Shareholder Meeting The Office Quotes

Buffett opined that “a chief risk officer is an employee that makes you feel good while you do dumb things.

From then on, employees are expected to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings (similar to the vicious confrontations of the Synanon Game), “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting” (that’s according to Leadership Principle #13). If an underling gives an opinion or responds to a question in a way their manager doesn’t like, they can expect to be called stupid or interrupted midsentence and told to stop speaking. According to ex-Amazonians, maxims often repeated around the office include: “When you hit the wall, climb the wall” and “Work comes first, life comes second, and trying to find the balance comes last.” As Bezos himself wrote in a 1999 shareholder letter, “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified.

The thing is, there’s generally no consequence for bad police behavior, even repeated or serially bad behavior. Even if individual officers are successfully sued, the only thing that happens is that the city’s corporation counsel pays out some cash, and life just goes on as before. An officer’s record of complaints or settlements isn’t listed publicly. A defense lawyer who wants to find out if the officer who arrested his client has ever, say, bounced an old lady’s head off a sidewalk or lied to a judge about witnessing a drug sale has to meet an extraordinary legal standard to get access to that info. In order to look at an officer’s record, you have to file what’s called a “Gissendanner motion,” the term referring to a 1979 case, People v. Gissendanner. In that case, a woman in the Rochester suburb of Irondequoit was busted in a sting cocaine sale by a pair of undercover police. The court in that case held that the defendant isn’t entitled to subpoena the records of arresting officers willy-nilly, but that you needed a “factual predicate” to look for records of, say, excessive force or entrapment. In other words, you already need to know what you’re looking for before you find it. What this all boils down to is, if you really feel like it, you can definitely sue the New York City Police Department. Since so much of what they do happens on the street, in front of witnesses, you might very well even win. But even if you win, there’s not necessarily any consequence. The corporation counsel’s office doesn’t call up senior police officials after lawsuits and say, “Hey, you’ve got to get rid of these three meatheads in the Seventy-Eighth Precinct we keep paying out settlements for.” In fact, when there are successful lawsuits, individual officers typically aren’t even informed of it. What makes this so luridly fascinating is that this system is the exact inverse of the no-jail, all-settlement system of justice that governs too-big-to-fail companies like HSBC. Big banks get caught committing crimes, at worst they pay a big fine. Instead of going to jail, a check gets written, and it comes out of the pockets of shareholders, not the individuals responsible. Here it’s the same thing. Police make bad arrests, a settlement comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket, but the officer himself never even hears about it. He doesn’t have to pay a dime. And life goes on as before.

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

Corruption had always annoyed me, but I recognized that it was because of Putin and his system of governing that it had become so normalized in recent years. The whole country knew that, and I wanted to do something about it. To do so, though, I needed to become a fully qualified party in the battle against corruption. In one corner there would be Putin's corrupt oligarchs and bureaucrats and in the other there would be me. But what claim did I have to be the opposition? I wasn't a prosecutor, so how could I legally go after them? I had by then graduated from the Financial Academy with a degree in finance and credit and had a fair idea of how stock markets and exchanges worked. It dawned on me that there were state-owned companies where corruption was particularly blatant, and I could buy shares in them on the stock market. By making even a small investment, I would have the power as a shareholder to request documents from the company, file complaints, go to court, and attend annual meetings. For $5,000 or so I bought shares in several companies, including Rosneft, Russia's largest oil company; Gazprom, the largest gas company; and Transneft, which transports oil. These were gigantic, wealthy, state-controlled corporations it would be scary to tangle with. If you did you would probably get a visit from some toughs sent to beat you up for asking awkward questions. No one (including the companies) could imagine that some blogger without powerful friends would risk taking them on. If he did, he must surely have powerful forces backing him. Actually, I had no one backing me. I just knew my way around finance, and I also knew my rights. At that time newspapers regularly published articles about embezzlement in state-owned companies. Thanks to my shareholdings, I was now directly affected by this reporting. I wrote something like this in a letter: Dear Gazprom, I've been reading an article in such and such newspaper and wonder what's going on here. Could you kindly give me, as a shareholder, an explanation? Even though my shareholding was vanishingly small, they were obliged to report back to me. When the answer came, I would read it carefully, and if the company's actions were against the interests of its shareholders, I would take them to court. As soon as I became party to a lawsuit, I could demand to be sent documents and minutes of meetings. When ?I received them, I made them publicly available on my LiveJournal blog. My battles with state-owned companies eventually attracted tens of thousands of followers. However, I was looking for allies, not just followers. I invited my subscribers to send complaints and sue these companies with me. For instance, in Vedomosti, I read a report that the government had bought a building in Moscow city center from Viktor Veskelberg, an oligarch, for several times its real value. It was obviously a corrupt deal. I prepared templates for complaints, and thousands of people submitted them along with me to the Investigative Committee and President Medvedev, who at the time was pretending to be vigorously fighting corruption. I repeated this technique many times. It was easy enough to disregard one person, but much more difficult to ignore thousands, especially if you knew that all the documents were going to be published on the internet. I attended shareholder meetings, which were usually held in a theater or somewhere similar. Invariably there was a stage on which representatives of the company sat and read their reports. Those in the audience were mostly ordinary shareholders who were suitably impressed by all the ceremony. The senior management on the stage, security officers everywhere, the presence of journalists-all of it ensured the audience remained reverently silent, in the midst of which I would stand up and say, "I have a question.

At the time it was de rigueur among Putin's economic operators to represent themselves as 'effective managers.' In practice, however, it was limited to the facts that they dressed in bespoke Brioni suits, bought up the priciest offices in Russia, and modeled themselves on Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, only it was the state's money they managed rather than their own. Beneath the veneer of effective management was the same bunch of crooks who, given the slightest opportunity to steal, would do so. They were effective only in being able to devise fifteen different ways of cooking the books of a government contract in less than a minute, inventing a dozen fake commercial deals to make everything look proper, and briskly spiriting the loot away to their offshore company. The top dogs in all these state corporations were totally corrupt, and most of the regular staff were even more outraged by that than I was. It was from whistleblowers that I obtained the information that provided the basis of my first high-profile anti-corruption investigation. In 2007, VTB began purchasing oil drilling rigs in China and then leasing them to Russian oil producers. The cost of a Chinese drilling rig was $10 million. VTB Leasing, however, paid 50 percent more than that through an intermediary offshore company registered in Cyprus. It seemed an entirely pointless arrangement. What did Cyprus have to do with anything, and why was an intermediary needed? Surprisingly, it turned out that this offshore company was controlled by VTB's top executives, and the price difference went straight into their pockets. They purchased not five, note ten, but thirty of these drilling rigs. It would have been impossible to find customers for so many. This deal was supposed to remain secret, like dozens of others, but on this occasion things worked out differently. I not only wrote about the business but traveled to Yamal, where, in the middle of a field, I found the orphaned rigs still in gigantic containers and covered in snow. In the summer they rusted in a swamp. This investigation was very straightforward. You didn't need a degree in economics or to be an expert on oil production to work out what was wrong. I wrote hundreds of complaints, went to court, and even won. In those days that was still possible. I urged all the minority shareholders of VTB to file complaints together with me and demand documents. They did. This lasted for years, with statements to the police, rejections, appeals, lawsuits in Russia and Cyprus. It was a particular pleasure to question Kostin personally on the topic of drilling rights at shareholder meetings. He tried to find excuses, but with a marked lack of success.