You all love Warren Buffett, right? Would you pay $2.1 million to have lunch with the oracle of Omaha like this Chinese investment manager who decided to pick up the tab by taking part in a high-stakes online charity auction?
Zhao Danyang, 36, will have lunch with the US billionaire at a Smith and Wollensky steakhouse restaurant in New York. He can bring seven friends to enjoy Buffett’s company for, oh, maybe two hours. Three hours max... maybe.
That’s serious pogi points if you like to project a certain image. Now if you just want to be generous and donating millions of dollars to charity is your kind of thing, why not get a lunch with Buffett into the bargain?
Generosity is a curious thing. On the one hand, the world needs more of it. An interesting list of random acts of money kindness in this article have made life a lot more livable for quite a number of people.
I have also said in a previous post that we can’t always expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and that there will be times we will be called to give till it hurts -- and we should.
On the other hand, (and I type this with a mountain of misgivings) sometimes we are too generous for our own good. A friend said she was looking at her credit card bill for June and found that she paid almost P6,500 for restaurant meals. The funny thing is, she could have pared that down to P1,500 if she wasn’t as generous in footing the bill. After all, her lunch mates –- colleagues and friends -- were not exactly welfare cases.
At a Money Makeover dinner with Augustus J.V. Ferreria last December, Bianca* was quick on the draw when the bill came. Oh, the kind-hearted sermon that one brought about! Joe advised all of us to develop the habit of dividing the bill when we dine out with friends and colleagues.
There are many other ways we can be too generous for our own good. In the same vein, there are also many ways people can be ridiculously stingy! Oh boy, I’m sure you know the type.
From a scale of one to ten, ten being the most stupidly generous and one being terribly stingy, where do you stand?
Recently in corporate governance Category
If you knew that a company does business in an ethical way, would you buy more of its shares? Would you do more business with that company? Does good corporate governance translate into shareholder or customer loyalty?
Jesus P. Estanislao, chairman of the Institute for Corporate Directors, thinks so. He says corporate governance is closely linked with performance. He doesn’t have the figures yet. He is still in talks with the University of Asia and the Pacific to do a thorough study on the topic.
During the ICD roundtable last Wednesday, Jess revealed the top 20 listed companies in the 2007 Corporate Governance Scorecard. Here is the list:
Alaska Milk Corp.
Alsons Consolidated Res., Inc.
Asian Terminals, Inc.
Ayala Corp.
Ayala Land Inc.
Bank of the Philippine Island,
First Gen. Corp.
First Philippine Holdings Corp.
Globe Telecom Inc.
Manila Electric Co.
Manila Water Co.
MIC Holdings Corp.,
Panasonic Manufacturing Phils. Corp.
Petron Corp.
Philex Mining Corp.
Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.
San Miguel Corp.
Semirara Mining Corp.
Sun Life Financial Inc.
Read my article here.
It’s going to be a tough thing to prove. But in the post-Enron world, and most recently the Societe Generale, wanting more good governance should be a no-brainer. The problem is, investing and chasing after returns can get the most of the market and put ethics in the backburner – until the next scandal comes along.
Meanwhile, here’s a video of Jess saying that Philippine listed companies’ governance practices are now at par with Asian countries, with the top five already at par with the US. Enjoy.
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