Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team and many other great books is one of my favorite thinkers. This is one of his latest thought provokers:
Fame
A few months ago, prompted by all the news about Michael Jackson’s troubled life and drug-related death and the similarities between him and Elvis Presley, I started to think about the dangers of fame. And when the travails of Jon and Kate (of the Plus Eight television show) became known, I sat down and wrote a first draft of an essay on that topic. But I got busy with other priorities and I set it aside. Well, with the recent revelations about Tiger Woods and his family, I decided it was time to finish that essay.
Now, I have no desire to indulge in any of these real life tragedies, and I have no right to judge the people involved—we all have problems. But I cannot help but think that their fame was related to, if not the biggest cause of, their problems. I get more and more convinced of this every time I go through the check stand at the grocery store and see how many famous actors, musicians, celebrities and athletes experience more than their fair share of suffering. In fact, I’ve decided that fame is actually a very good predictor of misery.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Fame is ultimately a lonely proposition, fraught with supposed benefits which always prove to be temporary and which seem to crowd out the only thing that really matters, which is love. When people who achieve fame begin to feel the emptiness of their situation, they can’t help but wonder what is wrong with them. Troubled by this, they usually seek to fill their emptiness with greater gusto than ever, starting a spiral that leads them inevitably to misery.
And yet, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of this pattern, there continues to be a universal and growing obsession in our society with becoming famous. This is apparent when we consider the proliferation of reality TV shows, celebrity gossip TV shows, talent shows and 24-hour “news” channels, not to mention all those newsstand magazines at the grocery store. In spite of all the evidence of its harm, fame is as alluring as ever. This is so astoundingly, insanely illogical that it calls for an analogy.
Imagine that a trendy and extremely expensive new car hits the market and that it is known to easily flip over and cause serious injury, even death, to its drivers in far greater numbers than any other car. Now, imagine people doing anything they could—borrowing great sums of money, mortgaging their homes, cashing in their kids’ college fund—to buy that car. And when they are asked why they would do something so self-destructive, they look at you like you’re crazy and say “Do you know how many people wish they could drive this car? Besides, that won’t happen to me. I’m a better driver than everyone else!”
That’s pretty much what so many in our society do when they see the undeniable pain experienced by people who achieve fame and still insist that its benefits are worth the cost. They ignore the compelling stories told by the handful of people who have lived through the nightmares of fame and warn against its dangers, and pay attention instead to those fame-addicted celebrities who keep getting up off the ground and coming back for more misery (e.g. Celebrity Survivor, Celebrity Fit Club, Celebrity Rehab, Celebrity Boxing, you get the point).
As humorous and innocuous as this may seem, it poses a very real problem in our society, especially when young people start to believe that fame is itself a goal, an accomplishment worth almost any sacrifice.
So what are we, as a society, to do? We can start by exhorting one another to avoid the temptation of fame and encouraging each other to value those things in life which prove to be real sources of lasting peace and joy. That may seem like a monumental task, I know, but I have one idea about how to get things started.
I would like People Magazine—and for that matter, all the other publications lining the aisles at the grocery store—to start printing a big disclaimer on its cover:
WARNING! THE PEOPLE FEATURED IN THIS MAGAZINE ARE NOT TO BE ENVIED OR EMULATED. IN FACT, THEY SHOULD BE PITIED AND PRAYED FOR BECAUSE THEIR FAME REALLY IS A TERRIBLE BURDEN AND SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASES THEIR CHANCES OF BECOMING MISERABLE.
I’m pretty sure the folks at People won’t like my idea. But maybe we can all do our best to remember it whenever we pick up one of those publications and are tempted to wish we were like the smiley and beautiful people we see and read about. Instead, maybe we will decide to thank God for the enduring gifts He gives us. Heck, maybe we’ll even put that magazine back on the shelf.
If you'd like more of Patrick Lencioni's wisdom go to http://www.simplewisdomproject.com/ and sign up for his emails.
“The Simple Wisdom Project is a source of perspective and common sense about topics relating to family, faith, and life’s daily challenges. We believe that much of the wisdom we need to live better lives has been forgotten or abandoned, and what we really need is to rediscover simple truths.”
Patrick Lencioni
“people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed”
Samuel Johnson
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Consequences Of Not Confirming Financing Can Be Huge
Virginia Court Allows Owner To Stiff GC And Four Subcontractors For $13,000,000!
Sometimes when we ask contractors to confirm financing we get push back . . . "I know they are good for it" or "We've worked for this owner (or GC) a lot" or "I hate to ask that question - it is kind of an insult". Today it is essential that you get written confirmation of financing before starting work or you may end up like these guys.
According to the Construction Law Group Alert of Hirschler Fleischer (www.hf-law.com), construction began in July, 2007 on the $180 million condo project in Norfolk and was stopped 2 months later after the owner failed to get financing. The GC and subs filed suit for payment and owner said it had no liability to the GC, citing a provision in the contract stating that it had "no obligation or liability to the GC for any costs in the Construction Phase" in the event that the owner could not obtain funding for the project. The GC and subs argued that because the Owner had issued a notice to proceed, directed that work be continued, and approved payment applications they had waived that provision and were estopped from relying on it.
The judge ruled for the owner and directed that all 5 lawsuits be dismissed and ordered the mechanic's liens be released. The judge acknowledged that this decision would "cause serious hardship to some subcontractors and materialmen" on the project but that it was his duty to "construe the contract as written and not to produce a result some might find fair or just."
In making this decision the judge determined that the Owner had never represented that its construction loan had been funded and that the GC knew that the project could not be funded without the loan. Also the GC had failed to exercise its right under the contract to demand evidence of a construction loan to fund the Owner's obligations under the contract.
Moral of the story - Always demand evidence of financing prior to starting work on a project!
TPE3
Sometimes when we ask contractors to confirm financing we get push back . . . "I know they are good for it" or "We've worked for this owner (or GC) a lot" or "I hate to ask that question - it is kind of an insult". Today it is essential that you get written confirmation of financing before starting work or you may end up like these guys.
According to the Construction Law Group Alert of Hirschler Fleischer (www.hf-law.com), construction began in July, 2007 on the $180 million condo project in Norfolk and was stopped 2 months later after the owner failed to get financing. The GC and subs filed suit for payment and owner said it had no liability to the GC, citing a provision in the contract stating that it had "no obligation or liability to the GC for any costs in the Construction Phase" in the event that the owner could not obtain funding for the project. The GC and subs argued that because the Owner had issued a notice to proceed, directed that work be continued, and approved payment applications they had waived that provision and were estopped from relying on it.
The judge ruled for the owner and directed that all 5 lawsuits be dismissed and ordered the mechanic's liens be released. The judge acknowledged that this decision would "cause serious hardship to some subcontractors and materialmen" on the project but that it was his duty to "construe the contract as written and not to produce a result some might find fair or just."
In making this decision the judge determined that the Owner had never represented that its construction loan had been funded and that the GC knew that the project could not be funded without the loan. Also the GC had failed to exercise its right under the contract to demand evidence of a construction loan to fund the Owner's obligations under the contract.
Moral of the story - Always demand evidence of financing prior to starting work on a project!
TPE3
Monday, August 31, 2009
It's A New World Out There - The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues.
If Steven Malanga is correct in his thought provoking article, our approach to business and investing will need to become more cautious in the future. This is from the Dallas Morning News of August 23rd:
Steven Malanga: Whatever happened to the work ethic?
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues
04:31 PM CDT on Friday, August 21, 2009
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a "taste for physical gratification" that citizens would be "carried away and lose all self-restraint." Avidly seeking personal gain, they could "lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all" and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity.
The genius of America in the early 19th century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued "productive industry" without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America's balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance and modesty – virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion.
Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the "Protestant ethic" and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America's economic success.
What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don't understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is "not to be disturbed in his toil," as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures or bail out old ones.
They would find what Tocqueville described as the "fatal circle" of materialism – the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.
And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, business, popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue.
Not even Adam Smith – who was a moral philosopher, after all – imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes and monetary policy moves won't be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic – not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.
The American experiment that Tocqueville chronicled in the 1830s was more than just an effort to see if men could live without a monarch and govern themselves. A free society had to be one in which people could pursue economic opportunity with only minimal interference from the state. To do so without producing anarchy required a self-discipline that was, to Max Weber, the core of the capitalist ethic. "The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism," Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. "Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less its spirit."
