August 9, 1995

When Del Laboratories, a cosmetics and pharmaceutical company, agreed to pay $1.185 million last week to settle a Government complaint that its chief executive had sexually harassed women employees, women's groups hailed the action as a step toward discouraging such behavior. But many lawyers and experts on the way companies are managed see nothing to cheer about. They say the behavior of the company's board of directors fell far short of what shareholders should expect. Among their questions are whether the Del board was too dominated by friends and associates of the chief executive, Dan K. Wassong, with no truly independent directors who could step back and act dispassionately. They also asked whether a separate board committee should have guided the company's response. And they wondered why Mr. Wassong was allowed to remain deeply involved in the board's deliberations.

If numbers meant as much to art lovers as they do to sports fans, the following statistic would be quoted everywhere: In any given year, New York City art museums draw far larger crowds than all New York professional sports teams combined. Modern audiences may boycott baseball or cough through Wagner, but the popularity of looking at art has been growing steadily for several years, give or take a few dips and peaks.

In a surprise choice, the BankAmerica Corporation, the nation's second-largest banking company, yesterday named David A. Coulter to succeed Richard M. Rosenberg, its 65-year-old chairman and chief executive. Mr. Coulter, 48, now a vice chairman, becomes president immediately and chief executive on Jan. 1. Mr. Rosenberg, who has been president since 1990 and chief executive since 1991, will remain chairman until an unspecified date in the second quarter of next year, when he will pass that title on to Mr. Coulter, as well.

This region of cornfields and shale-encrusted hills near the Pennsylvania border once seeped with wealth in the form of crude oil. Now the very same hills conceal pockets of poverty and welfare dependency. In this town where oil barons lived in splendor 100 years ago, today an estimated 1 in 6 households is on welfare and 1 in 4 is poor, about the same percentages as in Brooklyn.

Just five years after the "Beeg Mek" took Russia by storm, a group of local businessmen has retaliated by beginning the country's first chain of fast-food restaurants, complete with their own version of a Happy Meal -- borscht, blini and vodka. Open less than a week, in a spotless two-story space across Pushkin Square from the busiest McDonald's in the world, Russkoye Bistro promises to do for Russian culinary capitalism what, well, McDonald's did for Russian culinary capitalism.