Novartis CEO Sends Emails to 140 Animal Rights Activists: “You Are Criminals”

On October 5, 2009

Novartis CEO Sends Emails to 140 Animal Rights Activists: “You Are Criminals”

The news that Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella has sent 140 animal rights activists letters warning them to back off -- they burned down his vacation home and desecrated his family grave in July -- will have many in the pharmaceutical business cheering in their cubicles: Finally, someone is taking a stand and defending the industry, instead of cowering behind press releases and security guards.
On October 5, 2009

The Power of Goal Setting

I was recently invited by Phil Taylor of Goal Achievers International to join his LinkedIn network. At 65 I have achieved most of what I have wanted in life but as I skimmed his website, much of what he said resonated with me particularly about the importance of writing down your goals. My introduction to formal goal setting was in 1979. I was a general manager of a division in an Australian multinational (suffering I admit from a mid–life crisis) and a young graduate I had hired suggested that I should consider a career as an investment banker. As I was 35 I dismissed the idea as impossible but then in a moment of serendipity came across a book by...


On October 5, 2009

Benioff To Ballmer: ‘Now That’s Efficient!’

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn't make a lot of friends last week when he wrote that, with corporate budgets shrinking, customers will turn to Microsoft to get more technology bang for their beleaguered bucks. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is the most recent to express his displeasure while describing his cloud-based company's growth and introducing new features to the company's call center technology during a conference I attended at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in New York City. Benioff boasted that his company runs applications for its 63,000 customers on only 1,500 PC servers -- 500 on the West Coast, 500 on the East Coast, and 500 in Singapore. "Now that's efficient," he gloated. It's hard to imagine Microsoft using less than...


On October 5, 2009

New FTC Rules for Bloggers and Celebrities Are All Steve Garvey’s Fault

The FTC has issued new guidelines for celebrities and bloggers when it comes to endorsing products in ads or blogs. If you don't like them, you can blame Steve Garvey, former former first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, who annoyed the FTC when he won a long-fought legal battle to escape liability for an allegedly deceptive weight-loss product he once hawked in infomercials.


On October 5, 2009

Insurers Love New Hurricane Study

Insurance companies say they are only a hurricane away from being obliterated by a killer storm producing thousands of claims, and need to charge higher rates in coastal states. No surprise, then, that they've embraced a recent study published in Nature -- one that found the last decade of Atlantic Ocean hurricane activity was the highest in a thousand years. The study by Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann also says the higher hurricane activity will continue due to high sea levels caused by global warming. The National Science Foundation funded Mann's research, so critics can't claim that the insurance industry had a hand in his conclusions. But the rates insurers can charge for homeowners insurance is as much about politics...
On October 5, 2009

Salesforce, Cisco Lend Each Other A Hand

Salesforce.com and Cisco struck up a partnership giving Salesforce access to Cisco telephony applications while giving Cisco a leg up into the smaller end of the market and a look into the working of the software-as-a-service business model.
On October 5, 2009

The Man Behind the Uniform

I delivered the keynote address this morning to the fantastic folks at the Virginia SHRM State Conference in Virginia Beach. It was a full, large ballroom of incredibly gracious attendees who warmly gave me their attention and kindly laughed at all the right parts. One gentleman approached me after and told me how much he agreed [...]
On October 5, 2009

Microchip Implant to Link Your Health Records, Credit History, Social Security

Novartis and Proteus Biomedical are not the only companies hoping to implant microchips into patients so that their pill-popping habits can be monitored. VeriChip of Delray Beach, Fl., has an even bolder idea: an implanted chip that links to an online database containing all your medical records, credit history and your social security ID.
Next Page
Previous Page