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Showing posts with label career. Show all posts
Showing posts with label career. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
The Haiku of Finance for 05/24/16
Working very hard
Long time since last haiku post
Need a longer day
Long time since last haiku post
Need a longer day
Monday, October 12, 2015
The Haiku of Finance for 10/12/15
Wandering career
Chase bonus around Wall Street
Tech will end this ride
Chase bonus around Wall Street
Tech will end this ride
Career Wanderlust On Wall Street Faces Obsolescence
Wall Street's top performers usually move around a lot. They jump from one firm to another every few years if the gaining firm finds their high-powered connections or book of accounts desirable enough to warrant a signing bonus. The upside to such wanderlust is a fatter paycheck for a small number of people. The downside is a mercenary culture that rewards greed over loyalty. The future may be different.
A specter of automation haunts Wall Street. Robo-traders can do everything human brokers can do at much lower coast. The AIs fronting automated portfolio rebalancing systems can't jump to rival firms and don't need bonuses. Their programmers and domain experts can jump firms, but there are far fewer of them than today's hordes of financial advisers and investment bankers. The hordes will be gone in a few years and Wall Street firms will be more efficient in their absence.
I used to work at a wealth management firm that tried to pretend its career revolving door did not exist. The "You and BS" people bragged about poaching top earners who brought clients from other firms, but stuck loser labels on their own defectors. Every firm thinks that way, even the once-mighty Merrill Lynch whose "Mother Merrill" culture encouraged people to stick around. I meant what I said when I told prospects I was loyal to my firm. They must have though I was naive not to have a mercenary mindset. That may be why they never wanted to invest with me. Many people really do reward disloyalty, as if it were a sign of maturity.
The most disloyal people end up with the biggest bonuses after years of cheating their teammates. Perhaps that's my bias showing, or just a broad truism. Bonus pay to reward wanderlust may not directly reflect the competence or integrity of a prized hire. If the pay is based on the hire's proven trailing revenue then it has everything to do with the winning firm's revenue. The future of AI relationships means all of a firm's human best practices will be permanently recorded in computer code. No ethically challenged humans need apply. Money formerly earmarked for bonuses will return to clients as saved transaction costs or to shareholders as dividends.
Wanderlust has a point if it diverts performers away from trouble. Sometimes the only way out of a bad job situation is to say goodbye and never look back. That worked for me once I realized that no investment firm or client would ever care enough to pay me for my work. It still works for a little while longer, until AIs copy all of the human skills they need.
A specter of automation haunts Wall Street. Robo-traders can do everything human brokers can do at much lower coast. The AIs fronting automated portfolio rebalancing systems can't jump to rival firms and don't need bonuses. Their programmers and domain experts can jump firms, but there are far fewer of them than today's hordes of financial advisers and investment bankers. The hordes will be gone in a few years and Wall Street firms will be more efficient in their absence.
I used to work at a wealth management firm that tried to pretend its career revolving door did not exist. The "You and BS" people bragged about poaching top earners who brought clients from other firms, but stuck loser labels on their own defectors. Every firm thinks that way, even the once-mighty Merrill Lynch whose "Mother Merrill" culture encouraged people to stick around. I meant what I said when I told prospects I was loyal to my firm. They must have though I was naive not to have a mercenary mindset. That may be why they never wanted to invest with me. Many people really do reward disloyalty, as if it were a sign of maturity.
The most disloyal people end up with the biggest bonuses after years of cheating their teammates. Perhaps that's my bias showing, or just a broad truism. Bonus pay to reward wanderlust may not directly reflect the competence or integrity of a prized hire. If the pay is based on the hire's proven trailing revenue then it has everything to do with the winning firm's revenue. The future of AI relationships means all of a firm's human best practices will be permanently recorded in computer code. No ethically challenged humans need apply. Money formerly earmarked for bonuses will return to clients as saved transaction costs or to shareholders as dividends.
Wanderlust has a point if it diverts performers away from trouble. Sometimes the only way out of a bad job situation is to say goodbye and never look back. That worked for me once I realized that no investment firm or client would ever care enough to pay me for my work. It still works for a little while longer, until AIs copy all of the human skills they need.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
The Haiku of Finance for 09/15/15
Find a cloud career
Hire aptitude, then train skill
Workplace does compute
Thursday, August 20, 2015
SVForum Disrupts Unemployment With i4j Panel
I checked out SVForum's "Disrupting Unemployment" event last night, part of the Innovation for Jobs (i4j) project. I drove on down to Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus to get acquainted with thought leaders cutting through the bleeding edge of career transformations. I had to get my fill of chicken fingers and dolmas before the intellectual action began. Check out my awesome badge selfie before I get down to business.
