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NY Times: The Sales Profession: Attention Must Still Be Paid

Everybody’s Business

The Sales Profession: Attention Must Still Be Paid

By BEN STEIN

Published: April 25, 2009

ASIDE from some gardening and baby-sitting in my neighborhood when I was a child, my first summer job was in the summer of 1962, just before my first year of college. It was at Shoe Giant, a large discount shoe store in Langley Park, in Prince George’s County of Maryland, and I got the job thanks to a high school pal who also worked there.

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The job entailed selling shoes. The shoes were tossed about in giant bins and some were stored in boxes. Once the customers had picked out the kind of shoes they wanted, my task was to find the right size, close the sale, write up a receipt with my sales clerk number on it and escort the customer to the cashier. (A pair of shoes there was rarely more than $10 — and was often less.)

I made not much more than a dollar an hour, as well as a small commission. I recall that my first week’s paycheck was about $70.

I did not stay at that job for long. Later that summer, my mother found me a job at the Civil Service Commission, where I sat at a desk and added numbers on an ancient Marchant machine with a crank, to find Civil Service health insurance payment data for various kinds of injuries and sicknesses. I hated that job, but I did it anyway. I missed Shoe Giant. I missed the drama of selling.

Even after all these years, and after many other jobs, my mind often returns to my brief stint as a shoe salesman. It was then, amid that tangle of sandals, sneakers, oxfords, high heels and brogans, that I discovered the ballet that is sales. Forever after, I have had a deep respect for selling and for salesmen and saleswomen.

Sales — when done right — is more than a job. It is an art. It is a high-wire act. It is, as Arthur Miller immortally said, being out there “on a smile and a shoe shine.” It is learning the product you are selling, learning it so well that you can describe it while doing a pirouette of smiles for the customer and talking about the latest football scores. It is knowing human nature so well that you can align the attributes of your product or service cleanly with the needs and wants of your customers.

At its best, selling is taking a doubt and turning it, jujitsu style, into a powerful push. Selling is making the customer feel better about spending money — or investing it — than he would have felt by keeping his wallet zipped.

I have special memories of people who have sold brilliantly.

In 1976, when I moved to Los Angeles, I desperately wanted a Mercedes 450 SLC, a car that was — even in used form — far more than I deserved or could afford at my entry-level, highly tenuous work as a scriptwriter. My salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills, Larry Anish, listened to my objections and simply asked, “Don’t you believe in your own future?” Of course, I bought the car.

Many years later, an insurance broker came to call on my wife about disability insurance. I scoffed at him and told him how incredibly unlikely it was that a healthy woman like my wife would ever be disabled. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what we think, too. That’s why it’s so cheap and pays so much if she does get disabled.”

I bought the policy, and when my wife did get temporarily disabled, it paid off magnificently and we needed it.

When in doubt about any aspect of human interaction, I always consult the best salesman I have ever known, Barron Thomas, real estate and airplane salesman extraordinaire, and occasional writer, who could sell oil to the Saudis.

In particular, I’ve come to love insurance sales representatives. After many years of skepticism, and despite many warnings from consumer “experts,” I have come to believe that you can rarely have too much insurance, and that whatever insurance you don’t have is exactly what you will wind up needing. The fact that so many people in insurance sell you what’s good for you, even when smart alecks are telling you not to buy it, makes their work extremely impressive. I wish I had paid more attention to them.

People who work in sales often sit next to me on airplanes, which are my true home. In “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller also wrote: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” Those who are in sales are always aware that the next sale is behind the next door, and they are always great companions. They are where the rubber of production meets the road of consumption, whether in a showroom or a studio or on the phone or calling you at home. When the recovery starts, they will be the ones making purchases happen.

Lawyers and doctors and dentists and politicians and accountants and actors — all of us sell something, every day and every time we meet someone. For me, it all goes back to Shoe Giant, 47 years ago, and I wish that every 17-year-old I know could have that experience. It takes some ability at sales to believe in your own future, no matter what that future may be.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.

FT: All systems go

All systems go

By Andrew Jack

Published: April 30 2009 20:24 | Last updated: April 30 2009 20:24

Facing a crisis: globalisation has helped spread infection far and wide

“An external event strikes. Fear grips the system, which, in consequence, seizes. The resulting collateral damage is wide and deep.”

A description of the coming flu pandemic, or the events of the past 18 months in the world of finance? As the World Health Organisation on Wednesday night raised its level of alert and instructed countries around the world to “immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans” following the spread of an aggressive flu virus from Mexico, intriguing parallels between ways to address a public health crisis and a shock to the financial system are becoming increasingly apparent to officials and policymakers.

The lessons from these could prove critical to the success of efforts to minimise the impact of H1N1. The decisions taken in coming months by international agencies, national governments, local authorities, employers and individuals alike will be the first real “stress test” of an unprecedented and still fragile structure of pandemic preparations built up in recent years.

Much of the architecture of today’s system dates from the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome. This was swiftly followed by fears of a widespread outbreak of the “bird flu” H5N1 virus. Both helped mobilise a sharp rise in worldwide funding for pandemic preparations. The WHO was assigned the role of choirmaster, conducting the tracking of disease, the speedy dissemination of information and the co-ordination of the response by governments and agencies.

BELOW: Genetics, the history of swine flu – and clues to its future

Yet the lack of any immediate outbreak led to “flu fatigue”. Public concern gave way to a sense that sufficient preparations were in place and alarmists were crying wolf.

