This is Black Friday, when millions of bargain-crazed Americans head to the malls to shop for deeply discounted merchandise. The only purchases I’ve made today have been on behalf of my son: at the doctor’s office, the pharmacy and – in a weak moment – an online gaming site.

If you’re a baseball fan and a fan of baseball caps, the Major League Baseball site is running a sale at the MLB.com Shop. I’m not buying anything there today, but this orange-billed San Francisco Giants cap did catch my eye.

I also stumbled onto a link to one of what the site describes as several recordings of classic baseball games on radio that you can buy. The one in the Giants’ area was of a game against the Astros at Enron Field. That park carried that name for so short a time that I’m amazed there was time to find a classic there. I’ll be poking around to find more classic broadcasts available on the site.

I’d love to dredge up some old Cleveland Indians’ broadcasts from the 1960s, when the team was usually terrible. Imagine reliving thrills from 1967 as the Tribe and Washington Senators battled for seventh place in the American League! Seriously, I’d love to hear random games from the past, if only to recall so many fine old players like Ken McMullen and Sonny Siebert or to hear announcers like Jimmy Dudley on WERE in Cleveland or Ray Lane and Ernie Harwell on WJR in Detroit.

The The Chron has an article by Mary Flood comparing and contrasting the judicial treatment of R Allen Stanford and Jeff Skilling. I’m not sure of what Mary’s point is, unless it’s simply that Stanford is being treated particularly harshly – even before his trial. But by making that argument, she makes it appear that Skilling was somehow babied.

There was no real news either with Skilling’s case or Stanford’s, so I think this was just filler for a slow news day. But it is interesting to see how the media are treating Skilling now that they’ve helped put him away.

Bethany McLean will be giving a talk about The Smartest Guys In The Room on November 30, 2009 from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. at Miller Center ( 2201 Old Ivy Rd., Charlottesville VA 22904).

If you attend, please report back. I’m curious if she has anything else to talk about or if she’s just going to ride Enron’s coattails for the next fifty years.

I have mixed feelings about the Enron dataset. Generally, I disapprove of it because those emails are private communications and I don’t think it’s anyone’s business what they say. Specifically the personal emails between a man having an affair and his paramour seemed to be gratuitously included in the set, and they have nothing to do with Enron, either work or organizationally related.

But in case your opinion is different, the Enron dataset has again been released – this time with attachments.

Since so few people actually read the record, maybe these attachments will serve as some kind of contemporaneous proof that Enron’s deals were legitimate. That is my hope.

The blogosphere is abuzz with news of the latest global warming scandal.  A latter day “Daniel Ellsberg” has released the climate equivalent of the Pentagon Papers onto the web.

In 1971 former Defense Department employee Daniel Ellsberg  turned over  a large collection of Pentagon  Vietnam War related documents   to the New York Times.  Recently an unknown whistler blower released 61 megabytes of  documents along with       emails involving communications between Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and various other scientists who support the claim that humans can raise  air temperatures by  increasing the amount of the magical  atmospheric gas  carbon dioxide (CO2).

Some of the old media are reporting this scandal, but most seem to be ignoring it.

John Delingpole on the London Telegraph site suggests:  “The Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)”

Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun suggests “the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down skeptics.”

Marc Sheppard points out the hypocrisy of Jones, et.al. criticizing the funding of their opponents.    Of the two documents that  mention funding for global warming claims it’s “the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale.  In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on.  Three — the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative and the Energy Saving Trust – are UK-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth – Renewables North West — is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.”

Bishop Hill has an index of many of the emails for those interested in further reading.   There is also a searchable database.

These revelations aren’t the first that question  claims about global warming.  Lawrence Solomon reported that the Enron Corporation pushed global warming claims  in the 1990’s because of a desire to profit from trading  carbon credits.   Enron also felt it would benefit from encouraging use of  its natural gas holdings  over coal and petroleum.  Former Enron official Jeff Shields  has been associated with Renewables North West.

Will the old media continue to  ignore  evidence  that global warming is a fraud, or will they decide to expose it like they did Watergate and other past scandals?    Have old media reporters been ignoring the scandal because they are being paid to, or are they just too lazy to investigate claims of fraud?

I am very pleased that the Royal Court secured some of the most important awards at the Evening Standard Awards yesterday.

I loved Enron, with Sam West, and Jerusalem with Mark Rylance.

