Previously, I identified one threat to private equity firms: Section 404 of SOX, a matter of some concern to my clients. Another threat they are facing is that carried interest could be taxed as income rather than capital gain. How would this potential change affect private equity firms? How should...

In June, 2009, the Obama administration proposed a comprehensive restructuring of the federal government's supervision and regulation of the financial industry. Timothy Geithner announced several proposals that, if adopted, would affect not only public companies but also private equity funds, venture capital funds, and funds of funds.

The proposals are...

Today's entry is an interview with Pamela Mearsheimer. We attempt to outline the issues that are rearing their heads in the healthcare policy debate.

Leslie: Welcome, Pamela! Could we take a few minutes to talk about what is going on with the healthcare debate? I read your synopsis of...

This entry is the third in our series about capitalism, economics, education, the environment, and value creation.

Fair taxation is the only true driver for an equitable and stable society. The U.S. tax code is a cruel joke. Due to excessive corruption within government and lobbying, it is unwieldy...

In our first entry in our series "Back to the Roots" we wrote:

If businesses in the U.S. cut salary and fringe costs by 35-65% (fringe costs consisting mostly of health care and dental, disability, life insurance), we will become a more competitive economy, especially compared to countries with an...

This entry is the second in which Raj and Leslie offer a tangential view, not a consensus view, and not the average view. We seek to synthesize information and ideas from different vectors and extrapolate a resultant vector in an orthogonal dimension. Raj is an entrepreneur/technologist born and raised in...

When Arianna Huffington introduced Marcus Buckingham as a new blogger she wrote that she was particularly interested in how women achieve balance. I am too. Much of the work I do is with men: In fact, 98% of the executives I assess (all executives I assess are for senior management...

For those who want to be as high functioning as possible, let me now share the four categories I use to assess active coping.

The first category is articulating positive goals. Can you define what it is you want to achieve? Understand this can be difficult. Are your goals realistic...

In the coming months, we will come together to offer a tangential view -- not a consensus view, and certainly not the average view. We seek to synthesize information and ideas from different vectors and extrapolate a resultant vector in an orthogonal dimension. Raj is an entrepreneur/technologist born and raised...

My last entry defined the questions we asked regarding the relationships among various measures of motivational orientation (as a proxy for leadership style), intelligence, coping, and the dependent variable, the perception of leadership effectiveness. This entry will report the findings.

Recall the subjects of this study were an already...

In this post I want to describe the hypotheses and measures used to test the hypotheses of the research to which I alluded in my previous post.

Gender differences in motivational orientation are important mediating factors in fashioning an individual's leadership style. Some researchers have examined the relationship between the...

I came to this view my sophomore year in high school when reading The Sun Also Rises. Happiness is overrated. As Maureen Dowd points out in her September 20, 2009 column Blue is the New Black, women are getting sadder and men are getting happier. Her column picks up...

I polled some turn-around executives regarding my previous post. That post linked job complexity to size of operating unit measured in terms of revenues. But revenue is too simplistic as a proxy for job complexity. The reality of leading a business varies widely. Some tasks that I noted at $1...

Whenever I make an assessment of an executive, I enter into a data base how the executive scored on each of the measures assessed, along with company size in terms of revenues; industry; role; relationship with owners; questions the hiring party wants ferreted out; what I recommended; whether the client...

Now let's look at a situation in middle management. Jeff was his boss's star direct report. He generated useful ideas and his boss, Ken, didn't mind giving him credit for them. He was grooming Jeff to succeed him and hoped that Jeff's potential would encourage higher management to promote him....

Let's go back and see if this information can help make sense of the problems described at the beginning. Jim's case is an easy one. He was comfortable in a Stratum IV position because he had reached a cognitive level four. But he had not reached cognitive level five when...

So far, I've described a static system. Individuals have a certain level of cognitive power. A job requires a person to have a certain level. Everybody is either at the right level, too high, or too low. But in fact, the system is not static. For one thing, jobs change....

As one goes higher in a managerial hierarchy, the most difficult problems grow increasingly complex, and as the complexity of a task increases, so does the complexity of the mental work required to handle it. This complexity, like time span, also occurs in leaps or jumps. In other words, the...

Here are the work strata, as Elliott Jaques described them in Requisite Organization.

Stratum I (time span: one day to three months). First-line manual and clerical work. A task is assigned in terms of a specific, concrete output. Examples: pack these crates into the truck; mail copies of this letter...

"To fit" means to be the same size as something else, and size is about something that can be measured. Organizations talk a lot about job fit. Can we measure a human being, measure a job, and then say whether they are the same size? Let's look at what ought...