Cereal Box™ Marketing from The Bosson Group
Inside every company there is a fortune of untapped wealth waiting to be mined, refined and cut into fine diamonds. That “fortune” is of course the power of creativity locked away in your workforce. Boardrooms have often thought it might be good to incorporate frontline views of a wider spectrum of company departments into the whole of their sales/marketing strategy.
But how do you acquire real wealth from unrelated individuals functioning in completely different company job descriptions? How do you combine the observations of a customer service rep with an engineer and someone from accounts payable all at once into some cohesive form of real intelligence (and here’s the real issue) – How do you do this without bringing your operation to a complete standstill?
Cereal Box™ is a way to get your entire company involved and excited about the decisions that impact the way your company thinks and what it does. This is more than a pretty ingenious way to explore potential in new and existing markets - this is a program that puts your employees on the front line, fighting the war to make your company greater. Their desire to see your company succeed isn’t new information, but what is new is a method you can execute to make use of their innately creative ideas. These people share something vital – they possess a “feet on the ground” view of the battle that is taking place in and for your markets.
Your engineers, estimators, customer service reps, and sales and management people all have something in common with one another, they each possess a definitive and singular view of your business as it affects your customer. In addition to that, in the light of today’s crushing economic environment, your employees have an integral stake in your company’s success. As our market landscape shrinks the survival of an individual’s employment becomes more than an issue of their own efforts…it becomes something they view as a member of your company “team”. Most employees know the best way to insure their continued employment is to work in a successful environment. Not only must they contribute their personal best but they must hope for and – in every possible way – provide to the greater prosperity of the whole company (not just their cubicle or office).
Americans consider their jobs to be one of the most important and defining elements of their lives. Most of the truly dedicated professionals; young or old - officer or foot soldier, see the company they belong to as the team they support and they are always willing to give much more than companies ever ask. Not in paperwork, phone calls, reports or time at work, but in how their ideas might help the company improve.
Listed as one the most important aspects of our adult life, our careers often seem out of our control. That helplessness can be a dreaded and frustrating experience for most people - not because of anything you do (although that’s not always true), but because of what you don’t do – and that is to ask them their opinion.
When we independently asked company employees if they were willing to participate in “contributing ideas” to help their company explore new marketing opportunities, knowing that 90% of what they would do would happen at home and off campus, the overwhelming response was “Yes!” Your employees want to get your attention. They are often tripping over themselves to tell you exactly what they think.
They want to contribute to their own success. They want to be a part of the company’s success. They are waiting for you to ask them – “What do you think?”
Cereal Box™ by The Bosson Group can show you how to practically and strategically take advantage of your company’s inherent resources to make new inroads to existing clients or new markets. The question of marketing for any company is a complex process and different for each company. We couldn’t possibly cover all the different venues for marketing/branding in this paper. What we will cover here is Cereal Box™ by The Bosson Group
The project is fairly simple to execute. Any box company can sell you a short run of boxes that will fold into something like a cereal box. I got these for .68 each and purchased 50 for one client project*. I’ve purchased less and paid a little more and had larger projects that required a couple hundred, so it really depends on your company and how many people you want to get involved.
Provide three boxes minimum (unfolded) per team member or as many unfolded boxes as a team member might request (children and spouses at home may want to get involved – some companies have even invited client members or community organizations for goodwill). The idea is for the team to get together and come up with THREE WAYS TO SELL EXISTING PRODUCTS TO NEW MARKETS OR THREE NEW MARKETS FOR EXISTING PRODUCTS OR (WITH SLIGHT MODIFICATIONS) THREE ENTIRELY NEW PRODUCTS AND MARKETS (OR ANY COMBINATION OF THE ABOVE). But it’s not limited to new markets or products – how about THREE WAYS TO CREATE NEW PRODUCT APPEAL – THREE WAYS TO BETTER SUPPORT YOUR CUSTOMER – THREE CONTESTS THAT GET MORE NEW COMPANIES INVOLVED – THREE NEW IDEAS FOR SEMINARS OR CONFERENCES – THREE WAYS TO IMPROVE SALES, REDUCE COSTS, ENHANCE COMPANY IMAGE…the team idea proposition is almost endless!
The basic structure for Cereal Box™ is simple enough. Usually three to five teams of three to five people each. Each team should include people in your company who might not otherwise have a chance to either work together or collaborate over work issues. One team of three might include; one from engineering, another from sales and the last from customer service. A second team might include someone from management, IT and marketing. A third team might have someone from customer support, another from accounting and a third from shipping. This way you have people with very different views on how your business is conducted, received and employed by point of process personnel in client companies who ultimately share the same objective; company wealth. If you have fewer departments, mix the people up from relevant groups and put together fewer teams. For best results…
1.There shouldn’t be less than three teams with a minimum of three people per team.
2.All members of each team should have some direct interaction with your customers.
3.Whenever possible never have two people from the same department on the same team (exceptions might be customer service and technical support or people with billing questions where sometimes the lines of relativity get blurred).
4.Never more than five teams of five people each (once you properly analyze the intelligence you have gathered and the effectiveness of the program you can always create new teams and run the contest over and over again).
5.Cereal Box™ teams are selected either by managers, employee elections or random selection (draw from a hat).
6.Each team must have a leader responsible for reporting back to upper management. Speaking of upper management, a good rule of thumb is to include someone from sales, marketing and the boardroom – but if you are smaller or you want to simplify things, pick the person who will most profit from this (marketing makes sense).
7.No matter how you elect to put together the teams, make the announcement a company event and get the teams involved. One easy way is to give each team a name (try to be more creative than “the red team and the blue team”). You can even let them choose their own team name (just the names they select may tell you something about what you can expect from their desire to work together and the level of creativity you might expect). One note: Make certain names are not controversial or border on tasteless (be forewarned this can happen no matter how innocently)
8.Reward each department and have a winner, both team and individual, providing some general incentive for the most popular or contributing team member. If their families are involved have some Little Contests pepper your Cereal Box™ program. For children of employees, suggest an art or essay contest whereby the student who submits the most creative art or poignant essay on “Why daddy’s company is good for the community” is presented with a $500 donation for their favorite school activity or approved charity (make sure you have a list - you don’t want them contributing to something dangerously political or religious). Or ask the winner to do something with the money that helps the community and have them report back to you for your monthly newsletter. And what do you do with an eight year olds’ art? How about using it for your next year’s employee Christmas card or for the cover of the monthly newsletter! Big Contests for employees on the winning team can be a day off, tickets to a local sporting event or maybe even a sit down lunch with the CEO to talk about his or her contribution, but try to stay away from giving cash, it tends to never be enough and gives the program the “must do” commitment feeling, which sucks the fun out of it.
