It's immoral to be rich

Being extremely wealthy is impossible to justify in a world containing deprivation. There is a lot of public discussion about inequality, but there seems to be far less talk about just how patently shameful it is to be rich. There are plenty of people on this earth who die because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be rich. 

• White families in America have 16 times as much wealth on average as black families. This is indisputably because of slavery, which was very recent.
• Larry Ellison of Oracle bought the island of Lanai. It’s kind of extraordinary that a single human being can just own the sixth-largest Hawaiian island, but that’s what concentrated wealth leads to.
• Every dollar you have is a dollar you’re not giving to somebody else, the decision to retain wealth is a decision to deprive others.
• It is sometimes claimed that CEOs get paid too much, or that the super-wealthy do not pay enough in taxes. There is no problem in CEOs getting paid as much as the company decides to pay them. And taxes are certainly a tyrannical form of legalized theft. But the question is of the morality of their retaining wealth after it is given to them.
• The process by which those rich people attained their wealth is totally consensual. People on the right often defend wealth along these lines. I earned it, therefore it’s not unfair for me to have it. But the question is that regardless of how you have earned it, to what degree you are morally permitted to retain it? 
• It’s one thing to argue that you got rich legitimately. It’s another to explain why you feel justified in spending your wealth upon houses and sculptures rather than helping some struggling people. There may be nothing unseemly about the process by which a basketball player earns his millions. But there’s certainly something unseemly about his having those millions. 
• If the problem of inequality is systemic, and rich people do not really make choices but pursue their class interests, then asking them whether it is moral for wealthy people to retain their wealth is irrelevant and incoherent. 
• Giving away wealth in the form of charity is actually bad, because it allows capitalism to look superficially generous without actually altering the balance of power in the society. “The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves, because they prevented the core of the system from being realized by those who suffered from it,” as Oscar Wilde ludicrously put it.
• Moral duty becomes greater the more wealth you have. The super-rich, the infamous millionaires and billionaires, are constantly squandering resources that could be used to create wonderful and humane things. If you’re a billionaire, you could literally open a hospital and make it free. You could help make sure no child ever had to go without lunch.
• Everyone who earns anything beyond is obligated to give away the excess in its entirety. The refusal to do so means intentionally allowing others to suffer, a statement which is true regardless of whether you “earned” or “deserved” the income you were originally given. 
• Wealthy people do give away money often in piecemeal and self-interested and foolish ways. They’ll donate to colleges with huge endowments to get needless buildings built and named after them. David Geffen will pay to open a school for the children of wealthy. Mark Zuckerberg will squander millions of dollars trying to fix Newark’s schools by hiring $1000-a-day-consultants. Brad Pitt will try to build homes for Katrina victims in New Orleans, but will insist that they’re architecturally cutting-edge and funky looking, instead of just trying to make as many simple houses as possible. Just as the rich can’t be trusted to spend their money well generally, they’re colossally terrible at giving it away. This is because so much is about self-aggrandizement, and “philanthropy” is far more about the donor than the donee. 
• If you’re a multi-billionaire, giving away $1 billion is morally meaningless and you’re still incredibly wealthy, and thus still harming many people through your retention of wealth. You have to get rid of all of it, beyond the maximum moral income. 

It is not justifiable to retain vast wealth. This is because that wealth has the potential to help people who are suffering, and by not helping them you are letting them suffer. It does not make a difference whether you earned the vast wealth. The point is that you have it. We should acknowledge that it is immoral to be rich. 

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I don’t hate capitalism, I just hate rich people.

