The long-struggling home improvement retailers didn't fare well either. Today, Home Depot posted second quarter results that were down 24% from the year before. And while rival Lowe's reported higher than expected profits, it set its third quarter forecast below Wall Street analysts'.

Still, there was some good news mixed in with the bad. Both Home Depot and Lowe's beat expectations, and analysts referred to Lowe's quarter as being strong. Both attributed better operating efforts, merchandising initiatives, or tighter expense controls as help.

While that comes as little surprise in this economy, it's a stark reminder of how much the pendulum has swung. Gone, it seems, is the touting of new store openings, innovation initiatives, or eco-friendly campaigns as the path to good results. While those are still important, of course, the dominant management credo today seems to have shifted from hot new innovations to operating a better-run company. Will it be enough to surmount a housing market and inflationary environment worse than we've seen in decades? Who knows. But those who do both well--innovation and operations--are most likely to come out on top in the end.

Peters reminds us that sometimes, you've gotta known when not to fold 'em, too, or at least persist a little longer. How to endure. He reminds us that some of the most successful people (he mentions John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs at the time they started Pixar) create great success out of persisting through failure. Of course, sometimes you don't hold the cards. But if you do, Peters says, think twice before folding 'em completely.

Read the post and join in on the guessing game of who Tom's visitor was here.

That's why this post over at the great blog HR Capitalist intrigues me. Blogger Kris Dunn, an HR VP at SourceMedical, a software company, writes SABMiller's new head of HR, Tony van Kralingen. While that sort of news is announced every day, van Kralingen is also taking up a second post. His title? Director of human resources and supply chain. Not only is the overlap in skill sets in today's economy interesting. It should also give van Kralingen a better seat at the table than the average HR exec, who is all too often seen as having little impact on the bottom line, and therefore, given little voice in major company decisions.

For more on the idea of human resources as having a lot to learn from the supply chain, check out Peter Cappelli's great book, Talent on Demand.

The GAO’s study was ordered up by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. Its conclusions focus on the fact that large foreign corporations are more likely to avoid taxes than US companies.

Like most of these studies, the GAO’s report looks at taxes as accounted for on the corporate income statement, not the cash taxes actually paid. (By that measure, 42 of the companies in the S&P500 had an actual tax rate of less than 10% over the past 5 years, another 58 paid less than 16%, and neither group paid anything like the statutory corporate tax rate of 35%).

According to the GAO, in recent years the gap in the number of US and foreign companies enjoying a tax free year has significantly narrowed. Though the authors didn’t go into exactly how both groups are sidestepping the tax man, they did indicate that transfer pricing looks to be a culprit. Transfer pricing is how much one part of a company charges another for something.

In a 2003 story on corporate taxes, we dug up and example of how this worked for hotel chain Hyatt.:

In one U.S. tax court case that is still pending, the IRS accused hotelier Hyatt International of paying too little for the Hyatt brand and other services provided by its U.S. parent. The IRS alleges that from 1976 to 1988, various Hyatt companies underreported income by $100 million because of those lowball fees. In an October, 1999, ruling on some aspects of the case, U.S. Tax Court Judge Joel Gerber ruled that the $10,000 one-time fee International had paid for each hotel bearing the Hyatt name was far too low. Hyatt declined to comment because the broad case is ongoing.

Tax economist Martin Sullivan, thinks half of the sharp drop in the foreign tax rates of U.S. multinationals -- from 49.6% in 1983 to 22.2% in 1999 – is the result of similar shifting of income from foreign countries with a higher tax rate to those with lower rates.

Beyond shedding some light on the impact of transfer pricing, the report also shows:

• Fewer large foreign-controlled companies are paying no taxes today than in the past. That figure has declined since its 2001 peak of more than 50%.
• More US companies (large and small) reported zero tax liability in 2005 (the most recent year included) than foreign-controlled companies.
• 72% of foreign-controlled companies reported no tax liability some time between 1998 and 2005, while 55% of US-controlled companies did so.
• The biggest tax breaks come from deductions for salary and wages, and from a category called “other” that includes travel expenses, legal fees, and insurance, as well as dividends paid on stock owned by employee stock ownership plans.

It's not surprising that in a slow down, or worse, a company would need its CEO to be its chief operating officer says Brian M. Sullivan, CEO of executive search firm CTPartners. In boom times, a CEO may best spend his (or her) time on overseas expansion, strategic partnerships, wooing Wall Street, and the like. But when the going gets rough, the CEO must focus on defending and protecting the business he's already got. "A CEO in this environment has to focus as a COO or won’t be adding value to the business and will be derelict in their responsibility," says Sullivan. Sullivan recalls Lou Gerstner's comment on his first day at IBM when a reporter asked "What’s your vision for IBM?" "He said, 'The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.'"

