Gretchen Morgenson is one of my favorite commentators—at once witty and pertinent. In case you missed her most recent piece about the current business and financial woes, here’s the link (“They’re Shocked, Shocked, About the Mess”).

These short extracts show why I thought the article so relevant. I’ve been saying for months that the root cause [...]

The trick to living through tough times is to focus on the essentials. If you want to make progress, you must be very clear and specific about what that means. In easy times, you can afford to be vague. Not now. To protect what matters most means abandoning the rest. If you don’t, all that useless baggage will drag you down.

Parting words from a successful Hedge Fund manager 
In case you missed this article (“Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F—- You”) on portfolio.com on October 17th, here are the parting words from Andrew Lahde, the manager of a small hedge fund, who grabbed the spotlight last year after his one-year-old fund returned 866 percent betting against [...]

When things go wrong like this, we tend either to get mad or become depressed. And because we live in a ‘can do’ society, far more people get mad. The trouble with blaming ‘them’—whoever ‘they’ are—is that you are placing the problem ‘out there’ where you have no direct control and probably little influence. While you dissipate your energy in resentful complaints and self-righteous demands, ‘they’ are untouched.

For several decades, anything that produced wealth was approved, regardless of much else. The economy was ‘high’ on the addictive drug of executive stock options, double-digit growth in paper profits and deregulation. Now the ‘high’ has ended and we have to face the ‘cold turkey’. Conventional thinking won’t show us the way out of the mess it caused.

A risk is always a risk. A big one is riskier than a small one. Acknowledge that and you’re at least forewarned that your strategy may well go wrong. Pretend you’ve found a way to make it a near certainty and you’ll probably bet the farm on it—then have to run to the tax-payer to bail you out.

When the history of these times are written, people will once again marvel at human stupidity and the power of the herd instinct. They’ll ask the same question they always do: “How could anyone be so dumb?” The answer will also be the same: “Those who don’t think and allow fashion to rule their lives climb to the top in good times and take us all into the abyss a few years later.”

The last few decades have seen endless parade of new management fads and panaceas. The evidence seems to be that none of them actually make things better, even though they may give the business that use them a higher publicity profile. I suspect that’s because they are either applied mechanistically, used as a substitute for thought, or given only lip-service by employees already wearied from past exposure to management faddism.

[‘Wordless Aarticle’] In a time of fear, the temptation is to try somehow to ‘cure’ the problem that you’re afraid of. This is a mistake. The reality is that there has never been a way to remove uncertainty from life altogether. The only sound answer lies in accepting what is and coping with it as best you can.

Coyote is trying to enjoy the peace and quiet of the desert when he meets the ‘Spirit of Free Enterprise’ who makes him a surprising offer. Coyote, however, finds it not to his taste and, in typical Coyote style, ends up with something very much better.