If you are an egalitarian, how come you are so rich - GA Cohen 

Rich do not deserve their wealth - Robert Nozick 

Implosion of trust

• The year 2017 witnessed the largest-ever drop in trust across the institutions of government, business, media and NGOs.
• Trust in media fell to an all-time lows, while trust levels in government dropped and is the least trusted institution. The credibility of leaders also is in peril: CEO credibility dropped globally to an all-time low, plummeting in every country, while government leaders remains least credible.
• The mass population distrusts their institutions, compared to the informed public.
• The implications of the global trust crisis are deep and wide-ranging. It began with the Great Recession of 2008, but like the second and third waves of a tsunami, globalization and technological change have further weakened people’s trust in global institutions. The consequence is virulent populism and nationalism as the mass population has taken control away from the elites.
• Current populist movements are fueled by a lack of trust in the system and economic and societal fears, including corruption, immigration, globalization, eroding social values and the pace of innovation.
• Politicians and the government are in real trouble. People don’t think they are the solution. They simply don’t trust them. The majority of people believe blunt, outspoken, spontaneous straight-talkers over rehearsed and diplomatic communicators.
• The cycle of distrust is magnified by the emergence of a media echo chamber that reinforces personal beliefs while shutting out opposing points of view. People favor search engines and more likely to ignore information that supports a position they do not believe in.
• People now view media as part of the elite. The lack of trust in media has also given rise to the fake news phenomenon and politicians speaking directly to the masses. Media outlets must take a more local and social approach.
• The dispersion of authority is evident. An ordinary person is now just as credible a source of information about a company as is a technical or academic expert, and far more credible than a CEO and government official.
• Business is viewed as the only one that can make a difference. Many believe a company can take actions to both increase profits and improve economic and social conditions in the community where it operates. Moreover, among those who are uncertain about whether the system is working for them, it is business that they trust most.
• Yet business finds itself on the brink of distrust of the public seeing it stoking their fears. A majority of population  worries about losing their jobs due to the impacts of globalization, lack of training or skills, immigrants who work for less, jobs moving to cheaper markets and automation.
• Business is the last retaining wall for trust. Its leaders must step up on the issues that matter for society. It has done a masterful job of illustrating the benefits of innovation but has done little to discuss the impact those advances will have on people’s jobs. Business must also focus on paying employees fairly, while providing better benefits and job training.
• Trust in business & NGOs dropped. Employees are trusted more than CEOs. In many countries people have lost faith in the system. Trust in traditional media and social media dropped. Only online media received the biggest bump in trust.

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Now a days, we don’t trust anything, or anyone. Mistrust is high, morale is low and trust is in crisis.Trust has been so much corroded that we now trust leaked information much more than traditional news sources and algorithms over human editors. Trust in institutions has evaporated to such an extent that falsehood can be misconstrued as fact, strength as intelligence, and self-interest as social compact. To rebuild trust and restore faith in the system institutions must move beyond their traditional roles of business as actor and innovator; governments as referee and regulator; media as watchdog; and NGOs as social conscience. Companies can build trust by treating employees well, offer high-quality products and services and listening to their customers. With employees more credible than a CEO, companies should work harder to get their customers and their expert employees to speak and advocate for them as much as possible. Companies have to show that they are not just listening but are also learning and responding to any feedback that they are given. The winners will be those that are more open, responsive and leverage the collective voices of both their employees and their customers.

