Dive into the archives.
- Green Shoots of Knowledge
Something looked terribly familiar about the article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. It nagged at me for a day until I checked back in my blog archives and found that I’d been thinking along the same lines— that the models we use to understand our business world seem to be broken. That means [...]
- Organizational Corrosion 2: Follow the Money
In my last post, I wrote about a disturbingly corrosive organizational trend in which decisions with strong impact upon organizational clients are treated as “business as usual”. While these clients are not always an organization’s end use customers, but rather potential partners in service delivery, the aura of unreflective action may strongly shape negative perception [...]
- The Corrosion of Organizational Character
We live in an era of turbulence as our assumptions of institutional stability are challenged. Typically, we are reminded with the headlines of our morning newspapers that particular institutions or their agents are the fault. From the patently illegal misrepresentation of Madoff to the squeaky clean optimization by financial organizations of their own bottom lines, [...]
- Making Sense of This Non-Depression
Woke up this morning to the radio announcer’s chirp confirming that the Recession was over and that most economists agreed. OK, it won’t be reflected in employment statistics, and there will be a lot of people out of work, but things are good. We’ll see by the Third Quarter.
The S&P is over 900, the Dow [...]
- The Ghost of a Former Family Business
Business developments expand and contract in harmony with economic developments. From this vantage, the current recession might be likened not so much to the Great Depression, but to more generalized periods of economic contraction. Yet, just as the ghost of the Great Depression has become a media favorite with which all of us must now [...]
- Judging What We See
David Brook’s article in the NYT of April 9 is worth reading. He couches it in the shift from moral philosophy to ethics, as informed by cognitive science. The subject is the simultaneous actions of perception and apperception: the instantaneous linkage of sense data and implicit judgment. For fun, he might have added that implicit [...]
- A Conviction in Economic Recovery
The word “conviction” confirms the outcome of a process of proving. After weighing the evidence, sifting through facts, conviction emerges cognitively through what William James called the “slow heave of the will”. Conviction is solid. Conviction is grounded, based on a foundation.
Mania, on the other hand, is an enthusiastic effusion bouncing high in flight from [...]
- Obama’s Outrage and AIG
Outrage? The New York Times tells us that President Obama’s economic team was “on message” delivering the news that $165 million in AIG bonuses to derivatives traders who helped precipitate AIG’s financial hemorrhage, could not legally be blocked.
But the public’s response to the news (“the growing outcry”) caused the President to change tactics, with Treasury [...]
- The Madoff Metaphor
While the sentiment of moment is harshly judgmental, it is difficult not to think about Madoff as a metaphor of recent times. He has played his role well in the public drama of shock and blame: stoically bearing guilt within the rituals of censure and condemnation.
His decision to turn from trading to the fabrication of [...]
- Bartleby and the Avoidant Personality
I woke up one morning last week, thinking about Bartleby the Scrivener. It was a few days after my last posting, which had related to Bartleby via two Welsh Academics and one Slavic Lacanian, which is an oblique route to Herman Melville, and Bartelby— who worked, as it happens, in an establishment very close to [...]
