Compound this with a very astute tweet by my friend Chris Heuer (another budding author) a couple of weeks back:Companies don’t really have conversations with customers, their employees do. People talking to people is real, beyond marketing and spin... 10:56 AM November 01, 2007
James Fallows offers up an interesting contrast between Japan and China.
Put yourself at Bernanke's shoes; better yet, get Paulson's shoes too and combine them: wear Ben's shoe on the left and Hank's on the right. The goal is to try and walk a straight and narrow a line for the economy, without embarrassing yourself. I submit that this is, in fact, impossible.On the one foot, the Fed is getting screamed at to lower interest rates by at least another 200-250 basis points: PIMCO, Greenspan, The Conference Board, every bank and broker in town and abroad - they all demand and expect cheaper money for a variety of reasons, all immediately and extremely mercenary. The bond fund managers are salivating at the potential of capital gains from short and medium treasurys, the banks and brokers need the massive cash bailout to stanch the bloodletting from their toxic paper and real estate portfolios, the businessmen need the consumer to keep spending and Greenspan wishes above all to remain relevant - even in retirement.
Stuck listening to Celine Dion over and over and over on a long roadtrip, I understand this Doonesbury strip.
In April, 2005, Sam Zell travelled to Abu Dhabi to meet Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Zell is best known as a real-estate magnate, whose reputation has been enhanced by the sale, last February, for thirty-nine billion dollars, of Equity Office Properties Trust, the largest collection of office buildings in the country. Zell, who is sixty-six, delights in claiming that at the time the sale—to Blackstone, the private-equity firm—was “the largest single transaction that has ever been done.” But for decades his appetite for economic opportunity has lured him beyond real estate into investments in oil and gas, barges, insurance, wineries, cruise ships, department stores, waste-to-energy power projects, and radio stations. In April, he signed an $8.2-billion deal that would effectively give him control of Tribune Company, the giant media conglomerate, whose assets include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. For about a dozen years, he has also invested aggressively abroad, most recently in the Middle East. He spends about twelve hundred hours a year on his plane—the equivalent of flying from New York to London every few days. “I want to see everybody in their habitat,” he told me, in a low, rasping voice. “When these people see me come halfway around the world to meet them and spend time with them, it creates a level of confidence that translates into other things”—by which he means, he says, “successful business.”Zell has made much of his fortune by identifying opportunity where others see only trouble. He says that he is constantly trying to “shut out the noise” of conventional wisdom, because, although it may not always be wrong, it is rarely profitable. In the mid-seventies, he bought about three billion dollars’ worth of distressed real estate in cities across the country for “a dollar down and a hope certificate.” He made hundreds of millions of dollars. In 1978, he published an article about his exploits in Real Estate Review, which he titled “The Grave Dancer” (“I was dancing on the skeletons of other people’s mistakes”), and this became his nickname. If Zell gains control of Tribune Company—the deal is expected to close before the end of the year, though obstacles remain—it will be the biggest distressed entity that he has ever acquired. In addition to the Chicago and Los Angeles daily newspapers, the company owns Newsday, six other dailies, and twenty-three television stations, as well as the Chicago Cubs. In part because of rapidly declining profits in the newspaper industry, Tribune’s revenues have been dropping for years. When Tribune’s directors put the company up for sale, in September, 2006, a number of prospective buyers examined its assets and walked away. By the time Zell made his offer, last March, his only competition was a less fully formed bid from the Los Angeles businessmen Ronald Burkle and Eli Broad.
Graham Bowley & Andrew Revkin:
They were modern adventure travelers, following the doomed route of Sir Ernest Shackleton to the frozen ends of the earth. They paid $7,000 to $16,000 to cruise on a ship that had proudly plowed the Antarctic for 40 years.But sometime early yesterday, the Explorer, fondly known in the maritime world as “the little red ship,” quietly struck ice.
There were the alarms, then the captain’s voice on the public address system calling the 100 passengers and the crew of about 50 to the lecture hall, according to passengers’ accounts on the radio and others relayed from rescuers and the tour operator.
In the lecture hall, they were told that water was creeping in through a fist-size hole punched into the ship’s starboard. As it flooded the grinding engine room, the power failed. The ship ceased responding.
“We all got a little nervous when the ship began to list sharply, and the lifeboats still hadn’t been lowered,” John Cartwright, a Canadian, told CBC radio.