Similarly, in finance, continued economic expansion generated a sense of hubris that militated against tougher regulation. “The parallels between finance and medicine or other branches of science are very thought-provoking – it is something which is being talked about seriously now,” observes one senior European central banker.

In a further link, the financial crisis itself – and efforts to rein in public expenditure even before the credit crunch began in summer 2007 – may have helped slow pandemic preparations and squeezed the ability of medical systems to respond. In the UK, Treasury scepticism over the past two years delayed the purchase of extra supplies of antiviral drugs and antibiotics, leaving the government scurrying to place fresh orders this week.

Looking to the future, the pandemic may slow down tentative signs of global economic recovery, as declining travel, falling productivity and rising healthcare costs add to the pressures on companies, consumers and markets already struggling and deeply sensitive to further psychological setbacks.

TRIPLE TEST IS THE LATEST CHALLENGE FOR THE GLOBAL HEALTH BODY

The response to the H1N1 flu outbreak now spreading from Mexico around the globe is a high-profile triple test for a recently appointed boss, a young set of rules and a well-established institution.

For the World Health Organisation, founded just over 60 years ago, it is the latest in a series of important contributions to public health, which have included the elimination of smallpox, the introduction of the Tobacco Convention to spur tougher anti-smoking measures, and efforts to accelerate treatment for HIV patients across the developing world.

The challenges it faces include politics, bureaucracy and several failed public health campaigns including an attempt to eradicate malaria and a lengthy effort to fight polio that remains incomplete.

Its preparations for a pandemic have been reinforced by the adoption in 2007 of the International Health Regulations, which theoretically give it greater powers including certain rights to encroach on national sovereignty in fighting disease.

But the biggest test is perhaps a personal one for Margaret Chan (pictured), the discrete Hong Kong-raised civil servant who took over as director-general of the WHO in 2006 after a tough election campaign triggered by the sudden death of her predecessor. She must mobilise her own staff and delicately negotiate with top politicians around the world to work for the common good.

Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, warned on Thursday that the impact of the pandemic could be “quite drastic” in some countries.

The rise in globalisation that drove the expansion in international finance in recent years has also helped frame the conditions for the pandemic. Increased air travel, for example, has helped spread infection far and wide, illustrated in the initial outbreaks of H1N1 outside Mexico: from a honeymooning couple in Scotland to school-children returning home to New York and New Zealand.

Distinctions between the financial crisis and the flu pandemic include the fact that, with the former, there was – with no over-arching international organisation – little planning for a severe downturn, and the more alarmist warnings of a few critics were brushed aside by the majority.

In recent years, by contrast, there has been general consensus in the public health community, co-ordinated by the WHO, that a pandemic was a matter of “when, not if”, and plans – albeit of variable quality – were being put in place for an event seen as inevitable.

Now, as those plans are activated around the world for the first time, the question is how far they will prove effective, given that the responses of individuals and institutions as the threat of infection begins to affect daily life are unpredictable.

Just as the flu virus itself is constantly evolving genetically, so the financial services sector is continually inventing instruments. In health, too, there has been frenetic and complex innovation in recent years that is poorly understood by the vast majority of the population, creating a gulf between them and the tiny minority with understanding. That requires considerable trust, which can swiftly crumble and trigger panic when faith in the few collapses.

As a senior accountant says: “Most people don’t know how modern medicine works – all that stuff about DNA and what is inside pills. They have to trust their doctor. There are parallels there with finance. So much relies on trust.”

The dangers of the lag after widespread unofficial information and before any official response were starkly demonstrated by the saga of Northern Rock, the UK bank. A media leak on the BBC of its problems in mid- September 2007 caught the authorities on the hop. They presented no convincing explanation of the scale of its problems, triggering a run on deposits.

When Sir Callum McCarthy, former head of the UK’s financial regulator, tried to tell consumers any panic was “irrational”, it simply sparked greater fears. By the time the government finally stepped in four days later to guarantee deposits, customers had lost faith in almost anything it said, sparking deep cynicism about the health of other banks including many small British building societies.

The lessons include the need to recognise and respond to the fact that information travels at lightning speed around the world; and, in the internet era, vague reassurances that the authorities are in charge no longer work. “A hundred years ago, people would be reassured by a solemn statement from the Bank of England,” says a senior European regulator. “That doesn’t work now – people want evidence. Messages have to be short and clear. People want a website they can go to, hard facts.”

Embracing the explosion in information, one critical aspect of pandemic preparations that followed Sars was the adoption of the International Health Regulations. That, for the first time, gave the WHO the power to use data from non-official sources that warned of a potential infection rather than relying on its member states.

Initial indications suggest that the agency, as well as regional affiliates and national health authorities such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were relatively slow to react, picking up on warnings in the Mexican media of outbreaks some days after they were identified by specialist analytical companies.

“My big question about how things have developed is around surveillance and warning,” says a senior official co-ordinating the British pandemic response, who adds that the UK escalation was triggered by its own observations of activity by the CDC rather than any formal WHO notification. “If we had had even two more weeks’ warning, we could have had better efforts to contain the infection and more time to distribute drugs.”

RESPONSE MEASURES:

Key components of the WHO’s role in tackling the flu pandemic include:

●Track and assess the risk of the virus

●Mobilise countries to plan and react

●Agree public health measures to respond

●Co-ordinate the development of flu vaccines

●Establish medical treatment guidelines

Writing this week of the “striking” similarities between the 2003 Sars outbreak and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England and author of the scenario sketched at the top of this article, notes that a modest “triggering event” is augmented by a media frenzy that transcends borders. Similarities between crises in public health and finance are “no coincidence” as both are “manifestations of the behaviour under stress of a complex adaptive network”.

