“What are three quick ways to become a leader?a) Execute on the firm’s ‘axes,’ which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit.b) ‘Hunt Elephants.’ In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them.c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”— Former Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith, in a damning open resignation letter published in the New York Times.
ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron writes that the letter has “confirmed virtually every negative characterization of the bank.”
Today’s must-read. (via quickhits)
15When I read that Yahoo was suing Facebook my immediate reaction was disdain. As I thought more about it, I came to realize that this case could be the water shed moment that causes enough people to recognize just how horrific our patent law is.
—Mark Cuban (via azspot)
(via azspot)
“It takes discipline to say, “let’s take care of the customer, and think of the long term” when you’re talking about normal amounts of money.When the amounts of money become as staggering as they were in the mid-2000s, the game – at best – becomes “how can we convince ourselves that we’re taking care of the customer.”Because what if the only way to take care of the customer is to get out of the game?Which was certainly the case with sub-prime-mortgage-backed-CDOs by the mid-2000s. How do you turn off the machine that is responsible for the lion’s share of your firm’s profits? And if you don’t, then what exactly do you mean when you say you’re taking care of your customers? The financial crisis should have led to a dramatic, wrenching shrinkage in the size of Wall Street. The businesses that were at the center of the crisis – mostly derivatives and structured products businesses – should have shrunk to tiny fractions of their former size, both in response to greater regulation and in response to customer’s shunning the products.But finance as it had come to be practiced had become not only too big to fail, but possibly too big to shrink, in any meaningful way, and our political response was not merely to fend off collapse – that was necessary – but to nurse the industry back to something resembling its former health – which not only wasn’t necessary, but was actively dangerous to our political and economic future. If you talk to people on Wall Street now, they talk about the job market still being tough, particularly for new entrants, but they have no idea what tough would really mean. The industry is still enormously too big, enormously too profitable. We can’t fix the culture of a firm like Goldman so long as it’s still doing the same kind of business. Long term, the only way to fix Wall Street is to finally break it.”
Jay Parkinson + MD + MPH = a doctor in NYC: Most startup ideas should terrify you.
don’t worry, it’s not a sign of weakness. arguably it’s a sign of sanity. the biggest startup ideas are terrifying. and not just because they’d be a lot of work. the biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you’d have enough ambition to carry them through.
there’s a scene in
a really great idea ends up with three innovations — product service, product distribution, and revenue model
Stowe Boyd: Why Companies Need Futurists, Not Analysts
Roger Martin, the author of The Design Of Business (on my reading list), makes a great case for futurists:
Fast Company: As we slowly climb out of the recession, everybody’s looking for where the next innovation will come from. Why does our pace of innovation seem to be slowing?
Martin:…
people are much more productive and healthy when they can connect their values with their work.
—Ryan Vanderbilt from Building Better Businesses By Closing The Happiness Gap (via fastcompany)
(via fastcompany)
In an open Q&A with one company’s chief operating officer, an employee asked about the morale problem and got this answer: “There is no morale problem in this company. And, for anybody who thinks there is, we have a nice big bus waiting outside to take you wherever you want to look for work.
The key thing about good content is that it requires that you think about it first and foremost from the point of view of the consumer and what they want to hear, rather than from the point of view of the brand and what it wants to say. That is a major shift in perspective for many marketers and one that some aren’t capable of making. It often requires talking about your category or the subject you’re expert in rather than the characteristics of your company or brand.
—Jonah Bloom, executive director of content strategy, KBS+ Content Labs, from today’s Co.Create virtual panel. (via fastcompany)
(via fastcompany)
That’s the whole central tension of life: we all want to feel unique and we all want to feel like we’re part of something that’s bigger than ourselves.
—Rob Walker, author of Buying In, on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters Podcast (via austinkleon)
Schmidt promoted the idea of a stepping stone as the world figures out how to connect the very poor to the Internet. He said that “mesh networks” — small groups of devices connected to one another but not the Internet — are a way to at least get remote communities together. Mesh networks can serve as a kind of “digital watering hole,” where small communities can work out important issues.
“No one is saying technology will suddenly change the world’s social structure, but connectivity changes lives
These variances suggest that the future of newspapers, rather than being determined entirely by sweeping trends, can be significantly affected by company culture and management — even at papers of quite different sizes.
People matter. More than machinery, products, or real estate. People invent and build. People support and serve customers. Your people either create or undermine value, cultivate or kill relationships, drive or reduce success. A well-conceived strategy living in the hands of unhappy, misdirected, misinformed people is a sure way to a slow and painful death. There is no comparison to being in the hearts and hands of energized, informed, and motivated people.
Companies are not linear, inert systems. They are ever-changing, organic communities that are dependent on the engagement, talent, and energy of their people to operate successfully. Ignore the mental well-being of your people and culture at your own peril. Step inside any company, no matter the size, stage of development, or level of success, and the culture is either driving the strategy or undermining it. To exist in the first place, a company must have a clear purpose, a deliberate intent, and a set of ideas that it uses to pursue a clear goal—but it’s the people who have to execute it.
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This is an excerpt, you can read the entire article here:
Don’t Let Culture Vultures Scuttle Your Strategy | Fast Company
(via teneasysteps)
(via teneasysteps)
