People are jumpy right now

Posted on August 14, 2021 by Stan

You’ve probably noticed it. My latest indicator was an experience at the shipping store this morning with Cheri. While she went in to send a package to her nephew, I stayed outside with the bikes.

Enjoying the lack of commitments or deadlines in the day, I stood under a shade tree and day-dreamed. My gaze settled on a leaf on the sidewalk. Wait. That’s not a leaf. It’s a twenty dollar bill.

I picked it up, noticing that it was near a car parked at the curb. So I walked into the shipping store and raised my voice through my mask so I could be heard, “Anybody in here own the white VW parked outside?”

The five customers and two clerks snapped their heads towards me. Everybody leaned away, their shoulders hunched up a bit. I caused the whole group to flinch.

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In praise of taxes

Posted on June 18, 2021 by Stan

In the Judeo-Christian traditions there is a concept of “tithing”. The idea is that the collective contribution to the institution that represents the spiritual foundation of its people is a privilege and a duty. To support this idea, there are references in the Bible that describe tithing as “putting God first” in one’s life, since it is believed that God is the reason why a person earned what they earned. Since God presumably needs no income, the tithing is used by that religious organization to further spiritual work on Earth, for the people who benefit from it. A church takes the tithing to accomplish things that a single person or family could not do on their own, such as create a school, build a church, provide support for the poor, create community events that form the glue of the congregation, etc.

A similar approach to financing large endeavors was the hallmark of monarchies for hundreds of years. The royal families owned everything. They taxed the people who were allowed to live on the royal lands as a kind of rent. The taxes collected were then used to pay for the common defense, explore the New World, build nice palaces and gardens, etc. While taxes and tithing are based on different concepts of authority (King or Queen on one hand, God on the other), the underlying premise was that the amounts paid were owed, and that they allowed accomplishments that could only be achieved through collective contribution of resources.

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Wealth inequality is not so simple

Posted on May 14, 2021 by Stan

The dichotomy between the trajectory of the stock market over the last year and the state of the general economy in the U.S. has been the subject of many a pundit’s ruminations. There are many articles about the unfair advantage of the wealthy. The conclusion is that the disparate economic experience of the pandemic is evidence of systemic forces that ensure the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. As I read them, it seems something is missing from the analyses.

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“Culture” is hot right now

Posted on May 7, 2021 by Stan

I was speaking recently with the CEO of a successful, growing e-commerce services company. The subject was organizational culture, and how to consciously create it. Coincidentally, another call a day later with the CFO of a 2,000 person biotech company on the East Coast was about the exact same thing.

It seems that the attention being paid to the concept of “culture” in a business has never been higher, since the point where it was introduced by the founder of modern management theory, Peter Drucker, in 2006. Now, each day a new service firm is created to support what appears to be a growing market for guidance in building a desired culture.

It’s always been a critical element of why some organizations endure and others don’t. The form of the topic, its scope and perspective, its terminology have changed, however. Now, “culture” has come to be the most prominent word to describe the collection of behaviors that are considered required, or at least promoted, throughout an organization, by those who hold the most authority and thus potential influence on the lives of others in the organization.

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