Word: messier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...brash, swashbuckling style of fallen supermen like Messier--who referred to himself as a "master of the world" and published two autobiographies, one while he was CEO and a sequel after he was ousted--has been consigned to history, for now. "The extreme case of 'the company, c'est moi' is behind us," says Booz Allen's Newkirk. At engineering giant ABB, based in Zurich, Jurgen Dormann stunned senior managers by telling them in one of his first meetings after taking office in September 2002, "I don't like to work too hard or take decisions. You do that...
...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 months--and no cash...
...visited Umm Khalid, a sad-looking woman there, she told me that I shouldn't view her as poor. "I am well-educated. I drive my own car," she said, waving her hand around her neatly arranged, well-swept tent as if to compare it with those of her messier neighbors. The proud woman's son Fahad Salaam, 15, was playing in the front yard of the family home in Fallujah a few weeks ago when he was killed by a piece of shrapnel from an American bomb. "Where are the human rights in Iraq now?" she asked me. "Where...
...problem confronting the U.S. in Fallujah and elsewhere. U.S. officials have tended to characterize the Sunni insurgency as the work of Baathist "bitter-enders" and expatriate terrorists - not the sort of folks with whom the U.S. maintains a "discussion track." But the reality of Fallujah is plainly a lot messier: Brig.-Gen. Kimmitt insists the Iraqis killed there are almost all insurgents, but local hospital sources insist most were civilians. The scale of the casualties, and the pause for negotiations suggests that instead of isolating a group of desperadoes, the U.S. has confronted broad opposition in Fallujah...