When I got back from Russia I found in my mailbox "The National Lampoon Treasury of Humor", an out of print collection that I had ordered on Ebay. This book contains the 70's-era piece that Ian had told me about, "How to Talk Dirty in Esperanto." There I found that "Estes mia esprima deziro ke fulmo frapus vian pinon" is how you say "It is my express wish that your penis be struck by lightning" in the universal language.
Another useful sentence in Esperanto is "La grandioza kvalito da via mer-do garantas aboleri la konkurson," which means "The superb quality of your shit is guaranteed to wipe out the competition." From now on, on days when the Dow is down more than 200 points I will provide at least one Esperanto translation, for relaxation purposes. (I wonder how one would say in Esperanto "George W. Bush has the paltry intellect of a lower-status macaque.")
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Stoicism
The stoic philosophers believed that man’s life is governed by fate, much of which is downright unpleasant, but that one of these fates is to be presented with choices daily. In the good life this free will is exercised according to high ethical principles. Because the stoics held out at least some hope for free will and a good life, they are also called “therapeutic” philosophers, and that is why someone like Admiral Stockdale found solace reading Epictitus in a POW camp. (My entire knowledge of stoicism was gained over a whisky in 40 minutes talking to Professor Gareth Williams at a Columbia alumni cocktail party, so take it for what it’s worth.)
Now let’s talk about “therapy” as we understand it in 2007. This involves a small office off the lobby of an apartment building on West End Avenue, where one sits on a loveseat across from a person with a notepad saying things like, “And how do you feel about what your mother said on the phone last night?” No fate, no universal design, just a couple of defenseless parents who managed to prepare you for adulthood by screwing you up, and who still get a dig in whenever they can.
(As an aside, the only poem I can recite is the one by Philip Larkin that starts: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you.”)
Given Freud’s dominance, it should be no surprise that art in the 20th century became increasingly obsessed with the traumatic youthful experiences that turned protagonists into tragic figures. I’m referring to Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and, yes, Barbra Streisand, the queen of therapy, who a couple of years ago actually reenacted her therapy sessions in a concert at MSG. I’m not kidding, you can look it up. Barbra’s movie “The Prince of Tides” has stuck in my mind as the apex of “Freudian drama,” where the Nick Nolte character, after finally confronting the rape he suffered as a child — with the help of a heroic psychoanalyst played, natch, by La Streisand — is suddenly freed from all his angst. The movie ends with him sailing off in the sun, “cured.” Very, very silly if you watch it today, in the age of Prozac and chemical depression.
So let’s focus on a character that does feel totally contemporary: Tony Soprano. During the course of the series we see that he is of course a product of his environment, but we also learn that his mother was a borderline personality and his father was bipolar. In the classic episode when Tony learns about his father’s condition, he explains to Dr. Melfi that nothing he has done is his fault because it was all preprogrammed into his brain — i.e., “fated.” He assuages his guilt by denying the existence of free will, but Melfi refuses to let him off that easy, arguing that he nevertheless makes choices every day.
A work that confronts nature vs. nurture in an even more disturbing context is the novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” by Lionel Shriver, written from the perspective of a mother whose son is a Columbine-style school murderer. While the narrator details precisely her failings as a mother, she also shows the child as malevolent from birth, leaving the reader with no pat, Streisandian “answers”. Anyone who has had kids knows that they exhibit clear personality traits as babies, well before you can even begin the long, elaborate process of screwing them up.
Thus post-modern literature, created with full knowledge of Freud, DNA, Prozac, etc., requires the author to depict his key characters as products both of nature and nurture: i.e., Tony Soprano, not Nick Nolte the Prince of Tides. Chemical preprogramming is our “fate,” but we do have free will. In this way our art is closer to the world of the Classics than the one depicted in 20th century drama.
