WSJ: When the Boss Is a Screamer

No one forgets a screamer—a boss who yells at workers, leaving them feeling powerless and constantly on edge, and sometimes reduced to tears when the explosion comes.

It is a figure Andrew Cornell vows not to become. He sometimes feels like yelling when employees at his manufacturing company don’t meet his expectations. But he bites his tongue. “Yelling is a vestige of a past time, and I always regret it,” says Mr. Cornell, chief executive of Cornell Iron Works in Mountaintop, Pa. Instead, he holds short, frequent meetings with employees having problems, rather than “waiting until the end, throwing a nuclear bomb and leaving blood all over the wall.”

Among the dinosaurs

France’s Socialists have yet to come to terms with the modern world

BLISS is it in a financial crisis to be a socialist. Or so it ought to be. In speculators and ratings agencies, Europe’s left has a ready cast of villains and rogues. In simmering social discontent, it has an energising force. A recent issue of Paris-Match inadvertently captured the mood: page after full-colour page on Britain’s rioting underclass were followed by gory visual detail of the bling yachts crowding into the bay near Saint-Tropez. Time, surely, to put social inclusion before defiant decadence.

The oddity is that almost everywhere the European left is in decline. Among the large countries, Socialist parties rule only in Spain, where they look likely to lose November’s election. The only big place where the left has a good chance of returning to power is France, at next spring’s presidential election. Yet France’s Socialist Party also stands out as Europe’s most unreconstructed. Hence the contorted spectacle of a party preparing for power at a time when the markets are challenging its every orthodoxy.

For a hint of French Socialist thinking, consider recent comments from some of the candidates who will contest a primary vote in October. Ségolène Royal, who lost the 2007 presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy, argued this week that stock options and speculation on sovereign debt should be banned. Denouncing “anarchic globalisation”, she called for human values to be imposed on financial ones, as a means of “carrying on the torch of a great country, France, which gave the world revolutionary principles about the emancipation of the people.”

Ms Royal, believe it or not, is considered a moderate. To her left, Arnaud Montebourg, a younger, outwardly sensible sort, argues for “deglobalisation”. He wants to forbid banks from “speculating with clients’ deposits”, and to abolish ratings agencies. Financial markets want “to turn us into their poodle”, he lamented at a weekend fete in a bucolic village, celebrating the joys of la France profonde with copious bottles of burgundy. No one seems to have told him that there is a simple way to avoid the wrath of bond markets: balance your books and don’t borrow.

Next to such patent nonsense, promises by the two front-running candidates, Martine Aubry and François Hollande, seem merely frozen in time, circa 1981. They want to return to retirement at the age of 60 (it has just been raised to 62), and to invent 300,000 public-sector youth jobs. Each supports Mr Sarkozy’s deficit-reduction targets, but refuses to approve his plan to write a deficit rule into the constitution. More taxes, not less spending, is their underlying creed.

The party is not out of tune with public opinion. The French are almost uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them one of the world’s richest people. Fully 57% say France should single-handedly erect higher customs barriers. The same share judge that freer trade with India and China, whose consumers snap up French silk scarves and finely stitched leather handbags, has been “bad” for France. The right has held the presidency since 1995 partly by pandering to such sentiments.

The causes of French left-wingery are various, but a potent one is the lingering hold of Marxist thinking. Post-war politics on the left was for decades dominated by the Communist Party, which regularly scooped up a quarter of the votes. In the 1950s many intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, clung to pro-Soviet idealism even after the evils of Stalinism emerged. Others toyed with Trotskyism well into the 1970s. François Mitterrand, who mentored Ms Royal, Ms Aubry and Mr Hollande, was swept to the presidency in 1981 by offering a socialist Utopia as a third way between “the capitalist society which enslaves people” and the “communist society which stifles them”.

Given such a tradition, it is possible that today’s Socialist leaders believe what they say. At any rate, there is a debate to be had about the right amount of market regulation and fiscal consolidation. Yet the problem with their promises is this: for every bit of conviction, there is a shameful share of pure posturing. Read more in The Economist.

