One of the great benefits of being a team of authors is that we, too, are learning from each other. So on that theme I wanted to review some of the Posts that have been written by my fellow authors as a reminder of some powerful motivational ideas.
When asked about his approach to climbing Everest at the third attempt in May 2009 and, at age 65, the oldest Briton to do so, he captured the full spirit of separating actions from goals when he said:
Plod forever! Don’t expect to get there. Don’t think there is going to be a top to this mountain. Just plod forever!
Regular readers will know that fellow LfD author, John Lewis, has been posting regularly on the subject of remarkable people. I have found them inspiring, to the extent that I’m going to depart from my usual safe area of economics and tell a personal story. It’s a story of family dynamics, the power of sibling bonds and why hope and trust in the future, especially for young people, is so, so important. I have called my story the Power of Words.
—–oooOOOooo—–
I can hear it like it was yesterday, resonating in my head, crowding out the doubts and negative thoughts, filling my mind with possibilities: yes, I CAN do it!
Then ....
I was in my junior year of college and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. It was becoming quite a burden.
Because I had always been good in school, i.e., the “smart one,” everyone had expected so much of me when I went to school. I really envied my older sister; she had always been the pretty one, the popular one, the one who got invited to the prom by not one, but three young men.
And, it seemed to me at the time, she was so lucky because no one expected her to go out and conquer the world after high school. She didn’t go to college; she went to secretarial school and studied to become an airline attendant instead.
I envied her in every way possible! But at least I had something: I was “the smart one,” or so I thought! Years later, my sister went back to school to study psychology. She earned a 4.0 [four straight ‘A’s. Ed] and was invited to continue on to earn her Ph.D. I’ll be darned if she wasn’t the smart one, too! And she is a wonderful and thoughtful person to boot! But I digress.
How Peter L Bernstein’s work helps us make the safest decision with regard to global warming.
Probably like me you hadn’t heard of Peter Bernstein. He was instrumental in understanding risk and that alone makes him worth knowing about. Here’s the entry from Wikipedia:
Peter Lewyn Bernstein (January 22, 1919 – June 5, 2009) was a financial historian, economist and educator whose development and refinement of the efficient market theory made him one of the country’s [USA] best known authorities in popularizing and presenting investment economics to the general public.
Watch the YouTube video before reading on:
You could not have missed a fundamental message in the interview – if the consequence of something is critically harmful then don’t take ANY risks. Bernstein’s book on risk is Against the Gods.
It would be fair to say that my knowledge about what I am writing in this Post is minimal to the point of total ignorance. So why open my mouth and prove it! Because the conquest of fundamental questions about our world is not only an example of mankind at its greatest but also something of broad appeal.
That is proved by the continuing popularity of the BBC Television Series – Horizon. In that series there have recently been two fascinating programmes: Who’s afraid of a big Black Hole? and How long is a piece of string? (Readers outside the UK will not be able to view these programmes.)
Here are the programme summaries:
Black holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question – what was there before the Big Bang?
The trouble is that researching them is next to impossible. Black holes are by definition invisible and there’s no scientific theory able to explain them. Despite these obvious obstacles, Horizon meets the astronomers attempting to image a black hole for the very first time and the theoretical physicists getting ever closer to unlocking their mysteries. It’s a story that takes us into the heart of a black hole and to the very edge of what we think we know about the universe.
and
Alan Davies attempts to answer the proverbial question: how long is a piece of string? But what appears to be a simple task soon turns into a mind-bending voyage of discovery where nothing is as it seems.
An encounter with leading mathematician Marcus du Sautoy reveals that Alan’s short length of string may in fact be infinitely long. When Alan attempts to measure his string at the atomic scale, events take an even stranger turn. Not only do objects appear in many places at once, but reality itself seems to be an illusion.
Ultimately, Alan finds that measuring his piece of string could – in theory at least – create a black hole, bringing about the end of the world.
A fascinating and revealing interview in the Sunday Times.
This article in the British Sunday Times was published on November 8th and I’m sure many will have read it. But for those that didn’t it really is worth settling down to a reasonably long read. For you will learn that Goldman Sachs:
It’s the site of the best cash-making machine that global capitalism has ever produced, and, some say, a political force more powerful than governments. The people who work behind the brass-trim glass doors make more money than some countries do. They are the rainmakers’ rainmakers, the biggest swinging dicks in the financial jungle. Their assets total $1 trillion, their annual revenues run into the tens of billions, and their profits are in the billions, which they distribute liberally among themselves. Average pay this recessionary year for the 30,000 staff is expected to be a record $700,000. Top earners will get tens of millions, several hundred thousand times more than a cleaner at the firm. When they have finished getting “filthy rich by 40”, as the company saying goes, these alpha dogs don’t put their feet up. They parachute into some of the most senior political posts in the US and beyond, prompting accusations that they “rule the world”. Number 85 Broad Street is the home of Goldman Sachs.