Not to mention my own little novel in the context of a great work like the Sopranos, but “The Education of Rick Green, Esq.” which was published in 1995, also attempted to address the nature/nurture question. Probably the book that had the biggest influence on mine was “Listening to Prozac,” which I think should be required reading in writing courses — not that anyone asked me.
Now let’s talk about “therapy” as we understand it in 2007. This involves a small office off the lobby of an apartment building on West End Avenue, where one sits on a loveseat across from a person with a notepad saying things like, “And how do you feel about what your mother said on the phone last night?” No fate, no universal design, just a couple of defenseless parents who managed to prepare you for adulthood by screwing you up, and who still get a dig in whenever they can.
(As an aside, the only poem I can recite is the one by Philip Larkin that starts: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you.”)
Given Freud’s dominance, it should be no surprise that art in the 20th century became increasingly obsessed with the traumatic youthful experiences that turned protagonists into tragic figures. I’m referring to Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and, yes, Barbra Streisand, the queen of therapy, who a couple of years ago actually reenacted her therapy sessions in a concert at MSG. I’m not kidding, you can look it up. Barbra’s movie “The Prince of Tides” has stuck in my mind as the apex of “Freudian drama,” where the Nick Nolte character, after finally confronting the rape he suffered as a child — with the help of a heroic psychoanalyst played, natch, by La Streisand — is suddenly freed from all his angst. The movie ends with him sailing off in the sun, “cured.” Very, very silly if you watch it today, in the age of Prozac and chemical depression.
So let’s focus on a character that does feel totally contemporary: Tony Soprano. During the course of the series we see that he is of course a product of his environment, but we also learn that his mother was a borderline personality and his father was bipolar. In the classic episode when Tony learns about his father’s condition, he explains to Dr. Melfi that nothing he has done is his fault because it was all preprogrammed into his brain — i.e., “fated.” He assuages his guilt by denying the existence of free will, but Melfi refuses to let him off that easy, arguing that he nevertheless makes choices every day.
A work that confronts nature vs. nurture in an even more disturbing context is the novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” by Lionel Shriver, written from the perspective of a mother whose son is a Columbine-style school murderer. While the narrator details precisely her failings as a mother, she also shows the child as malevolent from birth, leaving the reader with no pat, Streisandian “answers”. Anyone who has had kids knows that they exhibit clear personality traits as babies, well before you can even begin the long, elaborate process of screwing them up.
Thus post-modern literature, created with full knowledge of Freud, DNA, Prozac, etc., requires the author to depict his key characters as products both of nature and nurture: i.e., Tony Soprano, not Nick Nolte the Prince of Tides. Chemical preprogramming is our “fate,” but we do have free will. In this way our art is closer to the world of the Classics than the one depicted in 20th century drama.
Not to mention my own little novel in the context of a great work like the Sopranos, but “The Education of Rick Green, Esq.” which was published in 1995, also attempted to address the nature/nurture question. Probably the book that had the biggest influence on mine was “Listening to Prozac,” which I think should be required reading in writing courses — not that anyone asked me.
An Arresting Image
The other morning I took my puppy Teddy to the local dog run where we met another Teddy, a Mini Goldendoodle whose parents were a 5-pound male Toy Poodle and a 65-pound female Golden Retriever. Talk about punching above your weight! I kept picturing this mating scene, first from the perspective of the poodle, humping away happily and not quite believing his luck, determined to hang on as long as possible before being thrown off. Then I saw it from the perspective of the retriever, at first curious and even charmed by the naive rascal atop her; next somewhat irritated; then, when she grasped the seriousness of the business at hand, infuriated; and, finally, resigned to the indignity and hoping it would soon be over. Now replay the same scene, substituting Karl Rove as the breeder, George W. as the poodle, and the American people as the retriever, and it all comes clear. Just remain calm — it will soon be over.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
The New Esperanto
Does anyone remember the language Esperanto, invented by a Polish Jew named Zamenhof in the 1870’s based on his idea that if everyone spoke a universal auxiliary language, wars would end (Esperanto means “hope” in, well, in Esperanto)? Various societies over the years tried to adopt Esperanto as their official language, including a proposal in China after 1911 Xinhai Revolution to officially replace Chinese with Esperanto as a way of bringing the country quickly into the 20th century. There have been as many as 2 million Esperanto speakers at a given time.
