Dear Stan,

Paul Simon probably wasn't referring to behavioral feedback mechanisms, but who knows?

This is the 75th anniversary of our Social Security system. It was created during the most economically tenuous period of our country's history. It was designed to provide some measure of financial support to people who were either unable to earn a living due to a disability prior to retirement, or who were of retirement age and needed the income at a time when they could not continue working due to old age.

But it's not giving up without a fight.

The first time a person serves in the role of CEO in an organization is a rite of passage no less momentous than the transition from individual contributor to first line supervisor. There are similarities as well. As a new supervisor, now accountable for what other people do or don't do, there is initial discomfort and uncertainty. A new CEO often, and should, feels the same awkwardness. But the CEO position is usually the final step in long years of progression through the various types and levels of leadership. For the new CEO, it can feel like arrival after a long journey. It can also seem like starting over.

The value of "leading" economic indicators varies, some proving more potent than others. For example, the University of San Diego has a decent index that it has tracked over the years to predict the economic cycles within our region. And the unemployment index is a very reliable predictor of labor cost movement. But the national purchasing managers' predictions of demand are often completely off the mark in anticipating major movements up or down in economic activity. The oil futures index did not accurately predict the dramatic rise and then fall of oil prices between 2008 and 2009. I believe I've found a powerful metric that correlates highly to economic cycling.

"Hold him," the boss said. "Hold him accountable."

The July weather finally has turned to July. This morning, under a breezy, sunny blue sky, Garry Ridge and I shared coffee and organizational philosophy. Garry is the CEO of WD-40 Company, an international producer of many of the most recognized brands in the land of squeaks, stains and smells. I just bought my oldest daughter her first can of WD-40, a ritual of passing into adulthood.

Our tiny car of unknown brand rattled a bit and had a touchy accelerator, but it seemed able enough to carry us through the streets of Habana toward the highway. Loop and I were excited to see it, yet we felt trepidation in visiting the Bay of Pigs. I was 10 years old when that failed invasion occurred, but I still remember how strange the whole thing was. Didn't understand why the United States was involved. Forty-seven years later, I can see how delusional the political thinking was for both hemispheres at that time. The communists thought that equalizing power and wealth was the way to go, and the capitalists thought that the invisible hand of the market would work better. They thought they could force their opinion on each other.

Loop and I left the Habana Airport and decided we'd make sure we had at least two good nights ahead of us, so we registered at El Hotel Nacional de Cuba. This venerable hotel was, at one time, the place to be during the 1930s and 1940s. Kings, crime bosses, presidents, movie stars and generals strolled the warm, solid Spanish colonial buildings.

The immigration officer asked us the normal questions.

I stood in front of a large group of corporate executives who asked me to facilitate their strategic planning meetings. The company was a government contractor, with most of its work on fixed-profit terms. They could make no more than 2 percent net profit on contracts comprising 80 percent of the company's revenues. The other 20 percent of their revenue was from fixed fee contracts, but which similarly required documentation of all time charged to ensure that the assigned staff was not charging the federal government for time spent on other projects. Anyone who has worked with government contracts knows that this reporting administration can be a burden. And anyone who has been in charge of spending public money can tell you that if it weren't for contractors who defrauded the government, these types of administrative controls wouldn't be needed.

Nobody asked me to address a graduating class, so I'll abuse my columnist prerogative and do it here.

Dear Stan,

The outcries against what many perceive as a move toward socialism in our country are valid. Recently, the proportion of personal income received from private enterprise versus government spending in our country dipped to 44 percent of the total. That means 56 percent of household income was derived from government spending.

"Well, Stan, be careful what you ask for, eh?" she said, smiling. "Wasn't I just saying a month ago that my work life was in the doldrums? From becalmed to a gale in two seconds!"

"He built the business from the ground up."

The Dow dropped nearly 1,000 points on May 6, before it recovered around 600 points to close down over 300 points. In mountain climbing vernacular, that's an "elevation change" of 1,600, or almost 15 percent, in one day's hike through the jagged peaks of Wall Street.

Before I embarked upon the path of the business man, I tested whether or not I could pursue a career in psychotherapy. I worked for a year in the mental health ward of Mercy Hospital. Most of that year was on the "graveyard" shift, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., in the intensive care unit. This was a locked ward within a locked ward.

