I am particularly amused this morning by a question from a reader who works for a large financial institution. It seems that on payday the company had a small glitch and a bunch of people not on the direct-deposit program didn’t get their checks… for five days. One supervisor, approached by an employee who needed the money to live, gave an interesting piece of advice: Go to the guy responsible for Payroll and ask him to lend you the money. The guy in charge of Payroll is our correspondent. Of course, he’s ticked off. I think he has every right to be, for sure. Unless…

Several other matters of import are discussed. Check it out.

On another front, keep an eye on the debate now ongoing in my prior post on silver linings. You may want to weigh in. What’s better for the world? Gigantic multinational corporations whose brands define consumer activity worldwide? Or local businesses which are are a lot less efficient but do have a certain charm and utility?

Global? Local? Price or service? We may not have any choice, ultimately, in the way that story goes down. But we might as well talk about it while it’s happening, huh?

There are those who see the glass as half empty, and most of them write for financial magazines and newspapers and, I think, get kind of a charge out of scaring people and bumming them out. Maybe they want company.

Others see the glass as half full, and they mostly work for banks or brokerages trying to sell you stocks. Market down? Time to buy more!

Finally, there are the cosmic philosophers who see no glass at all. Who knows. They may be right.

But there are very few who at this point see a big, frosty glass virtually brimming over with delicious nectar. Such people are to be treasured for, in my opinion, they perceive a deeper truth that always lies just beyond sight.

It is often difficult to see the good in any situation, because it is the bad that rises up most insistently to accost us, offend us, frighten us. It’s difficult to see how lucky we are to be on the planet, breathing fresh air and tasting sunshine, when your company has lost 25% percent of its value in the last three months due to some stupidhead on Wall Street who issued sub-prime loans to untrustworthy mendicants.

How hard it is to see the seeds of prosperity, peace and happiness in our current miasma of loss, defalcation and disappointment.

Yet that is what I just enjoyed in the most recent issue of The Economist. The piece in question is called Somewhere over the rainbow, and it outlines, with this magazines customary verve, plain speaking and cheeky insight, the reasons why we all should be optimistic about the road that lies ahead.

I like that. In general, you know, I believe that optimism, even when it is based on bad information, false assumptions or simple goofy hope, is better than pessimism. The words “self-fulfilling prophesy” come to mind. Good vibes produce things of value. Bad vibes don’t. So I appreciate the former, particularly in times like these, when they seem, well, counter-intuitive.

Read the article. Reasons for optimism cited by this comfortingly stodgy publication, include:

• The number of people in the worst kind of poverty actually decreased between 1999 and 2004, reduced by 135 million individuals during that time;
• The population explosion has eased;
• Developing economies are growing faster than the established ones, suggesting the growing viability of the global marketplace;
• In fact, the global rate of economic growth has been sustained and strong just about everywhere, including South Asia and Africa, with smaller economies leading the pack;
• There has actually been a decline since the 1990s in worldwide deaths as a result of war and genocide. There’s still far too much, but the trend is in the right direction;
• All these factors and many more may be harbingers of an impending era of global growth, stronger economies that in turn produce an incentive for peace, and puppies in the spring.

Well, maybe not that last. But sort of. This explosion of goodness seems to be contingent on the continued globalisation of the planet, leading to greater cooperation among nations and less poverty and desperation in general.

This theme is mildly evocative of Davos, which this year brought us a bunch of mega-capitalists talking like backstage talent at Woodstock. There was something cute but kind of creepy about that whole thing. Is the spread of international corporate and state-sponsored capitalism too high a price to pay?

The magazine concludes, “The World Social Forum, a gathering of self-proclaimed progressives who want to turn back trade, growth and globalisation has adopted as its slogan the motto ‘Another world is possible’. In reality, another and better world is painfully and fitfully coming into being.”

Imagine, as John said. It’s easy if you try. Should we try?

In 2008 I believe we mark a very special anniversary: the 250th year that American Airlines has been serving the vermicelli and shrimp appetizer to Business Class passengers. But seriously. I know there has only been heavier-than-air flight for less than that, so those of you prepared to fire off a corrective comment can just stop right there.

It does feel like a long time, though. I recall, once upon a time, that American used to feature the food stylings of a number of chefs from establishments around the nation. Today, it’s kind of odd. They hand out menus with lots of type in them, but they always feature the same food. It’s Groundhog Day in the air.

