Sep 03
Lukeeconomy financial crisis, IMF, USA
By Simon Johnson
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
ONE THING YOU learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.
The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.
Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea’s 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit.
But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out.
No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.
Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.
In Russia, for instance, the private sector is now in serious trouble because, over the past five years or so, it borrowed at least $490 billion from global banks and investors on the assumption that the country’s energy sector could support a permanent increase in consumption throughout the economy. As Russia’s oligarchs spent this capital, acquiring other companies and embarking on ambitious investment plans that generated jobs, their importance to the political elite increased. Growing political support meant better access to lucrative contracts, tax breaks, and subsidies. And foreign investors could not have been more pleased; all other things being equal, they prefer to lend money to people who have the implicit backing of their national governments, even if that backing gives off the faint whiff of corruption.
But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.
The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.
Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.
Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia now realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery can begin. It’s a game of musical chairs: there just aren’t enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt completely.
So the IMF staff looks into the eyes of the minister of finance and decides whether the government is serious yet. The fund will give even a country like Russia a loan eventually, but first it wants to make sure Prime Minister Putin is ready, willing, and able to be tough on some of his friends. If he is not ready to throw former pals to the wolves, the fund can wait. And when he is ready, the fund is happy to make helpful suggestions—particularly with regard to wresting control of the banking system from the hands of the most incompetent and avaricious “entrepreneurs.”
Of course, Putin’s ex-friends will fight back. They’ll mobilize allies, work the system, and put pressure on other parts of the government to get additional subsidies. In extreme cases, they’ll even try subversion—including calling up their contacts in the American foreign-policy establishment, as the Ukrainians did with some success in the late 1990s.
Many IMF programs “go off track” (a euphemism) precisely because the government can’t stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A program “goes back on track” once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern—and thus win or lose—under the IMF-supported plan. The real fight in Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively smoothly. In Indonesia, it led to the fall of President Suharto and economic chaos.
From long years of experience, the IMF staff knows its program will succeed—stabilizing the economy and enabling growth—only if at least some of the powerful oligarchs who did so much to create the underlying problems take a hit. This is the problem of all emerging markets.
Becoming a Banana Republic
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.
But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.
But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.
The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry’s ascent. Paul Volcker’s monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population invested more and more money in securities, helped by the invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services.
Johnson's Chart
Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.
The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.
Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.
In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.
Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.
One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.
These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.
Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.
A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”
Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.
Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.
As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities—all intended as cautionary tales—served only to increase Wall Street’s mystique. Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote Liar’s Poker, an insider’s account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book might provoke outrage at Wall Street’s hubris and excess. Instead, he found himself “knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share. … They’d read my book as a how-to manual.” Even Wall Street’s criminals, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, became larger than life. In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.
From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:
- insistence on free movement of capital across borders;
- the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;
- a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;
- major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;
- a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;
- an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;
- and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.
The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights.
America’s Oligarchs and the Financial Crisis
The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year. Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the financial world. But major commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew.
Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question what was going on. Instead, Fed Chairman Greenspan and President Bush insisted metronomically that the economy was fundamentally sound and that the tremendous growth in complex securities and credit-default swaps was evidence of a healthy economy where risk was distributed safely.
In the summer of 2007, signs of strain started appearing. The boom had produced so much debt that even a small economic stumble could cause major problems, and rising delinquencies in subprime mortgages proved the stumbling block. Ever since, the financial sector and the federal government have been behaving exactly the way one would expect them to, in light of past emerging-market crises.
By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists—at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy’s favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused.
Stanley O’Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, pushed his firm heavily into the mortgage-backed-securities market at its peak in 2005 and 2006; in October 2007, he acknowledged, “The bottom line is, we—I—got it wrong by being overexposed to subprime, and we suffered as a result of impaired liquidity in that market. No one is more disappointed than I am in that result.” O’Neal took home a $14 million bonus in 2006; in 2007, he walked away from Merrill with a severance package worth $162 million, although it is presumably worth much less today.
In October, John Thain, Merrill Lynch’s final CEO, reportedly lobbied his board of directors for a bonus of $30 million or more, eventually reducing his demand to $10 million in December; he withdrew the request, under a firestorm of protest, only after it was leaked to The Wall Street Journal. Merrill Lynch as a whole was no better: it moved its bonus payments, $4 billion in total, forward to December, presumably to avoid the possibility that they would be reduced by Bank of America, which would own Merrill beginning on January 1. Wall Street paid out $18 billion in year-end bonuses last year to its New York City employees, after the government disbursed $243 billion in emergency assistance to the financial sector.
In a financial panic, the government must respond with both speed and overwhelming force. The root problem is uncertainty—in our case, uncertainty about whether the major banks have sufficient assets to cover their liabilities. Half measures combined with wishful thinking and a wait-and-see attitude cannot overcome this uncertainty. And the longer the response takes, the longer the uncertainty will stymie the flow of credit, sap consumer confidence, and cripple the economy—ultimately making the problem much harder to solve. Yet the principal characteristics of the government’s response to the financial crisis have been delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector.
The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal”: when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine. In March 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase in what looked to many like a gift to JP Morgan. (Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, sits on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, along with the Treasury Department, brokered the deal.) In September, we saw the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the first bailout of AIG, and the takeover and immediate sale of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan—all of which were brokered by the government. In October, nine large banks were recapitalized on the same day behind closed doors in Washington. This, in turn, was followed by additional bailouts for Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup (again), and AIG (again).
Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still isn’t) what combination of interests was being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.
Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.
Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand. The first AIG bailout, which was on relatively good terms for the taxpayer, was supplemented by three further bailouts whose terms were more AIG-friendly. The second Citigroup bailout and the Bank of America bailout included complex asset guarantees that provided the banks with insurance at below-market rates. The third Citigroup bailout, in late February, converted government-owned preferred stock to common stock at a price significantly higher than the market price—a subsidy that probably even most Wall Street Journal readers would miss on first reading. And the convertible preferred shares that the Treasury will buy under the new Financial Stability Plan give the conversion option (and thus the upside) to the banks, not the government.
This latest plan—which is likely to provide cheap loans to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank assets at relatively high prices—has been heavily influenced by the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that. As Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury official under both Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner (and a Goldman alum) told Congress in March, “We had received inbound unsolicited proposals from people in the private sector saying, ‘We have capital on the sidelines; we want to go after [distressed bank] assets.’” And the plan lets them do just that: “By marrying government capital—taxpayer capital—with private-sector capital and providing financing, you can enable those investors to then go after those assets at a price that makes sense for the investors and at a price that makes sense for the banks.” Kashkari didn’t mention anything about what makes sense for the third group involved: the taxpayers.
Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the government’s velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change. As an unnamed senior bank official said to The New York Times last fall, “It doesn’t matter how much Hank Paulson gives us, no one is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns.” But there’s the rub: the economy can’t recover until the banks are healthy and willing to lend.
The Way Out
Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.
Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.
The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.
In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn’t. Yet there are limits to what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over what they do.
At the root of the banks’ problems are the large losses they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan portfolios. But they don’t want to recognize the full extent of their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent. So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren’t enough to make them healthy (again, they can’t reveal the size of the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive: unhealthy banks either don’t lend (hoarding money to shore up reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and investments that could pay off big, but probably won’t pay off at all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does, bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate—creating a highly destructive vicious cycle.
To break this cycle, the government must force the banks to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks hold all the cards—contorting the terms of each deal to minimize government ownership while forswearing government influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is impossible.
Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC “intervention” is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.
The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.
Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5 trillion (or 10 percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.
This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.
Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.
Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we’ll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.
This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.
To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than 100 years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting.
Caps on executive compensation, while redolent of populism, might help restore the political balance of power and deter the emergence of a new oligarchy. Wall Street’s main attraction—to the people who work there and to the government officials who were only too happy to bask in its reflected glory—has been the astounding amount of money that could be made. Limiting that money would reduce the allure of the financial sector and make it more like any other industry.
Still, outright pay caps are clumsy, especially in the long run. And most money is now made in largely unregulated private hedge funds and private-equity firms, so lowering pay would be complicated. Regulation and taxation should be part of the solution. Over time, though, the largest part may involve more transparency and competition, which would bring financial-industry fees down. To those who say this would drive financial activities to other countries, we can now safely say: fine.
Two Paths
To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century economist, everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time. If the U.S. were just another country, coming to the IMF with hat in hand, I might be fairly optimistic about its future. Most of the emerging-market crises that I’ve mentioned ended relatively quickly, and gave way, for the most part, to relatively strong recoveries. But this, alas, brings us to the limit of the analogy between the U.S. and emerging markets.
Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on wealth, and are weaklings globally. When they get into trouble, they quite literally run out of money—or at least out of foreign currency, without which they cannot survive. They must make difficult decisions; ultimately, aggressive action is baked into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world’s most powerful nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well stumble along for years—as Japan did during its lost decade—never summoning the courage to do what it needs to do, and never really recovering. A clean break with the past—involving the takeover and cleanup of major banks—hardly looks like a sure thing right now. Certainly no one at the IMF can force it.
In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.
Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do you know that you aren’t being fleeced?
Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.
The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.
Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.
The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.
