...Corporate Hero with Scandal: Lessons Learned from Martha Stewart’s Insider Trading Crisis Shuhui Sophy Cheng Assistant Professor Department of Communication Arts Chaoyang University of Technology 168 Jifeng E. Rd. Wufeng District Taichung 41349, Taiwan Abstract Martha Stewart places her name on her products. She becomes the face of her company and the voice of her brand. When her personal misconduct occurred, she made her company vulnerable and risky as well. This casestudy examines how Martha Stewart managed her corporate communication when her public image and reputation were tarnished on trial for alleged insider trading scandal. The trial not only led her to prison but also hurt her brand equity. The study shows that Stewart’s early response to her crisis demonstrated lack of situation awareness. In the beginning of her investigation, she kept her public persona intact, ignoring or downplaying her role in it. As a result, what Stewart called “a small personal matter” later became a full-blown crisis. If she had managed her communication in a more timely manner, the magnitude of her crisis might have been minimized. This article also provides detailed insights for organizations to learn from her crisis response strategies. Keywords: Organizational crisis, Crisis communication, Image restoration 1. Introduction The personalities of strong business leaders can help shape and enhance their corporate image. In some cases, the leaders become the virtual icon of the corporate...
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...Throughout the case study on Martha Stewart, evidence provided illustrates how public relations can alter the image of a national personality in both negative and positive lights. In particular, the case illustrates how Stewart’s initially poor public relations responses tarnished her image and, only after changing her tactics, did she actually work toward correcting the problem. Ultimately, the Martha Stewart case is pivotal in illustrating how the power of public relations, if used correctly, can revamp a person’s public portrait----even if formal charges of criminal activity exist. Martha Stewart, a “model student” and iconic legend of the kitchen, has been world renown for her success and outspokenness in the past; however, upon receiving allegations of insider trading, Stewart actually became a ‘silent diva’ by inevitably isolating herself from all media and society (Seitel, 17-18). Although this initial public relations response helped Martha avoid responding to the pressing questions from the media, I believe that her silence was counterintuitive to proving her innocence in the sense that her natural personality was “typically feisty” (18). Using logical thinking, most Americans accused of a crime that they were not responsible for would protest, appeal, and flat out become outraged----actions that an already “feisty” Stewart surely would have carried out had she truly believed in her innocence. By remaining silent and withdrawing from her daily life on talk...
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...International ETH 501 BUSINESS ETHICS MOD 1 CASE STUDY Dr. Cathy Anderson Introduction The case against Martha Stewart surrounded her sale of 3,928 shares in ImClone Systems Inc., and whether she lied to investigators and her company's investors about it. On Dec. 27, 2001, Stewart cashed out her ImClone stake at an average price of $58.43, collecting about $229,500. After the market closed the following day, the Food and Drug Administration announced its refusal to review ImClone's application for Erbitux, a promising cancer drug. The next trading day, Dec. 31, ImClone's shares opened at $45.39 per share. That difference in price would have cost Stewart about $51,200 if she sold first thing that morning. Had she acted responsibly? The obvious answer is no. But I defy anyone to ignore the possibility that they could lose a large some of money in a short time. Her actions after getting the news that she could lose thousands of dollars were a matter of self preservation. For those that states it’s all about the money; I ask, why then does a billionaire continue to buy low and sell high. It’s clear they’ve reached a point of saturation a few million dollars ago. For some it’s the thrill of the hunt not the kill that keeps them motivated; they’ve enough severed heads mounted within their mansions. Compared to the recent actions of others CEO’s Kenneth Lay of Enron and L. Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, Martha Stewart told what amounted to a ‘little white lie’...
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...Complete the case studies for this week. Review the case studies below in the textbook. Prepare a one-page report for each of the following case studies: * Case Study: Martha Stewart’s Lost Reputation, pg. 34 * Case Study: Texaco: The Ecuador Issue, pg. 41 * Case Study: Where Were the Accountants?, pg. 44 Ethics Case: Martha Stewart’s Lost Reputation In June 2002, Martha Stewart began to wrestle with allegations that she had improperly used inside information to sell a stock investment to an unsuspecting investing public. That was when her personal friend Sam Waksal was defending himself against Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allegations that he had tipped off his family members so they could sell their shares of ImClone Systems Inc. (ImClone) just before other investors learned that ImClone’s fortunes were about to take a dive. Observers presumed that Martha was also tipped off and, even though she proclaimed her innocence, the rumors would not go away. On TV daily as the reigning guru of homemaking, Martha is the multi-millionaire proprietor, president and driving force of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. (MSO), of which, on March 18, 2002, she owned 30,713,475 (62.6 percent1) of the class A, and 30,619,375 (100 percent) of the class B shares. On December 27, 2001, Martha’s Class A and Class B shares were worth approximately $17 each, so on paper Martha’s MSO class A shares alone were worth over $500 million. Class B shares are convertible into...
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...------------------------------------------------- Martha Stewart’s Lost Reputation Discussion of ethical issues 1. What was the basis of Martha Stewart’s reputation? According to how stock prices of MSO fluctuates during her law suit trials, stock prices and market shares formed the basis of her reputation. 2. Why did MSO’s stock price decline due to Martha Stewart’s loss of reputation? The public trusted MSO reputation especially in the area of stock prices, thus when Martha was accused of insider’s trading of stocks, it tarnished the very foundation of the trust the public has on MSO. Naturally, the public would worry of losses and thus sell their shares they have on MSO. 3. Who is Martha Stewart’s target market? The target market is mostly upper-class ladies who lavished on premium products/ 4. What qualities were associated with the Martha Stewart brand, before the controversy? Which of these were affected by the accusations of insider trading, and how? How would you find out for sure? Credibility, reliability and trustworthy were the qualities associated with the brand, in which all three qualities were affected by the accusation of insider trading, an illegal and unethical act which ultimately loses the trust of end users. These can be inferred from how stock prices and market shares of MSO fluctuates during the period of the law suit trials, where public begin dumping their shares of MSO during unfavourable situation to Martha and buying back shares when situation...
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...where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has” (Cole 3) In one source, many people argue that our criminal justice system is based on the premise and promise of equality before the law, but at times predicate on the exploitation of inequality (Cole 5) Some feel no matter the crime, the rich and famous will find a way to settle out of court, pay off witnesses or just erase some or all charges against them. Celebrities get the best lawyers and the best chance at justice that money can buy”. (“Times”) There are many court cases that lead people to believe the justice system is unfair. Celebrities, in the eyes of the public, receive less time than the average American citizen for the same crime. Furthermore, celebrities also receive more publicity than the average American citizen. Why do celebrities receive more camera time and less punishment time? However, our judicial system claims that all men are equal in the court of law. For example, in the court case of Marcus Dixon, a high school football player at Pepperell High School in Floyd County, Georgia, the state Supreme Court sentenced Dixon to ten years in prison. He was a black athlete accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old white girl in a small Georgia town. In addition, many believe that the justice system is not equal because of the outcomes of celebrity court cases. Some may disagree with the fact that celebrities get special treatment in the courtroom, but their court cases seem to prove...
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...Insider Trading: Education, Prevention, and Rule 10b5-1 Plans Speaker: Bruce Brumberg, Esq. Editor-in-Chief, myStockOptions.com Producer, Think Twice videos, InsiderTradingVideos.com Copyright © 2007, myStockPlan.com, Inc. Please do not distribute or copy without permission Roadmap for Presentation • Overview of various cases and interesting themes • Fundamentals of insider trading law • Compliance programs • Rule 10b5-1 trading plans • SEC investigations • Martha Stewart case: lessons and training 2 HEADING Shares sold in cases of insider trading often come from option exercises or restricted stock vesting. 3 Accounting scandals/fraud intertwined with insider trading. Insider trading cases more interesting to juries and easier for prosecutors to explain. Did the CEO sell stock knowing his company could not make its earnings targets without improperly booking revenue? 4 The SEC detects and prosecutes even small-profit cases. $38,000 in profits by former CFO. 5 Criminal charges are now more likely. Justice Department and local US Attorneys interested in these cases. Ex-Countrywide execs get probation terms for insider trading By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer LOS ANGELES—November 26, 2007 Three former Countrywide Financial Corp. executives who pleaded guilty to criminal charges of insider trading were sentenced Monday to serve three years probation, the U.S. attorney's office said. They must also serve several hundred hours of community...
