It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here. I’ve been immersing myself deeply in shoujo and josei manga (Japanese comics for young and older women), so I haven’t been taking time to maintain this blog. Outside of that, there hasn’t been much for me to ramble on about. Maybe you’ve noticed like I have that not much has changed in the past 5 years. Just in my own life I’ve noticed my husband and I are driving the same cars and don’t feel the need to get new ones, we are still driving our entertainment off the same two laptops, I’m still using an iPad 2, and both of our “newer” laptops are equivalent to the Blackbirds we had 5-years ago.  I feel this enormous sense of stagnancy, and quite frankly most everything bores the hell out of me. Okay, okay, there are three things that excite me: Manga, 3-D printing, and drones — specifically the prospect of food delivery using drones (I want the taco-copter yesterday).

It would be too easy to blame the economy and the government gridlock for this stagnation. The economy is a symptom of stagnancy rather than a cause from my point of view. Companies and very rich people are sitting on huge piles of cash rather than using that money to create things and employ people.  Money is power, yet as long as companies and rich people sit on that money, it’s reduced to worthless paper, and thus diminished in power. Somewhere along the line monied people have forgotten about this and instead believe hoarding cash has some kind of meaning. We are seeing the value of money challenged by the Bitcoin “Revolt” (and yes, this is a revolutionary movement, because let’s face it, paper is just as worthless as bits), the rise of bartering, and the Maker movement. People simply have no money to trade, so some of us have gone back to actually trading useful stuff; you know that thing called “doing BUSINESS”. Anyhow… keep sitting on that paper, companies and rich people. The world will move on with or without your money. The question is do you want use your power to shape the future or are you playing “he who has the most paper when they die wins”?  Nobody cares about that beyond where your money, and hence your power, goes after you die.  So you may as well spend it all now and make the world in your model.  This thought brings me great sadness because so many idiots have lots of money.

I think it’s safe to say the stock markets are no longer engines of innovation. People put money in the stock market for short term gain and not because they believe in the long term vision of a company. Company chase the stock price quarter to quarter and concentrate on the paper rather than on the products that they sale. Hence the endless pursuit as cutting back to profit, a line of thinking that makes absolutely no sense. In this paradigm, R&D is another expense to minimize rather than the engine of growth. Instead strategies like currency exchange become the engines of growth to get more currency — worthless paper chasing after worthless paper. Meanwhile companies find themselves 3 to 5 years later with no new products in the pipeline, a bunch of worthless MBA spouting nonsense about hockey-sticks, and no actual engineers to design new products because they were all laid off in the relentless pursuit of the bottom line.  Raise your hand if this describes the current state of your workplace? Is your company going broke? Is your company’s stock price in the toilet? When will CEOs realize this is not “business”. The company’s stock is not the company’s product and the stock market brokers and analysts are not your customers.  Seriously, what does it matter whether Wall Street likes your latest product? They aren’t the ones buying your product. Your CUSTOMERS are the ones buying your product. Ignore the whims of the stock market and get back to selling actual stuff and services to paying customers.  When business is doing well, meaning your company is selling lots of stuff and services for a profit, stock market adulation will come.  I imagine as long as executives and boards are paid with stock and when they bonuses are dependent on hitting stock market targets, their focus will be on the stock market rather than on products and the customer.  And because these folks make money whether the company is doing well or not, executives could care less. They’ll move on to the next company to drain on the way to the bottom, without it being acknowledged that these executives may actually be a very poor manager.  It’s a vicious cycle. I wonder when a group of execs will get together and decide that this compensation scheme is doing to great harm to society on the whole and change compensation to focus on customer satisfaction and true market growth — as in actual paying customers — and not the stock “market”?

Another harmful consequence of chasing the bottom line is severe risk aversion. Executives don’t want to try something new and revolutionary because they fear if it’s not a hit, they’ll be clobbered by the stock market. I wish I could say it had nothing to do with getting executive bonuses, but it is human nature to put oneself before all others and everything.  This seems silly considering how much money big companies are sitting on. I suppose not every company is like this. To Microsoft’s credit, they tried with The Surface and they are trying with the XBox One, but they totally misread the market and are getting clobbered by customers. Honestly that sounds like a bunch of their tech leadership is completely out of touch of with everyday people, and  is usually a problem caused by lack of diversity, siloed organizations, and corporate inbreeding (driven by ranking). But I digress… Anyhow… I look around and ask myself, with the exception of Google, why don’t I see a 3-D printer from major tech giants who have giant printing divisions (Uh HP, cough, cough, Canon, ahem….cough, cough…the remnants of Kodak… hack… ugh… Whoo! I don’t know what frog got caught in my throat). Of course, it’ll be over once Amazon builds an army of 3-D printers and delivery drones that let people get whatever they want overnight… >_>…. Sigh… Bezos wasn’t kidding about that alarm clock. Wake the hell up and quit chasing the iPad. The iPad is a commodity. Quit piling on that.  Instead, why don’t you rehire the Engineers you laid off, pay them fairly, and let them loose on creating new markets. And, no creating new markets is not what an MBA does.  Masters of Business Administration are Administrators. They administrate.

Ugh… okay, enough rambling for now and back to enjoy my manga.