Trust and Judgment

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Today offered another one of those lessons you learn early but need to be reminded of often: leaping to conclusions usually lands you in the wrong place.  I was at lunch and the person I was sitting next to, someone whom I trust, started talking about the ongoing situation here in the Piedmont Triad between Waffle House Inc. and its (now former) local franchisee.  Long story short the local franchisee got out of the business and in the process some employees were issued paychecks that bounced.  Fingers were pointed, but early on the local franchisee looked like the bad guy.

Now it's important to provide some context here.  People in the Triad who pay attention to these kinds of things are likely predisposed to believing the worst in any story about employees being given rubber checks, because another local company recently went out of business, and in the process the owner really did screw his employees out of pay and health benefits. 

At lunch I was hearing from a trusted source that the Waffle House franchisee was one of the most honorable and ethical business people she had ever met.  Knowing what I know about the source, and knowing the number of people she knows in the business community, my angle on the story instantly shifted 180 degrees. After reading the initial coverage of the story I'd just assumed that the franchisee had gotten in too deep and had done what lots of companies do in that situation: tried to hold on and pray for a miracle while telling the employees nothing of the problems and then eventually bouncing paychecks. I also assumed that stories of delinquent payroll taxes would soon follow. A one minute conversation at lunch changed my assumptions, and I began to think that there's probably a whole lot more to the story and I probably needed to reserve judgment until the situation was fully aired.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think the media did any faulty reporting.  The stories I read simply stated the facts: employees' paychecks bounced, the state's labor department was investigating and if they found any wrongdoing they were going to go after the franchisee for the employees' pay.  I did the rest of the work myself, leaping to conclusions and letting my own biases take me to an early, and potentially faulty, conclusion.  Luckily I was saved from myself today.

After lunch I got back to my desk and found this story waiting in my alert box. It seems that my source at lunch was right and it's the folks at Waffle House Inc. who haven't been behaving too well in this case, at least to this point.  And that's where I need to remember another lesson: there's usually more to a story than meets the eye, and it will probably be a while before we have the full story here.  Stay tuned. 

For Those Who Still Think All Blogs and Twitter Feeds Are About Cats and BM

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As reported by the Triad Business Journal the Wake Forest MBA program's student run blog and related Twitter feed have been recognized as a "must follow" by TopMBA.com. 

Five years into this whole blog experiment thing and I still feel the need to justify my existence.  I never knew I was so insecure.

Something for Nothing

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I was doing some research for the day job and came across this article about a panel discussion on the future of GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).  There are several good quotes contained within, but these two really caught my eye: 

But according to White and Booher, it was a broader cultural issue, an unbalanced federal housing policy that stressed homeownership at the expense of rational underwriting. “I believe that the deception of our culture, that money grows on trees, that there can be action and no reaction, is so prevalent that we live in a fantasy world,” White said. “And members of Congress were the ultimate actors there.”

That unbalanced housing policy was prevalent on the operations side as well. "The problem really starts with a culture that’s increasingly looking for something for nothing,” Durkin of Wood Partners explained. “That permeates our housing policy.”

I really do hope my children's generation ends up being smarter than mine or my parents'. 

Once Again NCAA Shows How It’s Done

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Remember a month ago how the rumors started flying about the NCAA men's basketball tournament field potentially getting expanded to 96 teams? Today the news hit that there would indeed be an expansion, but it would be to 68 teams and not 96 teams.  I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that there's a very high probability that the NCAA deliberately "leaked" the 96 team number so that when the true expansion hit everyone's reaction would be "Only 68 huh?" and not, "Jeez, 68 teams will totally dilute the field and make this thing a crapfest!"

PR flaks around the world are smiling.

A Question Only an English Major Would Ask

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I'm no scientist (I'm actually the antithesis of a scientist), so this is probably the dumbest question ever asked, but I have to ask it: Is it wise to put a solar array on the roof of a hardware company's distribution center?  Still it's kind of cool that Winston-Salem will have two of Duke Energy's new solar sites.

Don’t Just Blame the Banksters or the Bums

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It's easy, convenient, a good story line, etc. to blame the Great Recession on a-hole investment bankers trying make a quick buck, or stupid home buyers who should have known better than to buy a $500,000 house on $45,000 a year in income, but it's also wrong.  As with most things in life it's complicated, and hopefully we'll start seeing more in-depth explanations for the financial meltdown as we move out of crisis mode and into recovery/finger-pointing mode.

I might have found a good place to start in today's Wall Street Journal.  Columnist David Wessel profiles the University of Chicago's Raghuram Rajan who has an upcoming book (July publication date) titled "Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy."  Based on the quotes that Wessel provides from his interview of Rajan it sounds like the book will look at the crisis from a big-picture angle, and while the usual suspects are identified as key players in the crisis they are also seen as role players and not arch villains.  I think that's an important distinction if we're going to learn anything from this crisis and fix whatever we need to fix if we're not going to completely torch the economy.

Anyway, here's my favorite quote from the column:

 "When easy money pushed by a deep pocketed government comes into contact with the profit motive of a sophisticated, amoral financial sector, a deep fault line develops," Mr. Rajan writes.

More Proof That Times Have-a-Changed

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Check this out: The Supreme Court is losing its only Protestant to retirement.  Of course he might be replaced by another Protestant, but I don't think that's going to be one of the criteria that the Obama administration looks at when nominating a new justice.

According to the article, of the Supremes that Justice Stevens leaves behind, six are Roman Catholic and two are Jewish.  It's hard to believe that just 50 years ago it was a HUGE deal that Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic to be elected POTUS. From the article:

It was not ever thus. Presidents once looked at two main factors in picking justices.

“Historically, religion was huge,” said Professor Epstein of Northwestern. “It was up there with geography as the key factor.”

There is, for instance, no official photograph of the justices from 1924. The court had to cancel its portrait that year because Justice James C. McReynolds, an anti-Semite and a racist, refused to sit next to Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice.

The fact that William J. Brennan Jr. was Catholic seemed to figure in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to nominate him to the court in the election year of 1956.

But when Justice Abe Fortas resigned in 1969 from what was considered the “Jewish seat,” President Richard M. Nixon saw no political gain from replacing him with another Jew, settling instead on Harry A. Blackmun, a Methodist.

As that progression suggests, religion, which once mattered deeply, has fallen out of the conversation. And it seems to make people uncomfortable on the rare occasions it is raised.

(h/t to Lex for the link)

Summerfield Town Council Has an Interesting Perspective on Marriage

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According to The Northwest Observer the Summerfield Town Council has decided that the spouses of Council members may serve on town committees but they can't be voting members.  From the article:

Council began discussing the issue after Town Manager Michael Brandt recommended that council members’ relatives be allowed to serve only as nonvoting committee members. Brandt said because of their relationship to council members, relatives might carry more weight on committees and it might be difficult for the town manager to discipline them if they did something wrong.

The Council applied the recommendation to spouses but not to other relatives, which leads me to think that they have a different point of view on marriage than I do.  I can guarantee you that of all her relatives I'm the least influential on my wife.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when someone tries to tell my wife she can't do anything just because she happens to be married to me.  Actually, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that explosion because I'd definitely catch some shrapnel, but you get my point.