Did you know ‘communications’ are like the Force, with both a light and dark side?

Communications may be used to engage, enlighten and clarify.

Communications may be used to confuse, coerce and obfuscate.

I usually write about the light side of communications.

Dark-side communications are what brought the economy down and are still popular, most recently at JP Morgan.

Consider the following presentation written by Bruno Iksil, the whale himself, on Jan. 26, 2012, as the losses were growing. He called for executing “the trades that make sense.”
He proposed to “sell the forward spread and buy protection on the tightening move,” “use indices and add to existing position,” “go long risk on some belly tranches especially where defaults may realize” and “buy protection on HY and Xover in rallies and turn the position over to monetize volatility.”

Confusing? Don’t feel alone; that was the finding of the Senate investigation report.

“This proposal encompassed multiple, complex credit trading strategies, using jargon that even the relevant actors and regulators could not understand.”

Companies of all sizes have a responsibility to communicate so their customers understand.

Bosses have a responsibility to communicate in ways their people understand.

Not that you’d know it listening to them or reading the content they produce—it’s full of jargon and jargon is the bane of clarity.

So which side are you on—light or dark?

By the way, that choice carries into your personal life in the way you choose to communicate with your family, friends, pets and all other constant or random interactions with anything that breathes.

Flickr image credit: Marina Avila

What a joke. Bloomberg offers up information on which bankers are foregoing salaries and how bonuses are being set up.

For example, Steve Black and William Winters, who head up JPMorgan Chase’s investment banking unit, will forgo cash and stock bonuses in 2008, accepting only 700,000 stock options each.

“The stock will be awarded based on future company performance and must be held for five years, the bank said. The JPMorgan stock appreciation awards were priced at $19.49, the average of the high and low price of trading on Jan. 20, according to Bloomberg data. Shares of JPMorgan fell 21 percent that day and have since climbed to $24.28.”

I love the ‘only’. I just checked and the stock is up another 22 cents.

That means that even if the stock is no higher in 5 years they would still reap a little more than 3.5 million dollars.

Let’s not all cry at once.

There’s a reason that all those hotshot MBAs want to work on Wall Street. It’s because they believe, with reason, that they’ll make low seven figures within a year, two if they’re slow.

The attitude is blamed on Wall Street culture, but it goes further than that.

It goes back to their individual MAP and the deeply seated belief that they deserve it—they are entitled to that compensation; and that MAP certainly isn’t reserved for the new grads, it permeates all levels.

It’s not that they call themselves ‘Masters of the Universe’—it’s that they believe it.

Big problem since MAP is only changeable from the inside out. MAP is also sneaky and will pretend to change and then revert to its normal pattern when no one’s looking.

That means that we, the people, and we, the politicians, better have longer memories going forward than we’ve had in the past.

(Richard is traveling and will return next week.)

Image credit: flickr