Word: baptism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like Jews at a baptism, Gadfly had to ask the person next to us what exactly was going down in the water. Turns out the Northeast’s best and brightest prefer to settle their collegiate rivalries by imitating the slave galley on a Roman warship...
...third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson ordered a naval and military expedition to North Africa, without the authorization of Congress, to put down regimes involved in slavery and piracy. The war was the first in which the U.S. flag was carried and planted overseas; it saw the baptism by fire of the U.S. Marine Corps--whose anthem boasts of action on "the shores of Tripoli"--and it prefigured later struggles with both terrorism and jihad...
Fourtou's experience may be extreme, but it's emblematic of the baptism by fire that new European CEOs often face these days. Fourtou is practically the anti-Messier. A sturdily built rugby fan from southwestern France, he is as low-key as Messier was flashy. Unlike Messier, whose acquisition spree was propelled by a subsequently discredited vision of the future, Fourtou has taken an approach to Vivendi that is basic. Rather than embracing a grandiose strategy, he started by selling what was easiest to sell while asking shareholders to be patient. After some strategic twisting and turning, he decided...
...vigilance. In the end, socially-engineered viruses rely on user gullibility to spread. But you don’t have to stop using e-mail to be safe—just be a little more liberal with the “delete” key. Hopefully, the current baptism by fire will convince new and novice users that e-mail attachments aren’t necessarily friendly. Because if not, socially-engineered viruses with payloads that do more than open security holes—like payloads that delete files or steal passwords—could make the current hacker spat...
...sales and market share in Europe, where it lost €447 million before tax in the second quarter to June. Workers at Genk last week staged two 24-hour strikes at the plant, which makes the Mondeo sedan and Transit minivan; they're threatening more stoppages. It's a baptism by fire for Lewis Booth, 54, the former head of Mazda who took over at Ford of Europe in August. "The automotive market in Europe has deteriorated dramatically since only a year ago," he says. The risk for Ford is that if it can't get the Belgian unrest under...