Being a CFO and other topics

Not just finance, hobbies too ....

Month: March 2016

Reading Comic Books the modern way

By

On March 10, 2016

In Comic Books, General, Hobbies

With the recent success of super hero movies and TV programs, especially the Marvel Universe movies, liking comic books is solidly back in the mainstream. That is probably a little bit of an exaggeration as comic books have been widely popular for decades and decades. They are about the purest example of popular fiction out there and for a very long time the comics code authority kept them no worse than PG rated and a G rating was probably closer to the truth except for the violence.
What I think happened is that the mass market appeal dropped in the 1980’s and they started appealing to the collector crowd and not so much to the regular kid. Newsstand sales became much less important and specialty comic book sales became more important. There were still plenty of Saturday morning cartoons and I don’t think there ever was a period without at least a TV show that was super hero based in some way, but the comics themselves moved solidly up in printing quality and cost and moved away from dime sales to younger kids.
So there was a whole portion of the nerd population that was into comic books when the average person wasn’t. The late 1970’s and the 1980’s was my period of reading comics in a more classic way. I went to the comic store weekly and bought what I had allocated from my allowance. I quickly learned to buy a bag and a cardboard insert and I carefully read and saved my comics. I think I was a very typical cross-section of the group that would like them. I was playing D&D, reading SF and Fantasy, had just started programming on my high school’s Apple ][+ computers, and I was reading comic books. At the time, I was a big Marvel fan, and in particular, the X-Men and any comics associated with them. I also liked The New Teen Titans a lot and read the occasional Batman issue.
By the time I got to my last year of University, I had a pretty decent sized if narrow collection and I had some bills I needed to pay. There was a large comics book dealing in Montreal (called 1000000 Comix or something similar) that advertised in the comics themselves and I took my collection out to the West Island and sold it to them. That trip was important to me in a few ways. The first is that I was able to negotiate better than average dealer buy prices for my comics. The second is that I was actually at their warehouse, and I got a first hand chance to see just how big an industry comic collecting was. The owner had well over 1,000,000 comics there. I was able to find an interview of the owner from back in 1986 on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j03FeFuZkg
After I sold off my collection, I occasionally would buy and read a comic, but I was travelling and moving a lot after college and hauling around comics just didn’t seem like the best use of my time and space. I missed reading them, but they were not very convenient when on planes and packing suitcases as they were guaranteed to be ruined. The Batman movies came out, and that rekindled some interest in comics. I still had the same problem, though. Too many moves, too easy to damage the comics when on planes or in hotels. Plus, for the time it takes to read a comic, they take up a fair amount of room and add too much weight to your luggage. I had pretty much resigned myself to reading only the occasional “blockbuster” series that came out in graphic novel status, until maybe 5 years ago I found a new way to buy and read comic books called Comixology. Comixology not only had real comic books from Marvel and DC in ebook form, they had a very good reader for my iPad. At that time, you could even buy the comics directly from your iPad (today you need to visit their website).
Comixology developed a very good method to read comics on a smartphone screen or on an iPad called Guided View. Basically, they give you the choice of reading the whole page on one screen similar to how it would look on the actual comic book page or by naturally zooming in panel by panel (even word balloon by word balloon) . On top of that, they had regular sales of back issues for 99 cents each.
I now had a way to buy comics and could buy them anywhere I had an internet connection and my storage worries were solved. What followed over the last 5 or so years was an explosion of me buying comics, both new issues and catching up on back issues. I now have over 5,000 comics in ebook form and new comics Wednesday is a day I look forward to again. Comixology carries the comics from many publishers, not just DC and Marvel and their back issue library keeps growing and growing.
If you used to like reading comics when you were younger, or even if you never did, I suggest that you give it a try. The maturity level of comic books writing and the art has greatly increased compared to the time before the 1980s. The comic code authority is gone, but the mainstream comics are still owned by major media companies (Disney for Marvel and Time Warner for DC) so they still are tame enough. Many titles are solidly in the PG range, but only smaller publishers make comics that would be R rated.
I had dropped out of reading comics right when many of the smaller, independent publishers were springing up and starting to gain market share. A good example is Image Comics that publishes The Walking Dead, the source for the popular TV series. Image was founded in 1982 by several artists to try and keep ownership and copyright of their creative work. Another example is Mirage Studios which published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I actually started reading TMNT when it first came out, but I think it was the only independent comic I did read back then. Comixology opened up those comics publishers to me and I was able to greatly expand my comic book reading horizon.
The Comixology app on a tablet makes it very easy to read and enjoy the comics. You can drop in and out of guided view if you want to see how the comics were originally laid out on the page. The artwork looks very good and you can carry many comics on your device with all the books available on the server if you want them. I was a little worried that maybe they might go bankrupt and I would lose access to them, but then they were bought by Amazon.com and I am a lot less worried today.
I could go on for quite a while describing which series I like (the main character/series I buy is Batman but I buy quite a few others regularly) but I think it is better that you try it yourself if you want to take a look. You can download the app for iOS or Android tablets or read the comics right on your computer screen if you want to.
www.comixology.com
If you used to read comics when you were younger and now are coming back to them, I should warn you that DC and Marvel have had several events where they have blown up and reset their universes. For example, as of this writing Batman is Commissioner Gordon, not Bruce Wayne and Thor is a woman. They also have taken a jump to much more of a PG rating and there are plenty of publishers that go past that. Comics have always been a place that pushed the boundaries of social acceptance, and this is even more the case today. The X-Men have featured bigotry and the effects on the mutants since their very first issues, and the comic has carried on that tradition to the comics today. A good example is homosexuality. There are many openly gay characters in the mainstream comics today (Midnighter by DC features a gay main character). Someone wrote a letter to Marvel a few years back complaining about a gay couple in the X-Men comics. Marvel responded by having them get married and that was on the cover and the main story that issue. I don’t think anyone should get offended by such stories, but the language and open nudity and sex scenes in some titles from the independent publishers might not be appropriate for younger readers. I even have to be careful on planes from time to time in case something is too explicit.
I have had to slow down my buying a little as I have a few too many back issues to catch up on, but maybe I’ll be sitting next to someone reading this one day in the future and then I’ll know that my blog helped someone else become a fan or rediscover their fandom.