Instead, the essence of capitalism is "a rational tempering" of the impulse to accumulate wealth so as to keep a business (and ultimately the whole economy) sustainable and self-renewing, Weber wrote. It is "the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational ... enterprise."
Weber famously argued that the Protestant Reformation – with John Calvin's and Martin Luther's emphasis on individual responsibility, hard work, thrift, providence, honesty and deferred gratification at its center – shaped the spirit of capitalism and helped it succeed. Calvinism and the sects that grew out of it, especially Puritanism and John Wesley's Methodism in England, were religions chiefly of the middle and working classes, and the virtues they promoted led to a new kind of affluence and upward mobility, based not on land (which was largely owned by the aristocracy) but on productive enterprises.
Nowhere did the fusing of capitalism and the virtues that made up the work ethic find a fuller expression than in America, where Puritan pioneers founded settlements animated by a Calvinist dedication to work.
One result was a remarkable society in which, as Tocqueville would observe, all "honest callings are honorable" and in which "the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural and honest condition of human existence."
Unlike in Europe, where aristocrats and gentry often scorned labor, in the United States, "a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living."
This thick and complex work ethic, so essential to the success of the early, struggling American settlements, became part of the country's civic fabric. It found its most succinct expression in the writings of Benjamin Franklin, whose well-known maxims, now considered quaintly old-fashioned, recommended to citizens of the new country a worldview that promoted work and the pursuit of wealth.
Franklin's best-selling writings had an enormous impact on America. His ideas, widely applauded, permeated popular culture and education. The leading grammar school textbooks of the 19th century, for example, by William Holmes McGuffey and his brother Alexander, inculcated children with the virtues of work and thrift.
The work ethic even shaped American play. The most popular game of its time, The Checkered Game of Life, produced by Milton Bradley in the mid-19th century, challenged players to travel through life and earn points for successfully completing school, getting married and working hard, while avoiding pitfalls like gambling and idleness. In his patent application for the game, Bradley observed that it was intended to "impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice."
Decades later, this secularized version of the Protestant ethic served as a lodestar for millions of poor immigrants, many from countries with little experience of free markets and democracy. Their assimilation into a culture that they recognized not as Protestant but as American reinvigorated the country, helping to set late-19th- and early-20th-century America on a distinctly different path from much of Europe.
The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-19th-century European artists and intellectuals who sought "to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life." By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which "nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored," Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic's prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline and deferral of gratification.
Weakened along with all these virtues was Americans' belief in the value of work itself. Along with "turning on" and "tuning in," the '60s protesters also "dropped out." As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, "affluence, hedonism and radicalism" were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement, resulting in a sharp slowdown in U.S. productivity from 1965 through 1970.
The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic – especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new child-centered approach that treats every pupil's "personal development" as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum.
The bourgeois values, however, had helped to sustain Weber's "rational tempering" of the impulse to accumulate wealth. When the schools and the wider society demoted them, the effects were predictable. In schools, for instance, the new "every child is special" curriculum prompted a sharp uptick in students' self-absorption, according to psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.
What resulted was a series of increasingly self-centered generations of young people displaying progressively more narcissistic personality traits, including a growing obsession with "material wealth and physical appearance," the authors observe. Thus did the '60s generation spawn the Me Generation of the '70s . By the mid-1980s, a poll of teens found that more than nine in 10 listed shopping as their favorite pastime.
The economic shocks that followed the tumultuous late 1960s, especially the devastating inflation of the 1970s, reinforced an emerging materialism. The inflation hit hardest those who had embraced the work ethic, destroying lifetimes of savings in unprecedented price spikes and sending the message that "saving and shunning debt was for saps," Fortune observed. "The lesson seemed to be, buy, buy, buy, before the money visibly crumbling to dust in your hand vanishes completely."
Once Fed chairman Paul Volcker's tight-money policy tamed inflation in the early 1980s, America began to pick itself up. But it was a different country, one that had lost to some degree the "rational tempering" of the "pursuit of gain" that Max Weber had seen as the key to "forever renewed profit."
The corporate restructurings of the 1980s, prompted by a new generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs and takeover artists reordered corporate America, shaking it out of its 1970s complacency. But the plant closings, downsizings and restructurings of the 1980s also stoked anxiety among workers, as the old ideal of lifetime employment at one paternalistic company gave way to a job-hopping career in a constantly changing business landscape.
While the results were often salutary – innovation for companies and income gains for the most talented players – the "get it while you can" mentality that developed among some workers and investors found its ultimate expression in the "day traders" of the technology stock boom, speculators with a "right now" time horizon rather than long-term investors.
There become a growing sense that a new ethic had superseded the old standard of playing by the rules. The 1980s version of the Horatio Alger tales was not an inspiring story of uplift but the popular movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko's infamous "greed is good" speech.
With government policy reinforcing the "get it now" mentality, a new era of consumption based on credit blossomed, and Americans turned from savers to debtors. Ostentatious displays of wealth grew more common. To fuel these purchases, inflation-adjusted total U.S. consumer-credit debt rose nearly threefold, to $2.56 trillion, from 1980 to 2008, while the nation's savings rate shrank from an average of about 12 percent of personal income annually in the early 1980s to less than 1 percent by 2005.
The denouement of this transformation was the 2008 meltdown of world financial markets. America has certainly had its con artists, robber barons and speculators before, but what distinguished the latest panic was that millions of mortgages belonging to ordinary Americans triggered it – mortgages that were foolhardy at best and fraudulent at worst.
According to the FBI, reports of mortgage fraud soared tenfold nationwide from 2001 to 2007. No one knows precisely how deep the problem ran, but some mortgage servicers, examining portfolios of subprime mortgages that went bad in 2007, found that up to 70 percent of them had involved some kind of misrepresentation. This multitude of scams required the complicity of businesses that ultimately destroyed themselves and shattered an entire industry.
In the wake of the market crash, our national discussion about how to fix capitalism seems limited to those who believe that more government will fix the problem and those who think that free markets will fix themselves. Few have asked whether we can recapture the civic virtues that nourished our commerce for 300 years.
We're not likely to find many churches preaching those virtues today. Though America is more religious than most industrialized countries, today's pulpits hardly resound with the bourgeois work ethic. While John Wesley once observed that religion produces "industry and frugality," and the American Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher declared that the way to avoid poverty was through "provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality," today the National Council of Churches, to which these denominations belong, advocates for a left-wing "social gospel" of redistributing wealth.
And though the Catholic Church once strove to assimilate generations of poor immigrants into American economic life, today its major social-welfare organization, Catholic Charities, has become an arm of the redistributionist welfare state. Even our evangelical churches, whose theology most resembles that of the great Protestant reformers, have focused their energies primarily on social issues, such as fighting abortion or gay marriage, or even inveighing against welfare reform that encourages single mothers to return to work.
Could the schools do what they once did – create educated citizens inculcated with the ethical foundations of capitalism? That would require rededicating the schools to "making Americans." Promisingly, a few public and private schools around the country have replaced the child-centered curriculum with one focused on learning about our culture and its institutions. But these examples amount only to a tiny handful, swimming against the educational mainstream.
Late in life, Adam Smith noted that government institutions can never tame and regulate a society whose citizens are not schooled in a common set of virtues. "What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue?" he wrote. "All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these."
America in the 21st century is learning that lesson.
Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal, from whose summer issue this is adapted.
Steven Malanga: Whatever happened to the work ethic?
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues
04:31 PM CDT on Friday, August 21, 2009
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a "taste for physical gratification" that citizens would be "carried away and lose all self-restraint." Avidly seeking personal gain, they could "lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all" and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity.
The genius of America in the early 19th century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued "productive industry" without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America's balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance and modesty – virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion.
Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the "Protestant ethic" and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America's economic success.
What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don't understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is "not to be disturbed in his toil," as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures or bail out old ones.
They would find what Tocqueville described as the "fatal circle" of materialism – the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.
And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, business, popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue.
Not even Adam Smith – who was a moral philosopher, after all – imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes and monetary policy moves won't be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic – not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.
The American experiment that Tocqueville chronicled in the 1830s was more than just an effort to see if men could live without a monarch and govern themselves. A free society had to be one in which people could pursue economic opportunity with only minimal interference from the state. To do so without producing anarchy required a self-discipline that was, to Max Weber, the core of the capitalist ethic. "The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism," Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. "Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less its spirit."
Instead, the essence of capitalism is "a rational tempering" of the impulse to accumulate wealth so as to keep a business (and ultimately the whole economy) sustainable and self-renewing, Weber wrote. It is "the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational ... enterprise."
