Joneses, Sleepyheads and Killers

I am busy lately.

With chores of works and responsibility here and there.

But this does not stop me from reading at times.

I like this article. It reminds me on how things work differently. It reminds me that the rich and the successful have a different wavelength from the rest of us. The joneses that makes 99.9% are just the sleepyheads and the zombies. What the 0.1% people are? They are the killers. The are different and they think differently. They are the special ones.

Try to imagine this. Due to this freaking recession globally, everyone across the board, the old and young ones, the commoner and the dreamer, the employees and workers around the globe, will be cursing and swearing about the lost of their job, the increase in price and the inflation, the lack of bonus, the money they have to save and etc blah blah blah.

But but, those killers. You know what they do? They are different. They will not be penalized.... You think huge organizations and business owners will kill these killers? At most they will be let off with a huge compensation but will be re-hired at another organization. They are the killers. They make things work and they have guts. They are not afraid of the norm nor killing the weak ones. They make right decisions at unpleasant times. They can watch you bleed while they are having their steak.

To think about it, it makes perfect sense. You think these predators will give any damn to you and about you, if you are to lose your job and complains about your lack of bonus? Dream on my friend. Dream on. Compassion is best left away from the world outside. They will eat you alive.

Now, do you want to be the joneses, sleepyheads or the killers?

Updated: To further demonstrate the differences between where this will happens, we takes 2 examples of 2 different countries, America and China.

You see, in America, you will be paid millions of dollars in bonus and compensation for experiences, results and wisdoms. In short you will be paid millions of dollars for your intelligence as compensation for your results to transform your employer to perform in Wall Street.

In China, i believe it is slightly different. You are mentally programmed since young to do it for the sake of country and the honor of your country. You are hired for your experience and intelligence. But you will not be compensated hugely in multimillions but your name will honored and remembered for your contribution to the country. You are supposed to do it for the sake of your country. Just look at the medals for athletes in China during Olympics in 2008. They fight for their country.

In America, you fight for your individual success, medals and money.

This is just a piece of my humble opinion.

In Malaysia, no 1 fights for anything anymore, for the exception of their birth rights, bumiputra or non-bumi. Or maybe they fight for their deserved salary or lands behind their house in their kampung, perhaps. Hahaha.

Managerial Incompetence

What is managerial incompetence?

Doing the right things or doing things right? How about doing wrong things right and doing wrong things wrong?

WTF??!?!?!?

I was reading this post. It makes me think. Check it out here.

It is a commonplace assumption, for instance, that they were undone by overly generous union contracts. But, when dependency ratios start getting up into the 3-to-1 to 7-to-1 range, the issue is not so much what you are paying each dependent as how many dependents you are paying. “There is this notion that there is a Cadillac being provided to all these retirees,” Ron Bloom, a senior official at the United Steelworkers, says. “It’s not true. The truth is seventy-five-year-old widows living on less than three hundred dollars to four hundred dollars a month. It’s just that there’s a lot of them.”

A second common assumption is that fading industrial giants like G.M. and Bethlehem are victims of their own managerial incompetence. In various ways, they undoubtedly are. But, with respect to the staggering burden of benefit obligations, what got them in trouble isn’t what they did wrong; it is what they did right. They got in trouble in the nineteen-nineties because they were around in the nineteen-fifties—and survived to pay for the retirement of the workers they hired forty years ago. They got in trouble because they innovated, and became more efficient in their use of labor.

So tell me again. I was pretty shocked. Is innovation and improvements good? Is paying for retirees bad? How do they solve this problems? History of problems. Have the past management really screw up? Or perhaps they did not think into the future at all? Or perhaps they wanted to guard against their own interests?

And continued here about the problems faced by the current scenarios, current situation by the current batch of CEOs.

Here, surely, is the absurdity of a system in which individual employers are responsible for providing their own employee benefits. It penalizes companies for doing what they ought to do. General Motors, by American standards, has an old workforce: its average worker is much older than, say, the average worker at Google. That has an immediate effect: health-care costs are a linear function of age. The average cost of health insurance for an employee between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine is $3,759 a year, and for someone between the ages of sixty and sixty-four it is $7,622. This goes a long way toward explaining why G.M. has an estimated sixty-two billion dollars in health-care liabilities. The current arrangement discourages employers from hiring or retaining older workers. But don’t we want companies to retain older workers—to hire on the basis of ability and not age? In fact, a system in which companies shoulder their own benefits is ultimately a system that penalizes companies for offering any benefits at all. Many employers have simply decided to let their workers fend for themselves. Given what has so publicly and disastrously happened to companies like General Motors, can you blame them?

Or consider the continuous round of discounts and rebates that General Motors—a company that lost $8.6 billion last year—has been offering to customers. If you bought a Chevy Tahoe this summer, G.M. would give you zero-per-cent financing, or six thousand dollars cash back. Surely, if you are losing money on every car you sell, as G.M. is, cutting car prices still further in order to boost sales doesn’t make any sense. It’s like the old Borsht-belt joke about the haberdasher who lost money on every hat he made but figured he’d make up the difference on volume. The economically rational thing for G.M. to do would be to restructure, and sell fewer cars at a higher profit margin—and that’s what G.M. tried to do this summer, announcing plans to shutter plants and buy out the contracts of thirty-five thousand workers. But buyouts, which turn active workers into pensioners, only worsen the company’s dependency ratio. Last year, G.M. covered the costs of its four hundred and fifty-three thousand retirees and their dependents with the revenue from 4.5 million cars and trucks. How is G.M. better off covering the costs of four hundred and eighty-eighty thousand dependents with the revenue from, say, 4.2 million cars and trucks? This is the impossible predicament facing the company’s C.E.O., Rick Wagoner. Demographic logic requires him to sell more cars and hire more workers; financial logic requires him to sell fewer cars and hire fewer workers.

WTF?!?!?!?

Is there anyway out of this hole?