Papal White Paper

Papal  encyclicals don’t normally hit my radar.  But this summer, when the Vatican released what some called a papal white paper on globalization and ethics, I took note for two reasons.  First, the subject is one of my favorites, and second, because so many people ask me “What’s a white paper?”

Since so few white papers garner any publicity, I’m commenting on this one, timed perfectly to coincide with the G8 meeting in Italy.

Please note that my comments intend no disrespect to the church — centuries of papal correspondence dictate the form this encyclical takes.  My intent is educating business communicators on the places where a business white paper will align and diverge from the style perpetuated by Pope Benedict XVI.

Telegraph with a great title

The official title of the work is Latin, CARITAS IN VERITATE (“Charity in Truth”).  I can’t criticize the church for using its official language, but I can advise business communicators to go with something catchier.

Define the audience and focus on its needs

The pope addressed this message to “the bishops, priests and deacons, men and women religious, the lay faithful and all people of good will.”

Business communicators, don’t ever try to write this broadly.  If you want to reach everyone from Bible scholars to faithful illiterates, do so with different versions for each audience.

State your objective and stick to it

Straightaway, the pope diffuses any notions or potential criticisms of interfering in politics while staking a claim in perpetuating the “mission of truth.”  I’d grade this objective a solid C+:

The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim “to interfere in any way in the politics of States.”  She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation.

More clearly stated, I might suggest: The Church maintains its distance from the politics of States (“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s).  At the same time, She speaks directly to individuals in all walks of life,  including statecraft, to apply Christ’s teachings to their daily lives and decisions in all matters, including business, economics and the proper use of modern technologies.

Follow a logical outline

In Chapter One we learn that CARITAS IN VERITATE is an update of a forty-year-old encyclical by Pope Paul VI and we get a recap of that earlier work .

Chapter Two’s first paragraph tells us why the world needs an update:

The economic development that Paul VI hoped to see was meant to produce real growth, of benefit to everyone and genuinely sustainable. It is true that growth has taken place, and it continues to be a positive factor that has lifted billions of people out of misery — recently it has given many countries the possibility of becoming effective players in international politics. Yet it must be acknowledged that this same economic growth has been and continues to be weighed down by malfunctions and dramatic problems, highlighted even further by the current crisis.

Chapter Three diffuses mis-perceptions about “moral interference” with the economy:

(T)he conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from “influences” of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise.

Chapter Four brings it home to individuals with:

Many people today would claim that they owe nothing to anyone, except to themselves. They are concerned only with their rights, and they often have great difficulty in taking responsibility for their own and other people’s integral development. Hence it is important to call for a renewed reflection on how rights presuppose duties, if they are not to become mere licence.

Chapter Five works its way up from the individual to the family and finally, to the entire race:

The development of peoples depends, above all, on a recognition that the human race is a single family working together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side.

Chapter Six discusses the proper use of technology, from financial to communications and bioethics:

By analogy, the development of peoples goes awry if humanity thinks it can re-create itself through the “wonders” of technology, just as economic development is exposed as a destructive sham if it relies on the “wonders” of finance in order to sustain unnatural and consumerist growth.

The Conclusion states:

Development needs Christians with their arms raised towards God in prayer, Christians moved by the knowledge that truth-filled love, caritas in veritate, from which authentic development proceeds, is not produced by us, but given to us.

Grade for following a logical outline: A+.

Research & interviews

White papers are not editorials or essays.  You must back your claims with research and quotes.

In the church’s case, the pope handled that through scripture and footnotes of earlier papal works.

Business writers need to be careful that the sources they cite are credible to the intended audience of the piece.  For example, when I write for financial clients, I won’t include a news story from USAToday when I can find it in the WSJ.

Hone and polish

Again, centuries of custom allow (perhaps even dictate)  using passive voice, but centuries of custom don’t make the papal white paper easy to understand. Business communicators, place your subjects and verbs as close to each other as possible.  Visual cues like bulleted lists and call-out boxes are a godsend (couldn’t resist that).

As I said in another post, good writing requires that you “kill your darlings“  and I have to grade the Vatican harshly on this point.  By including too broad an audience, the encyclical went waaaaay over the heads of most everyone but the scholars faaaaaar too often.

Focus, writers, focus!

