eirinnphotography.com

By SARAH TILTON

STATS: A 4,396-square-foot home with four bedrooms and 3½ bathrooms, asking $850,000, or $193.35 a square foot. Property taxes in 2011 were $10,440.04. The asking price has been lowered from $1 million.

DETAILS: This house began its life in Connecticut in 1775, according to the current owners, who bought it and moved it piece by piece to their land in Vermont in 1988. The owners preserved many of the home’s original details such as the square nails in the floors, the hand-carved banister, the wood paneling and the central brick chimney. They also brought some of their own history to the house, including a garden gate from a state department posting to Romania and a carved window from time spent in Katmandu. The barn started out across the road until the owners moved it to their land. The house sits on 72.6 acres and the owners rent the fields out to a local farmer (they highly recommend the apples from the Jonathan tree). During the day, the owners like looking out at the White Mountains. At night, they appreciated the black sky and the lack of light pollution. “On a dark night, particularly one without any moon, you see every star,” says the wife.

SELLERS: Ambassador Harry Barnes and his wife, Elizabeth. Ambassador Barnes served as the U.S. ambassador to India, Chile and Romania. Mrs. Barnes is a writer.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD: It’s about three hours to Boston, or stay home for the foliage or skiing. It’s just over an hour to Dartmouth College.

WHAT WE PAID: The owners estimate that they have put well more than $1 million into the house and the land.

WHY WE’RE SELLING: The couple has relocated due to health reasons.

WHAT WE’LL MISS: “It was our dream house,” says Mrs. Barnes. “Every room is a pleasure for me to look at.” She especially liked the kitchen which has two tables, a fireplace and a walk-in pantry.

WHAT WE WON’T:The stair chair lift that they added just in case the stairs got to be too much for them. Mrs. Barnes says it can be removed.

COMP: Nearby, a 3,500-square-foot house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on 115 acres has an asking price of $1.3 million.

OTHERS SAY:
Susan Quatrini of Quatrini Real Estate says the price is in the right range considering the home’s history and its location in “the quintessential Vermont community.” Angie Holmes of Lang, McLaughry Spera has the listing and says that people have come from across the country to see the house. “Coming from England, it reminds me of home,” she says.

Write to Sarah Tilton at sarah.tilton@wsj.com

While serious bartenders tend to assemble their tools piecemeal, we layfolk often fall for the convenience of bar-in-a-box type sets. The problem with those? They generally stink. Not so with this one, a collaboration between Bombay Sapphire and New York-based fashion label Barking Irons. It includes high-quality, professional grade tools that you’ll see behind the bar of any craft-centric cocktail joint: a Boston shaker, a hefty Hawthorne strainer, an elegant Japanese bar spoon, a citrus squeezer. It even includes more esoteric bar items like a bird’s-nest double strainer used to remove small shards of ice from a shaken drink (to keep the cocktail from getting too diluted) and an ice pick, should you be interested in mastering the art of carving huge globes of ice for your Scotch. And the bag itself, modeled after an antique doctor’s bag, is gorgeous. The exterior is a buttery soft, leather and the interior is a striking sapphire-blue waxed canvas. It practically begs you to make a martini. $495, barkingirons.com

—
Kevin Sintumuang

By DENNIS NISHI

Social networking can be a powerful tool for small businesses looking to grow. But for some start-ups, it’s more than that: Social networking is the basis for the business.

Take Brent Hieggelke and his wife. Three years ago, the couple decided to rent their vacation home in Mt. Hood, Ore., but worried about letting strangers on the property. That’s when Mr. Hieggelke decided to use social networking to screen tenants.

He created a Facebook app called Second Porch that keeps dealings between friends. Users post their property availability, and the listings stream in their friends’ news feeds. Friends can also make recommendations about prospective tenants and properties.

“Every person probably knows 10 people that have vacation homes and even more than that are interested in renting. That amounts to a lot of vetted choices,” says Mr. Hieggelke.

Within a year, Second Porch attracted more than $1 million in investment funding, which Mr. Hieggelke used to set up an independent website that worked with the app but offered more features. The site drew more than 16,000 listings—and caught the eye of another rental service, HomeAway, which acquired Second Porch five months ago.

