Word: ken
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...long ago, many would have placed Enron's Ken Lay--innovative, daring--in the pantheon of American business. That such a judgment could be made by those not otherwise known for idiocy places our value system into question. The task of companies is to provide returns for investors and so create jobs and spread wealth. But by the '90s, top businessmen had become celebrities, writing books (or having them ghostwritten), gracing covers of magazines and preaching the wonders of American management and transparent accounting practices to companies in other countries. After Enron, the audiences overseas for heroes of glamour capitalism...
...Enron affair matured into a scandal just as it began to seem that the culture of celebrity was defunct; suddenly, we remembered that Barbra Streisand was not a political philosopher. Neither is Jack Welch or Bill Gates or, certainly, Ken Lay. In the '90s, we treated businessmen as if they were film stars (and we treated film stars like gods). But we lend stars our affections only; we lend businessmen our chance of future prosperity. A lesson from Enron: we would be wise to entrust that responsibility to those with their feet on the ground, not on a pedestal. Even...
...blackout period - oh, that blackout period. It may be a pleasant thought that Ken Lay wouldn't have been able to pay back that billion-dollar loan with company stock during the lockdown. But if Bush really wanted to make things fair for workers and investors, "OK for the sailor" and "OK for the captain," as he put it Friday, he'd make a company halt all trading of its stock - Wall Street too - while a blackout period was on. Then we'd see how often those blackouts occurred - and what happened during them...
...times Enron found a little government intervention came in handy. When India delayed approval of Enron's $3 billion power plant in Dabhol in 1996, Clinton White House counselor Mack McLarty instructed the U.S. ambassador in New Delhi to monitor it and gave regular progress reports to Enron chairman Ken Lay. (Four days before the project received its final O.K., Enron gave $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee.) And when Enron was trying to sell its interest in the Indian project, the New York Daily News reported, Vice President Dick Cheney raised the issue in a meeting last June...
...market responded, and now, says Ken Jacobsen, a vice president at the Segal Co., a consulting firm with headquarters in New York City, "we've got complicating options at almost every level of health care." The newest options provide more choice, but they burden the consumer with more decisions. On today's health-care menu...