Aug 05
Lukeeconomy bubble, China, real estate, stock, USD
来源 ：《财经》杂志 2009年第16期
政府并没有能力扭转市场趋势。然而，“政府不会让市场‘跳水’”这一想法，在中国股市里根深蒂固
中国股市和房地产市场再起泡沫，这是由于银行海量贷款刺激，加上对出现通胀的恐惧共同造成的。我认为，中国股市和房地产市场价值被高估了50％，甚至100％。这两个市场很可能在今年四季度出现调整。
不过，在明年某个时候，两个市场可能会再次爆发泡沫。美元再次转强之日，也是美丽的泡沫破灭之时。严重的通胀将迫使美联储加息，或许会成为击碎泡沫的催化剂。
中国资产市场已成为一个巨大的“庞式骗局”——价格完全靠升值预期来支撑。随着越来越多的人和流动资金被吸入市场，价格被进一步哄抬，不断验证着人们看多的预期。于是，又有更多的人加入这场狂欢。然而，到没有足够的流动资金来喂饱这头“野兽”之时，泡沫也就破裂了。目前来看，流动性还不构成制约因素。尽管上半年新增贷款达到7.4万亿元人民币，但6月贷存款比例仅为66.6％（去年12月这一比例为65％），增幅甚微。这意味着，许多贷款没有进入实体经济，而是成了资产市场交易的杠杆。中国房地产市场与1997年香港的情况极为相似。
泡沫随美元起伏
中国资产泡沫源于流动性过剩，表现为较高的外汇储备水平以及较低的贷存款比例。美元疲软和出口强劲，造成了中国流动性过剩的状况。
虽然目前中国正在经受出口疲软的折磨，但弱势美元使中国得以大肆释放其在过去五年内积聚的流动性，而不必担心货币贬值的风险。
其实，预言泡沫什么时候破灭并不难。当美元再次变得强势时，流动性将会重重地击破泡沫。
不过，很难讲美元何时会转强。自1985年“广场协议”后，美元就迎来了熊市，并在十年后的1995年触底。然后，就是七年牛市。目前的美元熊市始于2002年，从那时算起，美元指数（DXY）的价值已减少约35％。如果把上轮熊市作为标杆，目前的熊市可能会持续到2012年。IT革命开启了上一轮美元牛市，谁也说不准会不会有另一场技术革命，从而引领美元进入一个可持续的牛市。
当然，货币政策可以促成一个短暂而火爆的美元牛市。上世纪80年代初期，当时的美联储主席保罗沃尔克，用两位数的幅度加息，以控制通胀。从那以后，美元升值的进程十分艰难。目前的局势与此类似。照此发展，几乎可以肯定，中国资本市场和经济将会“硬着陆”。
泡沫能维持多久，取决于政府的流动性政策。目前的泡沫，很大程度上是由政府鼓励银行贷款和超低的银行间利率造成的。由于美联储实行零利率政策，加之美元疲软，中国的外汇储备水平很高，贷存款比例又很低，因此，造成流动性增加，将进一步扩大泡沫。然而，考虑到其他一些因素，可能会促使政府冷却一下过热的情绪。
如果政府尽其所能制造流动性，那么，当泡沫破灭时，连挽救的“弹药”都没有了。如果那时全球经济已经恢复，中国经济或许会随着强劲的出口“软着陆”，但资本市场“硬着陆”是必然的。相反，如果全球经济那时依然疲弱，依照我个人观点，股市、房地产市场和经济都将出现“硬着陆”。
虚妄的“泡沫无害论”
“走走停停”的方法可能会降低这一风险。政府先是掀起了流动性“巨浪”，然后想关上这个“水闸”。当流动性被完全吸收时，市场也将失去动力。一旦市场下跌到一定程度，政府可以引发另一波“巨浪”，使其再次焕发生机。这种做法，不但能够保存“弹药”，还能限制泡沫的规模，在泡沫最终破灭时，把危害降到可控范围内。我觉得，政府可能会采用这一策略。如果今后几年内全球经济仍将下滑，我们或许可以看到，中国的股票和房地产市场每年都要来这么一次大波动。眼前，这股向下的波动可能发生在“国庆节”前后。
很多人认为，中国没有泡沫。高资产价格只是反映了中国高增长的潜力。没人能肯定地说,这到底是真正的资产繁荣，还是只是泡沫。
我对中国资本市场的现状看法很明确：存在大量泡沫。泡沫的爆裂将给整个国家带来极坏的后果。但由于很多人正乐在其中，政府不会先发制人，消灭泡沫。事实上，在政策决策层，许多人认为，泡沫有利于经济复苏。在美元疲弱时，这一说法听起来有些道理，因为泡沫可以在经济降温时，带来更多的流动性。当美元复苏时，中国的资本市场，也许整个经济，都将出现“硬着陆”。我希望，那些大力鼓吹泡沫的人，能够站出来，为造成损失承担责任。
研究泡沫最基本的方法是看估价。评估房价，最重要的方法是衡量一下价格收入比和租金收益。目前，在全国范围内，每平方米房价已经相当接近美国的平均水平。而美国的人均收入是中国城市人均收入的7倍。中国房屋每平方米均价，相当于一般人三个月的工资收入，这一水平也许在世界上都是最高的。
就我所知，现在，很多房子都租不出去。平均租金收益，如果算上那些租不出去的房子的话，真是低得可怜。无论从百姓的购买力，还是预期的出租收入看，中国的房价都高得离谱。有些人认为，中国的房地产一向如此：房价越来越高。这是不对的。
中国房地产市场泡沫还有另外一面，即其在地方政府财政中所起的作用。土地销售收入以及物业销售带来的税收，占了地方政府财政收入很大一块，因此，他们有很强的动力来刺激房地产市场发展。土地销售往往被精心设计，以期重燃涨价预期。例如，那些以超高价格投标的土地，会被封为“地王”。最近，“地王”往往被国有企业拍下。当国有企业借用国有银行的钱，再通过土地竞拍把钱还给地方政府，价格还有意义吗？只不过是资金在政府的“大口袋”里面滚来滚去罢了。如果私人开发商试图跟着国有企业追涨土地市场，无异于自杀。
股市从无“救世主”
股市又处于最后的疯狂。无知的散户投资者都被上升的势头吸引。他们再次梦想一夜致富。和过去一样，散户投资者通常会赔钱，特别是现在刚跳进股市的那些人。最后的疯狂往往不会持久。在中国，股市的转折点经常与政治日历相关。散户投资者普遍认为，政府不会让股市在共和国60周年大庆之前掉下来。短期内，这种信念会自我实现。从历史经验看，这一波上涨将在“十一”之前逐渐熄火。
“政府不会让市场‘跳水’”这一想法，在中国股市里根深蒂固。在格林斯潘时代，金融市场相信他总会在危急时刻出手“救市”。但在现实生活中，在大势发生逆转时，政府并没有能力去扭转市场趋势。过去，中国股市大起大落，这表明政府根本无力阻止市场下跌。然而，这一虚构的信念仍然深深植根于投资者心里。
有些政府智囊认为，泡沫的害处也许没那么大。一个流行的说法是，在泡沫起来时，钱从一个人的口袋进了另一个人的口袋，只要钱还在中国国内流动，就不会产生什么长期危害。这么说的人，应该看看日本和香港，看看泡沫究竟如何不出境而造成了巨大的破坏。
在泡沫之下，资源被用于制造更多泡沫。这些资源将被永久性浪费掉。例如，商人再也不愿意把精力放在实体经济中，转而投入时间和精力，从事市场投机。这意味着，未来的中国，将不会有具有全球竞争力的公司。尽管中国已经历30多年的高增长，但很少有公司拥有全球竞争力。一连串的泡沫，可能是造成这一现状的主要原因。
现在的年轻一代，对真正的工作兴味索然，反而沉迷于股市投机。相对于每月领固定薪水，他们更愿意看到自己持有的股票价格在一天内变来变去，然后开始产生幻觉，认为自己能在股市里面挣到大钱。当然，他们中的大多数人可能会输得一无所有，然后，可能就会做出一些极端的举动。如此造成的社会后果可能相当严重。
房市蜃楼
房地产泡沫通常导致经济过热。建筑空置，代表着永久性损失。在中国，大多数人也许会嘲笑这一可能性。毕竟，13亿人的住房需求几乎是无限的。但是，现实情况完全不是这样。中国的城市居民人均占有住房面积为28平方米，按国际标准来衡量的话，这一水平也相当高。中国的城市化率是50％左右，它可以上升到70％-75％。以后，由于人口老龄化的原因，农村人口将会减少。因此，中国的城市人口会另外增加3亿人。
如果我们假设，这些人都能够负担得起一处房产（以今天的价格来看，这个说法很可笑），中国的城市可能需要额外84亿平方米住房。中国现在的工作，已经完成了超过20亿平方米的建设，现在还有足够的土地能够容纳另一个20亿平方米。每年建筑业生产能力约为15亿平方米。产能绝对过剩，即没有足够的人来住满所有的房屋，可能这一状况很快就会出现。当这样的情况出现时，后果是相当严重的。房地产价格可能大幅下降，正如日本在过去的20年中经历的一样，同时，这将摧毁整个银行系统。
房地产泡沫造成的最严重的损害，就是人口的变化。高楼价会降低人口出生率。当泡沫破灭的时候，房地产价格下降，低生育水平的文化观念是无法改变的。香港、日本、韩国、台湾在其发展进程中都经历了房地产泡沫。在泡沫肆虐时期，他们的出生率下降，随后，尽管政府激励，这一状况也没有改变。单是中国的计划生育政策本身，就导致未来20年的人口灾变。房地产泡沫使趋势变得更加不可逆转：即使政府放弃计划生育政策，对出生率也不会有明显影响。未来20年，中国将面临人口老龄化以及人口总数下降的局面。当然，房地产价格也将非常低，并一低再低。
泡沫除了造成再分配的净亏损，还会带来非常严重的社会后果。在股市泡沫中，大部分家庭会损失，而极少数人则赚得盆满钵满。中国的财富差距现象已非常严重，泡沫使情况变得更糟。即使等到中国的城市化完成，相当部分的人，甚至是大多数人，可能都没有什么钱。这将造成社会不稳定。当大多数人都拥有财富，并在社会中有一席之地的时候，市场经济才是稳定和有效的。
总之，眼下市场的疯狂不会持续很长时间。“纠偏”可能发生在今年四季度。明年，由于中国仍有能力释放出更多的流动性，可能会出现另一波热潮。当美元恢复强势时，可能在2012年，中国的股票和房地产市场，可能会像在亚洲金融危机期间一样，遭遇雪崩。■
Aug 05
Lukeeconomy Dell, FDI, globalization, IBM, Lenovo, service
来源：第一财经日报
说到中国企业跨国经营，联想无疑是一个无法回避的案例。人们依稀记得，当联想并购IBM PC事业部后不久，一家竞争对手居然打出了“连（联）想都不要想”的口号，极尽挖苦揶揄之能事。联想该不该并购IBM PC? 买下后能不能消化掉？这些问题一直都有争议，笔者始终对此持质疑态度。
从战略到战术，再到操作层面，“联想”都给予了我们深刻的启发。
联想曾经在PC行业连续十年占据老大的位子。那时，国人还不知道戴尔是谁。然而，联想不甘于只在微机行业施展拳脚，她要有更大的抱负，于是，2001年，联想提出了“高科技的联想、服务的联想、国际化的联想”的企业愿景，开始全面扩张，四面出击，实施其多元化战略。结果几近于惨败。想借助多元化实现国际化的联想， 到2001年，联想美国公司成立为止，联想在国外拥有7家分公司，1家物流中心和100多家海外营销渠道，俨然一副跨国公司的架势。然而，按照普遍认可的标准，一家国际化公司总收入的20%以上应该来自国外，而联想海外分公司的收入占其总收入的比重仅为3％左右，而且还主要是一些零部件，而不是品牌产品、最终产品。显然，这样的国际化程度，离其远大的目标还相差甚远。
在联想不甘心只是家做电脑公司的时候，戴尔却并不介意自己“只是做PC”的形象，依靠直销和成本管理优势蚕食着国内市场。廉价PC和无人匹敌的分销网络曾经让Legend（传奇）成为Reality（现实），但当联想转向多元化时，联想的市场份额在逐渐缩小，对手却在以远高于联想的毛利率和惊人的增长速度抢夺市场空间。戴尔因此成为中国市场的老大，而在全球PC市场也成为数一数二的角色。2004年，联想的多元化战略以失败告终，三年前美好的梦想也因此破灭，又开始了全面收缩战线，重新回归PC业务之举。
联想回归PC后的应变之策果然非同凡响，2004年3月26日，联想以付出不菲的代价正式跻身于国际奥委会全球合作伙伴——希望利用奥运会的资源来率先实现品牌影响的国际化。2004年12月8日，联想集团宣布以总价12.5亿美元收购IBM的全球PC业务。这一次，联想更敢想，将重点突破的目标市场定位在北美、欧洲和日本这三个全球最大的PC消费区域，其次才是亚洲和北非市场，同时向世人公布了一个可以量化考核的目标——在三五年内，联想要将海外销售额从现在的5%提高到25%~30%。这是一条短期达到目标的捷径还是一副饮鸩止渴的慢性毒药，殊难判断。但这符合联想的国际化愿景，并购让联想成为了名义上的全球性公司，具备了大型跨国公司的规模，引入了外籍高管，把总部设在了国外，CEO的薪酬也实现了与国际接轨，然而，形似不等于神似，联想连续两个财年的净利润都出现大幅度下滑。
并购之后，为IBM原有的客户提供服务的已经不是那个令人尊崇的蓝色巨人了。联想虽然在中国非常强势，但在欧美市场，很多消费者还没有听说过Lenovo这个品牌，甚至有些人还以为Lenovo是一种意大利的小甜点。
应该说，联想在并购整合过程中的做法，确有可圈可点的地方：其聪明之处是首先稳住原IBM的核心管理层、研发和市场团队，第一年，联想为留住原IBM PC业务的客户与员工，不惜牺牲了效率和降低成本的速度，直接导致净利润率快速下降为1%～2%，比收购前下降了三个百分点；第二年，联想实施了重组与裁员，大幅缩减成本。这是真正融合的开始，围绕着组织、流程变革，文化取舍和冲突的矛盾突显出来并一直延续至今。为了避免淡化IBM文化而联想本土文化尚不能被欧美雇员接受造成的真空，联想巧妙地利用了竞争对手的力量，大批引进戴尔管理人才，带来与欧美同源但比联想本身期望的更灵活、快捷的经营风格。经过三年的全面整合之后，2007年财报显示，联想全年销售额上升17%，净利润较上一财年增长201%，在2008年以167.8亿美元的规模首次挤入《财富》全球500强企业榜单。但是，作为关键的指标，2007财年3%的利润率未达到并购前的预期，截至2008年底，联想净亏损9700万美元。最新的消息是老将柳传志再度出马，担任董事局主席，杨元庆改任CEO，接替威廉·阿梅里奥的职位。
