2 gang members shot at funeral

Two reputed gang members were shot at a funeral in the Park Manor neighborhood on the South Side this afternoon, police said, with a minister at the services tweeting afterward, "This is Crazy."

The two men were shot outside St. Columbanus Church in the 300 block of East 71st Street shortly before 12:30 p.m., across the street from the A.A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home, police said.

They were taken in critical condition to Stroger, according to Chicago Fire Department spokesman Will Knight. Both victims are convicted felons and known gang members, police said.

The shooting occurred after the funeral, according to the minister who was presiding, the Rev. Corey Brooks.

"I just preached a funeral and gunfire has broke out and I believe people have been shot," Brooks tweeted. "Please pray I believe people have been hit it is Chaos about 500 people here. This is Crazy!!

"Please pray for Chicago," he added in a later tweet. "This is horrible."

Please pray I believe people have been hit it is Chaos about 500 people here. This is Crazy!!

— Corey Brooks (@CoreyBBrooks) November 26, 2012

Brooks said later, in an interview with the Tribune, that about 500 people attended the funeral, including about 50 children. The church was so crowded, people were standing in the back.

Brooks had finished the eulogy and the man's family and friends had gone out the front door of the church when shots rang out.

"That's when all the gunfire broke out and it was just crazy," said Brooks. "People were hollering and screaming and kids running everywhere. By the time we got back around to the front, you got these guys who have been shot."

Brooks said he usually accompanies families out of the church after funerals, but had left by a side door for a radio interview.

"I do know that the shooters were at that funeral," he said. "From what everyone is saying, those guys came out of the funeral and waited."

He said a witness told him one of the men raised his hand as he was shot.  "One of the guy's whole hand got shot off because he raised his hand to stop the shot and it shot his hand off," Brooks said.

 Brooks believes the men who were shot were targeted. "It's not a random [shooting], you can mark that one off. If someone shoots at a funeral and somebody gets hit, more than one, it's direct, it's specific. . .This is more a hit: These are guys that I want and I want to get them. So it was a target."

Brooks is the pastor who spent weeks on the rooftop of an abandoned motel last winter in an effort to get it torn down to make way for a community center in the Woodlawn neighborhood.

"It says that things are definitely out of control," Brooks said. "There was a time with a lot of gangbangers, older guys, where things were off limits, weddings, funerals. Church was off limits. Now we are living at a day and time where these younger criminals have no regard for life or for street rules. That means things have gotten to a level where someone has to step in and do some drastic things to change it."

One witness said she saw someone firing at two people outside the church.

Deborah Echols-Moore said there were several hundred mourners in the sanctuary of the church when she heard gunshots. “We thought it was someone banging on the seats,” but soon realized it was gunshots, Echols-Moore said.

People panicked and made a rush to get out of the church. "A lady fell on me.”

The funeral was for James Holman, 32, who was shot last week at an apartment building in the Washington Park neighborhood on the South Side.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking

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Online sales jump 24 percent early on Cyber Monday: IBM

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Online sales jumped during the first hours of Cyber Monday suggesting strong growth from earlier in the holiday shopping season continues, according to data from International Business Machines Corp.

Online sales were up 24.1 percent as of 12:00pm EST on Cyber Monday, compared to the same period a year earlier, said IBM, which tracks transaction data from 500 U.S. retail websites. In 2011, the early Cyber Monday year-over-year growth was 15 percent, IBM noted.

Strong online sales growth on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday sparked concern that shoppers may just be buying earlier, threatening revenue later in the season.

“So far that is not the case,” said Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce. “Extending the shopping season has really just fueled additional online spending rather than cannibalizing days later in the season.”

(Reporting By Alistair Barr)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Beyonce documentary premiering on HBO in February

NEW YORK (AP) — Beyonce is getting personal.

HBO announced Monday that a documentary about the Grammy-winning singer will debut Feb. 16, 2013. Beyonce is directing the film, which will include footage she shot herself with her laptop.

