Corporate Values

During my 4 years of business studies the most confusing, misunderstood and misleading subject has been CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility. Library fulls of thick books have been writen and many heated arguments fought over what is the coporations role in the society? When the anwser has been written clear down on the Chapter 1 of nearly every single finance and strategy textbook ever written. The one and only ethical operating principle any company will ever have in a society is this

The purpouse of a company is to create value for its shareholders.

Value is generated when the company is able to invest its

capital at a return greater than the cost of capital.

Its that simple, now you maybe wondering what all of this CSR stuff is all about then. It again is simple, to disguise this cold hard fact from you. CSR is in fact just a part of the company's PR plan, its purpouse is to make you feel warm and cuddly about to company and only for the reason, you guessed it, CSR has been proven to generate bigger returns. 

A few examples, those Pink Breast Cancer Awerness ribons, have fairly little to do with breast cancer, but a whole hell of a lot to do with rates of return. Ladies you can bet your oh so sweet asses that some guy, a little bit like me, went through some data and came to the conclusion that by generating x% of extra sales the company could afford a price cut of y% and if the sales would increase above x% then generate a higher return on investment. Then some ruthless marketing person came up with a concept where by donating a portion of the sales price to a charity(breast cancer) that the main focus group (women)  are interested in the company could achieve the new sales targets and maybe in few years they might be actually be able to charge a higher price than before. Lo and behold the Pink Ribbon campaign was born, now they are selling the product and making you feel good about spending money, since your not really spending it you are donating. If you are serious about helping to cure cancer donate to a freaking cancer charity or better yet to straight to a goddamn University Hospital. 

More positive examples are how treat your employees and customers. The first chapter of every Customer Service textbook always deals with how good customer service leads to high return on investment. Its a proven fact that repeat customers offer higher returns than new customers, they provide a steady stream of revenue. The same goes to treating employees, employees and their know-how present is the most important intangible asset the company has, Google is a good example of this, they treat their employees like Gods with spectacular results.

Now you maybe wondering how can business be ethical if the only thing they should care about is the rate of returb? The anwser is simple, you. While the corporations don't have any moral guidelines, you do. The companies are there to make money by fulfilling your wants and needs, how you choose to fulfill those wants and needs is entirely up to you. If you don't care about things like child labour or the destruction of the environment, businesses will provide you with cheap products by using child labour if that is the way to the highest shareholder value. If on the other hand you refuse to buy a brand that is associated with the use of child labour then the returns on investment for that product will go down and the shareholders will lose value. The key to ethical business are ethical consumers. So if you are pissed at a company, don't buy its products and tell your friends about it, on Facebook or Youtube.

Final words to the ones reading this who have their own business or are planning on starting one, should note that the rule at the beginning also applies to you. If I would ask you, what your required return on equity* is, how would you anwser me? I would be interested in hearing your anwsers.

*(return on equity is the "cost" of capital for the money you put into the company aka how much profit you want to make on your investment into your own business)

Movies that are awesome

Continuing with the movie theme, a short list of films that I happen to like in no particulat order of importance

Platoon: If you want to see an emotional side of war or men being emotional, this is one of the best movies on these topics. Made by Oliver Stone who actually served in combat in Vietnam earning Broze Star before being wounded. It is made as authentic as humanly possible, for example to prepare for filming the entire cast was taken for a brutal 2 week Jungle warfare training. It was more of a recreation of the war filmed than a movie. The result is simply awesome, from the confused firefights and the constant threat of ambush to the anger, despair and hopelesness of the tired teary eyed men is simply breathtaking. My favourite scene is at the end when Sergeant O'Neil, played by John McGinley, hears that he has been assigned to lead a platoon, the expression on his face goes beyond words.

The Dark Knight: This is one the best films I have seen in recent years. The atmosphere, the plot, the characters and the theme all come together to form a cinematic masterpiece. Heath Ledger pulls of the role of his life, managing to surpase the previous Joker played by Jack Nicholson by miles. Aaron Eckhart(Harvey Dent), Gary Oldman(Commisionare Gordon) and Christian Bale(Batman) form the Triumvirate of the Good guys who begin to make some serious headway into bringing down crime in Gotham, each with their own strenghts and weakness that complement each other really well. The plot is brilliant and the moral dilemmas possed to the characters would make Aristotle cry and they force you to think what would I do in this situation, combined with cripping action scenes. But the best part is the ending which they had the balls to make into a tragedy, like they did with the whole film.

