Finance and Economics « 800 CEO Read

November 14, 2011

Thoughts on “Generation Sell”

Filed under: Careers,Current Events,Finance and Economics,General Business,Innovation — dylan @ 9:09 pm

“The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.”

That quote comes from an intriguing opinion piece called Generation Sell that was published in the New York Times this weekend. It is a piece about a generation just coming of age and today’s youth culture. It really deserves to be read in its entirety, but I think that if one passage can sum up the basic argument of the article, it is this:

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration—music, food, good works, what have you—is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

The piece was written by William Deresiewicz, and there is so much I agree with and so much I disagree with in it—and it’s all wound tightly together in a wonderful and entertaining piece of writing. I’m a member of the generation he’s writing about, “people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less,” so I probably took it more personally than others, more personally indeed than I should, but I do take issue with some of Deresiewicz’s characterizations.

The first issue I ran into was in what I think was an unnecessary or misguided attempt to say something about hip-hop, which has undoubtedly had an affect on the generation and merits mention, but the sentence Deresiewicz offers doesn’t do it justice. After describing the (counter)cultural characteristics of the beatniks, hippies and punks, he briefly offers this:

Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

Because that’s all he offers us on the subject, I feel it would have been better to have left it out altogether. Because hip-hop, like jazz or rock-and-roll, shouldn’t be defined as a “youth-culture” in and of itself, but as an art form that influenced youth culture. And while some of its currents may have been “all about rage and nihilism,” it began as party music more predominantly wrapped up in a social conscience and commentary, cultural irreverence, and the urban art forms of dance, painting and poetry. There may have been a decent amount of rage there, but I don’t get the nihilism. To “punk’s younger brother” seems to miss its roots and how it ended up as part of the youth culture he’s critiquing. It would be more accurate to define it as a part of the millennial generation in the way he did with jazz and beatniks, of which he wrote:

Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; … of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

Something like this might have been more accurate:

Theirs was a culture of hip-hop, with its social conscience and cultural irreverence (and confusion); of finding a voice, of the city street; of the quest for personal invention and aggrandizement.

But, of course, that doesn’t ring true either, because it isn’t a culture defined solely by rap. The generation wasn’t defined by any single movement in music as much as previous generations have been—movements that the major record labels could latch onto and push out into the wider consciousness to become the soundtracks of their generations. I think, if anything, this generation was shaped by the demise of the major labels’ cultural influence, the proliferation of independent labels, and all the noise, cross-pollination, creativity and confusion that has spawned from that. The last real uprising or rebellious “movement” in popular music was the rise of grunge music in the ’90s. Since then, the only movement I can detect is one toward ever smaller, more focused independent labels. It is, as the author rightly notes, a movement to a new business model, and he’s right that “selling out” has largely left our lexicon since then:

It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was certainly not to start a business. That was selling out—an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary.

But I think there’s a more important reason for that. “Selling out” used to mean that a band was abandoning one of the little labels so many cherished for a major. People were passionate about those labels—Dischord, Matador, Thrill Jockey, Touch & Go, etc.—and a move like that felt like an abandonment of something just on the verge of exploding and choosing a paycheck over principle. “Selling out” was also applied to those who sold a song for use in advertising, a move I don’t think many begrudge bands for anymore due to the paradigm shifts in the music industry. And I think the larger idea that starting a business 20 years ago was considered selling out is a misnomer. I doubt anyone accused Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye of selling out when he started Dischord in 1980, or told Aaron Rose he was selling out when he opened Alleged Gallery in the early ’90s. Selling out would have been signing with a major label or taking a job curating art at the The Met.

And this leads me to a the generalized character at the heart of the article—the “hipster” that the author feels is “a lot more representative [of the Millennial Generation] than most of them care to admit.” The definition is bandied about and applied to many people, but I’m still not sure what exactly a “hipster” is (though perhaps n+1‘s What Was the Hipster could help), and putting it in the same category as the counterculture figures that preceded it seems problematic to me. Beatniks, hippies and punks were all actively participating in larger countercultures, and defined themselves with those movements. The one predominant characteristic of a “hipster” is that nobody self-identifies with it. It’s always a label attached to others, and usually with a heavy dose of derision. As such, it’s not really a counterculture that anybody’s participating in or defining themselves with as much as it’s, if anything, an alternative lifestyle loosely defined. I do agree with the author that this lifestyle and its bohemian values were heavily influenced by the baby boomers and “Bobo in Paradise” parents that David Brooks wrote about a decade ago.

