Why is everyone surprised when the banking bailout turns into a catastrophic failure? The AP is shocked, shocked I tell you that executives are still holding on to their jobs after the bailout (see AP: 9 in 10 execs at bailout banks remain on job). What did the AP think was going to happen to these guys? They took the handout directly themselves. It's not like they were going to fire each other.

My children interact with other kids who have a hand out with a harsh sense of entitlement. We call those kids assholes spoiled and avoid them and their parents.  These kids are our apparent future banking leaders.

Banking executives were rewarded for bad decisions, just like the people who handed over the bailout money keep getting elected in spite of their own dysfunctional legacies. There is no greater irony I've witnessed than that of congress lecturing car companies on fiscal responsibility. The only thing worse than that was the pathetic car execs with their fake remorseful faces holding their hands out. Where is John Galt to tell them to get the hell out of his way?

There is apparently some ignorance in human behavior in the media. Fire, hot, burn. No more wood. Put it out.

Yahoo has spoken out about their Chinese connection and it makes the stomach turn.

Yahoo executives feel "horrible" about political arrests of Internet users in China but believe it's better to operate in that market and cooperate with authorities than not be there at all, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang said Wednesday.

This position is the old "it's just business" excuse reworded to sound sympathetic. Yang comes across as saying that it's a shame they are helping the oppressive Communist government out, but at least they are in the market and making money. His comments come very close to whining about how if Yahoo isn't in that market, Google and Microsoft will have a larger market share. Yeah, well, they are spineless cowards too.

Then Yang pulls a moral equivalence triangulation worthy of a politician running for the Senate.

Internet companies have to deal with regulations that affect their business in other countries as well, even in the U.S., which has the Patriot Act, he said. "There is no 100 percent clean, no matter what country you're talking about."

It's the tired old "the U.S. is not a perfect angel" defense people use when defending oppressive foreign governments. Most Americans don't like everything our government does, but direct comparisons between the U.S. and Chinese governments does nothing to strengthen the argument. In fact, his defense of Yahoo falls apart at that point. It's kind of like a bank robber saying "nobody's perfect" at his trial and expecting to get off.

It's frightening to watch today's business leaders attempt to build an amoral high ground to justify everything they do. You cannot separate morality and ethics from business. Just like everything else, refusing to judge and taking no action is an action all by itself. Yahoo is condoning the arrest of people whose only crime is to seek out information. The reason they are condoning the arrests is because they want a competitive edge in China. What a lousy reason. This is what it's like to not take a stand for or feel anything. The next thing you know, Yahoo will be part of the UN Security Council.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It's supposed to be about remembering the man who articulated the struggle of black people so well during the Civil Rights Movement. Like so many important issues of today, King's legacy has been twisted and transformed into something negative. Racism has turned the corner and is no longer a cultural and social problem. It's a political talking point. Sure racism is still around because there are a-holes in every walk of life. However, there are those who would have you believe that every issue is somehow tied to race-relations and that everybody is a racist and has a racial agenda.

I never knew King since he died before I was born. I can't profess to know what he would think about today's racial discourse. However, if you are objective about history, you know that he personified intelligent, peaceful social change. No one can deny his oratory legacy as well as his ability to lead. You take that image and juxtapose it with today's leadership and their rhetoric and you will find a frightening contrast. Jesse Jackson, who was part of King's entourage, is a good example of somebody who could have been great but chose to use racial rhetoric to shakedown companies and misrepresent the truth for political purposes.

I'd like to write that Martin Luther King would have come unglued with anger at Jackson and the host of black and white politicians who will use race to ignite anger among the voting public. What I can say is that King projected class and his efforts actually produced positive results. He spoke of respect for all people and his words seem to paint a utopian picture of how people should live together. Maybe the world has too many cynics, but it's hard to believe somebody could get by talking like that today. Would King survive the 24 hour news cycle and the relentless media pundit criticism and the tabloid stories about his private life?

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King's legacy was not just his public presentations and his ability to lead, but also his gift for showing the world a positive way to live. Can we turn down the gansta rap and the frothing political rhetoric and the angry bitterness of the entitlement culture enough to hear Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech with new ears?

Is it possible to change today's business culture? To do so requires CEO buy-in and they make up much of the problem. The change I'm writing about is how business should treat employees, treat customers, and demand excellence of itself. Mediocrity seemingly runs the business world. At the risk of sounding like Ayn Rand, this country was not grown by mediocre businessmen who spent their time analyzing whether or not building railroads to the West was a sound business model for a quickie ROI. And while I'm at it, don't lecture me on the Chinese labor or slavery of old. Just because those things existed in this country doesn't mean good things didn't happen then. In fact, I would say many of our good qualities are masked today by fear, political correctness, and our litigious culture. There were some daring businessmen in the 1800s. It was a time where our culture was evolving and finding its way.