Marvel Encyclopedia

The DC Comics Encyclopedia, Updated and Expanded Edition

In case you want a preview of some upcoming movies:

Captain American vs. Iron Man
Civil War

Batman vs. Superman
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Infinity Gauntlet
Infinity Gauntlet

Working with investment bankers

By

On March 8, 2016

In CFO, Finance, Working With Investment Banks

If you have followed a normal career progression through finance to make it to CFO, you probably worked with investment bankers at least once along the way. It is possible you did not, maybe you are at a start-up that is just now successful enough to go public or do some form of pre-public fund raising and you are dealing with bankers for the first time. It is a fallacy to believe that working for a big company means you would have worked with investment bankers as you climbed the ladder as normally only the Treasury department and the CFO do that, division finance staff normally are not involved. Even if you are involved, it is as a data source, not negotiating the deal. Mid-sized companies tend not to have formal Treasury departments and are a lot more egalitarian, so a much better chance of gaining some experience.

This blog is about working with the bankers themselves. Each investment bank is different and has resources far beyond the bankers that directly cover you, but you will probably never see the rest of the bank, just the small staff that covers you and the few people within their bank that they introduce you too. I try not to be too caught up in the name of the bank they work for and focus more on what my coverage team can deliver. Obviously, there are different tiers of banks, but which ones want to serve you is already at least partially driven by your company size. There just is not enough business for larger investment banks to devote resources to smaller companies.

Investment banks and their bankers get a lot of negative press. The recent, Oscar nominated film “The Big Short” is a good example. They usually are a topic in just about every major political campaign, and populist anger is stirred up against them. The current hit musical “Hamilton” has some of the Founding Fathers attacking them as doing nothing but moving money around. At the end of this blog, I will link some books that are quite critical on bankers and their culture. I can tell you that I have worked with quite a few bankers over my career and I have cannot remember working with any that are like the tell all books I have read, but the banking culture certainly is a culture into and of themselves. I will also link a few more “studious” books as well, if only for balance.

Let’s start with describing the three types of bankers you are likely to work with. The first, and most important, in your coverage banker. The leader of that team is almost always a “managing director” and typically has a small team that works for them. The MD is usually an industry specialist but otherwise a generalist. The next type of banker that you are likely to meet is a product specialist. There are many different products that a bank can sell to the market or to you and the product specialist is the one that supports the MD in pitching the products. Examples are syndicated loans, hedging instruments, convertible bonds, asset backed securities. The bank probably has someone who specializes in that product. The final banker that you are likely to meet is someone from one of the “desks”. This may or may not be one of the specialists that came to sell a product to you, but the important ones you want to meet are the heads of the Equity Capital Markets desk or the Debt Capital Markets desk.