Friends of Friends

Entrepreneurs who build their businesses and websites around social networking say it offers a big advantage: Customers get unusually engaged with the business, sharing favorite products and services with friends and often turning them into buyers, too. In the best cases, entrepreneurs say, customers see the business as a kind of social activity in itself, interacting with other customers and making recommendations that will stream on the Facebook news feeds of all of their friends.

James Yang

Yardsellr.com has built its entire business around its customers’ chats about products. The San Francisco start-up lets Facebook users sell products to people with similar interests. Members join groups, or “blocks,” representing their niche interests, from “Star Trek” collectibles to guitars to purses. When a member lists an item for sale, it shows up in the news feed of other people that have subscribed to those blocks and allows them to participate in ongoing conversations.

The comments on those listings “are where all the action happens,” says founder and Chief Executive Danny Leffel. “More than 100,000 followers regularly comment on products that they love, and that creates entertainment value that can also promote educated purchasing decisions.”

Members then follow links back to Yardsellr’s own site to make their purchases. The company makes money from a buyer’s fee and from optional marketing services available to sellers. The company is private, so Mr. Leffel won’t disclose any financials, but he does say that Yardsellr has 3.9 million members and is adding more than 20,000 new ones every day. Its parent, YellowDog Media Inc., recently launched a similar site called Style.ly that focuses on clothing.

Bringing It Back Home

Facebook won’t disclose how many companies are combining its core features with commerce. But a spokesperson says that more than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with the social network, allowing visitors to do things like share a site’s content with their Facebook friends. And most social-networking sites, including Linkedin, Twitter and even YouTube, offer similar abilities.

Small companies have never had this level of customer access or ability to track behavior, says Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, an advisory firm in San Mateo, Calif. “You know their names, what they might like and so much more than you did before,” says Ms. Li. “That kind of knowledge can help you accelerate a new business because you understand what customers want and need.”

But companies need to tread carefully, she says. When businesses bring customers in so close, they need to forgo the hard sell—or else risk alienating those buyers and others in their networks. They also need to be extra responsive to requests and complaints across all social-media channels, especially if they are made in public forums.

That may mean having staff members dedicated to the job, Ms. Li says. Companies can’t simply hand the task off to “a junior person…who is snarky to customers.”

Mr. Nishi is a writer in Los Angeles. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

By JEFFREY ZASLOW

Ten, nine, eight, seven …

This New Year’s Eve, Dick Clark will again be on TV, counting down the seconds to midnight. But in his slurred speech, the result of a 2004 stroke, some of us can’t help but hear the countdowns in our own lives—to the end of our careers, to the difficulties of old age, to the decisions we must make about closing chapters that defined us.

Mr. Clark turned 80 this past Monday, and a lot of people consider him a hero for remaining on the job. They see him as a role model for resiliency, and a vital steward of New Year’s Eve, a holiday designed to look back as well as forward. They ask: Why surrender Dec. 31 to the young?

Others argue that Mr. Clark has become an inappropriate symbol for what should be a happy celebration, because he reminds viewers of sadder things: the ravages of illness and the hazards of aging. He had his time, they say. He ought to let go of the baton and allow a younger generation to run with it alone.

We heard similar drumbeats around 80-year-old Bobby Bowden, the legendary Florida State football coach. In the wake of the team’s lackluster record this year and calls for his resignation, he announced his retirement on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey has confirmed that she will end her talk show in 2011, after she completes 25 seasons. “This show has been my life,” she said, “and I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye.”

These public figures remind us of the hard decisions that often accompany letting go. It is an inexact process. It can be a mistake to leave a job too early, and it can be easy to stay too long.

“A lot of people retire because they have enough money. I call them ‘the bored affluent,’ ” says John Sondereker, who retired in 2003, at age 60, as an executive vice president at Wells Fargo Financial. “Golf will never replace a good career.”

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Dick Clark, on ‘American Bandstand’ in 1970: He’s still in the spotlight.

But staying too long in a job can be worse. I’ve heard from readers over the years offering sharp advice about clinging to a fading career. Here’s how one summed it up: “When the horse dies, dismount.”

When people can’t bring themselves to retire, it is often because they look for evidence that confirms their urge to hold on, says Richard Staelin, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, who studies “confirmation bias.” Those who hang on too long tend to ignore things that would tell them it’s time to leave, he says.