From Wikipedia:
As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. It has been described as “a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative and to a certain degree isolating in character”. The phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. The phonemic inventory is essentially Slavic, as is much of the semantics, while the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from Germanic. Pragmatics and other aspects of the language not specified by Zamenhof’s original documents were influenced by the native languages of early speakers, primarily Russian, Polish, German, and French.
As a friend reminded me, the National Lampoon once published a guide to talking dirty in Esperanto, including the universal version of the phrase “Please direct me to the nearest medical facility. My penis has been struck by lightning.”
Although Esperanto never took off, I can tell you that English is becoming the new Esperanto. I travel around the EU a lot, and everywhere you go, you now find people from every other corner of the EU, whether it is Poles waiting tables in London, British lager louts enjoying cheap pints in Estonia, or hefty Germans roasting themselves on Bulgarian beaches like so many Bratwursts. And English is spoken everywhere, though not exactly as we speak it in the U.S., but a modified version that eliminates grammatical particularities that confuse people from other lands.
For example, articles like “the” or “an” are dropped in the interEuropean English, so that a Finn knocking into a Czech at a bar in Riga might say “Sorry, too much beer just now. Need find man toilet.” In fact, last night at a bar a seriously inebriated Estonian at first mistook me for a Finn and hung upon my arm while chattering into my ear in Finnish – oddly I have found that enough beer gives me the illusion that I understand Finnish – but then switched into European English, some story that seemed to be about his training as a Coast Guard diver.
When we produce reports from my private equity fund, usually drafted by non-native English speakers, the task usually falls to me of putting them into “proper English,” as my co-manager calls it. I will then spend an hour adding “the”s where they belong and removing them where they don’t – an original version might read, “Company improved results in 3Q because of the increasing sales.” You do not have to be Maxwell Perkins to fix that one.
Lately, however, it occurred to me that I was involved in an increasingly pointless task, because our reports are also meant to be read mostly by other non-native speakers, and this European form of English might even be easier for them to understand than my prettied up version with all its fancy articles. In fact, I have found myself giving in and speaking this language, just to make life easier – like last night when I extricated myself from the Estonian Coast Guard by saying, “Good luck diving friend, must leave you now. Have great need for urination room.”
From Wikipedia:
As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. It has been described as “a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative and to a certain degree isolating in character”. The phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. The phonemic inventory is essentially Slavic, as is much of the semantics, while the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from Germanic. Pragmatics and other aspects of the language not specified by Zamenhof’s original documents were influenced by the native languages of early speakers, primarily Russian, Polish, German, and French.
As a friend reminded me, the National Lampoon once published a guide to talking dirty in Esperanto, including the universal version of the phrase “Please direct me to the nearest medical facility. My penis has been struck by lightning.”
Although Esperanto never took off, I can tell you that English is becoming the new Esperanto. I travel around the EU a lot, and everywhere you go, you now find people from every other corner of the EU, whether it is Poles waiting tables in London, British lager louts enjoying cheap pints in Estonia, or hefty Germans roasting themselves on Bulgarian beaches like so many Bratwursts. And English is spoken everywhere, though not exactly as we speak it in the U.S., but a modified version that eliminates grammatical particularities that confuse people from other lands.
For example, articles like “the” or “an” are dropped in the interEuropean English, so that a Finn knocking into a Czech at a bar in Riga might say “Sorry, too much beer just now. Need find man toilet.” In fact, last night at a bar a seriously inebriated Estonian at first mistook me for a Finn and hung upon my arm while chattering into my ear in Finnish – oddly I have found that enough beer gives me the illusion that I understand Finnish – but then switched into European English, some story that seemed to be about his training as a Coast Guard diver.
