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<title>Employment RSS : Gourt</title>
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<dc:rights>Copyright 2007, Gourt.com</dc:rights>
<dc:date>2008-09-07T21:57+10:00
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<item rdf:about="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/24mgmt.html?ex=1340337600&#x26;en=e86da63e5fb6e486&#x26;ei=5088&#x26;partner=rssnyt&#x26;emc=rss">
<title>Under New Management: Life After a Merger: Learning on Both Sides</title>
<link>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/24mgmt.html?ex=1340337600&#x26;en=e86da63e5fb6e486&#x26;ei=5088&#x26;partner=rssnyt&#x26;emc=rss</link>
<description><![CDATA[Managers should act promptly (and creatively) to keep the best people after a deal.]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/24homefront.html?ex=1340337600&#x26;en=ab542f64a6269d9a&#x26;ei=5088&#x26;partner=rssnyt&#x26;emc=rss">
<title>Home Front: Training for the Twists of Driving a School Bus</title>
<link>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/24homefront.html?ex=1340337600&#x26;en=ab542f64a6269d9a&#x26;ei=5088&#x26;partner=rssnyt&#x26;emc=rss</link>
<description><![CDATA[A program in Brooklyn helps low-income or unemployed New York City residents become bus or truck drivers.]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/24boss.html?ex=1340337600&#x26;en=f8aaf630134f762c&#x26;ei=5088&#x26;partner=rssnyt&#x26;emc=rss">
<title>The Boss: When Focus Leads the Way</title>
<link>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/24boss.html?ex=1340337600&#x26;en=f8aaf630134f762c&#x26;ei=5088&#x26;partner=rssnyt&#x26;emc=rss</link>
<description><![CDATA[“New Orleans defines who I am,” said Arnold Donald, chief executive of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International.]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2008/09/05/Sim-CEO?tid=true">
<title>Sim C.E.O.</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2008/09/05/Sim-CEO?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[It&rsquo;s Monday morning, and the president of Back Bay Battery, a $240 million company, is looking over his financial statements. Sales are way up for his main line of nickel metal-hydride batteries, and yet he can&rsquo;t help noticing the customer complaints, particularly about how long the batteries take to recharge.The company&rsquo;s new ultracapacitor batteries recharge in less than a 10th of the time, but so far they&rsquo;re losing millions of dollars as the company scales up production. Betting that they&rsquo;re the future, though, Back Bay&rsquo;s president takes a deep breath and decides to shift scarce R&amp;D dollars away from nickel metal-hydride research and toward ultracapacitors. It might sound like another stressful day at the office, but it&rsquo;s actually a stressful day at school&mdash;the business simulation will be part of an assignment for Harvard Business School students in their second-year Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise course.Simulations like Back Bay Battery have become increasingly popular at business schools as educators seek to promote experiential learning over passive instruction via lectures, arguing that students work harder and retain more information when given more hands-on instruction. And they seem to be a natural fit for students raised on playing videogames. Today more than 90 percent of business schools use at least one simulation in their teaching, and many use more.Simulation games have become so successful that H.B.S.&rsquo;s publishing arm, Harvard Business Publishing, which also produces the classic case studies that generations of B-school students were weaned on, has begun producing its own simulations in partnership with Forio Business Simulations. One of the first is a simulation of running a Benihana restaurant that&rsquo;s based on a bestselling case study. Other simulations focus on specific business situations and challenges, such as managing a complex supply chain (The Root Beer Game), running a technology-driven business (Back Bay Battery), and climbing Mount Everest as part of a team (Everest). &ldquo;Experiential learning is a big deal everywhere&rdquo; says Denis Saulnier, Harvard Business Publishing&rsquo;s assistant director for educational technology. &ldquo;[We] saw it as a natural complement to the case-study method,&quot; he says, adding that students actually get to act out scenarios and see cause and effect.Saulnier says that while sales of its simulations and other e-learning products are nowhere near that of the publisher&rsquo;s paper cases because they&rsquo;re so new, they are the fastest-growing part of its catalog, and he expects them to become a significant part of overall sales in the future. Customers of the simulations, which typically cost about $12.50 per student, include many of the country&rsquo;s top business schools, including Columbia, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon.Harvard Business Publishing already has some strong competition, however. Dan Smith, president of Capsim Management Simulations, estimates that sales of his recently launched Comp-XM game, in which students run a virtual $100 million company for five sped-up years and answer questions about their decisions, are up 20 percent over last year. And Sam Wood, a former Stanford Business School professor who founded Responsive Learning Technologies to market the games he and fellow professor Sunil Kumar developed, notes that the majority of schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business now use either his or Capsim&rsquo;s products.&nbsp;The virtual simulations do bear some resemblance to old-fashioned case studies. In general, students watch a short clip explaining the scenario (just as case studies set the scene), and then have to make a decision about what to do next. Unlike with case studies, however, students using these simulations are able to get instant feedback on their decisions through multiple rounds of play. In Harvard&rsquo;s Benihana restaurant simulation, for instance, students choose whether to move customers from the bar to the restaurant in batches or individually&mdash;and see how this affects sales. They can change the size of the bar and the number of tables. They can try to speed up table turnover, then run 20 iterations instantly and see how profits change. Students seem to prefer the challenge and the format. Wood notes that when Stanford started using an early version of Littlefield Technologies, an operations management simulation that he and Kumar designed, student ratings for that class rose dramatically. The games do have their critics, however. One study conducted during the 2004-&rsquo;05 school year at a business school in Edinburgh found that while the majority of students enjoyed the simulation game, it seemed largely due to their novelty rather than to any inherent advantage they possessed. Others wonder just how realistic these simulations can possibly be, which even some of the game makers admit is a limitation. &nbsp;&ldquo;Would a kid who ran a simulated company be qualified to run a Subway franchise? I doubt it,&rdquo; says Capsim&rsquo;s Smith, who is an adjunct professor at DePaul&rsquo;s business school. But, he notes, &ldquo;You can get some clue whether the students mastered the basic concepts and more importantly, can integrate them together.&rdquo;The games also get knocked for the poor quality of their graphics, especially given the power of today&rsquo;s computers. Harvard&rsquo;s Everest simulation, for example, looks little better than the Oregon Trail computer game many current business students may have played in elementary school. Saulnier says graphics are secondary to the game&rsquo;s content and ease of use, but other simulation makers are taking a different approach. The latest version of Marketplace, a popular simulation about selling computers put out by Innovative Learning Solutions, features factories that could show up in Second Life, scenery reminiscent of World of Warcraft, and colorful characters like a villainous loan shark named Guido. &ldquo;People do like a little bit of entertainment along with the education,&rdquo; explains Ernie Cadotte, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville marketing professor who designed the game.For its part, Harvard Business Publishing plans to issue six more simulations this year, including extremely current topics such as a mergers-and-acquisitions simulation and another where students manage a private-equity portfolio. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re only going to scale up,&rdquo; Saulnier says.Related LinksLaw Firms' Summer MadnessLaw Firms' Summer MadnessB-School Buzz: A Future in Failures
      
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<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/08/31/GOP-Convention-CEO-Maria-Cino?tid=true">
<title>Politics Party</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/08/31/GOP-Convention-CEO-Maria-Cino?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[                                                                                                                                                                                                     Job Title: C.E.O. of national party convention                             Employers: Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee                        Openings: Political connections Salary Cap: $200,000                        Number of Jobs: Two             Maria Cino has been thinking a lot about balloons lately.     The C.E.O. and president of the Republican National Convention has nightmares about mishaps like the 2004 Democratic convention when the celebratory balloons failed to release following John Kerry's acceptance speech, causing much embarrassment. To guard against anything similar happening with the 200,000 balloons on tap at this year's Republican convention, Cino has 300 pounds of confetti ready to drop at a moment's notice.  It's just one of the many details Cino worries about since she started planning the convention more than 18 months ago. The four-day extravaganza in the Twin Cities is expected to draw 45,000 people, and transportation, accommodations, and security must be arranged for all of them, in addition to arranging for logistics and technology for all the events and speeches. Since January, her staff has swelled from a skeletal crew of some 12 planners to a force of 150 full-time employees, who in turn oversee an army of volunteers.     &quot;We are basically a Fortune 500 company created overnight,&quot; she says. &quot;We start with nothing and end up with about a $125 million budget and 10,000 volunteers to put together a four-day event. Then we tear it down in about two weeks and the company closes.&quot; The budget is comprised of a $50 million grant from Congress for security (one is given to each party); $17 million from the Federal Election Commission; and up to $58 million raised by the host city's Republican committee.    Part party planner, part politician, and part entrepreneur, the job of convention C.E.O.&mdash;a position that turns over every four years&mdash;is broad and fast-paced and unlike anything found in politics. It's something Cino considered when R.N.C. Chairman Mike Duncan offered her the convention job over cheeseburgers in January 2007. Up until then, Cino's 25-year career had included chief of staff to former congressman Bill Paxon of upstate New York, and then following him to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, which guided the successful effort by Republicans to win control of Congress in 1994. Eventually, she rose to deputy chairwoman for the Republican National Committee; and later, under President Bush, Cino was appointed Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Commerce during his first term, and Deputy Secretary of Transportation during his second. &nbsp;    &quot;As I started thinking about it, I realized it's the only job I haven't had at the national committee, aside from being chairman,&quot; she says. &quot;It's a great opportunity. Instead of being the No. 2, I'm the No. 1&mdash;president and C.E.O. of my own company.&quot;     Indeed, Cino delegates like a corporate C.E.O., setting the mandates for seven division heads handling everything from transportation to decorations and music, then making sure preparations proceed according to plan.    Naturally, the last days of preparation are the most intense, with a litany of staff meetings and walk-throughs and questions (do the 560 individual televisions screens that make up the big screen function in unison? Are the aisles too narrow? How is the cell-phone reception around the arena? Are there enough buses to move 45,000 people through the city?).  &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;  The magnitude of the task is apparently enough to obscure party loyalties. Cino says she's been in regular contact over the months with her counterpart over at the Democratic National Convention, Leah Daughtry.    &quot;We all talk&mdash;we all have the same nightmares a couple days before the convention,&quot; she says. &quot;It's a profession.&quot;  Related LinksShe's BackCarly FiorinaShould We Take Economic Advice From Fiorina?
