Blog Resmi Formadegama

By Gary Hamel

In the years ahead, any leader who hopes to have followers will need to carefully examine the foundations of their own authority. Why? Because we live in a world where the effectiveness of positional power is rapidly diminishing—at least outside of prisons and elementary schools. 

Thanks to Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, FEMA, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae, et al, the generation now joining the workforce has an extraordinarily jaundiced view of authority. They are deeply (and often rightly) suspicious of large organizations and those who run them. In their view, it’s not titles and credentials that make a leader worth following, but mission, self-sacrifice and world-class competence. Another worrying trend for centralization-minded leaders—an accelerating pace of change that penalizes organizations with lumbering top-down decision-making structures. 

While the Facebook Generation must still contend with trickle-down power structures at work and in school, they have experienced a ubiquitous and powerful alternative: The Internet. The Internet is flat, open and meretricious. Nevertheless, there are thousands of natural hierarchies online. Pick any subject, search the blogosphere, and you’ll uncover a hierarchy of influence—some blogs receive higher authority scores than others. Visit any online discussion group and you’ll find that a few frequent contributors have been ranked more highly than the rest. Or click the “most viewed” tab on a website that features user-generated content, and you’ll quickly discover who’s been blessed with creative genius and who hasn’t. While the barometer of respect may differ from site to site, the rankings are nearly always peer-based. Online, you have millions of critics but you don’t have a boss.

Online hierarchies are inherently dynamic. The moment someone stops adding value to the community, his influence starts to wane. Power is always on the move, always flowing—towards those who are making a difference and away from those who aren’t.

By contrast, a fixed chain of command may be efficient, but it can have some nasty side-effects. [See my previous post.] Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent. Their inherent inflexibility can also lead to persistent misalignments between positional power and genuine leadership ability—lags that can ultimately destroy a great organization. Review the troubled history of any chronically struggling company—like Chrysler, Sony or Motorola—and you’ll find a management model that concentrated too much power in the hands of deadwood executives, and awarded too little power to the natural leaders who might have had the energy and vision to set the company on a new course. 

But there’s no reason your organization has to follow suit. Natural leaders today have the means to challenge ossified and change-resistant power structures. Thanks to the reach of the Web, a lowly but brilliantly effective leader can mobilize followers across a global organization and beyond—by writing an influential blog, by using that notoriety to get a platform at industry events, by hosting a Web-based discussion on a hot topic, by building an online coalition of similarly-minded individuals, by disseminating a provocative position paper to hundreds or thousands of fellow employees, and by using email to ensure that supporters show up at key meetings. The same technology that allowed Barack Obama to challenge the old guard in the Democratic party can help natural leaders in your organization outflank the bunglers and the obstructionists. 

So, readers, here’s my question: What’s your advice to natural leaders who feel stymied by the formal hierarchy? How can they use the new social technologies of the Web to extend their influence and accelerate the pace of change?

*Diambil dari Gariy Hamel's Management 2.0 di Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/05/18/empowering-natural-leaders-in-facebook-generation-ways/

Oleh: Rahmat Febrianto

By Jason Zweig**

It is sometimes said that to be an intelligent investor, you must be unemotional. That isn't true; instead, you should be inversely emotional.

Even after recent turbulence, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up roughly 30% since its low in March. It is natural for you to feel happy or relieved about that. But Benjamin Graham believed, instead, that you should train yourself to feel worried about such events.

At this moment, consulting Mr. Graham's wisdom is especially fitting. Sixty years ago, on May 25, 1949, the founder of financial analysis published his book, "The Intelligent Investor," in whose honor this column is named. And today the market seems to be in just the kind of mood that would have worried Mr. Graham: a jittery optimism, an insecure and almost desperate need to believe that the worst is over.

You can't turn off your feelings, of course. But you can, and should, turn them inside out.

Stocks have suddenly become more expensive to accumulate. Since March, according to data from Robert Shiller of Yale, the price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 index has jumped from 13.1 to 15.5. That's the sharpest, fastest rise in almost a quarter-century. (As Graham suggested, Prof. Shiller uses a 10-year average P/E ratio, adjusted for inflation.)

Over the course of 10 weeks, stocks have moved from the edge of the bargain bin to the full-price rack. So, unless you are retired and living off your investments, you shouldn't be celebrating, you should be worrying.

Mr. Graham worked diligently to resist being swept up in the mood swings of "Mr. Market" -- his metaphor for the collective mind of investors, euphoric when stocks go up and miserable when they go down.

In an autobiographical sketch, Mr. Graham wrote that he "embraced stoicism as a gospel sent to him from heaven." Among the main components of his "internal equipment," he also said, were a "certain aloofness" and "unruffled serenity."
 
