Mostly for the media, but I’m sure it fits many you already know.
20 Years Ago Today, Hurricane Andrew and 175 MPH Winds Bore Down on Florida Like an Atomic Bomb
If you look dead east to the hurricane, you’d find where I lived 20 some odd years ago. It hit like an atomic bomb that make south Florida look like Hiroshima.
It sounded like a freight train all night long. We had a new born and were mighty scared for hours. Fortunately, it moved fast and was over by the next day.
I had to crawl out of a window with a chain saw to cut a tree off of my front door so that we could get out of the house. We were lucky as it was a relatively compact storm and hit only about 40-50 miles south of where our house was. That was the difference between our house standing vs. being a pile of bricks.
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When You Feel Like Slapping Someone Who Needs It
Mostly the media and the double speak of certain candidates….and the double standard of who is held responsible for what.
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Elvis Died On This Day and Madonna Was Bornalso
Not that I care anymore, about any of them.
Also, the Giffords (Kathy and Frank) were born this day.
But the most famous thing is that Elvis died this day in 1977, on the toilet
Here’s a throwback to 1986 – Core Introduces New PC where I was a spokesman for the company…..
Here is a quote that notes I’ll vanquish my foes:
From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business, of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Muslim terrorists, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.
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Rod Stewart – Stay With Me
Whenever I need a pick me up when working out or just riding in the car, this is the song that does it for me. I even blew a speaker to this song when I turned it up too loud. I’m still proud of that.
So if you need a pick me up that is as good as a 5 hour energy, take a listen.
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Milton Friedman Would have been 100, Still One Of The Best Economists Ever
Economists have either followed Friedman or Keynes for Economic Theory over the last century. Keynes is being used currently and you can judge the results for yourself. For me, it does not seem to work, nor has history shown it to have worked for any of the presidents who have based their administration on Keynesian theory anywhere in the world.
I quote one of the best authors of our generation on economics for this article.
If Milton Friedman were alive today — and there was never a time when he was more needed — he would be one hundred years old. He was born on July 31, 1912. But Professor Friedman’s death at age 94 deprived the nation of one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense.
Most people would not be able to understand the complex economic analysis that won him a Nobel Prize, but people with no knowledge of economics had no trouble understanding his popular books like “Free to Choose” or the TV series of the same name.
In being able to express himself at both the highest level of his profession and also at a level that the average person could readily understand, Milton Friedman was like the economist whose theories and persona were most different from his own — John Maynard Keynes.
Like many, if not most, people who became prominent as opponents of the left, Professor Friedman began on the left. Decades later, looking back at a statement of his own from his early years, he said: “The most striking feature of this statement is how thoroughly Keynesian it is.” No one converted Milton Friedman, either in economics or in his views on social policy. His own research, analysis and experience converted him.
As a professor, he did not attempt to convert students to his political views. I made no secret of the fact that I was a Marxist when I was a student in Professor Friedman’s course, but he made no effort to change my views. He once said that anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
I was still a Marxist after taking Professor Friedman’s class. Working as an economist in the government converted me.
What Milton Friedman is best known for as an economist was his opposition to Keynesian economics, which had largely swept the economics profession on both sides of the Atlantic, with the notable exception of the University of Chicago, where Friedman was both trained as a student and later taught.
In the heyday of Keynesian economics, many economists believed that inflationary government policies could reduce unemployment, and early empirical data seemed to support that view. The inference was that the government could make careful trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, and thus “fine tune” the economy.
Milton Friedman challenged this view with both facts and analysis. He showed that the relationship between inflation and unemployment held only in the short run, when the inflation was unexpected. But, after everyone got used to inflation, unemployment could be just as high with high inflation as it had been with low inflation.
When both unemployment and inflation rose at the same time in the 1970s — “stagflation,” as it was called — the idea of the government “fine tuning” the economy faded away. There are still some die-hard Keynesians today who keep insisting that the government’s “stimulus” spending would have worked, if only it was bigger and lasted longer.
This is one of those heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose arguments. Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
Although Milton Friedman became someone regarded as a conservative icon, he considered himself a liberal in the original sense of the word — someone who believes in the liberty of the individual, free of government intrusions. Far from trying to conserve things as they are, he wrote a book titled “Tyranny of the Status Quo.”
Milton Friedman proposed radical changes in policies and institution ranging from the public schools to the Federal Reserve. It is liberals who want to conserve and expand the welfare state.
As a student of Professor Friedman back in 1960, I was struck by two things — his tough grading standards and the fact that he had a black secretary. This was years before affirmative action. People on the left exhibit blacks as mascots. But I never heard Milton Friedman say that he had a black secretary, though she was with him for decades. Both his grading standards and his refusal to try to be politically correct increased my respect for him.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.
He also wrote this:
When both unemployment and inflation rose at the same time in the 1970s —”stagflation,” as it was called — the idea of the government “fine tuning” the economy faded away. There are still some die-hard Keynesians today who keep insisting that the government’s “stimulus” spending would have worked, if only it was bigger and lasted longer.
This is one of those heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose arguments. Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
Although Milton Friedman became someone regarded as a conservative icon, he considered himself a liberal in the original sense of the word — someone who believes in the liberty of the individual, free of government intrusions. Far from trying to conserve things as they are, he wrote a book titled “Tyranny of the Status Quo.”
Milton Friedman proposed radical changes in policies and institutions ranging from the public schools to the Federal Reserve. It is liberals who want to conserve and expand the welfare state.
As a student of Professor Friedman back in 1960, I was struck by two things — his tough grading standards and the fact that he had a black secretary. This was years before affirmative action. People on the left exhibit blacks as mascots. But I never heard Milton Friedman say that he had a black secretary, though she was with him for decades. Both his grading standards and his refusal to try to be politically correct increased my respect for him.
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Will Rogers Gets It Right on Our Government Spending
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Dan Cathy Of Chick-fil-A, A Genuine Person
A true leader who built a business by standing for what he believed in. Now he is being discriminated against by those against discrimination. Hated by those who say they are against hate.
Mr. Cathy goes about the success of Chick-Fil-A and serves, hires and buys from those who say they hate what he believes in. Who is the hypocrite?
UPDATE: Cathy sticks to his guns.
As you can see, he is not picking on any group, rather is giving to what he believes in. Just because you aren’t a politically correct lemming doesn’t make you against something, it is your right to have an opinion. He can run his company the way he so desires. Those who believe otherwise to make a statement by starting their own business and supporting their desired group, rather than trying to change everyone else.
For many months now, Chick-‐fil-‐A’s corporate giving has been mischaracterized. And while our sincere intent has been to remain out of this political and social debate, events from Chicago this week have once again resulted in questions around our giving. For that reason, we want to provide some context and clarity around who we are, what we believe and our priorities in relation to corporate giving.
A part of our corporate commitment is to be responsible stewards of all that God has entrusted to us. Because of this commitment, Chick-‐fil-‐A’s giving heritage is focused on programs that educate youth, strengthen families and enrich marriages, and support communities. We will continue to focus our giving in those areas. Our intent is not to support political or social agendas.
As we have stated, the Chick-‐fil-‐A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect – regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender. We will continue this tradition in the over 1,600 restaurants run by independent Owner/Operators.
Political correctness has made us a nation tolerant only of “one-legged opinions,” a friend of mine recently observed. We take a stand on a hot issue, but only on one leg at a time, shifting when necessary so as not to offend the beliefs of others—but never standing solidly on two feet.
Like a modern day parable, the story of a lone, courageous businessman has taught us what it means to be guided by truth, rather than political fad.
Dan Cathy is the Chief Operating Officer of Chick-fil-A, a privately owned chain of quick service restaurants with annual sales of $4 billion. The company is ranked the 10th fastest growing retailer in the country, although Chick-fil-A restaurants close their doors every Sunday, the best sales day of the week for those in this business sector.
Cathy recently expressed his belief that marriage is the union of a man and…
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Gun Control and Our Constitutional Rights, Once Politicians Get Their Foot In the Door…It is the Beginning of the End of Our Rights
My deepest sympathy goes out to the families in Colorado. The killer was an idiot, but if we didn’t have guns he would have found another way to do what he did. He was evil and had his mind made up already. I am not afraid to call evil what it is and history shows they will do what they do with whatever tool they can find. People blow themselves up in the middle east which he may have done the same thing last week. Booby trapping his apartment showed he thought he was going to die anyway.
THE POINT OF THIS POST
What galls me is the politicizing of this tragedy by some who have an agenda. I do not wish to get into left vs. right on this discussion as it is about protecting our constitutional rights. Once they take one away, they can take any or all of them with precedent
I disagree with Mayor Bloomberg, Attorney General Holder, and those who are using this event in order to get rid of our 2nd amendment rights, and we know who they all are. Here are some sentiments from others who agree on the T shirt below. The box is the IQ level of those who think gun control works and would have stopped this madman. Even the UN is trying to take away our right to bear arms.
Steve Chapman discusses it further here:
When someone is ill or anxious to avoid illness, he may be open to any possible treatments. That’s why quack remedies, untested formulas and obvious placebos often find takers. When a mass shooting occurs, the urge to find a cure is powerful. As a rule, though, those that emerge are sugar pills.
A nation with very few guns, exceedingly tight firearms restrictions and little interest in such weaponry would not experience these atrocities as often as ours does. But in a society with hundreds of millions of guns and huge demand for them, as well as high rates of violent crime of all sorts, the challenge borders on the insurmountable.
The tactics of the alleged killer in this case serve gun control supporters as a roadmap to what should be done. He had an AR-15 “assault weapon,” proving we should prohibit these guns. He had a magazine that can hold 100 cartridges, dramatizing the need to restrict magazine capacity. He bought some 6,000 rounds over the Internet, suggesting that the government should outlaw large purchases or monitor anyone who makes them.
All these conclusions sound perfectly plausible. And none of them offers any prospect of averting the next massacre.
Take the danger posed by “assault weapons.” It turns out the one recovered in Aurora, Colo., might have been illegal under the federal ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., calls for reviving that law on the ground that “these are weapons that you are only going to be using to kill a lot of people in close combat.”
What she and many others don’t realize is that “assault weapons” are functionally indistinguishable from ordinary semi-automatic hunting rifles. They don’t fire more rapidly, they don’t deliver more lethal rounds, and they don’t “spray” bullets. They only look like military arms.
The features that disqualified a gun under the federal ban were ones that didn’t affect destructiveness, such as pistol grips and bayonet mounts. If accused killer James Holmes had been prevented from buying this gun, he could have found plenty of others that would have served his purpose just as well.
Almost everyone who buys an AR-15 uses it to hunt small game or perforate targets. The number of customers who obtain guns like this only “to kill a lot of people in close combat” is just slightly above zero — a market that would be far too small to induce a company to make them.
Holmes reportedly equipped his rifle with a 100-round magazine — compared to the maximum of 10 allowed under the old federal law. But limiting magazine size would most likely be an exercise in futility.
In the first place, a halfway competent shooter can quickly replace an empty magazine with a fresh one, or else switch to another gun. (Holmes allegedly used three and had a fourth.)
The brief interruption a killer needs for reloading is helpful only if someone can seize the moment to subdue him — something more common in movies than in real life. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck says he knows of only one mass shooting in which that happened, in 1993. In the 2011 Tucson shooting, the suspect was overcome when his gun jammed after he reloaded.
Tracking anyone who makes large ammunition purchases? David Kopel, research director at the free-market Independence Institute in Denver, points out that more than a billion rounds are sold each year in the United States — many of them in bulk by target shooters who burn through hundreds or thousands every month.
If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were to investigate each of these buyers, it would have little time to do anything else. And it would probably catch no criminals, since they would buy in smaller lots to avoid detection.
Besides, most of the rounds that Holmes allegedly bought lay idle. The quantity of ammunition he is said to have used could have been obtained in a few purchases that would set off no alarms. The rest of his fearsome stockpile had no bearing on the outcome.
Ideas like these are proposed anytime a mass shooting takes place but lately, at least, never go anywhere. Supporters take that as proof of the vast, unhealthy influence of the National Rifle Association. But it could be Americans just have no appetite for soluti
ons that don’t solve.
How well did that work out for those countries? Bad guys have guns and if we take them away from those who are responsible and will defend others, the bad guys have already won. History has proven that.
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How Not to Succeed At A Job Fair
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Having A Bad Day? It Could Be Worse
When you think you’ve got it bad…..be thankful because you could be just one step away from it being worse.
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Why the 2nd Amendment Matters – By the Japanese Leader of the Pearl Harbor Attack
This was from the guy that was the architect of Pearl Harbor. He was educated in the US and understood the 2nd Amendment better than the anti-gun activists do today.
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HOW COMPUTERS ARE MADE
One of the Problems With Big Companies is Their Middle Management
There has been a dearth of articles about middle management issues with big companies recently. Vanity Fair had a great article about how stacked performance reviews has killed innovation at Microsoft, but it really described the problems with most big companies. The irony was that it pointed out how Microsoft made fun of IBM, yet Microsoft had now repeated the same mistakes they IBM has suffered from for years.
Additionally, not to exonerate any big company, all of which have middle management problems, many also have stacked performance reviews which clearly has caused a big morale problem at companies I worked for which is also documented in the article at Microsoft. From what I’ve heard from my associates around RTP, most of the companies (with the exception of NetApp) including but not limited to IBM, , Lenovo, and many others use this type of employee rating. See Stacked Performance reviews below for a further discussion.
FIRST LINE MANAGERS, ONE OF THE WORST JOBS
When I worked as a plumber, they told me I only had to know 3 things to be qualified. They were; 1) payday is Friday, 2) $h!t flows downhill and 3) the boss is an a$$h0le. This is basically true in a lot of jobs. The first line manager has to usually do their regular job, plus be a people manager for which most aren’t trained for and most are not good at. They have extra work for the same pay just on the promise that they would get ahead, which almost none do. It may finally pay off for some, but only when they reached VP or higher. Directors have to take it from the VP’s, but at least can delegate the crummy work to the first line managers.
The reason this job is such a loser is that while you have to deal with the day to day issues, in this economy your managerial duties are to basically give bad news that there are little to no raises, people are being laid off so be happy you’re still working….also that there won’t be any bonuses this year. I watched these managers get dumped on by their next level of management as they had to do the dirty work (some then got laid off just after they let others go). Very few made it past this level of management as there just are so may executive jobs available, and there are many vying for those positions. Plumbers rule numbers 2 and 3 apply here.
Here is an excerpt from Forbes which describes the problem with middle management.
I watched this phenomenon also ruin morale at my last company and David Williams nails some points starting here:
In my opinion, a company needs leaders—not managers.
What does that a leader look like? We start with two of our 7 Non Negotiables of leadership—we Trust and then we Empower. You know how leaders will typically say “I empower my people”—and then they don’t? The tendency is all too common. (This happened in my last job before I retired. I was told by my then manager to be more independent, but I had to run everything by my him before I did anything, and trusted the opinion of a new hire over my review of a meeting that said new hire didn’t attend…talk about lack of trust and sending mixed messages to your employees).
The minute there’s a mistake it’s like a rope around your neck that snatches back—you either get your head taken off, or you get yanked back so hard the natural reaction is to hunker down and become “less” instead of growing to “more.”
With my own paired leadership partner, Fishbowl president Mary Michelle Scott, we start at the top of the company with a holistic, high altitude view of what we want to achieve. Then we bring in the department captains (there are 3 pairs) and say, “This is what we’re thinking. We think it’s time to open up Canada, the UK and South Africa.”
We give that big piece of meat to the captains. They chew on it for a while and come back with either 1) they don’t like it (generally coupled with a counter proposal), or 2) the multiple ways they see to go about achieving the goal. The captains are leaders who play a core role in the strategy’s formation. Then they run the day-to-day deployment of the strategy that’s been jointly created and set.
Yes, there’s a fine line between leadership and management—but there’s a massive difference as well, I maintain. Our approach makes the groups and leaders autonomous, but also interdependent. They are bright. All voices are heard. We decide on the “best” idea, no matter who originates it, and most of the time, we actually forget who brings the idea forward. Nobody worries about “the glory” because all will benefit as a team (my compensation strategy is here.) They come up with better answers than we could ever hope to achieve on our own.
(Editors note here: My view as the author of this blog is not everyone is cut out to be a manager. There are a lot who think that it is their career path or a way to get ahead, but that doesn’t make them qualified. I had a few managers who just were not people persons. Some middle managers held success against the top achievers when they out-performed the manager, or couldn’t handle the fact that some made more than others including the manager. They shouldn’t have let this guide their decisions, but they did. People like this shouldn’t have been allowed to be managers. This guy also used age discrimination while at IBM to get rid of a competent worker, Bill Gesick and wouldn’t re-hire Sid Baker, a veteran coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Further, this person whom his employees named Mr. Feckless bragged that he tried to get rid of me (because I (made more money that he did) as well as bragged at how he gave no extra pay to others, which everyone promptly told me about. I just tried to consistently do good job and was always more successful than he was with work. An example is this success story which I kept him out of on purpose so he couldn’t ruin it. It was how I had to deal with him as did his peer managers as well as his boss (who later told me he wanted to get rid of him and would have had the company not been sold to Lenovo). It is a clear case of a person that should have had a staff job.
Why leaders hear too many questions? – From The Leadership Freak
You’ve delegated tasks rather than results, vision, and resources. Delegating tasks is too granular and suggests your need for granular involvement. Delegating tasks causes others to focus on tasks. Delegating vision along with resources frees good people to make decisions on their own.
You may hear too many questions because you don’t have clear processes and procedures. People ask too many questions when they aren’t sure what’s next. Establishing processes and procedures for repeated activities frees both leaders and employees.
On the other hand: The best leaders/managers I worked for had the following trait.
The captains don’t “manage” every day. They have just one meeting as captains per week. That meeting determines the deployment of strategy. We hand off to the captains—then they hand off to the teams, who hand off to the individuals who deploy day to day, and then they get out-of-the-way (as they resume their own production roles, side by side with their teams.)
Here is some advice on how to manage properly if most would take it.
Yes, there are some management components. But we try to stay away from the temptation to micromanage, which makes people so fearful of making a mistake, they feel they don’t dare to create something courageous. (Note: This happened with another manager who said she wanted each of us to take charge, but just couldn’t leave our work alone until we wound up having to do it as if we were her. This made it very hard for our team as we all had different styles… none of them matched with the manager. This of course killed our creativity and morale as we had to try to do things in the style as if we were her, all the while knowing that we knew how to do our jobs better and knew our area’s deeper. The micro-management ruined our chances to succeed as well as our motivation). We had to report every detail constantly making each task taking five times longer with way more revisions than it could have taken. She was one of the last managers I had, and certainly not a leader
.
Conversely, the manager I had before her gave me the freedom to succeed by macro managing and encouraged me to try my own ideas which drove me to want to give it everything I have. This fueled my creative juices including starting this blog and joining twitter. I also wanted to help others learn social media, something the following manager didn’t support except by hiring a noob who turned out to be a loafer to basically handle tweet wrap ups.
The link above best describes how to do it this way:
Some managers fear empowering team members because a more powerful team might take some action or a make a decision that the manager would not have made. But you can’t over-control your teams. It’s the responsibility of a manager to know what’s going on but not to micro-manage.
It’s best if you can pick your own team and hire motivated workers who will inspire and enthuse other team members.
That 2nd manager of our Cross Brand team thought that she owned the ability to communicate and this just made it hard for us to get our jobs done. The employees grouped together for self preservation.
The Leadership Freak comments appropriately here:
You may hear too many questions because you’re a control freak (see my micro-manager above). Your people are paralyzed by your need to know, control, and direct details. On a personal note, I don’t think of myself as a control freak, but I am. I mention that because you may not see your freakishness. In my opinion, leaders tend to be control freaks. Don’t toss this possibility aside without thinking it over.
You may hear too many questions because your people lack experience or need training.
You may hear too many questions because you punish rather than learn from mistake makers. Begin honoring both the lessons learned from and the persons with the courage to make mistakes. Obviously, mistakes from negligence, insubordination, or sabotage shouldn’t be honored.
Not all questions are good questions. Some questions indicate poor leadership. Are you hearing too many questions?
ANOTHER MANAGEMENT ISSUE: HOW STACKED PERFORMANCE REVIEWS ARE KILLING INNOVATION
Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
Blog Editors note: At my last company, we also had to compete against equal employee “bands” (level of experience commensurate with pay and responsibility) across the company. This was especially unfair for remote employees as those in the home office of New York had access to the management and knew the strategy well before it was disseminated.
TELECOMMUTERS ARE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST
The millions of Americans who are skipping out on the daily commute may also be losing out on a promotion.
These so-called ‘telecommuters’ are less likely to receive positive performance reviews from superiors than their colleagues who show up in the office, a new study by MIT Sloan Management Review shows.
The report chalks up much of the discrepancy to managerial subjectivity. Managers are less likely to be comfortable with a worker they don’t actually see on a regular basis. In fact, they may become more irritated with someone who they perceive isn’t available at all times. Telecommuting employees are also less likely to reap the benefits of showing up early and leaving work late than their commuting coworkers.
Advances in internet technology have allowed for telecommuting to become more widespread. About 20 percent of workers worldwide report that they telecommute, while 10 percent report that they work from home on a regular basis, according to a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll. That same poll found that 34 percent of workers, when asked, stated that they would telecommute on a regular basis if they could.
But according to some critics, telecommuting creates cause for concern. For instance, telecommuting could prevent workers from being able to fully understand what their managers ask of them, according to PC World. That’s because non-verbal facial expressions are an important component of the workplace that telecommuting, which often takes place over instant messaging or phone, doesn’t allow.
This definitely happened at my last job even though they claimed it was not true. If you did not work in NY (it was an old boys club with both men and women), you didn’t stand a chance for promotion unless you were in the High Potential (HyPo) group, which means you were destined for NY eventually. What was almost funny was that some of the senior management even made fun of those not in NY as if we had a lower IQ. In fact, we knew we could do the same job for 30% less cost of living and didn’t have to go to NY, we just knew that we would only go so far unless we moved there.
I’ve had managers who didn’t trust you if you weren’t there. He projected his own lack of work ethic at home on the team. Each of us were mature responsible workers, except for the middle manager.
One of my favorite worst management lines ever was on the first day of a new job, the manager said to me, “I’m too busy with my new job, you are on your own to figure out how to do your job”. He since has been demoted to a staff job after not succeeding at another company and came back to IBM.
16 THINGS SUCCESSFUL LEADERS NEVER DO – BY LEADERSHIP FREAK
Not doing is one side of finding success.
- Never let the bottom line be the bottom line.
- Never pretend things are ok when they aren’t.
- Never let what you’ve never done be the reason not to try.
- Never get ahead by resenting those who get ahead. – My former boss Ray G.
- Never let those who aren’t doing something prevent you for doing something.
- Never do on the road what you wouldn’t do at home.
- Never trust anyone who never admits mistakes.
- Never achieve greatness through negativity.
- Never pretend you can do what you can’t.
- Never let others fail before doing everything appropriate to help them succeed.
- “An executive has never suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.” Peter Drucker
- Never find wisdom in excuses, defensiveness, or blame.
- Never think of loyalty as a gift.
- Never waffle when it comes to taking responsibility.
- Never waver when it comes to giving credit.
- Never make excuses. “Never make excuses. Your friends don’t need them and your foes won’t believe them.” JohnWooden
Bonus: Never create the future by recreating the past.
CONCLUSION
We can’t get away from having middle management, but companies need to vet who they let be in that position via a better method. They should also give them better training and most of all, realistically set their expectations of the chances of moving up. If they did this, it would weed out those who are only doing the job to move up or to get paid more. Most however, are doomed to stay there and live with plumbers rules numbers 2 and 3.
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Does Telecommunting or Working At Home Hurt Your Career?
A new study suggests workers are judged harshly for not showing up at the office. Despite advances in teleworking, smartphones, and Skype, face time, it seems, really does matter.
- Getty Images
- Working from home might not work for you.
Professors, Kimberly Elsbach of the University of California, Davis, and Daniel Cable of London Business School, looked at perceptions of employees’ performance based on whether they were in the office or not. The research measured “passive face time,” which is simply time spent in the office, regardless of whether the staffer is working hard or not.
The results aren’t pretty for employees who would rather work remotely, according to an article Elsbach and Cable wrote in MIT Sloan Management Review.
Workers who are seen at their desks during regular work hours are considered “responsible” and “dependable,” they wrote: “Just being seen at work, without any information about what you’re actually doing, leads people to think more highly of you.”
Work longer hours — early, late, or on weekends — and “rather than just being considered dependable, you can get upgraded to ‘committed’ and ‘dedicated,’” according to the article, which referenced a paper Elsbach and Cable published in the academic journal Human Relations.
Bosses, and peers, often don’t realize they’re forming views of workers’ competence based on whether they’re at their desk, Cable said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“Without us knowing it, we are creating these assumptions about people based on physical presence,” he said. This isn’t just a perception. Bosses’ vague feelings that a worker does a better job can be seen on employee evaluations, especially when they’re encouraged to make subjective calls in performance reviews.
That leads to pay, promotion, and career-trajectory decisions. Cable estimates that more than 60% of companies are still using “1950s-style” evaluations that prioritize such subjective write-ups over hard data on sales wins, customer satisfaction, or other measures of the employee’s business performance.
So what can employees do to counter this pigeonholing, especially those who want to work from home?
If working long hours from the office isn’t an option, employees might consider sending emails early in the morning or late at night, to prove they are on the job at all times. They might also try using their time in the office to build strong connections to co-workers and superiors, like going to lunch with people or organizing in-person meetings?
Meanwhile, managers should be aware that they may be discounting remote workers’ contributions, albeit subconsciously. (Or, they may be monitoring their home-based workers, as The Journal’s Sue Shellenbarger writes.)
“The bottom line is that employees should be wary of work arrangements that reduce their office face time, and supervisors should be wary of using trait-based performance measures, especially when evaluating remote workers,” the article said. “Finally, employees working remotely need to make sure they are evaluated on objective outputs. Barring that, you might consider sending an e-mail to your boss tonight . . . say, around midnight.”
YOU ARE LESS LIKELY TO BE PROMOTED ALSO
According to an MIT study by the Sloan Management Review, you are less likely to get ahead:
The millions of Americans who are skipping out on the daily commute may also be losing out on a promotion.
These so-called ‘telecommuters’ are less likely to receive positive performance reviews from superiors than their colleagues who show up in the office, a new study by MIT Sloan Management Review shows.
The report chalks up much of the discrepancy to managerial subjectivity. Managers are less likely to be comfortable with a worker they don’t actually see on a regular basis. In fact, they may become more irritated with someone who they perceive isn’t available at all times. Telecommuting employees are also less likely to reap the benefits of showing up early and leaving work late than their commuting coworkers.
Advances in Internet technology have allowed for telecommuting to become more widespread. About 20 percent of workers worldwide report that they telecommute, while 10 percent report that they work from home on a regular basis, according to a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll. That same poll found that 34 percent of workers, when asked, stated that they would telecommute on a regular basis if they could.
But according to some critics, telecommuting creates cause for concern. For instance, telecommuting could prevent workers from being able to fully understand what their managers ask of them, according to PCWorld. That’s because non-verbal facial expressions are an important component of the workplace that telecommuting, which often takes place over instant messaging or phone, doesn’t allow.