Mark Rylance’s performance was one of the best I’ve ever seen on stage, so it would have been a travesty if he didn’t win the Best Actor.

The only performance I’ve seen that tops it in the last five years was Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello at the Donmar Warehouse. That performance was elemental, he was like a huge storm cloud moving across the stage rather than an actor. He really reclaimed the play from Iago (a far weaker performance by Ewan McGregor), and rightly was awarded the Olivier Award for Othello in 2008?

Another recent excellent performance by Dominic West in Life is a Dream, also at the Donmar. Although he didn’t reach the same levels as Rylance and Ejiofor, his incarcerated prince was powerful and nuanced.

Having managed to miss every single show that Rylance has been in over the last 10 years, I was kicking myself when I saw him in Jerusalem. I now want to go and see shows like Endgame and I generally can’t stand Becket.

I think Rylance will sweep the boards at other Awards with his performance as Rooster, and my money is on him to pick up the Oliviers. Jerusalem won Best Play but it is only a good play and not a classic; it’s Rylance that lifts it above being just good.

Enron is overall a better production, so it’s fair that it picks up Best Director for Rupert Goold.

I love Ian Rickson, the director of Jerusalem and the ex-artistic director of the Royal Court.

He directed a fantastic production of The Seagull as his final show there – also starring Ejiofor, as well as MacKenzie Crook (surprisingly disappointing in the main role), Pearce Quigley, who for me stole the show as the awkward school teacher, Katherine Parkinson from the IT Crowd, Kristen Scott Thomas, Carey Mulligan now flying to fame in An Education. All incredibly impressive in a hilariously funny, yes funny, verision of Chekhov.

But Jerusalem was ponderous in places and could have done with a slightly firmer hand, so I don’t feel too bad for Rickson losing out to Goold.

Enron, although not quite as good as everyone is making out, is a beautifully composed production. It weaves together storytelling about financial products (surely the best way to learn about boring accountancy issues) with choreographed musical numbers of a type hard to categorise, and startling original and disconcerting imagery.

I did think that the scenes in court and the final monologue with Sam West is slightly anti-climatic, a bit of a damp squib after the perfectly orchestrated rest of the play.

Both Jerusalem and Enron are transferring to the West End in January 2010.

Would highly recommend both of them.

You can get tickets for both plays through the Royal Court Box Office on 020 7656 5000 or online at www.royalcourttheatre.com

But you can’t beat the £10 nights on a Monday at the Royal Court — which is what I paid for great stalls seats for both Enron and Jerusalem. Just sign up to the mailing list and get in there quick for future productions.

I’ve been on a bit of a documentary kick lately. I’ve already talked about I.O.U.S.A. and I just finished Maxed Out, which takes on personal debt and the credit card companies as opposed to the national debt. Just like I.O.U.S.A. it serves as a wake-up call for financial responsibility. I first had this wake-up call after attending a Dave Ramsey, Financial Peace class about a year ago and I can’t stress enough how important is for the individual to maintain financial responsibility. Debt is crushing people out there so I suggest you take control before it comes down on you. One probem I had with Maxed Out is that they never told the consumer to take control of their finances. All the film did was points it’s finger at the big, bad credit card companies and debt collectors and while I agree that these companies take advantage of consumers, I also believe that these consumers have the opportunity to avoid a lot of this if only they would take financial responsibility and control

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room was another pretty fantastic film. It seems like between this one, I.O.U.S.A. and Maxed Out we cover governmental financial irresponsibility, corporate financial irresponsibility, and personal financial irresponsibility. So that makes for a nice trio. It’s a very interesting film and it leaves you with a pretty good understanding of why that company was destined to fail.

I also just recently saw Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. Certainly an interesting little documentary about an extremely interesting football game. It’s wild how many people are mentioned as being associated with the team, who went on to become quite famous. People like George W. Bush, Al Gore, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, and Garry Trudeau. I also was very impressed to learn about Brian Dowling. Dowling was the inspiration for B.D. in Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic and up to the point of that tie, there had not been a game in which Dowling had started and finished and been on the losing team since the 7th grade. That is just amazing. I do not know how he fared collegiately from a W-L standpoint after the Harvard game, but that’s a remarkable feat. He didn’t fare too well in the NFL though.

