By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It’s in incredibly bad taste to give out 7-figure bonuses to the execs who drove your company (and the whole economy) to ruin while holding your hand out to collect billions in government bailouts. Worse than the auto CEOs flying separate corporate jets to go begging in Washington, at about $20K a pop. This is simply an outrage. Bonuses are supposed to reward performance. This performance is not worth rewarding, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding these bonuses.

President Obama ordered Secretary Geithner to use “every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.” I totally support his call. And I look forward to seeing these thieving and clueless pretenders to the throne of economic wisdom grovel before Congress tomorrow.

Of course, if the execs are smart, they’ll donate their huge bonuses to the recovery effort. And if they’re not, it wouldn’t surprise me if they find themselves the victims of physical attacks on their homes or their persons. I don’t condone that kind of violence (in fact, I don’t condone violence at all), but it would be a predictable result of this kind of class warfare mentality, and they should not be shocked to see angry mobs at their gated communities. People have lost their homes, lost their jobs, because of the incompetence of these executives and the companies they operate. To take home bonuses several times the size of the typical American paycheck under these circumstances has no positive benefit, it only serves to incite.

This is OUR money these companies are squandering, after all.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Bernard Madoff is, by his own admission, a despicable human being. Here’s the opening paragraph of his statement on sentencing:

Your Honor, for many years up until my arrest on December 11, 2008, I operated a Ponzi scheme through the investment advisory side of my business, Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC, which was located here in Manhattan, New York at 885 Third Avenue. I am actually grateful for this first opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed. As I engaged in my fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal. When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come. I am painfully aware that I have deeply hurt many, many people, including the members of my family, my closest friends, business associates and the thousands of clients who gave me their money. I cannot adequately express how sorry I am for what I have done. I am here today to accept responsibility for my crimes by pleading guilty and, with this plea allocution, explain the means by which I carried out and concealed my fraud.

You can read the whole confession at the AP site, here.

Well, I’m glad he’s finally decided to be transparent. Yes, it’s far too little, too late. But it’s better than we ever got from Ken Lay…or for that matter, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the other war criminals who brought us knowingly into war on false pretenses. They don’t seem to believe in admitting even mistakes, let alone frauds. And let’ face it–the cost of our fraudulent entry into Iraq has been far worse than the $65 billion that Madoff scammed. Economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes put the cost at a jaw-dropping three trillion–that’s 46 Bernie Madoff Ponzi schemes, and that doesn’t even count the human cost of the dead and the wounded and the broken families and those raised to commit terror to avenge the injustice they’ve experienced at the hands of the US.

When Bush was asked in 2004 what his biggest mistake had been since 9/11, he was unable to come up with an answer. Does that mean Iraq was a fully deliberate decision? And since that time, the litany of mistakes–or, Heaven help us, deliberately wrecking things–includes Katrina, wiretapping, attrition of civil liberties, blatant cronyism, and trashing the economy. Still no apology, not even an admission of being wrong.

So on that level, Madoff’s sudden case of candor is refreshing, if somewhat disingenuous. But I draw the line at “I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal. When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible.”

Hello! Where’s the personal responsibility here? It continued, because Mr. Madoff knowingly allowed it to continue. At any point, he could have stopped the juggernaut, admitted guilt, repaid the stolen money, and maybe served five or ten years in prison. In what way was he unable to stop? I don’t buy the argument that he was helpless in the matter, any more than I buy the argument that a wife-beater can’t seek help and stop committing violence. Help is available from lots of places, but it all starts with number one: take responsibility for your behavior.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , , ,

An open letter to Bernie Madoff (how appropriate, that last name!)

Dear Mr. Made-off

Was it worth it?
$50 billion in your pocket–but the rest of your life in jail and your name disgraced forever?

Was it worth it to have kicked the legs out from under some of the worthiest charities in the country, not to mention thousands of individual investors for some quick personal gain?

And why does anyone need $50 billion to begin with? Couldn’t you have lived lavishly enough stealing just a few million?

You are a disgrace to the business community! Thank goodness there are those who think differently about business, who accept the consequences of their actions, and who use business to advance the common good. Business at its best is a laboratory for innovation, a funnel for economic improvement, and the engine of the economy.

Bernard Madoff, How great you could have been if you’d used your considerable skills toward better ends! Do you feel any guilt and shame? Or just frustration that you got caught?

Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

This is the sort of post that’s often directed against Microsoft. But this time, Microsoft is the victim.

After last year’s skeevy maneuver of making it very difficult for on-demand-printed authors to do their printing anywhere else besides one of Amazon’s own printing companies, now it has announced it’s discontinuing support for rival e-book formats, such as those form Microsoft and Adobe.

Sigh. Will someone please tell them that the old cutthroat competition model is dead? And that customers don’t like to be bullied? Amazon’s model used to be about choice–remember “Earth’s largest selection”? What happened?

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

A Neilsen Online study, quoted by Adam Ostrow on Mashable, claims “66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email.”

In other words, social media has become more popular than e-mail.

I’d find this hard to believe if I didn’t have kids in their teens and 20s. In that demographic, e-mail is all-but-irrelevant, except when they need to talk to parents or teachers. They talk to each other on Facebook and Skype and mobile text messaging–all day long. This is one very wired generation; my wife reports that her university students constantly try to text their friends during class, even at the risk of lowering their grades. To my generation, that’s really rude. To theirs, it’s accepted, almost demanded.

As for those who text while driving, or worse, that idiot who killed himself and others by driving a train while texting, that’s a serious safety hazard for those around you, and should be treated like driving drunk. No way can you drive safely while your eyes are looking down making sure your thumbs are in the right place.

I love social media. I’m always haunting Twitter, though from my own computer and not from a phone. I spend a lot of time on Facebook and some other sites. But call me old-fashioned; I still prefer e-mail for many situations.

And even though I don’t text, I certainly see the power of texting. Especially in situations where talking isn’t practical. But I wonder, will this be the generation that forgets how to talk on the phone, just as we were the generation that forgot how to write letters? I never understood why my daughter and some of her friends prefer to text, despite the awkward interface and much higher cost (our cell plan charges extra for all texts, because we got it for the voice features) than a computer-based solution–or than picking up the phone.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government Tagged with , ,

California State and Consumer Services Agency chief Rosario Marin resigned from the Schwarzenegger cabinet after taking criticism for accepting large speaking fees from companies who had a vested interest in the outcome of her decisions.

California policy prohibits this, and Marin’s actions show exactly why. I say this as someone who makes part of my own living as a professional speaker, but goodness, I’m not a regulator regulating my own clients!

A quick bit from the L.A. Times story:

Among the fees Marin took was $15,000 from Pfizer Inc. for a speech in 2007 at a time when the company was lobbying the Board of Pharmacy, a regulatory panel Marin oversaw. Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $13,500 for Marin’s speaking services last year within weeks of lobbying her agency.

“I don’t know how you could justify that,” said Assemblyman Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate), chairman of a legislative committee on accountability and oversight. “The conflict is so clear, in my mind.”

I don’t know either.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Politics

Yeah, I know, I’m late to the party. Should’ve blogged on this five weeks ago. But I only just found the brilliant analysis by George Lakoff, the Left’s best theorist on the power of framing and language. He wrote “Don’t think of an Elephant” and many other books.

If you want to better understand marketing, patriotism, and a progressive agenda, click here to go and read it. Well worth the time.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

This is a company that is confident in its product and comfortable with social media. Go to https://skittles.com/ and you’ll see (Gasp!) the results page for a Twitter search on “skittles,” in real time.

The “real” nav bar is a window superimposed over the Twitter page

Especially remarkable considering that the product is much-dissed in literature as a quick sugar high that too often substitutes for real nutrition (going all the way back at least to a Doonesbury strip that has Mike asking incredulously, “Skittles is your DINNER?”–must be 15 years ago). And one post that’s visible on my screen as I write this is about “skittlefisting.” Abig BRAVO to them on the transparency front!

I can’t remember another example of a major corporation saying to the world, “we’re not going to control or filter what you learn about us on our own website, we’ll leave it to the randomness of the world.” The only control the site is exercising is demanding to know the age of a viewer and acknowledgment that the company isn’t responsible for the messages.

For people who’ve never used Twitter, it must be really weird. But then again, among the demographic Skittles most appeals to, Twitter use is probably very widespread.

How did I find out about this? I saw a Twitter post from my friend Patrick Byers over at the Responsible Marketing Blog. There’s apparently a whole #skittles thread running at Twitter (the hashtag allows people to search easily for topics).

Speaking of transparency, why did I put # at the beginning of my headline? My blog feeds automatically into Twitter (and from there to Facebook). So by putting the # at the front of this post’s title, I expect that this post will be on Twitter’s homepage briefly this morning, until it gets knocked down out of sight. As a grassroots marketer, I want my 15 minutes of fame. 🙂

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with

Fascinating. Paul Smith demonstrated a real-world example of how to use Twitter for powerful real-time research–in product development, marketing, or journalism.

He posed a question on behalf of a client who wanted to launch a Green product that would be made in China, and how that would be received by consumers–and posted several responses at the above link.

I’ve used Twitter to drive traffic to a survey, but this kind of direct and immediate feedback may be even better–because it’s much more human, not to mention faster. Who knew a year ago that Twitter could be used for market research?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Peace and War Tagged with

We’ve known for quite a while that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is rife with incredible corruption. Under the Bush administration, there were basically no safeguards, and stories of money diverted into the pockets of US looters were legion.

Still, I had no idea it was this bad. According to Patrick Cockburn of the respected UK newspaper The Independent, when you add up all the thefts of a few billion here, a few million there, it totals around $125 billion. That is two-and-a-quarter times as much as Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Perhaps the saddest part is that of course, this money is NOT being used to rebuild Iraq. And therefore, not creating some good will to mitigate the horrific effects of our totally unjustified invasion and occupation. A proper rebuilding effort would have gone a long way toward demonstrating that the US had at least some altruistic motives. Instead, the rubble grows, the infrastructure fails, and Americans are hated more than ever.

I hope the Obama administration cracks down on these crooks, gets the troops out (I notice the timeline just got longer, from 16 to 18 months), and shows the Iraqi people that we are made of stronger stuff, and take seriously the mission to help undo the calamity we created.

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