But outside of the skinny pants and fixed gear bicycles, the irony and the vanity, the defining character traits of the so-called “hipster” lifestyle—being young, urban, fashionable, artistic, and entrepreneurial—are mostly seen as positives. And I think the aversion to the label “hipster” is an aversion to labels and definitions in general. This generation hasn’t fully defined itself and doesn’t want to be defined by others—even their peers. Statistically, it’s more likely to switch jobs many times, move to new cities, to freelance, start a business of the their own or work for themselves. I don’t think of this as the end of history of counterculture in any major way, but as the rise of many independent yet interconnected subcultures that are entering the popular culture in a way that mirrors how previous countercultures were absorbed and watered down—except that today’s subcultures seem to be entering it with more artistic and economic control and largely on their own terms.

The characteristic art form of our age is not the business plan; it is do-it-yourself, independent local production, scale and control. Most people I know didn’t start with a business plan and still don’t have one. They started with a vision and are working every day to realize it. They made the decision to strike out on their own and practice their art, craft or trade—and hope people value their vision enough to pay for it. My wife, a self-employed photographer, began Ellagraph Studios. My friend dwellephant is a working artist. My friends Daniel and Maria run Ball & Biscuit, the best catering company in Milwaukee. My neighbors run Orchard Street Press, an eco-friendly printing company. I could go on and on, and wouldn’t be able to find a “hipster” in the bunch—just a lot of hard-working, creative and passionate people.

If I could sum up the generation, it would be with the once annoying labels “indie” or “underground” (which became so annoying simply by virtue of being such ubiquitous labels). The indie rock and the underground dance music and hip-hop that grew up in the ’80s and ’90s dominated the subcultures that we ourselves grew up in, and have since turned into more codified and sustainable (though possibly not very profitable) small business models. That simple yet profound change in how we learn about, purchase and consume (in the best sense of that word) the music that so shaped us during our formative years has fundamentally altered the cultural landscape. The “rockstars” of our generation were closer to us, more accessible, usually a part of our artistic communities. And alongside the independent music sprang up independent labels, music venues, galleries, coffee shops, screen printing operations, skate shops, DIY arts and crafts fairs. The internet then came along and kicked it all into overdrive.

The author says “the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent.” But I think that that is what so defines the generation. It’s a rebellion of production, a commercial rejection and inner dissent. It’s a rejection of corporate principles and a simple consumer choice for the alternative. It’s a generation not fundamentally different in attitude than its predecessors, but in the solutions it offers. The heretics of today saw previous generations’ protests and rebellions crushed in the street, so they rented the abandoned buildings beside it and started trying to build something new inside them. It’s in some ways a return to mom-and-pop capitalism.

Sure, you can call it “generation sell,” but I think “selling” is a dirty word rather deliberately used. It could easily be called “generation create” or “generation present.” It does often seem as if everyone nowadays has something to present, advertise, market or “sell,” but by-and-large I think it was and is being done with good art, the right intention and decent manners. And if one of the results of that shift is that people fault this generation for being polite and pleasant, well… being the affable generation it is, I think they’d be okay with that.

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October 31, 2011

Halloween, Zombies and the Devil’s Derivatives

Filed under: Book Reviews,Finance and Economics — dylan @ 2:20 pm

This may be a ghost story. It happened on a dark night mistaken for morning in America, a night that would descend over the entire financial world.

Nicholas Dunbar sets the scene in his book, The Devil’s Derivatives:

For most of it’s history, our financial system was built by on the stolid, cautious decisions of bankers, the men who hate to lose. This cautious investment mind-set drove the creation of socially useful financial institutions over the last few hundred years. … People like that did not drive the kind of astronomical growth seen in the last two decades.

So who did create that astronomical growth? Dunbar tells of encountering them one evening while they were “celebrating their annual bacchanal, which is also known as “bonus season.’”

I knew bout some of them: there was the head of the financial institutions derivatives marketing who forgot which of his Italian supercars had been towed off to the car pound. There was the head of credit structuring notorious for preying on female staff and having his corporate credit cards stolen by prostitutes. These young men—and almost all of them were young, some shockingly so—were the avant-garde of the credit derivatives boom, enjoying the first, fifth, or tenth million. … There are many sobriquets for these young lions, but I like to think of them as the men who love to win.

