[lit-ideas] Re: Found Poetry

  • From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 03:31:39 -0400

Anyone got any found poems to share? Best MN

Here's (a long) one from my editor days at a Wall Street newspaper.

_____


Wisdom of the CEOs
-based on out-takes from actual interviews with American CEOs-

Since peace broke out we've always been looking over our shoulder,
looking forward through thick or thin -- off the cuff and out in the 
blue. There's no doubt in my eyes a thread which falls through many of 
these is that we don't want to talk about another fallen angel.

I mean we've never liked it when an industry was tarred with bad apples.
We would be taking the tail of the elephant and wagging it for 
everybody. Especially when markets are turbulent you spend a lot of time 
hand-holding that could be better spent in other directions. That is, we 
don't want to run to a telephone when it rings, we want it to ring on us.

Connoting a positive flavor to vertical integration, going strong and 
smoking like a fish, we would start to reflect upon our corporate navels 
and decide whether the moment of truth had been reached.

To be more specific, some of these stocks have been taken out behind the 
barn and shot between the eyes and they don't deserve it at all. People 
don't have to disappear to vanish. That's putting a lot of the monkey on 
the investor's back to turn it around.

If their feet are on the ground an their eyes are on the stars and they 
have some idea of where they are, they focus on just serving the retail 
market in Spain, not getting into a lot of sexy lending, not feeling up 
real estate. Also it's probably smarter to marry someone who won't take 
insidious dilution on you. They'll probably do it again.

My strategy is very simply to keep the powder dry, lay in the bushes, 
wait for something to happen, and then pounce. I'd wait for them to lay 
in the bushes and wait for the fallout, at which point they could kick 
off some real plums ... bulks of people ... They have very deep pockets 
but very short arms.

What I've learned is on top of everyone's teeth these days. Unless the 
industry gets at arm's length of its unregulated affiliates (and I mean 
at full arm's length -- and right now they're perhaps at skin length) 
the hammer of regulation is going to fall on the unsuspecting unwary 
anvil of the utility manager in a most painful way.

There's a voice inside me that looks at the Coca-Colas of the world and 
says, "Gee whiz..." We've got to open to the same page and pull the same 
oars together.

_____

Eric Yost

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