K Marx The Spot

Stop and Shop is Hiring. Not.

Who says that there aren't jobs out there? Yesterday's Boston Globe had a 20-column inch display ad:

Stop&Shop
Now Hiring
Temporary
Replacement Workers for
Cashier and Clerk Positions

The temporary employment
would occur in the event
there is a strike or lockout
because of a labor dispute

They're offering the regal sums of $15 per hour for full-time and $12 per hour for part-time positions, with the added bonus that the new hirees would be helping to break the union that made the place a barely tolerable place to work.

Stop & Shop took exactly the same tack three years ago, in the hopes of battering the union then. (It didn't work then. Perhaps Stop & Shop is hoping that recent news stories of the problems that the Shaw's chain is having will somehow make its workers cower in fear. Or perhaps the company's masters have no ability to alter the company's sclerotic playbook.)

Labels: Stop and Shop, stupid corporate tricks, supermarket, Unions

Bizarre Moments in Branding

I understand that if you have dreams of a small chain of maternity stores where motherhood is considered a blessing, not a burden, then it makes sense in a lot of dimensions to have a name positively associated with motherhood. It is even better to have a name that has been associated with motherhood for several millennia.

But I wonder if it makes much sense at all to pick as the name the Egyptian goddess Isis, well-known for becoming wife of her brother Osiris.

(Somehow, I don't think that Hera Maternity would be quite as popular, perhaps because more people know she was Zeus's sister, or simply perhaps she had quite the temper if you believe that sort of thing.)

Labels: Mythology, stupid corporate tricks

The Truth about GM Crops

Supposedly GM crops were supposed to to solve all sorts of annoying resource problems. Increased yields were supposed to help poor countries. Golden rice was supposed to cure Vitamin A deficiency.

Alas, golden rice has never been a commercial priority. And it seems that biotechnology companies are not really interested in increasing yields of what poor countries really need: staple crops.

What is industry leader Monsanto planning for the medium term? Certainly profitable stuff but nothing that will solve any systematic resource problems.

In particular, many [executives] point to new lines of drought-tolerant corn, due out in 2012, that have been engineered to use water more efficiently.

How such products will alleviate hunger in developing nations is another issue. Monsanto's corn, for instance, isn't meant to be eaten off the cob. Its most common use, as with soy, is to produce animal feed. So doubling yields is most likely to benefit affluent meat-eaters but is of little use to the malnourished. Monsanto says it's working with African aid groups to develop drought-tolerant white corn to help local farmers, but CEO Grant says such crops are "eight years down the road."

Biotechnology companies are not looking to increase yields, to reduce pesticide use, to feed the hungry, or to save the planet. They are looking to generate profit for their shareholders. Period.

Labels: GM corn, GM crops, Monsanto, stupid corporate tricks

Celebreality

It was only a matter of time before some bright corporate type stole the idea of recent tax policy to use as its marketing strategy.

Why should Congress and the White House have a monopoly on giving free things to folks who do not need free things? (For an example of what Congress likes to do, note that in 2005, over 56% of long-term capital gains in the United States were reported by those with adjusted gross income of over $1,000,000 per year. Remember that when the notion of capital gains taxes comes up.)

Today, the local broadsheet talks about the success of a high-end stroller company. And guess how they made their mark?

They ... [hired] a New York public relations firm that works with makers of baby products. The firm included the Vista stroller in a temporary private showroom it set up in a Beverly Hills hotel. The firm invited celebrities to troop through and request the products they liked—which they'd receive free, compliments of the company.

The result was the opportunity to "gift" UppaBaby strollers to actresses like Brooke Shields, Tori Spelling, and Denise Richards. (Ben Affleck and Tom Brady have also received strollers from the company, gratis.)

"We realized it was a big spend on public relations," Lauren says, "but we think you get a lot more bang for the buck from PR than marketing. It can cost $60,000 to put a one-page ad into a parenting magazine for just one month."

Paparazzi photos of celebrity moms using the strollers, it turned out, had even more impact than print advertising.

"If you get a picture of a celebrity pushing your stroller into the tabloids, it's amazing how many people will run out and buy it," says Janet McLaughlin, publisher of the website StrollerQueen.com. "That's like gold."