联想能走到今天，应该说是很不容易了。联想的国际化不仅仅是整合IBM PC后能否盈利的问题，更深层面的问题在于，能否继续做大做强？联想知道自己不能永远靠PC生存，这个认识是正确的，可惜当初确实是“超前认识”。联想看到了蓝色PC巨人成功地从制造业变身为高科技服务提供商，走入了更新更宽广的新境界，也尝试去模仿，但终究方法不对，无可奈何中又回到了起点。联想现在应该考虑的是，吞掉和消化IBM PC其实也仍然没有解决打造“百年老店”的战略问题，如何从产业链的低端（制造PC）向高端(IT服务)转移，对于中国企业来说，是注定无法逃脱在低层求生的宿命，还是将出现涅槃再生式的嬗变？这是一个重要而紧迫的问题，联想现在必须要考虑这个问题了。
（作者系香港招银国际投资银行高级副总裁，《海外鏊兵》作者，个人博客：http://charlielzheng.chinavalue.net）
Jul 29
LukeIT barcode, bokode, camera, optical tags
Source: http://web.media.mit.edu/~ankit/bokode/; ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2009), to appear
Abstract:
We show a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. This bokeh-code or Bokode is a barcode design with a simple lenslet over the pattern. We show that an off-the-shelf camera can capture Bokode features of 2.5 microns from a distance of over 4 meters. We use intelligent binary coding to estimate the relative distance and angle to the camera, and show potential for applications in augmented reality and motion capture. We analyze the constraints and performance of the optical system, and discuss several plausible application scenarios.
Paper: http://web.media.mit.edu/~ankit/bokode/bokode_sig09.pdf
Jul 21
Lukeeconomy Carl Marx, economics, financial crisis, national capitalism
By Leo Panitch @ Foreign Policy
Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.
The economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of Das Kapital have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and its high priests—in an ideological tailspin.
Yet even as faith in neoliberal orthodoxies has imploded, why resurrect Marx? To start, Marx was far ahead of his time in predicting the successful capitalist globalization of recent decades. He accurately foresaw many of the fateful factors that would give rise to today’s global economic crisis: what he called the “contradictions” inherent in a world comprised of competitive markets, commodity production, and financial speculation.
Penning his most famous works in an era when the French and American revolutions were less than a hundred years old, Marx had premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later. He was singularly cognizant of what he called the “most revolutionary part” played in human history by the bourgeoisie—those forerunners of today’s Wall Street bankers and corporate executives. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
But Marx was no booster of capitalist globalization in his time or ours. Instead, he understood that “the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” foreseeing that the development of capitalism would inevitably be “paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises.” Marx identified how disastrous speculation could trigger and exacerbate crises in the whole economy. And he saw through the political illusions of those who would argue that such crises could be permanently prevented through incremental reform.
Like every revolutionary, Marx wanted to see the old order overthrown in his lifetime. But capitalism had plenty of life left in it, and he could only glimpse, however perceptively, the mistakes and wrong turns that future generations would commit. Those of us now cracking open Marx will find he had much to say that is relevant today, at least for those looking to “recover the spirit of the revolution,” not merely to “set its ghost walking again.”
If he were observing the current downturn, Marx would certainly relish pointing out how flaws inherent in capitalism led to the current crisis. He would see how modern developments in finance, such as securitization and derivatives, have allowed markets to spread the risks of global economic integration. Without these innovations, capital accumulation over the previous decades would have been significantly lower. And so would it have been if finance had not penetrated more and more deeply into society. The result has been that consumer demand (and hence, prosperity) in recent years has depended more and more on credit cards and mortgage debt at the same time that the weakened power of trade unions and cutbacks in social welfare have made people more vulnerable to market shocks.
This leveraged, volatile global financial system contributed to overall economic growth in recent decades. But it also produced a series of inevitable financial bubbles, the most dangerous of which emerged in the U.S. housing sector. That bubble’s subsequent bursting had such a profound impact around the globe precisely because of its centrality to sustaining both U.S. consumer demand and international financial markets. Marx would no doubt point to this crisis as a perfect instance of when capitalism looks like “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.”
Despite the depth of our current predicament, Marx would have no illusions that economic catastrophe would itself bring about change. He knew very well that capitalism, by its nature, breeds and fosters social isolation. Such a system, he wrote, “leaves no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’” Indeed, capitalism leaves societies mired “in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” The resulting social isolation creates passivity in the face of personal crises, from factory layoffs to home foreclosures. So, too, does this isolation impede communities of active, informed citizens from coming together to take up radical alternatives to capitalism.
Marx would ask first and foremost how to overcome this all-consuming social passivity. He thought that unions and workers’ parties developing in his time were a step forward. Thus in Das Kapital he wrote that the “immediate aim” was “the organization of the proletarians into a class” whose “first task” would be “to win the battle for democracy.” Today, he would encourage the formation of new collective identities, associations, and institutions within which people could resist the capitalist status quo and begin deciding how to better fulfill their needs.
