I agree with your point that just taking people who are already 40 or 50 year old specialists and then promoting them to be general managers of a business unit doesn’t really solve the problem – it just pushes the same problem down to business units instead of the whole company. I think the more interesting idea is encouraging people to spend time in different functional areas. At a minimum, there are ways to make sure that finance and operations people actually talk to sales people (or, even better, a customer) on occasion, which should benefit how a company functions as well as developing additional skills. Like everything, there’s the need to guard against going too far the other way, with too many people in long meetings that don’t have a point.

Unfortunately, some of this mindset has fallen by the wayside because it was easier to implement when the expectation was that people would stay with 1 company for an entire career.

Monday we read, “Great News, Spain announces austerity measures to get its financial house in order, markets set to rise in response.”

The last couple days we read, “Doom and Gloom, Spain announces austerity measures that will ruin its economy and send unemployment ever higher, markets plunge in response.”

One way or the other, Spain is in trouble (and the US as well). Did anybody really believe they had an easy way out?

As a case in point, today Matt Levine at Dealbreaker explains how municipalities suffered a loss due to LIBOR manipulation – http://dealbreaker.com/2012/07/libor-man ipulating-banks-used-baltimores-tax-doll ars-to-help-pay-off-your-mortgage-or-som ething/ . The NY Times/Dealbook post – to which Matt links – doesn’t explain that the underlying issue was a divergence of LIBOR/SIFMA and instead includes phrases like “many [municipalities] borrow money through investment vehicles that directly derive their value from Libor” which sure sounds like someone who doesn’t understand an interest rate swap trying to write a description of an interest rate swap and missing the mark a bit.

All of this, BTW, is just a few weeks after Gretchen Morgenson had a featured Sunday piece, her gist of which was “municipalities are getting screwed because they are having to pay money to banks today on scary derivatives” and the reality of which is “banks borrowed at variable rates, changed that borrowing to a fixed rate through interest rate swaps, and today should be paying the exact same total interest cost that they expected because short-term interest rates have gone way down”.

If the NYT can’t hire some business/finance reporters that understand math and their subject matter, they ought to just focus on deal scoops and work a deal to license content on any complicated topic from the WSJ, the FT, or the Economist.