Occupy this…

I'm going to explain a harsh truth here. Companies are in business to earn money for their investors. That's it.

Despite whatever you may hear, it is NOT about the patients (heard in the pharma and biotech industry), it's not about healthy living (food industry), it's not about a healthy lifestyle (certain sneakers, workout fashions, etc.) it's not about ANYTHING other than the investor community.

What you eat, what you ingest, what you wear is not there to nurture you, heal you, or keep you warm and dry…it's there to line the pockets of the very wealthiest people in our society.

Here are two recent articles detailing exactly how far we've come in the greed game:

This one, from the Huffington Post speaks to how business has managed to skirt a law to REVEAL CEO pay, the greed here is heart stopping. The question is, could someone else do as good or even better than these money sucking CEOs? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/30/ceo-to-worker-pay-ratio_n_3184623.html

Bloomberg puts a more personal spin on things; they show the difference between a JC Penney employee who lost her ($8.30/hr) job vs. their recently departed CEO. Yes, he did an awful job, yes, he walked away with wads of cash. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-30/ceo-pay-1-795-to-1-multiple-of-workers-skirts-law-as-sec-delays.html

It's astonishing to me that this system has gotten so far and that the American public doesn't seem to mind supporting this system. Do people really believe that these overpaid CEOs are worth the money they're paid? I've heard people say to me, "well, they've worked hard for it". I work hard; just about everyone I KNOW works hard and none of us are pulling in that kind of money.

Here's another article, one talking about the 10 things Americans don't know about America, http://bananenplanet.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/10-things-most-americans-dont-know-about-america/ this article actually touches on the fact that America's primary economic intention is to satisfy the investor community.

I can say with some certainty that the current selection of FDA approved pharmaceuticals on the market are nothing short of miracles. We have cured or controlled countless horrible diseases just in my lifetime and that's GREAT. What isn't great is what we pay the CEOs and other officers of these companies. In some cases a pharmaceutical CEO makes in one year what an entire drug research and development program would cost over the entire lifespan of that program! Yes, it's true.

Many research programs get started but most of them fail before every getting near to an actual product and all those failures cost money, LOTS OF MONEY but there is value there as well. For all the failures many make it through to save or enhance our lives. But why oh why does that mean that the CEO, CFO, CMO, etc. of these companies are entitled to salaries and bonuses equal or greater than the entire cost of a drug development program?

And why do we do nothing here to put a cap on that? Trust me when I say that not one of these people is the sole or even PRIMARY reason that a particular drug makes it to market. Their goal is to bring value for the investors not better health and well-being to the public.

Another bit of background reading, http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/novos-exceptional-first-quarter-still-disappoints/2013-05-01?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal about a diabetes company, you'll notice that most of this article is about the investment community and their response to the Q1 earnings update. But here's what ISN'T said, this is a company that primarily makes insulin to expand their product line they've gone further and further down the insulin path into more and more EXPENSIVE territory. Guess what folks, you could remain reasonably healthy with diabetes by using regular ol' human insulin and a vial and syringe. As long as you were compliant about testing your blood glucose and knew how and when to inject your insulin you'd be fine, but that isn't what's at question here, it's how well the investment community is responding to how well a company can generate profits.

It doesn't matter if you're the CEO of Target or the CEO of Pfizer, you're there for one reason and one reason alone…investor profits. The clothes you stock your shelves with can be poorly made by cheap labor in foreign lands because that boosts profits and higher profits equal higher rates of return for investors and that's the only good news. Buy American you say? How when no one will SELL AMERICAN. No one will INVEST in America in the truest sense of the word.

How much really is ENOUGH? If I made $17 million this year and was expecting $21 million next year how would I even SPEND all of that before I die? Why can't this be cycled back to the employees and the products and services offered? Why are the rich so breathtakingly richer than the rest of us; and what is it really buying us? It's buying us unemployment as jobs are off-shored, it's buying us inferior quality products, it's buying us American poverty and a forced greater dependence on welfare and other social systems.

I still have no answers to this but I can't help but raise the issue again..and again…and again.