In a time where nothing is certain, where the markets offer a different buffet of doom every day, it should be kind of nice to have something that never changes, never alters, year and year after year after year after… hm? Oh. Sorry. I got stuck in a loop there.

I have some questions for American I thought I would share with you, because perhaps you might have some answers.

Did somebody at the airline, back in the last century, achieve massive economies of scale by purchasing the largest number of teeny weeny beef filets in history? And do they now reside in an enormous frozen vault somewhere, tiers upon tiers of them, reaching up into the sky, a miniscule percentage defrosted annually for use until the next century dawns? How else are we to explain their ubiquity?

Were market tests done to determine that the vast majority of salad eaters enjoy creamy dill dressing? For a bright and shining moment last month, business passengers were offered a modified Caesar heretofore unknown, but that option seems now to have disappeared. Was there an upheaval among frequent flyers to bring back the creamy dill? If so, why hasn’t it been documented?

Who invented the super-cooked shrimp with rice-noodles that seems to be the annointed appetizer on most transcontinental flights? Is there an executive somewhere whose resposibility it is to say, “No. Enough,” and bring in the prosciutto with reconstituted melon dip as an alternative? When was it decided that resilient shrimp and limp, translucent noodles were not only the amuse bouche of choice for most customers, but of such popularity that they would be on the menu for most of our adult lifetimes?

Is the universe divided between those who select beef and those who opt for pasta? Is there no other road through the infinite regions of space?

Are these things immutable? Perhaps not. A few years ago, American introduced soy beans into its hot nuts mixture. Reaction must have been swift and powerful, since they were rescinded almost immediately thereafter. So change is possible. But is it called for?

Is there a vast business populace out there that, as they check in for their 15th or 20th flight of the year, has puffy little thought balloons above their heads filled with cold shrimp and chewy beef filets? Are there routes out there that offer other fare entirely, dishes that those of us who go between New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco know not of?

I know there are more serious matters questions that face us, ladies and gentlemen. This will never be the Davos Question featured by YouTube for response worldwide. But it isn’t only the big stuff that occupies us, is it? Aren’t the little issues sometimes just as intriguing, worrying away at the corners of our consciousness like termites, burrowing like moths into the fabric of our composure?

If you have any answers, please send them along. If any of you now reading this are associated with the airline, feel free to weigh in. And those of you who don’t fly this particular carrier quite as much as I do, are there similar patterns, concentric mobius strips of repetitive service in which you, when you travel, are forced to inhabit?

What other weird things have you eaten in the course of business lately? And yes, readers in Asia, I AM speaking to you.

The news coming out of Davos, as always, makes me kind of queasy and resentful. The sight of the world’s super-capitalists, including some former communists, cavorting with canapes coming out of their ears is an annual source of amusement and irritation. I’ve been to enough boondoggles. I know what these guys are up to.

Big news today seems to be about a party thrown by the Russians that included moguls ice skating. Serge Brin of Google (GOOG) reportedly came off the ice with red cheeks. In other news, a trader who earned in the neighborhood of 100,000 euros a year seems to be responsible for a $7 billion swindle. He is now on the run. Times have changed. When I made 100,000 euros a year, all I had was signatory authority for a department lunch. Are the grownups still in charge of the candy store? Two things caught my eye emerging from this orgy of schnapps and self-congratulation. The first was a blog in the New York Times that commented on the power of sovereign wealth funds — huge pots of money controlled by States around the globe — representatives of which gave a symposium today to discuss what they’re going to do with their cash to make the world economy sing on key again.”Now the men and one woman in charge of some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, the huge pools of state-controlled cash that have rescued American and European banks from their own mistakes in recent months, took to the Davos stage to defend their intentions,” the Times reported from the scene.Their intentions… hm… the world finance edifice is relying more than ever before on money controlled by politicians, sheiks, party functionaries and government bureaucrats. True, those people are well-aligned with those who control the “free” marketplace, but there’s a big difference between being bailed out by a world financial institution on the one hand or the government of Romania on the other. I’m only using that as an example. Romania is not bailing anybody out at this point, if ever. The apparently opposite trend came from a very upbeat Bill Gates, who introduced the idea of “creative capitalism,” in which that very same global free market system would benefit the poor as well as the rich. Somewhere in the stew they are serving at Davos is a link between the growing importance of state-controlled capital and the creation of an international system by which the markets that are increasingly reliant on that capital come together to make the entire world a better place.Thank God I’m not smart enough to see it.