No such ambitious vision for enacting change has arisen from the crisis so far, and it is this void that Marx would find most troubling of all. In the United States, some recent attention-getting proposals have been derided as “socialist,” but only appear to be radical because they go beyond what the left of the Democratic Party is now prepared to advocate. Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, for example, has called for a $2 million cap on certain Wall Street salaries and the enactment of a financial transactions tax, which would impose an incremental fee on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets. Marx would view this proposal as a perfect case of thinking inside the box, because it explicitly endorses (even while limiting) the very thing that is now popularly identified as the problem: a culture of risk disassociated from consequence. Marx would be no less derisive toward those who think that bank nationalizations—such as those that took place in Sweden and Japan during their financial crises in the 1990s—would amount to real change.
Ironically, one of the most radical proposals making the rounds today has come from an economist at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and certainly no Marxist. Buiter has proposed that the whole financial sector be turned into a public utility. Because banks in the contemporary world cannot exist without public deposit insurance and public central banks that act as lenders of last resort, there is no case, he argues, for their continuing existence as privately owned, profit-seeking institutions. Instead they should be publicly owned and run as public services. This proposal echoes the demand for “centralization of credit in the banks of the state” that Marx himself made in the Manifesto. To him, a financial-system overhaul would reinforce the importance of the working classes’ winning “the battle of democracy” to radically change the state from an organ imposed upon society to one that responds to it.
“From financialisation of the economy to the socialisation of finance,” Buiter wrote, is “a small step for the lawyers, a huge step for mankind.” Clearly, you don’t need to be a Marxist to have radical aspirations. You do, however, have to be some sort of Marxist to recognize that even at a time like the present, when the capitalist class is on its heels, demoralized and confused, radical change is not likely to start in the form of “a small step for the lawyers” (presumably after getting all the “stakeholders” to sit down together in a room to sign a document or two). Marx would tell you that, without the development of popular forces through radical new movements and parties, the socialization of finance will fall on infertile ground. Notably, during the economic crisis of the 1970s, radical forces inside many of Europe’s social democratic parties put forward similar suggestions, but they were unable to get the leaders of those parties to go along with proposals they derided as old-fashioned.
Attempts to talk seriously about the need to democratize our economies in such radical ways were largely shunted aside by parties of all stripes for the next several decades, and we are still paying the price for marginalizing those ideas. The irrationality built into the basic logic of capitalist markets—and so deftly analyzed by Marx—is once again evident. Trying just to stay afloat, each factory and firm lays off workers and tries to pay less to those kept on. Undermining job security has the effect of undercutting demand throughout the economy. As Marx knew, microrational behavior has the worst macroeconomic outcomes. We now can see where ignoring Marx while trusting in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” gets you.
The financial crisis today also exposes irrationalities in realms beyond finance. One example is U.S. President Barack Obama’s call for trading in carbon credits as a solution to the climate crisis. In that supposedly progressive proposal, corporations that meet emissions standards sell credits to others that fail to meet their own targets. The Kyoto Protocol called for a similar system swapped across states. Fatefully however, both plans depend on the same volatile derivatives markets that are inherently open to manipulation and credit crashes. Marx would insist that, to find solutions to global problems such as climate change, we need to break with the logic of capitalist markets rather than use state institutions to reinforce them. Likewise, he would call for international economic solidarity rather than competition among states. As he put it in the Manifesto, “United action, of the leading . . . countries, at least, is the first condition for the emancipation of the proletariat.”
Yet the work of building new institutions and movements for change must begin at home. Although he made the call “Workers of the world, unite!” Marx still insisted that workers in each country “first of all settle things with their own bourgeoisie.” The measures required to transform existing economic, political, and legal institutions would “of course be different in different countries.” But in every case, Marx would insist that the way to bring about radical change is first to get people to think ambitiously again.
How likely is that to happen? Even at a moment when the financial crisis is bleeding dry a vast swath of the world’s people, when collective anxiety shakes every age, religious, and racial group, and when, as always, the deprivations and burdens are falling most heavily on ordinary working people, the prognosis is uncertain. If he were alive today, Marx would not look to pinpoint exactly when or how the current crisis would end. Rather, he would perhaps note that such crises are part and parcel of capitalism’s continued dynamic existence. Reformist politicians who think they can do away with the inherent class inequalities and recurrent crises of capitalist society are the real romantics of our day, themselves clinging to a naive utopian vision of what the world might be. If the current crisis has demonstrated one thing, it is that Marx was the greater realist.
