EppsNet

• Notes on Strategy from the Harvard Business School: http://bit.ly/1jTVWO #
• The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing. With examples: http://bit.ly/daUqF #

• HarvardBusiness.org: 3 Things You Didn't Know About Marine Corps Leadership http://bit.ly/3XHmHu #
• Philip Garrido's Guide to Low-Budget Dating #badbookproposals #

There are some things that one just didn’t do. That’s the way I was brought up. It’s not gray; it was black and white.

Now the ethical standard seems to be if everybody else is doing it, I can do it too. Carry that over into the banking. Everybody else is doing these funny loans and having earnings grow faster, building up their margins, leveraging those margins.

The more leverage A gets, the more leverage B feels inclined to get. So the system fed on itself and drove bankers to making decisions that they, presumably, should have known better than to make.

I don’t blame government for this. I was at a meeting of CEOs, even though I haven’t been to one for quite a while, and someone asked me to sum up the morning. This was a bunch of bankers and other CEOs. They said, what do you think about all this?

I said, you know, what I’m hearing here is you’re blaming the government for allowing you to do what you should have had enough brains not to do in the first place.

— John Bogle

Last year, Dick’s Sporting Goods bought Chick’s Sporting Goods. According to the Orange County Register, the four Chick’s locations in Orange County, including the one in Tustin that I shop at, will all be replaced by Dick’s by the second half of 2009.

I’m not happy about this. Oh, I know there are people who like Dick’s, and there are people who are 50-50 on the matter and can go either way, but there are also a lot of people like me who really prefer Chick’s.

In fact, I’ve been doing Chick’s for so long that I don’t see how I’m ever going to get used to Dick’s.