Playing with Clay in the Ivory Tower2011-09-20T01:08:23+09:00ivory_tower_nyTopics related to Audit, Finance, Organization, Science, Business Person's life Excite BlogBecause of Constructionhttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/14543710/2011-09-12T15:15:00+09:002011-09-20T01:08:23+09:002011-09-12T15:15:38+09:00ivory_tower_nyNY
MTA allows people to travel anywhere with only $2.50 to the extent there is a railroad. People can meet up with friends at Queens like Jamaica which is close to JFK airport and go to the Bronx where the Yankee stadium is with only $2.50. This cheap price allows people who are living far away from Manhattan to come to work every day. On the other hand, it makes harder for MTA to investing in the renovation of Fulton Street and construction 2nd Avenue line faster. People are supposed to push awkward spiral spring every time they come in and out the station. People are supposed to wait for never-coming trains at stations. It never comes seriously. Despite the effort made by MTA, people do not know there is a schedule for each line. Occasionally they are precise, which makes people miss the last train because they expect those trains to come much later than the planned time on schedule. The important thing is that New Yorkers are much more patient than expected. They can wait for never-coming trains at subway stations forever unlike people in Tokyo who always rush into the train which already has twice as many people as its capacity.
It is Friday here in NY. People started to pack and are ready to leave for their home early. Some may say TGIF (Thank God It's Friday). People are allowed to leave early on Friday for some reason. In subway stations, NY Police are on high alert for the threat of terrorism targeting 10-year anniversary. Police officers are everywhere and checking backpacks of passengers. It seems that my backpack is fancy enough to avoid such police search. People are living peacefully in New York. Now I am part of it. It is completely different from the image I had before I came here. Even in Harlem, people can walk around without too strong cautions. Things happen everywhere, not only in Harlem. It is 1 year since I came to the US. Nothing special happened, but it has not been that boring. I have expanded my world to some extent like everybody who come to this city with some hope and anxiety.
People are having apples in the train. I cannot do that because of my allergy to some fruits including peach, cherry and apple. I have been suffering from these types of allergy for a long time. Asthma and Bronchitis give me hard time. In the developing area of the world, too many people are suffering from these type of allergies thought the medication are well developed. In Japan, 40-60 years ago, during the economic expansion of Japan, there were a lot of pollution which seriously affected humans body. Nowadays, Japan has recovered its clean air in Tokyo and other metropolitan areas to some extent by imposing significant penalty to the drivers. In other developing countries, such as Asian, Latin American and Africa, air pollution is terrible. However, people do not realize until it becomes more serious since their economy is still expanding at high speed. People would not care about the pollution by closing eyes on those dirty aspects. The Government would not care about them until people are seriously affected by those and it deserves to be taken care of under some governments' policies. The risk is not regarded as risk until people realize that risk is not worth to take.
Central Park, New York]]>CFA Level 3 Resulthttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/14395330/2011-08-22T01:57:00+09:002011-09-09T23:35:48+09:002011-08-22T01:57:17+09:00ivory_tower_nyCFA
Level1を受験した目的は、先ずFinance, Investmentというものが、自分の業務に多少関係があったこと、それから英語力の補完(これは仕事、趣味かねて)、先輩にCFAホルダーがいたこと、などが挙げられます。公認会計士の修了試験(昔の3次試験)が2007年で、その勉強をあまりせずにLevel1のテキストを読んでいた気がします。この頃は、分野によっては1ページに知らない英単語が20個ぐらいあったかも知れません。英語の勉強だと思って、我慢して全て辞書を引きました。会計士の試験などで、Corporate Financeなどはある程度かじっていたこと、Accountingのパートに関しては得点源になったことから、英語以外の面での苦労は無かったものと思われます。ちなみにSchweserなどの参考書は買っていません。険しい山を登った方が英語力は伸びるだろうという方針で、CFAIから送られてくる、いわゆるCurriculumという分厚いテキストの山をひたすら読みました。2回ほど読んで、EOC(End Of Chapter)の問題を2回ぐらい解いて、試験会場に向かっていました。ただ全てを理解していた訳でもなく、やり残しも沢山ありました。時間的な制約(多くの日本人は英語力の問題から、CFAIのテキストを全部2回読む、ということをするとこうなると思います)から、ノートなどは一切作成していません。一応解いたあと復習をする、という繰り返しの後で試験を受けましたが、AccountingやCFといった得点源のおかげで、苦手分野を克服することなくLevel2に進んだ、という感じです。それからEthicsは何故かいつも高得点が取れます。Level1からLevel3まで、毎回70%<で、意外とこの辺が苦手分野の補完をしてくれているのかも知れません。
Congratulations. I am very pleased to inform you that you passed the June 2011 Level III CFA exam. You are one step closer to achieving your goal of earning the globally respected CFA charter.
51% of candidates passed the June 2011 Level III CFA exam. Your detailed exam results, including a matrix outlining your strengths and weaknesses, are in the table below.
The three columns on the right are marked with asterisks to indicate your performance on each topic area.
Machu Picchu, Peru]]>Stand clear of the closing doors please.http://itowerny.exblog.jp/14311295/2011-08-09T15:05:00+09:002011-09-12T15:20:14+09:002011-08-09T15:05:11+09:00ivory_tower_nyNY
I have finished that halal food and he may get one in the end. We are in New York and we are always struggling to get something. Sometimes we can get, sometimes not. I am as weak as that guy. Almost the same perhaps. I am not that tough. Another guy talked to me. "1 dollar please. 1 dollar." If he can get 1 dollar from me, it is the easiest job in this world. Even easier than the guy who gave me a speech. I ignored that guy to show some respect to the first guy. People are supposed to work to sustain their life, but are not supposed to cheat others. They may not have the chance to get a job. But I don't know what to say. Isn't it the work of the US government? I am not American, but I am paying a lot of tax to this country and city. I assume it is enough. The first guy talked to me again. He said he got 3 dollar from people around. He asked me to give him a dollar so that he can get the food, and I ignored him again. I could be like him tomorrow. So I do not help him to try not to be like him.
