Rupert Murdoch takes home $17m after 6pc pay cut

The figures, released in documents News Corp filed with US regulators, show Mr Murdoch’s son James took a 13pc pay cut to $8.8m.
The fall in pay comes despite News Corp, which owns 20th Century Fox, MySpace and a stable of newspapers across the world, recording an 11pc rise in full-year operating profits to $3.96bn on sales up 8pc to $32.8bn.
The strong performance was helped by the success of James Cameron’s 3D film Avatar, which grossed $2.75bn at the box office and broke DVD records when it went on sale in the US in April.
Rupert Murdoch’s third wife Wendi collected $92,000 in consulting fees for advising MySpace China and received options of more than 2.5pc of shares in the Asian version of the social media site.
The Murdochs’ pay was dwarfed by Chase Carey, News Corp’s chief operating officer, who collected $23.1m – including a $10m “golden hello”, after he rejoined NewsCorp from DirecTV, and a $5m guaranteed bonus. His basic pay was $8.1m – the same as Rupert Murdoch’s.
However, Mr Carey’s salary for the current financial year has been halved to $4.05m.
Roger Ailes, boss of News Corp’s Fox News TV network in the US, took home $13.2m.
Meanwhile, the company said Mark Hurd, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard who was forced to quit the top job amid allegations of sexual harassment, is to step down from News Corp’s board.
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Sleeping with your boss can ‘boost your career and give you a promotion… especially if you’re a woman’

By Daniel BatesLast updated at 1:32 AM on 28th August 2010

It will threaten to destroy your family life and lose you the respect of others.
But having an affair with the boss is seen as likely to boost your career, especially if you are a woman.
Some 37 per cent of office workers said that from their experience those who slept with their superiors were rewarded with a career boost.
And no wonder - no matter how high achieving, female executives will not reach the very top of their profession unless they find a ’sponsor’ who will speak out on their behalf, the study for the U.S. Centre for Work-Life Policy found.

Fair trade? Some 37 per cent of office workers said that those who slept with their superiors were rewarded with a career boost

More often than not they are in a position of power and influence, and almost always male and married.
Despite all the risks, affairs in the workplace are still a common occurrence.
Some 34 per cent of women in executive positions said they knew a female colleague who had slept with their boss.
Even at director level or above, 15 per cent of women admitted to having had an office fling.
The risks of inappropriate behaviour in the office were recently illustrated when Mark Hurd, 53, the chief executive of computer giant Hewlett Packard, resigned over alleged sexual harassment of Jodie Fisher, 50, a former reality television contestant turned marketing consultant with the company.
 

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The true mark of success is knowing how to lose one’s job

Furthermore, neither scandal nor failure seems to be a bar to future employment, once executives have scaled the heights.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Mark Hurd, the recently ousted CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP), already has job offers coming in. The fact that he was asked to leave the US technology company as a result of business conduct violations, connected to his relationship with a female marketing consultant, doesn’t seem to have stemmed the flow of calls.
While it is true that the HP board found no violation of its sexual harassment policy (Hurd has privately settled a claim from the woman), the improprieties by the boss of a company that had a stated policy of keeping out of corporate governance trouble hardly instill confidence.
Not surprisingly, at least one source of the reported offers is a private equity business, the departing executive’s favourite port in – or after – a storm.
Among those cast adrift after the financial crisis, Andy Hornby, formerly of HBOS, is now running private equity-owned Alliance Boots; while Northern Rock’sex-boss Adam Applegarth is advising US-based Apollo.
And there are plenty of advisory positions for former politicians to be had, too.
The genuinely voluntary departure, without a job to go to, is a rare thing, in politics as well as in business. Most resignations are nothing of the sort: they are carefully-worded circumlocutions, designed to preserve the dignity of those being eased out. So to quit on the stated grounds that one is not up to the job is almost unheard of.
That is what makes the stance taken by Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who resigned as leader of the UK Independence Party this week, so delicious. “I have learnt that I am not much good at party politics, which I do not enjoy,” he wrote in his resignation letter. Instead, he plans to focus on other interests – including “the treatment of people with intellectual impairment, teacher training, the threat from Islamism and the relationship between good and evil, not to mention my dogs and my family” (what I like best is that he lists his dogs ahead of his family).
There was one flaw in Lord Pearson’s announcement: he couldn’t resist pointing out that he had overseen a 50pc increase in the party’s share of the vote in the election. The subtle underlying message was that even though he, Lord Pearson, didn’t rate his performance terribly highly, others might well beg to differ. Still, this is a mere quibble.
It must be harder for Americans, who often think that what we would call showing-off is just healthy self-esteem.
Taking this into account, I thought Stanley Druckenmiller, the legendary hedge fund manager who once bet against the pound, did rather well in his letter to investors. Announcing the closure of his fund, Mr Druckenmiller explained that “the disappointment of each interim drawdown over the years has taken a cumulative toll that I cannot continue to sustain. This is true even though to date we have delivered an unbroken record of positive annual performance, which I hope will continue for 2010 as well. And while our clients were certainly pleased that we achieved positive results for 2008 and 2009 in a challenging environment, as you may have surmised I was dissatisfied with those results because they didnot match my own, internallong-term standard.”
In other words, however brilliant Mr Druckenmiller may appear to everyone else, he has such high standards that he constantly disappoints himself.
I don’t know about fund management, but in the very British art of mock self-deprecation, Mr Druckenmiller is certainly a champion.
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Hewlett-Packard’s Mark Hurd gets job offers after being ousted