The “desks” are always a little hard to understand, but the easiest way to think of them is that they run the sales force that will be selling your instrument to investors and they are the ones that decide on how it will get allocated between the bank’s customers (not you in this case).

What is very important here is that your coverage banker must be experienced and have clout internally. If you do a deal run by that bank, you need to best and most experienced team executing the deal and the relationship that the coverage banker has with the desk is key. A good relationship can result in above average resources devoted to your deal. A bad relationship or lack of clout in their bank and you might get the the C team and so-so execution.

One question that I get from time to time is how do you even get covered by a bank or bankers so you can get access to them and their resources. I find that question a little strange because bankers survive on fee income. So if there is a way for them to earn a reasonable fee, you should be able to get the attention of a banker. The main way to meet a banker up front is through your lawyers, accountants or through your investors if you are VC funded. If you have a deal for them or a good possibility of a deal in the near future, you will get some attention at least. If you actually have a transaction like an IPO, you can do a “bake-off”, and get a few banks to compete for your business.

Choosing a banker

Let’s say you have had your bake-off, or you have met a few bankers and now you are trying to decide which one to go with. I’ll try and list out some of the things that I consider the most.

The first is that is this is not a smaller transaction, then you probably will have several different banks working on the deal. Whoever you choose as the lead banker (the bank on the left of the list of bankers on the front page of the offering document) will end up controlling the deal, so I generally try and focus the most on picking that one. As an aside, banks and their bankers are very competitive and expect to have several ridiculous conversations about position and typeface and variations of the title they are called. You will need to make it very clear that the banks are to work together well. Most are professional, but they also want to position themselves for the next deal and they are perfectly happy to throw their competition under a bus if given a chance.

I tend to look for experience, both in the bank and from the banker, trustworthiness, and strategic sense. All banks will have two different experience elements in their initial pitch books – league tables and deal tombstones. They will cut industry data in a way that shows that they are a leader, usually the leader in whatever deal they are trying to get onto (or your industry if an initial meeting). They will list out all the deals they were on, sometimes even if they had only very minor roles if they need to, but usually any deals they were some form of bookrunners.

I am a little cynical about league tables because the data chosen is cherry-picked to make the pitching bank look good, but they do have some reference value because if you have 3-4 banks come see you, you can compare the tables and see if there is a pattern as to who is number 2 or three in all of them. That is a good indication of who the leaders really are. Having a big market share and being a leader for a long time can be a good indication of how strong the bank is. And if the banker cannot make his bank look good, then you need to ask yourself how good a job they will do for you with investors.

The tombstones are much less useful. I normally look at the dates to make sure enough are recent, and I ask if the banker and his team personally worked on the deals presented. With typical turnover, anything more than several years old was likely done by a different team and different leaders at the bank.

The next criteria is trustworthiness. This may be surprising, but even with the books listed at the end and my cynicism about the process, I like my current bankers very much and I have had almost uniformly positive experiences with them. What I need to know is that are they there to help me as their priority or themselves or their bank and if they can keep details confidential. Both are easy to tell. Are they listening and advising or are they selling? Are they sharing details of competition that would make you uncomfortable if they shared the same about you?

One of the best ways to tell if you are a priority is coverage (visits, phone calls, emails) even when there is not a deal on the table. The next best indication is if they lend you resources, typically an associate or two to help in a project you are working on. Banks tend to have very good in house models for M&A, for example, or they may have very good knowledge and advice on what to use for standard valuation metrics.

The final part, their strategic ability, is the toughest to determine from just one meeting. Normally this comes out over time. I already have defined that the purpose of strategy is to win. If you find a banker that can help you win more often and by bigger margins, then you have found someone worth their fees. The first thing you need as a start is that they have to look at your business and start giving suggestions. Could be a suggestion on recapitalizing your company. Could be intel on what the competition is up to. Maybe how to reposition yourself with your investor base. The idea is some value added advice that. Comes from them and. shows their understanding of your business and how it is positioned in the marketplace. I have found that the average banker I work with to be quite smart, And the more experienced and business savvy ones can give you very good advice.