  
]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2008/08/28/Neil-Smith-On-Negotiating?tid=true">
<title>Let&#x27;s Make a Deal</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2008/08/28/Neil-Smith-On-Negotiating?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[As president and general manager of the New York Rangers for over a decade, I had a responsibility to our ownership to negotiate effectively on almost a daily basis, whether with one of our own players or a fellow G.M. concerning a trade. The results of the hundreds of deals I conducted over that time were largely determined by how I conducted myself during the negotiations. Here are the basic principles I developed for successful negotiating.    1. Don't Commit First  If you can get the other side to state their position or proposal first, you may be pleasantly surprised at what they want. At the very least, you'll get valuable insight into what they're thinking before they know what you're thinking.     I once acquired a struggling player by asking the other G.M. how much of the player's salary he'd be willing to eat if we took him. Surprisingly, he was willing to pay two-thirds of the contract, and I got the player to renegotiate his contract down to that figure just for the opportunity to stay in the N.H.L. Result? He played for us all season and the other team paid his entire salary.     Getting the other side to commit to a position first allows you to use their proposal as the &quot;high-water mark.&quot; Then, if it comes to taking a middle ground, you can be closer to what you want than they are to what they want.     2. Put Your Ego Aside  Negotiations are about getting a deal done, so don't try to impress the other side with your intelligence and negotiating abilities. The stronger you look, the bigger the fight you'll have on your hands.    One tactic I use is to get the other side to help me during the process, asking questions that make them feel superior, such as &quot;I'm not really sure, what do you think?&quot; Or I might say, &quot;I don't know the market nearly as well as you do.&quot; Ego-driven negotiators make mistakes like telling the other side that they don't have to check with anyone above them, or they don't need to check with experts before making a decision.     When you put your ego aside, you retain options such as deferring a decision until you can think it through more thoroughly and consider opportunities to get something extra. You can also delay your decision until you've had a chance to check with your owner or board of directors.     3. Keep Your Eye on the Puck   When Wayne Gretzky played for the Edmonton Oilers during their run of four Stanley Cups in five years in the mid-'80s, he was constantly harassed by role players, fans, and coaches, all trying to get him off his game. But No. 99 knew that the only thing that mattered was putting the puck in the net more times than the other team. Just like Gretzky, an effective negotiator needs to focus on the issues and not be distracted by the actions of others. No matter what the outcome of a single meeting or phone call, don't let the other side's moves or reactions take your eye off the puck.  &nbsp;  One of my strategies when negotiating with agents was to make up a ridiculously low offer from my owner to lowball the agent, knowing that they'd be offended or even insulted. No matter what curses or other words came at me, I simply looked at the result, which was often a lowering of their expectations, to judge if I'd advanced toward my deal. If you react and let the other side get you upset or out of control, you'll always lose.    4. Always Make the Other Side Feel Victorious  When the deal is done, always congratulate the other side. You want them to feel like they won. &quot;Thank you, but please let me say that you did a fantastic job negotiating this deal&quot; was a favorite phrase of mine. Even if you think the other side didn't do well, congratulate them and never gloat. The reason for this is simple: You never know when you're going to want to do another deal with that person, and you want them to feel good about you personally when you do. Be humble in a victory and you'll be sure to have more of them in the future.      Neil Smith is the former president and general manager of the N.H.L.'s New York Rangers. He is currently the owner of a minor-league hockey team, the Johnstown Chiefs, serves as a consultant to the Anaheim Ducks and St. Louis Blues, and is an analyst on Versus Network, the NHL Network, SNY, and Hockey Night in Canada.    Related LinksFixing a HoleIdle Chatter:  C(Double)U Later?Tampa Bay Lightning Sale Deadline Looming
  
]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/08/24/Climbing-Guide-Willie-Benegas?tid=true">
<title>Peak Performer</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/08/24/Climbing-Guide-Willie-Benegas?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[                                                                                                                                                                                                Job Title: Ultra-high-altitude climbing guide                           Employers: Mountain expedition companies                     Salary Cap: $45,000                      Number of Jobs: 20 or 30 worldwide          When Guillermo &quot;Willie&quot; Benegas heard about the disastrous climb up K2 earlier this month that killed 11 people when an avalanche struck, he didn't spend any time second-guessing the climbers or their guides, despite having guided several expeditions up Mount Everest and neighboring peaks himself.&nbsp;     &quot;It wasn't anyone's fault. Things can go wrong&mdash;and they went wrong,&quot; he says. More than anyone, Benegas says he understands that the rewards of summiting the world's highest mountains come with substantial risks.     During 10 years as a guide for Mountain Madness, an adventure-travel company based in Seattle, Benegas has climbed Everest eight times and led a dozen other expeditions to peaks over 26,000 feet. In that time he's never had an accident or lost a client.    People he takes to the Himalayas come from all walks of life, from company presidents to bricklayers to retired lieutenant colonels. Benegas has guided his share of C.E.O.'s, but can't name names due to the confidentiality agreements he signed. To prepare, many of those clients go through Mountain Madness' Live Your Dreams program, where they may spend several years climbing progressively higher peaks in preparation for Everest. To climb the world's highest peak, Benegas says clients need perseverance, perspective, and a pack mentality.     Benegas definitely isn't in climbing for the money. Guides earn slightly less than half the $65,000 fee Mountain Madness and other outfitters charge climbers for each trip up Everest.     Since weather conditions limit Himalayan expeditions to spring and fall, Benegas supplements his income by guiding treks in South America, working on ski and avalanche patrol outside his home in  Salt Lake City, and from an endorsement deal with North Face, which has featured him in magazine ads.    For Benegas, though, climbing is less a job and more a way of life. Born in Patagonia in South America, he and his twin brother, Damian, who works as a guide in South America, started climbing in their teens. By the time he was 20, Willie had summited Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas. He moved to the U.S. a year later and, through hard work and ability, established himself as an elite guide, leading his first Everest summit in 1999.     EmbeddedVideo  Willie and Damian Benegas climbing Nuptse, a 25,726-foot peak in the Himalayas just southwest of Mount Everest, in 2006.    By now, Benegas has traveled in the Himalayas so often that he considers the handful of local Sherpas he works with extended family, and they, in turn, call him Willie Sherpa. When a 7.6-magnitude earthquake devastated the Kashmir region in 2005, Indian officials let him bring supplies to secluded mountain villages, which are off limits to Westerners for political reasons. It was due to the fact that he'd helped rescue a member of the Indian army during an ill-fated summit attempt two years before that he was permitted.     With his 40th birthday approaching late this month, Benegas admits to slowing down, but not by much. When he tore a wrist ligament that put him in a cast last March, he didn't think twice about leaving a week later to lead a monthlong expedition of 10 climbers up Mount Everest. His idea of a good time is still more extreme than most, like the 100-mile endurance run in Utah's Wasatch Mountains he'll compete in over Labor Day weekend.    Everest has taught Benegas to embrace extremes, a sentiment he tries to instill in his Everest clients. &quot;It's so much more than a guy with no experience who decides to pay $65,000 to climb to the summit,&quot; he says. &quot;Trust me, he'll suffer like he's never suffered in his life. But suffering will make him grow. Then he'll realize it's the most amazing thing he's done in his life.&quot;  Related LinksAttention K Street: Opportunity KnocksFord Drives a Surprise Profit Santiago
      
  ]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/08/17/Lego-Builder-Nathan-Sawaya?tid=true">
<title>Building a Career</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/08/17/Lego-Builder-Nathan-Sawaya?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[                                                                                                                                                                                              Job Title: Lego artist                          Employers: Corporations and individuals                    Openings: Word of mouth                     Salary Cap: Six figures                     Number of Jobs: About 40 Lego master builders       Who doesn't remember growing up playing with Legos&mdash;the small, colorful bricks that can be combined to create anything from airplanes to zebras? Most kids ultimately pack up their Legos and move on. But Nathan Sawaya never did.   The 35-year-old New Yorker makes a six-figure living as a Lego artist, creating large-scale works of art using tens of thousands of the plastic pieces. Among his recent projects are a 10-foot-tall replica of the new Trump Tower being constructed in Dubai for Donald Trump, and a four-foot-tall bumblebee commissioned by Fall Out Boy bass guitarist Pete Wentz as a gift for his new bride, pop star Ashlee Simpson. He says he receives hundreds of commission inquiries every month.   Though he played with Legos like most kids, they were the furthest thing from his mind when he set out in the working world. After graduating with a law degree from New York University in 1998, Sawaya became a Wall Street attorney, earning a comfortable six-figure salary&mdash;and working in a high-stress environment. To relax after long hours at the office, he would work on art projects at night, making sculptures using clay at first, then moving into more whimsical media, like candy.  One of Sawaya's first hobbyist projects with Legos was an eight-foot-tall pencil. Friends would come over to gawk at it, and Sawaya eventually set up a website, brickartist.com, to post photos of his creations. Visitors to the site sent in requests, such as Lego renderings of portraits of their children.   The hobby became the real thing in 2004 after he won a competition sponsored by Lego to find the best builder in the U.S. He quit his job and became one of Lego's &quot;master model builders,&quot; creating sculptures for its theme park in San Diego. They paid him just $13 an hour, but it gave him good training for when he returned to New York to create his own Lego works full-time.   Sawaya now keeps 1.5 million Lego bricks, meticulously organized by shape and color into clear bins (he buys all his Legos in bulk). He sketches his projects first on something called &quot;brick paper&quot;&mdash;essentially, graph paper modified for Lego shapes&mdash;and takes anywhere from a few days to a few months to build them. At any given time, he's working on three or four projects, earning anywhere from a couple thousand dollars up to six figures per work, depending on the complexity of the project and how quickly they need to be built.   For his own personal fulfillment, he also creates more avant-garde works and has two traveling exhibitions of his work (here's a slideshow of some of his work).   Ironically, Sawaya says he now works more hours per week than he ever did as a corporate lawyer, although he also makes more money than he did then. Most important to him, though, is the artistic gratification he gets out of his Lego creations, particularly when he gets feedback from children who are inspired by his projects. &quot;There are 400 million children out there playing with Legos,&quot; he says. &quot;Who am I to say that they aren't artists too?&quot;   Also on Portfolio.com Gas Prices Around the World Making Bucks on the Greenback The Denver Party CircuitRelated LinksRap's Economic IndicatorsDaily Brew: Science Shows What Harvard Students Really Think Of Rednecks360? Maybe Not.