Weber famously argued that the Protestant Reformation – with John Calvin's and Martin Luther's emphasis on individual responsibility, hard work, thrift, providence, honesty and deferred gratification at its center – shaped the spirit of capitalism and helped it succeed. Calvinism and the sects that grew out of it, especially Puritanism and John Wesley's Methodism in England, were religions chiefly of the middle and working classes, and the virtues they promoted led to a new kind of affluence and upward mobility, based not on land (which was largely owned by the aristocracy) but on productive enterprises.
Nowhere did the fusing of capitalism and the virtues that made up the work ethic find a fuller expression than in America, where Puritan pioneers founded settlements animated by a Calvinist dedication to work.
One result was a remarkable society in which, as Tocqueville would observe, all "honest callings are honorable" and in which "the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural and honest condition of human existence."
Unlike in Europe, where aristocrats and gentry often scorned labor, in the United States, "a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living."
This thick and complex work ethic, so essential to the success of the early, struggling American settlements, became part of the country's civic fabric. It found its most succinct expression in the writings of Benjamin Franklin, whose well-known maxims, now considered quaintly old-fashioned, recommended to citizens of the new country a worldview that promoted work and the pursuit of wealth.
Franklin's best-selling writings had an enormous impact on America. His ideas, widely applauded, permeated popular culture and education. The leading grammar school textbooks of the 19th century, for example, by William Holmes McGuffey and his brother Alexander, inculcated children with the virtues of work and thrift.
The work ethic even shaped American play. The most popular game of its time, The Checkered Game of Life, produced by Milton Bradley in the mid-19th century, challenged players to travel through life and earn points for successfully completing school, getting married and working hard, while avoiding pitfalls like gambling and idleness. In his patent application for the game, Bradley observed that it was intended to "impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice."
Decades later, this secularized version of the Protestant ethic served as a lodestar for millions of poor immigrants, many from countries with little experience of free markets and democracy. Their assimilation into a culture that they recognized not as Protestant but as American reinvigorated the country, helping to set late-19th- and early-20th-century America on a distinctly different path from much of Europe.
The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-19th-century European artists and intellectuals who sought "to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life." By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which "nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored," Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic's prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline and deferral of gratification.
Weakened along with all these virtues was Americans' belief in the value of work itself. Along with "turning on" and "tuning in," the '60s protesters also "dropped out." As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, "affluence, hedonism and radicalism" were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement, resulting in a sharp slowdown in U.S. productivity from 1965 through 1970.
The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic – especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new child-centered approach that treats every pupil's "personal development" as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum.
The bourgeois values, however, had helped to sustain Weber's "rational tempering" of the impulse to accumulate wealth. When the schools and the wider society demoted them, the effects were predictable. In schools, for instance, the new "every child is special" curriculum prompted a sharp uptick in students' self-absorption, according to psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.
What resulted was a series of increasingly self-centered generations of young people displaying progressively more narcissistic personality traits, including a growing obsession with "material wealth and physical appearance," the authors observe. Thus did the '60s generation spawn the Me Generation of the '70s . By the mid-1980s, a poll of teens found that more than nine in 10 listed shopping as their favorite pastime.
The economic shocks that followed the tumultuous late 1960s, especially the devastating inflation of the 1970s, reinforced an emerging materialism. The inflation hit hardest those who had embraced the work ethic, destroying lifetimes of savings in unprecedented price spikes and sending the message that "saving and shunning debt was for saps," Fortune observed. "The lesson seemed to be, buy, buy, buy, before the money visibly crumbling to dust in your hand vanishes completely."
Once Fed chairman Paul Volcker's tight-money policy tamed inflation in the early 1980s, America began to pick itself up. But it was a different country, one that had lost to some degree the "rational tempering" of the "pursuit of gain" that Max Weber had seen as the key to "forever renewed profit."
The corporate restructurings of the 1980s, prompted by a new generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs and takeover artists reordered corporate America, shaking it out of its 1970s complacency. But the plant closings, downsizings and restructurings of the 1980s also stoked anxiety among workers, as the old ideal of lifetime employment at one paternalistic company gave way to a job-hopping career in a constantly changing business landscape.
While the results were often salutary – innovation for companies and income gains for the most talented players – the "get it while you can" mentality that developed among some workers and investors found its ultimate expression in the "day traders" of the technology stock boom, speculators with a "right now" time horizon rather than long-term investors.
There become a growing sense that a new ethic had superseded the old standard of playing by the rules. The 1980s version of the Horatio Alger tales was not an inspiring story of uplift but the popular movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko's infamous "greed is good" speech.
With government policy reinforcing the "get it now" mentality, a new era of consumption based on credit blossomed, and Americans turned from savers to debtors. Ostentatious displays of wealth grew more common. To fuel these purchases, inflation-adjusted total U.S. consumer-credit debt rose nearly threefold, to $2.56 trillion, from 1980 to 2008, while the nation's savings rate shrank from an average of about 12 percent of personal income annually in the early 1980s to less than 1 percent by 2005.
The denouement of this transformation was the 2008 meltdown of world financial markets. America has certainly had its con artists, robber barons and speculators before, but what distinguished the latest panic was that millions of mortgages belonging to ordinary Americans triggered it – mortgages that were foolhardy at best and fraudulent at worst.
According to the FBI, reports of mortgage fraud soared tenfold nationwide from 2001 to 2007. No one knows precisely how deep the problem ran, but some mortgage servicers, examining portfolios of subprime mortgages that went bad in 2007, found that up to 70 percent of them had involved some kind of misrepresentation. This multitude of scams required the complicity of businesses that ultimately destroyed themselves and shattered an entire industry.
In the wake of the market crash, our national discussion about how to fix capitalism seems limited to those who believe that more government will fix the problem and those who think that free markets will fix themselves. Few have asked whether we can recapture the civic virtues that nourished our commerce for 300 years.
We're not likely to find many churches preaching those virtues today. Though America is more religious than most industrialized countries, today's pulpits hardly resound with the bourgeois work ethic. While John Wesley once observed that religion produces "industry and frugality," and the American Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher declared that the way to avoid poverty was through "provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality," today the National Council of Churches, to which these denominations belong, advocates for a left-wing "social gospel" of redistributing wealth.
And though the Catholic Church once strove to assimilate generations of poor immigrants into American economic life, today its major social-welfare organization, Catholic Charities, has become an arm of the redistributionist welfare state. Even our evangelical churches, whose theology most resembles that of the great Protestant reformers, have focused their energies primarily on social issues, such as fighting abortion or gay marriage, or even inveighing against welfare reform that encourages single mothers to return to work.
Could the schools do what they once did – create educated citizens inculcated with the ethical foundations of capitalism? That would require rededicating the schools to "making Americans." Promisingly, a few public and private schools around the country have replaced the child-centered curriculum with one focused on learning about our culture and its institutions. But these examples amount only to a tiny handful, swimming against the educational mainstream.
Late in life, Adam Smith noted that government institutions can never tame and regulate a society whose citizens are not schooled in a common set of virtues. "What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue?" he wrote. "All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these."
America in the 21st century is learning that lesson.
Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal, from whose summer issue this is adapted.
Obama's Summer Of Discontent
Frankly, I've been very concerned about the direction Obama and the Democratic party are taking. This opinion piece from the WSJ gives me some hope that he will be slowed down:
AUGUST 25, 2009, 9:32 A.M. ET - WSJ Online
Obama's Summer of Discontent
The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long.
By Fouad Ajami
So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.
A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.
It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.
So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without "loud voices." It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.
We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country's institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.
The leader would be different things to different people. The Obama coalition was the coming together of disparate groups: the white professional liberals seeking absolution for the country in the election of an African-American man, the opponents of the Iraq war who grew more strident as the project in Iraq was taking root, the African-American community that had been invested in the Clintons and then came around out of an understandable pride in one of its own.
The last segment of the electorate to flock to the Obama banners were the blue-collar workers who delivered him Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. He was not their man. They fully knew that he didn't share their culture. They were, by his portrait, clinging to their guns and religion, but the promise of economic help, and of protectionism, carried the day with them.
The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his "first hundred days." Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.
All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008.
He was no FDR, and besides the history of the depression—the real history—bears little resemblance to the received narrative of the nation instantly rescued, in the course of 100 days or 200 days, by an interventionist state. The economic distress had been so deep and relentless that FDR began his second term, in 1937, with the economy still in the grip of recession.
