Don’t Miss the Chance to Privatize

According to this Forbes piece, President Obama proposed privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in his budget, but Republicans from Tennessee are opposed using the very same arguments that democrats used to oppose privatizing the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), when President Bush proposed privatizing it.

First, I want to point out that politics is politics. In the comments of this post from February, Wally and I discussed the BPA, an electric power provider in the Northwest structured like the TVA as a Federal government stepchild.

It isn’t a fluke that President W proposed privatizing the BPA, while Obama proposed to privatize the TVA. The BPA provides power primarily to states that tend to vote for Democrats, while the TVA does the same in states that tend to vote for Republicans. Might as well take government goodies from your opponents first.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt to get your opponents in Congress spun up on keeping their government goodies so you can claim they are not cooperating with making budget cuts.

But, if I were a Republican I’d put privatizing the TVA on a fast track and call President Obama’s bluff.

It would make a great test case that Republicans could use to demonstrate privatization can happen without calamity. Successful test cases make good sales material. If it works out well, it just might touch off the willingness for more privatizations, including things like the BPA in the Northwest and the TSA.

Editorials say a lot

In this article in Forbes magazine, the owner of 13 “hyperlocal” newspapers in Texas, John  Garrett, tells us that his local editions serve a niche because “everybody is interested in roads and taxes.”

Garrett also said something that complemented my thought about bad journalism in this post:

We don’t editorialize. We lose all credibility when we take one side of an issue.

I wish I would have written that. Of course. How dumb are we?

It makes me laugh when I hear folks who believe media bias only exists on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal. Not I that I don’t think those sources are biased. Of course they are.

What makes me laugh is that many of these same folks don’t see the bias in their preferred media outlets.

But, here Garrett gives us such a simple and obvious test for that bias. Just look at which sides of the issues they come down on in their editorials.

If they consistently come down on one particular side, how can you trust their reporting to be objective?

Ahead of my time :)

My business school professor: What is the number one goal of a firm?

I raise my hand.

My business school professor: Seth?

Me: To please the customer.

My business school professor: Wrong! To maximize shareholder value. You could please customers by giving your product away for free, but that wouldn’t please your shareholders.

Me: With all due respect, it wouldn’t please your customers for very long if you go out of business by giving away your product for free — especially if they value your product, now would it? 

My business school professor: [This-discussion-is-over glare] [Proceed to explain why maximizing shareholder value is the key goal of a firm].

I never bought the ‘maximize shareholder value’ credo, or at least the moronic behavior it led to. I do believe it is the manager’s job to maximize shareholder value, but I never believed that was the goal. Rather, it is a result of pleasing customers.

I’ve seen too many short-sighted decisions come from the ‘maximize shareholder value’ mantra because the customer was left out of the equation.

 

I was pleased to see this article from Steve Denning on Forbes.com, The Dumbest Idea in the World: Maximizing Shareholder Value. Here’s a key snippet from the article:

Although Jack Welch was seen during his tenure as CEO of GE as the heroic exemplar of maximizing shareholder value, he came to be one of its strongest critics. On March 12, 2009, he gave an interview with Francesco Guerrera of the Financial Times and said, “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.”

I remember one example of this short-sighted focus on shareholder value when I as an engineer for a utility company.  One of our big industrial customers — infected by the shareholder value mantra — approached us seeking to buy the electrical facilities at their plant. We delivered power to them at the low voltage they needed to run their equipment. We also had special switchgear at their site — that we owned — to provide the volume and reliability they needed. We charged them extra for this enhanced service.

They computed the simple math of the cash outlay to buy the equipment from us, the fees that would save them and the cost they thought it would take to maintain the equipment. I saw their analysis. On paper it looked like a good investment, one that would add to their shareholder value by reducing costs and increasing profits.

But, their experience was different. They quickly learned that the higher fees they use to pay us included something they didn’t have — expertise and opportunity cost. They realized that trying to figure out how to maintain electrical switchgear took time away producing the products they made for their customers.

They first hired us back to maintain the equipment and then eventually sold the equipment back to us and ‘got out of the business of maintaining electrical switchgear’ so they could again focus on delivering value for their customers.