Fees

Fees are always negotiable to a certain point. If there is push back on banking fees, you can often tackle it another way via professional fees like the lawyers and accountants. Your lawyers and accountants can tell you what is usual and standard. Do not be afraid to push back here. There is a risk that if you push the fee too low the desk and sales people may not be too excited to sell your deal, but normally only the hugest deals get the very low fees. You can move part of the fee into a success or bonus fee payable at your discretion for over performance.

This isn’t an area to ignore as they can add up, but better performance can give you much better terms than expected and will save a lot more than a small fee reduction up front. Of course, the fee reduction is guaranteed and the extra performance is not, but you do want a motivated banking team.

Indicative Ranges

When a banker is pitching a deal to you, they can be a little too aggressive on the terms they say they can close a deal at. I have seen interest rates quoted well below the last few deals for similar companies quoted to me. Some think that once they have won your business and you are committed and on the road with them, they can always talk you up and blame market conditions. You are somewhat trapped and exposed once you start a deal process. This is where pushing the fee down and making some contingent on performance helps. If they start waffling on their indicative terms once you put some of their fees at risk, you know they are not as sure as they claim. You can always ask them what rate they would backstop the deal at or if they are willing to make it a bought deal and they take the risk or reward of the marketing. This is an area where getting several different banks pitching gives you a much better read on the market.

You need to trust your banker and believe that he is honest if you are going to be happy working with them. Their honesty about indicative ranges is a good touch point. No one can really guarantee what the market will be when the deal is launched, but over promising is dangerous to you. Someone that is not scared but who properly prepares you before a deal launches is very important. Fund raising is very much your responsibility as CFO and delivering a good deal reflects well on you. You need a banker that is a reliable team member.

A few final items

I have been out at events where several CFO’s are being taken to dinner. I find it quite questionable that some take the opportunity to order the most expensive bottle of wine. As much as you will see stories from the books I linked below about the excesses of Wall Street, the real crazy days are way behind us. You don’t want your banker to take advantage of you, so give him the same respect and courtesy. This may be someone you build up a relationship that spans years and maybe they are the one that give you the recommendation that gives you a board seat later in your career.

If you borrow staff and get additional support over time, remember that and try and steer business their way. If they do well, recommend them to other business contacts. They can be very helpful to you personally and can make a big difference in your career prospects, and it is much easier to work with people you respect. Don’t forget their lower level staff that work on your deals. Far too often the celebration at the end forgets your staff and the banking associates. Try to make sure that they get included. If not appropriate for the formal closing dinner, have the junior bankers take your junior staff out.

Finally, don’t get too caught up in the anti-banking media hype. There are plenty of good bankers out there that really care a out their clients. Be careful, remember that they are probably smarter than you with much more resources than you can bring to bear, but buil the right mutually beneficial relationship.

Books and Movies (I have read or seen these myself)

The Culture of Bankers

Liar’s Poker

Liar’s Poker (Norton Paperback)

Liar’s Poker (25th Anniversary Edition): Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (25th Anniversary Edition) Kindle

The Big Short

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Bankers Behaving Badly

Straight to Hell

Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals

Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD)

The Buy Side

The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale of Spectacular Excess

The Industry

Too Big to Fail

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System–and Themselves

The Bankers’ New Clothes

The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It

Book Reviews – Larry Correia’s Grimnoir series

By

On March 6, 2016

In Book review, General

As a reminder, my Sunday book reviews are with the idea that you are in the airport and about to leave on a trip and need something to keep you entertained or informed while travelling.  I link to Kindle versions (could just as easily be Nook or whatever is popular in your home country) so you can just buy and download them if you decided to give them a try.  I prefer not to travel with paper copies of books if I can avoid it for weight and clutter reasons.

Larry Correia is famous for his Monster Hunter International series (and political cause reasons that have nothing to do with enjoying his books).  I enjoy the Monster Hunter series, but I actually prefer the Grimnoir series instead.

These books are set in a fictional period after WWI.  The world is essentially a derivative of our world, except that an event in the past triggered the ability for some humans to use magic.  Exactly what the source of magic is for the world is a mystery at the start of the series and it is slowly revealed through the trilogy.

The series pits a secret society called Grimnoir that tries to stop and fight against improper use of magic.  The main foe in the series is the Prime Minister of Imperial Japan and his agents.  The Japanese have a more advanced understanding of how to use runes to augment the innate magic of their agents and they are more technologically and magically advanced in their weapons of war.

