Category: Dealing with People

Joke of the Week: The Linguistic Pitfalls of International Trade


ImagesBelieve it or not, but a few of my readers actually complain that sometimes my posts are "too technical."  I guess, they forget that, even though I manage to squeeze a ton of cultural references here,  this is primarily a business blog and some of the topics will be amusing and/or relevant only to financial professionals, executive managers, and business owners.

Well, even though this may further aggravate the merriment seekers, I cannot pass on the opportunity to share the following 100% true episode that has occurred in one import/export company early last week.  It's just so hilarious (at least to me)! 

Here is the premise.  English has become a common language of international business many years ago.  Of course, there are other linguistic possibilities: if transacting parties are both Latin American, they will use Spanish; employees of a company in Shanghai will speak Mandarin to their counterparts in Guangdong region.  But I guarantee that communications between, let's say, a Turkish manufacturer and a Dutch banker, or a Latvian banker and a Swiss financial broker, will be conducted in English. 

Of course, a Korean supplier has no choice but to employ English to communicate her concerns about a Letter of Credit (LC) provided as a form of payment by an American importer.  The document itself is prepared in English for crying out loud.  Still, it's a foreign language – some linguistic pitfalls are unavoidable.  

Those who work in international trade or read my book CFO Techniques know that LCs are very strict documents treated in a very literal manner by the banks responsible for making sure that a supplier gets paid only if and when it complies with conditions stipulated in the buyer's LC.  For example, the shipping documents (most frequently these are Bills of Lading (BLs)) must be prepared in accordance with the importer's requirements.

Now, enter a young and anxious clerk at the Seoul office of the said Korean supplier.  She is responsible for putting together all documents to be presented at the bank so that her employer can get paid $2,745,000 for 1500 mt of the product that just sailed away.  She knows very well that the papers must be in full compliance with the LC.  She is a novice and feels a lot of pressure to do it right.  On top of that, it's all in English, and, even though she is pretty good with it, the stress makes her paranoid.  Basically, she is a nervous wreck. 

One thing in particular bothers her the most.  So, she writes the following email to the customer's CFO:

"LC request is 'FREIGHT PAYABLE WITHING 7 DAYS OF SHIPMENT DATE' but the shipping line put on Bill of Lading 'FREIGHT PAYABLE WITHIN 7 DAYS OF SHIPPING DATE'.  Please urgently ask the shipping agent to revise the BL."[sic]

The American CFO, who has dealt with the international trade issues for many years, had a good laugh reading it, thought that the girl needs some Xanax, and replied:

"Relax.  The difference between the words 'SHIPMENT DATE' and 'SHIPPING DATE' will not be construed as discrepancy by ANY bank as these phrases mean EXACTLY THE SAME."

Hey, it's all good.  At least she didn't have to gesture and guess.            

   

Quote of the Week: If You Haven’t Got Material


220px-MamasAndPapas260"You could be a good singer from now ’til hell and back and if you haven’t got material, you’re just standing there with your mouth open. You’ll be singing commercial jingles for the rest of your life."

                                        Mama Cass Elliot

The Frustrated CFO's comment:

When I first heard this long-ago interview on The Best of The Mamas & the Papas  compilation, I thought right away that Mama Cass stumbled on something very fundamental and universal here.  It's not just music.  Without writers, actors wouldn't have roles to perform.  Without choreographers, dancers would be standing there motionless.       

In fact, I frequently use this quote as an analogy in business situations.  It works wonders, for example, in shrinking heads of "star" traders and salesmen, who think themselves to be the only important people in an organization.  They forget that the music they are singing to clients and customers is a combination of the company's goodwill created by executives, the finances that buy the products, the infrastructure that delivers and supports the commerce.  Without all of these efforts together, they would be standing there with their mouths opened selling… nothing.

     

The Chronically Insubordinate “Nurse Jackie”


Images-1If there are people out there who can be identified as The Frustrated CFO's devoted readers, they probably have been to the author's Facebook page and know that, for the time being, Nurse Jackie is listed there as one of my top 5 favorite TV shows.  Besides the incredible ballsiness of the creators, who do not shy away from some of the most controversial issues of healthcare industry, social division, workplace dynamics, and intimate relationships, my highest appreciation goes for the show's realistic depiction of the overwhelming human frailty. 

There are no good or bad people on the show – everyone is a cunt with some redeeming moments here and there.  Nobody more so than Jackie Peyton herself, all her blemishes exposed under the microscope of the show's creators.  I have no right to judge, but I hope my readers will agree that Jackie can be considered severely flawed even under our contemporary, shifting moral standards.  She is a shitty mother, wife, friend, girlfriend.  It would be an unpleasant experience to simply bump into her on the street by accident.  She is a cheater, a liar, and… oh, yes, a drug addict.  As I always say, "Love the show, hate Jackie." 

I can hear the opposition screaming at me, "But she is a wonderful nurse!  She helped so many people!"  Here's what I have to say to that: Jacky Peyton is a highly skillful professional, but she is a terrible employee, who violates all rules of her workplace and, as a result, does more damage than good.  Moreover, she is an unethical employee who bestows her graces on a few people of her choosing, while screwing others.

Those who consistently watch the show probably anticipate my bringing up her current season shenanigans.  But no, I will not do that. Instead, I would like to give you an example of Gross Audacity strategically introduced to us at the very start of the series.

The main medical emergency of the Pilot was a young bicycle messenger with a brain bleed.  When he died, Jackie falsified his driver license to pass him as an organ donor, because she was of opinion that it was a "right thing to do."  Then she sat in front of his family and lied to their disbelieving faces about it.  The deceit deepened when she convinced the transplant team that Coop signed off the body release to them.  Jackie can lie like no one else!  And you know why she doesn't waver? Because she thinks that she is above personal wishes of a dead young man,  above rules and regulations, above subordination.  She believes that she can get away with anything as long as she follows her own perverse sense of right and wrong.  And that's fucked up!

Here is my question for those who still think that Jackie is a Good Nurse – if you had an employee like that on your staff, how would you deal with her?  By the way, this and many other cases could've landed dear Jackie in jail.  Loving mother, isn't she?

       

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.