French, Humor

Am I Pretentious?

I was chatting with an old friend of mine, and he told me that he never felt inclined to read anything I wrote. Naturally, I was a little miffed. I mean, I pour my heart and soul into my books, columns and these posts here, and people don’t even feel inclined to read it? Why would that be? My friend, helpful as always, explained that it was because I sounded pretentious. My first reaction, of course, was to get offended and say all kinds of nasty things about him. But one has to learn to make use of criticism. After all, if I sound pretentious to somebody, there is no use pointing out that I am not really pretentious because what I sound like and look like and feel like is really what I am to that somebody. That is one of the underlying themes of my first book. Well, not quite, but close enough.

Why do I sound pretentious? And what does that even mean? Those are the questions that I shall analyze today. You see, I take these things very seriously.

A few years ago, during my research years here in Singapore, I met this professor from the US. He was originally from China and had gone to the states as a graduate student. Typically, such first generation Chinese emigrants don’t speak very good English. But this guy spoke extremely well. To my untrained ears, he sounded pretty much identical to an American and I was impressed. Later on, I was sharing my admiration with a Chinese colleague of mine. He wasn’t impressed at all, and said, “This guy is a phoney, he shouldn’t try to sound like an American, he should be speaking like a Chinese who learned English.” I was baffled and asked him, “If I learn Chinese, should I try to sound like you, or try to hang on to my natural accent?” He said that was totally different — one is about being pretentious, the other is about being a good student of a foreign tongue.

When you call someone pretentious, what you are saying is this, “I know what you are. Based on my knowledge, you should be saying and doing certain things, in a certain way. But you are saying or doing something else to impress me or others, pretending to be somebody better or more sophisticated than you really are.”

The implicit assumption behind this accusation is that you know the person. But it is very difficult to know people. Even those who are very close to you. Even yourself. There is only so far you can see within yourself that your knowledge even of yourself is always going to be incomplete. When it comes to casual friends, the chasm between what you think you know and what is really the case could be staggering.

In my case, I think my friend found my writing style a bit pompous perhaps. For example, I usually write “perhaps” instead of “may be.” When I speak, I say “may be” like everybody else. Besides, when it comes to speaking, I’m a stuttering, stammering mess with no voice projection or modulation to save my life. But my writing skills are good enough to land me book commissions and column requests. So, was my friend assuming that I shouldn’t be writing well, based on what he knew about how I spoke? Perhaps. I mean, may be.

However, (I really should start saying “but” instead of “however”) there are a couple of things wrong with that assumption. Everyone of us is a complex collage of multiple personas happily cohabiting in one human body. Kindness and cruelty, nobility and pettiness, humility and pompousness, generous actions and base desires can all co-exist in one person and shine through under the right circumstances. So can my weak articulation and impressive (albeit slightly pretentious) prose.

More importantly, people change over time. About fifteen years ago, I spoke fluent French. So if I preferred conversing with a French friend in his tongue, was I being pretentious given that I couldn’t do it five years before that time? Ok, in that case I really was, but a few years before that, I didn’t speak English either. People change. Their skills change. Their abilities change. Their affinities and interests change. You cannot size up a person at any one point in time and assume that any deviation from your measure is a sign of pretentiousness.

In short, my friend was an ass to have called me pretentious. There, I said it. I have to admit — it felt good.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Back Office, Finance et al

From the quant and quantitative development perspective, Back Office is a distant entity. Their role is vital in the trade lifecycle, as we shall see later, but they are outside the sphere of influence of the quants and developers.

Back Office and Finance

Back Office concerns itself mainly with trade settlements and accounting. Upon maturity, each trade generates a settlement trigger usually with the help of a vended trading or settlement platform, which will be picked up and acted upon by the Back Office professionals. They also take care of cash and collateral management.

Finance functions are closely related to Back Office operations. Among a host of accounting related operations, they have one critically important task, which is to produce annual reports. These reports get publicly scrutinized and determine everything from the stock price to performance bonuses, salary levels etc. Finance professionals may require quant and analytic help for certain tasks. In one of my previous roles, I was asked to estimate the fair market value of the employee stock options (ESOP) for the purpose of accounting for them in the annual reports.