When to Facebook, What to Facebook

(Note from Tamela) When I spoke to the Carolina Professional Saleswomen & Entrepreneurs in June, I promised a follow-up on their questions about Facebook.  I turned to my good friend and social media genius, Andy Ciordia, who built and maintains my wonderful blogsite,  for a guest column on the subject.

Andy Ciordia speaks

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.. Unless you’re under a rock someone has talked about it and usually I hear this:

“An old highschool friend [who I may or may not desire to find me] has found me on facebook. I’ve connected with everyone I used to know.”

along side,

“I am losing at least a few hours a day just flipping through Facebook. I can’t believe how easy it is to just get lost in.”

Do I need Facebook?

With every new technology there are those who are already there, those who are in transition, and those who are defiant to it.  Unfortunately time is not on your side, the new usually always beats out the old and even the most stoic convert eventually.  Remember cell phones?

But do you need Facebook?  No, of course not.  It’s an application, a medium of communication.  You’ll never find yourself in a desert and think, “If only I had Facebook”, haha!  However, as a medium it courses with information.  Information that can allow us to grow, to understand, and at times get lost in.  Like any technology there can be abuse, but that’s not the question at hand.

While you may not desire Facebook and the level of transparency you can gate a large percentage of that through their options.  In the budding age of social networks I recommend people getting online, checking out the tools, and share only what is comfortable to them and lock out the rest until they find a purpose to it.  At the core of the thought is that you should be aware of what is going on in the internet space and this is where a lot of growth is coming from.  If you miss this age you might be even further out when the next layers come down.

What does Facebook mean to business?

A good question and one central to anyone in modern business.  You used to be able to not be online.  Remember that?  Oh I don’t need a website. My how times have changed.  If you are not online you can hear a collective consumer sigh as they switch gears and Google your competition.  Now we’re entering the social media age, which was really there all along but it’s never been so easy to tap into. Before this was mainly limited to the relationships fostered by brick and mortar establishments.  Now the power of the individual business through social networking can establish healthy relationships with people from around the world!

While social media is undoubtedly something you will want to integrate into your marketing portfolio the uses of it and Facebook is a bit more unclear. Some markets it is required for, national brands, local outposts, grass root campaigns, and many others. However it’s not always critical to the success of you or your brand.

Facebook works best for the personal or group mentalities. After watching many come to Facebook with the expectation of huge sales and followers only to be hit on the head after hard sales approach many can walk away dejected due to the misunderstanding of the media. Facebook requires you to culture more of who you are, show it, relate with others, while developing and fostering relationships.

Social media takes time

These medias which unite us together and create a stronger representation of self, what you stand for, and your business are fantastic but it comes at a cost. Your time.

In the old sales channels how often were you out beating the street and meeting others. Knocking on doors, or picking up the handset? Quite frequently if you want to keep your business up. A relationship is a relationship. You’re still going to have to build and maintain it. What happens differently in this medium is there are elements of entertainment. Well we are really good at being entertained and all of a sudden your day is done but how many new people did you meet, how many people did you really interact with, and did any of your goals from the onset get met? You have to be careful.

One step at a time

I challenge you to get involved by taking small steps. Like Tamela often asks me, ‘Which part of the elephant are we eating today?’ The domain of all of this knowledge is large, the nuances subtle, but the payoffs can be large for you personally or for your business.  Enter the arena slowly, watchfully, and aware of what you are exposing.  Be honest and share what you can with who you want and evolve the relationships naturally.

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Andy Ciordia works for Nuance Labs Consulting helping small businesses to establish their brands, identities, and strategies online with a hands-on personal approach. You can find Andy on LinkedIn and Twitter helping others in the community. Feel free to reach out and connect with Andy for the beginning of a great relationship.

Green Tax Code?

Thanks to The Atlantic’s July-August edition, I took a brief walk through the US political-environmental history of my adult life.

For me, it started with President Carter’s much-derided “sweater address” to the nation, in which he suggested we lower our thermostats.  I recall vaguely the buzz about the White House’s unsightly solar panels. Even as a high schooler I paid attention to the news.

What I didn’t understand at the time was how much reliance this country puts on the tax code to affect behavior — individual,  corporate and regulatory.   Hence today’s post and writing prompts for bloggers & newsletter publishers.