Nor was JFK about style. He had known military service and combat, and familial loss; he had run in 1960 as a hawk committed to the nation's victory in the Cold War. He and his rival, Richard Nixon, shared a fundamental outlook on American power and its burdens.
Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can't rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can't be his. Mr. Obama isn't Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads.
In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation's esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was "morning in America" he meant it; he believed in America's miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power.
The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.
In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.
Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn't underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.
American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.
Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence.
Mr. Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is also an adjunct fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
AUGUST 25, 2009, 9:32 A.M. ET - WSJ Online
Obama's Summer of Discontent
The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long.
By Fouad Ajami
So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.
A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.
It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.
So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without "loud voices." It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.
We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country's institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.
The leader would be different things to different people. The Obama coalition was the coming together of disparate groups: the white professional liberals seeking absolution for the country in the election of an African-American man, the opponents of the Iraq war who grew more strident as the project in Iraq was taking root, the African-American community that had been invested in the Clintons and then came around out of an understandable pride in one of its own.
The last segment of the electorate to flock to the Obama banners were the blue-collar workers who delivered him Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. He was not their man. They fully knew that he didn't share their culture. They were, by his portrait, clinging to their guns and religion, but the promise of economic help, and of protectionism, carried the day with them.
The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his "first hundred days." Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.
All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008.
He was no FDR, and besides the history of the depression—the real history—bears little resemblance to the received narrative of the nation instantly rescued, in the course of 100 days or 200 days, by an interventionist state. The economic distress had been so deep and relentless that FDR began his second term, in 1937, with the economy still in the grip of recession.
Nor was JFK about style. He had known military service and combat, and familial loss; he had run in 1960 as a hawk committed to the nation's victory in the Cold War. He and his rival, Richard Nixon, shared a fundamental outlook on American power and its burdens.
Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can't rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can't be his. Mr. Obama isn't Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads.
In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation's esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was "morning in America" he meant it; he believed in America's miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power.
The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.
In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.
Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn't underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.
American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.
Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence.
Mr. Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is also an adjunct fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Are You Confused About How We Got In This Financial Mess?
Well, I am too and I am diligent about trying to understand it and keep up. This week I received the following note from my friend, Mark Schupbach. Check out the website he recommends . . . I think you will find it very informative. By the way, Mark and his team are excellent advisors.
"From: Schupbach Mark
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 20:38:11 -0500
Subject: Current Economic history
Do you know the facts about our current economic challenges and woes?
CNBC.com has put together an exhaustive web site (10 main pages plus hundreds of links) to explain, in chronological order how our economy got into it's difficult and dangerous position. This is the most comprehensive chronicle I've seen.
It is complex and won't be digested in a quick setting. However, if you really want to know what, when, how and who got us where we are take time to work your way through the site. There is so much misinformation in the "sound bite" media that is refreshing to see this. You need to know the details - not from an economist's perspective but as an informed citizen. The site is:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31187744
The truth shall set you free. Or, in this case keep you from getting fleeced!
Mark S. Schupbach, ChFC
CEO
CPF Texas.
6900 Dallas Parkway, Suite 700
Plano, Texas 75024
214.696.2323 / Fax 214.696.8885
www.cpftexas.com
Securities offered through LPL Financial
Member, FiNRA/SPIC"
All The Best,
TPE3
"From: Schupbach Mark
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 20:38:11 -0500
Subject: Current Economic history
Do you know the facts about our current economic challenges and woes?
CNBC.com has put together an exhaustive web site (10 main pages plus hundreds of links) to explain, in chronological order how our economy got into it's difficult and dangerous position. This is the most comprehensive chronicle I've seen.
It is complex and won't be digested in a quick setting. However, if you really want to know what, when, how and who got us where we are take time to work your way through the site. There is so much misinformation in the "sound bite" media that is refreshing to see this. You need to know the details - not from an economist's perspective but as an informed citizen. The site is:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31187744
The truth shall set you free. Or, in this case keep you from getting fleeced!
Mark S. Schupbach, ChFC
CEO
CPF Texas.
6900 Dallas Parkway, Suite 700
Plano, Texas 75024
214.696.2323 / Fax 214.696.8885
www.cpftexas.com
Securities offered through LPL Financial
Member, FiNRA/SPIC"
All The Best,
TPE3
Monday, June 1, 2009
Lloyd D. Plyler Brought An Intense Customer Focus To General Contracting
Lloyd Plyler was an “Original”. Nobody was like him, like God definitely threw away the mold when He made Lloyd. Lloyd passed on his passion for construction and his special “brand” to his sons, grandsons, and hundreds of longtime Plyler employees who will carry on his tradition. Lloyd was a “hand shake” guy . . . if he said it, he’d do it – you could depend on his word.
In the 1960s Lloyd started Lloyd D Plyler Construction Company and soon he had a job building one of the first Gibson’s stores. That began the first of many long term customer relationships. Plyler’s focus has always centered on the best interests of the customer by providing outstanding value and product combined with expedited project completion.
In order to be consistent in maintaining superior quality and fast completion of projects, Lloyd began to self perform many trades. In those early days most GCs self performed carpentry and concrete. Soon Plyler was doing that and mechanical, electrical, HVAC, sheet metal, process piping, and structural steel fabrication. They performed other trades when necessary to get the job done.
Plyler was always looking for a “better way” by applying technology to construction. Today their structural steel and sheet metal fabrication shops use cutting edge automation.
Lloyd traveled with his family as a baby by wagon and mule to Durant, Oklahoma. He began working with his dad A.D. at the age of eight; including working and managing saw mills, cotton gins and thrashing oats. He and his dad built a lot of houses in the area. Lloyd and his father worked on the Denison Dam, the railroad bridge and the Roosevelt Bridge on Lake Texoma as form carpenters.
He served in the Army Air Corp and attended college at Washington State University and studying maintenance and rebuilding of aircraft engines, including working on B-29 bombers. In 1946, Lloyd returned to Durant. He built and operated an automotive repair garage. His spare time was spent building boats . . . including a houseboat made from a revitalized school bus on a barge, an all metal boat called the Flying Saucer and a flat-bottom boat with an aircraft engine. At 90 m.p.h. it was the fastest boat on the lake. Next he began building a boat that was to be powered by an aircraft jet engine. He never got around to getting the engine – nobody is sure whether he didn’t have the money or his wife put her foot down!
Lloyd’s other big passion was baseball and formed and managed sandlot baseball teams in the early 1950s. Here’s what the Durant paper said about Lloyd:
“Then came Lloyd Plyler and everything changed in Durant. Lloyd absolutely loved the game of baseball. He was a blue-collar catcher who moved into coaching and eventually into every aspect of the game. He used his own money, materials and labor from his just-starting construction business to build what eventually became Lloyd Plyler Park. The park was built especially for American Legion baseball.Plyler brought in kids who wanted to play summer ball and put them to work with his construction company. Some outstanding players and teams have graced Plyler Park. The State Tournament was played here one year and memory says it rained for maybe three months. Plyler Construction darn near went under because Lloyd put teams in motels to keep them in town. The tournament was completed.
It's safe to say Lloyd Plyler is the father of Durant American Legion baseball. It was his baby. He birthed it, fed it, burped it, changed its diapers and grew it into one of the better programs in the state.”
Lloyd Plyler loved this great country and always had the American Flag flying. Lloyd Plyler, an American original, taught me a lot about taking care of your customer in the 20 years I’ve had the privilege of working with him.
TPE3
In the 1960s Lloyd started Lloyd D Plyler Construction Company and soon he had a job building one of the first Gibson’s stores. That began the first of many long term customer relationships. Plyler’s focus has always centered on the best interests of the customer by providing outstanding value and product combined with expedited project completion.
In order to be consistent in maintaining superior quality and fast completion of projects, Lloyd began to self perform many trades. In those early days most GCs self performed carpentry and concrete. Soon Plyler was doing that and mechanical, electrical, HVAC, sheet metal, process piping, and structural steel fabrication. They performed other trades when necessary to get the job done.
Plyler was always looking for a “better way” by applying technology to construction. Today their structural steel and sheet metal fabrication shops use cutting edge automation.
Lloyd traveled with his family as a baby by wagon and mule to Durant, Oklahoma. He began working with his dad A.D. at the age of eight; including working and managing saw mills, cotton gins and thrashing oats. He and his dad built a lot of houses in the area. Lloyd and his father worked on the Denison Dam, the railroad bridge and the Roosevelt Bridge on Lake Texoma as form carpenters.