The world’s most successful investment bank likes to hide behind the tidal wave of money that it generates and sends crashing over Manhattan, the City of London and most of the world’s other financial capitals. But now the dark knights of banking are being forced, blinking, into the cold light of day. The public, politicians and the press blame bankers’ reckless trading for the credit crunch and, as the most successful bank still standing, Goldman is their prime target. Here, politicians and commentators compete to denounce Goldman in ever more robust terms — “robber barons”, “economic vandals”, “vulture capitalists”. Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, contrasts the bank’s recent record results — profits of $3.2 billion in the last quarter alone — and its planned bumper bonus payments with what has happened to ordinary people’s jobs and incomes in 2009.
and later on in conversation with the Chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein:
“Is it possible to have too much ambition? Is it possible to be too successful?” Blankfein shoots back. “I don’t want people in this firm to think that they have accomplished as much for themselves as they can and go on vacation. As the guardian of the interests of the shareholders and, by the way, for the purposes of society, I’d like them to continue to do what they are doing. I don’t want to put a cap on their ambition. It’s hard for me to argue for a cap on their compensation.”
So, it’s business as usual, then, regardless of whether it makes most people howl at the moon with rage? Goldman Sachs, this pillar of the free market, breeder of super-citizens, object of envy and awe will go on raking it in, getting richer than God? An impish grin spreads across Blankfein’s face. Call him a fat cat who mocks the public. Call him wicked. Call him what you will. He is, he says, just a banker “doing God’s work”
Safe, as in psychologically as well as physically, has its rewards.
I had a very interesting session recently. I did some coaching work with a client company who managed a small team. The day was split into two – the morning with the client and the afternoon with the whole team.
What struck me about the day was the power of good leadership and the importance of leaders who are aware of how they come across and are capable of forming a relationship with their teams. My client was struggling with her team because she was unaware how she was communicating, not only with her team but with other people in the organisation.
Unfortunately, becoming aware of how we are in a relationship with others brings us face to face with ourselves and requires a willingness to accept ourselves, warts and all, before trying to change anything.
After we all had lunch together and broke the ice a bit we focused on what was working (not what was not working), what was missing, what inspired and what was possible. By examining these areas and so creating a safe environment, everybody was able to reveal more of themselves and what they needed to have a satisfactory, safe working relationship with each other.
If there’s a strategy behind Karzai’s ‘win’, it’s pretty difficult to spot!
AFGHANISTAN: News from the Press on November 2nd revealed that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had phoned Hamid Karzai to congratulate him on winning the recent Presidential election.
“Yes,” I hear. “He is our ally in a war and has been re-elected. Quite normal.”
In “The Telegraph” we read: “An inquiry by a UN-backed watchdog this week confirmed staggering levels of fraud, most of it in favour of President Hamid Karzai. It declared more than one million ballots suspect – a quarter of the total cast..”
So, many in Karzai’s party CHEATED. To what extent Karzai himself orchestrated all this is unclear, but HE IS THE LEADER, and if the Leader is not overall responsible, who is? Mr Brown and the UN have also called on Mr Karzai to “end corruption”.
To summarize, A) the Karzai regime is corrupt and B) it cheated in the recent elections.
Given this, WHAT ON EARTH are we doing CONGRATULATING him? Do we usually congratulate corrupt cheats, or only when they are Presidents?
Or perhaps this is traditional, accepted “Diplospeak”?
For us, the world needs honesty, which includes above all speaking the truth. The truth is, there is NOTHING to congratulate Karzai for and so it should NOT have been done. If this is “diplomatic convention”, then CHANGE the convention in the interests of honesty.
Sgt Olaf Schmid, British Army
We are stuck with Karzai for the moment, but if the corruption continues, then we will lose the fight; the Afghan people will simply no longer support our presence propping up a corrupt regime. But being stuck with him does not mean grovelling, or that honesty has to go out of the window. Too much is at stake.
On Sunday, November 1st, a British bomb expert was killed defusing his 65th bomb on his last mission. The truth is (that’s what we seek, isn’t it?) that we are paying a heavy price to support a corrupt cheat; many will soon start to say “too heavy a price”.
By Chris Snuggs
[PS. Interesting article in the Financial Times advocating that the US shouldn’t commit to a surge. PPS. Another 5 UK soldiers killed in Afghanistan brings this year’s total to 92. Ed.]
Is this, in the end, how our Governments are treating us?
Yves Smith runs the incredibly successful Blog, Naked Capitalism. Frankly, I have no idea where she finds the time to put together her Posts, many of which are constructed on the back of in-depth research.
On Friday, 16th October there was a Post which has huge implications. It is all about Access Journalism. It needs to be read. Here’s an extract.
Let us start with the cheerleading in the media over Wall Street, and in particular, Goldman earnings. Matt Taibbi, in “Good News on Wall Street Means… What Exactly?,” tells us why this is so distorted:
It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.
I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.
The press has been on a downslope for at least a decade, as a result of strained budgets and vastly more effective government and business spin control (and it was already pretty good at that, see the BBC series, The Century of the Self, via Google video, for a real eye-opener). I met a reporter who had been overseas for six years, opening an important foreign office for the Wall Street Journal. He was stunned when he came back in 1999 to see how much reporting had changed in his absence. He said it was impossible to get to the bottom of most stories in a normal news cycle because companies had become very sophisticated in controlling their message and access.
I had a very interesting session recently. I did some coaching work with a client company who managed a small team. The day was split into two – the morning with the client and the afternoon with the whole team.
Learning from Dogs 