The network said the documentary will include “video that provides raw, unprecedented access to the private entertainment icon and high-voltage performances.” It will also feature home videos of her family and of the singer as a new mother and owner of her company, Parkwood Entertainment.

Beyonce said in a statement the untitled project was “personal” to her. She is married to Jay-Z. They had their first child, daughter Blue Ivy Carter, in January.

The 31-year-old will perform at the 2013 Super Bowl halftime show on Feb. 3, 13 days before the documentary airs.

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Hospitals Face Pressure From Medicare to Avert Readmissions

After years of gently prodding hospitals to make sure discharged patients do not need to return, the federal government is now using its financial muscle to discourage readmissions.

Medicare last month began levying financial penalties against 2,217 hospitals it says have had too many readmissions. Of those hospitals, 307 will receive the maximum punishment, a 1 percent reduction in Medicare’s regular payments for every patient over the next year, federal records show.

One of those is Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, which will lose $2 million this year. Dr. John Lynch, the chief medical officer, said Barnes-Jewish could absorb that loss this year, but “over time, if the penalties accumulate, it will probably take resources away from other key patient programs.”

The crackdown on readmissions is at the vanguard of the Affordable Care Act’s effort to eliminate unnecessary care and curb Medicare’s growing spending, which reached $556 billion this year. Hospital inpatient costs make up a quarter of that spending and are projected to grow by more than 4 percent annually in coming years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The readmission penalties will recoup about $300 million this year. But the goal is to pressure hospitals to pay attention to what happens to their patients after they walk out the door. The penalties have captured the attention of hospitals, and many are trying to improve their supervision of discharged patients’ recoveries.

“I’ve been doing this for over two decades and talking to hospital leaders about readmissions, and I used to get polite but blank stares,” said Dr. Eric Coleman, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who has devised widely adopted methods to reduce hospitalizations. “Now they’re paying attention.”

With nearly one in five Medicare patients returning to the hospital within a month — about two million people a year — readmissions cost the government more than $17 billion annually.

Hospitals’ traditional reluctance to tackle readmissions is rooted in Medicare’s payment system. Medicare generally pays hospitals a set fee for a patient’s stay, so the shorter the visit, the more revenue a hospital can keep. Hospitals also get paid when patients return. Until the new penalties kicked in, hospitals had no incentive to make sure patients didn’t wind up coming back. The maximum penalty is set to double next October and then reach 3 percent of reimbursements in October 2015. Medicare also is expanding the list of conditions it will assess in setting punishments.

Right now it only evaluates readmissions of heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia patients, counting every rebound, even ones not related to the original reason for hospitalization. The penalties are based on readmission rates in the past and applied to future payments for all Medicare patients.

Researchers say that while some readmissions are unavoidable, many are caused by the short shrift hospitals have given patients on their way out.

Jonathan Blum, principal deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the penalties had helped galvanize hospitals’ efforts to avoid readmissions. “We’ve seen a small but significant reduction,” he said. “That tells me we’ve focused the industry on improvement.”

Medicare’s tough love is not going over well everywhere. Academic medical centers are complaining that the penalties do not take into account the extra challenges posed by extremely sick and low-income patients. For these people, getting medicine and follow-up care can be a struggle.

At Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Dr. Lynch said physicians from all over the Midwest referred their sickest heart patients to his facility for transplants and other major interventions. But those patients can skew his hospital’s readmissions numbers, he said: “The weaker your heart, the more advanced your emphysema, the more likely you are to be readmitted to the hospital.”

Dr. Lynch said Barnes-Jewish set up follow-up appointments for patients who didn’t have their own doctors. But about half of the patients never showed up, he said, even after the hospital made reminder phone calls and arranged for free rides. Sending nurses to see patients at home did not significantly reduce readmission rates either, he said.

“Many of us have been working on this for other reasons than a penalty for many years, and we’ve found it’s very hard to move,” Dr. Lynch said. He said the penalties were unfair to hospitals with the double burden of caring for very sick and very poor patients.

