CEO to Self: "What Do I Do at Work Today? I Dunno."
We do! Imagine!
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Charles Dickens
The rules of the game have changed so dramatically in the last few months that many if not most CEOs and heads of financial institutions and beleaguered out-dated manufacturing companies like The Big Three auto manufacturers don't have a clue what to do when they report to work each day. Their paradigm is obsolete.
The fiasco at the Congressional Big Three bailout hearings last week wasn't just that the CEOs couldn't figure out a way to jet pool there or horror of horrors drive one of their cars. They didn't even know how much to ask for or how it would be spent. Even my teenage daughters know how to put a number to a financial request and say what it's for.
CEOs are trained to know about financial matters, but the training they have has little to do with how to grow a company productively in today's competitive, fuel and environmentally conscious world especially with the world wide financial crisis.
Sure Michael Jordon was a great basketball player, but he wasn't much of a baseball player and his golf game gambling cost him a lot of money. Michael Jordon can afford his sports dalliances and they are victimless endeavors. But we can't afford CEOs, who may be stars in the Casino Economy, to be failures in our economy. We are the victims of their greedy crimes against humanity. And ironically so are they as long as they cling to the past.
Thanks to deregulation, our economy and the world economy has been dominated by a Casino Economy for several decades. See my economic historian father Doug Dowd's website at www.dougdowd.org.
Some of the most successful hedge funds and short traders have made a killing by betting on the downturn or even demise of companies that must be productive for a healthy economy. We live in a destructive, opportunistic Casino Economy totally dominated by "new instruments" like derivatives.
Many of the CEOs and top management came into power because of leveraged buyouts or saw their power rise due to leveraged expansion. Corporate debt is staggering and it is all based on the rosiest of predictions, which is often not even their primary concern. That's the next management team's problem -- they'll be long gone before the shit hits the fan. Until now.
For them, business as usual is the same as in Vegas. "Can I have another marker?" More debt. Although attention is often focused on personal and government debt, personal debt and government debt historically follow corporate debt, not the other way around. In a healthy productive economy, government and personal debt diminish dramatically. Many if not most our financial bean counters truly don't understand the long term potential of their own companies. The film "Who Killed the Electric Car" is a dramatic example of GM's short-think, and in turn, self-destructive mentality. IBM missed out on being at the front of the PC revolution even though the best and the brightest of their own employees urged them to get into it. It took guys in garages like Jobs and Woz, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen to launch it. Some of this can be attributed to large companies not being nimble, but it's also about an atmosphere that rarely rewards innovation that may take a few years to show on the books. R&D is kept in a business as usual bubble.
That might be fine if there were no competition, but consumers will find what suits them best not what they are told to buy, especially the most sought after consumers -- the younger generation. Toyota is beating the pants off of Detroit because they have used a strategy they call "look see" when they go out and meet the people and then produce a product the people actually want. The latest Republican myth they are pushing is that lower pay to workers in right to work states allows Toyota to be profitable. In truth Toyota was doing just fine before they ever opened a plant in America. And auto workers in Detroit don't make too much or have unreasonable benefits -- they just make enough to get by with their families and have their health care and retirement covered. If health care was covered the way it is by all other industrial countries (without profiteering) then that would allow companies, big and small, to be relieved of that burden and be more competitive and make better products.
Like sports coaches and managers, corporate execs are all about the short term. For a coach it is about making the playoffs and hopefully winning the Super Bowl or you are out of there. For a CEO it is about quarterly profits and at best yearly profits. They are more like managers than entrepreneurs. Building a competitive company for the Twenty First Century would mean a revolutionary re-think and training as when basketball introduced the jump shot or a football team started to pass the ball instead of just sticking with the running game.
Since we are all reflecting on the Great Depression, Stanford's Hank Luisetti became the first basketball player to score 50 points on January 1, 1938 against Duquesne when he surprised them with his revolutionary new jump shot. The rest is history as the teams (read companies) and the thrilled fans (read consumers) all followed suit.