The process of pricing ESOP is similar to (although a bit more complicated than) normal call option pricing. Among other things, you need the volatility of the underlying stock in order to calculate the price. I used the standard exponentially weighted moving average method to estimate it from the published stock prices over the previous two years or so to compute it because that was all the data I had access to. Before that time, there was some corporate action and stock ticker name had changed (or did not exist, I don’t remember which). In any case, I knew that the impact of adding more data prior to that date would be negligible because of the exponentially diminishing weights; it would be much less that the round off error in quoting the price to four decimal places, for instance. But the accountant who was asked to look at the computation was upset. She came to me with her rulebook and referred me to page 57, paragraph 2, where it was specified that I was supposed to use ten years for the EWMA computation. I tried, in vain, to explain to her that I couldn’t. She kept saying, “Yeah, but page 57, para 2….” I went on to explain why it didn’t really make any difference. She said, “Yeah, but page 57, para 2….”

Accountants and Finance professionals can be that way. They can be a bit “technical” about such things. In hindsight, I guess I was being naive. I could have just used a series of zeros to back-populate the missing eight years of data (after all, if the ticker price was not quoted, it is zero), and redone my ESOP valuation, which would have given an ESOP price identical to what I computed earlier, but this time satisfying both Finance and the quants.

IT and other support

A team which quantitative developers work closely with is Information Technology. They are charged with the IT infrastructure, security, networking, procurement, licensing and everything else related to computing. In fact, quantitative development is, as I portrayed it earlier, a middle layer between IT and pure mathematical work. So it is possible for quantitative developers to find themselves under the IT hierarchy, although it doesn’t work to their advantage. Information Technology is a cost center, as are all other Middle and Back Office functions, while Front Office units connected to trading are profit centers. Profit generators get compensated far better than others, and it is better to be associated with them than IT.

Corporate Life, Philosophy, Physics, Quantitative Finance

My Life, My Way

After almost eight years in banking, I have finally called it quits. Over the last three of those years, I had been telling people that I was leaving. And I think people had stopped taking me seriously. My wife certainly did, and it came as a major shock to her. But despite her studied opposition, I managed to pull it off. In fact, it is not just banking that I left, I have actually retired. Most of my friends greeted the news of my retirement with a mixture of envy and disbelief. The power to surprise — it is nice to still have that power.

Why is it a surprise really? Why would anyone think that it is insane to walk away from a career like mine? Insanity is in doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Millions of people do the same insanely crummy stuff over and over, everyone of them wanting nothing more than to stop doing it, even planning on it only to postpone their plans for one silly reason or another. I guess the force of habit in doing the crummy stuff is greater than the fear of change. There is a gulf between what people say their plans are and what they end up doing, which is the theme of that disturbing movie Revolutionary Road. This gulf is extremely narrow in my case. I set out with a bunch of small targets — to help a few people, to make a modest fortune, to provide reasonable comfort and security to those near. I have achieved them, and now it is time to stop. The trouble with all such targets is that once you get close to them, they look mundane, and nothing is ever enough for most people. Not for me though — I have always been reckless enough to stick to my plans.

One of the early instances of such a reckless action came during my undergraduate years at IIT Madras. I was pretty smart academically, especially in physics. But I wasn’t too good in remembering details like the names of theorems. Once, this eccentric professor of mine at IIT asked me the name of a particular theorem relating the line integral of the electric field around a point and the charge contained within. I think the answer was Green’s theorem, while its 3-D equivalent (surface integral) is called Gauss’s theorem or something. (Sorry, my Wikipedia and Google searches didn’t bring up anything definitive on that.) I answered Gauss’s theorem. The professor looked at me for a long moment with contempt in his eyes and said (in Tamil) something like I needed to get a beating with his slippers. I still remember standing there in my Khakki workshop attire and listening to him, with my face burning with shame and impotent anger. And, although physics was my favorite subject (my first love, in fact, as I keep saying, mostly to annoy my wife), I didn’t go back to any of his lectures after that. I guess even at that young age, I had this disturbing level of recklessness in me. I now know why. It’s is the ingrained conviction that nothing really matters. Nothing ever did, as Meursault the Stranger points out in his last bout of eloquence.