“For us, it’s not a readmissions penalty,” he said. “It’s a mission penalty.”

Various studies, including one commissioned by Medicare, have found that the hospitals with the most poor and African-American patients tended to have higher readmission rates than hospitals with more affluent and Caucasian patients. But the studies also determined that some safety-net hospitals performed better than average, showing that hospitals can overcome the challenges posed by the kinds of patients they treat.

In some ways, the debate parallels the one on education — specifically, whether educators should be held accountable for lower rates of progress among children from poor families.

“Just blaming the patients or saying ‘it’s destiny’ or ‘we can’t do any better’ is a premature conclusion and is likely to be wrong,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale-New Haven Hospital, which prepared the study for Medicare. “I’ve got to believe we can do much, much better.”

Some researchers fear the Medicare penalties are so steep, they will distract hospitals from other pressing issues, like reducing infections and surgical mistakes and ensuring patients’ needs are met promptly. “It should not be our top priority,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who has studied readmissions. “If you think of all the things in the Affordable Care Act, this is the one that has the biggest penalties, and that’s just crazy.”

With pressure to avert readmissions rising, some hospitals have been suspected of sending patients home within 24 hours, so they can bill for the services but not have the stay counted as an admission. But most hospitals are scrambling to reduce the number of repeat patients, with mixed success.

A few days after Eda Laurion was discharged from the Banner Del E. Webb Medical Center near Phoenix after treatment for her congestive heart failure in August, a nurse showed up at her house.

“She helped explained the medicines I’m taking, the side effects, what they do for you,” said Ms. Laurion, 91, of Sun City West.

Still, readmissions can’t always be prevented. The nurse, Sue Koner, sent Ms. Laurion back to the hospital after two weeks for dangerously low sodium caused by an undiagnosed kidney problem. However, Ms. Laurion avoided re-hospitalization in October when Ms. Koner deduced that her hallucinations were a reaction to an antibiotic.

Overseeing former patients is expensive and time-consuming, so many hospitals are relying on financing from community health organizations and foundations. Ms. Koner works for Sun Health, a foundation-supported nonprofit. Since Sun Health started its program in November 2011, only nine of 213 patients have been readmitted.

Dr. Krumholz said hospitals should think of readmissions as a challenge to overcome. “One day, we’ll look back,” he said, “and we’ll be incredulous that one out of every five patients ended up back in the hospital.”

This article was produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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Obama taps Walter as new SEC chief

WASHINGTON -- President Obama on Monday designated Elisse Walter as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it's unclear if the Democratic commissioner will be the permanent replacement for outgoing Mary Schapiro.

Walter, who has served on the SEC since July 2008, will take over the reins of the agency after Schapiro steps down on Dec. 14. Schapiro announced her resignation Monday.

Obama thanked Schapiro for her "steadfast leadership." 

"When Mary agreed to serve nearly four years ago, she was fully aware of the difficulties facing the SEC and our economy as a whole," Obama said in a written statement.

"But she accepted the challenge, and today, the SEC is stronger and our financial system is safer and better able to serve the American people – thanks in large part to Mary's hard work," he said.

Obama can designate a current commissioner as chairman. But he must nominate a permanent replacement, who then has to be confirmed by the Senate.

After Schapiro departs next month, the SEC will have two Democrats and two Republicans, making it difficult to pass any controversial measures.

The White House did not indicate if Walter was among those being considered for the nomination.

Walter served as chairwoman for a short period in January 2009 after the departure of former Chairman Christopher Cox, before Schapiro was sworn in.

Walter, a former executive at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the National Assn. of Securities Dealers, has been mentioned as a permanent replacement for Schapiro.

Obama said he was "confident that Elisse's years of experience will serve her well in her new position."