Light on vision, the private equity CEO is the "embodiment of the CEO who is the COO" says Sullivan. Guys like Bob Nardelli at Cerberus-owned Chrysler are roll-up-your-sleeves types digging in to unlock value. Private Equity investors "don’t want a CEO who thinks, they want one who does," he says. And he means it as a compliment.

Peter M. Felix, President of the Association of Executive Search Consultants thinks that Sarbanes-Oxley may be behind some dwindling in the COO suite as well. With CEO's now having to attest to the accuracy of their financial statements, says Felix, "delegating operating responsibility may not be a good idea."

According to the authors, the influence of analyst ratings on boards and CEO dismissals increased dramatically post-2002, when new independence rules were set up following the dot-com scandals. Before the scandal, a CEO whose firm had a mean rating of 2.7 (one point below the average on a five-point scale) would have a 3% chance of being dismissed within six months. After the new rules were introduced in 2002, that CEO would have a 7.9% chance of dismissal.

That was surprising to the researchers, especially since stock analysts became the butt of many business world jokes following their insanely high ratings on companies that couldn't even eke out a profit. "Given the crisis in confidence that the securities industry experienced, we expected to find that analysts' influence would have diminished," Prof. Wiersema commented in a press release.

I'm always on the lookout for good management blogs to read, but they're a fairly rare breed, especially ones written by business school profs. For example, I'm a big fan of Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana, the author of Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, but his blog hasn't seen an entry since December.

Then this week, I received London Business School's management journal, Business Strategy Review, in the mail. On page 54 is a huge glossy picture of a guy who looks more like a Thomas Pink model than a management professor. What follows is five entire pages of edited postings from the blog of Freek Vermeulen, a management professor at, of course, LBS. A reference to a link might have been a better use of print pages, I thought, given that the blog is online for everyone to read.

Still, I decided to take a look, and Vermeulen's blog seems compelling for those who want to keep up with recent management research and ideas. He writes about narcissistic CEOs, whether shareholders really are owners of a company, how bad business practices survive, and women leaders, among other topics. For anyone looking for good online management material, Vermeulen's blog is worth a read.

The more these teens can alter what they're buying, the happier they are. One of the most popular brands with male teens today is Adidas. The sneaker maker's in-store events, where kids can decorate their own shoes, is a sign the company gets it. T-shirt Web store Threadless.com is among the top five sites with teen males, who like the designs but also embrace its democratic ethos. Over 300,000 registered users design, review, and buy the T-shirts, which are produced in limited runs of 1,000.

With Dell, pioneer of mass customization, seeming to put its struggles behind it, maybe the idea is still ablaze. Or maybe not. A deeper look shows Dell's possible salvation has a lot more to do with decidedly more standardized gizmos, like lap tops, than the build-your-own PCs they pioneered.

So do we all want to participate in making our own stuff? Or is mass customization ultimately limited in its appeal? Keds'new launch is either evidence this trend has legs or a sign that it's topping out, I'm just not sure which.

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Also, on an earlier topic, Vice, it's worth taking a look at this story about businessman gambler Steve Wynn upping his bet on high-end Las Vegas.

Earnings last week from Philip Morris International certainly provide strong support for that truism. When Altria, maker of Marlboro, spun off the international business in March, PMI, got CEO Louis Camilleri and the company’s entire business outside the US. It’s easy to see what appealed to Camilleri. The company’s earnings rose almost 23% this quarter, and management says the outlook for the rest of the year is 19 to 21% growth. And people weren’t just buying cigarettes; they were paying more from them. Yes that’s right, pricing power. As affluence spreads across the globe, cigarettes are an easy status symbol and Marlboro has been the beneficiary of trading up from local smokes. Among the countries with notable “favorable pricing”: Indonesia, Mexico and Russia. But even in longer trod markets, like Germany and Italy, the company found hiking prices didn’t do too much damage.
In a July 24 report, Morgan Stanley analyst William Pecoriello found that even the weary US consumer is managing to make it to the supermarket to stock up on some Bud Lite, or, more often, a craft beer. Pecoriello’s research showed that year-over-year US alcohol volume sales were up 2.3%, and dollar sales even higher, up 4.7%, in the four weeks ending July 13.
This week we roll into more news on the darker side of the economy.

Now that the experts have spoken, it's our turn. I spoke with someone the other day that gave me a tip I'm going to try to implement myself: Create a stop-doing list, along with a to-do list. Make a list of the things you're going to try to stop doing, and check that as often as the list of things you have to do. It's just as important to not getting overloaded with tasks that are unimportant, that others could be doing, or that just shouldn't be taking up your time.

Now, I'm asking you: What are the time management secrets you put to use every day? How do you manage the email deluge? What are the ideas you implement to get from your coffee-fueled commute and back home again to the people you really care about? Please leave your ideas here. We'll print the best ones in a reader-generated list of time management tips in BusinessWeek Magazine.

