Saturday we looked at some incongruous actions and compensation of various CEOs and it reminded me of something I read a year or so ago, so I went looking and found it. Amazing!
I realize that housing is a touchy subject these days, but over the last few decade as houses got bigger and bigger I found it weirder and weirder.
There’s no way to ever convince me that any family or person, really needs a seven thousand-plus square foot house in order to live comfortably—let alone 10,000 and up.
The item I remembered article was an UpFront blurb in Business Week that I found hilarious.
The research was done by Finance professors David Yermack of New York University and Crocker Liu of Arizona State University and their conclusions casts housing excess in a new light.
The bigger or pricier the house…the greater the risk of lackluster shares.
If [the CEO] buys a big mansion, sell the stock. Many of these guys have been super performers, but at some point that stops, and they reap the benefits.
Seems reasonable to me.
Remember the old saying? Something about boys and the price of their toys.
Seems like the toys’ values are going up, while the boys’ values (and value) are decreasing. (Note: As used here, “boys” is genderless.)
I doubt that the current housing market has changed that particular mindset.
So the next time you go to invest, be sure to plug in the size of the CEOs home when evaluating a company and, thinking about it, the same probably applies to the entire C suite.
Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is Climate Change, so I asked Chris Blackman, who is a strategic consultant specializing finding both private and public funding in the green and clean technology sector, to offer her thoughts on a subject that enrages me every time it comes up—which is more and more often. The subject is the sacrificing of one limited resource for the sake of another.
From Chris…
Would you choose to go hungry and thirsty so that you could have energy?
To biomass’ benefit the water it consumes is reused over and over again, but turning waste to energy using the aerobic digestion method has a 1:1 ratio—one ton of waste requires one ton of water to process that waste.
In some ways, we have adopted an anything goes approach to producing some green energy and it seems a bit deja vu: using oil products to produce other energy forms.
In this case, it is even worse—it is not only the environmental impact but also the real possibility of going thirsty or hungry if we use our drinking or irrigation water to produce energy.
A recent New York Times article revealed that a solar power company dangled the opportunity to create hundreds of new jobs in a desert community at the cost of “consuming 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of the desert valley’s available water.”
All that community needs to do is to look at the legal battle being waged right now amongst the states that have access to the Colorado river to vividly understand why they should not sell their water rights, in the hopes of procuring water from their neighbors.
Already there are many parts of the country in which the water is already unusable in spite of the Clean Water Act.
In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. … the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.
I am not in any way advocating stopping our investments in clean and green energy; however, it is tunnel vision to invest in clean energy at the cost of clean water.
There are places in this country better suited, where the solar and water requirements are better aligned: Florida and the rest of the Southeast, at least in most years. (See Chris’ post on how dark, rainy Germany used US-invented technology to become a global solar leader.)
The opening question may seem melodramatic, but I wonder what the former Soviet Republic would give today to have the Aral Sea back, since today it is mostly a dry lifeless bed of blowing salt.
Was its loss, and the salt poisoning of the surrounding lands, worth the measly two decades of cotton they produced while depleting its water sources? The environmental and economic toll of the Aral Sea’s destruction could end up being as costly as Chernobyl.
That is not melodrama, that is precedent.
Want more proof? T. Boon Pickens, who isn’t known for his ‘friend of the community’ attitudes, is betting 100 million dollars that water is the new oil.
‘Oh Father, spare me the need to eat and drink so that I may use these resources for electricity’ – who would ever pray for that?
We still don’t get “the vision thing.”
When will we begin to approach our economy and the environment as a single integrated whole?
When will we balance out the true costs and benefits of our activities?
When will the options we choose from include using less, instead of always inventing new ways to consume more?
Company culture is a hot topic in the business press; CEOs are working to foster “cultures of innovation;” and culture is being lauded or blamed for a variety of happenings.
The bird’s eye view of what’s important in culture is as varied as the executives, academics, pundits, media and other experts who expound on the subject.
But what about the worm’s eye view—what do plain vanilla employees think and want? It’s important, since without them there is no company.
It used to be when I talked with people that it was easier for them to articulate the attitudes and behaviors they didn’t want to encounter in the workplace.
Even today, with a far more savvy and sophisticated workforce, people still tend to focus first on what they don’t want:
Too much politics: personal, group, or in senior management.
Unnecessary bureaucracy.
Poor management practices such as erratic management; intimidation; micro-management; belittling or contemptuous treatment; poor scheduling; no loyalty; the attitude that “we don’t have enough time to do it right but we have enough time to do it over;” workaholism; etc.
