The reason the economy is where it is today – me

Last week I got to be a guinea pig. Abbott’s continuing education people wanted to test the value of a new financial modeling class they were considering rolling out to the company. Before they did so, however, they wanted to offer a pilot course for approved individuals to attend for free – as long as the participants offered feedback at the end. My team was one of the ones approached, and being the junior-most member I was dutifully offered up as sacrifice. When I read the description for this class I was quite skeptical. Pshaw! I thought. I have an MBA from the University of Chicago, and I eat P&L statements for breakfast in my current role. What could I possibly learn from this experience?

But I showed up dutifully at the start of this two-day class anyway. The morning of the first day, I learned that we would be breaking up into teams of three to four individuals, and would be running a company for the remainder of the class. The company would be a manufacturing concern, where we would have to make decisions such as how much raw material to buy, how much to produce, what price to set for our goods, what loans to take, and how to manage our expenses. We would get to observe our company for the course of a “year” – at the end of each “month” we would see what happened in the market the instructors created, and have the opportunity to adjust each of the variables above. The emphasis throughout the course would be on managing the financials of the company by monitoring cash flow, the balance sheet, and the income statement, with the goal of learning what made a company financially sound. Pshaw! I thought (again). I got this.

Except that I didn’t. My team, egged on by yours truly, made a couple of bad decisions, caught a few unlucky breaks, and ended up as a marginal takeover target by the end of the game. We did so poorly that we barely had anything of value left at the end, but I took solace in the fact that we weren’t alone. Inevitably, those teams that had individuals with financial backgrounds performed poorly. Instead, the team that won consisted of one person from Abbott’s foodservices division (the people in charge of stocking Abbott’s employee cafeterias), someone from Abbott’s library, and someone from Abbott’s technology arm (the IT folks).

While I spent the game acting out my investment banker fantasy (“Guys, let’s borrow up to our eyeballs and get all the loans we can. This is called ‘leveraging’ in the financial world. What good is it to own a building when it doesn’t do anything for you? Better to sell it, then rent it back, and use the cash from the sale instead.”), and while a fellow financial wizard at a neighboring table urged his team to price their product absurdly low (“Let’s capture market share and crowd out the competition – those suckers won’t be able to compete at these low prices and will go out of business”), the winning team was employing a slightly different strategy. For them, it didn’t make sense to take out large loans, or sell their buildings and land. Instead they borrowed only what they could comfortably repay. Neither did they horse around with pricing too much – they set a decent price that earned them an honest profit, and they reinvested that profit back into the company.

Around halfway through the game it became clear that my team wouldn’t be able to make its debt payments. On the other side of the room it struck the other financial geniuses that they had priced their products so low that they were selling at a loss so bad that they weren’t even covering their expenses. Meanwhile, the librarian, foodservice manager, and tech lady kept chugging along. The humiliation was complete by the end of the game, when each team got to walk around the room and see how the other teams had played the simulation. “Why would you take a loan that you couldn’t repay?” someone would ask. “Why would you sell all your assets?” I had no answer for either question.

I left that two-day seminar happy that I had learned more about financial statements than I could have imagined. Abstract numbers on a sheet weren’t so abstract anymore, and the interconnectedness of the various statements that measured the health of a business became a little less arcane for me, the snooty MBA graduate. But as I packed my things and left class to go home that last day, a depressing thought came to me. I realized, in a flash of distressing brilliance, that it was because of idiots like me that we found ourselves in the economic mess we see now. Some overly clever bankers got together and thought they could game the system, except that the system bit back hard. But as soon as I had this epiphany, I also understood the way we could make sure that this would never happen again: when the dust settles on this economic scandal, and all guilty financial whiz-kids have been identified, they should be stripped naked one by one, taken out back, and slapped silly by librarians, foodservice managers, and tech ladies.

How to write a consumer complaint

I've found my inspiration for any future customer complaint that I ever write. The letter below was written by a Virgin airlines passenger at the conclusion of his flight. You have to check the link to see the pictures that he refers to in his beautiful prose. Enjoy!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/4344890/Virgin-the-worlds-best-passenger-complaint-letter.html

Dear Mr Branson

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.

Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at thehands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [see image 1, above].

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in: [see image 2, above].

I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn't custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.

I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this: [see image 3, above].

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.

Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.

By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation: [see image 4, above].

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.

I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.

Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on: [see image 5, above].

I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel: [see image 6, above].

Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.

My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations: [see image 7, above].

Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.

Richard…. What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.

So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.

As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and begging for sustenance.

Yours Sincererly

XXXX

Paul Charles, Virgin’s Director of Corporate Communications, confirmed that Sir Richard Branson had telephoned the author of the letter and had thanked him for his “constructive if tongue-in-cheek” email. Mr Charles said that Virgin was sorry the passenger had not liked the in-flight meals which he said was “award-winning food which is very popular on our Indian routes.”