ALSO:

SEC chief Mary Schapiro to step down

Warren Buffett says tax hikes won't stop wealthy from investing

New faces likely for key U.S. economic posts, starting at Treasury

Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

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4th quarter: Bears 28, Vikings 10

The Chicago Bears regained their swagger and halted their two-game losing streak by thumping the Minnesota Vikings 28-10 in a critical NFC North matchup Sunday at Soldier Field.
 
With Jay Cutler returning to the lineup after sitting out Monday night's loss at San Francisco because of a concussion, the Bears' offense displayed some long-sought consistency as the quarterback and Brandon Marshall connected repeatedly on key plays.
 
Marshall wound up with 12 catches for 92 yards. Cutler completed 23 passes of 31 passes for 188 yards and one touchdown and a passer rating of 86.5
 
The Bears improved to 8-3 and will at least continue to share the division lead with the Green Bay Packers (7-3), who play the New York Giants on Sunday night. The Vikings fell to 6-5.

Robbie Gould's 46-yard field goal with 3:57 left in the third period capped the scoring. During the drive, Matt Forte was taken to the locker room with a right ankle injury. His return was listed as questionable.

Forte (14 carries for 42 yards) was injured on a bizarre play. He was tackled by several Vikings and the ball came out belatedly. The fumble appeared to be recovered and returned 51 yards for a touchdown. After a review, the TD was denied and the Bears took over.

Injuries already were a major concern for the Bears. Devin Hester was ruled out for the game in the second quarter after suffering a concussion. Guard Chris Spencer left with a knee injury and guard Lance Louis had to be helped off the field with a knee injury after taking a vicious hit from the Vikings' Jared Allen. Cornerback Charles Tillman missed considerable time with an ankle injury.

The Vikings had pulled to with 25-10 after a 40-yard drive. Quarterback Christian Ponder passed two yards to tight end Kyle Rudolph for a touchdown with 10:44 left in the third period. The score was set up by an interception by Antoine Winfield after a Cutler pass caromed off the hands of Marshall.

The Bears were energized early, taking a 25-3 halftime lead on a 13-yard Cutler TD pass to tight end Matt Spaeth. The score came after  Chris Conte intercepted a Ponder pass and returned it 35 yards to the Vikings' 13 with 1:55 left until halftime, and that was the score at intermission after Gould's 39-yard field goal attempt was blocked on the final play.

Cutler completed 15 of 17 first-half passes for 170 yards and one touchdown. His passer rating was 115.0.

The Bears had 169 yards of total offense, compared to the Vikings' 92. Adrian Peterson was limited to 25 yards on seven carries.

Earlier, a 1-yard touchdown run by Michael Bush, his second of the day, had extended the Bears' lead to 16-3. On the extra point, holder Adam Podlesh took the snap from center and ran in for the two-point conversion for an 18-3 advantage with 4:01 left until halftime.

The Bears had gone up 10-3 on a 47-yard field goal by Gould with 32 seconds left in the first quarter. The drive covered 25 yards in 10 plays. The drive featured a taunting penalty against a feisty Cutler for flipping the ball at the Vikings' A.J. Jefferson.

The Vikings' Walsh had a 30-yard field goal attempt blocked by Julius Peppers with 12 minutes left until halftime.

The Bears' defense got back to its turnover-producing ways early when Peterson fumbled and Charles Tillman recovered at the Vikings' 34. Nick Roach forced the fumble. The Bears converted the opportunity into a 1-yard touchdown by Bush with 7:17 left in the first quarter to take a 7-3 lead. The drive included a 15-yard pass from Cutler to tight end Kellen Davis to the Minnesota 1.

The Bears lost the ball on their opening series when Forte fumbled with 13:07 left in the first period. The fumble was recovered by Chad Greenway at the Bears' 28. The drive resulted in a 40-yard field goal by Blair Walsh.

After dropping two straight, the Bears needed to fend off the Vikings, who entered one game back at 6-4. And the Bears were trying to at least keep pace with the Packers as leaders of the NFC North. The Bears and Vikings will meet twice in three weeks. On Dec. 9, the Bears travel to the Metrodome.

