Business and Politics

Did you ever stop to consider that Business and Politics are almost identical! Except, that businesses have no multi-party system, which kind of makes business similar to the communist party where anyone can reach the top, but everyone has to toe the party line!- RaviD


The above has to the above ultimate irony for a capitalist business from an ideology point of view.

Some more nuggets -

Monopoly - Monarchy

Big Business - Oligarchy

Board of Directors - Senators / Congressmen / Member of Parliament

Chairman Emeritus - Queen of England / King of Spain / etc.

Institutional Shareholders - Power brokers

Individual Shareholders - Voters

Venture Capitalists - Lobbyists

Transnational Corporations - World Domination

Mergers and Acquisitions - European Union

Corporate De-merger - Dissolution of Czechoslovakia

Corporate Cartels - NATO


By the way did you notice there is no mention of democracy here. Democracy is about promoting equality which is a supposed need (disguised wants), business thrives when there is inequality, which promotes wants. So essentially in a thriving economy or business environment there is not need for a democracy...???!??!? Comments...?

Some more analogies -

Walmart - China

Conglomerates - Ex-Soviet Union

Google - India

GE - USA

Goldman Sachs - Switzerland

Microsoft - Japan

Exxon-Mobile - Saudi Arabia

SAP - Germany

Yahoo - England

Ask.com - France

Apple - Canada

Patent Trolls - Al Qaeda

Bear Stearns - Greece

Lehman Bros. - Iceland

Cisco - South Korea

NAFTA - United Nations

Gatekeepers and Screeners at the door - That's what HR recruiters call themselves!

As mentioned in the prior post I got a bunch of responses to my questions on HR and Recruiting. Some of the responses were just amazing!!!

Listed below is the query I framed and a few selected responses -


"Quite often I hear - "... a resume has less than 30 seconds to make an impact to a recruiter - independent or corporate HR.." WHY?"

- "Let me first correct you: It takes 3-10 seconds to review a resume to verify if it meets qualifications for a majority of positions. If it was 30 seconds, I would never get any work done."

-  "Because time is money."

- "10-15 seconds tops... You have to market yourself if you are missing some requirements on the job description...otherwise 10 seconds is all you will get."

- "My goodness, I don't read resumes for a living, but do you know how many of these answers I could skim over in 30 seconds and get a pretty darn good idea of what they were talking about?"

- "For the same reason cyber security is in such great (sic) shape in this country and beyond. As far as I can tell that's 29 seconds past the maximum attention span of most recruiters."

- "The way we see the problem is often greater than the problem we're trying to solve.

To most people;

1. Busy = important, 30 seconds "I must be busy, I'm important"
2. Decision Making = Important, "5's" (performance level relative to the 1,000's in their industry) aren't asked their thoughts on "move the needle" issues, thus, why not make it up in volume, 30 seconds at a time ... important again
3. Believe their intentions are good; say a prayer and move on

I coach the coachable HR people on how to do the process more effectively and efficiently. However, my systems reward / create consequences for HR performance as most don't.

Litmus Test on the Culture of an HR Dept:

What % of the HR Payroll will be paid, regardless of who is hired?
Example: $5M in salaries and $4.7 is paid regardless while $4.9 - $5.1 has a 95% chance of getting paid. Where's the motivation?

Life's too short to worry about it unless you're helping someone that is open to changing it." 

- "They're not, by and large, out there searching for talent. They're the gatekeepers, who screen applications sent in."

- "Because HR people are the equivalent of soccer goalies - their job is not to let anyone in but to keep just about everyone out. ...Getting your resume or a letter in front of the hiring manager is the only way you can get through the stonewall the square peg HR gatekeepers put in your path."


Now keep in mind the above are just a few excerpts from from about 25% of the responses received, the majority of them were basically of the opinion "How dare I ask this question and bring this issue up!".

Well here are a few of my rebuttals - enjoy!

- "...most of the responses seem to validate the "30 Second" rule / hypothesis.

So taking that for a baseline if one was a great recruiter and received and average of 100 resumes a day, that's about 50mins of your time in the day. I'll be generous and round it up to 60min, wait I'll be magnanimous and give you 1min per resume that's 2 hours of your day every single day of the month. Almost every recruiter out in the field would kill for those kind of potential leads, the fact is none have them, get them, or come even come close to generating them!

So, what do you do the rest of the day? Waste of company time and money if internal Dept. and do outrageously high billing if an external recruiter!

If I was a CEO/CFO/COO I would take a quick look at my HR recruiting Dept and partner recruiting companies and FIRE THEM! HR guys you just discredited your entire industry! You just proved that you provide very little value addition to the hiring process which can be completely substituted by an automated system, albeit one that may require a little more fine tuning"

- "The responses here themselves say a resume is a way to get your "toe" into the door! How can you make a judgement call for an individual by "seeing" their so called "toes" only? It's like the story of the 5 blind men who touched a different part of an elephant and came to a different set of conclusions as to what it was and what it could do, without seeing or even feeling the entire elephant."

