A freelance Egyptian TV cameraman who was detained while covering the country's constitutional referendum for The Associated Press was released on bail Friday, but the case remains open, authorities said.
Hassan Abdullah Hassan was producing live video coverage of the first day of voting Wednesday outside a polling station in Cairo when police seized him along with his driver, Mohammed Salah Mohammed. Mohammed was freed Thursday.
Hassan said he was detained after police saw his footage being broadcast live on Al-Jazeera Television's Egyptian affiliate and wrongly concluded that he was an Al-Jazeera employee. Authorities here have been highly critical of Al-Jazeera's Arabic-language local affiliate, alleging it is biased against the government.
AP video footage is made available to client broadcasters and other AP customers all over the world.
"We are pleased that Mr. Hassan has been released on bail, and we hope that any remaining legal questions can be resolved quickly," said John Daniszewski, AP senior managing editor for international news.
Several journalists have been detained in recent months as part of a broader crackdown on what authorities say is biased coverage favoring ousted president Mohammed Morsi. Among them were three journalists jailed in December in Cairo while working for Al-Jazeera, arrests that have drawn criticism from numerous international journalist and news organizations.
This week's referendum was part of the country's political roadmap toward new elections for a president. It was also seen as a test of public opinion on the removal of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood from power last July by the military in a popularly backed coup.
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Friday, January 17, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Why do so many companies want to fire their CEO?
Want to fire the C-Suite?
According to a recent report from advisory firm the Corporate Executive Board, nearly a third of companies would replace their leadership teams if they could. That’s a pretty startling lack of confidence in both the people that lead companies and the processes by which they reach the top of the tree.
So what’s going wrong?
One issue, according to CEB’s Conrad Schmidt, is that the number of stakeholders that any top team needs to understand and work with has grown enormously over the last few years. Regulators, investors, employees, analysts, media and pressure groups all demand a hearing and have more tools at their disposal to attract attention to their needs. Combine that with a slow economy, accelerated business cycles, investor pressure and business complexity and it’s easy to see that business leadership has become more difficult than ever before.
“Most CEOs simply don’t know what to do,” is how one senior leader put it to me. Having run a leading telecommunications company, she now mentors C-suite executives. Typically, they’ve come up through the company and honed specific disciplines; they’re great finance thinkers, product innovators or salepeople. Their entire careers have been characterized by the steady accumulation of deep skills in one area.
But once they assume senior executive positions, they need entirely different skills: networking, knowledge-gathering, consensus building, listening. They should be good at this – so why aren’t they?
One reason is because top execs often don’t believe (or remember) that these things matter. Impressed by their own status, they carry in their head an image of leadership as the tough-minded heroic soloist who knows, or is expected to know, everything. And so they take one of two roads. They either start acting like prima donnas in the hope that they will live up to their billing, or they panic and fall into despondency because they know they can’t live up to it. Both choices are poor, but the first explains the shrinking tenure of CEOs while the second is sometimes redeemable.
What these leaders should do instead is expunge forever the image of the CEO who knows everything and replace it with the image of the leader who knows everyone. Managing a rich network isn’t about collecting business cards, but rather about a deep internal understanding of a rich collection of smart, informed people who want to help and be helped.
Randy Papadellis, CEO of Ocean Spray, once told me he thought he was better described as the Chief Alignment Officer, which could explain why he and his cranberry farmers have done so well.
According to a recent report from advisory firm the Corporate Executive Board, nearly a third of companies would replace their leadership teams if they could. That’s a pretty startling lack of confidence in both the people that lead companies and the processes by which they reach the top of the tree.
So what’s going wrong?
One issue, according to CEB’s Conrad Schmidt, is that the number of stakeholders that any top team needs to understand and work with has grown enormously over the last few years. Regulators, investors, employees, analysts, media and pressure groups all demand a hearing and have more tools at their disposal to attract attention to their needs. Combine that with a slow economy, accelerated business cycles, investor pressure and business complexity and it’s easy to see that business leadership has become more difficult than ever before.
“Most CEOs simply don’t know what to do,” is how one senior leader put it to me. Having run a leading telecommunications company, she now mentors C-suite executives. Typically, they’ve come up through the company and honed specific disciplines; they’re great finance thinkers, product innovators or salepeople. Their entire careers have been characterized by the steady accumulation of deep skills in one area.
But once they assume senior executive positions, they need entirely different skills: networking, knowledge-gathering, consensus building, listening. They should be good at this – so why aren’t they?
One reason is because top execs often don’t believe (or remember) that these things matter. Impressed by their own status, they carry in their head an image of leadership as the tough-minded heroic soloist who knows, or is expected to know, everything. And so they take one of two roads. They either start acting like prima donnas in the hope that they will live up to their billing, or they panic and fall into despondency because they know they can’t live up to it. Both choices are poor, but the first explains the shrinking tenure of CEOs while the second is sometimes redeemable.
What these leaders should do instead is expunge forever the image of the CEO who knows everything and replace it with the image of the leader who knows everyone. Managing a rich network isn’t about collecting business cards, but rather about a deep internal understanding of a rich collection of smart, informed people who want to help and be helped.
Randy Papadellis, CEO of Ocean Spray, once told me he thought he was better described as the Chief Alignment Officer, which could explain why he and his cranberry farmers have done so well.
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