and that the unemployment rate surged to 7.6 percent, up from 7.2 percent at the end of December. B...

    By Stephen Taub • Feb. 6, 2009
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    Delphi: No Health Care for Retirees

    Delphi Corp. is seeking permission to cancel health-care and life-insurance benefits for current and future salaried retirees, the Associated Press reports.The bankrupt auto-parts supplier told the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York it wants to cut the benefits to 15,000 retirees as soon as April ...

    By Stephen Taub • Feb. 6, 2009
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    CFOs on the Move: Week Ending February 6

    On the same day it announced a fourth-quarter net loss of $3.6 billion and the suspension of its quarterly dividend, Motorolasaid its prominent CFO,Paul Liska, is leavingthe company. Liska,a former finance chief of Sears, Roebuck, and The St. Paul Cos. who was at Motorola for less than a year, wi...

    By Kate Plourd • Feb. 5, 2009
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    Tax Issues Tie Up Washington

    Citing personal tax issues as the reason for their decisions, two of President Barack Obama’s nominees for prominent posts in his administration withdrew their candidacies Tuesday.Just hours after Nancy Killefer, the former Treasury department CFO who President Obama appointed chief performance o...

    By Kate Plourd • Feb. 3, 2009
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    Motorola CFO Paul Liska Departs

    On Tuesday, the same day it announced a fourth-quarter net loss of $3.6 billion and the suspension of the quarterly dividend, Motorola announced that its prominent CFO, Paul J. Liska, is leaving the company. Liska, a former finance chief of Sears, Roebuck, and The St. Paul Cos. who has been CFO o...

    By Stephen Taub • Feb. 3, 2009
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    Sick of It

    Though companies are keen to cut costs, many fail to manage employee absentee rates, argues Mercer, an HR consultancy. After surveying nearly 800 companies across Europe, it found that while most can cite data on the number of days employees have been absent, less than half are able to identify t...

    By CFO Editorial Staff • Feb. 2, 2009
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    Ready for the Worst

    When Robert McDonald was named CFO of Woolworths last October, he sounded like a man on a mission — and with good reason. The troubled UK retailer lost nearly £100m (€111m) in the six months to August 2008, and McDonald joined an army of new executives — including a new CEO — to turn it around. “...

    By Tim Burke • Feb. 2, 2009
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    Pension Plans Grow More Bearish

    Corporations should brace for a major pension shortfall over the next five years or so, according to a new study by Greenwich Associates.U.S. pension funds have sharply ratcheted down their expected investment returns from most major asset classes through 2013, Greenwich reported. The consulting ...

    By Stephen Taub • Feb. 2, 2009
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    Pension Investing: What’s the Right Level of Risk?

    Pension funds using liability-driven investment strategies in 2008 strongly outperformed those using a traditional asset-allocation approach, according to Watson Wyatt.The pension consulting firm constructed hypothetical LDI and traditional investment portfolios at the end of 2007 and tracked the...

    By • Feb. 2, 2009
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    Stepping Up

    “I wasn’t planning to stay in finance forever.” In April last year, Laurent Matras made good on his plan, moving from his post as UK finance director of insurer AXA to UK managing director at Groupama, a rival insurer. Though he describes the expansion of his responsibilities as “what I always wa...

    By Jason Karaian • Feb. 2, 2009
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    The EBRD’s Manfred Schepers

    It’s rare today to find a bank that plans to increase its lending. But the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is no ordinary bank. Set up in 1991 to support the private sectors of countries in central and eastern Europe, it later expanded its investments into the former Sovie...

    By Tim Burke • Feb. 2, 2009
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    Plenty of Pain, a Dash of Relief

    When the final tallies are complete, 2008 results for company-funded pension plans are sure to be dismal — so dismal, in fact, that Congress stepped in with some relief right before its holiday break. The Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008 will temporarily ease some of the stringen...

    By Alix Stuart • Feb. 1, 2009
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    “I Like Innovative, Disruptive Businesses”

    Nothing can scratch a diamond except another diamond, but a recession can carve deep gouges in the diamond- jewelry business. Take the holiday season that just ended: sales of luxury goods, including jewelry, fell 34 percent. Still, Marc Stolzman, CFO of online diamond and jewelry merchant Blue N...

    By Kate Plourd • Feb. 1, 2009
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    Scoping Out the Talent

    David Bronson is ready to pounce. Other companies may be laying off workers by the hundreds or even thousands, sending the U.S. unemployment rate to its highest level in nearly two decades, but at PSS World Medical, a $2 billion medical equipment distributor and services provider, the door is ope...

    By Scott Leibs • Feb. 1, 2009
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    Prognosis: Negative

    When CFO Tony Aukett went shopping for company health insurance last May, he paid careful attention to how each plan would treat employees. No, he wasn’t worried about whether the doctors knew what course of action to take for a given illness or injury. Rather, “I wanted to avoid the kind of plan...

    By Josh Hyatt • Feb. 1, 2009
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    How to Talk about Layoffs

    On the same day in November that it reported record revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2009, Aruba Networks announced it was laying off 9 percent of its more than 500 employees. In an earlier time the conjunction of good news and bad news would have been jarring, but not now. “We took a har...

    By Kate O'Sullivan • Feb. 1, 2009
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    Losing It

    In October 2007, Steven Crane aimed to align himself with shareholders in a big way. The CFO of ModusLink Global Solutions bought 10,000 shares of company stock at $13.80 a share. If the decision made him a better CFO, as management gurus would assert, he is certainly the poorer for it now. As of...

    By Alix Stuart • Feb. 1, 2009
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    Moving On, Happily

    Much has been written about the high rate of CFO turnover, often with the implication that finance executives are bailing out or being sent packing. But new research from KPMG suggests that behind the numbers actually lies a story of collective success. CFOs aren’t being booted for botching Sarbo...

    By Scott Leibs • Feb. 1, 2009
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    Week of the Falling Jobs

    In a grim reminder that the economic crisis is clearly a global affair, Tokyo-based electronics giant NEC announced Friday that it would cut 20,000 jobs.What’s more, even employees of companies with established international businesses haven’t been spared. For example, Boeing said it would elimin...

    By Stephen Taub • Jan. 30, 2009