Good grief. It's bad enough that these strollers cost about the same as an Apple computer. If they really were worth $600 apiece, would the company need to fool its consumers into thinking that their favorite celebrities actually bought them?

Labels: celebrities, strollers, stupid corporate tricks

Why Is This So Familiar?

Why is this claim about genetically modified (GM) rice so familiar?

Genetic engineering also helps achieve other goals of the organic farming movement. By reducing the use of pesticides and by reducing pests and disease, it can make farming more affordable and thus keep family farmers in business and assure local food security. It can also make food more nutritious: In 2011, plant breeders expect to release "golden rice," a genetically engineered variety that will help fight Vitamin A deficiency in the developing world, a disease that contributes to the deaths of 8 million young children each year.

They say that this great strain of rice will be released in three years. Oh, yes, I remember that claim like it was yesterday.

AstraZeneca P.L.C., a giant pharmaceutical company, said today that it would sell a genetically altered strain of "golden rice" in the developed world and also help make the technology freely available to the world's poorest countries.

The London-based company, which announced the agreement here in a news conference with one of the scientists who invented the rice, said it would be made available in three years. The rice, which is fortified with beta carotene that converts to vitamin A, would be given away in the developing world in the hopes of improving the health of undernourished people and curing some forms of blindness.

AstraZeneca's announcement came in May of 2000.

The problem is at least threefold. First, the giant agribusiness companies have a great deal more incentive to push new GM varieties that work with their pesticides (like Roundup Ready canola, corn, cotton, and soybeans) or that have other, marketable traits. Amazingly enough, Roundup Ready soybeans have not been there years away from market for the last eight years.

Second, the problem with pushing "golden rice" is that current rice varieties are already quite nutritious—as long as the grain is cooked and eaten whole—think brown rice, not white rice. And plenty of cheap, effective ways to get vitamin A already exist—think carrots and other vegetables. But solving the problem of getting actually existing nutritious food to the poor would require asking why tens of millions are subsisting on little more than polished rice.

Third, despite knowing a lot about the genomes of various plants, scientists do not have a full understanding of how organisms incorporate genes into their genomes, or whether the various bits of "junk DNA" actually affect those organisms. It would be great if someday, scientists could say for sure that inserting gene ZZ9-alpha would do these three things and these three things only—but that day is not coming anytime soon.

Labels: "golden rice", AstraZeneca, Genetic engineering, Monsanto, stupid corporate tricks

Big Pharma

Every man, every man for himself. Big Science. So said Laurie Anderson a generation ago. And Big Pharma is showing today just how knackered the American health care system is. The profitability of a drug has very little to do with its efficacy. Marketing to consumers leads to gross overuse of marginally useful drugs. And doctors, who one might think might be able to afford to be objective, are too often swayed by financial incentives, whether small (free lunches, pens, and the like) or large (consulting contracts). How do you know if your doctor is on the take? You don't. You just have to hope not.

Business Week, whose editors are once again deciding that what is bad for people might actually be bad for investors, made the sad finding that modern medical miracles are too often overstated.

Martin Winn's cholesterol level was inching up. Cycling up hills, he felt chest pain that might have been angina. So he and his doctor decided he should be on a cholesterol-lowering medication called a statin. He was in good company. Such drugs are the best-selling medicines in history, used by more than 13 million Americans and an additional 12 million patients around the world, producing $27.8 billion in sales in 2006. Half of that went to Pfizer for its leading statin, Lipitor. Statins certainly performed as they should for Winn, dropping his cholesterol level by 20%. "I assumed I'd get a longer life," says the retired machinist in Vancouver, B.C., now 71. But here the story takes a twist. Winn's doctor, James M. Wright, is no ordinary family physician. A professor at the University of British Columbia, he is also director of the government-funded Therapeutics Initiative, whose purpose is to pore over the data on particular drugs and figure out how well they work. Just as Winn started on his treatment, Wright's team was analyzing evidence from years of trials with statins and not liking what it found.

