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THE TOUGHEST JOB in today's business world is chief executive, and Rick Wagoner has the toughest job of all as CEO of General Motors, Fortune says. "The Detroit giant is a weird and scarred combination of businesses: a carmaker doing poorly and an insurance company engulfed by its obligations. It's heading for a wreck," the magazine says. Fortune looks at 10 other CEOs "on the spot," including Neville Isdell, the third CEO at Coca-Cola since 1997. "Running the world's largest beverage company, with a market value of $100-billion, Isdell has to hit some very big home runs to make any impact," Fortune concludes.

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM in Washington is that crass corporate lobbyists lavish millions of dollars on lawmakers in an attempt to buy influence on Capitol Hill. But BusinessWeek reports that the 11,500 people who earn their living in the influence-peddling profession say that more often than not, members of Congress take the initiative to attract money. "Everybody thinks it's the interest groups buying the members. A lot of the time it's the members shaking down the interest groups," California political scientist John Pitney Jr. tells BusinessWeek.

IF INVESTORS are so rational, why do some gamble away fortunes on money-losing investments, or hang on when logic tells them they should fold? That's what scientists at Stanford University are trying to find out, Bloomberg Markets says. Researcher Brian Knutson, exploring a new and controversial field known as "neurofinance," says the answer "may lie somewhere in the 60,000 miles of neural wiring inside our brains." Nobel laureate and economist Daniel Kahneman calls brain science "the wave of the future in the financial world," merging classical economic theory and studies in human psychology.

LOOKING FOR THE NEXT SMALL THING? It's out there, FSB: Fortune says in a look at some interesting entrepreneurial, but smaller-style, inventions. New York-based Xethanol, for example, operates plants that can cheaply distill the alternative fuel ethanol from bizarre sources such as stale butterscotch candy. Diana's Homegrown, a startup in Lemitar, N.M., markets the Pull Out Pouch System, which is designed to prolong the life of a sandwich by separating its filling from the bread in a hermetically sealed polymer pouch.

IS NOW A GOOD TIME to invest in the stock market? According to a BetterInvesting survey of individual shareholders, only 41 percent of men and 34 percent of women think so. Nearly half the shareholders thought it was better to move money into safer, lower-risk investments. Professional investment advisers disagree. One adviser said that "for those with discipline and realistic expectations, now is as good a time as any to enter the stock market."

Compiled from Times wires and Web sites.

[Last modified February 17, 2006, 21:23:03]