Merrill shareholders must be spitting fire part 2

The straw wasn’t very thick, in the end, and it appears to have broken during the course of today.

Between the time I wrote and posted the first note late last night (“Merrill shareholders must be spitting fire“, October 28-07) and this one, both the NYT and WSJ have run different stories outlining the departure of Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal.

The Times’ multiple-source piece approached it as a forced change resulting from the board, while the WSJ had a single source seeing Mr. O’Neal as stepping down on his own, either today or tomorrow.

Regardless, CEO’s should start to use www.myscorecard.com for their golf handicap tracking, rather than anything at the club that allows the public to track where, and when, they play golf. Bear Stearns’ CEO James Cayne took heat for playing in a Pro/Am golf tournament as that firm experienced its subprime challenges last summer. And, if what RIM CEO Jim Balsillie says is true (“It takes me one tenth the time to run RIM as it used to”), one can see a scenario where public shareholders begin to resent CEOs and CFOs who are able to squeeze 80 or 90 rounds of golf in each season.

Why (fill in the blank), are you making the money you are if the job doesn’t require much of your time?

MRM