I left banking for a variety of reasons; remuneration wasn’t one of them, but recklessness perhaps was. I had some philosophical misgivings about the rightness of what I was doing at a bank. I suffered from a troubled conscience. Philosophical reasons are strange beasts — they lead to concrete actions, often disturbing ones. Albert Camus (in his collection The Myth of Sisyphus) warned of it while talking about the absurdity of life. Robert Pirsig in his epilog to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also talked about when such musings became psychiatrically dangerous. Michael Sandel is another wise man who, in his famous lectures on Justice: What is the Right Thing to Do? pointed out that philosophy could often color your perspective permanently — you cannot unlearn it to go back, you cannot unthink a thought to become normal again.

Philosophy and recklessness aside, the other primary reason for leaving the job was boredom. The job got so colossally boring. Looking out my window at the traffic 13 floors below was infinitely more rewarding than looking at the work on my three computer screens. And so I spent half my time staring out the window. Of course, my performance dwindled as a result. I guess scuttling the performance is the only way to realistically make oneself leave a high-paying job. There are times when you have have to burn the bridges behind you. Looking back at it now, I cannot really understand why I was so bored. I was a quantitative developer and the job involved developing reports and tools. Coding is what I do for fun at home. That and writing, of course. May be the boredom came from the fact that there was no serious intellectual content in it. There was none in the tasks, nor in the company of the throngs of ambitious colleagues. Walking into the workplace every morning, looking at all the highly paid people walking around with impressive demeanors of doing something important, I used to feel almost sad. How important could their bean-counting ever be?

Then again, how important could this blogging be? We get back to Meursault’s tirade – rien n’avait d’importance. Perhaps I was wrong to have thrown it away, as all of them keep telling me. Perhaps those important-looking colleagues were really important, and I was the one in the wrong to have retired. That also matters little; that also has little importance, as Meursault and my alter ego would see it.

What next is the question that keeps coming up. I am tempted to give the same tongue-in-cheek answer as Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge — Loaf! My kind of loafing would involve a lot of thinking, a lot of studying, and hard work. There is so much to know, and so little time left to learn.

Photo by kenteegardin

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance, Uncategorized

Rates and Valuation

Marking trades to market requires up-to-date market data. There are two types of market data required for pricing — one is the live spot rates, volatilities, interest rates etc. This type of data is collectively called rates. The second type is the kind that goes into defining the products being traded, or the characteristics of the rates. These include definitions of interest rate pillars, bond coupon dates and rates etc. This second type is considered static data.

Valuation and Product Control

The rates management team is in charge of the first type data. They ensure that the live data providers are consistent with each other and that the data itself is accurate. They do this by applying various automated tests and limits to the incoming rates to flag any suspicious movement or inconsistency. Once approved by the team, the data gets consumed by the trading platform. The rates management is a critical role, and the market data is often stored and served in dedicated databases and services. Because of the technicalities involved, this team works closely with the information technology professionals.

The static data is typically managed by a separate team independent of rates management. They go by various names, Treasury Control being one of them. They set up traded products and rates pillars and so on. In some banks, they may also be responsible for trade input data validation.

Two other important functions of Middle Office are valuation and product controls. These functions are pretty far removed from quantitative development and trading platform. These teams ensure that the trade valuations and P/L movements are consistent with market movements. Valuation Control takes a close look at pricing and P/L mostly at trade level while Product Control worries about P/L explanation typically at portfolio level. Since we have the Greeks (rates of change of product prices with respect to market quantities and time), we can compute and predict the change in the prices (or P/L movements) using Taylor series expansion. If the independently computed prices (using actual market rates) are at odds with the predicted ones, it points to an internal inconsistency and should trigger a detailed investigation.

Product Control may also help Finance and Human Resource with valuation reserves process, which estimates the level of exaggeration in the profit expectations of ebullient traders. Since traders’ compensation is tied to the profit they generate, this process of assigning reserves against profit is essential in ensuring equitable performance rewards.

Corporate Life, Life and Death, Philosophy, Work and Life

Rules of Conflicts

In this last post in the rules of the game series, we look at the creative use of the rules in a couple of situations. Rules can be used to create productive and predictable conflicts. One such conflict is in law enforcement, where cops hate defense attorneys — if we are to believe Michael Connelly’s depiction of how things work at LAPD. It is not as if they are really working against each other, although it may look that way. Both of them are working toward implementing a set of rules that will lead to justice for all, while avoiding power concentration and corruption. The best way of doing it happens to be by creating a perpetual conflict, which also happens to be fodder for Connelly’s work.