9.Keep the company appraised on how each team is doing and don’t let the contest last more than a few weeks (certainly no longer than four weeks).
10.Allow teams to meet once a week for a couple of hours at work (maybe even throw in a lunch for each team if budget allows) but make it clear that much of the creative work should take place at home.
11.If you decide to do this without our supervision, make sure you establish firm but fair rules like how much time they can spend on the project at work. You must insist there are no unauthorized meetings off campus with anyone – period. Have rules on where, when, how and if they can include customer input (usually get them to have customer questions approved by the team leader). Approve all email content designated for inter or intra-office communication. Supervise their work but don’t be Machiavellian
Results vary but the experience as a whole for individuals and the company are usually massively impressive on many levels. You cannot conduct the program without learning some rather hard and wonderful truths about who you really are. Over the years we have used the program successfully on several clients. One company found a way to improve the click-back rate on an incidental email product from about 1/2 of 1percent to over 7 percent and, with a slight engineering change, created a new product and named the product.
The Cereal Box™ marketing program engages individuals from different company departments who would normally never have an opportunity to share insights and new ideas.
This is a controlled, manageable and creative exchange process which can and will increase your brand awareness and sales by embedding your company’s personality and enthusiasm across a broad spectrum of your market rather than the more typical explosive single point impact created with normal sales and marketing efforts.
Think of the efforts from Cereal Box™ as being an open hand with all ten fingers gripping your customer as opposed to a single fist pounding one target area.
Cereal Box™ is simple to organize, effective in bringing your own company people together as a team and a powerful way to impact your market and engage your customers on a wide range of relevant issues.
Cereal Box™ is a gift you give your own company. Infuse your company with a new sense of unity. Promote a healthy dialogue and reward new ideas. Discover new talent you might otherwise have never seen; creating venues that are fresh and uniquely constructed, speaking the native language of your markets.
Typical disclaimer
Of course not everyone can participate all the time and some people may not be a fit for such a program. The Bosson Group has engineered a quantitative, behavioral and predictive tool which evaluates tests and assists in the selection and proper cross-section of personnel to participate in your company’s own unprecedented marketing event. Each team member is carefully considered and their department’s contribution weighed for just the right balance in customer service, marketing, sales, engineering, IT services and management representation.
We reserve the rights to the name Cereal Box™ and it would just be in bad taste to use it as your own anyway. No promises are guaranteed or implied in this communication. Results vary and even more when you try this on your own. Please don’t call for more hints or suggestions if you attempt this yourself and without our input – we don’t want to be unfriendly but we can’t provide assistance without accepting liability. People, places and types of business all, individually and collectively, affect how to structure your event and this communication carries many generalities and no specifics. So a word to the wise – use common sense if attempting this on your own. Yes, you can hire us to set the program up so you can run your own event internally without additional compensation to The Bosson Group.
*send to info@thebossongroup.com for a full copy of this report with photos
Friday, December 3, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
We have met the enemy…and we used to work for them!
“We have met the enemy…and we used to work for them!”
On August 6th USA Today reported the following ( http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-08-06-manufacturing04_CV_N.htm ) “Faced with rising costs, General Electric is moving production of its new energ -efficient water heater halfway around the world. The country it's leaving? China. The one it's bringing 400 jobs and a newly renovated factory? The United States. A small but growing band of U.S. manufacturers — including giants such as General Electric and Caterpillar— are turning the seemingly inexorable offshoring movement on its head, bringing some production to the U.S. from far-flung locations such as China. Others that were buying components overseas are switching to U.S. suppliers. Ford Motor said Wednesday that it's bringing nearly 2,000 jobs to its U.S. plants by 2012 from suppliers, including those in Japan, Mexico and India.”
In September, ABC News (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=5492084&page=1 ) followed up with a report of their own calling the new movement “Insourcing”… “As the U.S. economic slump continues, American jobs are increasingly in short supply: the U.S. Labor Department reported on Friday that employers shrunk payrolls by 51,000. The decline was smaller than expected but still marked the country's seventh straight month of job losses. The national unemployment rate, meanwhile, has jumped from 5.5 percent to 5.7 percent. But some experts say there is a bright spot on the jobs front: At least a handful of American companies who had relied on workers stationed overseas are now bringing jobs back to the United States. In addition, foreign companies are continuing to expand U.S. operations and hiring more local residents, instead of flying in foreign staff for business. “
Since then, amongst a score of local and national articles paying attention to this phenomena, Bloomberg Businessweek (www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_26/b4090038429655.htm ) and even NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100131296 have spoken on the subject of economic balance. We are finally meeting in the middle and that means that jobs once shipped off to China and India, or any of the other exotic or at least distant ports, may be coming home.
The headlines and debaters in newspapers, business magazines and even television are beginning to talk about the stabilizing costs that will make outsourced jobs attractive to American workers. Surprisingly there is a good argument for making this case. Rampant unemployment in America means that corporations can probably get people to work for less and even snag a slightly better caliber of person to do this kind of work. Tax breaks are being offered as bait for cities desperate to attract business, government incentives of cash and trade protection, a century of reliable, honest production (no radioactive lead in our toothpaste, honey) and (for anybody who has driven through a major city in the last two years knows) there is more than ample room for anybody who wants to move in and set up shop The timing for returning these outsourced jobs back onto American soil is good – probably never better. But not so fast!
Don’t you hate when there’s always that but in any supposed “good news”? The economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Before we as a country start handing the keys to every major city in America over to these conglomerates, maybe we ought to walk down memory lane and recall that no small amount of the unemployment we are suffering is the direct result of these very same Fortune companies bailing out of America in her time of need. Not that they had any national obligation to stick in the heat with us and turn this thing around for the good of Old Glory and all that (although those time worn values need to be picked up, dusted off and made more than some kind of bumper sticker philosophy). And I don’t say “hold on a second” because I am certain that they will abandon us at the next drop of the economic hat either.