Yes, Wright saw, the drugs can be life-saving in patients who already have suffered heart attacks, somewhat reducing the chances of a recurrence that could lead to an early death. But Wright had a surprise when he looked at the data for the majority of patients, like Winn, who don't have heart disease. He found no benefit in people over the age of 65, no matter how much their cholesterol declines, and no benefit in women of any age. He did see a small reduction in the number of heart attacks for middle-aged men taking statins in clinical trials. But even for these men, there was no overall reduction in total deaths or illnesses requiring hospitalization—despite big reductions in "bad" cholesterol. "Most people are taking something with no chance of benefit and a risk of harm," says Wright. Based on the evidence, and the fact that Winn didn't actually have angina, Wright changed his mind about treating him with statins—and Winn, too, was persuaded. "Because there's no apparent benefit," he says, "I don't take them anymore."

In some cases, treatments for nasty diseases work splendidly. The antibiotics given to treat stomach ulcers kill the bacteria in almost all patients, and heal those ulcers in many of them: one in five by the end of treatment, and one in two by the end of a year. In medical terms, the number needed to treat NNT is about 1.1 for the antibiotic cocktail in terms of killing the ulcerating bacteria and about 5 for healing the ulcers.

For statin drugs, the NNT is about 20 to prevent heart attacks in high-risk patients. The NNT is between 75 and 200 to do the same for lower-risk patients. And for Zetia, the NNT is at least 1000 and may be infinite.

Think about that. All Zetia does is lower cholesterol, but it does not protect against heart disease. As long as Merck/Schering-Plough can keep reminding consumers about the cholesterol reduction, useless though it may be, it can keep selling its well-nigh useless but nonetheless profitable drugs to a populace that is mostly ignorant about current medical research.

Labels: Big Pharma, Lipitor, stupid corporate tricks, Zetia

The Belly of the Beast

How rotting is the culture at a major television "news magazine"? At "Dateline," it is worse than I ever feared.

At the moment [NBC Entertainment president Jeff] Zucker blew in and interrupted, I had been in [Dateline executive producer David] Corvo's office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks. While well known in security circles and among journalists who tried to cover international Islamist movements, al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11. It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. "Maybe," said Zucker, "we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters." He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine....

I did [...]point out to the corporate-integrity people unhelpful details about how NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor. I wondered aloud, in the presence of an integrity "team leader," how we were to reconcile this larger-scale conflict with the admonitions about free dinners. "You make an interesting point I had not thought of before," he told me. "But I don't know how GE being a defense contractor is really relevant to the way we do our jobs here at NBC news." Integrity, I guess, doesn't scale.

Where does this useful, albeit depressing, article by Jeff Hockenberry appear? In a major newspaper? In a weekly newsmagazine? In a popular monthly magazine whose editors ought to be eager to show how today's networks seem to be copying dark movie satires for ideas?

No. It appeared in the MIT alumni magazine. Sic transit gloria hominis.

Labels: John Hockenberry, NBC News, stupid corporate tricks

Sample versus Population

Why would one expect that most drug samples go to wealthy and insured patients rather than the poor or uninsured?

Because if one remembers that pharmaceutical companies recruit their new drug representatives from the ranks of collegiate cheerleaders, then one might come to a couple of realizations. First, drug companies are very interested in, literally, flirting with doctors who might write lucrative prescriptions. Second, drug companies do not have the public's best interests at heart.

Labels: Drug reps, stupid corporate tricks

Lending a Hand

Do take a few minutes to look at this most excellent site that satirizes the rhetoric and rationale for the payday loan industry. (The actual industry site is much less fun. No "Predatory Lending Tools"; no discussion forums; no barbed "testimonials" from victims.)

If the payday loan industry were merely a shady backwater of the financial services industry, then the Predatory Lending Association "website" would still be worthy and notable. But, increasingly, these firms are publicly traded companies, or, worse yet, divisions of banks like Wells Fargo and US Bancorp. What a country.

Labels: satire, stupid corporate tricks

Stupid Tax Tricks

How stupid can state legislators be? One way to find out is to look at the targeted tax breaks that they give away.

A common tax break are incentives to reduce property taxes for companies that build new facilities—at least in theory, they have a justification because the taxes paid, even after the breaks, exceed the taxes previously paid on the real estate in question. (In practice, it is debatable whether the tax breaks offered are really all that necessary.)

Take a look at what Lenoir, North Carolina offered Google to build a new server farm on previously vacant land:

To keep Weiss [Google's representative] interested, the Lenoir City Council voted in closed session on Mar. 21, 2006, to expand the tax incentives then on the table. An initial offer of 100% off local property taxes and 75% off real estate taxes, both for 15 years, grew to 100% and 80%, respectively, for 30 years. Fine, said Weiss, but there were other issues....

