JUMPING SHIP: There's an uneasy feeling floating about the workplace. Something just might be up. What's an executive to do?

Leave. Right now.

A study on managing the "stigma of failure" found that those high-level executives who left their positions in the two years before a company collapsed helped erase the bad name of that company from their reputations more easily than those who stayed with one that failed.

The study tracked executive vice-presidents and other C-suite bankers in Texas whose institutions underwent federal intervention in the late 1980s during the nationwide savings and loan crisis. Bank executives whose institutions did not fail were also studied.

In a follow-up in 1993, those who left their jobs earlier were found more likely to have avoided negative outcomes — having to work in another city or demotion — than those who stuck with their institutions.

"(You think) you can't get away from a bad deed ... you actually can," said Matthew Semadeni, lead author of the study.

The study, "Fight or Flight: Managing Stigma in Executive Careers," was published in the Strategic Management Journal in February.

RANKINGS GO GREEN: Jobs related to the environment and alternative energy are touted as the next big growth sector by hiring firms. Institutions and corporations extol their own eco-virtues.

And now Princeton Review, one of the handbook of college rankings-starved parents and high-schoolers, will assign a "Green Rating" to higher education.

The bases for ranking schools by how green they are, developed in tandem with ecoAmerica, an environmental marketing agency, lie in the university's commitments to environmental responsibility, if "healthy and sustainable" campus life is available for students and how well the school teaches its students to be good environmental citizens.