Since his stroke, Mr. Clark’s show has continued to be television’s top-rated New Year’s Eve program. It’s not as if he’s a football coach whose team has stopped winning, says Larry Klein, the show’s longtime producer. “We don’t have losing seasons. We win every single year.”

Also, feedback from viewers has been far more positive than negative, says Mr. Klein. “They say Dick shows strength and courage. He created the show. He’s an American institution. He deserves to decide on his own when and if he’ll leave.” (Mr. Clark, who launched his New Year’s Eve show in 1972, declined to comment for this column.)

Dr. Staelin wonders if Mr. Clark and his team are subconsciously focusing only on the positives—the high ratings, the complimentary fan mail. They may not be giving equal weight to other questions: Are Mr. Clark’s limitations compromising a show that might be stronger without him? How will these post-stroke years change the public’s perception of him? Will he be remembered for the telegenic charm of his prime, or for being an entertainer who held on too long?

It’s hard to view ourselves with clear eyes, says Dr. Staelin. He uses himself as an example. He is 70 and believes his teaching skills are undiminished. “But I may also have confirmation bias,” he says.

Leaving and Grieving

Jack Rigby, a 58-year-old dentist in Hudson, Ohio, has gone through all the stages of leaving and grieving for a job. In 2005, suffering from liver disease that left him fatigued and in pain, he made a hard choice. He wrote to 1,200 patients saying that “with great sadness,” he was giving up his practice. A younger dentist would take over.

More than 250 patients wrote back, and their loving and supportive letters sustained Dr. Rigby through his 2007 liver transplant. Reading the letters became a retirement ritual for him. On mornings when he yearned to go to work, he’d sometimes get up early and sit at home, paging through the letters. “I had them stacked up, and when I was feeling badly, it helped to read them,” he says.

Over time, he realized that pining for his job wasn’t going to help him move forward. And so, this past August, he decided to get rid of the letters.

He could have just thrown them away, but he wanted to do something more meaningful. He took out his paper shredder, and read each letter one last time before feeding it into the machine. “I was pretty emotional,” he says. “But I’m glad I did it. You can’t walk two trails. I can’t go back to being a dentist. I now look at those letters as a lifeboat which supported my passage to this new place and time.”

The medicine Dr. Rigby takes leaves his hands trembling, so he knows he will never return to administering anesthetic and drilling teeth. But he’s grateful that in retirement he has been able to re-embrace his love of photography. Because he uses a tripod with his camera, his tremors don’t matter.

Dr. Rigby says he hears from former patients who are happy with the young dentist who took over his practice. And though it saddens him that he will never get to work with his son, who will soon graduate from dental school, he is buoyed to know that newer generations are carrying on the work he loved. Likewise, Mr. Sondereker, the retiree from Wells Fargo, says he feels a sense of accomplishment in retirement, knowing he trained and mentored dozens of people who are still there.

Measuring Success

Ann Fishman, a consultant who specializes in marketing to different generations, says those contemplating retirement should measure success by how well they perform as mentors. In that regard, she thinks Dick Clark is doing OK.

Since Dec. 31, 2005, Mr. Clark has shared New Year’s Eve hosting duties with Ryan Seacrest of “American Idol,” who is 34.

“We need to honor our aging and we need to honor our young,” Ms. Fishman says. “America was built on the cooperation of generations working together. When Clark and Seacrest are together, it shows us that we don’t have to be afraid of aging, and we don’t have to promote youth to the exclusion of old age.”

Mr. Clark knows he won’t be the New Year’s Eve host forever. Like bandleader Guy Lombardo, his tenure will end. For now, perhaps, we should pay attention to his exchanges with Mr. Seacrest, and to the high-spirited ways he introduces acts 50 years younger than he is. In today’s splintered media world, there aren’t many places anymore where several generations share the same stage.

Until Mr. Clark decides to retire, this image of him passing the baton, however slowly, may serve all of us well, as we consider our own paths and the emotional countdowns to come.

Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

What do chief executives do all day?

It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings.

WSJ’s Francesca Donner looks at the results of a study that followed 500 CEOs to determine what they exactly do all day. It’s not as cushy a work life as it might seem. Photo: Willa Plank/The Wall Street Journal

That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time—and how that affects the performance and management of their firms.

Their study—known as the Executive Time Use Project—incorporates time logs kept by CEOs’ personal assistants, who tracked activities lasting more than 15 minutes during a single week selected by the researchers. The project, which is ongoing, so far has collected data from three different studies of CEOs from around the world.