Another conflict of this kind can be seen in a bank, between the risk taking arm (traders in the front office) and the risk controlling teams (market and credit risk managers in the middle office). The incessant strife between them, in fact, ends up implementing the risk appetite of the bank as decided by the senior management. When the conflict is missing, problems can arise. For a trader, performance is quantified in terms of the profit (and to a lesser degree, its volatility) generated by him. This scheme seems to align the trader’s interests with those of the bank, thus generating a positive feedback loop. As any electrical engineer will tell you, positive feedback leads to instability, while negative feedback (conflict driven modes) leads to stable configurations. The positive feedback results in rogue traders engaging in huge unauthorized trades leading to enormous damages or actual collapses like the Bearings bank in 1995.

We can find other instances of reinforcing feedback generating explosive situations in upper management of large corporates. The high level managers, being board members in multiple corporate entities, keep supporting each other’s insane salary expectations, thus creating an unhealthy positive feedback. If the shareholders, on the other hand, decided the salary packages, their own self-interest of minimizing expenses and increasing the dividend (and the implicit conflict) would have generated a more moderate equilibrium.

The rule of conflict is at work at much larger scales as well. In a democracy, political parties often assume conflicting world views and agendas. Their conflict, ratified through the electoral process, ends up reflecting the median popular view, which is the way it should be. It is when their conflicting views become so hopelessly polarized (as they seem to be in the US politics these days) that we need to worry. Even more of a worry would be when one side of the conflict disappears or gets so thoroughly beaten. In an earlier post, I lamented about just that kind of one-sidedness in the idealogical struggle between capitalism and socialism.

Conflicts are not limited to such large settings or to our corporate life and detective stories. The most common conflict is in the work-life balance that all of us struggle with. The issue is simple — we need to work to make a living, and work harder and longer to make a better living. In order to give the best to our loved ones, we put so much into our work that we end up sacrificing our time with the very loved ones we are supposedly working for. Of course, there is a bit of hypocrisy when most workaholics choose work over life — they do it, not so much for their loved ones, but for a glorification, a justification or a validation of their existence. It is an unknown and unseen angst that is driving them. Getting the elusive work-live conflict right often necessitates an appreciation of that angst, and unconventional choices. At times, in order to win, you have to break the rules of the game.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Market Risk Management and Analytics

If you play in the market, you run the risk that it may move against you. This risk is, of course, market risk and we have a Middle Office team to manage it. Market Risk Management (MRM) ensures that the risk limits on the volumes and types of products traded are set in accordance with the risk appetite prescribed by the senior management. It also ensures, through regular processing and monitoring, that these limits are adhered to.

MRM

What is monitored are risk measures such as the Greeks and Value at Risk (VaR). The Greeks are the first and second order derivatives of the price of a security with respect to various market variables such as the price of the underlying, interest rates, volatility as well as trade specific entities like the time to maturity. The VaR is a statistical end point measure estimating the amount of loss at a given confidence level in the case of an adverse market movements, and is typically computed using the historical market movements over the past year or so. These risk measures are aggregated, sliced and diced in various ways to make it easy to monitor them, and reported to senior management, risk control committees, trading desks etc. The MRM team is also responsible for reporting to regulatory agencies, both in the form of regular compliance reports as well as ad hoc reports in response to drastic market moves.

Quants can find opportunities in the Analytics team embedded within MRM. This team is in charge of pricing model validation, which is the process of ensuring that the mathematical models deployed in trading systems and other valuations engines are both appropriate and correctly implemented. There is a significant overlap between the work that MRM analytics quants do and their Front Office counter parts (whom we called pricing or model quants). The Analytics team also takes care of any other quantitative tools needed in MRM or risk management in general. Such tools could include potential future exposures (PFE) for credit risk management, liquidity modelling for Assets and Liability (AML) etc.

Life and Death, Philosophy

Life: East vs. West

In the last post we examined life from the perspective of evolutionary biology. Now let’s move on to philosophy. There is an important philosophical difference between the perspectives on life in the East and the West. These views form the backdrop to the rules of life, which shape everything from our familial and societal patterns to our hopes and prayers. How these rules (which depend on where you come from) do it is not merely interesting, but necessary to appreciate in today’s world of global interactions. In one of his lectures, Yale philosophy professor Shelly Kagan made a remark that the basic stance vis-a-vis life (and death) in the West is that life is a good thing to have; it is a gift. Our job is to fill it with as much happiness, accomplishments and glory as possible.