I also just watched Super High Me, which chronicles comedian Doug Benson’s “investigation” into the affects of marijuana on the human body and mind. Inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, Benson takes it on himself to not smoke marijuana for 30 days while undergoing a litany of tests. Then he follows that up with 30 days where he smokes so much that he’s high during pretty much every waking hour. I think he could have done more in the way of medical testing. I exaggerated when I used the term “litany”. There is also a point where the DEA is raiding and shutting down medicinal marijuana dispensaries and I believe he should have done more to show the legality of those actions. Yes, the filmmaker did point out it was legal with a quick message on the screen, but no one ever dared argue with the protesters who were acting so offended or even ask those tough questions to play devil’s advocate and inspire the protesters to choose their words wisely. At one point you hear a protester yell (Or maybe this is a combination of two quotes) “The DEA isn’t doing their job! Their job is to stay out of California!” …uhhh, how remarkably stupid is that? That is the DEA’s job? Well why isn’t someone paying me? I’ve stayed out of California my whole life. In this film we also see Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt (of Big Fan fame), Dave Navarro, and the apparent Prince of Pot, Marc Emery. (Who knew?)

So do I feel more educated? Well, I dunno. I certainly prefer the classroom. Not in the sense that it’s more enjoyable, or easier to have a conversation about. But in the sense that if you take a class on a topic you should leave it with a pretty solid foundation of knowledge. These films are great for digging that hole for you to pour that foundation, but they are not a foundation. For one they are almost always biased. Maybe the bias is subtle (I.O.U.S.A.) or maybe the bias is obvious (Super High Me). Either way it exists. Yes, I’m sure it exists in the classroom also, but in the class room you spend much more time on the topics, also you are usually sent out to write things like research papers, which encourage you to do your own fact finding. This leads to a more rounded informational intake. Which in itself is probably the main reason the class room is a better way to learn. The breadth of information is much wider. That can’t even be denied so I’m not gonna to even explain myself.

I have another batch of documentaries lined up to watch so maybe in a couple weeks I’ll be doing this again. I don’t see why not. I would suggest all of these if you have plenty of time. It just turns out that the way I ordered them in this blog is probably the same order I’d suggest watching them.

Another two weeks down,
the pay checks coming round
looks like I’ll barely make it
with just enough gas in the tank to fake it
with enough funds in the bank to not break it
nothing’s sacred
might as well sell pictures of myself naked

pull a Levi Johnston, make a mil and bounce
take it to the Mil, chill with about an ounce
yall can call me a clown
I’ll laugh til I fall down
The bank tellers will frown
they won’t know what to tell me
I’ll tell him that feeling their feeling is jealousy

Cuz ain’t that the real American dream?
From Enron plots to Ponzi schemes
Move the numbers around, make the books look nice
We all sell our souls, did you get the right price?

Jesus Christ, even Jesus can be for profit
See, Even a prophet can’t stop it
Capitalism: a steamroller it seems
steamrolling your dreams, popping your jeans out their seems

shaking down the homeless
on the corner for a quarter
Mad at Mexicans coming across the border
How we gonna build other nations we can’t get our shit in order?
A generation used to taking orders
raised on computers and camcorders

Trying to put screens between them and real life
Cuz they know what they’re seeing just ain’t right
They don’t feel theres shit they can do about it tonight
So they put down the fight and pic up a mic

Pick up the words that lift up the kids
that came to their show trying to get rid
of the feelings that come in with the darkness
To feel a connection, to know the world ain’t heartless

That’s what the point of this goddamn art is

Here’s one of those articles that would get my goat if I owned a goat.

It’s the typical rah-rah article about how wonderful ERM is and everyone should be doing it. (I am always  a proponent of those.) But the fact that it was published at a site called WebCPA should have tipped me off that I was going to be short one goat by the time I was finished.

After the author quotes the requisite parts from the COSO ERM framework – thus illustrating that she can copy and paste from the COSO ERM framework -  she recites a lot of the usual fluff about why ERM is so great. But what really sends my goat running, is how she tries to make the point that somehow internal auditors are the “meek who shall inherent the ERM” so to speak.

Accountants, including internal auditors, have been getting by for years with their control self-assessments and opinions. Thanks to a few financial frauds like Enron and WorldCom, the government passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and many internal auditors were kept busy for a while; recently they have IFRS conversions. I am tired of internal auditors trying to make ERM something for internal auditors to do. What’s more, it muddies the water, making it increasingly difficult for ERM practitioners to communicate that risk management is not the same thing as audit.

