The Assidity of a Company

Recently, I had the pleasure of realizing that a company's current and future performance may be correlated with the Assidity of the company.

Assidity, NB not Assiduity, means the amount of Ass-hole like behavior exhibited by employees and executives of the company. The behavior does not have to be directed exclusively to internal or external persons.

I've worked at several fortune 500 companies in the recent decade. The assidity of the company increases when the company, either as a collective, or by executive decision, is trying to shed some employees. By increasing assidity of the company, some employees or officiers may elect to leave the company. Typically this happens only in two situations.


a.) the company is running out of money and cannot support it's currently employeed personnel.

b.) the company is doing really well, and the departure of some personnels means more bonus/stocks for those who stay.

It is easy to distinguish the two types of assidity. Type A assidity is typically justified with a long term plan that cancels some projects. Type A assidity can be in the form of "changing directions" in the company's business. Both of these changes may seem to make complete sense, but in reality only affect a selected, identifiable group of employees.

Type B assidity on the other hand will rarely be justified. The company is performing well, so it has the leeway to take risks that it would otherwise not afford to take. Assidity may be applied to a particular lucrative customer. To any passer-by, this type of assidity will seem completely absurd and absolutely irrationaly.

Now, the question that remains, is, as a non-insider, how do we determine the amount and type of assidity a company has. And once we can quantify this measurement, we can apply it to stock price prediction and profit from other people's assidity.