My Ektars were sniffling as I walked by them today, especially the 100mm Wide Field (He is such a sap!).
The films are hibernating in the freezer. They won’t know until I wake them.
My Ektars were sniffling as I walked by them today, especially the 100mm Wide Field (He is such a sap!).
The films are hibernating in the freezer. They won’t know until I wake them.
Peter Y.
@ Brian, you forgot the much need tar and feathers. Anyway I found the most interesting part of the online article being in the last sentence "In consultation with Cerberus".....was that not the three head dog that guards Hell's gates? So they are considering a pact with you know who >
"Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will
accomplish them."
Warren G. Bennis
www.gbphotoworks.com
Which Button? Maybe Alt+F4.
Drew Bedo
www.quietlightphoto.com
http://www.artsyhome.com/author/drew-bedo
There are only three types of mounting flanges; too big, too small and wrong thread!
Please not Cerberus one of the most amoral companies in the world but then again Antonio Perez isn't a very moral CEO either. Tar and Feathers for Perez + 1
Dominik
Corporate amorality, including the behavior of officers and directors, is normal and, in fact, expected. Corporations are not humans, they are creations of the law. Corporations have only two absolute requirements: don't violate the law and make the maximum possible profit for their shareholders/owners.Originally Posted by MDR
If those running a corporation make decisions and act in ways that violate the law or reduce profitability because their personal sense of morality demands it, they are derelict in their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders/owners. They may suffer financial and/or legal consequences as a result.
The only way considerations of morality can indirectly influence a corporation is if its customers, as a condition of continued patronage, demand certain things that are not required by law. Should the corporation ignore those expectations and suffer a loss of profitability, morality (the customers' perception thereof) will have had some impact. Otherwise, if it's legal and profitable, it's perfectly acceptable.
This is the system we live under.
You're far too optimistic, Sal. I can think of any number of big US companies which
tanked or sold out in the last few years because the share-holders were in effect
ripped off themselves by upper mgt. As you might recall, it wasn't that many years ago
when even our two biggest energy corps here in Calif ripped off their own publicly
traded utilities, deliberately bankrupting them by transferring staggering sums of money to the tightly-held parent corps, then got a public bailout to boot. These kinds of folks don't give a damn about public opinion. It's a lot more important for them to go golfing with the right senator or whatever. And as far as breaking the law or not,
why not break it if the odds are that, at worst, the penalities are only a fraction of the
illegal earnings at the top? There aren't enough investigators, courts, or judges in the
country to clean up the mess. The best they can do is bag a prominent offender from
time to time. And the SEC has no teeth anyway.
I'm not sure it is as strict as this. The whole point of corporations is to create a legal entity apart from its founders/leaders, so that it can, for example, own things, suffer or benefit from its own consequences, and pay taxes. Many corporations are non-profits, and many corporations do not have either stock or shareholders.
The point of being a stock company is to capitalize a business plan, providing those who help capitalize it a share in the resulting reward. But stock companies can exist without being corporations, and corporations don't have to be stock companies.
But one thing corporations do have to do is behave like an entity, and that includes all the same moral and legal obligations that are expected of individuals. Many could easily say that individuals have no obligation beyond following the law and taking care of themselves. But corporations are subject to all manner of criticism when they behave amorally, or in ways that are seen as excessively uncharitable. Witness the backlash against Bank of America for charging a new fee, and (much more substantively) against BP after the Gulf oil spill (and even after Exxon after the Valdez--even now I have a hard time buying gas at an Exxon station, though that is clearly irrational given the way retail gasoline sales work). Courts examine legal requirements, but corporations are still often subject to consequence of moral lapses.
The routine expectation that corporations are expected to behave as entities in the same way individuals are is the reason why corporations support charities, which they do in vast amounts. I'm sure that Kodak has supported charitable giving even in the midst of its current troubles.
The boards of for-profit corporations are indeed expected to represent the interests of the shareholders. But there is a legitimate argument to be made that burning the furniture in a November cold spell is no way to keep warm through a long winter, and thus the Kodak board is not, in fact, representing the interests of shareholders. There is also a legitimate argument to be made that representing shareholder interests includes an expectation of being a good corporate citizen, which requires moral behavior at least as great as would be expected of an individual. And publicly traded corporations are absolutely expected to consider the long-term shareholder value of stock as well as its spot stock price, so boards do have an obligation to consider sustainability when they review the CEO's proposals.
If a board and the CEO are conspiring against shareholder value, then they are subject to legal and well as moral consequences.
