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A recent court case against Fidelity Investments is interesting, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Ten days ago, Fidelity won its appeal in a whistle-blower case. Two Fidelity employees had claimed, in separate lawsuits, that the firm had retaliated against them for pointing out what they saw as accounting problems with its mutual funds. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that because Fidelity Investments was not the same legal entity as its funds—it had a contract relationship with them—the two employees were not protected by the Sarbanes-Oxley whistle-blower provisions.

Those protections cover only employees at public companies, and Fidelity is privately held. Newer and broader whistle-blower protections were made part of Dodd-Frank legislation. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor both filed briefs supporting the former employees. The SEC says it is reviewing the decision.

“I’m not surprised the SEC filed an amicus brief,” says Barry Barbash, partner and head of the asset-management group for law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Barbash also served as the SEC’s director of investment management from 1993 to 1998. “The SEC wants to be supportive of whistle-blower functions and would support a broader reading. It recognizes its shortcomings in terms of resources. The court paid no deference to the SEC opinion, but it’s on record.”

Fidelity wouldn’t discuss the case except to say the employee claims had “no merit” and that it has long provided staff with a hotline to report anonymously “potential violations of ethical business practices, laws or regulations.”

But these events happened years ago, and the larger issue here isn’t one of whistle-blowing. It’s the bright legal line the courts are drawing between mutual funds and the companies most investors think they are a part of. Last summer’s Supreme Court decision for Janus was even more startling in this respect. In June, the court ruled in favor of Janus Capital Group (ticker: JNS), effectively saying the parent company wasn’t responsible for misstatements in Janus fund prospectuses, and stockholders of the publicly traded firm weren’t allowed to sue.

In this case as well, the funds were deemed separate legal entities, and neither the parent company nor the subsidiary, Janus Capital Management, were responsible for claims made in multiple prospectuses that the funds had taken steps to prevent market timing, the practice of allowing some institutional customers to rapidly trade a fund at the expense of longer-term shareholders. Janus stockholders said those assurances were assumed to be false when, in 2003, New York’s attorney general filed a complaint against the company, causing its share price to fall. Janus Capital Group agreed to pay $201 million and cut fees by $125 million to settle claims by state and federal regulators, causing a further drop in its stock. But Janus Capital Group stockholders weren’t allowed to sue for losses because, according to the Supreme Court, Janus Capital Group was not responsible for the promises made in Janus funds’ prospectuses.

THESE LEGAL BATTLES SHOULD BE a reminder for investors. While the courts insist the funds are separate legal entities, investors rarely acknowledge that fact. “It would be a distinction without a difference but for the fact the courts have drawn a very sharp distinction,” says Neil Getnick, managing partner at New York law firm Getnick & Getnick. “Now shareholder rights are at issue.”

The problem with this construct, Getnick says, is that it’s a “legal fiction”—a description that came up more than once in conversations on this topic. “It implies the mutual fund is a wholly distinct entity with a separate advisor, when in reality it functions as one unit,” he says.

This raises the question of fund boards. Every mutual fund is required to have a board of directors that meets, in person, at least four times a year. The primary role of fund boards is to negotiate fund fees on behalf of fund shareholders, and keep watch for any potential conflicts of interest at the fund-advisor level, says Susan Ferris Wyderko, president and CEO of the Mutual Fund Directors Forum. The majority of fund boards are made up of so-called independent directors, which means they do not have “any significant business relationship with a mutual fund’s advisor or underwriter.” Many independent directors serve on multiple boards.

Do these boards do enough? “Independent directors play a minority role in most cases,” Getnick says. “They may see something, but that’s putting a lot of responsibility on them.”

What’s more: “The courts have not been that tough on fund boards, either,” says Laura Lutton, editorial director for Morningstar. “Most litigation around fund boards is fee-related. It raises the question as to whether the boards are a good enough watchdog for shareholders.”

But that question we’ll save for another column. 

Money Funds Suffer

Equity funds averaged $5.4 billion in weekly inflows in the four weeks ending Wednesday, according to Lipper. Taxable-bond funds averaged inflows of $7.7 billion and municipal funds $1.2 billion. Money-fund outflows averaged $11.5 billion.