In their initial analysis, they forgot to include their customers.

 

Worth reading

My latest issue of Forbes has three editorials that I recommend reading:

1. A column that I cannot yet find on Forbes.com entitled, Economic Growth is Easy. Here’s a snippet:

John Stuart Mill long ago observed that we trade “products for products,” so if the desire is for increased consumption, we must stimulate the supply side of the economy. Specifically, we must remove the tax, regulatory, trade and monetary barriers to productivity. For individuals to consume, they must first produce.

Most people don’t understand that, which is one reason we keep electing fools. Consumption does not drive wealth. Investing to take a chance of realizing benefits do.

2. Another from British historian, Paul Johnson, Men Blinded by Their Brains. In it he writes how intellectuals seem to have an affinity for the powerful and evil. In the print version, this appears immediately after the subtitle, Moral Blind Spot:

Of course, intellectuals, whom I define as those who think ideas are more important than people, are notoriously bad at seeing the ordinary world and coming to moral decisions about it.

This article struck me because I’ve known such men. They could reason their way into very bad things and reason their way out of feeling any remorse or accountability for their actions.

3. Steve Forbes’ lead-off editorial, Gold and the Wicked Magicians, is top-notch and important. From his piece:

Linking the value of money to gold removes a huge source of Big Government’s power. No longer can government confiscate wealth by stealth by devaluing your money. Economists hate the gold standard because they think they’re being deprived of one of their magic wands to shape the economy.

Big Government looks after its own interests. Left to its own devices it will relentlessly expand, crushing the private sector. That’s what’s happening in Europe today. Despite all the talk of austerity, the public sector has hardly been touched, while businesses and individuals have been hit with more and more taxes.

Despite thousands of years of experience to the contrary, central bankers and countless policymakers and economists believe that money manipulation can stimulate and wisely guide an economy.

It’s a destructive delusion. The world today would be an immensely richer place were it not for these hubristic notions that a handful of people can keep an economy rolling smoothly with minimal unemployment.

Steve Jobs wasn’t even Steve Jobs

I’ve been noodling on a post for a while about the effects Steve Jobs has on the business world. He’s seen as a hero and other leaders want to also be heroes. They love hearing about this guy who was so difficult, meticulous and sort-of command-and-control. It makes them think they can do it too.

But, they usually turn out to be envious goats who take the batta-batta-batta-”iPad”-swing, miss, then get fired.

The leaders of Intuit don’t want to be Steve Jobs. This is from an excellent piece in Forbes about innovation at that company.

Plenty of companies are a religion, where people take their cues from the top. Intuit is a science lab, where anything can be tested and proven incorrect. “When you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs; you have politicians. When you have lots of ideas you have entrepreneurs,” says Cook.

He’s found a kindred spirit in Smith, who became CEO in 2008. “Genius and a thousand helpers are not going to solve the problems of today or tomorrow,” says Smith, 48… “There are very few Steve Jobses out there. We run small teams and lots of rapid experiments. No politics. No PowerPoints.”

I agree. I’ve seen innovation choked by politics in organizations that take their cues from the top. I’ve seen those same organizations languish and go through multiple leaders who all had the same general idea – their idea, whatever that was.

Other ideas could not get the resources even for a small test because those would take resources away from the leader’s idea. Too bad the hit rate for new ideas is so small. That’s the key insight that the leaders either don’t realize or think they can outsmart it. Or they don’t care because they’ll make a decent sum whether they produce or not.

But, I even think the Steve Jobs story as command-and-control genius is overplayed. No doubt the guy was hard-charging genius. But his greatest genius of all was opening his products to benefit from lots of small tests that would come through the iTunes and app communities.

If iPods and iPhones were just music boxes and phones, I would probably have neither. But, along with these devices, Jobs created a wide community to create stuff for them to make them more useful with minimal political drag on which apps and podcasts could be made available.

This resulted in lots of small bets placed by the thousands of developers and podcast creators and that resulted in tons of content and functions that more and more people found useful, even if it was just a handy way to kill time while standing in line at the grocery store or as a pacifier to keep me from saying truthful, but career-limiting, things in business meetings.