He served in the Army Air Corp and attended college at Washington State University and studying maintenance and rebuilding of aircraft engines, including working on B-29 bombers. In 1946, Lloyd returned to Durant. He built and operated an automotive repair garage. His spare time was spent building boats . . . including a houseboat made from a revitalized school bus on a barge, an all metal boat called the Flying Saucer and a flat-bottom boat with an aircraft engine. At 90 m.p.h. it was the fastest boat on the lake. Next he began building a boat that was to be powered by an aircraft jet engine. He never got around to getting the engine – nobody is sure whether he didn’t have the money or his wife put her foot down!
Lloyd’s other big passion was baseball and formed and managed sandlot baseball teams in the early 1950s. Here’s what the Durant paper said about Lloyd:
“Then came Lloyd Plyler and everything changed in Durant. Lloyd absolutely loved the game of baseball. He was a blue-collar catcher who moved into coaching and eventually into every aspect of the game. He used his own money, materials and labor from his just-starting construction business to build what eventually became Lloyd Plyler Park. The park was built especially for American Legion baseball.Plyler brought in kids who wanted to play summer ball and put them to work with his construction company. Some outstanding players and teams have graced Plyler Park. The State Tournament was played here one year and memory says it rained for maybe three months. Plyler Construction darn near went under because Lloyd put teams in motels to keep them in town. The tournament was completed.
It's safe to say Lloyd Plyler is the father of Durant American Legion baseball. It was his baby. He birthed it, fed it, burped it, changed its diapers and grew it into one of the better programs in the state.”
Lloyd Plyler loved this great country and always had the American Flag flying. Lloyd Plyler, an American original, taught me a lot about taking care of your customer in the 20 years I’ve had the privilege of working with him.
TPE3
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Help Your Friend - www.GetBacktoWorkFaster.com
I ran across Jill Konrath a few years ago through her outstanding website (www.sellingtobigcompanies.com), helpful sales emails, and book on Selling To Big Companies (Check all that out!) She has made a difference in our approach to accounts.
Many of you have read the book Go Giver . . . Jill Konrath is a Giver. All of us have a friend or acquaintance who has lost a job and is struggling. Jill has a new tool just for them - this is a very creative approach to job search. Do your friend a favor and forward them this email! This is a description from her recent email . . .
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The Current Crisis - A Blessing Or Wound?
One of my favorite authors is Patrick Lencioni. We have used his Five Dysfunctions Of A Team as a text to improve our MHBT Construction and Bond Team. His new thing is The Simple Wisdom Project - a source of perspective and common sense found through rediscovering simpletruths.
Here's his latest email on our financial crisis.
For your own free subscription go to: www.simplewisdomproject.com.
Enjoy!
"Simple Wisdom Project POV: March 2009
A Blessing or a Wound?
Okay. This financial mess we’re in is definitely a crisis. The full extent of the problem is unclear, but a few things are likely. It is global. It will be long. And for those of us under the age of seventy five, it will probably be unprecedented and, thus, will change our lives.
The big question we need to be asking ourselves is “how will it change our lives?” And there are only two possible answers to that question: for better, or for worse. That’s right. Sometime in the future we will look back at this time and see it largely as a blessing or as a wound. The key to determining which of these will occur—in our families as well as our nation—lies in how we view suffering and the decisions we make as a result.
Ironically, I’m not as worried about our collective ability to survive this crisis—people are always more resilient than they think they are—but rather about what we might do before we feel its full impact. That’s because the anticipation of pain and suffering is often worse than the suffering itself.
I remember when I was a boy waiting for my dad to come down the hall and give me one of his rare but much-deserved spankings. It was misery. But I also remember that the spanking itself was never all that bad, and that when it was over I felt no resentment for my usually gentle dad. In fact, I quickly came to feel a sense of gratitude and relief because I had endured the punishment and pain, and could move forward stronger and better for it.
However, if you would have asked me before the spanking what I would have done to get out of it, I would have said ‘anything.’ Lied. Begged. Faked remorse. Sold my baseball cards. And that’s what worries me. Will we be so desperate to avoid or delay or even anesthesize ourselves from pain and suffering that we will make dangerous decisions which will only prolong and exacerbate our problems? Or will we take our medicine and allow it to make us stronger?
For families, desperation and danger can manifest itself in small and large ways, from over-investment in the time and energy we give to our work or the adoption of an unhealthy diet, to more serious vices like substance abuse, infidelity and gambling. These are particularly tempting during a crisis because they seem to provide a sense of distraction and relief, albeit a false one.
On the other hand, a crisis can be an opportunity to recommit to what is most important in life. It is a chance to cut back on unnecessary or non-critical activities and pursuits, and work to appreciate the real joy and blessing of being a family, which has much less to do with money than we seem to believe during times of prosperity. I realize that this might seem like a meaningless cliché to people who are already struggling to pay bills in their families, but in the end, proving that we can endure a crisis without sacrificing our principles really is its own reward. The fact is, even if we have to move to a smaller home or take a job that we had thought to be beneath us, we can emerge from all of this with what is far more valuable than any financial asset.
Now, when it comes to a nation, these ideas apply as well. Before and during times of difficulty, countries are often tempted to abandon principles that have always served them well but which are temporarily inconvenient. National leaders often justify policy decisions that they know to be wrong because they hope that they will somehow reduce or delay pain and suffering. But just like a family, these decisions usually prolong or exacerbate the pain, and sometimes in ways that are irreversible.
One of the examples that come to mind in the United States right now is a readiness to spend money that we don’t have to prevent some companies, agencies and other institutions from facing their mistakes. Another is the well-intentioned but misguided willingness to “forgive” unwise homeowners or others who have lived outside of their means, thereby rewarding them for bad behavior. In the end, we will find ourselves moving closer and closer to socialism, something that is dangerous but worthy of another POV of its own.
All too often, what looks like a life preserver in a storm often turns out to be an anchor for the individuals and society who swim toward it. This has proven to be the case again and again throughout the past century, and yet, when the going gets tough, we often forget history.
It is my hope and prayer that we, as families and as a nation, will have the courage and strength and wisdom to endure whatever pain and suffering comes our way, and to emerge on the other side with our principles and confidence and future intact. And that we will look back at this crisis not as a wound that scars us, but as a blessing that will rain down on our children for years to come.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
Yours,
Patrick Lencioni"
Great perspective.
TPE3
Here's his latest email on our financial crisis.
For your own free subscription go to: www.simplewisdomproject.com.
Enjoy!
"Simple Wisdom Project POV: March 2009
A Blessing or a Wound?
Okay. This financial mess we’re in is definitely a crisis. The full extent of the problem is unclear, but a few things are likely. It is global. It will be long. And for those of us under the age of seventy five, it will probably be unprecedented and, thus, will change our lives.
The big question we need to be asking ourselves is “how will it change our lives?” And there are only two possible answers to that question: for better, or for worse. That’s right. Sometime in the future we will look back at this time and see it largely as a blessing or as a wound. The key to determining which of these will occur—in our families as well as our nation—lies in how we view suffering and the decisions we make as a result.
Ironically, I’m not as worried about our collective ability to survive this crisis—people are always more resilient than they think they are—but rather about what we might do before we feel its full impact. That’s because the anticipation of pain and suffering is often worse than the suffering itself.
I remember when I was a boy waiting for my dad to come down the hall and give me one of his rare but much-deserved spankings. It was misery. But I also remember that the spanking itself was never all that bad, and that when it was over I felt no resentment for my usually gentle dad. In fact, I quickly came to feel a sense of gratitude and relief because I had endured the punishment and pain, and could move forward stronger and better for it.
However, if you would have asked me before the spanking what I would have done to get out of it, I would have said ‘anything.’ Lied. Begged. Faked remorse. Sold my baseball cards. And that’s what worries me. Will we be so desperate to avoid or delay or even anesthesize ourselves from pain and suffering that we will make dangerous decisions which will only prolong and exacerbate our problems? Or will we take our medicine and allow it to make us stronger?
For families, desperation and danger can manifest itself in small and large ways, from over-investment in the time and energy we give to our work or the adoption of an unhealthy diet, to more serious vices like substance abuse, infidelity and gambling. These are particularly tempting during a crisis because they seem to provide a sense of distraction and relief, albeit a false one.
