I hate getting an envelope every however many weeks asking me to pay for my newspaper.  With that envelope comes the obligation to either write a check or find some cash. But it also comes with the uneasiness of deciding how much of a tip to leave the paperboy.  Of course these days, at least in my neighborhood,  the paperboy is not the neighbors’s kid.  It’s a whoever, that throws the paper into the driveway.

This scenario creates 2 unfortunate situations for the newspaper industry.

First , it forces me to re-evaluate the purchase decision of getting the newspaper every time I get the envelope.  2nd, tipping is not cheap these days, so the actual cost of the newspaper is more than the subscription rate.  For some, maybe double.

Being the curious and cynical fellow that I am. I went to the website of the Dallas Morning News to get more information on payment options. There, to my surprise was the ability to EZPay. I could pay by credit or debit card and avoid “The Envelope” . So I converted to payment by credit card.

For  a year of pre-paid service. Did they offer me a discount ? Nope. It was $19 dollars a month whether I got 1 month or 12.  New subscribers got a $30 gift card and 10pct off. But not me.  That’s ok. Belo needs the money more than I do.

But the bigger point here is one that eluded me in the past. The ownership of the credit card by newspapers. I’ve always been a believer that Amazon has excelled not just because they have great customer service and decent prices, but because they have those, PLUS they have my credit card on file. It’s easier to buy from Amazon than it is to go to the store.

Newspapers want to charge for content, or really, anything and  everything they can. In order to do so, you need to get the customers credit card on file. NO ONE , and I MEAN NO ONE is going to go through the hassle of entering a credit or debit card in order to buy their first penny, nickel or dime article. It’s far too much hassle. Even using PayPal is a hassle.

You need to get reader’s credit cards on files and start being the baby Amazon of your local area.

Whatever it takes to convert your daily home delivery subscribers to credit or debit card. DO IT.

I don’t know how many credit cards you have on file, but I would do all I could to maximize  that number and start selling everything and anything I could to those people.

The quickest and easiest place to start would be by making sure that every time I went to DallasNews.com you knew that my credit card was on file and  you offered me specials. Free or otherwise.  If some local artist has a small or large hit, go to the label and try to license it and offer it for free to those of us who pay by card. I may not want “Jessica Simpson’s latest hit, free to EZPay Subscribers”. I might just download the soundtrack to the local musical that you helped sponsor, or a special track from a performer coming to the local performing arts center. Or what about the speech that an author gave at the local college ? Or the presentation at the local breakfast club ?

In fact, you should look at anything and everything digital that you can acquire and give away or sell to your subscribers.  It costs you next to nothing to host and allow the downloads, but you are driving traffic, and  immediately offering incremental value that isnt available elsewhere.

From there, its a question of imagination.

Want the super special Dallas Cowboys expanded 10 page draft section. $5.00, charged to your card.  Get the weekly video blog for the Dallas Mavericks, delivered to your email box for only 29c per month, charged to your card annually. Want to get the indepth analysis of whats going on with High School Football, get the exclusive insight that only Joe Blow of the Morning News can offer for $2.95 per month, Delivered to your email, or get our special expanded print edition every saturday with indepth analysis and pictures of every high school football game with exclusive links to online video for only $9.95 per month during HS football season.

Upload us a family picture and 500 words, and we will put it front and center on the front page of the Morning News along with the headline you pick and deliver it to your door for $25. Want a copy for grandma, $10 per extra copy.  We have negotiated for a special price on the Disney DVD release of The Jonas Brothers DVD. Have it on your doorstep at 5am the morning its released, for the low , low price of $17.95.  Our advertiser, Dallas Flowers is offering a mothers day special of a dozen roses for $19.95 if you pre order from DallasNews.com/mothersday and  pay with your EZ PAY.

You get the picture.  People are used to looking at the paper for advertising. They are used to scouring the paper for deals. The only thing they aren’t used to is actually buying things through the paper.  I have no idea what products, content or gimmicks will work. But I do know, that if you make things interesting, differentiated and easy to buy, you might just sell something. Will it be $100mm dollars, or digital pennies ?

Only one way to find out

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I posted a warning almost 2 years about Hedge Fund IPOs and the risk of leveraging. With the market skyrocketing back up and never seemingly going down, I wanted to re post some reminders of just how I believe the market works. Agree or disagree, its up to you. This post is from June of 2007

I’m far from a sophisticated investor, although I guess I am an accredited investor because of my networth. As I have written before, I’m a big believer that whenever you do a business deal with people you don’t know, particularly buying and selling stocks, you always look for the sucker. If you don’t see the sucker, then you are the sucker.