Harvard Business School and its immoral profit strategies

• In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis USA was enraged because not a single Wall Street guy who got them into the mess was prosecuted. 
• There are many financiers who could have been made to take the perp walk, there’s also a case to be made that the fault lies with those who laid the intellectual foundation upon which a market-driven financial crisis could happen in the first place.
• Corporations are not institutions set up to be moral entities. They are institutions which really only have one mission, and that is to increase shareholder value.
• By the late 1970s, HBS had proved itself a dependable supplier of prescreened and highly motivated graduates to big business. 
• In the 1980s, HBS graduates weren’t going to big business anymore but were headed to Wall Street and consulting.
• In the 1980s, HBS had abandoned its mission and threw its lot in with Wall Street. HBS had nurtured the professional manager from his birth and then helped to kill him.
• “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” laid the groundwork for the most radical change in the hierarchy of power in corporate America since the robber barons gave way to professional managers.
• Managers had become too entrenched and lacked discipline and accountability. Managers weren’t going to voluntarily reform so the system had to be adjusted so that they would be forced to do so. No longer they would be judged by their board. The market was henceforth to be judge, jury and executioner.
• Executive pay was largely tied to company size. The highest-paid CEOs ran the largest companies. But the unproductive diversification had resulted in excess capacity, flat or declining profits, and stagnant share prices. Companies sitting on large piles of cash suddenly became the target of hostile acquirers. The age of investor capitalism began, and its heroes were not CEOs but corporate raiders.
• A wave of deregulation then created the active market for corporate control, with the new belief that the shareholder was supreme, absolving managers of responsibility to any one except shareholders. The bottom line was all that mattered.
• A story was cited - George Bernard Shaw asking an actress if she would sleep with him for a million dollars. When she agreed, he changed his offer to $10, to which she responded with outrage, asking him what kind of woman he thought she was. His reply: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.”  
• It was concluded that we’re all whores. “Like it or not, individuals are willing to sacrifice a little of almost anything we care to name, reputation or morality, for a sufficiently large quantity of other desired things.” Having started from the assumption that we are all whores, they naturally ended up with prescriptions for making us well-behaved whores.
• Bad management theories are destroying good management practice. This is precisely what has happened over the last several decades, converting our collective pessimism about managers into realized pathologies in management behaviors.
• If everybody assumes you’re a whore, you might as well grab as much money as possible while you’re still in demand. By propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility. And HBS threw its lot in with the cynics.
• Graduates of HBS had always been drawn to finance, but in the 1980s they began heading to Wall Street and private equity firms in droves. 
• In 1965 only 11% of HBS MBAs entered the fields of consulting or investment banking and by 1985 these two fields took in 41% of the school’s graduating class. And many of them would play a significant role in downsizing the traditional manufacturing and product firms that previous HBS graduates had helped build.
• Before the 1970s, companies’ increased cash piles had lessened their dependence on banks. But as those cash piles evaporated, the pendulum had swung back in finance’s favor. 
• In a capitalist economy, power equals money. Between 1983 and 1992, professional managers in the nation’s top 1% of household wealth holders showed decline, while that of people working in finance spiked. And so that’s where the MBAs went.
• Any lingering doubt about the purpose of the corporation, or its commitment to various stakeholders was resolved. The corporation existed to create shareholder value; other commitments were means to that end.
• Business educators legitimized the notion that good management might mean dissolving the firm to improve shareholder return, without concern for the social costs to employees who lost their jobs or to communities that lost employers.
• All that is nonsense about the social responsibility of business. When students enter business school, they believe that the purpose of a corporation is to produce goods and services for the benefit of society. When they graduate, they believe that it is to maximize shareholder value.
• During 1980s, the threat of being taken over and fired effectively created a market for corporate control, which helped executives stay focused.
• High indebtedness engendered by leveraged buyouts forced executives to be much more focused on the operations of their companies. If and when executives did participate in LBOs by amassing their ownership stake, their incentives would then be directly linked to the company’s stock price following the argument that, takeovers and LBOs would cure the nation’s economic woes.
• An a HBS article in 2012 pointed out that the rising tide didn’t lift all boats. In the name of beating foreign competition, completing (or avoiding) takeovers, and serving the interests of shareholders, it became acceptable to sell off businesses that didn’t fit the new corporate strategy and to lay off battalions of workers.
• Corporate takeovers do not waste resources; they use assets productively. Shareholders gain when golden parachutes are adopted. Such blanket claims came with the good seal of approval of Harvard Business School.
• Excessive CEO compensation is not the biggest issue. The relentless focus on how much CEOs are paid diverts public attention from the real problem - how CEOs are paid.
• In 1992, CEOs of Fortune 500 firms made an average of $2.7 million. By 2000, it was up to $14 million. Stock options as a percentage of compensation rose from 19% in the 1980s to nearly 50% in 2000. What also increased is the short-termism and the tendency for executives to manage earnings, using aggressive accounting to give Wall Street analysts a smooth earnings trajectory on which to base their forecasts.
• The compensation of America’s corporate executives shot up in the 1990s, regardless of their performance.
• Corporations lost significant credibility in the wake of the 2007-10 financial crisis. There is no doubt that finance and financial markets are central to what public corporations do. What is less clear is that an ownership society is a workable model for prosperity and security.
• In 1951, John D. Rockefeller said that the job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups - stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Nowadays, many people forgot that.
• In March 2009, Jack Welch the longtime CEO of General Electric said that “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy. Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal. Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.
• HBS students were all going to Wall Street, and Wall Street firms were all sending money back to HBS. The net effect of it all was that agency theory rendered business history irrelevant.
• They had a tradition at HBS which could have said that this isn’t the way business should be operating. Instead, they just went with the flow. 
• Shareholders are the owners of a company. They’re not, at least if by 'own' one means it in the way one can 'own' a car or an iPhone. We know that the value a company creates is produced through a combination of resources contributed by different constituencies. If the value creation is achieved by combining the resources of both employees and shareholders, why should the value distribution favor only the latter?
• American managers loaded their companies with debt, they started paying themselves in equity and options, and they did everything they could to juice the value of that equity. And in doing so, they sacrificed long-term value for short-term gain, often engaging in outright fraud.
• The wondrous world of hostile takeovers unleashed the insider trading. It was insider trading in the shares of Enron, that tipped investigators and number of HBS graduates were ensnared in the ensuing investigation.
• The propensity of executives is to be overly optimistic about forecasts that support lofty share prices. If executives would present the market with realistic numbers rather than overoptimistic expectations, the stock price would stay realistic. But the scholars don’t yet know the real answer to how to make this happen. That’s called ethics and the Harvard Business School doesn’t know how to teach ethics as well as it knows how to teach financial engineering, and it never will.
• In 2003, the HBS added a Leadership and Corporate Accountability course that sounds like: “decisions that involve responsibilities to each of a company’s core constituencies - investors, customers, employees, suppliers, and the public,” with discussions on insider trading rules, the fall of Enron, human character, employee responsibilities, labor laws, corporate citizenship, socially responsible investing and serving the public interest. But in this, its influence is akin to pushing on a string but no one knows how to kill the monster.

