There are a lot of government subsidies, and in the current fiscal atmosphere many are shrinking by necessity. What appears to be lacking is any rational way of deciding which should shrink. The volume of federally guaranteed student loans to students at so-called proprietary colleges — the ones that intend to operate at a profit and get nearly all their revenue from the government — continues to grow. At the same time, state and local governments across the country are slashing spending on higher education, and community colleges — the ones most likely to offer alternatives to the students recruited by the far more expensive proprietary schools — are suffering some of the largest reductions. That trend has been welcome news to the proprietary colleges. ... Continue reading →
Some have called activist hedge fund investor Daniel Loeb’s targeting of Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson “résumégate,” and suggested Loeb might not be acting in the company’s best interest. But criticism of Thompson has been growing on the web, and Eric Jackson, a Forbes contributor who is a Yahoo investor, believes that Thompson will be ousted from the boss’s job by Monday. Loeb, head of hedge fund Third Point, fired off a letter to Yahoo’s board today, demanding that Thompson be fired by noon on Monday. Yesterday Loeb, who owns 5.8% of Yahoo, sent a scathing letter to Yahoo’s board detailing how Thompson’s résumé included the false claim that Thompson holds a degree in computer science from Stonehill College, when in fact Thompson’s degree is in ... Continue reading →
The latest version of an annual survey from Medscape/Web M.D., shows dissatisfaction among U.S. doctors rising. In an online questionnaire of 24,000 doctors representing 25 specialties,only 54%, said they would choose medicine again as a career, down from 69% in 2011. Just 41% would choose the same specialty again. Only a quarter of doctors said they would choose the same practice setting, compared with 50% a year ago. Why such frustration and discontent among physicians? The Medscape survey cites declining incomes, excessive paperwork, and vast uncertainty about changes dictated by the Affordable Care Act. David Korn, a former dean of medicine at Stanford and former vice president at the Association of American Medical Colleges says that, although it’s a “third rail” for the Republican party ... Continue reading →
Jeffrey Neely: Taking the Fifth Amendment on Capitol Hill this week. Yesterday I wrote about the incredible stupidity behind the $823,000 Las Vegas conference that has landed the General Services Administration at the center of criticism and hearings on Capitol Hill. It’s clear from the April 2 report filed by the GSA’s Inspector General, Brian Miller, that a culture of abuse had taken hold at the agency, where those planning the conference flouted federal procurement rules, ignored the GSA’s own regulations, and overpaid for everything from a $2,700 room party to $44 breakfasts. Today the Washington Post has a wonderfully detailed piece that reveals more staggering stupidity, mostly linked to Jeffrey E. Neely, 57, the acting regional director in the GSA’s San Francisco-based Pacific Rim ... Continue reading →
Former Government Services Administration chief Martha Johnson, GSA Regional Commissioner Jeff Neely and GSA Chief of Staff Michael Robertson swearing in before testifying at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Now that the leadership and staff of the General Services Administration are being raked over the coals in Congressional hearings on the GSA’s outrageously lavish, $823,000 Western Regions conference, held at the M Resort Spa Casino outside Las Vegas for four days in October 2010, I thought I would take a look at how the conference was organized and managed. How did a government agency that, among other things, is supposed to figure out ways to minimize government costs, put together such a stunning debacle? The government has wasted much larger sums, of course, ... Continue reading →
Mitt Romney: The unemployment problem is much bigger than female job loss. When I wrote a piece yesterday saying that Mitt Romney’s attack on President Obama over women’s jobs was misleading, I got a number of comments decrying the President’s economic policies and his failure to create jobs. To recap: Romney has been saying that 92.3% of the jobs lost during President Obama’s term were lost by women. I pointed out that it’s typical in a recession for men to suffer the first job losses, since male-dominated work like manufacturing and construction tend to be the first to take a hit. If you look to the beginning of the recession in December 2007, you see that men lost almost 3.3 million jobs in the 13 ... Continue reading →
Romney's claim that 92.3% of jobs lost under President Obama were lost by women is technically true, but ignores the typical job-loss cycle of recessions. The Romney campaign’s effort to fault President Obama’s record on women and jobs is looking more like an exercise in context manipulation, as news outlets and think tanks have checked Romney’s statements and showed how the presumptive Republican nominee is painting only part of the picture on job losses. In campaign stops on Tuesday and Wednesday, Romney claimed that 92.3% of all the jobs lost since Obama took office were lost by women. Though that assertion is technically true, it fails to reflect the fact that more men than women have lost their jobs since the recession began, a fact ... Continue reading →
Steve Jobs was the ultimate overconfident innovator. The late Steve Jobs was a prime example of an overconfident CEO who was also a wildly successful innovator. Not interested in focus groups or feedback from his colleagues, Jobs stuck to his perfectionist vision for such revolutionary inventions as iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad. Was Jobs an anomaly, unlike any other CEO? The conventional wisdom is that overconfidence in a CEO is a liability, associated with terrible business decisions that do harm to a company. But an upcoming paper in the Journal of Finance suggests that in fact, like Jobs, overconfident CEOs foster greater levels of innovation, in the form of riskier projects, larger investments in research and development, and more innovation. In the paper, professors, ... Continue reading →
I was meeting with my editor in his office one day when a colleague appeared at the doorway and asked if she might have a word with us. She looked my editor in the eye and said, “You may have heard this already, but I wanted to tell you myself. I’ll be leaving the company.” A top performer on Forbes‘ audience development team, she’d been lured by The Wall Street Journal. “It’s been a pleasure to work with you,” she went on. “I’ll miss you all.” Wow, I thought to myself. That was incredibly considerate and gracious. What a class act. Even as the economy struggles to add jobs, workers keep moving around, sometimes for greener pastures. Career coaches and human resource pros agree it’s ... Continue reading →