In one instance, Mr Hurd, who ran HP for five years, is said to have received a call about a potential opening the day after his resignation was announced.
He is also said to have told these friends – who the Journal does not name – that he is in a period of “mourning” after his hasty exit. As such, it is expected to be some time before he returns to full-time work, a decision that will be cushioned by the $30m-$35m (£19.2m-£22.4m) payoff he received on departing.
Mr Hurd was forced from his role as chairman and chief executive following an investigation by HP’s board into his conduct after Ms Fisher claimed he had harassed her.
Although the company found that he did not harass Ms Fisher, he was said to have breached business standards guidelines by allegedly altering expenses claims in order to cover up the pair’s friendship, a charge friends of Mr Hurd have gone on to deny in several reports.
Earlier this week it emerged that Mr Hurd agreed to settle privately Ms Fisher’s claims with her just two days before the board meeting which led to his resignation, and a day ahead of a scheduled mediation session with HP’s lawyers.
It is understood the move incensed HP’s board, and led to his ousting.
Meanwhile, details of Ms Fisher’s original claim have appeared in a number of media in the US, including an allegation that she lost her contracting role with HP because she refused his sexual advances. The claim is understood to have been lodged at the end of June.
Mr Hurd has denied making any such advances towards Ms Fisher, who worked for HP’s marketing department for two years until 2009. Her main role was helping to organise networking events for HP and its customers, at which directors such as Mr Hurd would attend.
It is understood that she worked for HP on 12 separate occasions during that two-year window, most of which occurred in the first year, with the number of events slowing in the second year as the company’s marketing budget was trimmed.
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Oracle’s Larry Ellison attacks Hewlett-Packard board over Mark Hurd’s exit

Mr Jobs‘ exit led to 12 years in the technology wilderness for Apple, during which time he bought Pixar and founded NeXT, which created the basis for Apple’s OSX operating system.
Mr Hurd resigned from the world’s largest maker of personal computers on Friday night after an internal investigation, sparked by sexual harassment allegations from former HP contractor Jodie Fisher. The investigation found him not to have breached any harassment guidelines but to have broken the company’s business standards conduct after allegedly falsifying expenses claims to cover up his friendship with Ms Fisher.
Mr Ellison claimed HP’s board voted 6-4 in favour of going public with Ms Fisher’s claims. “In losing Mark Hurd, the HP board failed to act in the best interest of HP’s employees, shareholders, customers and partners,” he continued. “Publishing known false sexual harassment claims is not good corporate governance; it’s cowardly corporate political correctness.”
Ms Fisher said in her own statement that she did not have an “intimate sexual relationship” with Mr Hurd and that the pair have settled her claim privately.
Mr Ellison also said that his friend did not commit expense fraud, saying such claims were “not credible” and showed the “HP board desperately grasping at straw in trying to publicly explain the unexplainable”.
Other anonymous friends of Mr Hurd have come to his defence, saying that his misfiled expenses were the result of mistake by his administrative staff, and that he has since paid all monies owing back to the company.
HP dismissed Mr Ellison’s claims, saying that the “board voted unanimously for Mr Hurd’s resignation” and that was the only vote it took on the issue.
HP shares were broadly unchanged in lunchtime trading at $42.65 in New York.
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Actress Jodie Fisher cost Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd his job

