The 007s — Week 12

Highlights of the week: I binge watched the GSB speaker series and that’s about it.

• Faustian Bargain: It is a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches. The term refers to the legend of Faust, a character in German folklore and literature, who agrees to surrender his soul to an evil spirit (in some treatments, Mephistopheles, or Mephisto, a representative of Satan) after a certain period of time in exchange for otherwise unattainable knowledge and magical powers that give him access to all the world’s pleasures. A Faustian bargain is made with a power that the bargainer recognizes as evil or amoral. Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the person who makes them because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained.

• Co-Determination: Co-determination is a structure of decision-making within an enterprise whereby employees and their representatives exert influence on decisions, often at a senior level and at a relatively early stage. Co-determination may operate in parallel to, and complement, other industrial relations mechanisms of employee representation and influence. It does not substitute for other instruments that enable employees to influence management decision-making, such as collective bargaining. Co-determination is rooted in the industrial relations traditions of a number of EU Member States. In Germany, for example, there are two distinct levels of co-determination: at the establishment level (via the works council) and at the enterprise level (such as on the supervisory board of a company). Read more here.

• Neoliberalism: Built on the principles of classical liberalism of the 18th century, Friedrich Hayek came up with the ideology of Neoliberalism — a policy model that encompasses both politics and economics and seeks to transfer the control of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector. Many neoliberalism policies enhance the workings of free-market capitalism and attempt to place limits on government spending, government regulation, and public ownership. Neoliberalism is often associated with the leadership of Margaret Thatcher–the prime minister of the U.K. from 1979 to 1990 and leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990–and Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the U.S. More recently, neoliberalism has been associated with policies of austerity and attempts to cut government spending on social programs. Read more here.

• Patient Capital: Patient capital does not have a rigid definition, but generally refers to long-term investment, where investors are prepared to wait a considerable amount of time (3–5 years in some sectors, 10–15 years in others) before seeing any financial returns. For this reason, fund managers implementing a patient capital strategy will maintain their investments even if they’re seeing short-term losses for the fund. Pension funds and sovereign wealth funds are typical examples of patient capital. But, in recent years, patient capital has also come to be associated with impact investing. Patient capital investing can bridge the gap between the efficiency and scale of market-based approaches and the social impact of pure philanthropy. Patient capital has a high tolerance for risk, has long time horizons, is flexible to meet the needs of entrepreneurs, and is unwilling to sacrifice the needs of end customers for the sake of shareholders.

Image Source: Wikipedia

• Emotional Contagion: Emotional Contagion is the ability to influence the emotions and behaviors of others, either directly or indirectly. The etymology of “Contagion” comes from the conscious and unconscious acts of sharing our emotions with others via verbal or physical expression. We are born equipped with the evolutionary capacity of emotional contagion to help synchronize our emotions and express our wants and needs. Mirror Neurons are the physiological and biological reason behind emotional contagion. In humans, the premotor cortex and the parietal area of the brain, hippocampus, and limbic system are responsible for the execution and perceiving of emotions. The mirror neurons are fired when goal-related actions are seen or performed by others. Research says that emotional contagion triggers a similar neurological activation as a process of directing experiential understanding.

• CEO Disease: CEO disease isn’t actually a real disease, and it can’t kill you. However, the disease is proving responsible for the collapse of many businesses both large and small. Furthermore, the disease does not only affect notorious individuals such as Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron: almost all managers may be confronted with it. Symptoms of this malady include:
  - a CEO’s debilitating level of self-aggrandizement
  - a certain obliviousness to how their actions and mood impact the rest of the organization
  - an acute refusal to be wrong.
  These symptoms alienate the ailing CEO, you, from what’s really going on inside your company. The germ of CEO Disease is a perception problem — your employees are unwilling or unable to share how they really perceive you and your business, so your perception of the business and the teams you lead is skewed.

• Duck Syndrome: Although not a formal mental-health diagnosis, duck syndrome has mostly been described in college or graduate students and refers to the situation in which the sufferer looks completely calm on a superficial level while in reality, they are frantically trying to keep up with the demands of their life. Risk factors for duck syndrome include the stress of the college environment, personal and family tendencies to excessively emphasize achievement or family overprotection. Depression, anxiety, and mental illness, in general, can predispose a person to develop duck syndrome.