I have found myself on both sides of trades. I’ve been the sucker, buying stock in companies that turned out to be far from what they said they were, or even who the principles said they were. I’ve watched in amazement as the internet bubble went to the moon with the entire world ignoring the history of technology stocks. Anyone who tells you they have never made a mistake in the market is either lying to you or never traded in the market.

Today’s boom stocks are hedge funds that are going public. Fortress could be the netscape of the boom with Blackstone and many others to follow. Would I buy ? No. I personally would never buy stock in a public hedge/private equity fund. Ever. My position is based on basic common sense and a rudimentary understanding of the hedge fund business. Here is the logic:

When you are an investor directly into a hedge fund you have 1 single element of leverage on the hedge fund , and that is the ability, often with very stringent limitations, to pull your money from the hedge fund. That is it.

That leverage is mighty however, particularly for the bigger investors in the hedge fund. Why ? Because when an investor pulls a significant amount of money from the fund, it creates a cascading series of problems.

It may cause the fund to have to sell securities in order to pay back the investor while still retaining their required or chosen cash levels.

The more leverage the fund uses, the more the cash problem is leveraged as well.

A fund’s “scoreboard” is their return and their amount of assets. Its also their marketing pitch. If they perform, they can draw more money into the fund if its open, or to their next fund if its closed. If they don’t outperform, they can usually forget about growing or their next fund. Its unfortunate, but you rarely if ever hear about the hedge funds that closed unless they were absolutely huge.

Hedge funds obviously don’t want their big investors to withdraw, so they work incredibly hard to make sure they outperform their peers. As the number of funds has grown, so has the difficulty to outperform. There are so many funds chasing the same deals in every area of specialty that the funds keep on investing in riskier and riskier deals. All in hopes of keeping their “money happy”

Bottomline is that hedge funds scramble hard each and every day to make their big investors, some of which can leave on the drop of the hat, happy.

Appeasing hedge fund investors is a very, very different business than making shareholders happy.

If a shareholder sells their share of stock, the hedge fund wont really care. Sure, they want the stock price to go up. They own shares of stock in the fund, and as the stock price goes, so goes some percentage of their networth. That should be enough for them to do whatever it takes to increase the stock price, right ? Maybe

Increasing the price of a share of stock is as much marketing to create demand for the stock as it is earnings of the fund.We also call this increasing the P/E of a stock. There are dozens of ways to increase the PE of a stock that is showing a profit. Hedge fund investors care about 1 thing. Cash. Money that is returned to them. Shareholders care about the price of the stock. One is capital returns, the other is capital appreciation.

That difference is just common sense, but its significant.

Which makes me wonder why those who put money into these hedge funds are letting them take the fund public. It will certainly change how the fund invests and manages its assets, even if the fund says it wont.

They can’t be responsive to shareholders and investors with the same story

Hedge funds are known for laying it all out on the line and doing the big deals. Often ones considered to be crazy by outsiders, but smart by insiders. They are the ones buying the lousy or stagnant public companies and taking them private, remastering them, only to reissue them to the stock buying public investor a couple years later at multiples of their investment.

How many public companies do you know that are known for their risktaking ? That gladly take outsized risks that some consider crazy,and do they do it on an ongoing basis ? How many public companies do you know that aren’t focused on hitting “the number” to keep shareholders happy ?

The hedge funds that are staying private have to be licking their chops. Competing against public hedge funds that have to deal with reporting and disclosure requirements is a lot easier than competing with a company that is stealth in their actions. They also know that despite proclamations to the contrary, the public funds will certainly change how they approach investing to make the market happy. The earnings of public funds impact the brand of the fund. If earnings are good, its business as usual. If earnings are bad, and / or the stock underperforms, then the public fund’s brand , and their ability to raise money is diminished.

Finally, the IPO also seems to put public shareholders on the opposite side of the ledger of those that have invested in the fund directly. Shareholders participate with management in the earnings of the fund, while those who put cash into the fund participate in the returns of the investments of the fund. Of course, the higher the return on investments, the greater the income of the fund itself and the numbers allocated to public shareholders. But fund investors returns are also a function of how much or how little management takes off the top. This isnt a problem when things are going great, but its always a problem when things aren’t going great.

