"If one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath."
David Lynch
The weirdest friend I wish I had (and I hope the readers get the irony of the quote in conjunction with this photo).
Month: August 2013
The Frustrated CFO Recommends: A Theory of the Economic Doomsday
While I am trying to restore some bits of sanity in my hopelessly depressed mind by breathing the magical air of the Pacific Coast's Redwoods and pretending for a hot second that the rest of the world doesn't exist, you, my readers, should not be laxing. Especially those who are interested in the posts I file under the sad category It's Only Gonna Get Worse. You MUST check out Benjamin Wallace-Wells' article for New York magazine The Blip about Robert Gordon's economic theory on the inevitable halt of US Economic Growth.
Trust me, it's excellent and incredibly enlightening, even for people in the know. In fact, I have nothing critical to say either about the article (for once a journalist managed to cover a lot of ground in a very concise manner) or the subject matter. Let me give you a little teaser:
"'You look at the numbers, at how much more it costs now to get ahead – all the tutors, the college-prep courses, in some cases the private admissions consultants – and it is just astonishing," Gordon said. What he was describing was a society where the general privilege of simply being American was once again losing out to the specific, inherited privilege of being born rich."
How about that?
Also, it turns out that I'm not the only person with a Ph.D. in Economics who believes in connection between the economic conditions and the quality of cultural environment. When Gordon speaks about Hollywood's golden age he chokes on his tears. My kind of an economist for sure.
So, go on, just click on that link.
Quote of the Week: More on Economics of the Moviemaking
"Barton Fink is a 1991 American film, written, directed, and produced by the Coen brothers. Set in 1941, it stars John Turturro in the title role as a young New York City playwright who is hired to write scripts for a movie studio in Hollywood, and John Goodman as Charlie, the insurance salesman who lives next door at the run-down Hotel Earle. The Coens wrote the screenplay in three weeks while experiencing difficulty during the writing of another film, Miller's Crossing. Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1991, Barton Fink won the Palme d'Or, as well as awards for Best Director and Best Actor (Turturro). Although it was celebrated almost universally by critics and nominated for three Academy Awards, the movie grossed only $6,000,000 at the box office, two-thirds of its estimated budget."
From Wikipedia's front-page featured article on 08/13/2013
The Frustrated CFO commentary:
You see, it has always been like that in the cinema production - you either make art or you make money. Sometimes, you go for art and hit the gold vein, e.g. Pulp Fiction ($8 million budget, $213 million gross). It's rare and you have to take big risks. But no one has better economic instincts than Hollywood honchos: they feel in their guts that the money wells are drying out, and they will do anything to keep their mansions, jets, and trophy wives. So, forget risks and forget art; hello meaningless 3D bullshit easily digestible by the billions in China, Russia, and Middle America.
“Passive-Aggressive” CFO
One of my former CEO’s contacted me after reading my post on Bill of Rights in Small Business Environment (who knew they would be looking?). He’s been in business for 27 years with many employees passing through. Listening to his opinion on the Freedom of Speech, I came to realize that his point of view might be typical for a lot of business owners and should be shared here.
According to him, employees, including his current CFO, choose not to voice their opinions as a manifestation of a passive-aggressive attitude. In reality, he says, he would not mind listening to what they have to say on variety of business issues.
My first impulse was to laugh. I used to work for this person and, to put it mildly, he is not the friendliest of bosses. My policy, nevertheless, was always to express my judgement on all professional issues. This, I must say, received mixed reaction, depending on whether my opinion was in agreement with his or not. It was fortunate that our commercial views were nearly identical and we rarely had disagreements. However, on those occasions when my opinion differed, what I got back was the cold silent stare that could have discouraged someone less straightforward.
But I didn’t laugh, because I wanted to know more about the reasons he has classified his new CFO as passive-aggressive. So, I asked more questions. Actually, this was not the first time I asked these questions. Over the years more than a few senior execs have used that term to describe some of their employees to me. It always puzzled me how these business people recognized a behavioral (i.e. psychological) trait.
Let me tell you, most of the time, including in case of the CFO in question, it amounts to “sulking.” Instead of speaking out, the employee shows a “bad temper”: he is morose, with disappointment and annoyance written all over his face. In other words, unreleased frustration (my favorite subject), jumps from inside onto his face. And yes, that can be classified as a passive expression of aggression.
Yet, at the same time the CFO still works hard, diligently performing all his duties and making sure that the business continues to survive and prosper. And that’s actually the opposite of passivity.
Sulking on its own is not a sufficient symptom to diagnose someone as passive-aggressive. There are far more significant and damaging, especially in business environment, manifestations: procrastination, obstructionism, chronic tardiness, tendency to blame others for one’s own failures, making excuses for non-performance, deliberate creation of chaotic situations.
If you keep catching your employee shuffling papers on his desk every time you walk by, or even if he appears to be busy but never delivers any results; when a deadline of a project gets pushed further and further back, then you may have a passive-aggressive person in front of you.
However, if the employee does his best, but looks upset, maybe you should just let him exercise his constitutional freedom to speak his mind.