Terminator 2: The movie starts with a simple premise, two robots are sent from the future, one to kill a kid and one to save the same kid turns into an epic battle to change the future. Its also a story about how young John Connor is forced to grow up into an adult, while teaching the a terminator designed to kill, how to be a responsible human being, while trying to keep his mothers psychotic mother in check. In the same way the Terminator learns to value human life, while his mother finds new hope when she realizes that the future is not set. Add to this action scenes that still look awesome today, with one of best endings I have seen.

Rambo First Blood: A story about an argument between two men which gets way out of hand. What is cool about this film is that its really hard to tell which one is the good guy and which the bad guy, Rambo or the Sheriff. Another interesting bit about is that Rambo uses is skills, intelligence and guerrilla tactics to defeat a large number of better equipped opponents. No guns, just a knife, intelligence and the will to survive. The end is again not what you expect, how many action films end in an emotional break down of the main character.

Empire Strikes Back: The first Star Wars film I saw(Thanks Dad for showing me this one first) and in my opinion the best of them. Starts of with heroes desperately defending their base and barely escaping the seemingly invinsible onslaught of the Empire and ends in one of the most epic fight scenes in movie history. Main issue here is how to defeat evil without being corrupted into being evil? The atmosphere is foreboding as the heroes try to desperatly escape or are preparing to a face a far superior foe. On the side we get an exciting chase and a well acted romance, which is fun and interesting to watch. If you haven't seen any Star Wars films, watch this.

Its a Wonderful Life: This one is old but still gold. A story about a man, who feels like he failed in his life and learns the hard way that this is in fact not true. Its a christmas classic, but also works well one is feeling depressed. Its the ultimate feel good movie with a very satisfying end.

Fight Club: A story about how pointless modern life occasionally feels and the quest of two men to change things. Bard Pitt as the nihilistic anarchist Tyler Durden who seeks to go deep into the primal urges of man that have been burried under all the bull shit of modern life and bring these instincts back. Starts of with a a bunch of guys kick the shit out of each other and culminates into an attempt to decimate the foundations of modern society, with an interesting twist end.

Harry Potter Goes Camping around England

Just came back from seeing Harry Potter The Deathly Hallows part 1, which turned out into a real disappointment. This is going to be a review of that film, so SPOILER alert, not that the movie is really worth watching, let alone paying for. But now on with the review.

The beginning of the movie was pretty awesome, the mood and the music are straight from Dark Knight and I half expected Batman to appear, then we see Snape marching into a creeping looking mansion where Voldemort and his Legion of Doom is having meeting and the main topic on the agenda is, how do we capture/assassinate Harry Potter. This doesn't feel like a movie about a magic kid who gets bullied at school, this Harry Potter meets Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer and James Bond. The movie continued on this line with chases, ambushes, near misses, intelligence gathering, betrayals, paranoia and daring raids into enemy strongholds. Just swap the magic wands with Glocks, SIGs, Uzis and AKs, you get an action packed secret agent film, which I thought was fan-fucking-tastic. The best part is that all of this is happening with a background of a society that is falling under the heel of oppressive tyranny that practices similar racial doctrine that the nazis had. Harry Potter has become a lead figure in a resistance movement fighting against an oppressive regime. How could this movie possibly go wrong from here?

Then Harry, Hermione and Ron escape to a forrest where they "temporarily" set up a camp and then they stay there feeling sorry for themselves, listening to the radio and not really doing anything for the rest of the film  All other characters disappear, the plot doesn't move any where, the characters don't really do anything remotely interesting or meaningful and nothing happens, the scenery occasionally changes as the move to a new cinematic spot somewhere in England, but thats about it. At this point I got really pissed, what happened to fighting the Dark Lord? What happened to the other characters? What is going in the society? How is the change in government affecting the lives of the people in the Potter-vers? All of these interesting plot lines and events that they started to talk about in the first half are completely abandoned and all we get is 3 people in a tent having a really boring holiday. Everything that happened in this part that took about 40 minutes could have been done in about 10.