After all, we made them who they are - and I mean that in every sense. So, we have to take some responsibility and recognition the Fortune companies that are good and those that are just plain evil. You know them; the companies that deliberately flood the market with inferior products and inflated prices and the corporate directors who took hundreds of millions to remove themselves from the very companies they raped and pillaged. Or billionaires that flaunt their wealth shamelessly while they drape themselves in the very freedom and protection they enjoy under our Constitution without the slightest bit of remorse or sense of duty to one’s country (it’s a nice place to live but I wouldn’t want to pay employee wages here – yuk, yuk). After all, what could we do when they folded their tents and moved away to greener pastures (never was a metaphor so acutely and sadly accurate)? I mean it’s a country built of the principle of capitalism, right?
It’s also the country that was built and paid for by the blood of patriots, many of whom lost much of everything they owned and many of the people they so dearly loved, who made that statement and started this whole party to begin with. These corporations that made their products globally iconic because they were “made in America” had the labels reprinted and warnings written in Chinese. But am I just angry because they were pathetically empty of values and any sense or morale decency in their ruthless pursuit of corporate wealth?
No…well maybe a little. But that’s not the subject of this editorial. I think there is a very practical and relevant point to be made here and issues we should explore before we open up the shores and let these critters wriggle back.
Assume, as any reasonable person must, that they will be returning with the same mindset they had when they left. Seriously, when was the last time a corporate boardroom was accused of sensitive creativity? Can you imagine these dominions rebuilding their dynasties on today’s fractured infrastructure? Talk about the end of the world and God calling! Nothing could more swiftly bring about the sudden and abrupt collapse of cities, highways, railways, airports and electrical grids (not to mention the chaos that would ensue from cities competing to regain these monolithic empires ) then the sudden appearance “theme park” size campuses built around the fact that these corporations would almost certainly receive the land, buildings and titles for almost nothing in exchange for the promise of work for the locals.
I’m not against incentives for getting companies to set up shop in industrial areas that already exist. I’m just certain that we can do this differently – better – if we do it right this time.
I have been a strong proponent since early 2007 of the “extended depression”. I believe that our economy, no matter what occurs, will not see its bottom until 2012. I have even factored in the consideration that at one point in our economic slide (which seems to be now) it would become just as economically feasible to offer the outsourced jobs to a desperately and deeply compromised unemployed America as it would to offer those jobs to India or China. We need the jobs but we can’t handle the influx of these workers on our roads, in our cities and over the course of our antiquated infrastructure. If we bring these jobs back with the mindset that Fortune America had when it left, we will inadvertently sign away our frail economic recovery. Things are going to change and, in this case, they will not change for the better. If their coming home ends up being a financial miscalculation on their part do you think they will end up paying for it?
Trickle Up and Then Tumble Down
Unfortunately, any disaster to Fortune companies eventually craters the American economic landscape (at least this is true so far – I believe I hold a significant alternate theory based on my predictive models). Here’s the most ironic aspect to this whole insourcing probability; as Fortune companies return home, the initial inflight will at first seem like a boom to our prosperity. The fact is that it is a bust waiting to implode. The effect of these jobs coming home without serious modification to the current corporate America model is based on the anticipated corporate premise that they can fill huge call centers with immensely overqualified people to work the phones. This will backfire on them in the middle of our recovery (and that word “recovery” will take on new meaning by 2012) in and about 2015 as literally tens of thousands of highly skilled workers abandon these monster call centers to accept more fitting work opportunities while compensating their expertise and salary expectations.
Trickle up and then tumble down (as I call it)- the result of more economic woes that will be the cause of a deafening crash and an even more substantial setback to any serious recovery. This time we will have isolated another even more fragile element of our society and those people now just hanging on by the tips of their fingers will be washed away in a tsunami of economic recession. Ultimately this perplexing cycle will once again creep up the ladder of our society and wreak havoc on a beleaguered middle America.
Keep in mind I feel like Paul Revere as I scream “things will never be the same…things will never be the same!” But,
the cruel, hard fact is that they will never be the same and deep down I think most Americans have accepted that. The last thing we need are the frighteningly simple minded corporate leaders making a wholesale decision to pepper our landscape with jobs they “think” they can steal for pennies on the dollar from desperate Americans. But not long after the call centers are abandoned and skilled help is not available at bargain basement wages, these giant entities will collapse like edge of the tide sand castles and, once again, we will have the domino effect on business. If we as Americans have not learned from our mistakes, be sure CEOs of these mega-conglomerates have learned less - and they learn at a slower rate.
Tethered Communities - The Future of Business in America
While the overall economic global picture for markets will grow exceedingly dim, the average American will have (and in many ways already has) readjusted. We are sleeker, trimmed down and more prepared to weather the storm of this economy knowing that at some point jobs must come back or corporations will have essentially said to the world “we have no buyers!” Nothing has become more visible to politics and business than the understanding that the bottom line for every company - no matter what they do, make, service or sell - eventually comes down to how much they sell their product or service for and what they NET off those sales or services. Like the young actress once said “it isn’t rock science!” And, no I didn’t misspell or misquote - that it is the actual quote (I will spare her name because – well – we all make those errors when standing on the red carpet- I guess).
So, in what will be a snide bit of twisted irony, American corporations who have bankrupted the country in search of the ever important “profit” have left in their wake a society that has no intentions of being put in such a position again. As they migrate back to the country they abandoned and the millions of Americans they left stranded without hope of income, they may want to rethink how they are going to plant their flag this time around. I have some suggestions, and I am certain of three things –
Number one: Large corporations became large corporations because at one time they were innovative.
Number two: Large corporations, when they become large corporations, cease being innovative.
Number three: Large corporations will have to once again become innovative if they have any hope of remaining viable in the 21st century.
What we can hope for is that we can offer returning corporations an alternative to their current business modeling by absorbing these jobs by using a combination of what I call “Tethered Communities “ and “Smart Space” work environments.