FX’s “The Americans” and the Issue of Assimilation
A couple of months ago, on the subway, I looked to my left and glimpsed an article that a person next to me was reading. My eye caught a headline – it was a review of the first season of FX's new show The Americans, which I haven't seen at that point.
Do you know that our eyes scan a text much faster than our brains can register the information we see, yet the familiar data will always stand out? I looked at the page for no more than 10 seconds, but I could've sworn that I saw a mentioning of Homeland there. So, I allowed myself to look again (I actually consider it rude when people read over each other's shoulders in public transportation, but couldn't resist in this case). My eyes returned me to the right place and I've read a verbose sentence, which amounted pretty much to the critic's opinion that, as far as spies-vs.-federal-agents shows go, in some ways The Americans was better than Homeland.
Being a devoted fan of Carrie Mathison's completely fucked up character, I decided to check out the FX's (co-produced by Steven Spielberg/Kathleen Kennedy's Amblin Entertainment) period piece (it's set during one of the Cold War's coldest periods, the 80s) about two KGB officers, who have been implanted into American suburbs as a married couple, Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, sometimes in the 1960s. So, I watched (and enjoyed) the first 4 episodes of the show.
Alas, it's not Homeland (oh, the "professional" critics!): the intensity of the storytelling, the multi-layered subtlety of every single character of the Showtime's hit series – they are not there. I mean, the fact that I was able to stop after 4 episodes and indefinitely postpone watching the rest speaks for itself. I wouldn't be able to do it with Homeland. But it's definitely a very well-made, higher-quality entertainment. It succeeds in tricking the audience into the same fucked up experience of not wanting the main characters, clearly enemies and murderers, to get caught. I definitely plan to watch the rest at some point.
But it's uncanny how a human mind functions – its associative powers work in mysterious ways. The most persistent train of thought The Americans evoked in me had nothing to do with the spydom shenanigans; it was about the intricacies of social and cultural assimilation.
You see, the series' main characters, even though pretend to be US-born, are essentially a first-generation immigrant couple transplanted onto American soil, flawless and accentless English notwithstanding. No matter how intensive their training was back in Russia, it could not have prepared them for the lifestyle and social conditions so acutely different from their homeland. There is a flashback in one of the first episodes that takes us back to "the Jennings'" supposedly first night in America: They enter some motel room and marvel at the cool air coming out of the conditioning unit in the window. That's it. And there is nothing else needed to accentuate the dramatic shift - even the KGB generals, who blessed their clandestine future, didn't have air conditioners in their offices at the time.
Fifteen years later, at the show's "present" time, they don't marvel at the household conveniences anymore – people get used to comforts very quickly. However, their socio-psychological adaptation to American life is a completely different matter.
Phillip/Mischa (Matthew Rhys, an immensely talented and versatile Welsh actor, who himself is obviously assimilating quite well in Hollywood what with five years of playing Sally Field's gay son on Brothers & Sisters and now this series) has completely embraced the American culture and lifestyle. He obviously considers this suburb, this house, this cover business truly his own. For him, it feels like home here. He listens to the same music his very American kids do and speaks their lingo. He even annoys his teenage daughter at the mall in a goofy, American-dad kind of way: He tries on cowboy boots and does a bit of a country dancing to the music playing on the overhead system. He's assimilated to the point that the idea of defecting to FBI is not just plausible, it's desirable and he proposes it to his wife practically in the second episode.
This suggestion is met by Elizabeth/Nadezhda (a convincing Keri Russell, whose severe appearance effectively helps you to forget her soft and fuzzy Felicity past) with a scorn that goes way beyond the slighted sense of duty and reverence for the higher purpose of the "brighter future" she believes she serves. It's not just the ideology talking – you can feel that she LOVES Mother-Russia and still treats her life in America as an assignment.
Living and working in New York City, you deal with immigrants practically every single moment you are at work or in public. And I cannot even begin to tell you what a spectrum of various assimilation degrees one can observe, if one cares to look. Middle-aged and older people, of course, have more difficult time adjusting. But I know young people, who came to this country as teenagers from China, India, Pakistan, Russia, Middle East, went to high schools and colleges here, but have no interest in American culture.
They read only their native-language newspapers, watch only cable channels that show news and movies from their home-countries, even use specific nationally-oriented search engines. These people usually live in the areas predominately populated by their countrymen and frequently end up working for the businesses ran by them as well. It is virtually impossible to have a conversation with them about anything that we consider a common knowledge. They live here for decades, but they give you an impression that they just came from some remote planet. And the longing for their native land is just astonishing, even if it is the most oppressive place on Earth imaginable! Ok, Elizabeth/Nadezhda was sent here to spy, but why these other people came? For the conditioned air?
What I realized, after years of dealing with immigrants, was that the ones with higher ability to assimilate are generally more open-minded, more adaptable, and more cultured people. Those who read Faulkner, watched Coppola, and listened to Jimi Hendrix before they came to the States will continue immersing themselves into American culture. They are the ones who end up caring about the national politics and the future of their new home. The other ones - how can we consider them Americans, even if they carry the US passports?
The Frustrated CFO 