The Eastern view is just the opposite – the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism is that life is suffering. Hinduism, which gave birth to Buddhism, says things like this world and the cycle of life are very difficult (Iha Samsare Bahu Dustare in Bhaja Govindam, for instance). Our job is to ensure that we don’t get too attached to the illusory things that life has to offer, including happiness. When we pray for our dead, we pray that they be relieved of the cycle of life and death. Deliverance is non-existence.

Of course, I am vastly oversimplifying. (Let me rephrase that — this oversimplified version is all I know. I am very ignorant, but I plan to do something about it very soon.) Viewed in the light of these divergent stances against the conundrum of life, we see why westerners place such a premium on personal happiness and glory, while their eastern counterparts tend to be fatalistic and harp on the virtues of self sacrifice and lack of ambition (or its first cousin, greed).

To an ambitious westerner, any chance at an incremental increase in personal happiness (through a divorce and remarriage, for instance) is too good an opportunity to pass up. On the other side of the globe, to one brought up in the Hindu way of life, happiness is just another illusory manifestation not to be tempted by. Those caught in between these two sets of rules of life may find it all very confusing and ultimately frustrating. That too is a macro level pattern regimented by the micro level rules of the game.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Credit Risk Management

Risk management is a critical function of Middle Office. Credit risk is the risk that somebody who owes you money may not be able or willing to honor their obligation. In other words, they may default on their credit obligation. This risk is managed in a bank using a variety of statistical tools.

Middle Office

When a bank issues you a credit card, it takes on credit risk that you may not pay up. You pay an insanely high interest rate on your outstanding balance precisely because of this credit risk. The risk is not secured. A mortgage or an auto loan, on the other hand, is secured by the equity of your property, and you pay a significantly lower interest because of the collateral.

The Middle Office team of Credit Risk Management (CRM) operates using the same two paradigms. Much the same way as you have a credit limit on your credit card or line of credit, each counterparty that the bank trades with has a certain credit limit based on their credit rating as published by credit rating agencies such as Moody’s or Standard & Poor. The problem with this mode of managing credit risk is that the bank has no way of knowing how much credit is loaded against a counterparty’s rating in other banks. Nor does it have a means of finding out how many credit cards you have. In Singapore, the regulatory authority, MAS, tries to minimize the risk of people going bust be requiring that their credit limit be twice their monthly salary. Bt they may get as many credit cards as they want from different banks against the same limit, effectively nullifying the good intention behind the requirement.

This overloading against credit rating is avoided when the risk is managed using collaterals. Much like you cannot take two mortgage loans on the same property (not without adequate equity, any way), counterparties in trading also cannot use the same collateral for multiple trades. Banks and counterparties typically use bonds as collaterals and physically exchange them during secured transactions.

Before the Front Office trader can enter into a trading agreement with a counterparty, they will need to get approval from the credit controllers who will assess exposures and check them against predefined limits. The exposure assessment uses techniques such as potential future exposure (PFE) based on a large number of simulations of potential future markets.

In addition to the risk of counterparties defaulting during the life time of a trade, CRM professionals worry about the potential for default during the delay in settlement — after the maturity of a trade (where the bank is in the money) and its settlement. This risk is aptly called the settlement risk.

Life and Death, Philosophy

Game of Life

We started this series with chess and then moved on to the socio-political topology of a typical corporate landscape. Both could be understood, in some vague and generous sense, in terms of a simple set of rules. If I managed to convince you of that satement, it is thanks to my writing prowess, rather than the logical cohesion of my argument. I am about to extend that shaky logic to the game of life; and you should be wary. But I can at least promise you a good read.

Okay, with that reservation stated and out of the way, let’s approach the problem systematically. My thesis in this series of posts is that the macro-level patterns of a dynamic system (like a chess game, corporate office, or life itself) can be sort of predicted or understood in terms of the rules of engagement in it. In chess, we saw that general pattern of any game (viz. structured beginning, messy mid-game, clean endgame with a win, lose or draw) is what the rules prescribe. In this last post, we are going to deal with life. In a trivial analogy to chess, we can describe the pattern like this: we are all born somewhere and some point in time, we make our play for a few years, and we bow out with varying amount of grace, regardless of how high we soar and how low we sink during our years. But this pattern, though more rigorously followed than our chess pattern, is a bit too trivial. What are the salient features or patterns of human life that we are trying to understand? Human life is so complex with so many aspects of existence and dimensions of interactions among them that we can only hope to understand a limited projection of a couple of its patterns. Let’s choose the pattern of family units first.

