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Mickey D's New Chef

Since taking over McDonald's (MCD) in 2004, Chief Executive James Skinner has hired—and lost—two chief operating officers and heirs apparent. On Jan. 11 the 65-year-old Skinner named his third, elevating another veteran of the world's top restaurant chain to president and COO. Don Thompson, 46, succeeds Ralph Alvarez, who resigned in December, citing health reasons. Thompson joined the Golden Arches in 1990 as an electrical engineer and has run McDonald's USA—the company's biggest division—since 2006. He beat out two other insiders: Denis Hennequin, who runs McDonald's in Europe, and Timothy Fenton, the company's Asia-Pacific head.

—Edited by Harry Maurer & Cristina Linblad

The Optimism Meter: Discouraging Signals

The Meter clocked in at 49* on Jan. 12, down from 52 a week earlier, as attitudes became decidedly less cheery. The share of individuals who think that equity markets and home prices will rise in 2010 dropped over the past week, and more believe that the unemployed will continue to struggle to find new jobs. Developed by Bloomberg BusinessWeek using data from pollster YouGov, the Meter is a proprietary measure of sentiment and expectations, economic statistics, and market forecasts.

* 0=lowest and 100=highest

—Edited by Harry Maurer & Cristina Linblad

More Changes at Citi

Last year, when Washington became the largest shareholder in Citigroup (C), regulators ordered the bank to get a management appraisal from an outside consultant. That report has now sparked yet another shuffle of top executives. On Jan. 11, Citi said that Manuel Medina-Mora, who oversees units in Mexico and South America, will take over the North American consumer business from Terri Dial, who got poor marks in the report. Responsibilities also may change for other panned executives, including Vice-Chairman Lewis Kaden and Chief Administrative Officer Don Callahan, a person briefed on the matter said. CEO Vikram Pandit, who won a mostly positive review, stays in his post. Dial was the highest-ranking woman at Citi and was one of the first people Pandit hired when he took over in late 2007.

—Edited by Harry Maurer & Cristina Linblad

Do-Gooders at Goldman?

Preparing for the negative publicity that's certain to fall on Wall Street when the first 2009 bonus checks are cut, Goldman Sachs (GS) is pondering the expansion of a program requiring top staff to donate a percentage of their earnings to charity. The New York Times reported on Jan. 11 that the firm may adopt a scheme like one at failed investment bank Bear Stearns, which compelled more than 1,000 employees to donate 4% of their pay each year. Were Goldman to impose something similar, hundreds of millions of dollars would flow into philanthropic causes. Goldman already has a program under which its 400-plus partners must donate an undisclosed amount to charity. It also set up, in October, a $500 million fund for loans to small business, to be partly overseen by one of its biggest shareholders, Warren Buffett.

—Edited by Harry Maurer & Cristina Linblad

All Worked Up Over Privacy on the Web

Is privacy dead in the age of the Internet? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at an awards ceremony in San Francisco this month, said as much, when he commented that privacy is "no longer a social norm." His words kicked off a lively debate in the blogosphere.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, on the technology industry blog ReadWriteWeb, grants that, because of sites like Facebook, the notion of privacy can no longer be equated with absolute secrecy. A contemporary understanding of privacy centers on context, writes Kirkpatrick: "We expect our communication to go on in an appropriate context (no drinking in church or praying in the bar) and we expect to understand how our communication will be distributed." So if a college pal snapped photos of you carousing at a bar and showed them to people at church, you might feel your privacy has been violated—even though the bar is a public place. Kirkpatrick goes on to argue that just because some people think nothing of posting compromising pictures on their Facebook page, Zuckerberg should not assume the rest of the site's 350 million will readily give up the right to control who can view such material. (Facebook last year rejiggered its privacy settings, making "public" the default setting for text, photo, and video updates.)

On his blog Net.Effect, Evgeny Morozov notes that, Zuckerberg's pronouncements aside, some governments are moving toward reinforcing privacy protections. In France, for instance, a bill under debate would give Internet users the option of having old online data about themselves deleted—though the technology to make this possible is not yet available. ("Why Facebook Is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important" ReadWriteWeb, Jan. 11) ("France Wants to Forget; Facebook Doesn't" Net.Effect, Jan. 10)

—Edited by Harry Maurer & Cristina Linblad

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