Introverted

[Pennhaven]

I hear you TH. Been there, etc. Senior "leadership" philosophy to set targets beyond what anyone has any idea how to achieve, because "you can do more than you think you can". End result is that even though people achieve excellent results by any objective standard, they still feel bad about themselves because the "stretch" target is unmet.

And this is supposed to be motivating.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Well I was fine with it when the stock was up 400% and the bonuses were paying at a 4x or 5x multiplier. I had a spreadsheet with all my stock options in it, the value vs todays stock price, and the number of days until my next sabbatical. It was called "anger to joy sheet.xls". When something dumb happened, I would open it up and look upon it and feel almost immediately better. Seven figure numbers and imminent 12 week paid hollidays will do that for you

After I took my first sabbatical and the number of days went back over 2500, and then the stock fell by 80%, there was no longer any joy...or motivation to remain.

 

[Pennhaven]

I had a "motivational" .xls sheet too. Input fields were service date and date of birth. Output was eligibility date for early retirement and count down clock of days to ER day.

 

[Bob_Smith]

I hear you TH. Been there, etc. Senior "leadership" philosophy to set targets beyond what anyone has any idea how to achieve, because "you can do more than you think you can". End result is that even though people achieve excellent results by any objective standard, they still feel bad about themselves because the "stretch" target is unmet.

Well said Pennhaven and TH. You have summed it up perfectly. In the end we're all worse off with this type of management manipulation.

For example, in another thread a few of us mentioned a general decline in the quality of service at Vanguard. I just read an article in Money Magazine about that, and I think it is relevant to your comments above. It seems that Brennan has bought into some management gobblygook called VUE (Vanguard Unmatched Excellence). He has hallways and cubicles displaying multi-color bar graphs showing various various measures of efficiency, and electronic display boards continuously monitoring the maximum time any caller has been on hold, along with roughly a dozen other measures of quality. The "best" employees show plenty of "on-the bus-ness" meaning that by truly "embracing" VUE, they have gotten on the bus. Having a "black belt" means the employee is an expert in DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, and control). What a crock of _ _ _ _.  What it really means is that he is probably a little weasel, despised by his peers, because he is an expert in sucking up to management.

I'm becoming a little uneasy about placing my life savings in the hands of a company that makes its employees miserable, and I think it bears watching. Nevertheless, despite all the nonsense Brennan has brought down on his employees, the quality of service at Vanguard has plummeted. Ultimately that's where this type of manipulation leads. Everyone loses. I'm still living in that type of nightmare in my job, and I expect the bad dreams to last awhile after I'm out.

 

[Cut-Throat]

I'm becoming a little uneasy about placing my life savings in the hands of a company that makes its employees miserable, and I think it bears watching. Nevertheless, despite all the nonsense Brennan has brought down on his employees, the quality of service at Vanguard has plummeted. Ultimately that's where this type of manipulation leads.

I know what you mean Bob, but at least the computers are in charge of the index funds, and they don't care which idiot happens to be running the company.

 

[Whakamole]

I just read an article in Money Magazine about that, and I think it is relevant to your comments above. It seems that Brennan has bought into some management gobblygook called VUE (Vanguard Unmatched Excellence). He has hallways and cubicles displaying multi-color bar graphs showing various various measures of efficiency, and electronic display boards continuously monitoring the maximum time any caller has been on hold, along with roughly a dozen other measures of quality. The "best" employees show plenty of "on-the bus-ness" meaning that by truly "embracing" VUE, they have gotten on the bus. Having a "black belt" means the employee is an expert in DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, and control). What a crock of _ _ _ _.

Dear God! That sounds like something out of Dilbert.

I will admit to thinking Brennan is a weasel for what he did to Bogle and the way Vanguard has been run since he took control. This doesn't help. I've been selling some of my Vanguard funds anyway, maybe it's time to do some more pruning.

 

[Bob_Smith]

Right Cut-throat. As long as he keeps his mitts off the computers and doesn't harass the fund managers with his nonsense, we should be OK. However, given enough time he could run Vanguard into the ground, so I wish some other company would copy the Vanguard model and compete with them. I wonder why someone hasn't?

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I've seen it. Success due to uncontrollable factors leads to feelings among management that they must have done something to create this success. This leads them to think they must be management geniuses, they hire a couple of consultants, read a couple of books, and hilarity ensues.

Same thing happened at my old company. We produced a product that sold like hotcakes. We used to say our factories might as well be ATM machines. One thing I did note is that the engineers crafted the products and off to manufacturing they went. Sometimes they asked someone in marketing a question or two if they thought the specific person knew what they were talking about. Sometimes someone in management made a good decision about what to fund and what not to fund.