Why Are They Leaving?

Russia’s small but educated middle-class is deserting the mother country in search of opportunities and freedoms elsewhere, but the state is waking up to their grievances and reform could be in the air.

By Julian Evans

Konstantin Gaaze is a bright young Russian. The 30-year-old is the political editor of Moskovskie Novosti, a leading daily newspaper, and was previously an adviser to the minister of health. He is a political insider who should have a bright future ahead of him in Russia’s booming economy. Instead, Mr. Gaaze is preparing to leave. “I’m thinking about moving to Israel,” he says. “It’s a question of economic opportunities. The system of state capitalism that has grown up here exterminates the social elevator for young educated people.”

Live and Learn

Why we have college.

by Louis Menand

My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.

The angel and the monster

Mother Teresa and Lady Gaga are the latest icons of the leadership industry. Don’t laugh.

THERE are obvious differences, of course. Lady Gaga’s raw-meat dress would probably not have appealed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The pop star’s habit of changing from one bizarre costume to another several times a day, and maybe 20 times during a gig, might have struck the late nun as extravagant. Mother Teresa wore the same outfit every day: a white sari with three blue stripes, reflecting her vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Lady Gaga, by contrast, is not big on chastity. (“Baby when it’s love if it’s not rough it isn’t fun,” she sings.)

Sex, lies and the reckless choices of the powerful

(Reuters) – Sex and power are no strangers. History is littered with tales of the powerful and privileged felled by sex scandals.

But make no mistake. If IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is found guilty as charged of attempting to rape a hotel maid in New York City, he would be in a league virtually of his own.

Few have been accused of a violent crime like Strauss-Kahn. The world financier and French presidential hopeful was charged on Sunday with criminal sexual act, unlawful imprisonment and attempted rape in New York City after a hotel maid said she was assaulted.

In Greece, austerity kindles deep discontent

By Anthony Faiola

Athens — Already struggling to avoid a debt default that could seal Greece’s fate as a financial pariah, this Mediterranean nation is also scrambling to contain another threat — a breakdown in the rule of law.

Thousands have joined an “I Won’t Pay” movement, refusing to cover highway tolls, bus fares, even fees at public hospitals. To block a landfill project, an entire town south of Athens has risen up against the government, burning earth-moving equipment and destroying part of a main access road.

Clash of Civilizations: Time to open our eyes

Op-ed: In face of Mideast radicalization, we should re-read Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations

by: Yoaz Hendel

Samuel Huntington’s famous book, The Clash of Civilizations, includes a grim prediction of the post-Cold War world. Contradicting what was considered politically correct, Huntington chose to point to that which is different and problematic, thereby prompting a discussion on the danger inherent in cultural isolationism (Among other things, in respect to the distance between Islam and the West.)

Inflation? Deflation? It’s All About ‘Meflation’

Pick your poison, says Wall Street. Either Uncle Sam’s borrowing binge will flood the system with money, leading to a replay of the 1970s as inflation eats away at your purchasing power. Or all that debt and the liquidation of distressed financial assets will paralyze the economy and send prices falling, like the deflation Japan has suffered for the past 20 years.

10 Mistakes That Start-Up Entrepreneurs Make

By ROSALIND RESNICK*

When it comes to starting a successful business, there’s no surefire playbook that contains the winning game plan. On the other hand, there are about as many mistakes to be made as there are entrepreneurs to make them. Recently, after a work-out at the gym with my trainer—an attractive young woman who’s also a dancer/actor—she told me about a web series that she’s producing and starring in together with a few friends. While the series has gained a large following online, she and her friends have not yet incorporated their venture, drafted an operating agreement, trademarked the show’s name or done any of the other things that businesses typically do to protect their intellectual property and divvy up the owners’ share of the company. While none of this may be a problem now, I told her, just wait until the show hits it big and everybody hires a lawyer.