So the stage is set for a battle between the men who love to win, for whom “any uncertain bet is a chance to become unbelievably happy, and the misery of losing barely merits a moment’s consideration,” and the men who hate to lose, who “are attached to the idea of certainty and stability” (you can think of them as vampires and werewolves). But the battle never happened. The moon was just right that night.

[T]he love-to-win mindset spread like a virus. With all that pixie dust—or was it filthy lucre?—these bankers sprinkled across London and New York, who could be surprised that their influence spread? First, it infected the traditional bankers (and their hate-to-lose cousins at insurance companies, municipalities, and pension funds). Men and women who had been pillars of the communities from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Seattle shrugged off their time-honored—boring!—roles of prudently taking deposits and offering loans and started wanting to make “real” money. Regional bankers in turn spread it to consumers, who were encouraged to drop their “antiquated,” risk-averse attitudes toward borrowing and home ownership. And thus was born the greatest wealth-generating machine the world had ever seen. It was truly awe inspiring in its raw power and avarice, and truly horrifying when it came crashing down.

Dunbar traces this all to a new emphasis on shareholder value among banks in the late ’80s and the rise of new derivatives that would help banks increase that value, sparking “the innovation race between two ways of transferring credit risk: the old-fashioned ‘letter of credit’ versus a recent invention, the credit default swap.” Perhaps it’s a good idea to briefly define exactly what a derivative is (to the best of my limited knowledge). A derivative is essentially a forward contract on a future transaction that allows each side to reduce uncertainty and “square up logistics.” The largest derivatives market in the world is in interest rates, with the most common being the interest rate swap. The most destructive derivative has been the credit default swap:

Rather than being linked to currency markets, interest rates, stocks, or commodities, these derivatives were linked to unmitigated financial disaster: the default of loans or bonds. I found it hard to imagine who might be interested in buying such a derivative from a bank. The nonfinancial companies whose activities in the globalized economy exposed them to financial uncertainty didn’t seem interested. The derivatives that were useful to them—futures, options, and swaps linked to commodities, currencies, and interest rates—had already been invented. It seemed to me as if the credit default swap as an invention searching for a real purpose. As it happened, the kind of companies that found credit default swaps most relevant were those that had lots of default risk on their books: the banks [themselves].

This allowed money to flow much more freely as institutions could make loans they weren’t responsible for recovering, loans could be bundled into credit default obligations (CDOs), and you could speculate on that bundle of loans with credit default swaps. It was, essentially, creating money out of thin air, loaning it to whoever would take it and then buying insurance on it just to turn a buck. The problem is that there are a finite number of applicants out there qualified to take out loans the banks could bundle, and invented money is infinite. So they started loaning money to folks who they knew wouldn’t be able to pay it back, and this is where the zombies come into the story.

Having flooded the market with seemingly safe investments larded with subprime money, the traders created zombie banks to buy them. Brick-and-mortar banks liked these zombies, because they evaded accounting rules and regulations, and increased profits. Hungry for higher fees, ratings agencies encouraged the growth of this new market and undermined governance. Wall Street saw the zombie structured investment vehicles (SIVs) as ideal “dumb money” customers for buying subprime CDOs and began setting them up specifically for this purpose. But at first whiff of in 2007, investors fled this market, causing the zombies to collapse almost overnight. Banks were forced to bail them out, which increased their subprime problems

And that’s when it all came crashing down, when the banks realized that they didn’t even know how much risk they were carrying, and when the government stepped in to essentially insure an unknown and bail out the banks.

Well, at least the men who love to win “got theirs” for awhile, even if the rest of us largely lost out when it all came crashing down. But here’s my question: Was all that wealth, all those profits they created and moved around during those boom years really, truly growth? Or was it just a ghost?

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September 22, 2011

Joe Nocera Interview

Filed under: Blog,Finance and Economics — Jon @ 9:16 am

The following post and Q&A was written and submitted by Tom Ehrenfeld.

Joe Nocera is one of the best business journalists working today. He combines a deep knowledge of business with a healthy dose of skepticism, not to mention a good journalist’s passion for poking the powerful in the eye when they need it. His latest book, All the Devils Are here, co-authored with Bethany McLean (co-author of the definitive Enron book The Smartest Guys in the Room), provides the most comprehensive, even-handed, and insightful coverage of the financial crisis of 2008. Instead of running on about how good this book is, I’ll just share a few short excerpts that feature the crisp writing and clear analysis that give this book its power.