  
]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Peter-Guber-and-Class-AA-Baseball?tid=true">
<title>Switch Hitter</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Peter-Guber-and-Class-AA-Baseball?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[And for tonight&rsquo;s act, Peter Guber pre&shy;sents . . . the sixth season of the Class AA Frisco RoughRiders.     Yes, that Peter Guber, the movie producer behind blockbusters like Batman and Rain Man. The same Peter Guber who was booted from his job as chairman and C.E.O. of Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1994 for incurring the company&rsquo;s biggest write-down ever. Since then, Guber has moved on from Hollywood to small-town America, refashioning himself as a mogul of a different kind: one who buys distressed minor-league baseball franchises and transplants them in second-tier cities looking for an economic boost. As he did at Sony, Guber has hooked up with deep-pocketed patrons, only this time around it&rsquo;s local governments, which will foot the bill for pricey new stadiums. This is a standard yet perennially controversial arrangement, but it hasn&rsquo;t prevented Guber from becoming one of the biggest owners of minor-league franchises today. He owns five teams, operates one, and is in the process of buying another, the Winston-Salem Warthogs.     Owning minor-league teams is not as sexy as moviemaking, he admits. &ldquo;But there&rsquo;s a sizable bottom line if you do things right,&rdquo; he says, showing the same promotional savvy that made him famous a decade and a half ago.   Guber got into the minors almost by accident. After leaving Sony, he formed Mandalay Entertainment, a TV-and-film-production company (its most notable release is I Know What You Did Last Summer), and made a few bids on various major-league sports franchises, including the Oakland A&rsquo;s and the N.B.A.&rsquo;s Miami Heat. When those failed, Guber instead partnered with a father-son team that owned two successful minor-league franchises to form Mandalay Sports Entertainment.      Today, Guber relies on his own scouts to find cities that are in the market for a team. Back in 2002, for example, Frisco, Texas, a fast-growing town north of Dallas, was eager to acquire a club. Tom Hicks, owner of the major-league Texas Rangers, wanted to bring a team to Frisco to anchor a planned real estate development. He contacted Guber, who already had multiple teams in his stable, and they reached an agreement. Frisco would pay for a $22.7 million ballpark, while Hicks and Guber would reel in a team. Their quarry: the struggling Shreveport, Louisiana, Swamp Dragons, which they snapped up for just over $4 million, renamed the RoughRiders, and exported to Texas. Now Mandalay, which bought the bulk of Hicks&rsquo; interest in 2003, pays Frisco to lease the city-owned stadium, Dr. Pepper Ballpark. Attendance at RoughRiders games has increased dramatically as players&rsquo; on-field performance has improved. The team went from last in the league in 2001 to first in 2004.     &nbsp;The Frisco arrangement is similar to a deal Guber struck in 1999 involving the Rockford, Illinois, Cubbies. According to a person close to the club, Guber scooped up the franchise for $4 million, renamed the team the Dragons, and forged an affiliation with the Cincinnati Reds. An intermediary introduced Mandalay to city executives in Dayton, Ohio, who offered to finance a $23 million downtown ballpark in order to entice a team to move there.     As part of that deal, the city of Dayton and Montgomery County issued municipal bonds worth $18 million to pay for most of the stadium&rsquo;s cost. Mandalay put in $4 million. In return, it secured a 20-year operating lease with an option for an additional 10 years. Mandalay is currently working with the city on a multiuse real estate development surrounding the park. If the deal, worth $250 million, goes through, Mandalay will be an equity partner. At the time Mandalay connected with Dayton, &ldquo;baseball people thought we were crazy,&rdquo; Guber says. &ldquo;They said we were too close to the fan base of the Reds, that depopulated Dayton couldn&rsquo;t support a team, that I was just another Hollywood guy with a silly jones for baseball.... Well, sure, I&rsquo;m a fan, but this is not philanthropy for me.&rdquo;     Though Guber is prone to making exaggerated statements, this doesn&rsquo;t appear to be one. Over the past decade, minor-league teams have become the toy of choice among wealthy businesspeople and are known for performing better financially than their major-league parents. The teams are relatively cheap, costing anywhere from $1 million to $25 million, depending on their class affiliation. There is also a built-in financial advantage, in that major-league affiliates pay minor leaguers&rsquo; salaries and injury costs. Minor-league team owners, who don&rsquo;t get involved in scouting, trading players, or hiring and firing coaches, operate like movie-theater owners: Guber makes money through sponsors, ticket sales, and concessions, which can generate profit margins of 15 to 20 percent.     While the rate at which team values were appreciating has recently slowed, the minor leagues retain some advantages. Major-league teams, for example, collect only 6 percent of their minor-league affiliates&rsquo; ticket sales. And minor-league owners are allowed to keep all the revenue from concessions and merchandise sales.     Tonight, though, Guber&rsquo;s attention is on the RoughRiders, who are taking on the Midland RockHounds at Dr. Pepper Ballpark. While the Rough&shy;Riders go through their pregame drills, Guber, who is attending the game with his two 14-year-old sons, looks down at the crowd-pleasing Newlywed Game unfolding atop the visiting team&rsquo;s dugout. The action is broadcast on the stadium&rsquo;s giant outfield screen, bringing roars and howls from the crowd. Guber cheers right along.     &ldquo;I love this team. I love all our teams, because I love this game,&rdquo; he says. Just then, the crack of the bat echoes in the stands. All heads turn&mdash;except Guber&rsquo;s.      He is counting the house.