Kodak is the victim of long-term incompetence compounded by short-term extreme incompetence. If we were to meet Perez in a social setting, we might find him completely genuine and good-hearted, but I think we'd also find he doesn't know very much about photography. Good companies (whether or not they are corporations) whose business plan requires a long existence--which Kodak's certainly would--would be expected to define their core business and then support that core business. It appears to me that they can't seem to be clear about what their core business is, and they flit back and forth from idea to idea without direction. This is not Perez's fault. This has been a Kodak corporate weakness for many decades.
Good companies look for the intersection of 1.) what they can do better than anybody, 2.) what they want to do better than anybody, and 3.) what people are willing to pay for at a price point above costs. Kodak has for a long time taken the first for granted without rearticulating it as needed. They have been without opinion on the second--seeming to want to be a world leader on digital and film and still hinging much of their investment R&D on consumer crap. And they have been and utterly wrong about the third, missing the movements in the market altogether.
Rick "believing that corporations do have moral obligations perhaps more stringent than do individuals" Denney
Note that I posted this in response to Dominik's post, in which he wrote that Cerberus is one of the most amoral companies in the world. The entire point of my post was that the entity known as a corporation is inherently amoral. Not necessarily moral. Not necessarily immoral. Morality cannot directly affect the operation. Only the law can do so. Others' perception of the corporation's moral behavior can certainly have an indirect effect, which I also wrote.
I'm not optimistic at all. I understand that, like individuals, officers of corporations can and do break the law. I only said that law is the controlling factor, not morality.
The indirect effect of customer opinion (publicly traded utilities were those corporations' customers) was indeed minimal. Only the law governed. With respect to specifics of the laws and how those laws are written, I'm afraid we can go no further without violating the forum's prohibition on discussion of politics.
It's exactly that strict. The whole point of corporations is to shield their owners from personal liability and, if they're publicly traded, to permit those operating the corporation to take risks with other people's money. Nothing more, nothing less. I wrote "shareholders/owners" specifically to address the case where no stock or shareholders exist. Non-profits are an outlier category that is much more susceptible to perceptions of morality than other corporations.
I made no distinction between stock or non-stock corporations. Both are by nature amoral.
Neither corporations nor individuals have moral obligations under the law, only legal obligations. As a completely artificial construct of the law, a corporation's only legal obligations are to the law. No others. Nada. Individuals' only obligation under the law is to the law. There is no federal, state or local statute in the US I'm aware of that requires "morality." If one or more old ones remain, they will eventually be struck down as unconstitutional, rightly so in my opinion.
I believe you meant to write "when they behave immorally," but in either case, you've simply described some of the indirect effects I referred to.
There is no such routine expectation. Public corporations support charities because a) they can shelter some income from taxes by doing so and b) it's good PR. Some privately held corporations might have higher motivations for charity as well, but they too are motivated by a & b.
Only if the customers would react negatively to different behavior. If the customers don't care and it doesn't affect the bottom line, there is no requirement for behavior that you, or anyone else, would consider moral.
On this we emphatically agree.
And on that we don't.
I have never taken the time to understand bankruptcy. But I seem to see a lot of companies go bankrupt, but never shut down. American Airlines is the newest, and they are honoring all my frequent flier bonus miles and pre purchased tickets, and are flying every day. Didn't GM go bankrupt? Some of their new cars are doing very well this year. Reading these posts sometimes feels like going to a auto race hoping to see a crash. Isn't Chapter 11 for "reorganizing and rebuilding the business?" Or are they expected to file Chapter 7?
Also, urgently reporting how many remaining boxes of 8x10 remain...daily...again, seems fatalistic.
Finally, I'd like to address the comments on the other thread where a company is offering to do a bulk order of Tri-X film, if 250 boxes can be ordered. A few people replied they won't buy any more....everyone has enough already...blah. If we cannot get 250 people out of 300 Million Americans to buy a box of film, maybe Kodak has to go away. Is everyone honestly thinking that 300 million of us, and however many gazillion Chinese and other populations don't have .001% of people who will buy this product? I mean sheeze, there are probably 250 people in ARIZONA that buy horse saddles every year! If the only people shooting Kodak LF film are a handful on this forum, LF film from Kodak is dead.
Garrett
flickr galleries
Its too bad these companies became to big for their britches. If Kodak (or Polaroid) could have spun off their film business into a lean 50 person company it could probably survive. The analog demand is obviously out there (and growing), it just can't support a huge flailing company.
Where you should be hosting your photos: www.SmugMug.com
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