How do you find balance...

How do you seek out the answers you need without seeming overly demanding?

How do you deliver bad news when your audience is already upset?

Does "getting to the top" mean stepping on a lot of toes on the way?

FORTUNE Magazine did an interesting interview with one of the youngest CFOs of Citigroup (the largest bank in the world) Sallie Krawcheck and how she managed her way to the #2 spot. [link]

She makes a few interesting comments :

It is much easier to deliver good news to the Street rather than bad news. As a CFO one has to have the strength of character, the thickness of skin, to be able to deliver bad news as easy as good news.

We've taken a lot of steps to remove as much of the temptation as we can. A lot of decisions have to be made by the CFO and the CEO. Things like our loss reserves, our incentive compensation accruals, our legal accruals [have been] pulled back from the end of the fourth quarter. So even if I think, "Boy, I'm fine missing consensus," we've pulled those decisions back before we know what those numbers are going to be, so we make the right decision for the company.

I think a lot of it has to be done at the top. I have to let my CEO know every step of the way when I talk to him that it's okay to deliver bad news. We want bad news. Numbers don't lie. See what the numbers tell you, and you have to be just as comfortable delivering bad news as good.

Which is why I'm glad I was an analyst. I always knew that if my stock tips were going to work...I should be uncomfortable. It was probably not the right place to be if everybody said, "Way to go, good recommendation." As an analyst, I was very comfortable being uncomfortable, and as a CFO I have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I have to be fine with delivering bad news.

The paradoxical idea of "comfortable being uncomfortable" seems like something that takes experience but, perhaps, more importantly, certainty of why the audience is/will be angry and what, if anything, the bearer of 'bad news' can do about it.

I have to give credit to Businesspundit for the source of the original reference to the article posting [link]

Billy's Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -0.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.62

Have you ever noticed...

The idea of online shopping is supposed to make life more convenient, yet if you end up buying something online, you'll find yourself constantly checking online package tracking (like FedEx, UPS, etc.).

When small change can make a big difference

What is microfinance/microloaning? [Wikipedia entry]

The Wall Street Journal reports that "[p]oor households in India have borrowed $1.8 billion from microlenders in the past five years. But they could borrow more than 20 times that amount if they had institutions that could bring easy and affordable lending to each village..."

While it makes great sense to make small loans in many developing countries, how can we work to help expedite this process?

Stop the spam

There you go. Here's a blog for you guys with nothing else better to do but to spam my mailbox.