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The happy theory of business ethics is this: do the right thing and you will also maximize your long-term profit.
After all, the thinking goes, doing the right thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better staff and gives back to the community, the very community that will in turn buy from you. Do all of that and of course you'll make more money. Problem solved.
The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here.
If you would like to believe in business ethics, the unhappy theory is a huge problem.
As the world gets more complex, as it's harder to see the long-term given the huge short-term bets that are made, as business gets less transparent ("which company made that, exactly?") and as the web of interactions makes it harder for any one person to stand up and take responsibility, the happy theory begins to fall apart. After all, if the long-term effects of a decision today can't possibly have any impact on the profit of this project (which will end in six weeks), then it's difficult to argue that maximizing profit and doing the right thing are aligned. The local store gets very little long-term profit for its good behavior if it goes out of business before the long-term arrives.
It comes down to this: only people can have ethics. Ethics, as in, doing the right thing for the community even though it might not benefit you or your company financially. Pointing to the numbers (or to the boss) is an easy refuge for someone who would like to duck the issue, but the fork in the road is really clear. You either do work you are proud of, or you work to make the maximum amount of money. (It would be nice if those overlapped every time, but they rarely do).
"I just work here" is the worst sort of ethical excuse. I'd rather work with a company filled with ethical people than try to find a company that's ethical. In fact, companies we think of as ethical got that way because ethical people made it so.
I worry that we absolve ourselves of responsibility when we talk about business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Corporations are collections of people, and we ought to insist that those people (that would be us) do the right thing. Business is too powerful for us to leave our humanity at the door of the office. It's not business, it's personal.
[I learned this lesson from my Dad. Every single day he leads by example, building a career and a company based on taking personal responsibility, not on blaming the heartless, profit-focused system.]
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Posted: 24 Jul 2011 04:58 PM PDT In what amounts to nothing more than smoke and mirrors, At White House, Reid, Pelosi Push Debt Plan With $2.5T in Cuts Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., met at the White House for a meeting at 6 p.m. that lasted a little more than an hour. The meeting started an hour after the first of the Asian global markets opened. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on Saturday had asked for a debt framework before then, intended to give the Asian markets time to process a last-ditch bid to ward off the market turmoil.Geithner Proposes "Powerful Special Committee to Devise a Blueprint for Additional Savings" Not only did Geithner propose something idiotic, he called it a "likely path". What planet is Geithner living on? As for the Republicans, the least they can do it put Obama to the test. Pass a six month extension and see if Obama vetoes it. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Posted: 24 Jul 2011 10:02 AM PDT China Daily reports Property loans halted in 2nd and 3rd-tier cities Commercial banks are halting individual property loans in the face of tightening monetary policy and limited lending quota, the China Securities Journal reported Thursday.Jeremy Warner writing for The Telegraph says China's spectacular real estate bubble is about to go pop So you thought that UK housing was unaffordable. Try Beijing and Shanghai, where as can be seen from the graphic below, prices are off the scale relative to income, the commonly used yardstick for measuring affordability. OK, so these are the boom cities of the Chinese economic miracle, but even on a nationwide basis, affordability is no lower than in the UK.Bubbles Pop Jeremy Warner makes a case there is a bubble in Chinese real estate. Moreover, and by definition, bubbles pops. The question at hand is "when?" Warner states "soon". However, it is difficult to predict exactly when bubbles pop. There was clearly a Nasdaq dot-com bubble in 1998. However, the bubble got more extreme, rising another 100% in 1999. The bubble did not pop until March of 2000. Australia's property bubble has popped and it will play out in years of pain. Many are still in denial. A US housing bubble was brewing for years. Even after it popped in summer of 2005, many did not recognize that fact for 18 months as the chain reaction mentality "it's different here" spread to every city that had not yet burst. We cannot say "when" China's bubble will burst or if it will be city-by-city as happened in the US, or one big bang where everything implodes at once. However, we can say with certainty China's property bubble will pop. We can also say the longer it goes before it bursts the bigger the mess when it does. As with the US, the property bubble will take China's massive credit bubble and banking system with it. Indeed, China property bubble is only a subset of a much larger credit bubble. China's implosion looks to be massive. Few are prepared for the implications of a rapidly cooling Chinese economy. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
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How to Research Local Citations After Google Removed them from Places Posted: 24 Jul 2011 05:39 AM PDT Posted by randfish Late last week, in a move that was apparently spurred by threats of an FTC investigation, Google removed third-party reviews and listings from their Places pages in the Local/Maps results. This change was intended to help thwart complaints by sources like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Citysearch who claimed that Google unfairly used their content to make the Places pages results useful without compensation or traffic. Below is a visual of the change via the WSJ: Impact on Local/Maps/Places SEOUnfortunately, this move has a strong negative consequence for SEOs, web marketers and local businesses trying to improve their rankings (or earn a listing) in Google Places results. In particular, the popular tactic of researching the citation sources of competitors and fellow business listees in a city/region via their Places pages is now defunct. Since citations are like links for SEO/rankings in Google Places, this change is going to be tough on many citation researchers and local optimizers. Other Options for Local Citation DiscoveryThankfully, there are other ways to find the sources Google may be using to resource their Places data. #1: Identify Aggregators in the Standard Search Results This is as basic as it sounds. Just perform a query and seek out the aggregators - those that rank in the top few pages of results that list multiple local businesses. Not only is this a useful activity for Places SEO, it can also help drive direct traffic and brand awareness (e.g. Getting a listing on Yelp isn't just good for Google SEO, it's a great idea because lots of people use Yelp to find local businesses). In the screenshot above, I've pointed to several well-known aggregators that are likely good sources for a listing/citation if a business is targeting Seattle Ice Cream results. #2: Perform Competitive Research Using Google's Standard Results You don't need the citations listed in the Places pages to find where a business is earning listings/links/references. You can use good, old, regular Google results: The screenshot above shows one way to do this - grab a listing from the Local/Places results and use the combination of the business' phone number and name to see where they're mentioned on the web. This also works with any combination of address, business name, cityname, etc. It's likely the most simple and direct way to replace the old competitive citation analysis method. #3 - Search for Multiple Businesses at Once (Co-Citation) Another simple option is to query Google for several businesses at once in hopes of finding pages/sites that have listings for several places. The example in the screenshot above is a very simplistic one - you may want to combine this with phone numbers/addresses to help identify more listing-focused sites. #4 - The WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder Tool Darren Shaw's great citation finding tool has long been a staple of Places SEO research, and since it uses a methodology similar to tactic #2 above, it's not affected by Google's change to the Places pages. Just plug in a search as shown in the image above, and the tool will return a list of potential places to acquire a citation/listing. It takes a while to run (up to 24 hours in my experience), but is remarkably useful. Undoubtedly, these four aren't the only options for local citation research. If you've got more suggestions/ideas for ways to do this, please leave them in the comments below! p.s. Many thanks to David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal for their contributions and help in understanding this change and offering alternatives. |
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... it helps to be both. These are the two ways you earn attention.
If it's so obvious, why is it so difficult?
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