This is the Pelhem Bay Park Bound 6 local train. The next stop is 68th street Hunter College. Stand clear of the closing doors please...
On the subway, there are some people who shows serious faces as if they are about to kill somebody. Those people actually do not kill others but rather help them to open the door closing, or they let elderly have seats by calmly standing up. On the other hand, a person next to me who seems innocent gives me some pressure by her big ass. She may not know that I am supporting my body by grabbing the pole in the middle of the train not to let my body touch her lap. And it seems I am big enough to be patient with such situations and my arm is tough enough to support my weight while the train passes a few stations. Besides, her ass was big enough to occupy the seats which are normally used by two people.
There is a singer who sings "stand by me" on the subway. I have never paid even pennies to his song although he sings well. I feel a little relieved whenever I see him on the train since I can confirm that he is still vigorous. How could he survive in that way? There may be somebody who always support him on the train. Whereas almost everyone except for MTA employees spends most of their life above ground, that guys who is always singing stand-by-me on the train spends most of his time underground. Sometimes the country where the subway runs becomes Mexico because of the songs from a band with some music instruments. Or we can travel even other countries with the sound of the music instruments I have never seen. Where are they from? I don't have courage to motivate myself to give some fee to them and ask some questions.
This is the Pelhem Bay Park Bound 6 local train. The next stop is 103rd street station. Stand clear of the closing doors please...
Paracas, Peru]]>Whereabouts of Japanese as a languagehttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/14196153/2011-07-26T14:51:00+09:002011-07-26T14:57:26+09:002011-07-26T14:51:02+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
Peruvian speaks Spanish as first language, which was brought by Spanish people who made Peru a colony. People in the city do not speak English even as their second language, which makes my travel tougher. A guide said most of travelers are from the U.S., and other popular country is Germany. They know they need to speak English for them though some Americans understand Spanish, but still their English is not acceptable like Japanese people in Japan. However, as Latin American people speak Spanish, they may not have to worry about English too much. Currently, the majority of travelers are the U.S. people, but it would change to Spanish speakers like Mexican and other Latin American people since their economy is getting richer. English would not keep its the most popular language position in the future if the wealth keeps transferring to other countries from the UK and the US. Japanese travel guide books may be the best in the world in terms of the amount of information. This is maybe because of the language barrier and those books protect Japanese travelers from unfamiliar places. This is developed by Japanese travel agency or the map companies. Their business does not start until Japanese people travel around the world, and they may have made a lot of efforts to improve the guide books. Still there is a space to improve it, but it is already good enough.
In New York, there is something terrible under the ground. It is "SUBWAY". It is hotter than outside, though the temperature outside is like 35-38 degrees. I would say it is higher than 45 degrees. The purpose of talking about New York subway is not to complain about how terrible it is, but the language used there. There are 5 languages used in the directions, alerts etc from MTA (the company who operates subway and other train systems). English comes first, and Spanish second. Others include Mandarin, Korean and Russian. There is no Japanese signs usually though every once in a while we see it somewhere. Japanese population in New York city is around 60,000, which is less than 1% of the city's population. There are a lot of Asian people in this city, but mainly Chinese and Korean people as we could expect from the existence of China town and Korean town. It is said Chinese people are more family-oriented than Japanese people. Japanese people are company-oriented on the other hand. I may not be able to generalize it, but the existence of China town in the world support that assumption. Of course, historically Chinese immigrants had tough time outside the country, which might have made their connection stronger.
Demographics_of_New_York_City
Japanese people use 4 ways to write something. Kanji, hiragana, katakana and alphabet. Kanji came from the continent in the ancient past. We share it with Chinese speakers and Korean speakers. The sound is different from those of them, but still we can see similarity. Hiragana was developed by women writers in the past. Katakana was used as official language with Kanji. And alphabet is started to be used often, mainly after the world war II, when the U.S. governed Japan. I assume it would not disappear from the world since Japanese people are reluctant to learn different languages. They are reluctant not because they are stupid, but because the Japan's economy is big enough for most of Japanese people. After graduating from the university, most of people have been hired by Japanese domestic companies. They did not need to speak other languages. Now they are shifting the location of company's operation to overseas. And people started to learn English and other languages accordingly. Still Japanese economy is big enough for them, but it does not stand without other countries. Someday, Japanese people may speak English much better than now because of the needs.
]]>HOPE - People come and go, and come again.http://itowerny.exblog.jp/13660311/2011-05-25T09:37:00+09:002011-05-27T13:46:18+09:002011-05-27T12:41:50+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
Before I came to the U.S., I saw him and talked a little. I didn't have that good relationship with him and I wasn't a good grandchild for him, but it was good for me to see him before coming here. I didn't talk to him for a long time for some reason, but in the end I called back to his call. He was always talking about the same thing whenever I saw him. Although my memory is bad usually, I remember some of his stories because he unconsciously reiterated his boring story more than 10 times. He experienced the war and he sometimes told me about that. I was not listening to his stories seriously because I was thinking that I would listen to this and that story more than 20 times.
He had been a heavy smoker who opens 2 boxes of cigarette a day. His hand always shook when he tried to use a lighter maybe because of his disease and age. His favorite cigarette was "HOPE" when he was young. Later on, he tried to be more healthy, thus he was smoking "MILD SEVEN" for a long time. My uncle likes "HOPE". It might be kind of love to his father. He may change it to "MILD SEVEN" in the future. I used to smoke, but now it's been 4 years since I stopped smoking. I won't smoke in the future because of my asthma. Even if I don't have asthma and I restart smoking, I won't like "HOPE" because it's too strong. He didn't drink too much. I am like that.
He started business many years ago before I was born in this world. My father and uncle helped him start up business, and that company experienced many things, both sweet and spicy, during its life with my grandfather. That company is still alive after he passed away. I was grown up by the machines in the factory. He must have been proud of his company and business. It has been a big part of himself for a long time. He might have been expecting me to succeed his company, but I didn't decide in that way because I am not "business" person. Life is like that.
His wife, my grandmother, passed away 13 years ago. She must have been waiting for and worrying about him too much since he was a kind of cumbersome big child. It's good for him to have grandmother because he had been alone for a long time. And he died alone. Most of the things he talked about again and again were about my grandmother. I didn't have much memory about my grandmother, but now I have some memories about her because her husband, my grandfather, remembered well about her and told me more than 100 times.
People come and go, and maybe he will come back someday.
じいさん、長いこと大変だったな。お疲れ様。ありがとう。
Central Park, 木蓮]]>Inertia and Frictionhttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/13397673/2011-04-16T02:55:00+09:002011-04-17T09:22:17+09:002011-04-17T02:55:21+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
Or not only responsibility and tasks but also my gusto makes me work longer than I am required. I am not sure if this is only for Japanese or not, but we tend to work longer than required to make things better in details. Even if they are not required, people would like to make things better in quality, which have been observed in Japanese products. As such, it easily happens that people tend to work longer than physically possible due to the responsibility and pressures and more than required and expected due to their gusto. People who are not used to staying with those tendency should be taken care of by experienced ones. Otherwise, they will work on details until they realize that they cannot be recovered.
Squirrels, Morning Side Park]]>Toward the Futurehttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/13197510/2011-03-21T15:35:00+09:002011-03-29T02:25:57+09:002011-03-21T15:35:04+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
I am more emotional than usual because of the biased information about the earthquake. I am afraid that I cannot write up things in a neutral way, but I decided to start writing again. A small person, who lives abroad and has not experienced any disasters, may not be supposed to speak about things at this point. Nonetheless, simultaneously I believe to be honest to my present emotion is as essential as to be neutral as human beings. I was sleeping during the earthquake because of the time difference, and this fact made me suffer from my stupidity. I did not know anything about the earthquake and peacefully sleeping while a lot of people were struggling with the nature to survive. To come to the US was my decision and I know there was no way, but I feel disconsolate.
It is not only about my nostalgia for my mother country. Tohoku area, which still retains beautiful harmony between the nature and human beings, was damaged by the earthquake and a lot of people passed away. Such kind of harmonies have already been lost during the industrialization in many countries and even in Japan. What we have lost during this cataclysm is not only Japan's loss, but a huge loss for human beings. As a Japanese, I do not know how to express this emotion in words. In addition, Japan who knows the pain of atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is facing the difficulties with atomic power plants in Fukushima. This manmade disaster should not have occurred, but the energy of the earthquake was beyond human beings' expectation, capacity and imagination. The loss from this tragedy cannot be measured with the currency. We have to face the reality that we lost more than what we can imagine.
Japan is a country which has to face the natural disaster such as earthquake and tsunami because of the geographic location. On top of that, historically, people in Japan have been suffering from the eruption of the volcanoes which could occur with/after earthquakes. The damage from such disasters are more than serious, nonetheless, always people restored the civilization which could be appreciated by the world. The video images for this time makes people believe that it would take forever to recover, however I still believe we can make it and succeed the history. Japanese people have been looking forward to the future always, even under devastating situations, they have believed that there will be tomorrow and stepped toward it. And moreover, people have been loving Japan and created it. Gaman, Shouganai, some Japanese words frequently used in Japan, do not necessarily mean fatalistic or only giving up when facing a devastating situation, but at the same time it means people accept the rule of the nature and harmonize with them for the future.
What I can do for them now is limited to donation for the future restoration and to prayer that we can help as many people as possible. I am living in the US and physically isolated from my mother country, and the fact that I cannot know well about what is happening there and what I can do for them makes me disconsolate. I might not have any right to say something since I am keeping my daily life peacefully unlike people in Japan. People in other areas of Japan might feel in the same way as mine. However, comparing with people facing the reality and hardship, it is nothing. No wonder I feel it is a responsibility as a nation of Japan that I help the restoration after coming back to Japan. At this point, I can just pray for the people passed away. Also I hope the atomic power plants problem can be solved as soon as possible and they can start restoration for the future. Japan might be considered as a rich country in terms of materials accumulated, and it might sound that we are asking too much if we ask for some help. But I still hope you could pray together for people who have passed away and people who are still asking for help to survive.
I would like to thank you all for the help offered and messages sent from the world.
]]>Thoughts on Stereotypeshttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/12980486/2011-02-24T17:29:00+09:002011-02-24T17:33:24+09:002011-02-24T17:29:04+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
The judgment based on the experience is called Heuristics. It contains a significant potential problem due to the fact that only our past experience are reflected to the decision making process. The past accumulated experience and background information of the objective person in such a process would not be reflected to the conclusion. We just need to make a little effort to understand the objective when making a judgment, which makes the precision of the process of our judgment and decision making much higher. Though this thinking mentioned here is also based on my past experience, still there would be some evidences which prove that understanding more deeply and broadly the objective assures the precision. In our daily life, things which we usually do not care about due to the daily inertia contains a lot of destinies which could have been changed, which might indirectly prove that my experienced based hypothesis above is not that far from the right answer.
It is no wonder that we tend to overvalue things to which we have emotional attachments. I would say it should be better to hesitate more when saying something and making a decision, considering the fact that our fundamental experience and knowledge are extremely limited to a very small world. We should understand that the words based on our own experience cannot be necessarily applied to others, and we in fact understand that to some extent, nonetheless we tend to repeat such mistakes unknowingly. We can consider this fact as an evidence for the hypothesis that it is more than easy for everybody to justify and rationalize themselves. We sometimes listen to what others speak about with some doubts, hence we just need to have such doubts for ourselves before we start to say something. A habit to reflect ourselves and to try to disprove ourselves can be regarded as curiosity and skepticism. However, to be too skeptical to about ourselves makes us lose confidence. I am still wondering if there is a well balanced decision making process which considers both side.