It always starts with me opening my big mouth about how such and such needs to be so and so, and the next thing you know, I'm accountable for doing something about it. Been like that for decades. Can't seem to learn. Apparently I don't really want to change.

I recently heard a debate on the radio regarding the concept of a "living wage," and whether municipal employees should or should not receive this mythical compensation. I say "mythical" because a living wage is in the eye of the paycheck recipient. Or the union negotiator. Or the city council facing continuing budget deficits. Or the taxpayer who's funding the wage.

The theft occurred, as most thefts do, during the wee hours of the morning, when the thief is unable to avoid his own glaring introspection. The treasure is never locked, openly displayed for all to see, and the jewels that cover it are more valuable than any amount of cash. It's a wonder it has not been stolen more frequently. But as it turns out, responsibility is a treasure that few souls have the courage to steal. That's why it's not necessary to sequester it behind a safe's thick steel. It's there for the taking, largely secure from burglary, protected by the daunting fact that responsibility scares many people to death.

At lunch with a senior executive of a public company here in town, the subject of the role of an officer of a corporation came up in the context of "How can you tell when you've got one?" To answer that, we had to first establish what an officer of a corporation actually is, and how the function differs from people "down the line."

Wikipedia defines "pundit" as word borrowed by the English during the British Raj from the Hindi language, originally from Sanskrit. A "pundit" is someone who offers to mass-market his or her opinion on a particular subject area. The term has been increasingly applied to popular media personalities. While its usage from the 1800s stems from a respected term for an adviser, the word has a negative connotation currently.

A skeptic is someone who subscribes to the philosophy of skepticism, such as those who adhered to the principles of the Skeptikoi, a school of thought that said knowledge itself is an uncertain element of human experience, and that all such knowledge should be derived without prior bias, based upon evidence and logic.

There's a stereotypical term applied to people who believe in preparing for the absolute worst-case sociological scenario: a "survivalist," or more folksy, a "prepper." Without judgment as to the odds of a massive calamity of some sort occurring, I find nothing inherently wrong with putting together plans, supplies and procedures to follow in case the SHTF, as the "preppers" would say. Why, our fire, police and military professionals do exactly that every day.

Cheri and I recently adopted a young dog from the county animal shelter. Cheri has been volunteering a couple of times a week, walking the dogs who otherwise would languish in their concrete pens awaiting the luck of the draw.

"More heads are better than one."

The headlines talk about the criticality of employment in the auto industry and how we need to support car manufacturers and their supply chain. Newscasters report the struggling airlines and their potential bankruptcies. Wall Street's roller coaster indices are said to represent the vital signs of our economy. It's clear nobody is paying attention, as yet, to the backbone of the American economy.

Browsing the aisles at Trader Joe's, I looked for the free sample station usually found at the back of the store in Hillcrest. There it was, my treat awaiting. The young woman behind the stainless steel counter was making up small barbecued chicken sandwiches, cutting them into quarters and sliding each piece across the counter to the patiently waiting freeloaders like me. I stood to one side, however, and noticed that she continued to serve others who had arrived after I did. Perhaps she didn't realize I was similarly interested in the offering.

Is the world inherently competitive, or is competition just one possible choice of behavior? Does competition only arise when there are insufficient resources to accommodate everyone's needs? Could there ever be enough?

I'm sure most of you can finish that sentence. It has been a common refrain in the last couple of decades. It's the title of a best-selling book by Marsha Sinetar, published in 1987. Ms. Sinetar is a Ph.D. organizational psychologist, who has been able to follow her own advice. It's evident that her love is advising other people on how to make money doing what they love. As a data point of one, I would suggest that she may have extrapolated aggressively to arrive at her conclusion. Given the number of aspiring authors who love their work sufficiently to spend years of writing and attempting to publish, without anywhere near Ms. Sinetar's success, the one thing we can conclude is that if you tell people they can make a great income by indulging their fantasies, they will pay you to do so.

It seems there is a glaring omission in the rhetoric presented through the media and from our leaders in Washington. The two main symptoms of our dysfunctional system are universally acknowledged: 1) A large number of people do not have insurance, roughly 40 million Americans, and 2) Double-digit escalation of costs that will bankrupt our government and our population in the years to come. The Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress have vowed to do something about each of these, and for that I commend them. That which is omitted, however, is the key to identifying the right things to do.

