Writing Angry Letters Is Therapeutic, Sending Them Out Is Foolish


I remember reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People when I was about sixteen years old.  Early in the book, he talks about dangers of criticism and gives examples of written but unsent letters: by Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain.  It made a great impression on me.  I cannot avoid being critical entirely – the tongue is difficult to control.  However, I made a rule of letting stinging letters to stew for 2 days.  Then I re-read them.  If I still think it necessary, I send the letter.  90% of the time it doesn't get sent.

This is a recurring topic for management training gurus, self-help writers and bloggers.  They say,"Write an angry letter, if it makes you feel better, just don't send it." Unfortunately, no matter how many times people hear that advice, they write and send flaring mail, causing commercial and social damage.  If the problem was not persistent, there wouldn't be any demand for products I have described in the Cautionary Tale About Artificial Intelligence Progress.

As CFOs and Controllers, we deal with a lot of irking and ireful people.  With my firm believe in therapeutic qualities of writing, I always advise to let the paper or the monitor to bear your negative emotions.  As supervisors we also have to manage the anger of our subordinates.  How do we prevent hostile writing from going out?

In the times of hand-written letters, it took longer to complete them.  Plus, you had to stuff, seal, stamp and post the envelope.  By the time you were done, you might have changed your mind about the whole thing.   Dictating a letter worked even better.  Saying the angry words out loud had a potential of making you sound ridiculous even to yourself,  leave alone those girls in the typing pools.

Emails made us more vulnerable to our impulsiveness.  In the beginning, at least the ISPs were slow enough for you to recall the unwanted message.  Nowadays, soft keyboard, easy mouse, and fast internet create a volatile combination.

Here are few preventive measures I can recommend:

1.  Always leave "To", "Cc" and "Bcc" fields of the email header blank until you are absolutely positive you need to send it.

2. Re-read your letter at least three times right away and then yet another time later.

3. I have previously described my habit of putting stick-ons, stating "Please re-read all your emails before sending them out," on the sides of employees' monitors.  If you know that you suffer from the short writing fuse, then stick one on your own monitor as well.

4.  Whether for my electronic or conventional mail, the 2 days stewing rule works very well.  You should try it too.

5.  The Frustrated CFO actually offers a healthy alternative allowing you to go a step further than just writing your message.  Sharing your stories here lets you spill your frustration onto the virtual page and actually send it.  Not to the object of your anger, but to me – an understanding and compassionate reader.    

Perversity of Super-Rich: Walmart


Walmart Since Walmart and their subsidiaries (including Sam's Club) are public companies, the Waltons (Jim, Alice and S. Robson) are on the Forbes' billionaires list – numbers 20, 21, and 22 at $21 billion each.  That's their holdings in Walmart stock.  Well, let's say there is a few more billions in their private holdings.  Does not matter.  When it comes to bargaining for the Walmart's interests they come as one, so to evaluate their real power we should combine their wealth.  That puts them into competition for the first place on the world-wide list – definitely above Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.  No question – a very power family.

Many people have problems with Walmart for many reasons – they destroy local business, they discriminate, particularly against women (Funny how that class action suit was dismissed by the Supreme Court on account of women being too different to represent a class.  Well, they all have vaginas, don't they?) But you cannot deny the fact that they are the country's largest employer with a steady growth.  Remember my previous New-York-Magazine-Intelligencer-prompted post The New Economic Reality of Unemployment?  2.1 million people – where would they go, if it was not for Walmart?  Of course, most of them make very little money, but it's still more than the government's help.  

Anyway, it's a free country and I love capitalism (not the bastardy, distorted, perverted paper version we have now, but the real demand & supply model).  Then again, if they push out of business your local bakery, there is no way you will ever be able to get the same quality bread in Walmart.  So,  that's kind of sad.  But as long as they compete fairly… 

Well, that's a bit of a problem.  Look, now they are planning on coming to the place that cultivated boutique retailing for decades now, my hometown – New York City.  And there is nothing fair about the way they try to get in.  As a matter of fact, they do it in  the most perverse way  – by buying their way through resistance with charity donations.  According to Eric Benson's Intelligencer report from the last New York Magazine shown here (you can also read it here Big-Box Rolling), since they started campaigning for the location in Brooklyn, they have spent $13 million on charitable giving in New York.  Which small farm-to-table store can compete with that?