The reason why I feel uncomfortable when facing the low quality of foods and services in the Japanese foods restaurants is that there would be an error in the process of my estimation due to my stereotype. In New York, the quality of the service is not necessarily the same as that of Japan even though the staffs in the restaurant speak Japanese. This tendency of low quality may come from the fact that non-Japanese customers do not care about such quality as much as Japanese who have just arrived in New York. Even if I am in Japan, I would face a lot of situations that I feel uncomfortable due to the low quality of services. Nonetheless, I feel in that way much more in NY. In addition, the custom called tipping, which I still never understand well, make me more uncomfortable. Hence, to select cuisine other than Japanese for which I do not expect to be great, which is not the best solution but the second best, would work more than enough to enjoy my life since I am now in NYC where we can have any kind of foods.
Snowfall Central Park, Upper East]]>A Recovery Planhttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/12950168/2011-02-21T16:41:00+09:002011-02-21T16:47:59+09:002011-02-21T16:41:45+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
To a greater or lesser extent, people have some stresses which cannot be cured during their daily life. They might not have some time to spare for the introspection to recover either. However, if they don’t take care of daily required maintenance because of the lack of time to spend, such stresses would continue and might be chronic. Some people might be supposed to work instead of sleeping, but they will never be able to do so forever. Hence, it is essential to spare even a little time for recovery of themselves, in other words, they cannot continue things for a long time without doing so. I recover myself by reading books to some extent. To read books and reflect myself is a process of giving some water, air and sustenance to the drained heart. Nevertheless, I cannot expect reading books to be a drastic remedy for my heart so much. Reading books during commute is never a panacea for the stress accumulated during daily life. A sort of habit, for instance reading books, may not influence sufficiently for the recovery from symptoms though it can protect them from slipping and getting worse.
Then, what can we do for the recovery from symptoms. In my case, the ultimate method is to travel. To travel can be regarded as a process during which we go back to some point to pick up things we had left unconsciously. Escaping from the daily life and diving into non-daily life. It helps us look at things for which we usually don’t spare time to digest. An impulsion from non-material things happen to help us recover our mentality unlike daily material impulsions. In this world, where people are too westernized and persist too much in material things, people cannot cure their daily damages adequately even if they have delicious dishes and go to the museum to see beautiful paintings. This fact implies that the extent that efforts made in their daily life are effective would be limited. And the reason why I mention about this kind of topic here is that I am well-prepared to run away from the daily life and to dive into the non-daily life. I hate the word “busy season”. This word is going around in the accounting firm like an epidemic, and a lot of incomprehensible things which do not make sense are justified by this magical word. I might be selfish because I cannot accept this kind of blindness, and it gives me redundant stress. Eventually I may have to take a drastic remedy, I would say. In conclusion, this article may not give you any remedy, but this is just a documentation that definitely I would love to go out for a trip.
Brooklyn, Botanical Garden]]>The Nature of Human Beingshttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/12827207/2011-02-06T19:06:00+09:002011-02-22T07:05:41+09:002011-02-06T19:06:20+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
"Evidence" could sound too practical, but suppose "memories' of ourselves can be applied to the situation as an evidence here. Moreover, history or memories accumulated by others, mostly they are in books, could be applied as well. I assume people would say that there is no space to reflect those things in their non-peaceful daily life and criticize what I mention here. Considering myself, I am not as confident as I can say something to people about if I am doing such verification every day. Nonetheless, if people do not reflect themselves in their daily life because of the fact that they are too busy every day or the fact that almost all of people are not doing such collection of "evidence", it cannot be rationalize or justified. The person who can observe at the closest point is nobody but ourselves, and also the person who would be affected by such observation is nobody but ourselves. Nobody but ourselves would take neither the responsibility of what we do nor the benefit from what we do.
In the capital markets, we can count on an independent third party for such cumbersome verifications by design, whether the result are reliable enough or not. Not only in the capital markets, these kind of structures can be observed a lot in our society where people try to make structures more efficient. Nevertheless, unlike those in the macro structures, the verification for our daily life will never be performed an independent philosopher, but we have to do that by ourselves. Observing ourselves every day, at a single moment, and Comprehending what we feel then, without doing these time-spending duties, we would not be able to discover so-called "ourselves", I assumed. Or it might have been already proved that human beings behavior to find themselves is not rational by the result and the fact that almost all people have not discovered themselves historical observation and experimentation of human beings.
Then, we have no choice but creating ourselves every day, which might be considered as a part of the nature of human beings that they try to resist the reality in front of them. Even if we choose the way left, things we need to do are the same. To capture the moment, to apprehend the daily life and to confront the loneliness inside themselves. All those sound boring, unfancy and cumbersome are the point we eventually reach, which we usually don't feel like to do or rely on others' help. And hence, there items are the parts left by the inertia of daily life and ignored by us. Historically, in those left and ignored, we have concealed painful and troublesome things, and we all know somebody have to pay attention to them. It is no longer concealed but obvious nowadays, and it should be a common sense of people, however, we cannot help closing our eyes without confronting them since these are too annoying, cumbersome, unfruitful and uncertain. We must admit that this nature of human beings is nothing but indolence at this point. It is said that the nature of profession of auditors is being a watchdog because of the fact that they are supposed to confront such indolence, which could be regarded as the part of human beings, concealed in the place left and ignored by people whether intentionally or not. Skepticism itself was not developed for only the profession of auditors, but we just need to apply it to our daily life as philosophers were doing in the past.
