Hi there. I’m in Vegas again, having flown here next to two lovely women in perfectly pressed pant suits who conversed with each other over the strategic plan of their real estate enterprise for TWO SOLID HOURS. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t even say anything to them like, “Please be quiet, I’m begging you,” because, well, they were just so NICE.

This put me in mind of the concept we explored yesterday, the one concerning the establishment of a Rudeness Police, hereinafter referred to, when I wish, as the RP. It seems to have touched a nerve with a lot of you, and although I haven’t really done this yet, I thought I would share the pet peeves of some of you that have been cordially annoyed enough at the behavior of your fellow citizens to commit yourself to writing.

Fern of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, a state far more polite than its reputation, I think, relates hers (warning — some of these are pretty disgusting, although the fact that they even exist makes them worthy of RP note):

1. Broken Snapple and/or bottles all over the street. I always hope the kids (or adults) who threw them will somehow run over them when they drive by.
2. Emptied bottles of water now filled with urine — no joke (and I live in pretty upscale Bergen County).
3. Used condoms tossed on the street. 
4. Holding the door open for someone at a store or at the movie theatre and they walk through and don’t say “thank you.”
5. People talking on the phone while they are sitting with me at lunch. (I don’t think I’m THAT boring.

The tersely named “C” in Montclair, which is also in New Jersey for some reason, writes, “What about including loud eaters? Nothing is more disturbing than listening to the patron seated behind you shovel popcorn into their mouth like they haven’t eaten for days, while I sit there in agony secretly hoping they accidentally bite off their own fingers and choke - could we please add these people to your list? I for one think electronic dog collars are a great solution…perhaps we could up the ante by having repeat offenders sit in buckets of water while they watch the movie.” C adds at the end, “By the way - you rock Stanley!” Thanks, C. Back at ya!

Peter, who could live nowhere but in New York, suggests that “The seats in theaters should be wired to submit shocks to people who start talking and being rude. I say we give them 15 seconds then freakin’ zap’em! Even better (If I were king), I’d issue electric collars like we do for dogs and when people’s bad behavior begins, send a current through them that’ll make’em think twice! Kudos to Regal. They’re on the right track.” Personally, I think that’s a little excessive. As we assemble the RP, we should watch that we don’t simply punish people for every minor infraction. AB in Providence, for instance, relates that “while waiting for the bus, I saw a woman who sat in her car and let it IDLE for over ten minutes while she read the paper. Mind you it was a comfortable, dry 65 this morning so there was no need to leave the car running for heat or air conditioning. What a waste of gas… and oxygen.” I agree, of course, since I spend a lot of time in California and am very green now. But I’m not sure environmental insensitivity should classify somebody as worthy of detainment. “It works both ways,” says Philip of Smithtown, NY. “How about theater chains start having some respect for their paying patrons and eliminate the commercial advertisements before the movie. I think it is rather rude on the part of the theater chains to go in to a movie after having paid $8 or $9/ticket and be subjected to 5 to 10 minutes of advertisements. If I want advertisements, I can watch TV!” Now there’s a solution! Big screen! Your own couch! And TV, too! What a thrill!

What do you think of Bing’s advice in this week’s column?

USA TODAY reports that, in an effort to stem audience rudeness at its movie theaters, the Regal Entertainment Group (RGC) will be handing out wireless devices to certain patrons whose job it will then be to alert Security about any breaches of etiquette before, during and after the movie is in progress.

One can only wonder what the average security guard in your local movie theater would do with a pack of popcorn-throwing, cursing, muttering, cell-phone wielding rowdies. Or how he or she would deal with a two-year old screaming her head off while mom and dad watch Davy Jones emerging from his locker with tentacles dripping. Presumably, such unarmed, underpaid, and sometimes underweight security detail would be able to brandish empty tubs of popcorn and say, “Hey! Don’t do that!” while the offending parties laugh and offer suggestions about their mothers.