[B]y June the deal seemed to be falling apart on another front. In Raleigh, the state legislature was working on a Google-driven bill that would exempt server farms from sales tax on the copious electricity they use. On June 13, Weiss sent an e-mail to Jim Fain, the state's commerce secretary, complaining that the legislation "has remained cursed with unfortunate and petty dickering from the legislative drafting side—mainly refusing to reinsert better word choice." If North Carolina didn't quickly enact "sales tax exemptions that make it competitive with other states in which the project could locate, the project simply will not come to North Carolina," Weiss wrote. He continued to let officials know he was talking to several other states, including South Carolina and New York, according to documents and interviews. The legislation passed in July.

North Carolina's legislature was somehow convinced that Google was going to throw away months of work because of a 3 percent state sales tax. A three percent increase in the cost of electricity. Does anyone believe that the deal would be off if there were a three percent increase in electric rates? The state of North Carolina let itself get ripped off.

Labels: Google, State taxes, stupid corporate tricks, tax policy

Your Stock Market Darlings at Work

Business Week is continuing to take its latest tack of stock-market contrarian seriously. The magazine has published several recent articles about companies that prey on the underclass. This week's issue takes long-distance phone card sellers to task for misleading claims and bizarre fees.

Phone card companies also impose an array of "fees" on card users that reduce the value of cards by trimming 10, 20, or more minutes. Often called connection, service, or maintenance fees, these provisions sometimes are disclosed in ambiguous fine print on the back of cards, but other times aren't disclosed at all, according to a 2005 study by Julia Marlowe, associate professor emeritus of housing and consumer economics at the University of Georgia. IDT's $3 Crazy Crazy Crazy card, for example, charges a connection fee at the end of the call for every five minutes of use. The card also lists a 25% service fee, although it's not clear from the language on the card how the 25% applies. IDT says the fees are fair and vary by destination. A customer can avoid them by using all of a card's minutes for one conversation, the company says.

Regulation of phone cards has been light. Only 11 states, including California, Connecticut, Florida, and Illinois, have laws on calling cards. Other states rely on generic consumer protection regulations, but those are rarely applied to cards. The Federal Communications Commission has jurisdiction but hasn't used it much. The staff of the Federal Trade Commission is watching the calling card industry, suggesting stiffer enforcement could come soon. "We have been speaking to Hispanics across the country, and allegations about deceptive practices in the prepaid calling card industry keep coming up," says Lisa Hone, the FTC's assistant director of marketing practices.

But don't hold your breath waiting for the Bush administration's purported watchdog to do anything. Indeed, IDT seems to be among the more responsible of phone card providers—it has successfully sued competitors for promising minutes of calling that would be impossible to realize.

As the article correctly notes, many users of these prepaid cards are illegal immigrants who are singularly unable in many cases to take any legal action against the predators who are promising goods that they will never deliver.

Labels: Business Week, phone cards, stupid corporate tricks

Best Economics Post of the Year

The Calculated Risk weblog highlights one ridiculous side effect of the rush to private equity. The same companies that are making a commission on selling high-yield bonds to pension plans are recommending that those plans buy these bonds. Ordinarily, this would be a garden-variety example of today's financial marketplace, but the bonds in question are worse than ordinary junk bonds—they carry the first-loss position before the ordinary junk.

You take a bunch of subprime loans, and make a pool with them. Then you tranche that pool up and create a security... Then you take those low-rated subordinate tranches and put them into a pool with a bunch of other stuff (commercial security tranches, corporate debt, junk bonds, heaven knows what), and then you tranche that up into a new thing called a Collateralized Debt Obligation, the "beauty" of which is that it's an actively traded, not static pool, so that while you might know what's in it the day you bought part of it, you may never know what's in it after that. Then you take the lowest possible tranche of the CDO—the "equity" portion or the very first part to take any losses, which is so high-risk it is referred to as "toxic waste," the stuff that is unrated by the rating agencies because it has no "credit support" whatsoever—and you put it in a pension plan managed by some goofball who thinks that it must be a good deal because a party who owns some of the higher rated tranches—the ones you "support" with your equity piece—tells you that if the planets align and the Messiah returns and everybody rolls a lucky seven, you'll make 20%!