What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?To begin to answer that question, S)T's Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.
After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies' futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:
Personalized medicine—With the initial mapping of the human genome, scientists are moving rapidly toward the following likely breakthroughs for gene-based products and services:
FORWARD OPERATING BASE AIRBORNE, Afghanistan, Nov. 22 — The soldiers filed into the dining tent in the soft light before evening, carrying heaps of food for a Thanksgiving gathering as polyglot as anywhere.At one plywood table was a Special Forces staff sergeant who was born in Turkey. “No names, please,” he said. At another was Capt. Walter P. De La Vega of the Army, who trains and supervises the Afghan security forces in Wardak Province. He was born in Peru and reared in New Jersey.
Sgt. Kevin J. Quinones, an acoustic guitar player in camouflage, was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. When he strummed and sang “America the Beautiful,” the soldiers set aside their food and stood.
A cook who prepared the turkey, Specialist Yevgeny Goussev, was born in Moscow and received a work visa to the United States in 2002. He was a reserve artillery lieutenant in the Russian Army, although he said his commission was probably voided when he enlisted in the United States Army last year.
Specialist Goussev became a United States citizen this month. He said he understood what this American holiday meant. “Thanksgiving is to share with other people, and not expecting anything in return,” he said.
It is a pleasure to be here this evening. I am under strict instructions from the rector of Grace Church, Brooklyn, not to let down the Episcopal side. Uphold the highest standards of the Episcopalian intellectual tradition, he told me. What that tradition might be, he couldn't say, and neither can I. But I'll do my level best.My subject is Benjamin Graham: his life, his investment philosophy, his writings and his Jewishness. About his love life, I will say little, as my time this evening is limited—just three hours, I believe. Some years ago, Fortune Magazine, in a squib it published on the occasion of Graham's induction into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame, said that the thrice-married father of value investing "leaped from blonde to blonde like an Alpine goat springing from peak to peak."
I am a frankly worshipful admirer of Graham's. I love him for his heart as much as for his head. Between 1929 and 1932, his investment partnership lost 70% of its value. Not until 1936 did it recoup all it relinquished since the Crash. Yet Graham persevered and, along with his partner, Jerry Newman, went on to achieve a brilliant long-term investment record—not excluding those three disastrous years. We have all heard the platitude, "The first rule of investing is not to lose money and the second rule is not to forget the first." Very helpful. Well, Graham shows that a debilitating loss is no reason to give up. . . . Never quit.
Kurt Matzler, Franz Bailom and Todd A. Mooradian:
Should executives make decisions based on what their “gut” tells them? Lately that idea has lost some favor, as technology’s ability to accumulate and analyze data has rapidly increased — supplanting, according to some accounts, the high-level manager’s need to draw heavily on intuition. But intuition needs some rescuing from its detractors, and the place to start is by clarifying what it really is, and how it should be developed.Intuition is not a magical sixth sense or a paranormal process; nor does it signify the opposite of reason or random and whimsical decision making. Rather, intuition is a highly complex and highly developed form of reasoning that is based on years of experience and learning, and on facts, patterns, concepts, procedures and abstractions stored in one’s head.
In this article, the authors draw on examples from the worlds of chess, neuroscience and business — especially Austria’s KTM Sportmotorcycle AG — to show that intuitive decision making should not be prematurely buried. They point out that although the study of intuition has not been extensively explored as a part of management science, studies reveal that several ingredients are critical to intuition’s development: years of domain-specific experience; the cultivation of personal and professional networks; the development of emotional intelligence; a tolerance for mistakes; a healthy sense of curiosity; and a sense of intuition’s limits.