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...Unraveling the Details of 10 High-Profile Accounting Scandals written by: ciel s cantoria • edited by: Linda Richter • updated: 12/30/2010 Before digging into the dirty details of each of these major accounting scandals, we’ll take a look at some of the tools that were used to first detect them – including sophisticated accounting systems and advancements in high-tech communication. Technology Fighting Against White Collar Fraud Looking back at the 10 major accounting scandals that changed the business world, it was noted that most of their unraveling came about during the turn of the new millennium, which was a time when the American trade and industries were beginning to experience the benefits and detriments of high-tech computerization. Information storage and communication became sophisticated, which made possible the compilation of hordes of information in an instant. Recording and verification of accounting transactions in realtime were made easier and more accurate, which facilitated the reconciliation of supporting documents versus sources, with very little effort needed. Federal regulators were provided with data that revealed the corrupt practices of high-profile companies and their CEOs. Their bankruptcies became inevitable as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and financial analysts began to see the signs of irregularities among numerous companies. When the SEC ordered the restatement of their financial reports in accordance with the GAAP rules, it...
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...Touro University California Theresa Williams-Rivers Module 1 Case Assignment ETH501: Business Ethics Dr. Gary Shelton Saturday, April 26, 2014 A Master’s paper submitted to the faculty of Touro University California In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of Graduate Diploma in Master’s Degree in Business Management Introduction The purpose of this assignment is to provide a critical analysis of the 2002 collapse of Adelphia Communications as seen through the lens of Immanuel Kant deontological ethics. This analysis will be accomplished by providing a brief time lime of the Adelphia, identifying and discussing two key ethical problems raised and describing what is meant by deontological ethics. More specifically this paper will show how Kant’s Categorical Imperative (CI) applies to this scenario. The latter discussion will apply the deontological framework of business ethics to the two key ethical problems by constructing CI to the Adelphia scenario. The supporting material for this discussion can be found at Harvard University’s 2011 lecture: Justice, What’s the right thing to do? as presented by Professor Michael Sandel8. To examine the elements of the case, we will inspect the unethical behavior of five key figures culpable in the “rise and fall of the small town saga of epic dimensions8”. John J. Rigas (Founder), his two sons; Timothy J. Riga’s (CFO), Michael J. Riga’s (VP of Operations), James R. Brown (VP of Finance) and Michael...
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...Module 1 Case Assignment ETH501: Business Ethics Saturday, April 26, 2014 A Master’s paper submitted to the faculty of University of California In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of Graduate Diploma in Master’s Degree in Business Management Introduction The purpose of this assignment is to provide a critical analysis of the 2002 collapse of Adelphia Communications as seen through the lens of Immanuel Kant deontological ethics. This analysis will be accomplished by providing a brief time lime of the Adelphia, identifying and discussing two key ethical problems raised and describing what is meant by deontological ethics. More specifically this paper will show how Kant’s Categorical Imperative (CI) applies to this scenario. The latter discussion will apply the deontological framework of business ethics to the two key ethical problems by constructing CI to the Adelphia scenario. The supporting material for this discussion can be found at Harvard University’s 2011 lecture: Justice, What’s the right thing to do? as presented by Professor Michael Sandel8. To examine the elements of the case, we will inspect the unethical behavior of five key figures culpable in the “rise and fall of the small town saga of epic dimensions8”. John J. Rigas (Founder), his two sons; Timothy J. Riga’s (CFO), Michael J. Riga’s (VP of Operations), James R. Brown (VP of Finance) and Michael C. Mulcahey (Director of Internal Reporting). By reading the case study we will...
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...III of Federal District Court, who will begin the much-anticipated criminal trial of the former Enron chief executives Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling on Monday.! Judge Lake said in court on Thursday that he expected to choose a panel of 12 jurors and 4 alternates from 100 prospective members in one day. After examining responses to the jury questionnaires, Judge Lake indicated that he felt they did not show evidence of prejudice against the defendants. "I've been impressed by the apparent lack of bias or influence from media exposure," he said.! The lawyers defending Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling have contended for months that finding impartial jurors in Houston would be difficult, if not impossible. But the judge has rejected two requests to move the trial outside of Houston, where Enron was based, and has repeatedly denied pleas by the defense lawyers to allow them to question individual jurors during the final selection process, called voir dire.! The defense lawyers say they are deeply troubled by responses to jury questionnaires, which came back with mostly negative comments about Enron and the defendants. Many Houstonians hold a grudge against Enron's leadership for the company's collapse, which directly wiped out more than 4,000 jobs and retirement accounts and sent shock waves through the city's economy.! Edward J. Bronson, a jury consultant from California who was hired by the defense to study the potential juror responses, noted that among 280 questionnaires, "greed"...