Peterson reportedly missed the team bus to Soldier Field, but hailed a taxi cab in front of the team hotel and made it to the stadium at 10:23 a.m. for the noon start, according to the NFL Network.
 
The Bears have another NFC home game next Sunday against the Seattle Seahawks.
 
fmitchell@tribune.com

Twitter@kicker34

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Saudi telco regulator suspends Mobily prepaid sim sales

(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia‘s No.2 telecom operator Etihad Etisalat Co (Mobily) has been suspended from selling pre-paid sim cards by the industry regulator, the firm said in a statement to the kingdom’s bourse on Sunday.

Mobily’s sales of pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go, sim cards will remain halted until the company “fully meets the prepaid service provisioning requirements,” the telco said in the statement.

These requirements include a September order from regulator, Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC). This states all pre-paid sim users must enter a personal identification number when recharging their accounts and that this number must be the same as the one registered with their mobile operator when the sim card was bought, according to a statement on the CITC website.

This measure is designed to ensure customer account details are kept up to date, the CITC said.

Mobily said the financial impact of the CITC’s decision would be “insignificant”, claiming data, corporate and postpaid revenues would meet its main growth drivers.

The firm, which competes with Saudi Telecom Co (STC) and Zain Saudi, reported a 23 percent rise in third-quarter profit in October, beating forecasts.

Prepaid mobile subscriptions are typically more popular among middle and lower income groups, with telecom operators pushing customers to shift to monthly contracts that include a data allowance.

Customers on monthly, or postpaid, contracts are also less likely to switch provider, but the bulk of customers remain on pre-paid accounts.

Mobily shares were trading down 1.4 percent at 0820 GMT on the Saudi bourse.

(Reporting by Matt Smith; Editing by Dinesh Nair)

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Rolling Stones mark 50th year with London show

LONDON (AP) — The Rolling Stones are marking their 50th anniversary with a concert in London.

The band says R&B singer Mary J. Blige and rock guitarist Jeff Beck will be joining them on stage Sunday at the O2 Arena. Most of the tickets for the gig had sold out within minutes.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood will also be joined by former Stones members Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor, who will perform again with the band for the first time in more than 20 years.

The Stones are playing again in London on Thursday before going to the U.S. for a show in New York on Dec. 8 and in Newark, New Jersey, on Dec. 13 and 15.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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M.I.T. Lab Hatches Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. That’s not too far behind Thomas Edison, who had 1,093. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

Along the way, Dr. Langer and his lab, including about 60 postdoctoral and graduate students at a time, have found a way to navigate some slippery territory: the intersection of academic research and the commercial market.

Over the last 30 years, many universities — including M.I.T. — have set up licensing offices that oversee the transfer of scientific discoveries to companies. These offices have become a major pathway for universities seeking to put their research to practical use, not to mention add to their revenue streams.

In the sciences in particular, technology transfer has become a key way to bring drugs and other treatments to market. “The model of biomedical innovation relies on research coming out of universities, often funded by public money,” says Josephine Johnston, director of research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

Just a few of the products that have emerged from the Langer Lab are a small wafer that delivers a dose of chemotherapy used to treat brain cancer; sugar-sequencing tools that can be used to create new drugs like safer and more effective blood thinners; and a miniaturized chip (a form of nanotechnology) that can test for diseases.

The chemotherapy wafer, called the Gliadel, is licensed by Eisai Inc. The company behind the sugar-sequencing tools, Momenta Pharmaceuticals, raised $28.4 million in an initial public offering in 2004. The miniaturized chip is made by T2Biosystems,  which completed a $23 million round of financing in the summer of 2011.

“It’s inconvenient to have to send things to a lab,” so the company is trying to develop more sophisticated methods, says Dr. Ralph Weissleder, a co-founder, with Dr. Langer and others, of T2Biosystems and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

FOR Dr. Langer, starting a company is not the same as it was, say, for Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. “Bob is not consumed with any one company,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who wrote a case study on the Langer Lab. “His mission is to create the idea.”