“Here was the ultimate consequence of the delinking of borrower and lender, which securitization had made possible: no one in the chain, from broker to subprime originator to Wall Street, cared that the loans they were making and selling were likely to go bad. In truth, they were all taking on huge risks in granting these terrible loans. But they were all making too much money to see it. Everyone assumed that someone else would be left holding the bag.” (p. 228)

“All over Wall Street, an immense amount of risk was building up in the system. It wasn’t just that firms were taking on risk when they bought subprime mortgages and bundled them into securities, or when they kept some of the leftover pieces themselves, or when they bought whole subprime mortgage originators. Over the course of a decade, subprime mortgages had managed to seep into Wall Street’s bloodstream, as firms used products created out of them to increase leverage, reduce capital, generate profits, and, more generally, game the risk-based rules that were originally intended to give firms the flexibility to deal with the modern world. All of which also meant that the increasing risk was masked by layer upon layer of complexity, hidden where few on the outside could see it.” (p. 240)

Joe recently took time to answer a few questions:

Other crisis chronicles have gone out of their way to personalize the story—they characterize the events as outcomes of the greed of power brokers like Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, or dramatize the tenacious efforts of a prescient short to get the world to listen to his insights. But your book ratchets down the “you are there” reconstruction of dramatic events, choosing instead to reveal how systematic forces inexorably caused the meltdown. Was this a conscious decision? If so, why?

Joe Nocera: We absolutely made a conscious decision to report and write it this way. We always knew we wanted to write about the underlying causes. We didn’t know where that would take us. Bethany had grounding with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac—she had written about them for Vanity Fair and Fortune. I had grounding in issues surrounding Wall Street. From there we dove in without precisely knowing where we were going. I was thinking about subprime in terms of Wall Street. But Bethany saw very early on that the subprime issues began on Main Street. And so that was where you had to start. You had to start by examining where subprime mortgage lending came from, how it became popular, and how it became predatory. Tracing the rise of subprime lending was critical. Bethany figured that out very quickly and it turned out to be genius. I was tracking Lou Ranieri and the rise of mortgage-backed securities. She was writing about the rise of subprime. She stumbled upon Roland Arnault at Ameriquest and figured out that he was ground zero for shitty subprime mortgages.

And so we basically started to see this as a story that had a chronology that moved back and forth from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington with side trips to the ratings agencies. And at a certain point we realized we were putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and it would be an accomplishment to put the pieces together and not see the individual pieces. That was not what we had at day one but at the end we did so because that was where our strengths lie—in analytical skills and writing ability.

Does your approach shift some of the blame from individual behavior, focusing instead on ways that the system was rigged to fail?

JN: We were living in a bubble mentality and not just the last few years—a bubble mentality that let Washington think deregulation made sense, that let Countryside think it made sense to give out subprime, that let rating agencies bundle subprime into tranches and have seventy percent be triple A. These were mass delusions. Like tulips. But within that mass delusion people did things they knew they shouldn’t have been doing. Credit agencies knew they were selling their soul to the devil by rating these tranches as AAA. And you can go down the line with this: the guy at Merrill Lynch who took a $5 billion exposure and turned it into a $55 billion at the end of the year. Lots of people at Merrill Lynch knew this was not going to end well and they did not care.

There seems to be a striking contrast in the tone of your first book, A Piece of the Action, which you have said is about “the democratization of money” through the growth in individuals investing in stocks more than 25 years ago. It seems quaint today to think about, say, Peter Lynch advising individuals to buy stock in companies whose products they like. That represents a far simpler, and more old-fashioned approach than the way Wall Street operates today.

JN: A Piece of the Action came out in early 1994. Nine months later Netscape had its IPO. I remember that stretch of time between the publication of the book and that particular IPO. And the truth is that my book became quaint on that very day. Netscape’s IPO was the day that everything changed: everybody wanted to get rich quick, individual investors got hooked on the market in a fundamentally new way. That was the day that the modern Wall Street, for better or worse, was created.

One of the most discouraging threads in this book has to do with the failure of any regulatory agency to identify common industry practices as predatory, unsustainable, and potentially catastrophic to the economy. In a new afterword, for the paperback edition, you are unconvinced that the new regulations have sufficient power to correct the underlying causes of the crisis. Are you any more sanguine about the ability of Washington to prevent the recent crisis from recurring?

