What I would like to ask is, “What’s wrong with paying your fair share of taxes?” The same people who finagle ways to cheat the IRS don’t mind paying the fees for accountants to do so, nor do they mind giving large donations to charities (for the tax deduction?). They don’t have a problem giving money away; they just don’t want to give it to the US government to build roads, support the military, educate our children, secure our airports, keep our elderly solvent and healthy, deliver our mail, and so on. Yes, I admit, I have a problem with paying Michelle Bachman’s salary, but you gotta take the bad with the good.

I think this fixation on tax avoidance must have its roots in the Revolutionary War. “No taxation without representation!” was the cry of the original tea party revolutionaries. The new tea partiers seem to want, “No taxation!” Yet, no taxation is the one sure way to bring down a democracy. It is anti-democratic!

Let’s face it. We need a government. You can’t have a country without one. Collecting taxes ensures that the government can be run fairly and according to popular opinion – a democracy. Otherwise, either the government would own the industries to support itself ala socialism, or the wealthy would be running the country – an oligarchy, not a democracy. Or we can have even more corruption and let bribery and pay-offs determine our laws. So paying your taxes is probably the most democratic and patriotic thing an American can do to ensure we continue to have a government that represents the interests of all Americans and not just a few.
The Taxes of Equal!

Sorry, we don't have a very collaborative culture

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One curious aspect of human behavior is that when someone monitors performance, that performance changes (kind of like in reality TV.) When companies decide to measure progress, they often believe that it is just a way of ensuring that people are on their way meeting their goals. However, these measurements end up becoming the goals. When revenues fall short, maintenance, investment, and personal development are all put on hold to meet the short-term profit objective.  If the period of performance monitoring were longer, there would be a better chance that these investment activities would have enough time to prove their benefit.

What’s really interesting is that this is really only the perspective of corporate America (and corporate UK/Australia.) Having worked in Asia and Europe, I discovered that different cultures treat the passage of time very differently. In fact, in Geert Hofstede’s famous book, Cultures and Organizations, time is one of the dimensions of culture. For instance, both China and Japan take a very long-term perspective on time, easily sacrificing immediate gratification for a long-term benefit. It is common for parents to invest everything they have in their children. Getting something done ASAP in the US means within weeks or days, but in Japan it usually means months.

You can see this difference in perspective on smaller scales as well, like across industries. High tech companies work in a different time scale than pharmaceutical companies. Even within companies, you can notice a difference. Marketing folks are always rushing around, wanting everything immediately while your R&D department probably takes about a week to answer their emails. Plus, the higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more urgent everything is.  For anyone with a C and O in his title, end-of-day means three o’clock.

To be successful in business, it is absolutely essential to understand other people’s time frames.  To help you, I have formulated a time conversion equation that takes into account factors of position, nationality, function, etc.

TIME CONVERSION FORMULA

CONVERTING YOUR TIME TO THEIR TIME

Here’s the equation:

τ_r = τ_y *C*A*I*F*L

where
τ_r= relative Time
τ_y= your Time
C=Culture factor
A=Age factor
I=Industry factor
F=Function factor
L= Level factor

The following tables show the appropriate factor to use depending on situation. 

Let’s try some examples.
 
Suppose your boss is Indian, in his forties, a manager, and he has promised to get back to you tomorrow regarding your request for promotion. You are American, in your thirties, and staff level.
 
Using τr = τy *C*A*I*F*L 
τr =1 day * 25 * 1/.75 or 
You will hear back in 33 and 1/3 days and the answer is “no.”
 
Notice how you need to invert factors depending on how they relate to you.  Given the same two people but in reverse, your boss has asked you to deliver a project plan by the end of the week (3 days time), here is how the calculation works:
 
τr =36 hours *1/25*.75  or
He expects you to have it ready in one hour eight minutes and your delivery dates are too long.
 
Now, here’s a more complicated example:
Suppose you are a manager level consultant working for the CFO of a high tech company who asks you to put together a business case for an acquisition. He says he wants in next Monday, 1 week’s time. You are both about the same age, and he is French.
 
