Barack Obama, change and his place in history

No matter what you think of him, you have to agree that Barack Obama is working hard and will probably have a lasting effect on the US of A. He already earned his place in history books as the first "non-Caucasian" president. And, at least from my Canadian point of view, he's bringing about change.

In leadership school, you always learn that change is hard. People usually fight it because, even if they see the potential benefits, change will be uncomfortable in the beginning. This is why, usually, politicians promise change (hey! Everyone wants a better life) but never really do anything (sacrifice? Actually, it's not so bad right now…).

If you need to enact change, you have to be relentless about it. You have to show people that the benefits outweigh the costs and you have to keep saying it ad nauseam. You also need to have a plan in order for everything to go smoothly.

What Obama is doing is different. He's basically on the post-iceberg Titanic trying to keep it afloat. He can enact most of what he wanted to do with the country since the alternative is, well, drowning. This also explains his lack of success so far on foreign grounds (On that note, I don't think that what he accomplished with other countries so far, just that the extent of what he did within the US in such a short of time is very impressive). The question is: does he have a plan? To continue with nautical metaphors, you can't only be keeping the boat afloat, you need to find help or get the boat to a port.

It is with such a plan that he will be able to secure a much more significant place in history than the "token black guy". The leaders who lead in a crisis are in a tremendous position to enact long term change that will shape the destiny of their country. For better… or for worse.

 

Executive compensation

There have been calls lately to curb the compensation executives make. The idea behind this is that they are making an insane amount of money compared to their workers, which is even worst since most companies are not doing too well right now. But why are CEOs and other executives making so much? And what is really the problem.

First, here is a graph of the compensation packages of the highest paid executive in the US from 1997 to 2007 (from the Economic Research Institute). You can see that the base salary remained more or less constant (indexed to inflation) while the stock options sky rocketed. An interesting comparison is with the DJIA (from Google Finance).

 
 

The trends are similar. Executive compensation increased until the bubble burst of 2000 and went down during the following recession. When all hell broke loose however, CEOs were making the most, a bit like how it is now. This is only one prior example, but it's safe to assume, especially with the amount of public outcry this creates, that CEO remuneration will be lower in the coming years than it is now. They will be getting less stock options and the value of those will be lower (due to the market).

These stock options are a big part of the problem in my opinion. The idea is good: you link the employee's pay with how well s/he directs the company. However, since the stocks themselves are subject to the company's perceived value at a moment in time, it encourages them to do things that only affect this perception. The enduring value of the company becomes less important than the next quarterly result (this makes the partner idea of some non-incorporated firms superior in terms of long term growth). Of course, companies have tried to curb their agency problems through forbidding their executives from exercising their options before a certain amount of time which has proved somewhat successful (though probably not enough). No doubt this will keep evolving.

This blog post was sparked by a Sophie Cousineau article in La Presse Affaire's new magazine. She was actually talking of letting shareholders vote on the top executive packages. It has been done in countries such as Australia with some results. The problem is that the votes are not binding and that the Council can just do what they want. In my opinion, the shareholders are the owners of the corporation and should be able to decide its destiny. Yes, the government would need to step up and force such a vote but is this really different than the laws saying that corporations have to produce quarterly statements?

I also want to point out that I'm not saying that shareholders will necessarily make better decisions than the administrators, but that it's simply the democratic way to go about this and that shareholders should have total control over their company.

New posts coming

I was a bit busy in the past few weeks but I should be posting regularly here again… expect something more today and a reblog post as I catch up on my google Reader (1000+ new articles… yea!). In the meantime, an amusing website: http://survivingtheworld.net/

L’exclusion

Ces dernières semaines, dû à une annonce plutôt inattendue de la Fédération des Femmes du Québec, on a eu droit à un débat bizarre sur le port du voile dans la fonction publique. Au départ, les opposants à la position de la FFQ se faisaient nombreux et plusieurs avançait un argument étrange voulant que le voile soit un symbole d'oppression de la femme et qu'il devrait être interdit.

Donc, selon ces personnes, il faut interdire à certaines femmes musulmanes le port du foulard car nous (et non pas elles) jugeons qu'il les place dans une position de soumission aux hommes. C'est complètement ridicule. Je comprends l'idée d'un symbole mais lorsque quelqu'un est opprimé, ce n'est pas à la victime qu'il faut enlever des libertés mais au tortionnaire. Si des hommes forcent leur autorité sur leurs femmes et leurs filles, c'est sur eux qu'il faut agir et sévir.

Ceci dit, toute cette histoire vient de la question de l'interdiction de porter le voile dans la fonction publique et, en cela je crois qu'il faut mettre des balises. Le voile est un signe religieux qui démontre un certain niveau de dévotion de la part de la personne qui le porte. Ceci pourrait offenser certaines personnes qui voient la représentation de toute religion autre que la leur comme un affront. Oui, en tant que société ouverte et tolérante, notre gouvernement se doit de servir ces gens dans un environnement plaisant (pour eux) car il s'agit du gouvernement de tous les Québécois. Dans cette optique je crois que nous pourrions interdire les objets religieux ou contentieux pour ceux qui doivent travailler avec le publique.

Nous vivons dans une société ouverte. En fait cette ouverture fait partie même de notre identité et tout mouvement se dirigeant visant à enlever des choix aux citoyens devrait être perçu comme une attaque contre la Nation Québécoise.

French Vs Anglais

Cette semaine, une déclaration de Gilbert Rozon a fait un peu le tour de la presse montréalaise. Selon lui « il faudrait s'ouvrir plus que ça et trouver des aménagements pour attirer des immigrants qui, en plus de leur langue maternelle, vont apprendre le français et l'anglais ».

Je crois que nous regardons la protection de la langue française de la mauvaise façon. Nous voyons un danger et décidons de nous terrer dans notre terrier alors que nous pourrions l'attaquer de plein fouet. En fait, en protégeant les acquis présents du français comme nous le faisons, la langue ne fera que perdre du terrain en Amérique du Nord. Ce que nous devons faire est exporter le français autour de nous. J'aimerais voir plus de francophones diriger les grandes compagnies de la ville reine. Mais pour qu'un Québécois aille travailler à Toronto, il lui faut parler anglais. Nous devons cesser de voir l'apprentissage de l'anglais comme un coup porter au français mais plutôt comme une corde de plus à l'arc d'un francophone pour rayonner l'extérieur de la province.

Pour revenir à Montréal, outre l'avantage mentionné plus haut, une emphase sur le bilinguisme nous permettrait d'attirer plus d'immigrant de qualité. Présentement, un immigrant ne parlant ni français ni anglais qui vient au Canada a un choix. Il peut aller à Montréal, apprendre le français et pouvoir travailler au Québec ou aller à Vancouver ou à Toronto, apprendre l'anglais et se trouver de l'emploi n'importe où en Amérique du Nord sauf au Québec. En offrant aux immigrants qui arrivent au Québec la possibilité (ou l'obligation?) d'apprendre les deux langues officielles du Canada, nous donnons un avantage certain à Montréal par rapport aux deux autres grandes villes. Pourquoi en effet, quelqu'un se limiterait à n'apprendre qu'une langue quand une ville lui en offre deux.

Nous avons un grand potentiel au Québec car nous sommes différents. Je crois que le temps où nous devions nous cacher pour protéger cette différence est révolu et que nous devons sortir et montrer au monde qui nous sommes vraiment!

Reblog: women, The Pirate Bay and Mr. Internet

Okay, this is not Friday… but it's still reblog day!

• Criss has two new good posts. The first is about something that I never thought of. Women have had, at least in some parts of the US, higher rates of health insurance. I'm not sure where I stand on this since on the one hand I personally think it makes sense that someone who has a greater chance (or risk) of using the service could be charged more for private insurance (the same way young men pay a lot more for car insurance). On the other hand, I also think that health care is a need and should be available to everyone equally. In the end, I'm glad I live in Canada! The other post is about the abortion ban in the Dominican Republic. We here in Canada seem to think that the US are lagging on social issues but really, the truth is that the more homogeneous countries have those laws that greatly restrict the freedom of their citizens. It goes widely under the radar because of that homogeneity. If all (influential) people are for it, there aren't going to be protests in the street.
  