Mr. Graham's last wife described him as "humane, but not human." I asked his son, Benjamin Graham Jr., what that meant. "His mind was elsewhere, and he did have a little difficulty in relating to others," "Buz" Graham said of his father. "He was always internally multitasking. Maybe people who go into investing are especially well-suited for it if they have that distance or detachment."

Mr. Graham's immersion in literature, mathematics and philosophy, he once remarked, helped him view the markets "from the standpoint of eternity, rather than day-to-day."

Perhaps as a result, he almost invariably read the enthusiasm of others as a yellow caution light, and he took their misery as a sign of hope.

His knack for inverting emotions helped him see when markets had run to extremes. In late 1945, as the market was rising 36%, he warned investors to cut back on stocks; the next year, the market fell 8%. As stocks took off in 1958-59, Mr. Graham was again pessimistic; years of jagged returns followed. In late 1971, he counseled caution, just before the worst bear market in decades hit.

In the depths of that crash, near the end of 1974, Mr. Graham gave a speech in which he correctly forecast a period of "many years" in which "stock prices may languish."

Then he startled his listeners by pointing out this was good news, not bad: "The true investor would be pleased, rather than discouraged, at the prospect of investing his new savings on very satisfactory terms." Mr. Graham added a more startling note: Investors would be "enviably fortunate" to benefit from the "advantages" of a long bear market.

Today, it has become trendy to declare that "buy and hold is dead." Some critics regard dollar-cost averaging, or automatically investing a fixed amount every month, as foolish.

Asked if dollar-cost averaging could ensure long-term success, Mr. Graham wrote in 1962: "Such a policy will pay off ultimately, regardless of when it is begun, provided that it is adhered to conscientiously and courageously under all intervening conditions."

For that to be true, however, the dollar-cost averaging investor must "be a different sort of person from the rest of us ... not subject to the alternations of exhilaration and deep gloom that have accompanied the gyrations of the stock market for generations past."

"This," Mr. Graham concluded, "I greatly doubt."

He didn't mean that no one can resist being swept up in the gyrating emotions of the crowd. He meant that few people can. To be an intelligent investor, you must cultivate what Mr. Graham called "firmness of character" -- the ability to keep your own emotional counsel. 

Above all, that means resisting the contagion of Mr. Market's enthusiasm when stocks are suddenly no longer cheap.

*Diambil dari Wall Street Journal 23 May 2009 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124302634866648217.html

**Jason Zweig memberikan komentar pada buku The Intelligent Investor edisi ulang . Buku yang ditulis oleh Benjamin Graham ini diterbitkan dan diterjemahkan di Indonesia oleh Penerbit Serambi dan diterjemahkan oleh Rahmat Febrianto :)

Oleh: Rahmat Febrianto

By ERIN WHITE

Are more women moving into corporate boardrooms?

At least one study says yes. In the first three months of the year, 38% of new directors – 38 of 101 appointments – were women, according to data compiled by quarterly journal Directors & Boards. That's the highest number and percentage since the publication began counting in 1994.

Women's share of board appointments has been climbing for the past two years and spiked in the most recent quarter, says James Kristie, editor of Directors & Boards. For all of 2007 and 2008, it averaged about 25%; in 2006 it was 18.5%.

"We're at a new opportunity level for women to go on boards finally," says Mr. Kristie.

He sees several changes driving up the numbers. For one, it's getting harder to convince active CEOs to serve as directors at other companies, so boards are being forced to look at a broader pool of candidates, Mr. Kristie says. That's giving more women – including senior-level female executives who aren't CEOs – a better shot at a board seat. Plus, as more women get on boards, they may be opening doors to other women's candidacies, Mr. Kristie says.

The recession may also help. "You may have a lot of men executives who have perhaps lost their jobs or demurring on taking on new boards," Mr. Kristie says.

Some of the new appointees are joining big companies. Microsoft named to its board Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College; Chiquita Brands International named Kerrii Anderson, former CEO of Wendy's International; ConAgra Foods named Joie Gregor, who served as assistant to the president for presidential personnel under George W. Bush; and VF Corp. named Juliana Chugg, senior vice president at General Mills. Directors & Boards tracks every new director it notices, monitoring press releases, specialized websites and appointment announcements it receives.

Others who follow new-director appointments aren't seeing a surge. Julie Daum, who heads the North American board services practice at executive search firm Spencer Stuart, says about 20% of its director placements in the past quarter were women, up only slightly from 17% to 18% in 2008.

She does think the conditions are right for more women to come onto boards. "Boards are much more thoughtful about how they recruit – there's much more of a process in place where they define what they're looking for," she says. "Which is different from saying, 'We have an opening. Does anybody know who might be good?'"

