Fired, Staffing | featured news

After a troublesome, 17-month run, Ron Johnson is out as chief executive of J.C. Penney, and with that, the most closely watched revival effort in retail in recent memory is in danger of disintegrating.

Despite the Nets’ franchise-best start, recent turmoil led Nets ownership to dispatch Coach Avery Johnson.

That sound you heard from Detroit this morning was the other shoe dropping, loudly, at Opel. General Motors announced that Karl-Friedrich Stracke stepped down from his positions as GM Europe president Opel/Vauxhall CEO.

J.C. Penney Co.’s transformation team started to unravel on Monday. Penney president Michael Francis was fired after only eight months as the No. 2 executive at the Plano-based department store chain. Francis’ abrupt departure appears to be another corrective step from CEO Ron Johnson, who recently acknowledged that Penney’s marketing message has confused shoppers.

And so it begins. After Yahoo this week gave CEO Carol Bartz the axe, the stock rallied on the suspicion on the Street that the company almost certainly has now been put into play, and might not last very long with its current corporate structure.

It has been a very long week for AOL. And it's about to get even longer. Last Thursday, word leaked that one of its employees, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, was launching a venture capital fund that would include an $8 million commitment from AOL (AOL). Then came a more official version via the NY Times, which included positive quotes from both Arrington and AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong.

The sudden ouster of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz wasn't triggered by one specific factor, but rather because Ms. Bartz wasn't reaching a series of performance targets.

Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday it has removed CEO Carol Bartz and replaced her on an interim basis with Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse, ending a rocky two-year run marked by stagnating growth and a bitter rift with Chinese partner Alibaba.