The official welcome laid out the global problem at hand. A whole bunch of people in the world are either not gainfully employed at decent incomes, or not totally committed to their chosen work. My Google search for "percent of global labor force not earning sufficient income" turned up a bunch of reports from McKinsey, the US Department of Labor, and Pew Research showing how global markets increasingly challenge ethnic minorities and low-skilled workers. I am intrigued with i4j's thesis that new digital career-matching tools will reduce job frictions and add to personal income at the microeconomic level, eventually boosting the US's lackluster macroeconomic growth. I recall from my undergraduate studies in economics (yes, I still have all of my textbooks and course notes) that structural unemployment is the stickiest part of the unemployment picture. Rapid tech changes will add to that problem. I will tune in to the i4jECO Summit in January 2016 to see how thought leaders are solving that problem.
Legendary tech guru John Hagel gave the keynote last night. I have followed his work for many years and we are connected through friends, but last night was the first time I came face to face with this guy. He is totally brilliant. I'm sure he would find my own brilliance impressive but I wasn't there to steal his thunder. Anyway, John laid out the three challenges of automation, accelerating skill obsolescence, and a substandard educational system that hinder more effective career matches. He thinks society still needs institutions that can scale learning for a mass market. His key is connecting work to passion. Got it, scale and passion go together, sort of like peanut butter and jelly but without the bread.
My friend Robin Farmanfarmaian moderated the expert panel. I have no idea where she gets the energy to organize all of these high-profile events. I would need a fusion reactor to generate as much energy as she manifests. Alrighty then, enough about my energy deficit. The panel addressed the US's national competitiveness first. I am disappointed that the US is dropping in rank on a leading freedom index. That's what we get for adopting bailouts and managed health care regimes as the new normal. At least one panelist finally recognized that Silicon Valley's penchant for solving the rich world's problems in speedy transport and gourmet meal delivery won't always convert to developing countries that really need basic WiFi infrastructure.
The one panelist who insisted on being a negative Nellie eventually struck a few nerves. He was on a roll panning major telecom companies as losers, and describing a mostly jobless future where automation forces more people to earn less. His argument with another panelist about how coal workers recovered from mine troubles would have made more sense if either one of them had cited hard data. One audience member rudely called baloney on the negativity by citing The Seamless City, about how public-private partnerships and smart metrics solve urban blight. He could have waited until the Q and A to make his point without interrupting. I'd like to see San Francisco become a seamless city, once the mayor takes on the non-profits who lock up city contracts and grants.
One audience member claimed that some measure of worldwide return on assets now exceeds the return on work. I find that hard to believe without a citation. Record ROIs worldwide are lately more a function of central bank monetary stimulus. Once that steroid infusion ends, the pendulum should swing back to worker productivity. The HR community has metrics for the ROI of workforce investments, especially for job-specific training. Look them up at SHRM for yourself. Come on, people, nothing is impossible. The entrepreneurs in the audience working on people-centric innovations can get it done.
I stuck around longer than necessary in case anyone needed to partake of my wisdom, or in case any attractive women wanted my phone number. No one took me up on either count. That gave me time to grab more food and drink. SVForum held my interest all night.
The official welcome laid out the global problem at hand. A whole bunch of people in the world are either not gainfully employed at decent incomes, or not totally committed to their chosen work. My Google search for "percent of global labor force not earning sufficient income" turned up a bunch of reports from McKinsey, the US Department of Labor, and Pew Research showing how global markets increasingly challenge ethnic minorities and low-skilled workers. I am intrigued with i4j's thesis that new digital career-matching tools will reduce job frictions and add to personal income at the microeconomic level, eventually boosting the US's lackluster macroeconomic growth. I recall from my undergraduate studies in economics (yes, I still have all of my textbooks and course notes) that structural unemployment is the stickiest part of the unemployment picture. Rapid tech changes will add to that problem. I will tune in to the i4jECO Summit in January 2016 to see how thought leaders are solving that problem.
Legendary tech guru John Hagel gave the keynote last night. I have followed his work for many years and we are connected through friends, but last night was the first time I came face to face with this guy. He is totally brilliant. I'm sure he would find my own brilliance impressive but I wasn't there to steal his thunder. Anyway, John laid out the three challenges of automation, accelerating skill obsolescence, and a substandard educational system that hinder more effective career matches. He thinks society still needs institutions that can scale learning for a mass market. His key is connecting work to passion. Got it, scale and passion go together, sort of like peanut butter and jelly but without the bread.
My friend Robin Farmanfarmaian moderated the expert panel. I have no idea where she gets the energy to organize all of these high-profile events. I would need a fusion reactor to generate as much energy as she manifests. Alrighty then, enough about my energy deficit. The panel addressed the US's national competitiveness first. I am disappointed that the US is dropping in rank on a leading freedom index. That's what we get for adopting bailouts and managed health care regimes as the new normal. At least one panelist finally recognized that Silicon Valley's penchant for solving the rich world's problems in speedy transport and gourmet meal delivery won't always convert to developing countries that really need basic WiFi infrastructure.
