Dan Ariely 1 of 3: Trust, Revenge & Financial Reform

Bestselling author Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at  Duke, made a special appearance in Charlotte for our Business School Alliance last week. Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational, just went into a second edition and — holy cow– is still in hardcover. I’ll write about his visit in this and two other posts this week. Here’s what’s in the new edition:

1.  A New Intro: Why the recent events in the economy make behavioral economics more important than ever before

2.  Reactions and Anecdotes: Expanding on some of the lessons we learned in the earlier chapters with interesting new stories and some more science

3.  Thoughts about the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and Its Consequences: A more in-depth look at how irrationalities played a role in the recent Subprime Mortgage Crisis, along with some of his thoughts on how we can fix those problems

Part One: we trust and seek revenge irrationally

Cliff’s notes: Ariely demonstrates that people aren’t always “selfish economic maximizers.” We will trust when we are rationally unwise to do so.  He also points out that we are, irrationally, “very happy to spend lots of money to make others suffer,”  joking that if you’ve any experience with divorce you’ll understand what he’s talking about. He explained the social utility of revenge in situations where lawlessness prevails.

Interesting factoid: PET scans of brains plotting revenge are quite similar to those experiencing pleasure.

I particularly like the novel way he approaches financial and healthcare reform.  He reminds us that roads and highways have wider lanes than a vehicle width, they have shoulders where people aren’t supposed to drive, they have protective medians and speed limits — none of which a “rational economist” would allow for.  Conclusion: when we devised our transportation system, we allowed that drivers would need room to make mistakes (or get out of the way of others who do).  We should plan ahead for “mistakes” in financial and healthcare reform efforts as well.

I had the foresight to bring my digital recorder, so enjoy what Dan has to say (click the link to play inside this window or download).

Trust-Revenge-Financial Reform

Writing prompts for bloggers & newsletter writers

• This is a time of great mistrust and financial churn. Perhaps you have either benefited professionally or been mistaken for a miscreant (or both). It’s not all in your control, is it? Do you have any anecdotes on how people irrationally trusted you or another advisor?  What about anecdotes where someone wrongly thought you had treated them badly and sought revenge? Does this make more sense now that you’ve heard Dan’s talk? You might offer some straight talk to your clients and prospects on this topic.
• Dan talked about AIG employees being harassed in public after the bailout. Can you relate any episodes of client anger that you handled particularly well or poorly? What lessons did such an episode teach you about yourself? Your profession? Human nature?
• If you’re an advisor, can you see yourself making use of the mango story when dealing with marriage or business partners who are dissolving their relationship? Or perhaps the Dr. Strangelove metaphor works better?
• What do you make of the parallel between how a “rational economist” would design a highway system and how we should revamp our healthcare system or re-regulate our financial system?

Dwight’s Death

Dwight was new to my small business, but had worked for a similar company doing the kind of work we did and he was good at it.  He’d been with me about a month when he asked for an aspirin to suck on.  He had a bad tooth and his dental appointment, at a public clinic for the poor and un-insured, was weeks away.  Unlike many of his co-workers, Dwight’s tooth didn’t get in the way of a good day’s work.

I nearly fell down that Sunday afternoon when his young daughter called my cell phone to tell me that Dwight had died. I was buying some tools and supplies for the next week’s work and probably made a scene on the floor of the hardware store when I burst into tears and repeatedly screeched “What?  How?”

Officially, we’ll never know the answer since the family couldn’t afford an autopsy.  We all speculate that the tooth was worse than Dwight had let on and that it had poisoned his bloodstream and led to organ failure — a condition called sepsis.  According to estimates by the University of Rochester Medical Center 750,000 cases of severe sepsis occur each year, more than congestive heart failure, or breast cancer, colon cancer and AIDS combined. It begins with an infection that triggers an inflammation response throughout a person’s entire body. This whole-body response to infection – termed sepsis – produces changes in temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, white blood cell count, and lung function. Half of all people diagnosed with sepsis will die.