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...Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy Helene P. Foley Barnard College, Columbia University “Leave it to a playwright who has been dead for 2,400 years to jolt Broadway out of its dramatic doldrums” begins a recent New York Times review (December 4, 1998) of a British Electra by Sophocles starring Zoe Wanamaker and Claire Bloom. This fall the Times has repeatedly remarked on the “deluge” of Greek tragedy in the 1998-99 theater season: the National Theater of Greece’s Medea, Joanne Akalaitis’ The Iphigeneia Cycle (a double bill that combines Euripides’ two Iphigeneia plays), a revival of Andrei Serban’s famous Fragments of a Greek Trilogy, and a four-and-a-half-hour adaptation of the Oedipus Rex were announced at the start of the season. Off-off Broadway versions will inevitably follow. The Brooklyn Academy of Music even hosted a dance/theatre piece based on the Eleusinian Mysteries. 1 The Classic Stage Company, an off-Broadway theater group devoted to performance and adaptation of Western classics, currently receives more scripts that re-work Greek tragedy than any other category of drama. 2 From a global perspective, New York is simply reflecting a trend set by important modern playwrights and directors worldwide. Greek drama now occupies a regular place in the London theater season. In the past twenty years, acclaimed productions have been mounted not only in Europe but also in Japan, India, and Africa. Translations are even beginning to proliferate in China, occasionally...
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...Six months ago I wrote a report titled “How to Hack the Stock Market”. The report is just 62 pages long but it explains a specific stock market loophole I use to make roughly $10,000 a month. After first writing the report I sold it to experienced traders from an online investing community. Within weeks some of the traders were exploiting the loophole and making thousands of dollars. Because of that success I decided to create this website and sell the report online. I apologize for the short quiz I just had you fill out... I only want to teach this strategy to those who will actually put it to use. If someone couldn’t answer those simple questions, they will not have the drive or motivation to make this work. I could write a killer ad for my report. I could fill it with testimonials from successful students and even show you proof of my earnings. But I’m not going to do that – I hate those late night infomercials more than anyone else I know. Instead, I’m just going to let you read Chapter 1 of my report. (I’ve reproduced it below). But first, I need to tell you something. Some of my friends and clients laugh at the title of the report. I mean, I admit "How to Hack the Stock Market" is a little kitsch. But I called it that because... My report won't teach you about "life". I'm not gonna bore you with mindless drivel about personal finance and achieving your dreams. If you want that stuff buy 'Rich Dad Poor Dad'. Or any of the other "get rich quick" books...
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...M A G A Z I N E FA L L 2 0 0 2 Volume 20 Number 2 SPANNING THE GLOBE Duke Leads the Way in International Law Teaching and Scholarship inside plus Duke admits smaller, exceptionally well-qualified class Duke’s Global Capital Markets Center to launch new Directors’ Education Institute from the dean Dear Alumni and Friends, It is not possible, these days, for a top law school to be anything other than an international one. At Duke Law, we no longer think of “international” as a separate category. Virtually everything we do has some international dimension, whether it concerns international treaties and protocols, commercial transactions across national borders, international child custody disputes, criminal behavior that violates international human rights law, international sports competitions, global environmental regulation, international terrorism, or any number of other topics. And, of course, there is little that we do at Duke that does not involve scholars and students from other countries, who are entirely integrated with U.S. scholars and students. Students enrolled in our joint JD/LLM program in international and comparative law receive an in-depth education in both the public and private aspects of international and comparative law, enriched by the ubiquitous presence of foreign students; likewise, the foreign lawyers who enroll in our one-year LLM program in American law enroll in the same courses, attend the same conferences...
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...M A G A Z I N E FA L L 2 0 0 2 Volume 20 Number 2 SPANNING THE GLOBE Duke Leads the Way in International Law Teaching and Scholarship inside plus Duke admits smaller, exceptionally well-qualified class Duke’s Global Capital Markets Center to launch new Directors’ Education Institute from the dean Dear Alumni and Friends, It is not possible, these days, for a top law school to be anything other than an international one. At Duke Law, we no longer think of “international” as a separate category. Virtually everything we do has some international dimension, whether it concerns international treaties and protocols, commercial transactions across national borders, international child custody disputes, criminal behavior that violates international human rights law, international sports competitions, global environmental regulation, international terrorism, or any number of other topics. And, of course, there is little that we do at Duke that does not involve scholars and students from other countries, who are entirely integrated with U.S. scholars and students. Students enrolled in our joint JD/LLM program in international and comparative law receive an in-depth education in both the public and private aspects of international and comparative law, enriched by the ubiquitous presence of foreign students; likewise, the foreign lawyers who enroll in our one-year LLM program in American law enroll in the same courses, attend the same conferences...
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