Two Satirical Gems

Came across two brilliant works of satire today.

First, via David Maister, is Jonathan Copulsky's Smells Like the Publishing Spirit, which describes his upcoming bestselling book Who's Buying Our Guano.

Second, America Can't Win the War on Fire, by Harvey. The attention to detail is what makes this one special.

Enjoy!

Either Yahoo has a data problem, or you need to sell short RIGHT NOW

It's 12:09 EDT on Monday, and I noticed something very strange this weekend. Yahoo Finance tracks analyst recommendations of Strong Buy, Buy, Hold, Sell, Strong Sell on thousands of stocks. This weekend a great deal of those recommendations disappeared; zeros across the board!

How could this be?

There are two obvious explanations:

1) This is a computer feed problem at Yahoo that has persisted for a couple of days. Okay, the guy in charge is on vacation, and he'll get to it when he's gone throug the other 200 e-mails he got while he was out.

2) Analysts know something they're not saying out loud. Research shows that the Thompson database of analyst opinions was significantly altered following the dot com crash. If I'm an analyst, do I have any reason to tout stocks (after all, that IS my job) if I don't believe the trend is with me or that a particular stock is a great buy? Yet for the top 25% of stocks in the top 25% of industries in the stock market, most have no analyst recommendations.

Could be nothing; a data glitch. I'm just saying keep your eyes peeled.

UPDATE: I guess the guy got through his e-mails, because the analyst data is back at Yahoo Finance. Darn; it was such a fun conspiracy theory!

Asset vs. Liability Processes

It's been a while since I posted anything here. I've been working on a few things, including a primer on business process redesign. This snippet describes the difference between Asset and Liability processes. I grabbed this great photo from Steve Evans' amazing Flickr photo collection, and then Blabberizedd it. This was a first try, but the results came out irreverently productive enough to post. More soon.