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Stringer Gets Endorsements of Three City Newspapers

August 18, 2013 by

With varying degrees of enthusiasm, The Daily News, The New York Post and the editorial board of The New York Times all threw their support instead to Mr. Spitzer’s opponent in the Sept. 10 Democratic primary: Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president.

The newspapers denounced Mr. Spitzer, a former governor, for being “a cheat and liar” (The News) about the prostitution scandal that led to his resignation; for turning in a “dismal performance” as governor (The Times’s editorial board); and for being interested only in “feeding his insatiable ego” (The Post). The News, on Sunday, and The Post, on Saturday, even devoted cover photos to illustrating their disdain.

The endorsements could be a boost to Mr. Stringer, who, despite wide labor and official support, trails Mr. Spitzer by as much as 19 points in recent polls.

In an editorial, The Post praised Mr. Stringer as a “sober, honest man.” The News called him a “steady, serious, well-prepared public official with an unblemished record of accomplishment.” And The Times’s editorial board lauded Mr. Stringer for doing an “outstanding job” as borough president, and for improving “the scope, effectiveness and reputation” of a “sometimes marginal office.”

But most of their focus was on criticizing Mr. Spitzer. The News, for instance, printed excerpts from a tense interview he had with its editorial board recently about his prostitution scandal. The Post said, “We would not trust Eliot Spitzer to manage our 401(k), much less take our teenage daughter to the movies, so why should the city trust him with its entire pension fund?”

The endorsements were not a surprise. In fact, Mr. Spitzer has come to embrace such barbs as part of his campaign narrative of being an independent fighter. Lis Smith, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement: “Eliot’s spent his entire career taking on powerful interests on behalf of working New Yorkers. So it’s not surprising that the establishment is lining up against him and propping up a candidate who has spent his entire career proving he wouldn’t challenge them.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/nyregion/citys-newspapers-endorse-stringer-over-spitzer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Shortcuts: The Etiquette of Celebrating or Bragging About Achievements

January 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

MOST of you are probably not aware that, in the last month, many seniors in high school have learned whether they have been accepted to their top-choice college.

Or maybe you are. Maybe, even if you have no interest in this news, you’ve heard it reverberating on social media and across phone lines. Some call it celebrating. Others call it bragging.

As a newcomer to all of this, I was fascinated by the self-imposed rules that people have about how and when it’s proper to boast about such an achievement.

Some friends told me they thought it was fine for students to post about their acceptances and let their friends know, but too much for parents announce their son’s or daughter’s accomplishment online. Others felt that students should hold back in deference to peers who may have been rejected, but gave free rein to proud mothers and fathers.

Watching people parse the sharing of good news made me think about the bigger issue of bragging. As I researched it further, it became clear that this is something most of us are conflicted about: we want to let people know about our successes, but we don’t want to appear to be doing so. And we want to hear about others’ victories, but not too often or too loudly.

There is a common perception that it’s more acceptable to brag now than it was in the past, especially about our children. It used to be that parents didn’t want their children to get swollen heads (when’s the last time you heard that expression?) or, for more superstitious reasons, feared that praise would bring on the wrath of the gods, or at least bad luck.

Such trends are hard to measure. What is clear is that technology has provided “more outlets and a lot more reinforcement,” said Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Every cute thing a baby does is on YouTube.”

There are many reasons people feel the need to publicize their successes, ranging from sharing the joy to one-upping. But what research shows is that talking about ourselves just feels good.

Last year, two Harvard neuroscientists published a paper, “Disclosing Information About the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They conducted brain imaging and behavioral experiments and found that when people talked about themselves, there was heightened activity in the same brain regions associated with rewards from food, money or sex.

Diana I. Tamir, co-author of the study and a doctoral student at Harvard, said the research focused not on bragging, but on answering neutral questions about one’s personality.

“When asked questions about themselves, there was more reward activity than when asked about someone else,” Ms. Tamir said. And there was even more activity when the participants could choose to share information, by pressing a button, with someone outside the scanner.

Another experiment found that people were willing to give up small amounts of money to reveal information about themselves, rather than talk about someone else.

“I think there is a natural human tendency” to talk about oneself, Ms. Tamir said. “The interesting question is why we are motivated to share.”

Another interesting question is when sharing turns into bragging — and the answer is often in the eye of the beholder. As one commenter wrote on the Canadian blog wondercafe.ca, “I wonder if it’s sharing if I do it and bragging if someone else does it.”

Although boasting may seem more acceptable now, Susan A. Speer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manchester in England, has found that “self-praise” is still largely considered unacceptable.

