Category: Business

Elementary Business Literacy and Creative Integrity


Contract-signingSuffering from the recent loss of my dear kitty, nowadays I frequently find myself  opting for a lighter than usual entertainment fare.  I guess, at the moment, my ability to absorb sorrow and turmoil is at its limit.  This is not a good time for Lars von Trier.  So, at midnight on Saturday I idly let my remote to surf me to a sterilized version of Bridget Jones's Diary on some random non-premium cable channel.  

I must say that, when it comes to art, I strongly oppose any form of censorship.  This Film Is Not Yet Rated disturbed the hell out of me.  And I am offended by YouTube's barring the viewing of Marina Abramovic's art for users under a certain age.  For me, this is an equivalent to preventing teenagers from entering the Met. 

Someone like me couldn't possibly imagine that a benign movie like Bridget Jones's Diary would require alterations for a late-night showing on a "digital value" channel.  Of course, there is some sparse cursing (which, by the way, sounds much milder with the British accent), but other than that…  

Well, the false morality defenders found a way to shuck the most whimsical parts out of the movie, leaving only soppy husks.  Let me give you a little taste.  In the original, when Bridget quits her publishing job, she tells Cleaver, "If staying here means working within 30 yards of you, frankly, I'd rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein's ass."  Snap!  The neutered version offers, "washing Saddam Hussein's car" instead. And that "home movie" of 4-year-old Bridget and 8-year-old Mark at the end – it completely disappears.       

The problem isn't only in the censorship as a principle.  The whole point of Helen Fielding's character, the innovativeness of her novel (which gave rise to the whole slew of books, movies, and TV shows – from Sex and the City to Girls) is in these feisty details.  So, when somebody butchers it like that – it's nothing less than a desecration of artistic prerogatives. 

Moreover, Miramax and Working Title Films, the production companies that brought the novel to the silver screen, are famous for the edgy, breakthrough movies.   The former, for example, is responsible for bringing Pulp Fiction into our lives.  Go on IMdB and see the complete rosters of these companies' impressive achievements.  

But here is how the money-making in movies works.  The production companies facilitate the creation of the product and in this case Miramax was even responsible for the US theatrical release.  But after the big-screen runs are over,  most movies get pushed through other distribution channels, usually handled by home entertainment divisions of big studios, far removed from the creators and the ideas of artistic integrity.  These companies cover DVD and Blu-ray releases as well as the television circulation.  While the alteration of DVDs has been ruled by the courts in 2006 as an "illegitimate business" and a violation of federal copyright laws, the decision doesn't apply to television versions.  Those can be mutilated.    

The question is, whether the moviemakers, who sign contracts, which give distributors rights to rape their artistic creations any way they like, do it knowingly.  Are they such whores that they would sacrifice their creative integrity and sell their children to bordellos of family-friendly television for an extra buck?   

Well, call me a hopeless idealist, but I don't believe that all of them are.  At least some of them do care.  (Hey, counting money is my profession, but I know that there are more important things in life than raking the dough.)  But what I can absolutely guarantee is that 99.99% of them don't have any understanding of business and legal matters.  They rely on their agents, managers, and attorneys to defend their interests.  Well, that's just silly. 

At the end of the day, the only people who have an incentive to protect the art are the artists themselves.  The elementary business education and rudimentary understanding of how their industry works would do them tons of good.  At the very least they should be able to ask the right questions and request the correct clauses to be included into the contracts before they ink their famous names on the signature lines. 

In Defense of Business Owners: Scope of Responsibility


Many of my fellow small business CFOs and Controllers mistake my singling out a BOSS as one of the main frustration triggers for an ardent enmity towards business owners.  The truth is quite opposite.  As the matter of fact, most of the time I find myself on the same side as my boss; shoulder to shoulder, fighting the daily war of commercial survival. 

Yes, it’s tough to deal with their complex of unlimited powers.  At the same time, I always say that business owners create our jobs and that alone merits respect.  I also never imply that all CFOs and Controllers are made equal.  I’ve met plenty of inadequate, limited, lazy and dangerously indifferent financial execs who damaged the companies they were supposed to guard.  In due time I’ll write about them as well.

But we interact with out bosses more than anybody else and that’s why they are prominently featured in my posts.  Being a CFO or a Controller makes it inevitable that everything a CEO does or doesn’t do becomes a concern and frequently a touchy subject. 

And one of the touchiest subjects is the Scope of Responsibility.  I cannot even count how many CFOs and Controllers have complained to me over the years about perceived imbalance between their scope of responsibility and that of their bosses.  

This disconcert derives from two sources.  First of all, it’s the much-discussed here overwhelming multitasking of the senior financial management.
Secondly, it’s the confusion about what exactly the Scope of Responsibility is.  Even though the position’s breadth of influence on the business is important, it is not just the number of tasks and duties you perform.   The key factor is the depth of the impact executive decisions make on the company’s future.  

