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Corporate suicides highlight stresses at the top
By Clare Hutchison, Reuters
Posted at 09/01/2013 9:26 AM | Updated as of 09/01/2013 9:26 AM
LONDON – The suicides of two top executives in Switzerland has prompted calls for greater support for boardroom highfliers.
Heavy workloads, frenetic schedules and extensive overseas travel has obliterated the so-called “work-life balance” for many bosses and the financial crisis has piled on the pressure with job cuts, firesales and the scramble to survive.
“It has always been tough at the top and it has always been lonely at the top and certainly since the global financial crisis, it’s got even lonelier and even tougher,” said Executive Mentor David CM Carter, author of self-help book Breakthrough.
“That’s why it’s really important that those people at the top pay attention to the need for balance,” he said, pointing to entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Bill Gates, who have teamed glittering careers with a successful family life.
“They do hot air ballooning, they save the planet as well as running their fantastic empires. They have holidays and hobbies or they focus on their family and their relationships and on their health.”
But career chief executives often face more pressure from shareholders and their boards than company founders such as Branson and Gates.
And while they usually have a coterie of staff running around them, chief executive officers often feel isolated by their position and the high-stakes decisions they have to take. The need always to present a “game face” can inhibit them from confiding in colleagues.
Zurich Insurance Group’s Chief Financial Officer Pierre Wauthier was found dead at his home on Monday in what police said appeared to be a suicide.
Just weeks earlier, Carsten Schloter, the chief executive of telecoms group Swisscom, killed himself.
The deaths shocked Switzerland’s corporate community and have highlighted the sometimes lonely existence of high-ranking executives.
In media interviews, Schloter expressed regret about the distance between him and his three children in Germany, whom he saw far less frequently due to the breakdown of his marriage. He also said he found it “difficult to unwind”.
Executives often spend large amounts of time away from their friends and family and it is not uncommon for bosses to live in a different city or even country for work and commute home at weekends.
Schloter had also faced pressure after an acquisition he championed led to 1.3 billion euros of writedowns. More recently, Switzerland’s competition body said it had opened a probe into Swisscom after a rival suggested it abused its market position.
via Corporate suicides highlight stresses at the top | ABS-CBN News.

The critical question, then, is whether existing reserves are big enough to handle the struggling economies’ short-term obligations. Things are dicier than they could be. Mr Bussière et al note that not all emerging market economies rebuilt reserves after the crisis. India’s, for example, never recovered their pre-crisis peak. Meanwhile, short-term foreign-currency debt has grown sharply in many economies since 2008.
But on the whole, there is good reason to be optimistic. In 1997, Indonesia’s short-term debt was roughly 188% of its reserve holdings. As of last year, by contrast, the figure was around 40%. In India the number in 2012 was closer to 30%. Ratios are higher in South Africa and Turkey but remain well short of the Asian crisis danger zone, at least as of last year.
Balance-sheet effects aside, the biggest worry is that depreciation will disrupt monetary policy. A large depreciation raises import costs which can feed through to inflation. As financing grows tighter interest rates may rise; ominously, the yield on 10-year Turkish debt recently topped that on similar duration Greek bonds. Central banks may exacerbate the rises by raising short-term interest rates, either to encourage foreign capital to stay put or to head off looming inflation. After a hefty 50-basis-point rise today Indonesia has raised its policy rate 125 basis points since May, even as GDP growth has weakened.
via Emerging market currencies: Reserve judgment | The Economist.

This may be the first sensible step that Obama has taken in the Syrian crisis, and may prove to be one of the better ones of his Presidency—even if he loses the vote, as could happen. Politically, he may have just saved his second term from being consumed by Benghazi-like recriminations and spared himself Congressional mendacity about what they all might have done. It will likely divide the G.O.P. Although he said that he didn’t really, truly need to ask Congress for permission, he is doing so. Presidents—including Obama, in his decision to ignore the War Powers Act in Libya despite its clear application—have abandoned even the pretense that they need to seek Congressional approval. (Representative Peter King has already complained that the President is “abdicating”—a verb that tells you a lot about why this was a good decision.)
If he loses it’s not unambiguously clear, given how ill-thought out the military strategy appears to be at this point, that Syria, or even his Presidency, will be worse off. (See George Packer’s post on the possible costs, and wonder for a minute if getting the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through was such a victory for Johnson.) “Our democracy is stronger when the President and the people’s representatives stand together,” Obama said; he might have added that it can also be stronger when they stand apart, as long as they are standing up, voting, and being counted. As for his goal of reasserting the importance of international norms, laws, and processes—he would only have undermined that by heading off alone, and can at least live by it by losing.
Would a loss in Congress mean that there is impunity for the use of chemical weapons? That is what Obama will argue: “Here’s my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?” That case will only be stronger if it is argued in front of a legislature and the public, and not in a closed room in the White House. And a loss, as devastating as it might feel, might do less to undermine the possibility of a future consensus than a reckless strike that could have gone very, very wrong, and left too many people regretting having cared. A no vote could also shake other countries out of the view that international treaties and bodies are for show, while the real decisions happen in Washington, and lead to a strengthening of them.
Or it might go badly. Obama is certainly taking a risk, but that’s what the Presidency should be, and this one is worth it. The worst outcomes would involve either Congress or the President dodging this moment and its meaning. Congress might do so by constructing some legislative monstrosity, as it did during the debt-ceiling crisis, that relies on a complicated series of mechanisms that assure nothing—except that whatever happens is Obama’s fault—or too-sweeping powers. And the most disastrous thing that Obama could do is not admitting that he’s lost if he does, and bombing anyway. Perhaps it’s too optimistic to say that today’s decision might be what keeps some future President, our country, and who knows what other nation and people from the sort of tragedy that destroys cities. But it will certainly help, in an area where the world needs all the help it can get. And that makes this a morally important moment for the President as well.
via Going to Congress: Obama’s Best Syria Decision : The New Yorker.