Right down the road from Stanford at Google they have a new paradigm and workplace atmosphere that encourages innovation. Their product and the company seem to be doing quite well. I'd sooner let the folks from Google take over one of the Big Three then let present the management team stay on. Those frauds can learn a new skill on Google. Indeed, the Google team has been helping my friend Neil Young with his 1959 Lincoln Continental (a veritable steamship and the heaviest car in the world that year) which thanks to Wichita gear-head Jonathan Goodwin and his team now gets sensational mileage. Take a lesson Detroit. We can convert most existing cars with kits. See neilyoung.com then clickLincvolt. Neil is 63 and still rocking the free world.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman, de-regulation guru and uber promoter Alan Greenspan told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief."
No shit Sherlock! That's the point. Too many people in the financial and corporate world have little if any loyalty to their own companies, let alone their country or the planet.
So much money has been made by the packagers (investment bankers, bond sellers, attorneys, wheeler dealers and corporate execs) on IPO's, leveraged buyouts, mergers and acquisitions that it is an afterthought to look out for the company's future. It's naive to believe that most people making a killing in the Casino Economy will be overly concerned with a company's long term viability or collateral damage they inflicted any more than an unemployed ghetto kid, who makes a money dealing drugs, thinks about the long term consequences.
As my dear friend Waldo Salt, the Academy Award winning screenwriter, used to say: "It's the chair not the man." Change the societal goals and people will do the right thing.
So it's time to change the chair and the game plan. It's time for a dramatic game-changer -- a new game. I would call that revolutionary change. Just like when you change your diet in a revolutionary way after a heart attack that sends you to the ER. In England doctors get paid more for using preventative medicine. In America businessmen should get bonuses for innovation not financial manipulation (which we pay for now more than ever). The bailouts are even being put on our yet to be conceived children's credit cards as well as our children's. I think we can do better.
We have the opportunity to have a productive economy with a new generation of exciting new products like iPods and electric trains and even mass transit that is actually relaxing, productive while traveling and even fun -- with the added attraction of our planet being a more desirable place to live in the near future as well as for future generations.
This is real security. The false security of massive amounts of accumulated wealth is an illusion. Even the absurdly rich CEOs, who drank the Casino Kool-Aide, have most likely had their life expectancy diminish recently and many of their kids think of them as arrogant fools. Some security!
What about security for the rest of us -- the middle class and the under class? For those who were brilliantly manipulated (by financial Karl Rove-like wheeler dealers and all their advertising) into corporate pension plans, 401k's, money markets, hedge funds and certain stocks that are evaporating into the Casino smokestack, it is an urgent problem. As it is for those who bought homes with loans that the banks assured them were okay and often coerced them into. Then the banks shamefully didn't attempt to re-negotiate the loan terms which would and still could be in the banks, homeowners, taxpayers and our country's own self-interest. Placing so much blame on home buyers for the financial collapse is myopic. That's like blaming a crack habit solely on the user. It is the new financial instruments like derivatives and credit swaps, which have an uncanny resemblance to the multiple bets at a Vegas craps table on acid that accelerated the debt crisis thanks to the Wall Street wheeler dealers fanatically pushing them. Ironically many of them have a big cocaine habit as anyone who knows Wall Street can testify.
For the rising unemployed--the problem is urgent. For those caught in our so-called heath care system (as I was last year) the problem is urgent. On and on it goes--education, transportation -- you name it.
I believe Obama and his administration and the "Yes We can" mandate will allow us to have the opportunity to free ourselves from the Casino Economy's web of self-destruction. But for that to happen, democracy means involvement from us all as both Michelle and Barack Obama so eloquently remind us. It means more than occasionally voting. It means getting involved at work and in our communities.
As Robert Mauer writes in his book One Small Step Can Change Your Life The Kaizen Way: "Japanese corporations have long used the gentle technique of kaizen to achieve their business goals and maintain excellence. Now this elegant strategy can help you realize your personal dreams."