The way I always looked at it is as follows.  If you are fortunate to work for a brilliant entrepreneur who, given sufficient time and support, is capable of generating ideas that will ensure your company’s prosperity and growth, that should be his ONLY task.  I consider it my job then to take away from him all functions I can handle myself in order to free him for what he does best.  I don’t let bankers or vendors bother him; I don’t allow him to fiddle with numbers; I don’t ask him to learn the operational system.  As the matter of fact, I prefer them not even know Excel.  All I want them to do is to create business strategies, network, establish new commercial relationships.

Let me leave you with this simile of sorts.  Radiohead’s frontman Thom Yorke cannot read sheet music (neither does Sir Paul McCartney, by the way).  His musically educated multi-instrumentalist  band-mate Johnny Greenwood have been deliberately resisting for 25 years now to teach Thom any musical grammar out of fear that it may diminish Yorke’s creativity.  That’s a great executive support strategy.

And let me tell you: I’ve been to multiple Radiohead concerts through the years and I wouldn’t change anything about Thom Yorke. Nothing at all.


 
  

 

 

 

   

Do Yourself a Favor and Buy Your Boss Some Ginkgo


BooksI am currently reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.  Excellent book.  It's categorized by booksellers as a novel, but it is essentially a collection of stories stringed together by each character's connection to the book's most realized protagonist – the music-industry executive, Bennie Salazar.  I love that kind of staff.  Yet, it's not the author's writing skills that make this book important to me, it's the vivid emotional familiarity of people and situations.  Good writers manage to reach their audience in that way: you read a dialogue or an internal monologue and your heart aches with the painful recognition.

Let's leave the introspective explorations for some other discussion, though.  In light of this post's title I want to describe one particular scene in the book that seems to be taken straight out of my own experience with many a boss.

Bennie Salazar, the President of the record label he founded some years ago, is in his car with his right-hand and catch-all Sasha.  They just listened to the new material of one of the company's signed acts.  Sasha rules the two punk sisters unlistenable.  Bennie woefully wonders, what happened in the two years since he'd signed them on.  Sasha reminds him that it has been five, not two years.  She even gives him a precise time reference: she went to the contract signing straight from Windows on the World, i.e. when the Twin Towers were still intact.

Oh my God!  Did that ring a huge bell in my head?  Situations like this occurred with uncanny regularity throughout my entire career, no matter who the boss was.  We could be in the meeting with some bankers, for example, pitching the expansion of credit lines, and I would show a chart explaining how the company has been adding $40 million to its volume annually for the past five years.  Afterwards, the boss would ask me, if those numbers were true.  Are you fucking kidding me?  You've only seen the chart like a million times.  

And then there are endlessly repetitive requests: Could you send me that report for May (just sent it two days ago, but he doesn't recall)?  What was the bottom line in that forecast you compiled (what did you do with your copy of it)?  Let's finalize that new venture prospectus, okay ("we" did day before yesterday – it's on your desk)?  And so on and so forth.       

Sometimes it seems that the stress of running their own businesses causes these people to experience some form of amnesia or the early onset of Alzheimer's.  But that's not it, because their brains appear to be functioning just fine otherwise.  The fact that this memory issue is such a frequent occurrence among the entrepreneurs of various cultural and social backgrounds, operating in different industries, seems to indicate a psychological rather than physiological phenomenon.

It's my opinion that, when it comes to the retention of any type of information, these people have a luxury of allowing their brains to be extremely selective.  It's not like they make a deliberately verbalized decision, "I choose not to remember this."  But somewhere, deep in their subconsciousness, the opportunity to rely on various subordinates as human data-banks renders the memorization of routine data redundant.  It doesn't matter to them that this makes them look somewhat slow.  The value of your time wasted on verbally repeating and emailing the same things over and over again matters even less.

It's possible that the general improvement of memory functions attributed to Ginkgo can lower this mental resistance to absorbing information.  It may force certain tidbits to stick inside automatically.  Hey, if you are desperate enough, why not try it?  Just put it on his desk when nobody is looking and see what happens.  

An Aggravated Case of “The Servant of Two Masters”, or Working for a Married Couple


250px-Lucille_Ball_and_Desi_ArnazThey say (oh, those mysterious "they" of English language conventions – they do talk a lot), that there is nothing more expensive than a free advice.  I believe so too.  It's impossible to provide good advices without looking into particularities of each case, and nobody would do that for free.  That's why within these free-for-all posts I usually go with sharing of knowledge; if it's appropriate – with suggestions; and only if a statement can be safely generalized, I call it an advice. 

With that in mind, I am confidently offering the following as a friendly advice: never say that you "wrote the book on" whatever it is you think you know through and through.  It's never true.  None of these proverbial books of expert knowledge are ever finished.  Just when you think that you can close it and send it to the printers, there is a need to insert a new blank page and relate a freshly unique, never before experienced tale. 