Please folks educate yourselves' about these things, if corporate America isn't willing to admit it has a problem then maybe if we all wise up we can find a way to change things, Occupy had good intentions but nothing changed. We desperately need some change.

So whatcha gonna do ‘bout all that?

A friend of mine at work, someone who listens kindly and even encourages all my wild ranting, asked what my solutions are. She agrees that I've done a good job of identifying the problem or problems but what next? Most people, most BOSSES, don't want you to come to them with a problem unless you're prepared to offer a solution.

I thought about it for a second then admitted that maybe I don't have a solution, maybe I'm as far as putting the thesis together and that's where it stops for now.

As I talked though it occurred to me that even if I come up with a solution it won't matter because, just like with a substance abuser, the first thing is admit you have a problem. That's it. Corporate America, corporations, need to step up and say, "Hi, I'm a corporation and I have a problem, not only do I HAVE a problem…in many cases I AM THE PROBLEM!"

Right now, from what I can see, corporations don't believe they're the problem. They tout their corporate values and make sure everyone is abiding by them and then check each one off during the twice-yearly performance reviews. Yay for us, we have values and we stick to 'em.

What a crock of crap.

When corporations are ready, willing and able to call themselves out on their behavior then I can start coming up with solutions or better yet maybe THEY can come up with solutions. For now I'd like to see it get to the point of admitting a problem. At least it would be a start.

And once they each can own up to having a BIG problem then they can start to drill down to the little ones, get specific, look in the mirror and see the warts, and blemishes, and worry lines wrinkling their corporate foreheads.

But right now, I'd just like to see them start by standing up and admitting there is a problem and it can't be fixed by re-writing the core values or doing another lame team building exercise.

$$$ Uh-huh $$$

I've always kinda thought of myself as someone who *gets* math and even science at some level. Sadly, I've never really pursued it beyond patting myself on the back for knowing that I *get* that so yay me.

Some of my posts are just about silly things like please stop picking on Jennifer Aniston (I stand by that one, give it a rest folks, she's in her 40's there's no baby bump, shut up) but others, from the beginning of this blog, dealt with things like what the HELL is wrong with corporate America. I still hash this shit out over and over again with friends but haven't re-visited it here in a while.

Somehow in the past 24 hours I managed to come across two companies that might be getting things right.

Valve (http://www.cnbc.com/id/100522971/A_Billion_Dollar_Company_With_No_Bosses_Yes_It_Exists) is a video game company with no bosses, no HR department and seemingly no corporate-style issues like performance reviews. It seems to be working. Why is it working for them but not for everyone?

This morning I saw a news story on The Today Show about Zildjian (http://zildjian.com/About/History/Background ), the cymbal company, yeah, you know those shiny metal discs that hover above the drum kits on arena stages all over the world. They maintain a more corporate structure but still keep a family feel to the whole thing. They've never had a layoff in the company and when a job gets replaced by an advance in technology the person who had been doing that job gets re-trained for another comparable job. They showed one guy who'd been re-trained 7 times during his (many) years there and was pretty darn happy about it.

Why are these companies news items? Because they're not the norm, they ARE newsworthy. No one is reporting on the drudgery of corporate life in the entire REST of the companies here. No one is talking about the uselessness of performance review and goal setting season (just now drawing to a close in corporate America).

I'm discouraged, I'll admit it. There are no changes out there in the big world of corporate jobs.

I recently read an article about a couple of new books about FDR and The New Deal. I admit most history has completely escaped me by now. I know I learned about it but that's all I remember, I remember that I learned about something and that's it. The article made me want to read more about those times in not just US history but in the history of the world overall. It was during that era the Securities and Exchange Commission was founded and wasn't that a significant step towards where we are today?

Where are we? We don't innovate, we don't provide quality goods or services, we DO just enough to satisfy the investment community and that is our primary focus for anyone at all who even TOUCHES an industry. Even the small town deli owner is touched by big corporations when they buy their deli meats and other products. We're all in it; we're just all in it for the wrong reasons. I admit, I'm no investment guru but now I'm beginning to see that is the only real way to play in this game.

As the world became more and more industrialized people went from working farms or other small family businesses to working for someone else but in the beginning you did your job, you did your best to turn out a good product and as a reward you got to keep your job (usually for life) and even walked away with a pension, something that was set aside for you to live off of in your declining years. It was easy in many ways.