• From Thinksketch design, the Pirate Bay's have been sentence to a year in prison because they assisted in the availability of illegal downloads (something you could probably pin on the whole internet). As much as my artist friends may disagree, I think there is something fundamentally flawed with their way of distribution. Illegal downloads are not hurting creativity, far from that. They are hurting those that based their remuneration on the old way of cashing in on creativity, focusing on intellectual property. If the focus was on wider distribution instead, a group could devise a way to make the intellectual property rights seamless and make legal downloading as easy and painless as the illegal one. The half-mast flag is there in support of innovation instead of punishment and status quo.
  
  
• The entertainment industry might have its chance to sue the whole Internet as my last post is about a story about the net becoming self-aware from Kurzweil AI news. It is an interesting read as an expert named Ben Goertzel says that we are really close to that and that it won't drastically change anything for us humans.
  

 

Science and politics

In a previous post, I brought up the fact that no matter how weird government leaders' ideas may seem economically, they do know the basics of the field and do have advisors well versed with the intricacies of high level economics. With the current issues I felt like broadening this idea a bit.

Earlier this week, the European parliament has voted to ban seal products from Canada. In the meantime, in a seemingly weird move, Egypt has decided to kill all pigs on its territory becoming the real life equivalent of this comic. All of these situations have in common the fact that they don't really have any scientific reason behind them. The seals in question are not an endangered species and while the hunt is graphic, it does not incur an abnormal amount of suffering to the animal. The reason the decision was taken was that it was politically profitable. Very few people in Europe use seal product, so no "seal industry" would be destroyed by such a decision. The same is true with European relationships with Canada. Even though we are talking about it now, the "seal embargo" will not have much of an effect on seal hunters as only 5% of their exports are to Europe. The end results are European governments winning the votes of the part of their population that are easily impressed by pictures of a cute baby seal while not really bothering the rest. From the Canadian point of view, the PM will try to fight it as he can but he probably won't succeed. This will however give us good munitions in order to break a profitable free trade agreement with Europe in the coming years.

Egypt's reaction to swine flu first made me smile. Personally, I somehow pictured Mubarak huddled in a cave in fear of anything that would dare sneeze next to him. But really, such a measure is not targeting animals, or even a virus. It is aimed at the Christian minority in Egypt which are the only ones affected by this. I want to say this is not a conspiracy per say. It is simply that Mubarak's power is based on the Muslim majority in his country while he also wants to increase Egypt's influence with the other Muslim countries. With this in mind, it really is the same as in Europe. The government is catering to the people that will get them more power in the future while only angering, in Egypt's case, people that have very little power of their own.

Swine flu

Getting your facts right

Today I was reading this article on DIGG calling rapper "Bow Wow" names for not attending a venue. Because of him cancelling it, the owner was forced to sell her business which was doing community service by keeping kids off the streets and out of gangs. Reading the comments on the social news site, people at first seemed to be in accordance with one another in saying that the artist was at fault. Then, some people realized that some of the facts didn't make sense. I won't go over the whole thing, but it simply painted whatever the owner was doing in a bad light.

My point is that spinning a story about a good cause to further it can backfire. In this case, the attention was taken away from Bow Wow's action to the owner's management of the venue. In other cases, people might look at exaggerated details, as was the case with several global warming arguments, and use it to show that the whole idea is exaggerated.

Usually, where you are doing a good thing, charity work, environmental and the like, you really do not need to add to the argument that "It really does more good than bad". You do not need to exaggerate or falsify information. Doing so will tremendously weaken your case once the truth is told. Yea, there is a chance that this won't happen, but when you are trying to better other people's lives, can you really afford to take that chance?