So far, while struggling with huge media demand, the WHO has provided regular updates, although the data on its website have often appeared modest and belated.

While it is early days, the public response around the world to H1N1 appears calm, despite anecdotal reports of panic-buying of masks and efforts to obtain antiviral drugs. One risk is that such patterns escalate as the effects of the virus become widespread.

More worrying are the cracks appearing in the fragile mechanisms of solidarity between governments. Just as there was disagreement over fiscal stimuli and measures for international financial regulation following the crisis, so there are divergences about how to respond to a pandemic.

Even before the WHO posted advice this week that restricting travel was pointless, many countries were imposing a range of variants that did precisely that. Some countries, such as Egypt, have diverged even further from the science, with calls to slaughter pigs despite no evidence that they present a risk of spreading the infection.

As the pandemic advances, there will be far greater potential for clashes over different national policies towards vaccine manufacture, drug stockpiles and distribution, the provision of medical treatment and so on.

For now, the response has gone largely to plan, and appeared smoother than the response to the financial crisis. But it is only just beginning. As Angus Nicoll from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control puts it: “With flu, you have to plan for the worst, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” The best laid and most rational plans for the pandemic are – as in finance – still grounded in a good deal of faith.

Additional reporting by Gillian Tett

GENETICS: THE HISTORY OF SWINE FLU – AND CLUES TO ITS FUTURE

“Unpredictable” seems to be the word used most often by experts to describe the outbreak of swine flu, writes Clive Cookson. Scientists now concede that a pandemic is almost certainly imminent but they insist that they cannot predict its timing or how serious it will be.

All this talk about uncertainty should not disguise the astonishing amount that researchers have learnt about the new H1N1 viral strain, using the latest techniques in molecular biology, since an unusual outbreak of flu in Mexico came to the attention of the world’s health authorities a couple of weeks ago.

An H1N1 culture from a US patient

By last weekend, when the general public was becoming aware of the pandemic threat, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta was already completing the genetic sequences of flu virus samples taken from patients in California and Texas. (Flu virus genes are composed of RNA rather than the related DNA that makes up the genome of almost all other organisms.)

Since Monday, anyone has been able to download the full RNA sequences from the public GenBank database. For the uninitiated the viral genetic code is gibberish – “atgaaggcaat” is a typical short stretch – but for experts it can tell a fascinating tale of infections that have shaped the virus.

The Mexican strain is a complex mixture of components from viruses that originated in infections of pigs, people and birds – but there is no doubt that the dominant contribution comes from pigs, says Brian Willett, a virologist at Glasgow University.

“This virus almost certainly does originate in pigs,” says Professor Willett. “Mexican pig farms are a very strong candidate for where it started.”

Hence the controversial decision by the World Health Organisation to call it swine flu – to the dismay of pig farmers, who have been hit with a global slump in pork sales and bans on meat imports from Mexico and the US in some countries as a result.

A porcine origin does not mean the current outbreak is circulating among pigs today, experts insist. Now that the virus is spreading among humans, people face an immensely greater risk of catching Mexican flu from other people than from pigs.

Scrutiny of the viral genome – and comparison with other flu viruses – is also beginning to give scientists clues about its likely behaviour and effects on people. These seem to be reassuring.

The Mexican strain currently lacks some of the molecular characteristics associated with the most virulent viruses – adding to the emerging epidemiological evidence that it causes mainly mild illness. Experts believe the apparently high mortality rate in Mexico is the result of vast under-reporting of less severe cases.

But that is now. The future is, of course, unpredictable. Flu is a notoriously fast-changing virus, and it may mutate into a much more dangerous form. Or it may turn out to be less lethal than normal seasonal flu, which kills 500,000 people in a bad year.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Gagging on Google

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Gagging on Google

April 29, 2009 5:17am

Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women’s rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property.  The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business.  It would not be missed.

In a nutshell, Google promotes copyright theft and voyeurism and lays the foundations for corporate or even official Big Brotherism.

Google, with about 50 per cent of the global internet search market, is the latest in a distinguished line of IT abusive monopolists.  The first was IBM, which was brought to heel partly by a forty-year long antitrust regulation (which ended in 1996) and partly by the rise of Microsoft.

Microsoft has been convicted of abuse of monopoly power on two continents, in the US as a result of a lawsuit launched by the US Federal Department of Justice and a fair number of States, and in the EU by the European Commission.  Unfortunately, by the time the US judicial system got to the point of deciding on remedies, the Bush administration was in office.  The Bush administration never saw a monopoly they did not like, so instead of the obvious remedy for the Microsoft problem - unbundling, that is, not permitting the same company to offer both the operating system and application programmes - they settled on a number of weak and rather easily circumvented limitations on Microsoft’s ability to abuse its market power.  Fortunately, the European Commission took over after the US Department of Justice was neutered and imposed further, albeit still limited and inadequate, legal constraints on Microsoft’s ability to act as an abusive monopolist.

I believe that the combination of the restraining influence of the US Department of Justice, assorted US States and the European Commission Competition Directorate, under the able leadership of Neelie Kroes, have succeeded in shackling the Microsoft Leviathan to a sufficient degree to allow the survival of Apple, various commercial implementations of Linux and the continued use of a number of varieties of Unix for servers and workstations.

