Category: Psychology of the Deal

  • Culture of Secrecy

    How can companies still think what they do is top secret. Note I’m not talking about intelligence, research or military organizations here. I mean general competitive businesses in a competitive marketplace. How many of the projects we’ve been sworn to keep secret really needed or benefited from that? How many top secret projects failed to…

  • Transparency in Basketball Adminsitration

    One criticism I forgot to make in yesterday’s NBL Beyond a joke post was the absolute lack of transparency by basketball businesses, administrators, marketers and promoters. Fans of all types love talking about their favorite things. Basketball has been in crisis for a long time both in Australia and the USA. However the people at…

  • NBL Basketball beyond a joke

    Australia’s National Basketball League has become a joke. Now the Cairns Tiapans have gone into voluntary administration. They join the Brisbane Bullets, Singapore Slingers and Sydney Kings in bowing out of the NBL this year alone. The Sydney Spirit (formerly the West Sydney Razorbacks) remain only because the NBL could not afford to allow the…

  • ASIC Lifts Ban on Covered Short Selling

    From today covered short selling of non-financial stocks is allowed again on Australian stock markets. Obviously if you are a short seller you’ve known this for a week. What does it mean to us? The disclosure and reporting details are in this Market Advice. Australian Securities and Investments Commission – Requirements for disclosure and reporting…

  • Calculate the Beta Coefficient of a stock

    As part of the Corporate Finance subject of my MBA we have to calculate the beta coefficient (aka Beta) of a company’s share price. The is applied economics and market mathematics, but it simply is a number which indicates how closely (or not) a company’s share price moves in relation to a broader market (or…

  • Credit Crisis Explained

    A number of people have asked me if there is a simple explanation of the financial crisis. It is difficult to give a simple explanation that doesn’t paint the exclusive cause as naive greed. The credit crisis is one contributing factor to the financial crisis (I see these as two different issues). I see four…

  • Warren Buffet: Buy American. I Am.

    As part of my Corporate Finance class, Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway came up. Nobody had checked its stock price recently so I volunteered to do it. In doing so I came across the following op-ed piece Warren Buffet wrote in the New York Times. For the record BERKSHIRE HATH HLD A (NYSE: BRK-A) closed…

  • URGEN MESSAGE FROM NIGERIA, ER, AMERICA

    I received this overnight – what a hoot! Dear American: I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of…

  • People+Company Connections

    I’ve been playing around with the social web for a while now. One of the things I’m interested in is how people are connected through organisations. For examply take the Australian Stock Exchange, there are about 1800 companies listed on the ASX all of which have a board of directors. Many directors sit on more…

  • Fee split etiquette

    I am an active networker and I see many requests from recruiters to find a suitable candidate for a role. Sometimes someone replies with a request to split the fee. Can we talk about good etiquette for a fee split? If you work as a recruiter then it is quite reasonable to accept a fee…