Living in the bluest of the blue areas, I of course receive regular communiqués from French people. In fact, as a condition of living here, I am required to use a certain quota words like communiqué. Eric passes along the widely reported great news for our good friends at Exxon:

Exxon Mobil Corp. had a quarter for the record books. The world's largest publicly traded oil company said Thursday high oil and natural-gas prices helped its third-quarter profit surge almost 75 percent to $9.92 billion, the largest quarterly profit for a U.S. company ever, and it was the first to ring up more than $100 billion in quarterly sales.

Hats off to them, eh? I think that's just great. What intrigues (more French!) me most is how the press allows them to get away with this logic quarter after quarter. Imagine for a moment I own the world's leading bovine laxative company. Can you imagine me declaring that we had record profits because laxative raw materials cost more than ever? Of course not. If I said laxative raw materials cost the same as usual, but I raised prices for no reason, then yes of course I would make more money. We can read that the price of crude oil has soared, and so the price of refined gas soared. So why does that make Exxon more money? Perhaps those who patriotically poured French wines out on the streets will write to explain it to me. Because so far, we both just seem to be generating more bullshit.

Several unrelated events have sent my mind to ruminating on corporate management. My thoughts converge on a few points. Legal and personal requirements often lead managers into holding too much information too close to the vest. Instead of distilling these limitations into more general guidelines for employees, managers often head in the opposite direction, demanding ever more information from employees in an attempt to make ever more decisions. This invariably fails, in small ways and massive ways. Where managers should focus their data gathering energies is often on the complaints of their teams. Many complaints lack solutions, but the same powers for filtering and generalizing incoming information will serve managers far better by listening for problems to solve. In my young life, I have already seen talent flee complaint-deaf managers at several companies in several cities. Employees, like voters, are not as facile as the rapacious would hope. Repeatedly we see and hear praise for the straight shooter, yet like value investors, no greater numbers ever seem to try to imitate them.