Some of his employees, however, found it unseemly for a CEO to be shirtless on Facebook. And since he runs a company that's pretty open and has a whole system for making sure the CEO hears from the rank and file, well, he heard about it.

This is already a little unusual, but then he did something even more surpising. He wrote an article about his actions on BNET and asked people what they thought of his conundrum. Included as a topic for conversation: whether it's ok for him to post such shot and then turn around and put some limits on what his employees can do in the socially networked world. (For example, no employee tweets about the famous rock star in the hotel lobby.)

Deborah Schultz, a partner at Altimeter Group, a San Mateo based boutique consulting firm that advises on the social media landscape, says that while not every CEO will find themselves in this exact boat, all leaders (and followers) need to think about the changing modes of communication today and how they present themselves through them. "It used to be we had the 'luxury' of discreet roles," says Schultz. The new social media terrain "is forcing a much more integrated view of who we are as people...It's really about having a new set of etiquette, what is private and what is public."

Schultz suspects that the response of Conley's employees may well be an indicator of some broader issue, something this snafu might have helped surface but which predated the shots of him in a tutu. "Technology can be a lightning rod," says Schultz. She applauds Conley for embracing the chance to open up his internal debate to broad input through his BNET piece. And he's gotten a lot of comments, many very thoughtful. "He spoke to the horses mouth and asked people what they thought. Others would be meeting with their public relations staff behind closed doors."

Early discussions around social media often involved employee bloggers losing their jobs. Now it's the bosses who are hiking through uncharted terrain.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising is one of the most controversial issues in pharmaceuticals. Critics say the ads promote the over-use of prescription drugs that are sometimes dangerous. In fact, the United States and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow drug companies to pitch their products directly to consumers.

But drug companies just keep placing all those ads--to the tune of $5 billion a year. That may be because some research suggests they actually do work. According to market researcher Milward Brown, DTC is especially effective for raising awareness of new brands. Milward Brown surveys patients, and has found that 50% of respondents report requesting drugs they've seen on TV or read about in a magazine. "More often than not, after someone sees an ad, they go on the Internet to get more information, so they can have an intelligent conversation about it with their doctor," says Patrick Ryan, v.p. of Milward Brown's health care practice.

Maybe so, but Verilogue's researchers believe pharma companies could take several steps to make their ads more effective. They could provide doctors with materials that address patients' side-effect concerns, for example. Most importantly, they should find new ways to connect meaningfully with patients. The most frequently remembered campaign in Verilogue's study was for the osteoporosis drug Boniva, which actress Sally Field promotes. "Patients connect with Sally and see her as a trusted ally," says Verilogue CEO Jeff Kozloff. "It's the way she delivers the message. She gives examples of how she lives with the disease."

Verilogue even suggests tactics that go way beyond advertising, such as trying to place drugs into story lines of TV shows and films. He isn't aware of any companies that have tried that, but overall, he says, finding ways to connect emotionally with patients is important. "Don't just speak to the patient," he says. "Validate their experiences." Could the latest hot drug be coming soon to a theater near you?

The biggest drop will be to salaries, which will plummet 90% on average for these firms, while total compensation will fall by an average of about 50%. (Those numbers could be skewed by agreements reached with executives like outgoing Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis, who is forgoing all of his 2009 salary.) The reports also say that no top executive at AIG's financial products unit, which bore the blame of the insurer's near-collapse last year, will make more than $200,000. And any perks packages that total more than $25,000 at these firms will have to be approved by Feinberg.

While the numbers may be most startling, what's also notable in Feinberg's moves are the corporate governance changes reportedly being demanded at these troubled firms. The positions of Chairman and CEO will be split, boards will have to create risk assessment committees, and "staggered" director elections will be eliminated. In boards that have such elections, not every director comes up for vote each year, making it harder for shareholders to make their voice heard on the performance of individual directors.