Still, Regal is to be commended for trying to enlist cordial, civilized citizens in the effort to control and contain the growing ranks of drooling, yelling others. I’d like to suggest something even more radical: the issuing of such devices to anybody who wants them. It could be funded by either a Federal Program or by Warren Buffett, who possibly has more money than the United States at this point.

The idea is pretty simple: we each have a device. When we see or hear something rude and disruptive to the rest of us being committed by somebody who doesn’t care about other people one bit, we set off the alarm, the Rudeness Police arrives and detains that person until they issue an apology. As is generally the case in our culture, anybody who apologizes publicly for anything is immediately punished by that public in a manner 100 times worse than if they hadn’t admitted any wrongdoing whatsoever. When the Rudies are sufficiently chastized, they are then free to go.

Certain rules would apply. Anybody who has been cited for Rudeness within the past 12 months may not have a device. Those who are so cited lose their gizmo for the same period of time. Those detained for multiple infractions over time are subject to banishment to someplace where Rudeness does not matter–France, maybe. Potential hardware upgrades are possible for those who attain senior Rudeness Police status, including devices that spray a noxious fluid and those that deliver a 10,000 volt charge, particularly to people who talk on cell phones in restaurants.

Here are some examples of people who would immediately be detained in my book:

• Moguls who yell at people over their Bluetooth connection while walking on the street to and from lunch;
• Anybody who refers to excreta or sex with someone else’s parent while audible to others in a public place;
• Drivers who employ less than two digits to gesture at fellow citizens of the road;
• People who BlackBerry others while speaking to you, even if you are very boring and know it;
• Individuals who refuse to give up one-half of an arm-rest in coach;
• Men with beards who do not inspect them for bacon bits after eating;
• Anyone who, when aggravated at hotel, restaurant or spa, employs the phrase, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
• Bill O’Reilly.

This is just my list, of course. You may have your own. You may in fact be one of the people listed above, or sympathize with them in some way. That’s fine. Go about your business.

We’ll be watching.

What do you think of Bing’s advice in this week’s column?

Today, it being a holiday and all, I thought I would take a break from thinking about business… and think about business. Why is it that every thought we have immediately defaults to a business application? We’re obsessed. This weekend, which was supposed to be, in the words of an email I received on Saturday from a senior executive “a nice long break,” there has been a huge chain of correspondence on the positioning of an upcoming deal. I had to finally tell one of my guys, “Hey. Go barbecue something right now.” That was the last I heard from him. But I’m pretty sure there’s activity going on behind my back that I’m just not being copied on because, you know, I’m eccentric.

I need to detach now and then. For this purpose, I often read Scientific American, because it’s hilarious. Every discipline, from physics to math to biology, turns out to be shrouded in the kind of arbitrary nonsense that is completely recognizeable to anybody who has ever been called upon to present a five-year strategic plan.

My favorite article in a long time is in the June issue. I highly recommend it to any person who has secretly held the belief that the best business strategies are non-rational. It’s called The Traveler’s Dilemma, and it’s about game theory. I’m not going to go through it. It’s about two tourists, each of whom comes home from a trip abroad with a damaged souvenir, and how they go about retrieving its value. This happened to me recently after a trip to Mexico, but that’s another story. The point of the exercise is that the player who proceeds logically and rationally will often be the one who loses, that rationality is not, in the end, the best strategy for every game.

“What is interesting,” says the author, “is that this rejection of formal rationality and logic has a kind of meta-rationality attached to it. If both players follow this meta-rational course, both will do well. The idea of behavior generated by rationally rejecting rational behavior is a hard one to formalize.” Sure it is. But sometimes it’s the only way to play a crazy game.

What do you think of Bing’s advice in this week’s column?

What do you think of Bing’s advice in this week’s column?

Just a short link to brighten your Saturday morning as we kick off a long and hopefully uneventful weekend. In case you didn’t see it, a second individual has turned up who attended Stanford University — birthplace of the great geek movement that now runs our ecosystem — without actually, you know, being admitted to the institution. Spent quite a while just soaking things up, hanging around, and pretending to be a bona fide member of the Stanford graduate physics program.