Saw-blade growth

Quoting the article: “Plotted on a graph, the history of clean-energy production in the United States resembles the blade of a saw, rising and falling each time subsidies came and went. Japan, Germany, Spain, and Denmark show smooth, upward-sloping yield curves, a reflection of consistent government policy.”

Reliance on venture capital

Long excerpt:

The nature of venture-capital investing, which involves placing many bets in the hope that a few pay off, helped create today’s array of clean technologies. But venture capitalists have been unable to replicate the explosion of growth in the Internet sector, because they aren’t big enough to compete in the $5 trillion U.S. energy market. Google required only $25 million in venture capital to become the company it is today. A large wind or solar facility can cost upwards of $500 million just to get started. “When you’re talking power infrastructure, you’re talking thousands of tons of steel and glass and giant turbines,” says Peter Le Lièvre, the co-founder of Ausra. “All the investors in Silicon Valley combined cannot put $500 million into a project.”

This poses a problem. Venture capitalists can bring an idea from the lab to pilot scale. But sooner or later the limitations of their balance sheets kick in. Many start-ups have made it this far only to die searching for additional financing. Venture capitalists have a term for this. They call it the “Valley of Death.”

The nut of the problem traces all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s choice of tax credits as the vehicle for subsidizing renewable energy. Direct grants would have been simpler. But Congress had recently changed the federal-budget process to keep closer track of how much money was being spent. It suddenly became easier to spend indirectly, by manipulating the tax code. Although no one realized it at the time, Carter’s decision to use tax credits lit the very long fuse on a bomb that detonated last fall and nearly took down the entire renewable-energy industry in America.

The trouble with tax credits (my emphasis added) is that in order to make use of them, you must owe taxes, and most start-ups struggling toward profitability do not. So while a company looking to build a wind or solar facility would qualify for valuable benefits, it had no means of realizing this “tax equity.” The work-around was to partner with someone who did, someone large enough to finance a $500 million facility and profitable enough to incur a large tax bill. Having witnessed two decades of busts and bankruptcies, traditional U.S. banks wanted no part of this. European banks, going by their more positive experience, were comfortable funding large renewable projects, but didn’t qualify for U.S. tax credits. The perversity of the government’s incentives demanded a big balance sheet, huge profits, and an indifference to risk. Enter Wall Street.

Investment banks and hedge funds stepped in to fill the void, engineering tax-equity vehicles with suspiciously complicated-sounding names, like “partnership flip structure” and “inverted passthrough lease,” to exploit the tax benefits. These deals amounted to financing agreements for large infrastructure projects, given in exchange for tax credits, often worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that could be applied against profits earned primarily on other investments (like mortgage-backed securities). For renewable-energy companies, tax-equity deals meant life or death: the combination of credits could offset two-thirds of the capital cost of a project. Companies like Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG became an integral part—even the integral part—of the renewables industry, because the utility-scale projects they financed produce the overwhelming majority of clean energy in the United States.

Basing the entire system of federal incentives on tax equity had two weaknesses, one that has always been clear and another that became clear only recently. Forcing renewables companies to route government support through Wall Street, thereby sacrificing a portion of it, was needless and inefficient. But it also tied the industry’s fate to that of the financial world’s most aggressive players. Just as Wall Street bankers bet that housing prices could never fall and got wiped out when proved wrong, Congress seems never to have imagined that Wall Street might someday have no profits and need no tax equity. Early last year, the multibillion-dollar tax-equity universe consisted of 18 providers. After September’s record carnage, the number dropped to four. Credit froze, and most projects ground to a halt. All of a sudden, not just a few start-ups but the entire renewable-energy industry was staring into the Valley of Death.

Financial and Environmental Writing Prompts

• Do you agree with Raj Atluru, managing director of the venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, when he claims that the stimulus bill save renewables?  Here’s The Atlantic:

“To fill the tax-equity gap, the stimulus provides $32.7 billion in direct grants and another $134 billion in loan guarantees to attract new investors to large projects. To impose stability, it extends a variety of tax credits by anywhere from three to eight years. Most striking of all, it instructs the Department of Energy to invest directly in promising cleantech companies (though the payoff comes in jobs and environmental gains, not equity). By a stroke of his pen, President Obama made a federal agency the world’s largest venture capitalist. When the official in charge of the program appeared at a Santa Barbara energy conference in March, he was mobbed by eager CEOs.”

