Catch this. A print ad of almost half page in the Globe & Mail – suggesting business can be made better if restaurants print their menus in large type. Huh?
The reader is directed back to a web site www.accesson.ca – where the type is typically small web sized – when it really could have been larger, as the ad after all – suggests.
Oh, and it has light-green type on a white background – tough to read or what?
And back to the ad itself – it wasn’t even correctly sized to fit the newspaper page on which it sat.
Corner tag could’ve read: ‘genius at work” (with your tax dollars).

The Sheriff of Wall Street aka “the Spitz” rode his white stallion up and down the backs of us all. He built a modern day McCarthyism, Salem Which Hunts – fear, fear of being accused of not having enough ‘compliance’. We began to look in closets for ‘compliance’ and under pillows – like it was an object. Imagine the shame of it being said “you don’t have compliance’. The Spitz it is revealed didn’t quite have it either – but so long as it looked like there was ‘compliance’ it would be such a good world, so much better.

And then a new pet grew called ‘Sarb-Ox’. A wild animal – that was supposed to cull the beast of ‘compliance’ solved by the boogey bear of - disclosure. And some entities (corporations) finally said “too much”. They said it quietly of course for fear of The Spitz. But quietly some of them moved to London and other exchanges of the world to avoid the “Sarb-Ox’ beast.

Its coming undone – even with Sarb-Ox still on the loose, not as wild, and now more tame – but still its come undone. And in the midst – funny enough so too did the “Spitz”.

Well congrats and Bravo to Martin Sullivan of AIG – I dun’o if he’s right or wrong as far as his firms reporting goes – but he’s opened the floor to the question….is the reporting right? Is the disclosure working, is it real – does it need adjustment? So does it? Are we going to be brave enough to enter the dialogue?

Before we answer – remember, is was America that put “anti-bribery legislation into place” – forced and forcing themselves to take a moral high-ground. So seemingly strict it tied the hands of US companies operating overseas…seemed good at the time…BUT there was an unseen consequence…at the Xerox office in Cairo – the ‘company’ paid the local phone repairman a tip, a stipend of about $15. per month to keep Xerox connected – this was, under the new ‘law’ considered – illegal. Xerox Cairo stopped illegally bribing the phone repair man to keep their service at operational levels and poof, so went the phone service – gone.

Reporting, disclosure, transparency – all good. But is there really any of it – or is it fog, that only is conveniently lifted by “Spitz” like fella’s to expose when it best suits ‘their’ needs?

Lets encourage Sullivan, let’s engage the question – if the transparency that’s been built, that’s torn down so many, was so great – how’d this mess happen?

In 2007 Southern Ontario endured a round of Consumer Behavioural Training.

Likely we were being too grouchy about rising gasoline prices. So 'they' took it away. Yes gas stations ran out of gas. First they decided to charge for air…then "they" actually took gas away.

Yes, one small processing refinery in Ontario had an explosion, and gas supplies at that one brand went thin. Then another brand decided 'hey…its an ideal time to train the consumer that it’s a privilege to get gas, then they’ll stop grouching about price'. Scarcity will create fear of loss rather than price bitterness.

And now just so we don’t take for granted, the availability of gasoline, at of all places - a gas station, another ‘shortage’ of the stuff, this time in Western Canada. Yes Consumer Behavioural Training at what may be planned regular intervals.

The new mantra – “Who cares what it costs, at least we can get it.”
Take the heat off cost, by focusing on availability.

..."I just didn't know what else to say."
Robust. Today, a word used to justify any positive buying decision.
As in…”we bought that software package because it was robust”. So I guess - the other packages didn’t work? Or did this one still work, even if misused, or provided with junk data?
More emphatic…”we bought that one because it was the most robust”.
Today it seems, any time someone isn’t sure how or why a corporate buying decision was made re a technology, service or even lettuce – they describe the basis of the rational as:
- it was the most robust software
- it was agreed they had the most robust workers
- their lettuce was just far and above more robust. ( and so was their cabbage)