On the other hand, a crisis can be an opportunity to recommit to what is most important in life. It is a chance to cut back on unnecessary or non-critical activities and pursuits, and work to appreciate the real joy and blessing of being a family, which has much less to do with money than we seem to believe during times of prosperity. I realize that this might seem like a meaningless cliché to people who are already struggling to pay bills in their families, but in the end, proving that we can endure a crisis without sacrificing our principles really is its own reward. The fact is, even if we have to move to a smaller home or take a job that we had thought to be beneath us, we can emerge from all of this with what is far more valuable than any financial asset.
Now, when it comes to a nation, these ideas apply as well. Before and during times of difficulty, countries are often tempted to abandon principles that have always served them well but which are temporarily inconvenient. National leaders often justify policy decisions that they know to be wrong because they hope that they will somehow reduce or delay pain and suffering. But just like a family, these decisions usually prolong or exacerbate the pain, and sometimes in ways that are irreversible.
One of the examples that come to mind in the United States right now is a readiness to spend money that we don’t have to prevent some companies, agencies and other institutions from facing their mistakes. Another is the well-intentioned but misguided willingness to “forgive” unwise homeowners or others who have lived outside of their means, thereby rewarding them for bad behavior. In the end, we will find ourselves moving closer and closer to socialism, something that is dangerous but worthy of another POV of its own.
All too often, what looks like a life preserver in a storm often turns out to be an anchor for the individuals and society who swim toward it. This has proven to be the case again and again throughout the past century, and yet, when the going gets tough, we often forget history.
It is my hope and prayer that we, as families and as a nation, will have the courage and strength and wisdom to endure whatever pain and suffering comes our way, and to emerge on the other side with our principles and confidence and future intact. And that we will look back at this crisis not as a wound that scars us, but as a blessing that will rain down on our children for years to come.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
Yours,
Patrick Lencioni"
Great perspective.
TPE3
Monday, March 9, 2009
Fort Worth Project Substantially Under Estimate
Today the Fort Worth Press indicated construction costs are down on current projects:
Stakes marked the ground March 3 for the pending Will Rogers parking garage in Fort Worth and some city officials couldn’t help but think they got a steal of a deal on the project, which locked in a winning bid of nearly $4.5 million less than engineering estimates drawn up last fall.
A steal or not, engineers for the Western Heritage Parking Garage at Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum estimated the project would cost about $21 million. But with a winning bid of $16.5 million, the garage is just the latest example of public projects saving a bundle as construction prices drop. W.G. Yates & Sons Construction Co. will be building the garage.
“Those estimates were based on a garage that was done last year before things really turned in the real estate industry, but there was concern that [$21 million] wouldn’t be enough,” said Randle Harwood, program management office director for the city of Fort Worth. “This is about a 25 percent savings for us and that’s a big difference that can make a big difference. And other bids weren’t far off – the next one was $17 million – and when bidders are close like that, it’s the right price, which is great for us because this will allow us to stretch those dollars allocated to get more roads and better buildings.”
Harwood said the costs of construction products such as steel and asphalt have gone down because of a combination of lower diesel prices and the global economic slowdown that has put many commercial projects on hold, which has increased competition among contractors.
For entities such as the city of Fort Worth, this means a trip back to the drawing board. “As we move forward we’ll continue to see this impact from the pressure on bidding and it’s forcing us to go back and re-look at all of our cost estimates,” Harwood said.
For entire article go to www.fwbusinesspress.com/display.php?id=9710
Fort Worth Business Press
BY ALESHIA HOWE
March 09, 2009
Stakes marked the ground March 3 for the pending Will Rogers parking garage in Fort Worth and some city officials couldn’t help but think they got a steal of a deal on the project, which locked in a winning bid of nearly $4.5 million less than engineering estimates drawn up last fall.
A steal or not, engineers for the Western Heritage Parking Garage at Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum estimated the project would cost about $21 million. But with a winning bid of $16.5 million, the garage is just the latest example of public projects saving a bundle as construction prices drop. W.G. Yates & Sons Construction Co. will be building the garage.
“Those estimates were based on a garage that was done last year before things really turned in the real estate industry, but there was concern that [$21 million] wouldn’t be enough,” said Randle Harwood, program management office director for the city of Fort Worth. “This is about a 25 percent savings for us and that’s a big difference that can make a big difference. And other bids weren’t far off – the next one was $17 million – and when bidders are close like that, it’s the right price, which is great for us because this will allow us to stretch those dollars allocated to get more roads and better buildings.”
Harwood said the costs of construction products such as steel and asphalt have gone down because of a combination of lower diesel prices and the global economic slowdown that has put many commercial projects on hold, which has increased competition among contractors.
For entities such as the city of Fort Worth, this means a trip back to the drawing board. “As we move forward we’ll continue to see this impact from the pressure on bidding and it’s forcing us to go back and re-look at all of our cost estimates,” Harwood said.
For entire article go to www.fwbusinesspress.com/display.php?id=9710
Fort Worth Business Press
BY ALESHIA HOWE
March 09, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Living in Color
Guy Kawasaki's blog, How To Change The World (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/), pointed me to a couple of articles at Edelman, a global PR firm (http://www.edelman.com) I thought you might find interesting. More about the articles later. I was fascinated with Edelman's concept, Living In Color. Here's how they describe it on their website:
"At Edelman, what we do inside our offices is only half the story. 'Living in Color' is the other half. Living in Color is part of the Edelman culture, an aspiration for every one of our employees to be curious about the world around them, to explore the world outside their cubes and offices, to immerse themselves in the arts, culture, politics, literature, charitable organizations and/or wherever else their passions and interests may take them.
Edelman believes that its staff's personal growth and professional growth are intertwined. In keeping with that belief, Edelman has committed itself to aiding its employees' efforts to 'Live In Color'.
What does 'Living In Color' mean?
It means leading a culturally rich and rewarding life outside of work. It means spending time with family. It means giving back to your community. It means taking the time to learn about the world around you and your place in it.
While Living In Color can mean a lot of things, perhaps one Edelman's employees provided the best interpretation when she wrote:
'Living In Color Means...
...reading one or two (or three) newspapers every day. It's developing an ever growing interest for the place you live in, the world you live in. It's watching the news. It's expanding into new interests, opening doors. Living In Color is not "what you do after work" - it's what you do with your life. It never stops. It's agreeing to work for a pro-bono client, and helping another team - or office - with a project, so you can get exposed to things outside your area of comfort. It's understanding how what you do fits into the bigger picture. It's becoming an active, joyful participant in whatever you think is worth your time. If you are a contributor to making this office a better place beyond your account work, you're living in color. If you vote, you're living in color. If you volunteer, you're living in color. If you spend yourself in a worthy cause, you're living in color.
Living in Color doesn't "take time." It's how you fill the time you have. It's realizing you're part of something bigger than you.
If you think living in color is expensive, or something you can't afford, you're missing the point. Living in color is like living. It's yours. It's free.' " Isn't that fantastic?
Now the articles . . . First is:
Five Digital Communications Trends You Should Know
In Edelman’s latest white paper, Steve Rubel, Director of Digital Insights, highlights five of the more compelling digital trends to watch for in 2009, that impact how you effectively engage audiences online:
Full article: www.edelman.com/image/insights/content/Social%20Pulpit%20-%20Barack%20Obamas%20Social%20Media%20Toolkit%201.09.pdf
"At Edelman, what we do inside our offices is only half the story. 'Living in Color' is the other half. Living in Color is part of the Edelman culture, an aspiration for every one of our employees to be curious about the world around them, to explore the world outside their cubes and offices, to immerse themselves in the arts, culture, politics, literature, charitable organizations and/or wherever else their passions and interests may take them.
Edelman believes that its staff's personal growth and professional growth are intertwined. In keeping with that belief, Edelman has committed itself to aiding its employees' efforts to 'Live In Color'.
What does 'Living In Color' mean?
It means leading a culturally rich and rewarding life outside of work. It means spending time with family. It means giving back to your community. It means taking the time to learn about the world around you and your place in it.
While Living In Color can mean a lot of things, perhaps one Edelman's employees provided the best interpretation when she wrote:
'Living In Color Means...
...reading one or two (or three) newspapers every day. It's developing an ever growing interest for the place you live in, the world you live in. It's watching the news. It's expanding into new interests, opening doors. Living In Color is not "what you do after work" - it's what you do with your life. It never stops. It's agreeing to work for a pro-bono client, and helping another team - or office - with a project, so you can get exposed to things outside your area of comfort. It's understanding how what you do fits into the bigger picture. It's becoming an active, joyful participant in whatever you think is worth your time. If you are a contributor to making this office a better place beyond your account work, you're living in color. If you vote, you're living in color. If you volunteer, you're living in color. If you spend yourself in a worthy cause, you're living in color.
