The rollback man is gone, as are the do-gooder anecdotes and smiling associates in frumpy blue smocks. There is no tooting of the corporate-image horn and not a single word on price. But what is found in Wal-Mart’s first major.
Take the geometrical print ad, from GSD&M, Austin, popping up in August titles such as Real Simple, that looks as if it’s pulled from the home-furnishings aisle at Target. A series of back-to-school TV spots tout brands and merchandise first, make actual jokes (a rarity in Wal-Mart ads) and don’t include any in-store shots (long a Wal-Mart staple).
Daily Archives: August 10, 2005
Stock Options: Do They Make Bosses Cheat?
My sister, Mary forwarded this interesting, brief summary of research (PDF) on the shareholder effects of large option grants to the chief executive.
QUESTION for shareholders: If the company’s directors give lots of options to the chief executive, should you be happy or nervous?
The traditional answer from academia was that big options grants were good. They aligned the interests of executives with shareholders, and they helped to offset the tendency of executives to avoid risky but potentially profitable investments.
But it turns out that the conclusions were based more on optimistic theories than data. Now, with option grants having become the largest portion of chief executive compensation – worth more than either salary or bonus for the average boss – analysis of data on corporate performance provides some disturbing results.
It appears that really big options grants make it more likely that companies will fudge their numbers and that companies with such grants are more likely to go broke.
Crime, Punishment and Sports
Baseball star Rafael Palmiero Thursday wraps up his 10-day suspension for steroids. Athletes in other sports — also charged with doping — such as cyclist Tyler Hamilton and 10th-ranked tennis player Guillermo Canas are facing suspensions in increments of years, not days
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Netscape IPO +10 Years
Kevin Kelly looks at what Netscape’s IPO has wrought:
Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for most people. If it was acknowledged at all, it was mischaracterized as either corporate email (as exciting as a necktie) or a clubhouse for adolescent males (read: pimply nerds). It was hard to use. On the Internet, even dogs had to type. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring?
The memories of an early enthusiast like myself can be unreliable, so I recently spent a few weeks reading stacks of old magazines and newspapers. Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It’s not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: “It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals.” Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: “THE INTERNET? BAH!” The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: “baloney.”