My take was that 80% of the people in the company, most of them outside of engineering and manufacturing, could come to the parking lot each day, be tarred and feathered and go home, and the companies success would have been about the same.

The tarring and feathering part was irrelevant, but it made me feel better.

Why hasnt anyone copied the vanguard model? Well there are some etf's and low cost index funds available elsewhere, but why take .20% of someones money when they'll line up to give you 2% gladly. :-/

 

[BUM]

You guys are scaring me . ECATS went out to my "full service" broker Wednesday. All being xferred to Vanguard. I have a few days to determine how to slice up the pie. Thinking indexes all the way including reits, bonds, large and small caps.


May I should just go to Vegas, put it all on black and say, "Spinn'er!"


BUM

 

[BigMoneyJim]

May I should just go to Vegas, put it all on black and say, "Spinn'er!"

That's a fairly conservative gamble. While the beta is much higher, betting a single number has a chance for higher immediate return with the same long-term prospects: 5.26% per bet or something like that to the house (on an American wheel with both a 0 and 00.)

-----

Seriously, back a few years when I had never heard anything negative about Vanguard and they could do no wrong, I wondered even then if I should at some point consider some diversity in my trustees. Seemingly Vanguard can handle all the needs I forsaw for many years (and at least a couple of years from now), but even though my investment classes are diversified they are all held by the same company.

Now that I'm hearing troubling things about Vanguard and am about to free a sizeable flow of investment income I'm really starting to wonder about that again.

I don't recall any discussion about splitting investments between investment companies like Vanguard, Janus and the others for the sake of diversity in trustees/holding companies/banks/whatever the correct term is.

 

[Cut-Throat]

You guys are scaring me . ECATS went out to my "full service" broker Wednesday. All being xferred to Vanguard. I have a few days to determine how to slice up the pie.  Thinking  indexes all the way including reits, bonds, large and small caps.


May I should just go to Vegas, put it all on black and say, "Spinn'er!"


BUM

BUM,

I don't think you have to worry. They are just turds at Customer Service. And from Someone that used to manage a Customer Service Organization - Good Customer Service takes money.

Since Vanguard is trying to keep its costs low. - Be Proud that they are keeping costs low. - You get what you pay for!!

CEOs all say they want to improve Customer Service, but they don't want to spend money. - Spending money is how you do it!

 

[Bob_Smith]

To put this into perspective, although I don't like some of the things Vanguard is doing, I'm not too concerned about them stealing or misplacing my money. Well, they do misplace some of it sometimes, but so far they have admitted their errors and fixed them. It's more a hassle than anything else.

It used to be that they could brag about low costs without sacrificing service. No more. We'll see if this is just a temporary growth issue, or the start of a more insidious decline. Judging by the increasingly arrogant posture of managers I've dealt with there, I'm concerned, but not concerned enough to give up the cost savings. It would cost about $1,500 per year in increased expenses for me to switch. The only things that have changed for me are these:

-- more hassle with botched transactions
-- more hassle with needing to keep very careful records of communication
-- I used to feel good about having my money with the very best company in almost every respect. Now I feel that I have my money with the least expensive company - not necessarily the best.

I'm not losing any sleep over the spectre of losing my life savings at Vanguard, however.

 

[BUM]

Dammit! I just had a long post thanking C-T, Bob_Smith, and BMJ for the clarifications. I went to insert a pic of the E/R nest I'm feathering this week and PPFFTTT! lost the whole reply. I guess I need a primer on posting pics.

Anyway the full service broker is history. And he didnt seem conerned or upset at losing my account. I thought at least he would want to know why I bailed. I guess hes used to it.

I'm down on the south NC shore this week. And the Army Corps of Eng. is in full swing here pushing back the sea about 50 yds. over a few mile stretch. YOUR tax dollars at work. Thanks guys! 8) maybe pix tomorrow if I can attach properly.


BUM

 

[John Galt]

Guess the Corps of Engineers has done some good things. Normally I think it's a bad idea to mess with
Mother Nature. This may be the only area where
I am in sync with leftwing tree huggers. I believe
that mankind is pretty much a plague on the earth.

John Galt

 

[BUM]

I know what you mean John Galt but property owners and local tax collectors get upset when a long walk to the sea becomes a wet kitchen at high tide. Attempting to kill 2 birds with one dredge the Corps sucks huge amounts of sand and some water out of the sea channel which is slowly filling up with unwanted sand. Then pumps it on shore where monster dozers spread it about. Talked to the engineer yesterday. He said they are adding about 6 to 20 feet of sand in height...30 to 100 yards from shore....for about a mile stretch.... thats a lot of sand!