We at The Bosson Group understand how to take these insourced jobs and allocate their location, structure, management, analysis and technological needs based on detailed quantification of time, productivity and cost allocation. The “Tethered Community” emerges through a series of tests, analysis and position charting that will allow any workforce to reduce it’s on site needs for personnel by as much as 20%. A “Tethered Community”, using corporate locations with “Smart Spaces” (multiple personnel offices, etc.), will allow these corporations to relocate (insource) without pressing the equivalent of a nuclear footprint on our country.
Positions carefully constructed to work from homes; small satellite offices and even piggybacked desks will mean that major companies can bring in tens of thousands of jobs for a fraction of what it would cost them to simply reset the clock and bring back all the cubicles, desks and real estate that have already once been made to stand empty and abandoned.
The questions are hardly rhetorical and the correct answers will have a profound, positive impact on how corporate America proceeds into the 21st century with a new business model. They only have to ask themselves:
1. Do you really want all that real estate again?
2. What if going green was profitable as well as responsible?
3. Can you hope to keep these talented people caged up in call centers when the economy recovers?
4. What if you staff your company and save 40% on employee costs right up front without government regulations, long term contracts or minimum employment numbers?
5. Why not take advantage of the technology you yourselves created to do exactly what you created the technology to do?
A well thought out and efficiently deployed “Tethered Community” by The Bosson Group means:
• Thousands of jobs returning without the onerous employee costs Fortune companies must absorb
• The ability to control and significantly eliminate the pressure such returning positions would place on our country’s already failing infrastructure
• Savings in the tens of millions of dollars every day on precious fossil fuels
• An almost incalculable reduction in carbon emissions
• Less strain on employees commuting to and from locations through gridlock, making a friendlier, more personal work environment
• Smarter use of real estate leading to significant reductions in building, supporting, taxing and maintaining new developments
• Redesigning the American workforce to become flexible, mobile and global without ever having left the country to be competitive
For the record, whether you are a returning global competitor or a company in long term good standing on American soil, my concepts of “Tethered Communities” and “Smart Spaces” are effective and viable alternatives that can save you millions of dollars a year. And, if you’re a company on your way up in your market and you need to add people or consider expansion, The Bosson Group can show you how to consolidate your power to become more efficient while producing greater net profits. I’ve put a good deal of thought into this and I am asking corporate America, as they return, to do the same.
In God We Trust
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
On August 6th USA Today reported the following ( http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-08-06-manufacturing04_CV_N.htm ) “Faced with rising costs, General Electric is moving production of its new energ -efficient water heater halfway around the world. The country it's leaving? China. The one it's bringing 400 jobs and a newly renovated factory? The United States. A small but growing band of U.S. manufacturers — including giants such as General Electric and Caterpillar— are turning the seemingly inexorable offshoring movement on its head, bringing some production to the U.S. from far-flung locations such as China. Others that were buying components overseas are switching to U.S. suppliers. Ford Motor said Wednesday that it's bringing nearly 2,000 jobs to its U.S. plants by 2012 from suppliers, including those in Japan, Mexico and India.”
In September, ABC News (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=5492084&page=1 ) followed up with a report of their own calling the new movement “Insourcing”… “As the U.S. economic slump continues, American jobs are increasingly in short supply: the U.S. Labor Department reported on Friday that employers shrunk payrolls by 51,000. The decline was smaller than expected but still marked the country's seventh straight month of job losses. The national unemployment rate, meanwhile, has jumped from 5.5 percent to 5.7 percent. But some experts say there is a bright spot on the jobs front: At least a handful of American companies who had relied on workers stationed overseas are now bringing jobs back to the United States. In addition, foreign companies are continuing to expand U.S. operations and hiring more local residents, instead of flying in foreign staff for business. “
Since then, amongst a score of local and national articles paying attention to this phenomena, Bloomberg Businessweek (www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_26/b4090038429655.htm ) and even NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100131296 have spoken on the subject of economic balance. We are finally meeting in the middle and that means that jobs once shipped off to China and India, or any of the other exotic or at least distant ports, may be coming home.
The headlines and debaters in newspapers, business magazines and even television are beginning to talk about the stabilizing costs that will make outsourced jobs attractive to American workers. Surprisingly there is a good argument for making this case. Rampant unemployment in America means that corporations can probably get people to work for less and even snag a slightly better caliber of person to do this kind of work. Tax breaks are being offered as bait for cities desperate to attract business, government incentives of cash and trade protection, a century of reliable, honest production (no radioactive lead in our toothpaste, honey) and (for anybody who has driven through a major city in the last two years knows) there is more than ample room for anybody who wants to move in and set up shop The timing for returning these outsourced jobs back onto American soil is good – probably never better. But not so fast!
Don’t you hate when there’s always that but in any supposed “good news”? The economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Before we as a country start handing the keys to every major city in America over to these conglomerates, maybe we ought to walk down memory lane and recall that no small amount of the unemployment we are suffering is the direct result of these very same Fortune companies bailing out of America in her time of need. Not that they had any national obligation to stick in the heat with us and turn this thing around for the good of Old Glory and all that (although those time worn values need to be picked up, dusted off and made more than some kind of bumper sticker philosophy). And I don’t say “hold on a second” because I am certain that they will abandon us at the next drop of the economic hat either.
After all, we made them who they are - and I mean that in every sense. So, we have to take some responsibility and recognition the Fortune companies that are good and those that are just plain evil. You know them; the companies that deliberately flood the market with inferior products and inflated prices and the corporate directors who took hundreds of millions to remove themselves from the very companies they raped and pillaged. Or billionaires that flaunt their wealth shamelessly while they drape themselves in the very freedom and protection they enjoy under our Constitution without the slightest bit of remorse or sense of duty to one’s country (it’s a nice place to live but I wouldn’t want to pay employee wages here – yuk, yuk). After all, what could we do when they folded their tents and moved away to greener pastures (never was a metaphor so acutely and sadly accurate)? I mean it’s a country built of the principle of capitalism, right?
It’s also the country that was built and paid for by the blood of patriots, many of whom lost much of everything they owned and many of the people they so dearly loved, who made that statement and started this whole party to begin with. These corporations that made their products globally iconic because they were “made in America” had the labels reprinted and warnings written in Chinese. But am I just angry because they were pathetically empty of values and any sense or morale decency in their ruthless pursuit of corporate wealth?
No…well maybe a little. But that’s not the subject of this editorial. I think there is a very practical and relevant point to be made here and issues we should explore before we open up the shores and let these critters wriggle back.
Assume, as any reasonable person must, that they will be returning with the same mindset they had when they left. Seriously, when was the last time a corporate boardroom was accused of sensitive creativity? Can you imagine these dominions rebuilding their dynasties on today’s fractured infrastructure? Talk about the end of the world and God calling! Nothing could more swiftly bring about the sudden and abrupt collapse of cities, highways, railways, airports and electrical grids (not to mention the chaos that would ensue from cities competing to regain these monolithic empires ) then the sudden appearance “theme park” size campuses built around the fact that these corporations would almost certainly receive the land, buildings and titles for almost nothing in exchange for the promise of work for the locals.
I’m not against incentives for getting companies to set up shop in industrial areas that already exist. I’m just certain that we can do this differently – better – if we do it right this time.
I have been a strong proponent since early 2007 of the “extended depression”. I believe that our economy, no matter what occurs, will not see its bottom until 2012. I have even factored in the consideration that at one point in our economic slide (which seems to be now) it would become just as economically feasible to offer the outsourced jobs to a desperately and deeply compromised unemployed America as it would to offer those jobs to India or China. We need the jobs but we can’t handle the influx of these workers on our roads, in our cities and over the course of our antiquated infrastructure. If we bring these jobs back with the mindset that Fortune America had when it left, we will inadvertently sign away our frail economic recovery. Things are going to change and, in this case, they will not change for the better. If their coming home ends up being a financial miscalculation on their part do you think they will end up paying for it?
Trickle Up and Then Tumble Down
Unfortunately, any disaster to Fortune companies eventually craters the American economic landscape (at least this is true so far – I believe I hold a significant alternate theory based on my predictive models). Here’s the most ironic aspect to this whole insourcing probability; as Fortune companies return home, the initial inflight will at first seem like a boom to our prosperity. The fact is that it is a bust waiting to implode. The effect of these jobs coming home without serious modification to the current corporate America model is based on the anticipated corporate premise that they can fill huge call centers with immensely overqualified people to work the phones. This will backfire on them in the middle of our recovery (and that word “recovery” will take on new meaning by 2012) in and about 2015 as literally tens of thousands of highly skilled workers abandon these monster call centers to accept more fitting work opportunities while compensating their expertise and salary expectations.
Trickle up and then tumble down (as I call it)- the result of more economic woes that will be the cause of a deafening crash and an even more substantial setback to any serious recovery. This time we will have isolated another even more fragile element of our society and those people now just hanging on by the tips of their fingers will be washed away in a tsunami of economic recession. Ultimately this perplexing cycle will once again creep up the ladder of our society and wreak havoc on a beleaguered middle America.
Keep in mind I feel like Paul Revere as I scream “things will never be the same…things will never be the same!” But,
the cruel, hard fact is that they will never be the same and deep down I think most Americans have accepted that. The last thing we need are the frighteningly simple minded corporate leaders making a wholesale decision to pepper our landscape with jobs they “think” they can steal for pennies on the dollar from desperate Americans. But not long after the call centers are abandoned and skilled help is not available at bargain basement wages, these giant entities will collapse like edge of the tide sand castles and, once again, we will have the domino effect on business. If we as Americans have not learned from our mistakes, be sure CEOs of these mega-conglomerates have learned less - and they learn at a slower rate.
Tethered Communities - The Future of Business in America
While the overall economic global picture for markets will grow exceedingly dim, the average American will have (and in many ways already has) readjusted. We are sleeker, trimmed down and more prepared to weather the storm of this economy knowing that at some point jobs must come back or corporations will have essentially said to the world “we have no buyers!” Nothing has become more visible to politics and business than the understanding that the bottom line for every company - no matter what they do, make, service or sell - eventually comes down to how much they sell their product or service for and what they NET off those sales or services. Like the young actress once said “it isn’t rock science!” And, no I didn’t misspell or misquote - that it is the actual quote (I will spare her name because – well – we all make those errors when standing on the red carpet- I guess).
So, in what will be a snide bit of twisted irony, American corporations who have bankrupted the country in search of the ever important “profit” have left in their wake a society that has no intentions of being put in such a position again. As they migrate back to the country they abandoned and the millions of Americans they left stranded without hope of income, they may want to rethink how they are going to plant their flag this time around. I have some suggestions, and I am certain of three things –
Number one: Large corporations became large corporations because at one time they were innovative.
Number two: Large corporations, when they become large corporations, cease being innovative.
Number three: Large corporations will have to once again become innovative if they have any hope of remaining viable in the 21st century.
What we can hope for is that we can offer returning corporations an alternative to their current business modeling by absorbing these jobs by using a combination of what I call “Tethered Communities “ and “Smart Space” work environments.
We at The Bosson Group understand how to take these insourced jobs and allocate their location, structure, management, analysis and technological needs based on detailed quantification of time, productivity and cost allocation. The “Tethered Community” emerges through a series of tests, analysis and position charting that will allow any workforce to reduce it’s on site needs for personnel by as much as 20%. A “Tethered Community”, using corporate locations with “Smart Spaces” (multiple personnel offices, etc.), will allow these corporations to relocate (insource) without pressing the equivalent of a nuclear footprint on our country.
Positions carefully constructed to work from homes; small satellite offices and even piggybacked desks will mean that major companies can bring in tens of thousands of jobs for a fraction of what it would cost them to simply reset the clock and bring back all the cubicles, desks and real estate that have already once been made to stand empty and abandoned.
The questions are hardly rhetorical and the correct answers will have a profound, positive impact on how corporate America proceeds into the 21st century with a new business model. They only have to ask themselves:
1. Do you really want all that real estate again?
2. What if going green was profitable as well as responsible?
3. Can you hope to keep these talented people caged up in call centers when the economy recovers?
4. What if you staff your company and save 40% on employee costs right up front without government regulations, long term contracts or minimum employment numbers?
5. Why not take advantage of the technology you yourselves created to do exactly what you created the technology to do?
A well thought out and efficiently deployed “Tethered Community” by The Bosson Group means:
• Thousands of jobs returning without the onerous employee costs Fortune companies must absorb
• The ability to control and significantly eliminate the pressure such returning positions would place on our country’s already failing infrastructure
• Savings in the tens of millions of dollars every day on precious fossil fuels
• An almost incalculable reduction in carbon emissions
• Less strain on employees commuting to and from locations through gridlock, making a friendlier, more personal work environment
• Smarter use of real estate leading to significant reductions in building, supporting, taxing and maintaining new developments
• Redesigning the American workforce to become flexible, mobile and global without ever having left the country to be competitive
For the record, whether you are a returning global competitor or a company in long term good standing on American soil, my concepts of “Tethered Communities” and “Smart Spaces” are effective and viable alternatives that can save you millions of dollars a year. And, if you’re a company on your way up in your market and you need to add people or consider expansion, The Bosson Group can show you how to consolidate your power to become more efficient while producing greater net profits. I’ve put a good deal of thought into this and I am asking corporate America, as they return, to do the same.
In God We Trust
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Where do I put my money?
When I last wrote to you (just before summer 2010) I warned that summer was going to reveal the depth of troubles ingrained within the economics of the late great America. As we emerge from the summer the reality of our situation has certainly become more grisly, not just for Americans but for the entire world population. The stock market cannot recover, jobs continue to decline, the average yearly American earnings continue a downward spiral and fraud in corporate America is rampant. I said we would have to face the grim reality by summer’s end but I meant only that we would finally have to tell ourselves, “Okay we’re in this for the long haul. How do we make things work with what bits of this industry and bits of that industry remain?” I did not mean, nor have I ever thought, that we were literally going to face some kind of end time.
The economics of a country are like their vital organs and as each shuts down (for us this is caused by a toxic combination of bad politics and broken business) we witness the lifeblood of this country ebb away. Massive declines in manufacturing, natural disasters, war, famine and a chilling realization that the things we have come to rely on are the very things that have turned against us make the trial of the times clear but not apocalyptic. We were smokers and gluttons feasting on the corpse of a rotting world, and it was just a matter of time before we sunk to their level. And, like sin crouching at our door waiting for us, the venture vultures could hardly wait for us to drop to our knees to sink their teeth into us. All of this may make it look like the doomsday predictions seem almost inevitable, but they are not.
The end of our economic structure is not the end of the world; at least it doesn’t have to be. The final moments of our economic doomsday will be more of a gentle slide then a giant thud. After all we have been adjusting to the variations in our lifestyles for the better part of four years already and by 2012 we will have been in a global systematic failure for six years. This is more like starvation than death by a bullet. You don’t just wake up the morning after your last can of beans and drop over…it’s just the beginning of another kind of end.
In that way things are better than you should expect. Truly things will get worse…much worse…before they get better, but we will adjust. We will train ourselves to endure more and find new models to follow - models of virtue and not avarice. We will, hopefully, return to the values that made this country what it was at its apex. We will hold our families closer, our relationships will have more value, a dollar will mean something and a hard day’s work will be the feeling of a good day’s fatigue. The day may be coming when we start them on our knees and not on our Blackberries. A little prayer time would make us a whole lot stronger.
Only God knows when the world will end, not the Mayans or Nostradamus or the Hopi or your corner Palm Reader. We need to tune out our self-proclaimed prophets of the people like Oprah Winfrey and her companion in lunacy Sylvia Brown or the mesmerizing but fundamentally challenged Joel Osteen spreading their beguiling delusions of false spirituality or gospels of prosperity. This country is made of more than a handful of self-made billionaires whose actual life stories play out more like a Stephen King horror novel than a Frank Capra hero flick. Greed, loathing, deception and victory at any cost, including the sacrifice of self-redemption or the values that make such victories worth claiming, are hollow and unworthy of our applause.
So, the end of this time will come and it will skid to a halt slowly and irreparably by the end of 2012 according to my numbers. But by then we will have grown accustomed to lowering the heat and air, walking a little more than driving, praying a little more than preaching and caring a little more than collecting. We will have to start again in a whole different world - but we will start again. We’ve had monsters under our beds before and we will have them again. The great generation of World War II is passing into the deep, long night but perhaps another great generation is looming on the horizon.
So when I was walking the concourse with my placard in hand, warning that the end was coming, my sign may have been wrong. Well, not wrong - but misinterpreted. I didn’t mean the end kind of an end but rather the beginning of a new story. Things are actually better than I expected – although most of that is either a fluke (see my notes on natural disasters below) or a deliberate messy cash infusion from the government (see my notes on that also). Since 2006 (actually to be more precise, I began writing publicly on the subject of the American economic situation in April 2007) my conclusions have been accurate because I am not basing them on the traditional economic formulas we have used over the last forty years. Contrary to some remarks, I don’t get any pleasure out of announcing these predictions...I am as horrified as you! Isn’t it better to be prepared for what our world will look like in three years then to buy into the "everything will turnaround once again" theory?
I am becoming a topic of conversation to more people because more people are arriving at a place where they are beginning to doubt the voices that have guided them for the last five decades. Many of these people are neither clients nor associates – so my words have certainly spread. I am, apparently, gaining a wide audience - which is something I never sought to do nor am I comfortable knowing that it is occurring.
Regardless of the “flukes”, I am not retracting my third quarter 2012 bottom; I am simply saying that new factors seem to indicate that we will be better prepared than I initially anticipated. We will have had ample time to re-establish a new economic reality by the time we run our course. That it is dragging along as it is turns out to be a good thing.
Flukes
1. I am relatively certain that our President intends to release much of that three trillion dollars he allocated sometime in 2011(re-election needs) which will artificially inflate our wealth. Sadly, unless President Obama somehow becomes much more business savvy then he has proven to date, this infusion of lots of cash will be absorbed by the rich and never have a lasting effect on the average American worker. Nor will that money circulate long enough to sustain its own value (I’ll talk about that phenomena later in this series) and have a positive, lasting impact on the working American and our long term economic picture.
