psychotherapy, counselling, business coaching, organizational consultation, entrepreneurship, family business consultation
- Investor Suicide x Equity Shares
The evolving position of the retail investor is as an independent entrepreneur, both exploiting and exploited by the characteristics and opportunities of investment markets as markets become subject to the risks and uncertainties of large group psychology. Decreasingly, the investor is aware of the decisions and events characterizing value determination both of 1) corporations and [...]
- Inflection Point?
The dog woke me at dawn today. With lovely first light streaming in from the East, I fired up the ole computer to read what I take to be the first signs of a new inflection point in this months-long market chaos and my “passive research”. After 5 successive higher closes, the US equities markets [...]
- The Market as Object of Desire
We all exist and grow in our subjective relations to people and things: the significant objects in our lives. But what kind of object is a financial market? Composed of anonymous contributions, it is compounded of decisions themselves based in feeling and thought. We relate to it as we do to a large group or [...]
- Passive Research is to Markets What Action Research is to Firms
Organizational consultants frequently engage in action research, adapting their methods with the multiple contexts of work demands and constraints. Following the organization of financial markets however, requires a different type of participant observation. I have come to think of it as “Passive Research”, attempting to interpret the ups and downs of actions by the electronic [...]
- Lack of demand and the destruction of self-esteem
Just having finished my earlier post, “Psycho-Economic Depression“, I came upon this by Fritz Schumacher, from “Small is Beautiful” (pages 203-204). It seemed to fit: If the nature of change is such that nothing is left for the fathers to teach their sons, or for the sons to accept from their fathers, family life [...]
- Psycho-Economic Depression
The industrial revolution wrought by Frederick Taylor is complete. Production is divided among a mass workforce which, as if by Smith’s “invisible hand”, creates what we need. And so, in Hayek lockstep, we move forward. Its simple, elegant banner is Leonard Read’s classic, “I, a Pencil”. It is true, there is not one of us [...]
- Pairing: Bernanke as an Answer Among Uncertainties
Recent behavior in financial markets really does resemble the dynamics of large groups. Markets, like groups, struggle through long periods of anxiety, attempting to reach some momentary closure that brings sense— at least temporarily— to interactive flux. A perfect example has been the elevation of the Fed’s Ben Bernanke: from Rick Perry’s recent derogation of [...]
- The Markets’ Increasing Dread
It has been a few weeks since the “resolution” of the US debt crisis. And there has been a cascading erosion of public confidence as unemployment, diminished growth and “Japanization” in Europe and the US, increasing dangers of Eurodebt sans Eurobonds have correlated with a 16% drop in the S&P ( a measure of convenience). [...]
- Continuous Iterations of Anxiety
How has the world changed since 9/11? That was the question put to me by a colleague, anticipating an appearance on a radio talk show. He asked the question just as I had read online, that the Washington negotiations about the US debt ceiling were about to reach consensus, a day or two before the [...]
- On Knowing More Than You Know: the Bricoleur
Here is a Leatherman for your intellectual tool-kit, a terrific notion which could very well be serve as foundation for a talk I’ll be giving to equity investors in Sydney on June 21. It is from Levi-Strauss’ “The Savage Mind” (pages 17-18 in the University of Chicago edition, 1966): “The bricoleur is adept at performing [...]