τr =7 days*4*.2/. 5*.75*2.50E-05
or you better drop everything and pull all-nighters until you are done because you are already late, and he is going ahead with the acquisition anyway even if the business case doesn’t justify it.

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I really wonder why all this magical thinking is so popular right now? Is it because of the recessions? Is it because many of us feel powerless in our lives?  Even so, as children didn’t we all learn that wishing hard for something did not make it come true?  Now, I fully believe in the value of a positive attitude. Our thoughts shape our actions and our interactions with others. If we believe that we will fail, subconsciously we will communicate that belief with others through our non-verbals, causing them to believe that we will fail and then set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If we believe we will succeed, we will make others believe that as well and so on.

What I am talking about is not positive attitude or positive self-talk, but wishful thinking.  Send your wish out to the universe or visualize yourself succeeding at your goal, and it will somehow become true. Don’t we actually have to do something in between the visualization and the actualization?  I really can’t buy that all I have to do is wish it so to make it so.

Let me know if someone has wished really hard and the wish came true without any action in between. I’d really love to save myself the effort.

I spent over a decade of my career in corporate training and always laugh when I hear about how different adult learning is from childhood learning because adults learn experientially and need to know how the knowledge can be applied in the real world. Why do we believe that kids aren’t the same? Why do we subject them to an environment that we wouldn’t tolerate as adults?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The (Medieval Ages, last few decades) are also known as the Dark Ages due to the lack of advancement in (the arts, literature, and science; finance, economy, and government) during this period. Many people blame the stranglehold (the Church, economical dogma) had on society, and hence this period is also known as the (Age of Faith, Age of Wishful Thinking). The governing structure was a rigid hierarchy, known as the (feudal system, organizational structure) whereby the (nobility, executives) were able to maintain control of the (peasants, employees.) The (Kings, CEOs) were in possession of a huge amount of (lands, assets) and could not govern them effectively from a central position. Therefore, the (King, CEO) granted (manors, departments) to his (lords, vice-presidents) in return for their homage and fealty.  Likewise, the (lords, vice-presidents) granted (property, responsibility) to their (knights, managers) in return for their loyalty. The last people in this chain were the (serfs, staff) who usually ended up with only small (plots, cubicles).  In return, the (serfs, employees) agreed to obey their (lords, managers), work hard, and follow the rules laid down by (the lord’s court, corporate policies). 

There were various types of (serfs, employees), each with different degrees of (rights, respect.) A lucky few were (free serfs, entrepreneurs) who ran their own businesses while paying a large commission to the (lord, venture capitalists.) Most of the (serfs, employees) were not free and led miserable lives.  Forced to do the will of their (lord, employer), they looked to the wisdom of (the Church, management consultants) for relief.  Due to this, the (serfs, employees) mostly believed that if they worked hard, followed the word of the (clergy, latest management guru), gave their money to (the Church, their 401k) and did the (king’s bidding, latest corporate initiative), they would go to (heaven, Boca Rotan) in their (afterlife, retirement.)  Unfortunately, giving all their money to the (Church, 401K) did nothing to ensure a better life afterwards, but only served to make the (bishops, fund managers) very wealthy.

 Kind of scary, isn’t it? 

As I joked along with everyone else, I started to think, what if every US citizen got a bailout? How would that help the financial crisis?  It’s a little crazy, I know, but it has some real benefits.  The current estimations of the US deficit with the planned bailout and economic stimulus spending are over $7 trillion dollars. Experts are concerned that this is not enough money to turn our economy around. Personally, I’m annoyed that the first $350 billion went to recapitalize the banks and not to buying the bad assets as initially promised.

Spending the last two decades of my career on improving processes and fixing business problems, one of my tenets is to always address the root of the problem, not the symptoms. The corollary to this tenet is to dig as deep as you can to find the root.  Some of the big problems companies face have their roots in small problems that become compounded and amplified as they spread, not unlike the butterfly effect.  One example of what I mean is the bull whip effect where small changes in demand for a product get amplified along the supply chain and eventually become huge changes in demand for the supplier on the other end of the chain. Similarly, in a non-business example,   combating large crimes by prosecuting small infractions like graffiti, pan-handling, and subway fare jumping has lowered the crime rates in many cities.  Prosecuting these types of crimes, considered standard of living crimes, sets the tone that crime in general will not be tolerated with the result that total crime rates have decreased.