2. In April 2007 my paper “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel….run!” predicted that the end of this mess would occur no sooner than the summer of 2012. My exact words then were… “that (summer 2012) may even be a little optimistic”. I use my own “exclusive” quantitative process - nTelegenz™ (more on this later in the paper) to arrive at my conclusions. My formula anticipates everything from economic markers to natural disasters as elements in my analysis – but (and here it gets tricky), my process is a business production and analytics system designed to be spot on accurate up to three years out on data for random events like natural disasters. Because I am not an economist and no economist has ever been to the economic place we are going to be in 2012, with the end so far out from what my analysis accurately details, I could not know with any certainty (nor can anyone else) that my “rate of occurrence” for elements like earthquakes, hurricanes, wars, etc. could sustain itself beyond my three years. My formulas were meant to analyze up to a three year period. I was saying in 2007 that the bottom would not be evident until 2012. As we approach my markers and they remain true and consistent, it’s my belief that my analysis remains unquestionably valid. But natural disasters are a wild card and remain a fluke in my analysis no matter how I re-run the numbers. After all, who could have predicted BP’s oil spill in the Gulf, right?
So…to the point
In the four years since I started making my predictions it seems now I am being asked for more than analysis of the future markets. The number one question I get asked is “Where should I put my money?”
The answer is simple, even if the process by which I acquire my results is anything but simple. During the years prior to 2006, I had concocted my own quantitative process for the evaluation of a client’s market position to coincide with strategies which would Break]
1.) Reduce company costs while creating a more fluid and adaptable business environment
2.) Structure an ongoing growth anticipation and cost control strategy
3.) Increase sales through a combination of thorough market analysis, closing techniques and eclectic marketing processes singular to the client’s particular parameters
Over the course of a decade I honed this proprietary process to behave in the manner of an economic predictor. Normally I use my formula (nTelegenz(tm) to put my clients unto a playing field in which they are the lopsided favorites to win contracts, increase distributor sales, reduce costs and create a sleeker, far more efficient business profile. I look at my programming as a break through in business genetics. I approach my client’s position in the market the way an aeronautics engineer looks at designing a jet fighter for speed and stealth. Converting it (nTelegenz(tm)) at least in part to act as my own economic predictions model was done to make my programming more accurate over the long haul for my clients. My programs make businesses more competitive in tougher economies and the addition of this piece made sense for that purpose. It is now becoming something of its own command and providing authoritative disclosures for independent economic objectives.
The long and short of this is that I can and do populate a number of specific and non-specific data fields (recent events, natural disasters, market history, competitor structure, people, etc.) which allow me to identify the problems solely unique to my client. The mirror image of my work shows me the place, methods, modes and madness that my client will exploit to carve out their share of the market. At the same time the process allows me to map out a strategy using both a traditional and non-traditional approach that moves my client to occupy unchallenged frequencies of communication with their buyers; accelerating their sales and reducing company costs (the principle of “less friction brings about faster acceleration”). Using this process I have almost always been correct (no one is perfect) and flawless in my strategies.
As it turned out, my last client brought me into the heart of the mortgage banking business where I polished my skills and techniques while educating myself on the work of an economist. I will not slander the work or the efforts of the really honest and clever economists – no one can dispute the years of education and devotion one must have to become successful in this field. But, and I say this with the utmost respect, I have always and continue to state simply that, in my opinion, the reason today’s economists continue to make awful and clearly inaccurate predictions stems more from the fact that they are approaching the problem incorrectly then they have previously been and this economic collapse has merely exposed them for what they are. They are now more like weathermen in how they go about what they do and how they conclude what they see. I say this because they are using an incorrect set of questions, populating the wrong fields of data and arriving at conclusions that have nothing to do with our current reality.
They do not know what will happen next because at every turn in today’s economy we arrive at a place we have never been before.
Look it at like this –all economists use a very similar formula (very much the same for each with tweaks and slight variations on the theme to favor their peculiar idiosyncratic views). This sort of thinking has, until now, produced acceptable levels of accuracy - sort of like a weatherperson viewing a particular cloud cover and anticipating what should be the normal weather for that day. But, say that same weatherman was unaware of the earthquake that would consume the area at the same time the rainstorm hit. No one could blame him or her for not anticipating an earthquake. No…of course not! But what they can expect is that once the earthquake becomes a factor they would have the common sense to change the weather report to reflect the impact of the quake at least through the life of the seismic event and the time immediate following. For as long as the quake impacts the area it impacts the weather in that area as well.
Economists are simply denying or are unaware there has been an economic earthquake. As long as they ignore the immense and ongoing damage from the quake and continue to give us weather updates that exclude the gaping hole in the center of our village they will never get the magnitude or the extent of the economic ruin we are finding ourselves buried beneath. All of this leaves me with my formula which was first created to work in a competitive environment rife with change and unexpected interruptions, interferences and influences. My process is data rich, mathematical and observational; structured to work in a highly unpredictable and dynamic environment. It isn’t a “fill in the blanks” process - it’s a hands-on and minds-in game of business chess.
My program incorporates a host of unusual parameters normally not associated with the traditional data common to the field of economists. My conclusions result from data and performance as they relate to the American industry (historical commonalities and evolving social and business trends), sales, marketing and even employment. It wasn’t long after I started to use my own quantitative formula in 2006-07 that I could see the popular economists, who were predicting all sorts of recovery dates from late summer 2007 to early 2010 while revising their predictions as each economic marker passed, that I finally understood they had no clue what they were talking about.
That brings me to the question at hand and where I stand on any answer. More Americans are emptying their savings, raiding retirement funds, finding their home values upside down, dipping into Social Security just to stay afloat and unable to find any source that can give them definitive answers on questions ranging from “How bad will this get?” to “What will our economy look like in 2012?”
I can’t tell you that and no one else on earth can either. We, as a global population have never been where we are going. It means that as many adjustments as we will need to make, we will make. As much as we need to bend we will bend. But in truth, only God knows whether we will simply bend or whether we will break.