In the article, the author suggests ERM is the next great thing for internal auditors.  She writes: Organizations will also look to internal auditors to provide some non-traditional roles, including trainer, educator, and coordinator, or facilitator. As trainers or educators, auditors must understand that ERM is a process or methodology in the identification, assessment and management of risks enterprise-wide. This process provides for a structured and disciplined approach to implementing risk management.

To that I have to stay stick to your knitting (and auditing).

Perhaps try making internal auditors in charge of human resources or IT? Just please, stay away from risk management and leave ERM implementations to the professionals.

by The McCuistion Program, November 17, 2009.

During this weekend’s episode, Is “Corporate Ethics” an Oxymoron?, panelists discussed everything that surrounds corporate business ethics and the breakdown of ethics in portions of corporate America in the past years.  During the program, panelists discuss how the ethics of corporations will only be as strong as the ethics of the individuals that make up the organization.  This is a fascinating point as it leads to questions regarding hiring, promoting and the overall leadership training of organizations.  Tagging onto the question of corporate business ethics, the overarching question of ethics in general beg question.

In 2003, reporter Jayson Blair made national headlines for his lack of ethical reporting.  He had covered stories for the New York Times, ranging from the D.C. sniper case to the rescue of Jessica Lynch.  Unfortunately, he had both plagiarized and fabricated details of many of the stories he had written…(continue reading)

by Mercedes B. Suleik, for Manila Bulletin, November 18, 2009.

“In the next century, a company will stand or fall on its values,” Robert Hass, CEO of Levi Strauss was quoted to have said. I have sometimes used this quote to begin one of my lectures on corporate governance, saying that this statement has been validated by the humongous scandals and failures in the West – Enron, the mother of all f…k-ups, Worldcom, Tyco, even one of the big 5 accounting firms, Andersen, etc. in 2000, and repeated in 2008 with Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, US housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not the mention the big banks…all of whom had to bailed out (with the exception of Lehman) with taxpayers money. What indeed were the values espoused by these companies?

In discussing what corporate governance is about, I usually short-cut it by taking each of the elements in a definition I found very useful, that given by former World Bank President, James D. Wolfensohn: “Corporate governance is about promoting fairness, transparency, and accountability.” Transposing the letters to make an easy acronym, FAT, I have also added another letter to make FATE, with E representing Ethics.

Of course it could be said that observing FAT really means that underlying it all is the observance of E. If a company observes fairness, accountability, and transparency, then underlying it all, it must be ethical. FAT after all means that a good company assures that its shareholders are treated equitably, promotes long term value, and balances its profit motive with prudentially protecting its investments. FAT also means that in the relationships among the three important groups in a company – the shareholders, directors and management – each is accountable to the other, with the Board being accountable to the shareholders who own the company, and the Board being responsible for the actions of management which it appoints to implement its strategic and policy decisions. FAT also means that the Board ensures timely and accurate disclosure of all material matters, including material foreseeable risks, and requires a system of monitoring and reporting based on accepted standards of adequate disclosure…(continue reading)

In the next couple of weeks  with the help of this map I will uncover more in depth how all these men relate to each other but right from the start you can see that John Key has  some pretty close connections to the bankers who are ruling the US with Obama as their sock puppet. More so than anyone in New Zealand other than perhaps Don Brash.

For starters two names jump out; one is Stephen Belotti, the man who was John Key’s boss from 1996 when John Key started at Merrill Lynch and Robert Rubin who was a high flyer at AIG and at the same time was a member of the foreign exchange committee and “advisory” committee to the Federal Reserve of New York. He was a member of this committee at the same time Stephen Belotti was a member. This is the same committee that selected John Key to become a member in 1999. The only year mentioned on the list is the year of selection but generally members serve three years which would place both of them as leaving the committee at the same time John Key was selected to serve. John Key left the committee in May 2001 when he returned to New Zealand to take up politics.

Robert Rubin was named as on of the 10 most unethical business people in January 2009 by Market watch and is widely recognised as one of Timothy Geithners two mentors. The other is an equally disreputable character, Larry Summers who currently serves as one of Obama’s advisors

Banker meets banker to discuss trade?

Robert Rubin was also involved in an attempt to stop the Enron Bonds from being down graded. Oh oops, Merrill Lynch was involved in an attempt to help Enron to cover up and lie about the state of their company.