This post isn’t expert commentary. Its just a friendly heads up based on what I see.

If you are looking at investing in any hedge fund stock, take a long, hard look at the business,IN PARTICULAR, the tax consequences of the investment and your place as a shareholder before you buy. If you are looking at just getting in and hoping it goes up because its the hot company in a hot industry… Welcome to 1999

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It was a little more than 5 years ago that I started blogging with this post.  How interesting is it that my first post related to the quality and purpose of sportswriting and now 5 years later, my writings about newspapers have evolved from my annoyance with them, to my hope that they will survive ?

In the beginning , blogs were the easiest way to communicate an opinion. Then as with now, writing a blog doesn’t mean that anyone would take the time to read it, but sometimes people did. My most popular posts were about Steve Nash leaving the Mavs, the series of posts on Success & Motivation, The Stock Market, and my colonoscopy of all things.

Blogging today, is not the same as it was 5 years ago.  In the early days of blogging, it served as much as mini social networks as a publishing tool.  Many used blogs as a way to communicate with family and friends. I don’t see that as the case any longer.  Social Networks have become the primary means of keeping in touch with those close to you.  Friendster for a minute, then Myspace and now Facebook are the primary means for people to keep each other up to date.  Pictures and privacy  have made the biggest difference.  Facebook its a quick and easy way to share pictures, videos  and updates only among those people you want to see them.  It has become a unique utility, which for many people elminated the need to blog.

Beyond personal communications, blogs have also been used as a broadcast medium by public figures, consultants and corporate executives. Blogs have been the most expedient means to share a point of view, a quick thought , factual reporting and whatever else someone else wants to share to a potentially unlimited audience. RSS feeds have advanced so that it has become incredibly easy for people to subscribe to blogs and quickly determine from the RSS headline or full feed whether or not they want to commit to reading the full post.   However that is changing as well.

Enter Twitter.   Twitter has quickly changed the nature of “broadcast texting”.  While Blogs have been a great way to offer complete stories, Twitter, with its 140 character limit, by its nature is the best suited of options for short bursts of content.  The size constraint makes “tweets” far less intrusive and easy to receive and read on a phone.  Twitter works for what it is designed to do, however its future is not a slam dunk.

Competition is coming strong. I happen to like Facebook Fan Pages (see mine here) . What I really like about my facebook page is the ability to filter messages that I send to followers based on their demographic data. I also like that people use their real names. What I don’t like is that posts are not searchable.

Google just released their new profiles, this is mine. I like the Picassa integration, but its still pretty simplistic.

I think these are just the predecessors to what we will see on mobile platforms. All the IPhone apps are tests for what and how people use their mobile devices. Its going to be very interesting to see where things go.

Five years ago blogging was a big step. Now, the internet has become such a stable home and mobile platform for text and graphics, we are going to see a rush of derivative products that we will strain to keep up with, but benefit from as we integrate them

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Time Warner has taken a PR beating in its efforts to do the right thing.  I would like to offer them a suggestion.

You are not going to win the PR battle if you make usage caps an issue related to cost.  There is far too large a contingency on the internet who will do their best to shout down anyone  and every corporation that challenge the dogma of “free internet” or “unlimited bandwidth”.   You will have folks like Saul Hansell at the NY Times who doesn’t seem to realize how often he contradicts himself writing articles that try to support the notion that all bandwidth is equal, and cheap.

Saul ignores the fact that any person or company can buy a server from any hosting company to get direct access to unlimited pay as you go bandwith, at very low commercial rates. He cites the fact that an ISP would pay $1k or more per 100mbs, without questioning the value. Then goes on to suggest that its acceptable to share the same amount of bandwidth delivered to the home 500 ways.  Which of course is another way of saying that ” you can have as much bandwidth as you want, as long as you don’t use it”

Saul says that if the consumer does use it,  the ISP just “splits the nodes” as many times as needed till consumers get the bandwidth they need.  Of course this doesn’t take into account the differences between upstream (which is more limited for technical reasons) and downstream, but let’s set that aside as not being an issue.  The natural maximum amount of noding is to the point where  there is a 1 to 1 ratio between node and home.  At that point the consumer has a link to the network that is not much different than that of the ISP that Saul said was paying $1k per month per  100mbs.     Should the consumer pay $1k per month for 100mbs of switched bandwidth  ?