Dr. Bowen observes that there are many other academic laboratories, including highly productive ones, but that the Langer Lab’s combination of people, spun-out companies and publications sets it apart. He says Dr. Langer “walks into the great unknown and then makes these discoveries.”

Dr. Langer is well known for his mentoring abilities. He is “notorious for replying to e-mail in two minutes, whether it’s a lowly graduate school student or the president of the United States,” says Paulina Hill, who worked in his lab from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior associate at Polaris Venture Partners. (According to Dr. Langer, he has corresponded directly with President Obama about stem cell research and federal funds for the sciences.)

Dr. Langer says he looks at his students “as an extended family,” adding that “I really want them to do well.”

And they have, whether in business or in academia, or a combination of the two. One former student, Ram Sasisekharan, helped found Momenta and now runs his own lab at M.I.T. Ganesh Venkataraman Kaundinya is Momenta’s chief scientific officer and senior vice president for research.

Hongming Chen is vice president of research at Kala Pharmaceuticals. Howard Bernstein is chief scientific officer at Seventh Sense Biosystems, a blood-testing company. Still others have taken jobs in the law or in government.

Dr. Langer says he spends about eight hours a week working on companies that come out of his lab. Of the 25 that he helped start, he serves on the boards of 12 and is an informal adviser to 4. All of his entrepreneurial activity, which includes some equity stakes, has made him a millionaire. But he says he is mainly motivated by a desire to improve people’s health.

Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

The research in labs like Dr. Langer’s is eyed closely by pharmaceutical companies. While drug companies employ huge research and development teams, they may not be as freewheeling and nimble, Dr. Langer says. The basis for many long-range discoveries has “come out of academia, including gene therapy, gene sequencing and tissue engineering,” he says.

He has served as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies. Their large size, he says, can end up being an impediment.

“Very often when you are going for real innovation,” he says, “you have to go against prevailing wisdom, and it’s hard to go against prevailing wisdom when there are people who have been there for a long time and you have some vice president who says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to tap into the talent at leading research universities. In 2008, for example, Washington University in St. Louis announced a $25 million pact with Pfizer to collaborate more closely on biomedical research.

But in some situations, the close — critics might say cozy — ties between business and academia have the potential to create conflicts of interest.

There was a controversy earlier this year when it was revealed that the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center owned stock in Aveo Oncology, which had announced earlier that the university would be leading clinical trials of one of its cancer drugs.  Last month, the University of Texas announced that he would be allowed to keep his ties with three pharmaceutical companies, including Aveo Oncology; his holdings will be placed in a blind trust.

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Rosenthal: Big Ten getting too big for its own good?

There's a lesson the empire builders at Big Ten Conference headquarters in Park Ridge would do well to heed if they can be convinced to stop peering out to the distant horizon:

Growth through acquisition is fraught with peril.

"In the business world you acquire new companies and you have to deal with different corporate cultures, different priorities and so forth," Robert Arnott, chairman of Research Affiliates LLC, an investment firm, said in an interview. "Merging them is often very messy and often fails. Here you're merging two teams into an existing conference and it creates risks. … Even college football teams have different cultures, different ways of thinking about how to win and different standards."

There undoubtedly was a logic behind each acquisition as the old Sears sought to expand and diversify its corporate profile. By the time the Chicago-area company's portfolio grew to include Allstate insurance, Coldwell Banker real estate and Dean Witter Reynolds stock brokerage, it was clear the increase in size was in no way matched by an increase in strength.

Rather than an all-powerful Colossus astride many sectors at once, it was reduced to an unfocused blob, bereft of identity, covering plenty of ground but hardly standing tall. Years after shedding its far-flung holdings, Sears has yet to regain its muscle, mojo or market share.

"It's hard to find a better example of a company that lost its mission and focus in the quest for growth," Arnott said.