Any form of harassment, whether overt or covert
A generally negative attitude, i.e., the glass is half empty
Arrogance or an elitist attitude.
An unwillingness (at whatever level) to seek and implement the compromises necessary to meet most of the organization’s needs within the required timeframe.
But when you get them to focus on the positives, the sophisticated and savvier mindset of today’s workforce is even more obvious when discussing the factors they desire.
Here are some of the high points that people say they want for themselves and from their managers and company:
The opportunity to truly “make a difference.”
To be treated fairly.
To trust the management and be trusted by them.
To embrace the idea that work can and should be fun.
Accurate prioritizing of company, team, and individual goals while keeping them synergistic.
A positive “can-do” attitude (aggressive, but realistic—the glass is half-full).
Continuing development and quality improvement in people, products and services, and processes.
Committing to employees, customers, and investors—and meeting those commitments.
An open, accurate, company-wide flow of information starting from the top.
An environment that encourages people to reach their full potential, professionally and personally.
A conscious effort to stamp out “not invented here” syndrome (in all its varied forms) so as to not waste time reinventing the wheel.
There’s great value in this worm’s eye view. By eliminating what employees don’t like, and giving them what they want, you create a foundation on which to build the kind of innovative, profitable culture—the kind craved by investors, customers, and the rest of the outside world.
Yesterday I shared quotes from Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos that focused on entrepreneurial topics, especially stock and its price.
Today, we’re going to look at Bezos’ vision for Amazon marketing.
Let’s start with what you thought of the last Amazon ad you saw. You’re probably scratching your head and thinking that it wasn’t very good, since you don’t remember it.
There’s nothing wrong with your memory or the ad, for that matter, because there was no ad.
“Instead of shelling out big bucks for lavish trade shows and TV and magazine ads, Amazon pours money into technology for its Web site, distribution capability, and good deals on shipping. … “It is pretty unprecedented that their brand has ascended so quickly without a large marketing budget,” says Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer at brand consultant Landor Associates. “It’s not about splaying their logo everywhere. They are all about ease of use.”
Amazon has done well in the recession for the very reasons that Wall Street lambasted them after the dot com bubble burst.
Wall Street wanted short-term profits, while Bezos focused on the long-term.
When I was looking for yesterday’s quotes, I also found these two and they say it all.
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.”
It takes enormous strength of character to stay focused on the future when investors are pounding on you to focus on immediate returns.
Too many CEOs sell their company’s future by focusing on keeping investors, analysts and the media happy in the short-term.
I want to share three comments from Jeff Bezos today, because tomorrow’s post is about him.
They all focus on the financial side and point up the great difference between Bezos and many other CEOs when it comes to money and stock.
If Bezos is anything he is pragmatic and real—no BS. And that is just as true when he is talking about entrepreneurial topics as about his business.
The truth in this comment has only increased over the years and will continue into the future. “Good ideas will always get funded, so that’s not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.”
“It’s part of the territory with Internet stocks, that kind of volatility. It can be up 30 percent one month, it can be down 30 percent in a month, and a minute spent thinking about the short-term stock price is a minute wasted.” Obviously, Bezos never wasted any minutes on the subject.
If you’ve followed Amazon at all, you know that every time Bezos invested in better technology or added product lines Wall Street predicted its imminent demise. Even today, after a decade of success, the analysts question Amazon’s every move.
Bezos takes it in stride, still focusing on the long term and customer satisfaction, as he has all along.
“No. I’ve taken plenty of criticism, but it’s always been about our stock price and never about our customer experience. After the bubble burst, I would sit down with our harshest critics, and at the end of the meeting they would say, “I’m a huge customer.” You know that when your harshest critics are among your best customers, you can’t be doing that badly.”
Join me tomorrow for a look at Bezos’ approach to nonmarkteing.
Will the energy grid replace existing sources of power—oil, coal, gas, and nuclear—with renewable energy? Currently, our energy is finite and polluting yet highly efficient. And all of the players in the market, producers and consumers, recognize the need to overcome these limitations.
Solar energy accounts for only 0.003% of energy consumption in the US today and that is projected to increase to 2% by 2025. That kind of miniscule percent of the overall energy consumed is not specific to solar energy. Wind, bio-mass and geothermal heat all give a negligible contribution to the US’s power supply.
The players in the market have one requirement of energy: it must be reliable at all times. Oil and coal are reliable. And from what I could see at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference, oil and coal companies are not going to allow their market shares to erode without putting up a fight and having their case heard. Chris Poirier, CEO of CoalTek, emphasized to the audience: coal in particular exists here in the US in abundance; coal companies are developing cleaner versions of this resource.
Much is made of “clean coal” but at the end of the day, clean coal is an oxymoron. Coal is a disaster at every stage of its production.
To mine coal, currently the companies raze our mountains to procure the coal. What they absolutely never want to discuss is that they are a highly subsidized industry: all of the energy used to transport the coal over vast distances is subsidized.
But probably the gravest problem of using coal as an energy source is that it emits more carbon dioxide than any other fuel and those carbons are much more polluting because the carbon molecule in coal is larger.
According to John Woolard, CEO of BrightSource Energy, the only way that we can overcome the limitations of going completely green and clean is if we take a localized approach to integrating the grid. That requires the grid to receive energy locally: solar power from Southern California and the Western states, wind from the Mid-West states, tidal power from the coastal states, etc.
That is a smart way of consuming energy. However, what do cleaner oil and coal have in common? The infrastructure already exists for these products. The grid already runs on oil and coal.
How will consumers and the US government react to the fact that this resource resides in abundance in this country and that we wouldn’t have to pay to overhaul our infrastructure to continue to use it?
For argument’s sake, let’s suppose that all renewable energies will have the same level of projected involvement as solar will in 2025, renewable energies would capture about 15% of the market.
Hopefully this is an ineffective way of looking at the situation as nothing is static and clean and green tech companies could possibly improve the amount of energy they generate exponentially in the future.
This all begs the question: can green and clean tech survive and even thrive without national policies to encourage their adoption?
I fear that due to the propaganda of coal being cleaner from the coal companies and the lack of capital investment and political incentives from the government to upgrade our infrastructure we will not replace coal and oil in our grid with renewable energies.
Remember the old line “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”
It’s not true. Most people who go into teaching do it because they have a true passion—at least when they start.
But passion is hard to sustain when all you hear is that
you are too easy/hard;
you give too much/not enough homework;
you too often receive little-to-no respect from parents, kids, administrators and even your colleagues;
more time is spent on politics than lesson plans;
you spend more time teaching basic manners than educating; and
your de facto hourly pay rate is around minimum wage in spite of a 9 month work year.
Some manage it and they are the ones who truly leave their mark.
Most of us remember the teacher(s) who really touched us, who opened our eyes and helped us see the world differently.
And we remember the worst we had, but the majority fall in-between and become a blur.
some of the best come to teaching from other successful careers.
One of the highest profile of these is Tom Bloch, who left H&R Block (the family business founded by his father) after 18 years, five as President, and a salary of nearly a million a year to teach math at an inner-city middle school in Kansas City, because he wanted to make a difference—and he has.
Listen to this interview and then read his story in Stand for the Best. Share it; maybe it will inspire others to apply their passion to teaching, but if nothing else, perhaps it will encourage them reconsider their own attitude towards teachers.
There are many types of technology; Going Green brings together those active in what is called green tech and clean tech. Those fields are of critical interest for many reasons, to I prevailed on Chris Blackman to attend and share her impressions with you.
About Chris
Chris is a strategic consultant specializing in the positioning of clients for the acquisition of capital – private and public sources of funding – in the green and clean technology sector. Chris is a graduate of Columbia University having studied Political Science and International Relations. To date, Chris has written proposals in the green and clean tech space for a variety of water projects but is interested in a wide variety of topics. Her interest is piqued when there are projects at the intersection where green and clean tech meets the infrastructure.
Chris will be looking especially hard at these pressing questions:
What is being done in the green and clean tech space?
Who is financing the new startups and which kinds of startups are receiving funding?
What will be the impact of funding clean tech companies in the United States?
About the conference
AlwaysOn’s Going Green, founded by Tony Perkins of RedHerring repute, is a three day conference in the San Francisco Bay area that explores who is in the green and clean tech space and who is funding what in its myriad sectors. The conference can be viewed daily for free; if you have a webcam and mic you can be seen, join in and ask questions.
This year’s keynote speaker for the opening ceremony was R. James Woolsey. The former cabinet member of the Clinton administration analyzed the need for green technologies that continue to use existing infrastructure and the importance of developing green and clean technologies, which encourage local self-sufficiency on the community level.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Saturday we looked at some incongruous actions and compensation of various CEOs and it reminded me of something I read a year or so ago, so I went looking and found it. Amazing!
Company culture is a hot topic in the business press; CEOs are working to foster “cultures of innovation;” and culture is being lauded or blamed for a variety of happenings.
Yesterday I shared quotes from Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos that focused on entrepreneurial topics, especially stock and its price.
I want to share three comments from Jeff Bezos today, because tomorrow’s post is about him.
