“One out of four people in this country is mentally unbalanced. Think of your three closest friends, if they seem OK, then you’re the one.”
April 22, 2010
Mental Health
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April 21, 2010
Health
“True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are united.”
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Making Ideas Happen on inBubbleWrap
If you haven’t been keeping up with Sally over on inBubbleWrap, I humbly recommend you start doing so. And this week would be a good time to start, because she is giving away Scott Belsky’s wonderful new book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality. She named her post “Making Your Dreams Real,” which may sound hyperbolic, but if you’re a creative person (whether you’re starting a business or a novel) you know that “Making Ideas Happen” really is “Making Your Dreams Real.” After acknowledging the title may sound “a little like claiming that unicorns really do exist and frolic happily at the end of every rainbow,” Sally, like Scott Belsky does in the book, gets into the details on how we go about riding those unicorns:
“When discussing execution, Belsky explains that most people lose interest when they hit a ‘project plateau.’ ‘We know we’re on the plateau when we are overwhelmed with Action Steps and can see no end in sight.’ He counsels that this is when most of us get lured away by a new idea, when really developing endurance is the key to surviving the plateau. Setting up identifiable constraints helps rein in our creativity while still building and sustaining energy. Other guidelines: Make progress obvious and limit your ‘Insecurity Work’ which is that tendency to check results early and often, looking for assurance, but a lack of immediate feedback can take the wind out of your sails.”
That’s just a taste of the great ideas you’ll find in Belsky’s book,* and a sample of the great writing you’ll find on inBubbleWrap. So, head on over for the free copy of Making Ideas Happen, and stay for the elegant writing.
*If you’d like more, you’ll find his manifesto, What the Creative World Needs Now … on ChangeThis.
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April 20, 2010
Idleness
“Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind. Thinking without constructive action becomes a disease.”
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The Greatest Gamble Ever
Gregory Zuckerheim’s The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-The-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History tells of how Paulson “realized something few others suspected—that the housing market and the value of sub-prime mortgages we grossly inflated and headed for a major fall.” But it turns out that “The Greatest Trade Ever” may have been something very akin to a rigged bet. What the book didn’t tell us (because it was unknown at the time) is that Paulson had shaped the portfolio of mortgages—hand-picking the bonds it contained for Goldman Sachs—that he bet against to make his fortune. (This is what is behind the SEC suit being brought against Goldman Sachs we’ve been hearing so much about.)
Instead of explaining this myself (Because I don’t know if I really can), I’ll defer to The New York Times and the authors they’ve had weigh in on the situation this week.
Yesterday, Too Big To Fail author Andrew Ross Sorking wrote about When Wall Street Deals Resemble Casino Wagers:
The Securities and Exchange Commission, in its suit, says that Mr. Paulson asked Goldman to help create a synthetic C.D.O. of lousy mortgage loans that he selected so he could bet that they would go down and then profit on their fall
[...]
This kind of high finance can numb the brain, and the legal questions are murky. But when you strip all of that away, this deal was nothing more than a roll of the dice.
Try this mental exercise: Imagine if, a few years ago, an influential investor like Warren Buffett, bullish on real estate, had asked Goldman to develop a synthetic C.D.O. made up of undervalued mortgages.
Now, imagine if Goldman had found John Paulson to take the opposite side of the trade and, lo and behold, a year later Mr. Buffett turned out to be right and Mr. Paulson lost his shirt. Would you call that fraud? Would you be very upset?
Maybe not, but Mr. Paulson sure would be. And he might be inclined to sue over it, especially if he found out that his bet had been rigged against him from the start.
Today, Roger Lowenstein, author of The End of Wall Street, took his turn explaining Goldman’s Gambling With the Economy:
Wall Street’s purpose, you will recall, is to raise money for industry: to finance steel mills and technology companies and, yes, even mortgages. But the collateralized debt obligations involved in the Goldman trades, like billions of dollars of similar trades sponsored by most every Wall Street firm, raised nothing for nobody. In essence, they were simply a side bet—like those in a casino—that allowed speculators to increase society’s mortgage wager without financing a single house.
[...]
The government would not look fondly on Caesar’s Palace if it opened a table for wagering on corporate failure. It should not give greater encouragement for Goldman Sachs to do so.
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 author and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, in his Op-Ed piece about Looters in Loafers on Sunday, explained how these bets made the overall recession worse:
So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst.
As for the alleged creation of investments designed to fail, these may have magnified losses at the banks that were on the losing side of these deals, deepening the banking crisis that turned the burst housing bubble into an economy-wide catastrophe.
And, though not specifically about Goldman Sachs and the SEC suit being brought against it, William Cohan, the author of House of Cards, took the space allotted him today on the Op-Ed page today to say You’re Welcome, Wall Street.
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April 19, 2010
Idleness
“I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.”
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Leadercast
For those in the Milwaukee area, Kelly Leadership Group is hosting a Leadercast session on May 7, 2010 at Crowne Plaza in Wauwatosa. Tickets and more details can be found at www.kellyleadershipgroup.com or by calling 414-688-9642.
What’s Leadercast? Well, it’s a pretty big deal, and it’s great to have something of such magnitude happening in our city. Jim Collins, Tony Dungy, John Maxwell, Ed Bastian, Jim Goodnight, Chip Heath, Ben Carson, Connie Podesta, Steve Uzzell, and Mark Sanborn will be speaking via broadcast for this day-long event. Attendees will be inspired to make a difference – at work, at home, and in their community. The price of admission is also surprisingly affordable, so don’t miss this chance to hear some of the world’s greatest leadership speakers.
