But there’s one critical difference: Bill Gates and his entrepreneur-peers started with an idea, took extraordinary personal and financial risk, and were lucky enough to build meaningful companies (most fail, please remember). Corporate managers, on the other hand, are neither tasked with creating whole new industries nor required to take those risks, but they want to be paid as if they did.
Forecasts and forecasters are essential lubricants to the wheels of global commerce, and prediction markets may very well change them, all for the better.
Before prediction markets, the firm - and specifically its stakeholders - bore the risk of failure if decisions like that were made poorly, whereas now business leaders can manage their upside and their risk with uncanny accuracy. But only if they try.
Lost in the hubub of the HP board spying scandal is the event that triggered it: a member of the board of directors was found to have leaked confidential information. At minimum, this sows distrust among directors and nearly assures that the board cannot work effectively.
This is high-level thinking with so many variables and unknowns that one’s experience and intuition must fill the gaps to reach a desired outcome.
We may indeed be poised for a pullback in share prices, and maybe these firms will lead the way down, but I really think the whole options argument is a red herring.
He was first among enduring management thinkers, and the last of an in-between generation.
Today’s trouble is just another version of “options as currency printing press”, which is merely a sophisticated way of looting the neighborhood.
The Refco situation is not just going to hell in a handbasket, but on the express track. Yesterday, the NYSE halted trading in its stock; its bonds and traded debt have fallen at least as low as 30 cents on the dollar (down from 108 before the news broke); and the company suspended operations […]
There’s no doubt that losing one’s pension or health insurance is a problem of epic proportions, but this is like quite like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We’ve all seen this coming for a long, long time and we ignored it.