ExecWatchSM High level information If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. Dear ExecWatch reader, In order to more effectively deliver premium online content tailored specifically to your career advancement, BusinessWatch Network has decreased the number of articles in each newsletter - and increased the number of newsletters each month (from 1 to 2 Issues). This new format affords you better access to more selective business-critical information in your career specialty. We hope you enjoy the improved format. Thank you for your continued readership! Volume 10, Issue 2      In This Issue:   CEO pay drops, but... cash is king   Coping with fury at a price hike   America's most productive CEOs   Why I quit blogging   An unlikely tech tycoon   How to reduce your cost of sales   [CEOs] don't forget your people   The minds behind the meltdown   Before they were [Titans & Moguls] these people were rejected   Five Tax-Free Gifts To Family If you enjoy this newsletter, read more in our Archive and Explore more Topics and Events or Share this Newsletter: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn CEO pay drops, but... cash is king Public pressure and economics have changed some CEO's pay to cash from stock options. View Slide Show: CEO Pay Results from the Bloomberg BusinessWeek study of CEO pay. Bloomberg BusinessWeek's exclusive first look at the 2009 compensation of chief executives at 81 big companies. Here's a bit of good news for the Washington finger waggers who think executive compensation has gotten out of hand: A survey of 81 big companies shows that CEO pay dropped by 8.6% last year. Now for the worrisome twist: The cash portion of their compensation rose 8.3%. That's a sign that companies are de-emphasizing long-term incentives for their top guys, a particular bugaboo of Kenneth Feinberg, President Barack Obama's executive pay cop. Feinberg and many shareholder activists argue... Read the article     Back to top                   Coping with fury at a price hike Transparency is key when major changes have to happen. When eMusic raised prices, customers grumbled and threatened to leave. Was it too late to go back? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Adios to your service," griped one customer. "Boo, hiss," wrote another. "What the hell is going on?" demanded a third. And these were some of the more timid missives that were flooding the message boards at the online music retailer eMusic last June. The fury stemmed from two big changes eMusic had just implemented. First, it had raised its subscription rates -- as much as 100 percent for some subscribers. But that wasn't the sole source of the outrage. Founded in 1998, eMusic had become the nation's second-largest download site by touting itself as the best place to discover independent artists -- that is, those not affiliated with major record labels. But eMusic had just signed a deal with... Read the article     Back to top                   America's most productive CEOs The top entrepreneurial CEO's found by Inc. 15 Ways to Get More Done Good communication is the highest recommended method Lessons from 16 super-efficient and highly-productive entrepreneurs including Caterina Fake of Hunch. In a country whose citizens work longer and get more done than those anywhere else, no one is more productive than entrepreneurs. They have unparalleled freedom to work the way they want, and many create truly personal productivity systems to lash their to-do (and do and do and do) lists into submission. Like the companies themselves, those systems reflect the CEOs' values, goals, and leadership styles. To get a look inside the minds of the superefficient, Inc. interviewed successful entrepreneurs in various industries around the country... Read the article     Back to top                   Why I quit blogging To reach a larger audience, you need more than just a blog to advertize. Let's Take This Offline A decade ago, I started Joel on Software, a blog that put my company on the map. But as the business matures, I've come to realize that blogging is holding me back. You've started a business. You've built a great product. Now you're trying to get the word out. You don't have the budget to buy ads or to retain a PR agency. You'd like to hire a salesperson, but the experienced salespeople are smart enough not to work for you. Well, there's always blogging. These days, it seems like just about every start-up founder has a blog, and 99 percent of these bloggers are doing it wrong. The problem? They make the blog about themselves, filling it with posts announcing new hires, touting new products, and sharing pictures from the company picnic. [So, what's the formula for a blog that actually generates leads, sales, and business success? I didn't even understand it myself until last year at the Business of Software conference, when one of the speakers, a well-known game developer and author named Kathy Sierra, blew me away with an incredibly simple idea that explains why my blog successfully...] Read the article     Back to top                   An unlikely tech tycoon An inside look at the creation of Omniture How I Did It: Omniture's Josh James He built a Web analytics company into a powerhouse, then sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. Josh James says he has no special love for technology. But he has long seen its possibilities. In 1996, he and a college classmate launched a webpage-building service when businesses were just discovering the Internet. Fueled by tens of millions in venture backing, James built Omniture, based in Orem, Utah, into a thriving Web analytics and online marketing company whose software tracks