Shake-up At SonicBlue

InfoMinister writes "Good story at SiliconValley.com. The lead tells the tale: "In a boardroom drama rivaling its courtroom battle with Hollywood, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive, Kenneth Potashner, was ousted Thursday after he demanded board members repay more than a half million dollars in loans they gave themselves to buy stock in an affiliated company.""

Comments

SonicBlue 3dfx Connection

[Moridineas]

Greg Ballard was former CEO of 3dfx before it crashed. 3dfx is a terrible story of mismanagment of manager abuse. As a company, 3dfx existed to make money for it's managers, and for no one else--and Mr Ballard was at the helm then for 3dfx, and now for SonicBlue. Do the words Golden Parachute mean anythign to you Mr Ballard? If anyone is investing in SonicBlue, I'd pull out...

Whew

[Orne]

It's a good thing this sort of illicit loaning only goes on in the corporate world... Wait a sec, you mean it happens in government too?

Re:Large Companies

[dasmegabyte]

I'll tell you what's being taught:

Parents:
"Son, get your MBA. I'm proud of you and want you to make scads of money."

Friends:
"MBA? You're so smart. You'll make so much more money than I will with my BA in Art History, which I enjoy very much."

Business Administration:
"In times of decreased customer expenditure, it is often appropriate to reduce resources to appease the stockholders."

Business Ethics:
"Humans are our greatest resource."

Marketting:
""

Accounting:
"Payroll is the most expensive operating expense of any business."

Business Frat Poster:
"Win real money in our fantasy stock game! Each person gets $10k to play the market and the person with the most cash after just 30 days is the recipient of a $1000 datek account thanks to Takka Alla Profits"

Smart folks are filling in the blanks, mate. Customers are not always right -- they're the morons who fell for our marketting. Employees? Get the best we can get for the shit we're paying...young folks especially, and train them to work 10 hour days. Your only boss is the stockholders, and these guys will believe anything that shounds like it will make them money.

Lying? Don't get caught. Stealing? Give it a nice name. Executives have privilidge, or else they wouldn't be executives, eh? We're better than those 30k plebians. Offer them 28k and we'll get Mexican -- how does Mexico sound? Shit, we should move our corporate office there...cheap work, no taxes, and thanks to NAFTA no bloody tariffs.