Today, things are radically different. We have trapped our own entrepreneurial spirits by submitting to cultural fads, legal trends, and bad legislation. While there are still daring individuals out there, I think the status quo for CEOs is to appease shareholders rather than build something. There's a huge difference. To spell it out, a CEO of today is a product of learning to deal with the complexities of numbers projections while balancing shareholder general opinion, hoping that somebody somewhere doesn't sue you into oblivion. Those who have mastered these skills are good at what they do. Many of them are well-educated, talented people. But it's like they are holding themselves back from greatness because that would be poor form. In most cases, CEOs have handsome benefits for conforming to the mediocre CEO mold. Not that I've been in that position, but I'm sure it's hard to risk passing up a seven or eight figure parachute in exchange for building something nobody has ever before.

The sure path to mediocrity is to listen to current, popular sentiment as if it was a scientific law. As I've written before, the 90s ruined business culture on many levels. One of them that just crawls under my skin is the "good enough" philosophy of product development. This concept has become so commonplace, that nobody seems to question its wisdom or long-term effect. Basically, the principal is that, especially in the consumer technology sector, products only have to be good enough to provide a revenue stream to build the next version since the life cycle of the product is so short. This line of thinking has consumers already not expecting quality from cell phones, software, computer hardware, and now even appliances.

I would argue there is a dangerous cultural side-effect from the "good enough" mentality, which is that it doesn't stop with simple products. This mentality is creeping into our every day lives. Customer service is now just good enough, for example. There is a 7-11 close to my client's office. I stop by there for gas often. For the past month, at least half the pumps have been out of order. When did that become an okay way to run business?

Within corporate culture, "good enough" is around every corner as it spreads from product development to strategic business meetings to accounting and even to HR. After a while, it's hard to get a handle on standards for quality and excellence, much less enforce them. This is where most companies are today. Long-term vision is nearly replaced with good-enough-to-get-by until the next quarterly shareholder conference call. Don't even think of taking a short term loss to finance a great product that will benefit the company in the next ten years.

CEOs set the tone and culture for any given business. When they only expect the status quo, that is how the company will be from top to bottom. Employees are loyal to leaders with vision and courage while they simply "work for" companies without expectations. Start looking around you. How many things in your life are just "good enough"? Personally, I've been haunted lately by things that I did just to get by. I'm my own CEO and I am setting new expectations for myself. It has to start somewhere.

While scanning the news this morning, I noticed that Cingular posted a $497M loss.

Cingular closed its $41 billion purchase of AT&T Wireless in late October, a move that gave the Atlanta company about 5 million more subscribers than previous market leader Verizon Wireless, a joint venture owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC.

Over the last few months, Cingular has said it will cut about 7,000 jobs and announced plans to sell certain assets to meet merger-related regulatory requirements as it restructures to absorb AT&T's network and customers.

I started wondering about mega-mergers and the people and circumstances driving them. Even though financial, job, and even customer losses are expected, the goal is to make more money. Most mergers have the potential for great things for a company. Companies merge to unify resources and share intellectual property. Like everything else, is there a point when a merger is too big? Can there be a formula to ensure the merger is successful for the company?

Who benefits directly the most from a mega-merger? That would be the executives since 7,000 employees getting laid off are certainly not benefiting. I'm going to assume based on industry history that customers are not going to benefit; they are simply numbers on the pro forma and both AT&T Wireless and Cingular had nationwide coverage. If you are a subscriber, you now one of 49.1 million customers. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting good, individual customer service from the new behemoth. Shareholders may benefit in the short term, but after the market settles, customer attrition, and the golden parachutes open, I would expect that the stock will settle down to something close to both companies' original share prices.

I'm not against people making money. However, executives who plan and execute mega-mergers are their own driving force. They are involved for short-term personal gain. I respect leaders who have the long-term goals of the company in mind. Cingular is no longer nimble and will eventually have to answer to a younger, faster company. They are setting themselves up to be slow to respond to the market. The entire banking industry is full of mega-mergers that have shaken out. Now these banks sit around trying to figure out how continue to grow in saturated markets. In the end, the banks fight over market scraps, the employees have unrealistic expectations for growth, and customers talk about how bad the customer service is. These banks then try to go back and institute plans to make employees happy and customers even happier. Trying to retrofit a positive culture long after the mega-merger is nearly impossible since the culture came directly from the merger.

Executives will serve the company better by passing on mega-mergers when there is much to be done to improve long-term profitability and stability.