When we produce reports from my private equity fund, usually drafted by non-native English speakers, the task usually falls to me of putting them into “proper English,” as my co-manager calls it. I will then spend an hour adding “the”s where they belong and removing them where they don’t – an original version might read, “Company improved results in 3Q because of the increasing sales.” You do not have to be Maxwell Perkins to fix that one.
Lately, however, it occurred to me that I was involved in an increasingly pointless task, because our reports are also meant to be read mostly by other non-native speakers, and this European form of English might even be easier for them to understand than my prettied up version with all its fancy articles. In fact, I have found myself giving in and speaking this language, just to make life easier – like last night when I extricated myself from the Estonian Coast Guard by saying, “Good luck diving friend, must leave you now. Have great need for urination room.”
On Therapy
I took some heat for a post in which I referred cynically to the benefits of psychotherapy. Notably, my wife pointed out, with her usual subtlety, that “[you] know absolutely nothing about it.” “You should stop talking,” she added in case the point wasn’t clear enough, “about things that you know nothing about.” Ah, my dear, limited knowledge has never hindered me from talking before, and has helped to get you into that nice apartment we have.
Anyway, I have had therapy, 2-1/2 sessions with Jerry Pecker, an analyst provided by my wife’s health plan for career counseling, when I was between jobs in 1993. (I had expected him to say when I came in, “YOU have a problem? My name is Pecker, what should I say?!”) Because Pecker was in an HMO, he was only given 5 sessions to help me, which sent him into a kind of speed-therapy: I sat down and he barked out, “Okay, tell me about your mother. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your childhood.” Etc in rapid-fire fashion, so that by the end of the first session he had a preliminary diagnosis, and by the end of the second session I was cured. I showed up late for the third session and missed the last two.
How was I “cured”? That’s a long story, but in short he demonstrated to my satisfaction that I wasn’t suited to work in a big organization, where I would likely rebel and undermine myself, but would be much better off in a small group or ideally as my own boss. He gently pushed me in the direction of the then little-known business called a “hedge fund” that I was considering launching with a few friends, over the option of going back to work as a lawyer at the firm of Schmendrick, Putz and Naar (not their real names). Good advice — we started working on our fund almost the next day.
Pecker notwithstanding, I have these serious reservations about the psychotherapy industry. Maybe it goes back to my childhood friend Mike, who spent much of his youth in therapy dealing with the suicide of his father, a veteran who had returned from war (Korea I think) with shellshock and mental problems. Mike couldn’t learn to read, which was of course in 1967 attributed to his “trow-ma” (supply Viennese accent) over “ze det fazzer.” Will you believe me when I tell you that it took 7 years of therapy before a teacher at his school finally figured out that he was dyslexic? After a few months of special ed he was reading perfectly well, and went on to a fine college and career with no particular trow-ma.
Then there was my high school, Franklin, whose notably lax admissions standards rendered it the last stop on the private school express for kids who’d been kicked out of everywhere else. (The school still exists but now is called Dwight, or by insiders, “Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.” Paris Hilton went there, enough said.) Most Franklin students were thought of as losers, potheads, lazy, and dumb and, unsurprisingly given this feedback, by the time they arrived had mentally checked out of the educational process. (I was a scholarship boy at Franklin, and loved it because the prevalence of the above-mentioned lazy potheads made me a big fish in a small pond.)
Over the years I have thought about Franklin and it has come crystal clear that these kids were neither lazy nor dumb, but were burdened with undiagnosed learning disabilities. If they were potheads, let’s say they were self-medicating to handle the constant stress of being out-of-sync and inadequate. To the extent that these kids got any personal attention at all, it was centered on a (usually futile) hunt for the trow-ma — divorce, parental neglect, etc. — that had made them lazy potheads, and not for the neurologically-based LD that today would be the first diagnosis.