Professor Speer, a conversation analyst, looked at a variety of data, from psychiatric interventions to everyday conversations, that involved self-praise. The information came from the United States and Britain.

In her study, published last year in the Social Psychology Quarterly, Professor Speer discovered that in almost every case, directly praising oneself seemed to violate social norms.

She said people responded to self-praise negatively or, more subtly, with a long silence or a roll of the eyes.

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/your-money/the-etiquette-of-celebrating-or-bragging-about-achievements.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Your Money Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss: How I Finally Turned a Profit

April 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Staying Alive

Careful readers of my post on whether to buy a building might have noticed that my business reported a profit in 2010. Yup, it was right there on my 1120S: the company reported earnings of $92,155 on sales of $1,516,837. Which is a little bit of an accomplishment, considering all the years of losses and the terrible first quarter we experienced last year. I’ve been asked to provide some more information about this, specifically, what I did to turn things around.

Before I get into that, I want to reassure all of you that I understand that my years of cumulative losses far exceed this one small profit. I still have a large list of challenges that I’ll be addressing sooner and later, and I know that I’m still woefully ignorant in many ways, despite the best efforts of helpful commenters to beat some sense into me. So fear not, those of you who enjoy following my struggles. There are plenty more to come.

Back to the profit. I can think of six main reasons we ended up with more money at the end of the year than we had at the beginning:

1. I cut payroll costs brutally in the fall of 2008 and continued to shed workers as demand plummeted the following year.

This was very difficult. The meeting where I told half my workers they would be laid off, with no severance pay, was horrible. Cutting everyone else’s wages by 20 percent was just as bad. I had to do two more layoffs in 2009 to keep our production in balance with falling sales. The money we saved kept us from closing the doors.

2. I rolled the dice with my kids college fund and invested in marketing.

By early 2009, it was apparent that demand for our product had not entirely disappeared, but that our existing marketing wasn’t efficient enough to keep us going. I grabbed the only cash I could lay my hands on and went for it. Our revamped Web site does a much better job of connecting with prospective clients. We sold just enough to stay alive in 2009, and by spring of 2010 I couldn’t keep up with the incoming calls. Another critical investment was taking one of my best cabinetmakers off the floor and moving him into the office to learn sales. This was expensive in the short term. I lost his production capacity, which was significant, and it took him a while to get the hang of customer interactions. But now he’s a steady producer, and between the two of us, we can keep up with incoming calls.

3. I learned to monitor my cash situation so that I could take appropriate action when I was running out of money.

On the last Saturday in October, 2008, I sat down to figure out exactly when I was going to run out of money. After messing around in QuickBooks for a while, I gave up and wrote an Excel spreadsheet that takes into account future income and expenses in a way that allows me to test different payment scenarios. No accounting package that I know of allows for easy switching of the date associated with payments. My spreadsheet is a little too usear-unfriendly to post here, but it has turned into an extremely useful tool for managing my cash flow.

4. The economy turned around in 2010. I repeat, the economy turned around in 2010. Once more: the economy turned around in 2010.

Items 1-3 were important but nothing beats a steadily increasing stream of paying customers to inject some adrenaline into a sagging business.

5. I got rid of debt and cut costs wherever I could.

By mid 2009, I had finished paying off the vendors we owed money from 2008. This decreased cash demands by more than $10,000 a month. Several equipment leases ended in 2010, freeing up another $3,500 a month. I renewed my lease in 2010 at a 15 percent discount, saving another $2,500 a month. I switched insurance carriers and saved a few more thousand. We turned the heat and air conditioning off in the office and kept the shop floor temperatures further from the comfort zone than we ever had, which saved a few thousand more. And The Partner took a big haircut on money the company owed him when he left, saving another $3,800 a month. The decreased debt payments account for most of the year’s profit and made our cash flow positive for the last three quarters of the year.

6. As demand increased, I invested in efficiency instead of just hiring employees.

By that I mean, I bought better tools first, improved operations second and hired only when absolutely necessary. There are great deals on used machinery out there. And even the most hidebound craftsmen are willing to rethink their ways when the alternative is unemployment. When I did add staff, I was able to get great people at a discount from pre-2008 wages. Our productivity has increased significantly, and our new cost structure allows for a decent profit margin at the level of sales we are seeing this year.

Of course, I know that the smart things I did the last few years should have been done long ago. If I had been running the company in 2005 the way I am now, we would have had a big cash cushion on hand when the downturn started. I’ve learned hard lessons. But there’s no doubt that I have a new set of problems ahead as I try to manage a resurgence.

Would anyone like to predict what my next mistake will be?

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside of Philadelphia.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=13412c0fcdca5f9e1d8874e7f04cab7f

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,