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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JMD who wrote (35586)	7/18/1999 6:05:00 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

JMD-- I spend about 70% of my DD efforts on quality of management, with the remainder on 'the numbers'. Interesting. Do you have any MO you can share about how you go about assessing management quality? Knowing things like whether a top executive has a secretary or not doesn't sound like the type of info you get from EDGAR...

To: JMD who wrote (35586)	7/18/1999 9:49:00 PM
From: gdichaz	Respond to of 152472

JMD: Mike, having followed your posts for years I have noticed a fair amount of thought and forward looking searching among the humor which goes with it. OK perhaps you don't deserve a statue or other sculpture yet. But hey, you're young. Actually, I would consider your msg itself in reply to mine "thoughtful". Sorry about that. Yes, management is the sine qua non of success for a company and therefore for an investment in that company. But that is very hard to evaluate in advance and can only be observed (confirmed over time). Agree that in these case's top management - often one individual matter a great deal. Certainly the cases you cite such as Cisco's Chambers and G*/Loral's Schwartz (Bernie to those of us who rely on him to the major extent we do to almost literally pull rabbits out of a hat) and of course the Q's Jacobs who has so much that is positive within one man. BTW speaking of the Q reminds me that it is not just the top man that matters, but who he has with him among top management and who is attracted to the company from the trenches on up. The Q has a pervasive attractiveness IMO due to many parts - starting with the intellectual prowess at the top, through management skills demonstrated over time in bringing wireless CDMA out of the lab to becoming the ascendant wireless technology worldwide. This is the stuff for future MBAs to study. But then, you know more about that than I. Enough rambling for now. Much appreciate your reply which I am storing in my own thinking machine for future use. Best. Chaz

To: JMD who wrote (35586)	7/19/1999 2:30:00 PM
From: Nancy Haft	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

OT dd on management O Grand Poobah, thanks for sharing your ideas about researching management, a somewhat underappreciated but most excellent means of evaluating an investment. Here's a war story: Once many years ago I was reading one of those tiny little booklets that companies send you every quarter, you know, the ones printed on really thin paper with type a size I couldn't even read in my twenties. Way way in the back pages of said book were a couple paragraphs about a beach house in North Carolina that the company bought and maintained for the use of top management and their families. Hmmm. Following that were a couple paragraphs about a sale/leaseback agreement for company HQ buildings. OK, that's fine and dandy. But then the rent schedule was front loaded to an alarming degree and furthermore the sale of the real estate was to a company owned by a different family member. Can you say transfer of assets? Hmmmm. Then there were a few paragraphs about how they paid "rent" for the art collection that hung on corporate HQ walls. And of course further reading revealed that the company already owns the art collection. They are paying themselves "rent" on their own art collection. Double hmmmm. A few months later, surprise, surprise, it is discovered that there are accounting irregularities in the books and the stock tanks 65% overnight. I should have sold my shares after reading the quarterly report. It was all there on those pages. But I didn't. I was young and foolish and didn't understand that it is people who manage a business. A good lesson about character and management. Oh yeah, in my view this is the only dark cloud of any significance over Loral. Bernie Schwartz is getting a bit old and the question of succession is not proven. Thanks again, Mike. Nancy