Living in Color doesn't "take time." It's how you fill the time you have. It's realizing you're part of something bigger than you.
If you think living in color is expensive, or something you can't afford, you're missing the point. Living in color is like living. It's yours. It's free.' " Isn't that fantastic?
Now the articles . . . First is:
Five Digital Communications Trends You Should Know
In Edelman’s latest white paper, Steve Rubel, Director of Digital Insights, highlights five of the more compelling digital trends to watch for in 2009, that impact how you effectively engage audiences online:
- Satisfaction Guaranteed - Customer care and PR blend as consumers use social media to demand service
- Media Reforestation - The media’s reinvention as it transitions to digital
- Less is the New More - As information overload takes its toll, friends are helping to filter
- Corporate All-Stars – How workers are building their personal brands, yet offering employers a new way to market
- The Power of Pull - The benefits of creating content that people discover through search
Read the article at www.edelman.com/image/insights/content/EdelmanDigitalTrends0109.pdf
The second article is:
The Social Pulpit - The Change Brought By Barack Obama’s Success
Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory by converting everyday people into engaged and empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online video. By combining social media and micro-targeting in the manner that it did, the campaign revealed force multipliers that are already being adopted as part of a new communications model. This examines the tactics of this revolutionary campaign and what it means for communicators in a new era of public engagement. How will your business be affected?
Full article: www.edelman.com/image/insights/content/Social%20Pulpit%20-%20Barack%20Obamas%20Social%20Media%20Toolkit%201.09.pdf
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Understanding Our Current Financial Mess - The End Of Wall Street's Boom
Michael Lewis, author of Panic, has written an article that clearly gives the complex details of how we got into our current financial mess. The article has many quotes of some of the players with language that is pretty rough. Here's how the article starts:
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.
I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance . . .
To read the entire article go to: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Revised I-9 Form Must Be Used After 4-3-09
All employers are required to document that each newly hired worker is authorized to work in the United States. Each new employee must complete a Form I-9 and furnish acceptable documentation. The employer is responsible for ensuring that the form is completed properly and prior to the date of hire. This change was effective 2-2-09 but has now been extended to 4-3-09.
Employers must examine evidence of identity and employment authorization and record the required information in Section 2 of the form. The employer is required to retain a copy of this form.
For a copy of the NEW form and detailed instructions including acceptable documentation go to: http://www.uscis.gov/files/form/I-9_IFR_02-02-09.pdf
Employers must examine evidence of identity and employment authorization and record the required information in Section 2 of the form. The employer is required to retain a copy of this form.
For a copy of the NEW form and detailed instructions including acceptable documentation go to: http://www.uscis.gov/files/form/I-9_IFR_02-02-09.pdf
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Prepare For The Future Turnarond In The Economy NOW
One of my favorite authors is Patrick Lencioni. We have used his Five Dysfunctions Of A Team as a text to improve our MHBT Construction and Bond Team. Here's his latest email on preparing now for the turnaround in the economy. For your own free subscription go to: http://www.tablegroup.com/.
All The Best For A Great 2009,
TPE3
January 2009
The “Down Economy” Bandwagon
It seems like we’ve been preparing for this current recession for the past two or three years, constantly predicting it and staving it off as long as we could, all the while listening to the media tell us that it was just around the corner. And now that it is here—and it is here—we’re witnessing a new media-inspired cottage industry building up around the “down economy” and the bad times that are upon us and that lie ahead.
Every news story seems to have the addendum “in a bad economy” attached to it. I suspect that soon there will be a new “Recession Barbie” doll on toy store shelves, complete with a frown on her face and a copy of the job listings from the newspaper in her hands.
Well, so far I’ve resisted jumping onto the “down economy” bandwagon, not wanting to contribute to any self-fulfilling prophecy or culture of victimization that can make a bad situation worse. But after numerous requests, I’ve agreed to share my own perspectives about how leaders can survive and even thrive during difficult times.
The first thing we have to do is ask ourselves a fundamental question: do we believe things will get better? If we don’t, if we believe this is the definitive end to any upside in the economy and that it’s all downhill from here, then I’m afraid I have no good advice. Aside from moving somewhere that does have an economic upside.
But most of us would admit that this, too, will rebound. Maybe not the same way it has in the past. After all, there are some fundamental problems that we haven’t yet faced. But even in the absence of that, there is a good chance that we will experience an economic upturn sometime in the not-too-too-distant future. And if that is the case, our call to action is clear: use this time to invest in your organization’s future, especially when the investment is not a financial one.
The best place for an investment right now is in the general health of an organization. I’m talking mostly about improving the functioning of the executive team, and their clarification of and recommitment to the organization’s values and purpose. Doing this will require a little time and energy, but very little money. And it will yield significant returns now, and even more when the economy rebounds. How?
A wise executive team will take this opportunity during slow times to build greater trust and behavioral cohesiveness. This will benefit the organization by minimizing politics and infighting, that are common during difficult times, and it will allow the team to make better decisions about which programs and employees need to be retained and which shouldn’t. All of this will allow the organization to emerge stronger than ever when the economy turns around, and with a meaningful advantage over competitors.
That’s because most of those competitors will probably flail during down times, frantically searching for a tactical way to swim upstream and defy the current, leading to even more frustration and angst than is necessary. In the end they’ll simply be more weary and scarred and unprepared.
Of course, like so much of the advice that people are repositioning these days for a “down economy”, none of this is really new. Even during good times leaders should be investing in the health of their teams. But with so many shiny opportunities in front of them, they often fail to slow down and do what it is best for the long term. Now that there are fewer and fewer of those shiny opportunities, there is no good excuse. And that may turn out to be a good thing.
Yours,
Patrick Lencioni
All The Best For A Great 2009,
TPE3
January 2009
The “Down Economy” Bandwagon
It seems like we’ve been preparing for this current recession for the past two or three years, constantly predicting it and staving it off as long as we could, all the while listening to the media tell us that it was just around the corner. And now that it is here—and it is here—we’re witnessing a new media-inspired cottage industry building up around the “down economy” and the bad times that are upon us and that lie ahead.
Every news story seems to have the addendum “in a bad economy” attached to it. I suspect that soon there will be a new “Recession Barbie” doll on toy store shelves, complete with a frown on her face and a copy of the job listings from the newspaper in her hands.
Well, so far I’ve resisted jumping onto the “down economy” bandwagon, not wanting to contribute to any self-fulfilling prophecy or culture of victimization that can make a bad situation worse. But after numerous requests, I’ve agreed to share my own perspectives about how leaders can survive and even thrive during difficult times.
The first thing we have to do is ask ourselves a fundamental question: do we believe things will get better? If we don’t, if we believe this is the definitive end to any upside in the economy and that it’s all downhill from here, then I’m afraid I have no good advice. Aside from moving somewhere that does have an economic upside.
But most of us would admit that this, too, will rebound. Maybe not the same way it has in the past. After all, there are some fundamental problems that we haven’t yet faced. But even in the absence of that, there is a good chance that we will experience an economic upturn sometime in the not-too-too-distant future. And if that is the case, our call to action is clear: use this time to invest in your organization’s future, especially when the investment is not a financial one.
The best place for an investment right now is in the general health of an organization. I’m talking mostly about improving the functioning of the executive team, and their clarification of and recommitment to the organization’s values and purpose. Doing this will require a little time and energy, but very little money. And it will yield significant returns now, and even more when the economy rebounds. How?
A wise executive team will take this opportunity during slow times to build greater trust and behavioral cohesiveness. This will benefit the organization by minimizing politics and infighting, that are common during difficult times, and it will allow the team to make better decisions about which programs and employees need to be retained and which shouldn’t. All of this will allow the organization to emerge stronger than ever when the economy turns around, and with a meaningful advantage over competitors.
That’s because most of those competitors will probably flail during down times, frantically searching for a tactical way to swim upstream and defy the current, leading to even more frustration and angst than is necessary. In the end they’ll simply be more weary and scarred and unprepared.
Of course, like so much of the advice that people are repositioning these days for a “down economy”, none of this is really new. Even during good times leaders should be investing in the health of their teams. But with so many shiny opportunities in front of them, they often fail to slow down and do what it is best for the long term. Now that there are fewer and fewer of those shiny opportunities, there is no good excuse. And that may turn out to be a good thing.
