A Pie-in-the-Sky Treehouse Made Real – New York Times

I was thinking of building just this sort of treehouse, just the other day. The main problem on my part is that we don’t have any trees to build in.

It looks like something wonderful was rampant in the streets of London this past week.
I found out about this courtesy of Making Light, so thanks Patrick and Teresa.

SlushPile.net � Why People Hate Self-Published Authors

An interesting essay with some good commentary following.

Digby stays on top of things:

What mindless twit came upp with this gem:?
“The morning-after pill is a pedophile’s best friend,” Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a public policy organization, said in a statement after learning of Galson’s decision. “Morning-after pill proponents treat women like sex machines.”

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_digbysblog_archive.html#114600008253976488

As many people realize, Public Radio fund drives break down the camnpaign into hourly or short-term goals. Better for morale to try a $1000 goal for the hour than the $200,000 goal of the campaign.

Anyway, our local station is into the spring fundraiser and I tuned into the drive at the half-hour mark. The spritely, energetic fundraiser was anouncing that their goal for the hour was 30 callers to contribute. As she said, “a half-hour left and only 27 callers to go!”

I don’t know that I am enough of an optimist to do this.

11 Companies Rewarding Failure: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

It is interesting to see these compensation articles. I think that too much of an executive’s reward structure is based on short-term goals and the executive has often disappeared when the company collapses in the long-term (5-years or more.)

Why not develop a long term incentive system along the line that sets up long-term and short-term goals for an exec, with commensurate rewards based on whatever metrics the board wants to use. But, the exec can not collect the short-term rewards unless the long-term goals are met.

So, if an exec gets a bonus for raising the stock price 20% one year, and has a 5-year goal of doubling customers, the exec doesn’t collect the 1 year bonus for at least 5 years and then only if the customer base has doubled.

There are a fair number of variation on this theme; the main point is to hold an exec’s feet to the fire to ensure the long-term success of a company and not to allow an exec to gut a company to promote short term success. (I wonder what would have happened to the dot-com bubble if no one got any rewards until the long-term goals were realized?)

Continue reading 11 Companies Rewarding Failure: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance →