Top News
What do chief executives do all day? It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings. That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time – and how that affects the performance and management of their firms. (Wall Street Journal)
Visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204642604577215013504567548.html to view the full article online.
There’s an exclusive club in Silicon Valley, privy to only a precious few. Its members: the cream of the executive crop, CEOs of today’s tech industry giants, all at the helm of companies with billions in revenues and thousands of employees. But getting behind the velvet rope isn’t based on market cap, earnings or shares owned. It’s about salary – or lack thereof. (Wired)
Visit http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/one-dollar-ceo-zuckerberg-page/ to view the full article online.
International
Fittingly for a business that has peddled discretion for 271 years, the Zurich office of Wegelin is easy to miss. But according to an indictment unsealed in New York on February 2nd, Switzerland’s oldest bank brazenly helped its clients dodge American taxes on $1.2 billion in offshore accounts and poached American clients from UBS, a giant Swiss bank that prosecutors ensnared earlier. This first indictment of a Swiss bank has rocked the country’s financial industry. (The Economist)
Visit http://www.economist.com/node/21547229 to view the full article online.
After the Greek parliament on Sunday passed yet another package of austerity measures demanded by its euro-zone neighbors – this one worth $4.4 billion – the path seemed clear to finalizing a long-delayed, second bailout of the country totaling $170 billion. Well, it turns out the Greek vote wasn’t enough to satisfy skeptical euro-zone leaders. (Time)
Visit http://business.time.com/2012/02/16/what-happens-if-greece-doesnt-get-a-bailout/?iid=biz-main-lede to view the full article online.
Education
For years, MIT’s Sloan School of Management offered no degree to rival the master of finance programs at Princeton, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon. That changed in 2008, when the university made finance its first new one-year master’s program in more than 25 years. (It previously offered a finance certificate.) "MIT produces new degrees very rarely," says Andrew Lo, the director of Sloan’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
Visit http://www.businessweek.com/business-schools/an-mba-alternative-mit-sloans-master-of-finance-program-02132012.html to view the full article online.
A Dartmouth College Tuck MBA landed a private equity job with a total compensation package last year of $863,000, according to the school’s recently published employment statistics. While the Tuck MBA didn’t top the highest starting salary reported for a graduating MBA last year – a whopping $552,681-a-year job captured by an MBA from the London Business School – the Tuckie easily captured the highest total compensation package. (Poets & Quants)
Visit http://poetsandquants.com/2012/02/09/tuck-mba-reports-863k-pay-package/ to view the full article online.
Technology
Mike Trang likes to use his iPhone 4 as a GPS device, helping him get around in his job. Now and then, his younger cousins get ahold of it, and play some YouTube videos and games. But in the past few weeks, there has been none of that, because AT&T Inc. put a virtual wheel clamp on his phone. Under a new policy, AT&T has started cutting data speeds as part of an attempt to manage data usage on its network. (NPR)
Visit http://www.npr.org/2012/02/13/146805707/for-at-t-customers-unlimited-data-has-limits to view the full article online.
Entrepreneurship
Not many job categories are growing in today's economy, but here's one that is: the number of workers calling themselves "free agents." According to temp staffing agency Kelly Services, more than four in 10 workers call themselves "free agents," feeling unattached, long term, to any employer. This is up from 26% in 2008. People flit between organizations and – often – spend significant time working for themselves. (Fortune)
Visit http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/12/16/self-employed-vacation/ to view the full article online.
When is a handshake deal not a deal? When it's on national TV. On the ABC show "Shark Tank" earlier this month, a young, first-time entrepreneur, Megan Cummins, successfully pitched the panel of five "sharks" to raise money for her company, You Smell Soap. It's safe to say that the sharks liked her moxie. Cummins turned down offers from Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran, and took the deal from Canadian software mogul Robert Herjavec: $55,000 for 20 percent of her company, with a $50,000 kicker as her "salary" for the first year. (CNet)
Visit http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-57376863-250/stiffed-by-shark-tank-vc-startup-ceo-perseveres/ to view the full article online.
The Economy
U.S. factories are creating many new jobs. But owners are hard pressed to find skilled American workers to fill them. There is a "critical shortage of machinists," a common and crucial position in factories, said Rob Akers, vice president at the National Tooling and Machining Association. The problem comes at a terrible time. Domestic contract manufacturers -- known as "job shops" -- are seeing a boom in business. (CNN/Money)
Visit http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/16/smallbusiness/manufacturing_jobs/index.htm?iid=HP_LN to view the full article online.
Personal Finance
Don’t wait for your boss to come to his senses, give yourself a raise this year. Workers can spend, on average, about $3,000 a year on coffee and lunch, according to a recent survey by Accounting Principals, an accounting and finance placement firm headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla. But saving and investing that chunk of change can increase your wealth. (MarketWatch)
Visit http://www.marketwatch.com/story/give-yourself-a-raise-this-year-2012-02-13 to view the full article online.
Government
Through the smog and the smeariness of the seemingly ceaseless process of selecting a president, one thing is clear: Americans are seething. Some Americans are livid over illegal immigration. Others are ticked off about Obamacare. President Obama himself is not too happy about the way things are. "If one emotion came through in President Obama's State of the Union address," Forbes magazine notes, "it was anger." (NPR)
Visit http://www.npr.org/2012/02/13/146652679/america-is-angry-very-angry-why-thats-not-all-bad to view the full article online.
Leadership
To succeed in upper management, consider walking in the shoes of your lower-level workers. Scott Moorehead, Carolyn Kibler and Don Fertman did exactly that at different stages of their careers. They gleaned potent insights that made them more effective leaders and authentic communicators. (Wall Street Journal)
Visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203824904577212951446826014.html to view the full article online.
The job of the senior executive is much more complicated today than it was a decade or two ago – and that trend will continue, especially if you hope to play on a global stage (which is a nearly universal condition these days for many companies). Why? Here are five reasons. (Harvard Business Review)
Visit http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/its_harder_than_ever_to_be_a_s.html to view the full article online.
Lifestyle
Shukree Hassan Tilghman begins "More Than a Month," his investigation of whether Black History Month is a blessing or curse, with his tongue in his cheek. A third of the way through, though, he starts working his way toward something more serious, and for a moment it seems as if he’ll tackle it full on. (New York Times)
Visit http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/arts/television/more-than-a-month-on-pbs.html to view the full article online.
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