But this doesn’t excuse managers from giving otherwise stellar employees poor reviews just because they telecommute, Daniel Cable of London Business School and co-author of the MIT Sloan report told The Wall Street Journal. Approximately 60 percent of firms still use highly subjective employee review standards that prioritize manager write-ups over hard data, Cable told WSJ. This often results in managers promoting sub par employees over superior candidates that telecommute.
STACKED REVIEWS
Most corporations are using stacked reviews. This obviously pits employees against each other rather than trying to beat the competition. Stay at home employees are working at a disadvantage here as the in office workers can brown nose their way to places that home workers can’t. Here’s how it works.
Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE, BAD OFFICE MEMO OF THE YEAR
At IBM, if you don’t go to New York, you don’t get ahead. That is where the club is. The current Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications said that Raleigh was “Smallville with no chance of going anyone going anywhere if you stay here” at a town-hall meeting with all the communications folks in attendance. Jaws were dropping all over the floor and it was the topic of conversation for days. This was after he gave a speech that was supposed to be about communications careers, but was just an obviously recycled presentation that had been given to a different audience about EPS. Everyone saw through it and no one got why he came to un”motivate” the troops. IBM’s current vice president of external relations publicly made fun of the south as if NY was the mecca of IQ on a global call of all Comms folks. Everyone mentioned how short sighted this was and what a limited view of what different populations worldwide had to offer (there were multiple IM sessions going on around the world on this clear example of prejudice and ego centrism). Despite their high salaries, we are the smart ones spending more time with our kids and paying over 30% less in cost of living. Plus we don’t have to live in New York and work with them especially since this guy yells and cusses you out way more than HR should allow.
I personally turned down 2 offers to move to NY to get ahead. I’d been there many times and knew the unofficial rules that you had to be there to get anywhere. I didn’t want to raise my kids there and my family was more important to me than a job. Because of that, I was labeled someone who didn’t want to climb the ladder which was fine by me, so I worked in the pack and was passed over for promotions after that. My family is much better off having grown up where we wanted to live and I don’t regret it a minute. My kids are killing the NY public school kids at college. Plus, I would never send them to a den of socialism like Columbia or any other schools up there. I need them to get a real education.
But the fact remains, you run a severe risk of not getting ahead if you don’t show up at the office. Many will be able come up with some successful work at home employee story, but only to a certain level…. then you have to be in their face at the office. Either way, it is expected that you’ll check into work at all hours of the night and weekends anyway.
There was one manager in a group I worked for that sent out a “rules of the road” memo (bad office memo of the year) that said if you weren’t working in the office, you weren’t considered really working. Talk about generating trust on your team! He was viewed by his peers as the worst manager of the entire group, I was just lucky to have had the experience of working with him.
OFFICE COOLER TALK
You do miss out on hall meetings that allow you to find out things home workers miss. It allows you to get ahead of the telecommuters on the first news or get into the executives office at a moments notice. That is a drawback, but not enough to call me in. When they sold the building I was working in and asked who wanted to be a home worker, my hand was up faster than Arnold Horshack to get out of there.
The flip side is you have to hear all the office gossip which I was glad to miss. It is too distracting and usually it is never good about anyone, only what they are doing wrong, who is sleeping with whom or what some are getting away with.
Some people need the social interaction and have to be in the office for people contact. I’m perfectly happy to miss that as most of it is idle banter that takes away from productivity. I also don’t miss the hour commute.
Overall, I wouldn’t trade the home office for a cubicle anywhere, anytime. Being at home has more perks.
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Happy Birthday to My Dog
It is now a year later and my dog is 12 today. The average lifespan of Boxer according to my vet is “around” 8-10 years, so I’m living on borrowed time.
I named her after the dog in Jonny Quest because she had a black face like the dog in the cartoon.
Since I’ve worked at home the whole time we’ve had her, she has been my day pal. Now that my son has gone off to college, she is definitely my dog and I’m very attached to her.
Recently, I watched Marley and Me and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. Fortunately, she is still full of energy and looks like she’ll be around for a while.
I’ve posted about her over 
the years, some of them being the most read entries I’ve written.
After the story of Shoep and John here is the link I am especially sensitive to her longevity and day to day life. She has had cancer surgery and still has the energy to love my family, although she is especially attached to me. It is mutual.
Here are some of the best of links:
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July 4th 2012, Top Posts Round-up
First of all if you read the dates on the gravestone, Happy Birthday Mom.
So it’s Independence Day, declared in 1776 from the rest of the World. The USA has in its short life (compared with other countries) given more to others in benevolence, freed and saved more people, helped former enemies to recover, sacrificed more than others and established a new way of running a country other than a Monarchy. Unlike the Monarchy’s around the world, the land wasn’t taken from others in a border dispute war or outright takeover like those we declared freedom from….. and has contributed more development, medicine and technology than most other countries combined. So why are our leaders trying to run it in a way that has failed?
Ronald Reagan said, “The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.”
Most of this is a blessing from our Creator, mentioned in all the documents of the Founding Fathers, yet the government of today is trying to leave that model and get back to the type of behavior we declared independence from. Why?
First, let’s start off with the Star Spangled Banner.
Here is a round-up of the best posts for today.
Michelle Malkin – Happy 236th Birthday
John Ransom – Washington’s First Fourth
America joining the One World Crappola from the Daily Kos instead of celebrating why we are different (see our Judeo-Christian history) I tried finding something patriotic just for fairness, but it’s just a different world view I guess
America Haters from the Usual sources, Hollywierd
The other America Haters – The Media
Paul Greenberg – The American Idea
Rasmussen poll – Liberty and Justice for all
Speaker Boehner’s Independence Day Tribute: “Here’s to the Spirit of ‘76”
Joshpundit – America’s Birthday Edition (lots of links here)
Robert Samuelson – Love of Country 2012
Fleming: What Life Was Like in 1776
For levity, The Hot Dog eating contest where an American is the favorite
Finally, here is the Declaration of Independence, from tyranny and taxes. Have we come full circle?
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long-established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:
Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton
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9 Things Successful People Do Differently
Some people are better than others for certain reasons. Some are more political, better trained, work harder and so forth. I read this and it is a good summary of how to be more successful.
Via the Havard Business Review:
1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. “Lose 5 pounds” is a better goal than “lose some weight,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you’ll “eat less” or “sleep more” is too vague — be clear and precise. “I’ll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights” leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you’ve actually done it.
2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it’s not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.
To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., “If it’s Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I’ll work out for 30 minutes before work.”) Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.
3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.
4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.
5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won’t improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.
Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.
6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The good news is, if you aren’t particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don’t have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking …. well, there’s no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.
7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control “muscle” is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn’t get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.
To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you’d honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don’t. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur (“If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.”) It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that’s the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.
8. Don’t tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it’s important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don’t try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don’t put yourself in harm’s way — many people are overly confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.
9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., “Don’t think about white bears!”) has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.
If you want to change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like “If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down.” By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.
It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently, you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along. Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you, and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don’t need to become a different person to become a more successful one. It’s never what you are, but what you do.
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist, and author of the new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). She is also an expert blogger on motivation and leadership for Fast Company and Psychology Today. Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson
Heidi Grant Halvorson
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist and author of the HBR Single Nine Things Successful People Do Differently and the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Dr. Halvorson is available for speaking and training. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson.
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WORKING WITH THE COMPETITION ON A JOINT ANNOUNCEMENT – What went on behind the scenes with Microsoft, IBM and Intel
I wrote a while back about doing a joint announcement with a competitor. Communications wise, it was from the standpoint of Analyst Relations. Since I also did Public Relations for many years, I had the opportunity to lead an announcement with Microsoft and Intel.
CODE NAME FIRESTORM
Recently I came across a press release that I had coordinated on behalf of the Netfinity Server (System X now, update: It has been sold to Lenovo) with Microsoft and Intel in the early 2000’s. In reality, all the work was done between Waggener Edstrom for Microsoft and me for IBM. All other parties weren’t interested enough to contribute as long as their name and content was in the release. It was done to best Oracle in the TPC-C benchmark category (there are multiple TPC benchmarks but this one worked for effect). While the machines pale in comparison to recent server announcements, it was quite an achievement in 2001 terms. The code name internally at IBM was Firestorm and had the high priority and secrecy of a CIA mission with me having to sign a non disclosure agreement that expired on announcement day just to know about it.
HOW IT WAS RUN
We had weekly internal meetings to cover the progress as what was at stake was having DB2 exceed Oracle in database transactions, basically one-upmanship in a bake-off. I coordinated it for IBM even though there was a Software Division product at stake. Since it was run on an IBM server, that established what the importance to the company was and to this day servers are still a critical product to the company (you can’t run software or have services without one). I told the then PR manager for DB2 Lori Bosio, that I would run it for them as they didn’t have much involvement in the benchmark testing (their PR group didn’t even know about it during the testing) so it was cleaner this way. She was a Karen and bossy, then turned out to be a back stabber so my instincts were right. It was already going to be hard enough to work with multiple companies which turned out to be true, so this kept the cooks out of the kitchen. Moving her out of the announcement was vital to being able to get anything done at IBM.
If you recall, there was bad blood between Microsoft and the IBM PC group since the beginning of the PC era (which Netfinity was a part of, until PC’s were sold to Lenovo). It was apparent from the start to the end of this process. I had to also keep the GM of Netfinity, John Callies out of the process as he was a useless suit whose ego commanded his actions which weren’t always good for the division. The GM of the overall PC Group was also hopeless (see the letter below) so I ran the process and kept the ego maniac suit and the helpless suit from ruining things. They were part of the old IBM who got their jobs through working the system rather than competence. It is part of executive ego managing, a tool that everyone needs to know when dealing with executives.
The other PR teams jointly listed in the release didn’t have the spirit of the announcement as their focus, rather it felt like we were in the cold war. This happened even though IBM did all the work (it was built and conducted by IBM technicians, then independently verified by the TPC committee) and handed to the other companies as a freebie. Back then, Microsoft then had the clout of IBM PR during the System 360 and initial PC days when they were king of the hill and could (and did) throw their weight around.
THE PRESS RELEASE BATTLE
As I recall, there were over 30 revisions of the press release before we got to the final (below). It seemed as though every word was contested. This is how it went; I’d send a press release draft around which had the details giving all parties credit and explaining the products and process. A few days later I’d get back a draft which talked about Microsoft with relatively little mention of the process or an understanding of why the benchmark mattered to database users. It was a combination of elbowing IBM out-of-the-way to get headlines and a general lack of understanding of what we were announcing. Intel went along with us as they were confident in our ability to make a successful announcement.
The negotiations went on for about 3-4 weeks prior to the announcement until 2 days before the big day. We couldn’t agree to the verbiage and finally Wag-Ed suggested that we just each write our own press release. While I disagreed with this strategy, we actually agreed to it just to make the deadline and got it approved by the IBM executives. I didn’t want to do it as this inherently would present problems like why are there 2 separate releases if the companies are working together? However, since I knew the reporters I knew I was going to tell them the background off the record. I fully understood that a press release is merely a place holder and a conversation starter. No self respecting reporter would use someone else’s words if they were worth their salt. Only the companies really care what it says.
THE RESOLUTION
The announcement was to be made on a Monday which we could agree on for effect (good PR tactics in those days, especially with IBM/Microsoft/Intel vs. Oracle in the headlines). Our final joint call occurred the Friday before the announcement and was attended by PR teams, spokesmen and company executives (note this was the first time I recall an actual Microsoft executive on these calls). It was on this call that a Senior VP from Microsoft (who reported to Ballmer and Gates) stated through his heavy French accent that having two press releases was a stew-peed idea and which idiot suggested it (I agreed with him). I pointed out that it was Microsoft’s idea which we accommodated. I’ve rarely heard such a gasp of silence as all parties realized what was going on. They quickly agreed to do a joint release and we cobbled together what to me was a very neutral (and useless) document. I silently was grateful that he asked this question that I’d pondered the whole time I dealt with this crew. By then, I was glad to have excluded any other IBM PR groups like Lori because for every person, it adds more than one layer of unnecessary work. I was fed up with Microsoft, Wag-Ed and the whole announcement. The real work was yet to come.
I had known the whole time that this was a press release wording struggle and the real work was going to be done in the one on one’s with reporters after the press release hit the wires. I also was informed that Microsoft was only going to speak with a couple of magazines they viewed as their buddies. I agreed and kept quiet as I knew that this left the door open for us to lead the announcement. One has to have one’s priorities in focus and getting proper coverage was mine. I knew the reporters they wanted to talk to and they wrote my story and told me they didn’t like how pushy the W-E PR team was. See the part about relationships.
It is important to note that a press release is merely a document to get an interview except when a wire service will run it early hours to beat a deadline. It is the relationship that the PR person has with the reporters that is the key to getting results. It didn’t hurt that so many big names were seemingly working together on this and that it had the element of controversy (IBM teams with Microsoft and Intel to beat Oracle) which is a headline grabber. It was then that I knew that things would work out despite our differences.
For strategic purposes, I saved the IBM draft version of the release and used it for my press work as it described more accurately what we were doing, including a better presentation of how Microsoft and Intel contributed. Since Microsoft was only interested in the press release and thought they would get minimal coverage, I didn’t bother telling them and they didn’t care past the document.
THE RESULTS
It turned out that the IBM team did the bulk of the publicity work (we had the most invested so no surprise). There was only a few joint calls with Microsoft and Intel where the executives touted the significance of this benchmark and during which everyone worked together like professionals.
After hammering the phones and working with reporters for days, we received thousands of articles which was a shock to the other PR teams, especially Wag-Ed. While they tried to claim coverage, it was heavily nuanced to the IBM side of the story as we did the actual work both in the test and in the PR effort so no one believed Microsoft’s Wagg-Ed team.
I worked with most of the reporters who covered it to give them the real story of the benchmark, and just left the press release controversy alone. I even fed them the line that we “Blew the doors of the TPC benchmark” which got printed and made it to the halls of Armonk.
THE AFTERMATH
While I was glad it was over, I learned a great deal about working with others such as keeping the big picture in focus. It was one of the years largest announcements for our group and garnered massive coverage. I received my one and only personal email from Lou Gerstner praising the results. He stated that he had no interest in bake-off’s, but that this one was significant given what we had accomplished. This meant a lot as I thought Lou was one of the two best executives I had worked with at IBM, and I had a great deal of respect for his saving and running IBM as a company.
I also received a personal note from the head of our division. The reality was that the IBM PC group had managed to fall to about sixth in the industry by then behind the likes of Dell, Compaq, HP, Acer and E-Machines, and this was one of the more competent things the group did while I was there.
EPILOGUE
If you go to the link at the top of the page, you find that the Analyst joint announcement I did with Oracle was a far better experience, go figure. I received a personal note from the GM however. Note that he got my name wrong which caused me to chuckle and save it for the memories. Execs like Callies and Thomas cost IBM market share and progress. It was surprising that the doors opened some days in the PC division with people like that running the place. It is an indication of why they were 6th behind companies that didn’t exist only a couple of years later. The division fell off the map at IBM and was sold to Lenovo who took it back to the top of the industry.
Overall, it was tenacity over talent, execution over ego but it is how the game is won.
IBM, INTEL, MS CLAIM WORLD’S FASTEST SERVER CLUSTERIBM, Intel and Microsoft announced the world’s fastest server cluster for commercial use, recording performance levels that triple the performance of Oracle running on a Sun Microsystems cluster, at one-third the price. Using the performance measurement technique agreed to by all computer makers (TPC-C), this alliance of leaders in industry standard computing achieved record-breaking results in server and price performance. “This benchmark constitutes a solution that will entirely bypass the normal glitches and costs of second implementations that accompany exponential transaction growth rates,” said Marshall Freiman, CTO, Web Emporium LLC, an IBM customer. “It also offers scalability for e-businesses affected heavily by the transaction spikes associated with the holiday seasons. This is the type of cooperation between industry leaders that we should expect. With IBM, Intel and Microsoft making a move like this, others are bound to follow.” “Scalability concerns for e-businesses are a worry of the past,” said Perry Cain, vice president, Neoteric Solutions, also an IBM customer. “With this benchmark, we receive the cooperative efforts of IBM, Intel and Microsoft yielding a standardized and tested solution with double the transaction capabilities of anything else before. These technologies are no longer dreams of engineers.” IBM, Intel and Microsoft joined forces on this groundbreaking effort to prove that a combination of Netfinity Servers with Pentium III Xeon processors running at 700 MHz (megahertz) with 2 MB (megabyte) L2 cache, IBM DB2 Universal Database and Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system provides a highly scalable environment. This technology combination is ideally suited for data-intensive applications like business-to-business (B2B), e-commerce and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). “With this record-breaking event, IBM has once again demonstrated the power of DB2, and has raised the bar for industry-standard servers with Netfinity,” said Ralph Martino, vice president, strategy and marketing, IBM Personal Systems Group. “IBM’s strong, productive relationship with Microsoft and Intel, and our collective ability to achieve extraordinary results as we did with this benchmark, is changing the way the world views industry-standard computing.” “Achieving strong industry-standard benchmark results is one of the leading ways to show the industry and our customers that Windows 2000 is a highly scalable operating system for mission critical enterprise deployments,” said Jim Ewel, marketing vice president for IT infrastructure and hosting at Microsoft. “Beyond the numbers, this benchmark effort illustrates our commitment to working with IBM and Intel to deliver to customers the largest and most reliable enterprise-class solutions.” “This breakthrough performance on Intel-based servers and achieved by IBM’s Netfinity 8500R server showcases the incredible scalability of our large cache Pentium III Xeon processors,” said Raghu Murthi, director of marketing for Intel’s Enterprise Platform Group. “Intel-based servers are designed for large enterprise class implementations and we worked closely with IBM and Microsoft to deliver outstanding performance and solutions tailored to meet the rapidly growing e-Business economy.” Benchmark Configuration DetailsThe configuration included an unprecedented 116 terabytes of physical disk space configured for high availability using RAID 1 and RAID 5 arrays. The Netfinity 8500R servers, containing Netfinity X-Architecture features adopted from IBM S/390 and RS/6000 servers, contributed to this benchmark’s success. Specific features that convinced the benchmark team the servers were up to the test include the 8500R’s expansive memory, the number of processors supported, the number of PCI slots available for add-on components and the amount of LAN I/O for the transfer of data in and out of the system. In addition, the setup utilizes Giganet cLAN interconnects for fast server-to-server communications. Key components of the cluster included:
DB2 Universal DatabaseThis announcement highlights IBM’s leadership in the database market. DB2 demonstrated record-breaking results in transactions and in the ability to manage the world’s largest database of more than 116 TB of online storage – this is equivalent to a stack of paper 3,480 miles high. A proven foundation for B2B applications, DB2 Universal Database Version 7 integrates breakthrough technologies that enable customers to slash development in many cases nearly in half and perform high-speed text searches as much as ten times faster than traditional relational database search engines. DB2’s ability to scale to 1000 nodes, using a single database spread across the cluster offered significant advantages in scaling and management over other data management solutions that follow a federated architecture (i.e., one database instance per machine, each requiring individual management.) Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced ServerMicrosoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server was configured using a scale out approach to run on each member of the cluster of the Netfinity servers. Scale out architecture ensures that customers creating enterprise solutions will be able to achieve the highest possible levels of scalability and reliability with unmatched price and performance; this benchmark is further evidence of the performance, scalability and economic advantages of the results that can be achieved using Windows 2000 Advanced Server. COM+ is a complete, mature set of component services for quickly building scalable, reliable applications that is delivered in the Windows 2000 Server family of operating systems. COM+, the most popular component model in the world, includes critical scalability and reliability features necessary for building large-scale applications by integrating the features of the Microsoft Transaction Service (MTS) deep into the COM component model. This integration makes it easier for developers to create and use scalable software components in any language, using any tool. Windows 2000 Advanced Server is a solution that includes additional functionality to enhance the availability and scalability of e-commerce and line-of-business applications. The Windows 2000 operating system is the ideal platform for the next generation of business computing; helping organizations Internet-enable their businesses with a reliable, manageable infrastructure that is optimized for existing and emerging hardware. Intel Pentium III Xeonprocessor at 700 MHz with 1MB/2MB of L2 CacheThe new large cache 700MHz version of the Pentium III Xeon processor has a record 140 million transistors. The processor is based on Intel’s advanced 0.18-micron process technology, and offers 1MB and 2MB of Advanced Transfer Cache memory with Advanced System Buffering, which boosts performance by placing a full-speed, level-two cache memory directly on the processor die and increasing the width of the data pathway to the processor. The processor also offers a 100 MHz system bus and on-cartridge voltage management for increased system reliability. The new processors also are built on the same form factor, enabling server manufacturers to use them with existing server platform components, accelerating time to market. For more information about: — IBM Netfinity servers and DB2 Universal Database, visit www.ibm.com — Intel, visit www.intel.com — Microsoft, visit www.microsoft.com. The Transaction Processing Performance Council is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. About MicrosoftFounded in 1975, Microsoft is a worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device. Sun’s Enterprise 6500 cluster achieved 135,461 transactions at a price performance of $97.10 tpmC. IBM, Intel, Microsoft cluster achieved an audited record attested to by TPC-C (Transaction Processing Performance Council, type C benchmark) of 440,879.95 transactions per minute at a price performance of $32.28 per tpmC. Data is current as of July 3, 2000 and is subject to change without notice. For the latest benchmark information, visit www.tpc.org. Solution specification, pricing and availability information is subject to change without notice. Contact John Simonds, IBM, 919-254-9732, jsimonds@us.ibm.com or Deborah Young, Waggener Edstrom for Microsoft, 425-637-9097 deborahy@wagged.com. |
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How Much They Know About Us, The Perils of Big Data
I wrote this as humor years ago. I thought it was a joke, but due to tracked digital footprint and Big Data, it turns out to be true.
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Saturday Humor – Joe Isuzu and Monarchy
This series of commercials was especially funny to me, for a particular reason. This is my favorite one of the bunch as it pokes fun in an acceptable way. When this came out, I had just taken a picture of my daughter next to a guard who couldn’t move in a very similar guard-house, so even to this day I find it funny.
I hope you do also.
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Keys To Being Excellent At What You Do
We’ve found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it’s possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest. Aristotle Will Durant*, commenting on Aristotle, pointed out that the philosopher had it exactly right 2000 years ago: “We are what we repeatedly do.” By relying on highly specific practices, we’ve seen our clients dramatically improve skills ranging from empathy, to focus, to creativity, to summoning positive emotions, to deeply relaxing.
Like everyone who studies performance, I’m indebted to the extraordinary Anders Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has been making the case that it’s not inherited talent which determines how good we become at something, but rather how hard we’re willing to work — something he calls “deliberate practice.” Numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of such practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.
That notion is wonderfully empowering. It suggests we have remarkable capacity to influence our own outcomes. But that’s also daunting. One of Ericsson’s central findings is that practice is not only the most important ingredient in achieving excellence, but also the most difficult and the least intrinsically enjoyable.
If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, as well as frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That’s true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.
Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:
- Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
- Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
- Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
- Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
- Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
- Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to build rituals — specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.
And now a note from me, work harder than the next guy but do it smarter. The above will help guide you but I’ve found that if you can figure out your passion, the resolve to do the rest falls easier into place. Concentrate and focus on what you and your competition are doing, that way you know what the playing field is. Learn the un-written rules of the game as well as any politics that will serve you better than your competition.
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Memorial Day 2012 Round Up of the Best Posts
Memorial Day, when we remember that many sacrificed for our freedom, many made the ultimate sacrifice.
It pains me to see those who protest against those who serve and served, when their ability to make mendacious and hateful comments against our military are protected by those who defended that right to free speech. Except for Jane Fonda who was over in Viet Nam and conspired with the enemy, John Murtha and John Kerry who served and later demeaned our soldiers, most of these protesters haven’t been there and have no idea of the hell these people go through.
The solemn act of honoring those who have fallen in battle is a custom that seems to have faded in importance to our nation over time.
Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected.
While there are towns and cities still planning Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some think the day is for honoring anyone who has died, not just those fallen in service to our country.
Perhaps they do not know how deeply our nation once appreciated those who sacrificed their lives in defense of the principles we hold most dear. Perhaps those very principles of individual sovereignty, freedom and liberty are no longer so important.
It was not always so.
In 1868, on May 5th, Memorial Day, originally called “Decoration Day,” was officially proclaimed by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order No. 11.
General Logan asked that we cherish “tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes. Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders.”
Freedom is never free.
Here is a round-up of coverage.
The importance of Memorial Day
If you leave the blog here, watch this short video narrated by John Wayne on taps:
Memorial Day by Blackfive, a MilBlogger
Times Free Press, note it has the casualties from each war.
US Department of Veterans Affairs listing of Events
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How An Average Joe Can Be A Millionaire By Doing Simple Principles
Notice that I didn’t use the words becoming rich. Having a full life, belief in God, friends, family or a passion for doing something is rich. Becoming a millionaire is about money.
Next, this subject has been addressed by the more knowledgeable than I, but I’m going to talk to the average Joe like me, which is the likely reader here.
Finally, I don’t claim to know it all, nor do I claim to be in any financial category. I do observe trends and try to learn from them. Hopefully I’m eating my own dogfood.
HOW IT IS DONE
It is simple math. You either make money or spend less, or a combination of the two. I realize that we have a burdensome government, a tough economy and a next to impossible IRS tax code. In fact the real unemployment number is not what you read in the main stream media, but the U6 rate which as of this writing is 14.5%.
For the purposes of becoming a millionaire, we will assume employment. That means get a job instead of living on entitlements, because that will disqualify you from this discussion.
Sure it is easy to have received Facebook stock or have invented Facebook, but the average millionaire doesn’t have that at their discretion.
USE YOUR MONEY TO MAKE MONEY
This means compounding what you have in ways other than just putting it in the bank. I had a roommate who was a stockbroker and he told me many stories of secretaries making minimum wage who came to him at retirement with 7 figure 401K accounts. They saved in a way that maximized the return on their investment. This usually involves a company match and some diversification. It also assumes that you take risk when you are younger and seek advice or study investing voraciously as it is a mystery to most….despite the fact that everyone thinks they know about it.
Part of your diversification also means not putting everything in the stock market. As an example, real estate has just undergone a busted bubble (thanks to the Community Reinvestment Act which never should have been enacted), but it means there are properties to be had for a song right now and are ripe for the picking. They will grow and become more valuable. My advice is no different from what you’d expect. Start out small and work your way up. That process allows you to learn about what value really is, and compound your earnings into larger investments that have bigger payoffs.
There are many other ways, but the concept is the same, save and invest wisely by starting small and growing your profits and portfolio. You must also study and read or you could throw your money down the drain if you think you know everything. It also involves patience. If you recall the story from my roommate, it was saving and investing over a lifetime
HOW TO LEARN
There are articles ad-infinitum to read about the aforementioned. The other way is to talk to people who have done this. I suggest that you start with Dave Ramsey or Crown Financial Ministries if you are starting out (or are in trouble, or anywhere in between). It is a tried and true method of handling you money.
Who you talk to also matters. There are people who talk in $10’s of thousands, $100’s of thousands, millions or Zuckerberg’s and Gates’. I suggest you seek out those who are in the highest category possible as you need to think big in making and investing. I don’t have coffee with Warren Buffet, but his advice is readily available.
Find those who are successful and ask them how they did it. I’m betting that you’ll find there is no secret code or magic key, they just worked at it and kept their long-term goals of financial independence in mind, and kept check over their human nature.
