News Digest for November 17, 2006

There are 9 items… SEC chief to unveil company rule change |Are Buybacks Financial Coverups? |Study: Options Good, People Bad | Audit Clears SEC’s Financial Statements |Stakeholder Letters Push Corporate Sustainability Improvements | Audit Clears SEC’s Financial Statements | Bring Your Personas to Life! |Five Personalities of Broadband Users | Why Savvy CEOs Hang Out in Second Life

SEC chief to unveil company rule change
Cox said the U.S. regulators “will unveil significant changes” to internal controls reports. “Those changes will be aimed at ensuring that the internal-control audit is top-down, risk-based and focused on what truly matters to the integrity of a company’s financial statements,” he said.

Are Buybacks Financial Coverups?
Beware of companies that issue new debt to finance share repurchases and use “per share” metrics to calculate executive compensation, warned Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, in a statement.

Study: Options Good, People Bad
“These findings are consistent with the view that grant date manipulation reflects governance problems rather than a compensation device used for valid business reasons,” conclude the report’s authors – Harvard Law School’s Lucian Bebchuk, Yaniv Grinstein from Cornell University and INSEAD’s Urs Peyer.

Dear Sir or Madam: Stakeholder Letters Push Corporate Sustainability Improvements
If an investor letter is not answered by the company–and this happens more often than you’d expect–the company is a candidate for a shareholder resolution. The resolution prompts a quick response and usually a face-to-face meeting

Audit Clears SEC’s Financial Statements
Auditors gave the financial statements of the Securities and Exchange Commission a clean bill of health, a sign that the market watchdog has taken steps to fix problems that prompted a lawmaker last year to chide the agency for what he called “hypocrisy.”

Bring Your Personas to Life!
Method acting combines a careful consideration of the psychological motives of the character and some sort of personal identification with and possibly the reproduction of the character’s emotional state in a realistic way.

Five Personalities of Broadband Users
Broadband has created a population of five segments with unique characteristics: content king; social clicker; online insider; fast tracker; and everyday pro.

Why Savvy CEOs Hang Out in Second Life
Whether it’s closing a big deal, meeting with investors, holding a press conference, or sniffing around the competition, the responsibilities of a chief executive are no longer relegated to the real world.

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