JN: I don’t know if the new regulations are sufficient or not. It seems to me that Dodd- Frank fiddled with the world as it existed in 2008 rather than trying to radically change that world in ways that would make us feel safe. And since the House Republicans have taken over, the pushback has been incredible. It’s been like the eighth season of Dallas where what happened was like a dream. It’s like the crisis never happened, and it’s absurd. They’re fighting capital requirements, fighting everything. And it’s infuriating to watch this.

I think you have to go back to the response in the 1930s. Its incredible that at the time Congress went to Morgan Bank and said, we are splitting you in two. It’s incredible that that the country had the wherewithal to do that, and that they went ahead and did do it. We did not have another major financial crisis for 80 years. And that is the best you can hope for with financial regulation.

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August 10, 2010

High Financier

Filed under: Book Reviews,Finance and Economics — dylan @ 4:04 pm

Niall Ferguson writes big books about really big topics—The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and The Cash Nexus: Economics and Politics from the Age of Warfare Through the Age of Welfare, 1700-2000, just to name a few.

At first blush, his latest book, High Financier, seems different. It focuses on “The Lives and Time” of just one man, Siegmund Warburg. But, what you may not know (what I certainly didn’t) when picking up the book is just how big a life Siegmung Warburg lived, how close he was to so many events that shaped the world of the 20th Century, and how much he himself would come to shape the 21st. He came up in the South German countryside during World War I on the fringes of one of the most prominent banking families in Germany. He joined the family firm in Hamburg after The Great War, while the Weimar Republic was still in full bloom (which his uncle had a prominent position in), and spent time apprenticing with firms in New York in London during those days.

Ferguson writes of those years with the desire and idealism of youth. It is in this section of the book that he speaks more of Seigmund Warburg’s inner life. He begins the book speaking of Warburg’s lifelong love of German literature, particularly Thomas Mann and the Warburg family’s close resemblance to the family in Mann’s Buddenbrooks—a clever and literary way to pull you into the world Siegmund Warburg grew up in. The example of Buddenbrooks also foreshadows what happens next, as Weimar Germany collapses into Depression and, eventually, Nazi Germany. The former nearly collapsed the family business, which became almost a moot point when the Nazis moved in and Aryanized the bank, removing his uncle from leadership and the family name (M.M. Warburg & Co.) from the business.

Seigmund himself had already fled the antisemitism of Hitler’s regime, taking his family to England to build his own firm, S.G. Warburg, which would eventually become a force that would, in it’s own small way (through investment and intelligence), helped win the war effort and, in a very large way, shape post-war TransAtlantic and European finance.

Ferguson had access to over ten thousand letters and diarie entries that have been unavailable to others before him, and he uses these often to show Seigmund Warburg’s clarity of thought and unusually prescient reading of the political and financial winds of the time. And Ferguson simply knows how to write history, adding his own acute observations alongside those of Warburg. Consider the section on the similarity of the U.S. and German Depressions, and the huge disparity in their outcomes:

On the same day that Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address … another newly elected political leader gave a speech to another nation mired in the depths of the Depression. The second leader was Adolf Hitler and his speech … though in some respects surprisingly similar to Roosevelt’s in content, differed profoundly in its tone. [...] With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Hitler’s appointment was an event pregnant with future calamity not just for Germany but for the world—and particularly for the Jews of Europe. And we see that, for all the radicalism of Roosevelt’s rhetoric (which explicitly blamed the Depression on unscrupulous financiers and threatened to override the power of Congress to combat an economic emergency), his New Deal posed no meaningful threat to individual liberties in the United States. [...]

On 30 January 1933, Hitler was finally sworn in as chancellor at the head of a coalition government of Nazis and German Nationalists.

Historians generally see the Depression as the principal cause of this political earthquake. … Yet the historical puzzle remains: why did the Depression in Germany produce the Third Reich, while the other countries which were hit just as hard hit managed to retain democratic government and the rule of law? The rate of unemployment was nearly as high in the United States as in Germany in 1932; yet America voted for Roosevelt, who passed only two minor constitutional amendments in his twelve years as president, while Germans voted for Hitler, who overthrew not only the Weimer constitution but also the longer-established rule of law, deprived Germans of their political and civil rights, persecuted the Jews and other minority groups to the point of exterminating them and unleashed the most destructive war of modern times.