"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with the first step." --Lao Tzu
Right now we are in the financial ER with a bailout of the week to keep the financial giants like AIG and CitiGroup afloat because they are supposedly too big to topple. The Big Three are on deck. The big question is "Who's next and at what cost?" And "Will this bring change or more of the same?" So far there have been few strings attached to the billions of dollars of bailouts and the ones that are seem to be made of silly putty. We are enabling CEO Casino addicts with more Casino crack. Bloomberg News and NBC Evening News just reported that it looks like so far the US taxpayers are on the hook for about 7 trillion dollars of financial bailouts and backstops. And we've only just begun. While the rest of us are on the verge of singing that old Depression era refrain: "Brother can you spare a dime."
Even if the contagious, lumbering behemoths who brought us the Casino Economy survive temporarily thanks to the financial bailout ER, what will it take for them not to be toxically and contagiously unhealthy in the future? It's our future...Our children's future...America's future...and the planet's future.
Boeing used to be called the Boeing Transportation Company and even dabbled in mass transit for awhile. The Big Three were all able to quickly convert to making tanks and military vehicles in World War II. Shipyards re-tooled to turn out three Liberty ships a day. This kind of conversion was possible then and still is today with leadership, vision and true economic patriotism which goes well beyond symbolically wearing a flag pin while economically raping your fellow Americans.
Like many of you, I have traveled 200 mph on the hi-speed French TGV (train à grande vitesse) and the new version can go up to 350 mph and it will be on line in the near future. It is safer, more comfortable, much less polluting, much more energy efficient and much quicker than air and car travel. Imagine going from Chicago to Cincinnati, New York to Washington or Los Angeles to San Diego in an hour with even a quick suburban stop. Or do you prefer driving through traffic jams to an airport, security checks, delays and American air roulette with the under-staffed, over-worked, technologically handicapped air-traffic control system we now have? Or maybe you prefer sitting in the San Diego Freeway/ slow moving parking lot for several hours between LA and San Diego. FYI, the MAGLEV, or magnetic levitation Japanese train has been clocked up to 361 mph. It relies on magnetic suspension rather than wheels--yet another exciting possibility to explore. The Jetsons laid it out in a cartoon decades ago.
I speak on a lot of American campuses. Believe me when I say that up until the Obama campaign, they were very concerned about their future. Not only their economic survival but their mental future -- they were concerned about "dying of terminal boredom" at work.
Now a whole new generation is ready, willing and able to get on board re-building the world. They aren't cynical. They believe: "Yes We Can!" There are so many older people, who are well-educated and skilled, but doing the wrong jobs making the wrong products or often shuffling bureaucratic paper that is nonessential and produces nothing. That's if they still have a job. They want change and they want it now. What about all the knowledgeable and often bored retirees? Imagine how they could pitch in some of the time.
Every problem is indeed a great opportunity. We need a very specific five year plan and a ten year plan. Not the kind V.I. Lenin talked about. We need one that is in the Spirit of America while recognizing that we are in a global economy. We need a long term, always flexible strategy, not a knee jerk tactic of the day, week or quarter that Wall Street, big conglomerates, and Washington, D.C. dump on us when they are not constipated. What team doesn't have a game plan for the next game and for the season?
The good news is that hundreds of millions of Americans are ready to contribute. The solutions already exist to solve most of our problems somewhere at home or on our planet. But it will take a new "revolutionary" approach to allow America to be what it can be and what we want it to be. Like the Velvet Revolution it can be bloodless and invigorating. Just imagine looking forward to going to work or a community meeting.
For the record -- we are talking about more freedom not less. We now have an opportunity to have more freedom at the work place to be innovative and more freedom from our government that now enables the Casino Economy and even goes to war in the name of freedom and security to preserve an out-dated ideology and fear based mentality. We need a new kind of freedom that brings with it real security. That's life as it should and can be.
I prefer the other Lenin -- John Lennon's approach in "Imagine."
"You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one"
"Yes We Can!"
"If we build it they will come!"
Let's make it the best of times!
Jeff Dowd
The Dude Abides!