The probe cleared Mr Hurd, 53, of sexually harassing the actress, who was contracted to appear at events sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, but found he had submitted inaccurate expense reports to conceal a “personal relationship” with her.
Ms Fisher denied having been in a relationship with the former chief executive in a statement released by her lawyer on Sunday night. She added that the pair had settled the sexual harassment claim privately.
“I was surprised and saddened that Mark Hurd lost his job over this. That was never my intention,” the statement read.
“Mark and I never had an affair or intimate sexual relationship. I first met Mark in 2007 when I interviewed for a contractor job at the company.”
The investigation into Mr Hurd’s conduct began in June, when Ms Fisher sent him a letter setting out her sexual harassment allegations.
It uncovered irregularities in his expenses claims ranging between $1,000 and $20,000 for meals and travel, and found that he had failed to disclose a close personal relationship with Ms Fisher, who was paid at times when there was no legitimate purpose.
Ms Fisher acted in such R-rated films as Intimate Obsession, Body of Influence 2 and Sheer Passion and appeared on the 2007 NBC reality show Age of Love, which paired older women with a younger man.
She was under contract to represent HP at “high-level customer and executive summit events,” according to her lawyer.
Mr Hurd said in a statement following his resignation that he “realised there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP”.
Marc Andreessen, a director of Hewlett-Packard, said: “Sadly, Mark’s conduct undermined the standards we expect of our employees, not to mention the standards to which the CEO must be held, and the board decision was unanimous.”
Hurd, 53, was credited with reviving Hewlett-Packard’s fortunes during his five years at the helm.
His strategy of drastically cutting costs and thousands of jobs allowed the company to overtake Dell as the biggest manufacturer of PCs in the world in 2006.
His departure leaves the technology firm in search of a new CEO and chairman.
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Hewlett-Packard boss quits suddenly after contractor files charges of sex harassment

By David Gardner In Los AngelesLast updated at 11:27 AM on 7th August 2010

Quit: HP head Mark Hurd’ shock resignation was revealed in a statement by the board last night

Hewlett-Packard boss Mark Hurd resigned yesterday after it was revealed he had falsified expenses to conceal a ‘close personal relationship’ with a woman contractor.
The shocking announcement from the world’s top personal computer maker wiped $10 billion off the value of the company.
Hurd is one of the most admired executives in Silicon Valley, credited with reviving HP after the tumultuous reign of previous CEO Carly Fiorina.
The unnamed contractor, who did marketing for HP from late 2007 to fall 2009, contacted the firm’s board in June this year and alleged that Hurd had sexually harassed her, HP said.
The board ordered an investigation and found that the married 53-year-old Hurd did not violate HP’s sexual harassment policy.
But he had a ‘close personal relationship’ with the woman that was never disclosed to the board, HP said.
‘The board investigation found that Mark demonstrated a profound lack of judgment that seriously undermined his credibility and damaged his effectiveness in leading HP and Mark agreed,’ HP General Counsel Mike Holston said, adding that the board’s decision to replace Hurd was unanimous.
Gloria Allred, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who has represented numerous high-profile clients including Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses, said she is representing the woman who made the sexual harassment claim.
She said her client did not have sex with Hurd, but declined to identify the woman or comment further.
According to HP, Hurd filed ‘numerous inaccurate expense reports’ that concealed his relationship with the contractor, who also received compensation and expense reimbursements without legitimate business reasons.
Hurd, who was also chairman of HP and had a reputation for rigid cost discipline, said the decision to step aside was a ‘painful’ one.
‘I realised there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP,’ Hurd said in a statement.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd delivers a keynote address at the 2007 Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco

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Hewlett-Packard boss Mark Hurd quits after sexual harassment inquiry

Shares in HP fell as much as 10pc on the news in extended after-hours trading, in spite of the company pre-announcing better-than-expected second quarter sales of $30.7bn (£19.3bn).
Michael Holston, HP’s general counsel, admitted to Bloomberg that Mr Hurd had “demonstrated a profound lack of judgment”, but the investigation, conducted by external lawyers and Mr Holston, found that he had not breached the company’s sexual harassment policy.
Mr Hurd said: “As the investigation progressed, I realised there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP.”
He is to be replaced as chief executive on an interim basis by Cathie Lesjak, HP’s chief financial officer. A board committee, which includes Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, and Larry Babbio, former president of Verizon, has been set up to find a permanent replacement, after Ms Lesjak ruled herself out.
Mr Hurd is believed to have come to a severance agreement ahead of his resignation, with speculation that he may receive as much as $40m.
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Hewlett-Packard sees signs of stability

Hewlett-Packard (HP) reported a drop in profits but pointed to signs of
stability in the market.

The world’s largest PC maker said its profit dropped 19 per cent in the latest
quarter, dragged by ongoing weakness in sales of personal computers,
software and printer ink.

But the company said that consumer spending on PCs was improving, helped by
price cuts. HP has been branching out aggressively into other areas, like
technology services and computer networking, but the PC business still makes
up nearly a third of its revenue.

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HP Boss Mark Hurd Under Fire From The Blogging Fraternity

HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd announced, on the 20th February that he would be implementing a company wide cut in pay for all employees. Starting with a reduction in his own salary by 20%, followed by senior executives who would take a drop between ten and fifteen percent, regular employees 5 percent and exempt employees 2.5 percent. This is on the back of an already reduced headcount at HP & recently acquired EDS (Electronic data systems) of 40,000 employees globally.

None of which has impressed the blogging fraternity.

Well respected Internet Blogger Julia Mackenzie says in her blog - Is it me or is everyone else stupid

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