Are most companies unethical?

It is typical these days for many companies to delay payment of invoices to smaller suppliers as long as they they can. They do this thinking it is simply being clever. However, a few years ago many companies thought that backdating stock options was being clever. Others thought that null trades, where nothing really changed hands, but revenue was booked in both directions, was exceptionally clever. So how clever is it to avoid paying legitimate debts until you have gone past agreed terms?

One of the Principles of Mars, Inc., a company which is a passionate believer in ethics, is prompt payment of suppliers. In fact, it is also good business since other companies want to do business with such a company. Therefore, the manager who initiates a policy of slow payment is not only acting unethically, but is doing his or her company a disservice.

Why are the people who know the least, the least likely to ask?

As someone who has spend all his career moving between line management and consulting, I have seen again and again, that the really capable individuals have the self confidence to admit when they do not know something. This means that they will ask for help and learn. No one knows what they do not know, but the smart people will recognize that there is a lot which they do not, and will check to find out. As both a participant and an observer, I have become fairly good at predicting which managers will fail, and which will succeed, simply based on their attitude to learning.

Health Insurance will get worse before it gets better

While the US is the only wealthy western country without universal health care (even Brazil has it), and the number of uninsured continues to climb, it will continue to get worse until far more middle class people feel the pain. Most of what has been proposed simply applies Bandaids to the problem. Few are prepared to blow the current system up and start from scratch. Few are prepared to take on the very strong lobbies of pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies and health care providers simultaneously. Whether the country uses a single payer system like the UK and Canada do, or a tightly regulated insurance company managed one as in France or Germany, it will require major change. Even in France and Germany, insurance companies cannot turn anyone down, vary price by pre-existing conditions or age, or refuse reimbursement, which makes them the same as a single payer system in effect.

The "black hole" of leads management

In every industry, in every company, it is difficult to track the progress of leads through the sales process to closing. However good the CRM system, the issue is always a human one. While it may be in the company's interest to track leads, for most sales people it is not in their best interest to complete the data entry. They have little to gain and they lose time and perhaps information which they would rather keep for themselves. In many industries, a sales person's Rolodex is their biggest asset, so they would rather build their own personal database than the company's.

The Education Business

Visiting colleges with my daughter this summer has been an educational experience. It is clear that higher education in the US has become more and more of business, much like health care. While this change is happening in other countries - just note how aggressively they court foreign students who tend to pay higher fees - it is less so. The reason is that as in health care, the US is the only Western country in which higher education is so divided into private and public. Even Universities like Oxford and Cambridge, which American perceive as private, actually receive about one third of their funding from the Government. This enable the Government to exert much more influence over them than it can over a US private university. So the salaries of star academics, star administrators, and star fund-raisers continue to climb as do the fees.

Insurance guy moves to CMO of Coke

I regularly hear that nless you fit the spec precisely, you will not get the job interview. What the client wants is "someone who has done the identical job for the leading competitor for the past ten years - but can think outside the box." Yet, I see regularly that companies hire Chief Marketing Officers, and indeed CEOs who have quite eclectic backgrounds.