The differenceof course is the quality of service required.  The ISP needs the full 100mbs available to it 100pct of the time.  Without the certainty of availability, it has no way to reliably offer service to its customers. The presumption is that consumers don’t  require any specific level of quality of service for their internet needs.

That is where the cable companies are getting their PR approach wrong.  They know what happens to their customer service lines if TV service is interrupted for even the shortest periods of time.  Look at the big to do made about the transition to Digital TV. Politicians were counting lost votes from consumers who couldn’t get their convertors for their analog TVs.  People get upset when they can’t watch TV.

Netizens are just as passionate about their internet.  Not only do they want access, but they want it fast.  Unfortunately for 99pct of the vocal minority of netizens, those who post all over the net and start websites about the importance of unlimited bandwidth, they think bigger numbers mean faster access.  It doesn’t.  They just don’t know it.  Firefox with too many tabs open on an Airbook will slow how fast a website comes up or your gmail loads more than whether or not you have a 2mbs, 10mbs or 100mbs connection.  The size of your Outlook database on a PC will impact how quickly your new email downloads and is available for you to reply to than the speed of your internet connection.

It won’t be easy, but the battle ground has to switch from amount of bandwidth and cost, to performance .

Consumers understand that there is a huge difference between quality and quantity.  Consumers understand that realworld speed comes at a premium price. We see it with our toll tags. We see it in carpool lanes. We see it with Fedex and UPS.  Amazon gives us delivery options with different costs. We as consumers make judgements every day about whether or not we want to pay for better performance.

The cable companies need to stop making this about gigabytes per month, and make it all about performance. You need to start making it clear that usage caps SERVE AND PROTECT the performance of your customers.  That you want to offer your customers the fastest access to your favorite websites at the lowest possible cost. That your network is finetuned to optimize the performance for 99pct of your customers. That you want to offer streaming video that doesn’t buffer. That you want to allow for fast downloads.  That can’t happen when a few people take advantage of the network.  Let people know you have special offerings for those who use corporate level quantities of bandwidth and that usage caps are in place to identify those people.

I like usage caps because there is nothing that pisses me off more than the network slowing down when Im trying to get work done. I’m a consumer that places a premium on quality over quantity.  I’m one of the 99pct of your consumers that you are putting 2nd to the 1pct. The vocal minority that probably don’t turn their lights off and then wonder why the electric bill is so high.

Focus your message to us. Those who care about quality of service.

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So I’m sitting in traffic in Manhattan. Not moving.  In the distance I can hear a firetruck siren and its getting closer. As those around us start to realize that we were in its path, I could see the frustration and even sense of fear in the driver’s face as he physically turned in all directions looking for an opening. I’m sure the same scene was played out in every car around us.  Fortunately we got out of the way, and the firetruck, was able to pass, although certainly not without a lot of stop and starts and incremental risk to those waiting on its arrival.

So what does this have to do with the internet ?

As our dependence on the net continues to increase, our habits of how we deal with emergencies and critical situations will change as well.  Will the habits of our kids push them to think to text a message to 911 rather than try to make a call ?  In a widespread emergency, a Text may have a better chance of getting through than a landline or cell phone call.  But in our net neutrality universe, how can we differentiate between a call for help in a life or death situation  vs some kid texting about what happened in class today ?

As medical care applications that use the net as transport to and from hospitals expand,  how can we make sure that the transport of an XRay, a surgical video, or a video conference that could save a life is given priority over some bittorrent porn download ?

The internet has become a utility.  We have come to depend on it with out really taking into account the situations where that dependence can be the difference between life and death.  While the discussion for the National Broadband Policy is occuring in the fight for stimulus money, its time we take the steps to make sure that we define how to identify packets of bits that can save a life

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We are in the broadband era.  There have been stairstep increases in broadband speeds on a market by market basis across the country and the world.  As fiber and Docsis 3.0 enter markets, providers jack up their download speeds to 50 and even in some cases 100mbs.  That’s great. Speed is always what we need. But what has it brought us so far ?

To date, the best and brightest among you have not been able to create and deliver any new applications that take advantage of magnitudes higher of broadband.  Not in the U.S., not elsewhere around the world that I have seen.  It seems to me that the most popular use of bandwidth that we have been able to come up with is  retransmitting TV, Movies and User Generated Content over the net.    Maybe we can add online gaming. Replacing consoles in the cloud. Then there is online backup. (disclosure , im an investor in Filesanywhere) That’s all I can think of.  Is that the best we can do with our bandwidth ?