GE's six business segments have been reduced to four, centered around what it calls its three "core industries": infrastructure, finance and media. The move combines GE's commercial and consumer finance divisions under one umbrella, splits off its energy infrastructure businesses into a separate unit, and combines the enterprise solutions business (left on its own after the announced consumer & industrial spin-off) with aviation, transportation and healthcare, which last week saw its head, Joseph Hogan, depart for Swiss electrical engineering company ABB Group. It will result in the promotion of John Krenicki, who has been running GE's energy unit, to vice chairman of the newly formed energy infrastructure segment.

Some kind of reorganization was not unexpected. Immelt had said in past discussions with analysts that he was considering moving the aviation and energy financial services units back into GE Commercial Finance as a way to simplify the structure. He's openly said he would be reallocating capital from GE Money, the consumer finance business, toward Commercial Finance, moves that are surely easier to do under one unit. And during GE's conference call for the second quarter, when earnings met expectations and revenue beat them after a big first-quarter miss, Immelt outlined GE's major industries in a slide called "Company going forward" that separated the energy and technology infrastructure businesses. Some analysts saw the move coming: "It is clear [management] is evaluating all options and we anticipate a reorganization in the near future," wrote Credit Suisse analyst Nicole Parent in a research note.

All options, indeed. Immelt's reorg is yet another sign that he's taking big steps to steer the company, and shake it up, in a tough market after years of stock market malaise. By elevating energy to a separate unit, Immelt is saying a lot about the company's commitment to this fast-growing area. Separating infrastructure into two divisions and combining financial services into one sends the smart signal to Wall Street that GE is focusing itself on infrastructure --its financial services exposure has weighed it down in recent months as that troubled sector has suffered. And finally, calling NBC Universal one of its core industries could quiet those investors still calling for GE to shed the peacock. Only time will tell if it will help reignite the share price.

Over the holiday, I had a chance to watch the YouTube video, which has now been converted into a book that's been translated into 30 languages, viewed millions of times across the globe, and turned a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor named Randy Pausch, who died today at the age of 47 of complications from pancreatic cancer, into a worldwide phenomenon.

But even before he became famous for his "last lecture," Pausch drew crowds for his lectures on time management, which he has said he's most proud of. It reveals tips on multitasking, efficiently dealing with e-mail, and some of his own secrets, like standing up while talking on the phone to keep from talking too long.

For many, Pausch's lectures are a thought-provoking reminder that business and workplace lessons can come from anywhere, including a computer science professor. His ideas are especially powerful for leaders in the workplace not just because of his unique perspective as a man dying from pancreatic cancer, but because his voice comes from outside the day-to-day world of business.

But what made Pausch's lectures more powerful than anything was how readily they were passed along to others, as my editor did, and as millions of others did to people they hoped would listen. If you haven't yet viewed Pausch's words, take time to watch it today. And then, tell someone you know to search "Randy Pausch" and "last lecture."

Executives at Ford and elsewhere have tried a variety of techniques to get their obligations to retirees under control in recent years, and for a while it seemed to be working. After hitting bottom in 2002, these plans began to climb back to a balanced budget thanks to benefit cuts and strong investment returns. By last year the S&P 500 pension plans as a whole were actually $60 billion in the black. The market’s swoon has erased all that, and now Zion is estimating they’re back in the red by $110 billion.

Quite a whipsaw and one Zion points out is likely to put pressure on earnings as management antes up cash to shore up the funds. It's not just Ford that’s headed for a rough ride, either. General Motors, Unisys and Office Max are among those with their own unfunded bills coming due.

With the rise of designer gas prices, no one is getting slaughtered more than the fastest-growing group of commuters: extreme commuters. Soon, they may well have to flee suburbia.

This made me think of a study I came across a few years ago when I was writing a piece about the epidemic of extreme commuting.

The research came from a fascinting reserach duo in Europe, who proved the Faustian Bargain of commuting in a paper called The Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox.

The researchers, economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, of the University of Zurich's Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, found that most people travel long distances with the idea that they'll accept the burden for something better, be it a house, salary, or school.

They presume the trade-off is worth the agony. But studies show that commuters are on average much less satisfied with their lives than noncommuters.

A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, Frey and Stutzer found. People usually overestimate the value of the things they'll obtain by commuting -- more money, more material goods, more prestige -- and underestimate the benefit of what they are losing: social connections, hobbies, and health.

Says Stutzer, "Commuting is a stress that doesn't pay off."

Something else to think about in the era of couture gas.

I wonder if the moves are less a sign of discontent in the ranks of GE--as the stock continues to struggle--and more a sign of greater pressure to perform within GE.

Hogan is a contemporary of GE chief executive Jeff Immelt. He took over the business where Immelt made his greatest mark--GE Healthcare. While Hogan did well the last quarter, though, he has presided over some tough times at the $14 billion unit. This is a business that's supposed to shine. John Dineen, Hogan's successor, likely has to ramp up results.