There is a definite danger of reducing everything down to a formula. When you do that, you get crap. Adding a formula to a creative process can be visualized best as:

creative + formula = crap

It's really unfortunate that success breeds its own sort of creative stagnation. Each new creation has to be better than the previous. There is no end to the cycle and I think the end result is uncreative, recycled crap. Hey, that sounds a lot like Hollywood. Sure, there are some good formula movies out there, but then again what the hell was Van Helsing? Hmmm, you take Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale and toss them into a CGI blender with no script and you get $160,000,000 eye candy. They could have made the movie for a lot less and had a better story. Current thinking in studios probably took them down the CGI path rather than the creative route. Who needs writers when you have computers?

I'm not a big gamer. I love the games, but I have a business and family, so I don't get to play too much. As a result, I haven't been following the trends in games lately, but I figured this would happen: Video Game Makers Go Hollywood (free subscription required). The gaming industry overall has been excelling Hollywood in revenues for several years now. It only makes sense that they would want to keep their standing. And when it comes to battling Hollywood, it's a crap fight.

The numbers can go much higher for some new games. Atari spent $20 million on its "Enter the Matrix" game last year, an amount that is about one-third the average cost of a feature film.

As a result of the changes, game publishers are less willing to take creative chances, people in the industry say. They make fewer games and rely more on movie tie-ins and what they consider sure-fire sequels. But the smaller number of bets can make publishers walk the kind of financial high-wire that has long been part of the hit-driven movie business. At Activision, 40 percent of publishing revenue last year came from two sets of games, "Tony Hawk's Underground" and "True Crime: Streets of L.A."

In other words, they have a formula that works right now today and they will use it forever. Hollywood still makes money and they still make crap, so why change?

Here is where business executives in the creative industries should remember their roots. Most business are built on risk. Sure it's great to have a formula for making money, but it's also great to take chances and reap the rewards--that's called living. I find it interesting that once people achieve a certain amount of success, they don't want to change the formula (or even update it a little).

It's a tough problem to solve, balancing creativity and profitability. Naturally, the Times thinks this is a tragedy. The gaming industry is not fringe anymore. It's big business, in spite of the fact that their primary market eats, drinks, and breathes cutting-edge. Big business means they have thousands to employ and a market to satisfy. However, there is always room for experimentation and fitting that into the formula may produce more creativity supported by the sure hits. Such a formula may look like:

(risk * creativity) + (formula) = crap + some hits + really cool stuff nobody's seen

This is too good to pass up: Web addicts escape army conscription.

Doctors have found the young men miss their computers too much to cope with their compulsory six months in the forces.

Yes, I know this is the Finnish Army, but it's the army right?

When I was in basic training, there was a guy in there who faked a back injury to get out. I remember him crying each night the first week. He just couldn't take it. In fact, a drill sergeant later told me it was very common for people to fake illnesses, tragedy, or insanity to get out during basic training.

Granted, there are some mental illnesses you certainly don't want in the military. One guy in basic with me was washed out for his inability to pass the psychological exam. It was pretty easy, too. The questions ran like: "How do you feel today?", "Do you feel good about decisions you make?", and "Do you find your German Shepherds's butt attractive?". I think we all know how to answer questions like that. However, this guy didn't answer the questions like a normal person. Our drill sergeant pointed out, in formation, that he was a getting washed out for mental reasons. I can't be sure, and I'm no psychiatrist, but I think it's a bad idea to publicly humiliate somebody who can't pass an entry-level military psych exam, especially as he's about to be released back into the world.

I'm sort of old-school when it comes to thinking about addictions. It's behavior, not disease. Military training is behavior modification. You would think that if there is a group of people out there who can't stop one-handed surfing for a few weeks, the military is the perfect rehabilitative environment. Who else is going to tell you to quit crying like a little school girl because you miss www.hotandhairyeasterneuropegirls.fi? Who else is going to stop you from playing Age of Empires until you are too fat to pull yourself up the stairs of your mother's basement? I thought that's what the military is supposed to be about.

Hey, suck it up and do your duty! (He says as he finishes this blog entry and posts it on the Web.)

I've been giving a lot of thought to the culture of CEOs. I've been watching Ken Lay with bemused interest as he says things like "I accept responsibility for Enron's collapse. But failure does not equate to a crime." He's right, but if he didn't know something was wrong, it was a moral crime to let him remain as CEO. As Enron set course for an iceberg, executives should have sounded the alarm. Instead, the attitude of the executives at Enron was sophomoric at best.

I first realized that corporate management was incompetent many years ago when I did some work through Earnst and Young for a major client of theirs. Between the client's inexperienced management and Earnst and Young milking the client for everything they had, I felt like I was back in high school with the cliques and power struggles. A few years later, I contracted with Montgomery Ward to work on some internal IT projects. Again, the power struggles and internal competition were fierce. I believe Wards would be around today if they didn't have five simultaneous competing IT projects managed by five different departments. Where was the leadership?