Leo Panitch is Canada research chair in comparative political economy and distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto, and coeditor of the annual Socialist Register.
Jul 21
Lukeeconomy Carl Marx, communism, economics, financial crisis, national capitalism
（联合早报网讯）香港大公网报道，金融海啸令资本主义学说面临前所未有的危机，也让西方社会重新卷起“马克思热潮”。五／六月号的美国《外交》（Foreign Policy）期刊发表专文说，马克思大作《资本论》近日在全球热销（德国一家书店的销量由2007年的一百本增至去年的数千本），反映了这次危机之广泛和惨烈，及导致许多资本主义信徒出现了意识形态的迷失。
这篇题为《完全摩登马克思》（Thoroughly Modern Marx）的文章说，为什么人们要为马克思招魂？其中一个原因是他在150年前就准确预言了当今资本主义全球化（capitalist globalization）的出现及其后果－即今次金融海啸的发生；更甚的是，他还为此预留了解救的“药方”，值得我们今天作为参考。
马克思在《共产党宣言》中就开宗明义指出：“资产阶级如果不使生产工具经常发生变革，从而不使生产关系－亦即全部社会关系－经常发生变革，就不能生存下去。‥‥资产阶级既然榨取全世界的市场，这就使一切国家的生产和消费都成为世界性的了。”这段话简直是金融市场现况的镜映：当今资产阶级的领跑者－华尔街的高层－为了创造利润而不断对金融工具进行“创新”，再把这些工具所制造的产品倾销到世界各地，埋下了孕育金融危机的种子。
马克思如果今天仍然在生，他会毫不犹豫地指出，证券和衍生产品等金融工具尽管有助于近数十年的高速经济增长，但同时亦直接催生了一个又一个的经济泡沫，当中最重大和危险的就是美国的房地产泡沫。正因这个泡沫对于美国消费者需求及全球股市的持续高企至关重要，所以当它一旦最终爆破的时候，所产生的后果会是如此的惨烈。马克思会以此作为“资本主义发展到最后，会像一个魔法师，无力再控制自己召唤出来的魔鬼”的完美例子。更重要的是，马克思认为资本主义无可避免会导致社会的疏离，让人与人之间的关系只剩下赤裸裸的个人利益和金钱交易，这现象的一个后果即如各企业今天碰到经济不景，首先想到的就是裁员和减薪，令社会涌现大批失业和无家可归者。同时，这种疏离亦会使社会中各成员不能团结一致去建立取资本主义而代之的另一种制度。
因此，马克思为今天的危机开出的第一个“药方”，将会是解决这种全面的社会疏离和无力的情况。在150年前，他认为当时如雨后春笋浮现的工会和工人政党是踏出了正确的一步。在今天，他会鼓励人们成立新的利益公同体、协会和组织，用以抵抗资本主义的现状，并开始抉择如何更好地满足自己的需求。
马克思开出的第二个“药方”，将会是号召金融市场的公有化，并“通过拥有国家资本和独享垄断权的国家银行，把信贷集中在国家手里”（《共产党宣言》）。吊诡的是，这一倡议在今天也的确找到鼓吹者，但这人却是英国金融业的建制中人，同时也是伦敦经济学院教授的威廉．比特（Willem Buiter），肯定不是一个“马克思主义者”。
今次金融危机所曝露的关于资本主义的荒谬性，甚至已超越了金融的领域。例如，美国总统奥巴马为解决气候问题，提出二氧化碳排放配额的拍卖机制，让这配额可以在市场上自由交易；但这种交易制度却须依赖于现成的、充斥衍生工具的金融市场，这就让人为的操纵和波幅大起大落变成无可避免。因此，马克思的第三道“药方”，将会是提倡打破“以资本主义市场解决一切问题”的逻辑，转而利用国家集权的机构解决诸如气候变化等问题。
最后，在第四道“药方”中，马克思会呼吁世界各经济体，为了应付目前的金融危机，应以团结一致的行动取代勾心斗角。但与此同时，新的变革却必需由各国的内部做起，包括劳动阶级需先解决与其国内的资产阶级之间的关系，为达致这目的，经济、政治和法律制度也需作出相应改革。而正因各国国情有所不同，变革的措施也必需因应其各自的实际条件。但无论在任何情况下，马克思都会强调，变革的雄心壮志是不可或缺的。
上述“药方”成为现实的机会有多大？就算在金融危机水深火热、世人迷失焦虑的今天，这个问题也是难以预料的。如果马克思今天仍然在生，他也不会断言，当前的危机将何时得以解决，及将以怎样的方式解决。与执着于幼稚乌托邦情结的浪漫改革家相比，马克思从来都是一个伟大的现实主义者，他或许仍会视当前的危机为资本主义漫长自我演化过程中，必然出现的一个阶段。
Jun 17
Lukemanagement organizational behavior
好老板，坏年景
管理专家Robert Sutton与大家分享在危机时期处理裁员和团队问题的经验教训
来源《麦肯锡季刊》
《麦肯锡季刊》（以下简称《季刊》）：我们今天邀请到了斯坦福大学工程研究院的著名管理及组织专家兼作家Bob Sutton。您最近为《哈佛商业评论》撰写了一篇题为“如何在经济艰难时期做个好老板”（How to be a good boss in a bad economy）的文章，请您谈谈我们所面临的挑战。
Robert Sutton：首先，我之所以动手写这篇文章，是因为我所认识的几乎各个层次上的每一位主管，似乎都参与处理了裁员、减薪等问题或者有参与这方面事宜的兆头。来自五湖四海的人们都有这方面的感受。但是，这个问题为什么重要，为什么在艰难时期做个好老板很难，这起源于一个我称之为“有害关联”（toxic tandem）的原则，这个说法是我从从事实验研究的许多优秀社会心理学家那里借用的。
这涉及到权力的两个方面，对此人们已经有了很多论述。其一，当人们拥有权力时，他们或多或少会忽略那些权力不如他们大的人的需求和行动。你可以通过各种方法模拟这一过程，在实验室中很容易模拟。而有害关联的另一个方面有时被称为过度警惕。
《季刊》：所以，要在艰难时期做老板的话，就会成为焦点。
Robert Sutton：你会成为焦点，会被非常密切地关注。因此，如果考虑有害关联的话，显而易见，你首先想到的是老板，然后是下属，并且会越来越担忧。人们往往将更多的精力投到老板身上，如果是首席执行官，他们会在董事会身上下功夫，以求弄清楚现状及前景。而他们并不会在面临威胁的人身上投入那么多的精力。
然后，就是有害关联的另一面，老板们必须谨记的事情是：大量研究表明，当人们关注老板，并担心老板在做什么的时候，他们往往会做最坏的假设。这样，细小而微不足道的信号就会被放大。
我认为，这一点并没有在我的文章中得到阐述——在我的博客中是有阐述的，因为那是在我的文章发表之后。我向一群高管介绍了这一想法。有个人朝我走过来，开始向我讲述他的执行副总裁，他的一位秘书又如何找到他问道：“裁员何时开始？”他纳闷：“什么？”接着，她（秘书）就开始解释：“啊，这对您来说，可是‘有趣鞋子’的一天。”
这个人有个众所周知的特点，就是当他心烦的时候，他与人交谈时不会与对方相视而言，他的眼睛老是盯着自己的鞋子。于是，大家就说，“老板今天又是‘ 有趣鞋子’的一天。”因此，根据这个人走来走去，眼睛不看任何人这一事实，秘书就直接走上前去了。在我看来，这是个很好的迹象，表明他在这一点上太显而易见了，是吧？
《季刊》：所以，要点在于，艰难岁月时期它自己的活动规律。但是，你作为老板需要明白的是，人们都会盯着你看。他们在好年景时，也许会忽略你，在需要时，也许会注意你一些；但是，突然之间，你会以前所未有的方式成为备受瞩目的焦点。那么，你该怎么做呢？如何妥善应对呢？
Robert Sutton：嗯，首先，我一直强调的一点是，我是位管理理论家。谈论管理要比实际进行管理要容易得多。所以呢，对于《麦肯锡季刊》的读者以及其他人来说——
《季刊》：您要发表免责声明了，对吧？
Robert Sutton：不过，这不仅仅是免责声明。这也是我只是谈论管理而不实际操作的原因之一。我有许多担任CEO的朋友，我通过他们看到了管理有多难，看到了他们是如何呕心沥血、如何劳神费力。但是，这里面也有某种诀窍，这要追溯到我与我读研究生时的导师Robert Kahn（我想他现在应该92岁了）一起开创的某项研究。这个诀窍就是：预测、理解、控制和同情。
预测的思想在于：当人们知道自己是安全的时候，某种压力所带来的破坏性要远远小于当人们知道自己正受到威胁的时候。Martin Seligman是与这一思想关联最密切的心理学家。在这方面，有一个很好的实例，我所认识的一位CEO，他担任一家非营利机构的负责人。他向我描述道，人们知道捐赠量在下降，拨款在下降，他们的股票投资组合也在下降。情况看起来不妙。这些情形还纠缠在一起了，成为经济形势的一部分。
但是，他的下属非常紧张。所以他这么对他们说：“我承诺，90天之内不会出现裁员和减薪；不会出什么事的。你们在这之前都是安全的。”这样，人们就不会每天来工作的时候都提心吊胆地等待那一只尚未掉下的鞋。这样的承诺可以给人们某些心理上的安全感，也让他们知道，何时该担心自己的生活。
《季刊》：所以，不要过度许诺，但同时，如果你能够提供某种定心丸，不妨予之，对吧？
Robert Sutton：对。我也听到其他地方有许多CEO说起过这种事情。那么，下一件事情就是理解，对此人们有诸多论述。不论面临的压力有多大，人们都需要知道事情发生的缘由。他们需要某种解释。这里就存在某种挑战，因为如果你给出的解释太复杂，他们会困惑，就会东猜西想，产生错觉。能给出一种复杂但又不过于复杂的解释是一种艺术，这样，才能让人们明白。让人们理解是消除恐惧的手段之一。
刚才说到的是理解，接下来是控制——也就是你是否能让人们对事情如何发生有些控制。我在文章中谈到了一个很好的例子，这发生在几年前，雷富礼（A. G. Lafley）于2000年出任宝洁CEO的时候，当时公司董事长仍然是John Pepper。John Pepper讲述了关于如何关闭工厂的许多经验教训。宝洁公司曾经是半夜悄然出台决定。但是他们懂得，在事先宣布时，要告诉人们为什么出此决定，给员工提供各种他们能够掌控的出路选择和地方，并表现出同情心——而且宝洁有着非常好的指标——他们会留住更多的好员工，在社区中获得更好的媒体反映。而另一方面，它的产品在当地社区的销售不会下降太多，这对于他们来说，是另一件非常重要的事情。
对我来说，更简单的思想就是，你所做的事情和做事情的方法之间总是存在差异。我的朋友Michael Dearing（曾担任eBay高管）就常常这么说。确实显而易见的是，即使已事先宣布，但人们还是经历了好几轮的裁员，这是最糟糕的情形这样，最好的员工就会开始离开，而留下的人工作也不会那么卖力了，还会出现精神健康方面的问题。
所以，应该在你力所能及的范围内提供预测——当然，在目前的环境下，预测将要发生的事情非常困难，但是，只要你不让人们经历好几轮的裁员，你作为老板，日子会好过一些，从各个方面讲，员工的日子也要好过一些。
《季刊》：请问有哪些“切忌不要”。比方说，如果当出现糟糕的情况时，你通常会避开他人的眼睛，但切忌不要盯着自己的鞋子看。此外，从更大的范围来说，还有哪些“切忌不要”？
Robert Sutton：我认为，这里有个非常重要的微妙之处，我曾与之交谈过的一位经理特别强调这一点（她本身曾在大约6、7家公司任职并参与过裁员），就是感情的节奏和时间限度。这一问题涉及两个方面。第一个方面是，当你作为老板或决策者经历试图决定要不要裁员这一过程时，你会经历各种感情斗争。首先你会愤怒，然后会沮丧。但是，轮到你把决定公布给员工时，这对你来说已经是旧闻了，而对他们来说还是新闻。所以，从某种意义上说，你还得给人考虑的时间。
我还要强调另外一点，这涉及从长远考虑的问题。文章中的故事实际上来源于Randy Komisar，说的是他在一位名叫比尔·坎贝尔（Bill Campbell）的人手下任职时的事，后者因担任教练而在硅谷闻名。事实上，《麦肯锡季刊》之前曾对此有过介绍。大家都知道，比尔非常热心，且乐于助人。[坎贝尔和 Komisar]投身于一家创业公司，公司一度展翅高飞，后来却摔了跤。比尔在这一过程中对每个人都非常好，在感情上也是如此，他孤军奋战，努力帮助雇员找工作，并且以能够帮助员工保住工作的方式卖掉公司——这样，尽管公司基本上无望了，但最高管理团队的成员一个也没有离开，他们都对他非常忠诚。
这是个比较极端的案例，但是，我认为，需要记住的关键是，来日方长，有时公司有支撑不下去的时候。有些时候，你自己作为老板也会丢掉工作。人们会回过头来看并且记住你是如何应对的。在这一过程中，你还要面对自己的良心。我认为，这是[需要记住的]非常重要的一点，因为每个人都有点只关注短期效率。
《季刊》：最后一个问题：您如何对待那些没有被裁掉的人员？
Robert Sutton：如果他们认为裁员是公平的，他们就更有可能保持忠诚，心理上会较少受到伤害，他们还会感到更加内疚，从而更努力工作，以便帮助你。确实存在这种怪异、难以言明的心理，也即是说：如果留下来的人得到良好的对待，他们会有某种负疚感，因为存在一种所谓“若非上天眷顾，我便该去了”的现象。事实上，在我所说的有关预测、理解、控制和同情的各个方面，大多会对整个系统产生影响，无论人们是否丢掉饭碗。
好老板，坏年景
管理专家Robert Sutton与大家分享在危机时期处理裁员和团队问题的经验教训。
这 篇短文是“抛砖引玉”栏目的文章之一，我们邀请一些嘉宾就当前的热点问题发表各种观点。裁员、减薪以及组织调整成为经济低迷时期普遍存在的现实。在本次视 频访谈中，管理学教授兼作家Robert Sutton 对于如何在当前艰难的环境下做个好老板，提出了自己的建议。请观看视频或者阅读以下的文字稿，发表您对Sutton建议的看法，并分享您所获得的有关危机中领导问题的经验教训。
Video: 好老板，坏年景
