Category Archives: Business

The following idiotic “open letter” advertisement ran in last Sunday’s New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirier, and other newspapers:

Dear CEOs:

I have listened to the executives of many companies say that they are eliminating thousands of jobs to “improve the bottom line.”

I own stock in many of these companies and would prefer that the company make a smaller profit and the stock fall, in the short term, rather than affect the lives of our neighbors and their families as jobs are lost.

Please join me in reminding all CEOs that we are not just dealing with numbers and profit, but with real people and real families who need to keep their jobs.

Please keep your employees working.

Steven H. Korman
CEO and Chairman of the Board
Korman Communities
kormancommunities.com

Apparently he’s also sending this letter to CEOs of major companies. May I wear my snark hat and write a reply?

Dear Mr. Korman:

Your ad positions you as a nice guy. Someone who cares about his community and people. Heck, your company name even has the word “community” in it — how cool is that? As you probably hoped for, people are praising this letter as an example of good corporate citizenship.

But alas your heart warming message cannot mask the brutal but necessary ways of markets. Let’s parse your plea sentence by sentence.

I have listened to the executives of many companies say that they are eliminating thousands of jobs to “improve the bottom line.”

Why do you put quotes around “improve the bottom line”? Are you skeptical that this is the real reason? Do you believe these capitalist monsters simply prefer to cut jobs? Hint: they’re cutting 10% of jobs so they do not have to cut 100% of jobs.

I own stock in many of these companies and would prefer that the company make a smaller profit and the stock fall, in the short term, rather than affect the lives of our neighbors and their families as jobs are lost.

Tell me, how does a stock fall and profit shrink in the “short term”? What happens in the long term? When the company cares again about profit, what happens to the neighbors and families? Or should companies never care about profit?

Please join me in reminding all CEOs that we are not just dealing with numbers and profit, but with real people and real families who need to keep their jobs.

Yes. I also “need” a billion dollars. Anyway, please join me in reminding all sentient beings that companies which do not generate those pesky numbers and profit do not survive, and when companies do not survive, the people who work there lose their jobs.

Please keep your employees working.

Good point. How about the government just employ all of us? Then everyone can keep working!

Yours earnestly,

Benedict

Each of the following numbered/bullet points is worth reading.

Bob Sutton's 15 "Things I Believe" on work and management:

1. Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no harm!
2. Indifference is as important as passion.
3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can't have both at the same time.
4. Saying smart things and giving smart answers are important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.
5. Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
6. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.
7. Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.
8. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.
9. The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power.
10. The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?
11. The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence.
12. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated.
13. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.
14. It is good to ask yourself, do I have enough? Do you really need more money, power, prestige, or stuff?
15. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity.

Gretchen Rubin's manifesto on happiness:

• To be happy, you need to consider feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, and an atmosphere of growth.
• One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
• The days are long, but the years are short.
• You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.
• Your body matters.
• Happiness is other people.
• Think about yourself so you can forget yourself.
• “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” — G. K. Chesterton
• What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you, and vice versa.
• Best is good, better is best.
• Outer order contributes to inner calm.
• Happiness comes not from having more, not from having less, but from wanting what you have.
• You can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do.
• You manage what you measure.
• “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

A successful entrepreneur recently told me one of the main things he tries to determine when interviewing potential employees is their capacity to give and receive feedback.

Everyone involved in his start-up, he said, must be comfortable offering constructive criticism in real-time to bosses and subordinates and taking constructive criticism (“taking” is different from acting on all criticism). Rapid iteration of the sort that drives new companies can only happen if feedback constantly flows throughout the office.

I totally agree. You can never spend too much energy honing your skills at giving and receiving feedback. It is the distinguishing factor between those with “good” people skills and “great” people skills. Good businesspeople, and great businesspeople.

Robert Rubin may not be the world’s most popular man at the moment, but I still admire his decision-making philosophies as outlined in his terrific memoir In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington. VentureHacks recently quoted from Rubin’s commencement speeches:

“Decisions tend to be judged solely on the results they produce. But I believe the right test should focus heavily on the quality of the decision-making itself…

“Individual decisions can be badly thought through, and yet be successful, or exceedingly well thought through, but be unsuccessful, because the recognized possibility of failure in fact occurs. But over time, more thoughtful decision-making will lead to better overall results, and more thoughtful decision-making can be encouraged by evaluating decisions on how well they were made rather than on outcome…

“It’s not that results don’t matter. They do. But judging solely on results is a serious deterrent to taking the risks that may be necessary to making the right decision. Simply put, the way decisions are evaluated affects the way decisions are made.”

In other words: you can make a good decision and still suffer a bad outcome (roll the dice again) or you can make a bad decision and enjoy the good fortune of a positive outcome (don’t get cocky – improve the process).