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While Some of Us Are Hoping for Change, Others Are Literally Starving for It
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted November 27, 2008.
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/108622/while_some_of_us_are_hoping_for_change%2C_others_are_literally_starving_for_it/
Thats the problem with today's MBA types. T
here are soprecious few who understand how to build, create and innovate, and make things.
Today's business "leaders" only know how to slash, chop, downsize and outsource
Short term thinking vs long term thinking.
The main difference between today's robbor barons and yesteryear's, is that the old timers in their quest for money and power, they actually built things, like railroads, factories, buildings, todays barons only know how to tear these things down in the name of the bogus supplly sider free market theory of "creative destruction"
Creative destruction has nothing to do with supply side economics. Creative destruction is what has brought our country from an agrarian society to its current shape. It's how productivity and thus wealth is increased.
Absolutely, and almost all of these comments on The Dude's rant reflect a lack of understanding of what really powers our economy and what really happens with CEOs and their teams. Shareholders, including a majority of Americans these days, invest to see their investments grow. (They don't invest in risky "innovative" start-ups, because such companies have not yet gone public AND because individual [read "middle class"] investors don't want to take big risks with their hard-earned money.) CEOs must balance investors' expectations of continuous profit growth (increasing share price) with the need to innovate in order to win the competitive battle. In business you are never standing still. You are either moving ahead or falling backward. In this the consumer wins, always voting with his dollar. It's so much harder to run a business than our contributors here understand. Yes, some CEOs and their Boards of Directors make bad choices for bad reasons. Sometimes it's greed. That's human nature, which even St. Obama will not change, nor will the Dude with his community meetings. But most make the best choices they can, caring about their employees and fanatical about their customers. That's what the MBAs learn at Harvard and Tuck and Stanford, etc.. Companies whose leadership teams fail to embrace these enlightened methods eventually begin to fall back. It's convenient to blame "conglomerates," as universally corrupt and corrupting, but it's a viewpoint rooted in ignorance, often deliberate ignorance.
Well thats the point isn't it these business leaders have the destruction part down pretty good.
The "creation" part - not so much
But what is the underlying reason that these business "leaders" slash, chop, downsize and outsource? Company shareholders but a tremendous amount of pressure on company management to produce monetary results. CEOs tend to have short term, greedy little one-track minds, but many are also worried about loosing their jobs.
We need responsible investing. People willing to take real risks and invest in the companies that are pushing innovative ideas and solutions. This is what creative destruction is. The out of touch companies pushing obsolete products fail and the pioneering prevail.
Across the board we have experts warning us of impending water and food shortages. We've already felt the bludgeoning of an energy crisis - but it's only the tip of the iceberg. The United States is going to need real solutions - fast - for these problems, and the people that are working on them are going to be the nouveau riche.
How many CEOs do you know personally? How many corporate planning meetings have you participated in? What do you actually know, vs. simply feel? Experts, by the way, come in all shapes and sizes. One definition: an expert is a guy from out of town, wearing a suit and tie. If you have time, read Michael Crichton's speech, Aliens Cause Global Warming about the concept of consensus science. Just because most of the experts say it's so, doesn't make it so. The consensus among experts at one point in time was that the world was flat. Now the consensus is that humans are destroying the planet. Be careful about adopting the "dogma of the day." It's almost always proved wrong eventually. Real problems will find real solutions when smart, ambitious, self-involved as well as selfless people can profit from creating those solutions -- because problems in our society are always opportunities. Solutions have value -- monetary value. Our society is programmed to pursue that kind of value creation better than any society in history. Don't obstruct it through government efforts to micromanage it or force it. And since when has government proved to be either innovative or efficient? The solutions will come from businesses large and small, if we don't stifle them with our politics.
We often hear about Keynesian Economics which FDR started to partially turn to in 1937 as the Great Depression became worse-- it is worth quoting John Maynard Keynes himself as my economic historian father Doug Dowd www.dougdowd.orgg) does in his upcoming book:
"Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success of Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of he outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism -- which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.
