Sometimes I ramble on about wall street or big oil etc... thoughts around here are about the leadership of these organizations. Just like the middle class I speak of there are people hard at work, trying to support their families in trading or on oil platforms and so on. There is tons of energy spent by people working in a variety of tasks. I just would like to see their energy spent more fruitful for the economy and the populace as a whole.
For example, there are many people on wall street with major league MBAs etc working hard, but they are focusing their energy on trying to build trading strategies so large corporations can squeeze an extra buck out of daily trading. This energy would be better spent in true investment banking helping companies raise capital to develop new businesses. This use to be a major part of wall street's business. I don't see that as the case anymore. Yes Wall Street still does IPOs and other projects, but the real heart of capitalism is neglected. How does a person convince all these intelligent people that it would benefit them and the country in the long run if they focused more on business development, new industry development, not day to day profits for wall street?
Too many companies are working too hard to please wall street, worried about their stock price if they don't meet expectations. This is such a waste of talent in these corporations. They should be able to spend more time developing profit strategies for five years not one quarter.As always my ideas aren't new or radical, there is constant talk about trying to get executive pay more in line with long term profits, but unfortunately wall street expectations still play too large a part in corporate planning. This step would not solve all the problems, but would put pressure on the top of an organization to really plan ahead and if they don't have one-three good quarters, but five good years it would be better for the company.
This would create more innovation because more talent would be used to develop business not react to immediate/quarterly earnings. Develop the business, plan it and expect some bumps and in the long run you will have many years of profits because you can always think and plan ahead instead of reacting to trends that other entities place upon you.
Another example is many people fearful that we would lose more employment if oil production slowed down by switching to alternative or NEW sources of energy. Not really if you think about it, the people on the off shore oil rigs would still have jobs for years because a change wouldn't happen overnight. What would change would be new workers coming on board, rather they would go to the new opportunities so the generation still working the bulk of the oil business would still work while the transformation in great abundance would happen over a half a generation or so and the newer workers or young engineers or managers would have grown up in the new sources of energy and their livelihood would be intact and the oil workers would be retiring as the change is happening. Again we need to think long term to be successful in this country before another country takes away what is staring us in our face.
Think about job creation if we started selling two million electric cars a year to India, China, or South America. If we beat everyone to the punch then we rebuild our automotive industry. Takes some forward thinking though.
We have it in our country we just need to realize the potential within ourselves again.
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