But the Microsoft Leviathan has now been joined or even replaced by Google’s Godzilla as the main threat to the freedom of the internet, and now also a growing threat to key intellectual property rights, especially copyright, and privacy.

Copyright

Google has been making available copyrighted material for download on its websites for years (books through Google Books, music through YouTube, newspaper material through Google News), often without obtaining prior consent of the copyright holder and generally without making any payments to the copyright holders.  There is a word for that kind of behaviour: theft.  Just because you steal using internet technology does not make it anything other than theft.  As an author, this naturally concerns me.

Google Street View: the universal voyeur

Google Street View, an addition to Google Maps provides panorama images visible from street level in cities around the world.  The cameras record details of residents’ lives, including pictures of drunk people throwing up, people in intimate clinches with persons with whom they are not officially affiliated, small children playing in a yard, with or without adult supervision, etc. etc.  A wonderful database for voyeurs, peeping toms and would-be child molesters.

Users with objections can register complaints before images of their street are made public.  Thanks a lot. On April 23, 2009, the UK Information Commissioner ruled that Street View, does not breach the Data Protection Act.  This decision, while ludicrous, was not surprising, as it came from an official in a country where closed circuit TV cameras, public and private, already cover much of the public domain, and have brought the UK closer to Big Brother land than any other country, past or present, even without the added contribution of Google.  The Information Commissioner’s office also said that they would watch Google closely (perhaps using Street View?) to ensure that it responded quickly to requests for the removal of images that identified individuals.

Google and tracking cookies

Another way that Google (along with others, including Microsoft and Yahoo) invades our privacy is through the use of tracking cookies or ‘third-party persistent cookies’ to implement interest-based advertising (a.k.a behavioural targeting).  From Michael Horowicz’s illuminating article I cite the following:

Cookies are small, plain-text files that reside on your computer and are managed by a web browser. As web pages are downloaded to a computer, cookies typically come along for the ride. Likewise, as you make requests for new web pages, your web browser may upload a cookie as part of the web page request.

Cookies that come from the web page you are viewing (the one whose address is displayed by your web browser) are referred to as “first party” cookies. Those that come from other sources, be they ads on the web page or small independent pages (IFRAMES) included in what appears to you to be a single page, are “third party” cookies.

Cookies are used as the foundation of interest-based advertising (a.k.a behavioral targeting). This type of advertising recognizes things you care about and shows you ads that relate to your interests, even when you are viewing an unrelated web site.

For example, someone interested in dogs, will be shown dog related ads, even while reading news stories about financial topics.”

While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft each offer you a web page where you can opt-out of the tracking cookies, all three companies opt you in by default.  That is, in my view, wrong and unethical.  We know from endless examples (opting in vs. opting out for trade union memberships, opting in vs. opting out for occupational pension funds,) that the ‘framing’ of the choice makes a massive difference to the outcome.   When opting in is the default, 80 per cent or more of employees remain subscribed to the occupational pension fund.  When opting out is the the default, only 20 per cent may end up with a long term participation in the fund.  Clearly, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft should opt you out by default.

Search engines like those of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can provide the companies that own and manage them with detailed information about many aspects of our lives, including our intimate, personal lives.  In the wrong hands that information could be used not only to put a commercial squeeze on people, but alto to extort and blackmail them.  Transferred to government hands they could provide much of the information required for a pretty effective and very nasty police state.

Can we trust Google not to abuse the information they collect?  Of course not.  This is a profit-seeking company.  Its owners, CEO and top managers are typical amoral capitalists who want to make as much money as they can without ending up in jail.  Their ruthless, unethical behaviour as regards copyright, Of course we cannot trust them.  They must be regulated and restrained by law so we can sleep at ease even though we know we cannot trust them.

A further problem is that even the act of opting out of the tracking cookies gambit results in one or more cookies being placed on your computer.  When opting out of tracking cookies results in more cookies, we clearly have a problem of trust.  As Michael Horowicz puts it “A cookie is just a plain-text file. The actions that happen based on the data in the cookie today could be different from the actions taken next week”. When the asymmetry in information and power between the individual and Google (or any other company in a similar position) is as extreme as it is in this case, and when the commercial and control incentives for abusing the information that can be collected through the cookies are as strong as they obviously are in this case, it is irresponsible to trust Google or any other company capable of tracking our internet actions.  They should not be trusted because they cannot be trusted.

Conclusion

When confronted with criticism of Google’s repeated assaults on copyright and privacy, Google CEO Eric Schmidt comes up with the most astonishing infantile defence.  It amounts to: if something can be done, it will be done and indeed ought to be done.  Well, no, actually.

We can run carefully controlled experiments on the response of newborn infants to long-term submersion in freezing water.  We don’t do this because it is considered cruel and inhuman.  We have even declared such act to be illegal.

We can deal with annoying little foreign countries by dropping H-bombs on their cities, killing most of their population and turning the country into a radio-active hell hole.  We chose not to do this because it offends our sense of proportion and its irreconcilability with any notion of a just war.  We can, easily and effortlessly do a great many things that we either voluntarily choose not to do, or that we are prevented from doing by law or other social constraints.

Google company’s founding motto is: ‘Don’t be evil.’  But it does evil.  It has indeed, become the new evil empire of the internet.  It is time for people to take a stand, as individual consumers and internet users, and collectively through laws and regulations, to tame this new Leviathan.  When I get back from this trip, I will do my best to remove every trace of Google from my computers, even the tracking cookies (if I can!).