"(Growth) may be partly a defensive move. It may be ego driven. In the corporate arena, you certainly see that in spades," he said. "When growth is through acquisition, you have to figure out what the real motivation is. Is it synergy, the most overused word in the finance community, or is it ego?"

Adding the University of Maryland and New Jersey's Rutgers University in 2014 will push the Big Ten to 14 schools and far beyond the Midwestern territory for which it's known. But doing so may not achieve what its backers envision.

Rather than spread the conference's brand, it may merely dilute it. The fit may be corrosive, not cohesive.

There is a school of thought that this is but the latest evidence that the Big Ten is not about athletics, academics or even the Midwest. Instead, it is just a television network, the schools content providers and student-athletes talent.

As it is, the overall TV payout is said to give each of the 12 current Big Ten schools about $21 million per year. They point to the Big Ten's lucrative deals with ESPN and its own eponymous cable network, a partnership with News Corp. They note that public schools Rutgers and Maryland are near enough to New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., to drive a better bargain with cable carriers.

To Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany, a New Jersey native, the addition is more the result of a paradigm shift that has redrawn the college sports map over the past decade. Some conferences splinter. Others seize new turf. The result: Idaho's Boise State football team is poised to join the Big East Conference next year.

"Institutions that get together for academics or athletics have got to be cognizant that they are competing for students, they are competing for student athletes, they are competing for research dollars," Delany told reporters.

"When you see a Southern conference in the Midwest or you see a Southern conference in the Plains states or whether you see other conferences in the Midwest or Northeast, it impacts your recruitment. ... It impacts everything you do," he said. "At a certain point you get to a tipping point. The paradigm has shifted, and you decide on a strategy to basically position yourself for the next decade or half-century."

Big has always meant more than 10 in the Big Ten, an intercollegiate entity formed by seven Midwestern universities that now boasts 12 with the bookends of Penn State and Nebraska added in 1990 and last year, respectively. Last week's announcement of adding schools 13 and 14 was just a reminder that the conference has only had 10 member schools for 70 of its 116 years and won't again for the foreseeable future.

Rutgers President Robert Barchi said his school looked "forward as much to the collaboration and interaction we're going to have as institutions as we do to what I know will be really outstanding competition on our field of play."

But make no mistake, the Big Ten was born out of sports, specifically football. A seven-school 1896 meeting at Chicago's Palmer House had Northwestern among those still stinging from a scathing Harper's Weekly critique of college sports abuses, the Tribune reported at the time.

A prohibition on allowing scholarship and fellowship students to compete was shot down. But "a move towards the coordination of Faculty committees" in terms of standards and enforcement passed and the precursor to the Big Ten was born.

Along the way, the conference has added member schools and come to recognize that the Big Ten's image has much to say about how those institutions are perceived. Scandals already are no stranger to the Big Ten. But whether you play in a stadium or on Wall Street, the bigger one gets, the bigger target one becomes.

"Whoever's biggest draws scrutiny," said Arnott, co-author of a research paper, "The Winners Curse: Too Big to Succeed." "That means politicians, regulators, the general public generally don't root for the biggest. They look to take them down a notch, so it's harder to succeed as the largest. It's also harder to move the dial and move from success to success as you get really big."

Everyone talks about becoming too big to fail, but there's also too big to scale, companies that are unable to capitalize on the efficiencies of their increased size ostensibly because they are so big that they cannot be managed adequately.

"People talk about economies of scale. There are also vast diseconomies of scale, mostly in bureaucracies," Arnott said. "The more people you have involved, the more people you have who feel they have to have their views reflected in whatever's done. So you wind up with innovation by committee."

That's deadly. That's why companies break up, citing the need to get smaller so they can grow.

"If you break up companies into operating entities that are more nimble," Arnott said, "the opportunities to grow are no longer hamstrung by centralized bureaucracies that have to pursue synergies that don't exist."

Size matters in all fields of play. Sometimes smaller is better.

philrosenthal@tribune.com

Twitter @phil_rosenthal

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