Postscript: two weeks ago I saw a bunch of these kids for the first time in many years at my 30th reunion, and most agreed that the poor preparation they had gotten at Franklin (in my translation, inappropriate learning environment) had dogged them for the rest of their educational lives and, I would assume although we didn’t discuss it, their careers as well. On the other hand, they were the warmest, funniest group of people I have met in years, and only one or two laughed at my bald head. (Or rather, nodded in recognition when they saw it, as if to say “Okay, okay, I see, this is what the passage of time does.”)
Now I am not going to sit here in my boxer shorts in a London hotel room and deny the efficacy of therapy, especially when combined with meds — indeed, plenty of evidence shows that emotional trow-ma can be the source of neurological change, making both forms of therapy necessary — but what does irk me is when the talk therapy “industry” gets its hooks into a kid who mainly needs chemistry, a trained special ed teacher, or both.
Anyway, I have had therapy, 2-1/2 sessions with Jerry Pecker, an analyst provided by my wife’s health plan for career counseling, when I was between jobs in 1993. (I had expected him to say when I came in, “YOU have a problem? My name is Pecker, what should I say?!”) Because Pecker was in an HMO, he was only given 5 sessions to help me, which sent him into a kind of speed-therapy: I sat down and he barked out, “Okay, tell me about your mother. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your childhood.” Etc in rapid-fire fashion, so that by the end of the first session he had a preliminary diagnosis, and by the end of the second session I was cured. I showed up late for the third session and missed the last two.
How was I “cured”? That’s a long story, but in short he demonstrated to my satisfaction that I wasn’t suited to work in a big organization, where I would likely rebel and undermine myself, but would be much better off in a small group or ideally as my own boss. He gently pushed me in the direction of the then little-known business called a “hedge fund” that I was considering launching with a few friends, over the option of going back to work as a lawyer at the firm of Schmendrick, Putz and Naar (not their real names). Good advice — we started working on our fund almost the next day.
Pecker notwithstanding, I have these serious reservations about the psychotherapy industry. Maybe it goes back to my childhood friend Mike, who spent much of his youth in therapy dealing with the suicide of his father, a veteran who had returned from war (Korea I think) with shellshock and mental problems. Mike couldn’t learn to read, which was of course in 1967 attributed to his “trow-ma” (supply Viennese accent) over “ze det fazzer.” Will you believe me when I tell you that it took 7 years of therapy before a teacher at his school finally figured out that he was dyslexic? After a few months of special ed he was reading perfectly well, and went on to a fine college and career with no particular trow-ma.
Then there was my high school, Franklin, whose notably lax admissions standards rendered it the last stop on the private school express for kids who’d been kicked out of everywhere else. (The school still exists but now is called Dwight, or by insiders, “Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.” Paris Hilton went there, enough said.) Most Franklin students were thought of as losers, potheads, lazy, and dumb and, unsurprisingly given this feedback, by the time they arrived had mentally checked out of the educational process. (I was a scholarship boy at Franklin, and loved it because the prevalence of the above-mentioned lazy potheads made me a big fish in a small pond.)
Over the years I have thought about Franklin and it has come crystal clear that these kids were neither lazy nor dumb, but were burdened with undiagnosed learning disabilities. If they were potheads, let’s say they were self-medicating to handle the constant stress of being out-of-sync and inadequate. To the extent that these kids got any personal attention at all, it was centered on a (usually futile) hunt for the trow-ma — divorce, parental neglect, etc. — that had made them lazy potheads, and not for the neurologically-based LD that today would be the first diagnosis.
Postscript: two weeks ago I saw a bunch of these kids for the first time in many years at my 30th reunion, and most agreed that the poor preparation they had gotten at Franklin (in my translation, inappropriate learning environment) had dogged them for the rest of their educational lives and, I would assume although we didn’t discuss it, their careers as well. On the other hand, they were the warmest, funniest group of people I have met in years, and only one or two laughed at my bald head. (Or rather, nodded in recognition when they saw it, as if to say “Okay, okay, I see, this is what the passage of time does.”)