The one panelist who insisted on being a negative Nellie eventually struck a few nerves. He was on a roll panning major telecom companies as losers, and describing a mostly jobless future where automation forces more people to earn less. His argument with another panelist about how coal workers recovered from mine troubles would have made more sense if either one of them had cited hard data. One audience member rudely called baloney on the negativity by citing The Seamless City, about how public-private partnerships and smart metrics solve urban blight. He could have waited until the Q and A to make his point without interrupting. I'd like to see San Francisco become a seamless city, once the mayor takes on the non-profits who lock up city contracts and grants.
One audience member claimed that some measure of worldwide return on assets now exceeds the return on work. I find that hard to believe without a citation. Record ROIs worldwide are lately more a function of central bank monetary stimulus. Once that steroid infusion ends, the pendulum should swing back to worker productivity. The HR community has metrics for the ROI of workforce investments, especially for job-specific training. Look them up at SHRM for yourself. Come on, people, nothing is impossible. The entrepreneurs in the audience working on people-centric innovations can get it done.
I stuck around longer than necessary in case anyone needed to partake of my wisdom, or in case any attractive women wanted my phone number. No one took me up on either count. That gave me time to grab more food and drink. SVForum held my interest all night.
Friday, March 27, 2015
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
3 Crucial Skills for US Military Veterans Seeking Corporate Careers
I served in the US Army after my studies at the University of Notre Dame. Some of my ROTC program classmates stayed on active duty for the long haul, longer than I thought would be sane. They are now approaching their 20-year service milestones, which means some of them are considering life on the outside. I have them in mind when I think about the references I used years ago when I started my own transition to civilian life. The published works available to help military veterans make career transitions could fill a whole library shelf. Most of that material is general and repetitive. Hardly any guidance is tailored for someone with a more technical career goal. Fear not, senior veterans, because Alfidi Capital is here to fill the knowledge gap.
I have identified three skill sets germane to a large corporate environment. These skills are portable to any corporation and are particularly useful in very technical fields. Acquiring them requires mastery of peer-reviewed bodies of knowledge. These qualifications are vastly more credible with corporate recruiters than any military-specific skills a veteran possesses.
Six Sigma certification is the first skill set that veterans should acquire if they want corporate careers. Completing a Six Sigma project within the US Department of Defense confers a resume bullet more valuable than experience with real bullets. The American Society for Quality (ASQ) maintains extensive references on Six Sigma and related topics. The International Association for Six Sigma Certification (IASSC) lists options for completing the qualifying exams. Completing the appropriate training and exams is not cheap but is absolutely necessary for official qualification.
Knowledge management (KM) is the second skill set. Practitioners become the go-to people when an organization translates the DIKW Pyramid into real operations. Experts read KMWorld for the latest developments. The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) defines many KM best practices. The KM business discipline does not yet have a universally recognized body of knowledge and several organizations have emerged with competing certification standards. I believe that mastering the APQC material through independent study is sufficient at present to claim expertise.
Operations research (OR) is the final skill set. The Allied Powers in World War II invented the modern field of OR, and today select US Army officers maintain qualification in the operations research / systems analysis (ORSA) specialty. The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is the US governing body for the OR profession; they have all the resources needed for someone seeking qualification.
Mastering these skills enables a veteran to compete for corporate jobs that have prerequisites beyond entry-level experience. Combining them with certification as PMI's Project Management Professional would make a veteran's resume very compelling. Lacking these hard skills can be a serious handicap. It is an unfortunate fact of modern life that business skills have diverged far enough from the generalist "soft skills" of military leadership to disqualify many veterans from white collar occupations. Veterans who wish to avoid confinement to the low-income ghetto of permanent entry-level career paths should master widely accepted business knowledge. This means hitting the books all over again.
I recently attended a talk by US Marine Corps combat veteran David Danelo about his book The Return: A Field Manual for Life After Combat. The audience at San Francisco's Marines Memorial Club recognized that veterans' passion for a meaningful life should carry over into a civilian career once they leave the military. Passion hits a brick wall when civilian employers find a veteran's resume devoid of recognizable prerequisites. Veterans who master the three disciplines above prove they have the passion to carry on as relevant civilians.
Monday, June 16, 2014
The Haiku of Finance for 06/16/14
Office flirtation
Sure-fire path to advancement
Style over substance
Sure-fire path to advancement
Style over substance
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
10 Signs Your Coworkers Are Useless
I work by myself, for myself. I do this because the years I spent working with others in a corporate environment revealed to me the depths of human stupidity. Countless instances of thickheaded blunders made me roll my eyes in disgust. I'll boil down the general trends into ten signs that show you where the stupid burns.
