In Conversation with my Conservative younger Cousin

The other day, I stumbled into a strange conversation. My younger cousin and I found ourselves in a conversation concerning President Obama’s Health Care initiative. I was strongly for and he as strongly against.

He questioned the constitutionality of such a program – at the same time he acknowledged that he had not read nor knew anything about the program over what Rush L had spewed out on his radio program.

I attempted to disabuse him of such by informing him of the similarity of such programs as Social Security, Medicare and the progressive income tax to Obama’s overall policy direction. He continued to simply parrot Rush’s anti progressive case with clearly wrong information.

After further inquires he admitted that had bought into Rush because of a kind of laziness towards sorting through the "real" and complete arguments, which suggest to me that probably more members of my family and others might be suffering from the same weakness.

So with that in mind I thought to start sketching some thoughts on political "conversations" – why they start the way they do, and some of the strategic outcomes they tend to produce. This post won’t change minds – not my issue – it will be a place I can use to forward folks to, if the occasion arises.

For those that might want to see my conversation documents over a span of either time or resources there is a “list” (presentation tool) of the documents that can be played interactively.

I suggest everyone should join Diigo.com just for the annotation and highlighting which you can used to bring together just those elements of the conversation that are to your special interest. It will be my practice to annotate those elements of my argument that I have written on in other post so that my complete line of reasoning can be traced.

The primary reason I am going to such lengths is that one of my overarching goals for writing a blog is the mastery of social networking tools while in a social networking conversation. This exchange offers a unique opportunity for all my interest to come together.

For those that have been following my post this will come as no surprise. For others of you new to by brand of quirkiness , I am hoping that while you here to express your support on one side of our conversation or the other will take a look around.

There is something very strange about political discussions – all too often those engaged seem to not to be talking to each other but instead they seem to be talking pass each other over and over again. Thomas Sowell in his book “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles” focuses on two opposing visions”

· Constrained – human natures as unchanging and selfish

· Unconstrained – human nature is malleable and perfectible

He offers a fairly convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.

Not that all people are as neatly defined as this might suggest, but even for those that are a closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. So as we look, for instance at whether Barack was being consistent from one audience to the other – some of us see one set of facts while others of us might naturally pick up on a different set.

Visions are what provide consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues. The two groups have different visions of how the world works. Therefore our visions are what counts for making the right judgments on the right things or even if the course needs adjusting – no less the direction.

Visions are like maps that guide us through a tangle of bewildering complexities. Like maps, visions have to leave out many concrete features in order to enable us to focus on a few key paths to our goals. Visions are indispensable-but dangerous, precisely to the extent that we confuse them with reality itself!

Some have said these visions or worldviews are a "pre-analytic cognitive act". It is what one senses or feels before constructing any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory, much less deduced any specific consequences as hypotheses to be tested against evidence.

Enter Richard Rorty and others that argue that there is no such process as “pre-analytic” for him it was thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein that enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature, or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This third way of visioning, I claim for my own. This is especially true for a new generation of leaders that have making changes in our societal arrangements as their goal.

Instead of perfecting or standing static, I suggest that we change but the direction is not determined as a goal to reach but as a “play” in language and a collective meme – a virus of the intellect. What happens is the leader creates an opening for a new way of using old terms that revise the collective meaning of the original term while holding on to some of it earliest elements. This is the play the Barack is really under taking from my point of view. So in this sense, I have envisioned Barack’s suggested “perfecting” as repurposing a term had lost its power.

But no matter what which strategy of visioning we use, as the saying goes “it will never account for "every sparrow's fall".

In Broken Images

David Brooks in his column of 1/19/09 described the cultural changes that unseated long held cultural truths of our collect past. In so doing he reminded me of a poem that for me captures the moment.

 

 

He is quick, thinking in clear images,

I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images,

I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;

Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;

Question the relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;

When the fact fails me, I approve my senses;

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;

I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;

I in a new understanding of my confusion

(Robert Graves)

Bad Faith – Living a Madoff Life!

Evil tries to be complicated. Its methods are tricky--working by indirection and opposites, by mirror-effects and sleight of hand.

Bernard Madoff’s name will surely become a verb recognized as evil incarnate much like Palin is for small mindedness. He was the insider’s man with the plan. Lots of evidence is coming forth spelling out the attack that his system of switches and moves and how they will infect those that trusted him. His is the specific case that proves the general wrong of the current economic system. Madoff summed up his activities with devastating simplicity. He is said to have told the F.B.I. that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.” 

His ongoing enterprise demonstrates the essence of violence,  power  and control, humiliation and degradation on a global scale. Gaia will  always see his acts of hostility and anger and turn her face away from him wherever he goes – even more so will he face loneness.