      
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<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Carlos-Ghosn-Renault-Profile?tid=true">
<title>Speed Kills</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Carlos-Ghosn-Renault-Profile?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[One night in February 2007, a technician at Renault crafted a noose in his two-bedroom apartment in the village of Saint-Cyr-l&rsquo;École, outside Paris, and hanged himself. The technician left behind a wife and young son, who had gone out of town and expected him to meet them the next day. His suicide was unexpected in many ways. He had a loving relationship with his family, and his work should have been equally satisfying. The position at Renault was a dream job&mdash;he had been obsessed with cars as a youth and had worked at the company since 1992, and Renault was putting him through graduate school for engineering. His performance reviews were consistently positive, and he was on track to be promoted to engineer.                     But in the months before he died, the technician, Raymond D., had been sliding into an emotional abyss, largely because of pressures at work. (Under French law, the last names of suicide victims are not disclosed without the approval of family members.) The company was in the midst of a radical turnaround plan implemented by Carlos Ghosn, who had taken over as C.E.O. in 2005. As a result, the workload had steadily increased for all of Renault&rsquo;s employees, particularly those at the design center where Raymond was employed. Workdays became longer and deadlines more intense. Before he killed himself, Raymond left a note on his son&rsquo;s blackboard that said, among other things, &ldquo;Tell Mr. Ghosn I can&rsquo;t handle the pressure anymore.&rdquo; (View a pop-up graphic showing notable groups of business-related suicides.)                   Raymond was not alone. Between October 2006 and February 2008, six employees working at the company&rsquo;s design complex&mdash;a campus called the Technocentre&mdash;and one at its nearby test facility tried to kill themselves; five succeeded, three of them during a period of just four months. Particularly gruesome were the two deaths that occurred at the complex itself. It&rsquo;s possible that this is just a statistical anomaly&mdash;Renault is a huge company, with more than 63,000 employees in France and 12,000 at the Technocentre alone. Peugeot Citro&euml;n, another French car manufacturer, has also experienced a handful of suicides. But some of the Renault employees who killed themselves blamed workplace pressure as the main cause. And one, Raymond, went a step further and blamed Ghosn, the man brought in to save the company.                                                                                                            Renault, the third-largest automaker in Europe, made no immediate public comment on Raymond&rsquo;s death, or on any of the others. No one from management called his widow to offer condolences. But as news of the suicides at Renault became public and experts posited that such a cluster in one facil&shy;ity was unusual, the questions surrounding the deaths became harder for the company to ignore. Job-related suicides are particularly rare in France, where strict worker protections such as 35-hour workweeks are enforced and labor unions have ample input into plant activities. Yet the turnaround plan at Renault was extremely ambitious and involved releasing 26 new or redesigned cars in less than four years, a pace far faster than most auto companies can sustain.&nbsp;                      &ldquo;I am trying to motivate people to want to do more than they thought they could do,&rdquo; says Ghosn, 54, in an interview at his office in Boulogne-Billancourt, the Paris suburb where the company is headquartered. He is short and stocky, dark-eyed, and impeccably dressed in a tailored black suit. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the most important role of a manager, and that&rsquo;s what I appealed to when I began the transformation at Renault. I was certain that everybody in the company would feel that they were doing something extraordinary by helping Renault achieve what we set out to accomplish.&rdquo; Moments later, though, reflecting on the suicides of Raymond and his colleagues, Ghosn adds, &ldquo;But if you say people&rsquo;s motivation is the greatest wealth and asset of the company, scenes like these cannot be ignored.&rdquo;                     The events at Renault raise larger questions about how far a company is able to push its workers. At a time when the global economy is sagging, most large corporations are trying to increase their productivity. This involves painful initiatives that can backfire, especially in countries with worker-friendly &shy;labor laws. Most restructuring efforts follow a predictable pattern: reduced budgets, layoffs among well-trained workers, and new &shy;operations in cheaper parts of the world. In the process, says Kaj Grichnik, a consultant at Booz &amp; Co., manufacturers are alienating themselves from their most critical asset: their employees. &ldquo;In &shy;exchange for working harder and harder, most manufacturers offer their workers static salaries, decreasing benefits, increasing anonymity, and abuse from middle managers,&rdquo; Grichnik says. &ldquo;And when workers feel that they &shy;are not being treated with respect, the company suffers.&rdquo;                 &nbsp;The French Ministry of Health has classified the first two deaths as workplace accidents, a category that few suicides fall under unless they are indisputably linked to job conditions. The designation ensures that the victims&rsquo; families receive life insurance payments and a pension from the government. Potentially more problematic is the fact that the company could face charges. French labor inspectors recommended to the government prosecutor in Versailles that Renault be investigated for &ldquo;moral and institutional harassment of workers,&rdquo; according to a source in the prosecutor&rsquo;s office. At the time of the suicides, French employees could not work more than 35 hours a week; that policy has since been overturned. The prosecutor has already begun an inquiry, which will include taking depositions from the director of the Technocentre and the immediate supervisors of the suicide victims, and local police are working to determine whether employees were forced to put in longer hours than legally allowed. Authorities plan to decide in the coming months whether or not to file charges.                    When Carlos Ghosn became C.E.O. of Renault in 2005, he took over a company with a superb reputation for innovation but little strategic direction. For decades, its engineers designed cars that were mechanically and aesthetically different from virtually everything else on the road. It was the first car manufacturer to put turbochargers and hatchbacks into widespread production, among other innovations.                     However, under Ghosn&rsquo;s predecessor, Louis Schweitzer, a former high-ranking official in the French government, Renault swung from one new idea to another with little apparent rationale. The company had long specialized in economical cars for the masses, but beginning in 2001, Schweitzer made an embarrassing foray into upmarket autos by introducing the Avantime, an eccentric three-door coupe-minivan, and a staid model called the Vel Satis, a luxury car that retailed for about $50,000. Neither sold well, in large part because Schweitzer had tried to enter a market that was dominated by models from companies like BMW. And during that period, while Schweitzer was distracted by the launches, the quality of Renault&rsquo;s less expensive models dropped significantly. &ldquo;Traditional customers began to question where the brand was going and why the cars they wanted weren&rsquo;t as good as they used to be,&rdquo; says Stephen Norman, Renault&rsquo;s senior vice president of global marketing.                     It was no surprise, then, that Ghosn inherited distressing numbers. Revenue in 2005 had risen only 2 percent compared with the previous year, and Renault&rsquo;s market share in Europe had dipped to less than 10 percent for the first time in years. Ghosn had seen this before, or something like it, anyway. The Brazil-born Lebanese executive had first come to Renault in 1996 as an executive vice president. Before that, Ghosn was North American C.E.O. of Michelin, a title he achieved by his late thirties, when he forged a reputation for relentlessly slashing expenses. Renault was the perfect venue for such skills. Schweitzer had set a target of trimming about $600 from the manufacturing cost of each vehicle, but when Ghosn arrived as V.P., he established a plan that would triple the projected savings. Some of his initiatives provoked strong reactions. After he closed a large Renault factory in Belgium, hundreds of workers staged work stoppages and clashed with police. Workers in France also protested, out of solidarity. Political leaders from both countries demanded that the facility remain open, but Ghosn got his way. The factory was shuttered, and by 1998, Renault&rsquo;s profit margin had recovered to a healthy 5 percent.                     By 1999, Renault had rebounded to such an extent that it was able to rescue a competitor, Nissan, which was then nearly bankrupt. Renault paid $5 billion for 44 percent of Nissan&rsquo;s stock, and Ghosn took over the top spot. He quickly restructured the company by slashing budgets and laying off workers. A year after Ghosn took over, Nissan was profitable, and within three years it was virtually debt-free. With its newly streamlined cost structure, the company pushed its operating margins to 10 percent, comparable to those of industry leaders Toyota and Honda.                     Ghosn had become the auto industry&rsquo;s best-known high-wire act: the C.E.O. who would publicly proclaim an improbable set of goals for a company and somehow manage to achieve them. A Japanese comic-book series about his exploits, The True Story of Carlos Ghosn, became a bestseller, and business school students, without irony, compared Ghosn to famous historical figures in works like &ldquo;The Change Efforts of Douglas MacArthur and Carlos Ghosn in Japan.&rdquo; His press coverage could be hyperbolic; the Detroit News, for example, ran an article with the headline &ldquo;Nissan C.E.O.: The Making of a Superstar.&rdquo; Anytime an auto company had a down quarter or two, Ghosn was rumored to be in line to save it.                     &nbsp;When Schweitzer stepped down as Renault&rsquo;s C.E.O. in 2005, the celebrated Ghosn was the obvious choice to replace him. Renault had lost much of its cost-cutting zeal in Ghosn&rsquo;s six-year absence, but the company was marginally profitable, and there was little sense of urgency about trying to fix it. Ghosn chose to retain his chief-executive posi&shy;tion at Nissan while running Renault&mdash;to this day, he spends half of each month in Japan and the other half in France, and keeps a separate briefcase for each of his jobs&mdash;and most managers and employees expected that Ghosn&rsquo;s arrival wouldn&rsquo;t mean radical upheaval. Schweitzer told the Wall Street Journal that there would be no &ldquo;sudden changes in strategy.&rdquo;                     Yet it took only a year for the perpetually kinetic Ghosn to produce a turnaround plan for Renault that was as radical as anything he had dreamed up before. Presented at a February 2006 news conference, the campaign, called Renault Commitment 2009, would deliver &ldquo;the strongest period of growth in the history of Renault,&rdquo; Ghosn proclaimed. To do this, three benchmarks had to be met in a little less than four years: an operating margin of 6 percent, a redesigned sedan called the Laguna 3 that would be ranked among the top three cars in its category, and annual sales of 3.3 million vehicles (up from 2.5 million in 2005). To increase sales by that amount, the company estimated, it would have to launch 26 new or redesigned cars&mdash;an average of one every two months.                     Soon after the announcement, Ghosn toured the company&rsquo;s facilities, looking to shore up support for his plan, and some of the meetings turned testy. Oliv&shy;ier R&eacute;moleux, director of the Renault factory in Flins-sur-Seine, outside Paris, recalled a plant manager asking whether the company could realistically hope to reach Ghosn&rsquo;s targets, especially with European sales slowing. &ldquo;Wrong question,&rdquo; R&eacute;moleux says. &ldquo;Mr. Ghosn looked at him like he was crazy. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s not a target,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s mandatory.&rsquo; Commitment 2009 was like shock treatment to our workers.&rdquo;                     Ghosn&rsquo;s management style might be considered a Western version of kaizen, the Japanese continuous-improvement method, in which small, incremental changes gradually make an organization more efficient. In a typical kaizen initiative, for example, the bolts required for a particular step on the assembly line are moved closer to the worker who needs them. Over time, thousands of similar moves combine to speed up production significantly. But in Ghosn&rsquo;s version of kaizen, you accelerate the process first and force the workers to do whatever is necessary to keep up.                &ldquo;With kaizen, you are going to be a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit less wasteful, but in the end you&rsquo;re just overlaying a little bit of improvement on the things that you&rsquo;ve always done,&rdquo; Ghosn says, in the anteroom of his office overlooking the Seine. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not transformation. I want to take Renault into unknown territory, which by definition means we will be stretching ourselves to go beyond little improvements into the untapped area where innovation occurs.