john maddente | midwestern clarity

I 'm disgusted with the current presidential election.   Finding a good diversion from politics is hard.  Take television.  Little TV is worth watching and that's why I was delighted to discover a SHOWTIME series called Billions .  SHOWTIME image / Wikipedia This series is based upon a high stakes dual between a billionaire hedge fund manager and a shrewd U.S. District Attorney.  Within a week, I devoured the entire twelve episodes from season one.  Happily, the show is coming back for a second season. The two principal characters: U.S. Attorney, Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and billionaire investor, Bobby Axelrod aka "Axe" (Damien Lewis), are both wickedly good .  An outstanding supporting cast includes ... Billions writers per Wikipedia Jeffrey DeMunn (as  Charles Rhoades Sr ),  David Costabile (as Mike Wagner), Maggie Siff (as Wendy Rhoades), Malin Akerman (as Lara Axelrod) and Glenn Fleshler (as Orrin Bach). Due to the ca...

T he Fed always inspires debates among stakeholders like institutional investors, economists, politicians, financial journalists and industry  leaders. Now the Fed has received an activist group at its annual Jackson Hole symposium to hear their views on monetary policy.  This week, a movement called “Fed Up” sponsored by The Center for Popular Democracy  met with Federal Reserve officials including Bill Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York .  The Fed Up team merits an A grade for inventiveness.  Such groups often petition the legislative and executive branches of government that control spending and tax policy, but now one has successfully lobbied the The Federal Reserve  within spitting distance.  To be fair, the group had some trained economists in their midst and they did nothing disruptive; but do political organizations belong at this annual forum? http://whatrecovery.org/  website  Yes, ec...

Freepik image This post is about business development (BD). There's a BD ailment in the professional services markets (and other markets I suppose) which I call, "Shiny Penny Syndrome".   Symptoms include short attention spans, misplaced time allocation and indifference to existing prospects.   The time professionals have for BD is finite and good BD takes time. What often subverts efficient use of their time, is Shiny Penny Syndrome.   It works like this... We're all so eager to attain revenue goals, that all it takes is a simple distraction to catch our eye (i.e. a shiny penny).  The promise of a hot lead at a new prospect often retards efforts at existing prospects  by shifting valuable attention and resources away from them.  F requently, we drop everything to chase a sale at an unqualified prospect requiring a  time consuming proposal with a  quick turnaround.   It's impossible to avoid that shiny  coin ...

I nteresting people and teachable moments are often nearby and I try to remain open to them.  I'm more open some days than others, but at conference in Chicago some three years ago, I made an unlikely acquaintance whose words resonate with me this morning. The is an industrial psychologist who practices in the financial services space.  Before his clients extend lucrative offers to hire C-level executives, candidates must pass his curated psychological assessment. So I plied this man, named Grant, with questions to learn what he looks for and who receives his endorsement.  Grant told me a little about his trade at a technical level, but when he got to the part about who fails his assessments, I was struck by his answer.   It turned out that an outsized ego is the kiss of death for candidates seeking his seal of approval.  He explained that an executive that pretends to have all the answers often has a high probability of sub-par performance at his cl...

O n Halloween night I wrote,   "Donald Trump and Ben Carson will decompose in the coming months and try to trade whatever political capital they have in the form of an endorsement, for something they can use to remain relevant".  I also wrote Marco Rubio would become the GOP nominee.   ( More fun paring back the candidates, October 31, 2015 ).   I stand by these predictions although I now believe Trump may withhold his endorsement of another candidate. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- M illions of Americans are mourning the loss of Justice Antonin Scalia .  He was a colorful, principled and brilliant American jurist.  Justice Antonin Scalia Wikipedia image Much has been discussed about his near obsessive attention to originalism (which I learned today he sometimes called textualism) .  It means a focus on the intent of the Founders and a dedication to...