 

Doing Evil

The construction of all human to human activities are defined in their exchange – reputation in this sense is an investment of exchanges made over time that provides certain benefits at another. Madoff was a singular master at accumulating, moving and maximizing exchanges of trust, even under the conditions of bad faith.

Reputation is the ongoing rant that I’ve focused on – even looking at Mr. Madoff I see the deep themes of reputation and the positive lessons of living life as play within his acts. Evil operates in our current context as the collapse of faith in the markets.  His story is an example of a radical metaphor  - a trapdoor being open onto a chaotic life of Dante's Paradise Lost or the into the light of Constantin’s Sculpture .

 

In describing evil there are several views that feed into its construction. To consider evil in a more dramatic way literary text are best suited, we simply need to listen to Goethe's Faust. When Faust ask his visitor who he is, he answers,

The spirit I, that endlessly denies

And rightly too; for all that comes to birth

Is fit for overthrow, as nothing worth;

Wherefore the worlds were better sterilized;

Thus all that's here as Evil recognized

Is gain to me, and downfall, ruin, sin,

The very element I prosper in.

This destruction is not a means to any positive aim – like rape is not intended for procreation. The visitor is simply anti-life. Whatever is arising, he is against it. His element is mere refusal. Original Sin notwithstanding, does this super natural corruption make our natural world its home, or are there other ways to explain this refusal of good.

Mark Twain’s “Letters from Earth” has Satan the Archangel pose the question of free will -

“What shall you do with them, Divine One?”

Put into each individual, in differing shades and degrees, all the various Moral Qualities, in mass, that have been distributed, a single distinguishing characteristic at a time, among the nonspeaking animal world –courage, cowardice, ferocity, gentleness, fairness, justice, cunning, treachery, magnanimity, cruelty, malice, malignity, lust, mercy, pity, purity, selfishness, sweetness, honor, love, hate, baseness, nobility, loyalty, falsity, veracity, untruthfulness –each human being shall have all of these in him, and they will constitute his nature. In some, there will be high and fine characteristics which submerge the evil ones and those will be called good men; in others the evil characteristics will have dominion, and those will be called bad men.

It was Satan’s sarcasm in wondering “whether they are worth the trouble” that got him banished to Earth for a “celestial day”. So should we question “free will’s” position in the scheme of things - in the same manner as Satan?

Some have and continue to hold that there are no supernatural or preordained causes stemming from our nature that explain evil such as Madoff, but instead believe the phenomena of evil is caused from external pressures – systems, buildings, market mechanics, or geography. Now obviously there are powerful outside causes. There are physical pains, diseases, economic shortages and dangers, procedures of obedience --everything that counts as "natural evil" – yet, his life was not one that faced no more than anyone else, as such, in fact, his has been a long life of privilege and position – maybe too much so.

So was there cultural factors--bad example, bad adaptation, bad teaching, and bad organization. One of the basic tenets of his religious and cultural tradition is the caring for orphans and widows – the mission of so many of the foundations that entrusted him with their endowments. But these cultural causes should have stood as a bulwark to prevent this behavior – he had the benefits of good purposes so we must still ask, how did he become corrupted so profoundly?

Bad Faith – The Lie I Tell Myself

Jean-Paul Sartre’s name for the state of mind where Madoff lies to himself – miss stating the good for the evil he actually committed: Bad Faith. Some of our inner lies are trivial and harmless: I know that I am going to be late if I don’t leave now, but I carry on as if I think there is plenty of time. Denying I am in Bad Faith: I am being deliberately late, but I allow myself to believe I am unaware of it. When someone complains, I can say: ‘My goodness, I never noticed the time.’ Sartre points out how weird this self-deception is’…the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same’. The liar is also the victim. In Bad Faith, I am pretending to be two different people; I am myself, but I am also another person. Neither is responsible for how I seem to have acted.

But the real evil of Bad Faith isn’t the little moments of self- deception. Madoff’s inner voice spoke not only to him but what others seem to asking - to a whole way of living, choices both he and others made in the life of consumerism, and the Bad Faith that infects our economic system.  Was Madoff seduced to demonstrate his mastery over our economic system linking and winking its desire to be taken? Even groups of well heeled Board of Directors acting in the context of groupthink wink their approval. As Sartre puts it, in sadness, anger and violence - ’A person can live in bad faith’. We as a people have lived our last forty or so years as if we weren’t the person we really are. If the lies really work, then when other people confront us with our actions, we call out with genuinely felt disbelief and outrage. The concept of Bad Faith is an example of the wider existential idea, that nothing can relieve us of the burden of responsibility for our lives and our actions.

