(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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So Lehman Brothers are accused of managing by gimmicks, specifically – according to the BBC – an accounting “gimmick” known as Repo 105. “This is a legal accounting device that involves shifting around assets to reduce the size of a company’s balance sheet.”
Picture credit: Okinawa Soba
Apparently they got away with this gimmick for many years, until it blew up in their faces and the wallets of the world.
But deliberately hiding billions of dollars doesn’t sound like a gimmick, though; more like “smoke and mirrors” or maybe just plain old “cooking the books.”
How did this happen and why did it take so long to come to light?
Simple, there were obviously different sets of numbers in play: one set for public consumption, another for internal management. A risky strategy but far from unique.
Many organizations maintain “different versions of the truth,” either by design or accidentally.
By co-incidence, in the same week of the Lehman Brothers report, I wrote about the risks of management teams using different sets of numbers, please look for the topic titled Singing from the wrong spreadsheet at the Devil’s guide to iT.
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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When something goes wrong, it is better to understand the reason why – rather than hear an excuse. Is there a difference?
Picture credit: whizchickenonabun
Of course there is. But how do you tell the difference between an excuse and a reason?
Well an excuse is generally our way of trying to excuse our behaviour: to justify ourselves in a bad situation – before, during or after the event.
Whereas a reason is more straightforward: it’s the cause (direct or indirect) of the event.
A measure of our integrity is the balance we strike between giving excuses and reasons.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Here are some important lessons for those of us who use services like YouTube to deliver business content. A friend recently had his YouTube account suspended and can no longer access his “archive” of 900+ clips, many of which are unique business-related videos, created over the past couple of years.
Picture credit: castaway in Scotland Now
It’s a very difficult situation for him, because he was using YouTube as the sole repository of his video output. So without his account, he has lost access to a back-catalogue of valuable stuff.
I am sure that Google and Youtube are within their rights and I can’t really comment on the details of the case.
But setting aside the nature of the disputed copyright violation content for a moment, there are a couple of observations that might be drawn as lessons for others:
Firstly, the YouTube “Three Strikes” policy seems to have been invoked without a prior warning.
Secondly, committing clearly valuable content (unique business video creations) to a non-contractual provider in the cloud, without backup provision, is a clear risk – albeit a risk that many of us routinely ignore, either wittingly or unwittingly.
Mark has my commiserations for his predicament and I do hope he can reach a settlement with Google/ YouTube, even if they only re-instate his account on a “final warning” basis.
Of course the real lesson is: what Google giveth, Google may taketh away.
