Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
it teaches men not to admit their ache, like the pain of an amputee, for the lost parts of themselves.
I Don't Want to Talk About It
Terrence Real
After painstakingly collecting this data, my graduate student and I discovered that people in workplaces averaged only three minutes, five seconds on any low-level event on or off screen before switching to the next one.8 This included interactions with colleagues. But if we just looked at attention behavior on the computer, we found that people shifted their attention on average every two and a half minutes. Switching all activities every three minutes and specifically switching attention on the computer every two and a half minutes seemed unfathomable at the time. But this was nothing compared to what was to be discovered in the next decade and a half to come.
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
There was even the unwritten but well-understood goal of getting the share price of Finova to $60. Compensation packages were tied to achievement of that share price. Now, it is a basic principle of Accounting 101 that bad loans and their write-downs get in the way of loan-portfolio growth. Finova employees who knew the extraordinary numbers goals and that their compensation packages were tied to those goals soon discovered that the downside to this principle of portfolio growth could be no bonuses at all. The result was that Finova divisions were carrying loans that should have been written down, and in some cases, Finova capitalized expenses related to repossessed property so that the portfolio value would go up despite the clear uncollectibility of the loan. A bad loan is not an asset, but in this world of promises of continued double-digit growth, employees do rationalize. For example, Finova had one loan to finance a time-share RV golf resort in Arkansas. The loan of $800,000 for this tempting Garden of Eden, complete with wheels and sewerage hookups, was made in 1992. By 1995 the loan was in default and the property was worth only $500,000. However, no one wanted to take the hit to the portfolio, so the loan was carried as an asset and then some as the managers capitalized expenses for the golf course and its restaurant. By the time this accounting impropriety was uncovered, the loan was being carried as a $5.5 million asset. As one of the managers I interviewed said, “All of Arkansas isn’t worth $5.5 million.” By 1999 the auditors began to ask questions, and there were other loans, of significantly higher amounts, that had questions, baggage, and problems. Ernst & Young refused to certify the company’s financial statements until it wrote down a $70 million loan to a California computer manufacturer that had gone bad months and possibly years earlier. Shareholder lawsuits filed against the company alleged that the write-down was postponed because bonus and compensation packages that were tied to the share
The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse
Marianne M. Jennings
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise