Reader Comments From The Fray:


Let me add another backlash signal to the list: No more free fruit. About nine months ago, the outrageously rich and powerful investment bank for which I work decided the best way to keep its analysts and VPs from jumping into the arms of any dot.com whispering about stock options, was to disperse free fruit and soda throughout the office. At that time I thought this was an innovation in the company-employer relationship. I waxed poetic to my Marxist friends about the care firms have to show their employers in the New Economy, in fear of the employee leaving for free fruit and fusball in other companies. The little guy was getting a little back, and it inspired me.

Not even a year later and suddenly my free bananas have been slashed in a cost-cutting measure. It seems the $500 a month was a completely gratuitous expense only appropriate for boom years, and not the coming famine. The significance of this, I quickly realized, was that the fruit was not a New Economy entitlement on the same inviolable plane as healthcare or free coffee, but was actually a bonus. So when the company is doing well, peons such as myself get an apple while the MDs get 15 million dollar bonuses. When the economy is bad I don't get fruit and the MDs are forced to rely on only 10 million dollar bonuses. When I pointed this out to my co-workers, they replied that we'll probably also lose the coffee soon. I walked by a board meeting today and saw that all the guests were given a little fruit salad to tide them through the meeting. Seems the New Economy backlash simply means a return to normal.

--DW

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Stock options: Offering options as an enticement to desirable, prospective employees to come to work for high-risk, high-gain companies is, really, a fundamentally sound idea. It was just far too over-applied, misunderstood, and misused. Eventually, everyone came to think this was a free-lunch. Now they know it's not. Options, as Walker points out, have a downside for both employers and employees. But what's a surprise is that that's a surprise to anyone. Are options now going to be thought to be as "bad" as they once were thought to be "good"? Why?

Business plans on napkins: People aren't very rational at spotting trends or patterns. We're wired to error on the side of over-reacting, which isn't a bad evolutionary strategy. Successful businesses that started as jottings on a napkin--either literally or metaphorically--were no more common in the last few years than they ever were. People read of a few dramatic success stories, and never think to ask just how many more failures there were for each success. Does this mean there's nothing new under the sun, that there aren't visionaries who come up with great, immensely profitable ideas after a few cocktails and perhaps a handful of salted nuts? Of course not. Most successful businesses, however, are the result of a lot of research, planning, and hard work.

Foosball: What's wrong with foosball? Is treating employees well either a very "new", or a very "bad" idea? I recall shooting hoops in the early eighties at a broadcast radio automation company. There are diminishing returns in treating employees well, but there's diminishing returns in treating them like slaves, too. Where to draw the line is always going to be a subject of debate, more driven by whim than careful consideration.

When I think about how extraordinary these last few years have been for me, I don't really think that I was lucky to have lived during a time when "everything changed". I think I was lucky to live in a time during which I was lucky, if you know what I mean. What seems striking to me is the sense of mania that accompanied these years--in other words, people acted a little weird, but the world itself wasn't all that different.

Wait twenty or thirty years 'till half the U.S. is either a desert or underwater--then we'll see what legitimate, justified shadenfreude is.

--Keith M. Ellis

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