Yesterday I unearthed a little nugget of American history of which I had no prior knowledge. While working on a posting on busyness, I did what I usually do on a lot of subjects: went over to Wikipedia to see what the collective wiki-mind might have to say about it. I typed in the words, “as busy as a chicken with its head cut off wiki.” Up popped the listing on Mike the Headless Chicken, whose picture once again graces our page. 

At first I thought the whole thing was kind of a gag. I mean, a picture of a chicken walking around with his head cut off is pretty amusing, as was the incredible fact that Mike lived for a year and a half in that condition after, you know, his head was separated from his body. 

Then, later in the day, I went back and read the entire wiki on the incident, which took place in the late 1940s and was, in its own way, the Britney Spears saga of its day… or maybe Anna Nicole Smith. It’s the story of a living creature turned by an accident of fate into an object of tragic fascination… and how much the public is willing to pay for the chance to buy a little piece of that tragedy.

The bare outlines are these: Mike’s owner was instructed by his wife to get a chicken for their dinner. He went out back and found Mike, who at that point was a pretty normal chicken, in the sense that he had his head. The owner then botched that operation, leaving Mike in his compromised state. The fact that he lived through what many poultry had not made him suddenly an object of affection and fascination to his handlers.

They nursed him back to a certain kind of health of sorts. He was never quite the same, but he was unaware of his status as a diminished entity, trying at times to crow and strutting around proudly as if he was a normal bird.

The owners came to love Mike and care for him during his tortured remaining time on the planet. The physical realities of his situation were dire. He had respiratory problems. Eventually, he died much the way Jimi Hendrix did. Before doing so, however, he had become a national sensation earning, in 2005 dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the people who cared for him and marketed his unique ability to appear in his headless state.

Today, in a small city in Colorado, they still have Mike the Headless Chicken Day, sixty years after the decease of the celebrity, and there’s a whole website dedicated to Mike – his life, his career, his untimely passing. 

In an era that has seen the death of hundreds of once-loved brands throughout our culture, and total amnesia of the populace on a wide variety of famous figures and events, Mike the Headless Chicken remains a legendary presence, along with names like James Dean, Judy Garland, and now Heath Ledger, individuals who were doomed by the very thing that made them infinitely fascinating and marketable.

Perhaps, he didn’t have the talent these icons possessed. But he sure had a lot of pluck.

Sometimes my gut absolutely mirrors the Market. Yesterday I was all freaked out. By the end of the day, I felt better. Now I actually smell a little bit of hope in the air. Things are marginally back to normal. The sky did not fall. The sun will come up tomorrow. If every cloud does not yet have a silver lining quite yet, there are patches of blue among the gray. So I think I’ll get back to business and usual and do what I said I was going to do last Friday and offer 10 things you can do if you’re too busy.

1. You can cancel all meetings with aggravating people right now unless they are your boss. It’s amazing how many meetings we create with people we’d rather not see for reasons that, once we are at them, are unclear. I believe many of us whip up activity to prove to ourselves and others how non-fungible we are. A little fungibility never hurt anybody, particularly the terminally busy who are already essential in quite enough areas, thank you. Be less fungible. Share your funge.

2. Never write a long e-mail if a gnomic BlackBerry message will do. It’s incredible how many chunks of work can be tossed over the side with a short electronic piffle like, “OK, let’s do that. Can you handle?” If you’re a big player, that’s called delegation. If you’re not, it’s called passing the buck. Either way, it results in less bussitude.

3. Close your door and tell your assistant that you will only be disturbed by a) your boss or b) somebody who is bringing you a hot pastrami sandwich, and nobody else. Your door has to have meaning if you are not to lose your sanity.

4. Take lunch. You won’t be less busy, but you will FEEL less busy. Let me ask you a question. When you eat lunch at your desk, do you end up with less to do after lunch? I’m betting the answer is no. So if you’re going to be screwed up anyhow, why not enjoy a nice, peaceful hour away from the office? Have somebody join you that presents a legitimate opportunity to use your expense account, if you have one.

5. Don’t go on conference calls unless your boss is on it. Isn’t there somebody junior to you in your area? Somebody ambitious, who still believes they get some kind of juice from being on a big ratpack event? Put them on the call. They can be the ones who sit there and twiddle their thumbs while you’re out generating non-fungibility.

6. Schedule an occasional offsite for yourself. Every city has conventions, gatherings, symposia about new technology and other BS you can glom onto. “Where’s Ambruster?” people will say. “Oh, he’s at the global streaming thing at the Hilton,” will come the answer. Smart Ambruster! To be interested in such an arcane issue!

