July 2010

Playing with my new Leica... great

July 24, 2010

Gmw guarida2.0 08062010

USA Banking performance: Credit quality improving?

July 19, 2010

Credit quality has been improving for a few quarters in a row -however, USA mortgages are not expected to improve anywhere soon-. CFOs' of some banks are "optimistic" about their assets quality... while they may be more nervous about new regulations and "de-intermediation" -reduction of people willing to use their services-... so, the optimism looks shallow. There are no interesting proposals coming from bankers about restructuring financial services industry... except consolidation, and that pathway drives to the wrong place: criminal complacency and legalized unethical compensations  "... don't worry, we are too big to fail".

Service Mapping

July 06, 2010

To map services requires a set of distinctions out of which maps are going to be build. Geographical maps are build based in share conventional distinctions such as latitude and longitude, curves of level, and color coding among many others. Good powerful maps are based in sharp distinctions that allows us to observe, assess and take relevant actions. Here there is a collection of service mapping intents. Many of them are based in symbolizing "things" people encounter when experiencing a particular service on ad hoc bases. They also provide a larger context  - a service process- in which it is possible to appreciate  how customer's experience of the service takes place and how one particular event may be related to a previous one. There is a more structured set of distinctions to map services, such of those used by New Scale or Vision Consulting. These approaches have two main advantages. First, they allows to track specific actions that are delivering value to customer. Second, they map critical roles that are both, the source of stability for the process and the possibility for change and innovation.

Educational environments and emergent virtues

Jane McGonigal thinks the opposite of games and gaming is not reality, but depression. In ten years from now, playing games in synthetic environments (MMORPG) will become a skill that new generations will perform at a virtuoso level. As a result of that a new range of dispositions will be available for that generation: urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity and epic meaning. A whole new educational environment of planetary scope has emerged in a decade, with enough force to tackle our "real" contemporary challenges.

The emergence and collaps of a market: CDO/Collateralized Debt Obligation

July 01, 2010

... or sub-prime mortgage credits (triple-B-rated) packaged in bonds (triple-B-rated), and then packaged in CDOs (triple-A-rated... the magic leap)... that may also become components of new CDOs (triple-A-rated)... against which mortgage default swaps were issued... swaps that became the exclusive component of the synthetic CDOs (triple-A-rated)... then Mr Wing Chaw - and many, many others- advising institutional investors (big pocket, risk averse, only triple-A-rated assets) to buy them... a systemic failure in making risks assessment.