管理专家Robert Sutton与大家分享在危机时期处理裁员和团队问题的经验教训。
《麦肯锡季刊》（以下简称《季刊》）：我们今天邀请到了斯坦福大学工程研究院的著名管理及组织专 家兼作家Bob Sutton。您最近为《哈佛商业评论》撰写了一篇题为“如何在经济艰难时期做个好老板”（How to be a good boss in a bad economy）的文章，请您谈谈我们所面临的挑战。
Robert Sutton：首先，我之所以动手写这篇文章，是因为我所认识的几乎各个层次上的 每一位主管，似乎都参与处理了裁员、减薪等问题或者有参与这方面事宜的兆头。来自五湖四海的人们都有这方面的感受。但是，这个问题为什么重要，为什么在艰 难时期做个好老板很难，这起源于一个我称之为“有害关联”（toxic tandem）的原则，这个说法是我从从事实验研究的许多优秀社会心理学家那里借用的。
这涉及到权力的两个方面，对此人们已经有了很多论述。其一，当人们拥有权力时，他们或多或少会忽略那些权力不如他们大的人的需求和行动。你可以通过各种方法模拟这一过程，在实验室中很容易模拟。而有害关联的另一个方面有时被称为过度警惕。
《季刊》：所以，要在艰难时期做老板的话，就会成为焦点。
Robert Sutton：你会成为焦点，会被非常密切地关注。因此，如果考虑有害关联的话， 显而易见，你首先想到的是老板，然后是下属，并且会越来越担忧。人们往往将更多的精力投到老板身上，如果是首席执行官，他们会在董事会身上下功夫，以求弄 清楚现状及前景。而他们并不会在面临威胁的人身上投入那么多的精力。
然后，就是有害关联的另一面，老板们必须谨记的事情是：大量研究表明，当人们关注老板，并担心老板在做什么的时候，他们往往会做最坏的假设。这样，细小而微不足道的信号就会被放大。
我认为，这一点并没有在我的文章中得到阐述——在我的博客中是有阐述的，因为那是在我的文章发表之后。我向一群高管介绍了这一想法。有个人朝我走过 来，开始向我讲述他的执行副总裁，他的一位秘书又如何找到他问道：“裁员何时开始？”他纳闷：“什么？”接着，她（秘书）就开始解释：“啊，这对您来说， 可是‘有趣鞋子’的一天。”
这个人有个众所周知的特点，就是当他心烦的时候，他与人交谈时不会与对方相视而言，他的眼睛老是盯着自己的鞋子。于是，大家就说，“老板今天又是‘ 有趣鞋子’的一天。”因此，根据这个人走来走去，眼睛不看任何人这一事实，秘书就直接走上前去了。在我看来，这是个很好的迹象，表明他在这一点上太显而易 见了，是吧？
《季刊》：所以，要点在于，艰难岁月时期它自己的活动规律。但是，你作为老板需要明白的是，人们都会盯着你看。他们在好年景时，也许会忽略你，在需要时，也许会注意你一些；但是，突然之间，你会以前所未有的方式成为备受瞩目的焦点。那么，你该怎么做呢？如何妥善应对呢？
Robert Sutton：嗯，首先，我一直强调的一点是，我是位管理理论家。谈论管理要比实际进行管理要容易得多。所以呢，对于《麦肯锡季刊》的读者以及其他人来说——
《季刊》：您要发表免责声明了，对吧？
Robert Sutton：不过，这不仅仅是免责声明。这也是我只是谈论管理而不实际操作的原 因之一。我有许多担任CEO的朋友，我通过他们看到了管理有多难，看到了他们是如何呕心沥血、如何劳神费力。但是，这里面也有某种诀窍，这要追溯到我与我 读研究生时的导师Robert Kahn（我想他现在应该92岁了）一起开创的某项研究。这个诀窍就是：预测、理解、控制和同情。
预测的思想在于：当人们知道自己是安全的时候，某种压力所带来的破坏性要远远小于当人们知道自己正受到威胁的时候。Martin Seligman是与这一思想关联最密切的心理学家。在这方面，有一个很好的实例，我所认识的一位CEO，他担任一家非营利机构的负责人。他向我描述道， 人们知道捐赠量在下降，拨款在下降，他们的股票投资组合也在下降。情况看起来不妙。这些情形还纠缠在一起了，成为经济形势的一部分。
但是，他的下属非常紧张。所以他这么对他们说：“我承诺，90天之内不会出现裁员和减薪；不会出什么事的。你们在这之前都是安全的。”这样，人们就 不会每天来工作的时候都提心吊胆地等待那一只尚未掉下的鞋。这样的承诺可以给人们某些心理上的安全感，也让他们知道，何时该担心自己的生活。
《季刊》：所以，不要过度许诺，但同时，如果你能够提供某种定心丸，不妨予之，对吧？
Robert Sutton：对。我也听到其他地方有许多CEO说起过这种事情。那么，下一件事 情就是理解，对此人们有诸多论述。不论面临的压力有多大，人们都需要知道事情发生的缘由。他们需要某种解释。这里就存在某种挑战，因为如果你给出的解释太 复杂，他们会困惑，就会东猜西想，产生错觉。能给出一种复杂但又不过于复杂的解释是一种艺术，这样，才能让人们明白。让人们理解是消除恐惧的手段之一。
刚才说到的是理解，接下来是控制——也就是你是否能让人们对事情如何发生有些控制。我在文章中谈到了一个很好的例子，这发生在几年前，雷富礼（A. G. Lafley）于2000年出任宝洁CEO的时候，当时公司董事长仍然是John Pepper。John Pepper讲述了关于如何关闭工厂的许多经验教训。宝洁公司曾经是半夜悄然出台决定。但是他们懂得，在事先宣布时，要告诉人们为什么出此决定，给员工提 供各种他们能够掌控的出路选择和地方，并表现出同情心——而且宝洁有着非常好的指标——他们会留住更多的好员工，在社区中获得更好的媒体反映。而另一方 面，它的产品在当地社区的销售不会下降太多，这对于他们来说，是另一件非常重要的事情。
对我来说，更简单的思想就是，你所做的事情和做事情的方法之间总是存在差异。我的朋友Michael Dearing（曾担任eBay高管）就常常这么说。确实显而易见的是，即使已事先宣布，但人们还是经历了好几轮的裁员，这是最糟糕的情形这样，最好的员 工就会开始离开，而留下的人工作也不会那么卖力了，还会出现精神健康方面的问题。
所以，应该在你力所能及的范围内提供预测——当然，在目前的环境下，预测将要发生的事情非常困难，但是，只要你不让人们经历好几轮的裁员，你作为老板，日子会好过一些，从各个方面讲，员工的日子也要好过一些。
《季刊》：请问有哪些“切忌不要”。比方说，如果当出现糟糕的情况时，你通常会避开他人的眼睛，但切忌不要盯着自己的鞋子看。此外，从更大的范围来说，还有哪些“切忌不要”？
Robert Sutton：我认为，这里有个非常重要的微妙之处，我曾与之交谈过的一位经理特 别强调这一点（她本身曾在大约6、7家公司任职并参与过裁员），就是感情的节奏和时间限度。这一问题涉及两个方面。第一个方面是，当你作为老板或决策者经 历试图决定要不要裁员这一过程时，你会经历各种感情斗争。首先你会愤怒，然后会沮丧。但是，轮到你把决定公布给员工时，这对你来说已经是旧闻了，而对他们 来说还是新闻。所以，从某种意义上说，你还得给人考虑的时间。
我还要强调另外一点，这涉及从长远考虑的问题。文章中的故事实际上来源于Randy Komisar，说的是他在一位名叫比尔·坎贝尔（Bill Campbell）的人手下任职时的事，后者因担任教练而在硅谷闻名。事实上，《麦肯锡季刊》之前曾对此有过介绍1。 大家都知道，比尔非常热心，且乐于助人。[坎贝尔和 Komisar]投身于一家创业公司，公司一度展翅高飞，后来却摔了跤。比尔在这一过程中对每个人都非常好，在感情上也是如此，他孤军奋战，努力帮助雇员 找工作，并且以能够帮助员工保住工作的方式卖掉公司——这样，尽管公司基本上无望了，但最高管理团队的成员一个也没有离开，他们都对他非常忠诚。
这是个比较极端的案例，但是，我认为，需要记住的关键是，来日方长，有时公司有支撑不下去的时候。有些时候，你自己作为老板也会丢掉工作。人们会回 过头来看并且记住你是如何应对的。在这一过程中，你还要面对自己的良心。我认为，这是[需要记住的]非常重要的一点，因为每个人都有点只关注短期效率。
《季刊》：最后一个问题：您如何对待那些没有被裁掉的人员？
Robert Sutton：如果他们认为裁员是公平的，他们就更有可能保持忠诚，心理上会较少 受到伤害，他们还会感到更加内疚，从而更努力工作，以便帮助你。确实存在这种怪异、难以言明的心理，也即是说：如果留下来的人得到良好的对待，他们会有某 种负疚感，因为存在一种所谓“若非上天眷顾，我便该去了”的现象。事实上，在我所说的有关预测、理解、控制和同情的各个方面，大多会对整个系统产生影响， 无论人们是否丢掉饭碗。
Jun 08
Lukeproject management MBA
“重复美国管理的模式是一种愚蠢的行为。”明茨伯格在采访中反复强调。这位管理大师，自从上世纪70年代开始，就尝试着重新定义和解读管理世界。在他看来，对于管理的传统理念，过于强调分析、工具，而忽略了作为管理者，实践和经验才是智慧之源的事实是非常可怕的。
在过去整整30多年中，明茨伯格始终与传统管理理念保持距离，坚持管理不是“教”出来的，而是一手一脚从一线工作中领悟到的。明茨伯格强调用一种科学的、动态的视角来看管理的本质，为此，他提出了“动态管理”的理念，在接下来的“管理大师系列”栏目中，我们将分别从管理的本质、成功管理者要素、平衡的社会三个部分来探讨明茨伯格的这一理念。
真正的管理来自于实践，而不是鼓吹。
这一点，我们可以从不同的组织中看到管理的精髓。比如企业、政府机构、非营利组织……来自银行、娱乐、飞机制造或者零售业等不同的行业，都有着对管理的真知灼见。我们也可以从组织的不同层面看到对管理的不同理解。来自一线经理与中层管理者、CEO，他们都对企业管理有着不同视角的认知。当你位于一个难民营，或者一个交响乐团，你会遇到完全不同又规律共通的管理问题，因此，管理来自于实践之中。
你是哪种管理者？
在真实的商业世界，经理不可能是一部高灵敏度的系统反馈装置，只要输入来自管理典籍中的理念、工具，然后管理就开始了。实际情况中，CEO们往往忙于解决突发的危机，不断被打乱计划，需要应对眼花缭乱的各种状况。
新的管理方式应该是这样的：它不再是outlook上一连串的任务表，而是一种动态的过程。管理者通过分析信息、与人沟通协调甚至是直接行动这三个要素来达成既定目标。不同的管理者都有最适合于他的管理方式，有些长于沟通协调，有些长于分析信息，不可忽视的是，优秀的管理者必然具有三者的平衡能力。管理不是一种职业，而是一种实践。你需要去思考，从中找到适合你的方式。
然而，也许你会说，在现实的管理中，我们都会遇到一些困境。比如，信息困境：谁是这一商业关系的主导者？应该如何向下属授权？面对新市场，如何执行以往的管理？你还会遇到人事困境：当管理工作非常杂乱时，你如何让其他人工作得井井有条？应该让企业像军队一样高纪律，还是给一些无序创造的空间？如何不要过于傲慢，又保持自信？而有时，行动的困境则更为直接：你该如何面对变革？
于是，我给予管理者这样的框架：艺术、科学和手艺。
擅长分析信息摆脱困境的人，属于科学这个范围。他们喜欢用科学的工具分析信息，寻找系统的证据。另一种管理者则具有艺术气质，他们富于想象力，具有透析人们想法的洞察性。还有一种管理者，他们强调经验出真知，一旦出现问题，总是愿意先行动后思考，勇敢面对变革。
优秀的管理者往往能够找到这三种素质直接的平衡点，形成适合于他个人的管理方式。这一找到平衡点的过程，也就是在管理中实践的过程。
现在，美国式管理最糟糕的一个产物就是MBA。他们完全忽视从实践中获取认知。负责MBA的教授纷纷强调分析技能和工具，而脱离了真实的管理情境。分析不是管理，管理者应该是结合自己的经验，来制定管理方法，而不是沉湎于工具和技巧之中。
“美式管理”软肋
更为糟糕的是，当管理者从MBA毕业后进入咨询公司，他们又会更多地追寻工具和分析，忘记了管理的本质是什么。有些咨询公司宣称，他们的模式工具可以解决任何问题。对于一个手拿锤子的小孩子来说，所有的东西看上去都像是钉子。没有一个研究理论是绝对的真理，所有的真理都是相对的。好的咨询公司懂得根据实际情况来提供服务。
的确，美国人引领了“美国式管理”的辉煌数十年，这种“美国式管理”是指对美国公司管理方式的称谓。但是现在这种管理方式显然出了问题。很多企业高管已经与企业脱节，不再了解真实的运转情况。长此以往，在美国公司内部，只有一个高高在上的CEO，他们对基层事务很少问津，却对股票价格紧张透顶。真正好的领导者应该是关注公司的每个层面，并且确实能把握一线生意进展的真实状况。
不可忽视的一个问题是，在美国公司，每个高管都拿着巨额的红利，而且就算是他们管理公司失败了，他们还是心安理得地接受巨额的薪酬。任何一位严肃的领导者都应该明确自己的薪水与绩效之间的关系，不应该让自己的薪酬超越于组织中的其他成员之上。所有接受年终红利的管理者都不应该自称为合格的领导者。
眼下，美国式管理出现的主要问题在于，没有一个CEO能够有效衡量对于公司长期发展所产生的影响。绝大多数的红利是针对短期绩效发放的。这是一种误区。谁会给可能在两年后让银行破产的CEO发奖金？这就是华尔街的怪诞之处。
人们工作都是为了获取报酬。销售员的奖金很容易衡量管理，因为直接与销售数据相关。而CEO的奖金却很奇怪，它们的多少取决于股票价格在市场上的波动。而实际上，股票价格波动有着复杂的影响因素。因此，我们很难去考察CEO长远的绩效。正如我们目前面临美国银行或者花旗银行等等的问题，他们难以判断两年后银行可能出现的破产风险。
我的建议是，将公司整体绩效，针对不同层级，乘以不同的比例来计算，公司的成绩与每个人相关，这种方法具有一定的公平性。尽管这样，我们也很难用短期成绩来折射长期绩效。
在年终，我们总会就过去一年的成绩来评估每个人的奖金。但是，往往有些经理会选择猎杀来年的销量来获得今年的绩效奖金。你将如何处理这种局面？下一任的经理往往就会成为替罪羊。
在美国式管理的公司中，CEO从来不会说长期目标、探讨十年计划，对他们来说这简直是疯了。
我的忠告是，千万别复制美国式管理，这简直就是一种愚蠢的自杀行为。在过去数十年，美国培养了很多优秀的企业管理者，但是在未来依旧沿袭过去的美国式管理，将是一场灾难。
Feb 12
LukeUncategorized process, security, transition
Author: Chad Perrin
