Captians (and Generals and Admirals) of Industry

            It’s funny sometimes how things that at first glance seem unconnected, later come together in a kind of synchronicity.  For instance, yesterday I read an article about a study that suggested large companies whose CEOs are former members of the U.S. military are less likely to commit fraud than companies whose CEOs never served.  Later I watched an episode of Mad Men where an employee of the fictional advertising agency featured in that show faced a moral dilemma. She had to decide if she would commit an immoral act for a client who could potentially be very lucrative for both her and her employer, or forgo the act and potentially lose the client and his money.

            While the article’s study showed far less fraud by ex-military CEOs, it also showed that their companies made less money.  It was supposed that executives with a military background are rule-followers and not innovators, thus they were more about maintaining than expanding, and that when the line between right and wrong turned gray, they stepped back until it was thick and black again.  A feather in the cap for the ex-military CEOs is they perform better during downturns.  It was suggested having been on a battlefield makes one less likely to be too upset over tough times and slow returns.

The article also asked which company you’d rather have your pension invested in; the lower performing ex-military led company or the better performing non-ex-military led one.  Knee jerk reaction to this question would likely place most of us on  the side of the better performing company, but then the question was raised, How much more likely is it that a non-military background CEO would move his jobs offshore.  It doesn’t really matter which type of company I put my retirement in, if my job moved to another country and I had no income to invest.

            In the Mad Men episode the employee elected to commit the immoral act.  The ad agency got the client, and she got a partnership and a 5% share.  There was another character that was sure they would get the client with her having to perform the act, but he was out voted by the other executives.

            But these points might be moot, because ex-military led companies are becoming extinct.  Without the draft fewer and fewer business men and women are serving before they go into the business world.  Are we losing a group of leaders who serve with honor and have a distinct sense of right and wrong, or are there leaders, and future leaders, in the business world who want it to be a business world where ethics is considered with equal weight as the bottom line?

            A group of graduates from the Harvard Business School, class of 2009, have started a movement to have MBAs take a sort of Hippocratic Oath, to act responsibly and ethically.  I’m not sure that would work though.  Doctors are held by that oath because there is far more accountability in the operating room than there is in the boardroom, and profits are profits.

            I don't know a lot of MBAs, but I would imagine since they come from the same human race as the rest of us, that there are good ones and bad ones.  Of the few I know, I realize which are which and in a small sampling, the good ones don't seem to be as wealthy as the bad ones.  If you consider wealth in monetary terms.

Fancy Bred

Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?

 -William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

                    (And Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka)

There she was on the television news, clutching about a dozen copies of John Lennon’s LP Double Fantasy against her chest as if rescuing them from a burning building, smiling and just slightly out of breath.  Just exactly what the reporter asked her I don’t remember, but her answer was something about the LPs being collector’s items.  You see, John Lennon had just been murdered in New York City.  My thought was, can’t they just print more?  They could and they did.  What she probably should have done was buy out the entire store, because if the Double Fantasy LP has become a collector’s item it’s not because of the death of the artist but because of the death of the medium.  My memory sets the price for LPs in 1980 at about five bucks.  An admittedly short Internet search puts the best price of the Double Fantasy LP at just under $19.00 today.  That’s a 280% profit in 30 years.  I wonder if the Facebook stock with garner that much in 2042?

            This week a jersey that Babe Ruth wore sold at auction for 4.4 million dollars.  Unlike LPs from the eighties they can’t make more clothing worn by the Bambino so that jersey is worth more.  But not to everyone.  I like baseball gererally and the San Francisco Giants particularly.  I wouldn’t take a second look at a Babe Ruth jersey but I’d take several at one worn by Willie Mays.  But would I pay 4.4 million bucks for it?  Even if I had it, or if I had 20 times it, I don’t think I would.  I’m not a “collector’s item” guy.  I know people with signed baseballs and I like their collections but more for the esthetics than as an investment.

            Awhile back someone paid a couple million for the first Superman comic.  It went for that price because it was in good condition and very rare, and because someone was willing to pay that price.  Maybe in a few years he’ll sell it for twice or thrice that much.  But it’s already not as rare as it was on auction day.  About two weeks after the unnamed buyer got it, a nicer copy was found.  So if his copy was “very” rare, then the discovery of another, better one could only devalue his.  It’s a gamble like stocks, but unlike stocks you can’t always liquidate collectibles when you want the cash.

