Here's One Thought Why There Is A Nascent Sense of Dissatisfaction Among Employees
Not that most employees, or even many, could articulate the following, but my sense in working with managers over the last few years is employees know something is desperately wrong. Government statistics guru John Williams explains the economic circumstance as follows:
"If you look at the government’s latest statistics - the poverty survey of 2009, which is the most recent release, with average and median household income adjusted for inflation (and they use a really gimmick low inflation rate with that one) - it shows that not only has household income been falling the last year or two, but it’s below its near-term peak before the 2001 recession. Household income has not recovered above that, and if you use the CPI-U (the usual inflation rate to deflate that by instead of the gimmick one) it shows that household income today is below where it was in 1973. Again, the average household has not been able to keep up here. If income growth is not keeping ahead of inflation, very simply you can’t have consumption growing faster than inflation on a sustainable basis." - John Williams
P.S. If Williams is right (and I believe he is) this should be saying something to business, too.
"If you look at the government’s latest statistics - the poverty survey of 2009, which is the most recent release, with average and median household income adjusted for inflation (and they use a really gimmick low inflation rate with that one) - it shows that not only has household income been falling the last year or two, but it’s below its near-term peak before the 2001 recession. Household income has not recovered above that, and if you use the CPI-U (the usual inflation rate to deflate that by instead of the gimmick one) it shows that household income today is below where it was in 1973. Again, the average household has not been able to keep up here. If income growth is not keeping ahead of inflation, very simply you can’t have consumption growing faster than inflation on a sustainable basis." - John Williams
P.S. If Williams is right (and I believe he is) this should be saying something to business, too.
posted by Jim Karger at 3:24 PM
1 Comments:
In the main, publicly traded businesses aren't being run strategically any longer. They're being run quarterly; within that reality, whatever trends or cycles may be on the horizon don't seem to enter into the meeting rooms of the operational folks. They're usually brought in by the consultant AFTER the company has tanked hard enough to stop it and make it think tactically for a minute. THEN, and only then, will the suits 'get it'. Or, at minimum, the consultant will get the opportunity to push their noses into the data they never looked at, such as the good stuff below. The issue is primarily rooted in the spreadsheet. A nice little device for looking backwards with great precision. The problem with looking backwards is it tells you NOTHING about the future. What they need is an application that provides a matrix view of a projection analysis that combines all the meaningful predictor data (news, trends, etc.) with a decision tree no more than three wide so the idiots in charge can have something to blame while they at least take a decision based on forward thinking. And they get a one in three chance of a hit.
Post a Comment
<< Home