WWI was ended through the use of ‘Tesla” beam weapons which for all intents and purposes can be thought of as being a nuclear death ray.  So there is somewhat of a standoff between imperial Japan and the rest of the world powers because of fear that the Tesla weapons will be used again.  They were used to end WWI and the devastation is still scarring Europe.

Although the point of view switches between several more characters, then two main characters are “Heavy” Jake Sullivan and Faye Vierra.  Jake is a hard boiled P.I. in full noir tradition.  Jake is a very interesting character in that he is a physically large character, and his magical ability (localized gravity control to make things heavier or lighter) typically goes with slower thinking people but not true for him as he is as smart as he is large.  Although the cliché of the hard boiled detective with an unbreakable code of honor is the foundation for his role in the books, he becomes more complex as the books continue.

Faye is a little bit of a Mary Sue character as her abilities grow and evolve as the series goes on as needed by the plot.  Overall the magic system in the series is reasonably consistent, but the heroes are able to break previously established rules and their powers scale higher as the series progresses.

Mr. Correia is also a gun enthusiast and occasionally the narration gets slightly derailed as he details out the latest hardware one of the characters is using.  This is nowhere near as constant as happens in his Monster Hunter International series, but it is a little distracting when it does happen.

With the above caveats in mind, this series is just about epitomizes what is needed to meet “entertain you on a flight”.  The action is pretty much non-stop, well written and fun.  The characters are not exactly multidimensional, but they are fun and easy to identify and they certainly do move the story along.  The villains are interesting and have their own motivations that are not “be pure evil”.  The source of the magic is the world is slowly revealed and opens up the final quest in the book.  The ending is satisfying and I stayed up late a few times to finish the book that I had started.

I give the series a very good rating for pure entertainment value and I think pretty anyone looking for a fun read will enjoy it.

I originally “read” the books by listening via Audible.com and I found the narration good and entertaining.

 

Hard Magic – Book 1

Hard Magic – Kindle version

Spellbound – Book 2

Spellbound – Kindle version

Warbound – Book 3

Warbound – Kindle version

 

Pressing Words – How I started my blog

By

On March 3, 2016

In General, Hobbies

This blog entry is going to be self-referential, because it is about what I did to get this site up and running and what I discovered along the way.  I am brand new to this and I have never done most of the things I am going today, so all of it is new to me.  I did have a website on Geocities ages and ages ago, plus something hosted by Comcast well over a decade ago.  The only real HTML I had ever done was in notepad, and I cannot say I was all that skilled, but I did learn the tagging system at least.

A few years ago I received some form of Black Friday advertisement from GoDaddy.com for what was essentially a free domain for a year (you needed to pay some small ICAN fee, but otherwise no real cost).  I reserved mgpotter.com for no reason other than vanity.  It is my name, after all.  I had some vague idea of using it for something, but I was pretty busy and never got around to doing very much.

About 6 months ago, after yet another month of intensive work to get a financing for a solar project over the finish line, I decided that I needed a little more investment into myself.  I have already written a blog on starting to play D&D again, and taking the time to actually write was one of the things I wanted to do.  I thought that I had enough experience as a CFO of public companies (12 years now) to add value in sharing my experience and I also wanted to write about the different things I do for fun.

The past Black Friday there was another sale email that came about hosting WordPress on your own GoDaddy site and I decided to try that.  I had absolutely zero experience with WordPress but it looked like it was the leading blogging product out there.  I now know that it is actually one of the leading website or content management systems in widespread use today, but it certainly is pretty powerful for blogging.

Once I had bought the WordPress option, I decided to start writing.  I wanted to get at least a few weeks done in advance so if my schedule became too busy I would not lack content.  I’m not a few weeks ahead now, but that is OK as I’ll have some time to bank some more blogs soon.

I decided to post Tuesday for CFO topics and Thursday for other topics.  I decided on the very first topic while drinking some beers after an SCA fighter practice.  One of the other knights there was interested in my put selling strategy and that was my first blog I wrote.  Over the Christmas break I wrote most of the first month of content.  This was just typing into Word on my iPad, I hadn’t done more than initiate the WordPress option at this point.

Now that I had some content done, I turned to actually getting the blog part working.  I decided that instead of reading a book on how to set things up, I would just try and do it cold.  I had deliberately chosen to host under my own name and to keep away from politics as a topic to write about because I spend about ½ my time in China and wordpress.com is blocked there.

