Suits: A Corporate Director Who Plays Hardball

If Zach Nelson, the chief executive of NetSuite, hopes to be paid like a pro athlete, his company may have chosen the wrong baseball executive.

Jeffrey H. Smulyan

NetSuite, a small-business-software maker backed by Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle, added Billy Beane, the former big-league baseball player who is now general manager of the Oakland Athletics, to its board this month.

Mr. Beane has signed multimillion-dollar contracts with some pitchers and shortstops, to be sure. But he is best known for his strategy of playing hardball in salary negotiations and squeezing the most out of players for the least money, which was the subject of Moneyball, a best-selling book by Michael Lewis. PATRICK McGEEHAN

LEAVING THE BOARD Moguldom is not what it used to be. Just ask Jim Clark, who ignited the dot-com boom by taking Netscape public a decade ago.

He recently resigned from the board of Shutterfly, the online photo processing service, saying that the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-governance law had taken all the fun out of being a director. Congress enacted the law and President Bush signed it in 2002 in response to the Enron, WorldCom and other scandals.

Mr. Clark, who founded Shutterfly and owned about 30 percent when it went public last September, complained in his resignation letter that he believed that the law forbids him to be chairman or to run any of the boards committees.

Whats left, he added tartly, is liability and constraints on stock transactions, neither of which excite me.

So Mr. Clark went home, taking some solace, one presumes, in his 292-foot yacht, Athena, the worlds largest three-masted schooner when it was launched in 2004. ELIZABETH OLSON

TOYOTA, MEET TEXAS Ever since Toyota opened its new $1.2 billion assembly plant in San Antonio two months ago, Texans have been giving everyone connected with the company a big, very un-Japanese Lone Star welcome. Gov. Rick Perry, for example, hugged the companys chief executive, Katsuaki Watanabe, at the plants dedication ceremony in November.

More recently, two other Toyota executives — the chairman, Hiroshi Okuda, and Yukitoshi Funo, who is in charge of its North American operations — were startled when a stranger approached them in the lobby of the Omni San Antonio Hotel and exclaimed, in an unmistakably Texan accent: Welcome to San Antonio! Were so grateful to have Toyota here. MICHELINE MAYNARD

BUT THANKS FOR ASKING There is no doubt about who commands the microphone in the boardroom of Emmis Communications.

An investor was asking his fellow shareholders to vote to eliminate Emmiss Class B shares, which carry 10 votes each and give Jeffrey H. Smulyan, the founder, chairman and chief executive, control of the company though he owns less than 20 percent of its stock.

Emmiss board did not support or oppose the proposal. It just declined to even consider it at all. The board said the issue was moot because the change required the cooperation of Mr. Smulyan, and he had already said hed withhold it. PATRICK McGEEHAN

MORE TO COME? Federal prosecutors successfully concluded criminal cases against two former U.S. Foodservice executives late last year, but the affair is not over.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Suzanne Brown, the former corporate controller, agreed to pay a $100,000 civil penalty to resolve accusations that she helped inflate revenue by $700 million from 2000 to 2003. She did not admit or deny any wrongdoing.

Michael J. Resnick, the companys ex-finance chief, pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges last September and was sentenced in December to six months home detention and three years probation. Mark P. Kaiser, a former marketing executive, was convicted in federal court in Manhattan in November; he is to be sentenced Feb. 8.

The S.E.C. is still investigating the case, an agency official said, and more enforcement actions may come soon. JEREMY W. PETERS

HE IS NOT AMUSED Its been a rough year for Daniel M. Snyder. His Washington Redskins racked up a 5-11 season, and his Six Flags amusement parks posted a 14 percent decline in attendance.

While he does not plan major changes with the football team, Six Flags is another matter. Less than a year after he bought the company, he is selling 7 of its 30 parks for $312 million.

Six Flags C.E.O., Mark Shapiro, said selling the parks — in California, Colorado, New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington State — would reduce its debt load. ELIZABETH OLSON

THIS OLD HOUSE Bet on it: Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Inc., wont be appearing on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition anytime soon. He lost a fight to tear down a 17,250-square-foot mansion in Woodside, Calif., that he has owned since 1984.

Mr. Jobs wanted to replace the 30-room Jackling House, built in the 1920s for a copper magnate, with a smaller house. But preservationists sued to stop him, and a state appeals court in San Francisco last week upheld a ruling that blocked demolition. PATRICK McGEEHAN

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