[Sorry for my absence of late. As I said in my last post, work was particularly busy, but I have just passed that time. Plenty to do at home, but maybe I can be more regular in posting. But hey, this week I have “captured” three writing ideas, put them on paper, and put them in the notebook.]
On CNBC, Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM Central Time is a show American Greed. I don’t know how long it’s been running. I’ve seen three or four episode, each one about someone in the corporate/financial world who got ahead by cheating/milking their company, but who were eventually was taken down. Tonight was the CEO of Tyco, Kovlowski.
Last week was the founder/chairman of CyberNet Engineering Group, a Grand Rapids, MI company. I don’t remember his name, though I might look it up and edit it in. He had earlier in his career embezzled money from his own companies or otherwise cheated investors out of much money. He dodged prison, plea-bargained down, moved to a new city and set up his evil shop again. He did this three times, ending up in Grand Rapids. There, he co-founded CEG, a value-added reseller of computing systems. In the 1990s the business was perfectly positioned to make money from the burgeoning computer market. What did he do? He set up a small legitimate business, and a huge fake business, complete with fake invoices for fake inventory for fake customers. The deception was an incredible web of deceit. Moreover, the deception must have taken just as much work as a legitimate business would. The work of doing evil was not less than the work of doing right, and might have been more. So why did he do it?
For now, evil pays more than doing right–most of the time. I believe doing right–i.e. doing good does pay well compared to doing evil, especially if you take a wall-to-wall view of costs and benefits. However, those who are evil have trouble seeing it. It appears the internal evil blinds them to the good, the right. They see the apparent huge payoff for doing evil, and they go there.
Somewhere there is a lesson in this for us.
Somewhere there is a lesson? I’m sure you had you’re tongue firmly placed in your cheek on that one 😉
I’ve not seen the program, but it seems intriguing…we definitely given greed a prominate place in our culture and we seem to be reaping the results of this greed driven consumerism. Well, I best not get up on my soap box.
Good to see that things have calmed down a little with work – and I trust we returned your wife in good care and spirits. I hope you have a blessed weekend.
sorry for my grammatical and other errors…just notice “you’re” instead of “your” – it has been a long week and I’m not seeing or thinking clearly…but I’m sure that my faults are excused.
Yes, I intend for a lesson to be taken from the life of that greedy American, but came to the end of my post and could not think of how to end it, how to describe the lesson in a coherent way, and so decided to end as I did.