Yours,
Patrick Lencioni
Thursday, January 15, 2009
The Art Of Laying People Off
One of my favorite bloggers is Guy Kawasaki (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/11/the-art-of-layi.html). This post is from his blog How To Change The World and from his new book, Reality Check. This seems particularly appropriate in these times. Read on & learn . . .
The Art of Laying People Off
Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World November 18th, 2008 - 11:47 PM
I hope that you never have to lay off or fire people, but the reality is that you will as you advance in your career. If you are scoffing (“Guy, you are clueless: We’ll never downsize, because we’re growing so fast, and I’ll never make a bad hire”), then you’re my intended reader.
The Art of Laying People Off
Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World November 18th, 2008 - 11:47 PM
I hope that you never have to lay off or fire people, but the reality is that you will as you advance in your career. If you are scoffing (“Guy, you are clueless: We’ll never downsize, because we’re growing so fast, and I’ll never make a bad hire”), then you’re my intended reader.
- Take responsibility. Ultimately, it is the CEO’s decision to make the cuts, so don’t blame it on the board of directors, market conditions, competition, or whatever else. In effect, she should simply say, “I made the decision. This is what we’re going to do.” If you don’t have the courage to do this, don’t be a CEO. Now, more than ever, the company will need a leader, and leaders accept responsibility.
- Cut deep and cut once. Management usually believes that
things will get better soon, so it cuts the smallest number of people in anticipation of a miracle. Most of the time, the miracle doesn’t materialize, and the company ends up making multiple cuts. Given the choice, you should cut too deeply and risk the high-quality problem of having to rehire. Multiple cuts are terrible for the morale of the employees who have not been laid off. - Move fast. One hour after your management team discusses the need to lay off employees, the entire company will know that something is happening. Once people “know” a layoff is coming, productivity drops like a rock. You’re either laying people off or you’re not—you should avoid the state of “considering” a layoff.
- Clean house. A layoff is an opportunity to terminate marginal employees without having to differentiate between poor performers and positions that you’re eliminating. It’s good for the marginal employee because he’s not tainted with getting fired. Finally, it’s good for the employees who remain because they will see that you know who’s performing and who isn’t.
- Whack Teddy. Most executives have hired a friend, a friend of a friend, or a relative as a favor. When a layoff happens, employees will be looking to see what happens to Teddy. “Did he survive the cut or did he go? Is it cronyism or competence that counts at the company?” Make sure that Ted is dead.
- Share the pain. When people around you are losing their jobs, you can share the pain, too. Cut your pay. In fact, the higher the employee, the bigger the percentage of pay reduction. Take a smaller office. Turn in the company car. Reassign your personal assistant to a revenue-generating position. Fly coach. Stay in motels. Sell the boxseat tickets to the ball game. Give your 30-inch flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug faster. Do something, however symbolic.
- Show consistency. I cannot understand how companies can claim that they have to cut costs and then provide severance packages of six months to a year of salary. You would think that if they wanted to conserve cash, they’d give tiny severance packages. Typically, there are three lines of reasoning for generous severance packages: Cutting head count, even with severance packages, is cheaper than keeping the employee around indefinitely, and we don’t want any lawsuits; We have lots of cash, so our balance sheet is strong, but we need to cut heads to make our profit-and-loss statement look better, and Wall Street (or your investors) is expecting dramatic actions, so we need to do this to show the analysts that we’ve got what it takes to be a leader.
None of these reasons makes sense. If you need to do a layoff to cut costs (and conserve cash), then provide minimal severance packages, cut costs as much as you can, conserve as much cash as you can, and deal with your guilt in other ways. If nothing else, it’s a consistent story. - Don’t ask for pity. Sometimes managers go to great lengths to show the person they’re laying off (or firing) how hard it is on them. This reminds me of the old definition of chutzpah: A boy murders his parents and then asks the court for leniency because he’s an orphan. The person who suffers is the one being terminated, not the manager.
- Provide support. Usually, the people getting laid off aren’t at fault. More likely, it was the fault of top management—the same top management with golden parachutes. Hence, you have a moral obligation to provide services like job counseling, résumé-writing assistance, and job-search help. There are firms that specialize in helping employees during “transitions,” so use them.
- Don’t let people self-select. We had a joke at Apple during the dark days of the late eighties that went like this: We would announce that employees who want to quit should come to a big meeting. Those who want to stay at the company should not attend. Then we would let the people go who didn’t attend the meeting and keep the ones who wanted to quit—because the latter were smart enough to know that we were in bad shape or that they had better opportunities elsewhere. The point is that if you let people choose to get laid off or retire, you might lose your best people. Deciding whom to lay off is a proactive decision: Select the go-forward team to ensure that you never have to lay people off again. Do not leave this to chance.
- Show people the door. With few exceptions, all you should do is let people finish the day, maybe the week. (My theory is that Friday is the best day to do a layoff because it lets people have a weekend to decompress.) Showing people the door seems inhumane, but it’s better for both the people leaving and the people remaining.
- Move forward. Let people say good-bye and then get going. This is when leadership counts. In bad times, you separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls. After the layoff, this is what the remaining employees will be wondering about:
Guilt: “Why did I survive the cut and my colleagues didn’t?”
Future of my job: “Will I survive the next round if there are more cuts?”
Future of the company: “Will the company survive at all?”
So you set—or reemphasize—goals, explain what everyone needs to do to get there, and get going, because the best way to move beyond a layoff is to get back to work. - Immediately after a layoff, you might want to retreat to your office, turn off the phones, stop answering e-mails, and avoid everyone. These are the worst actions to take. This is the time for you to motivate by walking around. Employees need to see you, talk to you, and get your help and advice. They don’t want to think their leader is cowering in some foxhole. The brave face that you put on may be a charade, but it’s an important charade.
Reprinted by permission from Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition. In other words, I asked myself if it was okay. If you liked this chapter, there are ninety-three more where this came from.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Employers Beware:
California Wage and Hour Laws Apply To Any Employees Traveling to California to Perform Work in the State!
According to an article written by Thomas H. Petrides (310.552.5077, thomas.petrides@klgates.com) and Henry T. Goldman (617.951.9156, henry.goldman@klgates.com) of K&L Gates, the price tag on conferences and business trips in California just went up. In addition to airfare and pricey hotels, a recent federal appeals court decision held that non-California employees who work in California , even for as little as one day, must be paid in accordance with California law. This is an important decision for two reasons. First, California law on overtime and related wage and hour requirements is very different from federal law and the law of most other states. Second, employers who do not comply with California law may later face class actions that seek to accumulate these seemingly small violations of the law, but which can add up to be quite expensive. This alert analyzes the Sullivan v. Oracle decision and examines some of the key elements of California labor laws out-of-state that employers should consider.
To view the complete alert online, click here: http://www.klgates.com/newsstand/Detail.aspx?publication=5129
According to an article written by Thomas H. Petrides (310.552.5077, thomas.petrides@klgates.com) and Henry T. Goldman (617.951.9156, henry.goldman@klgates.com) of K&L Gates, the price tag on conferences and business trips in California just went up. In addition to airfare and pricey hotels, a recent federal appeals court decision held that non-California employees who work in California , even for as little as one day, must be paid in accordance with California law. This is an important decision for two reasons. First, California law on overtime and related wage and hour requirements is very different from federal law and the law of most other states. Second, employers who do not comply with California law may later face class actions that seek to accumulate these seemingly small violations of the law, but which can add up to be quite expensive. This alert analyzes the Sullivan v. Oracle decision and examines some of the key elements of California labor laws out-of-state that employers should consider.
To view the complete alert online, click here: http://www.klgates.com/newsstand/Detail.aspx?publication=5129
Sunday, January 11, 2009
WC Subcontractor Forms Must Be Filed with TDI
A recent article on the Independent Insurance Agents Of Texas site said that a contractor received a nasty surprise on his workers' compensation audit. He executed DWC-83s on all subcontractors throughout the year and presented them to the auditor after the policy expired. Unfortunately, the workers' compensation law requires these forms to be filed with the TDI Division of Workers' Compensation (DWC) and the carrier within 10 days of execution. If they are not filed, then the carrier is not required to accept them and can charge a premium for the subcontractor's employees. Form DWC-83 applies to residential and small commercial contractors and is used to elect or reject coverage for employees of the hiring contractor's subcontractors. For large commercial contractors and other employers that hire independent subcontractors, form DWC-81 is used to elect coverage and also must be filed with the DWC and the carrier. Form DWC-85 is used to reject coverage, but this form does not have to be filed with the DWC or the carrier at the time of execution, but filing with the carrier is recommended. Give us a call for more information.
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