            This week a man in San Francisco was arrested for printing fake barcodes for Lego collectibles.  He would go to Target stores and put his labels on expensive Star Wars Lego items, purchase them at maybe 10% of their retail price, and then sell them on Ebay at 100% of their retail price.  What is interesting about this story is that not long, long ago (about three days), and not so far, far away (Mountain View) another man was doing the exact same thing.  The authorities describe the actions of these two men as, “extremely labor-intensive and not particularly lucrative.”  Those same authorities have found no connection between the two other than that they are willing to put a lot of man hours in for little return, and they “targeted” Star Wars Lego items. 

            These items are not rare.  They haven’t been locked away in a barn since the Yankees shared the Polo Grounds with the Giants or hidden in a childhood closet untouched since the Truman administration.  They’re new and there is no reason the Lego Company can’t make more.  Just like printing more John Lennon albums in 1981.  They are collector’s items for no other reason than the Lego company says they are.  They are called “manufactured collectables” in the industry. 

In a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the bad guy are sitting in a Cairo bar.  The bad guy – I forget his name but I remember that he totally eats a fly by accident in a later scene- pulls out a watch and comments how it’s only worth a couple of dollars today but if it gets buried for a thousand years it becomes priceless.  Maybe these two guys should hold on to their Star Wars items and then sell them in 20 or 30 years instead of right away.  On Amazon I found a Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon for $2,700.  Those are serious dollars but I can’t see where how many have actually sold.

            What makes something a collector’s item?  Is it its rarity, the demand, a flaw, perhaps contact with someone or something famous or infamous, whim of fancy, a emotional connection to an childhood memory, marketing brilliance, or an intangible something that just strikes you?

            One man’s trash will always be another man’s treasure.  Whether its old baseball paraphernalia, brand new toys, or comic books that depict the origin of a pop culture icon, some things will be assigned value via the heart and some the head.  In the mean time, I’ll be stuffing my boy’s Lego Star Wars toys back in the boxes as soon as they move out.  Daddy needs a retirement fund.

Stormy Night

 It was a dark and stormy night (Thank you Edward Bulwer-Lytton).  Well, of course it was dark, it was night.  I was at a sleepover at my friend Mark’s house which is where the stormy part comes in.  We were in our sleeping bags in his back yard when it started raining so we moved inside.  Rain in Fresno in July is weird enough but the precipitation wasn’t the strangest thing to happen that night.  It was July 15, 1976.  As Mark and I listened to the Queen album Night at the Opera over and over again until we got too sleepy to go on, about 40 miles north of us 26 children never came home from school.

            The next morning after we got up and grabbed two bowls of Frosted Flakes, we turned on the TV to watch cartoons or maybe some old black and white horror film; sometimes one of the channels would show the same one Friday night and then again Saturday morning.  But when we switched on the tube there were neither cartoons nor The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there was instead the seeds of a real horror story on the screen.  The image we were looking at was a school bus, something we’d seen a thousand times before that morning without giving it a second thought, but this one was cantered over in a grove of reeds or tule grass, I don’t know which, lit from most likely the spot on a Sheriff’s car, and as empty as a ghost town.

            As Mark and I dropped the needle on Bohemian Rhapsody, 26 children and their bus driver had been kidnapped right off a lonely country road outside of Chowchilla.  The image of that abandoned bus, poorly lit and listing to one side, was far more haunting to me than any murder victim from a movie.  The youngest missing child was 5, the oldest 14.  Just like me.

            Parents of those children, and parents everywhere, must have been haunted by what could have happened.  This was just a few years after the Tate/LaBianca murders and after the Zodiac killer in a letter to the Chronicle talked about how “school children make such nice targets.”

            Thankfully those parents anguish was taken away when all 26 children and their bus driver were found alive in a quarry in Livermore.   Their kidnappers had put them in a buried moving van through a hole cut in the top.  After 16 hours the bus driver, Ed Ray, and some of the older boys used a board to pry open the cover that the kidnappers figured was too heavy to move (thank you Archimedes) and escaped.