 

    

 

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Cockroach Theory for Self Development

Sundar Pichai - CEO, Google

A beautiful speech by Sundar Pichai - an IIT-Stanford Alumnus and Global Head Google Chrome and now CEO of Google.

At a restaurant, a cockroach suddenly flew from somewhere and sat on a lady. She started screaming out of fear. With a panic stricken face and trembling voice, she started jumping, with both her hands desperately trying to get rid of the cockroach.

Her reaction was contagious, as everyone in her group also got panicky. The lady finally managed to push the cockroach away but …it landed on another lady in the group. Now, it was the turn of the other lady in the group to continue the drama.

The waiter rushed forward to their rescue. In the relay of throwing, the cockroach next fell upon the waiter.

The waiter stood firm, composed himself and observed the behavior of the cockroach on his shirt. When he was confident enough, he grabbed it with his fingers and threw it out of the restaurant.

Sipping my coffee and watching the amusement, the antenna of my mind picked up a few thoughts and started wondering, was the cockroach responsible for their histrionic behavior?

If so, then why was the waiter not disturbed? He handled it near to perfection, without any chaos.

It is not the cockroach, but the inability of the ladies to handle the disturbance caused by the cockroach that disturbed the ladies.

I realized that, it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, but it’s my inability to handle the disturbances caused by their shouting that disturbs me. It’s not the traffic jams on the road that disturbs me, but my inability to handle the disturbance caused by the traffic jam that disturbs me.

More than the problem, it’s my reaction to the problem that creates chaos in my life.

Lessons learnt from the story: “Do not react in life. Always respond.“

The women reacted, whereas the waiter responded.

Reactions are always instinctive whereas responses are always well thought of, just and right to save a situation from going out of hands, to avoid cracks in relationship, to avoid taking decisions in anger, anxiety, stress or hurry.

A beautiful way to understand LIFE.Person who is HAPPY is not because Everything is RIGHT in his Life.He is HAPPY because his Attitude towards Everything in his Life is Right!

Life doesn’t always throw at us pleasantries, but also disappointments. How we deal with these disappointments is what will determine whether our lives will be chaotic or whether it will be under control, and finding a solution to it. Many people try to blame other people for their problems. A good advice is that you should remain calm in times of stress. This helps you see the problem in a different perspective and helps you think of ways of dealing with the problem. It is much better to respond to life stresses instead of reacting to them. In this way, you will develop the right attitude in enriching your life, despite the challenges that come your way.