Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Afraid of a Hostile Take-Over? Get a Shareholder’s Rights Agreement!

Also known as a “poison pill”, a shareholder rights agreement can be a valuable anti-takeover device for a company that wnats to remain independent. Given that M&A activity is likely to go on an upswing as the economy slowly recovers, any company that sees itself as a likely takeover target that wants to remain independent should consider taking any steps it can to stay that way. As per this recent Industry Week article on how “poison pills still offer protection”, especially if the poision pill triggers below the 5% IRS threshold.

It also summarizes a few suggestions from a new report from the Conference Board, titled Poison Pills in 2011, that recommends that board members absain from certain defensive tactics, such as introducing supermajority voting requirements or disallowing action by written consent or limiting the ability to call special meetings, because they could cause the ire of ISS and attract activist shareholders.

Your Global Supply Chain is Getting More Dangerous By the Day

As per this recent blog post over on the Supply Chain Management Review on how escalation in piracy places supply chain under pressure, ocean piracy has it an all time-high with 142 attacks worldwide in the first three months of of 2011. Yikes!

The International Maritime Bureau ( IMB ) has been tracking piracy worldwide since 1991 and the number of attacks in the first three months of this year are higher than any number ever recorded. To be precise, there were 142 attacks that resulted in 45 vessels being fired upon, 45 boardings, 18 hijackings, 344 hostages, and 6 kidnappings.

If the trend continues, energy AND insurance prices are going to go through the roof, or, in this case, the stern.

Is That US MBA Really Worth 80,000?

According to ans article over on MBAPrograms.org, the average cost of a two year MBA is $80,000, which is more than the average annual salary of a graduate. But is it worth it? Especially when this recent article by Robert Kaplan on “The Hollow Science” (on the HBR blogs) points out that US MBAs have too much training on the coastline of business and not enough on the mainland. Too much discussion, and analysis, on the capital markets where companies and investors meet (and on the associations between the prices of traded equities, debt, and financial instruments and the information in company disclosures, corporate governance practices, and financial analysts’ reports and not enough on emerging best practices in asset valuation and risk management in well-managed financial institutions.

And if this isn’t enough to deter you, some US companies (and one US bank in particular) have already stopped hiring U.S. business school graduates because, in Kaplan’s words, they don’t have the requisite skills to value and assess the risks of complex, infrequently traded assets, for staters.

So is that US MBA, which might get you black-balled, really worth $80,000?