It is the ability to frame such questions that makes Niall Ferguson such an important author of financial history. He makes us aware of just how closely intertwined the history of economics and politics are, and what politics of hate and fear can do to a country (indeed, the world). And he does it all in an entertaining biography of what sounds to many like the most boring of topics—the life of a banker.

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January 21, 2010

Roger Lowenstein’s take on the current financial crisis

Filed under: Current Events,Finance and Economics — Jack @ 8:45 am

From the introduction of his April 06, 2010 book called The End of Wall Street, Roger Lowenstein states:

“On the evidence, Lehman was more nearly the climax, or one of a series of climaxes, in a long and painful cataclysm. By the time it failed, the critical moment was long past. Banks had suffered horrendous losses that drained their capital, and as the country was to discover, capitalism without capital is like a furnace without fuel. Promptly, the economy went cold. The recession mushroomed into the most devastating in postwar times. The modern financial system, in which markets rather than political authorities self-regulated risk-taking, for the first time truly failed. This was the result of a dark and powerful storm front that had been long gathering at Wall Street’s shore. By the end of summer 2008, neither Wall Street nor the wider world could escape the imminent blow. To seek the sources of the crash, and even the causes, we must go back much further.”

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August 25, 2009

Retiring Wisely

Filed under: Blog,Finance and Economics — Jon @ 2:16 pm

For the working world, investing might be a scary venture these days, as the predictability of stocks might be mostly negative. Though that’s changing, soon-to-be or recent retirees are facing even more critical decisions about what to do with their money that will ensure them comfortable living for as long as possible.

Enter financial expert Daniel R. Solin’s book The Smartest Retirement Book You’ll Ever Need. For the above mentioned audience, this book couldn’t have come at a better time, as Solin provides clear, straight-to-the-point insight into account strategy, low cost insurance, investing, reverse mortgages, and more. And he does it step-by-step, walking you through every area that you can invest and save in. He begins by asking readers to rethink retirement investing:

“How you invest during retirement is as critical as how you invest in preparing for retirement. Things are never as simple and automatic as they once may have been – you worked hard, saved, and then sat back and collected your benefits. You can’t rely on someone else coming up with the cash you’ll need once you stop working.”

If you’re in the market for this kind of advice, look no further, except maybe at this great video Solin put together to make his point:

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June 17, 2009

Life Inc.

Filed under: Blog,ChangeThis,Current Events,Finance and Economics — Jon @ 3:15 pm

Life Inc., the recent book by writer, filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff, examines how corporations took over America and how we can now, in a struggling economy, use that situation to revive natural growth, and take back control from the grip of corporations that contributed to creating the situation we’re in. Overall, the book is an inspiring proposal to look at the downside of the current economy with optimism and enthusiasm to make positive change.

Rushkoff also recently contributed a manifesto to our site ChangeThis. The manifesto offers a brief overview to the central argument of his book.

And for an even more immediate snapshot, Life Inc.: The Movie can be viewed below:

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

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March 24, 2009

Why You Should Read Michael Lewis

Filed under: 100 Best,Big Ideas,Finance and Economics — Todd Sattersten @ 9:30 am

There are a set of writers who we assign superpowers to in The 100 Best. To the Wall Street trader turned juggernaut writer Michael Lewis, we assigned interpretation. And that may not seem like much of a gift, but it is his ability to make apparent, to bring meaning and understanding to those hidden forces. Take his answer to the question asked by Fortune Magazine, “The stars of your books typically find ways to capitalize on market inefficiencies. Is contrariness necessary for greatness?” for example.

We chose Lewis’ book Moneyball for The 100 Best because the story of Billy Beane and his management of the Oakland Athletics transcends baseball. It is the story of a man disrupting an institution. These are lessons for design engineers, HR managers, and corporate strategists.

There are two other sports stories that Lewis has written that capture the same disruptive effect. The first was his 8,787 word story that appeared in Play, the now-defunct sport magazine of The New York Times, about Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach and his game-changing view for how college football should be played (consider the effect in their run at the national championship this year). The second appeared just a few weeks ago in The New York Times Magazine. The 9,004 word story centered on Houston Rockets Shane Battier and his almost unmatched ability to make his team better when he is on the court (and not through offense). Both are brilliant and should be read.

