Corporate Executives

A decision due today could begin settling a question that has long pitted small shareholders against corporate executives: Should the value of stock options given to employees be subtracted from company earnings?The Financial Accounting Standards Board, a seven-member panel that sets accounting rules, is due to vote this morning on proposals that would make companies either subtract the value of the options from profits, as the FASB staffers want, or simply describe the options more clearly in earnings reports, as many executives prefer.

WASHINGTON -- Taxpayers will be paying the airfare for some of the nation's highest-paid executives during the Far East tour on which President Bush is bringing along 21 U.S. business leaders to help him "relentlessly pursue our mission to create jobs."Administration officials said yesterday that the business leaders will be flying free aboard Air Force One and its 747 backup plane on the Dec. 30-Jan. 10 trip that will take them to eight cities in Australia, Singapore, Korea and Japan.The White House typically does not calculate the cost of trips aboard government-owned aircraft.

To hear Mannie Jackson tell it, the feature film about the Harlem Globetrotters will be a cross between "Rudy" and "Malcolm X.""It's going to be a blockbuster," Mr. Jackson said of the Columbia Pictures project, tentatively titled "Showtime," blessed with a $50 million to $75 million budget and due out in 1997.Mr. Jackson, the Globetrotters' first African-American owner, is intent on providing the Globetrotters' story with a happy ending.In 1993, Mr. Jackson, 56, formed a partnership that purchased the Globetrotters for $6 million from the bankrupt Minneapolis-based International Broadcasting Co., rescuing the team from declining revenues and attendance and infusing it with new blood, innovative concepts and Mr. Jackson's own corporate vision.

Two of the world's most powerful industries converged with a bang yesterday as software giant Microsoft Corp. and NBC announced plans for two news services that would reach viewers through cable television and the Internet.In the more conventional of the two ventures, the companies said they have formed a 50-50 partnership to launch a 24-hour cable news channel that would compete directly with Ted Turner's CNN.But in a move with even greater potential impact, the companies cemented an alliance that could bring Tom Brokaw and the NBC Nightly News to your computer screen.

WASHINGTON - Corporate executives and board members are forever telling Maryland's Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes how difficult he's made their lives. "They tell me, `This is really making us work extra-hard,'" says Sarbanes, a Democrat and the chief author of last year's sweeping corporate reform legislation. But the complaints don't bother him. "They should be working hard," he says of the corporate chieftains, directors and accountants whose jobs were forever changed by the bill, which marks its first anniversary of enactment tomorrow.

The larceny and fraud trial of two former Tyco International executives crumbled yesterday in a New York City courtroom, six months after it began, when one of the jurors who had been deliberating for the past two weeks received a threatening letter that prompted the judge to declare a mistrial. The development was a setback for the prosecution of former Chief Executive Officer L. Dennis Kozlowski, whose $6,000 shower curtain and $2 million toga party had set a new standard for executive excess, but analysts and legal observers doubt that the aborted trial will have any effect on a future trial, or on any other high-profile corporate fraud cases.

NEW YORK - President Bush came to Wall Street yesterday vowing to "end the days of cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking our laws." But the legal reforms he advocated - from longer prison sentences for fraud to a new task force to prosecute corporate malfeasance - were not as far-reaching as some proposals gaining steam in Congress. In his first extensive policy speech in months on a subject other than combating terrorism, Bush tried to quell a growing political storm by asking Congress to provide the Securities and Exchange Commission with $100 million in additional funding to beef up enforcement, far less than the increase some in Congress are demanding.

This has been the summer of raging uncertainty in corporate America. The second-quarter earnings season, which began two weeks ago, has seen positive and negative extremes. But the earnings reports and the company comments that accompanied them have given Wall Street little direction on where the economy and the stock market are heading. "My crystal ball is still fuzzy," said Charles L. Hill, director of research at Thomson First Call. "I thought we would get more clarification on the outlook for the third and fourth quarters, but for every positive we get a negative."

While politicians and even chief executives make righteous speeches and advocate tougher penalties for corporate misdeeds, Sister Patricia Daly is smiling. For three decades, she has been quietly forcing changes her own way. Or perhaps not so quietly. Daly, 45, a Dominican nun and member of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, leads its efforts to make corporations more liable financially for damage to the environment and climate changes from global warming. Operating frequently from the group's headquarters on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, in a square building known as "the God Box," Daly spends her days meeting with corporate executives, drafting shareholder resolutions and trying to put pressure on large corporations such as Exxon Mobil and General Electric.

To the rest of the country, Jim McKay is the man who held overnight vigil in an ABC broadcast booth during the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the man who has traveled the wide world of sports for the past thirtysomething years.But to Maryland, and its horse racing community, Jim McKay is the man who brought a number of previously warring factions together for an event that in its first five years has made an impact both locally and nationally. In many ways, Jim McKay is the Maryland Million.