Brooklyn, Prospect Park]]>The Prediction Precision of the Universalityhttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/12629932/2011-01-04T05:10:00+09:002011-01-05T00:17:19+09:002011-01-04T05:10:01+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
I hope you could share my understanding that the process of evolution of animal beings and individuals of human beings, or the evolution of the technologies accumulated by the human beings should get the status where they don’t know what to do next after getting accustomed to their environments completely. To transcend this point, there is no way to describe but using the word “penetrate”, they need to make a jump to the next stage. In terms of the individuals, there is certain possibility that they can change themselves when they change their environment, however, for the next jump, they have to make twice as many efforts as the first time since they have already adjusted to all of the situation surrounding them in a optimal way. In other words, they had made the best choice at the point of bifurcation, and to go further, they are required to have an ability to make a quantum leap. According to this understanding, if someone desires to extend his or her ability exponentially, he should have a gift which virtually people cannot obtain. Otherwise he or she needs to have a brave with which they do not have to hesitate to change their environments many times, which can be also considered as a gift which almost all people cannot obtain, and hence to desire an exponential growth during his or her life should be a dream created by the media who don’t care about the bias included in their information.
Instead of having such an exceptional gift and contributing to the society, most of the people are supposed to work normally. Nonetheless, they have to engage their brain when working. It is no wonder that everyone agrees with it, however the performance of most of the people is less than expected. I would say that the reason why they cannot meet the expectations is the lack of ability. Both the managements and employees believe that “To engage their brain” is essential for their business, however most of managements are suffering from the stress due to the low productivity of their employees. It is certain that “To engage one’s brain” should be required to the employees to an appropriate extent. For instance, the auditors who are very skeptical and have high ability to find an issue with respect to accounting treatment cannot solve the question regarding the rocket science for which auditors do not have any knowledge and experience by only engaging their brain. This is an extreme example though, auditors cannot even get into the entrance of the issues to be solved since they do not have the fundamental knowledge which is requisite in its field. To engage one’s brain would be meaningless if the problem in front of the person is too challenging with a limited budget, and they would be unproductive by wasting their time on the never-solved questions. It might be said that the responsibility to manage this problem belongs to the employees, however they cannot decide whether the assignments are too difficult for them or not, hence the managements should have the responsibility to get the measure of their employees before blaming their low productivity.
No wonder that it is essential to determine the assignments to each employee depending of their level of knowledge and ability. For instance, the expectation that a new hire of an accounting firm would be able to do well this work and that work is just a stereotype used in the firms. There should be a difference between the expectation according to such stereotypes and the new hires’ actual ability, which is usually absorbed by the new hires. As such, some of the managements believe in an implication that miss-estimations made by the managements and firms should be covered by the new hires’ and other employees’ efforts in return for hiring them to a brilliant firm and letting them have an exceptional work environment. I would never deny the understanding that professional firms should have a minimum requirement to the employees working as a professional, however the self responsibility tends to expand during downturn like this several years. The evaluators should have some buffer during such downturn to make a fair decision about the evaluation. Nonetheless, things which are not acceptable happen within the firm even though the evaluators have an appropriate buffer for their feeling about the employees situation. At that point, the person being evaluated should not have been hired by the firm, then the responsibility of them should belong to the organization, not the evaluator or evaluated per se. We might be able to regard an organization which makes someone blamed without taking these things into consideration as the organization which has poor managements. Furthermore, such poor managements might have happened to make poor decision regarding recruitments since they cannot count on others as much as the employees. The management might be defined as to design the structure who and how to take the responsibility of each event in the firm.
Turning back to the point that I was firstly talking about, I would think further about if we can fight against the nature that both the evolution of the animal beings and the growth of individuals would mature and stop at some point or not, which would result in the conclusion that we cannot do that virtually. To belong to a country or an industry which has lost the power to grow is not helpful for individuals’ growth, however it is not necessarily easy to decide to leave them or not since the failure related to ourselves are not necessarily caused by our environments. Also as a nature of nexuses, each component will grow to adjust itself to the environment during highly volatile period in any industries, but they will lose their momentum of growth as time passes and they get used to the changes. After that happens, most of the components neither move into the new environments nor adjust themselves for adaption since the places and environments which they get used to are optimal at that time, and it is extremely cumbersome to get out from such status and meaningless for most of them. It is not that bad, rather it is the nature of evolution that people settle down at some optimal place for them and try to keep themselves updated by showing superficial growth. At this point, it seems like the Nash Equilibrium in game theory, meaning the motivation to grow, improve and evolve would be inhibited because the loss from changing themselves whereas the environments are stable can be significant and the organization per se does not need to think about stepping ahead from the current status. Neither does individuals and the evolution. I would say that they are not desiring the stable condition at the beginning, but in fact they reached the optimal point in a certain regard by evolving and growing themselves and adapting to the surrounding environments, and finally they get stable and do not feel the necessity to get out those optimal places.
We regard these optimal conditions as niche. The ecological niche is not organized by itself, but the environments surrounding the individuals or organizations would try to find how to be, interact each other, decide their roles in the environments, and finally niche will be generated by such chemistries to keep the optimal conditions after such mechanism movements. An association seek the niche, interact and influence the environments, then continues a death match called a mass suicide destruction until it extinguishes. It cannot help continuing the death march until it extinguishes since it misrecognizes that it is on the way to the stable and optimal status and it never refrains if they way it has come was correct or not. Hence, the association does not even think about adapting itself to the changes in its environments. At the point it recognizes that is necessary to adapt to the environment, it would have been already too late and there would be no way but to collapse like an avalanche, which might be the nature which evolution congenitally holds in itself. If an organization can drastically improve the structure at the point a small avalanche happens, it would have a relatively longer life than others that cannot. Under the environment base on such a nature of evolution or growth, an individual is just a sample of a massive scale experiment, which would finally result in a failure and devastate the organization or association to which it belongs. A small step made by an individual might let an organization or an association go extinct, which might be observed as a magnificent avalanche. However, it is impossible for human beings to predict such consequence, and in fact nobody cares about the effect which their action would cause. Hence people in the organization will not give up things due to the future devastated by his or her action, and they will run through the organization with an amazing speed.