There are many different hosts that support WordPress.  GoDaddy has a nice and integrated approach called “managed WordPress” but I even could have hosted it on my Asustor NAS if I had wanted to.  By using an external site, I was able to outsource the bandwidth and the maintenance of the WordPress program itself.  Managed WordPress means that WordPress itself is always kept up to date.  The releases for the major NAS are not as regular as WordPress itself, so you may have more security issues if you self host.  If you just want a small, local version of a blog or a website, then hosting on a NAS could be a good solution.

The first step seemed to be choosing a theme which seems to be the look and feel of your blog site.  I initially used one of the prominent starter themes called 2015, but I didn’t like the multi-column look.  I searched through for something simple and found a theme called Lovecraft and decided that I liked it.  There are thousands of free themes and lots of themes that you need to pay for as well.  I have marked exploring themes down as something to do in the future.

My chosen theme used a horizontal picture across the top and I made my first design choice and picked a picture of the effigy of William Marshall that I had taken myself at the Temple Church in London.  I have always been fond and interested in him and I was able to figure out how to upload the picture onto my site.  WordPress uses a media repository and serves up pictures from there.  You also can use a URL to a picture if you want that instead.

With a theme and a top picture chosen, I clicked on “publish” and now I had live content.  I used wechat to get a colleague in China to check if my site would load.  A quick test later and it did work.  I puzzled and puzzled over how users were supposed to login to make comments.  I even contacted GoDaddy customer service and they helped me to figure it out.  Nothing appears  on the main page, but there is an option if you go to the individual blog page (click on a headline on the front page if you did not use a link to go directly there).

A blog with no readers is not that useful, so I posted the link to my page on my Facebook feed.  I did that manually, and noticed that the picture of William showed up as a preview.

The next thing I experimented with was publishing into the future.  WordPress makes that easy with an obvious scheduling option.  I tested it out, scheduling my post to show up the next mornings and, sure enough, when I woke up, there was the post published for the world to see.

I grew concerned that perhaps with the comment system turned on, that I might attract spam.  So the first option I looked for was something to handle spam.  There was a prominent option called “plugins” on the left menu when I signed in as the editor of the site (you can have multiple editors).  Just like themes, there is a powerful built-in search I was able to use.  A simple search for spam and I was able to find a plug in with a very large number of users called Akismet.  It was pretty simple to install and I quickly had spam protection.

The next thing I wanted is something that would track users.  I know that Google has quite an extensive suite of options to track visitors to websites called Google Analytics and I search for that in plug-ins .  I found one called Google Analytics for WP Dashboard.  I later found out that Yoast is probably the most popular, but the one I picked is near the top in popularity as well.  That plug-in inserted the needed tracking code into my website and now I could see statistics on the tens of people visiting my blog.

I also knew that there was something called Search Engine Optimization of SEO, and I searched for a plug-in that does that.  I picked All In One SEO Pack and it seemed to do what I would expect such a plug-in to do.  There is a Yoast version of that as well.  I am still not 100% sure what all the options do there, but I have slowly started using the different features.

By now I was several weeks into the blog being posted and was posting links on my Facebook and LinkedIn.  This was completely manual at this point.  I knew I would be travelling and I needed more options.  I again did a little searching in the plugins and some Google searching as well, and discovered that Jetpack which is by the same company that does WordPress is a very popular option.  It can automatically post to many popular social media sites but does have some limitations like it does not post to LinkedIn groups.  Since the few groups I belong to have the broadest reach anyways, I thought a more manual touch was appropriate and that did not bother me.

Jetpack actually adds quite a lot more features than just posting to social media .  It adds a much better commenting system but it is hosted on the WordPress site so it is not a good solution for users in China.  It adds the option to subscribe to new posts but the final step to that involves the WordPress site as well.  I may turn that on anyways.  Is does add the sharing buttons which are now on my site and an optimized theme for mobile devices which I am trying out.  If you are looking at starting a blog or a content-rich website, you may want to consider using all the other features of Jetpack.

The final thing I added to my blog was advertising.  Google and Amazon seem to be the most popular advertising options out there.  I did not want to make any advertising too obtrusive.  Far too many posts on LinkedIn and Facebook are just click bait with ad after ad in the middle of the article you are trying to read.  I am trying to keep the ads out of the way.  Because Google is blocked, I decided to go with Amazon.com.  I signed up for Amazon Associates which gives you a special ID and the ability to generate links with the ID embedded.  I first used links for books and then tried to figure out how to post a more generic ad as well.  There are plug-ins that help, but I found that using the text widget with the HTML in it is the best.  I still have not figured out how to place the more natural link for products that is generated, online seems to refer to posting them in HTML mode but I seem to have visual and text as the two modes to post in.

I guess I am now a professional blogger as I have made $0.65 as of this blog being posted.

This has been my process so far, trial and error by someone that has seen some concepts mentioned (like SEO) but never actually had to do anything about it.  I keep discovering extras like featured image which allows each of my posts to have their own image plus the SEO package has it’s own way of populating the OpenGraph (Facebook standard) excerpting.

If you are wondering if I really am a technical CFO, this blog and the process I just described is typical for me.  I am fine with someone showing me what to do, but I like to struggle through things myself to learn.  It really is not that hard or expensive to do.  You can write only on social media, but I feel you have more control and reach on your own website.

As a quick summary – find a host that you trust that can provide the WordPress program.  If you use WordPress itself you limit yourself to non-China visitors but maybe gain additional functionality.  Pick a theme and add in the plug-ins you need.  Publish and publicize.  Don’t be overly annoying when you do the publicity.  Unless you are a large and well established blog, you are unlikely to make any real money from your writing, but there are easy to use ways to monetize yourself a little.

Next up for me is to turn my blog posts into podcasts.  Something else for me to learn from scratch.

Corporate Culture – Hearts at War and Peace

By

On March 1, 2016

In CFO

If strategy, the subject of a previous blog, is what to do, culture is the wellspring of actually doing it. The energy and drive that the company needs to execute comes from the people there and the culture of the company greatly impacts what they do and how successful they will be.

Culture is just about as soft as you can get when you look at leadership. It is feelings and emotions and learned behaviors. Certainly some of it is mirroring the top leadership and how they act, but sometimes it is different. As soft as it is, it is absolutely crucial to making sure your company will succeed. Even with the best technology, the wrong culture can mean you don’t get the full benefit of it or you completely beat even your high expectations.

Here is a reasonable,definition of what corporate culture is from Investopedia:

Corporate culture refers to the beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company’s employees and management interact and handle outside business transactions. Often, corporate culture is implied, not expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the cumulative traits of the people the company hires. A company’s culture will be reflected in its dress code, business hours, office setup, employee benefits, turnover, hiring decisions, treatment of clients, client satisfaction and every other aspect of operations.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporate-culture.asp

Cultures in companies evolve and change over time. The small team that was there at start-up probably had one culture t it might not be the right one 10 years later. A culture that works in one country may not work well in others. For example, some countries require some form of national service and at least all the men and sometimes the women as well have served in the military for a year or two when they were younger. There is a much higher chance that a more hierarchical culture is more natural. If you expand into or out of such a culture from a more free wheeling culture, you might run into clashes and resentment.

Although culture is not strategy, morale and people working together obviously is a key concern of strategists. In his Earth book of his The Book of Five Rings, Musashi says:

“The comparison with carpentry is a metaphor in reference to the notion of houses. We speak of houses of the nobility, houses of warriors, the Four houses [there are also four different schools of tea], ruin of houses, thriving of houses, the style of the house, the tradition of the house, and the name of the house. Since we refer to houses all the time, I have chosen the carpenter as a metaphor.”

In the examination of corporate culture and how it fits with strategy, you need to know what you have and what state it is in, you need to know what style of house you have and what the traditions are.

“The master carpenter should take into account the abilities and limitations of his men. Circulating among them, he can know their spirit and different levels of morale, encourage them when necessary, understand what can and cannot be realized, and thus ask nothing unreasonable. The principle of strategy is like this.”

As a member of the senior leadership team, you need to know what you have and what can and cannot be reliably done. If you do not understand the culture of what you are working with, you well thought out strategic moves can easily fall flat. You also cannot only rely on what you have done before, what others do, or what you prefer.

Finally Musashi makes clear that you should not rely on only one weapon but use whatever one is best. So you should be able to cope with whatever the culture is and get good results. If you need a more traditional culture on a job and you are in a “flat” culture, then build a more traditional team within your company.