April 29, 2009 5:17am in Culture, Economics, Ethics, European Union, Politics | 33 comments

FT: For a happier life, shake off your misplaced optimism

For a happier life, shake off your misplaced optimism

By Alain de Botton

Published: April 30 2009 19:11 | Last updated: April 30 2009 19:11

It has been clear for a while, at least since the first talk started about “green shoots” of recovery, that what we have to fear above all is hope. Attempts to trust that the worst is over and to stop frightening ourselves seem doomed to project us into yet worse disappointment. We are not only unhappy but – believing calm and happiness to be the norm – unhappy that we are unhappy.

It is time to recognise how odd and counter-productive is the optimism on which we have grown up. For the last 200 years, despite occasional shocks, the western world has been dominated by a belief in progress, based on its extraordinary scientific and entrepreneurial achievements. On a broader perspective, this optimism is a grave anomaly. Humans have spent most of recorded history drawing a curious comfort from expecting the worst. In the west, lessons in pessimism have derived from two sources: Roman Stoic philosophy and Christianity. It may be time to revisit some of these teachings, not to add to our misery but precisely so as to alleviate our sorrow.

To focus on the first of these sources, the philosopher Seneca should be the author of the hour. Living in a time of financial and political upheaval (Nero was on the Imperial throne), Seneca interpreted philosophy as a discipline to keep us calm against a backdrop of continuous danger. His consolation was of the stiffest, darkest sort: “You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened ... ?” Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them – in AD62 – that natural and man-made disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become.

If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden calamity, in the money markets or elsewhere, and pay a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting decades; on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event, after which nothing will ever be the same again. The Goddess of Fortune can scatter gifts, then watch as with terrifying speed a 50-year-old company disappears or a balance sheet is destroyed by toxic assets.

Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (“There is nothing which Fortune does not dare”), we must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times. No one should make an investment, undertake to run a company, sit on a board or leave money in a bank without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of the darkest possibilities.

Given our financial prowess, we have for too long thought of ourselves as in control of our destiny. We have trusted in the mathematical geniuses who promised us “risk management” and fashioned derivatives so complex we dared not look inside. Such trust could not be further from a Stoic mindset. We must, stressed Seneca, expand our sense of what may go wrong in our lives: “Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break. A body weak and fragile.”

Christianity only backed up the Stoic message. It pointed out that while humans might strive for perfection, it is a problem – indeed a sin – to suppose that such perfection can ever occur on earth. Nothing human can ever be free of blemishes. There cannot be an end to boom and bust, mayhem and death.

We have tended to cast such gloomy messages aside. The modern bourgeois philosophy pins its hopes firmly on two great presumed ingredients of happiness, love and work. But there is vast unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within this magnanimous assurance that everyone will discover satisfaction here. It is not that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so for too long.

When an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and disaster in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages, unexploited ambitions and exploded portfolios, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to make more of ourselves.

We should, of course, instead remember the great pessimistic voices of history. There are two quotes I cherish for these sorts of times. One is from Seneca: “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” The other is from the French moralist Chamfort: “A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

The writer’s most recent book is The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Calvin and Hobbes: Secrets

FT: Entrepreneurs do not treat bonuses as a birthright

Entrepreneurs do not treat bonuses as a birthright

Published: April 28 2009 03:00 | Last updated: April 28 2009 03:00

From Dr Malbert Smith III.

Sir, You have reported recently on the global outrage at business leaders in terms of executive compensation. The overwhelming public opinion is that bonuses should play a smaller role in overall executive compensation. What I think most people find outrageous is the notion of paying out bonuses to executives within organisations that have lost money and received government bail-out dollars. Most people subscribe to the belief that bonuses should be paid only out of profits. When profits do not exist, bonuses are not paid.

The outcry on Wall Street is that without such bonuses there will be a talent drain and they will not have the requisite leadership to dig us out of the crisis. So we want the same leaders who dug the hole to dig us out of it? To think there is not enough talent within these organisations for others to replace any of these too talented folks is naive. I think it's worth the risk to lose some of these executives, and we may be surprised at how few actually leave.

Entrepreneurs in the real world (privately held companies) have never suffered from the illusion that bonuses are routine and a birthright. As an entrepreneur who has started a number of companies and has had to seek capital and loans from banks and investors, I have never had the audacity to believe that bonuses could be paid to me or my executive management team when we did not hit our profit numbers. Ironically, on one occasion one of the big banks restricted my salary (not my bonus, but my salary) when we were out of compliance with the terms of its loan. Banks have never had difficulty in limiting and restricting management pay in privately held companies that were in “trouble”. So often in life what goes around comes around and apparently these executives are offended by the application of these same principles upon them. During this period a banker from a big financial firm explained the “Golden Rule” that was being applied to me: “He who has the gold, rules.”

I, like many Americans, believe that the capitalist, free market system has been the great engine and catalyst of growth and prosperity for our country. The entrepreneurial spirit and creativity of our true business executives is best seen in the private markets, not in the entitlement culture of Wall Street. When I hear about executives complaining about their need for bonuses, I rarely see a true entrepreneur who has created a company and jobs but typically a person who has risen through the ranks of the organisation. By and large as a group, they are a bunch of folks who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.

The hubris exhibited by these elite executives is as objectionable today as it was in Ancient Greece and across all countries.