Having just finished the annual predictions edition of The Economist, I am tempted to crawl into a cave and wait out the new year. But predictions based on trend analysis alone have an error rate of at least 50 percent, because half of the factors affecting the forecast are ignored.

Relationships can die for many reasons, and unfortunately it seems they are easier to kill off than to nurture and grow. That's probably because relationships must overcome the normal human tendency to distrust others quickly when we perceive a possible antagonism. As soon as another person is seen as a potential threat, the hard work of building trust over a long period of time can be lost in moments.

Maybe you have already heard of this entrepreneurial movement in China and India and other developing economies in historically depressed regions. I became aware of it just recently. As a business idea, it's rather ingenious. As a way of making a living, it's a depressing demonstration of wasted human life.

A "dissident" director complains about the performance of the existing management team, successfully garnering support for his view and proposes a search for a new CEO. In the meantime, the director offers to serve as interim CEO and head of the search committee. Three months later, the interim CEO suggests that there's no better candidate than himself.

Discrimination, segregation, persecution, revolution. These are the four sequential effects of psychological processes that are part of evolved human behavior, and which are part of many other animal species' as well. The negative outcome from these four effects has reached a point where the evolutionary benefits are no longer compelling. And there have indeed been benefits from these processes, else humans (and other animals) would not have developed the behaviors in the first place. What are those benefits?

"How do you mean?" I asked Ken, thinking about how many ways his axiom could be true.

So here we are, in an economic trough of Grand Canyon proportions.

Decision-making has been shown by scientists to include both logic and emotion in recent research. The studies further show that the content of emotion actually adds to the quality of the decisions. People who have damage in the part of the brain that provides affect to behavior don't do as well when challenged on tasks that require them to choose effectively. But is there a limit to the effectiveness of emotion when it occurs during critical points of choice? One would have to intuitively believe that the answer is "yes." We have all seen the proverbial hot head issuing orders to his staff in an angry flurry. While the decisions may be fast in coming, and the activity of the staff high, the results are usually less than they could have been. But sometimes, the emotion coupled with the decision can act in a way that perhaps the researchers haven't yet studied.

Dear Stan,

I'm not an easy sell when it comes to popular business books. After a few decades you begin to see the same themes repeated with new jargon and therefore the content is less than compelling.

Do you remember rotary dial telephones that had a hard wire to the wall, typically no more than a few feet long? You had to sit or stand right next to the phone to talk to someone. For a seven-digit telephone number, it could take up to 30 seconds to dial, particularly if they were all high numbers. The rotary return took longer to unwind than winding it, and you couldn't force it to move faster. SsshuNK, clicka-clicka-clicka-clicka. SssshuNK, clicka-clicka-clicka. Etcetera.

Paul and I were discussing the growth plans he has as the new president of HRG Inc., a consulting company I founded in 1989. Paul was director of consulting services at HRG for five years, before he took an opportunity to be general manager for a manufacturer of specialty printed products. That was 10 years ago. Now, with a wealth of additional experience and one of the best minds I've met, Paul has returned to carry the torch of the entrepreneur.

Being the leader means you make the decisions, right? You're in control, aren't you?

Do you remember when you were 29 years old? (That is, assuming you are not at this moment 29?) What was your view of the world at that time? Were you hopeful? Did you think you had things figured out pretty well? Did you believe that your life's goals could be achieved before you were 30?

Economists talk about the "hidden hand" of an efficient, free market. They are referring to the collective effect of market participants negotiating value in open trade based on supply, demand and the information associated with the risks and rewards of the transactions. There's another "hidden hand" at work in our economy, however, that may not be fully appreciated.

Some people are lucky enough to be born broadly talented, perhaps even highly adept at one or more areas of human endeavor. We easily recognize the value of such abilities, but there is a hidden dark side to being good at things.

To ponder this riddle, you must of course know that "HOA" stands for "Homeowners' Association." An HOA has most of the characteristics of the national form of American governance. It's a group of people who tie their economic and social futures together through individual and combined ownership. That could be the main reason why the original 13 colonies expanded to 50 and endured well over two centuries.