The Corporate Image

Companies try to redo their image as well as focus when fortunes turn. They do what individuals do with New Year’s resolutions. Most individuals never seem to take those resolutions seriously.

When companies do it, the program is an expensive undertaking. Moreover, it’s a sign of desperation and poor management when it periodically and habitually occurs.

Customers and the public instinctively feel management may be hiding real problems and that it is all a sign that management is weak or dishonest.

There is a natural tendency not to believe what corporations say and do, because of populist left-leaning media and politicians. Corporate managers have to be doubly careful about image. They can be damned no matter what they say or do.

Anti-Trust Laws and Jobs

The Sherman Antitrust Ac has been relatively timid for over 120 years.

There always is a debate about what actually is a monopoly. Many on the left consider size alone as the deciding factor, when in the past, the competitive effect on the consumer was always important.

The bottom line as to whether there is a monopoly or not should be the effect on the consumer. If the corporate situation being investigated helps the consumer, then there is no monopoly. The whole intent of the Act was in the interest of the public.

What is telling is the administration’s position and the support of lawyers, who are always ready to sue. But such plaintiffs do not always have the consumers’ interest at heart.

What about jobs? Any effects of strict leftward action will be negative as a result.

The Types of Business Management Risks

There are four types of business management risks.

1) Knowing what the possible risks are.

2) The size, types and pitfalls of accounts receivables.

3) Salary excesses, their fringe costs and how they can be controlled.

4) Existing and potential production problems and where they can be regulated.

What compounds these problems in many companies, large or small, is the inability to adequately recognize them early on. And to monitor them, while managing their potential risks on an ongoing basis.

College Debt

What about college-imposed debt?

The numbers received on this subject from the College Board, are for average students are huge and are based on a 1999 study. They handicap careers.

What the estimates do not take into account are a list of important factors. including how student debts racked up in going to college ought to include those of their parents and how they weigh down college advantages.

Interest on the debts are huge and add to problems associated with those debts.

What’s a College Education Worth?

I see estimates of a college education being worth, from about $800,000 to as much as $1 million. However, I find it’s more likely a fictitious figure, comparing what someone can earn over a lifetime with a college degree, as opposed to earnings of a laborer working at minimum wage for his or her whole life.

An assumption is made that all non-college jobs are non-skilled. Many skilled jobs that do not call for a college degree, such as electricians and plumbers, pay far better than college-bred positions.

Eliminate janitor-type jobs from the conventional comparisons, and the comparison gets completely skewed.

Vaunted Non-Profit Companies

The public usually seems to get the impression that non-profit companies are good and for-profits somehow are not. That non-profits are there to be helpful; the others may be greedy, seeking nothing for the public or consumer, but profit only for themselves.

The public have been taught by populist politicians and the media, that somehow profit is a dirty word. Unless, of course, a member of the public loses a job. In which case the boss has no profits with which to pay salaries.

But then again, for-profits must have cheated to get their earnings, if you listen to the populist media expositions.

However for-profits have an upside, in that they are seen as more competent. Too many folks have had run-ins with the post office and motor vehicle personnel.

Global Warming?

Rethink the expensive global warming laws that have been based on what we are now learning are global warming hoaxes.

And what about ethanol production? It is expensive because the fuel is not efficient. And it is the product of a source of food that is becoming more expensive because of its diversion to energy use.

The outlawing of incandescent bulbs, and the buying of costly compact fluorescent light bulbs instead, is another instance of the need for rethinking some of the global warming nonsense.

What about green car manufacturing and the plans of companies who are going "carbon neutral." Lots of talk, and huge expense. Really over nothing.

When will schools stop teaching the kids the cataclysmic effects of climate change?