&rdquo;                   Ghosn counted on the Technocentre to implement this vision. A vast 150-acre complex in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the $725 million Technocentre is where most of Renault&rsquo;s new models are born. No manufacturing happens there; instead, the facility houses 12,000 designers, engineers, technicians, and manufacturing gurus in a lablike setting designed to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas from one project to another. The campus is dominated by three buildings, all of them a silvery-white color that in sunlight takes on an antiseptic, bluish tinge, like a city in a science-fiction movie. It features gardens, waterways, and tree-lined paths, along with restaurants, retail outlets, a music room in which workers needing a break can play on company-supplied instruments, and a gym complete with a sauna and fitness classes (at noon and 5 p.m. every day). Since 2006, the Technocentre&rsquo;s sole priority has been to design the more than two dozen new models that Ghosn promised as part of Commitment 2009.                      Almost immediately after Ghosn&rsquo;s plan was announced, conditions at the Technocentre started to deteriorate, as managers began to set unrealistic timetables. As one unnamed worker later told researchers in a government-initiated investigation into the suicides, &ldquo;I leave at 6 p.m. to pick up my kids, which is an hourlong drive. I start work again at 9 p.m. and go until 11 or 12. This is every day. I have to work every weekend.&rdquo; Another worker said, &ldquo;Extra hours without getting anything for it is considered a mark of loyalty.&rdquo;                      Some Technocentre employees say they tried to reason with their supervisors, asking for leniency when they couldn&rsquo;t finish tasks on time, but they were either ignored or told to stop complaining. Christophe Delaine, a Renault electrician for 19 years, says that supervisors became increasingly impatient. &ldquo;They push people to do more than they&rsquo;re capable of,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a culture of blame in the management. It&rsquo;s deliberate.&rdquo;                     &nbsp;The situation came to a head one morning in October 2006, when Antonio B., a 39-year-old engineer, jumped to his death from an elevated walkway in one of the Technocentre buildings. He fell more than 30 feet onto concrete and died instantly. According to a union delegate who was nearby, people initially thought a chunk of the building had broken free. Several employees saw the body hit, as the engineer had chosen a location people routinely passed and a time, 10 a.m., when they were on break. On Antonio&rsquo;s computer screen, according to Technocentre employees, was a description of a bitter argument he had just had with his manager. (Neither Renault nor the local police will confirm the contents of the note.) In that description, he said that he felt unappreciated and that no matter how hard he worked, management was never satisfied. Antonio&rsquo;s death traumatized the Technocentre for weeks. One worker says, &ldquo;Coming to work each day is like going to a crime scene. I can&rsquo;t forget the sound of his falling body.&rdquo; The elevated walkway has since been closed.                     Three months later, the body of Herv&eacute; T., a 44-year-old technician, was found in the artificial pond on the grounds. He had been missing for more than a day; because of the papers on his desk and the fact that his car was still in the parking lot, co-workers assumed he had to be on the campus somewhere. But the property is immense, and by the time his body was finally discovered&mdash;in a remote corner of the pond&mdash;he had been dead for 36 hours.                     Herv&eacute; left behind a diary of a yearlong battle he had waged against depression, including a short hospital stay to treat anxiety. He described the tension at work and the fear that he didn&rsquo;t fit in at Renault anymore. &ldquo;We are always working in a state of emergency,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;This has led to a lot of negative stress. I&rsquo;m afraid to make mistakes in the documentation, and since we generate the engineering data, it can have consequences for purchasing, prototype, logistics, and manufacturing.&rdquo;                    Raymond D.&rsquo;s suicide, less than three weeks later, was perhaps more disturbing, in that people who knew him well had watched him emotionally disintegrate. In October 2006&mdash;soon after joining the team producing the Laguna 3 sedan, one of the three components of Ghosn&rsquo;s turnaround plan&mdash;Raymond&rsquo;s wife says he told her and friends that if he didn&rsquo;t complete the technical specifications for the car&rsquo;s undercarriage, which was his direct area of responsibility, the car would not come out in fall 2007 as Ghosn had promised. Worse, the Sandouville plant in northern France, where the model was being built, would be closed. It&rsquo;s irrational for one technician to assume responsibility for a factory full of workers, but Raymond&rsquo;s wife maintains that he believed he carried the future of that facility on his shoulders and that his supervisors had encouraged him to think that way. He began to put in up to 15 hours a day on the project, breaking only to eat and sleep erratically for as few as three hours a night. &ldquo;There were times,&rdquo; his wife recalls, &ldquo;when he would wake up at 3 in the morning, after going to sleep very late, and check if I was asleep. If I was, he would sneak out of the house and go back to work at the Technocentre.&rdquo;                    Raymond told his brother-in-law, also a Renault worker, that he felt as though he wasn&rsquo;t good enough for the job and that his supervisors didn&rsquo;t think he was capable, belying his positive performance reviews. Raymond said, &ldquo;Next to Carlos Ghosn, I&rsquo;m nothing,&rdquo; according to his brother-in-law. And when his wife suggested that he mention his concerns about the Laguna&rsquo;s falling behind schedule to his supervisors, his face grew ashen. &ldquo;Then I won&rsquo;t get my promotion,&rdquo; he told her. Though Raymond was losing his grip, his family feared that had they forced him to seek help, he would have completely withdrawn from them. So they did little more than gently try to persuade him to seek help at work. (At the time, the company had doctors on staff to counsel employees who needed emotional help, and an enhanced program has since been put in place.)                    His wife still lives with their young son in the home where Raymond hanged himself. She has a letter written by Raymond&rsquo;s doctor saying that he had known Raymond for 15 years and that he&rsquo;d never shown any signs of psychological problems. A tall, well-spoken woman originally from Sarajevo, Raymond&rsquo;s wife is haunted by the stark goodbye note he left on their child&rsquo;s blackboard, and the eerie reference to Ghosn. The family&rsquo;s lawyer says she believes that he left such an explicit signal because he felt that the first two suicides were dismissed by Renault as flukes. &ldquo;Every day I wake up in an empty bed and think about Carlos Ghosn, how he doesn&rsquo;t suffer the same pain that I do,&rdquo; Raymond&rsquo;s wife says. &ldquo;All I want is for Carlos Ghosn to say he did something wrong.&rdquo;                    That hasn&rsquo;t happened. Soon after Raymond&rsquo;s death, Renault issued a statement that there was &ldquo;no correlation between work conditions and the three suicides&rdquo; or between the deaths and management strategy. More recently, a Renault publicist emailed Cond&eacute; Nast Portfolio a response to questions about the suicides that read, &ldquo;We are profoundly shaken by these events, and took prompt action to assess the situation and address specific points on which improvements could be made. This does not mean that there is a direct link between work and the suicides, the causes of which are highly complex.&rdquo; The company&rsquo;s stance is that the multiple deaths were a mere coincidence and, in fact, correlated closely with the annual suicide rate in France, a relatively high 20 per 100,000 people. In the U.S., by comparison, the suicide rate is only about 10 per 100,000 people.                     &nbsp;But suicide experts say such reasoning is flawed. Broad averages can&rsquo;t predict which types of individuals will commit suicide; more specific factors such as age, gender, and occupation must be considered. In France, agricultural workers between the ages of 25 and 49 have the highest suicide rate&mdash;about 61 per 100,000 people&mdash;compared with only about 12 for every 100,000 people in that age group with jobs in corporations. Given these statistics, the recent wave of three suicides in one year at the Technocentre is actually more than double the national average for its category.                    Of course, suicides sometimes happen in groups because of the copycat phenomenon. Yet multiple people taking their lives in the workplace is unusual, and two in the space of three months is &ldquo;exceedingly rare,&rdquo; says suicide expert Sally Spencer, executive director of the Carson J. Spencer Foundation. Most people who commit suicide leave notes saying that they have relationship, family, or money problems, not that they can&rsquo;t stand their bosses. The Technocentre deaths, says psychiatrist Christophe Dejours, professor at France&rsquo;s National Academy of Arts and Trades, &ldquo;indicate that something is happening at Renault in the way the work is organized that is putting people off balance.&rdquo;                    In September 2007, yet another Renault employee killed himself. Few details were reported, other than that the victim was a maintenance technician who worked at the company&rsquo;s D&rsquo;Aubevoye facility, which tests the prototype cars coming out of the Technocentre. (The two operations are managed jointly by the same executives.) He committed suicide while out on sick leave.                    Not long after that, a Renault health-and-safety committee, prodded by the Technocentre unions, brought in the consulting firm Technologia to look into the company&rsquo;s operations at the campus. The report, which was made public, painted a picture of a troubled facility. Technologia found that 31 percent of Technocentre employees&mdash;three times the norm for workers in similar jobs&mdash;were under stress and at risk to develop psychological problems. It also said that the problems at the Technocentre can be linked to &ldquo;the combination of professional passion and ambition and a managerial system that pushes these buttons to meet their increasingly ambitious goals.&rdquo;                     The first-person accounts in the report are more specific. As one engineer in the Technocentre study put it, &ldquo;The workload is such that it is necessary to work every night of the week until about 11 or midnight.&rdquo; Another added that the extra work, performed without compensation, is taken as proof of an employee&rsquo;s &ldquo;devotion to the company.&rdquo; The comments of a third worker went straight to Ghosn&rsquo;s management style: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lot easier to give nonrealistic objectives and to see what comes out than it is to give objectives with some cohesion. From a human standpoint, it&rsquo;s a catastrophe.&rdquo;                    Earlier this year, at the midpoint of his four-year plan, Ghosn had a lot to be proud of. Renault&rsquo;s operating margin rose to 3.3 percent in 2007, from 2.6 percent the year before, and revenue was up slightly, to $60 billion (or 40.7 billion euros). Renault has expanded its presence in emerging markets, and non-European customers now account for more than a third of all sales. In addition, Renault launched six new models in 2007, with nine more coming out in 2008.                    But some analysts believe that the company will fall short of its ambitious goals and may have to scale them back in the coming months. In fact, by the most basic measure&mdash;how many cars are sold in a given year&mdash;Renault&rsquo;s sales have remained flat since 2005. The new Laguna family sedan (the car Raymond was working on, released with great hype in September 2007) failed to meet expectations.                     In the wake of the suicides, Renault named Bernard Ollivier, an engineer, to manage the Technocentre and implement new measures to improve morale at the facility. Among these initiatives are weekly meetings to bring supervisors closer to their staffs and the hiring of about 100 new vehicle-development employees to lighten the load of those already there. &ldquo;We took these steps because we&rsquo;re concerned,&rdquo; Ghosn says.                    But the innovations aren&rsquo;t enough for some employees at the facility, who dismiss them as window dressing. The amount of work and pressure, they say, remains relatively the same, and many employees still work extremely long hours. The situation was driven home again in February, a year and a half after the first suicide at the Technocentre. Even as Renault&rsquo;s human resources chief, G&eacute;rard Leclercq, was announcing at a press conference that the company was on a &ldquo;good course&rdquo; toward improving labor conditions at the facility, the automaker separately confirmed what the local newspapers had reported a few days earlier: Another Technocentre worker had been found dead&mdash;the fifth suicide among Renault employees. People close to the victim say that he had worried for some time that his job was in jeopardy because he wasn&rsquo;t proficient enough in English.                    Related LinksCarmakers Post Mixed ProgressThe Minimum Wage and EmploymentAre Minimum Wage Hikes More Effective Than Tax Rebates?
  
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<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Companies-Pay-Tuition-Cost?tid=true">
<title>School Daze</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Companies-Pay-Tuition-Cost?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[                                                                           Morgan Stanley spent $2,094,387 on C.F.O. Colm &shy;Kelleher&rsquo;s&nbsp; London assignment in 2007, including an &shy;unspecified sum on &ldquo;reimbursement for educational costs in the U.K.&rdquo;                                                                             Lehman Brothers paid $13,863 to cover the December&nbsp; 2006 tuition for the dependents of C.F.O.Ian Lowitt in London.                                                                             Aluminum company Novelis agreed in 2004 to pay the private-school tuition for the kids of Martha Finn Brooks, president and C.O.O., from grades one through 12: a perk that cost $48,741 last year.                                                                             Former Thomson Financial president and C.E.O. Sharon Rowlands got $166,158 in 2006 for her kids&rsquo; tuition, including $79,008 for the tax gross-up.                                                                                  Last year, Elizabeth Arden Inc. spent $59,150 on secondary-school bills for the children of Jacobus A.J. Steffens, the Switzerland-based international &shy;division&rsquo;s general manager.                                                                                Atari spent $51,982 on education bills and tax gross-up for the kids of its former chief technology officer Jean-Marcel Nicola&iuml;.                                                                                Software services firm DST Systems spent $99,318 last year on tuition at the American School in London for   the three children of international C.E.O. Thomas Abraham.  Related LinksLondon House Price Datapoint of the DayBringing Back Regulation's Good NameLondon Banks, Falling Down
  
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<item rdf:about="http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Challenges-Facing-Citigroups-Pandit?tid=true">
<title>Citi Under Siege</title>
<link>http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Challenges-Facing-Citigroups-Pandit?tid=true</link>
<description><![CDATA[When Vikram Pandit became C.E.O. of Citigroup in December, he could have turned his office into a miniature version of the Guggenheim Museum if he had wanted to. Citi&rsquo;s low-rise executive offices are strewn with objets d&rsquo;art, the bounty from the companies around the world that Citigroup has conquered.             But there are no lavish decorations in Pandit&rsquo;s office&mdash;no Andrew Wyeth watercolors, no Andy Warhol screen prints. Instead, there is a large sheet of graph paper, reverently framed. On it is a blizzard of numbers, words, and lines, bizarre and seemingly random, but with a kind of maniacal Rube Goldberg logic. It&rsquo;s a fitting decoration, this being Citigroup&mdash;that staggering, lurching, insanely complex Rubik&rsquo;s Cube of a financial-services company. And for Pandit, a kid from the sticks in provincial India who trained as an engineer and earned a Ph.D. in finance, the diagram is as resonant as a Norman Rockwell painting: It depicts the very first automatic-teller-machine system, inaugurated at Citibank in the early 1970s by his revered predecessor and current adviser John Reed. (View a slideshow of some of the executives who have shaped Citigroup.)             But while Pandit, with his master&rsquo;s degree in electrical engineering, wins praise for understanding the guts of Citigroup&rsquo;s myriad businesses, it&rsquo;s not the scut work that is Citi&rsquo;s problem at the moment. The bank&rsquo;s issues now are more M.B.A. than Ph.D.: Has the company grown too big to make any sense? What&rsquo;s the logic holding it together? What is the future of banking? Should Citigroup even survive intact?              And that, in turn, raises a much bigger question for Vikram Pandit: If dealmaker Sandy Weill was the C.E.O. for Citi&rsquo;s era of empire building, and lawyer Chuck Prince helped dig the company out of a legal and regulatory mess, is Pandit, a shy academic who built a reputation on managing risk, the right person to reimagine the nation&rsquo;s biggest financial-services company? Although Pandit&rsquo;s understanding of the nuts and bolts of finance was key to his getting Citi&rsquo;s top job&mdash;like every other bank in the world, Citi was terrified of its subprime exposure&mdash;the demands of the company have morphed and grown. Citi&rsquo;s challenge is now more structural than operational, a management nightmare ill suited to a C.E.O. running his first-ever public company. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know who his godfather is,&rdquo; says one former Citi banker. &ldquo;He has the background to run a hedge fund, not a bank.&rdquo;             The stock market has its doubts as well. Citi shares have declined consistently during Pandit&rsquo;s tenure. While much of that slump can be blamed on dismal business in the financial sector in general, the company seems particularly vexed: Even a smaller-than-expected loss in the first quarter couldn&rsquo;t boost the stock. Citi shares are down 42 percent on Pandit&rsquo;s watch.             Citi&rsquo;s quarterly loss, its third in a row, reflects a widely held view that the company remains uniquely exposed to an economy that is darkening, both in the U.S. and abroad. For instance, worsening consumer credit will hit Citigroup&rsquo;s enormous credit-card business hard; its most recent quarterly results include a $2.5 billion charge to bulk up against coming credit losses.             Pandit and other senior Citi execs&mdash;including a handful who followed Pandit to the company from his previous post at Morgan Stanley&mdash;insist that they&rsquo;re on course. Since almost 50 percent of Citi&rsquo;s business is outside the U.S. and close to 35 percent is in emerging markets, Pandit says he is focusing on those areas for the company&rsquo;s future growth. In fact, he talks more about growing in the future than winding his way out of Citi&rsquo;s past, reciting his strategy in well-rehearsed cadences, reflecting a Pandit-era culture that favors neologisms like globality and clientcentricity.             &ldquo;When you look at growth patterns, as the world goes from 6 billion to 9 billion people, the overwhelming majority of them are going to be in emerging markets,&rdquo; Pandit says. &ldquo;As Wayne Gretzky said, you need to &lsquo;skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it&rsquo;s been.&rsquo;&rdquo;        &nbsp;     Citigroup, of course, isn&rsquo;t just a bank; it&rsquo;s a multinational colossus, with 200 million customers in more than 100 countries. Its fingers are in every &shy;financial-services pie&mdash;banks, credit cards, brokerages, investment banking, and hedge funds. It is less a company than a collection of city-states. The glass-half-full way of looking at Citi is to see it as &ldquo;a company that could not be created today at any price that would be rational,&rdquo; as Michael Klein, Citi&rsquo;s outgoing chairman of institutional clients, describes it.             The glass-half-empty view&mdash;the prevailing one on Wall Street&mdash;is that Citi is unmanageable in its current form. And it is this mess that Pandit must somehow unravel.              Managing Citi at a time like this requires many qualities, but optimism must surely count among them. In person, Pandit is cordial, supremely confident, and transparent up to a point, though he reverts to hostile-witness mode when asked about his private life, acting more like the hedge fund manager he recently was than the head of an immense publicly held company. One longtime associate tells me that he has known Pandit for many years but has never had dinner with him or been to his home, where Pandit lives with his wife and two adolescent children. Pandit recently bought a sprawling apartment on Central Park West that once belonged to the late actor Tony Randall.            Pandit is one of the most prominent Asians in corporate America, an emblematic Indian American success story. His hometown is not the cosmopolitan coastal city of Mumbai, as is commonly and incorrectly reported in the Western media, but Nagpur, a community farther east. It is a kind of Indian Middletown, located near the geographic center of the subcontinent. His father, now retired, was a pharmaceutical executive. His family name is of Hindu Kashmiri extraction&mdash;derived from the Hindi word for pundit. Nagpur is hardly the Paris of the subcontinent. It&rsquo;s a market town of about 2.5 million people and an overnight train ride from Mumbai. During the British Raj, Nagpur became a center of the noncooperation movement against British rule. More recently, it has become a major manufacturing center.            Just like a provincial American city, Nagpur had little to offer its ambitious youth. A European diplomat based in New Delhi tells me that even when such towns grow richer, they often remain culturally stagnant. &ldquo;There is no orchestra, no theater, no rock bands. Boredom is the chief trouble of India.&rdquo;            But, he adds, Pandit didn&rsquo;t stay long enough to experience much of that. &ldquo;He got to America when he was 16 and stayed.&rdquo;            That was 1973, when Pandit was admitted to Columbia University to study engineering&mdash;a typical, if precocious, career path for upwardly mobile young Indians at the time. He charged through college in three years. Pandit downplays his youthful brainpower, perhaps anxious to avoid being labeled a geek. He says, for instance, that he cracked the books during the summer because it was hard for foreign students to get summer jobs.            For Pandit, Columbia&rsquo;s academic fare was far more palatable than a traditional Indian education. He gravitated toward economics and found the numbers-meets-strategy approach that would come to frame his career. &ldquo;I found economics was an interesting juncture,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;somewhere between the philosophical ways of looking at the world versus the precise engineering perspective. It was a way to blend both views, which I found fascinating.&rdquo;            He received a master&rsquo;s degree in engineering and then began studying finance. In 1982, he accepted a teaching position at Indiana University, in Bloomington, while completing his doctoral dissertation, &ldquo;Asset Prices in a Heterogeneous Consumer Economy.&rdquo; According to the abstract, his paper &ldquo;examines the properties of asset prices in a multi-consumer, dynamic economy under uncertainty.&rdquo; It sounds difficult, and it is, even by doctoral-dissertation standards. But it would define the playing field for Pandit once he arrived on Wall Street.            The Indiana campus was a far cry from the urban landscape of New York. &ldquo;He was an excellent teacher, but being from India and New York City, he felt that maybe Bloomington was a little too small,&rdquo; recalls Robert Klemkowski, who headed the business school&rsquo;s finance department and hired Pandit.             While at Indiana, Pandit worked on a project for Morgan Stanley, and he was soon offered a job at the investment bank. Morgan Stanley was a partnership then and hired just 20 new M.B.A.&rsquo;s each year. Its total head count, a mere 2,500, was a fraction of what it is today. Pandit began at the bottom of the ladder and moved steadily up the rungs, achieving a reputation as a cheerful, diligent, and uncomplaining worker bee. By the late 1980s, he was already performing impressively in Morgan Stanley&rsquo;s capital markets division. It was a training ground for future leaders at the investment bank&mdash;former chairman Dick Fisher followed that career path as well&mdash;and Pandit was a steady, if not conspicuous, performer.       &nbsp;     One former colleague remembers Pandit as &ldquo;a thoughtful, conscientious, understated guy.&rdquo; He was &ldquo;easy to work with, and there was no standout thing about him,&rdquo; the colleague says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s kind of interesting that he&rsquo;s gotten to this position because usually people who &shy;do that are much more self-promoting and political.&rdquo;            But Pandit&rsquo;s ascendance&mdash;he pitched himself as a numbers guy who could handle the M.B.A.-speak&mdash;was perfectly timed. Wall Street was in the process of becoming increasingly recondite and concept-driven. Pandit was instrumental in creating the first options on the Nikkei stock index in Japan and the XMI index, which tracked the Dow Jones industrial average. It was an &shy;innovative instrument, because at the time, investors couldn&rsquo;t buy options outside the exchange.            Then, in the mid-to-late-&rsquo;80s, new and sometimes esoteric hedging strategies became all the rage, some using Pandit&rsquo;s three-year options and others using portfolio insurance, which would soon become notorious. The strategy employed computerized trading to sell stocks swiftly in market declines, a tactic later widely blamed for contributing to the market crash of October 1987.            Pandit sees parallels between the 1980s portfolio-insurance craze and the recent excesses involving mortgage securities. &ldquo;People felt protected because they had portfolio insurance and the program trading behind it,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;They felt they could take on more risk, and if the markets started going down, they could hedge out. But a lot of people took that same approach, and when the market started going down, everybody converged and the system was overloaded.&rdquo; So, ironically, &ldquo;what was right for an individual investor or company created a systemic issue for the entire market,&rdquo; he says.            Similarly, Pandit notes, the big banks hedged the risk of their subprime loans by securitizing and selling mortgage-backed securities, thereby turning a risk-reduction strategy into a problem.               For helping flag portfolio insurance as a problem, Pandit was named a managing director of Morgan Stanley in 1989. A year later, he became head of equity capital markets and occasionally got his name in the trade press by creating new and improved financial instruments. By 2000, he was one of the top-earning executives at the firm, snagging a then-impressive bonus of $8.4 million and, in September, an even more impressive set of titles. He and Stephan Newhouse were named co-presidents and co-chief operating officers of Morgan&rsquo;s institutional-securities group. John Havens, one of Pandit&rsquo;s closest friends, replaced Pandit as head of worldwide institutional equities.           Not long afterward, Morgan Stanley&rsquo;s internal politics boiled over, and Pandit and his prot&eacute;g&eacute;s became involved in a boardroom putsch. They joined a group of top traders and bankers at the firm who sought to oust C.E.O. Philip Purcell, a former Dean Witter executive whom they saw as destroying the Morgan Stanley culture. The Dean Witter and Morgan Stanley sides of the company never jelled, and internally, Purcell was made out to be the reason.           The details of the fight were chronicled in dozens of articles and even a book&mdash;Patricia Beard&rsquo;s Blue Blood and Mutiny. The outcome for Pandit was that his palace coup didn&rsquo;t work, and by March 2005, he was gone. Havens stayed at Pandit&rsquo;s side, quitting Morgan at the same time. A top risk-management official, Brian Leach, quit a few weeks later, and so did two other heavy-hitting bankers, Joseph Perella and Terry Meguid.           As Havens describes it, he and Pandit planned their future as a kind of intellectual exercise: &ldquo;We got together and started thinking about our future, and because we had worked together for 20 years and had a level of respect for each other, we did a lot of this thinking and planning together at that point.&rdquo;           As so often happens when like-minded Wall Streeters engage in intellectual exercises, a hedge fund emerged: &ldquo;We had thought for quite some time that there were great opportunities in building a multi-strategy fund if you could go out and find a group of people who just were excellent at what they did,&rdquo; Havens says. &ldquo;So that&rsquo;s what we ended up doing.&rdquo;           While Purcell, their old boss, was slowly spit-roasted in the media, Pandit and Havens started their hedge fund, Old Lane Partners. From the start, it was overflowing with institutional capital and eventually had $4.5 billion under management.           Old Lane was a comfy perch for the corporate exiles&mdash;and the 20 percent share of profits and 2 percent management fee the fund charged investors certainly helped&mdash;but it was not a successful fund, despite Pandit&rsquo;s reputation as an expert in managing money and sidestepping risk. Multi-strategy funds, by definition, can engage in any kind of investment strategy, and such funds are supposed to outperform less risky investments in good times and bad. Old Lane did not. From its inception in April 2006 to this past April, the fund was flat, according to a Citi official. In 2007, it returned just 2.8 percent after fees, half of what Standard &amp; Poor&rsquo;s 500-stock index returned with dividends reinvested.      &nbsp;     But Old Lane&rsquo;s failure managed not to tarnish Pandit himself; after all, hedge funds were suffering across the board, and Pandit&rsquo;s credibility as a steady hand was not affected. So in early 2007, Citi C.E.O. Chuck Prince decided to buy Old Lane as a way of bringing Pandit and company onboard. Citigroup vice chairman Lewis Kaden, who was involved in the acquisition, says that buying Old Lane &ldquo;was appealing to us because of Vikram&rsquo;s reputation and experience&rdquo; and because it would bring in the &ldquo;half a dozen founding partners,&rdquo; including Havens and Old Lane risk management chief Leach (who would assume the same post at Citi). As Kaden puts it, the purchase of Old Lane was grounded in &ldquo;optionality&rdquo;&mdash;the idea that &ldquo;people with this background could play other roles at Citigroup over time&rdquo; instead of simply running a $4.5 billion hedge fund.           The price Citi paid for Old Lane was never announced publicly, but it is privately confirmed to be $800 million, one-fifth of which went to Pandit. When the transaction closed in July, he received $165.2 million for his share of Old Lane, $100.3 million of which he put back into the fund, according to company records. There it will remain, in either Old Lane or other Citi hedge funds, for another four years. Pandit has the $65.2 million he cashed out, another $2.5 million he was awarded by the board in January, plus restricted stock grants and other goodies that should push his first-year pay well north of $200 million.           After the acquisition, Pandit was promptly named the head of Citi&rsquo;s &shy;alternative-investments unit, which now included Old Lane. Other fund managers from Old Lane were shifted elsewhere, however, which triggered a provision in the fund&rsquo;s partnership agreement that allowed investors to bail out if three or more key people departed. Almost all the investors&mdash;mainly institutions&mdash;decided to pull out their money. When the fund was shut down to outside investors in June, it was almost an anticlimax.           Old Lane certainly served its purpose, though, if its purpose was to function less as an investment vehicle than as an expensive way to bring Pandit and his cohorts to Citigroup. After six months of heading the alternative-investments group, Pandit was named head of the institutional clients group in October. Then in November came Prince&rsquo;s forced departure, and Pandit emerged as C.E.O.            Just as Prince, a lawyer, was the right man for the Citi helm in the wake of its Enron and WorldCom misadventures, Pandit fit the moment. Risk, having been handled so badly across the industry, had become a Wall Street buzzword, and Pandit was viewed as Mr. Risk. It was his brand, so to speak, even if, in reality, that branding was a stretch: Old Lane was clearly a disappointment, and even Pandit&rsquo;s Morgan Stanley experience was more about avoiding risk than dealing with it directly.          Pandit has surrounded himself with an inner circle of trusted advisers, led by Havens and chief administrative officer Don Callahan. And he has researched his plan to fix Citigroup with a focus bordering on obsession. He has consumed every scrap of information about Citi that he can, reading yellowed texts with titles like Marcellus Hartley, A Brief Memoir (Hartley was the first president of the International Banking Corp., which was acquired by the old National City Bank) and carefully preserved annual reports dating back to 1956. All were provided for him by his fellow history buff John Reed, whose name is duly inscribed in each volume. Together, the volumes chronicle the corporate folklore of the tradition-conscious financial superstore that Pandit now runs.          Pandit has traced the company&rsquo;s various permutations back to 1812, when the City Bank of New York was founded as a successor to Alexander Hamilton&rsquo;s ill-fated Bank of the United States. &ldquo;With any organization that&rsquo;s been around for 200 years, it has a history and culture,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It develops a unique DNA in many ways. To get a clear sense of that picture has been very important to me.&rdquo;          The unflattering truth about Citigroup today is that the company&rsquo;s defining quality is not innovation&mdash;not A.T.M.&rsquo;s, unsecured personal loans, credit cards, or any of the company&rsquo;s other firsts from its golden days&mdash;but overreaching (as with the subprime mess) and stagnation. No amount of nostalgia can paper over the troubles that face the sprawling company. Of the 25 independent research firms surveyed by BNY Jaywalk, only five rate Citigroup shares a &ldquo;buy,&rdquo; with the rest rating it &ldquo;neutral&rdquo; or &ldquo;sell.&rdquo;          In the first nine months of Pandit&rsquo;s tenure, the company has been hit by staggering losses stemming from the burdens of the recent past. Citi amassed $7.6 billion in red ink since Pandit came onboard, with mortgage-related write-downs (mostly the legacy of his predecessor) exceeding $54 billion, much of that from subprime securities and other mortgage-related financial instruments. Citi, of course, was hardly alone. Prince was eased out the door at almost the same time as Merrill Lynch&rsquo;s Stan O&rsquo;Neal during the same round of subprime-related head choppings.     &nbsp;     Pandit plans to shed $400 billion of Citi&rsquo;s least desirable legacy assets over the next three years. He&rsquo;s already parted with Diners Club (though the impetus for that move predated his arrival), as well as CitiCapital, the company&rsquo;s equipment financing division, and there have been miscellaneous divestitures of other minor units. There have also been cutbacks: Bank branches have been shut, and fewer mortgages have been written. But even if that $400 billion could be removed from the balance sheet tomorrow, it would reduce Citi&rsquo;s $2.2 trillion in total assets only by less than a fifth, which may not be enough. Citi&rsquo;s elephantine structure was being criticized well before Pandit came on the scene, and the pressure to break up the company has intensified since he arrived. It&nbsp;didn&rsquo;t help when Reed told the Financial Times in April that the merger of Citicorp with Salomon Smith Barney was a &ldquo;mistake.&rdquo;          Perhaps most painful of all for Pandit are the suggestions among analysts and the media that he is not the solution to Citi&rsquo;s ills but part of the problem. A widely hyped three-and-a-half-hour dog and pony show for analysts and investors on May 9 received tepid reviews, and an employee forum held five days later played to a corporate auditorium with conspicuously empty seats. He was criticized after the company&rsquo;s annual meeting in April. Some of Pandit&rsquo;s moves&mdash;such as his revival of the &ldquo;Citi Never Sleeps&rdquo; ad slogan from the 1970s and the &ldquo;important&rdquo; email that he spammed to customers in May describing his plans for the company&mdash;have been greeted with something approaching derision.          &ldquo;Much ado about nothing,&rdquo; wrote Oppenheimer &amp; Co. analyst Meredith Whitney after the May 9 program, which she said &ldquo;regurgitated themes outlined over the past several months&rdquo; and was identical to one given by Prince a year and a half before. Citi, she believes, may be &ldquo;past the point of fixing.&rdquo; Critics like Whitney contend that Pandit has not sufficiently addressed the company&rsquo;s pressing problems, such as its antiquated and incompatible technology, which will be expensive and disruptive to fix. Pandit is also faulted for not having a clear enough post-cutback plan. &ldquo;You grow to greatness; you don&rsquo;t shrink to greatness,&rdquo; says Jim Huguet, a longtime Citigroup critic, who runs Great Companies Investment Management in Tampa, Florida.          Even if Citi completes its shrinkage, it&rsquo;s not clear how it will then grow. The firm&rsquo;s top brass, now dominated by longtime Pandit cohorts from Morgan Stanley and Citi who were elevated by Pandit, are putting on a brave front. But much is out of their control. Gary Crittenden, Citi&rsquo;s chief financial officer, says that the company has acted to reduce risk in its positions in anticipation of a major increase in home foreclosures during the year ahead: &ldquo;Although you can calibrate the impact on credit cards pretty well, because we&rsquo;ve been through some of these cycles as an industry in the past, this is kind of new territory with real estate. So the order of magnitude of that could be very large, and it may play out over a long period of time.&rdquo;          That, in turn, will cast a pall on Citi&rsquo;s ability to deploy its cash. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re in a strong capital position,&rdquo; Crittenden says. &ldquo;Still, we have mortgages on our books, ordinary nonqualifying prime mortgages, as do others, and these are not trivial amounts. As long as you have those exposures, you&rsquo;re going to be careful about how you commit your capital, even if you&rsquo;re in a strong capital position.&rdquo;          As for the omnipresent stench of subprime mortgages and the related derivatives, Pandit acknowledges that more write-downs are possible. So one would think that Citi would be careful about spending money, even if on dividends, particularly when there are no earnings from which to pay them. Asked about the dividend, Crittenden points out that, losses notwithstanding, the company&rsquo;s cash flow is &ldquo;largely unimpeded&rdquo; and the dividend will continue.&nbsp;            Back in India, Pandit&rsquo;s rise to the top of the U.S. financial heap was greeted with something approaching ecstasy. While not quite the classic Bollywood story&mdash;Pandit is too wellborn to resemble the archetypal Indian movie hero&mdash;it comes close.         In an interview with the Times of India, Pandit&rsquo;s father, Shankar, described the phone conversation he had with his son after he became head of Citigroup. Speaking in their native tongue of Marathi, Pandit told his father &ldquo;in a calm but happy voice that everything had gone well.&rdquo; Shankar added, &ldquo;We do not use words like thank you and sorry in our conversations. But my son was definitely very excited. In fact, my grandson Rahul could not contain his excitement, and he sounded so proud of his father, telling me how thousands of people were listening to his dad speak.&rdquo;         Pandit is not a sentimental person, not even about India. Though now a U.S. citizen, Pandit, as an Indian native, is entitled to the Indian government&rsquo;s Person of Indian Origin card, which would give him various privileges in India, including the ability to buy real estate. Even outsiders who marry Indians can get a P.I.O. card. But Pandit doesn&rsquo;t have one, and he doesn&rsquo;t even seem to know much about it.         Instead, his passion is reserved for Citi, and one senses in talking to him that he is almost frenetically anxious to make it all work. At the moment, Pandit is deeply concerned about recruiting top people to Citigroup&mdash;he&rsquo;s &ldquo;talentcentric,&rdquo; as former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin puts it. Kaden tells me how he flew to London with Pandit to recruit Terri Dial, a top retail-banking executive at Lloyd&rsquo;s of London. In two hours, he says, she was won over. &ldquo;He breeds loyalty in people because he&rsquo;s humble and willing to listen,&rdquo; says Ajay Banga, a Citi veteran who runs the firm&rsquo;s Asian operations.         Banga compares Pandit to his old boss Sandy Weill, whose instincts for dealmaking were legendary. &ldquo;In his gut is a comprehension of risk-reward,&rdquo; Banga says. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s like Sandy. Sandy used to get it.&rdquo;         Perhaps, but what Citigroup needs now is not a wannabe Sandy Weill but someone with the elusive qualities needed to revive the banking giant from its slump. Pandit&rsquo;s current course doesn&rsquo;t seem bold enough, nor does his vision seem clear enough, to put the lumbering colossus back on track. The Citi execs I interview seem hard-pressed to come up with a cogent answer for what would fix the company, and they also seem a bit anxious to correct any impression that Pandit is indecisive, as some press reports have suggested. Callahan says, &ldquo;He was just in here: &lsquo;I want to do this, I want to do that.&rsquo; He&rsquo;s a real man of action, always has been&mdash;a mind that works quickly.&rdquo;         Money manager Jim Huguet points out that when he interviewed Jack Welch for his 1999 book Great Companies, Great Returns, Welch told him that it took five years before he began to feel that he understood General Electric. Pandit realizes that the market will simply not wait that long.Related LinksLet the Hedge Fund Lawsuits BeginCiti Shows the LoveCredit Losses: The Good News
      
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