Any way back to Timothy Geithner. That would be the same Timothy Geithner John Key met with last week discussing a free trade deal. The same Timothy Geithner who was the Federal Reserve of New York director when the bubbles started to burst.

The same Timothy Geithner who evaded paying tax and the same Timothy Geithner who as the secretary of treasurygives the biggest banker crooks most access to himself and Obama.

And while we’re at it why did the John Key and Timothy Geithner discuss free trade should that not have been with Hillary Clinton who after all is the secretary of foreign affairs?

And doesn’t make you feel somewhat nervous to see our Prime Minister so close to what are arguably the biggest Ponzi schemers and crooks of our time?

.

Extraordinary Circumstances

I’ve wondered for a while why there are over half a dozen books about the collapse of Enron, but only two about WorldCom. Maybe it was because Enron happened first.  Maybe it was because Enron disappeared but WorldCom survived in the form of MCI, who presumably have lawyers. Maybe it’s because Enron’s story is sexier and more complex.

One of the few books available about WorldCom was written by the Vice President of Internal Audit, Cynthia Cooper: Extraordinary Circumstances the Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower.  Let’s get the housekeeping out of the way: it’s written in the present tense and has no illustrations, and both these things are constantly annoying.

So what actually happened at WorldCom?  According to Cooper, it was a fairly simple accounting fraud, well hidden but nowhere near as specialised as the off-balance sheet stuff at Enron, and it was committed to save the company not so a Fastow-figure could skim off illicit cream for personal gain. Basically, WorldCom played PacCom in the 1980s and 1990s munching up telecoms and internet companies but failing to integrate them.  Cooper asserts that it wasn’t the fraud or exposing the fraud that killed WorldCom; it became a dead company walking when the internet bubble burst in 2000 and sucked telecoms into its wake.

The most engaging section of the book is when Cooper tells the story of the few months before and after she and her team of internal auditors discovered the fraud, reported it to the internal audit committee and all hell broke loose. WorldCom had become a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of acquisitions but it had no single set of operating systems. You can only only make savings from acquisitions by doing the boring operational stuff of cutting out duplication and waste. Instead it was faced with the rising costs involved in managing a hodge-podge of companies, falling revenues as telecoms tanked, and a share-price that burst with the bubble, and that was when CFO Scott Sullivan instigated the fraud. WorldCom started making a loss, but Sullivan reported non-existant profits by moving the cost of renting lines from operating costs to capital, to the tune of $3bn over 5 quarters and (according to Wikipedia) by over-stating sales.

The final few chapters of the book are among the most interesting. It’s clear that CFO Sullivan was, as the judge said, the architect of the fraud. Cooper says she could not decide in her own mind about CEO Bernie Ebbers’ guilt. The book is well lawyered, so although these doubts are phrased in the present tense they are located in the section before the jury came to their verdict.But in Cooper’s mind at that time at least the case against Ebbers was not-proven. Ebbers is serving 25 years, mainly on Sullivan’s testimony.  Sullivan has just finished a 5 year jail term.

The case against Ebbers hinged on the financial pressure he was under following the fall of telecoms stocks.  In April 2002 PacCom’s cigar-chewing, cowboy booted CEO packed up his stuff and left. He faced personal bankruptcy. He had been the king of the deal, driving forward to one takeover after another, and Cooper comments on how his personal style changed as he grew in hubris and then fear kicked in. By the end of his tenure he’d cancelled the free coffee and was issuing memos telling staff not to use the colour copiers. All his wealth was in WorldCom stock, and he borrowed against it, so when telecoms stocks collapsed he effectively ended up with ‘negative equity’ to the tune of $300 million dollars. Even so, there is no concrete proof he instigated, encouraged or permitted the fraud.  The only evidence against him was Sullivan’s testimony saying that Ebbers told him to commit fraud quarter by quarter by telling him ‘we must make the numbers’.

It’s hard to tell if this was plausible deniability in action, or a matter of style.  Cooper implies the latter, and the implication that a nod is as good as a wink in the C-Suite, or the C-Suite of WorldCom at least, is one of the other interesting aspects of the book. Because it’s a first person account, Cooper reports what was said and what she thought at various meetings throughout her career.  Most corporate auto-biographies are not about how people interact, being the narrative equivalent of a series of photographs of the mighty hunter clutching his rifle, one foot on an animal’s corpse.  Those biographies leave me wondering to what extent the C-Suite is a foreign country and how differently they do things there. Cooper casts some first-person light on this, and WorldCom appears to have been political and focused but less testosterone-fuelled than Enron, running at a rapid pace on cryptic comments, laconic remarks and inference.  One could argue, though Cooper is careful not to, that Ebbers is a modern-day Henry II.  If so, then the disparity in sentencing is troubling, to say the least.