1) Your coworkers don't understand the value of money. Financial service sector workers are egregiously bad at managing money. Maybe it's because they're around so much of it every day that they think it comes in an endless gravy train. I remember coworkers who spent money daily at the break room vending machine and the corner coffee shop. That's a five dollar daily habit that blows over a thousand bucks a year. I had another coworker who took a taxi to work every day. I take Muni whenever I go downtown in San Francisco. Her monthly transportation expenses were 20x larger than mine. I achieved financial independence; if you can't figure out why, stop reading right now. You're useless.
2) They worship process over results. This is the sine qua non of government bureaucracies and corporations in oligopolistic market positions, with rare exceptions. Winston Churchill begged us all to look at results sometimes but hardly anyone listens. Cubicle residents would rather wear down the same ruts in the carpet year after year than stop to consider a course correction. Process can be a very comfortable cocoon for the myopic in our species. Getting results often requires making someone uncomfortable.
3) They have no career goals. I remember one gal at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" (a major investment management firm, renamed) who took maybe twenty minutes a day to do her job. She spent the rest of the time socializing. Coworkers admired her for being on some kind of "fast track" because she was rotating laterally between easy jobs that paid little and had light workloads. Consider just how lame everyone there must have been if she was their role model.
4) They earn little money. Like it or not, money is a measuring stick of a human's contributions to society. Life isn't fair and sometimes the most ignorant rock stars become multimillionaires. Tough stuff. The rest of us have to prove our abilities in a daily grind. Those who can bust their humps get paid. Those who expand their skills get paid more. People who show little interest in either of those projects will be at subsistence level indefinitely.
5) They save little money. This relates to #4 above. Low-income earners can build wealth through diligent saving and frugal living. High-income earners have an easier time building wealth but even they throw away money on frivolities. I currently know several high earners in San Francisco's social circles who live like there's no tomorrow. If they find themselves suddenly unemployed, they won't have a tomorrow. My former bosses at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" would brag - yes, BRAG - about their own empty savings accounts. I stopped listening to them when they encouraged me to spend all of my paycheck just to fit in with the work group. Those idiots had nothing left to teach me.
6) They are ignorant of the world. Intellectual activity brings personal growth. This is a no-brainer for autodidacts like Yours Truly but most people have no brains. Cubicle denizens would rather fill their spare time with rom-com movies instead of independent films, pro sports instead of performing arts, and fashion magazines instead of intellectual journals.
7) They don't know how to operate common work systems. I worked with senior wealth managers at "You and BS" who did not understand how to use the firm's automated tools to construct portfolios, retrieve analytical reports, or create pitch books. Senior supervisors at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" with years of experience did not know how to dig into their reporting systems for audit records. I figured all of these things out within weeks of my hiring date. Sticking out like a sore thumb helped get me fired from entry-level jobs. I can't relate to so-called "professionals" who refuse to master the tools of their chosen profession.
8) They waste time. During my first week at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" my supervisors took off in the middle of the work day for a three-hour shopping trip. I was left to wonder how these people could say they earned their pay. Other brokers at "You and BS" would pretend to work by eyeballing their wealthy family's money and then take off to go drinking in the early afternoon. Time-wasting losers may think they have earned sloth status with past performance. The only thing they really earn is contempt.
9) They are just plain dumb. There is nothing snobby at all about judging people at least partly on IQ scores and other objective measures of intellect. Smart people are job creators in a knowledge economy. Dumb people are a drag on productivity. Anti-intellectual coworkers belong in low-income occupations at the bottom of society yet somehow they work their way into cubicles and corner offices. Cleaning up their messes, editing their typos, and covering their errors is for masochistic suckers.
10) They lack personal integrity. I thought about listing this first but decided to leave the best for last. Losers can find excuses for lying and cutting corners. Karma eventually catches up to destructive people. Trying to change a sociopath is always a waste of effort. I put as much distance as possible between myself and liars once someone reveals their first instance of lying.
If you work with people who regularly exhibit these behaviors, it's time to find some new coworkers. If everyone in the company acts this way, the stock may be a good short candidate. There's always a better job somewhere else. If the world runs out of better jobs, there's always self-employment. Life is too short to spend even one working day with useless excuses for human beings.
1) Your coworkers don't understand the value of money. Financial service sector workers are egregiously bad at managing money. Maybe it's because they're around so much of it every day that they think it comes in an endless gravy train. I remember coworkers who spent money daily at the break room vending machine and the corner coffee shop. That's a five dollar daily habit that blows over a thousand bucks a year. I had another coworker who took a taxi to work every day. I take Muni whenever I go downtown in San Francisco. Her monthly transportation expenses were 20x larger than mine. I achieved financial independence; if you can't figure out why, stop reading right now. You're useless.
2) They worship process over results. This is the sine qua non of government bureaucracies and corporations in oligopolistic market positions, with rare exceptions. Winston Churchill begged us all to look at results sometimes but hardly anyone listens. Cubicle residents would rather wear down the same ruts in the carpet year after year than stop to consider a course correction. Process can be a very comfortable cocoon for the myopic in our species. Getting results often requires making someone uncomfortable.
