psychotherapy, counselling, business coaching, organizational consultation, entrepreneurship, family business consultation
- Equities and the Time Value of Emotion
A commonplace in Finance I is the “time value of money”- the idea that future worth may be discounted to the present moment. But looking at the oscillation of stocks over a given time-period, spanning a universe of daily volatility unknowable in any discrete “present”, it makes you wonder about an equity’s present “value”. What [...]
- From Poetics at Changan to Business in Xian: Reflections on Desire and Aging
The Chinese poet, Du Fu, famously failed the civil service examination at Changan, present day Xian, some 1400 years ago. Scrambling, he found a calling in poetry (and a place in posterity), though continuing to bemoan throughout his life, the loss of a prestigious career and its benefits. Fittingly, by middle age, when he finally [...]
- Harmony & Asian Business Consultation
Consultation would not, could not, exist without workplace conflict at its root. Even under conditions of “harmony”— the Asian aesthetic ideal of concordant notes, tones, or contributions achieving a pleasing coherence. We are called to organizational assessment exactly because even within harmony, the sensitive ear detects dissonance. In consulting to multinational and regional organizations based [...]
- A Flowery Assumption
Quite literally, it lay at the bottom of the bag: the bag I was given, full of orientation materials for the Organizational Development course I was to teach in Taipei. And it? It was not the city map I had hoped for, but a pamphlet for the 2010 Taipei International Flora Exposition. I didn’t get [...]
- Redefining corporate self-interest
The tumult of North Africa’s rising threw unexpected light on the defining qualities of corporate self-interest. Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate, examines the three strategies of Facebook, Google, & Twitter in relation to Arab Revolt. And the upshot is that very different corporate “values” really do affect companies; and that acting on values may have [...]
- Too much good stuff to contribute
Just got off the phone with my friend Bob. And the subject got around to making a “contribution” to human-kind across the relatively short lifespans we’re allotted. We’d got past the part about the relativity of what we’d done; and the part about the challenges of the present and future; and even the part about [...]
- Displacement & Externalization: psychology, economics, and social science
A twitter contact tells me about the disappointment in Ireland, when candidates canvassing for Fine Fail push election materials under the door and then, disappear. The disappointment is in not being able to “give them a piece of my mind” she says. Fine Fail’s long-tenured government guaranteed the debt of dodgy banks as a sovereign [...]
- Corporations are/are not People
Catchy title. Reminds me of “Soylent Green”, that sci-fi predictor of things to come. And there are some similarities. Thanks to the marginalia of some diligent law clerk 100 years back, US corporations acquired the legal status of people. But, unlike people, corporations are encouraged to indulge in bad behavior: the kind that families recognize [...]
- The Dynamics of Public Blame: BP (and Groupon)
I’ll be discussing the dynamics of blame and BP at the weekly case conference of the William Alanson White Institute, NYC; on February 22 at 10 AM. Here’s the announcement: February 22, 2011 – Blaming BP: Examining the Psychodynamics of Blame Ian Miller, Ph.D., NYU Postdoc & WAWI Org. Prog. The psychodynamics of blame will [...]
- The Long and Short in Investing
Market participation by investors embodies the short term. Even if one intends to follow an issue for the long-term, trades are made short term, when market forces are advantageous. The short term conforms to the timeline in the corporate and finance world where the next quarter is the horizon and year on year growth suggests [...]