At that point in time I could afford to offer my employees medical insurance but Dwight hadn’t passed the 90-day waiting period.  Truth is I don’t know if he could have passed the medical questionnaire required to qualify for coverage.

Since employee life insurance was bundled with medical, his family had to postpone his funeral twice while they raised money to bury him.  Everything I had (and then some) was already in the business or I’d have written the check myself.

Seeing both sides of the fence

Health care reform gets very personal to me as a result of being a small business owner who used to be an insurance company executive.  I have a view from both sides of the fence.

Dwight’s story tells the personal side. From the insurance side, I remind readers that the American courts have decided a corporation’s primary LEGAL responsibility is to its shareholders, therefore insurance companies must put their profit motive first — before quality of care, before anything. Regulations are in place to mitigate this profit motive, but they’re just speed bumps.

Blood money

We set private insurers in the business of earning “money gotten at the expense of others’ lives or suffering,” which is blood money by definition.  We Americans do this because we worship the market.  We don’t have a healthcare system in this country, we have a market for it.

Author Thomas Frank’s book One Market Under God walks us through the development of our cultural ethos that says we must leave everything to the markets. The mantra “Markets are good, government is bad” is why we’re in this healthcare jam.  After all, markets are interested in profits and profits only; service, quality and general affluence are different functions altogether.

According to Frank, here’s what Americans have come to believe: “You must liquidate the past; you must privatize, deregulate, and de-unionize; you must trust the market implicitly and allow the market to dictate every aspect of your existence. Only when you commit yourself fully, when you give it all to the market, will your voice be heard; only then will the little guy be empowered.”

He then reminds us what happens when the markets rule: “The market will give you a voice, empower you to do whatever you want to do – and if you have any doubts about that, then the market will crush you and everything you’ve ever known.”  Didn’t Lehman Brothers a year ago illustrate that?

In last year’s PBS Frontline special Sick Around The World, journalist TR Reid walked through how parts of the US healthcare “market” resemble the “systems” of other countries:

• VeteransAdministration = British NHS
• Medicare = Taiwanese system
• Employed people with workplace insurance = German system
• Any poor country = Americans not covered in one of the above

Limits on the magic of markets

If the crash of 2008 taught us anything it’s that we don’t REALLY trust markets.  If we did we wouldn’t have bailed anyone out and fallen into a Depression that would have made the 1930′s look downright prosperous.

Time to carve out an exception to the wisdom of the markets in this healthcare debate.  The market is just a market, not an omniscient, benevolent diety, and certainly not a responsible government guided by a collective conscience.

The Road to Success is Paved With…

lots of detours and false starts, from the looks of things.

I’m already on record as a fan of FlowingData, whose blog I subscribe to.  This morning Nathan posted an evergreen allegorical cartoon, originally published in 1913, that blows me away. If you want to study it closer, click to get it in another browser window by itself, then zoom in.  (UPDATE 1-31-62 I just learned the company with the copyright produces great reprints and Tshirts).

Scroll past the poster for my thoughts on success and wisdom from the Buddha on healthcare, entitlements and financial reforms.

Macro events on micro successes

This allegorical poster works well across the range of arenas in which people strive to succeed, whether it be spiritual enlightenment, gaining the esteem of family and neighbors, building a thriving business enterprise or artistic mastery.  When you think about it, there are really several mountains of success we climb in this life: family member, citizen, profession, avocation, seeker…everyone’s list varies.  And none of us is at the pinnacle of all life’s mountains at the same time. Life is full of trade-offs.

The one thing the poster doesn’t account for, however, is the role of macro events in our micro lives. For example, let’s say you created the world’s most precise wristwatch and fashioned it into a gorgeous piece of jewelry at a time when mobile phones have essentially replaced the need for a separate timekeeping device.  Your company goes bust, taking down the family and friends who invested in your vision. Does that make you unsuccessful? Depends upon your definition of success, doesn’t it? I had a similar experience, touched upon lightly in this essay published in Charlotte Magazine, Breathe In, Breathe Out.