SAVE YOUR MONEY
The other side of the equation is savings. In other words you need to spend less and when you do, spend wisely. Of the people I worked with at my last job, many were high salaried executives who were in debt because they had a keeping up with (or passing) the Jones mentality. This was especially true of those in the New York area for some reason (but demographics shouldn’t really matter). They had big houses with unfurnished rooms because they were house poor. Living within your means is important which is my next segue.
NEED VS. WANT
Including the basics of food, clothing and shelter, one has to look at the way one buys things. Most buy what they want rather than what they need. If you adopt the buy it tomorrow instead of now mentality, you likely will realize that you don’t really want it as badly as you think.
There is the adequacy (not delusions of adequacy ;-)) vs. luxury mentality also. A Casio, Timex or Seiko watch tell as good of time as does a Rolex, so unless you have money to burn, why are you buying the Rolex? This applies to cars, clothes or virtually any tangible item. Ask yourself, self do I need this/do I need to have the very best/am I showing off or would what I can really afford what I have? I have relatives who have to have the very best, but have wasted as much money as I’ve earned on things to show off.
My son said that some people need to wear their paycheck. You can see them coming down the road in cars that are raised with shiny rims and a 24 thousand watt stereo. Others have to order the best wine, food and show off at restaurants (my brother-in-law).
Back to the person who knows this better than most, here is a story about expensive car drivers:
But what if Ranger Rich is like many people who define rich in terms of income instead of net worth? Certainly many drivers feel the need to display their socioeconomic achievements by acquiring prestige makes of motor vehicles. They may think that those who are successful in generating high incomes drive luxury brands. And correspondingly drivers of more common makes have dull normal income credentials. But the hard data suggest that the level of prestige of a car and the income of its driver are not anywhere near being perfect correlates. In fact, many drivers of luxury makes have neither the levels of income nor net worth which would qualify them as high economic achievers.
Along these lines, Joann Muller, writing for Forbes.com, poses “what the rich people really drive.” She defines rich people in terms of income, not net worth.
. . . the richest people were the most likely to buy luxury brands [39% for people with household income above $250,000 vs. 8% for those people who earn less than $100,000 a year].
. . .61% of people who earn $250,000 or more aren’t buying luxury brands at all.
Her analysis indicates that those households with high incomes are more likely to drive luxury cars. But just because someone is driving a luxury brand it does not necessarily mean that the driver has a high income or a high net worth, for that matter.
Further, here is a story about how the average millionaire deals with car buying.
You have to spend on things that will appreciate, not sparkle. Again, my relatives are the worst offenders who have overspent on toys, baubles, cars and anything else they can waste their money on. It baffles me. When they bought real estate, they over paid, over leveraged and bought for show instead of ROI.
DEBT AND LEVERAGE
This gets most people in trouble. If you can’t pay off your credit card each month, you effectively are paying more for what you bought (because of the interest). Compounding works for debt in the same way as it does for savings. It is the accumulation that is the issue. I’m not just picking on credit cards, anything can be substituted here. If you saved first, you could buy it for less and your want will likely decrease.
For housing, it used to be that you had to put at least 10% down, but due to the above mentioned CRA (can you tell I loathe that legislation?) one could buy a house they couldn’t afford because they were told they qualified for it…. with no money down. You were PLAYED for a fool on this. Living below your means is the best policy.
If you care to splurge on something, it’s OK….just don’t borrow.
The same can be said for leverage. I’ll stay on housing here. Banks will always want you to buy more as the more you borrow, the richer they get. Typically one is paying at least 3 times the amount for a big-ticket item buy leveraging which brings me to my next segue.
PAY OFF YOUR HOUSE
The wisest know that man can not serve two masters. When you have a huge mortgage hanging over your head, it is your boss/master/slave driver/keep you up at night worry/cause of divorce or many other calamities. The bank won’t be calling on you to take your home away nor will you have to file bankruptcy (again, my relatives).
Besides owning a house within or below your means, paying it off early is the best way to get out of debt and improve your cash flow. Take out a mortgage less than 30 years, pay more than the minimum and do everything you can to pay it off early.
Forget the argument that it is a tax deduction. Congress is aiming at trying to take that away as I type. Also, any money you get back on taxes is just an interest free loan to the government at your expense.
By doing this, for most people it will likely be one of the best long-term financial decisions they can make.
CONTROL YOUR DESTINY
Note: I am quoting Dr. Thomas Stanley here. It is better told than I could say it, but it clearly is the moral to the story and what I would have said:
In The Millionaire Next Door I quoted the words of a corporate sales professional, a millionaire whom I interviewed. He like other self made millionaires said that he had a “go to hell fund. . . just in case my employer suggests (insists) that I leave Austin for corporate headquarters in Rottenchester.” He never had to leave Austin and he added, “PTL.” In other words, [the millionaires next door] have accumulated enough wealth to live without working for ten or more years.
I was reminded of these words of wisdom after reviewing an email from Ms. F who currently resides in a lovely community in the Southern United States:
I went to my local library this morning, hoping to borrow The Millionaire Next Door. However, the only available book was in Spanish, so I borrowed “Millionaire Women Next Door” instead. By the time I completed the second paragraph on page 8, I had collapsed in a fit of “craughter” – simultaneously crying and laughing at my sad truth. My newest work assignment is no less than 8,200 miles, 18 hours of flying time and 12 time zones away from everyone who means the most to me in this world. Simply put, the situation stinks, but I had convinced myself that it was necessary to pay the bills. Suffice it to say that I have renewed by concerted efforts to become a cultivator of wealth, and I plan to share my transformation with you soon. Thank you for creating this compilation of evidence-based encouragement!
What precipitated Ms. F “crying and laughing?” Consider the words from Millionaire Women Next Door:
Aren’t you growing tired of being among the ranks of hunter-gatherers? Do you enjoy your hyper consumption lifestyle so much that you must fly out of town every week to earn a paycheck to pay your bills? . . . begin making the transformation to a cultivator of wealth. Think about that the next time you are ten thousand miles from home, surrounded by strangers, and flying in dreadful weather. It is up to you. Do you want to spend your life as a hunter and gatherer of income, earning a million mileage points? . . . those financially indpendent folks. . . . They make their own decisions about their next destination. Right now, you and your career are essentially corporate property. Neither one of you has the luxury of self-determination.
I also stated that:
The [millionaire business] women profiled herein will not tolerate such an existence. They are free. They are cultivators of wealth and satisfied with life. They are in control of their own destiny.
INCOME AS A PERCENTAGE OF WEALTH
More from Frank Stanley, their income is only 8.2% of their wealth:
People who believe that they will never become wealthy generally fulfill this hypothesis. I explained to Brit, who was once a member of the ultimate income statement affluent club, that he has an excellent chance of becoming a millionaire next door type and that the typical millionaire next door is 57 years old. The Bible states that those with faith and hope can achieve a great deal. Even those with faith the size of a grain of mustard seed will likely reach their intended goals.
The will and discipline that this couple demonstrated in paying off its considerable debt is telling. The same determination can be used in setting aside at least 15% of their income for savings and investing.
What should you anticipate as a typical member of the millionaire next door fraternity? One, given the calculation via the Wealth Equation, actual net worth exceeds its expected value by a factor of 2 or more. Two, the market value of the home is less than 20% of net worth. Three, debt totals the equivalent of less than 5% of net worth. Four, annual income tax is the equivalent of about 2% of net worth. Five, total annual realized income is approximately 8.2% of net worth [median], or the equivalent of $8.20 of income for about every $100 of wealth.
This $8.20 figure from my own research is fairly congruent with the findings of other researchers. For example, three scholars employed by the Treasury Department, Johnson, Raub and Newcomb, compared the wealth characteristics of millionaires via 36,352 federal estate returns who passed away in 2007 with the incomes of these decedents when they were living. Those millionaires who were married and under the age of 70 [like the large majority of the millionaire next door types that I have surveyed] realized the equivalent of $8.45 for every $100 of their net worth. This figure is within approximately 3% of the dollar figure ($8.20) that was determined from my surveys.
IN CONCLUSION
There is no conclusion, just work and keep your long term goal in mind. I may talk later about other basic ideas that contribute to this like paying cash instead of credit (briefly mentioned here), couponing, buying the store brand instead of the premium name brand and other tricks. Nevertheless, adhering to the above puts you well on your way to being the average Joe millionaire.
My relatives laughed at me all my life for watching what I spent, how I lived and called me a skinflint. I knew that I had a long term plan for financial security. Today, at retirement age, they work just to keep up. Who’s laughing now?
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Facebook Overnight Millionaires and Employee Turnover
Update: As predicted, the brain drain has begun with executives leaving and others questioning Zuckerberg’s leadership ability.
As we all know, Facebook will go public in a huge IPO. This will create many mega-millionaires overnight who work there.
I wonder what the drain in human intellectual property will be when they don’t have to work like maniacs anymore.
WHY PEOPLE WORK
Most people work only because they get paid. A common cliche is that work is a 4 letter word. Otherwise, they wouldn’t put up with the job they have, proven by frequent job shifts over a lifetime. They leave for a better opportunity, or a bigger paycheck. My observation (not scientific) is that if the paycheck wasn’t a part of the deal, the job wouldn’t get done.
Then there are a few who really like to work like my Dad. His life was his work (HVAC engineer) and he loved it. My uncle was a pilot who also loved his job. Both regretted their retirement.
Finally, there are a few who love what they do because it is their passion. It has been said that if you do what you really love, it isn’t work. These are usually the most successful people.
MILLIONAIRE HEAVEN
When Facebook goes public and there will be a group of people created who are the overnight millionaires, many will move on. Some of them are the creative minds behind what has made the company the success it has been. Sure you can hire more programmers and throw options at them, but they are in the category of working for a paycheck. Many won’t have the need (some the desire) to work. I watched many friends I had at Amazon become millionaires and quit. They went on to do what they wanted to because they sold stock and had the money to do so.
The people that lived and breathed the Facebook that we know it have and hold the history and the reason that it is what it is today. That knowledge can’t be replaced.
What will be the brain drain at Facebook? I’m sure there are loyal employees who will stay. The executives will likely stay because they already are rich and at that point it is a matter of power, not money. Others, I’m not so sure.
WILL THEY SELL
You bet they will. There is already a lot of insider selling:
Insiders and early Facebook investors are taking advantage of increasing investor demand and selling more of their stock in the company’s initial public offering, the company said Wednesday.
Facebook said in a regulatory filing that 84 million shares, worth up to $3.2 billion, are being added to what’s shaping up to be the decade’s hottest IPO.
Facebook’s stock is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday under the ticker symbol “FB”.
The entire increase comes from insiders and early investors, so the company won’t benefit from the additional sales.
The biggest increases come from investment firms DST Global and Tiger Global. Goldman Sachs is doubling the number of shares it is selling. Facebook board members Peter Thiel and James Breyer are also selling more shares.
Even the Motley Fool is predicting investors will get burned.
Facebook’s IPO: A Quick Way to Go Broke
Facebook’s IPO will create at least 1,000 millionaires, estimates The Wall Street Journal. Founder Mark Zuckerberg is cashing out $1 billion worth of shares. But most investors who buy shares will get burned…
REASONS TO SELL
Recently, it was stated that Facebook could be a passing fad. This fact is not lost on those looking to make a killing.
If you recall Palm, Friendster, Sony Walkmans and other technologies, or beanie babies and tickle me Elmo’s, fads come and go quickly. As Qui-Gon Jin said: There is always a bigger fish. This means the next bigger and better Social Network or better idea is already being worked on. Innovation drives technology and history has proven it…..ask 3com, Wang, Digital or many others.
We already know that they economy is still in a recession and cash is king. If this IPO is anything like Groupon, it will trend high, then the price will go down and people want the most bang for their buck. I know I’d dump it all and diversify by day 2. I can’t comment as to whether I’d quit as I don’t know the culture, but I’ve worked for paranoid owners before and I know that it is a tough environment. Zuckerberg has publicly stated that it’s good to be paranoid. If that was the case, this is the time to bail.
It’s no secret that Facebook is not fully baked on their mobile strategy or execution yet either. That is a pretty large faux pas.
Worst of all, millions are choosing to not be on Facebook or are just saying no to it. Many of these are in the high wealth category.
A comparison of the two companies from WordStream, a search marketing management company, suggests that Facebook is a much less effective ad medium than Google. (The caveat here is that WordStream is, obviously, rather more dependent on Google than Facebook as a medium.)
So how much brain drain and personnel IP will leave? Time will tell, but I’m sure there are a lot of folks contemplating this issue as I write. The pressure of work, making a killing on stock or losing a fortune takes its toll on the workers.
I had a lot of friends at Cisco when they were flying high in the market. While others played solitaire at the other technology companies, Cisco employees spent half their day watching the stock price to see how high it would go and calculate how rich they were. The problem was that they weren’t vested. I hope that Zuckerberg and lawyers are smart enough to make their employee options at least 3-5 years before they are fully vested to keep the best and brightest there. Still, some might be mailing it in until year 3 while dreaming of being rich.
The average Joe won’t get rich anyway because here are the people who have made the money:
My final comment on the greatest brain drain comes in the form of 2 people, Paul Allan and Steve Wozniak. They got out and went on to different lives, but I’m not sure they still held the passion they had while building their company’s.
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Carroll Shelby RIP, Life Is Short and You Are Only But a Vapor
Carroll Shelby died last Thursday night. It should be a reminder of how short life really is. He was the longest living heart transplant survivor, but unfortunately, no one can escape death.
He will be remembered as the creator of some of the worlds (American) best sports cars, not to mention beating the Ferrari powerhouse in racing in the 60’s.
OUR LEGACY
However, some of us will vanish quicker than others, but we must remember that we are but a vapor in life, you can’t grasp a vapor. You don’t know today what will happen tomorrow. Don’t boast about tomorrow for you don’t know a day will bring forth (Proverbs 27:1).
Here is a poem about life, all too true. Remember, a cemetery is full of people who have plans.
When I was a child I laughed and wept and time crept;
When I was a youth, I dreamed and talked and life walked;
When I became a full grown man, time ran;
When older still I daily grew and time flew;
Soon I shall be traveling on, time will be gone.
COUNT THE DAYS YOU HAVE
How long will you live? The average American lives to the age of 77 (Shelby was 89):
If you are 15 you have 744 months to live.
If you are 25 you have 624 months to live.
If you are 35 you have 500 months to live.
If you are 45 you have 384 months to live.
If you are 55 you have 264 months to live.
If you are 65 you have 144 months to live.
If you are 75 you have 24 months to live.
After that, you are beating the curve, don’t buy green bananas.
So when it is over, then you have eternity to deal with. Many have contemplated this thought in different ways. The unpredictability and brevity of life reminds us that we are short sighted.
We all contemplate these questions even if you deny it:
Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where will will I go when I die?
Here is a thought to contemplate. Carroll is doing it now.
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9/11 Trial, First a Circus….
Read the full story here, but making a farce of it seems to be the first objective.
Walid bin Attash used to frequent online dating sites. “Loves to travel — sometimes at a moment’s notice,” bin Attash described himself before his 2003 capture. So writes former CIA veteran Jose Rodriguez in his new book, “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”
On Saturday, bin Attash was one of five defendants charged with 2,976 counts of murder for their role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It would seem that bin Attash has grown very devout at Guantanamo Bay. His civilian attorney, Cheryl Bormann, wore a hijab and an abaya at the military pretrial hearing. She even suggested that female prosecutors dress in more “appropriate” fashion in deference to the defendants’ “fear of committing a sin under their faith.” According to news reports, distaff prosecutors wore military uniforms with knee-length skirts.
“Is the bin Attash in your book the same guy whose attorney feels she must cover her entire body?” I asked Rodriguez. Yes, he answered. “These people are pretty hypocritical. One thing is their religious beliefs; the other thing is what they do.”
It’s clear from Saturday’s antics that the military tribunal, which is not expected to begin until May 2013, will be a circus. Defense attorneys don’t have much of a claim to the clients’ innocence. In 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed issued a statement in which he proclaimed that he was the mastermind of 9/11, “from A to Z.” In 2008, KSM and his co-defendants told a military court that they were guilty and wanted to be martyred.
When President Barack Obama was elected, he halted military legal proceedings in favor of a civilian trial in New York. Fearing a possible terrorist attack, Congress objected. Under new rules, the military tribunal is back.
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The Real KSM – I Will Personally Kill You
One of Mohammed’s frequently stated goals was to be put on trial in civilian court in New York — which nearly happened until Congress last year blocked the Justice Department from transferring any Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States.
INTEL GATHERING: Al Qaeda’s 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed was held at secret CIA interrogation jails — or “black sites” — like this one in Lithuania (pictured), where he was waterboarded 183 times but did not crack, according to a new book by CIA interrogation boss José Rodriguez Jr. What finally broke the terror chief was being kept awake for 180 straight hours — more than a week — and subjected to loud noises, slaps to the face and stressful positions, such as standing for long periods of time.
José Rodriguez Jr.
“It seemed to us that he was looking for a platform from which he could spout his hatred for all things American, and a trial would certainly present that opportunity,” Rodriguez writes. “It strikes me as more than a little ironic that several years later, Attorney General Eric Holder almost granted KSM his wish.”
Once he became compliant, Mohammed developed a rapport with his interrogators, watching PG-rated movies with them in his cell, and offering a religion-themed overview of the “history of the world.”
“A few months later, he reported that he was ready to continue and build on his earlier presentation. He had one requirement, however. Only those officers who sat through the prerequisite first session should be invited to the [second] session,” Rodriguez recalls.
He even penned “playful” notes to them, Rodriguez says. “Unless you are trying to manipulate me, could you turn up the heat a bit?” the terrorist asked in one missive.
But it was all a facade.
After telling an officer to have a “safe trip” before he left for home, Mohammed continued, “It is not that I wish you well. But if I ever get out of here, I want to personally be the one to kill you.”
By his own admission, Mohammed’s done it before.
“In a confession he later submitted for a potential tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, KSM wrote: ‘I decapitated with blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,’ adding, ‘For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.’”
Washington analysts had Mohammed pose holding a sack with a bowling ball in it, so they could compare his arm to those in the video cutting Pearl’s throat.
“Those photos compared to the actual video showed that KSM was not lying to us,” Rodriguez writes. “Just when you thought he had a human face, he would disappoint you.”
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More on the Gitmo Trials
Trying not to cooperate, the terrorists accomplished their jobs. What is ironic is that in 2008, they already pleaded guilty so they could die as martyrs. If the trial had not been stopped so Attorney General Holder could put them on display, this would have been over.
To provide balanced coverage, I picked a site that is the opposite in ideology from yesterday’s source. I will let the readers make a decision on who covers it fairly. I only care about justice.
The other defendants — Ramzi Binalshibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa al Hawsawi – joined Mohammed in refusing to answer questions from Army Col. James Pohl, the judge presiding over the proceedings.
At one point, two defendants got up and prayed alongside their defense tables under the watchful eyes of troops arrayed along the sides of the high-security courtroom.
Bin Attash was put in a restraint chair for unspecified reasons, then removed from it after he agreed to behave.
Lawyers for all defendants complained that the prisoners were prevented from wearing the civilian clothes of their choice, in a proceeding equally slowed by technical legal questions about defense complaints about the court’s authority and access to evidence and translators.
Brigadier General Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor of the Pentagon’s Office of U.S. Military Commissions told Fox News that he “understands the skepticism” about access to evidence, but some still remains classified.
Mohammed’s civilian lawyer, David Nevin, said his client was not responding because he believes the tribunal is unfair. He also suggested Mohammed was not wearing the earphones because it reminded him of being tortured.
All 5 men occasionally looked through what looks like the Koran, magazines, and other reading materials.
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9/11 Terrorist Trial
I’ll try not to take sides and let justice be served. I’ll post events that are being covered as they occur. I don’t know if KSM was really the mastermind as he claims or has delusions of grandeur. Either way, he has all the appearances of being a troublemaker.
At least it is a military trial instead of a civil trial (he’s not a citizen of the US, rather an enemy) in the US with the ability to get off on a technicality. We should see it to conclusion.
He and the others want to die as martyrs, for the only guarantee in the Koran of reaching heaven is dying in Jihad, although Gitmo may not qualify.
I caught shit from the Muslims at IBM who said they were offended by my calling Muslims Terrorists. Junaidah Dahlan from Accenture started in on my blog and I just said I’m calling it like it is. The terrorists were and almost always are Muslims Junaidah. Take your offense elsewhere
This weekend’s arraignment marks the beginning of the third major effort to bring the 9/11 conspirators to justice. The Obama administration dropped earlier military-commission charges against them when it decided in late 2009 to bring the 9/11 case to federal court in New York. But Congress, not wanting Guantanamo detainees brought to the United States, blocked the civilian trials. Meanwhile, the administration’s own view of the institution was evolving. When President Obama first took office, he froze commission proceedings with the apparent intention of shutting them down. But later that year the administration shifted gears and worked with Congress to make small but important adjustments to the Bush-era Military Commissions Act. These left commission proceedings more closely resembling the norms of a federal court trial.
It’s been a long time since KSM was last in court. In 2008, during an arraignment for a commission that ultimately got cancelled, he quickly pled guilty to multiple murder counts. “This is what I want,” he told the court, in English. “I’m looking to be martyr for long time.”
That case was interrupted for a variety of procedural reasons, and KSM never got his chance. In the intervening years, Congress and the Obama administration reformed the controversial military trials — making it easier to seek capital punishment, by providing detainees with so-called “learned counsel” lawyers specifically skilled at death-penalty cases, which makes such sentences less likely to be reversed on appeal. Last month, after flipping a key detainee to testify against KSM, the government brought charges against KSM and four alleged accomplices for the 9/11 plot. “If convicted,” the Defense Department clarified, “the five accused could be sentenced to death.”
However much the commission procedures have changed, KSM’s ambitions probably haven’t. “He wants to die because it fits into his massively egotistical narrative,” says Josh Meyer, author of the recent book The Hunt for KSM. “He’s like Napoleon. Wasting away in a cell is not his style. Going out in a bang of glory is.”
That calculation means that the 12 U.S. military officers who will decide if a convicted KSM lives or dies will face more than a narrow legal choice. They’ll also, however unfairly for them, have the burden of a policy choice. Should KSM be put to death, it might simultaneously provide a measure of closure for the families of his victims and allow al-Qaida’s remaining acolytes to portray him as a martyr.
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The WinkelVii
From The Social Network, because for the first time in their lives, they didn’t get what they felt they were entitled to because of who they are.
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Doctors Disagree on How, But Most Want To Fix Healthcare
From Kevin MD:
Three out of four dentists recommend this tooth brightening toothpaste — make your smile sparkle like never before! Six out of seven plumbers recommend this drain opening de-clogger — make your bathtub drain like never before! Nine out of ten doctors recommend improving the medical system in the United States — make your health care system heal like never before!
But how do we do that?
Do doctors think the Affordable Care Act is the soothing balm for the festering wound that is the economics of the American medical system—paying too much while delivering too little population health? What do our health care experts think about health care reform? Do we think it is a step in the right direction? A step towards doom and damnation? A small step for insurance companies, a huge leap for mankind?
It goes on to say that they need to read the bill to see what is in it.
However, here is what is in the bill click on it to find out what is in the bill and what rights we the people lose like financial control over our own assets and our own doctors. We do lose that despite what congress and the POTUS say to the contrary.
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Nice Call There On The Need For A Mouse Dvorak
John has always been interesting and very gracious to me (while I was just a flack) whenever we spoke. He should get a kick out of this..
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Why The Husband Was Banned From Target – Friday Humor
After I retired, my wife insisted that I accompany her on her trips
to Target. Unfortunately, like most men, I found shopping boring and
preferred to get in and get out. Equally unfortunate, my wife is like
most women - she loves to browse.
Yesterday my dear wife received the following letter from our local
Target.
Dear Mrs. S
Over the past six months, your husband has caused quite a commotion
in our store.. We cannot tolerate this behavior and have been forced to
ban both of you from the store. Our complaints against your husband, Mr.
Samsel, are listed below and are documented by our video surveillance
cameras.
1. June 15: Took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in other
people’s carts when they weren’t looking.
2. July 2: Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at
5-minute intervals.
3. July 7: He made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to
the women’s restroom.
4. July 19: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official
voice,’Code 3 in Housewares. Get on it right away’. This caused the
employee to leave her assigned station and receive a reprimand from her
Supervisor that in turn resulted with a union grievance, causing
management to lose time and costing the company money.
5. August 4: Went to the Service Desk and tried to put a bag of M&Ms
on layaway.
6. August 14: Moved a ‘CAUTION – WET FLOOR’ sign to a carpeted area.
7. August 15: Set up a tent in the camping department and told the
children shoppers he would invite them in if they would bring pillows
and blankets from the bedding department to which twenty children obliged.
8. August 23: When a clerk asked if they could help him he began
crying and screamed, ‘Why can’t you people just leave me alone?’ EMTs
were called.
9. September 4: Looked right into the security camera and used it as
a mirror while he picked his nose.
10. September 10: While handling guns in the hunting department, he
asked the clerk where the antidepressants were.
11. October 3: Darted around the store suspiciously while loudly
humming the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme.
12. October 6: In the auto department, he practiced his ‘Madonna
look’ by using different sizes of funnels.
13. October 18: Hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed
through,yelled ‘PICK ME! PICK ME!’
14. October 21: When an announcement came over the loud speaker, he
assumed a fetal position and screamed ‘OH NO! IT’S THOSE VOICES AGAIN!’
And last, but not least:
15. October 23: Went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited
awhile, and then yelled very loudly, ‘Hey! There’s no toilet paper in
here.’ One of the clerks passed out.
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Life Isn’t Fair, So What is New? Why Are We Trying To Kill The American Dream?
After reading an article by one of the top economists we should listen to, it occurred to me that life isn’t fair, but that alone is fair.
An excerpt from the article starts us off:
Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and “unfair” to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity– David Riesman, I believe– who said: “The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results.”
If by “fair” you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense.
Even within the same family, among children born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, the first-borns on average have higher IQs than their brothers and sisters, and usually achieve more in life.
Unfairness is often blamed on somebody, even if only on “society.” But whose fault is it if you were not the first born? Since some groups have more children than others, a higher percentage of the next generation will be first-borns in groups that have smaller families, so such groups have an advantage over other groups.
TRYING TO EQUALIZE THE RESULTS HAS LESS CHANCE OF SUCCESS THAN CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT TO SUCCEED
I propose that Life isn’t fair, now get over it and try harder. The American dream is to work hard, be successful and get ahead. We shouldn’t kill that dream which is what is being proposed for those making over $250,000. Further, it was said that “cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. it will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the swat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Some are richer, some are born into more prosperity than others, some are smarter, some have more ambition….the list goes on forever.
Here are two good examples of those that exemplify that some have it easier than others, just for being born into the right family.
To try and make it otherwise is usually a result of envy or jealousy of others success. There is no way to legislate tenacity to succeed, one’s ability vs. others, familial or environmental factors and many other causes. Some have more and do better than others, GET OVER IT.
We live in a country where people have come to because of the American Dream defined as:
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, an upward social mobility achieved through hard work. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.[1] The idea of the American Dream is rooted in the United States Declaration of Independence which proclaims that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”[2]
Any effort to equalize things by wealth redistribution is socialistic and doomed to failure. I beg for someone to show me an example of where communism or socialism has succeeded. Ask Greece, the USSR, most European countries….
Why?
Margaret Thatcher once said that ‘The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’?