Leadership, real leadership, is one of those things that is as rare as originality in business. Real leadership directs a company by example, integrity, and vision. Real leaders are often at odds with the shareholders, who demand quick profits for a minimal stake in a company. Real leaders take chances, hurt when the company hurts, and live to make the company valuable to its industry. Seeing how that is rare I have come up with a theory for most CEOs.

I think most CEOs are nothing more than a location joke. You know, you had to be there to appreciate it and if you weren't then you will never get it. The joke is on the employees and customers because the location joke CEO gets paid the equivalent of a small town each year and will never feel what it's like to be penalized for a negative performance. In fact, many CEOs are rewarded for a failure by signing on to another CEO position while the fan is still getting smacked by crap at the previous company. This happens because many board of director members serve at each others' companies to help each other out.

There are really two kinds of CEOs. The first is the location joke CEO. This CEO doesn't care if the company is around in ten years. He just wants the benefits, golden parachute, and gargantuan paycheck. He is the CEO of convenience and will cut jobs, reduce product quality, and will hurt customer relations just to placate the share holders.

The other type is the CEO of passion. This type of CEO is a leader and will do whatever is necessary to keep the company viable for years to come. The CEO of passion fantasizes about the future of the company and is unwavering in his belief that the company is good and should be around for years.

Which type of CEO would you want to work for?

This is an excellent opinion piece on the current state of the MBA program: The MBA Menace.

Congratulations! You have a sparkling new degree, highly prized in this world. You have learned a great many things about business. You have invested two years of your life, not to mention lost wages and a small fortune in tuition, in this impressive undertaking. As a result, you are fully qualified to go out and become a menace to society.

It's nice to see others out there noticing that higher level education programs are not preparing people for the real world. While not in this particular article, I see this as especially problematic with ethics.

Steve Soandso was a former manager of mine. His grasp on management was similar to that of a toadstool. Yet when he was introduced, it was always coupled with the MBA designation.

There's no other way to put it; Steve was an idiot. I blew my top with him over and over again because he couldn't even understand simple concepts like square pegs and round holes. My co-workers and I eventually went to HR to complain because we didn't want him in charge of reviews and raises.

The whole HR thing blew up in my face because HR always sides with the MBA. It must be some kind of abbreviation coalition. I learned that I was expecting too much from him, which is ironic because most humans are capable of doing great things. Does that mean that MBAs cannot? No, it just means that many MBAs are not experienced enough to handle the responsibility given to them. Three little letters is all it takes.

I personally witnessed the most uncool, unprofessional action today. I belong to a networking and leads group. I won't specify since this action would stain the national reputation. During our meeting, one of the local directors publicly humiliated our chapter's vice president. He had requested that both I and the vice president provide a solid testimony as an example to the members. I finished my testimonial and then the VP stood to give his. The director forgot what he asked the VP to do and rather than just letting him finish and moving on with the meeting, he told the VP to sit down like a dog--in front of sixty people. I couldn't believe it.

No, wait, I could.

This isn't the first time I've seen power-hungry organizational leaders. To all of you people out there in leadership positions in professional organizations, please get over yourself. For goodness sake, do you think you're running a pre-school? I've been through this time and time again, and it's old. First of all, when I pay dues to an organization, I'm doing it because I want to be there. My mother is not putting me on a bus, and, in fact, I drove there. I'm old enough to buy beer and I certainly know how to behave in public (forget the fact that one of my fellow members pointed out that I had my shirt on backwards and I had to sneak to the bathroom to turn it around; I can't be a complete adult all of the time, I guess). I've been in a leadership position in just about every professional organization that's had me. So to those of you out there who feel the need to get your jollies from talking down to me or other members, remember that we must have more a life than you do.

I have this theory about professional organizations that says that there are two kinds of people in them: the movers/shakers/overall busy people who work for a living and then there's the people who have nothing better to do than live the organization. Some people call them dedicated. Some people call them eccentric. I just call them pathetic. These are the kind of people who cannot understand that there's life and business after the meeting. When I left the meeting today, I made conference call, published a Web site, and fed my kids dinner.

When you are in a leadership position in a trade organization, please remember that we're all adults. Making an ass of yourself only keeps other professionals from joining. For example, I've already heard that at least four people who attended today will not joining our organization because of this directory. It's a shame because we have a good group and I do make money from the referrals I receive from fellow members.

Leadership is about leading by example not showing your ass. I can take my money I paid this organization and buy an iPod; I will if this keeps up. My dues are due next month and I have a decision to make.