Feeling substantially de-jet lagged.
Met with Faith Gilbert about business plan forLetterbox Farm Collective. She is very bright and numerate. Hopefully they will get their grants and loans. As she noted, part of this is just jumping through the hoops. The loan application is over 60 pages long.
Need to invoice for this work.
Talked with Matt Almeida.
YouThisMe entered a new phase today that ultimately leads to 2018-2019 with the focus on UTM Healthcare software products. This email marks the initial meetings at Columbia Memorial Hospital concerning our emergency room app that a year later began to morph into UTM RPM.
Raised $1 million at investor meeting with UThisMe LLC.
35th wedding anniversary. Tennis lesson in the morning. Went to movie in Millerton. Best Marigold Hotel. Then dinner at Escoffier Restaraunt at CIA in Hyde Park. Excellent and extravagant.
Temperature reached 96 by 1pm. Retreated to bedroom at 4pm. Spent most of the day catching up on bills and other personal admin. Sent letter to Jesse returned by HK post office for inadequate address to their new address.
Talked with Harvey Meyerson. Spent evening in AC’d tv room.
Conversation with Actinica. They continue to get more sales, but still need to develop better commercial sensibilities. Prompted them about acting on cash flow by asking a customer for an early payment. Then pointed out that they need to be ready to outline how they want to do business with a new possible vendor who has a track record as a rain maker. Still and all, a tremendous change in their sales and their self-confidence as business people instead of just engineers.
Finished up avageyer.com. What a strange world it is that parents are so hands on in working with their children to get into college. Obviously not unusual, but still strange. I don’t remember even a teacher at Taft reviewing my college essays let alone parents!
Second significant snow of the season.
This van gets 43 miles per gallon in city driving! GM actually can build efficient vehicles. How did this happen? It turns out that the Chinese government has vehicle efficiency regulations and simply requires this level of efficiency. So, if even GM can do this in China, imagine what they could do here if we had a government that was serious about improving our use of petroleum.
So that is the first tale.
The second tale is to imagine the fate of Mr. Murtaugh who pulled of this amazing feat of GM ingenuity. You might be entertaining thoughts that he would be brought back to Detroit to show the car city boys how to do it here. No such luck.
“A soft-spoken man in a company known for autocratic leaders, Mr. Murtaugh ran the China operations for more than nine years from his base in Shanghai, repeatedly making some of the best calls in the industry. Now he finds himself unemployed and living in a small community in rural Kentucky.
His resignation in March, at the age of 49, came shortly after senior company executives reorganized management to give more power to Detroit executives to oversee design, engineering and various manufacturing disciplines all over the world, including operations in China.”
I have been telling people for years that GM is a dinosaur, still standing perhaps, but a dinosaur waiting for the next deep recession to move it from its present status as a junk-bond-rated behemoth to the bankruptcy courts. This second tale of GM management brilliance is further evidence to bolster my case.
By the way, “Mr. Murtaugh said that he was playing a little golf now, but found himself with many idle hours.
“I’m looking for work,” he said, and then joked, “do you have a deck that needs painting?””
The collapse of energy giant Enron over the last six months has produced a surprising level of outrage especially for a cynic like me.
As this drama continues to unfold, I have been trying to understand how Enron structured their business and made money. Until just last night I was operating on the belief that the cleverness and sophistication of Enron’s managers simply outstripped my analytical skills. But, as I have been following the writing in the NY Times and Wall St. Journal, slowly it has come to me that they don’t understand the maze of structures and deals employed by Enron for years either.
Then, last night, on the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS, Paul Solman, one of the regular financial reporters, gave his analysis of what has been going on. After listening to Solman’s report, it is clear that Enron has been engaging in massive deceit, deception, and downright criminal activity for years.
Now, I must admit to some familiarity with the habits and attitudes of managers. I am used to the aggressive behavior of managers trying to stretch the accounting systems to make the most recent quarter look good. In fact, I have participated in such activities. But, Enron has engaged in a long-term shell game aided and abetted by its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, LLC. The failure of the government (the SEC) and more importantly, the audit companies, to provide oversight, transparency, basic facts, and above all the application simple commonsense ethics to a huge company’s activities is outrageous. It undermines the credibility of the economy. If Arthur Andersen, one of the oldest and most prestigious audit firms can be so blind over so many years, what are we to make of their, and other audit firms’ reliability for oversight of all the other firms so many of us hold in our 401K funds?
It will be interesting to see how the government and the financial institutions of capitalism react to this. It is a basic tenant of the capital and equity markets that timely, transparent information is essential not only to the best and highest use of our capital resources, but also to the maintenance of trust in a reasonably fair play space.