Usually, the life of a human being is not long enough to cause an evolution in terms of biology, and due to the immateriality of its effect, one cannot make an association such as an organization evolve. All of the people rush into the stage at some point and disappear. They just live from hand to mouth, therefore they cannot help being extremely myopic when deciding some actions. The extent one can imagine is highly limited, and thus most of the people cannot recognize even past or current information, let alone future information. The impact caused by such a vulnerable individual is too tiny to be taken into account, and nobody believes that it would be the reason of the important fact in the future. Because of such an accumulation of actions by an individual, not only human beings but also all biological beings would repeat an evolution and a death march to the extinct as mentioned above. Let me reiterate since it is imperative parts of what I am writing here. Interestingly, things people do not regard as important would be a reason for an avalanche-like change in the future. Nobody realizes that a decision made by an individual would have been the reason for such drastic changes until the result comes up. Moreover, even though we get the results, we cannot figurer out the reason since the impact caused at the beginning was too tiny to be recognized.
After the evolution by optimizing themselves gradually with the accumulation of tiny things, it might happen that they would be vulnerable to the changes in environments. The more robust the relationships amongst the components, the more vulnerable the organizations built with such relationships will be when invaded by heterogeneity from outside of the environments. The degree of how robust the relationships can be regarded as the degree of correlation in terms of the words used in finance field, and hence it proves that the relationships amongst the components of the organization should be moderate. During a high-growth period of an organization, it would be easier to achieve a stronger performance under the climate, atmosphere or color of the company, which might be replaced the way of thinking. However, the growth and performance achieved would get lenient and step down as time passes due to the pressure from the competitiveness in the market. If the way of thinking within the company continues, in fact it usually continues, the anachronistic way of thinking is still shared though it is no longer effective under the new environments. The organization cannot change their mind as quickly as its environment, thus their mind would be always somewhat outdated and biased toward a wrong direction, which would finally result in the shakeout of such companies. Under the inflationary economy, or early stage in the emerging economy, the companies do not care about small distortion and scars of their body(e.g. someone’s mistake), since the momentum to go forward is extremely strong, and hence the companies tend to believe that their first-aid treatments cure all such diseased parts. On the other hand, under the deflation economy, the companies would have a tendency that they blame each other for a small mistake to protect themselves from being blamed. The burden under the deflation economy gets more onerous as well as the money borrowed from a bank.
In one’s life, the failure is not allowed in general though it is said that the failure is mother of the success. This is because the life is too short, and hence people cannot challenge so many things by trial and error. If someone really desires a true answer, it is necessary to repeat observations and experiments. And then they need to make an assumption built upon trial and error and feed back the result to correct the precision of the assumption. However, for most of the people, trial and error is not taken for granted due to the limitation of time frame as mentioned above. How on earth a myopic person like myself can be a fundamental for the next generation by leaving the results of experiments and observations which have not been completed? We struggle with finding the answers in the chaos where uncertainties are ordinary, but we are forced to make a decision without having statistically sufficient samples, and as a result, a lot of people repeat failure without obtaining something useful for the next trial. Wise men learn by other men’s mistake, which means people who are smart refer the result of past experiments and try to derive a conclusion as correct as possible to the extent probabilistic logic works. However, the history of the human beings which can be captured with books, paintings and layers of the earth is so short that we cannot advance the universal theory, and hence even wise men who learned enough from the past history would repeat an error. These analytics help us figure out the reason why there is no big difference between the precision of the universal theory advanced by a diligent business person who has a brilliant academic background and careers and that of the ridiculous theory advanced by an old man who has no occupation and is killing time at a racetrack, this might not be an appropriate example though.
Reference: At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Stuart Kauffman
Monochrome Central Park, Manhattan]]>The Model Calibration to the Anachronistic Informationhttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/12559152/2010-12-23T12:44:00+09:002010-12-24T00:21:00+09:002010-12-23T12:44:08+09:00ivory_tower_nyAudit
Turning to the budget for the next year, they usually depend extremely on the actual amounts of the prior year results. They modify(increase) the required hours for each entity by adding some reasons which reflect the implementation of the new accounting standards and other requirement by the regulators. In addition, there are some minority changes with respect to the audit procedures within the firm, which would be the biggest reason why the audit teams cannot achieve the budget every year. The accounting firms are also regulated, and the regulators’ requirement makes auditing ridiculous. However, as an investor not as an auditor, the partners should maximize the return on their investments called partnership. Because the increase of the audit fee, one of the method to increase their return, is not achievable during the downturn, they myopically try to reduce the cost incurred in the engagement by utilizing the cushions(described below) of each member. The budget is absolutely given, and whatever happens during the engagement term, it should be achieved. Hence, the manager assigns the given budget to the members, which would not enough for the assignment. The other members are supposed to charge the assigned time regardless of the actual hours they would have worked for, meaning they are contributing their precious time to the partners and their poor time management. I would like to call them as cushions since it seems as if they are absorbing the impacts occurred by the environment and its uncertainties like cushions.
The cushions never be able to continue being fancy cushions as they will wear down as a result of hard cushion work and lose the flexibility to absorb the frictions and impacts. To the extent they can keep their identities as human beings, they are willing to sacrifice their private time for the engagements in return of being compensated, learning useful knowledge and obtaining experience in the accounting firms. The more ridiculous the system of the organization becomes, the more they would lose their flexibility as cushions. And at that point, they will decide to quit being cushions for the partners and poor management systems, and leave the firm to keep their identities as human beings. And ironically, the difference between the cushions and them is that they can decide to quit being cushions by leaving the firms by themselves. For some industrial machines, the mechanicals periodically perform maintenance. During the maintenance, they might change the cushions for the machines if it is overused. Likewise, managements tend to treat the members as parts of some machines. They perform maintenance when it is considered too late since it is performed cosmetically and they do not care about the result. "Whether the maintenance works well or not" does not matter, but "whether the maintenance was done or not" matters significantly. I am not just blaming the managements for their poor management. I have to take the difference of motivation between managements and others into consideration, rather I have to admit that I cannot manage the organization better than them or than I am expecting them to do.