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April 16, 2010
Friday Links
➻ Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market, pondered Improving the Let’s-Persuade-Business-to-Improve Movement in a recent Harvard Business Review post. There’s a lot of folks out there writing about we can persuade business and those in it to behave more ethically, but Fox thinks its still a hard sell:
I don’t think anyone has come up with an argument for or description of better business behavior that has anything like the elegance and power of the economists’ “incentives matter.”
He ends, understandably, on a slightly defeated note, writing: “Clearly, I’m stuck here. Can somebody help me out?” Umair Haque, his colleague at HBR tried to answer his call for help, making The Case for Being Disruptively Good, arguing for the forces of information, discipline, competition, disruption and rule-making. He writes:
So why don’t more businesses see these forces? It’s the wrong question. The right one is: because there will be some organizations that are quicker to get it than others, what do the forces above mean for the economy? Well, they suggest that businesses who can do more good will survive, thrive, and prosper — and those who do more bad will stumble, falter, and fall.
I think he’s definitety right, but he is taking a pretty long view of history when he writes: “Yesterday, the global economy was built on debtors’ prisons, usury, expropriation, colonialism, and slavery. Today, it isn’t.” and “Yet even two hundred years from now, I’m sure incumbents will ask—what, you want us to do more good? And then, as ever, from under their patrician noses, revolutionaries who can do better will disrupt them.” And while Umair’s language speaks to me, I don’t know if it is as catchy as “incentives matter” to those marching off to Wall Street. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
➻ Richard Florida also takes a longer view in his works about the creative class—such as The Rise of the Creative Class—and he has a great new book coming out in May called The Great Reset. You can get a taste of the book in his March article in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America, or by reading his recent interview with Conor Clarke for the same magazine.
➻ Portfolio has posted a new issue of The Business Beat. Featured this month are Peter Escher, author of The MBA Oath, Michael O’Malley, author of The Wisdom of Bees, and, as always, our own peerless leader Jack Covert in his Just Jack corner. Jack discusses Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life, one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and a close second (in my mind) to Studs Terkel’s Working as the best book of interviews ever created about work.
➻ Speaking of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, you can now read it in Indonesian.* Muhammad Mishbah penned a review for Seputar Indonesia Daily writing:
Books 100 Best Business Books of All Time provides 100 units with a discussion of book selection of different problems. This book is like a “dictionary” of business books that point us in order to save time, money and energy before seeking appropriate books.
(Shakes fist at Google Translate.)
*This applies only to those of you that can actually read Indonesian.
➻ Peter Elkind’s new book, Rough Justice: The Rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer, is embargoed until next Tuesday, but you can get a preview at Fortune, blessed as they were with an an exclusive excerpt. “‘Is there a way to wire money where it’s not evident that it’s coming from me?’ the governor asked.”
➻ The Web Designer Depot posted a great overview of Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen by Cameron Chapman. He writes “Making Ideas Happen is an excellent resource for those of us who have no shortage of ideas but often have a hard time seeing those ideas through to completion.” That is everyone I know, including me and probably you.
➻ Roger C. Parker has a novel idea: Learn to write a business book by studying 800-CEO-READ’s Top 25 Business Books.
➻ “Some people seem to think life is all about the I, and the Me, Me, Me.” The WePad begs to differ. (HT to Siobhan O’Leary at Publishing Perspectives.)
➻ Following the Freakonomics trend, America’s finest news source, The Onion, reported recently that “last month’s quarter-inch drop in height among Mexican dead-lift competitors in the middle-heavyweight division could spell disaster for GE’s aviation and software subsidiaries.” “But, like anything else, a shrewd investor must always ask himself one thing: How many hot dogs did I eat last year?”
➻ I’ll ask her someday.
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Truth
“The trouble with too many people is they believe the realm of truth lies within their vision.”
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April 15, 2010
Pulling
With developments in technology, and the effects they are having on our lives; how we think, research, question, and seek, there’s a lot to be said about how we’re changing how we work and interact. Two recent books address that through the definition of ‘Pull,’ David Siegel’s Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business and John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison’s The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.
Siegel’s book talks about how the web is changing, and how it will infiltrate more and more into our lives though our interaction with it (working in the cloud) and physical material (ex. buildings ordering their own supplies). It’s important to understand these changes in order to adapt our businesses to them. Because, as Siegel states, “It isn’t going to be easy, and you don’t have any choice.” As unpleasant as that sounds, our jobs will change drastically, and the effort of change will reveal many rewards with how we interact with customers, provide better services, and survive in the world going forward.
The lack of choice that Siegel mentions is reflected in Hagel, Brown, and Davison’s focus on how the concept of pull requires personal commitment, ambition, and voluntary action. The author’s state:
“Pull is a very different approach, one that works at three primary levels, each of which builds on the others. At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to you that are relevand and valuable, even if you wer not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull-the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.”
The lesson here is that push programs tell you what to do, and pull programs give you the opportunity to coordinate your own knowledge and experience. Both books provide great insight into the quickly changing world of information. On the surface, they are books about technology and business, but on a deeper level, reveal much more about the future of communication, culture, and people.
