Word: messieres
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Person of the Week CANCELLED He took Vivendi Universal on a corporate buying spree, trying to transform a staid, provincial French utilities firm into a multinational media giant. But Jean-Marie Messier overreached and Vivendi's stock price collapsed, leading to his dismissal as company chairman last week...
...universal idiot; the boob who believed it. Believed in what? That I was going to become rich, powerful, partake in the absolute quest of human happiness - one attainable with the laws of the triumphant market. Or better yet, that I'd become a little bit like Jean-Marie Messier myself. Why not give it a try? For more than a year, I only wore socks with holes in them, just like Jean-Marie. I also ridiculously parted my hair on the side and wore the permanent, ingratiating smile of a used-car salesman. I even made desperate efforts to avoid...
...French business titan Jean-Marie Messier been a footballer, he might not be suffering disgrace and joblessness today. Last month, after France's World Cup humiliation, President Jacques Chirac advised disgruntled fans against turning on their beloved Bleus - warning "we mustn't burn today what we considered beautiful yesterday." Messier wasn't so lucky. Though once regarded as a national hero for turning a sleepy French water company into the world's second-largest media group, Vivendi Universal, Messier saw his corporate reign come to an ignoble end last week as the stock market and the French media, business...
...didn't help Messier's case when he moved his primary residence to New York and started giving interviews saying that the beloved "cultural exception," subsidies granted by the French government to domestic filmmakers and other artists, was an outdated idea. In April things reached a point of no return when Messier fired Pierre Lescure, the popular president of the money-losing Canal Plus...
...Messier leaves full of regret. In a farewell memo to Vivendi employees he says he's leaving the company in order to save it, and pleads that his successor be given the time and freedom to implement policies that Messier himself believes he did not have. And, he says, people should feel free to email him. At his America Online address...