J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment,
Interest, and Money (1936)
This leaves a guy a little speechless. So much emotion, so little information. Catchwords and slogans in place of genuine experience. Feels like the '60s all over again. Just a good-natured rant, I guess. The comments follow the same pattern. I'm pretty sure none of the contributors has ever run a company of any size, much less one of those awful "conglomerates" that seem to be doing so much harm everywhere in the world. One guy even implied "corporate executives" weren't needed to run a company. He must be thinking about that time in the future after everyone finally "gets it." That's when we won't need any government, either. Everyone will just know what to do. Community meetings will handle most things. We might just teach those guys at Toyota a thing or two. Even they could get rid of their executives if they played their cards right. Down with the outmoded old and up with the endlessly exciting new. Banish boredom from the workplace forever. This is change we can believe in. Yes we can.
I think I'm late to my community meeting...
Actual
No, you're right. Clearly, those executives were qualified and knew what they were doing.
Clearly, they had their own long term interests at heart.
Clearly, "voluntary regulation" is in no way an oxymoron.
Clearly, "trickle down" economics has been born out, and has actually increased wages and buying power for the average worker over the last thirty years.
Clearly, speculation in any and every segment of the economy has been just another way to create wealth, including speculation in energy markets.
Clearly.
And clearly, the people who forwarded and lobbied for those notions weren't guilty of any kind of "wishful thinking", "naivete", or trying to blow sunshine up anyone's a**.
Clearly...
Which executives? Who have you lumped into this category? Do you have some actual evidence to demonstrate that the average employee hasn't increased both wages and buying power in this country (and most other developed and developing countries) over the past 30 years? I would like to see it. What else does speculation seek to do other than increase wealth for the speculators? Seriously, I'd like to understand that. I agree that voluntary regulation is suspect, but I don't agree it's impossible.
Are you indicting the entire notion of free market capitalism, or are you just unhappy with the current state of things. It's not really clear.
I like the defense of conservatism over liberalism that implies a conservative's belonging to some imaginary band of realists forging a future free of dreamers, hippies, community organizers, and promoters of civil rights. The premium placed on realism is clear, but try & argue with someone who has nightly tet-a-tets with the Madonna. Dowd draws different conclusions from corporatist bottom-feeders, getting wealthy on mergers in a deregulated market, gigantic companies with ballooning administrative costs cutting down the low-ranking employees who are the actual producers of actual services and actual goods. The health insurance industry is a case in point. And what information would suffice to one such as Floorsander? See the other post==>
You walk into WalMart and buy just about anything you need and want for your daily life at prices that are unbelievably cheap compared to comparable prices 50 years ago. Much if not most of what you buy there wasn't even available 50 years ago. This, in your estimation, would seem to be the work of "corporatist bottom-feeders." You can get a couple of cheeseburgers, a coke and fries at McDonald's for less in inflation adjusted dollars or as a percentage of daily wages than you could 50 years ago (I know, McDonald's was barely visible 50 years ago). Corporatist bottom-feeders? These companies merge and acquire and reduce costs through outsourcing, job reductions and any way they can. We get more goods and services for less. The "low paid" workers deliver nothing until they are hired and trained and properly supervised in an environment designed to support their assigned tasks. The training is done by former low paid workers who have earned more responsibility. They are supervised by former trainers who have demonstrated the ability to supervise even larger groups. And so on. Almost every CEO started somewhere as a low paid employee. Dowd is obviously an idealist without corporate experience. Had life put him on a different path he might have been Bill Gates, whose idealism has gone from innovation to massive job and wealth creation to unequaled philanthropy. Corporatist bottom-feeder?
Perhaps you noticed, maddocbrown, that even though my reply was earlier than either of yours, Floorsander didn't care to take issue with my post.
Hmmm, wonder why that is? I guess if you don't quote some source that Floorsander can yap about having a "liberal bias", then he doesn't have an argument.
These are the data from Time Magazine c04:
"Overall, Washington has structured the game just as any gambling house would, so there are a few winners but a lot more losers.