• Is it inefficient to force renewable companies to route government support through Wall St?
• What do you think about the Department of Energy now essentially becoming the world’s largest venture capitalist?
• Comment on this claim: “American capitalism—even when it’s working—is not without its limitations, one being that promising ideas rarely get funding if their commercial potential lies beyond venture capitalists’ 10-year investment horizon.”
• Do you agree that The Energy Department research budget has never recovered from Reagan’s cuts?
• Do you have statistics to back up or dispute this claim? “People in cleantech circles often point out that the electric utilities spend a smaller portion of revenue on research and development than pet-food companies do. “

Books in Queue

I’m a book lush. My reading aspirations, however, always outstrip my productivity.

Here are a couple of books that have my attention. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s read them.

Cheap:  The High Cost of Discount Culture

From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt—and almost everywhere in between—America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time—the engine of globalization, outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world.

“Around the world, people are being forced to reconsider the very idea of prosperity, and to ask what kind of wealth matters most and can be sustained. Cheap appears at just the right moment to enrich this discussion. This history of discounting and bargain-mania will change the way shoppers think about their next trip to the mall. As an examination of the global effects of the quest for rock-bottom prices, Cheap an important addition to arguments about America’s economic future. This is a valuable book for a troubled time.” —James Fallows, author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square

“More stuff for less!—the American recipe for material well-being. Now Ellen Ruppel Shell takes a hard look at this apparently simple notion and finds it isn’t so simple after all. Cheap pulls apart the old economic verities and subjects the glib new promises of Wall Street and globalization to scrutiny. How did we find ourselves in our current mess? Shell finds part of the answer in our confused ideas about what, exactly, is a bargain price.” —Charles C. Mann, author of 1491

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

The world’s largest corporation has grown to prominence in America’s Sun Belt—the relatively recent seat of American radical agrarian populism—and amid a feverish antagonism to corporate monopoly. In the spirit of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? historian Moreton unearths the roots of the seeming anomaly of corporate populism, in a timely and penetrating analysis that situates the rise of Wal-Mart in a postwar confluence of forces, from federal redistribution of capital favoring the rural South and West to the family values symbolized by Sam Walton’s largely white, rural, female workforce (the basis of a new economic and ideological niche), the New Christian Right’s powerful probusiness and countercultural movement of the 1970s and ’80s and its harnessing of electoral power. Giving Max Weber’s Protestant ethic something of a late-20th-century update, Moreton shows how this confluence wedded Christianity to the free market. Moreton’s erudition and clear prose elucidate much in the area of recent labor and political history, while capturing the centrality of movement cultures in the evolving face of American populism. ~ Publisher’s Weekly

Why Outsource Newsletters & Email Campaigns?

After June’s speaking engagement, members of Charlotte Professional Saleswomen and Entrepreneurs (CPSE) have been in touch with questions about email and newsletter marketing.  Since we ran out of time in person, this post is fourth in the series of online follow-ups.

Question: Why not just send my newsletter from my own email account?

Answer: There’s a lot more to email marketing than selecting recipients from your address book and hitting the “send” button.

I’m proud of the email/newsletter service I offer and in answering this question I’ll identify when I’m pushing my own service so you can skip the parts labeled in blue if you want to be like Joe Friday and get “Just the Facts, ma’am.”

Administrivia

• Subscribe and unsubscribe requests — every time you send a campaign, some people are likely to want to get off the list. It may only take you a minute or two to deal with, but if you need to stop what you are doing and switch tasks, it adds up quickly. And what happens if you miss one and send to that person again? Federal CAN-
  SPAM violations can run to $11,000.

  Commercial: My service lets people unsubscribe instantly from any email they receive, and your list is updated automatically — just what CAN-SPAM envisioned.
  

• Dealing with bounced emails — For any given campaign, you might expect up to 10% of the emails to be bounced back to you. That could be hundreds or thousands of emails you need to handle somehow.

  Are they permanent bounces? Then should you remove them from your list? Or do you need to resend the email to them?

  Commercial: My service instantly removes hard bounces, and re-sends your campaigns automatically to addresses which soft bounce.