One of such areas of expertise for me deals with typical characteristics and behavioral quirks of the entrepreneurial executives - those to whom I simply refer as "bosses."  My career allowed me to observe many of them in different situations – as my employers, clients, business and social relations, even charity connections.  I honestly thought that, based on this experience, I can predict the behavioral patterns of most business owners, including those sharing power and governance as partners. 

Alas, my anthropological study of bosses did have a gaping hole, which I would have never discovered if my life didn't expose me to peculiar antics of a married couple as business partners.  As it turned out, all regular characteristics of executive co-existence described in my previous post  "The Servant of Two Masters" still apply, but with some very specific aggravating additions. 

No matter how hard they try to keep it professional, they can never completely eliminate marital undertones.  While they usually manage to control the urges of affection, it becomes more difficult for them to rise above the intimate knowledge of each others' weaknesses when conflicts flare up.  I am not necessarily talking about full-blown battles of Lucy-and-Desi magnitude with hammer injuries.  But take my word for it – witnessing spousal tiffs and spats cause extreme discomfort; to the point that members of the executive board wish they were Hogwarts graduates with apparition licenses.  You just want to disappear.

One of my biggest complains about dealing with multiple owners always was that, unless you get them all in the same room, you must work with an assumption that what you explained to one is unknown to another.  You will need to repeat everything to each partner individually.  Well, don't assume that the situation is different just because the execs belong to the same household. It's even more unlikely that they will share your info at home.      

And then there are those very special casual dismissals husbands and wives reserve for each other – shrugging-offs and waving-offs, which are frequently more harmful to one's ego than verbalized insults.  The shit gets especially intense when the issues of personal value to the business or equitable compensation come up. 

All you can do is to pretend that you have gone momentarily blind, deaf, and inattentive – didn't see, hear, or notice anything.  More importantly, don't take sides: eventually your allegiance will be discussed at their kitchen table, or in bed, and both of them will hate you.

    

Sometimes You Get Lucky and See a Spark of Intelligence


I always complain about the general population's low level of intelligence heightened by inertia and group mentality. The gray matter deficit upsets me in its many manifestations: the music that tops the charts (Justin Bieber!), the books that become uber-bestsellers ("Fifty Shades of Grey," judging by the synopsis, didn't really stray too far from 1919 "The Sheik"), the movies that break box-office records ("Pirates of the Caribbean, part XX"), the TV shows that attract most viewers (American Idol – over 6 million watching every airing!), the celebrities who get the most hype (Angelina Jolie, who has not shown us a glimpse of decent acting since 2001 "Original Sin"), etc. Even dear to my heart nerdy world of independent filmmaking is degrading (more about this in another post). Some say, "Stop oppressing people with your judgements! Why do you care anyway?"

I'll tell you, why I care. Only a small group of people can construct their lives in isolation from the world. The rest of us are forced to interact with surrounding individuals, frequently in a very direct manner. The general population is where those unbearable customer service representatives come from, those waiters who screw up your orders, those cab drivers who don't know where to go, those doctors who throw random diagnosis at you and prescribe the most expensive procedures, and so on, and so forth.

Most importantly for the frustrated CFO, this murky pond spews out the job applicants as well as auditors, field examiners, bankers, investors, etc. – people that have an impact on our professional lives. Most are so dull and limited, dealing with them quickly turns an intelligent and composed CFO into the frustrated one.

Once in a blue moon, though, you may get lucky – the wave of professional activities may land on your shore someone with a spark of genuine intelligence in his or her eyes.

I have a client with a trade finance line provided by one of the major banks. Among lender's requirements are periodic field exams of the client's books and records. All banks conduct these reviews from time to time. That doesn't mean, however, that they employ departments full of highly-paid auditors. Instead, they outsource and make the clients bear the cost. There are large and small consulting companies and CPA firms that have built their practices specializing in this type of work.

I've helped this particular client to go through their first field exam. The examiner flew to New York from a medium-size firm in Chicago. My expectations were pessimistic (what else is new?): I was preparing myself for days of explanations about the nature of the business, the accounting principles and pronouncements that apply, the international trade conventions, etc.

But this guy was different. Five minutes after the introductions I knew this was a kindred spirit: someone who is not just smart, intellectually quick, logical, and absorbent, but also a person with the same high standards for the quality of work as I have; someone who doesn't allow garbage to come off his desk. Just like me, he has developed his own analytical tools and instruments that set him apart from everybody else.

Working with him was a gift, an unexpected pleasure. In 3.5 days we have completed the field exercise. Of course, both of us understood that such meeting of professional minds is quite rare, so we felt compelled to share our future aspirations. I genuinely hope that our paths cross again soon.

When he concluded his work and was ready to leave my client's office, I asked him how many other associates in his firm were as good as he was. He said, "Just one other guy." And here you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the real-life statistics on the proportion of professional intelligence in the general pool of employees: 2 to 58, or 3%.