In one sample of 65 CEOs, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals, on average. Some of the remaining time was spent traveling, in personal activity, such as exercise or lunches with spouses, or in short activities, such as quick calls, that weren’t recorded by CEOs’ assistants. Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.

The more direct reports a CEO had correlated with more, and longer, internal meetings, the researchers found. Rather than foisting off responsibilities to other managers, CEOs with more direct reports may be more hands-on and involved in internal operations, they said.

But not all direct reports are equal. In companies that incorporated a finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy, the CEOs’ time in meetings was reduced by about five-and-a-half hours a week, on average, the researchers found.

Even if a CEO has a lot of direct reports, “the effect of the CFO or COO is stronger,” and may help reduce a CEO’s time spent in internal meetings, says Harvard Business School’s Raffaella Sadun, a co-author of the project. The other researchers were Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat, of the London School of Economics and Julie Wulf of Harvard Business School. Their preliminary findings were just published in a Harvard Business School paper.

The researchers said they weren’t surprised by the amount of time spent in meetings, since one of the roles of a CEO is to manage employees and meet with customers and consultants.

A busy meeting schedule—often conducted virtually in global companies—can indicate that executives are engaged with their companies and close to their managers and clients. Still, CEOs say they pine for more solo time to think and strategize.

Rory Cowan, CEO of Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a Waltham, Mass., technology-services firm with about 4,500 employees, says he is constantly communicating with staff and clients. “I don’t know when I’m not in a meeting,” he says.

Instead of spending a lot of time in long face-to-face meetings, however, Mr. Cowan spends more time “doing frequent iterative touches,” either in person or via text messages, instant messaging and video chat—sometimes with “four or five windows open concurrently.”

As a result, his meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes, he says.

Lars Dalgaard, CEO of SuccessFactors Inc., a human resources software firm, says he spends about a third of his work time, at most, in formal meetings.

“While you are sitting in a meeting, your competition is getting stuff done,” he says. (Software firm SAP AG recently announced that it was acquiring SuccessFactors.)

NV “Tiger” Tyagarajan, president and CEO of Genpact Ltd., a technology-management firm, recently analyzed his time use to make sure he was spending enough time meeting with clients. He determined he was. But he does wish for more time to “sit back and think,” he says, or simply to bounce around ideas “without a fixed meeting or a fixed agenda.”

Mr. Dalgaard says he tries to dedicate as much as 25% of his week to thinking by making time on flights or blocking out time on his schedule—occasionally retreating to a quiet room or driving on the highway to let ideas crystallize.

Likewise, Mr. Cowan says that he tries to “build a big fence” around his first work hour in the morning at 7 a.m. to clear his thoughts, catch up on reading and manage email.

In contrast, Jon Oringer, CEO of New York based stock-photo provider Shutterstock Images LLC, doesn’t seem to lack “alone time.” He is rarely on the phone and averages about three meetings a day mostly lasting about 30 minutes, with some going up to 90 minutes.

The rest of the time he is usually scoping out his competition on blogs like TechCrunch, monitoring Web traffic and Twitter feeds and working on his own pet projects.

He is in the office from about 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., but says he works a lot from home, even during weekends.

“It doesn’t feel like I work when I’m working,” Mr. Oringer said. “It’s my thing.”

Executives’ assessment of how they spent their time differed from the actual records, as noted by their calendars and personal assistants, researchers found.

When top executives compare their top priorities to their time use, “they are usually surprised about the mismatch,” says Robert Steven Kaplan, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.

He recommends executives substitute the word ‘money’ for ‘time’ when deciding how to schedule their week. “With money… you’d be more careful and judicious about it. If someone asked you for some, you’d be more likely to say no,” says Mr. Kaplan.

The researchers’ global study involved both private and public companies from many countries; they didn’t determine whether executive time use correlated with a firm’s performance.

In another sample of 94 Italian CEOs, the researchers found that the way an executive budgets his or her time strongly correlated with a firm’s profitability and productivity, measured as revenue per employee.

In the Italian sample, the key to a company’s performance was with whom CEOs met. Meeting with external figures didn’t help a firm’s productivity, they found. Better performance came from more internal meetings, they found.

—Willa Plank contributed to this article.

Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman@wsj.com