1. A Salinas storyteller's taleNATIONAL STEINBECK CENTER
Salinas, Monterey CountyIt is always a challenge to commemorate a life, never mind a writer's life. Unlike museums devoted to sports legends or war heroes, a museum that honors a man of arts and letters must reflect his quiet, solitary pursuit. Which is to say that such a repository may be unbearably dull. How delightful, then, is the National Steinbeck Center at the end of Salinas' Main Street, a place whose undercurrents deliver shock after tiny shock -- here an arc of unknown history, there a jolt of social commentary. The museum is just a couple of blocks from where townspeople burned Steinbeck's books, enraged at his perceived betrayal of them and agriculture, the economic star then and now ($3.5 billion worth of crops in 2006) of Monterey County's show. Never mind that he was a hometown boy -- you can see his Victorian birthplace just up the street from the museum and have lunch there -- he was Judas to the growers and landowners portrayed unsympathetically in "Grapes of Wrath" and "East of Eden." The modern-looking center may seem incongruous with the unpretentious persona of the author, whose work won Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. But like his books, it shines a light on the issues, using film clips and displays that are muted set pieces, occasionally somber but never dull. To see this place and the fields that surround Salinas is to understand that Steinbeck's so-called Valley of the World is really the Heart of California.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy [8.5MB mp3 Audio File]:
From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person.C-SPAN Video.America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who--with their hands, their intelligence and their heart--built the greatest nation in the world: "Come, and everything will be given to you." She said: "Come, and the only limits to what you'll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent." America embodies this extraordinary ability to grant each and every person a second chance.
Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That's what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it. And she fought for this freedom whenever she felt it to be threatened somewhere in the world. It was by watching America grow that men and women understood that freedom was possible.
What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind.
Leslie Feist rocked Madison Friday evening, 16 November 2007. Despite her severe ankle sprain (evidently while running in Omaha, NE the prior day), Feist and her band entertained the sold out Orpheum Theatre with ouststanding vocals, delightful instruments and an elegant video art show. Check out the playlist here.
More, please.
Watch an MPEG-4 Video Slideshow:
Rob Thomas attended the concert and wrote this.
So as readers of this site know, I represent Robert Greenwald (pro bono) in a some fair use matters. My first work was on his film Outfoxed. Robert has been continuing the campaign against Fox. His latest is a very clever set of attacks on the "indecency" of Fox News. (The purpose is to push the FCC to unbundle cable channels). Watch the video below and you'll see the point.
Interesting video clip on GPS receivers and New York City Taxis. The conversations were fascinating. The TomTom 910 GPS receiver was quite useful this summer (just replaced by the 920). The iPHone
Throughout Asia's developing nations, once penniless painters are getting used to this most unexpected emotion. The region's contemporary-art market has never been so hot. Last year, a collection of dreamlike portraits and landscapes by China's Zhang Xiaogang raked in just over $24 million — more than British enfant terrible Damien Hirst made in 2006. In March, a sale of modern Indian art in New York City raised a record $15 million, including just under $800,000 for Captives, a stark evocation of desiccated torsos by New Delhi–born Rameshwar Broota. Two months later, an auction in London elicited $1.42 million for a Tantric-inspired oil painting by India's Syed Haider Raza. Even in Vietnam, idyllic rural scenes coated in the country's distinctive lacquer that sold for a few hundred dollars a few years ago are now selling for 10 times that. A gouache-and-ink painting by Vietnamese post-impressionist Le Pho, whose work is part of the permanent exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Paris, captured nearly $250,000 at a Singapore sale. Overall, leading auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's auctioned $190 million in contemporary Asian art last year, compared to $22 million just two years before. "This is just the beginning," says Swiss art dealer Pierre Huber, who in September oversaw a debut contemporary Asian art fair in Shanghai. "For so long, people did not know about Asian art. But now the world is turning to Asia, and what they see is amazing."
Passengers departing on Skybus Airlines from Columbus, Ohio, walk out of a brand new terminal and traipse across the tarmac to board their planes. In some cities, travelers fetch their own luggage off luggage carts. The airline has no telephone number that customers can call.With fares starting at $10 one-way, do you expect more?
Skybus Airlines Inc., now six months old, brings a new level of bare-bones service -- and very affordable prices -- to the U.S. skies. The carrier also raises the question of just how cheap U.S. travelers will go to travel. So far, many seem to be willing to go very cheap. At a time when bus companies and Amtrak struggle to attract customers, and many travelers still gripe about the loss of in-flight meals and the addition of so many airline fees, Skybus filled more than 80% of its seats all summer.
IN AN AGE OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD, identifying the most useful information in a timely fashion isn't easy -- and it may be some comfort to know it never was. Yet by studying the adaptive skills of earlier captains of commerce, entrepreneurs in even the most cutthroat businesses can learn how to smack down the competition.The key: Embrace invention -- even that of your competitors -- and use it better and faster than they do.