E-mail:
beverly.goodman@barrons.com

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN And JOE LIGHT

In March, at the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner, Rep. Anthony Weiner made cracks about his surname.

“It’s part of me, it’s part of the campaign slogans,” he said. “Vote for Weiner. He’ll be frank. Vote for Weiner. He’s on a roll.” Although he’d been teased about it as a kid, the New York congressman said he’d learned to embrace his name.

A few months later that same name—which ranks 2,238 in frequency among U.S. surnames, according to U.S. Census data—became fodder for relentless jokes and headlines after Rep. Weiner admitted he’d sent women lewd photos of himself over the Internet. As the humbled congressman discovered, memorable names can be both a blessing and a curse.

When personal-injury lawyer Patricia Z. Boguslawski argued her first motion in court, the judge paused when he saw her name.

“He said, on the record, ‘Bogus law. Bogus law.’ I said, ‘Yes your honor, bogus law is in my name. However, the law that I am about to argue is not bogus,” Ms. Boguslawski recalls. The Teaneck, N.J.-based lawyer went on to win the motion.

In a controversial, widely cited 2002 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo found that people were more likely to choose professions with names that are similar to their own first names. Another study, out of Wayne State University, Detroit, found that medical doctors and lawyers were more likely to have last names that somehow evoked their professions. It was published last year in the journal “Names: A Journal of Onomastics.”

Frank Nuessel is a professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, and editor of the “Names” journal. He coined the term “aptonyms.” These refer to names that mirror their holders’ professions, such as “Anita House” for a real-estate agent. Still, as a scholar of names, Mr. Nuessel says, “I really don’t believe in nominal determinism. Probably most of these tend to be accidental.”

“The possibility that a name really impacts big life decisions is an extraordinary claim and we need extraordinary evidence,” says Uri Simonsohn, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of two forthcoming reports to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that dispute the findings of some previous name research.

While he didn’t base his career on his name, Austin, Texas-based urologist Richard Chopp, who goes by “Rick,” has managed to have some fun with it professionally.

Although he tries to be sensitive about emphasizing his name in marketing materials, patients who get a vasectomy at Dr. Chopp’s practice leave with a T-shirt that reads “I was ‘chopped’ at The Urology Team, P.A.” Dr. Chopp says he sometimes sees people wearing the shirts at the beach or at local festivals.

“I don’t take myself all that seriously,” he says, adding that people ask him four or five times per week if he changed his name once he entered the field. (He didn’t.)

Sex therapist Jacqueline Rose Hott, of Great Neck, N.Y., says patients often bring up her name to help break the ice. “We joke about it and then get down to business,” she says.

A family team of realtors in Weirton, W.V., with the optimistic-sounding name Greathouse, says it gets at least three calls per month from marketers offering to help advertise the family’s services.

“It’s really nonstop. The most common one is just to split the name up, ‘Buy a great house.’ I’ll go out to dinner and people will come up to me and ask if I’ve ever thought about a slogan,” says Cory Greathouse, whose mother and father are also realtors.

Scarsdale, N.Y., cardiologist Douglas Hart says his name had nothing to do with his chosen medical specialty.

In fact, he says, he has yet to hear a funny remark from patients who draw the connection between his name and profession—though he says some patients seem to randomly select him from a list of doctors provided by their HMO based on his name.

“I’ve been waiting 14 years for someone to say something clever. It never gets beyond, ‘Ah ha!’” he said.

Some people may find themselves inclined toward a particular profession because of their name.

Growing up, Sue Yoo, an in-house lawyer for Think Passenger Inc., a Los Angeles social media firm, never had dreams of becoming an attorney. “But when I was younger, people always said ‘Oh my god, that’s your name, you should totally become a lawyer,’” recalls Ms. Yoo. Perhaps “psychologically that helped me decide to go in that direction,” she says.

Although Ms. Yoo was sometimes teased about her name as a child, she now finds it helpful because few people forget it.

The marketing potential of her name, however, may be wasted at the moment. In her current job as in-house counsel, “I actually don’t litigate. I don’t sue anyone,” she says.