I'm still not sure everyone is getting the picture here, so let's try this: the subordinate tranche of a subprime ABS/MBS is a "pig." With or without lipstick. The equity tranche of a CDO made up of subordinate tranches of a subprime ABS/MBS, mixed up with some other junk you do not understand, is a pig of a pig, distilled essence of pig, ur-pig, Total Ultimate X-Treme Mega Pig. Buying a B tranche of a subprime ABS is playing with matches. Buying the equity tranche of a CDO is playing with a blowtorch in the parking lot of the Exxon station while wearing a St. Lucia wreath on your head.

To put it another way, when someone is selling you a tranche of a security, there is a reason. It is because someone else did not want that part. Sometimes, that someone else is too risk-averse, but often that someone else has made a reasonable decision. Buying a lower-rated tranche is gambling that their risk assessment is somehow flawed. And buying an equity tranche is not only gambling that everything will go right and you will actually earn you stated return, but that the other tranches are filled with fools who are getting better security when they do not need it.

Labels: bond tranches, stupid corporate tricks, Wall Street

The Good Side of Business Week

In spite of their recent decisions to waste two whole pages on Robert Parker's wine column and on Jack and Suzy Welch's ramblings, the editors at Business Week sometimes show why they have a respected magazine.

The most recent example of high-mindedness at Business Week headquarters is the recent cover story explaining how large American companies are sucking the underclass dry.

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

The list of businesses eager to exploit the poor include used-car retailer J. D. Byrider Systems, which manipulates sales prices to maximize profits, and customers are the last to know what is going on.

Byrider dealers say they can generally figure out which customers will pay back their loans. Salesmen, many of whom come from positions at banks and other lending companies, use proprietary software called Automated Risk Evaluator (ARE) to assess customers' financial vital signs, ranging from credit scores from major credit agencies to amounts spent on alimony and cigarettes.

Unlike traditional dealers, Byrider doesn't post prices—which average $10,200 at company-owned showrooms—directly on its cars. Salesmen, after consulting ARE, calculate the maximum that a person can afford to pay, and only then set the total price, down payment, and interest rate. Byrider calls this process fair and accurate; critics call it "opportunity pricing."

Other great companies going after the same dollars include tax prepaper Jackson Hewitt, which specializes in lending tax refund money at exorbitant rates; BlueHippo, which gouges customers through its rent-to-own scheme for household goods; and payday lenders Advance America Cash Advance Centers.

All of these companies, save Byrider, are publicly traded—their investors are preying on the miseries of the underclass, and their lenders surely must know what is going on as well. Their customers are the least informed, of course.

Labels: Business Week, stupid corporate tricks

Seeing the Light

One would think that some company would realize that making energy-saving light bulbs for Americans in the United States would be a truly green move. Less of a distance between factory and consumer should mean less fuel consumed overall.

Alas, the lure of low wages and lax environmental enforcement—compact fluorescent bulbs use small amounts of mercury—have led General Electric and other companies to make them in China. American unions have started to ask why that must be the case.

Labels: CFLs, civil unions, energy savings, stupid corporate tricks

The Welch Way: It's My Company and I'll Cry If I Want To

Another week brings with it another issue of Business Week and with it the columnar stylings of Jack and Suzy Welch, the business columnists for those who like their business columnists to be both predictable and bad.

This week, they take on the question of whether what rises to the top of American business is not always the cream.

Do the "best and brightest" actually lead American business?—B---- F----, Modesto, Calif.

It depends on what you mean by business. If your definition includes hedge funds, private equity, and investment banking, then the answer is a flat yes. If by business, you're referring to the industrial and consumer companies at the core of our economy, the answer is: less and less so. And therein lies a problem.

O.K., so maybe it's not a big problem yet, but there is definitely a worrisome trend emerging as a growing number of talented senior executives leave publicly traded businesses for privately held concerns. Dave Calhoun's departure from GE to run Nielsen and Mark Frissora's leap from Tenneco to Hertz are just two of the more publicized cases. But as a seasoned executive-search consultant we know recently put it: "The shift is real, and it's gaining momentum. You can almost feel a landslide coming."

