Deal Journal - WSJ.com : Mean Street: The Reluctant Prophet of Goldman Sachs

Deal Journal - WSJ.com : Mean Street: The Reluctant Prophet of Goldman Sachs: "The latest of these prophets is Arjun N. Murti, an influential Goldman Sachs oil analyst, who has marched his bullish oil followers straight off a cliff.
You may not have heard much of Murti, a publicity-shy 39-year-old from New Jersey. He leads the Goldman Sachs Americas Energy Research Team and has been researching energy stocks since he was 23.
Along with OPEC, T. Boone Pickens and some pipeline-destroying Nigerian rebels, Murti moves the oil markets. “Even if you disagree with their views, the problem is that Goldman does carry such credibility,” said one energy trader to the New York Times in May. “There are a lot of traders who are going to buy based on their reports.”
In 2004, Murti offered up his “Super-Spike” theory–saying future price spikes in oil are inevitable. Murti’s argument was simple: The world is running out of oil, and its expanding economy would continue to push prices higher. Unpredictable geopolitical forces, meanwhile, would create the “super” in the Super-Spike.
On March 30, 2005, with oil trading at $54, he laid down a controversial call. A barrel of oil could fetch $105 by 2009.
As prices rose over the ensuing three years, Murti’s reputation grew in kind. Barron’s dubbed him “Mr. Crude Oil.”
Then came the next big shocker. On May 6, 2008, Murti predicted $150 to $200 oil within six to 24 months. Prices dutifully jumped. Then they rose even higher, peaking at more than $147 on July 11."

A survey says 1,132 chiefs have left their posts this year amid a tough economy.

"ushing the chief executive turnover rate in a popular survey to an all-time high.

This year, 1,132 CEOs have left their posts, according to employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. That is the highest nine-month total since the firm began keeping track in 1999, and makes it likely that 2008 will eclipse the record 1,478 seen in 2006.

The tally of departed CEOs includes those who have retired, left for better jobs or otherwise resigned on their own accord. But Challenger's own chief executive says the rise in the turnover rate probably reflects increasing pressure on corporate leaders from their boards and shareholders.

"When in a difficult economic time, more companies report poor results and shareholders are upset," John A. Challenger said. "Sometimes, the CEOs have actually mismanaged; sometimes they're scapegoated. Either way, they're more vulnerable."

The survey is based on public announcements and covers private and public companies. Among the prominent CEOs who stepped down this year were Angelo R. Mozilo of Countrywide Financial Corp., Meg Whitman of EBay Inc. and Philip J. Schoonover of Circuit City Stores Inc.

Richard Koppes, a corporate governance attorney at law firm Jones Day in San Francisco, said the high salaries paid to many chief executives can also be a liability.

"There's a lot of anger at executive compensation that is causing boards to say, 'We're paying you well, so you'd better perform,' " he said.

The digital information age is also contributing to turnover, said Leslie Gaines-Ross of public relations firm Weber Shandwick, which issued a study on the executive departures this year.

"These are much harder times because of the Internet, where more information and leaks and chatter from former employees and others create more chances for the CEO to be compromised," she said.

"It's the nature of the CEO job to have a short shelf life . . . ," she added. "If you make it to five years, you're an old-timer."

Other findings from the Challenger survey:

* Twenty-seven CEOs were fired, 354 resigned and 283 retired. Other chiefs lost their jobs for other reasons. Challenger said the numbers don't tell the whole story: Often executives resign or retire under board pressure.

* Turnover was heaviest in the healthcare sector, with 206 departures. In part, however, that stems from the large number of small healthcare businesses, Challenger said.

* Financial firms took the second-highest hit, with 133 exits."

JIS CEO fired

Wednesday, 08 October 2008
RJR News understands that Huntley Medley, Chief Executive Officer of the Jamaica Information Service (JIS), has been booted from the position.

Mr. Medley was dismissed with immediate effect Tuesday night.

Sources say no reason was given in his dismissal letter, which came from the Public Services Commission.

However, sources also report that he was blamed for logistical problems with the government's celebrations for the Beijing Olympic team.

There have been widely reported problems with the celebrations which started last week.

Some government insiders have also complained that Mr. Medley's management of the Government's Public Relations has not been stellar.

In March 2007, Mr. Medley replaced former Chief Executive Officer of the JIS, Carmen Tipling, who spent six years in the position.

Mr. Medley was Press Secretary to former Prime Minister PJ Patterson from 1997 to 2000, and again from 2002 to 2004.

He has close to 20 years experience in the media both locally and regionally.

Mr. Medley was responsible for the JIS' operations, which include the editorial,

Wachovia Corp. (NYSE: WB) Chief Executive Kennedy Thompson was living on borrowed time. The company, though, had a funny way of showing it.

In 2007, Thompson was not awarded cash incentives or performance-based stock to Thompson because things were going poorly. Or were they?