• Dealing with spam complaints — Sometimes people forget that they signed up for your emails, and hit the spam button. No one wants to defend themselves against the feds in a CAN-SPAM matter.

Commercial: My system instantly removes people from your list as soon as they make a spam complaint, ensuring they do not receive any more email.

Improve your deliverability

Your email campaign can only succeed if your recipients are actually able to read it. When you subscribe to my service to send your campaigns you’ve entrusted a powerful ally.

• Commercial: Whitelisting and feedback loops — My service has relationships with major Internet Service Providerss like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and many more.  This means our mail servers are recognized as legitimate senders of bulk email, so your campaigns have a much greater chance of being delivered.

• Commercial: Monitoring of blacklists — We continually check blacklisting services to make sure our servers are not being listed, something which is time consuming and complex to do for your own servers.

• Commercial: Specialized network of mail servers — our mail servers optimize email delivery for particular recipient mail systems, throttling the speed of delivery to match acceptable levels for each system.

You’d be hard pressed to do these with regular email:

• Personalization — Use custom fields to adapt your emails for individual subscribers
• Segmentation — Send focused emails to subsets of your full lists
• Powerful import and export — Easily get your subscriber lists into and out of the system at any time
• Archive your campaigns — Easily display your previous campaigns on your website

Focus on your customers, not on your technology

Sure, you can use your own email client and deal with unsubscribe requests and bounces from bad emails all day. But wouldn’t you rather use an email service provider that lets you avoid the mundane administrative work and concentrate on serving your customers better?

Question: What’s this service got to do with you as a ghostwriter?

That depends on you.  If you want to use my service and write your own content, go for it. At least you’ll get the advantages discussed above (and a great custom template).

If you want my help, it can range from editing your work to developing an editorial calendar, integrating newsletters and email campaigns with your blog and marketing strategies.  Or, I can simply write your content from source material you provide.

Let’s talk about your skills and needs.  You want to be free to focus on the aspects of your business that can’t or shouldn’t be outsourced.  If you’re not a Business Person who writes like an English Major, you can hire someone who is.

Greenfinger?

With the G8 coming to agreement on climate change, The Atlantic’s article “Moving Heaven and Earth” is timely.  In it, I learned a new vocab word, “Anthropocene,” coined in 2000 to describe the period of time when humans began changing the world’s climate and ecosystems.

I also learned about large-scale projects that are designed to “deform the Earth intentionally, as a way to engineer the planet either back to its pre-industrial state, or to some improved third state.”  These projects fall under the term “geo-engineering”and give me the creeps.

Following is a brief overview of the strategies followed by writing prompts for bloggers and newsletter publishers (but they can also be used for conversation starters at the neighborhood pool party).

Gas the planet

For those who saw Blade Runner, the red skies envisioned by this strategy will be familiar.  Imagine factories whose sole occupation is pumping out sulfur dioxide.  During the day all that aerosolized pollutant would shield the planet from the full blast of the sun and would often redden the sunsets.  Cost estimate: $100billion compared to an estimated annual $1t to cut carbon emissions through traditional means.

Churn the seas

The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s plan calls for a fleet of 1500 ships constantly churning sea water and spraying it high enough for the wind to carry it to the clouds, making them whiter and fluffier, which in turn enables them to better reflect the sunlight. Cost: $600m up front plus $100m annually.

Frisbees

An astronomy and optics professor at the University of Arizona proposes shooting Frisbee-sized ceramic disks at the gravitational midpoint between Earth and Sun to provide a huge sunshade and keep the planet in a perpetual state of annular eclipse.  Cost: Several trillion (the technology doesn’t exist).

No international treaty needed

The trouble with treaties is the incentive to cheat, but with geo-engineering any one country could act alone.  “Instead of a situation where any one country can foil efforts to curb global warming, any one country can curb global warming on its own.  Pumping sulfur into the amosphere is a lot easier than trying to orchestrate the actions of 200 countries  — or for that matter, 7 billion individuals…”

The article contemplates a possible “Greenfinger” who might implement geo-engineering with the single minded focus of  the James Bond villain, Goldfinger. “There are now 38 people in the world with $10b or more in private assets…theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone.”  Even a poor country like Bangladesh could afford to take unilateral action to reduce the chance their low-elevation coastal zones would wash away in global-warming-induced rising seas by pumping out sulfur dioxide.