Employment transition is an often overlooked danger to company security. Make sure you pay proper attention to protecting your business from security compromises when someone leaves your company.
As this is being written in early 2009, much of the world is subject to a growing economic disaster. As we face an uncertain economic future, many businesses are preemptively cutting back on corporate expenses, while others are responding to very real downturns in profits with attempts to stave off further damage.
Such reorganizations of business structure typically include rounds of employee layoffs to cut costs, sometimes even eliminating whole divisions. As much of a disruption as this is to your business model, it can also have unforeseen consequences for security if you aren’t careful about how you handle employee departures.
The day a decision is made to transition employees out of a company is the wrong time to develop and apply security policies related to their departure. Being unprepared could result in security breaches, as well as resentment on the part of both former and current employees. Disgruntled employees create the very internal security problems against which you should protect your organization.
With that in mind, I’ve listed below 10 categories of security policy related to employment transitions. Some categories may overlap in certain areas, but each has its own, irreplaceable importance to overall policy effectiveness.
1. Access Controls
Biometric data, keycards, keys, parking or gate passes, and other physical access controls should be tracked and managed carefully. Many security precautions such as firewalls, deactivated remote access accounts, and strong password policy can be circumvented at times simply by walking up to a physical computer and doing things the “hard” way. Such items should be managed as carefully as possible without such management becoming intrusive into the work of employees, so that they are more easily recovered, deactivated, and/or replaced if and when the time comes. In extreme cases, locks may need to be changed and new keys reissued, but in many cases a well-managed system should allow most access control measures for a given employee to be simply deactivated with a few key presses or mouse clicks.
2. Accounts
Employee accounts must be carefully documented and centrally manageable as much as possible to ensure they can be secured once an employee transitions out of the company. When central management is not easily achieved, documentation becomes even more critical. Accounts that require special care include (but are not limited to) company credit cards, network logons, remote access accounts, server administration accounts, voicemail accounts, and workstation user accounts.
When an employee leaves the company, such accounts for the employee should all be deactivated as quickly as possible.
Don’t forget that restoring from backups made before the employee’s departure may restore that employee’s remote access, user, and administrative accounts. Be sure you have policy in place to resolve such potential security issues in the event of disaster recovery operations.
3. Debriefing
Whenever possible, conduct detailed exit interviews with employees. Among the things you should want to know about are the employee’s complaints about the company so you may improve things in the future, current work status, and encrypted file access. Don’t let your ego stand in the way of improving conditions after a disgruntled employee leaves, or of gaining important insights into what kind of mess you may have to deal with when it comes to a departing employee’s current work in progress. Such information may be quite important to ensuring future security or recovering important work from secured files.
4. Documentation
Company policy should, ideally and in most cases, require detailed ongoing documentation of employees’ work on projects from day one of employment. This not only ensures easier transition of projects to other (perhaps new) employees and recovery of important data, but also provides something of an automatic audit trail for something the employee may later decide to maliciously alter if he or she becomes dissatisfied with his or her work conditions. Such documentation should be logged to a central, version control tracked, regularly backed up resource. It may seem unintuitive at first, but Web-based collaboration tools such as MediaWiki can actually serve these needs on some organizations’ intranets.
Business documentation should be secured in other ways, as well — such as by granular, need-dependent access authorization, so that outgoing employees may not easily engage in last-minute corporate espionage. If your documentation contains trade secrets, no employee should have automatic access to all documentation. Access should be limited to the documentation an employee needs, and properly secured against unauthorized access.
5. Inventory
Detailed, regularly (preferably in real-time) updated inventories of office and employee assigned resources should be maintained for many reasons. One of the most important is so that you know what still needs to be recovered from an employee’s possession when he or she leaves the company. Maintaining careful inventories up front will help produce clear checklists down the line when they are needed, so start implementing your inventory policy sooner rather than later.
6. Lockdown
Various levels of physical, file, and account access lockdown should be set up to be quickly and easily enacted in the event that an employee leaves the company or is under suspicion of malicious activity. While this is in some respects just a reiteration of a key point of other categories of employment transition security policy, it deserves its own discrete mention because a clear, comprehensive, and well-managed policy for lockdown procedures should always be carefully planned and implemented to ensure there are no oversights when the time comes to act on that policy.