            Today, May 18, 2012, Ed Ray passed away at 91.  I understand that many of the “children” from that event visited him in recent days to pay respect to a man who rose to the times and likely saved over two dozen lives.  Ed Ray is a name that will be remembered long after today in all of Chowchilla and at least 26 homes.

The kidnappers, none of which has made parole in the last 36 years and probably never will – there have also not been school bus kidnappings - will not have their names noted here as my way of hopefully starting a trend where all future kidnappers, school or workplace shooters, and serial killers will go to their graves, by whatever means they arrive there, unnamed, unknown, unremembered, and without infamy. 

As a side note, I used to work with a guy who grew up in Chowchilla.  One day we were talking about it and I asked him what it was like during that time.  He said the only things he remembers is all the TV vans in town and walking down an alley past a car that Diane Sawyer was changing in and he got to see her bra.

No Shit. Sherlock

35 miles from my front door is London, California, supposedly named one early morning when tule fog had the opacity of latex paint.

            Some time in the mid-eighties I got on a Sherlock Holmes kick.  I couldn’t get enough of the famous Victorian detective.  I read all of Author Conan Doyle’s books and short stories, I rented every VHS movie I could find from The Seven Percent Solution to the tragically underappreciated Young Sherlock Holmes to Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective – but not the Basil Rathbone movies, I don’t care for the buffoonish Nigel Bruce as Watson - , and I read piles of Holmes stories written by other authors such as Isaac Asimov and Stephen King.

            Without looking it up I can tell you his address is 221B Baker Street, that his landlord is Mrs. Hudson, that he keeps tobacco in a slipper nailed to his mantel, that he met Watson at a hospital, that he was killed of by his creator and then brought back, that his stories originally appeared in a magazine named The Strand, that his brother is Mycroft and that Watson served in Afghanistan.

            I know why the dog didn’t bark.

            Some of the original stories I can name, also without looking them up; The Man with the Twisted Lip, The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and of course The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Not every story was a gem for me, just like not every movie satisfied my thirst for Holmes adventures, but more did than didn’t.

            Back in those same eighties, Jeremy Brett played Holmes on an English TV show that was broadcast over here on PBS.  A lot of Sherlockians view his portrayal as sacrilege, but I liked him.  Sure, he was a big ham who chewed scenery like a wood chipper, but the television shows were faithful to the source material; the original stories, and Edward Hardwicke’s Watson had a pair.  Brett my have actually given up his health to the role.

            I drifted away from the foggy streets of London and the…well foggy moors of the English countryside for awhile, and didn’t read or watch much Holmes stuff.  Then a couple of years ago a new television show based on Conan Doyle’s detective, titled simply Sherlock, debuted on PBS.  This time they put Holmes and Watson smack dab in the 21^st century.  Holmes is still a consulting detective but now he uses a Blackberry and has a website.  Watson writes his stories about Holmes on a blog instead of as serials in a magazine, but he still served in Afghanistan.

            Holmes is played by the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who I’ve only seen elsewhere in Spielberg’s War Horse.  With a name like Cumberbatch he sounds like he should be running the pub in Hobbiton.  He actually has been cast in The Hobbit but is playing not a hobbit but the voice of the dragon Smaug.

            Watson is played by Martin Freeman who I remember most as Authur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  He also starred in the British (original) version of The Office but will probably forever be remember after this December when he stars as the title character in The Hobbit.  I was going to write titular but I giggle when I say it outloud.

            This very Sunday Sherlock is returning to PBS for its second season.  It will be on at 9:00 on Masterpiece Mystery.  The slot formally held by Downton Abby.  I rented the first season on DVD and watched it with my boys.  I’ll be taping this season and watching the same way.  My oldest who is 15 has been banned from computer games for awhile, it’s like crack to him, and was banished to his Kindle Fire.  I know, tragic.  We blocked the web access on that device so he was forced to use it for reading.  All of Author Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories are free to download on Kindle so he is reading the same stories I read nearly 30 years ago.  I think it kind of nice a 15-year-old, surrounded by such a vast electronic buffet can still get some enjoyment reading stories that are over 100 years old.  Next up, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.