Zachary has some distinctive ideas on business ethics. He also has some interesting comments on networking (I am in total agreement on the uselessness of business card swap meetings.).
His web site is called Zachary Burt’s Blog.
Tag: James Pilant
E-History!!
Generally speaking, you don’t see a historical statement in the news. This may be one. I am a proponent of using the internet to do many things that formerly required actual physical presence. These are signing petitions, shareholder meetings and voting. We should not have to be physically present to do organizational things.
At one time, we could only speak face to face, the best we could do to improve the range was to speak loudly. How many times a day do you communicate with words? And how many of those were face to face?
The world has changed. If you can buy thousands of dollars of whatever online with reasonable assurance of security, surely you can vote – surely you can vote to confirm the CEO’s pay package. Let’s have some democracy!
Once upon a time we lived in tiny communities in an agrarian society. We could meet in small groups and make our opinions known. Now we live in vast cities in a society that makes money by moving other people’s money. But we can use modern communication to shrink to that small world where we could make our opinions known. We live there once more in tiny communities. Because it will always be the committed and informed that are but small groups in our society. The wheel has turned. We have opportunity here to improve our lot from identical insects in a hive to more like human beings. It’s a good step. Our humanity is hard to project and hard to maintain. But it is a step and a step in the right direction.
James Pilant
[And it all started in Utah.]
Didn’t Take Pilant’s Ethics Class Award 6/19/10
Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, gets the award today. Let us scream two phrases into the night sky with the scant hope that our elected representatives will hear and respond. (You can try e-mail or letters but is that really working?) The phrases are “conflict of interest” and “patriotism.”
What did good ole Eric do to get me really upset? Well, take a look at this from the Wall Street Journal.
Yes, that’s right. An elected representative of the people of the United States is taking a short position against long-dated government stocks. That doesn’t sound like a big deal you say, what does that mean anyway? It means that if the United States does badly economically, he makes money. On the other hand if the country is prosperous and successful, he stands to lose money. Wow, and guess what, as minority whip of the House of Representatives he has some say in whether or not the country does well.
Now, you might ask at this point if I am suggesting that he is acting to destroy the nation to make money. No, I don’t. But I can’t see this as anything other than a massive conflict of interest considering how many possible influences he has over government bond values. And for pity’s sake, is this the act of a patriot? Now, here you have another opportunity for a good question. Do you believe that Cantor is acting the traitor by investing against our government bonds? Once again, I don’t. However, this is poor judgment on his part and certainly carries implications as to his actual feelings regarding the limits of capitalism.
Let me explain what I mean by the limits of capitalism, You see, I wonder where self-interest stops and other factors of judgment kick in. For example, I ask this question a lot and it goes like this, “At what point are you willing to give up profit to protect the interests of your country?” My general perception of the executives (CEO’s, etc.) in the United States is that they are willing to give up nothing.
Nevertheless, I will continue to claim long and loudly that a patriot must give up profit if it damages the interest of his country.
Rogue Columnist!
“My aim has been to achieve the best in hard-hitting newspaper news column writing, a special and dying craft outside of a few places. I often fall short. But at its best this involves trenchant writing, a distinctive and compelling voice, backed by the facts (as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “you are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.”), analysis, context and pointed commentary.”
This is from John Talton’s latest column on his blog. This is one I read regularly and I recommend it to you.
I wrote him a short note by e-mail –
I put your latest column on on “Digg.” I am in the middle of writing something positive about it on my blog. When I was reading your piece I noticed that you said that writing a regular blog was grueling. Yes. Absolutely. I write on ethics usually twice a day. It feels like swimming up a waterfall. Increasingly we seem to live in a world devoid of honor. Well, enough of my musings. You probably get tired of hearing this, but I very much enjoy your columns. The only reason I don’t refer to them very often is that most people in NW arkansas (I’m only a few miles from Wal-Mart corporate headquarters.) have no idea what you’re talking about and a lot of your stuff is squarely in-state material.
My best wishes!
James Pilant
Read James’ entries on Pilant’s Business Ethics Blog
https://southwerk.wordpress.com/
You will notice I end my message with a shameless reference to my own blog. I feel bad about having done that but not bad enough to quit doing it.
James Pilant
Dylan Ratigan – Why Is He Angry?
“The fundamental problem right now is that you have conflict resolution, or problem resolution, that is predicated on bad motivations, where politicians are trying to keep their jobs with the strategy of explaining to everybody why everything is fine, no matter what…What if your economic plan—where you monetize the entire future with no money and create a giant credit casino—doesn’t work? No plan! Oh, OK—so that means we’re going to spend a few extra trillion and do no reform? Interesting concept, my politician friends!”
That’s exactly what I think. We are witnessing a fundamental failure of the leaders of this country to deal with continuing financial incompetence of Wall Street. They seem to live in a world where devotion to contributions and the next election trump all considerations of patriotism and national interests.
(The quote is from an article by Lloyd Grove in The Daily Beast.)
James Pilant
Can A Non-Profit Help Women Dress For Success?
In San Jose, California, there is a non-profit called the Career Closet. Volunteers at this non-profit can choose among a half million dollars worth of clothes to help women dress for interviews.