*Diambil dari Wall Street Journal edisi 12 May 2009 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124208439032108595.html#

Oleh: Rahmat Febrianto

Sejak pertama kali menerbitkan artikelnya yang memberi tonggak lain di dalam penelitian akuntansi, setelah paper Ray Ball dan Phil Brown tahun 1968, William Henry Beaver masih terus berkarya hingga 40 tahun kemudian. Saya merasa penasaran mengapa dalam 40 tahun, kita masih menemukan karyanya.

Pertanyaan saya adalah seberapa tua ia sekarang ini? Seperti biasa, oom Google membantu saya menemukan informasi tentang Bill Beaver ini. Setelah saya mendapatkan apa yang saya cari, sebuah riwayat hidupnya, pertanyaan tadi saya ganti menjadi: "Seberapa muda ia ketika ia menulis paper seminal tersebut?"

Ia lahir di Illinois pada tahun 1940. Jadi, ketika ia menulis paper tersebut di tahun 1968, ia masih berusia 28 tahun! Jauh dari bayangan saya bahwa orang yang menulis sedemikian fenomenal haruslah seseorang yang "sepuh" dalam artinya yang sesungguhnya.

Saya juga menemukan hal yang sama mengagumkan ketika penasaran dengan fakta tersebut: Ray Ball baru saja menamatkan MBA-nya pada tahun 1968, ketika papernya memberi jalan lebar kepada riset-riset akuntansi dan keuangan di masa depan. Saya tidak bisa menemukan kapan ia lahir, namun ia menamatkan S1 pada tahun 1965. Jika saat itu ia berusia 22 tahun, sama dengan Beaver, maka pada tahun 1968 ia masih berusia 25 tahun--tiga tahun lebih muda daripada Beaver.

Penasaran dengan Beaver, saya kemudian terus mengklik-klik link yang ada. Setelah menelusuri lebih jauh lagi tentang Beaver ini, saya mengetahui juga bahwa ia mendapatkan gelar doktornya pada usia 25 tahun di tahun 1965. Dan...lebih luar biasa lagi ia menyelesaikannya dalam 30 menit!

Tidak percaya? Silakan langsung klik ini.

Jika pada tahun 1968 itu Beaver masih 28 tahun, Ball masih 25 tahun, berapa usia orang-orang seperti Michael Jensen pada tahun 1976 ketika menulis Theory of the Firm, Ross Watts dan Jerold Zimmerman pada tahun 1986 ketika menulis Positive Accounting Theory?

Jika berasumsi bahwa rata-rata mereka menyelesaikan S1 pada usia 22 tahun, Jensen masih berusia 36 tahun pada tahun 1976 karena ia menyelesaikan S1 pada tahun 1962; Watts sepertinya sekitar 42 tahun pada tahun 1986 karena ia menyelesaikan S1 pada tahun 1966. Zimmerman lebih muda daripada Watts karena ia menyelesaikan S1 pada tahun 1969. Mungkin sekitar 39 tahun. Saya memang masih melihat mereka berdua ini masih segar ketika bertemu mereka tahun 2005 dan 2007 lalu.

Hmm...semuanya masih muda ketika pertama menulis karya fenomenal mereka dan kita masih menemukannya hingga sekarang menulis. Saya bahkan sudah berhenti menulis sebelum benar-benar memulainya. Salut buat mereka.

Sleman, May 2009
Oleh: Rahmat Febrianto

Di dalam sejarah penelitian akuntansi dan pasar modal, ada dua orang yang kepada mereka banyak penelitian pasar modal bersandar. Dua orang tersebut adalah Ray Ball dan Phillip Brown. Pada tahun 1968, mereka menerbitkan sebuah paper yang seminal. Tidak ada yang persis tahu berapa ribu artikel (atau mungkin: berapa juta?) telah menyandarkan diri pada penelitian mereka berdua secara langsung maupun tidak langsung.

Ball lulusan S1 di UNSW Australia. Phillip Brown juga lulus dari universitas yang sama. Yang menarik adalah mereka mendapatkan gelar MBA PhD dari universitas yang sama: Univ of Chicago. Ball bahkan baru menyelesaikan program MBA-nya ketika paper seminal itu terbit di usia ke-28! 

Tahun lalu, 2008, karya mereka genap berusia 40 tahun. Peringatan atas karya seminal mereka tersebut diadakan di universitas asal mereka, UNSW Australia. 

Berikut ini adalah link ke video peringatan atas ulang tahun tersebut.

Video peringatan ulang tahun ke-40 atas paper tersebut bisa dilihat melalui You Tube di bawah ini atau melalui link ini Ball & Brown (1968).



Oleh: Rahmat Febrianto