Cut carbon emissions

There is almost universal agreement by climate scientists that we’re better off reducing carbon emissions than going into geo-engineering.  Lots of ideas there too, including capturing emissions in giant cooling towers, but the problem is where to put all that captured carbon.  One idea is to inject it into the “right kind of geological structure” that would be deep enough to keep it there.

Another reduction strategy for reducing the carbon dioxide we currently produce is blooming plankton, which thrives on it.  Some envision offshore plankton forests to replace those no longer on land.  Problem is, the dead algae would produce methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

The article concludes with the suggestion that we “keep investigating geo-engineering solutions but make quite clear to the public that most of them are so dreadful that they should scare the living daylights out of even a Greenfinger.”

A note on language

As I wrote in May, people don’t respond as well to negative as they do positive language.  For example, the founder of ecoAmerica observed “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

Further, in another Atlantic Monthly article by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, “Although it might be hard to think about the person who will occupy your body tomorrow morning as someone other than you, it is not hard at all to think that way about the person who will occupy your body 20 years from now. This may be one reason why many young people are indifferent about saving for retirement; they feel as if they would be giving up their money to an elderly stranger.”

Bottom line for environmental communicators: find a way to couch messages in positive language; ground them firmly in the present.

Environmental and Financial Writing Prompts

• If you have working knowledge of these or other geo-engineering strategies, please leave a comment with links.  You might consider comparing and contrasting those you know with those in The Atlantic’s article.
• Refer to the post I wrote about Prince Charles’ Rainforest Bond proposal. Given what one rogue nation could do to gas the planet with sulfur dioxide, perhaps it makes sense to pay rainforest countries for the services their natural resources offer to the health of the planet and every living being.
• Given the state of venture capital, by what means can environmental entrepreneurs fund their work?  Is there something between governmental support and venture capital?  With so many unemployed financial mathemeticians looking for something to do, this seems a worthwhile problem to ponder.
• How can funding and regulation work together to protect the entire world from a Greenfinger or rogue state?

Beware the Fart Joke

Catching up on reading this week at the beach, including past issues of my favorite magazine, The Atlantic.

The November 2008 edition carried a fascinating article that touched on neuroeconomics, or the neurophysiology of economic decisions. I love this stuff.

According to Yale professor of psychology, Paul Bloom, “…remembering something is easiest while you are in the same state in which you originally experienced it. Students do better when they are tested in the room in which they learned the material; someone who learned something while he was angry is better at remembering that information when he is angry again; the experience of one’s drunken self is more accessible to the drunk self than to the sober self. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

Bloom’s research underscores why effective business communications need to take people to an emotional place in order to cement the message. Warren Buffett did this well in his 2009 annual letter to shareholders when he drew a parallel between derivatives and venereal disease:  “Participants seeking to dodge troubles face the same problem as someone seeking to avoid venereal disease: It’s not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with.”

If that gives you a creepy feeling, the Oracle from Omaha met his objective; he hates derivatives.

More Buffett bon mots:

• Tony and I feel like two hungry mosquitoes in a nudist camp. Juicy targets are everywhere.

• By year end 2007, the half dozen or so companies that had been the major players in this business had all fallen into big trouble. The cause of their problems was captured long ago by Mae West: “I was Snow White,but I drifted.”

• If merely looking up past financial data would tell you what the future holds,the Forbes 400 would consist of librarians.

• The tennis crowd would call my mistakes “unforced errors.”

• Upon leaving, our feelings about the business mirrored a line in a country song: “I liked you better before I got to know you so well.”

• Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the symbols. Our advice: Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

Advice for speakers

Back to Paul Bloom in The Atlantic story,  “Good smells, such as fresh bread, make people kinder and more likely to help a stranger; bad smells, like farts (the experimenters used fart spray from a novelty store), make people more judgmental. If you ask people to unscramble sentences, they tend to be more polite, minutes later, if the sentences contain positive words like honor rather than negative words like bluntly. .. All of these studies support the view that each of us contains many selves-some violent, some submissive, some thoughtful-and that different selves can be brought to the fore by different situations.“

Next time you’re delivering a presentation, keep this in mind.  The oft-repeated advice to open with a joke should be tempered by what you just learned about neurophysiology — don’t make it a fart joke.