In the 1870s, John D. Rockefeller had a telegraph line run to his Euclid Avenue home in Cleveland. When he came home for lunch, he could stay in touch with his Oil City, Pa., contacts for updates on gushers and dry holes. He could then telegraph his brother in New York to adjust the price of kerosene for the European market, and his brother could pass the price on to Europe by trans-Atlantic cable.
Although Standard Oil employed telegraphers, John D. Rockefeller sent and received his own "e-mails." Sending and receiving Morse code at commercial speeds were not easy skills to master, but Rockefeller was "computer-literate." He had to be skilled in the current technology to have the best information and act on it.
The oil business of that day was not a fuel business. Standard Oil sold illumination. Tallow and whale-oil concerns were its competitors. Kerosene lamps, especially with mantles that burned white-hot, were a great advance in technology. Standard Oil produced a lamp-fuel kerosene of such purity that explosions were greatly reduced. Its five-gallon branded blue tins became known around the world. (Meanwhile, the byproduct of kerosene distillation, gasoline, was discarded as a nuisance.)
Details of the Badgers 4-0 win available here. North Dakota had an amazing 43 shots on goal, including 25 in the third period. A tremendous, fast paced game. One of the best I've seen.
Gorbachev, The Berlin Wall and Louis Vuitton.
More here.
Dave Stark: [432K PDF]
My, my, this was certainly an interesting quarter of activity in the South Central Wisconsin real estate market! For a while there, it was looking like we might start to see an uptick in activity compared with the 3rd quarter of 2006. In fact, note that single family home sales for the third quarter in the combined Dane, Sauk, and Columbia markets are off only 1% from the same quarter of 2006. For the year, they’re off only 3%. Condo sales are off a little more, falling 14% for the quarter and 11% for the year. As we said in our last edition, the market appeared to have settled into a groove, down roughly 10-12% from the unrealisticallyfrantic 2005 pace.Dave Stark is a longtime friend and client. www.starkhomes.comAnd then, in mid August, the Great Sub-Prime Fiasco hit the national media like a nuclear bomb, and things changed dramatically. Within the third quarter numbers, reported closings in September are off nearly 24% from last September (as of this writing*). That shows you just how drastically things changed in mid-stream. The sensational reports speculating that Countrywide might go bankrupt seemed to throw the market into a kind of paralysis, and buyers scuttled to the side lines again just when they seemed to be finding the courage to come back onto the field.
Unfortunately, as has been the case throughout this period, the perceptions the public is being left with range from overstated to just plain wrong. While the events of August were real, our experience is that most local home buyers and sellers don’t understand what it means for us. The media has done a very poor job of distinguishing between what’s going on nationally and what’s going on here locally. The impression many people have is that foreclosures are skyrocketing, foreclosed homes are flooding the market, driving up inventories, lenders are going out of business so that home loans are no longer available, interest rates on the few loans that are available are rising, and home prices are plummeting. None of these things are remotely true in our local market. But as the September closing numbers suggest, these perceptions do have an influence on people’s behavior in the short run. Yes, something is going on, but what is it, really?
His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.Perhaps our elected officials might consider this matter vis a vis AT&T's flawed video "competition" bill. unlikely"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.
Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts.
Finally, we are being treated to a good old-fashioned bare-knuckles fistfight. The biggest and most respected players in the automobile industry are trashing each other’s technological plans for future automobiles, while promoting their own concepts as the future of the industry. It’s an elevated debate, not a product-vs.-product dustup. What I found most fascinating about all of this was Carlos Ghosn’s position that, one day in the near future, only electric cars might be allowed in some of the most congested cities in the world. There’s little doubt in my mind that he’s probably right; he’s just looking at the European viewpoint on that issue, not necessarily the Japanese.
Earmarkwatch.org. Via Lessig.
for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing energy independence lies in cellulosic ethanol. That's ethanol that could be brewed from things like corn stalks, straw, wood chips — things we normally throw away.AudioCompanies have been racing to find cost-effective ways to make this form of ethanol. A company called Range Fuels in Georgia is scheduled to break ground Tuesday on the world's first plant for making cellulosic ethanol.
Wisconsin State Capitol and Fall Colors.
The trade magazine VMSD (for visual merchandising and store design) reports on a trend I noticed first in a couple of Dallas 7-Elevens. Under competitive pressure, convenience stores are getting aesthetic overhauls.
James Fallows offers a few amusing notes on the challenges a traveller faces overseas.