Web traffic for companies such as Toyota, Gap, and JetBlue. James took Omniture public on his 33rd birthday, in 2006. Last October, Adobe purchased the company for $1.8 billion.... Read the article     Back to top                   How to reduce your cost of sales Using a across the board cuts do the most damage to your sales force. There are some smart ways to trim your cost of sales short of taking the dangerous step of slashing your sales force compensation. Why would you bite that hand that feeds you? That's a standard argument against training a cost-cutting eye on your company's sales department. After all, it's the sales team that brings in most of a company's revenue and secures the necessary cash flow to keep you in business. So why take anything away from these important players? When business is sluggish, however, that has a way of changing managers' thinking. If you find you must reduce your sales expenses, you should know that some trims are acceptable, even smart. Other methods of cutting your cost of sales are don't-go-there, last-of-the-last-resorts. Keep in mind that if you burn the salesperson, and you might burn the customer relationship, Ahearne cautions, citing 2007 research conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, which found that customers do remain loyal to a sales rep. With that said, here's a list of tips for cutting your cost of sales, ranked from bad to better to best... Read the article     Back to top                   [CEOs] don't forget your people Investments in people are coming back as the economy recovers: CEO's are hopeful to start hiring in 2010. Chief executives are starting to focus once again on people issues rather than purely financial survival in an effort to head off any future employee retention crisis as and when vacancies and job confidence start to return. We may still be some way off people feeling confident enough to dip their toes back into the jobs' market, but CEOs are keenly aware that it is something they need to be planning for if they don't want to suffer a mass exodus of skilled workers when a consistent upturn finally arrives. According to a poll of CEOs by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, tackling morale, employee engagement, training and development and flexibility of working are all likely to come back on to the agenda as key priorities in the post-recession world. The survey of around 70 British CEOs found that more than... Read the article     Back to top                   The minds behind the meltdown An excerpt from The Quants discussing hot the financial meltdown started. How a swashbuckling breed of mathematicians and computer scientists nearly destroyed Wall Street. On Thursday, President Barack Obama proposed new rules to curb a number of Wall Street's risky-and highly profitable-trading activities. One target: The secretive trading operations within banks that use large doses of leverage, or borrowed money, to make huge bets on the market. Wall Street says the regulations are unnecessary, and since the financial crisis struck, most banks have cut back on these trading outfits. But when the downturn first hit in the summer of 2007, several of them were among the first to suffer, and collectively they lost billions over a matter of days. In his new book, "The Quants," Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson suggests how this new breed of mathematicians and computer scientists took over much of the financial system-and the damage they inflicted in the 2007 meltdown... Read the article     Back to top                   Before they were [Titans & Moguls] these people were rejected College rejection letters are on their way. They could start many promising new careers. At College Admission Time, Lessons in Thin Envelopes. Few events arouse more teenage angst than the springtime arrival of college rejection letters. With next fall's college freshman class expected to approach a record 2.9 million students, hundreds of thousands of applicants will soon be receiving the dreaded letters. Teenagers who face rejection will be joining good company, including Nobel laureates, billionaire philanthropists, university presidents, constitutional scholars, best-selling authors and other leaders of business, media and the arts who once received college or graduate-school rejection letters of their own. Both Warren Buffett and "Today" show host Meredith Vieira say that while being rejected by the school of their dreams was devastating, it launched them on a path to... Read the article     Back to top                   Five Tax-Free Gifts To Family Know which gifts are tax free and how to give them so they stay tax free! In Pictures: What You Should Know About The Gift Tax Detailed explanations of gifts and taxes due (or not due) on them. There are simple ways to pick up some of relatives' biggest expenses without getting snared by the gift tax. If friends or relatives have come upon hard times, your first impulse might be to open your checkbook. But good deeds don't score any points with the Internal Revenue Service--and could get you in tax trouble. You must follow the same rules that would apply to any other lifetime transfers, including those designed to pare down your estate and leave less for Uncle Sam after you're gone. This issue, a common source of confusion, could trip up more people since the economic meltdown. Prosperous baby boomers are subsidizing parents, and sometimes siblings, who are less fortunate. In other cases... Read the article     Back to top                   Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive ExecWatchsm? 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