7. Don’t be so friggin’ reachable. A few years ago, I noticed that everybody in LA starts calling New York at exactly the time when we all want to go to lunch. For a long time, I answered their calls and upset my circadean rhythms. Then I thought, “The heck with them,” although perhaps not precisely in those words. “I’ll return their calls tomorrow morning while they’re in the shower.” The bottom line is, just because your phone rings doesn’t mean you have to answer it. CONTROL, guys. It’s the sense of losing it that makes you lose it.

8. At about 4:15, take a look at your To Do list. Anything on it that can be put off until tomorrow? Hold on! Can’t, like 80% of it be put off until tomorrow? Or even the day after tomorrow? That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. It’s called procrastination. It’s divided into three parts: PRE-crastination is all the things you do before you start your serious PRO-crastination which comes right before a good session of POST-crastination. Then you can do whatever it is. Or not.

9. Schedule a meeting with your boss to “go over things.” Anything you do with your boss supercedes in importance anything else you could be doing. If your boss is going out to play golf, accompanying him or her is actually “working” smarter and harder than constructing that spreadsheet you’re supposed to be showing to the Controller next Tuesday.

10. Work faster. Concentrate harder. Clear your platter aggressively. Then rest. Rest is work, too, particularly for those who take it seriously.

By the way, the picture you see at the top of this posting is of Mike the Headless Chicken, who lived for eighteen months with his head cut off between 1945 and 1947. Proving, I guess that our kind of lifestyle can go on for a while, but in the end does take its toll.

Whenever I feel afraid.
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
So no one will suspect
I’m afraid.

While shivering in my shoes
I strike a careless pose
And whistle a happy tune
And no one ever knows
I’m afraid.

The result of this deception
Is very strange to tell
For when I fool the people
I fear I fool myself as well!

Just a little song for you this morning, with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, for those willing to follow the links.

Keep whistling.

Without busyness where would business be? Noplace, and that’s the truth. But there is a point where busyness goes beyond the point of productivity and into the blasted plain where crows feed on the eyeballs of those who didn’t make it across to the other side. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do you forget what you were about to say just as you enter somebody’s office? And you know that it wasn’t that old canard about, “Oh well, that probably means it wasn’t important,” no, it was important all right, and it clear left your brain as you were walking the ten steps down the hall?
2. Do you keep lists on your desk that are full of Things To Do, but you have to keep updating them because all the Things To Do that were once at the top are now in the middle, supplanted by More Critical Things To Do that accumulated while you were doing Other Things To Do that weren’t even on the original list?
3. Are you interrupted every time you start to do something by another person’s agenda?
4. Do you eat lunch at your desk just about every day and are forced to talk to people, either on the phone or in person, with tuna fish hanging off the end of your chin?
5. Do you sometimes find yourself running to get to a meeting in your own building?
6. Are you late for things a lot of the time when before you used to be punctual?
7. Are you often shocked to find out what time it is? That the days seem to whiz by and at the end of them nothing really got done to completion?
8. Do you eat Advil three times a day?
9. Do you sometimes begin a sentence and then stand there with your mouth open, looking for the right word?
10. Did you scream at some innocent subordinate today over something so minor it now seems ridiculous? And would you like to do it again right now?
11. How many times does your phone ring while you are trying to concentrate?
12. When you close your door for some privacy, do people constantly knock on it and say, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but this’ll just take a second”?
13. Do you suddenly have difficulty conjuring up the names of people with whom you’ve worked for years if called upon to introduce them to a stranger?
14. Did there come a time in the last three months when you forgot to go to the bathroom and were then sequestered in a room you could not get out of for so long you nearly died?
15. Do you sometimes lose a document on your hard drive? Like, work on it for a while, leave to attend to another matter, return and can’t find it?
16. Is your e-mailbox over its size limit?
17. Do you put yourself to sleep at night thinking about all you have to do the next day, and then wake at 3:00 AM filled with free-floating anxiety?
18. Do you sometimes sit at your desk, thinking about a big, sweaty martini… at 11:00 AM?
19. Do people talk about movies you haven’t seen, candidates whose names are unfamiliar to you, and celebrity sex tapes of which you have no knowledge?
20. Are you developing BlackBerry-related arthritis of the thumb? 

If you answered yes to more than three of these questions… what the heck are you doing reading this? Get back to work!