What motivates a personal trainer? Some people love the culture of gyms. But I think personal trainers are often motivated by helping people. For 30 or 60 minutes at a time, they're physically close to a person who, in many cases, wants to feel better about themselves; trainers have the ability to help them get there. You could say that there's no irony between them -- the trainer isn't using a bait-and-switch technique, or attending sessions on how to "sucker in" more clients.

Usually, they're not just acting like, but are being a real person. Pretty simple, really.

Notwithstanding all that, training is normally capitalistic. My friend trains in her clients' homes and drums up work herself. She's an independent business person -- she uses her own capital to buy equipment and promote her company.

The free market is competitive. Though Adam Smith anticipates many features of capitalism -- the minute division of labour chief among them -- the pitting of opponents against one another to produce the best offer (product, price or marketing/placement) for consumers is central to how we view the positive side of the system today.

But within this system is a central irony -- that companies want to profit from their relationship with customers -- certainly from the consumer relationship (the B2B relationship is a bit harder to fudge). Most of the ads I take in make me feel like I'm being lied to; in fact, I think most people of my generation automatically handicap anything they receive via mass distribution, or that doesn't carry a label of authenticity with it.

What is the larger effect of this? I try not to consume media much anymore; just radio and Internet mainly, but few movies or magazines and no TV. But if I, like many people, took in hours of media daily, and if it was all funded by explicit and implicit (embedded) advertising messages, would that not affect how I see the world? The level of trust I generally have.

And would that carry over to my trust of political leaders, or in fact of policies that were genuinely developed in an objective and fair way -- the governance of our nation. Or of personal relationships, or of how I might relate socially in public places, like malls or sidewalks, or while driving in traffic.

I think there's something big about closeness -- I think physical trainers are more likely to develop friendships with clients than to lie to them and use them. What about mid-sized private companies? Are they more authentic than multinationals? And, if so, what is it about multi-nationals that makes then inauthentic? Can a multinational consumer chain be built that cultivates genuine and honest relationships in all points of business (relationships with suppliers and other vendors, creditors, employees/owners, and customers)? What if a group of local, authentic businesses formed a federation -- would it change things? What if that federation adopted a form of central authority -- what then?

I've written before that authenticity is big -- in PR and in business as well as of course in life. But for people who don't perform personal training or public school teaching etc. as a career, it can be difficult to not creep over that line. But that line really, in the long run, is vital personally and in society.

I like France's TGV trains because you can cross the country in a few hours and, if you're travelling between city centres, it often takes less time to travel from a train seat to your destination building than it would from a plane's touchdown to arrive at baggage collection. While these trains cross the French countryside at close to 200 kph, passengers are able to roam the length of them reasonably freely, and can have a hot lunch or sit in a bar stool and read a newspaper. Though many are driven by the desire to arrive quickly at their destination, few are so obsessed that they move to the front of the train to achieve this. In fact, almost anyone on a TGV train would find it irrational for a passenger to deem forward motion within the train as progress toward their destination.

If anything, on a train moving to Lyon from Paris, it may be beneficial to walk toward Paris while being hurtled toward Lyon, because the train station exits may be close to the back of the train in Lyon. It's not really necessary to point this out; most people get it.

But I wonder if in other contexts progress is measured more in terms of moving up and down a train that is otherwise hurtling toward something else at an immeasurably higher vitesse.

General Motors is bankrupt and shedding decades-old brand icons -- not to mention 1/3 of managers -- as it tries to recover from something terrible that happened.

But what exactly happened? Did cars end? How could such a terrible outcome affect an otherwise blessed corporation?

Perhaps the answer can be seen in how progress was measured at GM. Manufactured Obsolescence is one business strategy aimed at stimulating demand by deliberately making your products worse. Stimulated demand could give the appearance of progress, while in fact, anyone who thinks clearly and independently could see that deliberately making your products worse for 40 years would probably not make your company better.

The finance industry -- capital for capital's sake -- similarly engineered highly complex new products that created an illusion of progress. Much of the mortgage industry stepped onto a train clearly marked "Going over a Cliff" and then began to, not just walk but run along the length of this train in a direction marked progress. Funnily enough, this blind march did not stop the train from going over the cliff.

I've written many times about Jane Jacobs. I think the lesson of her life is that an intelligent person who is exceptionally independent of mind or contrarian will find it easy to see that trains marked "Going over a Cliff" will in fact go over a cliff. But, as Warren Buffet says, the elite management class spends much more time looking left and right to see what they should do than thinking for themselves.

No issue has united the left and right like this. A company whose leadership has done nothing but fail for two years; a company whose management is so incompetent that the business -- the world's largest financial institution in 2008 -- would evaporate from the planet if it were not for a $150 billion handout from American taxpayers. 

AIG is an epic icon of failure and immorality, responsible to a serious degree for the greatest economic disaster to affect the world in nearly 80 years.

And yet, the leadership is rewarding itself with $150 million in bonuses.

I think this illustrates a problem with how public markets have altered capitalism. We have ceased to think of AIG's management as "the help," when in fact they are an educated form of just that. Because large public companies usually have no clear owner -- just millions of stockholders -- a vacuum forms at the top and is filled by people who work at the company, but own little or none of it. But we have to remember that capitalism is based on ownership, not management. If it was based on management it would be called something like gilded socialism.

In the realm of private, closely held companies, management is just a more skilled form of a company's labour. Owners of private companies hire people with good track records and perhaps education and demonstrated skills, to achieve certain results using the owner's capital. If they are successful, they will usually be paid well, and may be rewarded with some of the profits or perhaps even with a sliver of the owner's capital itself.

But these private company managers know their place -- they know the owner is not an irrelevant abstraction. The owner is often someone they see in the halls and in meetings every day; or at least is someone who visits the office. They cannot fire the owner but the owner can dismiss them. 

Public companies should be the same. But this vacuum has allowed management to take the role of owner.  

Obama's challenge is to change this perception; to ensure that managers manage and owners decide, among other things, how much managers are to be paid. I fail to understand why this is so difficult in the case of AIG, as Obama's government owns 80 per cent of the firm. Why does Obama not remove AIG's board and appoint a committee representing taxpayers to evaluate the past achievements of AIG's top managers and make decisions about their future ability to create value for the firm. Instead of the loosers controlling the purse strings, they will be purged Once AIG has competent managers and is stabilized, it should be returned to the private sector under a new regime of regulation.

Apart from AIG, we need to understand how this ascension of management occurs, and we need to prevent it. Unless a CEO is like Bill Gates, where s/he owns a large part of the company (ideally a controlling share), all CEOs, CFOs, or SVPs should act as though their "owner" is someone who walks the halls and asks questions about $1,200 trash bins and other things that are difficult to sneak by a private company owner. We need a mechanism to make public companies operate with the kind of attention and passion private company owners bring.