While the pay cuts are sure to get the most attention, especially following months of public furor over Wall Street bonuses, the governance moves matter, too. Far too little focus has been placed on directors' role in the crisis, and what their oversight might have done to prevent it. Names like Andrew Hall, Citigroup's $100 million man, may have become overnight fodder for water cooler chatter, but how many people angry over executive compensation levels can name members of Citigroup's pay committee?

It's unclear whether these governance changes will have much impact--several of these bailed out firms already have separate chairman and CEO posts, for instance--but they at least strike at the heart of the matter. It is directors, after all, who have been responsible for setting pay for executives. By slashing pay as deeply as he is, Feinberg is saying, in a sense, that he doesn't trust boards to make those decisions. Still, perhaps the moves now being put into effect could help shareholders trust them a little more.

Continued R&D spending is considered a key to economic growth. And there are companies that have continued to keep up their research investments.

Nevertheless, the US overall now lags behind its competitors in terms of the percent of the nation's general economic output invested into research. Today, US research spending accounts for only 2.5% of its GDP. In Sweden, Finland, Japan and South Korea, research spending accounts for in excess of 3% of national economic output.

Despite being a fantastic operator of its retail stores and running a fairly successful Web site, Barnes & Noble seems to destined by Balter to be crushed by forces far larger than itself. Namely Wal-Mart and the World Wide Web.

Yesterday, Wal-Mart announced it would be selling 10 upcoming hotly anticipated books for just $10 each. Amazon matched the move post-haste. So Wal-Mart lowered its price to $9. According to Balter, the comparable prices at Barnes and Noble ranged from $13.20 to $21 for the same 10. The books include Sarah Palin's autobiography and the next offerings of Dean Koontz, John Grisham and Barbara Kingsolver, among others.(The full list of 10 is here.)

Not long after, news came out that Google would be launching an online site capable of delivering e-books to any device with a Web browser, with an initial library of about half a million titles.

Barnes & Noble, Balter concludes, "is gradually losing control over its destiny due to technology changes."

This is an old saw for the book retailer, which has long outlived the doomsayers that called it dead a decade ago, but competing against $9 books and the giants of e-commerce is only getting tougher.

That's a sign that investors are looking for more than just earnings that meet or beat the Street. As the economy begins showing signs of life--even GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt said in this morning's statement that "the global economic environment is beginning to slowly recover"--investors are increasingly watching the top line, seeking companies that can grow along with the recovery.

For now, GE Capital is hurting the company's chances. Rather than look for ways to grow, GE is trying to reduce the size of its massive finance unit, which includes everything from store-brand credit cards to consumer mortgages to commercial real estate. The company's finance arm posted profits of $263 million (down 87% from $2 billion in the third quarter of last year) but sales of just $12 billion (down 30% from $17.3 billion in the same period in 2008). Revenues slipped across all GE's other varied units, with the company's energy infrastructure division showing the strongest performance.

Meanwhile, earnings were up in GE's energy infrastructure, appliance and lighting, and media units, with NBC Universal showing one of the strongest quarterly profit growths in the company, at 13% from the year prior thanks to an after-tax gain on the sale of its stake in the A&E cable channel. That could make the reported deal with Comcast, in which reports have said the cable provider plans to acquire a controlling stake in the unit, more attractive. At the very least, it's sure to make the deal a hot topic Immelt will have to answer for analysts in this morning's earnings call.

When I spoke to criminal-defense attorneys in January, just after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Skilling’s conviction, few seemed surprised by that result. That surprised me, because I thought the government’s use of the honest services statute was pretty controversial. Added to the federal criminal code in 1988, the law makes it a crime to “deprive another of the intangible right of honest services” for private gain. The government commonly levies it against executives who allegedly put their own interest ahead of their company’s. Alan Vinegrad, a former U.S. Attorney in New York who is now at the law firm Covington & Burling told me in January that, at one time, the honest services charge “was almost unlimited in its potential application and prosecutors were using it in a wide variety of cases.” But, he noted, a series of court rulings have pared back its use.

