Sat - January 29, 2005

A week away...


Strapped to the rail-road tracks again
Locomotive comin' around the bend.
Thought virtue always wins,
man with the mustache says:
"This scene is through, it's curtains for you."

Posted at 08:48 PM     Read More  

Sat - January 22, 2005

Robert Sher's folly...


Robert Sher says...

First, please think about these questions:
• Do you need more hours in the day?
• Do you struggle with self discipline?
• Do you have trouble balancing your personal and work life?
• Are you having trouble keeping a reserve of cash and friends on tap?
• Do you spend more time at the office than at home?
The best thing in the world here is that the answers for me are these...
No. No. No. No. No.
But, when I used to work for Bentley Publishing Group I answered...
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The solution for me? Work for the premier art publishing company in the world. Working for a place where people value your input, value your talent, and value you as a human being is such a world different than I was used to.
Life is way too short to work for a morally bankrupt boss and to sit and watch life go past as you struggle for someone else's goal while your own goals are belittled and your own common sense is sidelined as "undisciplined" nonsense.
Think about it like this: If you keep fighting the same fights and feeling like the people in charge have an agenda different than the one they show you, you are wasting your life.
(next episode: "Family Business: ...it means you are in the business of soothing someone else's family problems")

Posted at 06:03 PM     Read More  

Tue - January 4, 2005

Robbing a man with a fountain pen...


I have been thinking about an old Woody Guthrie song in which he mentions that he has seen a man "rob another with a fountain pen." He's talking about the banks and the dustbowl farmers who lost everything, but I have been thinking of it in the larger sense.

In business, especially when things start going poorly, it seems like the rule of nature is that the one who thinks of a dastardly plan first gets to win. In business, things can go very wrong and can remain hidden for long enough that the "little guys" who trust the larger or seemingly more fit business end up taking up a small portion of the larger business's disaster.

It isn't a shock that a business can have several loans and, in that way, a business that dies a terrible death can lose a sum far in excess of any one of the liabilities of the individual bank. The banks, however, have so much historical data that they are pretty good at reigning in a business well in advance of its demise. Further, a bank makes it the bank's business to either secure the loans, review the qualifications, or even to call them due when or as the business starts to fail.

If a business starts to slide, it is at first hard to know if the slide is a long term problem. First come the cutbacks on staples and pens, and then on producing product that can be postponed, and eventually there are lay-offs or at least skipped pay raises for the steadfast employees. Pressure is put on the company to perform better but the rewards are saved for the ownership and repayment of critical debt or overhead.

If the slide starts to look more and more dire, a good business will alter course and try to stave off the worst case. If the business makes a mistake or is run by uncareful leadership, they will pour on the coal and head directly into the eye of the storm. That is when the creative financing (which is ultimately the topic here; the rip off) begins.

First it is important to note that, by this point, the leaders who have put the entire business in danger will NOT admit to any more troubles than the usual "economic" fluctuations or a bad period or even some isolated problem. If they have spent a lot of money buying new accounts or merging or making big deals, they will point to short term problems as though that is all there is to fear and as if there is a guaranteed turnaround. In cases where there is not mismanagement of the company and lying within the ownership, these short term problems are bumps along the road. In the case of a business in trouble, they are excuses and scape goats.

As the business experiences cash shortages, after expanding to produce more and more, the employees and vendors seldom see how serious the problem is until it is too late. The business pushes all credit to the maximum and then begins the slide into bare minimum maintenance of that debt. The credit lines become useless burdens and the vendors are all pushed to their limits. In some cases, the business may begin to reject products or demand rebates based on false quality issues or the business may begin to rush large quantities of work at once to create a bubble of debt that will then have to be "chased" by the vendor in the event the turnaround comes too slowly.

Employees may be asked to skip raises or cutback hours willingly or they may be terminated. Ownership may be asked to capitalize the company. Vendors may be pushed for even lower prices and longer repayment terms. All of these things can come as legitimate moves to bolster a short term pinch, but when the short term becomes the norm, this bubble eventually bursts and the business begins a cancerous decline into dysfunction and decay. The debts are often never repaid and eventually the business begins to search out multiple vendors as to spread around a small amount of debt per vendor, but an over-all larger debt to the company. The company may begin to break ties with vendors as a way to stall or even to default on payments. The relationships decay as new vendors are found and the vendors eventually are forced to give up their claim to the money or to fight a dying company for money it doesn't have.

Other earmarks begin to materialize. Typically, a strapped business will begin to over-tax and overpromise. The individual parts of the company become so burdened that they too begin to fail within themselves. Where phenomenal efficiency once reigned, chaos and errors that can ill be afforded move in. Accounting and book keeping employees, who tend to have the pulse of the company, begin leaving or searching for more stable or less frightening work. The ownership may begin to fight within itself as the pressures of funding the company mount. In the case of disagreement within ownership about the causes of this stress, the board may begin to re-evaluate the leadership and direction of the company and a change at the executive level may happen.

In short, a business that is driven into the ground through blind ambition and selfish greed can quickly find that treating the little guys poorly is the easy fix. They may find, too, that the little guys will eventually get wise and will begin, like the banks, to limit the power of this abuse by the company. The monster business that once grew by leaps and bounds and seemed unstoppable, soon shows the true colours and reveals that the growth was at the expense of the business relationships in which the company was the superior to start. As the small guys begin to pull the plug, the big business is faced with defaulting on deals made under the guise of the false sense of success that came before.

I know this isn't deep stuff. It is the setting into which the main character fits for this story. Our businessman and failed leader (the one with the initials RS) starts on top of the world and ends up stealing from the mouths of those less fortunate than himself. He wakes up to find that someone has realized what kind of guy he is and that the "resources" are very well aware of their danger.

Posted at 08:02 PM     Read More  

Fri - December 31, 2004

Boy, do I have a story for you! -Introduction


I am planning a story about a little company that tears itself apart after a series of bad calls and a lot of in-fighting. I have wanted to explore what a sane person can become when put in a setting of a failing business and his own shortcomings. Expect some morality-tale style entries about what happens to a guy who starts making bad calls and ends up tangled in all manner of very hateful and harmful activity to keep his failing business afloat, while keeping his family from finding out he's let them down. This story will no doubt include the other family members' experiences and influences over the failure of the business and I hope to be insightfully honest and brutally open about all of it.

Expect to see the classic villain with the mustache and how his real evil is his inaction that spawns his own need to hurt others for his self preservation. Financial hardship, lies, family fights, insurance fraud, and most of all ripping honesty about how life seems to find a way to set the right people down on their feet and the others on their backs. Let's hope I can manage this and more!

I made a number of short animations that relate to this story and, if they seem relevant, I'll work those into this project too. I may explore more theoretical stuff here too, but only if it seems like hypothetical re-takes on the main thread. I don't want this to become too abstract, but I also want the specific story to have universal relevance. That's the real trick, isn't it.

So, check back to find out what happens when, oh hell, let's just call him Nero, let's his business go to hell for the sake of preserving a big game of pretend with his family and then embarks on a life of horrific harm to others (and himself) as a foolish stab at saving his own selfish skin.

Posted at 02:11 PM     Read More  

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