I’ll leave you with a few others if you find Lewis to your liking:

Commie Ball: A Journey to the End of a Revolution – How sports agent Gus Dominguez, who has been convicted (wrongly, Lewis believes) of smuggling Cuban baseball players to the United States.
The End – This is the current day afterword to Liar’s Poker.
An Interview with Michael Lewis – The Atlantic Monthly’s Business Channel interviewed the writer in January 2009 on the anthology he edited Panic, his crazy long, two-part New York Times op-ed he wrote with David Einhorn from the beginning of that month and the future of journalism (of which Lewis has little to worry about).
Wall Street on the Tundra – His latest from the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair about the fall of Iceland’s economy.

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February 18, 2009

Article from Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration

Filed under: Finance and Economics,Strategy — Tom Ehrenfeld @ 9:18 am

Thanks to Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life, for the following article.
Exceeding Expectations: The Key to Value
By Tony Jeary
OK, the economy is ‘bad‘. In spite of that, most of us still have to put food on the table, manage our business and produce a profit! One thing I’ve learned during my life is that even though the economy may go up and down, some things never change. One of the things that never changes is that even in tough times when most of us cut back on spending, nobody can completely stop spending. That means somebody is always buying and somebody is always selling. In tough economic times, you just need to make sure you are one of those doing some selling! My father taught me a great truth when I was growing up: “Give value, do more than expected”. I have lived by that principle and it has been the key to my own success — in good times and bad. Exceeding expectations is the means by which value is created and things get sold! You can exceed expectations in price, quality or service and possibly all three — but you must understand what it really means to exceed expectations before you can actually do it.
The first thing to understand about exceeding expectations is this: The expectations you exceed today become the seed for new opportunities in the future. This may seem to be an obvious fact, but many people fail to connect today’s actions with future opportunities. By that I mean they approach exceeding expectations as a one-off special event rather than a way of life. Exceeding expectations is a foundational attitude and something that you have to pursue daily. Exceeding expectations is a proactive effort that is always looking for a way to express itself. Exceeding expectations is a completely voluntary activity and when it becomes foundational to the way you think it has the power to elevate value and become the seed for new opportunity.
It is rare for anyone to exceed expectations unless they do it on purpose. To exceed expectations on purpose means that you have an understanding of expected performance, and you realize that expected performance is in no way extraordinary. It becomes tougher when you realize that exceeding expectations requires more effort to surpass what might be described as “acceptable performance.” Acceptable performance is in fact mediocrity and mediocrity is usually the norm. The problem is that it’s hard to sell mediocrity!
Understanding how expectations are created is the first step in being able to exceed them in a positive way. Expectations come from our experience. As our experience changes, our expectations change, too. To illustrate how this happens, let me share an example. It involves a tool that has changed the way we all work and communicate: voice mail. Prior to voice mail, when you dialed a phone number, your expectation was to hear a live person answer the phone. When voice mail first appeared, however, that expectation was suddenly shaken by an invitation to leave a personal recorded message. The first time I encountered voice mail, I hung up! It was such a departure from my expectations, I didn’t know how to respond to it.
The original intent and strategy of voice mail was to create a positive tool that would exceed expectations by significantly improving the speed and results of telephone communication. Prior to voice mail’s the expectation of callers was to get caught up in a process that can best be described as message-slip phone tag. The message slips were created by switchboard operators and receptionists who handed the message slips off to the people being called. Typically, the message slips merely reflected the name and number of the caller and the reason for their call was fairly short and cryptic. Message-slip phone tag was the standard of telephone use until the advent of voice mail.
As with most good ideas, voice mail as it was originally intended accomplished a great positive result. It enabled people to leave personal recorded messages for specific people, who could return their calls more efficiently. Voice mail helped synchronize telephone communication to the real-world work environment. The ability to leave content-rich messages allowed people to engage the purpose of their call much faster and reduce the time it took to resolve problems. Prior to voice mail, only one in four calls made through a switchboard connected in real time to the person being called. Getting a message of content through via message slips was a hit-or-miss possibility. Voice mail allowed callers to leave a message directly with the person they needed 100% of the time. Clearly, voice mail exceeded expectations of business callers in a positive way and led the way to superior results, faster.
The voice mail story reveals two things about exceeding expectations. First, voice mail in its real-time use exceeded the expectations of the businesses that purchased voice mail and the customers of those businesses who were able to use voice mail to communicate with the business. The fact that voice mail exceeded expectations of the business and the callers to those businesses created enhanced value for both parties. It was the enhanced value that changed the status quo of using the telephone. Those facts give us a formula for exceeding expectations. If you can do something for your customer that not only exceeds their expectations, but also empowers them to exceed the expectations of their customers you have enhanced your value tremendously.
So, if you are concerned about the economy take heart! There are still plenty of prospects out there who will buy your product or service if you deliver enhanced value. The way to do that is to exceed their expectations! Do something positive in their behalf they do not expect.
(c) 2008 Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life
Author
Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life, has been and continues to be the coach to the world’s top CEOs and high achievers for more than 20 years. His clients include the Presidents of Wal-Mart, Firestone, Shell, Samsung, New York Life, and the United States Senate, to name only a few.
Learn more about Strategic Acceleration at www.strategicacceleration.com
Visit Tony Jeary at www.tonyjeary.com

