Word: jeane
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...Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is considered one of history's great gastronomes. The 18th century Frenchman, however, spent years as a lawyer before openly pursuing his epicurean calling. It's a trajectory scores of Americans have traveled in recent years as they abandoned the corporate world and sought greater happiness at cooking academies. But if Brillat-Savarin were around today, he would probably skip the law and head straight to the kitchen. The fastest-growing population in the nation's cooking schools is young people who refuse to do time as lawyers, orthopedists or even traditional college students but instead...
...days when CEOs in Europe could count on cozy relationships with boards, governments and financial institutions to protect them are gone. In part, that is a reaction to the irrational exuberance of the late 1990s, when CEOs like Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi acted like rock stars and paid themselves accordingly, and to the scandals that have enveloped European firms, such as Italy's Parmalat and the Dutch retailer Ahold, which owns a number of U.S. grocery chains. But the change also reflects the influence of American-style investor activism and the growing clout of U.S. pension funds in stock...
...through attrition, and he has linked the pay of thousands of managers to tough performance targets. Debt tumbled from $66.7 billion to $51 billion in his first year, in part because Breton persuaded the French government and bondholders to put up fresh capital. Coming in a close second is Jean-Rene Fourtou, 64, a drug-industry veteran who took over France's teetering Vivendi two years ago, and is turning it around (see next story...
...compensation has become a hot button for investors, who are increasingly unhappy about overpaying for underperformance. By U.S. standards most European executives aren't lavishly paid, but they have been trying to catch up. Not anymore. The board of British drug firm GlaxoSmithKline cut the pay package of CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier last December after shareholders voted it down at the annual meeting. (He still earned $5 million last year in salary and bonus, a 14% raise.) Even at Ahold, which was in need of a white knight following an accounting scandal last year, the new CEO, Anders Moberg, faced...
...When Jean-Rene Fourtou took over as chief executive of Vivendi Universal on July 3, 2002, he says, he planned to carry out "a calm diagnosis" of the company's many problems. Instead, he was plunged into a maelstrom. Two days after his appointment, Moody's threatened to reduce Vivendi's credit rating to junk status and thus seriously imperil its finances. Fourtou's predecessor, the celebrity CEO Jean-Marie Messier, had leveraged Vivendi to the bursting point. His legacy included opaque accounts, a huge pile of debt--$34.5 billion, of which $5.5 billion had to be repaid within nine...