So within Bad Faith we recognize both the refusal of Mephistopheles and the deception of Satan. Therefore the evil we encounter is ourselves in denial of our responsibility.  We all sold and purchased the idea that we could have things that are not there. Then to resist evil is to heighten our sense of personal integrity.

Before Celebrating Barack’s Victory

What is most difficult is to be still. I have dared to take on the challenge of Hope. I have exulted in my strength and forestalled the apathy of irony and the procrastination in cleverness. Now I seek the calmness of this moment’s Grace. Tonight’s celebration not yet  earned - Barack’s victory or defeat will bring a new vista of change - both large and small that much closer. The notion of a valorized victim will be smashed up against this race for 44^th President’s reign. Despite all the claims, no memory of those nagging days of doubt – blackness – temperament – resolve – organization: He has mastered being still.

There are great changes that come about in the darkest hours where there is, despite my claims, no memory of hope and the encircling gloom of Barack’s defeat is terrifying to the heart. It is this tragic possibility where my mind enacts this drama between hope and disappointment. Calmness in the midst of chaos, serenity in the midst of feverish activity is on one side. On the other is my ego that takes pride in climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter, feeding on the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of community, suffering a hunger in my soul with a glint of haughtiness.

All the while I am reassured that Barak knows the secret that all great commanders know, the secret he revealed in financial crisis, that the soul that is calm with controlled emotion is performing an act of faith – the battle continues.

To encounter these forces Barack has shown me that I must remember the way back into the very center of my being, to that eternal fountain of replenishment. For it is only there that my despair of his losing can be comforted. Otherwise we block, frustrate, and delay, giving over to a frantic spirit and a mind gutted with panic – our will can not feed our heart.

It is a hard lesson; perhaps it should be an easy one!

Consider: Barack’s vision, however vague, of your own sense of godhood, community, and collaboration. Defeat or victorious, we need not stay bewildered, tired, or impatient but be willing to be more and go faster. It is not him, but it is us that must carry the fight. He has shown and we must take up to expand our limited glimpses. But what is an hour, week, a month, yea, even 8 years? In the deep, inner quietness of my spirit, time stands still—before and after are lost in NOW. There is no movement, no action, even the outer edges of awareness blend into the surrounding calm.

It is this calmness that now you must carry with you into the maelstrom of your hectic days and hungers. Let it be remembered that Grace is your nourishing companion. It is your innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred YES.

Reputation and Customer Experience

All to often firms express the value for serving their customer based on hype. Much has been made about Comcast and other high contact firms - in this sense high contact means the firm provides key services - like phone, internet, banking, food, energy or other commodities - that most of us require to exist in this modern world.

This video describes somewhat sarcastically the pain we have all felt. What this video shows is the ease to which a customer can document their reasons for hitting a firms reputation.

Reputation Formula and ROI

Reputation = experience + actions + history + people

What the formula stresses is that it should be read from people back to experience. The most important method that a leader needs to use to convey this process is to manage relationships between the organization with the their stakeholders, including its customers. Over time this is how to manage reputation, to try and do so, especially in social media takes a consistent strategy

Strong Relationships = trust, commitment, satisfaction, control mutuality, exchange / control. It is easies to explained that most relationship start with the firm - stakeholder exchange, such as money for investment, product, or other exchanges but the important relationship to create is the communal relationship because its about loyalty.

With these exchanges in mind the following is a new way to define ROI

7 Steps of Reputational ROI

1. Define the”R” - define the expected results
2. Define the “I” - what’s the investment
3. Understand your audiences and what motivates them
4. Define the metrics
5. Determine what you are benchmarking
6. Pick a tool to analyze the data
7. Then to do the “so what"

Blogged with the Flock Browser

A Conversation On Leadership

A conversation about leadership at the Harvard Business School centennial celebration with John Doerr - venture capitalist, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Jeffrey Immelt - chairman and CEO, General Electric, Anand Mahindra - vice-chairman and managing director, Mahindra & Mahindra, Meg Whitman - former CEO, Ebay and James Wolfensohn - former president of the World Bank

The conversation ranged from the global difficulty that American Leaders face - the nature of the education that leaders should accrue in order to face the situations that we face - the need for innovation to be supported by government and the reality that government will have to grow just to cope with the world's financial situation.

Where Are the Good Americans!!

Last week Sarah Palin made a comment in North Carolina telling her audience that they represented the good Americans - but maybe she's right - Jon Daily has a view you should listen to.

Tina - Sarah - On SNL

The true art of a parody is to miss the truth slightly - watching Tina then Sarah, well maybe you can tell the difference

TIPS for Reputation & Finance for the Small Business

The recent credit crisis is just a reminder of the importance on every organization's leadership: reputation management. This is where having a sound reputation strategy that you can use to navigate through turbulent times to calm jingled nerves.