One thing I hope we’re all learning in this Great Recession, is how interdependent we are. Investors in now-failed enterprises run by managers with the highest moral fiber have suffered alongside those who placed their life savings in Ponzi schemes.  And now investors of all stripes are suffering alongside those now unemployed by the companies crumbling around them.

Here’s a story about some Madoff investors now marooned in a RV park in Arizona, because they can’t afford the $2500 to drive home to NY. He was a New York City Department of Corrections officer and she, a computer analyst; hardly the glitterati we associate with Madoff’s victims.

It’s a compelling interview, including this quote by the prison guard, “We have our money in a viable institution and nobody was there to check. I mean, if I went to work every day at the Department of Correction and just left the door open and let the inmates out…. That’s my job to keep them in line, keep them behind the gate. Did anybody do that at the SEC? Absolutely not.”

A third way — between unfettered capitalism and outright socialism

I’m growing deaf listening to the various screaming matches on financial reform and fixing healthcare/entitlements.

To hear those on the far right, Fascists monsters are lurking under our collective bed, waiting for us to fall asleep so they can nationalize all industries and make the US unattractive to capital, thereby plunging this great country into the abyss alongside other empires on which the sun has long ago set. The left sees virtue in centrally coordinated systems that make the quality of life in America less dependent on highly variable, state-based programs.  In this vision, we’ll provide for the common weal and wipe out blood money-derived profits, but unless we take swift and broad-sweeping measures to centralize federal control immediately, we’ll be swept into the dustbin of history as another fallen giant.

Interesting that no matter the side, both meet in the middle with their conclusion that we’re headed down the road to ruin.

Look, the desire to organize society around an enforceable ethical code and to take care of the poor, old and infirmed are goals as ancient as the human race. These aspirations separate us from the beasts of the field. Our approach to these goals differs as society matures and technical advances enable us to try new things.  So let’s all take a deep breath and look under the bed. With a flashlight.

I’m a fan of Buddhist monk Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart and think her work provides a useful frame of reference for the dread we feel about the changes now upon us. “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.”

When we can accept the falling apart and coming together of all things in life, starting at our personal lives and including our entire world, we might approach financial reform, health care and entitlements with less dread, hysteria and finger pointing.

All these systems met needs pretty well for a time as originally designed and implemented; things came together at those points in time. Times have changed and new tools and social conditions have come on the scene since then; things have fallen apart.

Two examples:

1. Things fell apart during the Depression, so we implemented entitlement programs and erected new regulatory bodies.  Things came together. I argue that the only reason we’re not in another Great Depression today is the post-Depression social safety nets that now provide unemployment insurance and a baseline of health insurance to our elderly and most financially vulnerable citizens. But since we essentially dismantled Glass-Steagall, and financial mathematicians developed products that were unforeseen by jazz era regulators anyway, we produced fake wealth and things fell apart again.
2. Employer-provided health insurance came into being in a different age, too, beginning in the 1930s and quickly expanding as an employee fringe benefit when wage and price controls were implemented during the Second World War. Breathe in. Time for an update — we don’t even drive vintage 1960′s automobiles anymore, so why a ’60′s era healthcare system? Breathe out.

Now let’s all chant Om and get on with finding third-way solutions to financial and social services reforms that work for all of us.

Collaging for Answers

Every business should periodically examine its market position. This summer I spent time with artist and consultant Catherine Anderson, who guided me through a process of collecting hundreds of images and snippets of text to make a series of collages about my life, work and clients. Toggling between collaging and the more traditional marketing exercises in Book Yourself Solid I clearly determined the kinds of people and projects that energize and satisfy me most.

This whole-brained process sharpened the focus of my business: I ghostwrite for financial professionals — advisors, accountants and attorneys — who are too busy with their own clients’ work to research the best communication channels and write their own newsletters, blogs, presentations, articles and books. They can’t trust their professional reputation to a rookie, which is why they work with me, a former financial services executive who writes like an English major. As a result of partnering with me, my clients solidify relationships, gain referrals, increase their self-confidence and have better scripting to use when talking about their work — in person, print and presentations.