I will make a broad and sweeping characterization of cultural types:

Hiring priority:

A) Team first – hire based on fit into existing staff without concentrating as much in experience or raw qualifications.
B) Skills first – hire experts based on skills and not so much focus on how they fit with the current team.

Organization structure:

A) Horizontal – very few or no layers. Most employees have immediate access to top leadership. Common in start-ups. Functional roles may be blurred somewhat.
B) Traditional – more defined hierarchy with clear roles and responsibilities, may not be many layers but they are there. Traditional functions exist.
And one final group

A) Transitional – a culture or company that is going through a large change. Maybe because of an M&A event or maybe a significant setback or success made the old mode less useful. Could even be a death of the founder or a handing from one generation to another, something as simple as a CEO change.

There is no obvious right culture or organization for every circumstance and every country you do business in. You can change the culture, but it is never a quick process. How to change a culture is a very demanding process. I will address that topic in a future blog, but you certainly need to create a transition culture before change can happen.

As much as I admire Musashi for his deep insight into strategy, if you approach the company culture looking for the right tool to apply, you are almost guaranteed to fail. The simple reason is that the culture is made up of people, not tools. From a top level strategic view point, the culture is a tool you are handed. In actual execution, you are dealing with people.

The Arbinger Institute has published two excellent books on effective interpersonal relationships. These are Leadership and Self Deception and The Anatomy of Peace. The foundation for both books is the work of philosopher Martin Buber. Buber identified two views you can have towards other people – I Thou and I It. One is seeing others as people and one is seeing people as objects. He actually does not say one is markedly better than the other, he more explores the way our thinking changes depending on how we view the others.  http://www.iep.utm.edu/buber/

The Arbinger Institute has developed the basic point that our thinking changes based on if we see people as people or objects into an entire program to improve interpersonal relationships. It applies just as much to the team first structure or the expertise first structure and they argue that if you want a truly effective and committed company culture, you need to insist that the culture is built on I Thou, not I It.

The heart of the books is the idea that once you view someone as an object, as I It, you commit an act of self betrayal and enter into a state where conflict is much more likely. Once you put yourself into that box, it is hard to get out and others are highly likely to react the same way. Your heart is at war. Not with others, with yourself. Since no one likes to think of themselves as a bad person, you start justifying your behavior. This pattern tends to lead to more conflict and there is so much investment in the conflict that the whole organization becomes frozen in it.

Is not unusual for a company to get stalled in cultural issues, and making sure you do not put yourself into a box (the books have different names for the different self justification archetypes we inflict on ourselves). As CFO, you do not have time to get mired into conflicts caused by the corporate culture, you need empowered teammates that feel that they have good prospects and a leader that sees them as people and not as a means to an end.

Of course, people need to do their jobs and you can have high expectations, but you need to act like a leader, and not allow yourself to work against your natural and best instincts. The culture usually is at least a partial mirror of the leadership and if you set and live the right example, you can influence the culture and that can result in better results over time.

When I first was exposed to the ideas in the books, I thought that it was saying to be soft and overly caring, but that is not the message at all. If you think of your staff as people, not objects, then you will want them to do well and have good careers. That could mean that they need to improve. There is nothing that says you cannot wage war with s heart at peace, just that the way you execute will be better.

This is something that I struggled a lot with earlier in my career because my people sense was off. I was too busy in my box thinking others were slow or incompetent or lazy or all the other labels that spring to mind when you try and justify your own bad behavior. I was lucky and had a few good mentors, but I also was in a larger company that had been around a long time. Many of my peers started in smaller companies and did not have that same opportunity.

So read your Musashi or whatever strategy wizard inspires you. Just don’t forget that you will quickly have to work with the messy people issues soon enough to get things done. Knowing yourself and acting well, staying out of the self betrayal box, keeping your heart at peace when working in teams, that is a skill that you can practice. As Musashi would say, this needs to be considered deeply.

There are a few other topics that I want to explore, such as how to write an earnings release beyond just the outlook section I already wrote about, but I will return to the question of corporate culture soon and in more detail. Toxic corporate cultures are all to prevalent and there is a lot of work here that needs to be done.

Books on avoiding self betrayal

The Anatomy of Peace

The Anatomy of Peace – kindle version

Leadership and Self Deception – getting out of the box

Leadership and Self Deception – getting out of the box kindle version

Page 2 of 2

Previous

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén