http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/story/2011-11-20/johnson-and-johnson/51314960/1?loc=interstitialskip How are all those webinars and credo surveys doing for you guys?
This US Today article doesn't even mention the LEVAQUIN lawsuits that accuse J&J of failing to properly warn doctors and patients about the risk of tendon rupture w Quinolones. Bad news.
The Company that Played with FIRE This article takes it to another level - take no prisoners http://blog.nj.com/njv_tom_moran/2011/11/nj_lets_wealthy_executives_liv.html N.J. lets wealthy executives live in Pennsylvania, at a big cost At the end of the working day, you can see the helicopters lift off from Merck and Johnson & Johnson, their happy executives aboard, heading west to their homes in Pennsylvania. William Weldon, the CEO at J&J, has a helicopter pad near his home in Bucks County. At Merck, a helicopter shuttles executives back to Doylestown Airport almost every day — a sensible move given that the firm’s top three executives all live in Pennsylvania. The reason they are flying the coop each night is simple: They are taking advantage of a quirk in the law that lets them pay income taxes to the state in which they choose to live, not the state in which they work. So they shopped for homes in Pennsylvania. This arrangement is unusual, and it costs New Jersey’s Treasury $50 million a year, by a conservative estimate. “It is the craziest thing ever,” says Joseph Seneca, a respected economist at Rutgers University who almost never uses such unequivocal language. “I don’t think you want a state policy that encourages people to leave your state. And this one explicitly does that.” By basing their companies in New Jersey, they can tap the state’s skilled and educated workforce. But choppering home every night means they can pay a flat tax of 3 PERCENT to Pennsylvania, rather than roughly 9 percent to New Jersey. So the choppers will continue to fly. The secretaries will continue to pay higher rates than the CEOs. The commuters to New York will still get slammed in a way their brothers from the south do not.
Re: The Company that Played with FIRE They also took over Big Pharma Cohan: Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street? By William D. CohanJan 2, 2012 6:01 PM About William D Cohan William D. Cohan is the author of the recently released "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times bestsellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- William Cohan, author of "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and a Bloomberg View columnist, talks about an article in a recent Journal of Business Ethics that blames the financial crisis on corporate psychopaths at the helm of financial institutions. Cohan speaks with Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg Television's "InsideTrack. (Cohan is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Source: Bloomberg) It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The“corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame. Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry”lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.” As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.” How do people with such obvious personality flaws make it to the top of seemingly successful corporations? Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and high turnover of “key personnel.” Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of“charm” and “charisma,” which makes “their behaviour invisible” and “makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.” Stable Environment Until the last third of the 20th century, he writes, companies were mostly stable and slow to change. Lifetime employment was a reasonable expectation and people rose through the ranks. This stable environment meant corporate psychopaths “would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects.” For Wall Street -- a rapidly changing and highly dynamic corporate environment if there ever was one, especially when the firms transformed themselves from private partnerships into public companies with quarterly reporting requirements -- the trouble started when these charmers made their way to corner offices of important financial institutions. Then, according to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield“considerable power.” They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single-minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.” Boddy doesn’t name names, but the type of personality he describes is recognizable to all from the financial crisis.