If you need a sounding board as you sharpen your professional focus, give me a call.

Think=”Strong” Feel=”Weak”

The Brothers Heath (Chip & Dan) ran another great column in July/August edition of Fast Company, proving it isn’t just me who’s observed that thinkers are considered to be strong, while feelers are considered to be weak.

“In Defense of Feelings” highlighted a series of experiments conducted by the University of Toronto, the upshot of which proves  “When people were given a choice to interact with a rational decision-making partner or a gut-trusting one, 75% chose the rational partner.”

Extrapolating to the roots of this Great Recession, I agree with the Heaths that this preference for rationality explains why we trusted spreadsheet-wielding financial mathematicians, whose modeling “proved” that NINA (no income, no asset) mortgages would perform even if default rates reached historically high levels.

What the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator teaches

In B-school at Duke, I studied the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for a class on leadership*.   One of the preferences the MBTI instrument measures is “thinking or feeling,” and most everyone in the world comes out with a preference (from slight to strong) for one or the other.  To paint an illustration with a broad brush, most bean counters are “thinkers” and most elementary school teachers are “feelers,” each being attracted to a profession where their strengths are most appreciated.

The Heaths addressed the feeling side of the spectrum, too, saying “Guts aren’t perfect. For instance, we tend to feel so much empathy for individuals that it can doom our efforts to be impartial and consistent.”

I have no MBTI preference between thinking and feeling, which is statistically rare.  Circumstances apparently drive my preference.  My children would characterize me as a “thinker” because of some of the tough love I’ve dished out — like letting my underage-drinking son deal with the law himself instead of hiring a lawyer to get him out of the consequences.  On the other hand, those familiar with my unprofitable environmental contracting business would say I was a “feeler” for not pulling the plug sooner — I “felt” sure I could turn it around in spite of clients declaring bankruptcy and a key employee who stole from me.  More about this debacle in an essay I wrote for Charlotte Magazine.

The thinking-feeling upshot for me is to know my vulnerabilities and do what I can to insulate myself from situations where I tend to apply “thinking” solutions to “feeling” situations, and visa versa.  For example, I vowed never again to have employees — I always work with contractors or project partners.

Back to the point at hand, that we prefer thinkers over feelers. Perhaps that explains why I studied business instead of psychology in the first place.

What about it?  Have you been in business situations where your gut told you one thing and your head said another? Do most people worship math geniuses and spurn touchy-feely types?

*The indicator is beyond the scope of this short post, so here’s a link for those who don’t know about this valuable tool.

Corporate vs Personal Bankruptcy Attitudes

Blame the victim?

I ghostwrite a bankruptcy practice’s blogsite and moderate the comments.  Got an interesting comment last week. The commenter wanted to be on record that bankruptcy attorneys are devil’s spawn who enable the deadbeat insolvent to saddle the piously solvent with their mistakes.

The commenter isn’t the only one with this attitude, which is why I bring it up.

When a company declares bankruptcy the angry mob doesn’t break out the pitchforks and go after the management team or board (with a nod to the quasi-exceptional case of former GM head Rick Wagoner).  But the screeds about people in foreclosure and those who seek bankruptcy protection proliferate like melanoma cells.

Upside-down logic

According to the Institute for Financial Literacy, the four most common causes of financial distress include overextension on credit, unexpected expenses, reduction of income and job loss.  These are essentially the same reasons corporations file for protection (income and job loss more logically rolled together in the case of businesses).

So when it’s the masters of the universe and captains of industry at the helm of corporations making short-sighted decisions that drive their companies into financial distress, why are we so hard on the employees and small business owners whose personal misfortunes are tied to corporate failure?

Welfare Queens?

Those of us alive during the 1980′s remember the famous stories/urban legends of the woman paying for groceries with food stamps, then carrying them out to her new Cadillac.  In other words, gaming the system and thumbing her nose at the rest of us.