And I am sure there are plenty of people who think it's a good thing – "they are helping…"  They are helping themselves to increase those $260 billion of annual revenues – that's what they are doing.  They did not give a penny to those charities before and, I am sure, if someone told  them "No" today, the donations would stop immediately.  How sick is that?  You cannot openly bribe the officials, so you do this?  That's not charity, that perverse marketing, and they shouldn't be allowed to use it as a deduction on their tax return.

Well, what can we do?  They are super-rich.  As I said in my last post, they can do WHATEVER THEY WANT.   

My Book Is Now Available for Pre-Order


Guzik cover My book "CFO Techniques: A Hands-on Guide to Keeping Your Business Solvent and Successful" (Apress, December 2,2011) is now available for pre order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble:

  • ISBN-10: 1430237562
  • ISBN-13: 978-1430237563


The Weakest Link in a Corporate Finance and Accounting System


Let’s say, as a CFO or Controller you have all policies outlined and procedures carefully designed.  Everything is properly documented and bound into books and manuals, which are readily available for orientation, training, and daily reference.  Through intensive internal audit program all components have been examined; everything have been tested in practice.  Whatever did not work well has been tweaked; cumbersome procedures were replaced with more straightforward ones; the inferior ones have been improved.

Finally it has been determined that the internal control system is both effective and efficient in accomplishing the company’s goals and the executive management’s objectives.  Is it reasonable at this point to expect that everything should be working like that expensive watch I keep mentioning as a model of a perfect mechanism?  Unfortunately, not. 

We don’t exist in the virtual world of The Matrix trilogy, where everyone is manipulated by the digital code.  In real life it is the other way around: our well designed systems and structures depend on being properly handled by people.  Their proficiency and diligence determine how well the policies and procedures are being performed.  The truth is that every task performed by an employee is vulnerable to occasional unintentional errors, consistent sloppiness, and even deliberate mishandling.

Any designer of functional systems, with frameworks that include people as key elements, knows that humans are the weakest links in the chain of actions.  Long time ago, when computers were so huge that a single unit occupied a hall the size of the New York Public Library’s Reading Room, all programs and data were coded on punch cards.  A punched out spot was read by the computer’s card reader as a character or a digit.  These cards were manually created by operators trained to use a keypunch machine.  Guess what?  Two separate people produced every card in duplicate.  No exceptions. If the cards did not match, they have to be re-punched.  Thus, the risk of human error was managed.

Such duplication of staff is unthinkable now.  Today, we rely on computer systems to reduce at least the most common of the risks.  The rest of flaws must be caught through vigorous and persistent scrutiny of performance quality.  Monitoring is the cornerstone of internal control and one of the most important responsibilities of a supervisor.  It brings the entire system together and assures that policies, procedures and people concur.  A series of timely and thoughtful tests should become a part of your, or your internal auditors’, routine.

Remember:   If not corrected, every mistake your employee makes will end up in financial data, documents and reports, for which you are ultimately responsible.  One erroneous entry may affect your bank’s collateral statement or a presentation to the board of directors.  Omissions will impair strategic decisions.  Communication mishaps can impact commercial relationships.  These flaws will most definitely be a poor reflection on your reputation as a financial leader.  You have to create filters that will catch the debris before they pollute the results of your hard work.

You can read about various practical techniques of reducing accounting and finance systems' vulnerability to human factor in my upcoming book "CFO Techniques" (Apress, 12/02/2011), now available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.    

Quote of the Day


Images "It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."

                                        Oscar Wilde

The Frustrated CFO's comment:

Oh boy, we, the conformists of the financial profession, live our entire lives like that.  Is it really better?  I don't know.  I think the great man wrote it in Paris, abandoned by everyone and destitute, but would he swap his life with someone rich and dull?  There is a Russian saying that it's better to be healthy and rich than sick and poor.  I think that's a closer reflection of our inner desires: have a steady income (and I don't necessarily mean being super-rich) and be fascinating at the same time.