Though the novel starts a bit slowly, the adventure heats up once our characters arrive in dragon country and Isabella starts to come into her own. This is the first book in a trilogy, and Brennan isn’t afraid to take major risks with beloved characters you might be hoping to have around for a while — and that is a good sign.
What’s truly great about this novel is the seamless merging of fantasy themes and incredibly realistic scientific and social details. Come for the dragon adventure — because there’s a lot of it. But stay for characters whose stories feel as real as Marie Curie’s.
via Don’t miss this engrossing novel about the science of dragons.

Goldin and Lawrence Katz have done about as close to an apples-to-apples comparison of men’s and women’s wages as exists. (They talk about it here in a Freakonomics discussion.) They tracked male and female MBAs graduating from the University of Chicago from 1990 to 2006. First they controlled for previous job experience, GPA, chosen profession, business-school course and job title. Right out of school, they found only a tiny differential in salary between men and women, which might be because of a little bit of lingering discrimination or because women are worse at negotiating starting salaries. But 10 to 15 years later, the gap widens to 40 percent, almost all of which is due to career interruptions and fewer hours. The gap is even wider for women business school graduates who marry very high earners. (Note: Never marry a rich man).
If this midcareer gap is due to discrimination, it’s much deeper than “male boss looks at female hire and decides she is worth less, and then pats her male colleague on the back and slips him a bonus.” It’s the deeper, more systemic discrimination of inadequate family-leave policies and childcare options, of women defaulting to being the caretakers. Or of women deciding that are suited to be nurses and teachers but not doctors. And in that more complicated discussion, you have to leave room at least for the option of choice—that women just don’t want to work the same way men do.
via Gender pay gap: The familiar line that “women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar” simply isn’t accurate. – Slate Magazine.

Making Windows Console just a little bit more livable. Click through to get the shell.

Configuring Console2 with Cygwin
When using Windows, Console2 does a great job of managing my console windows, but it’s not intuitive how to configure it with Cygwin (my console of choice).  It’s not that hard to simply get Cygwin to open in Console2, but it can be tricky to get it open to a startup directory.
Here are the steps to get Console2 to open to a specific startup directory:
Launch Console2
Open settings through Edit > Settings
Click tabs from the tree on the left
Click the ‘Add’ button to add a new tab
Set the title to ‘Cygwin’ (or another appropriate name)
via Configuring Console2 with Cygwin – Blog::Quibb.

No. There are a whole lot more people with high-prestige educations than there are “prominent posts”. I don’t know a thing particularly about Rubin, but I’m pretty sure that, like Clinton, he’s neither more nor less qualified for prominent positions than hundreds of his classmates, and the reason why he and she are on a different career track than their classmates are is their parents rather than any particular individual excellence.
This is the smallest of possible justice issues — the people who are qualified on paper for the jobs that get handed to Clinton and Rubin are doing just fine doing something else. But it still burns me having Sorkin patiently explain that the children of the powerful are running things because of their objectively judged merit.
via Unfogged.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)
So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.
And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.)
via Private school vs. public school: Only bad people send their kids to private school. – Slate Magazine.

But monitoring software is now available to track all transactions and detect suspicious patterns. In the new study, the tracking software was NCR’s Restaurant Guard product, and NCR provided the data. The software is intentionally set so that a restaurant manager gets only an electronic theft alert in cases that seem to clearly be misconduct. Otherwise, a manager might be mired in time-consuming detective work instead of running the restaurant.
The savings from the theft alerts themselves were modest, $108 a week per restaurant. However, after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of $2,982 a week, or about 7 percent.
The impact, the researchers say, came not from firing workers engaged in theft, but mostly from their changed behavior. Knowing they were being monitored, the servers not only pulled back on any unethical practices, but also channeled their efforts into, say, prompting customers to have that dessert or a second beer, raising revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves.
“The same people who are stealing from you can be set up to succeed,” said Mr. Pierce of Washington University.
In the research, the data sets were sizable. For example, there were more than 630,000 transactions by servers tracked and collected each week over the course of the project.
But more significant, the researchers say, is what the data analysis might contribute to fields of study like social psychology and behavioral economics — and the business discipline of human resources management.
In human resources, much emphasis is placed on employee selection: if you pick the right people, they will do the right thing. Instead, this research suggests that the surveillance effect on employee behavior is striking.
“What’s surprising is the weird effectiveness of the intervention, once the monitoring technology is in place,” said Mr. McAfee of M.I.T.
Not surprisingly, NCR is delighted by the results. “It validates the customer data we’ve seen,” said Jeff Hindman, a vice president at NCR. “But this is done by outside experts with the academic standards and statistical rigor they bring to the analysis.”
 
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via How Surveillance Changes Behavior: A Restaurant Workers Case Study – NYTimes.com.