Professor Elam

Football Ethics

What was the A & M Coach thinking in offering a near secret assessment of his players to a select few?  Click and read the article about how he charged $1200 for the inside information on which players were ready. He asked the subscribers to agree not to bet on the games.  So why did Coach Fran think they were subscribing?

What you do speaks louder than what you say, as always.

Room At the Top

The latest Forbes 400 list is out.   An examination shows that this is a fluid group with less than 100 of its original members.  Many in fact are self made folks.  And they did not make their money 'on the backs of the poor' as many would have you believe.  I don't find entire issues of magazine with lists of four hundred rich folks interesting, but this capsulation is quite a slice of what is America, and why everyone wants to come here.

Dubai = Las Vegas?

Casino City Times says the analogy is apt.  No gaming in Dubai, but it is a hot spot destination for the well to do set in the Middle East.  Managers in the area are taking classes from the Warton School on how to run a business.  Globalization it seems takes many forms.

Meanwhille further east, Hong Kong has decided not to build casinos to compete with Macau. Macau recently surpassed Las Vegas in gaming revenue.  Singapore is about to get in on the game, literaqlly with its own casinos. Wynns and the Sands have built casinos in Macau. What you aren't familiar with Macau? 

So Vegas goes to the Far East, Dubai studies Vegas, the Univ of Pennsylvania is in Dubai, gee the money is really going round the world.

Smuggling Radio active Material

Click here to read how government investigaors smuggled radioactive material from Canada to the US.  I saw this on tv alst night and googled the article. In fact the investigator said they simply walked it from a rented car on the Canadian Side to a rented car on the US side in a small red duffle bag.  No one stopped them.

What does this have to do with accounting, gladd you asked. The investigators were auditors from the Governmental Accounting  Office.  A couple of weeks back, the GAO issued a report on how well the Iraq government was adhering to benchmarks set by our government.  Today's auditors do a lot more than just add up numbers!

Money Does Not Equal Good Sense

Fancy cars and jewelry are ways to display wealth or success.  But that does not mean that the ability to make that kind of money necessarily equates to good sense.  So many of the folks that obtain expensive fancy cars get into trouble with them that the results are now on display.  Yep, Wrecked Exotics shows you just how foolish the newly rich can be!

Please be careful in your own driving, you might encounter one of these screwballs that believes having money insulates them from danger!

Facebook The Social Operating System

Facebook turned down a $1 B offer not long ago. Now it is courting investment on the idea that it is worth !10 B. Wow.

MSFT is upping the ante trying to buy the company. Murdoch owns My Space which is making Fox Interactive Media lots of money.  But Facebook is even more popular.  The article points out that at $10 B, facebook has twice the market cap of the New York Times.  Not bad for a new start up web company.  The article goes on to point out that Facebook could become an operating system, yep, there are thousands of widgets and programs designed just for Facebook.  This explains why MSFT wants to buy Facebook, what if folks switch from Office 2007 to Facebook, at least for web surfing and exchanging personal greetings.

And another thing. Facebook and My Space are used for people to post notes and videos and photos of

THEMSELVES.

I have the students in Prof Development read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends.  Carnegie makes the statement that 3/4 of all the people one meets want your sympathy.  He wrote that comment in the 1930s.  The success of these two web sites mirrors Carnegie's comment from 70 years ago. All these folks are saying Hey World Look at Me!  Everyone believes he or she is the center of the universe!  Just yesterday I received an e mail from a chap who used the personal pronoun I nine times in a short e mail, gee no question as to the real message there!  Facebook creators understand this universal truth, eveyone is interested in themselves.....If we remember that in dealing with people we will all be more successful with them.

Managerial Accounting in Action

Jerry Flint examines the 'family sedan' market in this column.  A studyof managerial accounting gives us the tools to really analyze what Jerry is saying in this article.  Here is my short list of just some of the conepts on display here.

In chapter 16 we studied horizontal analysis. One would use that to further dissect the table on annual sales for two years.

Now think about fixed and variable costs.  He makes the point that big volume means big profit.  Why?  Because as we will see in Chapter 5-6, fixed cost per unit falls with volume.  And the higer sales rise above break even the  more money the firm makes. Imagine how much higher the fixed cost per unit is on the much slower selling Ford Fusion or the Chrysler Sebring than on the Accord. 

Strategy is on display here.  Toyota and GM focus on two models, Honda on one, different strategies in the same market. GM does not offer a four cylinder in the Impala, the Japanese firms do.  Though here Flint is right, the American fours just are not in the same league with the Japanese fours.  Why is that by the way?  The answer in my opinion is that the Japanese honed their small engine skills making in the motorcycle market, particularly Honda.  Americans have no such experience. 

Honda and Toyota now have the kind of brand loyalty that GM and Ford USED to have.  This is a matter of perception, as Dr. Deming observes, people don't complain, they switch. Once lost markets are hard to regain.

Process costing is on display as well as the adherence to quality standards, that is what keeps folks buying Japanese cars now made in America.  And that is the nightmare GM Ford Chrysler never thought they woudl have, foreign competition in the heartland of America.  Meanwhile the GM workers in Arlington are on stike.  Given the numbers in the table in the article, is this any time for GM workers to strike?  I report, you decide.

Strike, What's a Strike

GM employees at the Arlington TX plant went on strike this week.  Please read this article.  Now having read the article, is their goal realistic?

History of Unions

Unions organized against Ford for good reason

Taft Hartley Act

National Labor Relations Board

National Right to Work Law

National Right to Work Committee

And the final result of al lthis in one of the most unionized states in the USA, which has had a net  loss of jobs

Michigan.gov

What we have here is a 1950s idea of union shop employment running smack dab into globalization, what will be the result?

If you read all these sites and listen in class you will have completed a better than average labor relations class

Failing Our Students Failing America

Suzanne Fields wonders what is going on in supposedly top notch universities.  Seems the students are pretty ignorant of civics and such.  The other day in class i asked wy Barbara Boxer would oppose expensing stock options.  That discussion went nowhere as no one knew who Barbara Boxer,  US Senator from California, was.

You will certainly be expected to reflect a knowledge of current events , both economic and civic on the job. That is the point of the blog, so let's get reading here.

The Age of Turbulence

Robert Novak ;points out that Greenspan realizes embracing the left while working for four Republicans is likely to get good press in Washington.  Indeed I mentioned that Newsweek put him on the cover for criticizing Bush, both of them in fact.  Novak wonders if Greenspan deceived all four Republicans, an interesting column.