Business stuff two days in a row. How about that?

So this morning’s lecture explains why fixing a broken corporate culture has something to do with angry, disoriented monkeys driving a bus on the sidewalk. Sorta.

Hate meetings? Who doesn’t?

If you’ve snooped around at all, you know that there are lots and lots of smart people with good advice on how to run effective meetings, but you may be thinking that none of those suggestions is really helping address what seem like deeper issues (and here, think “band-aid” and “sucking chest wound”). If so, let’s ponder the possibility that the problem lies not with the conduct of the meetings themselves, but with the culture in which they occur. Consider the following issues that I’ve encountered in various organizations through the years.

(Read the rest at the Exchange Blog…)

Just because….

There is much you need to know to wisely direct your life. At some point, an event may occur that you cannot personally witness. Suppose the consequences of the event affect you — without first-hand knowledge of the event, will you be aware of it? Will you be able to react to it?

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?
Full Story »

Salaries at newspapers are rising, reports Jennifer Saba of Editor & Publisher, a newspaper industry trade journal. But it’s not necessarily good news for would-be journalists looking to break into an industry beset by revenue problems.

Newspaper wages rose 2.1 percent from 2008 to 2009, reported Ms. Saba, based on the annual Newspaper Compensation Study by the Inland Press Association using data from 400 U.S. and Canadian papers.

But the folks getting the raises, up to 13 percent for “interactive producers,” are not the people producing the raw content — news stories.
Full Story »

Part eleven in a series

“China is more capitalistic than any capitalist country.”

Amy, an employee at a jewelry booth
in Beijing’s pearl market, strings
together a strand of pearls after
striking a bargain with a shopper.

Roger Perkins of Cooper Industries told us that early on our trip. You’d have to see it to believe it, perhaps—but I’ve seen that firsthand several times on the trip, most dramatically at the silk and pearl markets. It happens on the scale of global companies, too.

“China is pragmatic,” says John Chen of Prometric, a company that specializes in testing and surveying. “When it wants to be capitalistic, it’s capitalistic. When it wants to be communist, it’ll be communist.

Chen likens China’s approach to situational management: different situations require different management approaches.

China needs the influx of cash that capitalism provides in order to continue to fuel its burgeoning economy. But at times, the country’s top-down dictatorial style allows things to get done that otherwise couldn’t happen in a democracy.

“India, for instance, is the most democratic country in the world,” Chen points out by way of example. “Everything gets debated to death and nothing ever gets done.”
Full Story »

“A TOP TEN LIST? Really? Are you fucking kidding me, Cargo? You do not appear to have the qualifications to make such a list, what with your lack of tooth gaps and, well, jeez. I mean, you? A Top Ten list? Gawd. You must be out of mate–OW!”

No.

As the American Dream™ continues to gnaw on every last bit of exposed flesh it can pick from our flailing limbs, it will no doubt, for many of us, also eat those debt-strangled, rapidly depreciating havens of dirty secrets, personal failure and indoor allergens known as parcels of real estate.

It will eventually, after a judicial process, a waiting period and probably more judicial processes, send a henchman or three to, at long last, relieve you of the burdens of homeownership and shelter.

But, come on. People in any line of work are nonetheless good, hard-working people too! They know just as well as anybody that remembers what it’s like to be employed in recent memory that work sucks and is hard, and comic relief can get us through even the toughest of times.

Accordingly, when the Evicto Man comes to summon you to your shiny new life as a spent munition in America’s War on Prosperity, here are the:

TOP TEN ADVISORIES FOR YOUR FRIENDLY FORECLOSURE EVICTION REPRESENTATIVE!

Full Story »

Over the past nearly four years, nearly 2,600 posts have appeared on Scholars & Rogues, almost all researched and written by the 15 folks whose names appear on our writers’ bio page. S&R writers have devoted thousands of hours to the task of filling this space.

These are skilled people with diverse interests and even more diverse points of view. Three are college professors. Also writing for S&R have been or are an Hispanic activist from Texas; a foreign affairs writer who specializes in nuclear deproliferation issues and civilian casualties resulting from armed conflict; a gay staff cartoonist; a management consultant specializing in organizational behavior whose clients include 20 percent of the Fortune 500; an ex-pat South African economist; three experts in popular culture; a former director of the Berkeley Stage Company and statistical demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau; a professional stage actor; two stay-at-moms; a photographer; and occasional guest columnists.