As a British reader, there were two things I found intriguing which Cooper didn’t even notice.  One is that the main players are actively religious: Ebbers started each board meeting with a prayer, Cooper’s main contact with colleagues out of work is through their Church.  The second is that both WorldCom and Enron were companies located in the South, these are stories of hicks made good who went bad.  That’s not to say the patricians on the East Coast don’t do the same – look at our current banking crisis and the Wall St scandals of the 1980s.  Cooper mentions but does not explore the cultural differences between the various organisations that ultimately comprised WorldCom.

The book (like this review) is over-long and (unlike me) Cooper leaves it up to you to do your own analysis or not as you see fit.  But there is one extraordinary Ozymandias-like vignette:

It’s November, 2004.  The double glass doors to the executive suite are locked.  I peer through to see drops of water leaking from the ceiling in several spots, and a dimly lit room, many of the lights burned out and the remaining ones flickering, a ghostly symbol of the fall of a company and an executive team that once seemed invincible. The guard unlocks the doors and we file in.  Brown cardboard boxes are everywhere, each labeled with the name of a former WorldCom executive. There is barely room to walk. It feels as if we’re somehow trespassing on private property.  I read the names of people I used to work with as we slowly walk through. Bernie’s office is completely empty, not even a hook on the wall.

In high school, I heard a saying from one of my teachers…
“There are people who make things happen. People who watch things happen. And then there are those people who ask ‘what happened?’ “

While everyone laughed when they heard this, it was interesting to take a look at it from the perspective of everyone thinking they were the ones who make things happen. It was also funny to see that everyone automatically assumed that the people who asked, ‘what happened?’ were lazy people who were clueless and out of touch with the world.

But as life went on, I learned to honor the fact that sometimes you can’t always be making things happen. Sometimes you have to watch things happen because it is what you observe that can help you see a new direction you are supposed to take things. And if you are always so busy making things happen, you’re too busy to watch things happen and then you end up becoming the very person who asked ‘what happened?’
Take a look at the housing industry, the banking industry, Corporate America, Enron, 9/11, GM and even Global Warming.

You can have a bunch of people rallying to save the world, but then no one is actually doing it. You can have people be so busy pointing fingers when things go wrong, but then no one is minding the store. You can have people watch all this and sit back and do nothing. And you can also have a world so ‘in their own world’ – they are missing the very things that caused all these things to happen and they are now sitting back and asking ‘what the heck happened?’

Birds have a very interesting world. They sit, they watch the world. Sometimes they hunt. Sometimes they are the prey. But a lot of the times, they sit and watch what is happening. And if something is happening and they either need to get away from it or go toward it, they fly.

While we humans are not born with wings to fly we can change our own flight pattern by taking a bit more time to sit and watch what is happening. People who panic tend to do rash things and ultimately cause an unnecessary domino effect in this world. People who think they are invincible, sit too long and then end up becoming victims.

There is another saying…. “suit up and show up, s**t or get off the pot.” And that has its place in life, too.
John Mayer’s song “Waiting For The World To Change” used to get me upset…. Part of the song is true and I comprehend his generation’s thinking there was nothing that could be done to change the world. But there is an echo that I hear, or rather, yhe Mother Teresa screams I hear from afar that beg to differ. “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop,” which basically say Mayer’s song is a copout.

Hmm…
As the birds watch what is happening, and continue to breed and fly,
As they watch their eggs get eaten, or their new babies simply die….
In the world that is changing, where life on earth is tough,
They simply live life each day and, that is truly enough.
The birds will sit and reflect, who knows what they really see.
They observe and help us realize, the best things in life are free.

