Check Cashing, Pay Day Loans and Banks
In a very interesting article titled "Check Cashers, Redeemed", Douglas McGray writes for the New York Times Sunday Magazine about check cashers, pay day loans and banks.
McCray writes that about how the combined collection of check cashers and pay day lenders have "more outlets, in total, than all the McDonald’s restaurants in the United States plus all the Starbucks coffee shops. Inside, it’s like banking turned upside down. Poor customers are commodities, deposits are irrelevant, bad credit makes for a good loan candidate and recessions can be boom times."
In particular, he looks at Nix Check Cashing, a southern California-based company that was acquired last year for $45 million by one of the country’s largest credit unions, Kinecta.
All over the world people appear to be “rethinking the knowledge network”. The striking thing is that so much is written about how we should do this, so little about how we did it. The wealth of prescriptive information about knowledge management perfectly correlates with the dearth of evaluative insights. What happened when our organisations went through the painful processes of adapting to the new demands of the so-called “information society”? What did we learn?
In this paper I reflect on my own experience as director of a small think tank on European policy management, ECDPM. What I can bring to bear are my lessons learned as a manager interested in the study of knowledge networks (Box 2000). The case study is therefore autobiographical, or subjective. It is not based on empirical verification. It started in a conversation with Kenneth King who urged me to reflect on what I had learned as the manager of organisational change in a small organisation.
I shall argue that organisational adaptation was the strategy, but organisational transformation the outcome. In other words, adaptation is not enough. The organisation had to turn itself “inside out”, and in so doing: outside in. This means that the information networks in the organisation were explicitly linked to the ones outside it: the borderline between in and out became in fact a rather fluid one. For ECDPM this meant: generating an internet co-operative (Euforic) and helping to transform a UK based company into an international network (OneWorld).
This was only possible by turning the organisation “upside down”. Hierarchically the bottom positions in most of our organisations are shared by administrative personnel. In university environments, and international research centres, these generally also include documentalists. I purposely call them so, and not information specialists, because the old term better reflects their position in the professional hierarchies in the early nineties. ECDPM suddenly faced the fact that a documentalist was not available at the management's beg and call, but that he was calling the shots.
Thirdly I shall argue that this does not go without “strain and pain”. Going “virtual” generates harsh realities of conflict in the organisation. Looking back I have sometimes wondered if it has been worth the pain. It is so easy to sing the praise of organisational transformation to join the information society. It is much harder to acknowledge that respected colleagues could not keep up with the new pace and quit the organisation or were forced to do so. The costs and risks of transformation are much higher than is generally acknowledged.
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ALLEN
Payday Cash Advance Loan
Posted by: ALLEN | February 19, 2009 at 10:01 AM