Malbert Smith III,
President,
MetaMetrics,
Durham, NC, US

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Engineer making a big noise

Engineer making a big noise

By Amy Kazmin

Published: April 8 2009 03:00 | Last updated: April 8 2009 03:00

In India, one of the most used components of any motor vehicle is the horn. Drivers navigating livestock, pedestrians, animal-drawn carts and motor vehicles lean heavily on their horns to express frustration, if not to clear a path. Trucks are emblazoned with the slogan "horn please".

Responsible for much of India's distinctive road noise is Roots Industries, a small private company that is also the country's biggest hornmaker. It was founded in 1970 by K. Ramasamy, a US-trained automotive engineer, now 60, who has been obsessed with auto horns since his childhood in an affluent land-owning family near the southern town of Coimbatore.

Mr Ramasamy's fascination stems from his father's habit of installing a German-made Bosch horn in every car he acquired. "He said no Indian horn would last," Mr Ramasamy recalls. "It stuck in my mind that I should make horns similar to Bosch, so we would not need to import."

Little known outside the auto industry, Roots has quietly integrated into the global economy over the past 15 years or so, supplying both leading Indian vehicle makers such as Mahindra & Mahindra, and foreign marques such as Harley-Davidson. Throughout most of 2008, Roots ran three shifts a day, six days a week, turning out 400,000 horns a month for its home market and for export.

Now, as global vehicle sales have slumped, Roots has cut production to two shifts a day, five days a week, to make 173,000 horns a month. It has cut its workforce by 25 per cent to 875, mainly shedding single young men. But with one Indian worker often supporting up to five people, Roots has also sought to slash labour costs by reducing shifts and salaries rather than by shedding workers completely.

"It is predominately a social responsibility to keep them as far as the company can withstand," Mr Ramasamy says. "They don't have any facilities like unemployment benefits."

Despite the difficulties, Roots' revenues for the year ending in March 2009 are Rs965m ($19.3m) although they are expected to fall below Rs900m in the year ahead.

The challenges confronting Roots are typical of those facing the countless small manufacturers that helped drive India's years of fast growth and are now struggling to survive the global downturn.

After India loosened its tight economic controls in 1991, numerous private entrepreneurs such as Mr Ramasamy emerged from traditional landowning and trading families to meet pent-up domestic demand for manufactured goods and tap the new opportunities offered by globalisation.

But after ramping up operations, these small manufacturers are reeling. "People didn't believe that growth would slow down," says Subir Gokarn, chief economist for Asia Pacific for Standard & Poor's.

Indian manufacturers are theoretically bound by strict labour laws that make it hard to shed permanent workers. In reality, many factory owners in the worst-hit sectors have simply ceased operations and closed their premises as they wait for the global economy to recover.

Roots employees have long re-ceived monthly statements of the company's performance and have stoically accepted their falling pay, says Mr Ramasamy. "We have profit-linked salaries for everybody," he says. "Everything is transparent . . . Whatever actions we take, they understand the need for such actions."

Back in 1970, the young engineer's quest to create durable Indian horns to rival those of the German company began on his return from the US with a master's degree in automotive technology. To raise capital, he opened a garage and began fixing cars, shocking many in a conservative Hindu society with traditionally strict divisions between education and manual labour.

"People thought: 'Why is this boy getting into a garage with oil, mud, muck, dirtying himself'," Mr Ramasamy recalls. "But I enjoyed it because it was my hobby. In our religion, it says 'work is worship'. So how can we think differently of different work?"

Initially the aspiring entrepreneur developed a radiator coolant recovery system and a brake system, but struggled with sales. "I had no financial strength for advertising," he says. The 1973 Opec oil embargo was also a blow to Indian car sales, which averaged 50,000 a year in the 1970s.

But after a decade of tinkering and materials research, Mr Ramasamy in 1982 unveiled a horn with a lifespan of 200,000 "cycles", nearly double the local standard. Roots started selling them as spare parts, but in 1986 started supplying Maruti-Suzuki, then a fledgling car venture.

By 1989 Roots was the largest hornmaker in India, then still a tiny market constrained by state production quotas. But growth ac-celerated after government reforms in 1991. "Business really began picking up," says Mr Ramasamy. He attended his first overseas trade fair in 1992 and started exporting to the Middle East and Europe two years later.

As he built the business, Mr Ramasamy wrote three times to Bosch to request a partnership. He had to be patient: it was only after two decades from his first contact that Bosch signed a long-term technical collaboration and buy-back agreement with Roots - a moment Mr Ramasamy recalls as "a great joy". To finance the deal, he sold a 25 per cent stake in Roots to Reliance Industries, although Reliance plays no active role.

Roots also pushed into the US market, setting up an engineering and marketing office in Cadillac, Michigan, to work with leading US carmakers, although it has now closed because of the downturn in the US market. By 2004, it supplied half the horns used by Ford Motor Co in North America from a $1m, purpose-built factory. But Roots ended the arrangement last March after Ford pressed Roots for lower prices. "Raw material prices were going up very much, but Ford wanted to reduce the price," Mr Ramasamy says.

Roots also built a factory in Malaysia, which opened in 2003, to supply south-east Asia, although promises of a south-east Asia free trade zone have not been realised.

With day-to-day management left to trusted professionals, Mr Ramasamy is still pursuing his quest for a lighter, more energy-efficient, longer-lasting horn.

"We are working on many other products," he says. "When the upturn comes, we will be ready."