However, we all share one trait: We are volunteers. We don’t get paid. We have other lives, other responsibilities, other people dependent on us to make a living. As business models go, ours sucks. Modest ad income and passing the hat means S&R remains a labor of love. But can love be a sustaining force for the online medium in the absence of profit?
Full Story »

This year large metropolitan newspapers have folded in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson. More will likely follow. Journalists at the Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Citizen joined the 10,000 print newsies downsized or bought out from print newsrooms over the past few decade. Media pundits (including me) cluck-cluck incessantly over these democracy-wrenching signs of the impending journalistic apocalypse.

But readers in those cities still have print options for newspapers providing some local news.

Not so in the mountain town of Carbondale, Colo., whose population about equals its elevation. The Valley Journal, founded in 1975, had its plug pulled in March, reports DeeDee Correll of the Center for Rural Affairs. The 6,000 residents had no other sources of local news.

Their solution: Publish a newspaper themselves.
Full Story »

Part two in a series

From space, the road system around Shanghai must look like a bowl of Chinese noodles. But traveling on the roads themselves feels like traveling the straight and narrow. The long, straight parkways, well-manicured, roll out across the flat coastal plain that surrounds Shanghai.

Component await shipment at Cooper Industries
outside of Shanghai

The business of the day is business, so we’re visiting a number of manufacturing companies. The industrial parks we visit are laid out in grids that keep things well organized and makes it easy for delivery and cargo trucks to move about. It’s just the most visible indication of the careful planning the government has put into place to attract companies.

We tour a few American-based companies as well as a German-based one, although all are quick to characterize themselves as “global companies.” One company manufactures parts for electricity transmission; another manufactures parts for auto transmissions and brakes; another is an aerospace manufacturer; another specializes in urban development.

China represents a key market for each of them. Business here is booming. Full Story »

Several years ago, in the wake of Enron and several similar debacles, it was rightfully agreed that we needed to assure more responsible behavior on the part of American corporations. The result was Sarbanes-Oxley, a law that has since been at the center of any number of debates over the difference between “we should do something” and “DO SOMETHING!!!” I’m not an expert on compliance issues, but I’ve heard enough mind-numbing horror stories from enough people in enough places to suspect that a review of the law, as it has been implemented, might be in order.

Now this news, courtesy of John Carney at BusinessInsider.com: the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to SarbOx. As Carney notes, this particular decision by the Court is a little unusual: (Read the rest at the Exchange…)

As some of you know, the “day” portion of my double life finds me working as a business and marketing guy. As part of that gig I do some blogging on business subjects. Since I know there are people here who follow business (and perhaps even engage in it when they think no one is looking), I’ll be periodically x-posting or linking to stuff from one of my bizblogs. I just put one up at the Exchange Blog that may be of interest to anyone who deals with goal-setting. (For that matter, this one goes beyond basic business, so maybe there’s a broader audience, even.)

_____________

We can probably agree that it’s good to have goals. In business, especially, it’s good to know where you’re going and to have some mechanisms that help you chart and evaluate your progress.

Increasingly, though, we’re presented with more and more evidence suggesting that our goal-setting can easily go awry, and with dramatically counter-productive results. (Read the rest at the Exchange Blog…)

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is running an advertisement at the Washington Post and The Hill websites which makes the following claim: 72% of opinion leaders support coal electricity. The ACCCE touts this claim repeatedly at their various websites, but there is so little information available about the study that produced this claim that it’s literally impossible to verify. However, given the number of inconsistencies in what little information is available, we can make an educated guess as to the accuracy of the 72% claim.

If you click on the “America’s Power” advertisement (screen shots shown at right), you’re taken to this page, where the ACCCE claims “it’s easy to see why 72 percent of American opinion leaders support the use of coal.” On this page, however, there are four links on the page that all go to the same press release that describes the ACCCE study that produced this 72% number. Full Story »

As the poet Robert Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.” The common military iteration of the sentiment says that no plan, however well devised, survives contact with the enemy. And former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson explained, in the least poetic fashion possible, that everybody’s got a plan until you bust him in the mouth.

There’s a lesson in here for businesses, even those that aren’t involved in actual combat: Nothing wreaks havoc with strategic planning quite like hard times. We’ve all got a plan, a vision, a dream, but these plans have to navigate whatever reality throws at us, and the more adverse the conditions the harder it is to stick to the course.