3) They have no career goals. I remember one gal at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" (a major investment management firm, renamed) who took maybe twenty minutes a day to do her job. She spent the rest of the time socializing. Coworkers admired her for being on some kind of "fast track" because she was rotating laterally between easy jobs that paid little and had light workloads. Consider just how lame everyone there must have been if she was their role model.
4) They earn little money. Like it or not, money is a measuring stick of a human's contributions to society. Life isn't fair and sometimes the most ignorant rock stars become multimillionaires. Tough stuff. The rest of us have to prove our abilities in a daily grind. Those who can bust their humps get paid. Those who expand their skills get paid more. People who show little interest in either of those projects will be at subsistence level indefinitely.
5) They save little money. This relates to #4 above. Low-income earners can build wealth through diligent saving and frugal living. High-income earners have an easier time building wealth but even they throw away money on frivolities. I currently know several high earners in San Francisco's social circles who live like there's no tomorrow. If they find themselves suddenly unemployed, they won't have a tomorrow. My former bosses at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" would brag - yes, BRAG - about their own empty savings accounts. I stopped listening to them when they encouraged me to spend all of my paycheck just to fit in with the work group. Those idiots had nothing left to teach me.
6) They are ignorant of the world. Intellectual activity brings personal growth. This is a no-brainer for autodidacts like Yours Truly but most people have no brains. Cubicle denizens would rather fill their spare time with rom-com movies instead of independent films, pro sports instead of performing arts, and fashion magazines instead of intellectual journals.
7) They don't know how to operate common work systems. I worked with senior wealth managers at "You and BS" who did not understand how to use the firm's automated tools to construct portfolios, retrieve analytical reports, or create pitch books. Senior supervisors at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" with years of experience did not know how to dig into their reporting systems for audit records. I figured all of these things out within weeks of my hiring date. Sticking out like a sore thumb helped get me fired from entry-level jobs. I can't relate to so-called "professionals" who refuse to master the tools of their chosen profession.
8) They waste time. During my first week at "Baloney Goofball Imbeciles" my supervisors took off in the middle of the work day for a three-hour shopping trip. I was left to wonder how these people could say they earned their pay. Other brokers at "You and BS" would pretend to work by eyeballing their wealthy family's money and then take off to go drinking in the early afternoon. Time-wasting losers may think they have earned sloth status with past performance. The only thing they really earn is contempt.
9) They are just plain dumb. There is nothing snobby at all about judging people at least partly on IQ scores and other objective measures of intellect. Smart people are job creators in a knowledge economy. Dumb people are a drag on productivity. Anti-intellectual coworkers belong in low-income occupations at the bottom of society yet somehow they work their way into cubicles and corner offices. Cleaning up their messes, editing their typos, and covering their errors is for masochistic suckers.
10) They lack personal integrity. I thought about listing this first but decided to leave the best for last. Losers can find excuses for lying and cutting corners. Karma eventually catches up to destructive people. Trying to change a sociopath is always a waste of effort. I put as much distance as possible between myself and liars once someone reveals their first instance of lying.
If you work with people who regularly exhibit these behaviors, it's time to find some new coworkers. If everyone in the company acts this way, the stock may be a good short candidate. There's always a better job somewhere else. If the world runs out of better jobs, there's always self-employment. Life is too short to spend even one working day with useless excuses for human beings.
Saturday, April 05, 2014
Ethical Half-Lives In Finance
The few conversations I've had with people younger than me who aspired to finance careers always covered personal integrity. I could not ignore this subject because it is the ultimate litmus test of whether someone belongs in a large corporation. I use the term "belong" in a somewhat pejorative sense, as you'll see below.
I worked for three very large financial sector firms at various points in my career. They all publicly held themselves out as putting the client's interests ahead of their own. I observed their employees honoring this commitment more as an exception to general practices behind the corporate veil. It is possible to make a decent living by genuinely caring for a client, meeting their expectations, and charging them reasonable fees. Managers in large corporations often discount that objective by pushing their revenue producers (brokers, advisors, traders, loan officers, etc.) to make their department's growth numbers look good. That's how managers get promoted.
The competition for promotions in finance is fierce and unforgiving. A fast and loose approach to ethics is an easy ticket to the big time. It is very difficult to have a long career in a large organization without resorting to unethical behavior. The outsized rewards in finance tempt normal people to stray over to the dark side. The ones who cross over often enough will never look back, and never realize where they went wrong. Those rare people who climb ladders ethically and build business honestly deserve respect. The rest of these people are clawing, grasping, vicious vipers who masquerade as humans to deceive clients. They "belong" in a large corporation in the same sense that criminals belong in prison. Society must keep its sociopathic predators under positive control.