It's why many of us are falling further behind the harder we work, why our debt dwarfs that of our parents, why some of us receive world-class medical care and others almost none, why some can afford college but for others it has been priced out of reach, and why the wage gap between rich and poor has started growing again. In 1992 the 400 individuals and families with the highest income in the U.S., according to tax returns filed with the IRS, received on average $12.3 million in "salaries and wages."By 2000, the latest year available, that figure had more than doubled, to $29 million.
More significant, in 1992 it took the combined wages of 287,400 retail clerks at, say, Wal-Mart, to equal the pay of the top 400. By 2000 it required the combined pay of 504,600 retail clerks to match the pay of the top 400. "
Time magazine's commentary has almost always been as much opinion as reporting. Certainly your post, to the extent it represents a quote from Time, is obviously that. The numbers cited there are meaningless. It's not a zero sum game. The "rich" (undefined here) can get richer while the "poor" and the middle class also get richer. The gap is irrelevant in itself. Affording and obtaining education and medical care are not automatically connected to the gap. That's not to say a country as rich as ours shouldn't find solutions to educating our citizens and caring for their medical needs. It's unproductive to begin that problem solving with an unfair and inaccurate indictment of personal wealth as an automatic sign of corruption and unworthiness. Most people get rich the hard way -- by earning it. Getting rich or comfortably wealthy is a fundamental part of the American dream and of human nature. Demonizing it will only impede solutions to our country's problems and will ultimately fail.
Great article! I have been talking about the "Casino Economy" for quite some
time. But the problem you are stating goes much deeper than this. You can't heal
the patient until you change the patient's treatment plan. We are stuck in a 19th
century model for the 21st Century. Our educational system is archaic and heading
south compared with the rest of the world. Our whole system of government supplants
any ideas for change by throwing money at it (bailouts)... like money is a magic wand.
Corporations walked around like great behemoths until the environment ( economy)
killed them. People use the word "change" as some type of mantra. Until we invest
intellectual/financial resources ( actions more than words)into the America people,
I'm afraid we will just see the same.
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.
--Woody Guthrie
On the train to work today, I was wondering about the cost to the US taxpayers of the Senate's investigation into the use of steroids by professional baseball players. Many millions, I am sure. So, while they conducted this witchhunt (and nobody minded the store), the underpinnings of our economy were beginning to slip.
I could not agree more about letting the folks down the road @ Google have a go at running the Big 3. Or even the kid who started Facebook, for that matter!
This is one well-reasoned blog; I am going to have to ponder it with the help of an ice-cold Caucasion!
Make a great fireside talk at Esalen!
Fundamentally, business is a game. Mind you, it's a vitally important game. The problem comes when "busy-ness" (with a consequent accumulation of a little wealth, perhaps) turns into real game-playing. Busy-ness is an even-handed kind of activity, wherein individuals play on a reasonably level playing field. One person makes pine furniture; another breeds pigs for meat; a third is an electrician and so on. But when serious game-playing cuts in, the playing field is no longer level.
Being a CEO or any other acronym is part of the game-playing paradigm. It's not nice to think that the workforce on the shop floor could probably produce the goods without the aid of the CEO or any other high-flying game-player. But wait. What about management, strategy and so on - all those things in which CEOs and others take pride? Well, that's a fair point. After all, if a large company was run as a collective, would decisions ever get made?
That's a moot point, but the fact remains that humble ways of making a living sometimes have more validity.
Validity? Humble? What on earth do you mean?
Just wishful thinking. I'd like CEOs and other top execs to be philanthropic. :-) Yes, what on earth do I mean? These things may come to pass ...
Communism fails because not all human beings are equal. Give someone an opportunity to gain, and he or she will go for it. Capitalism suffers from the same problem. We need investors, entrepreneurs, wealhy people to introduce capital and so on, but crucially we need them on "our" side. Or, let's say, as much on our side as they are on their own side.
