5. Create your own luck. Create your own job desc­rip­tion. None of the best jobs in large cor­po­ra­tion are ever crea­ted by your boss. They’re crea­ted by you taking the ini­tia­tive. And there’s a defi­nite art to that. ~ evil plans and big companies | Gapingvoid.

It was the second part that caught my eye…One of the things I always said when I was at Freeman was that the minute they came up with a job description for whatever job title I had at the moment it was time to change my title. For the longest, I was able to gety away with that policy. My General Managers valued my contribution and the way I would work across department boundaries. My experience and my talents and skills allowed me to fit in with every department within our local branch. Sadly for me, managers change and the corporate culture became defined by MBA graduates. Everything must fit within the corporate definition. Anything that doesn’t is culled…

So in the end I was culled…And the company posted it’s worst year ever fiscally. The manager who didn’t value my talents is gone…Also culled. And the company goes forward into the third generation of management.I begin to believe the analysis of my cousin with the double degree…Most companies fail when the scond generation takes over the reins…Almost none make it to the third…It was after we had that conversation that I realized that Freeman, though having a second generation in the top seat, still relied on the first generation of upper management. As I watched those managers retire the feel of the company changed. More credit was placed in academic degrees, less attention was placed on the benefits of long experience. Another change, with the hiring of more and more MBA executives, there was a push to free up Freeman stock in the Freeman ESOP…Making all of us long-term employees a problem in their recruiting…I enjoyed a long, friend filled relationship with the company… I wish them luck.

For the record The list for those that don’t want to follow the links…

1. An EVIL PLAN’S suc­cess is 90% the peo­ple around you.
2. If your EVIL PLAN is not alig­ned with what your com­pany is doing, you have two choi­ces.
3. Patience is a vir­tue.
4. Risk.
5. Create your own luck. Create your own job desc­rip­tion.
6. Prac­tice. Fail.

To see the full list with all of the paragraphs and not just the first sentences…Follow the link: evil plans and big companies | Gapingvoid.

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1. Earth Day 2009
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So plans have changed, but life goes on. And funny as it may seem, the early boot out the door will mean that my original timetable has a better than even chance of being possible round the time I wanted to make the changes.

Almost every day now, Sherry comes home from work and says something to the effect that she “wants to pack up and just go…NOW”. A change in attitude, a change in latitude, a change in altitude…All three are calling. We have never lived in a place with seasons and that is what is calling me this Earth Day.

I long for a place where shorts and flip flops are not winter attire. Where long sleeved shirts don’t hang in the closet for 11 months each year. And when I say long sleeved shirts I am talking tee shirts here not flannels. I don’t think I put on a jacket at all last winter…Much less a coat.

Well, I am going to get out this Earth Day and plant some vegetables to start a new garden. Home grown and local vegetables, not a complete change, but a start to something…New…Maybe.

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Over the centuries, the United States has been most conspicuous for one trait: manic energy. Americans work longer hours than any other people. We switch jobs more frequently, move more often, earn more and consume more.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Commercial Republic – NYTimes.com.

From that opening thought David Brooks spins off in a business centric version of the American Myth. In his version it was the abundance of the frontier that called out to the American myth of success for everyone who tried. It seems to me that when the history of the American people is studied realistically, most people didn’t leave their “home” areas unless they were leaving something behind. For some, it was debts they left behind. Others left whole families, kith and kin.

Studying the history of American business successes leads one to wonder at the love affair we have with the myth of the self made man. Very few of the real success stories in this country have a thread of the moralistic ideals we are led to believe underlie our very national psyche. America prides itself on the ideal that anyone can rise to the top. We calibrate the few examples we are given. Yet most Americans will not rise above the class level to which they were born.

And its not the idealistic who do win up the ladder. No, the majority who manage to pull themselves up the ladder of success, do so at the expense of those around them. They stretch the meaning of the law even if they meet the letter. They use every trick and loophole to get a jump up.

Is there any reason then to be surprised at the excesses of the business and political sector in the last decade. It was only with societal regulation, that the business sector had been kept from allowing greed to run rampant over basic society mandated morality. The deregulation of the past two decades, the consolidation of whole economic sectors into a very few corporate hands, the wholesale bribery of public officials via lobbying firms and the handouts of favors and campaign funds have led us to this economic crisis. It’s not an American crisis, even though we led the way, it’s a worldwide crisis.

We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended. The public culture is dominated by one downbeat story after another as members of the educated class explore and enjoy the humiliation of the capitalist vulgarians.

Mr. Brook’s assertion that risk is out of favor is a bit ingenuous, most Americans are not adverse to risk. We live with it in our daily lives. We could die in our daily commute (if we still have a daily commute). It’s the abrogation of risk onto the taxpayer we have problems with. It’s the disingenuous use of the tax laws that allow bonus payments to be deducted from the corporate tax liability, but not the excessive salaries that those bonuses  actually equate to. Then the audacity of these financial titans to reward themselves for their abuse of the American trust by taking taxpayer money to pay bonuses to the very people who brought down the house…Get real.

If anything comes from this era of American history, I only hope the lessons learned last a bit longer than the last batch. All of this returning to the school of hard knocks isn’t really what I had in mind when I wanted a continuing education that would last a lifetime…

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I’ve been wondering why the impact of the financial crisis on the overall retirement “system” hasn’t gotten more attention in the media. We already knew the system was in bad shape before September 2008. According to the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, in 2007, only 60.9% of households where the head of household was age 55-64 had retirement accounts . . . and their median retirement balance was $98,000. Given that the stock market has fallen by over 50% from its October 2007 peak – and that, for decades, the standard investment advice has been that stocks do better than any other asset class in the long term – we would be lucky if that median balance were more than $70,000 today.

The Bloomberg article linked to above describes the fragile state of state and local pension systems. These systems suffer from two major problems today. One is that even if they had been managed in a reasonable way, the fall in asset prices over the last year would have blown a huge hole in their long-term solvency.

via The Biggest Story of the Week « The Baseline Scenario.

Over a year ago I began to tell the folks in my office to move their money out of the stock funds and get them into interest accounts…No body listened. For the last year all of the investment advice I have seen has been to stay put in your stock funds…Oh and keep putting your new contributions there also. People get paid well to be so wrong…Thank god I didn’t listen. Thank god the country didn’t listen while George W spent his “political capital” pushing the privatization of social security. Thank god I got out of the market in December of 2007…It wasn’t much, but if I’d stayed put, it’d be a lot less and I wont be adding to it any time soon…

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