On the other hand, during times of crisis, leadership should be focused on damage control. Organizations that have applied this leadership approach before apart from MSO include the Trump Organization in mid-1990 (Greenbaum & Thakor, 2007)
(MSNBC News, 2005) Martha's indictment and the stress on employees When Martha Stewart was prosecuted for inside trading, she was forced to renounce her position as Chief Executive Officer within the multimedia empire she had built herself. (Crawford, 2004) When this happened, the employees at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia felt abandoned as their leader and protector was facing incarceration
Martha Stewart's first action was to thank her fans for standing behind her during her time of crisis. Also, during her prison sentence, she returned to her initial paradigm: she worked on herself until she was satisfied and then translated this work back into her company (Brady, 2005)
The business/investing perspective This perspective examines what Martha Stewart's incarceration may do to falling Kmart stock prices, and also to the stock price of her company (Toobin 2003:1). As a convicted felon Stewart can no longer sit at the helm of her eponymous, publicly traded company, even though she founded the company (Anderson 2003)
The Department of Justice indicted Stewart, saying she lied because she denied any evidence of insider trading, a nebulously defined crime that some legal experts do not see as a 'crime' at all (Anderson, 2003). None of the other sellers of the stock, other than Waksal faced legal action (McMenamin, 2003)
There were also accusations after she was sent to prison that she skirted the rules of Alderson -- horrors of horror, taking too many condiments from the cafeteria, as well as the gleeful surprise that she even lost the Christmas decorating contest at the prison ("Martha Stewart Made Most of Prison Stay," 2005, Fox Business News). The business/investing perspective This perspective examines what Martha Stewart's incarceration may do to falling Kmart stock prices, and also to the stock price of her company (Toobin 2003:1)
In other words, Stewart's imprisonment still has ramifications on her compensation, and on the attitude of the company's executives towards the person and persona of Martha Stewart. Stewart's salary continued to rise in 2010, though it dropped slightly in the first quarter of 2011 to come in just under six million dollars (Angelo 2011)
The Maven's New Salary It is almost impossible to address the manner in which current events of any sort have helped to shape Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in the past decade without mentioning the imprisonment of the company's founder and figurehead. Those this occurred in the middle of the previous decade, with Stewart released from federal prison in 2005, the memory of the incident and the insider trading that led to her conviction is still quite present in the minds of analysts and other media, and thus continues to have an impact upon the decisions made by the company's officers (Carr 2009)
Martha Stewart Too Much of a Good Thing?: A Quantitative Analysis of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Martha Stewart and her business endeavors have come a very long way since the cooking, crafting, and home makeover maven attended a stock brokerage class and earned her trading license in 1968 (O'Rourke 2007). The fact that Stewart even had a brokerage license might seem some what ironic in light of the insider trading scandal and resultant prison sentence that have now become some of the best-known details of her life, but far from being exemplary or definitive of Stewart's character or path to success this episode is quite contrary to the overall trajectory of her life and business acumen (Bhattacharya & Marshall 2009)
In the following pages, a quantitative analysis of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia that examines the financial situation and valuation of the company from several angles will be conducted. This analysis reveals a complex situation for a relatively new corporation still struggling to make a profit despite the fact that it does many millions of dollars in business each year, and that is so closely tied to the persona and image of its founder and effective leader that it has struggled to form a more lasting and solid brand identity (Byron 2002; O'Rourke 2007)
Martha Stewart Too Much of a Good Thing?: A Quantitative Analysis of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Martha Stewart and her business endeavors have come a very long way since the cooking, crafting, and home makeover maven attended a stock brokerage class and earned her trading license in 1968 (O'Rourke 2007)
However, after the excesses of the 1920's and the ensuing depression, there was an inevitable backlash and shift in public opinion. Consequently insider trading was banned and serious penalties imposed on those convicted in engaging in the practice (Kennon, NDI)
When Stewart initially received the information about the potential drop in the stock price of the ImClone stock and subsequently asked her broker to sell her shares, it is possible that she did not knowingly engage in illegal behavior. However, once Stewart conspired with her broker to defraud the Securities and Exchange Commission and knowingly lie to federal investigators she engaged in illegal and unethical behavior for which no claim of ignorance would be credible (Rawls, 2009)
The court found that while O'Hagan had no duty to Pillsbury or its shareholders, he did have a duty to the source of his information. O'Hagan's failure to disclose his personal trading to Grand Met and Dorsey, in breach of his duty to do so, made his conduct deceptive (Salceda & Rodda, 1998)
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Company Overview For a time, Martha Stewart and her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (trading on the New York Stock Exchange as MSO) was best known for the brief imprisonment of its founder, namesake, and very public face due to insider trading convictions (Yahoo 2011; Brown & Rhodes 2011). Both Stewart and her company have more than rebounded form this debacle, however, and the long and almost entirely successful career of this cooking, crafting, and business wizard has hardly been affected by this isolated ordeal (Brown & Rhodes 2011)