The subtleties of worker relations in a new industrial era

Hundreds of thousands of Indians have lost their jobs to the global downturn or had a cut in pay. But in Roots Industries' base of Coimbatore - a hub of the engineering and textile industries - there has been little of the social unrest associated with job losses and wage cuts.

This reflects the weakness of India's labour unions, but Subir Gokarn, chief economist for Asia-Pacific for Standard & Poors, says it is also due to complex, generations-old ties between local entrepreneurs and industrial workers. "These are inherited relationships that have emerged out of a very established, elaborate social context, and have simply moved from the agrarian structure to the industrial structure," he says.

K. Ramasamy, founder of Roots, says that pay cuts are temporary emergency measures until business picks up. "[The workers] know if the money comes, we are giving it to them," he says.

In general, says Mr Gokarn, the workers understandthat the employer has no choice, and that "the more flexible they are, the better the chances that when the cycle turns, they can go back to old arrangements".

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Time: Does Beer (Goggling) Really Affect Whom We Find Attractive?

Monday, Apr. 27, 2009

Does Beer (Goggling) Really Affect Whom We Find Attractive?

By John Cloud

Alcohol often gets blamed for sexual assignations that, in the bright light of the next morning, seem unwise. It's called beer-goggling, but does it really exist? Does drinking actually affect how your brain evaluates the attractiveness of other faces, or do we just use alcohol as an excuse to hook up with the first willing target?

There's no better place to ask such questions than in Britain, where the culture of alcohol and inappropriate sex is so ingrained that it is subjected to rigorous academic inquiry. Recently, a pair of research psychologists — Vincent Egan of the University of Leicester and Giray Cordan of the University of Exeter — completed a survey of 240 subjects, half of whom had been drinking, to find out how drinkers and non-drinkers experience attraction. What they found was interesting, if a bit creepy. (Learn about addiction and the brain.)

The creepy part has to do with how all people, not just drinkers, rate the attractiveness of minors. Researchers have known for years that adults have a deep appreciation for neoteny, the retention of juvenile features like large eyes and baby-smooth skin in adults. Our fondness for neoteny is both obvious — most people find other people with youthful features to be attractive — and unsettling. Appreciating neotenous features isn't the same as being sexually attracted to children, but at least one study has found that average, college-age heterosexual males and child molesters share remarkably similar (and deeply neotenous) attractions: high cheekbones, unwrinkled eyes, glabrous skin.

Evolution, in short, favors nubile females who still look like they have a great many years of fertility ahead of them. Evolutionary impulses are more complicated for women, who tend to seek men who are powerful and can provide maximum care for their offspring, and such men aren't always young-looking. Gay men have two equally enthusiastic subcultures favoring twinks or bears — guys who look like they are in their teens and guys who look like they could be your dad.

The new study, set to be published in June in the 100th issue of the British Journal of Psychology, examined how alcohol plays into all these murky attractions to youth. The vast majority of men don't act on their potentially inappropriate, or criminal, impulses, but can those who do blame the booze?

The study's authors, Egan and Cordan, asked their 120 drinking and 120 sober participants to rate the attractiveness of 15-year-old girls versus 19-year-old girls shown in photographs. The study participants were evenly divided between men and women. For ethical and legal reasons, the photos were actually altered images of 17-year-old students from McMaster University in Ontario; they had given permission for their likenesses to be used. Researchers digitally manipulated the pictures to make the students' craniofacial features look like those of typical 15-year-olds or those of 19-year-olds. The doctored pictures were then shown in random order to participants recruited in bars, airport lounges, cafes and other natural settings.

On average, the participants found the "15-year-olds" slightly more attractive than the "19-year-olds," which reconfirms our inclination toward neoteny. Both men and women found the more youthful images of girls to be a bit more attractive than the older ones.

Surprisingly, drinking had little impact on the results. Both drinkers and nondrinkers tended to favor the 15-year-old girls over the older ones, and when asked to estimate the younger girls' age, both groups of participants overestimated them to be just over 18 — or, just over the legal age for sex in the U.S. (The one condition under which drinkers preferred the 19-year-old faces was when they were wearing makeup, which has the effect of smoothing out wrinkles and granting a younger appearance — a finding won't come as a great surprise to any woman who has ever worn rouge.)

The study suggests that guys who claim they were too drunk to notice that a girl was underage are probably lying, since drunkenness doesn't have much to do with one's ability to estimate age or attractiveness. But that raises a disturbing conclusion: you don't have to be drunk to think the girl next door looks better than your wife. It may be wired into your genes.

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Time: Why Bosses Tend to be Blowhards

Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009

Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?

By Jeffrey Kluger

Bosses may be an overbearing breed, but more often than not, you've got to admire their business chops. Wouldn't you love to have that same sense of competence and confidence, that ability to assess tough problems and reach smart solutions on the fly? Guess what? So would they. If you have ever suspected that your boss isn't actually good enough at what he or she does to deserve the job in the first place, a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that you might be right.

Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say. This works well when leaders know what they're talking about, but what if they don't? If someone acts like a boss but thinks like a boob, is that still enough to stay on top? (See the best business deals of 2008.)