Now I am not going to sit here in my boxer shorts in a London hotel room and deny the efficacy of therapy, especially when combined with meds — indeed, plenty of evidence shows that emotional trow-ma can be the source of neurological change, making both forms of therapy necessary — but what does irk me is when the talk therapy “industry” gets its hooks into a kid who mainly needs chemistry, a trained special ed teacher, or both.
Biznesmeny
When I was a lawyer in the ’80s, I used to travel around the U.S. meeting corporate executives, for whom I implemented (as Marty Lipton’s peon) poison pills designed as a bulwark against hostile takeover artists like Asher Edelman and T. Boone Pickens. (There should be a good anagram for T. Boone Pickens. I have two I made up, Russian Deputy PM Aleksey Kudrin — I see drunk alky — and Vladimir Putin — I put rival in MD. My friend Kelso long ago taught me, while we were stuck listening to a dull speech in Sweden, the pastime of anagramming the speaker’s name.) In any case, these CEO’s and their boards of directors embraced the poison pill and other takeover defenses, such as staggered boards, to protect “stakeholders” from “bust-up two tier junk bond financed bids.” At Wachtell Lipton in those days we had a macro that shot out that last phrase.
There has been plenty of academic research on the effects of takeover defenses, and I haven’t read it, but as I noted in a previous post, I refuse to let half-knowledge prevent me from commenting on any subject, because I just may be right, and if I am wrong, who has been hurt, really? Anyway, my “feeling” is that poison pills have done a good job of forcing bidders to pay the best price for a company, but that staggered boards have been a negative. “Staggered Board” by the way does not refer to the condition these gentlemen are in by the time they finish their martinis, though I have seen that too, but a board whose terms don’t expire all at once. This means that to replace the board in a proxy fight, a hostile bidder must wait usually three years. The implicit meaning is that the shareholders cannot be trusted to vote their long-term interests, especially when tempted by a bidder dangling special dividends and other inducements. More specifically, the companies fear their shares will have been accumulated by arbitrageurs, who just want the “short term gain” and will not wait to enjoy the company’s long term prospects. I bet the shareholders of Enron, Lucent, and countless others wish some hostile bidder had come along and saved them from the companies’ glorious long-term prospects.
Many US companies have unstaggered their Boards under pressure from instutional investors such as CALPERS, but a rule that still obtains in the US and almost nowhere else, I believe, is the lack of “cumulative voting” for directors. This means that if you have, say, 10% of a public company, you cannot elect 10% of the Board. In practice you need a majority to elect even one director. The reason the US Business Roundtable is so opposed to cumulative voting is that the presence of a dissident director would disrupt the “collegiality” of the Board. Yes, that bad new guy with his demands for dividends or whatever, wearing his too-strong cologne and his gold bracelet, hair shiny from pomade, speaking in that horrible ethnic accent (what is he, Italian? Greek?) and chopping up the golf course with his uncouth divots. And collegiality has worked so well, hasn’t it? Just think of the disruption if Bernie Ebbers or “Kenny Boy” Lay had had to deal with one or two ornery directors all those years!
All the above was a tangent from what I really wanted to write about, which was my personal reminiscence about meeting all those American executives years ago, and feeling that they were nice and all, but a different race from me. They had silver hair, whether real or synthetic was no matter, tans and good posture, and listened patiently until it was their turn to speak, an interesting innovation I thought compared to the Sawikin family shout-fests.