I bought my first iPod when I got tired of listening to the few podcasts that I followed on my computer and discovered that listening to those podcasts while exercising and traveling was something I valued. That was a start.

So, now I have both. And since then, I have found many other ways to make them useful — most of which are not produced by Apple. I have three music boxes: my library, Pandora and another app that lets me tune in radio stations. I play Words/Chess with Friends, but with Family. I ask Siri stupid questions and occasionally, it gives me a useful answer. I don’t get lost. And so on.

The key point: It was those many other things that made iPod, iPhones and iPads the success. I don’t believe any of Apple products would have been nearly the success if they only stored music and surfed the web. iPods probably would have been slightly more successful than the Nomad MP3 players if all they did was store and play music.

So, congrats Steve Jobs. You figured out how to make money off Wikipedia’s operation model and Wikipedia itself (another tool I often refer to through my Apple devices) (I wonder if there is a Wikipedia article on that?) and fool most folks into thinking it was all you.

Small businesses are dead capital

Often, when I’m reading a Forbes article and I think to myself, “This is a darned fine article,” I look at the byline to find it is another good article by Daniel Fisher.

That happened recently while reading, How the Government is Helping Hedge Funds Make Billions off IPOs.  This paragraph caused me to glance at the byline:

Hedge fund managers can thank Congress and the SEC for the opportunity [to buy early stakes in companies before they go public]. Some call it “regulatory arbitrage”: well-meaning but inherently flawed laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley that were designed to protect small investors from the next Enron have imposed such heavy costs on public companies that many private ones are delaying their initial public offerings. Venture capitalists, employees and early investors who want to sell out have little choice but to sell their shares to lightly regulated funds, which can buy stock in the next IPO at a steep discount to what retail investors ultimately will pay.

Innovation has a lot of headwinds these days. Most of it caused by (to borrow Fisher’s words) ‘well-meaning but inherently flawed’ ideas.

But I find the well-meaning and inherently flawed ideas around investing in small businesses especially annoying.

In this country you can easily sign up for an online brokerage account and buy and sell slivers of ownership in thousands of publicly traded companies on the various stock exchanges for as little as $4 per trade, with some assurance that the presence of the Securities and Exchange Commission has lowered your chances of being defrauded.

You can just as easily make personal loans to people who need cash now using Prosper.com.

You can donate money to loan to small businesses and create jobs (and make money). Well, at least you get a bracelet with that one.  Or you can lend money to entrepreneurs all over the world. You can also donate to individuals who need help funding the creative projects like a large tortoise that looks like a trading post.

But, if you want to invest with entrepreneurs here at home, it’s not so easy. You need to know somebody who wants to start a business. Or know someone who knows someone. Or you need to know a venture capitalist. Start-up investing is an opaque network of angel investors and venture capitalists.

This, folks will tell you, is for our own protection because there will be too many con men out to get you to invest in their bogus company.

But, I’d rather make it easier for everyone to invest in start-ups and let the market develop solutions to help people from being defrauded. The SEC currently makes trading equity in unregistered companies very difficult. This basically makes small businesses dead capital.

Prosper.com and Kiva.org use simple approaches to limit your risk.  First, you lend in small amounts to individual borrowers — for example, $25 — and you can diversify across many borrowers. So, if you lend to one deadbeat who doesn’t repay you, you’re not out your life savings.

Second, these sites act as an SEC and rating agency of sorts by qualifying borrowers and setting appropriate interest rates based on credit risk. Kiva.org works with organizations that administer the loans with the entrepreneurs with full disclosure on that organization’s track record.

We could use the Prosper/Kiva/Kickstarter models bring start-up and small business capital alive. A similar service could act as registration agent of sorts and market maker to connect investors and business owners and allow users to invest as little as $5 directly with entrepreneurs.

Why not? I’d rather invest directly in an entrepreneur with a chance, even if it is ever so slight, of getting a return on that investment than donate it with the assurance that I won’t.

