Exile From the Herd

I'm currently reading Joseph H Ellis' Ahead of the Curve - A Commonsense Guide To Forecasting Business and Economic Cycles. So far there are a couple of refreshing departures from conventional consensus, like his views on "recession".

The idea of an economic recession should be an objective measurement of reality, instead, in today's climate it simply isn't discussed in polite company. According to the politicians, it'll never happen.

Ellis argues that whether we are headed for recession is academic, because recessions are lagging indicators of a down cycle, not leading ones. By the time a recession hits, he says, a lot of the economic damage has already taken place.

What really matters, according to Ellis, are a series of leading economic indicators and a shift in the way we measure economic data....

Just kidding Rick, I saw one of your posts the other day and couldn't resist For those unfamiliar, Rick pens one of the premier VC point-of-view blogs at Post Money Value

• The CEO is way smarter than I am
  
  
• The CEO has built a team of people way smarter than he is
  
  
• The CEO has assembled an advisory board of incredibly smart people who just "get it". They're brilliant. Doc Searls, Rick Scoble, Seth Goodin, and Guy Kawasaki. Just to name a few.
  
  
• The CEO works 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and is driven by total passion and intensity. He doesn't draw a salary and drives a 1983 Lada. He donated his founders shares to charity and his family hasn't seen him in nearly a year.
  
  
• The first three funding rounds all took place at successively higher valuations.
  
  
• The developers are amazing. You should see the mashups these guys are cranking out. They came up with a very neat facebook application that's going to be just killer!
  
  
• The guy we brought in to replace the CEO made the company very attractive for subsequent funding rounds.
  
  
• The revenue projections look very promising.
  
  
  And then....
  
  
• We sold the company for $400 million, a great exit. Congrats to all involved.
  
  or
  
  
• Microsoft buys a 0.25% stake for $200 million, valuing us at 800 billion dollars, not bad for a pre-revenue venture with oodles of mindshare.
  
  

Just a quick observation, I was just out running an errand and I was in a grocery store. As I was cashing out I heard a cashier behind me calling for a "carry out" for a customer. A few moments later, I heard it again. Then she called over to my cashier, "I'm having a hard time getting a carry out".

My cashier turned to a guy over a couple aisles and asked "Nick, can you do a carry out?" and he just shook his head, expressionless, "I'm on lunch" and started walking away, past the customer waiting for a carry out, past that cashier looking for somebody to do it. I here a yell from the back of the store "Tell Nick to do the carry out", and yell back "He's on lunch" to which I heard a retort from the back "How long have you been on lunch anyway?".

I actually don't fault the business itself for this absolutely disgraceful display of employee complacency. It's rampant almost everywhere (except, I am happy to report, in my company) and for the most part gets rewarded rather than penalized in today's business climate.

The customer seemed to accept it all in good humor. I wouldn't have. Being a dour crusty bastard I would have basically gotten my money back and left the store, leaving the goods in the checkout aisle.

But not only was this a slap in the face to the customer, it was an insulting act of disrespect to one's co-workers, and employer. Granted, it's probably some kind of union gig where being lazy, insensitive and devoid of initiative is not only tolerated but probably a requirement; it was yet another moment where I marvel at these blow-off levels of complacency and entitlement that saturates our culture.

I only lament this because I fear these easy breezy days of pink cloud economics are nearing an end.

Back in my previous life as a failed musician, I wrote a song called Multi-Media World and the title of this post were the closing lyrics in the outro of that song. Around the same period of my life, I had zero financial literacy, was being hounded by debt collectors for my student loans and maxed out credit cards and had zero prospects.

I realize in retrospect, I had no business having credit cards back then. I also realize that most people have no business having a credit card today. Easy credit destroys lives. I was lucky, because 1) I was a middle class brat who had financially solvent parents to bail him out and 2) I was young enough to have the luxury of time on my side when it came to rebuilding my life from near bankruptcy, and most fortunate of all 3) the scenario I foresee in our collective near futures hadn't transpired yet.