Let me quote from the Mercury News: “Since 1992, this nonprofit has been dressing disadvantaged women in clothes donated by the Bay Area’s working women. Clients, referred by 130 local agencies, can choose a week’s worth of clothing, as well as handbags, jewelry and new underwear. They also get free haircuts and makeup consultations — everything they need to look professional.”
(Patty Fisher of Mercury News wrote the article I am discussing here.)
Is it fair that society judges people by looks and dress rather than their experience and ability? Certainly not. Unfortunately grim realities force accommodations. So, it is that those with more clothing knowledge, upper class accents and mannerisms will dominate the job market for years to come. With the advent of “emotional intelligence,” hiring decisions are more and more based on how your social skills appear. Emotional intelligence has great validity in sales and other people oriented jobs, but to use it broadly ignores the importance of ability and punishes the socially awkward or simply independent among us. We can do better. It doesn’t require a great deal of thinking to realize that emotional intelligence is but one facet of job skills and that they must be weighed in proportion to their importance. But when read articles about EI, I see over and over again broad statements stating directly or implying that social skills are the primary skill for success in all areas. Think about that. Think about the socially awkward like Thomas Alva Edison, Soren Kierkegaard, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, William Blake, Charles Lamb, Arthur Schopenhauer, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Blaise Pascal, William James Sidis, and H.P. Lovecraft. Let society decide that only the socially skillful are producers and creators of value. Isn’t that the current direction? I wonder what kind of human development we can expect in a civilization of the popular? What would you call that society? We already know.
It’s called Mediocracy, government by the less than average. That’s what you get when ability becomes a side issue. That’s what you get when the give and take of ideas become so painful that a feigned state of agreement becomes preferable. That’s what you get when money is more important than making things, more important than being sincere and honorable; because both sincerity and honor disturb people and has the possible side effect of appearing socially awkward.
Hiring the at-first apparently popular is easy. Hiring the skilled requires judgment. Judgment means thought, work, contemplation and the application of judgment means a willingness to disagree, to advocate for the unpopular candidate. So by exercising judgment, a skill, those who believe in hiring the skilled, become unpopular and thus unhirable themselves.
Remember acting with intelligence, judgment, humor, honor or conviction can make you unpopular. These qualities make civilization go forward. They are vital in making life worth living, in cultivating the young, following the pathway of love of country and fulfilling our responsibilities to fellow citizens and posterity.These are the things we must give up to be hirable and liked.
Something of an ethics problem, huh?
James Alan Pilant
David Lazarus: Retail Credit Card Fees, Who Should Pay?
David Lazarus writes for the Los Angeles Times. His column today deals with who should pay retail credit card fees.
Whenever you buy something from a retailer with a credit card, they pay an additional fee for processing, apparently about 1%. However, on a $300 dollar purchase that $3 and after a while it adds up. Congress has before it a new bill which will place supervision over these fees. The retailers want to be able to charge extra to consumers for using credit cards. The banks want things to stay the way they are. But what the banks are really frightened of is revealing how much it actually cost them to process these transactions.
These fees may have made sense in the early days of slow computers and inexperience, but your current computer be it a laptop or desktop could run thousands of transactions by itself. Does it cost a dollar to process a one hundred dollar credit card transaction? I don’t think so.
Lazarus has an elegant solution. Find out what the transactions cost and lower them to a more reasonable level. Banks are entitled to profit from their activities but without consumer and retailer knowledge of what actually takes place here, we have less of a service than a magical transference of your money by a priest of finance. That is not fair.
James Pilant
Malware Kills My Computer!
I’m thrilled. My dvd drive quit working. The computer indicated that the driver was malfunctioning and I went on the net to try to find one. I found an apparently reliable site but after it downloaded for about ten seconds, I decided I didn’t want to risk it and stopped the download. Well, guess what?, ten seconds is enough. My infested computer had to be wiped and the basic software reloaded. Now I being ever cautious have two computers that do this blog. So, one computer is left and it’s the main one. The one I just wiped is going to become a web cruiser only with tons of defensive software, so in a couple weeks I should have identical material on both computers.
It makes me angry that people would do this and much more angry that Microsoft’s operating system bears more resemblance to Swiss cheese than a computer program. But I’ll keep going.
James Pilant
Only One Blog Entry On Friday!
James Pilant
The Second Great Depression?
In The Business Insider, The Money Game, there is a series of charts comparing the stock market numbers from 1929 crash and the 2008 market disaster. There are a good number of other charts, graphs and numbers demonstrating similarities between our situation and that of the 1930’s.
I have pointed out repeatedly to my classes of Business Law Students that the 1929 stock crash did not immediately result in the Great Depression. It was a spiral downwards that culminated in 1933. There were stock market rallies from time to time but the numbers never reached the previous rally high. That’s what I watch for. We started at around 14,000 in 2007. We dropped at the worst of the crisis to above 7,000 and then rallied back to around 10,000. If we continue to cycle down (if the crisis continues), we will fall to some disastrous number but never make it back to 10,000, and then we will fall again and rally and never make it back and so on. I am in no way confident that there is a sustainable recovery. Our government has never in any way fixed the problems in our banking system. I hope that we all do well and prosper but those individuals who have the power to defend the nation against disaster have failed in their duty and little more than luck defends us from another or a continuing financial disaster.
James Alan Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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