With that said, we need to address the root cause of our biggest financial mess, bad mortgages, not the securities based on these mortgages.  The trading of securities has involved a great deal of leverage, which has lead to the dire straits of many banks, and the last thing anyone should want to do is pay for all that leverage.  This means buying the bad mortgages is a lot cheaper than buying the bad securities.  If the mortgages are no longer bad, neither will the securities be.  Herein lies the problem with buying these bad assets – no one knows how much they are worth.  This brings me back to our US citizen bailout. 

There are about 100 million households in the US. If we gave $100,000 to each household, that would be $10 trillion in government spending.  Everyone with an unaffordable mortgage should be able to pay it off or refinance on better terms. Even better, those that weren’t foolish enough to spend more than they could afford would be rewarded with the extra cash. The government buying bad mortgages rewards the wrong behavior.  Banks would be recapitalized because where else would you put the money?  I realize that the risk of inflation could make that amount of money worthless, but the government is already risking inflation by the level of spending it is proposing.  This alternative could actually be cheaper and more effective because it could solve a lot of our problems, at least temporarily, in one fell swoop.  Seriously.   Don’t bailout any more banks or the auto industry or anyone else – just give us the money, and we will fix our economic problems.

The way to fix our problems would to ask the American people to spend and invest responsibly in ways that would help the economy.  I realize that that sounds naïve, but I believe that the majority of people would be willing to do the right thing.  Plus, Barack Obama talked about redistributing wealth, and this would go a long way.

Here is what we would ask people to do with the money:

1.       Buy down your debt. Use the money to refinance your mortgage or get rid of your other personal debt.

2.       Buy personal health insurance plans.  This would allow everyone to get covered and get employers off the hook for providing health insurance, a huge drag on our current business’s balance sheets.

3.       Invest in college funds and retirement funds, again easing the burden of pensions from the coffers of businesses and governments.  Let’s face it. The days of a company taking care of its employees for life are long over.  We shouldn’t be dependent on a company for our retirement funds or our healthcare.  Allow GM and other companies and municipalities to renegotiate their pension obligations.  This investing should also bring the stock market up.

4.       Invest in your employer.  Do you want to keep your job? How about everyone buying a piece of your employer?  No one knows better than the employees if a company is worth investing in. If none of the employees want to put money in their own business, than it is not worth saving. 

5.       Invest in yourself.  Get educated. Get healthy. Start a business. Start many businesses. Help others start businesses. Start a community business. Start a green business.

6.       Buy American, if possible.  With the global supply chain, there are few purely “American” companies or purely “foreign” companies. Toyota, Honda, Nissan all have plants here as well as the big three. Spend some of the money frivolously, but spend it with a company you would like to see stay in business, especially ones in your town.

Of course, there would be a few catches. Along with the handout would be a hefty national sales tax to help keep spending in check.  This would be implemented after a year or two, depending on the recovery, and would replace all or part of the income tax. After all, we do want to encourage saving over consumption but our current tax code taxes income from savings while giving breaks for spending.  The only way to encourage saving is to reverse this incentive by instituting an-across-the-board retail tax somewhere around 15% on all spending, except may be food.  Imports, houses, (yes houses), clothing, cars, jewelry, computers , everything would be included. (A computer simulation would be helpful to determine what percent would provide the right disincentive to keep spending in check.)  We’d have to ensure that foreign retailers would face stiff penalties if they did not collect this tax abroad. Hopefully, this kind of tax would eventually replace the income tax which is cumbersome, ineffective, unfair, and discourages people from creating more income.  

The other thing I would ask is that we put up a website where people could flag abuses and scams and note if anyone is blatantly raising prices, like insurance policies or cars priced at  $99,999. Part of it could be an investapedia where people could report investment opportunities in small businesses and everyone could be a venture capitalist.  During WWII, Americans pitched in to do what was needed in the war effort. This may not be a physical war, but let’s call it a fight for the American way of life.    I think we can rise to the occasion.