Ain’t Too Proud to Beg Pride, arrogance, hubris, self-importance, pomposity is all one and the same. Pride is the top of the Seven Deadly Sins List followed by greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. As we all know that pride “goeth before the fall”, the question becomes what do we do to avoid the pitfalls of pride? Tonight, Kim and I went with Matthew and Philip to see Ain’t Too Proud to…
Expert Witness Back in 2012 I was recruited as an expert witness by a law firm trying a case about securities lending on behalf of a foreign pension fund. The suit was against a big bank that acted as the fiduciary for the pension fund. It was a fascinating case that involved a classically innocent and naive widows and orphan’s operation getting led by the hand down the primrose path of global alternative investments. …
Drowning in the Mainstream In the classic 1951 movie A Place in the Sun, Montgomery Clift rows out in a boat on Lake Tahoe (the reality versus the Adirondacks it was supposed to represent) and he has with him his knocked-up girlfriend played by Shelly Winters. He is vexed as a poor boy by the desire to make it big and snag the rich girl (Liz Taylor), to have his place in the sun,…
Stiffening The world is stiffening and becoming less flexible. One of my favorite old New Yorker Cartoons shows a Viking pushing up against a tree with the caption, “Even the Vikings had to stretch.” Obviously, what was intended was to take the ruthless and blindly ambitious Viking way of life (thought to be all about pillaging lesser and more sedate communities within their reach) and suggesting that no one can be continuously aggressive without…
Looking Shrewd One of the things I have learned in doing business in the Middle East is that shrewdness is a highly prized attribute. I have worked for and with Israelis. I have worked with and for Saudis. I have worked for (decidedly not with) a big-time Uzbek. I heard it said by one of these groups and maybe all of them that the greatest praise you can give a man is to tell him…
We Need a Hero A rainy night, a lonely road, a scratchy windshield wiper, a flash of light from the sky, and a roaring turbine with a sick metallic whine. Then Dustin Hoffman, his face covered in aviation grease and his wet and soggy socks dragging from his limping feet, wanders up the muddy slope after saving fifty-four airline passengers from the exploding inferno that was flight 104 from New York. Andy Garcia is a…
Ostrich Outreach I am reading about Quantum Technology and China’s push to dominate the space while Jamie Dimon and the Business Roundtable redefine the basis of corporate purpose to go beyond pure shareholder value. Something he has chosen to support since Rep. Katie Porter schooled him on the cost of living in Irvine, California. When you combine those thoughts with the goings on in China and Hong Kong and the shifting sands of capitalism and…
Remoteness Today I am sitting at my desk in San Diego. We are on a hilltop that looks in every direction. My office faces north, east and west. It is in an alcove and it literally has windows on three sides that gives me the feeling of being suspended over the mountain-top. This is the view from which and the likely time of day during which I will be doing my work from starting in…
This is the Job The eerily omniscient Mark Felt movie ended at 9pm. What an unbelievable story; a President with henchmen installed in DOJ, CIA and FBI and all other agencies who give more loyalty to a misguided and ill-intentioned traitor of a leader than to the nation and people they are meant to serve. That couldn’t possibly happen again, could it? And now I was looking for another movie to take me through to…
Inventions Management For the first time in my life I am getting a front row seat at the process of inventions management. My company is trying to innovate in the electrochemical arena which involves everything from filing patents with the U.S. Patent Office and the various international patent agencies to managing the process of commercialization of the inventions, taking them from the laboratory to the marketplace. As one would imagine, there is a lot…