7. Logging
Good logging procedures are key to tracking security compromise incidents and shaping incident response. This applies to employment transitions as much as it does to protecting your network against less personal threats from the Internet. Good logging procedures implemented today can ensure that, when you have to lay off an employee tomorrow or lose one to a competitor, you will be able to track any suspect activity prior to the employee’s departure as well as intrusions by a former employee after the fact.
Passive logging servers — servers that “listen in” on network traffic and log data intended for the server without specifically identifying that particular server as the logged data’s destination — can be key to such precautions. Even in the absence of such resources, however, active and direct logging to systems outside the authorized access responsibilities of a given employee can help ensure a clean, secure record of any illicit activity.
8. Passwords
Policy should require that access codes, passwords, and similar measures will all be reset to a temporary value that a departing employee would have no way of knowing until the accounts can be deactivated or even deleted entirely. It is for this reason, among others, that such measures should be taken long before an employee leaves the company as using personalized administrative accounts — so that a single employee leaving will not require that the entire IT department has to learn a new set of admin passwords. Careful records should be kept of what accounts are supposed to exist on all company IT resources so that unauthorized accounts can be quickly identified and dealt with, and so that previously authorized but newly obsolete accounts can be shut down and passwords changed as needed without fear of overlooking something.
In many cases, it may even be desirable to change passwords on accounts to which the departing employee was not supposed to have access. After all, employees sometimes share account passwords, store them on sticky notes affixed to their monitors, or keep them tucked under keyboards or in desk drawers, despite the best efforts of the IT department to disallow such practices and enforce strong password policies.
Don’t make the mistake of resetting passwords to some default or easily-guess value (such as “1234″), either. Changing passwords when an employee departs doesn’t help much if the “new” passwords are either widely-known defaults or subject to brute-force cracking in a matter of seconds.
9. Personal Electronics
Clear security policy with regard to personal electronics is often important to security. If the company deals in trade secrets, such electronic gear as cameras, USB flash media devices, and personal laptops may need to be carefully controlled or even disallowed. Disallowing cameras is becoming increasingly difficult with the ubiquity of cameras integrated into cellphones, and flash storage media may be difficult to regulate with the growing ubiquity of portable MP3 players, but that does not necessarily mean you should throw your hands up in frustration and ignore the potential problems. Leaving such matters unaddressed may lead to security compromise in the wake of an employment transition, such as in the case of an employee that has taken advantage of lax policies to copy sensitive documents and keep the copies stored off-site.
10. Privacy
Provide employees with clearly marked and limited private resources, such as a private directory each employee may use to store personal notes that are not specific to work project data. Doing so will ensure that personal data does not get mixed with company data, making it easier to clean out unnecessary data after an employee has departed and provide final personal data recovery access to an employee (such as to-do lists that may include personal matters). Whether such data will be backed up is, of course, up to the company, but employees should generally not rely on the company to provide backups of private data that is not directly related to the business.
Make sure that the company has a clearly articulated privacy policy. You will probably want to check data in an employee’s private directory when that employee is terminated before providing access so he or she can recover personal notes — and, to be certain there are no hard feelings, the employee should know that any data on company drives is subject to review in the event of termination as a matter of standard procedure. A lot of hard feelings, and potential for attempts to compromise security because of resentment, can be avoided by making it quite clear that there is “nothing personal” in company privacy policy.
Preparation and Incident Action
Policy for how to handle an incidence of employment transition — whether someone is being fired, leaving in (self-)righteous fury, retiring after forty years, being laid off in tough economic times, moving on to a career development opportunity at another company, freeing up time for school or other projects outside the company, starting his or her own business, or leaving for some other reason entirely — is important not only for business continuity, but also security against potential intrusions. Policies that at first glance may not be directly related to employment transition, that need to be enacted from day one of employment for maximum positive effect, are also important for the same reasons, however; they may mean the difference between smooth transition and a bureaucratic, security-ineffective nightmare.
Begin your policy development and implementation now. You’ll be grateful for it later.
Feb 06
Lukeproject management Microsoft Project, PM, project management
Source: TechRepublic
Let’s have a look at a typical project manager’s day. In the morning, he comes to his office and checks his e-mail for messages with project updates. He then spends hours calling his team members, e-mailing them or meeting them in person to collect all the information he needs and to make sure that everything is well and on track. After that, the manager has to merge these updates into the project plan. The updates also need to be communicated to the upper management. So the project manager has to make reports and hand them in to the company’s executives to keep them aware of the project’s progress. The manager also has to follow up on clients’ feedback or partners’ actions. During the course of the day, he constantly has to resolve issues through another endless series of e-mails, phone calls and meetings.
Looks familiar, doesn’t it? E-mail is still the most popular project communication tool. An employee on an average project gets between 30 and 100 e-mails per day. The majority of these e-mails contain tasks, change requests and discussions, so it’s hard to overestimate the knowledge buried in e-mail inboxes every day. This knowledge often bypasses project management tools like Microsoft Project.
Have you ever missed an important e-mail? Or forgotten to send a reply to an urgent request? Was it ever easy for you to find an indispensable piece of information buried in the thousands of messages that you have in your inbox? What if you weren’t CC’d on that e-mail? It gets even worse when you need to quickly share information that’s lost in your inbox with a newcomer.
This knowledge, buried in e-mails, causes project managers in too many organizations today to waste hours on transferring information from e-mails into their project management systems and back. As a result, their productivity and efficiency are damaged by this unnecessary routine. Instead of being a project leader, a project manager turns into a project secretary.
Traditional project management systems often are not integrated with e-mail. Systems like Microsoft Project are designed with the top-down project management approach in mind and aren’t suited well to leverage collective knowledge in an easy way. It means they create dozens of needless, routine jobs for the project manager. Therefore, instead of helping project managers, these systems make the manager’s workload even bigger.
What if managers could bring this “project secretary” job to a minimum and concentrate on the leadership part of the management job? How much more efficient and productive would the whole team become as a result? Experts say this is possible.
The change comes with the growing popularity of Enterprise 2.0 principles applied to project management. Project Management 2.0 relies on the same concepts as Enterprise 2.0. The power of many, also known as collective intelligence, helps to build, maintain and evolve an up-to-date picture of operations. Flexible Project Management 2.0 tools merge this picture from various pieces, giving a perfect example of what enterprise social software researchers call “emergent structures.” The software supporting these two concepts, collective intelligence and emergent structures, open new opportunities for boosting your own efficiency and your team’s efficiency by cutting the daily routine and leaving more room for creativity and leadership. They make a project manager’s life easier by bringing three major benefits:
Reducing routine work
Project Management 2.0 practices and supportive tools eliminate the need for extra meetings, phone calls, and e-mails, thus saving you time and letting you focus on getting things done. The best tools in this area are integrated with e-mail. They don’t break the habitual workflow, allowing project participants to communicate via e-mail messages. At the same time, they automatically absorb information from e-mails, which usually bypasses project management systems and is traditionally buried in the team’s inboxes. With project management 2.0 tools, this knowledge is shared and available to everybody on the team at any given moment in time.
Just imagine: there’s no need to call and ask your peer to find the important e-mail from a customer who wanted to make changes in a project schedule. Tasks, clients’ requirements, status updates, ideas, and project discussions are all captured by a single system, are shared among the project participants and are available at any given moment in time. So even if you need the information when nobody is in the office, you can still get it immediately. No need to call your employee on Saturday evening when you suddenly need to know where the project stands. Besides, there’s no need for the manager to manually adjust project plans and individual team members’ schedules.
Project Management 2.0 lets you to avoid micromanagement by allowing team members to mark updates of their part of the project work in the shared collaborative environment. This gives the project manager the up-to-date picture of where his team and the project stand. The top-down control comes in when the project manager aligns and guides those activities. Project Management 2.0 practices and tools let you gain harmony between top-down and bottom-up management styles.
Providing multiple project views
Besides giving an up-to-date picture of internal project operations, the new-generation technologies enable managers and other members of the project team to view projects differently. Project participants can pick any reasonable sub-set of tasks, create a view with these tasks and share the view with someone who needs it. It means that more people can collaborate and contribute to the project work productively.
Each of these views can be changed by team members as the organization and its environment changes. The whole structure evolves with time. Managers, who have access to more perspectives and to boarder views, can align multiple projects, avoid scheduling conflicts, and set the right priorities. Flexible, many-to-many structures that allow creating, sharing and easy merging of views are an important part of the Project Management 2.0 approach. This approach enables collective intelligence and leads to collaborative planning. In turn, collaborative planning makes organizations more productive and transparent.
Giving the complete picture of all projects
Upper-level managers can access the global organizational view, which gives them a clear picture of where the business stands. Project Management 2.0 tools merge individual employees’ to-do lists into one picture that is always up-to-date. It means that corporate executives are constantly in the loop with what’s going on in the project. The information is always at their fingertips. As a result, the organization’s leaders can adjust strategic plans to changes in the business environment much faster. It becomes easier for them to rapidly and cost-efficiently recognize changes and adapt to them. The whole organization becomes more agile and therefore more competitive, thanks to very simple tools and the powerful practices of Project Management 2.0.
The key to the making the whole organization more productive lays in gaining efficiency for the project manager and his team. Project Management 2.0 tools and practices become a catalyst to important innovations on the organizational level. They let everybody from team members to project managers and corporate executives focus on getting things done and spend less time on routine tasks. Naturally, software will not do the whole job alone, but it empowers people and multiplies their efforts. Project Management 2.0 democratizes project management, bringing it outside of enterprise project management offices to other departments, as well as to small and midsize businesses. It makes companies more agile, projects more controllable and people more productive.
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