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December 30, 2008

Marshawn Evans offers advice for surviving tough economic times

Filed under: Finance and Economics,General Business,Personal Development,Small Business — 800-CEO-READ @ 9:33 am

During these tough economic times, Marshawn Evans, author of S.K.I.R.T.S. in the Boardroom: A Woman’s Survival Guide to Success in Business & Life, offers these words of advice for making it through the uncertainty.

Making Certain Moves in An Uncertain Marketplace
By Marshawn Evans,

With the state of the economy and the bailout plan, everyone is concerned about the stability of jobs and 401Ks. As an entrepreneur, I understand and appreciate the concern over being able to maintain revenue. Regardless of whether you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, or recent grad, the marketplace has everyone uncertain about what tomorrow will hold, but there are a few things that we as women (this applies for guys as well!) can keep in mind to be sure that we are equipped and protected in spite of these uncertain times:

Do Not Panic. A lot of times when we panic we make bad choices. One of the things that I talk about in SKIRTS in the Boardroom is the importance of emotional intelligence, which is separating emotion from your decision making process. The first thing that is very important is not to panic and to think through decisions and plan. There are many advantages right now — it’s a buyer’s market. Real estate and stocks are cheap, plus you can negotiate deals of a lifetime. You need to make wise financial decisions and wise decisions about your career.

Keep Your Resume Up To Date. You never know who you may meet or who may have an opportunity for you, so having your resume up to date is a good way to be prepared for new opportunities that may come your way.

Research Opportunities. Continue to research other potential opportunities that may be out there. That might include other job opportunities. For entrepreneurs, that might mean seeking new client contacts to develop business. Don’t be content where you are. Continue to expand your base, expand your network and keep your options open. Nothing is guaranteed, so you need options. Plus, it is taking 6 to 9 months right now to find a new job. It’s important to constantly look and understand what other opportunities are available to you.

The misconception is because the economy is bad that there aren’t jobs out there, that there aren’t new business prospects, and that growth is not happening in other areas. However, that is not the case. There are a lot of companies that are very stable that are still showing record profits. It’s important to invest in your career by having your net cast in multiple areas.

Network. Go to networking events, but don’t be pushy. The worst thing that people can do at networking events is to immediately come out and say, “I am looking for a job doing x, y, and z,” or to be really forceful. As discussed in SKIRTS, when you go to a networking event your goal should be to meet the right people, to make sure that people remember you, and that they want to talk to you more, not to ask anyone for anything.

On the contrary, you should be asking them how you can be of assistance to them. The more you take time to learn about other people and their businesses and what they have going on in their world, the more you can be focused on trying to develop synergy in what they have available and what you might be qualified for.

Believe in Yourself. You have unique talents, abilities, gifts, and skills (T.A.G.S.). Don’t forget those things and that your strongest value asset is still in place …YOU. Push through frustration. Attitude can make or break you!

(c)2008 Marshawn Evans
Author Bio
Marshawn Evans is one of the nation’s leading experts on the art of maximizing human potential. She is the founder of Marshawn Evans Unlimited, a corporate life-enrichment consulting firm, and President of EDGE 3M Sports & Entertainment, a full service brand management agency.
S.K.I.R.T.S. in the Boardroom: A Woman’s Survival Guide to Success in Business & Life
For more information please visit http://www.skirtsintheboardroom.com.

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