CEOs of struggling companies managed to avoid the axe and will head into 2013 with their jobs intact... for now. We decided to take stock of a few of these endangered executives to assess which ones will get through 2013 in one piece.
A throwaway line in a CEO Scott Thompson's bio may cost him his job running Yahoo!, and it has already apparently ended the gig for Patti Hart -- the Yahoo! board member who hired him.
Yahoo is facing a showdown with a major shareholder, activist hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, who wants the troubled Internet company to fire CEO Scott Thompson for unethical conduct -- essentially, résumé inflation.
Yahoo's embattled co-founder Jerry Yang is off the board, but for disgruntled investor Third Point LLC, that's not good enough. The hedge fund with a 5.2% stake in Yahoo wants to take down Chairman Roy Bostock and potentially three other directors.
It'll be an interesting week in the news of the new: Yahoo has a fresh CEO, auto shows and the CES will show off the latest in cars and tech, and a major homebuilder will tell us how new construction is doing. (Oh, and JP Morgan will give us a clue about how the banks are faring.)
On Wednesday, Yahoo named Scott Thompson as CEO. He's a former PayPal president and veteran technologist -- and that's the trouble: Yahoo is following the same strategy that led it to hire Carol Bartz, who was ousted for failing to turn the company around.
Dollar Thrifty shareholders voted against a proposed acquisition from larger car-rental competitor Hertz, likely ending Hertz's five-month-long effort to acquire the company and indicating that a competing bid from Avis Budget Group may be gaining traction.
It's been 15 years since The Kids in the Hall, the seminal sketch comedy show by the Canadian troupe of the same name, went off the air. Now they're finally back with a new show, Death Comes to Town.