To lighten up my recent spate of posts, I wanted to share a case study about Semco, a Brazilian manufacturing company. Its story is actually not new, and the founder’s son, Richard Semler, wrote a book entitled Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace over a decade ago.

In many ways, Semco represents what many might consider an “ideal” working environment: transparent salaries, a completely flat or non-existent management structure, autonomous working groups, democratic decision-making, etc. Sound a bit anti-capitalistic? Probably the most surprising thing of all is that these radical-sounding ideas have made the company very successful by almost any measure you can choose.

Perhaps part of this is helped somewhat by certain Brazilian employment laws, but I’m sure Semco’s approach could still be easily adapted to other countries. The curious thing is, why aren’t there more examples of companies that run anything like this?

Sadly, we didn’t cover this case in our organizational behavior class when I was at school, but I here’s a short case study about Semco (originally posted free-of-charge at a link at Thunderbird) that’s worth reading or maybe even sharing with others at work. Who knows, maybe someone else out there might be willing to give Semco’s ideas a try!

Flexo just wrote a piece yesterday entitled “Would you travel overseas for cheap surgery?”, and that’s as good an introduction to any for what I’m about to write. Truthfully, I’m not sure I’d be able to answer Flexo’s question without being forced to choose in a real situation.

Having just spent over two weeks in Spain, I had the chance to observe first-hand some of the differences between the Spanish and US healthcare systems. Some of what I observed might be specific to the town or hospital where I was in northwest Spain, and things might operate differently in, say, Madrid, for instance.

Here, in no particular order, are some observations that struck me, from a necessarily American perspective, I’m sure:

Read the rest of this entry »

While I was out of the country, I wasn’t able to follow up on buying T-bills through Treasury direct. Now that I’m back, it seems that recent T-bill yields have taken a slight plummet. As a California resident though, these rates are still attractive in comparison to high-yield savings accounts and rates on CDs because T-bills are exempt from state income tax. For most people in California, including us, that represents a whopping 9.3% of our income.

Assuming a conservative 25% federal tax bracket, even the current 28-day yield of 4.86% APY (September 14, 2006 issue date) gives a tax-equivalent yield of 5.55%, which is higher than what I’m getting in my money market fund, CDs, or what’s being offered in high-yield savings accounts, all of which are subject to state income taxes.

The 6-month T-bill APY of (5.2% unadjusted, 5.94% under the same assumptions above) is even more attractive, and I’ll have to decide by the end of the week if I want to go ahead and put some money in the 182-day auction coming up next Monday, or play a bit more wait-and-see-what-the-Fed-signals before buying in. If you’re interested in learning more, there’s a very helpful and regularly updated thread about treasury bill rates over at Fatwallet.

Just to refresh your memory, the equations for calculating tax-equivalent yields are the following:

If itemizing (deducting) state income taxes from federal income taxes:

I’ve just added a simple javascript-based tax-equivalent yield calculator for non-itemizers under the online calculators section of this site.

So if you live in a state with state income tax, T-bills may still be worth your consideration. I feel I still need to catch up on what’s been happening recently before I can decide on when and what to T-bill to purchase (it’s amazing how being gone 2-3 weeks can throw a wrench into your entire schedule), but I’ll be sure to write updates here on any decisions I make.

Just a quick (but tardy) site update for consistency’s sake: August’s earnings were slightly down overall due to my 3-week post hiatus, though not as much as I expected. (Perhaps I’ve finally reached a certain level of critical mass of useful posts.) Adsense earnings continue to grow, and I received my first Adsense check as well.

Traffic hit a record 6,400 unique visitors last month. I think a lot of that came from stumbleupon, a social bookmarking-type site that Shane Ede of A Penny Saved… (and fellow Problogger group writing project devotee) pointed out to me. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, it’s a free service worth checking out that gives a nice boost to traffic. I’ve found the pages on this site that are the most popular with Google search results also do well there. Once you join, it’s easy to contribute your site, and the nice thing is that you can contribute specific pages (or posts) instead of just your site URL.

As you might recall, last month, I decided to sign up for Fat Pitch Financial’s Contributors Corner to learn and experiment with a different type of value investment called special situations investing, or workouts. For those who don’t know, George (the creator of Fat Pitch Financials) does a tidy job of researching and listing public companies that are soon to undergo mergers, go private, make tender lot offers, and other “special situations” where there’s some money to be made through a paid subscription service of $10 per month or $90 for the year. I decided to sign up for 3-months’ worth to start.

Before I left for Spain, I decided to purchase 499 shares of Advanced Nutraceuticals (ANII.OB, now BTCP.OB) at $3.46 per share. ANII was planning to turn private via a reverse split on September 8, 2006. Under the proposal, any shareholders holding less than 500 shares would automatically receive $4.00 for each share, assuming the proposal was approved.

All this data was conveniently provided on George’s site at the Contributor’s Corner, but I still read through the preliminary filing and proxy to make sure I was comfortable with the purchase. When investing in these situations, it’s important to keep abreast of SEC filings, news, and submissions. In fact, just last week, there was an announcement from the company that put in doubt that the transaction would go through, but information appearing today seems to show that the reverse split will be completed.

Read the rest of this entry »