The basic set of rules in human life comes from evolutionary biology. As a famous man put it, nothing in biology (or life itself, I would think) makes sense except in the light of evolution. On the other hand, everything from gender politics to nuclear family units makes perfect sense as the expressions of the genetic commands encoded in our DNA, although we may be stretching the hypothesis to fit the facts (which is always possible to do) when we view it that way. Let’s look at the patterns of gender relations in family units, with the preamble that I am a total believer in gender equality, at least, my own brand of it.

Evolutionary biology tells us that the instruction encoded in our genes is very simple — just live a little longer, which is at the root of our instincts for self preservation and reproduction. In the end, this instruction expresses itself as a man’s hidden antipathy toward monogamy and a woman’s overt defense of its virtues. Although this oft-repeated argument can be seen as a feeble attempt at justifying the errant and philandering behavior of man, it has simplicity on its side. It makes sense. The argument goes like this: in order to ensure the continued survival of his genes, a man has to mate with as many partners as possible, as often as possible. On the other hand, given the long gestation period, a woman optimizes the survival chances of her genes by choosing the best possible specimen as her mate and tying him down for undivided attention and for future use. Monogamy indeed is virtuous from her perspective, but too cruel a rule in a man’s view. To the extent that most of the world has now adopted monogamy and the associated nuclear family system as their preferred patterns, we can say that women have won the gender war. Why else would I feel scared to post this article? Weaker sex, indeed!

Evolutionary biology is only one way of looking at life. Another interesting set of rules comes from spiritual and religious philosophy, which we will look at in the next post.

Corporate Life, Humor, Philosophy, Work and Life

Art of Corporate War

A more complex example of how the rules shape the patterns on the ground is the corporate game. The usual metaphor is to portray employees as cogs in the relentless wheel of the corporate machinery, or as powerless pawns in other people’s power plays. But we can also think of all of them as active players with their own resources engaged in tiny power plays of their own. So they end up with a corporate life full of office politics, smoke and mirrors, and pettiness and backstabbing. When they take these things personally and love or hate their co-workers, they do themselves an injustice, I think. They should realize that all these features are the end result of the rules by which they play the corporate game. The office politics that we see in any modern workspace is the topology expected of the rules of the game.

What are these famous rules I keep harping on? You would expect them to be much more complex that those of a simple chess game, given that you have a large number of players with varying agendas. But I’m a big fan of simplicity and Occam’s Razor as any true scientist should be (which is an oblique and wishful assertion that I am still one, of course), and I believe the rules of the corporate game are surprisingly simple. As far as I can see, there are just two — one is that the career progression opportunities are of a pyramid shape in that it gets progressively more difficult to bubble to the top. The other rule is that at every level, there is a pot of rewards (such as the bonus pool, for instance) that needs to be shared among the co-workers. From these rules, you can easily see that one does better when others do badly. Backstabbing follows naturally.

In order to be a perfect player in this game, you have to do more than backstabbing. You have to develop an honest-to-john faith in your superiority as well. Hypocrisy doesn’t work. I have a colleague who insists that he could do assembly-level programming before he left kindergarten. I don’t think he is lying per-se; he honestly believes that he could, as far as I can tell. Now, this colleague of mine is pretty smart. However, after graduating from an IIT and working at CERN, I’m used to superior intelligences and geniuses. And he ain’t it. But that doesn’t matter; his undying conviction of his own superiority is going to tide him over such minor obstacles as reality checks. I see stock options in his future. If he stabs someone in the back, he does it guiltlessly, almost innocently. It is to that level of virtuosity that you have to aspire, if you want to excel in the corporate game.

Almost every feature of the modern corporate office, from politics to promotions, and backstabbing to bonuses, is a result of the simple rules of the game that we play it by. (Sorry about the weak attempt at the first letter rhyme.) The next expansion of this idea, of course, is the game of life. We all want to win, but ultimately, it is a game where we will all lose, because the game of life is also the game of death.