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Technology Stocks : 3Com Corporation (COMS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Edwarda who wrote (34545)	9/26/1999 4:09:00 PM
From: mr.mark	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 45548

excerpted from thestreet.com ... Chemdex May Well Be the Next Big Thing, but How Big? By Adam Lashinsky Silicon Valley Columnist 9/22/99 11:01 AM ET "On Another Matter Robin Abrams first appeared in this column as an example of the current state of employee loyalty in Silicon Valley. Her not so exemplary behavior consisted of ditching her job atop 3Com's (COMS:Nasdaq) Palm Computing unit after just five months for the No. 2 role at Chemdex. Subsequent Chemdex securities filings made it clear that, among other things, Abrams hopped aboard the prepublic Chemdex for a pay package that includes a salary of $300,000 per year, a signing bonus of $50,000 and stock options worth $4.4 million today if all the shares were vested. Yesterday, Abrams accepted her promised opportunity to defend her actions. Here's the short-form version of her comments, paraphrased and de-spun: Loyalty doesn't matter anymore, and all employees in Silicon Valley better learn to fend for themselves. "There are really complex decisions," she says. "And it's what makes you tick as a manager," she adds, explaining that the grounds-up opportunities to build Chemdex with a top-flight management team ultimately were more attractive pulls than the 3Com post. "And it's not all about money," she continues. "Most employees of technology companies look at the opportunity in front of them. Ninety percent of them take responsibility for their own careers." Abrams acknowledges that it was "painful" to leave behind employees who left positions at Hewlett-Packard (HWP:NYSE) to join Palm. But she suggests that that handful of managers has ended up with good jobs at 3Com and probably made good decisions for themselves. She wouldn't characterize either her move to Palm, or her departure from it, as a mistake. So the executive who is perhaps the Valley's most prominent job-hopper of the moment has illustrated clearly what people in the rest of the country are talking about when they suggest that other regions are better places to start a business than Silicon Valley: Employees are more loyal. In the Valley, taking a new job means never having to say you're sorry. (Full disclosure, as before: I left the San Jose Mercury News after 23 months to join TheStreet.com.) A final point. The other major thesis of the July 9 piece here about Abrams was that her departure meant 3Com never would spin off Palm, which it now is in the process of doing. Abrams now says the spinoff was in the works all along and that she left anyway. She notes approvingly at how 3Com CEO Eric Benhamou maintained a good "game face" while suggesting to the outside world that 3Com intended to build its future around Palm. And executives the world over, including Benhamou, can't understand why journalists are disinclined to believe what they are told when they are fed the corporate line. Imagine that."