Of course not. There are medical, security, engineering, defense and even shared processor applications in private networks. But where are they for the net ? You can’t blame cable and telco ISPs. While bandwidth to the home may be limited, thats not the case at universities and corporations. Its not hard or expensive to buy cloud computing from the likes of Amazon, or to put a server next to gigabits of bandwidth at hosting centers. The opportunity to invent new apps or to convert high end commercial apps is there. Why dont we see them available to us  ?

I’m a believer that there will be new high bandwidth applications that are truly beneficial to society that start to appear in the next 5 years.  I also believe that there will be “bandwidth viruses”.  hackers will be able to wipe out 100pct of your bandwidth and everything and anything you want to do by simply hosting P2P applications on unsuspecting host computers in our homes that send and receive hundreds of megabytes of noise. If that doesn’t work, the little kid next door can encode his softball game at 20mbs or more per second and get all his buddies around town to continuously receive the stream. Thats all it takes to slow your internet connection to a crawl. In a net neutrality  world, he has every right to do that as often as he likes.  Unless of course there are bandwith limits.

The point is that the concept of “open internet” where you can use any and all bandwidth how you want, when you want, is very, very flawed.  I agree that we should not segregate or discriminate by protocol or destination.  That creates a hierarchy of problems.  Bits are agnostic. They dont care what they hold, where they originate or what their destination is.

At some point, we have to recognize that in order for high bit rate applications to succeed , at the levels of latency they require, we need a way for people to buy the bandwidth and performance they need, dedicated to the application they want to run.  If you need or want more bandwidth for the high end applications that appear, you should pay for them.

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Every argument has its “go to” comparison.  Talk to anyone about what is going to happen with the future of TV,  and inevitably there will be a reference to “look what happened to the newspapers” or “Look what happened to the music industry”

Can we just set aside those arguments for all things media going forward and say that such arugments are INCREDIBLY STUPID  ?

Yes, they are INCREDIBLY STUPID.  In a digital era, it makes absolutely no sense to compare industries that were trying to protect and serve products that were and are PHYSICALLY DISTRIBUTED and by far the biggest source of their revenues vs industries that distribute their products completely digitally or for whom physical products are in the minority.

The music industry made the mistake of trying to destroy digital distribution in order to protect the physical distribution of CDs. Not only did they not have an answer to digitally distribute music in the Napster era, but they STILL DO NOT !.  Fortunately for them, they have finally recognized that for the most part the CD is dead, but where revenue is being generated by their music, they deserve their cut.  Imagine if they had established a digital distribution portal for audio and video, ala Hulu, that could at least attempt to compete with ITunes and Youtube. They would be in far better shape. Instead they are reinventing their business model. The CD was doomed to die, no matter what happened. Trying to protect it was a mistake.

The newspaper industry tried to protect the physical distribution of their papers. That was a mistake. Their problem was not only that they lost their ability to differentiate from content on the net, but they also lost their ability to differentiate their value to advertisers from the net.  There is no inherent advantage to reading the news or advertisements via the paper vs the internet, it has become a personal or business preference.  Unfortunately for the local newspaper industry, it doesn’t appear any of their publishers are creative enough to come up with options to attack digital.

Comparing Cable, Telco and Satellite TV vs Online Video and referencing music or newspapers is a mistake.  The internet, digital cable (which is becoming more ubiquitous, even to the point of Switched Digital), Telco video and of course satellite video are all already digitally distributed.  Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages.  None will be the winner to the complete exclusion of another. They all will complement each other.

The only real outstanding issue is with the big content producers.  The question is what happens with DVD sales ? Is the decline in sales due to the economy, the impact of downloads , the impact of VOD from cable, telco and satellite and internet, or maybe even the impact of people choosing to pay $10 to go to the movies rather than paying $15 to $20 for a DVD ? I’m not sure that we know the answer yet.

As you might guess, I have an opinion on this.  I think people are choosing out of home entertainment.  They are watching more TV and things on TV, and with limited disposable income, they are choosing inexpensive out of home entertainment.   If it costs less than $10 per person and its outside the house, its probably a business that is doing well. From movies to restaurants.

I think there is another issue as well.  There is a critical business distinction between the  digital distribution of movies via download vs the physical distribution of DVDs. When  DVDs  resellers and retailers buy quantities of the physical product, they take the responsibility of selling them. They write a check for the products they sell net of returns for the smaller movies , and with out returns for the biggest movies.  That is real money in the bank within 90 days of shipment. On the digital download side, its purely consignment. No cash, no certainty until after the fact.