With the rise of stock trading markets it is clear that we no longer work for a company to produce quality goods and work out our days until we're rewarded with a pension in our twilight years. We work to meet the goals and expectations of the financial investment community. That's it. There's no gratification in that. Yes, I want to make money as much as the next person and live comfortably and all that but there is no deep, personal, emotional connection or gratification to doing what I do.

Systemic mediocrity just may be the result of historic bureaucracy and governed by a financial system only looking to increase the bottom line at any cost. It sucks the soul out of the people engaged in doing the actual work and in turn seems to suck the soul out of the society the work is (supposedly) being done for.

Obviously there will be more on this from me. Some thoughts perhaps on what happens when you DO suck the soul out of individuals and society as a whole…

I’m American

I recently participated in a Scarborough Research survey. I wasn't going to, it seemed invasive but then I thought of all the times that I heard about a survey in the news and when I didn't agree with the results my knee-jerk response would be "no one asked ME" so someone was asking, I thought I'd answer.

The gentleman conducting the survey was a sweet, friendly guy. I chatted him up quite a bit which I'm sure negatively impacted his call time since the objective of any of these positions is to get people OFF the phone but I figured I wasn't giving in THAT easily, he'd have to put up with my corny jokes and reading recommendations (also I had already polished off a beer and was feeling friendly).

The survey was fine, I answered honestly and could see how some of the survey results we see published in the media end up the way they do. There were questions like "Do you think there's too much sex on TV?" The problem was that the only answers were "yes" or "no" and honestly "I don't care" would've been my true response. Saying "yes" made me sound like a member of the "Million Moms" (crazypants) group (newsflash, I'm not even a mom) and saying "no" kinda made me sound like a pervert. "I don't care" would've been more accurate; without that option I chose the pervert route.

There were other minor flaws in the survey questions and their proposed answers but none that were really offensive, they were mostly just dopey omissions of what a real answer (at least for me) would've been. It highlighted the flaws of survey research.

Then it was time for him to gather the demographic info, household income, own or rent, value of home, number of children under 18 living in the home, number of children over 18 but under 26 living in the house, and all that other happy horseshit. We were wrapping up when this question came over the phone line:

"What ethnic group do you identify yourself with?"

This was EASY. Oh yeah, no question about that one, I'm American. I am. My mom was in The Mayflower Society and The Daughters of the American Revolution. My family has been on these shores long enough to have intermarried and crossbred enough times to identify with an American ethnicity.

American wasn't an option.

I kid you not.

He kept prompting me for something more specific. What kind of food did we eat growing up? Mac and cheese, hot dogs and hamburgers, pork chops and chicken cutlets, salads made with iceberg lettuce and fresh jersey tomatoes, grilled cheese and tomato soup. We ate American food.

What languages did my grandparents speak? Huh? They spoke English…American English.

I finally gave the guy several answers, none of which I was happy with.

This ate away at me for the past few days and I finally sent Scarborough Research an e-mail explaining to them just what I've explained to you. I'm American. My name is American. My mom was born in da' Bronx, NYC. My dad was born in North Jersey, at home. I'm from HERE. Right here. I knew how to take the bus to NYC by the time I was 8 years old. I knew how to ride the subway. I knew where to get the best New York style cheesecake in NYC and in No. Jersey. I knew where to get an Italian hot dog or a Texas weiner (it's a way of serving a hot dog, trust me here). I have several wonderful recipes for mac and cheese.

I'm offended. Not just for me but for anyone who does identify as American, just like me. American.

I might be a bleeding heart liberal and have friends that are hardcore conservatives but the thing that allows us to have lively debates and remain friends, is that we're American.

I can't wait to hear back from Scarborough Research. I've asked them to add American as an ethnic choice and to be sure to update my survey answers to accurately reflect that response.

So, what ethnic group do YOU identify with?

PS: This blog post is dedicated to my mom who died approximately 2 ½ years ago. Mom and I didn't see eye-to-eye on most things and to say we had a contentious relationship would be an understatement but I know that she'd agree with every word I just wrote.