Is there a bit of that same belief about individuals who go bankrupt?  That they use bankruptcy as a personal money management strategy like Donald Trump uses it as a business strategy?  Hrumph, even The Donald gets his own TV show and multi-level marketing network of millions.  What gives with our idol worship of this guy and our disgust for the little guys?

I’d really like to know what’s behind the difference in attitude here.  Please weigh in.

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

The System is Rigged

Cover Story May 2009

“Jane”  is a Bank of America SVP and a friend of twenty years. I jumped at her invitation for a weekend on the North Carolina coast with her family.  She drove while I read from May’s Atlantic Monthly, featuring a couple of excellent articles on the economy.

Any time we go on a road trip there’s about thirty pounds of reading material in the car “just in case.” Over breakfast she’ll grab one section of the paper and I another, or we’ll take different magazines and debrief each other when something gets our back up.  We pass hours like this on the beach every summer. Everyone should have a Jane in their life — the mental stimulation will surely keep Alzheimer’s at bay.

In The Atlantic’s feature article, “Why I Fired My Broker” Jeffrey Goldberg got my attention right out of the gate with this statement  “…my crucial mistake was believing that the brokers and wealth managers and cable-television oracles who make up the financial-services industrial complex actually had my best interests at heart.”

Jane and I are an interesting duo.  I couldn’t be more committed to self-employment and she’s been committed to the same company her entire career.  I tell her I love that phrase “financial-services industrial complex” and Jane shudders, then reminds me of a tour of duty she did in BofA’s credit card division  after it acquired MBNA and how slimy it made her feel going to work everyday.  My skin crawls. Jane doesn’t appreciate the potshots being taken at bankers these days, but she’s clear eyed about the evils of credit card marketing.

She says, “Keep reading.”

The article routinely skewers Merrill Lynch and other so-called financial advisors who really can’t give financial advice anymore.  Jane, who had reason to believe until very recently that she could fund part of her childrens’ college educations through BofA stock options, couldn’t disagree with this observation by Larry Gellman:

“If the head of Merrill Lynch and every other investment firm had their way, no individual broker would ever recommend an individual stock or bond to a retail client again. They have essentially gotten out of the brokering-and-advising business and gone all in on the ‘wealth management’ business. The new model is to gather assets from wealthy people and then place those assets with a whole bunch of managers who will manage different pieces of it in diversified styles so you don’t lose it all at once. And by the way, people with less than $10 million need not apply. People like you are in a sort of purgatory because no one would ever come out and tell you that he doesn’t want your business anymore,” he said. “You had to figure that out by yourself.”

We chewed on that for a bit. Jane’s worked in just about every division of the bank, including wealth management.  She’s a sort of corporate MacGyver who moves from implementation to implementation, always delivering  on impossible deadlines and defying handwringers.  She’s familiar with the next fellow  interviewed,  Seth Klarman, whom Goldberg says turned $27m into $14b, and quotes as saying “The average person can’t really trust anybody. They can’t trust a broker, because the broker is interested in churning commissions. They can’t trust a mutual fund, because the mutual fund is interested in gathering a lot of assets and keeping them.  And now it’s even worse because even the most sophisticated people have no idea what’s going on.”

Jane snorts, “No shit.”

At a certain point in Goldberg’s article the expert who makes the most sense is a guy who runs a survivalist camp that teaches people to live off the grid.  Cody Lundin says  “ Wall Street has always been an illusion. Now it’s an illusion that’s crumbling. Wall Street is like someone who’s having heart trouble. It’s in constant need of resuscitation, but after a while, it just doesn’t work anymore. People think that Bernard Madoff was unique, that he was an illusion, but he’s just an extension of the same illusion, the same con game.”

Jane’s been quiet for awhile now, most unusual.  So when I’m done with the article  I don’t forge on to the next one as is our custom.  I have people skills.

She sighs and says, “I’m gonna turn on the radio for awhile.” Game Over.