Later, when I started to meet Russian biznesmeny, it always came as a shock because they all looked like my father and his friends. I remember meeting the CFO of the Nizhny Novgorod telecom and being stunned to see she was a dead ringer for Raisa Karpenkop, to whose house I used to go every Sunday night as a kid and eat chicken paprikash and kasha varnishkes while the Supremes on Ed Sullivan played in the background. I was reminded of this yesterday when I watched a presentation by an executive of Novolipetsk Steel Company and all I could think about was how he resembled my father’s late friend Morris (Moshe) Sempf, with whom my dad survived WWII in Russia and who later became a limousine driver, bungalow colony owner, and all-around meshuggeneh.
It all puts me in mind of the classic Richard Pryor routine about going to Africa for the first time and meeting a diplomat who looked exactly like an old wino from his neighborhood. Pryor thought: “Old wino, you were supposed to be a diplomat!” My dad and Moshe Sempf were supposed to be CEO’s, not limousine drivers!
There has been plenty of academic research on the effects of takeover defenses, and I haven’t read it, but as I noted in a previous post, I refuse to let half-knowledge prevent me from commenting on any subject, because I just may be right, and if I am wrong, who has been hurt, really? Anyway, my “feeling” is that poison pills have done a good job of forcing bidders to pay the best price for a company, but that staggered boards have been a negative. “Staggered Board” by the way does not refer to the condition these gentlemen are in by the time they finish their martinis, though I have seen that too, but a board whose terms don’t expire all at once. This means that to replace the board in a proxy fight, a hostile bidder must wait usually three years. The implicit meaning is that the shareholders cannot be trusted to vote their long-term interests, especially when tempted by a bidder dangling special dividends and other inducements. More specifically, the companies fear their shares will have been accumulated by arbitrageurs, who just want the “short term gain” and will not wait to enjoy the company’s long term prospects. I bet the shareholders of Enron, Lucent, and countless others wish some hostile bidder had come along and saved them from the companies’ glorious long-term prospects.
Many US companies have unstaggered their Boards under pressure from instutional investors such as CALPERS, but a rule that still obtains in the US and almost nowhere else, I believe, is the lack of “cumulative voting” for directors. This means that if you have, say, 10% of a public company, you cannot elect 10% of the Board. In practice you need a majority to elect even one director. The reason the US Business Roundtable is so opposed to cumulative voting is that the presence of a dissident director would disrupt the “collegiality” of the Board. Yes, that bad new guy with his demands for dividends or whatever, wearing his too-strong cologne and his gold bracelet, hair shiny from pomade, speaking in that horrible ethnic accent (what is he, Italian? Greek?) and chopping up the golf course with his uncouth divots. And collegiality has worked so well, hasn’t it? Just think of the disruption if Bernie Ebbers or “Kenny Boy” Lay had had to deal with one or two ornery directors all those years!
All the above was a tangent from what I really wanted to write about, which was my personal reminiscence about meeting all those American executives years ago, and feeling that they were nice and all, but a different race from me. They had silver hair, whether real or synthetic was no matter, tans and good posture, and listened patiently until it was their turn to speak, an interesting innovation I thought compared to the Sawikin family shout-fests.
Later, when I started to meet Russian biznesmeny, it always came as a shock because they all looked like my father and his friends. I remember meeting the CFO of the Nizhny Novgorod telecom and being stunned to see she was a dead ringer for Raisa Karpenkop, to whose house I used to go every Sunday night as a kid and eat chicken paprikash and kasha varnishkes while the Supremes on Ed Sullivan played in the background. I was reminded of this yesterday when I watched a presentation by an executive of Novolipetsk Steel Company and all I could think about was how he resembled my father’s late friend Morris (Moshe) Sempf, with whom my dad survived WWII in Russia and who later became a limousine driver, bungalow colony owner, and all-around meshuggeneh.
It all puts me in mind of the classic Richard Pryor routine about going to Africa for the first time and meeting a diplomat who looked exactly like an old wino from his neighborhood. Pryor thought: “Old wino, you were supposed to be a diplomat!” My dad and Moshe Sempf were supposed to be CEO’s, not limousine drivers!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)