Remember that how your reputation functions: it generates perceptions among employees, customers, investors, competitors, and the general public about what your company is, what it does, what it stands for. These perceptions stabilize inter- actions between you firm and its publics.

Don’t hesitate to contact the Reputationist for objective guidance in helping you make intelligent reputation decisions for the future of your business. In the meantime, below are some tips to help you assess your current reputation and financial condition and start re­thinking your business plan to face the current economic challenges.

1. Don’t panic! It’s difficult to make sound decisions if you do. To get a better sense of where you stand, begin by reviewing your position with those who are most alert to your firm’s activities, which includes your finances and anticipated cash needs. Are they both in line with your business’s short-term needs, goals and risk tolerance?

2. Take a fresh look at your methods of communication with your firm’s ambassadors, on one hand. On the other, your monthly income and expenses. Have you been meeting your budgeted projections? How much of a drop in dialogue have your messages and are they closely tied to the revenues? Can your business withstand a dip in either and for how long? What are your cash-flow needs for the next 90 to 120 days? Or 120 to 180 days? Do you have sufficient cash reserves for the next 30 to 60 days?

3. Check with your lenders on the status of your financial reputation - your credit lines. Are you in compliance with their terms? Will your bank renew their commitments at similar amounts, rates and terms?

4. Reduce your reliance on credit by disciplining your spending.

5. Refocus on your balance sheet and how much credit you are extending to your customers – are their reputations in tack?

6. If your credit lines are frozen or at their maximum limits, consider which of vendors you have the strongest reputation with to meet with and working out a schedule of partial payments that would allow continued delivery of critical materials and supplies.

7. Look into alternative types of financing. Some to be considered are loans on life insurance policies, loans from key customers that rely on your business for their materials and supplies or from labor unions, local development agencies or the U.S. Small Business Administration.

8. Keep an eye on your accounts receivable. Watch for new patterns of slow payments and follow up immediately. Review your largest and riskiest accounts to determine whether credit constraint or economic slowdown will affect their ability to pay you - keep receivables aging current at all times.

9. Manage accounts payable more closely. Forfeiting early pay discounts may be more advantageous in preserving cash that may be needed for critical items. Keep payables aging current at all times because that’s an important tool for managing cash

10. Analyze your expenses and determine which ones can be controlled. Can you reduce spending in any areas to put less of a burden on your cash-flow needs? As necessary, communicate to staff/team members about the need to tighten spending. If you are a manufacturer, review inventory management practices. Are there opportunities to reduce your on-hand inventory? Service companies should make sure they’re capturing all their billable hours and invoicing promptly. Have you billed all your contractual items? How about all your pass-through expenses, such as billable third-party services and travel and living expenses?

11. Consider ways to pass your increased costs (i.e., fuel expense) on to your customers.

12. Check the safety of any cash deposits you have. On October 3, 2008 the FDIC deposit insurance was temporarily raised from $100,000 to $250,000 per depositor through December 31, 2009. If you have more than $250,000 in any one bank, move the excess to another FDIC insured bank. Consider investments such as CDARs (Certificates of Deposit Account Registry) to spread the risk of short- to medium-term cash you may have invested in CDs.

13. Don’t engage in panic selling of your investments. Make sure your portfolio is diversified and in accordance with your risk tolerance.

14. Come up with a plan NOW to respond to future declines in revenues, before they actually occur. Re-think your business strategies and update projections. Review your product/service lines to identify the most profitable items and determine how to leverage for future growth in profits.

15. Contact your good customers – continue to build your reputation. Even casual discussions can lead to new business opportunities.

16. Review all your insurance coverage, particularly any from companies with weak balance sheets. Be careful not to surrender a policy, as securing new coverage might require underwriting that can affect your coverage.

17. Calm your employees’ fears about how this crisis will affect the company, their jobs and their retirement or other benefit plans. Speculation and gossip are counterproductive, so it’s better to address their concerns directly.

For help in understanding some of the issues facing small business, you can turn to the CPA profession’s free Financial Literacy Web site for consumers, http://www.360financialliteracy.org. It offers tools and tips to help you make important decisions for your business and your own personal financial planning needs.

Finally, remain focused on your own advantages. Remember that:

Small businesses have greater flexibility and can more easily adjust to changes in the economy than their larger counterparts by taking advantage the reputation built up.

Small business owners can use the recent crisis as an opportunity to buckle down, refocus, assess and make their company more financially sound, disciplined and less reliant on credit.

During tough times, it’s important to maintain communication with our firm, your trusted adviser. Remember that you are not alone. We know and understand your business and the challenges you face, and we can work with you to navigate these turbulent times. We can help you gauge your current situation in the wake of recent market events and create a sound business plan in response. Contact us today for expert advice on how to maintain your company’s success.