Category Archives: Business & Marketing

Forrest Gump on the bailout

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This showed up in my in-box and I don’t know the source or the author but will be happy to properly attribute if anyone knows.

“Mortgage Backed Securities are like boxes of chocolates. Criminals on Wall Street stole a few chocolates from the boxes and replaced them with turds. Their criminal buddies at Standard & Poor rated these boxes AAA Investment Grade chocolates. These boxes were then sold all over the world to investors. Eventually somebody bites into a turd and discovers the crime. Suddenly nobody trusts American chocolates anymore worldwide.”

“Hank Paulson now wants the American taxpayers to buy up and hold all these boxes of turd-infested chocolates for $700 billion dollars until the market for turds returns to normal. Meanwhile, Hank’s buddies, the Wall Street criminals who stole all the good chocolates are not being investigated, arrested, or indicted.”

Mama always said: ‘Sniff the chocolates first, Forrest’.

Quote of the day from a fund manager: ‘This is worse than a divorce… I’ve lost half of my net worth and I still have my wife..’

And one more perspective:

“Back in 1990, the Government seized the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada for tax evasion and, as required by law, tried to run it. They failed and it closed. Now we are trusting the economy of our country to a pack of nit-wits who couldn’t make money running a whore house and selling booze?”

Fortune: “The genius behind Steve”

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Steve Jobs gets a fair share of the credit for the cool products Apple produces. The company is also extremely efficient and well operated and much of the credit for that goes to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. For a look behind the scenes of the well-oiled machine that is Apple, check out this article in the November issue of Fortune. The following excerpt will get you started:

“Tim cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran – he’d worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years – with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.

“This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”

Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.”

Scott Adams: Recession

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“No one wants the economy to crumble. But having a reason to love your neighbor a little better doesn’t suck. If we can feed everyone – and I think we can – things will be fine. And as I have said here before, some kid in a garage has already figured a way out of this.”

–Scott Adams Blog

Recession: Not necessarily a bad thing

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Michael S. Hyatt has compiled a list of ten benefits of the current recession:

   1. It causes you to get more creative.
   2. It forces you to make the tough decisions.
   3. It thins out the competition.
   4. It makes you realize you can’t take anything for granted.
   5. It reminds you that real wealth isn’t about the stuff you own.
   6. It fosters out-of-the-box thinking.
   7. It makes it easier to abandon business-as-usual.
   8. It brings you back to the basics.
   9. It accelerates change.
  10. It causes you to be less wasteful.

"While you may not be able to control what happens with the economy, you can control your own mental focus. Usually, this determines whether you feel anxiety and fear or peace and hope."

Seth: Be careful who you work for

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“The single most important marketing decision most people make is also the one we spend precious little time on: where you work.

Think about this for a second. Your boss and your job determine not only what you do all day, but what you learn and who you interact with. Where you work is what you market.

If you want to become the kind of person that any company would kill to have as an employee, you need to be the kind of employee that’s really picky about who you align with.”

Seth Godin is the only blogger I quote so frequently I had to create a category for those posts. The nuggets above are from a longer post I encourage you to read.

I’ve only worked for two companies in my adult life and they’ve both been great. And if that’s important in good times, it’s true in spades in tough times.