Related articles

• Angel vs. VC: Which Investor Is Best for Your Startup? (readwriteweb.com)
• Entrepreneurs Shouldn’t Pitch Their Ideas To Venture Capitalists (forbes.com)
• Are venture capitalists more loyal to their entrepreneurs or limited partners? (bijansabet.com)

Two education links

1. Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy

2. Creating Innovators: Why America’s Education System Is Obsolete

Education links

1. Khan Academy on 60 Minutes.

2. TedED

(HT: Carpe Diem for 1 & 2)

3. A Forbes article about an online tutor bot, Knewton - This article has links to even more online resources.

And that resulted in…what??

I enjoyed this Forbes column from Jerry Bowers.  I’ve had experiences similar to the one he describes here:

Several months ago I was on the phone with the managers of a very, very large international bond fund. They wanted me to support the recommendation of the staff of an investment committee, on which I sit, to put a lot of money under their care. Their performance had been poor lately, but as a long-term investor, I didn’t hold that against them. I wanted to know how they thought, especially about risk.

But no matter what question I asked them about their way of thinking they always seemed to give an answer in terms of the intelligence, resume, or academic qualifications of their analysts. So and so studied under Barry Eichengreen at UCLA;  this guy has been analyzing bonds for X years; this other guy has lived in South America analyzing bonds for his whole career, etc. Well that’s nice. Smart is better than dumb, but right is better than smart, and right is largely a matter of fundamental principles.

I have one nit.  Smart isn’t always better than dumb.

But I like the story because I’m amazed by how often we put a premium on “smart” over actual results.

I’ve heard pitches from business consultants who tell me how smart their consultants are. They graduated from [insert top-tier business school name here] and have worked on projects at [insert Fortune 500 company names here].

Ask them to describe the tangible results they have produced and they’ll again point at their degree and list projects they worked on.

Then I ask, And those projects resulted in…??

Blank stares.

What do you mean?

I mean, can you tell me if the projects you worked on increased that company’s stock price?  Did it cause more customers to want to buy their products?  Did those projects improve profitability?  Are those companies still following your advice?  Have they asked you back or made you any job offers? 

The response to that is usually, Well, we can’t discuss specific outcomes of our other clients.  That’s proprietary and confidential.  But, I can assure you, we are the best and the brightest.  Then, they’ll usually try to throw a jab at my intelligence for asking such questions.  Besides, we can’t really measure the impact, for sure.

Unfortunately, their standard “we’re smart” pitch must work well enough to keep the work coming without having to demonstrate their actual results.  That’s too bad.  So, I was happy that Jerry Bowers didn’t buy it.

Business consulting and bond funds isn’t the only place the “I’m smart” pitch seems to make up for lack of results.   We often vote for “smart” candidates in elections.  We defer to the “smart” guys in the papers for political and economic opinions.  A few years back, we trusted those smart quants to reduce the risk of lending money to folks with bad credit histories.

When you hire a plumber or electrician you usually don’t care how “smart” the person is.  You don’t want the plumber to “figure it out” on your dime.  You expect a plumber to know because he has fixed the same problem hundreds of times before with good results.

We could avoid a lot of messes by putting more weight on actual results and less weight on how “smart” we think people are.

A short lesson in the Constitution

Chip Mellor provides a good lesson in the U.S. Constitution in his Forbes opinion article, An Unhealthy Exercise of Power.  Here’s a key excerpt (emphasis mine):

Congress claimed the power to enact PPACA [Obamacare] under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which says in its entirety that Congress shall have the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” The clause was placed in the Constitution to avoid balkanizing the new nation by giving Congress the power to prevent states from erecting trade barriers.

That is essentially how the clause functioned for 150 years. But in 1938 the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Wickard v. Filburn, which upheld a New Deal law allowing the secretary of agriculture to establish an annual national acreage allotment for wheat all the way down to individual farmers.

The Court effectively amended the Constitution by turning the Commerce Clause into an affirmative grant of federal authority allowing Congress to regulate any economic activity that has a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce.

I recommend reading the whole article.

For those who think the Supreme Court has the power to amend the Constitution, all I ask is to direct me to where that power derives from and explain to me how that power coexists with the Constitutional Amendment process defined in Article V.   While there is a fine line between interpreting and amending, they are not the same.