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BusinessWeek: January 17, 2000 |
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Up Front
Talk Show Return to top  One Heads-Up Headhunter The executive headhunter who has made many a corporate king is now something of a king himself. Gerard Roche, 68, chairman of Heidrick & Struggles International, has been named the headhunter of the century in a poll of 2,000 of his peers conducted by Executive Search Review. Over Roche's 35-year career, he has lined up more than 200 CEOs and presidents for his clients, including the CEOs now at Aetna, AlliedSignal, AT&T, EDS, IBM, Eastman Kodak, and Westinghouse. He recently lured former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt to head California winery Kendall-Jackson. Roche, who once considered becoming a priest, is the quintessential networker. He has befriended everyone from the late CBS patriarch William Paley, for whom he found four presidents, to GE Chairman Jack Welch, a golf partner. Roche's first top-level assignment in the late 1960s was to find a president for financier Saul Steinberg's Leasco group. More than 30 years later, he found a new president for Steinberg's Reliance Group, putting in corporate turnaround artist Robert Miller in November. He's hard-pressed, though, to name his favorite search. "It's like asking a parent to pick his favorite child," he says. Return to top Mousepad Not Included A New line of fashionable Dells will be rolling out this spring. But don't expect keyboards and monitors. Susan Dell, wife of Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, is preparing her ready-to-wear clothing line for April. She'll sell it in the recently opened Susan Dell store in an upscale mall in Austin, Tex. And that's just for starters. "We have plans for expansion," she says, "but nothing I want to talk about yet." Pieces in the spring line--evening, day, and outer wear--will start at $500. They'll be "strong, sexy, and feminine," says Dell. "It's Lee Miller meets Martha Graham." That means feminine fabrics for more masculine cuts, and vice-versa. Colors: black and white, reds, cream, browns, soft blues, pinks. Dell, 35, has a bachelor's degree in fashion merchandising and design from Arizona State and previously worked in real estate. She has been designing for friends for the 10 years she has been married. Now, with the help of a design team, she is ready to build her business. And as for playing on the success of that other Dell? Says Susan: "He's computers, I'm dresses. The two don't mix at all. This is my business." Hubby, however, is on the board. Return to top Be Very, Very Nice to Larry When Larry Augustin became an instant billionaire on Dec. 9, he was so stunned that he stared out the window of an office building in San Francisco at the Bay Bridge and kept repeating, "Look at the bridge, look at the bridge," to calm his nerves. Augustin, 37, is CEO of VA Linux Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif., an operating systems company that turned out the best initial public offering ever when its stock went up an incredible 698% to close at $239 that day. Augustin's stake was then worth about $2 billion. But for six months he can't sell any of that stock. So for now, he's something of a poor little rich boy. Augustin lives in a 1,200-square-foot tract house in Mountain View and drives a nine-year-old Volvo. So what will he buy? "No jet fighters or yachts for me," Augustin pledges. But he says he will upgrade his digs. He likes the big houses he saw as a child in Ohio. Of course, he could buy a sizable chunk of Ohio by midyear. Still, he says the "instant billionaire" label chafes. He labored in obscurity for years before his company's success. Now, he's focused on fulfilling investors' expectations. And what about that IPO? "That's yesterday's news," he scoffs. But what big news it was. Return to top | |
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Do You Rank As a "Full E-Business"? A Major consultant and a research outfit will each soon be rolling out proprietary benchmarking tools to analyze how e-businesses stack up against the competition and how they can do better. With the stakes so high, that's important. To snare clients, both will offer similar services--but at radically different prices. PricewaterhouseCoopers is rolling out its emm@, or EBusiness Maturity Model, in the U.S. this month. Tested in Europe, the service analyzes Web sites in nine categories, including strategy, performance, and technology, and rates their Web presence as anything from minimal to "full e-business," efficient and mature. Cost: up to $1 million. But starting in February, Forrester