Why do you think Netflix gets so much product once it hits their window and Youtube/Google doesn’t ? Because Netflix will offer minimum guarantees of revenue. Youtubue/Google and other online sites pay purely on consignment.  That is the key problem for movie and tv download sites. They have so little confidence in their ability to sell downloads for any given title, they are terrified of having to offer guarantees.

The content companies are happy to offer any and all shows/movies/content that is not generating revenue in physical form to any and all download sites.  But that is what separates them from the music industry. They have the ability to distribute through any and all types of distribution, as well as to offer downloads on their own. Its just a question of managing and optimizing the allocation of product to different distribution outlets rather than trying to completely shut down digital outlets ala the music industry.

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Now that twitter seems to be a media darling and an acquisition target, I thought I would share some of my observations.

1. Tweets are the blog posts you thought about writing, but didn’t feel they had enough substance

2. Twitterers are older. Myspace started around music and students. Facebook started around college students. Twitter was started by old people. Relatively speaking . It could be the first new social media platform to start old and get younger, but there really is no assurance of that. I don’t know that twittering will get big for the 18 and younger set.

3. The challenge of Twitter will be its anonymity.  It’s the same problem myspace has.  @collegehottie can be a 60 year old pedophile who pushes a Tweetup and creates a problem.

4. The plus for twitter is that can reduce text messaging minutes. Particularly for broadcasting to a group of friends.

5. Twitter will need to create a groups or list function with a private option and soon. Otherwise Facebook can create a twitter like “skin” for its users to do the quick updates that twitter options. FB seems to be trying to find their way there now, recognizing the threat of Twitter.  FB updates seem to be in decline as users utilize twitter for this function

6. While there is a growing market for 3rd party twitter apps, twitter cant depend on them to expand the platform. The beauty of twitter is its simplicity.

7. The beauty of twitter is its simplicity. It works perfectly and quickly on a phone. Translated, its the ultimate time waster for the 30 plus generation.  You are never bored when you have a phone and twitter, no matter where you are. Thats the key to its success.

What are your thoughts on the future of twitter and its uses. Im curious.

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I have a simple question.  Why are profitable companies laying off people ?  I can see if a company’s survival is at stake.  If payroll can’t be met. If debt can’t be paid. Then layoffs are a necessary evil. Even if companies have created cash flow deficits through their own mistakes, that’s the nature of business. Mistakes are made.  What I have a problem with is that discussion of executive pay never includes whether or not the executive has been good enough to pre empt or prevent layoffs.

Executives are not stupid. Usually. They recognize that killing off employees can juice a stock price. Even in this market. Which in turn can juice the value of their options and compensation.  At the companies I run, we have cut raises, put a freeze on hiring, done what we need to do, but we have done all we can to avoid layoffs. Why ? Because its the right thing to do. Its the patriotic thing to do. I’m selfish enough and arrogant enough to think that maybe if I pay attention to the big picture that I can impact the big picture.

As a shareholder, where possible, I would prefer that the companies I own shares in do the same thing.

I own stock in some firms whose backs are up against the wall because of debt. Unfortunately, they don’t have a choice but to cut jobs in order to save jobs. I understand this reality. It’s unfortunate, but a fact of life.  I also own stock in firms that are profitable.  Put a freeze on hiring. Put a freeze on all raises to employees of all levels, including yours.  You don’t have to try to squeeze every nickel to the bottom line. I realize these are extrodinary times.  I’m happy to accept a P/E ratio that is 20pct or 50pct higher (lower earnings vs the current price) . I want you to manage for the long term benefit of the company rather than manage to the stock price.

I don’t have data, but  I’m willing to bet that private companies are far less likely to lay off people than public companies.

As the discussion on executive pay continues, my message is simple.  Give credit to those executives who bust their asses to avoid layoffs except in cases where its an absolute necessity. Pay ‘em a premium vs those who cut jobs in profitable companies.  Look to private companies as guides to what a well managed company can accomplish, and how executives are compensated.

Capitalism isn’t about having the biggest bottom line for the current quarter.  Capitalism is about individuals busting their asses to maximize value for shareholders.  Sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture in order to reap the biggest returns. Not all rewards are short term.

My 2 Cents on CEO Pay

Apr 15th 2008 2:09AM

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