© 2009 Queena Verbosity 100% Real Words
Media Monster Communications, Inc.
Stacey Kumagai
http://www.100percentrealwords.blogspot.com
http://hubpages.com/profile/mediamonster
http://www.braingasm.com

D. Douglas Caulkins, an anthropologist at Grinnell College, Iowa, has used Grid-Group Cultural Theory to appraise and extend Jim Collins’ well known work on organisational culture, Good to Great (which is explained at www.jimcollins.com and about which you can read an article. )

Abstract
Jim Collins’s empirical study Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t (Harper Business, New York, 2001) has made a worldwide impact on management and leadership practice and research. His concept of “culture of discipline” is central to his ideas for achieving enduring, sustainable organizations, whether in the business or nonprofit sectors. In this essay the culture of discipline is re-theorized in the context of Mary Douglas’s grid-group analysis to provide a home within a broader theory which will locate the culture of discipline in relation to alternative cultures. The framework is illustrated with applications in a study of small, high-technology firms in peripheral areas of the UK, leading to the recognition of an organizational form missing from most of the management literature and furthering the exploration of a model of humble and collaborative leadership as an alternative to the model of charismatic or heroic leadership growing out of American management culture.

[Image credit: Woodleywonderworks]

Prof Caulkins has done a very good job of this. Caulkins’ approach is to equate the ‘great company’, with its long-termism and its culture of responsibility, with the Egalitarian bias of Cultural Theory. If this is so, Collins could be said to achieve this without at any point scaring American business leaders off by sounding like some kind of cheerleader for socialism. To recognise this strand in American business thinking is to call into question the easy assumption that the typical American approach is Individualist.

My only question regards Caulkin’s characterisation of the Enron culture (admittedly by no means the main point of his paper), which Fourcultures has previously touched on. Caulkins sees Enron’s ‘cult of personality’ as an increase in the ‘grid’ dimension:

“when the imperial CEO and CFO impose rules, rituals, and indoctrination that promote the interests and privileges of the top management, rather than the interests of the organization, then the cult of personality is driving the organization up-grid toward a more rule-based form of management that is no longer egalitarian.” (Caulkins 2008: 229).

The question here is the extent to which we accept the characterisation of Enron as a sectarian ‘cult’ (Tourish and Vatcha 2005). It could be argued that Enron’s acute, institutionalised and systematic lack of accountability positioned it as a good example of a rather extreme Individualist organisation. So on this account Enron did not start off Egalitarian and move up-grid towards Hierarchy or Fatalism, as Caulkins claims. Instead it started off reluctantly somewhat Hierarchical and by mocking all accountability moved resolutely down-grid towards an off-the-scale Individualism that was superficially praiseworthy but ultimately incompatible with the wider business environment within which it operated (see Linsley and Shrives 2009 for another Grid-Group inspired account of the culture of Enron).

In any case, Caulkins’s work shows how useful Grid-Group Cultural Theory can be for organisational studies.

Further Reading

Caulkins, D. Douglas (2008) ‘Re-theorizing Jim Collins’s culture of discipline in Good to Great‘, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research,21:3, 217 — 232

P. M. Linsley and  P. J. Shrives (2009). ‘Mary Douglas, risk and accounting failures’. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 20(4):492-508.

Tourish, D. and Vatcha, N. (2005). Charismatic leadership and corporate cultism at Enron: the elimination of dissent, the promotion of conformity and organizational collapse. Leadership, 1 (4), 455-480.

While I am still held up here with whatever this is, I have realized that those who oppose the leadership of this country are being marked, spied on, and otherwise identified as extremist because we do not subscribe to the policies and aims of those wanting to bring this country into an oppressive one government rule.  A few years ago, this would not be the case.  For one thing politicians cared about what the people back home thought.  A few years ago, we wouldn’t be bombarded with stealth like messages that carry double meaning so that the general public is deceived.

That has caused me to wonder what Henry ford was thinking bring people from Yemen to work in his factories in Dearborn.  Yes it was Henry Ford that infiltrated this country with the first Muslim population in this country.  Now there could have been others, but bringing from I understand was about 30,000 Yemenis at one time, that would have to be small community moving in.  Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against any people groups the right to country of opportunity, but the fact is that the land of opportunity is being robbed of all the opportunity.

Every day I here in the news from all networks that this business is failing, and that business is failing.  Then congress wants to pour more taxes on business so that the ability to make enough money to have the profits to put back into the innovation and development doesn’t exist.  These are not the mega businesses, but the average business both small and medium.  The companies  that spur new hires and new products are the target.

