Bad PR and Bad Banking: BOA

How to do bad PR: Announce plans to raise fees effecting low-income customers, then pull back, wait a year, then announce such plans again, then pull back yet again. This sort of PR strategy gives rise to headlines such as, “Bank of America Backs Down on New Fees.” The Wall Street Journal could have added, “yet again.” Besides the obvious PR downside to announcing unpopular fees—and on one’s least well-off customers—is the implication of weakness or vulnerability in repeatedly backing down. In the animal kingdom, Bank of America would not exactly be the alpha male lion. Rather, the bank would be one of the other males, which may or may not get to reproduce.

                                          
The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available at Amazon.com.  

The Filibuster: States' Rights or a Partisan Ploy?

Before 1917, senators could filibuster only by talking continuously on the U.S. Senate floor. There was no mechanism to stop them. Such filibusters were rare until entering World War I was debated. In 1917, the Senate passed its first “cloture” rule, whereby two-thirds of the Senate could cut off debate and force a final vote. Between that year and 1971, no two-year session of Congress had more than 10 such votes. Even so, in 1971 the rules were changed to allow other legislation to be taken up during a filibuster—relieving a senator of having to continuously talk to maintain one. Making it easier to filibuster quickly led to the predictable result of more filibusters. In the 93^rd Congress (1973-74), the number of cloture motions jumped to 31, from an average in the 1917-1971 period of two per Congressional session. In 1975, the number of votes needed to stop a filibuster was lowered from 67 to 60. However, this change did not curtail the use of the device, as it is rare for a party to control 60 votes out of 100 in the U.S. Senate. By 2010, the average number of cloture motions per two-year session had risen to 129, which suggests that the filibuster had become more typical in how senate business was to be conducted. In effect, legislation and even executive business, such as confirming presidential nominations, needed a supermajority (60 out of 100) in the upper chamber of Congress.


The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

Non-Tariff Barriers to Trans-Atlantic Trade

Karel De Gucht, the E.U. trade commissioner, said in late November 2012, “There is now, for the first time in years, a serious drive towards an E.U.-U.S. free-trade agreement.” The office of his counterpart, Ron Kirk, the U.S. trade representative, indicated that a high-level working-group consisting of Europeans and Americans was working on “how best to increase U.S.-E.U. trade and investment.” The sticking point concerned non-tariff barriers, such as different regulatory standards.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

Karel De Gucht, the E.U. Trade Commissioner, advocating a free-trade pact with the U.S.  (Reuters).

Steve Jobs: The Sad Truth about Visionary Leadership

According to Joe Nocera, Steve Jobs was not a consensus-builder but a dictator. Lest it be objected that this disqualifies him from being admitted to the “true leader” hall of fame, Nocera hints at an explanation for why visionary leaders may not be all that touchy-feely after all. Nocera suggests that Jobs was a dictator because he “listened mainly to his own intuition.” He “never stopped relying on his singular instincts in making decisions” on Apple products. This makes complete sense, as his sense was singular. 

Steve Jobs at Apple. Is it the vision or charisma that accounts for the focus on such pictures?   Getty

The full essay is in On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, which is available at Amazon.