Will Wynn, the former mayor of Austin, Texas, who served from 2003 to 2009, has a name that some might say pre-determined his political success.

When Mr. Wynn decided to run for mayor, he assembled his campaign staff and offered to award $1,000 to any member of the team who could come up with a clever campaign slogan using his name in a manner that “I didn’t already hear in the second grade,” says Mr. Wynn.

“They came up with everything imaginable—’Will Wynn Will Win,’ ‘We All Will Win When Will Wynn Wins,’” that sort of thing. But I heard them all before,” Mr. Wynn recalled. “No one is more clever than a bunch of second-grade kids on the playground.”

No prize was awarded, but Mr. Wynn did win two terms as mayor.

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

Our lives are filled with sounds: the screeching brakes on a subway, a baby’s coo, a dog’s growl, the mechanical pop of a toaster. Experienced separately, they’re mundane background noise, but with innovative music apps for the iPhone and iPad, you can collect these sounds and string them together into musical masterpieces. Using your camera and microphone, these apps essentially turn your device into a sampling machine. After gathering material, software magic will meld it into fun beats at the fraction of a cost (and difficulty) of an electric guitar or drum machine. More than anything else, however, they’ll make you hear the world around you in a new way. The beeps your microwave emits? They aren’t just beeps—they’re material for an appliance version of Beethoven’s Fifth. Here are four of the best sound-toy apps.

Smule recently released MadPad.

MadPad

Smule is known for its music apps that magically turn your iPhone into a piano or T-Pain’s distinctive Auto-Tuned voice. The company’s recently released MadPad might be its most ambitious app. By making clips on the spot, you build a video soundboard of voices, tones and percussive noises to jam on like a beat maven. I recorded myself flicking and banging clutter around my desk—rustling paper for a crisp hi-hat, clattering DVD cases to make a punchy kick drum. As I tapped away, I watched my own hands (all five of them!) playing my work space like a marching band. You need a good sense of rhythm for MadPad, however. If you don’t, you’ll feel like the awkward guy on the dance floor. $1, available for iPhone and iPad; smule.com

VidRhythm

VidRhythm

This app from Harmonix, the makers of music game “Rock Band,” goes even further into novelty land. Think of VidRhythm as a modern, mobile version of the photo booths at malls and carnivals. You choose one of 20 ready-made songs as a template, from fun and bizarre originals to Beethoven’s Fifth. VidRhythm plays a Simon Says game with you, telling you exactly what to do or say in front of the camera, step by step. The result? A bonkers music video, in one of 10 hyper-kitsch styles, to the tune of that song. VidRhythm begs to be disobeyed: I mumbled gibberish when it told me to snap my fingers, and yelled “No!” when asked to sing a note. What’s delightful is that the app turns disobedience of its instructions into virtuoso magic. Especially when it’s in the form of a metal song framed in glittering pink-and-purple cat collage. Free, available for iPhone and iPad; vidrhythm.com

Sample your world and play it back with this Softoft Techech app.

Sir Sampleton

In this Softoft Techech app, you can sample your world and then play back the noises as notes on a keyboard. It may look like a plastic Casio toy, but it’s surprisingly powerful: Your slightest sounds create full octaves of crisp notes, and pressing a button gives you a randomized drumbeat to play against. $3, available for iPhone and iPad; softofttechech.com

Everyday Looper

Everyday Looper

Mancing Dolecules’s naturalistic, gesture-controlled app has no buttons. With any instrument—say, some desk clutter—you can use Everyday Looper to embellish layer upon layer of sound until you’re conducting a sample symphony in your palm. It’s the sort of tiny idea that balloons into new ways of thinking about composition, and it’s just a few taps and finger swipes within reach. $6, available for iPhone and iPad; mancingdolecules.com

—Ryan Kuo

By NITIN GUPTA

Through the last 18 months, thousands of mid-career managers have hit an unexpected speed bump in their careers. These are people in their 40s and early 50s who have suddenly found themselves out of a job. Many will never regain their lost momentum; some will find themselves permanently off the executive career track.

Nitin Gupta

There are thousands of younger executives, in their late 20s and early 30s, in the first 10 years of their careers, who face the same risks in 10 to 15 years’ time. In this column, I want to advise this group on how they can avoid the career bust that has been so widespread in the last two years. The trick lies in taking control and actively managing their careers, with the same passion and ferocity that they put into managing their businesses.

When I started my own career after my MBA, I was a sales manager and brand manager. I stayed in my first company for nine years. There was a bunch of friends who had joined the same company together, and we were all happy and comfortable in our relationships. We coasted along in our jobs, got married, set up homes, started families.

We were ambitious, but not overly so. None of us were thinking very much about what direction to take our careers in, and that’s an important reason why we stayed in one place for 10 to 15 years. In retrospect, some of us feel we became complacent and stayed too long. Once we left, all of us went on to diversified careers – everyone did very well professionally. But our career graph changed only when we started thinking about it actively, and when we took the initiative to steer our own careers rather than sit back and wait for our employer to offer “career development and growth.”

So here are a few tips on managing your career actively. I can vouch for their effectiveness, because I have practised most of these in my own career.

Tip No:1 – Take charge.

It’s your career – for the company it’s just another job. Never abdicate responsibility. Whatever happens, it will be because you did something, or did not do something. Behave like the CEO of You Inc.

Tip No:2 – Don’t stop thinking.

So you were fond of finance and accounting at B-school. And are now on track to be CFO of a midsize fast-moving consumer goods company. Are you enjoying the job as much as you enjoyed the classes? Are you good at this? What should you do in the next five years? And in the next 20? Should you consider switching to consulting , or venture investing , or private equity ? If one of these tracks appeals to you , what do you need to do to get ready to switch tracks? As you make long term strategic plans for the brand you manage, make sure you continuously refine your own career plan.

Tip No:3 – Think. Then don’t hesitate to act.

I started off as a sales manager like most freshly minted MBAs who want a career in a FMCG company. I did that for four years and then was terribly bored. There were 18 sales manager slots, and only three brand manager slots. I wrote directly to the managing director of the company and made a case for why I should be made a brand manager. I was given the job three months later. I don’t think I was smarter than the others. I just did something the others didn’t – I asked for what I wanted.

Tip No:4 – Make friends when you don’t need them

I learned the art and skill of building long term relationships from many people along the way. The trick is to create a network of relationships without any expectation. As long as possible, do things for others. Help people connect with each other, offer ideas, use your own network to help others. Create a bank of goodwill. When you really need help, you won’t need to ask. By the way, this advice applies to your connections with headhunters as well. They’re as human as anyone else. They remember when you’ve been of help in the past- as a source of names, a referee, a good client, or an advisor on industry issues. The best time to create relationships with headhunters is when you don’t need them.

Tip No:5 – Watch your “value equation” like a hawk.

At the end of the day, this is what matters the most. Your career graph will always trend up so long as the value you carry is (1) increasing over time and (2) higher than your cost. And your value is a function of many factors, all of which need constant thought, but most of which cannot be measured . Here are a few questions to keep asking:

–Are you adding different dimensions to your experience over the years? For example, if you’re a finance person, make sure you cover accounting, controllership, tax, compliance, financial planning, budgeting, M&A and other aspects of the function over time. Make sure you rotate across business units. And across geographies. And India and overseas. When it’s time for you to be considered for a CFO’s job, in your own company or in another company, you’ll be well positioned.

–Are you becoming too specialized? In the last two years, many people found they had become uni-dimensional and when they were made redundant, there were limited options outside. This can happen to anyone. If you’re a sales and marketing person, it may not be a bad thing to get experience in two to three different industries and markets so that your range of options remains wide.

–Are you making a measurable difference to the bottom line? Are others in the company aware of the value you’re creating?

–Are you creating “supporters” in the company? People who will vouch for your value when it’s time to decide who gets promoted? Or on whom the axe should fall?

At the end of the day its your career and your life . There’s only one way to handle it – from the driver’s seat!

—Nitin Gupta is an executive search consultant at Spencer Stuart India. The views expressed here are personal