To determine just how easily an all-hat-no-cattle leader can take control of employees, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, devised a pair of tests. Cameron Anderson, an associate professor of organizational behavior and industrial relations, along with doctoral candidate Gavin Kilduff, recruited a group of 68 graduate students and divided them into four-person teams. To eliminate the wild card of gender, the teams were either all-male or all-female. Each group was given the task of organizing an imaginary nonprofit environmental organization; the group that did best — as determined by the researchers — would win a $400 prize. While the prize was real, the purported goal wasn't. What Anderson and Kilduff really wanted to see was how the alpha group members would emerge. (Read "How to Know When the Economy Is Turning Up.")

After the teams performed their work for a fixed amount of time, the members of each group rated one another on both their level of influence on the group and, more important, their level of competence. The work sessions were videotaped, and a group of independent observers performed the same evaluations, as did Anderson and Kilduff. All three sets of judges reached the same conclusions. Consistently, the group members who spoke up the most were rated the highest for such qualities as "general intelligence" and "dependable and self-disciplined." The ones who didn't speak as much tended to score higher for less desirable traits, including "conventional and uncreative."

"More-dominant individuals achieved influence in their groups in part because they were seen as more competent by fellow group members," Anderson and Kilduff write. (See pictures of Steve Jobs on the job.)

But so what? Maybe they were more competent. Isn't it possible that people who talk more do so because they simply have more to contribute? To test that, Anderson and Kilduff ran a second study with a new team of volunteers in which the skill being tested was a lot more quantifiable than forming a nonprofit green group. This time it was math. (See entrepreneurs breaking ground in global business.)

Once again, the volunteers were divided into fours in competition for a $400 prize, but now their assigned task was to work as teams to solve computational problems from previous versions of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT). Before the work began, the participants informed the researchers — but not their team members — of their real-world scores on the math portion of the SAT. When the work was finished, the people who spoke up more were again likelier to be described by peers as leaders and likelier to be rated as math whizzes. What's more, any speaking up at all seemed to do. Participants earned recognition for being the first to call out an answer, but also for being the second or third — even if all they did was agree with what someone else had said. Merely providing some scrap of information relevant to solving the problem counted too, as long as they did so often enough and confidently enough. (See TIME's photo-essay "All Cubed In.")

When Anderson and Kilduff checked the participants' work, however, a lot of pretenders were exposed. Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they'd even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period.

"Dominant individuals behaved in ways that made them appear competent," the researchers write, "above and beyond their actual competence." Troublingly, group members seemed only too willing to follow these underqualified bosses. An overwhelming 94% of the time, the teams used the first answer anyone shouted out — often giving only perfunctory consideration to others that were offered.

None of this comes as much of a shock — at least if you've been watching the news. You don't have to be a former homeowner burned by the housing fiasco or a blue-state voter screaming "I told you so" to agree that the way we pick our leaders is often based on something other than merit. That's not entirely bad, since no matter how competent bosses are, they still have to have the charisma and confidence to persuade people to follow them. Whether they're leading from the Oval Office or the corner office, it's up to the rest of us to watch them closely and make sure they know what they're doing and where they're going.

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FP: Monogamy

Monogamy: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

By Jacques Attali

September/October 2005

www.foreignpolicy.com

Two hundred years ago, few people foresaw legalized divorce or
open homosexuality-let alone gay marriage. Abstract art and jazz
were unimaginable. Aesthetics, morals, and family relationships, it
seems, are the bane of the futurologist. We constantly speculate
about the future balance of power, looming conflicts, and emerging
technologies. Yet somehow, we imagine that morals and aesthetics
are immutable. So we forget to ask how conceptions of good and
evil, acceptable and unacceptable, beauty and ugliness will change.
And they will.

Mogamy, which is really no more than a useful social convention,
will not survive. It has rarely been honored in practice; soon, it will
vanish even as an ideal. I do not believe that society will return to
polygamy. Instead, we will move toward a radically new
conception of sentimental and love relationships. Nothing forbids a
person from being in love with a few people at the same time.
Society rejects this possibility today primarily for economic reasons-
to maintain an orderly transmission of property-and because
monogamy protects women against male excesses.

But these rationales are dissolving in the face of powerful new
trends. The insatiable demand for transparency, fueled by
democracy and the free market, is placing the private lives of public
men and women under greater scrutiny. The reality of multiple lives
and partners will become more apparent, and society's hypocrisy
will be revealed. The continued rise of individual freedom will
permanently change sexual mores, as it has most other realms.
Likewise, jumps in life expectancy will make it nearly impossible to
spend one's entire life with one person and to love only that one
person.

Meanwhile, technological advances will further weaken the links
between sexuality, love, and reproduction, which are very different
concepts. Widely available birth control has already stripped away
an important obstacle to having multiple partners.

Just as most societies now accept successive love relationships,
soon we will acknowledge the legality and acceptability of
simultaneous love. For men and women, it will be possible to have
partnerships with various people, who will, in turn, have various
partners themselves. At long last, we will recognize that it is human
to love different people at the same time.

The demise of monogamy will not come without a struggle. All the
churches will seek to forbid it, especially for women. For a while,
they will hold the line. But individual freedom, once again, will
triumph. The revolution will begin in Europe, America will follow,
and the rest of the world will eventually come around. The
implications will be enormous. Relationships with children will be
radically different, financial arrangements will be disrupted, and how
and where we live will change. To be sure, it will take decades for
the change to be complete and yet, if we look around, it is already
here. Beneath our hypocrisies-in movies, novels, and music-the
shape of our future is visible.

Jacques Attali is a writer, president of PlaNet Finance, an
international nonprofit organization, and a contributing editor to
FOREIGN POLICY.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/index.php