Under the capitalism paradigm, the structure that middle-class and slaves are ripped off by the capitalists does not change from that of the era when bourgeois and lumpenproletariat were existing. It seems the structure has been most successful to accumulate the wealth in terms of money though there are a lot of problems regarding the redistribution of the income. I would like to mention the fact which should be observed by the members and changed when necessary. I am an outsider/stranger here, and might have more experience to implement some experiments within the organization than other members. I am just telling you how the management works within the firm, and is it worth while being observed as well as the capital market. Furthermore, there are a lot of similarities between the mechanism of the organizations such as companies and the mechanism of the human beings, which might come from the concept of self-organization. The self-organization mechanism has developed human beings’ function, and it can be considered as miracles on the earth. It is easy to treat them as miracles, however we can understand the mechanism to some extent and utilize the universal truths. To manage the organization such as companies, it is essential to comprehend the universal truths as fundamentals, whose importance is not well understood by the managements who persist in their own models.
The more time passes, the more their models would be outdated. Their model calibration to the anachronistic information will devastate the harmonization within the organization. They cannot help calibrating to the anachronistic information since auditors are not good at predicting future trend, and they tend to value the current information more than the truly essential important for the future of the firm. Thus they often respond too much to the current information which actually is not important. It can be said that they are too myopic to draw the picture of the future. They cannot change things related to themselves easily because they believe they do not have to change themselves due to the past successful experience. Such experience generates emotional attachment, which is a kind of nostalgia, and they persist in their framework used in their platinum age. At this point, the managements empirically know that they are unable to contribute the organization by their knowledge and other experience since they are all outdated by passage of time, and they intuitively feel that they cannot learn new knowledge as quickly as the younger generations. The history tells us that the power would not continue longer than it seems, which has the same reasons why the dinosaurs extinguished. The management should be refreshed by the decision of the organizations such as board members, rather ideally they should be replaced by the managements’ own decisions when the environment changes. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to let them decide to leave their positions since they are attached to their extravagant spaces and chairs by their emotions literally. Though it is not rational at all, the managements believe that they deserve to be respected by their past experience.
It is not fruitful to fight the status quo unless a lot of people want it. There would be a critical point where people change their mind. But under the capitalism paradigm, the managements do not have to care about the employees or labors too much since they are easily replaced. The critical point for a person does not influence the people in the organization, however if there is a historical critical point at the same time, it suddenly changes. To be precise, it seems it suddenly changes for the public. There would have been some signals which shows that we are approaching a historical paradigm shift, nonetheless people never recognize it because the signals are too tiny to see, especially if the change is differentiated with respect to time.
Central Park, Manhattan]]>A Productivity Revolutionhttp://itowerny.exblog.jp/12486798/2010-12-11T18:29:00+09:002010-12-13T05:53:34+09:002010-12-12T08:44:35+09:00ivory_tower_nyClay
http://www.uniqlo.com/us/
Interestingly, not only Uniqlo but other similar fabric brand such as H&M is now on the Chuo-dori as well. The streets and avenues are saturated with middle class “lay” people and younger generation and rather Chinese tourists, which changed the colors of the cities. What is happening in the world? Are we starting to recognize them as high-quality and acceptable brand to bring when hanging out with friends to the “Party”? I used to recognize Uniqlo as poor quality and unfashionable brand as mentioned above, and used them as underwear. Now I must admit that the quality of its clothes has been highly improved despite the fact that the production of the fabric is mostly operated in Mainland China and other Asian countries. Moreover, the heattech helps me survive in New York city in winter and now I am so grateful. The brand itself might not have penetrated the mind of New Yorkers as much as the heattech, the product of Uniqlo. Nonetheless, FAST RETAILING can be considered as one of the hopeful Japanese companies which will continue growing because of its strategies such as M&A transactions, hiring talented people in the market and the productivity revolution in its producing factories.
Or we cannot categorize this company as a “Japanese” company. Most of the productions are operated outside Japan, and workers there are local people in each city. I don’t know exactly about its statistics of labor force, nevertheless I am certain that the population of this company is not biased toward Japanese people like other major Japanese companies. They can naturally acquire the diversity of the population by expanding its operation outside Japan, which is very important for the companies to sustain its life. Why some kind of pure Japanese companies are disappearing? Or I should say, “why cannot pure Japanese companies survive in this turbulent age?”. Does the fluctuation of the currency shown in the chart tell us something regarding the change mentioned above in a similar fashion as someone’s facial expression tells others something? More likely “Yes”. The problem is that we cannot understand each other even though we are facing and able to see the facial expression. Likewise, we cannot understand all signals from the volatility in the chart of the capital market. Our ability to predict the future is limited to some extent, thus we could not help utilizing our Heuristics to protect ourselves from the environments and survive. Because of the Heuristics, human beings has been going forward without thinking about things too much in details. On the other hand, such omission of thinking or brain freeze had generated a lot of misunderstandings in the world such as superstitions and cult-like religions.
Efficiency is essential since one’s life is limited and people believe that they can achieve something if they can spare their time on special things. In fact, human beings have been achieved developing overwhelming technologies by which their life have been made more comfortable. It might be said that they have been staying focused on minimizing the time needed to deal with things to do while they are developing some devices and technologies. They did not have any idea about what would happen with their devices, however they were undoubtedly forced to develop them to protect themselves from the environments since they were too vulnerable to survive outside without any efficient technologies. It seems that they have succeeded to a great extent so far though the history of human being is much shorter than that of the earth and the universe. I have been observing Japan and rest of the world for this 10 years after I decided to work as an auditor, and I have to admit that it is too short to understand the paradigm shift in 1990’s. Nonetheless, I do need to go forward with my limited knowledge and experience, and heuristics helps me do that in an efficient way. From what I have learned in my work, the more we are heavily weighing on efficiency, the more the misunderstandings would be generated and the less people have high-quality accomplishments. It sounds very simple and everybody knows about it, but they never recognize that they are doing in such a hurrying manner while they are under time constraints. The pressure from time constraints justifies and rationalize everything they do, and sacrifice of the quality is not an exception as is obvious.