When the director decides to spend the latter half of the film on useless carbage, you know that the end is just going to plain suck and guess what it did. Its basically one deux ex machina after another.  First the Ghost of Bambi appears to Harry and leads him to a Magic Sword which just happens to be in a bond 100 meters from where they were camping. Then Ron comes back(He left at one point). Then they search for clues get betrayed and get caught by conveniently placed bad guys. No Problem, a magic elf appears, completely decimates Harry's captors and Harry and buddies escape. The End.

The movie turned out this way because the studios got greedy. This is based on the last Harry Potter book, so they better milk every penny out of this cash cow while they still can, so what I think happened was that they had a solid 3 hour screenplay for the last book, but they figured out that if they have two films they will get twice the money. So they had to add about 45 minutes of extra to make two two hour films, but since they were greedy bastards they didn't want to invest too much into it in terms of money, writing a meaningful plot or anything of real value. All they needed to do was to send the 3 principal actors into a wood for few days with a tent, a cameraman and an audio guy, the director wasn't sent, since nothing really happens in the woods the actors don't really need direction anyway.


The cast of Harry Potter includes some pretty awesome villains, Bellatrix Lestrange played by Helena Bonham Carter is simply awesome, insane, cruel and really entertaining to watch, she could easily be the girlfriend of Joker played by Heath Ledger from Dark Knight. Dolores Umbridge played by Imelda Staunton is another big favourite, a classic narcissistic sociopath with sadistic tendencies, looks all cute and cuddly on the outside, greets you with a big smile but underneeth beats a dark heart that wishes nothing but to bully, humiliate, dominate and hurt those who stand against her wishes. And finally Severus Snape played by Alan Rickman is perhaps the most complicated character in the series, but sadly he was reduced to a meer cameo in this film. Of the heroes Ron and Hermione are always entertaining, its fun to watch a screen couple that don't constantly profess their love to one anohter or kiss or do all that other cliche romantic stuff, reminds me of Princess Leia and Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back.


Speaking of Empire Strikes Back Roger Moore said the following in his review of the movie  "Alternately funny and touching, it's the best film in the series, an "Empire Strikes Back" for these wizards and their wizarding world. And those effects? They're so special you don't notice them." Sorry Roger this was not the best HP film and comparing this to Empire Strikes Back is like comparing Sacher cake to a Shit Cake. This movie tries to have similar contemplative part like the one Luke had in Dagobah, but with a one big difference. In the Dagobah part of Empire Strikes Back we learn interesting things about the nature of the Force, the philosophy of the Jedi and Luke grows as a person as he gets ready to face Darth Vader, in this film nothing remotely similar happens, in fact nothing really meaningfull happens. Plus in Empire Strikes Back we get to also watch what goes on with the other characters, which is what they should have done with this film.

Finally words, this movie could have been a really good movie, if they had gone along with the Harry Potter meets Jack Bauer thing, but instead they had to ruin it with a needless and poorly executed melodrama and a really stupid ending. Based on this part I won't be watching the next part at a theater where I have to pay, I will watch it online for free. Serves the greedy bastards at Hollywood right. 

The Problem of the One Eyed Man

"In the Kingdom of the Blind, One Eyed is the King" -Desiderius Erasmus 


This quote to me holds the essences of what it means to be an expert on a topic. Expert is a person who knows about a given topic more than anyone else in the given situation. The problem here lies in the fact that if everyone around you is completely ignorant on the topic, being the best at something doesn't require much knowledge. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when the praise you receive from the blind and ignorant makes you feel like you infact have two eyes instead of one. 


The lack of knowledge associated with having only one eye can become painfully obvious when you bump into a person with 2 or more eyes. In these situations the best you can hope is to barely pass off as a two eyed person and make most of the opportunity to learn and hopefully one day you will gain enough experience points to gain the level needed to activate your second and third eyes.