I care more about my personal integrity than my career. I performed very poorly when I worked in large financial institutions because I told the truth, followed rules, and executed my duties correctly. My supervisors marked me for elimination after observing my behavior. I wasn't fit for employment in their eyes because I would not lie or manipulate people. I stand out as an oddball and I couldn't care less. I dislike unethical people as much as they dislike me.
The half-lives of financial careers may be longest in corporate finance because incidences of temptation occur least frequently there. It's always possible to falsify payment invoices but internal auditors can catch those instantly, especially if they're tied to the enterprise's supply chain. There may very well be plenty of honest CFOs and treasurers around, and maybe this is why so many of them are sitting on piles of corporate cash rather than investing in overpriced assets.
Career half-lives are probably shortest in the financial sector's customer-facing roles. I specifically envision retail brokerage, institutional sales, and investment banking rainmakers as the career paths that winnow out honest people very quickly. The pressures to meet performance goals and earn bonuses are largest in those fields. Opportunities to deceive investors appear daily. The biggest liars and laziest trust fund babies win the retail production games.
Anyone who considers a career in finance should think very hard about the choice they will face soon after they begin work. Personal integrity and career success in a large enterprise become mutually exclusive at some point during upward career progression. Employees will choose one path over another. Choosing personal integrity usually leads to unemployment. Choosing career success usually means making ethical compromises. Those compromises come with severe legal risks that cannot stay buried forever in an era of pervasive surveillance. Having both integrity and success is possible with self-employment. I have extended my career's half-life by working for myself.
I worked for three very large financial sector firms at various points in my career. They all publicly held themselves out as putting the client's interests ahead of their own. I observed their employees honoring this commitment more as an exception to general practices behind the corporate veil. It is possible to make a decent living by genuinely caring for a client, meeting their expectations, and charging them reasonable fees. Managers in large corporations often discount that objective by pushing their revenue producers (brokers, advisors, traders, loan officers, etc.) to make their department's growth numbers look good. That's how managers get promoted.
The competition for promotions in finance is fierce and unforgiving. A fast and loose approach to ethics is an easy ticket to the big time. It is very difficult to have a long career in a large organization without resorting to unethical behavior. The outsized rewards in finance tempt normal people to stray over to the dark side. The ones who cross over often enough will never look back, and never realize where they went wrong. Those rare people who climb ladders ethically and build business honestly deserve respect. The rest of these people are clawing, grasping, vicious vipers who masquerade as humans to deceive clients. They "belong" in a large corporation in the same sense that criminals belong in prison. Society must keep its sociopathic predators under positive control.
I care more about my personal integrity than my career. I performed very poorly when I worked in large financial institutions because I told the truth, followed rules, and executed my duties correctly. My supervisors marked me for elimination after observing my behavior. I wasn't fit for employment in their eyes because I would not lie or manipulate people. I stand out as an oddball and I couldn't care less. I dislike unethical people as much as they dislike me.
The half-lives of financial careers may be longest in corporate finance because incidences of temptation occur least frequently there. It's always possible to falsify payment invoices but internal auditors can catch those instantly, especially if they're tied to the enterprise's supply chain. There may very well be plenty of honest CFOs and treasurers around, and maybe this is why so many of them are sitting on piles of corporate cash rather than investing in overpriced assets.
Career half-lives are probably shortest in the financial sector's customer-facing roles. I specifically envision retail brokerage, institutional sales, and investment banking rainmakers as the career paths that winnow out honest people very quickly. The pressures to meet performance goals and earn bonuses are largest in those fields. Opportunities to deceive investors appear daily. The biggest liars and laziest trust fund babies win the retail production games.
Anyone who considers a career in finance should think very hard about the choice they will face soon after they begin work. Personal integrity and career success in a large enterprise become mutually exclusive at some point during upward career progression. Employees will choose one path over another. Choosing personal integrity usually leads to unemployment. Choosing career success usually means making ethical compromises. Those compromises come with severe legal risks that cannot stay buried forever in an era of pervasive surveillance. Having both integrity and success is possible with self-employment. I have extended my career's half-life by working for myself.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Maximizing Value In The Alfidi Capital Network
The new year gives me an excuse to review the connections in my network. I decided who's worth keeping and who no longer suits my professional needs. I used to be a compulsive networker when I had no network at all. I can afford to be more selective now. I just dropped quite a few LinkedIn connections that I've had for years. They've proven to be disappointments by not advancing their own careers and not helping me advance mine. Good riddance.
Porter Gale's Your Network Is Your Net Worth describes one way of viewing a professional network. Anecdotes about building a brand and finding sweet spots are just the beginning. A professional network grows over time and needs management. I like a garden analogy to visualize my network. Food-bearing plants require water, sunlight, and nutrients to add value to a diet. The gardener must also pull weeds periodically. I cultivate my network pretty much the same way. I plant people in my garden because I think they'll yield me some nutrition, and I pull the idiots who turn out to be weeds.