And not only in the upper echelons—it's happening in middle management and at business schools as well....

One reason, of course, is money. Compensation for senior managers in public companies doesn't compare with the heaps routinely handed out by private equity and financial firms....

But we'd make the case that this trend is not totally about pay. There's a sociological phenomenon at work here. It's about people who love business wanting to get out of the crosshairs of people who despise it, or at least seriously distrust it. Everyone knows that American companies are being maligned these days. So-called shareholder activists have put the vast majority of corporate boards on the defensive, draining their attention away from growth initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, globalization, or anything even vaguely risky that involves building for the future. Meanwhile, CEOs face persistent scrutiny in a guilty-until-proven-innocent media environment. So when private equity firms or hedge funds call, what business enthusiast, young or old, wouldn't consider answering?

We will cut the column mercifully short there.

There are two big problems with this column. The first is that it flies directly in the face of advice that the Welches gave out earlier this year to an owner who was trying to choose between four worthy possible successors

Not all of them have the "stuff" for the challenge ahead, meaning the kind of insight and courage that will be required to reinvent your organization when you step aside. You need to push yourself to identify the single candidate who does.

Will that move prompt the runners-up to leave? It's very possible, due to feelings of disappointment or embarrassment. But don't focus on that too much. Their departure will actually be a favor—for them and the company. For them, because it certainly sounds as if they earned the right to run their own shows, and they deserve the challenge and fun of it. And when other companies show up to "steal" them away, make sure their severance packages are generous and contain some form of noncompete clause. That will help everyone...

In February, letting three senior managers fly the coop was "a favor" for both the managers and the company. But now, the flight of talent is something to worry about. But perhaps the flight of talent has a calculus that only Business Week columnists can understand.

The second, deeper, problem is the benighted notion of the corporation inherent in the column. It is hard to find a more arrogant statement in the American press that the "so-called shareholder activists" are somehow responsible for the perceived mediocrity of top American business leaders. Those shareholders are owners of their companies. Yes, owners. And managers like Jack Welch would prefer that the owners shut up and let the managers run the show.

Publicly-held companies are among the very few institutions in which the owners as a whole have very little say in how the the institutions are run, not just in their day-to-day activities, but in general. Shareholders vote on precious few items every year, and rare indeed is a position that management backs ever overturned by the shareholders. How many companies even offer their shareholders to choose among directors up for election? (Almost without fail, the best that shareholders can do is to withhold their votes.)

Now, the Welches might have a point if the shareholders were always complaining and the managers were nonetheless doing well by them. Alas, that is not the case. As the New York Times reported on Friday, when managers public companies focus their precious attention on acquisitions, they dramatically overpay when compared to private firms or private equity funds.

If it’s not your money, you may be quite willing to spend more of it.

That insight may seem rather obvious, but academic research demonstrating that it is true set off the great boom in equity compensation for corporate management over the past three decades....

Now academic research offers insights into how the very equity-based incentives—stock options and restricted stocks—that were supposed to make managers think like owners have instead encouraged them to overpay for acquisitions. The bosses win, whether or not the owners lose.

A new study by economists at the University of Pittsburgh and Ohio State University looked at all-cash takeovers done from 1990 to 2005, and found that the premiums paid varied based on who was doing the buying.

On average, public companies made bids that drove up the target share price by 32 percent. But bids from privately held companies were lower, pushing prices up 22 percent. The figure for private equity funds was 20 percent.

That difference means the public companies are paying more—and thus the merged companies are less likely to do well, all other things being equal.

I think that the "shareholder activists" are on the right track. But, then again, I did not convince the General Electric board to lavish me with millions of dollars of perks both extraordinary and quotidian upon my retirement.

Labels: Business Week, Jack Welch, stupid corporate tricks, Suzy Welch

Don't Be Evil

Dear Google Mavens:

Now that you own Blogger, someone should have pointed out that doing stupid things to Blogger could be misconstrued by some as doing evil things to Blogger.

Reconfiguring the archive file name format without telling anyone was a particularly stupid thing. (Some of us manually configure our archive links.)

And so was forcing bloggers to resort to hacks to get rid of the intrusive "navigation bar."

After all, one knows that big companies are never, ever, evil.

Labels: Blogger, Google, stupid corporate tricks