Financial Services Writing Prompts (aside from the obvious)

• Are people better off putting their money in an index fund than relying on the “financial-services industrial complex”?
• Will the deflated 529 plans  lead to a different scheme for funding higher education?
• Where are all those financial advisors going to work now?  All those financial mathematicians?
• At what point did you realize the (financial) emperor wasn’t wearing clothes?  What steps did you take?  Are you taking?

Queen for a Day

Funny greeting cards at www.someecards.com

Happy Mother’s Day to me.

My older son works at a sub shop and will probably sleep until 2pm before starting work at 3pm, which means he probably won’t call.  That’s ok — he has a steady job and an apartment.  This means that I don’t have to avert my eyes when I walk past his old bedroom (which I’m turning into a home office).

My younger son just mowed the grass so that I’ll ferry him across town to his friends’ house.  That’s ok — the schlepping will make him more pleasant when I see him for the big cookout this evening.  He may even kiss my cheek in public.

My spouse is running a soccer tournament in another county and will swing in for the cookout just in time.  That’s ok — with all the men out of the house I can sit outside in the shade and listen to the birds sing.

I plan to read a book and take a nap. The day will fly.

I don’t go in much for Hallmark holidays — the ones that everyone feels obliged to celebrate.  I am tempted sometimes to play my “Mother’s Day cards” to get the men in my life to give me the princess treatment, but resist.  I put all my cards in on my birthday — the day that’s uniquely mine.  If you call me on January 31 I’ll probably answer the phone “Birthday Girl Speaking” since it makes me smile and takes everyone off guard.

I have friends and family members who wouldn’t tolerate the kind of day I have in store.  To my eyes, they just set themselves up for disappointment by expecting everyone to drop everything else for mom and be happy about it.  I’ll hear plenty of carping from them about the argument that broke out over dinner “On Mother’s Day” and the work that they had to do “On Mother’s Day.”

Blech.

I count my blessings just as they present themselves — son with a job and apartment, son with friends who are basically good influences, spouse with a worthwhile hobby, and a day in quiet followed by a cookout with our best friends.   I’m one fortunate woman.

Now, I’m going to call my mom.

“Global Financial Hissy Fit”

One Planet, One People

A fellow Twitter-er sent a link to the best thing I’ve read all day:  a blog called “Creative Spark” by Marc Garnault.  In it, he perpetuates the term “Global Financial Hissy Fit” with proper attribution to its originator, Kim Sbarcea .

I selected just ONE extraordinary insight from this posting for writing prompts.

Marc’s Insight

“Everyone knows what everyone is doing now. There are no secrets, so if you’re doing evil you can expect to face some bad publicity. There’s also been a significant movement by us, the consumer, towards companies that have a compassionate backstory. We want sustainable materials, low carbon footprints and community involvement. It’s a major selling point. And, finally, you need good, creative, smart employees, and believe me, they’re not thick on the ground. It’s going to be a seller’s market on those skills, and these people are going to want their skills to go to worthy employers. If they feel like they’re going to be a cog in a corporate money making machine, well, there are nicer machines to be a cog in.

“It’s be wrong to be writing all this in the future tense, because if you look around you’ll see it happening right now. Newspapers are falling through the floor, but the online Huffington Post recently had a record valuation, online shopping is remaining steady but bricks-and-mortar retail is having it’s worst year since 1970, restaurant seating is going through the floor but sales of local organic produce are booming, no-one is buying DVDs but you’re sharing the average torrent you download with 30,000 other people, sales of premium priced Macs are doing fine, but all the generic PCs around them are feeling the pinch.”

Writing Prompts:

Consultants:  What are your most progressive clients doing to take advantage of the rise of global inter-connectedness?  What are they doing with their brands to connect with the “green” consciousness?   For those not on board, what holds them back?

Environmental:  Reflect on the state of greenwashing.  Out the evildoers.

Services:  What are you/your clients doing to retain and nurture the best and brightest?  Are you holding on to talent that isn’t fully billable for the sake of the future of your business?  How are you coping with a great talent pool in this time of retraction?

Financial:  What companies will you encourage clients to buy because of their alignment with this new ethos?

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