Whether it is related to justifications or rationalizations mentioned above, sometimes people in NYC are more aggressive than those in Tokyo when they are crossing the streets and avenues. I had been confident before I came to NYC about my reaction speed to cross the streets when the signals are showing red or DON’T WALK sign. I must admit I am not as confident as before, and the position keeping on the street is competitive in Manhattan as well due to the difference of the nature of people. By the way, the color of the walking sign in Manhattan is white, not green. But people here believe that it is green, not white. Everything is different here, but there would be some reasons why they regard white as "green" and this can be categorized as one of the example of justifications by time constraints. Say, people are too busy in NYC due to the time constraints, thus they tend to call the white walking sign "Green".
]]>Any Tips For Tipping?http://itowerny.exblog.jp/12453355/2010-12-07T12:19:00+09:002010-12-07T12:23:35+09:002010-12-07T12:18:58+09:00ivory_tower_nyNY
How to motivate oneself for the performance is one of the most bothersome tasks for most of the people. People, who are paid well enough to afford to buy things which they want to obtain to a reasonable extent, are not working for only money any more. I do not know exactly how much the waiters, taxi drivers and doormen are paid, but if they are not well-paid as much as we expect and they are motivated only for the salary, the degree and quality of the service which we would receive might change easily by the amount we pay for them. The motivation is well-defined by Abraham Maslow with his famous masterpiece, "Motivation and Personality". According to what he said in his book and from what I have learned with his book, people who have self-actualized are not people who have everything they want, but people who are independent to a great extent in their current situations. They will complain about their situations and ridiculous things surrounding them like other lay people, nevertheless they can enjoy their situation to some extent. Difference between enjoying and not enjoying makes much greater difference than what the word "not" means literally. I may not be categorized as this kind of people due to the tons of complaints about the situation I have so far. Since it is sometimes structurally impossible to change things, there would be some situations in which people should not continue fighting against something that they never be able to get rid of. It might be said that it is a compromise, however things which we cannot control would make our mind devastated.
I need to get back to what I was saying first. The tipping custom here is justified by the words like "Tipping has been persisting because it is an efficient way to maintain the diligence of employees." and "if tipping disappeared, why would anybody provide good service with no better income?". In my country, we do not have the tipping custom even when we are staying in luxury hotels or we are having dinner at classy restaurants. As I am used to being treated as a "customer", I do not want to tip too much for ordinary services here. The quality of the service does not differ so significantly from what we have in Japan, but they are much more reasonable and polite to the customers. I do not say that all Japanese are providing perfect service, since there are a lot of serious problems related to the services and processes which we have in Japan. Nonetheless, they are at least polite to the customers and what customers are requesting works as a pressure to the motivation for companies to improve their services. The demanding styles here are undermining the fascination of this city, and I would like to call them "anachronistic" and "outdated" service styles which were wide-spreading in some emerging countries in ancient times. No matter how we feel about tips, we have to keep in mind that tipping is not a small deal because it directly makes a big difference in the service which we would receive here.
Where the service cannot be differentiated easily, the price deduction would be the target to make themselves attractive to the customers. As I mentioned before, the manufacturing itself can be completed in China or other countries which have much cheaper labor forces. Things are very expensive in Japan because of the high salaries, and inefficiencies wide-spreading amongst the government and business sectors(e.g. infrastructures rarely used or capacities never utilized). Our generation in Japan has a serious symptom which gets rid of hope for future from Japanese people. After the burst of the bubble economy in 1990's, it is said that Japan has lost the growth during 20 years, rather we lost the miracle recovery after the World War II. The stock price, Nikkei 225, once reached one fifth and now one forth of the peak price in 1989, and it does not recover at all even after 20 years. And the interest rate continues flying at low attitude for a long time, which undermines the control ability of the central bank. Unfortunately, most of Japanese people believe that we are not allowed to expect a prospect future for our country, whereas the country next to us "China" is expected to continue high growth rate for another decade.
Do we have a brilliant future? I am not optimistic about the future of my country, and no idea to change the situation of Japan comes to my mind so far. Are we just supposed to wait for a gradual decline of our country by spending the savings accumulated during the miracle economic growth without having any hope? Younger generation do not believe that Japan would continue being an enormous economic power in the world, now it is already proved to a certain degree, and they are suffering from the stresses caused by the negative information broadcast by the mass-media. The anxieties we have inside ourselves come from the distant future, and the degree of the anxieties depends on the expectations about the future. Let us think about the concept of the present value which we would have learned at the beginning of the accounting or finance course at the university. We just need to discount the future liabilities, which we would have to deal with, by the discount rate which indicates the expectations about the distant future. The high expectation to the future can ease our anxieties by discounting significantly our liabilities in the future. If the expectation is very low or below minus like our expectation, the liability which people feel would get bigger. Especially for younger generations, because they have long durations for the process of discounting the future liabilities, they are fatigued already and they have no energies to overcome things in front of them.
A lot of people started to wear their hats and caps to keep their head warm, which makes the scenery in the subway more colorful. In the subway during my commute, some people are eating muffins with some coffee, having bathroom tissues(don't ask the reason), listening to music with their iPhones and reading a small free papers. The Christmas season and the busy season are both coming. According to the Happy holidays notice from the apartment management, there are many people who are waiting for the Christmas holidays bonus in my apartment. We have a same kind of custom in Japan called "Oseibo" which is a gift to the people who have some relationship usually, hence I can understand somewhat about the custom of Christmas bonus. It seems mandatory to give the gratuities here, whereas "Oseibo" is not necessarily required. Definitely, it is a big difference for our annual budget.
Prospect Park, Brooklyn]]>https://www.excite.co.jp/https://www.exblog.jp/https://ssl2.excite.co.jp/