Research's eBusiness Voyage counters with its own advisory services, costing just $10,000 to $40,000. The catch: The client might still have to hire a consultant to act on the findings. Whichever strategy prevails, both companies acknowledge that the business is there. After the disastrous holiday season of Toys `R' Us, when the retailer couldn't deliver toys folks ordered online in time for Christmas, no price may be too high to ensure success on the Web. Return to top Give Me Reform, or Give Me Jail William Kreml, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina, and a virtual unknown in the 2000 Presidential campaign, has no delusions of capturing the White House. But he could find himself in the "big house"--for violating Federal Election Commission campaign donation reporting laws. The professor, a Democrat, is deliberately refusing to disclose his own donors to the FEC, to force the agency to "come clean" on what he calls spending violations by major candidates. On Dec. 2, the FEC took the bait and fined Kreml--who has raised a token $7,500--$200. He hasn't paid the fine. Now he wants his day in court, hoping to prove that he's not the only candidate violating campaign finance laws. Kreml says that the FEC did nothing when the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign overspent its FEC-prescribed limit by $7 million, and Bob Dole overspent by $18 million. But after reviewing the matter, the FEC sidestepped the issue when the candidates argued that most of the money was spent not on ads for the candidates, but for issues. Clinton was eventually asked to repay $150,000, and Dole $3 million for other violations. Why is Kreml willing to risk jail? "Civil disobedience is more powerful than picketing, passing out pamphlets, or writing op-ed pieces," the professor says. Kreml figures that his electoral lawbreaking may yet add pressure to strengthen campaign finance laws--even if no one at all votes for him for President. Return to top A Picture's Worth a Thousand Lemons O.K., you grapefruits and oranges out there: Say cheese! Citrus growers nationwide have begun taking digital photos of crops for buyers to view. Sampling the virtual fruits won't replace tasting and feeling the real thing at packinghouses. But wholesalers and growers love the digital pics, which they say can be quickly e-mailed, expedite sales, and help resolve disputes over damaged fruit. Jack Cain, president of Voita Citrus in Indianapolis, says his buyers in California, Florida, and Texas all have digital cameras. "We call it our daily beauty contest," Cain says. Adds Billy Heller, general manager of Heller Bros. Packing Corp. in Winter Garden, Fla.: "We may be recommending something, and the buyer may be reluctant, or vice-versa. So we shoot and e-mail it to them." The Agriculture Dept. has also started taking pics for inspections. It will use them to help resolve disputes between growers and wholesalers, when, say, fruit approved by the agency ends up at its destination damaged. Return to top TABLE The Top Technological Blunders of the (Just Past) Century Remember Murphy's Law ("Whatever can go wrong will go wrong")? The 20th
century gave birth to that chestnut, along with such classic screwups as the
Titanic, the Hindenburg, and the Union Carbide chemical disaster at Bhopal.
Following, a small sampling of other catastrophes:
1940
A design flaw causes The Tacoma (Wash.) Narrows Bridge to collapse in high
winds.
1952
The DeHavilland Comet (pictured above), a commercial jet aircraft, debuts.
Seven of 21 copies promptly crash, owing to faulty design.
1959
The Malpasset Dam on the French Riviera, built too close to unstable ground,
bursts, killing hundreds.
1958-62
"The Great Leap Forward," China's botched technological revolution, causes
widespread famine; 30 million die.
1970s
The glass-clad John Hancock Tower in Boston sheds its 500-lb. windows, a major
construction embarrassment.
1986
The space shuttle Challenger explodes just after liftoff.
1986
In the Soviet Union, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffers a partial
meltdown.
1994
Juan Pablo Davila, trading commodities via computer in Chile, accidentally
types "buy" instead of "sell." To rectify his mistake, he starts a frenzy
of buying and selling, losing .5% of his country's GNPs. His name becomes a
verb, "davilar," meaning "to screw up royally."
DATA: ANNALS OF IMPROBABLE RESEARCH
Return to top Footnotes Proportion of U.S. cities surveyed that lowered property tax rates in fiscal 1999: 16.8%; that lowered sales tax rate; 1.8% DATA: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES Return to top |
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