Should Leaders Ever Swear? - Harvard Business Review

The BP oil spill has devastated the Gulf of Mexico, pummeled the oil company's market value, and created a lingering problem for the Obama Administration, which has been criticized for responding too cerebrally, without sufficient forcefulness or authenticity. The spill has also provided an interesting historical footnote: during an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today Show last week, Obama declared that one of his goals during meetings on the crisis has been to determine "whose ass to kick."

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The Inauthentic Community of the Modern Executive - Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review

Marshall McLuhan famously said: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." The same, I believe, holds for community. We shape our community by choosing which actors comprise it and what roles they play. And we want to be a valued member of that community, so we adhere to its norms and conventions — our happiness depends on it. For this reason, the community we choose is critically important. If it is a productive community, it will help make us better. If it is unproductive, it will quietly but surely make us worse. So it behooves us to explore the quality of the community of the modern business executive. As mentioned in my last post, customers, employees, home city and long-term shareholders loomed large in the typical community of the 1950s and 1960s. The intimacy of these communities was aided by the more manageable scale of the enterprises of the day. GM, the behemoth of 1960, pulled in revenues that would in today's dollars ($66 billion) put it behind Archer Daniels Midland, 2009's 27th placed company, way below number one Exxon Mobil with $442 billion. In fact, only ten companies in 1960 were bigger than regional power utility Pacific Gas and Electric (#176) in 2009.

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The Role of the Media in Business Forecasting

One of the major questions one has to ask is what role has the mainstream media played in the global financial crisis - in particular the role of TV business commentators.

This video provides very compelling evidence that mainstream media, in this instance TV, has not only been a participant in the most unreliable way, it actually distorts the truth. When you look at this video, you will view the claim that media represents responsible views as the bogus claim it really is. Here are leaders in government and business and their partners in crime the journalists making claims that can be seen as totally incorrect. The paradox is that the media can only ever represent the moment and it is those fragments of information in the moment that the media claims represent reality.

The great challenge at the moment is - who can we rely on to provide us with real information about what's going on? It seems we might have to rely on writers of satire to do that.

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