I have little patience for networking self-help books that are heavy on motivation but light on bottom-line justification. A garden has an ROI because it should yield produce (or at least pretty flowers) that have market value after investing time and resources. Spending my time cultivating people who won't help me grow is a waste, and if they're not growing themselves then they beg to be trimmed out of my life. My totally subjective ROI for a professional network starts with the monetary value of my time, which increases with more web traffic I attract and speaking engagements I obtain. It ends with the income my network yields for me personally.
There are ways to add objective criteria to my subjective network analysis, and they should improve my ROI. Value network analysis assigns financial values to connections and the transactions between them. I cannot conduct transactions with the Alfidi Capital business model so my network will never add value to that business. It can only prove useful to me as a starting database for analysis, and some metrics from social network analysis may prove useful. This might make a decent research report.
Some clueless networkers still insist on connecting with anyone and everyone on the theory that numbers are all that matters. They don't understand that virtual relationships must have real-world depth to matter. LinkedIn admonishes its members to keep it real and declines to endorse LION behavior. I do not believe a typical LION can evaluate their network's ROI but it gives them bragging rights among other cubicle dwellers and satisfies their immature egos. Good luck adding another thousand idiots to a network.
I would rather have a network of ten high-performing geniuses than a network of 1000 duds. I disconnected my LinkedIn connections who had never contacted me with business offers and were not advancing into high-powered phases of their own careers. I'm less interested in a long-ago contact who is a junior supervisor in retail than I am in a serial entrepreneur or professional investor. I decline a lot of invitations to connect, both in person and online, because I must have some way to judge someone's character and abilities first. I am going to make it more difficult for people to get to know me. My network reflects me. It has to be top-notch.
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
Stereotypes And Pathologies In Business
We are supposed to live in a post-racial age. Ethnic minorities have broken barriers and obtained America's highest elected and appointed offices. The destruction of prejudicial obstacles to advancement is cause for celebration. What remains to be destroyed are self-imposed pathologies that still hold people back.
I attended a Commonwealth Club event in June featuring Latinas who had succeeded in business. The problems they had faced during their climbs to the top in several professions were not outright discriminatory. I did not get the impression that any of their Caucasian bosses or co-workers had ever mistreated them because of their ethnicity. The event could have replaced the word "Latina" with black, white, old, young, or whatnot and the lessons would have been the same. I came away from the event thinking that career events aimed at ethnic demographics may do more to perpetuate stereotypes than teach people to overcome them.
One good takeaway from that CW Club panel was the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. A mentor is someone who just gives you advice and they're pretty easy to find. A sponsor is someone who actively promotes your career, partly because they want to look powerful by expanding their influence. Those are harder to find because they must see your work history. I've never had a sponsor because the senior people who saw my work history in large organizations tried to steal my work from me or suppress me out of malice. The few mentors I've had usually gave me the kind of advice that was so simplistic or just plain bad that I would have been better off not taking it. I now listen to no one but myself because I'm tired of losers steering me in the wrong direction.
I've digressed from the subject of self-imposed stereotypes. There are large cottage industries that cater to people who need to feel victimized before they can feel good about themselves. Check out The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Multicultural Counseling Psychology. I guess this is for folks who think Jung and Freud were biased. Equal treatment before the law and in the workplace presumes human beings are innately equal in potential ability and moral worth. Our Declaration of Independence implies that such innate equality is what makes America great. Constructing a "separate but equal" psychological paradigm defeats every gender and racial equality movement that strengthened America.
Organizations like the National Latina Business Women Association do good work if they can help Latinas move up in the world. The risk of perpetuating stereotypes lies in organizations outgrowing or outliving their chartered purpose. Here's a story from my youth. My parents were long-time members of the Order Sons of Italy in America, which was originally chartered to advocate for the well-being of Italian immigrants at a time when those folks were the headline-grabbing minority in America. That ethnic sub-group is now fully assimilated but the old-timers in OSIA still won't disband it or merge it with more mainstream Italian-American cultural appreciation societies. I remember the old OSIA coots from my youth who refused to speak English during bocce ball tournaments and always referred to themselves as "Italians" rather than Americans. Their pathology was a lifelong affliction and they had only themselves to blame.
No one in OSIA ever encouraged me to seek upward mobility. They preferred the comfortable ignorance of a shared identity as outcasts on the margins of American society. They aren't the only group that revels in a marginal status. I completely abandoned the San Francisco veterans' community because I got sick of its collective bottom-feeding mentality advocating permanent victimhood. Today's unassimilated ethnic minorities face the same hazard. Staying too long among people who love being victims will turn even the most ambitious strivers into a new generation of victims. Don't let it happen to you.