Perhaps not enough for the Supreme Court, though. In October Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote that Justice Antonin Scalia, for one, felt that “federal prosecutors had developed an unseemly crush on a particularly vague law.” Skilling’s case now joins two others in which the High Court has agreed to review the law, including one involving the conviction of newspaper executive Conrad M. Black. Executives everywhere might be rooting for Skilling and Black to succeed.

But just as you were starting to feel a mild sense of optimism, or at least a lower level of dread, down come the hammer: the companies hiring are also firing. Retailers, for example, have announced plans to hire 33,640 workers this year, more than any other sector and far better than 2008, when they added fewer than 4,000 posts. But retailers have also announced more than 95,000 job cuts through September. In the tech world, Microsoft reported plans to hire an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 workers to “support its business strategy in key areas.” But those plans, Challenger notes, were revealed just weeks after the software giant announced that it would trim 5,000 employees from it payrolls over an 18-month period.

“The labor market is extremely fluid, even in the worst of times," notes John Challenger, the firm’s CEO. "Companies are constantly adding and subtracting workers, sometimes simultaneously.”

Some of these do really beg for further explanation.

1. I got sunburned at a nude beach and can't wear clothes. 2. I woke up in Canada. 3. I got caught selling an alligator. 4. My buddies locked me in the trunk of an abandoned car after a weekend of drinking. 5. My mom said I was not allowed to go to work today. 6. A bee flew in my mouth. 7. I'm just not into it today. 8. I accidentally hit a nun with my motorcycle. 9. A random person threw poison ivy in my face and now I have a rash. 10. I’m convinced my spouse is having an affair and I’m staying home to catch them. 11. I was injured chasing a seagull. 12. I have a headache from eating hot peppers.

Source: CareerBuilder

Number 13 and on welcome in the space below.

There's already a body of evidence that they often do not. And news out of North Carolina this week shows just how quickly these headline-grabbing deals can go awry. While the business press on Dell Computers this week focused on its new smart phones and $3.9 billion bid for tech services provider Perot Systems, in North Carolina the news on Dell was all about the closure this coming January of its plant in Forsyth county. The move will put 900 people out of work. And it's doing collateral damage to the local incentives system that offered the Texas-based computer maker $280 million in potential tax breaks and grants to locate the plant in the state four years ago.

North Carolina's offer was eventually shown to have been much more generous than other states'.

Dell will repay much of what it's received so far, including $15.6 million from the city of Winston-Salem and most of the $8.5 million it's received from the state.

But the closure has become a political embarrassment for local politicians who had been urging the state to go further with incentive packages aimed at luring businesses, including a controversial $200 million plus package used to entice Google to build a location in the Blue Ridge Mountains two years ago. The day after the Dell closure was announced, Governor Bev Perdue, who was not in office when the incentives were offered, said the company would be repaying every "red cent" it owed the state.

Opponents to these kinds of deals, hope the Dell experience would cause politicians to think twice before they put together their next deal. "No matter how big the incentive package, operational decisions by businesses headquartered out-of-state will be driven by corporate financial considerations and not by any sense of loyalty to the community being left behind," argued Robert F. Orr, Executive Director of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law, which had sued the state over the Dell package. If government is going to use these kinds of deals, Orr said "those investments should be in smaller, local businesses and not in multi-billion dollar interstate and international businesses.”

With state budgets $350 billion in the red over the next two years, it will be interesting to see whether the incentives contests that have pitted state against state in order to woo major corporations slow at all. And whether the Dell story plays any cautionary role.

With good reason. When Mann--an 83-year-old serial entrepreneur--started started working on inhaled insulin early in the decade, it seemed like a good idea. If people with diabetes could breathe in their insulin instead of injecting it, they would save themselves a lot of hassle and pain, drugmakers thought. In fact, a lot of major pharmaceutical companies were interested: Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk were all developing inhaled-insulin products of their own.

But Pfizer's product, Exubera, flopped. It brought in just $12 million in sales in its first nine months on the market, prompting Pfizer to drop the product in 2007. Patients didn't like the clumsy inhaler, and doctors balked at the requirement that they test patients to make sure their lungs were working properly before prescribing Exubera to them. Soon Lilly and Novo Nordisk abandoned the idea, too.