I, too have had some of these experiences, though my luck in France was better than the sax player Fallows mentions.
A young Vietnamese shopkeeper greeted me in German one morning. There was no shortage of German, French and Australian visitors in this area.
Rain was lashing against the side of the plane as we broke through the clouds. Below us, Cambodia stretched out like a perfect disaster: fields flooded to the horizon, palm trees whipped by the wind, a sky so dark and heavy it seemed about to collapse. As we dropped closer, we caught a glimpse of two people pushing a truck through knee-deep water, struggling to keep from being washed away."It's fantastic!" I said to my wife, whose hand was clamped on mine in a vise-like grip. "It looks like we timed this perfectly!"
We'd come to Cambodia to see the famous temples of Angkor, those magnificent ruins that make up one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Asia, if not the world. And we'd come in July -- in the heart of the monsoon, which sensible people had told us was pure madness. Wait until the dry season, they said, when the skies are clear and you're guaranteed as much sunshine as you can handle. Go during the long, wet summer -- when more than 50 inches of rain falls -- and you're certain to get stranded in your hotel, swatting at mosquitoes and hoping you don't come down with malaria.
The Smart ForTwo isn't so much a small car as a short one. At just eight feet from stem to stern, it’s by far the shortest car on the market. What's the difference between small and short? A small car can stay low to the ground to achieve excellent handling and fuel economy. A short car only excels at one thing: unmetered parallel parking. The first-generation Smart proved the point. As reviewed on TTAC, it was a noisy, slow, poor-handling, stiff-legged, bouncy and crashy car with meh mileage. So, Daimler says it’s rectified the first-gen's faults. Is Version 2.0– headed stateside in 2008– ready for prime time?The new ForTwo maintains its Tonka-toy proportions and look at me I’m wearing designer glasses (without a prescription) unconventionality. There’s now a painted parenthesis around the driver’s compartment: a clever if unsuccessful attempt to reassure drivers that Smart’s got their back (as there’s nothing much behind them). From certain angles, the slash-marked Four Two looks like a Pokemon with weird sideburns. Anyway, there’s no denying that observers (especially women) fight the urge to muss the ForTwo’s metaphorical hair and pinch its figurative cheeks.
I've been running across examples of illustration designed to shake things up & reflect on the world, for better & for worse:
- [Note: Not for those offended by profanity] Paul Krassner's 1963 "F Communism" bumper sticker is a an incredibly efficient little satire of politics and obscenity. Check out Kurt Vonnegut's commentary on the work for historical context.
- On war & walls:
The NYT features a piece on Baghdad muralists hired to beautify, or at least adorn, the city's grim anti-suicide-bomber blast walls. "With few opportunities for work, [the artists] are delighted with the money, but are also uncomfortably aware that all they can do is paint the symptoms of a conflict that has mired their city in death squads..."
Elsewhere in the region, elusive British street artist Banksy has decorated Israeli's security wall.- Back in this part of the world, online company Brickfish kicked off a contest to "Design your own border fence" for the US-Mexico frontier.
As with most of my life decisions, my impulse to blog was a puzzling little soup of miscellaneous causes that bubbled and simmered until one day I noticed I was doing something. I figured I needed a rationalization in case anyone asked. My rationalization for blogging was especially hard to concoct. I was giving away my product for free and hoping something good came of it.I did have a few "artist" reasons for blogging. After 18 years of writing "Dilbert" comics, I was itching to slip the leash and just once write "turd" without getting an email from my editor. It might not seem like a big deal to you, but when you aren't allowed to write in the way you talk, it's like using the wrong end of the shovel to pick up, for example, a turd.
Over time, I noticed something unexpected and wonderful was happening with the blog. I had an army of volunteer editors, and they never slept. The readers were changing the course of my writing in real time. I would post my thoughts on a topic, and the masses told me what they thought of the day's offering without holding anything back. Often they'd correct my grammar or facts and I'd fix it in minutes. They were in turns brutal and encouraging. They wanted more posts on some topics and less of others. It was like the old marketing saying, "Your customers tell you what business you're in."
Peak Oil will be one of the defining events of this century. Forecasts by professionals in energy-related fields fall in a large range between 2006 and 2025+, with most forecasts by institutions in the later half of this range. Estimates vary widely due to two very different kinds of factors.
