Jenny and Erin

This post is for you captains of industry, boards that hire them, fund managers who bet on them and the average Joe (or Jane) who invests in the companies they run. A little knowledge never hurt anyone.

It seems bigger isn’t always better, especially for companies and stockholders, when it comes to the desires of their leaders. I ran across a great post from It is a Numeric Life citing an interesting study released in 2007 which located the primary residences of 488 CEOs of S&P 500 Companies and demonstrated a link between CEO home purchases and the stock performance of the company’s they ran. Click here to read the post.

This study, authored by two finance professors, found the average S&P 500 CEO home was more than 6,000 square feet, had 12 rooms, over 5 acres of land and a market value of $3.1 million. The analysis found:

• CEOs who lived in houses larger than the average of their S&P 500 peers had stocks that returned 3.35%* less than the stocks of companies whose CEOs lived in below-average sized homes; and
• CEOs who lived in the biggest homes of the group surveyed had stocks that underperformed their rivals in homes identified as being average or below average for this group by 6.9%*.

The study also examines the stock performance for 164 companies who had CEOs that purchased new homes after coming on board. When the CEOs bought the super large homes (10,000 square feet with 10 or more acres) their company’s stock performance suffered – to the tune of 1.25% performance lag each month.

Make of this what you will – use it for hiring advice, investment advice or as just plain old sage advice…

Click here to read the entire report yourself.

*on average

Wow, I found this web site that really tripped me out! Rather than some trite writing about how crazy this is, I’ll just give you the quick run-down and the link so you can see it with your own eyes.

Self described as “a cutting edge full service agency providing alibis and excused absences as well as assistance with a variety of sensitive issues”, the Alibi Network sounds like a nightmare to me. Among the services they provide:

• Virtual employment which allows you to sport your dream job, a “virtual” office, executive assistant and phone number;
• Custom alibis and excuses for “attached adults” involved in “discrete” relationships with others, along with all supporting documentation;
• Untraceable phone calls, in other words a phone number from which you can both make and receive phone calls which can be used no matter where in the world you happen to be; and
• “Discrete” shopping which is billed among other things as a way to “keep tabs on your business competitors discretely and without their knowledge by obtaining their products and services” on credit cards untraceable to you.

Whoa! And the highlighted items are just the tip of the iceberg – with enough money the implication appears to be just about anything is possible. Click here to check out the Alibi Network.

I have become completely fascinated with the concept of genericana. Genericana is defined as – the features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls and subdivisions.

There is some comfort in genericana:

• You can go to any Red Lobster or McDonald’s and feel at home, already knowing what to expect in terms of quantity, quality and cost; and
• As every suburb has a Home Depot, Gap, and Walmart, for instance, you’re never starting from scratch in any move and always know where to find what you’re looking for.

Genericana is running rampant. People in both red and blue states seem to be exhibiting an internalized form of genericana:

• Ask people their dream and how many will answer winning it big in the lotto, vacationing in the Bahamas, or retiring by 55? Maybe there will be small variations, but typically it’s the same vision;
• Most of us are exposed to the exact same ideas because we read the exact same “bestsellers” and watch the exact same television shows;
• We crave the same look - whether it be in our appearance or a potential mates - because we mimic what we see in the exact same magazines, advertisements, and we all shop in the same stores; and
• In a time when divorces runs rampant we still dream of an ideal soul mate – the person who “completes” us and we ignore the people right in front of us.

But to give credit where credit is due, it is much easier to “keep up with the Joneses” when it is so clearly defined and we know exactly where to find it. Generic America.