Frank Zappa said “Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.”
TO TRY AND MAKE IT EQUAL ALWAYS FAILS
There has been some talk during regarding those who make over a certain amount should give more, also called redistribution. This is directly from the mouth of a famous person in history:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs) is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
Thomas Sowell
Politicians love to say things like, “We’re just asking everyone to pay their fair share.” But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don’t pay.
Instituting wealth re-distribution, taxing folks who make over $250,000 and then waxing poetically that it is “fair” is no more than an attempt to kill the American Dream. I have a belief however that folks will find a way around it, the disadvantaged will still want to come here for success and
Governments aren’t invested with moral qualities; only people are. This basic understanding of the world is one of the distinctions between the progressives/socialists and conservatives.
A free market will create big differences in wealth. That wealth disparity is simply a byproduct of freedom — vastly diverse individuals competing to serve consumers will arrive at vastly diverse outcomes.
That disparity is not unfair — if it results from free exchange.
The free market (which, sadly, America doesn’t have) is fair. It also produces better outcomes. Even “losers” do pretty well.
A more astute observer than Moore might show how unfair government intervention is. Licenses, taxes, regulations and corporate subsidies make it harder for the average worker to start his own business, to go from being a “little guy” to being an independent owner of means of production. Most new businesses fail, but running your own business is the best route to prosperity and — surveys suggest — happiness, too.
So the conclusion is that Life isn’t fair and there will be some Warren Buffetts, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs that get richer and they should. If the Government would stay out of the free market, more would prosper. A rising tide floats all boats
After I wrote this, I found this piece of manure on 7/15/12 about US Income inequality.
Nikki Newman and Mark Ehrnstein have plenty in common. They both work at Whole Foods’ headquarters, and they share a passion for the Earth-friendly, healthy and egalitarian values the company espouses.Ask them why they work at Whole Foods, and you get a lot of the same answers.Ask them about their paychecks, though, and you get two different stories.
Newman, the receptionist at the company’s corporate offices, has worked for Whole Foods for six years and now makes about $17 an hour. She lives comfortably in a rented duplex, but she admitted money can get tight on occasion – like the time her dog needed a surprise $750 worth of dental care.
Ehrnstein, on the other hand, is Whole Foods’ global vice president for team member services, a position that pays him a six-figure annual salary. He and his wife, Renee, have worked more than 30 years combined at Whole Foods. They own a 3,151-square-foot home, according to Travis County Central Appraisal District records.
“I feel very grateful to be in the role I’m in, but most of all I feel grateful to work for a company that aligns with my values,” Ehrnstein said. “I feel connections with our team members in that sense. But certainly, the compensation affords different opportunities.”
This is not the stereotypical story of the gap between rich and poor. Few would criticize the wage disparity between Newman and Ehrnstein given their tenures and responsibilities at the company. Plus, the gap from top to bottom is much narrower at Whole Foods than other large grocers because it pays higher entry-level wages and caps executive pay at 19 times the salary of its lowest-paid employee.
To which I say so what. The higher up in the company they are or the more responsibility one has, the more they should earn. Their actions will bear the legal responsibility and shape the course and success of the company.
I don’t give a rats rump that someone has the chance to make more than me. We should have the opportunity to make the most money we can possibly make without the government restricting that chance. That is why we compete, innovate, work and strive for success. I say screw the idea of socialism because that is what makes America great. We compete to be the best and try to out do the other guy. It’s how we (the US) beat the Soviet’s to the Moon, *(humans) invented cars, trains, planes, computers, telephones, cellphones and is also the reason there is Apple, Facebook, Ford, steel, iPads and every other success that has been invented. We have the cure for polio, vaccines and advancements in medicine that socialized societies would never have had the incentive to create.
Now, to put it in quantitative terms, here is an excerpt from Sir Issac Newton via Townhall.com :
The planet Neptune has never been seen by anyone looking at the night sky through just their own eyes. So distant is it from the sun that the light it reflects toward the Earth is so faint that the planet is effectively invisible in the darkness of night. And yet, the outermost large planet of our solar system was discovered by astronomers who knew exactly where to look….
Following William Herschel‘s discovery of Uranus in 1781, the world’s astronomers went to work to observe and describe the seventh planet of the solar system, taking detailed measurements of its trajectory in space.
Forty years later, French astronomer Alexis Bouvard published detailed tables describing Uranus’ orbit about the sun. More than that however, his tables incorporated the lessons learned about planetary orbits from Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton to chart the path Uranus would follow into the future.
But then, something strange happened. Significant discrepancies between Bouvard’s projected path for Uranus and its actual orbit began to be observed – irregularities that were not observed in the tables he had created to describe the orbital paths of the planets Jupiter and Saturn using the same methods. Soon, observations and detailed measurements confirmed that Uranus was moving along a path that was not described by Bouvard’s careful calculations.
These irregularities led Bouvard to hypothesize that an as yet unseen eighth planet in the solar system might be responsible for what he and other astronomers were observing.
Over twenty years later, astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was working on the problem, taking a unique approach to resolving it.
What made Le Verrier’s work unique is that he applied the math developed by Sir Isaac Newton to describe the gravitational attraction between two bodies to solve the problem. Here, he used Newton’s theory to anticipate where an as yet unknown, but more distant planet also orbiting the sun would have to be to create the effects observed upon the position of the planet Uranus in its orbit.
Le Verrier completed his calculations regarding the position of the hypothetical eighth planet on 1 June 1846. A little over three months later, on 23 September 1846, the planet Neptune was observed for the first time at almost exactly the position in space where Le Verrier predicted it would be, confirming Newton’s gravitational theory in the process.
We’re going to do something similar today to explain why household income inequality in the United States has increased over time, even though there has been no change in individual income inequality.
From Darkness to Discovery
Our first chart below is based on data taken from the U.S. Census’ data [Excel spreadsheet] on the inflation-adjusted median and mean income for all Americans from 1947 through 2010, which we’ve presented in terms of constant 2010 U.S. dollars. For reference, we’ve also indicated the NBER’s official periods of recession in the U.S. during this period with the shaded red vertical bands on the chart:
Next, we took the U.S. Census’ breakdown of inflation-adjusted median income for both men and women for each of these years [Excel spreadsheet] and used the math that applies to log-normal distributions to construct the combined median income that applies to individuals. Our results are shown in the chart below, along with the actual median incomes reported by the U.S. Census so we can compare our calculated results with them:
As you can see, our calculated results in creating a weighted median from the subsets of median income data for men and women are very close to the actual real median income numbers for all individuals. Here, because per capita income has been demonstrated to follow a log-normal distribution, we are able to use this math to either combine or extract subsets of data that have never been officially presented.
As an aside, we achieved the results above by treating the reported median income data the way we might calculate a weighted average. The beauty of the log-normal distribution math is that we can do this with medians, which we ordinarily could not do otherwise.
In the chart above, you can see the effect of the changing composition of the U.S. workforce, as the relative share of women earning incomes in the United States has increased since 1947. In 1947, the median income for individuals is much closer to the median income for men than it is for women. By 2010 however, we see that the median income for individuals is about halfway in between the median incomes for men and for women, reflecting that nearly equal share that both sexes now have among all individual income earners in the U.S.
Extracting The Unseen
The U.S. Census Bureau provides the median income data for individuals (or persons), men and women. It also reports median income data for both male and female wage or salary earners [Excel spreadsheet], whom we’ll simply describe as Working Men and Working Women.
Using the math we demonstrated above with this data, we can extract the median incomes for two categories of people for whom the U.S. Census has never reported median incomes: men and women with incomes who do not earn wages or salaries, or as we’ll describe them from now on, Non-Working Men and Non-Working Women! Today, we’re putting what we found for all U.S. individual income earners together for the first time:
Constructing Households
Now, let’s combine our median income earners into two-person households, pairing working men and women, working men and non-working women, non-working men and working women and finally non-working men and non-working women. We’ve shown our results below, along with the U.S. Census’ official median income for U.S. households:
Well, look at that! The households formed by our single-wage and salary income earning couples from 1947 through 2010 closely parallels the actual real median income for U.S. households with a working man and non-working woman over that time (except for the years 1974 through 1977, where there seems to be an anomaly in the Census’ data for working men – and here, the actual median splits the difference!) Also keeping in mind that the actual median household income might include the income contributions of additional people (say individuals between the ages of 16 and 24 who might be working part time at minimum wage jobs while also attending school and living at home with their parents), which likely accounts for the difference between the two, we’ve pretty much just demonstrated that we can successfully model basic U.S. households using just the data that applies for U.S. individuals.
But wait! What about single person households? Our next chart throws them into the mix as well!
Using the figures for 2010, we approximated the income percentiles for each of our single and two-person median income earning households. The table below reveals our results (our model should put each approximated percentile within 0.2 of the actual percentile!):
| Household Type | 2010 Median Income | Approximate Income Percentile |
|---|---|---|
| Working Men and Working Women | $64,075 | 61.4 |
| Working Men and Non-Working Women | $50,026 | 50.7 |
| Working Women and Non-Working Men | $49,344 | 50.1 |
| Non-Working Men and Women | $35,295 | 36.7 |
| Working Men Only | $37,102 | 38.6 |
| Working Women Only | $26,973 | 27.7 |
| Non-Working Men Only | $22,371 | 22.4 |
| Non-Working Women Only | $12,924 | 11.5 |
It occurs to us that all we would need to increase the income inequality among households in the United States is to increase the nation’s percentage of single person households among all households. That would work by increasing the number of households at the lower end of the income spectrum, even though it would have absolutely no effect upon the measured income inequality for individuals. The U.S. Census Bureau shows the change in the number of single person households since 1960:
Here’s the U.S. Census Bureau’s Gini index measure of the amount of income equality among U.S. households for the years from 1947 through 2010:
And here is the Gini index measure of the amount of income equality among U.S. individuals for the years from 1947 through 2005 (the data since 2005 is presented here – it’s similar to all that recorded since 1960 in the chart below):
The relevant data in the chart above is the Gini measure indicated with the hollow circles, which is based on the “fine”, or more detailed, income bins reported by the U.S. Census in its annual Current Population Survey. The other data in the chart, indicated by solid diamonds, represents income distribution data reported by the U.S. Census in larger, or more “coarse” income bins, which are less detailed and are therefore a much less accurate measure of the nation’s level of income inequality in any given year.
Intersections and Connections
Looking at where all the data in these three charts intersect and overlap, What we find is that since 1960, the level of income inequality for U.S. individuals as measured by the “fine” Gini index is nearly constant, but has increased significantly for U.S. households. What has changed over that time is the composition of U.S. households, with a steady increase in the percentage of single person households.
Without a corresponding increase in the measured income inequality for U.S. individuals, the increase in the measured income inequality for U.S. households has been almost entirely driven by the increase in the number of single person households over time.
So income inequality among U.S. households isn’t increasing because the rich are getting richer. That means that policies intended to right this situation by going after the rich in the name of “fairness” are guaranteed to fail, because the real cause of the increase in income inequality among U.S. households over time is something that cannot be fixed by such actions.
If only the people pushing such policies could see that….
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Self Help Healthcare
I checked in with KevinMD for this piece of helpful information. The free market will produce a better product than the government will ever be able to handle. Capitalism always provides competition which drives DOWN prices and drives UP services.
f you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
-Lord Kelvin
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Of course the quantified self movement with its self-tracking, body hacking, and data-driven life started in San Francisco when Gary Wolf started the Quantified Self blog in 2007. By 2012, there were regular meetings in 50 cities and a European and American conference. Most of us do not keep track of our moods, our blood pressure, how many drinks we have, or our sleep patterns every day. Most of us probably prefer the Taleb to the Lord Kelvin quotation when it comes to living our daily lives. And yet there are an increasing number of early adopters who are dedicated members of the quantified self movement.
They are an eclectic mix of early adopters, fitness freaks, technology evangelists, personal-development junkies, hackers, and patients suffering from a wide variety of health problems. What they share is a belief that gathering and analysing data about their everyday activities can help them improve their lives.
According to Wolf four technologic advances made the quantified self movement possible:
First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.
An investment banker who had trouble falling asleep worried that his concentration level at work was suffering. Using a headband manufactured by Zeo, he monitored his sleep quantity and quality, and he also recorded data about his diet, supplements, exercise, and alcohol consumption. By adjusting his alcohol intake and taking magnesium supplements, he has increased his sleeping by an hour and a half from the start of the experiment.
A California teacher used CureTogether, an online health website, to study her insomnia and found that tryptophan improved both her sleep and concentration. As an experiment, she stopped the tryptophan and continued to sleep well, but her ability to concentrate suffered. The teacher discovered a way to increase her concentration while curing her insomnia. Her experience illustrates a phenomenon that Wolf has noticed: “For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown … they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.”
Employers are becoming interested in this approach in connection with their company sponsored wellness programs. Suggested experiments include using the Jawbone UP wristband to see if different amounts of sleep affect work performance such as sales or using the HeartMath emWave2 to monitor pulse rates for determining what parts of the workday are most stressful.
Stephen Wolfram recently wrote a blog illustrating just how extensive these personal analytics experiments in self-awareness could become when coupled with sophisticated technologies. Wolfram shares graphs of his “third of a million emails I’ve sent since 1989” and his more than 100 million keystrokes he has typed.
Anyone interested in understanding just how far reaching this approach may become in the future should examine the 23 pages of projects being conducted by the MIT Media Center. My favorites from this fascinating list include automatic stress recognition in real-life settings where call center employees were monitored for one week of their regular work; an emotional-social intelligence toolkit to help autism patients learn about nonverbal communication in a natural, social context by wearing affective technologies; and mobile health interventions for drug addiction and PTSD where wearable, wireless biosensors detect specific physiological states and then perform automatic interventions in the form of text/images plus sound files and social networking elements.
It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of all this new technology and to start crafting sentences about how the quantified self movement will “transform” and “revolutionize” health care and spawn wildly successful new technology companies.
Jackie Fenn’s “hype cycle” concept has identified the common pattern of enthusiasm for a new technology that leads to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, disappointment that results in the Trough of Disillusionment and gradual success over time that concludes in the Slope of Enlightenment and the Plateau of Productivity. Fenn’s book, Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time can help all of us realize that not all new technologies becomes killer applications.
Jay Parkinson, MD has also written a blog that made me pause before rushing out to invest in quantified self companies or predict the widespread adoption of this approach by all patients. Parkinson divides patients into three groups. The first group is the young, active person who defines health as “not having to think about it until they get sick or hurt themselves.” The second group is the newly diagnosed patient with a chronic illness that will affect the rest of their lives. After a six month period of time coming to terms with their illness, Parkinson believes this group moves closer and closer to group one who do not have to think about their disease. The third group are the chronically ill who have to think about their disability every day. Parkinson concludes that “it’s almost impossible to build a viable social media business that focuses on health. It’s the wrong tool for the problem at hand.”
The quantified self movement should be closely monitored by all interested in the future of the American health care delivery system. The potential to improve the life of patients with chronic diseases is clearly apparent; whether most people will use the increasingly sophisticated tools being developed is open to debate.
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Court Weighs Heavy on Health Costs
From the Raleigh WRAL sometimes news.
WASHINGTON — Death, taxes and now health insurance? Having a medical plan or else paying a fine is about to become another certainty of American life, unless the Supreme Court says no.
People are split over the wisdom of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, but they are nearly united against its requirement that everybody have insurance. The mandate is intensely unpopular even though more than 8 in 10 people in the United States already are covered by workplace plans or government programs such as Medicare. When the insurance obligation kicks in, not even two years from now, most people won’t need to worry or buy anything new.
Nonetheless, Americans don’t like being told how to spend their money, not even if it would help solve the problem of the nation’s more than 50 million uninsured.
Can the government really tell us what to buy?
Federal judges have come down on both sides of the question, leaving it to the Supreme Court to sort out. The justices are allotting an unusually long period, six hours over three days, in sessions that started Monday, to hear arguments challenging the law’s constitutionality.
Their ruling, expected in June, is shaping up as a historic moment in the century-long quest by reformers to provide affordable health care for all.
Many critics and supporters alike see the insurance requirement as the linchpin of Obama’s health care law: Take away the mandate and the wheels fall off.
Politically it was a wobbly construction from the start. It seems half of Washington has flip-flopped over mandating insurance.
One critic dismissed the idea this way: “If things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house and that would solve the problem of homelessness.” That was Obama as a presidential candidate, who was against health insurance mandates before he was for them.
Once elected, Obama decided a mandate could work as part of a plan that helps keep premiums down and assists those who can’t afford them.
To hear Republicans rail against this attack on personal freedom, you’d never know the idea came from them.
Its model was a Massachusetts law signed
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Creative HouseHold Self Help Tips
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Neurological Self Test (If You Fear Alzheimers)
1- Find the C below.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
2- If you already found the C, now find the 6 below.
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
69999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
3 – Now find the N below. It’s a little more difficult.
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMNMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
This is NOT a joke. If you were able to pass these 3 tests, you can cancel your annual visit to your neurologist. Your brain is great and you’re far from having a close relationship with Alzheimer.
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Are you a Geek or a Nerd?
From: MastersInIt.org
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Was IBM’s Watson a Breakthrough or Very Cheap and Creative Advertising?
The worst news in the above link is that companies like Google can do the the same for far less and that Watson doesn’t even work with other IBM technology.
Update: Watson is in the next publicity stunt with Wall Street as sales seem to be lagging.
As we all know, Watson appeared and won on Jeopardy last year. It was the culmination of years of work and manpower to build a machine that could react faster and be programmed to win a game show. It was brilliant, but more for promotion than technology sales (as evidenced so far). There is little doubt that the promotional value was priceless to the IT industry and an easy calculation by IBM to one up the competition.
The two humans were limited to their capacity, whereas Watson was a massive computer with incredible storage and processing capability. It was programmed specifically for the game, so while not a slam dunk, inevitability wasn’t in much doubt.
I don’t know about you, but as I get older, I forget things and computers don’t. You can add memory, processors and build it big enough to recall more than any amount of humans. Jeopardy had two champions, so it wasn’t really a fair fight. You ultimately can overpower any certain situation with billions in technology (which is what it cost to win), but throw something like emotion or nuance into a situation and computers are lost.
It was the perfect set up. Everyone loves to root for the underdog even though the humans really fit that role. It was accomplished by putting the biggest two winners ever on Jeopardy up against poor Watson. The truth was that it never was going to be close given the confines of the rules of the game. In real life, with unforeseen issues, the humans would have a fair chance. That was never the point of Watson though.
IBM got to promote a research facility, executives, technology and almost a free ticket for three days. Jeopardy also was a winner with dominant ratings.
I don’t want to debate the possibilities of Watson’s future contribution to technology other than stating that it is another step (and possibly direction) in data analytics, and it increases the perception of IBM’s lead in this area (thanks to a lot of M&A and some folks that worked without getting enough credit). It hasn’t been the breakthrough that companies have jumped on like an iPhone, yet billions of dollars have been spent on the same hardware used to build Watson since Jeopardy for traditional IT. Time will tell.
ADVERTISING
For now, the real victory was exposure. How much would it cost to purchase 1.5 hours of prime time advertising for a 3 day period where you basically get to change the rules of advertising to where you don’t even have to pretend that an ad agency was involved (also saving millions). Here is the breakdown of advertising to program, but in reality the big IBM Watson Avatar is a commercial by itself every time Alex said the word Watson.
From a Mad Men point of view (advertising show for those who don’t know) this was a stroke of creative genius that began with winning a chess match against Gary Kasparov, then moving to prime time TV when new exposure was needed. I saw people glued to their seats and talking about it the next day at a conference. Nevertheless, it still has all the appearances of a publicity stunt. Unfortunately, it saddled IBM with a 2015 earnings projection claim that Palmisano left Gini Rometty to figure out. With this economy, it has Sham’s chance of beating Secretariat in the Belmont Stakes to make it.
There will be claims that further technology is Watson legacy and success, but it is not what was intended by the efforts which related to making sure it beat the humans on Jeopardy. That is supposed to come later.
CURING THE COMMON COLD
It has been suggested that Watson technology is being used to cure cancer. I like others wish for this as I lost my mother to that disease. Along with AIDS and the common cold, I have my doubts that we’ll really see this in our lifetime. By then, trillions will be spent. Like Global Warming, we could do more by helping to feed the starving and providing help and aid to millions. This is not what Watson is about though last spring, it was the advertising win of 2010.
So the jury is out on whether it will succeed in medical or some other breakthrough. For now, it was the promotional prime time win last year.
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RIM – RIP
Update: Morgan Stanley on 6/25/12 confirms my premise that RIM is Essentially Broken:
Update: Yahoo shuns Blackberry from Fun Smartphones for all employees:
In a bold move reportedly instigated by new CEO Marissa Mayer, aging web giant Yahoo plans to outfit every one of its US employees with a new iOS, Android, or Windows Phone 8 device. According to an internal memo published by Business Insider on Saturday, the company is offering workers a choice between Apple’s iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S III, the HTC One X, the HTC Evo 4G LTE, and Nokia’s Lumia 920, with all bills taken care of. Yahoo is also discontinuing IT support for BlackBerry devices, seeking to move away from RIM’s enterprise-focused platform.
“We believe the only way RIM remains a viable entity is at a fraction of its current size, a transformation that erases much of its earnings power,” the analysts wrote. “The next 9 months likely see rapidly deteriorating fundamentals on the one hand offset by stories of potential strategic options on the other.”
Indeed, there was more unconfirmed deal speculation just this weekend, as The Sunday Times reported the BlackBerry maker was considering selling its handset-making unit or a stake in the company.
What I don’t get is why the Government just made it the standard handset. Are they that out of touch?
Update: RIM at a new low, sort of proving the following is on track. Executives are now bailing.
Now they are laying off people. I’ll be quoting them along with Palm, OS/2, Token Ring and other technologies that used to be.
Original story starts here.
Rarely do I write about the technology that I replaced because I’m usually so excited about the replacement. In this case I’ll make an exception. I already wrote about my new phone, but as much as I wanted the new phone, getting rid of my blackberry was more important. Rob Enderle reminded me of this in his tech trends blog.
At a Lotusphere show not too long ago, we did an announcement with RIM and Notes (it was an announcement of a product we were going to release at a later date). Not only was I underwhelmed by the product, the hardware and software technology from RIM was as cool as mud huts compared to new construction. On top of this, when I offered to help the RIM executives for gratis on very obvious marketing oversights, they had an attitude that belied the fact that they already had iPhone daggers fatally in their hearts and didn’t even know it. It now looks like it’s going to cost them their jobs. I was treated as if I was dust (I’m being nice to them) by their executives. Notes was almost impossible to use on a blackberry at first. It was a D- at best.
Update: Now I know he should have listened to me instead of being so arrogant. I could have helped them….and I’m not trying to be conceited, but I knew what was going on much more than the leader of RIM.
I knew then that not only was RIM in trouble as a company, I disliked the blackberry as a piece of technology almost more than any I’ve had in 30 years (I’ve had more than most in the last 30 years). I saw the crackberry addiction it caused in some folks which I didn’t like. I also saw that if you had a blackberry (before iPhone days), you just signed up for a 24/7 availability.
The first one I got for free, and promptly got rid of in a month as it was more trouble than it was worth. The last one I’ll ever have is because my then company had me get one when I wanted a real phone/data device instead.
My problem is solved. Too bad about RIM…their once leadership position is now only a memory with recent market share decline.
It looks like I’m not the only one who believes they are in trouble. Their Board is not helping out either.
Sales figures show the same decline. It was not even nice knowing you.
So throw the Blackberry on the technology rubbish pile along with the Palm, OS/2, Token Ring, Newton and a host of others. There, now they are on the way to being a good product back when Britney Spears was hot.
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Why I Bought an iPhone Vs. Any Google Device
It took me this long to finally buy an iPhone. I waited until the right carrier had it (AT&T is a diversity nightmare), then my current provider didn’t have international covered because of CDMA. So when that all came online, I then had to wait for an upgrade time so that I wouldn’t pay an arm/leg/firstborn. It wasn’t a feature to feature comparison, 3G or 4G or any other techie issue that caused it. It was because I know Google, have worked with Eric Schmidt and believe they are evil about their intentions with our data, public or private.
Before any hate mail comes in that Apple does it too, I turn off location services when I leave the house and can confuse them enough that tracking me doesn’t me do them any good….not that anyone would/should care. I’m a statistic to them and so be it.
Disclaimer: I’ve had an iPod since 1994 (rotary wheel version) and have an iPad and iPod before I bought the phone, but I worked with/against Google and have met Eric Schmidt at a partner conference. I don’t trust Google nor do I trust Schmidt as I heard what they are up to. Basically the same thing as Pinky and the Brain are after, take over the world.
I and I believe they are sincere. Apple developers are trying to build an ad base to compete against the world/Google, but I can turn them off…..Google follows me, my house, what I buy and everything else…..then are all too happy to share it with those I don’t want them knowing I exist.
In the quest for data analytics, companies have sold their soul. Google and IBM are at the top of this data list, closely followed by Oracle, only closely in this case as they are hampered by a leader who holds them back from becoming a great (or modern) company.
OPEN SOURCE VS. PROPRIETARY.
Most analyst’s I talk to have Android so that they can practice what they preach, it’s an open world. Well open source doesn’t work as well and smooth as IOS, so I don’t give a rat’s rump about this. I just want it to work and for me not to have to fix or code one more device. Most open systems require tinkering far too often. So I’m calling BS on that argument. I’m a consumer with too much going on to have a device that doesn’t work every time and easily.
SECURITY
It appears that Smartphones are now being attacked by malware and theft. I know of 2 so far on IOS, but Android seems to be up 90%, so it looks like Apps on this OS are easier to break into. This was not my initial decision point, but has skyrocketed to my list of concerns within a short period of time.
MY PREVIOUS SMARTPHONE
I had one of the newest Blackberry’s and in one word of advice for those who are considering buying it….don’t. The interface is archaic compared to IOS and I got it because of a corporate policy that stuck me with a device that was hard to use. I had to take it the phone store to set up the special things I wanted (I have about 7 email addresses and many special things related to what I do, and BTW I set them up myself on the iPhone) and have set up phones and computers for 31 years….before things were easy so I know how to reverse engineer without instructions
One thing I liked about Google was that 3 executives owned 8 corporate jets. God Bless Capitalism. I think IBM has a whole fleet of jets for the executives also so they “don’t” have to fly commercial. Too inconvenient I guess. It’s the same for most corporations.
Anyway I bought the iPhone.
BTW, I’ll never buy another Windows/Microsoft product again now that I work for myself. They can only treat me this poorly (since Windows was released) for so long before I vote with my own money like I did here….
It looks like I’m not the only one. ZDNet wrote this a few days after I wrote about my travails.
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Is the PC Dead Or Is It Marketing Hype and Spin?
Update: Apple is more nails in the PC coffin with the new announcement of Post PC devices.