Woody Allen once said 80% of success is showing up. In some places, that number can be raised by potentially another fifteen points and, in the case of certain positions in Research, New Media, and Academia, even more. A place like Stanford is so august, so rich with self-regard and superbity, that it confers authenticity on virtually anyone who meanders about within its aura dressed appropriately.

The same can be said of your average corporation. Put on a suit. Walk around with the appearance that you know what you’re doing, particularly with coffee. You can probably fool people into thinking you’re a vice president after a while, if you find the right empty office (which is not that difficult these days).

I occupied my first job at my company for a full nine months before they really hired me. I had done a short free-lance assignment. They gave me a small office in which to do it. After it was done, I simply kept coming in. After a while, everybody assumed I was part of the department. One day I informed my superior that I had never really been hired. She looked at me quizzically and, since I was knee deep in a bunch of stuff she would rather not have done, she put my papers through. I ran into a little trouble with HR for a while, but before long that was solved too. In other words, being an impostor is not an a priori barrier to entry in a large institution.

Obviously, it didn’t hurt that this young scamster found her way to the Physics department. “I thought she was just another grad student,” a legitimate Stanford physics student observed when told of the situation, “but then you talk to her and you realize that perhaps she doesn’t really know what’s going on.” As opposed to what? Other physicists?

A rather churlish article in today’s New York Times outlines a new trend in executive compensation — the #1 guy making exponentially more than his immediate subordinates. The immediate reaction, both from those who work for the Big Dog and those who work for the L’il Dogs who work for the bigger mutts who work for the Big Pooch, is to question why, say, the CEO of Omnivore makes $5 million a year while his direct subordinates earn only $2 million or, in dire cases, only high six figures.

As always in the world of business, there is a rational explanation for what seems to be an arbitrary scenario. A close analysis shows, in fact, that bigtime CEOs are generally worth the money they make, due to the extreme requirements (both operational and psychological) of their jobs. Even though our level of need may be the same or even higher, those who work for them are under far different burdens and are therefore worthy of less. Let me show you what I mean.

Let’s take a CEO I’ll call Big Bob. He makes $5 million a year and gets an $8 million bonus plus long term compensation that will pay him $18 quadrillion by the time he’s 106, which is the mandatory retirement age for ultra-senior executives. Standing next to him for our demonstration is a fellow we’ll call Forbisher, who works for Bob, He makes $400,000 per year, gets a bonus of $250,000 and stock options that will help him pay off his son’s bicycle when they vest around the time that global warming destroys what’s left of the planet.

Both compensation packages are fair and rational, and here’s why:

Take CEO Bob’s base pay of $5,000,000. After Federal, local and state income taxes, medical and retirement withholding, alimony from two failed marriages and child support for not only his own children but also the six his second wife adopted from Sri Lanka immediately prior to their separation, and you’ll find that Bob’s take-home pay comes to slightly less than $850,000 per year. For this he must support an executive persona that places him in the room with guys whose investments throw off twelve figures. On that money, he is also expected to be a philanthropist, since nobody worth a lick these days isn’t giving away big blocks of income to Bono.

Forbisher works hard, plays hard, and almost makes ends meet living in midtown Manhattan, Chicago or Santa Monica on take-home pay of about $200,000 a year. He has two kids in private schools, a house or apartment that costs $5000 a month, all-in. Once a year, he and his wife Barbara take a vacation at someplace nice. She also contributes income, of course, but finds it hard to work a 60-hour week with two kids to transport to and from school, ballet, piano and shiatsu classes.

So both CEO Bob and senior executive Forbisher are just scraping by on their paychecks. Now let’s look at bonuses, which is what both of them live on, really. Big Bob’s pays for his self-image, long, tormented and virtually sleepless nights, and the fact that every move he makes is chronicled in 10Qs, 8Ks and the gossip and business pages. He also takes out a house every summer in some terrific location where he can see other parade balloon-sized moguls perambulating on the beach. He lives with the constant knowledge that, given the vagaries of Boards, SEC regulations and predatory journalists, it could all be over five minutes from now. At this moment, he has enough in the bank to pay for his lifestyle for the next year or so, but he would really miss the front table he now enjoys at his restaurant of choice more than anything else.