One of the biggest problems is that when things aren’t going well, any temptation becomes more alluring. (Read the rest at the Exchange blog…)

Gerg wasn’t a monster, they insisted.

He was big. He was temperamental. He was covered in green fur and didn’t wear pants. He was ever demanding. His face changed color, shape and expression depending on who was looking at him. Everybody loved Gerg, and Gerg loved everybody, but not in that genuine, heartfelt way — more like a golddigger cherishes her trophy husband, or a cheerleader loves the ugly friend she keeps around to look better in front of guys. But the support was strong, the words as heartfelt as they could sound, and the dubious sincerity of it all was easily drowned out with more wide smiles and more pairs of outstretched arms.

Gerg was, indeed, the town’s beloved mascot. On top of it all, he was always hungry. Full Story »

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the very organization created to guarantee deposits against bank runs and failures, is instead about to guarantee that their services are in greater demand. They’re doing this by requiring all banks, large and small, to pay a one time charge of 20 cents per $100 of deposits (aka 20 “basis points”). In the process, this unbudgeted expense will likely cause some otherwise stable and profitable smaller banks to fail while larger banks, with the assistance of federal TARP funds, will likely be able to survive. Full Story »

Obama is currently haggling with Congress over $150B in budget for his green initiatives. As you know, he made the transition to a sustainable energy infrastructure one of his key priorities during the election, but that doesn’t guarantee success at the policy level.

For the past few months I’ve been thinking about how a particular piece of the Internal Revenue Code - Section 1031, which has been on the books since 1921 and which governs “like-kind exchanges” - might be used to help speed the greening of America along. (Full disclosure - I work in the 1031 industry. I’m still in the “vertical learning curve” phase, but the more I learn the more ideas occur to me.)

Recently a potential application to the energy industry hit me and I’ve been working for some time to try and nail the concept down so that it makes sense. Short version: right now energy companies can use the code to defer taxes when they sell an asset and buy a new one of “like kind,” but they can’t use the same code if they want to sell a fossil fuel production asset and replace it with a green energy asset. Full Story »

I recently offered up an open letter to America’s progressive billionaires where I noted how much better conservatives have been historically at making best use of their intellectuals and at assuring that those laying the foundation for political action were taken care of. That is, the Daniel Bells of the world didn’t have to slave at two jobs to scrape together half a salary, and as a result they were able to do important work that paid off - and handsomely - for their patrons.

In truth, the problem runs deeper than just “our side’s” billionaires, or so it appears. It started the other day when some prominent Left Blogistanis decided they weren’t going to keep their mouths shut anymore. The first shot was fired in a Greg Sargent piece at Who Runs Gov: Full Story »

American-style capitalism, sans regulation, has earned its present bad rap. Even so, some market mechanisms do work quite well. Commodities pricing is discovered and costs kept low because markets are very efficient at making sure that metals, oil, food, etc. are moved to where the demand is the highest from where the supply is greatest. Similarly, a market in traded sulfur emissions imposed by the Clean Air Act has enabled fossil fuel plants to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions (the main source of acid rain) dramatically since the market’s inception.

Markets don’t work for everything, however. The sulfur dioxide emissions market works because the effects are not hyper-localized - farmers in Kansas and Iowa won’t notice the difference between the emissions from coal plants in Denver, Boulder, or Fort Collins. However, in the case of mercury emissions from coal plants, an emissions market would be a very, very bad idea. Coal-produced mercury precipitates out of the air in a plume immediately downwind of the emissions source, and so there’s no way to fairly balance the increased emissions of one coal plant with the lower emissions of another. In this case, all the increased mercury emissions would to is poison more mothers and children.

But because markets work so well for so many things, the creation of a cap-and-trade market for carbon dioxide (CO₂) makes a lot of sense. In a similar fashion to sulfur dioxide and unlike mercury emissions, CO₂ emissions mix well with the atmosphere and so trading emission credits between one source and another is viable. Full Story »

“Come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry. And then either do one of two things, resign or go commit suicide,” said US congressman Chuck Grassley in an interview on radio station, WMT.

He was discussing AIG, and apologised later for the heat of his language. Many people probably feel that he was too polite.

It must be very cathartic to lay all of the blame for the financial crisis at the doors of bankers and investment brokers. No-one has yet asked how it is that a single industry has managed to attract nothing but liars, lunatics, imbeciles and pathological hucksters while the rest of the world is filled with wide-eyed softies who have been taken for a ride. Full Story »