- 362 Apple stores
- 315 million iOS devices sold through last year, including 62 million in the last quarter
- 585,000 apps created
- 25 billion app downloads
- 1080p movies and TV shows for iCloud and the new Apple TV
- 15.4 million iPads sold in the fourth quarter of 2011
- 200,000+ iPad apps
- 2048 by 1536 pixels displayed on the new iPad, with 264 pixels per inch
- 44 percent greater color saturation than the old iPad
- 5 megapixel sensor on the new iPad camera
- A maximum of 73 mbps downlink with 4G LTE on new iPad
- New iPad specs: 10 hours of battery life, nine hours with 4G; 9.4 millimeters thick, 1.4 pounds
- Same pricing as last iPad: Wi-Fi models are $499 for 16 gigabytes, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB; $629, $729 and $829, if you want 4G
- Old iPad now starts at $399 and $529
The Real Meaning in Marketing Speak
In the mid 2000’s, Sam Palmisano of IBM declared the era of the PC is over. This was somewhat of a marketing move since IBM had just sold the PC Division to Lenovo. What he really meant was that IBM is getting out of consumer products. IBM also sold other consumer divisions that were not the margin kings that Software and Services were. Disclaimer, after working either for/with/against/partnering with IBM for 31 years, I can say that a lot of what they do is incredible spin on pretty good technology. I had better knowledge of what was going on than what was told to the outside.
PC’s are Toasters Now
This is a bit of a history lesson. There was a time that PC’s were special and had value. They still can be found on almost every desk or backpack at an airport, but in reality they are now (and have been for a while) a consumer product. There gets to a point in time in every product’s life cycle that economies of scale and parts availability drive this value (and therefore the price) down when you can’t differntiate. It is compounded by newer technologies (tablet computers and mobile devices) to where you can get them at any consumer store that sells toasters, video games and TV’s. Any improvement is just a little bit better (except Windows which usually is worse), not an era better which was the case when they were new.
PC’s have done this to themselves over the years. Remember when all you could get was a bulky desktop? Technology moved on to the luggable computer to the laptop. Now you can get a wafer thin Macbook Air (for a premium price), but the technology curve will drive cost down here when every manufacturer offers it. Margins are razor thin and there is minimal hardware differentiation on the Wintel platform.
The Effect of iPad and Mobile Phones
Ultimately, the world is driving your communications and computing device to be in your hand. The end game of input is not a keyboard, but voice. This addresses the need for instantaneous that we have required as we’ve shifted from email to IM and texting, and from blogging to tweeting. I envision a vision screen that is projected by your small handheld that lets you see what a huge monitor is required for now in the near future. For more on this, see Project Blade Runner as an example of what the future could look like.
PC’s are already under fire from Tablet computing and smartphones. While at some point you still need a PC for complicated input/output such as the dreaded Powerpoint and the more mundane payroll/HR applications, they soon will be adapted to tablets as we easily morphed from immobile desktops to laptops.
Many analysts have shown that more phones and tablets are sold than PC’s. More texts are sent than emails and we certainly have more tweets than blogs.
The Cloud
Powering a lot of this of course is the overhyped Cloud model. While conceptually it has been around for a long time (we have called it client/server and other names), it is a software delivery model that will make the end device irrelevant. Perhaps you could get your email on your toaster or refrigerator. You could make phone calls by dialing in the air at some point. The issue is that we are driving the connecting device smaller, cheaper and more powerful (and less relevant) so that we can get what we want, when we want it and wherever we want it.
Lenovo and HP
Companies are jumping out of this market as evidenced by IBM and HP willing to sell their PC businesses worth billions in revenue, mostly because of low single digit profit margin. They realize that there isn’t much money to be made anymore, again putting them in the toaster category. Similar components by most, similar operating systems, market driving memory and storage costs and overhead to sell. HP is now particularly vulnerable as companies negotiating long term contracts will throw HP out as a viable vendor not knowing what their future will be either in terms of ownership or viability. HP has completely lost their way starting with the purchase of Compaq years ago, then dumping their tablet, announcing the sale of their PC division and switching CEO’s like underwear.
The Apple Factor
Everyone eventually builds a better mousetrap. The Mac has been around for a long time, but the entry way to the door to Apple changed with the iPad/iPhone. A new processor, operating system visibility, technology paradigm, profit potential and the coolness factor make Apple a different model than the PC. Prior to that, Mac’s were a niche player in the creative, advertising and education world. This has changed partly because the OS is better, Windows is not a great platform and Mac’s are headed in the direction of iPads.
So Is the PC Dead?
Ultimately yes, but not this year or in the near future. I’ve seen models of computers called bricks the size of your phone that you can drop in a kiosk and work anywhere. You can even use them like an iPhone if needed, but until the voice input issue is resolved, keyboard input is an inhibitor.
No one thought we’d ever see the end of typewriters, faxing or even the 360, but technology advances at an increasing rate economically speaking. What will be interesting is which social mores we’ll break like talking to ourselves (on a cellphone) in public (or worse in a bathroom or driving).
Is the iPad the next endgame? Likely also not. Companies are trying to out do themselves and we’ll wind up like the Jetson’s one day.
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June 14, Flag Day, Fathers Day, Thoughts and Curves
Here is another blog that WordPress lost in my transition. This one is from 6/14/2008.
First things first, it is my parents Anniversary. They would have been married 55 years today. It is the first June 14th that has passed that both of them are gone.
Today is also Flag Day. Unlike the bitter half of one of our candidates, I’ve always been proud of my country.
And of course, the greatest moment in Flag Saving History, Rick Monday Saves a Flag from being burned.
Birth of the Army – In 1775, this was the birth of the Army, thank you George Washington. The only thing the government has done consistently right is to defend our country. I hope the next president keeps that in mind
Fathers day – Tomorrow is Father’s Day. My Dad isn’t around any more. If yours is, appreciate the time you have left. In honor of him, I drove his car, on the curvyest road I could find. His car was meant for the turns.
Today was also the start of the 24 Hours of LeMans. I used to go to races with my Dad, in the car pictured here. So I’m melancholy today. In honor of our memories, I bought a grille badge on eBay.
So I thought about my parents, the country…and while I was exceeding the speed limit, enjoying the curves.
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Update on Grocery Shopping
I originally wrote about my shopping adventures from as much as 30 years ago mentioning dressing for the store, meeting someone at work, bikini’s, girls in the frozen isle….and other observations. Instead of just being out of college which was the perspective of the original blog, I’m now buying groceries for a college student.
I also wrote about the old people and their habits. It dawned on me today I’m almost one of them now. I go on BOGO (buy one get one free) day. My day is complete when I can get BOGO with a coupon for double savings. When did I get this old? Actually I’m just smarter with our money now and know there are deals to be had.
I’m even getting balloons for my dog to play with as they float and it gives her great pleasure to bark at them. If I could just get her to breath in the helium and bark, I’d be the one howling with laughter.
Just think, one more year and I can get another 5% off for senior discount on Thursdays!
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Duh, Science Confirms the Obvious
Another post that got lost which I liked.
I get the part about cigarettes cost you money, combining drugs and alcohol are bad for you…but get number 3 meeting heads!
3. Too Many Meetings Make You Grumpy
The Study: “The relationship between meeting load and . . . well-being of employees,” Group Dynamics, March 2005
The Findings: Ever get the feeling that you’d get more work done if you weren’t constantly attending meetings to discuss all the work to be done? Two social scientists from the universities of Minnesota and North Carolina hypothesized that meetings are analogous to “hassles,” defined in stress-research literature as “annoying episodes in which daily tasks become more difficult or demanding than anticipated.” The psychologists analyzed diary entries from 37 meeting-prone midlevel university workers over one week. They found that days chock-full of meetings left employees feeling stressed, exhausted and burned out.
Why Bother? Employers take heed: Since beleaguered workers may perform poorly, be tardy, or quit, the authors suggest that “organizations be sensitive to the number of meetings employees are required to attend.” Managers could create “formal guidelines” for meeting necessity (presumably not drafted at a meeting).
Here’s another Mr. Obvious, dudes prefer good looking women? Who’d have guessed it?
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When You See a Deer You See Bambi, And I see Antlers Up On the Wall
This originally appeared 12/3/2007, but was lost during a transition to WordPress (fail there). I’m re-posting it as it was my son’s first deer. Since then he has harvested more food for us, and hat racks for the wall.
Here is the Post:
With all kudos to Brad Paisley, I took my son hunting… and here is his first deer, a nice 8 pointer. To you vegetarians, sorry, but I’m an outdoorsman and I believe in being able to take care of yourself which is growing and harvesting your food…..both meat and vegetables. After all, I love vegetarians….most of what I eat are vegetarians anyway.
It’s also because of hunting and fishing that I get to connect with my offspring. I see many parents fighting with their kids, but we’re getting to spend hours together away from the computer, video games and other distractions that are potentially harmful to teenagers. We put the deer stand together, painted it camo, grew the food plots and reaped the rewards.
We also fed a herd of 50+ animals and worked the land from scrub to ecologically very fruitful and crop producing.
As Brad says, “but what can I say at the end of the day, honey I’m still a guy” .
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Finances and Bible Verses
Money is one of the most quoted subjects in the Bible. Many people are suffering right now because of countries governments mis-managing spending debt and other people’s money.-
I’ve always lived by the Larry Burkett and Dave Ramsey debt free living, and giving back to G-d first. For you non-believers, at least learn the lesson of a debt free lifestyle.
Out of nowhere on the same day come two blogs that mention this. Christian Personal Finance and Faith and Finance with scriptures about money.
You should click on either (CPF has 250 verses and F&F has 101) to know what to do with your money in these tough times.
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The Original Press Release for the IBM PC in 1981
At 4 pages (typed on a typewriter), here is the original Press Release for the IBM PC from 1981. Judge for yourself the writing style.
At $4500, you could get a fully configured 64k PC with 2 360k floppy disk drives and a small dot matrix printer. Such a deal. I’m pretty sure that there are wristwatch
es with more computing power available now.
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Count of Monte Cristo – A Book Review
Of course you could just go to Wikipedia and get someone’s version of it, but I read the book and found it to be fascinating. I read quite a bit and have 3-4 books going at all times. Through this, I’ve learned to read fast and retain a good deal of information. I’m constantly trying to figure out the plot before it ends, but I confess I didn’t succeed this time.
Originally, my son was assigned this book in school. Being a typical high schooler, he didn’t work hard and complained a lot. What got my attention was that he liked this book. There are times (few) that I find him astute, but I recognize the potential in him and knew I was going to read it.
GOOD VS BAD
Written by Alexandre Dumas, père in 1844, the book has hero’s that are trampled upon (Edward Dantes, the protagonist) and villains who sent him to prison for a trumped up charges (Villefort, Fernand, Mercedes and random others ). Good vs. evil always tugs at the heart strings to pull for the good guys.
After 14 years in prison, he ingeniously escapes after making friends with the Abbé Faria who was deemed mad for claiming to have millions. Upon his dying bed, he bequeathed it all to Dantes who was unceremoniously tossed off the cliff while posing as the dead Abbe. Fortunately he had a knife and set himself free.
Upon reaching the island of Monte Cristo, he discovered the massive fortune that did exist and changed his life. From then on he lived like he wanted to, exploring where he wished, eating on the best and setting up the rest of the book for what is basically a revenge plot. Dantes, who now has many aliases becomes for the most part the Count of Monte Cristo.
After learning the secrets of the above stated villans, he schemes to take them down for ruining his life, starving his father and losing his love, Mercedes (who later married Fernand the snake).
He gets his way and the villains are vanquished (or the Count helps them vanquish themselves) and revenge is exacted.
What is not fully explained is how he became so learned from a sailor and prisoner to a chemist, man of the world and just how he knows so much about who he is going make pay for his suffering. It does describe a long period of time (appx. 24 years) to do it and how he developed his learning skills from the Abbe in prison, but it would have helped to understand some of the chemicals he used in his actions. I do note that this doesn’t take away from the book, I just wanted more.
THE WARPED EUROPEANS
The book does expose the pontificous nature and pomp of the Europeans in that time period (not that they haven’t been for most of history). Fortunately, it also exposes the fallible nature of this culture. The class system is quite evident and appearance versus substance apparent. I remind the critics of current times as they denigrate or try to convert the USA to their lifestyle and government that this is just what we wished to escaped from. It is through this exposure to those times that history is revealed and relished.
OVERALL
The writing is excellent and builds as the book builds as it progresses, my favorite style of writing. At the end I could hardly put it down. I highly recommend it and it’s use of words not normally in our vocabulary anymore is brilliant. If we could only go back to that language rather than the obnoxious rappers like a self deluded Kanye West – (especially when drunk in front of Taylor Swift and the rest of the world) and others of his league, we would be bringing up better and more learned children. Fortunately, I listened to my son and benefited from it. I’m grateful to have sent him to a school that teaches the classics such as this.
I don’t have a star rating, but I would give it one less than the best. All should read it to better themselves and improve/understand good vocabulary, a good story and the struggles of man in good vs. evil.
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Interviewing, What Not to Say
As I face the end of this phase of my corporate career, I recall back on the many interviews I’ve had. Some went well as I’ve had jobs, and certainly many did not as I didn’t get others.
The strangest question I was ever asked was if you could choose whether to be on a planet where you worked all the time or one that you could rest and play all the time, which would you choose? Fortunately, I answered I’d go to the planet to work all the time so that I could get to the other one to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Somehow that worked and I got the job.
After I wrote this, one of my friends from work sent me this worthy entry. Thanks Arline.
After spending 30 minutes interviewing a young man for a position
he asked if I would elaborate a little more on my own position, I
kindly agreed, He then said he had decided he wanted my Job and
not the on he was interviewing for.
After hearing the mention of what people say, I decided to include these answers from Rachel Farrell, Careerbuilder.com, to whom I give full credit.
You can always depend on young children to tell you exactly what they think, or precisely how they feel on any given topic. Want to know if your breath smells bad, if you should wear a different tie or if you really look fat in that outfit? Find a 5-year-old. He will give you an uncensored, honest answer.
Needless to say, we expect more from adults. Especially adults who are interviewing for a job.
For the second year in a row, we asked hiring managers everywhere to tell us the craziest thing they’ve ever heard in an interview. Keep reading for 37 hilarious (and true) statements from the job candidates:
1. “I interviewed a gentleman who looked great on paper but said two things during the interview that made me think, ‘Really?’ When starting the interview, I asked him what his hobbies were, to lighten the mood. He replied, ‘I sometimes walk up to perfect strangers just to say hello. I also like to pick up trash if I see some when I’m walking around.’ After I asked him how the position would contribute to his professional goals and future plans, he replied, ‘My main goal is to be a rock star; this is more of a backup plan.'” — Jessica Harrington, marketing associate, Eastern Michigan University
2. “I remember interviewing a secretary some years ago and asking her, ‘What is important to you in a job?’ Her answer was: ‘I want to work close to Bloomingdales.'” — Bettina Seidman, career management coach, Seidbet Associates
3. “‘When your workload is heavy and you are overwhelmed, how do you handle the stress?’ ‘I run in the bathroom and cry.’” — Jessica Simko, Career Branding Guide
4. “We performed mock interviews where our clients were put in an interview session using their real backgrounds, interests, etc. When asked why the client left her last job, which was in a family buffet-style restaurant, her response was, ‘I was hungry and didn’t know it would be a problem so I had pizza delivered to the restaurant while was on the clock.'” — Jacqueline Lisenby, chief visionary officer and president, StatusJ Entertainment Group
5. “I interviewed a senior engineer for one of our open positions. He demanded coffee and proceeded to spill coffee in his lap. Then he pointed to his groin area, laughed and said, ‘It looks like I wet myself!’ Needless to say, he didn’t get the job.” — Lisa Hall, human resources trainer and author of “Taking Charge of Your Own Health”
6. “I recently had the craziest interviewee ever come into our offices for a copywriter position. I wanted enthusiastic, but this guy was so over the top, I almost laughed in the middle of the interview. He high-fived someone on my team after hearing that my team member just got engaged. He talked about how terrible his boss was for a good 20 minutes. He said he felt like he was already working with us. And then he left something behind so that he could come back and get it. He called wondering when he could come back, and we [saw] him prepping in the parking lot.” — Amanda Halm, senior copywriter, editor, Bridezilla.com
7. “Without a doubt, the craziest thing I ever heard came from a candidate for an entry-level management position. He looked perfect on paper, so we scheduled a phone interview for 3 p.m. He answered the phone and when I introduced myself he said, ‘Hold on, I’m at a bar. Let me finish this shot and go outside.’ Amidst the noise of an active game of pool and a rowdy bar crowd, he slipped outside and told me, ‘You know what? I’m a little drunker than I thought. Can we reschedule?’ Needless to say, we did not.” — Heather Lytle, senior partner, H&L Media Partners
8. “While I am not the interviewer for a corporation, having been in many interviews for opportunities, I have actually heard a number of interesting, crazy, less-tactful things said from the interviewer side. The worst was, I drove two hours to do an in-person, one-hour interview and the interviewer was 30-40 minutes late to the interview, even though she walked by me in the lobby six or seven times with a bag of chips talking about her personal life to the receptionist. When she finally came out to get me, she didn’t even act shocked or sorry for the delay, and just said, ‘I was munching on a bag of chips and time flies when you’re eating chips.’ Let’s just say I knew then it wouldn’t be a good fit.” — Chris Perry, founder of Career Rocketeer
9. “We recently asked a job candidate, ‘What do you know about us?’ He leaned back in his chair and replied, ‘Not much. Why don’t you fill me in?’ He wasn’t hired.” — John Kramb, Adams County Winery
10. “We always include a casual lunch or dinner portion during an interview to continue our discussions in a more informal manner. This candidate let their guard down, falling out of their ‘interview mode,’ during the friendly and casual meal-time discussions. They went so far as to share that they installed an illegal second network in their office with co-workers and would spend their afternoons gaming on the clock. They then went on to further share how regularly in the mornings and afternoons they would sleep at their desk during working hours. Bragging that they had never once been caught in either of these acts. Needless to say, this candidate was not hired. Prior to this meal-time, more casual discussion, they were likely to be made an offer. The lesson learned and to be shared is that you are on the interview from before you arrive at a location until you have returned home. I was truly surprised that such a smart individual would make such a stupid mistake by sharing such obviously unacceptable work practices with a potential new employer.” — Zachary Z. Zguris, chief technology officer, Lime Design Inc.
11. “The interview was for a highly visible administrative assistant position. Clearly, I was looking for someone who would exercise tact with top-caliber people who would come into our office. I opened the interview with a fairly standard question:
‘What is it that attracts you to this job the most?’ Without hesitation, she replied, ‘My mother thinks this will be the right job for me.'” — Bill Lampton, president, Championship Communication
12. “We have the standard lists of questions you’d expect to hear, but at any given moment, I’ll interject with, ‘If you were an animal, what animal would you be and why?’ The most shocking response was, ‘I’d be a cat so I can lay around all day and not have to do anything.'” — Efrain Ayala, account executive, Walt Denny Inc., The Home Products Agency
13. “The man’s phone kept ringing. Finally, he answered it and he said, ‘Hello. No. I’m fine. OK.’ Of course, it was rude and uncalled for in my opinion, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if everything was OK. He basically said nothing was wrong but that his wife was checking in. He had not flown in for the interview. He was local.” — T. Murray, author of “Stuck on Stupid: A Guide for Today’s Professional Stuck in a Rut”
14. “The most bizarre experience I ever had was regarding a candidate who was offered a position with my client. Because she had disclosed that she had a college degree, she was required to produce proof in the form of transcripts, diploma, etc. She told us that she was unable to produce the required documentation because her identity had been changed and that the information the firm was seeking was in her previous name. Due to safety reasons, she was unable to produce proof (in any name she had or was using).” — Cathleen Faerber, managing director, The Wellesley Group Inc.
15. “I was interviewing an older woman for a position in my company. I thought she had a great personality and was considering hiring her. Then at the end of the interview she asked if I would be able to give her a ride to work and then back home again everyday! Umm, no.” — Janice Celeste, president and CEO, Celeste Studios Film & Video
16. “I had a woman come in and tell me that she ran a business around the corner and that she would be working this job, as well as managing her business during business hours. I wanted to be sure that I understood her correctly — that she would be taking time away from the position with me to ‘check in’ on her store periodically. But when I asked her a few questions to clarify, she became upset with me and ended up storming out of my office.” — Shay Olivarria, speaker and author of “Bigger Than Your Block”
17. “One job candidate arrived late for the interview, in a not-so-gracious mood. ‘The commute is terrible,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad I don’t have to do this every day.'” — Sammie Samuella Becker, CEO, TigressPR
18. “I had a candidate in the final interview stages. He pretty much had the job. He was invited to interview with a couple of people who would become peers as last step in the process. One would-be peer asked my candidate to demonstrate to them his work ethic and drive, to which he replied, ‘You can just strap a saddle on my a** and ride me!’ Apparently, he was hoping to show what a workhorse he is. As you might imagine, he did not get the job.” — Jenny Foss, recruiting agency owner, recruiter and job search consultant
19. “I interviewed a candidate over the phone for a sales position. Less than five minutes into the call, I began to hear water swishing and realized that the candidate was taking a bath during the phone interview.” — Jessica Miller-Merrell, owner, Xceptional HR
20. “I had a candidate come into my office with her child and proceed to breastfeed her baby boy during the interview. There was no acknowledgment or mention from the woman I was interviewing about the baby or him eating.” — Miller-Merrell
21. “While interviewing a young lady who was wearing a revealing top, at the end of the interview, she leaned forward and said in a sultry voice, ‘I’ll do anything to get this job.’ She got people’s attention, but eliminated herself from getting hired.” — Ronald Kaufman consultant and author of “Anatomy of Success”
22. “One [candidate] came in dressed very professionally and really looked like she had made an effort to look the part. Some people assume because we are laid back and bring our pets to work, that we are extremely casual and will show up for an interview dressed in jeans, so this was a nice change. Toward the end of the interview, I complimented her on how professional she looked. She got this huge smile and looked down at her clothes and said, ‘I know. I think I look like Mary Tyler Moore; that’s why I wore this!’ We ended up hiring her and she was such a quirky, fun, enthusiastic employee with a style all her own.” — Cindy Lukacevic, owner/vice president of marketing, Dinovite Inc.
23. “While wrapping up a seemingly decent interview with a young lady for an administrative assistant position, I asked her if she had any questions. She asked one or two default questions about the company then — drum roll — she says, ‘I used my last bit of change to put gas in my car to make it here. Is there any way that you could help me out?’ Needless to say, I was floored and the candidate did not get the job.” — Clorissa Wright, senior publicist, WrightWay Marketing and Consulting
24. “‘I like to date the young ones, is that bad?’ and ‘I love older women, do you really only have women working in your organization?’ Those are the two I will never forget.” — Greg Palomino, CRE8AD8
25. “I was working for a private investigator and interviewing applicants for a decoy position, in which they could possibly be confronted with various situations while investigating everyone from potentially cheating wives to drug dealers. I asked a guy in his early 20s, ‘What would you do if you were working undercover and someone you were investigating starting using drugs?’ He laughed, ‘Oh, it wouldn’t bother me. I mean, I have a medical marijuana card and all. You know, anxiety and stuff.’ ‘Oh, really?’ I noticed his eyes were slightly glassy. ‘Yep.’ He grinned. ‘So, are you high now?’ I asked. A chuckle. ‘Just a little!’ ‘Oh, just a little?’ I replied. ‘When did you last smoke?’ ‘Oh, before I left my place to come here.’ He didn’t get the job.” –Lauren Gard, Infinite Public Relations
26. “Over a nice dinner, the president of a company conducted a final interview with a vice president of sales candidate. At the end of the interview, the job was going to be offered to the candidate. The waiter brought the bill and the candidate, who was employed at the time, took it, pulled out his company credit card and said, ‘Don’t worry about this, I’ll put it on my company’s expense account.’ The president later said he didn’t know which shocked him more, the lack of ethics or the candidate’s stupidity. Obviously the job offer was never extended.” — Brian Marchant-Calsyn, Health Career Agents
27. “An executive search recruiter was explaining the qualities needed for the job: multitasking, hard-working, time management skills, attention to detail, etc. The candidate responded with, ‘I can’t do that. I’m not a robot.'” –Andrea Friedman, public relations coordinator, The LaSalle Network, a Chicago professional staffing and recruiting company
28. “A recruiter was in the midst of an interview, when the candidate asked, ‘Do you mind if I use your kitchen to eat my turkey sandwich?'” — Friedman
29. “An executive search recruiter asked the candidate, who was previously an accounting manager, what their ideal job would be. The candidate responded with, ‘A Playboy photographer.'” — Friedman
30. “I had to interview for a position that required organization, time management and attention to detail. My candidate was young, in his early 20s, and wore all black to the interview. We were a very casual office, so I thought nothing of it. But when I asked him to describe for me an instance when he had managed his time effectively, he cited managing his time in dungeon raids in the online game ‘World of Warcraft.’ When I said I knew the game and had even played it a bit, he took that as his cue to answer all my questions with ‘World of Warcraft’ examples. The word ‘necromancer’ came up far too many times. Needless to say, I was looking for real-world examples and he didn’t get the position.” — Jennifer Escalona
31. “One of the funniest things an applicant said to me was in response to my question, ‘What do you like in an office environment?’ The applicant said, ‘I like 42nd and Broadway.’ Needless to say, that wasn’t what I was asking, and that wasn’t anywhere near our office location.” — Sharon Armstrong, author of “The Essential Performance Review Handbook”
32. “‘I have a hunch that someone in your office is dating an ex-boyfriend/acquaintance of mine and I feel that’s too awkward of a conflict of interest. I will not accept any job based on this kind of pork-chop recommendation.’ Especially amusing because no one in our office at the time was dating any men. We still have no idea where the candidate came up with this theory, or what exactly she means by ‘pork-chop recommendation,’ for that matter.” — Anne Howard, Lynn Hazan & Associates
33. “In an interview, the oddest thing has to be a candidate asking if we had any
food that she could have.” — Howard
34. “When I interview candidates, I always ask the following questions in this order: What are you most proud of? What do you enjoy doing? Why did you leave your previous jobs? Here are the answers I received from one candidate: ‘I am most proud of my wife and children.’ ‘The thing I enjoy most is spending time with my family.’ ‘I decided to quit. I had an affair with a co-worker and when we broke up there was too much tension in the office.’ And he said it without batting an eye.” — Bruce, executive recruiter and career counselor, Hurwitz Strategic Staffing Ltd.
35. “One time during an interview, a candidate removed his flip-flops and literally stuck his foot in my face. Another time, I was interviewing a candidate who asked me out on a date three times in five minutes. I had to remind him that he was on an interview — not speed dating.” — Heather Araneo, branch manager, Snelling Staffing – The Wyckoff Group
36. “Interviewer (president of a mid-sized company): Do you plan on having children?
Answer (me/candidate): Yes, at some point.
Interviewer: Do you intend to continue working then?
A: Yes.
Interviewer: What are you going to do, be like a cow and drop it in the middle of a field?” — Janice Warren, director, OneReport, SRI World Group
37. “One day, I met with a candidate who, on his résumé, had good experience and education. I was going through the normal interview questions with him when I asked him which accounting system he had implemented. His response was immediate: ‘PEACHTREE!’ But then he started shaking his head and saying, “No, no, no’ and then he slapped himself across the face and said ‘NO! QUICKBOOKS!'” — Meghan Norman, corporate recruiter
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Happy Birthday Mom
Most will celebrate the birth of our nation, as will I. Some are more proud of it than others, they usually are red stater’s.
For me, my Mom was born and died on July 4th, so it has a different meaning to me. Much of what I am, why I believe in God and many other things in my life are attributed to her.
She would have been 88 tomorrow, an age I may or may not see. What I do wish to see is her in my life still. For now, I’ll wait for the afterlife (read Revelation 21 on)..