I attended a Commonwealth Club event in June featuring Latinas who had succeeded in business. The problems they had faced during their climbs to the top in several professions were not outright discriminatory. I did not get the impression that any of their Caucasian bosses or co-workers had ever mistreated them because of their ethnicity. The event could have replaced the word "Latina" with black, white, old, young, or whatnot and the lessons would have been the same. I came away from the event thinking that career events aimed at ethnic demographics may do more to perpetuate stereotypes than teach people to overcome them.
One good takeaway from that CW Club panel was the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. A mentor is someone who just gives you advice and they're pretty easy to find. A sponsor is someone who actively promotes your career, partly because they want to look powerful by expanding their influence. Those are harder to find because they must see your work history. I've never had a sponsor because the senior people who saw my work history in large organizations tried to steal my work from me or suppress me out of malice. The few mentors I've had usually gave me the kind of advice that was so simplistic or just plain bad that I would have been better off not taking it. I now listen to no one but myself because I'm tired of losers steering me in the wrong direction.
I've digressed from the subject of self-imposed stereotypes. There are large cottage industries that cater to people who need to feel victimized before they can feel good about themselves. Check out The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Multicultural Counseling Psychology. I guess this is for folks who think Jung and Freud were biased. Equal treatment before the law and in the workplace presumes human beings are innately equal in potential ability and moral worth. Our Declaration of Independence implies that such innate equality is what makes America great. Constructing a "separate but equal" psychological paradigm defeats every gender and racial equality movement that strengthened America.
Organizations like the National Latina Business Women Association do good work if they can help Latinas move up in the world. The risk of perpetuating stereotypes lies in organizations outgrowing or outliving their chartered purpose. Here's a story from my youth. My parents were long-time members of the Order Sons of Italy in America, which was originally chartered to advocate for the well-being of Italian immigrants at a time when those folks were the headline-grabbing minority in America. That ethnic sub-group is now fully assimilated but the old-timers in OSIA still won't disband it or merge it with more mainstream Italian-American cultural appreciation societies. I remember the old OSIA coots from my youth who refused to speak English during bocce ball tournaments and always referred to themselves as "Italians" rather than Americans. Their pathology was a lifelong affliction and they had only themselves to blame.
No one in OSIA ever encouraged me to seek upward mobility. They preferred the comfortable ignorance of a shared identity as outcasts on the margins of American society. They aren't the only group that revels in a marginal status. I completely abandoned the San Francisco veterans' community because I got sick of its collective bottom-feeding mentality advocating permanent victimhood. Today's unassimilated ethnic minorities face the same hazard. Staying too long among people who love being victims will turn even the most ambitious strivers into a new generation of victims. Don't let it happen to you.
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
The Haiku of Finance for 04/03/13
Artistic career
Sell dumb stuff to rich patrons
Rake in the big cash
Sell dumb stuff to rich patrons
Rake in the big cash
Sunday, March 31, 2013
The Haiku of Finance for 03/31/13
Turn in that report
Boss must review the details
You get no credit
Boss must review the details
You get no credit
Sunday, September 04, 2011
The Limerick of Finance for 09/04/11
The unemployed still have it rough
Seeking jobs when there aren't enough
When part-timers compete
The jobless feel the heat
Finding stable work really is tough
Seeking jobs when there aren't enough
When part-timers compete
The jobless feel the heat
Finding stable work really is tough
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Contraction In Financial Careers Long Overdue
I can get pretty darn ornery when the subject of careers in finance makes the news. BofA's plan for throwing away a big chunk of its workforce gives rise to a whole bunch of discussion on how far it will go. That article makes me giggle when I read that "anybody who could walk and talk" could have landed a job in the middle of the last decade. Folks, I had an MBA from a pretty good school and I had to settle for entry-level jobs that paid next to nothing, and I went completely without job offers for several years after getting that now-worthless MBA. Add "family pedigree" to the walking and talking criteria and you've got a viable MBA job candidate.
The article is generally correct that hiring in finance has been overdone for years and will now permanently contract to a more sustainable level. That also means that MBA enrollments should contract, since the workforce won't need so many MBA-certified people to replace existing employees. The MBA degree will eventually revert to what it was decades ago, when the top 20 programs were a rite of passage for blue-bloods destined to keep publicly held companies under the control of private families.
Let this be a warning to anyone considering an MBA as a prerequisite for a career change. Don't do it, people. You don't need it to get the entry-level jobs of the future that will be available in farming, recycling, and suburban deconstruction.
The article is generally correct that hiring in finance has been overdone for years and will now permanently contract to a more sustainable level. That also means that MBA enrollments should contract, since the workforce won't need so many MBA-certified people to replace existing employees. The MBA degree will eventually revert to what it was decades ago, when the top 20 programs were a rite of passage for blue-bloods destined to keep publicly held companies under the control of private families.
Let this be a warning to anyone considering an MBA as a prerequisite for a career change. Don't do it, people. You don't need it to get the entry-level jobs of the future that will be available in farming, recycling, and suburban deconstruction.
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