Chief Executive Officer | featured news

As CEOs, Sam Walton, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs possessed common traits. They were tireless workers, demanding bosses and sticklers for detail. They were visionaries, too, who reshaped their respective industries....

Joe Nocera observes in The New York Times today that Steve Jobs violated every rule of management. He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager. He had an astonishing aesthetic sense, which businesspeople almost always lack. He could be absolutely brutal in meetings: ...

News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch and his son James face questions from parliament on Tuesday in a phone-hacking scandal that has rocked Britain's establishment right up to Prime Minister David Cameron.

PG&E said its chief executive will retire at the end of the month and it is conducting a search for a successor, a surprise change at a utility rocked by a series of setbacks. Peter Darbee, PG&E's chairman and chief executive, was brought in in 1999 as an outsider who would bring fresh ideas, but appears to have been felled by inattention to the bread-and-butter basics of the utility business: providing safe and reliable service to customers.

Apple shareholders have rejected a plan requiring the company to disclose a succession plan for its chief executive.

The financial crisis exposed, and in some cases led to, some remarkable examples of poor judgment by top chief executives. But this year as the economy has improved, so has CEO behavior — somewhat. No one claimed to be doing "God's work" in 2010 (cue Lloyd Blankfein) or invented 10,000 fictitious employees (Satyam Computer Services' B. Ramalinga Raju). But together chief executives made enough massive PR blunders — and engaged in enough dirty dealings — to remind us forcefully of their fallibility.