Here is one of the last pictures I have of her. For now, I’ll just have to live with the day lily named after her.
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Microsoft, Being Chipped Away by Google, Apple, Everyone
Every time a company comes up with a good idea, another company finds a way to one up it. Patents, trademarks, copy-writes or any other legal means don’t stand in the way of a better idea.
This also works when you don’t have a better idea, but your product still dominates the market, mostly due to better marketing. Yes, there is a good percentage of people don’t think Windows is a good product. Most have experienced the Blue screen of death. Booting takes forever, drivers, compatibility, price and any number of factors make it a product that is only doing well because of marketing and the force of Microsoft.
Apple OS, Linux and even OS/2 were or are better operating systems. Now the Chromebook is out. I won’t pontificate as to whether it is better or not, but it will take share away from Windoze as the OS of choice. There are many Google lovers or users out there and for the price of a Chromebook, you could only get Windows 7 from Microsoft.
I’ve often said that Microsoft will have to pull an IBM by re-inventing itself, but their phone OS, gaming, MP3 players and Office haven’t really done the trick. They are are the quintessential one trick pony.
Time will tell what will happen, but the introduction of the Chromebook is just another layer of the onion being peeled away. Good thing they have a lot of cash in the bank, because they will need it to buy a better product. They sure haven’t invented one……ever.
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Green Jobs – Teaching my Offspring about Capitalism
Times are tough for teenagers to get a job. I’ve heard that unemployment is more that 20 +% for teenagers. My son has struck out getting a job, although he has put more effort into video games than looking for a job, so we started an eBay business.
It’s name is NeonDeal, Click on the name and see what he is selling, vintage fishing lures. The one in the picture is worth a few hundred dollars. Of course, I know something about it, but he built the blog and the Twitter account which you should follow and see what he is selling. He sold and shipped his first lures last week and made more money in one night than he would in a month at McDonald’s. He’s learned a valuable lesson, work for yourself and it’s good to be the boss. Michael Dell started a company called PC’s Limited out of his dorm room….It’s now call Dell Computers. Hope my son gets that kind of taste for the real green. So he’s self employed for the summer and is understanding inventory, shipping, logistics, marketing, sales, blogging and if you don’t work…you don’t get paid.
Now, when I said green jobs in the title, I mean in terms of Money. If you thought I meant Green jobs in terms of saving the planet, they are tough to come by in real life. One thing I learned is that if they really were a better solution, they would have succeeded on their own already. That is the way business works.
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D-Day 2011, Remembering 67 years Ago
First, let’s start with President Reagan’s speech about D-Day on the 40th Anniversary
For the most graphic description of what took place, read BlackFive
Next, let’s look at the view of the beach that was taken
Here is the visual provided by the Army
It was one of the bloodiest days of WWII with the Germans cutting down our soldiers from pill boxes as they hit the beach, many seasick. The sea was red with blood and it took days to clean up the beaches, but this was the beginning of the march to Berlin. It was the “surge” that won the war.
As I’ve commented before, you do not negotiate the end of a war, nor the exit strategy. You win and gain surrender, then negotiate the terms of surrender. Pulling out just lets the enemy know how long they have to wait, then where to re-group. Today’s enemy’s, terrorist Muslims hate the US and the West mostly because of the liberal values that are against their beliefs. I especially blame Hollywood, MTV, College professors and the hippies of the 60’s for this.
D-Day was one of our greatest and most terrible moments in history. I salute those who showed bravery and fought for the freedom we have today.
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Memorial Day 2011
My fath
er saw Europe tear itself apart in the 40’s, a continent that has been at each others throats for hundreds of years. My uncle saw the atrocities of the Pacific Theater as a B-29 bomber Captain. We now face attack from radical terrorist Muslims from the outside and socialism attacking Capitalism or those who invent faux issues like Anthropogenic Global Warming from the inside. Now, other religions are trying to take our holiday from us.
We must stand on the principles that made this country great, honor the memory of those who gave their lives to make us free and stand up to those who wish to defeat us now, or tear us down because we are not like them or are able, willing and ready to defend ourselves and our freedoms This is unlike the pacifistic and appeasers and even some of our current deleterious leaders who didn’t understand what Patton, MacArthur, Nimitz, Bradley and others knew. You fight to win, then you negotiate the terms of surrender and how business will be conducted. Even on my blog, there are some that just have no clue as to what we are about as demonstrated in the absurd comments of this entry.
Others feel this way also like Ricky Gilleland, quoting from this article:
Quiet, soft-spoken 17- year-old Ricky Gilleland spends most weekends surrounded by tombstones, as he walks through Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington, D.C. looking for the burial sites of those individuals who have died in the line of duty since September 11, 2001. Gilleland has taken on the job that the historic cemetery has not been able to do itself.
Through his website, preserveandhonor.com, Gilleland has cataloged the thousands who are laid to rest in Section 60 of Arlington Cemetery. With a camera in hand, Gilleland shoots a photo of both the front and back of the headstone, “to provide a virtual place for loved ones and friends to both locate the graves of the fallen and reflect on the memory of their sacrifice.”
Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/05/30/teen-mission-preserve-and-honor-fallen#ixzz1NsEWLm3u
Or these great American’s who realize why we have Memorial Day:
GM’s Place The Last Battle
So I don’t wish a happy Memorial Day, although I hope you enjoy the hot dogs and family celebration. Rather, remember those who fought so that you could live free
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Dealing with Email
The 300 Baud Modem Days
I remember back in the 80’s when I had exclusive access to some very important reporters as only about 50 of us were on MCI Mail and it was sort of a club that we had. We didn’t say it, but we didn’t share our secret as they got pounds of press releases by snail mail daily. If they got an email over a 300 baud modem, they knew it meant something. We only contacted each other when it was important, so no one abused it.
Remember, this was the days of the office memo that got typed on a typewriter and sent around. CC’s were made with carbon paper so it was to tough to abuse it due to the trouble
The Evolution, Email is the new Snail Mail, and Spam King
Later, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Pegasus and a ton of other email clients have come and gone. Email could now even be regarded as the new snail mail, and certainly it’s the king of Spam. Being CC’d or BCC’d on thousands of notes fills up inboxes globally. Many have gone to multiple email addresses to divert off the spam for personal use, but if you work for a company, you’re stuck with that address that is all to easy to find.
So what are the up’s and down’s to email? It can be the only way to reach someone (in a company, a text message or tweet DM is likely faster) if they are in a different timezone or are miles up the corporate ladder for you. So that is good.
Slogging through endless emails that have little impact are a time suck now and you must fight the urge to respond, stopping the chain. There are other downsides which I’ll discuss below.
Email Road Rage
Ranting behind the false curtain of email rather than face to face or calling the person directly. I dubbed this tactic Email Road Rage. All have been the recipient of it or have seen someone go off the deep end, many times later to regret it. Bosses seem to think they have immunity on this, but it inhibits employee behavior and openness via email exchange.
The best executive I’ve worked directly for, Buell Duncan once told me to answer these kind of emails once, and then let it roll off your back like water off a duck. Don’t spend nights letting it keep you up. Deal with it and be done.
While it may be tempting to get into the fray, especially when one is feisty is to defend your position, attack back or go behind the offender’s back describing in unflattering terms what kind of a person would send these emails, the best answer is…..
Don’t Respond Unless Required.
Most email stops when you stop the chain. I get you have to answer the boss, but not joining the fray is the best medicine. I have found this hard to do, but being a Ph.D. in the School of hard knocks, I’ve learned to not answer when at all possible. Don’t explain or defend yourself, just use the del key, the appropriate response. This is true for tweets. I’ve gotten into endless tweetbacks that I wish had never happened. Now I just ignore and I’ve forgotten the next day or someone else is naive enough to get caught into the trap.
Along with don’t answer is don’t send. You can avoid a lot of useless email if you don’t feel the obligation to fire off emails at every whim. I’m learning that lesson also. My inbox thanks me.
The most important time to start going dark is….
Before Vacation
I purposely don’t start anything that could bite me while I’m trying to not work. IBM is the poster child for people working on vacation, something I try hard not to do. I got emails from bosses on anniversary vacations, which I’m sure made their spouses happy. The way I see it, the doors to the company will stay open while I’m away. Americans are notorious for not being good vacationers. Not me. I put on that I won’t be checking email until I return.
The key to this is to start slowing down a few days before you leave. This slows the wheels of motion and gets the anonymity going.
Conclusion
While email can be helpful and it certainly is still our main method of communicating, it follows Sturgeon’s law. Life has enough of that anyway, so why add to it?
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A Great Relief
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World’s Shortest Books (Satire)
For those easily offended, move along, nothing to see here. For those with a sense of irony, humor and perhaps sarcasm, enjoy.
The World’s Shortest Books:
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY COUNTRY
by Jane Fonda & Cindy Sheehan.
Illustrated by Michael Moore
________________________________________MY CHRISTIAN ACCOMPLISHMENTS &
HOW I HELPED AFTER KATRINA
by Rev Jesse Jackson & Rev Al Sharpton
_______________________________________
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT BILL
by Hillary Clinton
________________________________
Sequel:
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT HILLARYBy Bill Clinton
___________________________________MY LITTLE BOOK OF PERSONAL HYGIENE
by Osama Bin Laden
___________________________________THINGS I CANNOT AFFORD
by Bill Gates
____________________________________THINGS I WOULD NOT DO FOR MONEY
by Dennis Rodman
_________________________________THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE
by Al Gore & John Kerry
_____________________________________
AMELIA EARHART’S GUIDE TO THE PACIFIC___________________________________
A COLLECTION of MOTIVATIONAL SPEECHES
by Dr. J.. Kevorkian
__________________________________
ALL THE MEN I HAVE LOVED BEFOREby Ellen de Generes & Rosie O’Donnel
____________________________________
GUIDE TO DATING ETIQUETTEby Mike Tyson
__________________________________
THE AMISH PHONE DIRECTORY
_______________________________________
MY PLAN TO FIND THE REAL KILLERSby O. J. Simpson
_________________________________________HOW TO DRINK & DRIVE OVER BRIDGES
by Ted Kennedy
___________________________________MY BOOK OF MORALS
by Bill Clinton with introduction
by the Rev. Jesse Jackson
*******************************************************
AND, JUST ADDED:Complete Knowledge of Military Strategy!
By Nancy Pelosi
**************************************************************************************************************************
My Real-World Work Experience
by Barack Obama
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Interesting Facts About Israel and the Middle East
Below is some vital information for you to assimilate and to ready to give to others who do not understand.
ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM FACTS
1. Israel became a state in 1312 B.C., two Millennia before Islam;
2. Arab refugees from Israel began calling themselves “Palestinians” in 1967, two decades after (modern) Israeli statehood;
3. after conquering the land in 1272 B.C., Jews ruled it for a thousand years and maintained a continuous presence there for 3,300 years;
4. the only Arab rule following conquest in 633 B.C. lasted just 22 years;
5. for over 3,300 years, Jerusalem was the Jewish capital. It was never the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even under Jordanian rule, (east) Jerusalem was not made the capital, and no Arab leader came to visit it;
6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in the Holy Bible, but not once is it mentioned in the book of Qur’an;
7. King David founded Jerusalem ; Mohammed never set foot in it;
8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem ; Muslims face Mecca . If they are between the two cities, Muslims pray facing Mecca , with their backs to Jerusalem ;
9. in 1948, Arab leaders urged their people to leave, promising to cleanse the land of Jewish presence. 68% of them fled without ever setting eyes on an Israeli soldier;
10. virtually the entire Jewish population of Muslim countries had to flee as the result of violence and pogroms;
11. some 630,000 Arabs left Israel in 1948, while close to a million Jews were forced to leave the Muslim countries;
12. in spite of the vast territories at their disposal, Arab refuges were deliberately prevented from assimilating into their host countries. Of 100 million refugees following World War II, they are the only group to have never integrated with their co-religionists. Most of the Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab lands were settled in Israel , a country no larger than new jersey ;
13. there are 22 Muslim countries, not counting Palestine … there is only one Jewish state. Arabs started all five wars against Israel , and lost every one of them;
14. Fatah and Hamas constitutions still call for the destruction of Israel .. Israel ceded most of the west bank and all of Gaza to the Palestinian authority, and even provided it with arms;
15. during the Jordanian occupation, Jewish holy sites were vandalized and were off limits to Jews. under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian holy sites are accessible to all faiths;
16. out of 175 United Nations Security Council Resolutions up to 1990, 97 were against Israel ; out of 690 general assembly resolutions, 429 were against Israel ;
17. the U.N.. was silent when the Jordanians destroyed 58 synagogues in the old city of Jerusalem .. it remained silent while Jordan systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the mount of olives, an d it remained silent when Jordan enforced Apartheid laws preventing Jews from accessing the temple mount and Western Wall.
these are trying times. We must ask ourselves what we should be doing, and what we will tell our grandchildren about our actions during this crisis, when we had the chance to make a difference.
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Working With the Legal Department
I just had to get a press release approved for PartnerWorld. 9 lawyers later, I got a version back that resembled what I submitted.
It was now devoid of content and any facts relating to any announcement, said or implied, pertaining to or related to any issue with or without any implications to the company or any of it’s divisions or partners both expressed or implied whether discussing any actual issue, but not limited to any actual information that might be relevant to those to whom the information might be directed to forth with.
I sent the reporters what I wanted to anyway and blew off the lawyers as usual.
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Advice for Men, 9 Words that Women Use That YOU Need to Pay Attention To
Men, pay attention. This could save you.
(1) Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
(2) Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.
(3) Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.
(4) Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission.. Don’t Do It!
(5) Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to # 3 for the meaning of nothing.)
(6) That’s Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a woman can make to a man. That’s okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake..
(7) Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say you’re welcome. (I want to add in a clause here – This is true, unless she says ‘Thanks a lot’ – that is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say ‘you’re welcome’ . that will bring on a ‘whatever’).
(8) Whatever: Is a woman’s way of saying F- off!
(9) Don’t worry about it, I’ll do it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing herself. This will later result in a man asking ‘What’s wrong?’ For the woman’s response refer to # 3.
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Poison People in the Office
This article was written by Sid Adelman and Larissa Moss. I would recommend that you don’t be one of these, work for one of these or if you know one, stay away from them. It’s still work, but enjoying it has a lot to do with those you interact with.
One of the biggest risks to any project manager is having people on the team with the wrong attitude, bad work habits or incompatible skills. Do not accept them on your team, even temporarily – a temporary assignment may outlast your tenure, and is likely to, if you accept these people. Your job is not to rehabilitate, but to implement your project. Have a clear understanding with your boss of what your job really is. Your boss will only be successful when you are successful, so your boss should support your efforts.
The Poison People are not just dead wood, they infect the entire team, hurting morale, and hurting work habits. They will require time from both you and the other team members to deal with them, their problems and their incompetence. Good workers do not want to be on the same team with these people.
1. Retired-on-the-job Rudy – Rudy may, in fact, be close to retirement or just a non-performer. Whatever skills he once had (autocoder and board wiring) are either rusty or of little use on your project.
2. Bad Luck Bob – Bob has never worked on a project that has been successful. Disaster seems to follow him wherever he goes. His bad luck will undoubtedly rub off on the project.
3. Obstructionist Orville – Orville finds fault with every approach suggested and will argue every minor point that could be debated. By the time he is finally convinced (and then not convinced but grudgingly acquiesces) the project is way behind schedule or has been cancelled.
4. Learning Lena – Lena believes she can take on her assignments only if she attends classes (all scheduled in resort locations) for the next six months.
5. Researcher Russ – Russ believes that we should not move forward until we have thoroughly evaluated every tool on the market, brought each one in for extensive evaluation and testing and visited all the reference sites.
6. Incompetent Ernie – Ernie couldn’t find his mouse at high noon with both hands.
7. Oldie Goldie – Goldie has been with the company since the company was founded. She knows everything and everyone. She manages to stay employed by playing the politics very well and by working the minimum time. She does manage to look busy. It doesn’t matter what you assign her, she only works on tasks she enjoys doing. She has seen many project managers come and go and is willing to take her chances that she will outlast you.
8. Gunslinger Gus – Gus doesn’t believe in following standards, rules or anything else. Version control is an annoyance and cramps his style. He’s pretty confident of the quality of his code and so his motto is “Testing is always an option.”
9. Water Cooler Walt – Walt loves to discuss everything with the team, whether it’s relevant to the work or not. Unfortunately, he doesn’t just do it at the water cooler, he drops into the other team members’ cubicles and wastes their time and they don’t know how to get rid of him politely or otherwise.
10. Big Idea Bernie – Bernie has read everything – and he believes everything he reads. He knows every web site and he attends every conference. Unfortunately, he’s too busy to actually do anything productive.
11. Internet Ida – Ida surfs the net for everything. Very little of it applies to her job. She is an internet junky and, even though she has been urged to, she has not yet joined the 12 Step Program for Internets Anonymous.
12. Safe Stan – Stan has some mysterious connections that protect him from ever being fired. He may be the CIO’s wife’s idiot son (by a previous marriage) or he may have some pictures that the Board’s Chairman would not want on the front page of the Evening Bugle.
13. Insensitive Igor – Whenever Igor opens his mouth, he manages to offend everyone, and those that seem to be the most offended are the users. You hate to bring him to meetings for you know you will have to make amends later on.
14. Saboteur Sam – Sam hates everything and everybody. He has an ax to grind and thinks the company has done him wrong. He does his best to sabotage every project he is on.
15. Heat-seeker Henry – Henry know no fear. He will try anything and everything, as long as it is new and technical, even if he brings down a few systems in the process.
16. Reminiscing Rena- Rena remembers the Good Ol’ Days and she reminds you of them constantly. Nothing ever lives up to her expectations, and it takes an act of God to get her to try something new.
So, you say, you can’t get rid of these people. What to do? Establish a gulag; separate them from the productive workers. Make the separation physical as well as by tasks. Separate them from the mainstream project. Give them work to do that will keep them out of trouble, will not detract from your project and will minimize contact with the rest of the team. Give them tasks such as reviewing all the code and reporting on standards violations – a complete review is always required when anyone makes even the slightest change in their code. You might also assign them to research obscure tools that have no chance of ever being chosen, but be sure that activity does not take up the vendors’ time as well.
This article is excerpted from a book titled Data Warehouse Project Management.
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Will Apple Survive the Loss of Steve Jobs?
I’m not wishing any bad luck or premonitions to Steve, but conditions don’t look that good given he already had a liver replacement and he hasn’t been the picture of health at conferences. I hope that he has a good recovery and stays at Apple keeping the industry hopping and keeps Apple bringing out newer and better products that make our lives free from Microsoft.
THOSE WHO SAY YES
There is enough in the pipeline with iPhone extending to new carriers like Verizon and any CDMA based companies. The iPad is just beginning to take off and as soon as they resolve flash or HTML 5.0 or whatever video standard, it will be the de-facto standard. The only drawback I can see is the keyboard is less than stellar, but I’m sure the form factor will change. We can already see what the iPad has done to NetBooks, the next big notebook innovation that never happened. It will likely kill most of the low to mid range PC sales. I think the iPod has a lifespan that may be ending after a few more revisions, but there is just too many other options that make this redundant.
This doesn’t even count Macbook which shouldn’t be selling as well as it does at 3 times the price of a Windoze PC, but they have a following and a growing market share. If they pattern it after the iPad, look out HP and Dell.
The Apple designers have enough Steve Jobs inspiration for 3-5 years of innovation and they have set the bar again and again. As long as Tim Cook keeps the Jobs mantra viable, they will dominate.
Let’s not forget that Jobs created Next and sold it to Apple, and Pixar which made him one, if not the largest Disney stakeholder. He is the creative mind who invented Apple and rejuvenated it.
THOSE WHO SAY NO
John Sculley came to mind as a corporate wizard who doesn’t get what Apple is. It is a culture and a mindset that just isn’t GE or Pepsi or your standard fortune 100 company. They need to keep Cook in place to keep things together, but will need an actual creative genius who will keep the juices flowing and create the next iSomething. Otherwise, short the stock and move along. Tim Cook is boring and will try to tread water, but will likely lead the company down the Political Correctness and climate drain of boredom and safety rather than innovation. He seems more worried about diversity and the culture of appeasing political groups or his interests rather than how Jobs ran the company.
OTHER COMMENTS
Others like ZDNet weigh in:
There’s no doubt that Jobs played a big part in shaping Apple and helping it grow beyond that early base of cult followers and taking the company mainstream and beyond. Like Apple or not, you can’t dismiss the impact that the company has had on consumer electronics, music and movies. Jobs has done a marvelous job as CEO, and whether you own any Apple products or not, I’m certain that in some way Apple’s vision will have shaped and influenced some of the tech you have in your life. Apple shareholders should especially be grateful for the work he’s done and the effort he’s put into Apple.
So, given that Jobs has done so much for Apple, are the pundits right? Is Apple doomed without Jobs?
In a word, not yet. It will slowly deteriorate with the next product cycles or iphone refresh rate.
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When Science Triumphs Over Propaganda
After spending a year with the great minds of sustainability, I finally found a Global Warming Scientist that is correct and has some facts to back it up.
Piers Corbyn got laughed at when he made this prediction in November:
While he was laughed at and was told that the science was settled, he was proven right and called out why it is the Sun that is the correct predictor of the weather.
His Website shows how the facts are manipulated and as usual, follow the money….except that the carbon trading exchange has now been closed.
As always, history proves the truth.
I wonder what the next inconvenient truth will be?
UPDATE: I found out later from Tres idiots Tim O’Reilly, Tom Raftery and James Governor got on their high horses to claim the end of the world because of CO2 and AGW also. They voice support for Hollywood celebrities who live in mansions, fly private jets to global warming conferences and believe all the Al Gore nonsense about settled science without a shred of evidence, hypotheses that could be proven true and not one prediction of a climate crisis that is correct. It turns out that distribution of money to fake environmental causes was the real reason they bought into this along with the worship of earth as their god instead of The God of the Bible as their religion. I hope this makes them feel better as they travel the road paved with good intentions that leads to you know where.
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2010 in review
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,400 times in 2010. That’s about 23 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 19 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 283 posts. There were 38 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 11mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.
The busiest day of the year was December 7th with 122 views. The most popular post that day was Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a day that will live in Infamy.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, blog.softwareinsider.org, search.aol.com, twitter.com, and google.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for what the customer wanted, euphemism for stupid, jeff jonas, dan marino, and gina smith.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
1
Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a day that will live in Infamy December 2005
2 comments
2
Euphemisms for Stupid March 2006
3
Customer Service? Give the Customer what they want? October 2006
4
USS Indianapolis August 2006
17 comments
5
September 11, 2001, Good vs. Evil September 2006
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“Gore effect” strikes Cancun Climate Conference 3 days in a row (via Watts Up With That?)
It seems like weather/nature/climate and facts are against Al’s claims to AGW.
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Will the New Facebook Take Over Linkedin?
Not for me. There is already too much information available out there and Facebook just increased it. Regardless of the predictions, I don’t see it happening completely. Some will like millennials, but boomers are much more conservative. Also, a lot of youngsters don’t go to Facebook as their parents are on, enough reason to not put your life there.
I keep my professional life on Linkedin and my personal life on Facebook, family and real friends only. I like I assume others will keep it that way based on conversations I’ve had. I don’t want to have pictures of co-workers in compromising situations (guaranteed to happen) on my professional profile.
I can screw around a bit on Facebook, but even then I keep it tame as the world doesn’t need to know that much about me.
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The Social Network, A Movie Review with Comparisons to Corporate Life
I’m rarely first in line to many movies and the Social Network is the same, I just saw it last Saturday night. I realize that the movie didn’t tell the exact story, but I’m sure there were enough similarities to be close.
CAPITALISM, WHY OUR COUNTRY IS GREAT AND THE BEST ECONOMIC SYSTEM IN HISTORY
My first impressionism was thank the good Lord for Capitalism. There may have been some rough issues with the ongoings of the start up, but that we can live in a country where entrepreneurship and the ability to start a company, create jobs and have a shot at success should be celebrated. I want an environment where you can make it, or make it big, which is what is great about this country….The American Dream. The idea that we should re-distribute wealth because some do better than others is nonsense. One of the best lines in the movie came at the deposition when Zuckerberg answered if he stole Facebook from the Winklescarfs, “if you guys were the inventors of the Facebook, then you would have invented the Facebook”…ouch. It took hard work, vision and of course a couple of lucky breaks, but would this come out of the current environments in Venezuela, Iran, North Korea….I’m open to any examples?. That Zuckerberg had an idea and was able to become a billionaire gives real hope to everyone. Build a better Mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door………………………….but only in the free world.
<sarcasm>
WHY I’M GLAD IT TOOK PLACE IN hARVARD (lower case intentional)
<sarcasm/>
That (at least) the 2nd dropout from harvard (lowercase emphasis mine) became a billionaire shows that an Ivy League credential is not what it used to be, nor is it necessary or as prestigious as it once was (unless you are a dropout billionaire) . Another great line in the movie that the Winkledoofuss’s were mad because they didn’t get their way such as they had all their pampered life was epic. We don’t live in the entitlement world (or shouldn’t). I’ve worked with Finklehorsespatoots from all of the Ivy league skools (sp on purpose) as well as those like Duke, USC, UNC-CH, Notre Dame, columbia, princeton who take college snobbery to the wrong level. Proud of your school is one thing, elitism is another….guess which one is appreciated or listened to? These institutions are reducing themselves to credentialed, not necessarily educated. Guess which ones are laughed at and not considered worth the money they charge? For the most part, the extra money they paid for their education was a waste that could have been invested and would be worth more. The reality is most are doing the same job for the same money. It got to the point in one of my jobs at IBM when someone would brag that they had a harvard MBA, someone would comment in public what a waste of money that was for the person. The rest of us would know to work around that person as they would just be a hindrance to our ability to get any work done. They were almost pariahs to everyone else being the snowflakes they usually turned out to be.
It takes a dream and passion to see it to fruition, otherwise you are a lemming in the working world. No degree earns you the right to do anything but try. I also subscribe that things are not equal, nor should they be. Some get more than others, be it because they are smarter, work harder or some combination of both. If you get a lucky break, consider it a bone, but it’s not an entitlement.
The plaintiffs didn’t have the ability to pull off what Zuckerberg did and they wound up sucking on the hind teat of his success. You could tell that the lawyers got as much as the clients he settles with through billing and retainers on that settlement. Might as well include lawyers in the offended since it looks like I’m growing that list in this blog. This brings me to another of my favorite scene’s, the best answer I’ve ever heard at a deposition. I wish I’d said it although I’ve said something close I’ll admit.
HARD WORK
Facebook didn’t just succeed because of luck (maybe luck in the timing) and some who didn’t see it’s potential got left behind, but the key to it’s success like most things is ability and hard work. Although I work for a big company now, I cut my teeth with entrepreneurs who gave every drop of blood, sweat and many times their personal life to make something they believed in a success. Most are at least Millionaires now and I don’t begrudge a one of them. They took the risk and deserve the reward. I only wish more would make it so they could hire more people and reduce unemployment, restart and grow the economy This will be the turn around our current economic situation needs, and much faster than our present Keynesian politicians.
REALISM OF THE FILM
I thought they captured the timing and semantics of the period correctly I was noticing the coding on screen, the Apache servers and that Zuckerberg edited his blog in HTML. I even noticed that the cell phones were time period appropriate. What hasn’t changed is College partiers. Not that I know that much about college partying, but I’m sure some of that really happens. Although they said he wasn’t an asshole, but that he tried so hard to be one was partly true. He didn’t have to try.