"The Compensation Committee considered that while 2007 performance did not meet expectations for reasons noted above, under Mr. Thompson's leadership, earnings per share growth and Wachovia's tangible return on equity have been at or above the median of its peer group for 2007 and for the 3- and 5-year periods ending December 31, 2007," the company said in its latest proxy statement.

The company's board showed its displeasure and granted him premium priced stock options valued at $8.2 million. His total compensation was more than $21 million. Thompson did not have an employment agreement with Charlotte-based Wachovia and therefore would "only" be eligible for a severance of $1.45 million based on his years of service as of December 31. But don't shed a tear for Thompson.

Since Wachovia's performance exceeded its peers for the three-year period ending December 31, 2006, Thompson received a stock award valued at $15 million. In 2005, he got a cash incentive award of $5 million and a stock award valued at $14 million, according to the proxy.

Remember that under Thompson's leadership, Wachovia's shares plunged more than 58%. As Bloomberg News notes, his credibility was "dented" after he said earlier this year that the company's $24 billion purchase of Golden West was "ill-timed." Furthermore, the bank reported a higher-than-expected first-quarter loss, cut its dividend by 41% and raised $8 billion.

Once again, shareholders lose while overpaid chief executives win. This is a disgrace.

Tech Startups 3.0: Co-Founder of Facebook to Leave...fired?

"And the email from Moskovitz:

At various times in our progress, people have come up to me to deliver a now familiar question: “did you ever imagine Facebook would be this big?” And I give a familiar answer: “well… yea, actually”. Frankly, Mark and I knew even at the beginning this was something the world needed. We went into the college market as a stepping stone - identifying dense nests in the graph that would lead us to the rest of the world. We could see far enough in the future to know there would be an impact, we just didn’t know exactly what it would be. Now I can look back on our progress and see the ways the world has changed, the ways we have changed it. We’ve altered the future in a score of ways, from making it easier to look up phone numbers and email addresses to making it more difficult for terrorists to isolate impressionistic youth in the middle east. At the same time we’ve built a competent and vibrant organization, driven by a passion to push the world more open.

In the process of helping to build a company, I found I had another passion: making companies themselves run better. It’s easy to confuse this with a desire to manage, but even when I tried to do that I found myself drawn back to code for the solutions to my problems; I didn’t want to construct efficiencies, I wanted to engineer them. Communication is the key to scale in any size organization and technology is the key to communication. I’ve seen us unblock ourselves time and again with new tools to increase transparency and passive information flow and many times it was the fruit of my own labors. While working on improving Facebook’s tools, however, I came to a very difficult conclusion: doing this for all the companies of the world was not the same project as doing it for one of them. This idea is one that needs an organization that was built to do it, with every fiber of its DNA engineered in a way that producing an extensible enterprise platform becomes little more than the logical consequence of an organism executing its own nature. Further, the things we’ve scoped for Facebook’s product team to do are the right things to be doing and I wouldn’t have agreed with asking the company to divert significant resources to approach a project so different and so boundless in scope. Every time we introduce something new, we do it at an opportunity cost and this is too large a detour to take when we are already moving swiftly in the right direction.

And Facebook is moving in the right direction. When Facebook has a billion members (and 800 employees? maybe 900?) and someone leans over to ask me if I ever imagined it would get that big, my answer is going to be “you’re damn right I did. how come it only has 20% of the market?”. To know that this is Facebook’s future and decide not be a part of it is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but it’s allowed me to have a broader perspective for the future. Like you, I’ve worried about the people leaving the company but it took becoming one of them to understand that this is just another part of the ecosystem (you should just take my word for it though). I’m not leaving the movement - I’m becoming a new part of it. The inevitable flux of the men and women behind these organizations is what moves the industry forward in the same direction in a way that cross-company collaboration alone never will. As the world moves to modular stacks and applications built up from a smorgasbord of platforms instead of single toolkits, mortgage eating apples then the companies that build the parts will need to act more and more like cooperative teams in a single larger organization. As Justin would undoubtedly say, I am simply viewing the industry from a different level of abstraction. These changes are difficult and sad, and that’s certainly an understatement for me… but change brings new things and this particular change will bring a new ally to our mission - I think we can all be pretty pumped about that.

Whether I work here or not, life settlement I’ll forever bleed Facebook blue. Facebook has been my passion and my purpose for the past 5 years. Our new project is not a replacement for what we build here, but instead both a complement and a compliment, and we have every intention of making it feel like a natural extension of Facebook’s product and purpose. Similarly, my timing in leaving is not an indication that I have lost faith in our ability to succeed, but an affirmation in my confidence in the company’s enduring success irrespective of changing faces.

Justin and I going to be around for at least another month and I am really looking forward to going deeper on this idea with everyone and how we can continue to work closely with Facebook. I’ll always be really proud of the work we’ve done and grateful for the opportunity to work with such a uniquely remarkable team. We’ll also be at the Q&A later to help continue the conversation right away.

Dustin