Remember the President’s comments as then the candidate told Joe the plumber, shouldn’t the little person share in the wealth that you are creating?  That’s a paraphrase.  but the idea of redistribution of wealth from working to build a business to not be able to eat of your own labors.  At this rate, there will be no  opportunities without the governments approval.   That’s why I went back to school to prepare myself for the uncertain future.

So in my humble opinion we are losing the drive to create.  The government is follow the path of Enron. Ultimately what this will do is cause this once great land to become a mire shadow of its former self.

And that’s the way I see it today!!

The multimedia project I decided to analyze, The Enron Blame Game, does a terrific job at telling the story.  Not only is the multimedia project attached to an article, it does a solid job of allowing the user to understand what the project is all about. Its simple touch and click capabilities, along with easy to read explanations, make even the least informed user have an understanding of the whole Enron situation.

The multimedia elements clearly enhance the story.  With the 34 different options to click, you obviously are able to gain more knowledge with the use of this project.

I think this multimedia project does the job well, but could be spruced up a bit.  To me, it feels like a rather basic project.  Perhaps the use of some flash into this project would make it more enticing.  When I originally looked at the project, I was pretty underwhelmed.  Maybe it was because of the boring colors that are used throughout the whole project.

Perhaps I’m being a little too picky.  I mean, the multimedia project does the job, which is to add an element to the story and inform the reader.  Maybe I’ve just gotten so used to these over the top, tech driven multimedia projects, that at this point I can’t appreciate a more basic approach.

by Thinking Made Easy, November 11, 2009.

Introduction

Companies or business organizations encounter and address a variety of issues everyday. These issues range from addressing business and marketing plans, customer service, employee management, internal and external conflicts, profit generation, and control and regulation. To address these issues, companies need different strategies and plans to ensure the sustenance and maintenance of their operation and production.

However, the operation of any business organization is not as simple as it looks. Theoretically, companies must operate effectively to gain profit and to provide products or render service to consumers. Hence, business organizations are being comprised of teams that perform different functions to somehow make its operation simpler and better. In line with this, though, not all business organizations or companies achieve a smooth-sailing operation, for with the presence of different cultures, personalities and motives in the company, decision-making and governance is largely affected and altered. For this reason, good leadership strategies will be most useful, in encouraging teamwork and compliance from employees or colleagues…(continue reading)

D Day, Dooms Day, 9-11-01, 3 Tombstones of Democracy. What will happen if 9/11 truth & justice is not served? Everything points to a huge cover-up… Fiction clip based on facts by Mon Rasz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIeve1CG_GM

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xar6ly_v01-video-clip-d-day-911_school

Tags: 9-11, 9-11-01, 9/11, 9/11 Truth, Alex Jones, Architects & Engineers, Jean Marie Bigard, 911 Blogger, Bilderberg Group, Charlie Sheen, corruption, D-Day, David Ray Griffin, deaths, democracy, dictatorship, Dooms-Day, drumbeat, end, Enron, Eric Laurent, fear, freedom, history, Hitler, illogic,  justice, lives, logic, Mathieu Kassovitz, monuments, Nazi, Neils Harrit, neocon, peace, police state, politics, society, Sept-11-01, SS, Trilateral Comission, terrorists, trust, truth, Twin Towers, war, World Trade Center, WTC7

Take a peek at the ABC.com website and count the number of times the word “alleged” or “allegedly” is used in describing the massacre at Ft. Hood.

Based on my writing about Enron, I think any honest person must agree that I believe strongly in defendant’s rights, even a piece of crap like Major Hasan. But I don’t understand why he’s “alleged” to have killed those people. Many people saw him do it. There’s really no doubt that it was him.

And yet, the media says “alleged” murderer.

They were not so kind to the Enron defendants, many of whom were described as “scheming”, “devious”, etc. etc. There was no need for such technicalities for the men and two women in the Enron saga.

Take a peek at the ABC.com website and count the number of times the word “alleged” or “allegedly” is used in describing the massacre at Ft. Hood.

Based on my writing about Enron, I think any honest person must agree that I believe strongly in defendant’s rights, even a piece of crap like Major Hasan. But I don’t understand why he’s “alleged” to have killed those people. Many people saw him do it. There’s really no doubt that it was him.

And yet, the media says “alleged” murderer.

They were not so kind to the Enron defendants, many of whom were described as “scheming”, “devious”, etc. etc. There was no need for such technicalities for the men and two women in the Enron saga.

Hypocrites.

(Cross-posted at the Enron Blog).