Mann thinks his product, Afresa, is different. He told Reuters that patients in his clinical trials have not suffered any lung problems. And he enjoys carrying a prototype around to investment conferences to show off how much smaller and less obtrusive Afresa is compared to Exubera.

Investors know better than to count Mann out completely. In the 1980s, his company MiniMed invented an insulin pump that delivered a steady stream of the drug to diabetics through a tube implanted in their skin. Companies including Lilly and Novo Nordisk pulled out of the market for insulin pumps, but not Mann. He succeeded, and in 2001, Medtronic bought MiniMed for $4 billion.

Will Mann pull off the same feat with Afresa? The U.S. Food & Drug Administration is expected to deliver a verdict in January.

Of the group, 83 percent anticipate receiving bonuses this year, while more than one-third of the finance professionals expect even fatter payouts in 2009 than they received last year. The majority, or 57 percent, of financial services professionals expect their year-end bonuses to be flat or higher than last year's payout.

Why would that be? Among those looking forward to an increase, 33 percent believe it will be a result of last year's abnormally low bonuses due to the credit crisis. However, a relatively even match of 24 percent and 23 percent attribute the rise to personal performance and firm performance, respectively.

More than half, or 52%, of the professionals noted their firms have revised bonus policies. But there was a broad consensus that attitudes toward risk haven't changed. Among financial professionals who take risk, 60 percent said that their current bonus policies have no impact on risk taking. Meanwhile, 28 percent indicated constraint and 12 percent are emboldened by their firm's bonus policy to take additional risk.

Finance professionals working at bulge-bracket or commercial banks were more likely to have a new pay structure, while alternative asset management and boutique bank employees were the least likely.

Whoever fills the CEO role at the nation's largest bank, while sexy and headline grabbing, is not the most pressing need. What's more important is how the BofA board rights the bank's leadership course. This obviously includes the coveted prize, a new CEO, but to emphasize that decision at the expense of other more important matters represents bad governance. It also underlines the misguided longly held belief that great talent will solve anything. That's not the case at the BofA.

Here are several steps that the bank's board should consider:

1. Replace the Chairman. Board Chairman Walter Massey is now inextricably linked to the former regime as a result of ongoing litigation, government investigation and personal relationship. This is a perceptual non-starter. It also represents a serious first challenge for the board to answer. Massey's tenure has been brief and has already given rise to a crisis, when investors forced Ken Lewis to sacrifice the Chairman title. The law of unintended consequences has been cruel here so far. Whether Massey can right the ship when he himself is under attack should be the board's first order of business.

2. Find a way forward or out of the regulatory and judicial jungle. New CEO or no new CEO, BofA needs to move expeditiously with trying to reach settlements across the board on all current legal matters. This may sound a bit pie in the sky. But even a better good faith effort would send a stronger signal. Within this effort also lies a key competency for a new CEO. At least three quarters of the current leadership mandate is making sure the cloud that currently engulfs the bank is lifted.

3. Consult Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase. This step is more search-driven than strategic, but it's a practical step that only the truly hubris free will consider. Dimon has led an extremely successful, similar sized operation during a similar period of upheaval. No one else has the same knowledge or experience to deal with what faces BofA. To not consult Dimon would be a gross oversight. You can be assured of at least one thing: Whichever high end recruiter gets the assignment will take this step while simultaneously trying to woo talent away from Dimon.

This isn't about wasting a crisis or trying to bring Superman to lead the nation's largest bank. It's about doing what's right in the wake of months of misdeeds and leadership inertia.

If there is a silver lining, it's the fact that BofA's business appears to be on better footing than a year ago when the system collapsed. Yet that also unfortunately in this case speaks to a bank's greatest self perceived advantage: Time. Time to recover. Time to take more government money. Time to see assets come back. The more time a bank has, the longer it can live. Vice versa, the longer it can continue to do nothing and watch its once vaulted status nose dive into the abyss. Any of the major banks that neglects this consumer reality does so at their peril.