REAL LIFE
It turns out that Zuckerberg is a suck up to the President to promote Facebook. Why someone so smart would let himself be manipulated is beyond me. He didn’t realize that he let a campaign go on for the youth vote who are so easily manipulated by MTV, The Comedy Channel and such outlets. Older, wiser and those hurt more by the economy know better than to support this or be buffaloed by this sort of trick. The fact that Fakebook is censuring political groups that are not liberal and letting terrorists plan attacks or post mendacious things about moral groups shows who they and Zuck really are, biased.
EPILOGUE
This was a good movie that shows you can still make it in the business world. Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs and many others are all good examples of the American dream that Zuckerberg lives. By now it is out on DVD, I even TiVo’d it the other day an watched it again just to see success. I am glad we live in the part of the world where you have the chance to succeed or fail. But if you succeed, you usually take others with you. A rising tide floats all boats.
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The US Navy Silent Drill Team. Another Reason Why Our Military is Great
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Changing Jobs, My New Job, Resurrecting Old Talents
Today I start a new job. I’ll be working in external communications for IBM Global Finance.
I’ve been a part of Software Group at IBM for about 10 years in a number of A/R capacities, it was a good run, but like all good things….it came to an end.
I’ll be handling not only Analyst Relations, but also stepping back into previous careers.
What few know is that I majored in Accounting and actually started my career as one, so I have a good understanding of finance/accounting (debit is on the left). Combine that with my personal interest in economics, and you can see how the stars aligned for this.
Upon considering this job opportunity, the obvious occurred to me. These are tough economic times, customers have IT needs, the banks are fully financed with TARP money yet are not extending credit….and IBM is a major financing organization and is helping customers and partners with financing. Voila, it was a no-brainer.
So I embark on a new journey within IBM which is a good fit.
For all that I have worked with, I’ll probably still be working with you as IGF works with all IBM divisions to help them, so again, this to me is one of THE BEST STORIES NOT TOLD ENOUGH at IBM.
From our web page:
On a smarter planet, the opportunities that can emerge from intelligent and interconnected systems are unlimited. Unfortunately, your budget is not. The challenge for many organizations is how to invest in smarter systems when the majority of the budget is going towards maintaining current systems.
Building a robust and flexible IT infrastructure often involves systemic transformation that can happen all at once or in phases, and typically requires a new generation of hardware, software, and services. An equally robust financing and asset management strategy can provide you the opportunity to leverage new technologies, and turn your ambitious vision into a tangible solution.
IBM Global Financing can help credit qualified clients develop a comprehensive investment strategy, allowing them to seize new opportunities and accelerate transformation solutions with:
We provide flexible financing options and low rates that can:
- Turn large upfront costs into affordable and predictable monthly payments
- Customize payment plans that align costs to projected benefits
- Accelerate solution implementation, and improve ROI and payback
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Preserve cash and credit lines for strategic business investments
- Reduce or even eliminate the risk of project delays and technology obsolescence
Smart financial decisions, cost-effective results
From simple loans to custom leases, we can finance your total solution – including IBM and non-IBM hardware, software and services – under a single contract.
Learn the Key Elements for why IBM Global Financing is your smartest choice to fund critical IT investments and propel your business forward.
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The 65th Anniversary of the Hiroshima Bomb
August 6, 2010 is the 65th anniversary of the introduction to the nuclear age. Since then, over 1000 nuclear bombs of various configurations have been detonated by multiple countries, but only 2 have been in wartime.
Some say it was barbaric, I’m taking the position that it saved millions of lives. At that time “while the infrastructure and industrial capacity of Japan may have been ruined, the army was committed to and capable of suicidal resistance to the end.”
That is difficult to comprehend unless you understand the dedication to the emperor as a god, and the Samurai code of death by suicide before capture. Even when the Allies fought the Germans in the European Theater, both sides wanted to live and many surrendered before death. Not so in the Pacific theater where many Japanese were dropped off on Islands without provisions and told to live (as cannibals), documented in “Flyboys”. In fact, very few Japanese prisoners were taken as they either died fighting, or committed seppaku.
History notes the use of the bomb was first and foremost used to end a war against an enemy who was determined never to surrender.
While the Americans and their fellow countries were preparing for the Japanese invasion, they predicted the loss of life on both sides to be north of 2 million.
Ultimately, there had to be a statement of finality to convince this mentality of the utter futile nature of continuing. The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did this. My uncle, then a B-29 Pilot told me that far more damage and more lives were lost by the fire bombing, but it didn’t break the will of the Japanese people.
Japan still refused to surrender and upped its resistance with thousands of Kamikaze airstrikes. By the time of the atomic bombings, the U.S. Air Force was planning to transfer from Europe much of the idle British and American bombing fleet to join the B-29s in the Pacific.
Perhaps 5,000 Allied bombers would have saturated Japan with napalm. The atomic bombings prevented such a nightmarish incendiary storm.
The bombs also cut short plans for an invasion of Japan — an operation that might well have cost 1 million Allied lives, and at least three to four times that number of well-prepared, well-supplied Japanese defenders.
World War II was the most deadly event in human history. Some 60 million people perished in the six years between Germany’s surprise invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the official Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945. No natural disaster — neither the flu pandemic of 1918 nor even the 14th-century bubonic plague that killed nearly two-thirds of Europe’s population — came close to the death toll of World War II.
Perhaps 80 percent of the dead were civilians, mostly Russians and Chinese who died at the hands of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Both aggressors deliberately executed and starved to death millions of innocents.
World War II was also one of the few wars in history in which the losers, Japan and Germany, lost far fewer lives than did the winners. There were roughly five times as many deaths on the Allied side, both military and civilian, as on the Axis side.
Further, evidence was found that the Japanese had their own nuclear bomb and tested it on the Island of Hungnam days after the “bomb” was dropped on Hiroshima. So this act not only saved millions of lives, it now appears to have stopped a nuclear war. Reporter David Snell has documented this.
American soldiers found and destroyed a cyclotron in Japan shortly after the attack.
So ultimately, the goal of all war and the way it should be fought was achieved, to win. You fully defeat your enemy, then negotiate the terms of surrender. I only wish that today’s political correctness would go away and we would let the soldiers do their job without the meddling of an incompetent congress and inexperienced leader and put in a man like Harry Truman who said “We will unleash a rain of terror from the air”.
We face this again and will continue to face it as everyone will challenge the top dog. It is up to the free world to deliver what the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack knew.
This was both an important event in history and a lesson we should learn so that the next Hiroshima is not named New York.
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A Couple of Green Reasons How You Can Justify Buying A Porsche
You can now buy these Porsches.
The reality is nobody really buys one for green reasons, nor do they care about gas mileage or any of that nonsense.
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Microsoft Facing A Critical Time In Their Business Direction, (or I wouldn’t want to be in Microsoft Communicaitons right now)
There are times in any business that you need to re-invent yourself. Even if you are selling nuts and bolts, a bigger fish like Lowes or Home Depot can wreck your sales and pricing. Nothing changes faster these days than the IT industry.
Microsoft is facing the situation that IBM has faced at least 3 times now. The last one was a do or die decision to not break up the company and I credit one Lou Gerstner for such a great move. Nevertheless, he reformed and reshaped the company from a hardware (mainframe) company to more of a services and software organization. Microsoft unfortunately didn’t invent everything it sells and is faced with a fork in the road on success or pack mediocrity. I for one would not want to have to face the upcoming issues as a communications professional that Microsoft will face.
ORIGINS OF THE CASH COW’S
Microsoft got it’s start by buying an operating system and taking the Software PC business away from IBM. Next, they “stole” the Windows idea from Apple, here is a bit of history from MG Siegler….
For nearly 25 years now, the story has lingered that Microsoft stole the idea of Windows from Apple (AAPL) while working to develop software for the Lisa and Macintosh operating systems. The stories you hear generally seem to be a mixture of truth, urban legend, and fanboy fabrications at this point — but the fact is that Apple did sue Microsoft in 1988 for copyright infringement on the matter. After four years worth of arguments, Apple lost. They also lost the subsequent appeal (and they even tried to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that was denied). But they didn’t lose because Windows wasn’t thought to be similar to Apple’s operating systems. They lost because the judge ruled that you couldn’t protect the concept of a graphical user interface or the desktop metaphor idea. And more specifically, Apple ran into problems because of a decision that then-CEO John Sculley made in 1985 to sign an agreement licensing certain parts of Apple’s GUI to Bill Gates for use in what would become Windows 1.0 (presumably without realizing exactly what he was doing).
Siegler proves my point of re-inventing themselves here:
But now that idea is waning. Or rather, everyone is starting to recognize that the idea will be waning in the years to come. Make no mistake, Microsoft still makes a lot of money from Windows — and I do mean a lot. But Windows is not the future. By that I mean that the desktop metaphor GUI is slowly but surely being replaced by a rise of mobile and touchable devices. In other words, Microsoft needs a new idea.
The problem is that Microsoft hasn’t proven themselves to be capable of coming up with or executing such an idea on their own. Dozens of failed projects ranging from the original tablet PCs to SPOT watches to the Kin have been left in their wake. The fact that tablet computers are now exploding in popularity thanks to Apple’s iPad suggests that Microsoft, for whatever reason, has a hard time launching new, successful ideas on their own. Windows Mobile is another example of this. They were there early, much earlier than their main rivals. And now they’re getting trounced.
Instead, it may be time to piggyback off an idea again. To create a new inception, as it were. Lure someone in, take their idea — and take it to the next level. Microsoft has nothing if not a huge amount of resources. If they pick the right idea to take, they can once again transform the world — but they need that right idea.
BALLMER IS NO GERSTNER
I’ll go on record to say that Ballmer is no Lou Gerstner. A company needs a visionary like a Gerstner or maybe in this case, a Steve Jobs. Sam Diaz speculates his demise and that he might not even make it to CES to make the keynote.
Here is Diaz’s Ballmer scorecard:
- Mobile: Clearly, the KIN was a flop. And, isn’t it kind of funny that references to the mobile landscape are always centered around iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. When was the last time you heard someone get excited about the forthcoming arrival of Windows Phone 7 and talk about how it will rock the mobile landscape? OK, putting Microsoft shareholders and employees aside, when was the last time you heard anyone else talk highly of Windows Phone 7?
- Tablet: Well, Ballmer killed the Courier. Or someone at Microsoft did – but surely not without Ballmer’s permission. OK, so they killed a tablet PC project. Big deal. Isn’t that better than launching a loser (like they did with KIN)? But it wasn’t so much that they killed it as much as it was the extra line in the company’s official statement that declared “no plans to build such a device right now.” It seems that tablets are all the buzz right now, sparked largely by Apple’s iPad. And Microsoft has no plans for one?
- Software/OS: Regardless of what you think about Google, the cloud and even the Mac, you cannot ignore the fact that Geese that lay Golden Eggs at Microsoft – Windows OS and Office – are getting old. There’s fresh competition from all over – and this isn’t just the Mac vs. PC sort of competition. There’s excitement around the launch of tablets running Google’s Chrome or Android OS. Clearly, Apple is gaining some ground from its switch campaign. And companies are being given real options for productivity software from online providers.
The point of all of this is that Ballmer, as the CEO of Microsoft, seems to have spent quite a bit of time riding on the successful coat tails of Bill Gates – but really hasn’t done much to elevate the company further, XBox being the exception.
My .02, he needs to go and they need new leadership to fend off Google, Oracle, Amazon and most of all Apple. He is not the savior and they need a Gerstner.
Perception works both inside and outside the company. Recall that in the Apple turnaround, Steve Jobs started out with a company in deep trouble with products he had publicly called crap. He started changing the perceptions surrounding the company because he knew this would give him the time he needed to rebuild it. At IBM, Louis Gerstner changed out the entire marketing department as one of his first accomplishments. He knew that if he couldn’t deal with the perception that IBM was failing, that perception would drive an unavoidable result. In both cases, by aggressively dealing with perceptions of unavoidable failure, both internally and externally, they bought time they needed to get the real work done.
MINI-MICROSOFT WEIGH’S IN
One of the blogs I follow is Mini Microsoft as do many. He’s got the biggest set of attachments that I know to write things like this:
And now Kin is killed *after* it has shipped in June 2010. You can bet Andy was involved in the development of Kin, the partnership agreements with the OEM, Verizon and most importantly the “ship it” approvals all along the way. And Microsoft discovers its a bad idea after it blows up in the broad market. Absolutely no thanks to any pro-active decision making on Andy’s part.
Now there is spin that Andy killed kin to put all the wood behind Windows Phone 7. Er, the guy was in charge for two years of Kin development. He could have made this decision far earlier.
Similarly Windows Phone 7 has two years of development under his watch. Based on his past performance, 99% chance this is also going to be a total catastrophe. It further doesn’t help that much of the Windows Phone 7 leadership team was kicked out of Windows when they screwed up Vista.
And finally, one Danger-employee’s point of view of why they became demotivated:
To the person who talked about the unprofessional behavior of the Palo Alto Kin (former Danger team), I need to respond because I was one of them.
You are correct, the remaining Danger team was not professional nor did we show off the amazing stuff we had that made Danger such a great place. But the reason for that was our collective disbelief that we were working in such a screwed up place. Yes, we took long lunches and we sat in conference rooms and went on coffee breaks and the conversations always went something like this…”Can you believe that want us to do this?” Or “Did you hear that IM was cut, YouTube was cut? The App store was cut?” “Can you believe how mismanaged this place is?” “Why is this place to dysfunctional??”
Please understand that we went from being a high functioning, extremely passionate and driven organization to a dysfunctional organization where decisions were made by politics rather than logic.
Consider this, in less than 10 years with 1/10 of the budget Microsoft had for PMX, we created a fully multitasking operating system, a powerful service to support it, 12 different device models, and obsessed and supportive fans of our product. While I will grant that we did not shake up the entire wireless world (ala iPhone) we made a really good product and were rewarded by the incredible support of our userbase and our own feelings of accomplishment. If we had had more time and resources, we would of come out with newer versions, supporting touch screens and revamping our UI. But we ran out of time and were acquired and look at the results. A phone that was a complete and total failure. We all knew (Microsoft employees included) that is was a lackluster device, lacked the features the market wanted and was buggy with performance problems on top of it all.
When we were first acquired, we were not taking long lunches and coffee breaks. We were committed to help this Pink project out and show our stuff. But when our best ideas were knocked down over and over and it began to dawn on us that we were not going to have any real affect on the product, we gave up. We began counting down to the 2 year point so we could get our retention bonuses and get out.
I am sorry you had to witness that amazing group behave so poorly. Trust me, they were (and still are) the best group of people ever assembled to fight the cellular battle. But when the leaders are all incompetent, we just wanted out.
So it is even internal that they know they need a change…..BUT HOW
Most of their products that were successful were others, what they invented except the xbox were largely irrelevant or unsuccessful. They should have been a dominant phone player and got owned by Apple and Android.
And their big solution is this right now –
Microsoft: ‘If we don’t cannibalize our existing business, others will’
That’s not what companies do to reinvent themselves. Take Apple, or IBM…that is what Microsoft needs to do.
I’ll give them this, they have a lot of money in the bank, but they are not positioning themselves as a dominant player for the future.
COMMUNICATIONS
In talking to the analysts and even the press from time to time, arrogant seems to be a trend. They need to be humble and explain the situation. Most of all, they need a product and a strategy to deal with. I don’t envy them.
So far, they have emulated IBM in a lot of ways. Re-Inventing themselves would be a good start.
Fixing moral would be good too….I’ll end with what Rob Enderle says:
The best way the take on these problems is for the management team to engage with employees by both listening to them and providing insight into the company’s strategic plans. Candor is critical; the goal is to get people working as a team again. Employee surveys are generally ineffective because they aren’t trusted and the results don’t create the needed dialog.
Update: Their tablet strategy is labeled misguided and confusing. Who would have guessed that?
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New Meeting Bingo Words
I always like this game.
Center Square this week is i-anything or cloud anything
Web 2.0 – still alive
Web 3.0
HTML 5
unified
legacy
responsive
enhanced
awareness
zero footprint
community
extensibility
widget pallette
full client
micro browser
vision
business transformation
pipeline
organizational productivity
rich anything (connection, client, business data, etc.)
collaboration
platforming
work experience
customer value
marketshare
cloud anything
alternative models of computing
virtualization
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#ARchat, A New Paradigm for Analysts and Analyst Relations Professionals
There has been a new collaboration between both Analysts and Analyst Relations Professionals emerging on Twitter called #ARchat. For the record, it occurs every Monday from1-2 ET. Here is a description for A/R professionals.
DESCRIPTION
ARchat is a weekly themed conversation on Twitter for business professionals that deal with Industry Analysts and Influencers. This includes Analyst Relations (AR), Public Relations (PR), Investor Relations (IR) and Marketing professionals (especially since many in small firms function as all of the above), not to mention Industry Analysts (IA) themselves. Our focus involves both best practices and pressing issues or trends. All tweets are tagged with #archat which makes following the discussion very easy with applications like TweetDeck, TweetChat, TweetGrid or Twitter Search.
I recall the days when even speaking with a person from a competitor would be grounds for dismissal (OK, I did start working when we were still building fires in caves) and now we are collaborating on best practices. This doesn’t take the place of services like SageCircle (although they participate), rather it is the natural progression of social media in the Analyst Relations practice. I give kudos to Fred McClimans (Twitter handle @fredmcclimans) and Stephen Loudermilk (Twitter handle @loudyoutloud).
We’ve discussed issues such as the proper social media tools and other best practices.
What is interesting to me is the back channel conversations I have with the other participants during the conversation about what is going on. It makes the whole experience much richer. While there is serious discussion of what is best for our practice, there is jocularity about certain analyst’s proclivities (tweotches) or habits like Ray Wang (@rwang0) staying up all day and night.
I invite all the analysts and A/R professionals to participate, learn and contribute to this discussion.
See you there, Aloha.
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Jaws is 35 Years Old Today
One of the best speeches in movie history. In fact, one of the better movies. Here is the Indianapolis speech by Quint It described one of the bravest missions in Military history.
Here is the video
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Doing a Joint Announcement With Your Competitors
Recently, I’ve done joint announcements with Oracle, SAP, HP, Tibco, Software AG and HP. As you can imagine, I’ve had varying relationships with each and I’m happy to report that the state of the A/R industry is good and that we can work together.
When I was in PR, it was cat fight supreme with territorial ism and turf wars. Most of the announcements I did with these companies when in Analyst Relations didn’t have that element. For the most part, the announcements were about standards, not products. So that went a long way towards working together. Still, if you include IBM, the companies I’ve named here aren’t known for being best buddies.
As and aside, I can say that the executives (who can be the source of most problems) all worked towards the cause of the best briefing possible.
Some things are given, like in a certain area (we just did SOA) the analysts know the exec’s by company and the exec’s know each other so I’m happy to report they acted like grown ups.
TURF WARS
With the typical name calling (from the CEO’s)and because of t the belief in your own products, the first issue to overcome is that the announcement is usually about a jointly create product or standard, not us vs. them. That rule has to be set down first and if you don’t overcome that, you have no chance at building trust, the basis for working together.
DIVIDE THE DUTIES
One company can’t dominate the duties or or it is not a joint announcement. This also forces the companies to work together to approve what the others have created as their part of the announcement. There are analyst lists, invitations, charts, follow up issues and any number of duties that need to be attended to and dived up. Once that is done, you must rely on each other and the level of trust inherently rises.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
It’s important that the analyst see this as equal amongst the companies. One company presenting more than another is a dead give away. You can’t help Q and A as the analysts will direct the question directly to a company.
LESSONS LEARNED
You either put your differences aside and work together, or you’ll never get anything done. It’s tough to do when your day job is to hammer the company that you are working with other than on the announcement. These are the days of co-opetition though. You learn to get along or you’ll never make it to announcement day.
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Is Excel the Bane of Our Existance?
Microsoft office is mine.
Before I get to Excel, let me say how much of a time waster PowerPoint is. The executives I work with obsess over the charts ad nauseum only to have the analysts tear them apart. Some of our execs can only think in .ppt which in itself is a disease.
Now to excel.
It has many flaws, especially in very complicated or linked spreadsheets. Unfortunately, many company’s run their business off of it and I wonder how many have made fatal mistakes?
Gartner of all companies sums it up:
Excel hell is not an evil Microsoft plot, or some sort of madness that descends upon otherwise sane managers and knowledge workers when they open the PC. It is the fault of enterprise software failing to provide an alternative.
Most of the users who use your software for a significant part of their day do so because they have to if they want to get paid: accounts payable experts, call centre agents, payroll administrators and returns clerks, for instance. They can’t get up in the morning and say, “Today, I’ll use Lawson or Oracle, because I didn’t really like the feel of the SAP application I used to process those invoices yesterday.” Admin users are in an arranged marriage. On some rare occasions, love blossoms, especially in the payroll department. Most of the time though, they seethe with quiet loathing.
Most employees in an organization are voluntary users for the vast majority of processes. They don’t have to log onto the employee skills dashboard every week to check if their team is on track for their development goals. If once a year they log on to the HR application, complete the appraisals as fast as they can, and get out of there, they will. Many top sales people spend as little time as they possibility can in CRM systems. Many poor salespeople spend considerable time logged onto CRM applications.
Now you can draw up long valid lists of reasons why enterprise applications are better for business processes than Excel (an ideal use for Excel). You can deliver fire and brimstone warnings about the damnation that is Excel hell (use Facebook to attract others to your cause).
Gary Barnett of Bathwick makes an even stronger case
Excel-madness
We’ve all seen this – that faintly crazed look in a colleague’s eyes when they’re challenged on a point of data – You can see that they just want to shout “The number is 54.56% because the @$%$ spreadsheet says so!”. Who the hell are you to challenge the contents of cell 4987MP, What sort of messed up anarchist would challenge 4987MP?
If you look closer – into that person’s eyes – you will see their hidden desire to stab you in yours with their biro.
Question this number at your peril
And let’s face it – who the hell are you to challenge this – Did you spend 110 hours over the last 7 days rushing to produce this analysis for the meeting? Did you grapple with the two dozen spreadsheets that have been linked and interlinked in order to get to this number?
This number is the truth, because the spreadsheet (which as the dweebs amongst you will have noted is OpenOffice Calc) says it is.
As John Mihalec tweeted to me in response to my tweet about writing this blog:
@thinkovation Because 2 + 2 is so obviously 4 that it lulls us into complacency re whether either 2 is even 2 at all.
Many key decisions (many of which have a profound effect on our lives) are made on the basis of data that is simply garbage
Computer Science 101 taught us “Garbage in, Garbage out” – and we’ve been collecting, polishing and re-packaging garbage ever since. But this stuff is different – Our retirement funds, savings, economic stability, even our understanding of climate change all depend on knowing the right things.
The financial crisis was caused by many many things – and I’m not discounting either “greed” or “stupidity” as major causal factors – but the absolutely tippy-top of the list cause of the crisis was the failure of pretty much everyone (except Warren Buffet and a small number of others) to appreciate the level of risk that was associated with all of the various financial instruments that were flying about.
The reason for that failure to understand the true level of risk lies in the way in which both the instruments themselves, and the tools people used to assess their risk, wrapped and wrapped the risk under layers and layers of complexity – It was a giant game of pass the parcel – with the outer wrappings so numerous and shiny and neat,that the smell from the final parcel of dog do0-do0 was completely overlooked.
If you allow something to become en-mired in many layers of obfuscation, you have to accept that the “system” you create is going to become increasingly chaotic. If you can’t track the journey taken by a simple number through the myriad sections, tabs and linked files – You have to be prepared to factor in “chaos”.
The image below is hypothetical – but it’s not an exaggeration – there really are figures sloshing around that are derived from inter-linked hierarchies of spreadsheets that are a lot more complex than this one.
A simplified map of the spreadsheets involved in an analysis
Take this image as an example. Item A is the output spreadsheet – which combines the results from B, C and D – which each in turn depend on one or more “child” spreadsheets. Here are some boring questions one might ask –
- How long ago was the data in J refreshed?
- Has anyone audited the assumptions made in H?
- Is there anyone in the organisation who could explain to an Actuary how come the number is 54.56%?
If you can’t provide sensible answers to these questions – then, it’s time to take your life in your hands and tell your excel-crazed, sleep deprived colleague that they may as well have arrived at that number using a lab-rat and a roulette wheel.
Incidentally – someone has trained rats to trade, and reckons his rodents can do at least as well as the majority of the top fund managers – check it out here
To sum it up, they are good tools for simple applications, but they have done more to ruin productivity and correctness than most other softwared.
Disclaimer: I hate powerpoint presentations more than a root canal. It is time for a new paradigm of software that works better and stinks less.
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Will Google Buzz be the Next Twitter?
I doubt it.
Update: Nope, It looks like a loser, there isn’t any buzz nor is there Google wave and I doubt that Google+ will make it either.
In the caveman days by technology standards, something would be the buzz and a behemoth like Microsoft would swoop in with a copy and take over the market. Word/Wordperfect and Netscape/IE come to mind.
Anymore, the next buzz could only last months before the next buzz comes around.
Twitter is too established. So much so that the next big thing is likely to overtake it, not a me too of the same thing. If Buzz is as successful as Google Wave, it’s already DOA. It’s too bad that Twitter has censored certain groups because of political bias and moral casualness and relativity. They have become an untrustworthy platform.
Google’s problem is that it has a limited audience, Gmail users. It’s big, but not big in comparison to the the marketplace worldwide. Google has said do no evil, but their Chairman continually does so and interferes with political bias. With their meddling worldwide and privacy invasion, they violate the do no evil so consistently and constantly that they can’t be trusted.
The only possibility is perhaps the advertising model, but if you are like me, I hate watching an ad when I’m trying get to a video. That’s as annoying as popup’s and spam.
Twitter may have already have an advertising model.
As for me, I’m already looking for the next new grass roots product that isn’t overtaken by the masses. That way the message gets through easier without the clutter and noise. And there are a lot of annoying people on Twitter, almost as annoying as Twitter’s social policy stance.
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A Couple of Green Reasons How You Can Justify Buying A Porsche
It turns out that owning a Porsche is Environmentally friendly. Well, that’s one way to justify it.
Says Porsche:
Stuttgart. Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, Stuttgart, is supporting the generation of renewable energy. The manufacturer of sporty premium vehicles is making a 40,000-square-meter area on the roof top of its central spare parts warehouse in Sachsenheim (Baden-Wuerttemberg) available to the firm Goldbeck Solar GmbH, Hirschberg an der Berg-
strasse, in order to install and operate approximately 8,500 photovoltaic modules there. The system has a nominal output of two megawatts. The electricity will be fed into the grid of the energy provider E&W Eichwald GmbH, Bietigheim-Bissingen.
Well, if that isn’t enough, take this…
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Managing Executive Ego’s; The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
I’ve worked at 8 different IT companies in my career and have seen many people in management roles. I’ll draw upon my career and the colorful stories for this discussion.
Managing Executives is a very sensitive issue. This process is critical to the relationship and results with the press and Analysts. Much of the time this is unseen externally, but the machinations exist under the covers for us to get to the discussion in an orderly manner.
Executives have many demands on their time and are pounded or pulled at from every angle, but they make the big bucks so butch up. They might have come from a great meeting or one that they got machined gunned to death right before the analyst briefing. Different people handle stress in different ways.