- "...almost every other function that you said a "Generalist" may handle has been outsourced or is in the process of being outsourced and automated, or the employee is being "empowered" to handle on their own with the service provider.

So the one pure HR function that you can add value to internally is recruiting, however if that seems too much for most don't blame outsourcing and automation when it takes over completely. What you call "screening" can be done by anyone sitting half way around the world in a window less room, and then making an appointment for the hiring individual by an email or a phone call."

- "...In this day and age of almost 12% unemployment in the US, why employers are unable to fill positions with the "right" and properly "qualified" candidates is the mystery worth exploring..."

 

Are the economic experts reallly that stupid...?!?!?!

In the last quarter of 2009 there was great deal of optimism that the global economy was on the verge of turning around, but the US economy was doomed to complete annihilation, which was the reason gold was having such a great run up.

Now I'm not an economist or an expert on the subject, but I have studied it a little and do read a bit, more than anything I like to look at facts before making any kind of predictions.

Anyone who claims to be an economist even as a passing dilettante on the subject usually has reams and gobs of paper pass under their nose that would show factually where the fault lines are in the global economy. Yet, there is either a global conspiracy to suppress the evidence or the academics who teach the subject have no idea what they are talking about these days, or even in the past when were proven dead wrong(!); and still fail to admit that the academic theories they have grown up studying and teaching are fundamentally flawed in this new age of instant global inter-connectedness!

Let's get to the real issue - a great global meltdown is staring at us in the face yet nobody sees - EUROPE!!! All everyone can report about is the failures of the American economy, which are miniscule compared to what has already happened in Europe, is now happening, and will unfold in the coming months!!!

Greece is just the very "tiny" tip of the financial meltdown volcano that will erupt if people these so called economic experts do not take their heads out of places where the sun don't shine, and start initiating more sound economic polices rather than blow air as they did at the WEF recently!

Anyway, to satisfy my own curiosity and see how and why my hypothesis may just be right I created the following tables to analyze and draw my own conclusions. The information is as of 2008, so still current.

Rank	Country	GDP in Billions	% Debt. Of GDP	External Debt. in Billions	Per Capita Debt	Per Capita GDP
20	United States	$14,260.00	94.35%	$13,454.00	$43,793.00	$47,440.00
19	Hungary	$196.60	105.76%	$207.92	$20,936.64	$19,553.00
18	Australia	$800.20	111.38%	$891.26	$42,426.18	$36,918.00
17	Italy	$1,823.00	126.71%	$2,310.00	$39,741.00	$30,631.00
16	Greece	$343.00	161.17%	$552.80	$51,483.00	$30,681.00
15	Spain	$1,403.00	171.70%	$2,409.00	$59,457.00	$30,589.00
14	Germany	$2,918.00	178.48%	$5,208.00	$63,263.00	$36,320.00
13	Finland	$193.50	188.55%	$364.85	$69,491.00	$36,320.00
12	Sweden	$344.30	194.34%	$669.10	$73,854.00	$37,334.00
11	Norway	$275.40	199.02%	$548.10	$117,604.00	$53,738.00
10	Hong Kong	$306.60	205.85%	$631.13	$89,457.00	$43,847.00
9	Portugal	$236.50	214.38%	$507.00	$47,348.00	$22,232.00
8	France	$2,128.00	235.95%	$5,021.00	$78,387.00	$34,205.00
7	Austria	$329.50	252.63%	$832.42	$101,387.00	$39,887.00
6	Denmark	$203.60	298.32%	$607.38	$110,422.00	$37,304.00
5	Belgium	$389.00	320.31%	$1,246.00	$119,681.00	$36,416.00
4	Netherlands	$672.00	364.88%	$2,452.00	$146,703.00	$40,558.00
3	United Kingdom	$2,226.00	408.22%	$9,087.00	$148,702.00	$36,358.00
2	Switzerland	$316.70	422.48%	$1,338.00	$176,045.00	$43,196.00
1	Ireland	$188.40	1266.45%	$2,386.00	$576,805.00	$42,110.00

I have highlighted the US and six largest economies in Europe.


Just look at the per capita debt per person vs the per capita GDP and draw your own conclusions from the comparisons. By the way the population of US is approx. 311 million, while the population of European Union for those wanting to do more analysis is approx. 500 million.

Besides the teetering economies that we are already aware of Iceland and Greece, there are greater underlying problems in Europe specially in the realm of politics and it's proximity to Russia and the turbulence that arises from the Middle-East. Let's not factor out geo-politics when it comes to the occurrence, division, and allocation of natural resources, and ethnic tensions in the region.

If anyone of the readers was a betting person and was aware of the geo-political-economic world order which country would you place your bets on... to successfully emerge intact with the least amount of collateral damage from the current economic crisis?