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French stressed trader
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Thursday 31 January 2008
Shocking as it may seem, the French suffer from stress even more than we do. The following tells the tragic story of one sadly misunderstood trader. We publish it here in the spirit of the New Year (it's still January!) with thanks to Rodney Gray Employee Communication and Surveys. It originated with The Daily Mash (see comments below):

FRENCH TRADER WAS FORCED TO WORK AS MANY AS 30 HOURS A WEEK
FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.
Kerviel hid his November losses in a batch of wonderfully fresh croissant. Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.
One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike.
"But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.
"At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he'd been working for almost six hours."
As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns.
At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.
[more]

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posted by Dr Ron @ 11:15   2 comments
Good enough for McKinsey...
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Saturday 19 January 2008
Blood and Gore

We referred you to one of McKinsey's articles last year


This article has now been selected as one of their ten best in 2007. It describes how:
"three years ago, former US Vice President Al Gore joined with David Blood, the former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, to form an investment-management firm dedicated to investing for sustainability—that is, assessing the way social, economic, environmental, and ethical factors affect the strategy and valuation of businesses."

This parallels the approach that we advocate and present in its simplest and most user-friendly form as Start-up Mega Planning.

In the interview, "the two men explore the underpinnings of their investment philosophy and discuss traditional approaches to socially responsible investing, as well as society’s widening expectations of corporate responsibility."

They also "delve into their thinking on how to gain superior returns for investors while integrating sustainability into an investment model. They touch on the effects of long-term investing versus the “short termism” of some investors, discuss the complexity of valuing companies across multiple dimensions of sustainability, and assess the activities of companies that pursue the opportunities sustainability creates".

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posted by Dr Ron @ 07:00   1 comments
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