This article hits the mark. What is wrong with the bailout is that it is little more than an attempt to get the casino up and running again. Without severe re-regulation of the banking and investment industries we are just looking at the same thing happening again and again and again... And the folks who are engineering this years effort are absolutely the wrong people to ask how to fix the real economy. The folks heading up wall street, the banks and the car companies are little more than gamblers running a casino and taking bets on how many suckers they can get in the door. If there is a problem with the college football system or basketball system the schools don't run to Las Vegas to ask the guys running the betting books how to fix the problem. They don't know, and they have their own interests that have nothing to do with running a college. Same is true with American business and wall street. They don't know and their interest is in keeping the betting book going not in salvaging the American economy. Let Citibank fail, it may be painful, but then we can get on with fixing the real economy in this country.
Mr. Dude, pretty much the whole world citizenry and the majority of the U.S. citizens agree with the fact that America's big corporate leaders aren't leaders or patriots anymore. Not when they and their usual minions have flatly stated that watching out for the financial gain of the corporation, and NOT any of the other players like the workers, is what best benefits the U.S. This financial disaster proves them wrong. But does it allow for the new paradigm where a corporation's "personhood" is changed to "artificial person"? Without that change, NOTHING will change. Everything else will fall back to the same system that brought us here, only this time, the Chinese, the Russians, who already are preparing their financial sectors to do without the U.S., will become the superpowers.
Wow. Within a single blog entry you have written a tome on the subject of a newly emerging, bold and hopeful outlook on the future of this nation and world. I just hope the outlook becomes embodied by a movement that can meet it's potential.
Great post. Cant help but think of the problems Hollywood faces with piracy and declining box office sales. Stop complaining and start innovating. I know so many people who want to see movies with great stories but a scared off by the excessive violence. Why not make a PG version of the same film? Ever heard of "the long tail"? Inventory and distribution costs are virtually non existent in the online world and if directors weren't so up themselves they'd be happy signing off on alternate versions of the product. Products that people actually want. Let me spell it to you; I.N.N.O.V.A.T.I.O.N.
This is the BEST POST I have ever read on HuffingtonPost. A very thoughtful Tour de Force!
It's THAN, not THEN ...I'd sooner let the folks from Google take over one of the Big Three then let present the management team stay on.
Nit-picker. Had to show off, didn't you? I'm betting that was a typo. Surely there's more to complain about in this piece than a typo.
When I look at what goes on in Wall Street I am reminded of the Eddie Murphy line in Trading Places after he was told how the commodities exchange operates. "You guys sound like a couple of bookies."
IBM missed out on being at the front of the PC revolution even though the best and the brightest of their own employees urged them to get into it....
Not true. The first IBM PC was a runaway success. What doomed the IBM PC effort was the refusal of IBM's management to bring the operating system in house, until OS/2, and that was targeted at the 286 chip, not the 386.
IBM's "strategic" products would not get out of the way of the new way of PC software (OfficeVision, DisplayWriter, SNA Networking, Storage..). IBM was a victim of its success, and its focus on "Protect the Revenue Stream".
You have a distorted view of history. I was there. IBM management fought tooth and nail against the PC and capitulated by bringing out their own products only after they had no choice. They literally tried to use their business relations with upper management at the large corporations to keep them from allowing any employees from purchasing PCs. IBM thought that the PC would cost them their core businesses at the time: mainframe business; field engineering business; and business consulting. In the end those businesses declined and IBM declined from their dominating position as owner of 90% of the computer market. They only recovered partially when they shifted heavily into the consulting business. The operating system decisions were problematic, but IBM managements fight against the PC labeled them as the out of touch oldies who fought against innovation and resulted in 20 years of stagnation for the company. They have never really recovered from those mistakes.
It looks like I have set off a firestorm about IBM and the PC. I agree that top IBM execs did not seize the time. You PC history folks are educating me on various versions of that history which I greatly appreciate.
The point I was trying to make is that the entrepreneurial spirit and innovation has always been alive in America (often in garages) and bigger companies and conglomerates need to foster it more internally in a competitive world.
thanks for your comments and enlightenment.
Jeff
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