A common thread I’ve noticed is how much ego they bring, and how much control they have over it. Either way, the executive is the messenger and the content owner in the eyes of the audience. It is our job to make sure they are best prepared, deal with the issues, understand the big picture and be as professional as possible to achieve results. In some ways, we have to pull the strings and push the buttons behind the curtain to make successful analyst engagements happen.
As with the movie, I’ll take it in order.
THE GOOD
There are some executives that intrinsically get that analysts are deep thinkers, they have influence over customers, press and our reputation. The media are rarely deep thinkers, but need to be managed and have influence, albeit less and less.
The really, really good ones know that the analyst can provide great input into the strategy and can point out any holes or landmines in our strategy.
The really, really, really good ones (Buell Duncan) understand that it is about creating a relationship and that no matter how much influence they have at IBM, they can put that aside and get the message out and deliver value to an analyst discussion.
One key is they can manage their ego’s and those of the analyst (not the point of this post, but it is related throughout). The executive I’ve linked above always comes off as you’re smarter than I am, although it’s rarely true. He also accepts that criticism is part of the deal and doesn’t take it personally. I’m not sure if it was his basic nature or that he came from sales (I attribute a big piece to the fact that he’s from the south and is more polite than most) but no matter what the case, his briefings always were a home run.
These executives are of course the best to deal with. Some have higher maintenance levels than others, but when you know your big gun is going to deliver, you want to make sure his gun is as loaded as possible with bullets.
There are always disagreements over issues, but when an executive can put their ego aside and listen to input, everyone wins. These people are very perspicacious.
THE BAD
Everyone has a bad day. That can precipitate a less than optimal discourse. I’ve worked with some who just weren’t as good as others at dealing with media and analysts, although practice usually improved things. Some executives just shouldn’t be doing briefings as it isn’t their strength.
As described in the GOOD section, I’ve seen good executives come off distracted as they just got chewed out, or a multi-million dollar contract is about to be lost….it happens.
Some need more coaching and preparation than others, that’s our responsibility in communications. I’ll discuss this in the Executive Preparation post, yet to come.
There are some that are not cut out for analysts briefings. They should not be put in this situation. There is always someone else on the team who is the one really best suited for dealing with the analysts. They may not be as good with a P&L, but they get the strategy and the relationship issues. I use them as much as possible as it produces results on both the analyst and the company side.
Some just don’t get give and take. I don’t put them in the ugly as they just won’t budge on the fact that their solution is what it’s going to be, but many times they can be right. It is better for the company for them to make the tough choices and stick with our side of the argument. It rarely makes for a successful analyst engagement, but I defer when history shows that they didn’t take the analyst advice and the company or division benefits. Again, this a time where a lieutenant is best for dealing with the analysts.
I’ll bring up human nature here as I’ve been in a situation where an executive who is generally great at working with analysts has a beef with a person for some reason. In one case, both the analyst and the executive described the other person in to me terms of a deification orifice. Sometimes you just have to separate people and agree to disagree. This situation is a challenge in communications.
Some of the bad are nitpickers. The get caught up in details that are not relevant to the big picture. They are a distraction and a lieutenant is again best.
Another category that could be BAD or could be UGLY are the quick triggers. They fire off a response without considering the consequences. The reason I put it into BAD instead of UGLY is you never know how it’s going to turn out. It usually depends on the audiences’ response. Either way it is high maintenance. The quick witted exec’s can play this one well though, I’ll give them that.
I had to work with one entrepreneur who thought he knew more than anyone. He managed to pick a fight over a lie that he was making a product (disk drive) that he bought from Control Data. The reporters and analysts knew it and the company credibility was shot. I had to tell one reporter not to equate me with him as I was not going to lie for him.
The last of the bad is the death by PowerPoint crowd. They drone on and on and on and on without letting the analyst get a word in (when don’t analysts like to offer an opinion?) and everyone dreads these meetings. Their objective is to get through the slide deck come hell or high water.
These executives are hard to work with, but sometimes you have to do it and get through it.
THE UGLY
These are the worst experiences of anyone’s communications career. They also regularly put the company behind the curve with the relationship with the analyst. I have only experienced this a couple of times, but they are burned into my memory as times I don’t want to relive. Fortunately, I don’t work for or with any of these people anymore.
It almost every instance, it is fueled by the over estimation by the executives of the importance of themselves. These people also come in various flavors.
The Ugly Flavors
The Suits – These are people who have made it through the system via the Peter Principle. They pontificate, but aren’t well respected by anyone on either side and as with everyone in this category, are difficult to work with. They are found out quickly by the analyst and it hurts the cause to come to the table with them. Once, he called his assistant before a Forrester briefing to see if he could change his flight out so he could be home early and asked me to cut the analyst meeting short. This was less than professional and was very hard to explain to the analysts why he obviously was blowing them off.
Another Suit (A former head of NetFinity and IGF named Callies) incident came up when I had landed one of the highest level press interviews of my career. It was major media headline quality “Article of the Year” that anyone with half a brain would throw their best people and research at. I had to pull the speaker (his lieutenant) from the Suit’s “staff” meeting. The lieutenant was the best speaker I may have worked with and the Suit was one of the worst. Said Suit wouldn’t let the speaker go to the briefing threatening him with “it’s only your job if you leave”, or I’m more important than anyone else. As it usually happens with these types, I had to work around him to get the job done and got our name up in lights despite his efforts to torpedo any progress.
A different flavor suit flavor is described by Lou Gerstner in his book “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” He describes an executive who wrote memo’s on how to deal with him including what type of gum to have and how to set the clocks (pg. 32). These are unusually high maintenance people who want celebrity treatment. There is a good song about this syndrome, watch the video here. Adios reality.
The Terrorists
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These people give me nightmares. Almost everyone has worked with or heard about these tyrants. Nothing you can do is right, nothing is good enough and the analyst is wrong because they are right. This is different than the BAD situation from above. The BAD executive there is making a tough choice not to go with the analyst view, but it is well informed choice. The terrorist doesn’t really care about outcomes or just doesn’t know, rather it’s about what they want and their career, power and usually their insecurity. Every company has one and the main IBM terrorist, Sandy Carter has many dead bodies behind her quest to climb the ladder. She made it up the chain and managed via the Dark Side as a corporate climber who both played favorites and pitted employees against each other. We in communications had a support group for those who survived a term working for her and kept their job. Once, I even wrote a press release for one of her female employees just so she wouldn’t get fired, even though it never went out. She personally set back diversity according to the women who worked for her. I’ve rarely seen less respect for an executive. When she got promoted, her employees were high fiving in the hallway that she was leaving.
No matter what the SJW’s try to redefine diversity rules to, the smart companies promote the best performers.
Sandy used to bring us through about 50 revisions of Powerpoint charts. Most if not all changes were bad, but were done precisely as she had demanded. We were later castigated with “why did you do this, I didn’t ask for it?” She didn’t command much respect with the Press and Analysts who saw through this level (lack) of competency. It was embarrassing to be in a press conference with her. Although being a promoter of WITI, she internally hurt the path for many women, and certainly made many question affirmative action and diversity policies at IBM.
Having to sweat through every meeting prior to and with an analyst is counter productive and has never lead to the results that could be achieved.
I’ve noticed that the terrorist is found out by press or analysts by many means. Sometimes it is inconsistency in charts, sometimes it is through unusual calls and/or requests by A/R, many times it is through colleagues and sometimes it is through working with them enough times that you both understand that the executive is a terrorist, like Sandy. None of the Press or Analysts had any respect for her, just like her employees.
I’ve had one other terrorist who is now the VP of External Relations. I called him to warn him of a problem that a reporter alerted me to. It is expected that you let the person in charge of an area know if there is an issue so that they can deal with it as it is their turf. I was being the good employee (in my first 4 months) so I left a voicemail explaining the situation and doing the hand off so that I wasn’t infringing on another person’s PR territory.
I got a call back from this type A New Yorker (a former Ed Koch employee) who lambasted me for my efforts. Apparently, he was insecure as he kept reminding me that he was the boss and I was a nobody. Let me point out that this was not a morale booster for a new hire who was trying to do a good job and be a team player. Such is the life of working with terrorist Communications leaders. I found out later that he regularly abused most people who worked there. He deducted IQ points from those in the South which is another form of anti-diversity and discrimination. Most just refused to help him or stayed away so as not to have to deal with the chewing out. I’ve personally witnessed them confessing that they didn’t want to help him because of his temper. What a shame.
I checked LinkedIn and he’s gone from IBM like almost everyone mentioned here. It’s too bad for the employee’s at the new company who have to work with Ed.
Terrorist’s can come with unrealistic expectations. I to this day am not sure how to handle them. In both cases, I chose to move on and out as quickly as I could.
SUMMARY
To be effective with press and analysts, you must be able to manage the executives. Executives come with many styles. It is imperative that you learn the style and manage it for effectiveness.
Since people are different, one must adapt to each person. Just hope you get the good, deal with the bad and escape the ugly. As for the terrorist, I advise grabbing a parachute and jumping. The plane is usually going to crash anyways.
Here is a quote that sums it up terrorists for me: “They are simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” – Paul Keating
Update: SageCircle links here with a good post on improving executives.
For you Clint fans and movie buffs, here is the song and movie opening video.
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It’s Not Easy Being Green, Or getting the evidence of Global Warming – My Short Tenure at IBM in Sustainability
Note: I’ve edited this to accurately represent what really happened at the Green and Sustainability effort during my tenure at this job. It has died because once the fury of Green passed by, nobody cared about it. That accurately reflects the real position by everyone in the company that I worked with except the executive who got paid for running it. I don’t think he cared either once the assaignment was over because he moved on and it was dropped.
I was given a stretch assignment for Green IT at IBM this year. A stretch assignment means you get another job without the extra pay, or layoffs just happened and a person now has to do the work of 2 since they don’t want to backfill, or the powers that be don’t feel like you have enough to do so they use this as retribution. In this case it’s mostly the second one because they know I can deliver when others can’t, so they dump stuff on me frequently.
I have a lot ahead of me, thus the title of this blog post. The hardest thing about this assignment is that I know that IBM doesn’t really believe in it (and there is only a small faction of nuts in the company trying to get buy in). The entire premise is almost 100% hype for corporate responsibility and image rather than any actual product or offering. I really wasn’t given a choice whether I wanted to do it and I certainly will do my job, but as you can see in the details below, it’s hard to believe in something when it’s based on bullshit. I see through it and I know that TPTB are just being politically correct to avoid the (very small but politically damaging) social justice warrior hostage taking out there.
During the Major Analyst Conference we did in November, I had to get this nonsense into all the Smarter Planet materials to show (SJW and PC) compliance (so as to not get the Jessie Jackson-ish extortion treatment by the Al Gore crowd). It turns out to be a bunch of nonsense that is made up to try to fool the press and analysts into thinking IBM actually does something in the Green space.
It all started out with trying to be politically correct about global warming, since IBM really isn’t and has the carbon footprint of China (or Al Gore’s 2 houses and jet setting around the world). Now, everyone has started shying away from the words “global warming” once the world saw through that as a lie and ineffective, they renamed it Sustainability. That means you wrap up all the things that tangentially have something to do with being sustainable, since it is a nebulous name and concept and voila, you claim sustainability.
Once the word sustainability gets found out as a fraud as part of the global warming and money grabbing hoax, you then call it Smarter Planet or roll it up into that campaign and somehow you are politically correct, even if you aren’t really doing anything different (which IBM isn’t). We had to sell this crock to the press and analysts who wanted so badly to be able to charge extort us for pretending to buy our baloney of offering something in this space that resembled eco-friendliness. They were compliant in our scam as long as there was money.
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The worst thing is having to deal with the idiots out there who buy into this Gaia religion like Tom Raftery of Greenmonk and James Governor of Redmonk and Greenmonk. Our executives in a briefing after a different Green Day analyst conference in London actually called James a wanker and Tom a whiner after the event due to their outbursts and views as they interrupted the entire day. Greenmonk has since gone dormant for lack of money, facts and believable content on climate. Their credibility was shot when they wanted a carbon tax at a dollar a pound. James told me the real truth was he wanted to make money while trying pretend that they were doing it to save the planet, making money being the operative words (see the above extortion tactics). I put the Dilbert cartoon in specifically for O’Reilly, Raftery and Governer – the 3 stooges.
The net of it is that IBM is pretending to be a player in this shell game but is a pseudo player. Fortunately, the analysts and press who are pushing it are just bully’s, but know as we all do that the evidence is not there, so they make up new stories when the lack of facts expose the wild goose chase de jour.
Too bad it is all a farce and IBM’s offering is equally a load of hogwash.
THE WORLD IS FLATTER, BUT NOT LIKE YOU THINK.
That is right, the real flat earther’s are the one’s who buy into this farce of “sustainability” like Greenmonk whose job was to suck around for money. Another dissembler Tim O’Reilly, who couldn’t defend global warming with anything other than “climate science is hard” (or I have no real facts so I’ll call you names), while condemning those who don’t believe in it wrong without any proof of his position was another nut I had to deal with. None of either’s positions are based on anything but computer climate predictions of which none have come even close. they based their position on the IPCC report. It now comes out that The IPCC; Never Has So Much Been Made Out of So Little by So Many at So Great A Cost. In other words it was a money transaction that had nothing to do with climate other than earth worshipping. Any other “climate facts” are 50 years in the future, which is an even bigger joke since real meteorologists can barely predict the weather next week. I could be convinced of global warming if there was one little thing called evidence. What I find unfathomable is the lack of backbone by IBM to stand up to this money grabbing extortion theme by these pseudo experts.
As it turns out, I had tweeted in response to Tim’s crisis about the rising tides that I didn’t believe him, but would accept his facts if he had any. Like all good climate warriors, he made ad hominem attacks on me and in a more harmless statement, said that I got all my information from Fox News (I don’t watch any news as my career with the media already told me that the press are biased). The only real facts about the state of Climate issues are found at What’s up with That unlike Tim who had no facts like all climate warriors.
As it turns out, the tides are receding Tim and here is the evidence. The waters on the island of Tuvalu (the tidal benchmark) are receding. This is one of the crisis places of the world that was supposed to be drowned along with the Statue of Liberty. So Tim, your views are biased and calling people flat-Earther’s because they don’t sign up for the pseudo science you have bought into is ridiculous, like your views.
Epilogue:
I got out of this assignment because I couldn’t lie for the company, nor lie to myself by doing something I didn’t believe in and realized was a lie. It’s lost its mojo because both the premise of Sustainability and climate change are based on predictive models that aren’t true. The fact that IBM doesn’t really do anything (other that trying to keep up with the Jones) was too much for me to take, and claim any sense of honesty. My credibility is more important than getting a paycheck for lying. I’d never make it as a politician.
I left the position right before a green conference where Al Gore was the speaker. It was the second time in my IBM career that I made a conscious decision to avoid him so as to not listen to his spew about global warming, nor be disappointed in humanity by seeing so many people being fooled by this scam based on redistribution of money to the climate warriors.
I told James that it was good that Gore wasn’t president on 9/11/2001 as he couldn’t lead a lottery winner to any bank (other than his bank account), let alone a nation in a real crisis. Being a good liberal, he was offended since he knew it was true and couldn’t defend his hero. He, like Biden and Cheney were only impeachment insurance for their respective presidents.
So having to lie to defend Climate anything, especially at IBM when I understood the facts makes it hard to be green. I’ve moved on to something I can be honest about.
The position went away as it became “under the guise of everything is sustainable” – (more lies) that we didn’t need a person babysitting it anymore. The real truth is that it didn’t develop into an issue like diversity that a company could be blackmailed into payment or bad PR due to non-compliance. It just went away as did the fake committment to global warming by my employer.
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Star Trek Adapted to the Recent Mass. elections
Analyst Predictions for 2010. Everyone is Going Out On Basically The Same Limb
I’ve been keeping track of the analyst predictions waiting for enough time for them to post a listing of them. I think that since it is the last day of 2010, and that there is a sufficient amount of them out there, it is time to list them. Analysts are the prognosticators of the IT Industry and they should be right, but then meteorologists tell us about the weather, and they are great if they are only 50% right. In reality, they can’t tell us what next week will really be and yet we are basing many decision on what 20 years from now will be. I’m trusting that IT analysts are more accountable and have more tangible facts less subject to acts of God than the weather.
In reality, Carter Lusher and SageCircle is where you should go to get your A/R best practice as to what to do with these predictions, but I have to make some calls of my own. Here is what I’m going to use the predictions for in addition to Carters recommendations:
- Use it as the basis for discussion with the analyst showing that I have been reading and following them.
- Using them as analysts to select for briefings and consults based on their area’s of concentration
- Good natured ribbing if they really blow it at the end of the year. (note: not necessarily an A/R best practice here)
- Use it as part of my A/R plans to present to the executives I support.
So here is my listing. I’ll note that they are in no particular order as I’m getting them from my feed reader as they come up. I like and work with almost everyone on this list, so I am not going to show favorites in a listing order, it will be entirely random. You will note a trend very quickly as to where most of them are going for the year. See if you can pick it out.
Analyst Predictions for 2010
IIAR video of Gideon Gartner on the state of the IT Analyst Industry. (Note that this is not a part of the trend, just that it came up first).
IDC Webcast by Frank Gens, Robert Mahowald and Henry Morris. It has a link to the video which is worth watching, but the theme begins here with the discussion of the Cloud. I’m glad they consider the Hybrid model.
Laurie McCabe of Hurwitz Associates and her 2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions. At least she waits until number 7 to get to Cloud, thanks Laurie.
Bruce Tempkin of Forrester discusses Gen Y. While not really a 2010 prediction, there is no denying the fact that the attitude, social media ability of Gen Y’rs and their length of patience is a big HR issue we all face. They will help define the workforce make up as boomers exit.
James Governor of Redmonk leads the list with 20 predictions. Note the continuation of the trend as James has Cloud at numbers 1 and 12. I admire him for also considering the hybrid model as the cloud is not one size fits all. As I work with James quite a bit, I’m surprised to see Google and Green further down the list than I expected.
Amy Wohl and you guessed it, 2010 Predictions on SaaS and the Cloud. Note the build up in the trend. I still swear to random selection, but Cloud is getting a lot of attention.
Judith Hurwitz titles her predictions as: Predictions for 2010: Clouds, mergers, Social Network and Analytics. I’ll give her credit for the Social Networks as I delve there in my predictions also.
Claire Schooley again talks about Gen Y. While not an official 2010 prediction, there is no avoiding that we’ll have to address the issues of this culture in the workplace.
Rob Enderle in 2008 on 2009 highlighting Security. I’m including this as Security becomes an issue with the uptick in terrorist activity, both online and direct attack like flight 253.
Jonny Bentwood also covers this topic in his yearly round up. He actually gets to it first and we cross over quite a few, but I’m not going to use everything in his list so that you have a reason to to there and check out additional predictions I’m not covering.
Lee Odden’s 12 Digital Marketing Predictions. There is a lot of good Social Media info here to look at.
Rob Enderle checks in again with one of my beliefs, that the Private Cloud will Win over the Public Cloud Model. Anybody picking up the Cloud trend in predictions yet?
John Levitt from AnalystXpress on the Top 10 Wireless predictions for 2010. Of course Cloud makes number 3.
Chris Collins of Yankee Group posts a Webinar on 2010 predictions. Cloud Computing is a tag needless to say.
David M Smith of Gartner discusses the Psychology of Predictions, a different way of looking at it starting with caring about being right.
Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang discuss what’s coming to 2010 in a video with Robert Scoble.
UPDATE: Laura Cecere and Alan Johnson Of AMR have come to the table with another set of predictions. You need to be an AMR client for this one. Here is a link to their press release.
2010 Client Virtualization by Benjamin Gray
So between my list and Jonny’s list, you have most of the predictions for 2010. Will the analysts be as good or better than the weathermen? Only the Shadow knows.
My Turn at Making Predictions
Since I’m listing others predictions, it’s only fair that I put out my own. Disclaimer: I’m not an analyst, so I don’t feel any need to get to 10.
1. The Cloud is important, although I think the hybrid and private models are more important than the all everything public model
2. Twitter will continue to erode the number and quality of good bloggers.
3. We need to find a new Twitter as the current model has now been compromised in security, and there are just too many people on. We need another back channel to connect with our real business contacts. Plus, I’m an early adopter, so let’s find that new best method.
4. All predictions go out the window if there is another Terrorist attack. The top prediction will be Security.
5. Success in the economy will be defined as less of a loss than we expected.
6. Who you hire from Boomers to Gen Y matters to your ability to connect to the tech crowd when considering hiring practices.
Final note. At some point this year, I’m moving Delusions to a new host. Mine is bad so obviously I’m publshing on a back up blog. Stay tuned for that .
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I Am The Planner for The Analyst Connect Event
I lost this post in the switch from Blogger to WordPress. I’m re-posting it with corrections to accurately represent the facts. I’m retired now and can tell the real story.
Intro:
It’s no secret that Software Group is doing well for IBM. Analysts should be particularly interested in how and what we are doing, now more than ever. (This part is true, they actually cared back then)
We hold a yearly analyst conference in November to discuss our issues and give the analysts who follow our business the chance to listen to our leaders and ask what they may.
Running the Event:
Each year, one (un)lucky soul gets to be the A/R liaison for this event for logistics with the strategy team. This year it is yours truly. I did it once before and it is time consuming and the details are overwhelming. It’s a job to add to your job. For the record, I’m honored to do it.
Annotation here. I wasn’t honored to do it because it sucked. They stick this lousy job on someone that they don’t think is busy enough. I’d pulled it off once in 2006 and that was a rousing success. They used this event to fire a colleague (Tom B.). When my manager Amy Loomis told me I was doing it, I said nothing in response for almost half a minute of awkward silence until she said she thought I’d be honored, why I wrote the above. I knew she had it out for me as I made more money for less responsibility than her. I knew it got to her like it did Ray Gorman, two of my worst managers at IBM.
They call it a stretch assignment, but it is a bullshit term for work that they dump on the back of some unlucky person that needs an employee screwing. There were more than 40 A/R reps to take turns at running this and I got stuck with it twice in three years.
It’s a time suck and a thankless job that I didn’t want to do. I did the best job I could to not get fired, but was stymied at many crossroads.
The first one I ran was under Dave Liddell, the best Director of Analyst Relations we ever had. He was reasonable and expected results. This one was under Sarita Torres and Amy, which made the job twice as hard. They couldn’t make decisions and were constantly interfering in the progress in the guise of helping out and giving guidance. Many times I had to not tell them what I was doing to be able to make progress to get the job done. At times it seemed they got in my way or didn’t let me do the job when appearance was at stake.
They clearly were favoring female employees as they put incompetent mangers in place who were a spanner in the works. I missed Dave and Mike Bizovi tremendously during this time suck.
At the end of the conference, it was a party for the retirement of Jerrilyn Glanville, a co-worker. I liked her and she was one of the more competent reps we had. They went on for half an hour at the end of the conference with one brief mention of me running it. It may sound like sour grapes, but that actually worked for me as I hated attention. I was glad they had the girl fest so I could catch a plane to get out of there as quickly as I could. I knew it was thankless if I pulled it off. The only real attention I would have gotten would have been if it screwed up.
I pulled it off flawlessly with maximum social media coverage never seen before at the time. None of them understood it and that got ignored. I was playing the game by a different set of rules. The analysts knew as I was the leading A/R blogger and social media expert in the group. The rest of the A/R team barely understood Twitter at that point.
I had to work around Christy Pappas also. She was a control freak who thought she helped run it when she mostly processed PO’s and got office supplies. She was more of a speed bump I had to avoid to get the job done.
So I made sure that it was run right, regardless of the managerial interference and attempted back stabbing that came with it from management.
After this, my desire to over perform, as I’d done for decades was sucked out of me. I saw how the sausage was made and it stunk. I was glad to get it over with and asked never to do it again. I retired early only 4 years later, something they couldn’t understand.
I’d been saving and paying off every debt so that I could call the shots on when I want to go. When most of them got canned a few years later, they all said they wished they could go out on their own terms like I did. They all were neck deep in debt and mortgages and couldn’t understand how I did it.
Back to the original post.
I’ve decided to blog about it as part of the Social Media outreach. There will be a second blog residing on My developerWorks (I”ll post the link in an additional blog) so that you can follow our progress and what tools we are going to use.
I’ve been working on it now for a few weeks, but we meet with the powers that be today which really kicks off the event in terms of work to do.
Request for Advice:
Since two way interaction is actual communication, I’m open for (reasonable) suggestions from the analysts who want to find out more and interact prior to the event. It will only make for a better conference.
We’ll have a closed portal only to those who are registered, so sorry competition, there are some issues off limits. We’ll provide tons of data and make the conference easier to attend and navigate than ever.
Wish us luck and don’t be afraid to send me suggestions. Jsimonds@us.ibm.com
More annotation: I put the request for advice to be able to show the girls in charge that I was working with the analysts. That way I could do what I wanted under the guise of Analyst input. It was the only way I could get things done when the girls started meddling in my work. I set the agenda and made the rules to get it done so they couldn’t screw me like they did Tom.
They don’t hold it anymore because it turned into a gabfest. The analysts cared less and less because it was a show rather than an information exchange. I think Covid finally killed it along with firing all the employees who didn’t work at the home office.
At the end of the day, I was smart enough to not let them screw me. I gave them a highly successful and well organized conference. All the time I knew I had to go through the motions, but also knew it was bullshit from start to finish.
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The Back Channel, My Most Important A/R Tool
Getting to the person you want to meet with or communicate with when you want to is vital.
Relationships ultimately are very important, but I find that an A/R best practice is knowing the Back Channel.
My First Back Channel
I’m skipping the phone in this discussion. Most people screen calls.
Backing up a few years when I was in PR, I remember when public email first started. We were using MCI Mail on DOS and 300 baud modems back in the mid 80’s to reach influential people in the industry like John Dvorak, Paul Sommerson, Bill Machrone and others. I think there were about 10 of us using it. I was beating the big PR agencies and they couldn’t figure out why, as I was working for a small company that shouldn’t have had the presence we had. We were the inside club.
Email then of course became mainstream so we lost that advantage.
The Next Tool – IM
It’s hard to believe that as much as we use instant messaging now, that at the beginning of the technology not many were using it and again it was the way to reach those who were using it. At this point, Email immunity was beginning to take hold and if you weren’t important, you fell quickly out of the realm of first responders. I read a tweet from an analyst recently who noted his inbox was so far gone that he was about to delete everything and just start over.
IM also fell to everyone abusing it and we moved on.
Twitter:
Skip forward a few years and you have Twitter. This worked until the recent explosion of everyone being on the platform and it again became commonplace. It still is somewhat effective if you are high on the other parties list.
The Point of this Post:
I was meeting with an very influential analyst a few nights ago and to be honest, I’m not that high on his list. I decided to ask him, what is his back channel when I really need to reach him. The condition was that I wouldn’t abuse it so that when I really was using it, I had something of value to speak about. He was up front and gave me a personal address that he said he will look at. Bingo.
It occurred to me that this is the best practice. First, be high on the relationship, you will get through that way. Next, find out how the analyst wants to be communicated with as a preference and DON”T abuse it.
When you use that method, you get to them and they answer. Sure they will answer you anyway out of courtesy, but at some point, you have an I need it now, or you are on the road and don’t have your usual access. In a way, it’s part of managing the relationship properly anyway.
Delusions of Adequacy 