Forbisher spends his bonus on upgrades to his house. By the end of the year, he’ll have a new patio and barbecue to show for it. He’d like the bonus that’s paid to his boss Bob, sure, but the last time he had his name in the paper, it gave him diarrhea for a week.

As for long-term comp - stock options, restricted stock units, etc. - if they both make it for another ten years, they’ll each be fine at their perceived level of self-worth. Forbisher will probably get his payout when he’s ready to kick back and live the remainder of his life in somewhat reduced circumstances and increased happiness. Bob the CEO will most likely get it in the back of the neck when he least expects it, in one lump sum that could amount to, say, as much as a hundred million dollars. And how far does that go these days?

See? Business is rational, right?

What do you think of Bing’s advice in this week’s column?

What do you think of Bing’s advice in this week’s column?

NEW YORK, MAY 24, 2007 — Monday, Memorial Day 2007, has been declared Freedom From BlackBerry Day by Stanley Bing, it was announced today by Stanley Bing on this website, stanleybing.com, as well as at lunch today at an undisclosed midtown Manhattan location thought to be Michael’s Restaurant on 55th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in New York City.

“There comes a time in every business person’s life when one’s brain needs to function in analog mode,” said Bing as he pawed over his Cobb Salad looking for a last bit of bacon. “I believe that Memorial Day is recognized as a day of family recreation and personal enjoyment, even by hypertensive moguls who work every day and expect their subordinates to do the same. In declaring Memorial Day a period of rest from obsessive, intrusive, pathetically nerdy omnivorous accessibility, we are tapping into the values that continue to make America the land of the free.”

Bing called upon others in the business community to embrace what he referred to as “my bold, humanistic vision,” and to ditch the device made by Research in Motion (RIMM) and others like it.

He also added that he will be checking his laptop several times a day and will continue to be available via cell and landline to those who know those numbers.

All my life I’ve wanted to have a job that paid me ridiculously well regardless of performance. In that regard, my career has been a gross and total failure. Every year things get harder and harder, and nobody cuts me no slack. When I screw up, I get poleaxed. When things go well, I get a raise that makes perfect sense to anybody worried about corporate governance.  

It’s always been that way, but I’m not complaining. I guess I’m doing all right. I am not, however, making enough money to buy the entire economic output of Sierra Leone. I don’t even want whatever that is. Good luck to them with it. I do, on the other hand, want a two bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I’d have to mortgage my left leg to do it, though. That’s because I’m not running a hedge fund.

Hedge fund managers take a tasty little bite out of every dollar they manage, whether they’re successful in growing their clients’ ostrich eggs of capital or not. They do better, of course, if they do produce profits, but even if they don’t, two percent of a zillion dollars is still a couple of quadrillion. There’s very little downside, is what I’m saying. Big upside. No downside. That sounds like my kind of job.

My problem is I don’t really understand the technology. For instance, the concept of going short or long has been explained to me almost as many times as I’ve received instruction in the game of craps, with approximately the same result. I don’t even know enough to play. I understand that hedge funds deal with tiny fractions of a dollar, turning them into wads of crisp green. My fractions of dollars tend to stay that way.

I’m not giving up, though. I figure with hard work and sustained intellectual effort, I could become a very, very bad hedge fund manager… producing in several years of deplorable results only a small winery in Sonoma rather than the 2500 acre estate in Tuscany that would be the reward for the hedge fund manager who actually knew what he was doing.

That’s all right. I could deal with that kind of failure. I’ve always been willing to pay the price for my own shortcomings, and the hedge fund game seems like one willing to mete out the kind of punishments I’ve always felt I deserved. References available upon request.