Now get this, he hoped it would last a FEW years. "Last time we came through here was 2001."!!!!!

Its not nice to fool mother nature... Not to mention it doesn't work.

BUM

 

[ESRBob]

Re: Introverted/ Vanguard Alternatives

-----

Seriously, back a few years when I had never heard anything negative about Vanguard and they could do no wrong, I wondered even then if I should at some point consider some diversity in my trustees. Seemingly Vanguard can handle all the needs I forsaw for many years (and at least a couple of years from now), but even though my investment classes are diversified they are all held by the same company.

Now that I'm hearing troubling things about Vanguard and am about to free a sizeable flow of investment income I'm really starting to wonder about that again.

I don't recall any discussion about splitting investments between investment companies like Vanguard, Janus and the others for the sake of diversity in trustees/holding companies/banks/whatever the correct term is.

I've been a Vanguard die-hard for over 20 years, but I recently moved a significant portion of my savings over to Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) after reading about them in Bernstein's book. DFA won't take individuals' money directly, but if you get one of their approved fee-only advisors, you can get an incredible deal on fees: you pay what the $50million+ institutional investors pay, and can get funds like Emerging Markets Value, International Small Company, International Small Value, and US small or micro-cap value , among others, all quasi-indexed and very tax/trading-cost efficient. Also DFA can get you foreign bonds, which Vanguard doesn't have: 2 year global bonds for instance, which is a less-correlated asset class Bernstein recommends. Check them out at www.dfaus.com

 

[BunsGettingFirm]

Were these financial results or just project results and time tables? If it were the former, they're basically asking you to bear the brunt of the legal fury should the sh*t hit the fan.

Three+ years and I still get a nightmare every once in a while.  I worked for a couple of vice presidents that urged you to give very aggressive estimates on results and timetables, then when presented with those liked to double and halve them "just to see what happens".  "Unnecessary stress and lousy results" was my usual answer, to no avail.

Of course, this was also the same company that had a standard policy of putting two people into the same job (with the intent of one staying in it and the other doing something else, either by voluntary action or if not, later by force), thinking that this created a "healthy competitive atmosphere that increases productivity".

Its a wonder I sleep at all without having to go through a "program" first  

 

[BunsGettingFirm]

Right Cut-throat. As long as he keeps his mitts off the computers and doesn't harass the fund managers with his nonsense, we should be OK. However, given enough time he could run Vanguard into the ground, so I wish some other company would copy the Vanguard model and compete with them. I wonder why someone hasn't?

Because the old model of funds contracting out to funds management companies is just too profitable. The 1.5% average fee (not including the cost of high turn over) plus unlimited fund sizes are golden gooses that the fund management industry cannot kill.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Were these financial results or just project results and time tables? If it were the former, they're basically asking you to bear the brunt of the legal fury should the sh*t hit the fan.

Oh, no, just projects. No money funny business that I was ever aware of, outside of padding the heck out of expenses and hacking away at forecasts such that when the execs halved or doubled them, they were still achievable by flesh and blood people.

It was amusing to hear the observation of a 22 year old guy I hired that I brought to a budgeting meeting for learning purposes.

He said "We put together cost estimates and timelines, you double them, then the other guys halve them. We could just cut all you guys out of the equation with the same net results, and the cost savings from reducing headcount would pay for the projects".

Out of the mouths of babes. Then we had a series of long talks about business politics and what to say and not to say. Particularly around the piece that involved me losing my job as a cost savings maneuver.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Because the old model of funds contracting out to funds management companies is just too profitable. The 1.5% average fee (not including the cost of high turn over) plus unlimited fund sizes are golden gooses that the fund management industry cannot kill.

Not to mention if the idea of low cost buy and hold index investing really takes over the market, without a preponderance of "random" buying and selling the markets wont move and we wont make any money!!!

We are frighteningly dependend on the lack of investment comprehension by the general public leading to their erroneous direct investing activities, and their passive erroneous indirect investing activities through managed funds.

God help us if everyone figures it out...all we'd make are dividends and interest.

 

[John Galt]

Hi TH! All I make now is "dividends and interest".

John Galt

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I knew I should have put a "winkie" on that one.

Either that or a footnote to all my posts that says "* Note: the above opinions and information are null and void within a 10 meter area of John Galt"

 

[John Galt]

Others opinions and observations are null and void
within a 10 meter limit of John Galt. "Abandon hope
all yee who enter here!"

John Galt

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Indeed.

You're a fan dancer John...

 

[John Galt]

Fan dancer? I don't know about that. I am my own biggest fan though

John Galt