CALGARY
Last week marked the end of John Haugh’s two-year tenure as president and “chief marketing and merchandising bear” at Build-A-Bear Workshop.
He resigned from his position.
There has been a bit of a revolving door at the No. 2 spot at Build-A-Bear in recent years. Haugh was the Overland-based company’s third president in three years.
The company hasn’t said much about Haugh’s resignation. It noted the fact with two simple sentences in a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
In an email, Jill Saunders, a company spokeswoman, said that Haugh voluntarily resigned his position. It appears he taken a new job since she added that the company would prefer to let Haugh and his new employer announce his new position.
Sean McGowan, an analyst with Needham & Co., said he thinks Haugh left of his own accord.
“I feel strongly that it’s NOT a sign that things are going badly,” he wrote in an email. “Obviously he thought he had a better opportunity somewhere…I think he has changed jobs quite a bit in recent years.”
Haugh joined Build-A-Bear in March 2009. He was previously president of It’s Sugar, a candy and confectionary retailer. He has also held executive positions with Mars Retail Group, Payless ShoeSource and Universal Studios no credit check payday loans.
When he came on board at Build-A-Bear, he replaced Scott Seay, who had been fired in 2008. The company did not disclose a reason for it at the time other than to say the decision was not related to the company’s performance or business operations.
The company’s president before that — Barry Erdos — resigned in January 2007.
But despite the comings and goings of presidents at Build-A-Bear, the leadership at the very top has remained stable. Maxine Clark, the company’s founder, has been the “chief executive bear” throughout the retailer’s history.
Build-A-Bear has begun an external search for president and has temporarily assigned Haugh’s responsibilities to its senior management team.
The turnover comes at a time when the company is working to try to reverse same-store sales declines. In the first quarter, total revenue dipped 6.1 percent. It will report its second quarter earnings later this week.
If the proposed merger of pharmacy benefit titans Express Scripts and Medco goes forward, George Paz will find himself at the helm of one of the nation’s largest companies. He joined St. Louis-based Express Scripts in 1998 after working as a partner at Coopers and Lybrand, an accounting firm, from 1988 to 1993, and also from 1996 to 1998. He worked as executive vice president and chief financial officer for Life Partners Group from 1993 to 1995.
Paz took a few minutes Friday to talk about the blockbuster deal, his company’s lust for acquisitions and his management style. What follows is an edited transcript of that interview.
How would you characterize your management style or philosophy?
I believe that you can run companies in one of two ways: you can either collaborate and get the management team to work together for common goals, or you can dictate. I don’t believe in dictating.
How does that translate into Express Scripts’ mission, personality, or ethic?
I have 14,000 employees and 10 senior leaders. By getting everyone’s consensus views, it lets us build up many diverse inputs and work toward common goals.
What would be examples of a couple of big, pivotal decisions you’ve made at the company?
Our acquisitions. For acquisitions to truly work, it’s a lot of effort and a lot of work to integrate the businesses. To take on something large, you need not just the CEO’s buy-in, but the whole company’s buy-in. Another big decision was our focus on consumerology, behavioral science and helping us understand what drives people’s behavior in managing their health and how we can achieve cost savings.
Were these merger decisions risky? Were these hard decisions to make?
Business textbooks tell you that most acquisitions fail. For us, the acquisition has never been a reaction, but instead a purposeful event in which we see a strategic gain and opportunity.
Is there much debate involving these big decisions?
There’s debate around how to get there, and the strategy to get things done. We don’t do things unless we have 100 percent buy-in by senior staff. We keep debating until all debate is quenched, until we’ve resolved every issue.
How did the Medco acquisition come about?
I’ve known David (Snow, the chief executive of Medco) since 2003. We’ve talked numerous times over the years about the value of putting our two organizations together. We saw a golden opportunity.
Was there internal debate over the Medco decision?
That was unanimous.
How do you relax or spend your time away from work?
I love business. I love St. Louis. I love health care, I love the challenge of driving waste out of health care while producing better outcomes. I like to read, to study, to understand. I also like to play golf, but it’s something I don’t get to play that often.
LONDON - News International says it is shutting down the News of the World tabloid that is at the center of Britain’s phone hacking scandal.
James Murdoch, who heads the newspaper’s European operations, says the 168-year-old newspaper will publish its last edition Sunday. The scandal has cost the paper prestige and prompted dozens of companies to pull their ads.
The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid is accused of hacking into the cell phone messages of victims ranging from missing schoolgirls to grieving families, celebrities, royals and politicians in a quest for attention-grabbing headlines.
Murdoch owns several media operations around the world, including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in the United States.
Police say they are examining 4,000 names of people who may have been targeted by the paper quick payday loan.
The Sunday-only newspaper has acknowledged that it hacked into the phones of politicians, celebrities and royal aides, but in recent days the allegations have expanded to take in the phones of missing children, the relatives of terrorist victims and families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
James Murdoch said if the allegations were true, “it was inhuman and has no place in our company.”
“Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad,” he said, “and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued.”
Google Inc. has temporarily shut down a search engine feature that allows users to find real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and other social networking sites.
A message posted early Monday on Twitter by the team behind Google Realtime says the search feature has been temporarily disabled while Google explores how to incorporate it into its recently launched Google+ project. The tweet tells readers to “stay tuned.”
Google+ is the search giant’s latest stab at entering the social networking segment of the Internet free business cards. The project was unveiled last week and lets users share things with small groups of people.
Google did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on Realtime.
A group of 11 top executives have released a statement backing the merger of the operator of the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: X) for the London Stock Exchange Group.
The group, including former TSX chief executive Rowland Fleming, says the merger protects Canadian regulatory sovereignty, champions Canadian executive management, and maintains competition and a level playing field.
The group also includes Caldwell Securities chairman and chief executive Thomas Caldwell, CI Financial (TSX: CIX) executive chairman Bill Holland and Raymond James chairman and chief executive Paul Allison.
The executives say the bid by the Maple consortium of some of Canada
There hasn’t been a good reason to own a money market mutual fund for four years. These days, most funds are yielding under 0.1 percent. You can receive 1 percent in an online bank savings account, and get FDIC insurance to boot.
Nonetheless, the funds are still holding $2.7 trillion in investors’ money. That speaks to their reputation as a liquid, very-low-risk place to park cash while waiting for something better to come along.
Now it seems they may not be as safe as we thought. The problem is Greece.
Fitch Ratings reported last week that American money funds have half their money invested in European banks. European bankers, meanwhile, are very nervous about what might happen if the Greek government stiffs its creditors.
To understand why, imagine today’s financial system as a big house of cards. A card or two might tip over without any damage. But if the wrong ones slip, especially while a breeze is blowing, the chain reaction can bring the house down in a heap.
Back in 2008, the Treasury Department thought it could let Lehman Brothers fall without much danger. We saw what happened instead.
All this explains why the rich nations of Europe are resigned to bailing out the profligate, rioting Greeks
ST. LOUIS
MONTREAL—Moncton, N.B., and Victoria became the latest Canadian cities to be hit by the rotating postal strikes Tuesday, now in their fifth day.
The job action by members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers began at midnight local time and were scheduled to last 24 hours.
About one thousand of the 50,000 urban postal workers represented by the union were off the job.
In announcing that the rotating strikes would continue, CUPW told its members Monday that Canada Post had made some positive moves but also took several steps backwards.
The Crown corporation rejected the latest proposal from union negotiators, but backed away from its own thorny proposal to create more part-time positions to deal with a decline in mail volumes.
“With the hope that (the union) would start to address the issues facing the postal system (as) Canada Post has offered to withdraw this key proposal,” the corporation said in a statement.
Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton said Monday that negotiations with the union’s urban bargaining unit were continuing in hopes of getting a settlement, but added the union’s latest proposal was too costly.
“It’s just too expensive and still doesn’t help us get anywhere near where we need to be in terms of addressing the challenges facing Canada Post,” Hamilton said.
Canada Post says CUPW’s proposal didn’t offer solutions to problems such as declining mail volumes, increasing competition and electronic substitutions for traditional mail.
The union says Canada Post continues to refuse to address issues that include pensions, health and safety and disability coverage as well as demands for innovation and service expansion to keep the Crown corporation profitable.
“In Victoria and Moncton, the public has suffered deterioration in postal service due to Canada Post’s changes to the way mail gets processed and delivered,” John Bail, national director of the Pacific region for CUPW, said in a statement.
“We have been saying all along that these changes don’t make sense,” he added, referring to the consolidation of postal plants and what the union calls “convoluted processes” that have been created for the sorting and shipment of the mail.
Jeff Callaghan, CUPW national director of the Atlantic region, said that in Moncton “we have not only seen the restructuring of postal plants, but also job cuts that hurt our local communities.”
The company claims most of the postal network continues to operate despite the strikes.
But businesses have warned that the system will soon get “gummed up” once the walkout expands to larger centres.
“One problem will beget another problem further down the food chain and the system will become gummed up, I would imagine, in a week to 10 days,” said Dan Kelly, senior vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
The chairman of one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies says that cyber attacks are being developed so rapidly that a new nonproliferation treaty is needed to control their use.
BT Group PLC Chairman Michael Rake says the world’s militaries are being drawn into a 21st-century arms race and suggested that an international pact could help bring it under control.
Rake told a group of policymakers and business leaders in London Wednesday that it was “critical to try to move toward some sort of cyber technology nonproliferation treaty.”
He gave few details, and many there dismissed the idea. But some were supportive, with one academic suggesting using the U.N.’s telecommunications agency as an cyber-nonproliferation watchdog.
Powered by WordPress -- XHTML 1.0