Matthew 24
36"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,[f] but only the Father. 37As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
So, to answer those who ask me…”Where should I put my money?”, let’s wait and see what money is left in 2012 and what that money is worth. Avoid debt, pay down outstanding high interest obligations and, if you can work and you can find work, go back to work until we not only bottom out (2012) but for up to five years beyond as we fabricate our new economic language. Pray if you are so fortunate to have faith in these difficult times I know it helps me. Keep your eye on my blog and I will reveal more about how I come to know what I know and what more there is for you to know.
Frank Bosson (From his series “A New Day Dawns…Sort Of!” CEO, The Bosson Group frankb@thebossongroup.com www.thebossongroup.com
When I last wrote to you (just before summer 2010) I warned that summer was going to reveal the depth of troubles ingrained within the economics of the late great America. As we emerge from the summer the reality of our situation has certainly become more grisly, not just for Americans but for the entire world population. The stock market cannot recover, jobs continue to decline, the average yearly American earnings continue a downward spiral and fraud in corporate America is rampant. I said we would have to face the grim reality by summer’s end but I meant only that we would finally have to tell ourselves, “Okay we’re in this for the long haul. How do we make things work with what bits of this industry and bits of that industry remain?” I did not mean, nor have I ever thought, that we were literally going to face some kind of end time.
The economics of a country are like their vital organs and as each shuts down (for us this is caused by a toxic combination of bad politics and broken business) we witness the lifeblood of this country ebb away. Massive declines in manufacturing, natural disasters, war, famine and a chilling realization that the things we have come to rely on are the very things that have turned against us make the trial of the times clear but not apocalyptic. We were smokers and gluttons feasting on the corpse of a rotting world, and it was just a matter of time before we sunk to their level. And, like sin crouching at our door waiting for us, the venture vultures could hardly wait for us to drop to our knees to sink their teeth into us. All of this may make it look like the doomsday predictions seem almost inevitable, but they are not.
The end of our economic structure is not the end of the world; at least it doesn’t have to be. The final moments of our economic doomsday will be more of a gentle slide then a giant thud. After all we have been adjusting to the variations in our lifestyles for the better part of four years already and by 2012 we will have been in a global systematic failure for six years. This is more like starvation than death by a bullet. You don’t just wake up the morning after your last can of beans and drop over…it’s just the beginning of another kind of end.
In that way things are better than you should expect. Truly things will get worse…much worse…before they get better, but we will adjust. We will train ourselves to endure more and find new models to follow - models of virtue and not avarice. We will, hopefully, return to the values that made this country what it was at its apex. We will hold our families closer, our relationships will have more value, a dollar will mean something and a hard day’s work will be the feeling of a good day’s fatigue. The day may be coming when we start them on our knees and not on our Blackberries. A little prayer time would make us a whole lot stronger.
Only God knows when the world will end, not the Mayans or Nostradamus or the Hopi or your corner Palm Reader. We need to tune out our self-proclaimed prophets of the people like Oprah Winfrey and her companion in lunacy Sylvia Brown or the mesmerizing but fundamentally challenged Joel Osteen spreading their beguiling delusions of false spirituality or gospels of prosperity. This country is made of more than a handful of self-made billionaires whose actual life stories play out more like a Stephen King horror novel than a Frank Capra hero flick. Greed, loathing, deception and victory at any cost, including the sacrifice of self-redemption or the values that make such victories worth claiming, are hollow and unworthy of our applause.
So, the end of this time will come and it will skid to a halt slowly and irreparably by the end of 2012 according to my numbers. But by then we will have grown accustomed to lowering the heat and air, walking a little more than driving, praying a little more than preaching and caring a little more than collecting. We will have to start again in a whole different world - but we will start again. We’ve had monsters under our beds before and we will have them again. The great generation of World War II is passing into the deep, long night but perhaps another great generation is looming on the horizon.
So when I was walking the concourse with my placard in hand, warning that the end was coming, my sign may have been wrong. Well, not wrong - but misinterpreted. I didn’t mean the end kind of an end but rather the beginning of a new story. Things are actually better than I expected – although most of that is either a fluke (see my notes on natural disasters below) or a deliberate messy cash infusion from the government (see my notes on that also). Since 2006 (actually to be more precise, I began writing publicly on the subject of the American economic situation in April 2007) my conclusions have been accurate because I am not basing them on the traditional economic formulas we have used over the last forty years. Contrary to some remarks, I don’t get any pleasure out of announcing these predictions...I am as horrified as you! Isn’t it better to be prepared for what our world will look like in three years then to buy into the "everything will turnaround once again" theory?
I am becoming a topic of conversation to more people because more people are arriving at a place where they are beginning to doubt the voices that have guided them for the last five decades. Many of these people are neither clients nor associates – so my words have certainly spread. I am, apparently, gaining a wide audience - which is something I never sought to do nor am I comfortable knowing that it is occurring.
Regardless of the “flukes”, I am not retracting my third quarter 2012 bottom; I am simply saying that new factors seem to indicate that we will be better prepared than I initially anticipated. We will have had ample time to re-establish a new economic reality by the time we run our course. That it is dragging along as it is turns out to be a good thing.
Flukes
1. I am relatively certain that our President intends to release much of that three trillion dollars he allocated sometime in 2011(re-election needs) which will artificially inflate our wealth. Sadly, unless President Obama somehow becomes much more business savvy then he has proven to date, this infusion of lots of cash will be absorbed by the rich and never have a lasting effect on the average American worker. Nor will that money circulate long enough to sustain its own value (I’ll talk about that phenomena later in this series) and have a positive, lasting impact on the working American and our long term economic picture.
2. In April 2007 my paper “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel….run!” predicted that the end of this mess would occur no sooner than the summer of 2012. My exact words then were… “that (summer 2012) may even be a little optimistic”. I use my own “exclusive” quantitative process - nTelegenz™ (more on this later in the paper) to arrive at my conclusions. My formula anticipates everything from economic markers to natural disasters as elements in my analysis – but (and here it gets tricky), my process is a business production and analytics system designed to be spot on accurate up to three years out on data for random events like natural disasters. Because I am not an economist and no economist has ever been to the economic place we are going to be in 2012, with the end so far out from what my analysis accurately details, I could not know with any certainty (nor can anyone else) that my “rate of occurrence” for elements like earthquakes, hurricanes, wars, etc. could sustain itself beyond my three years. My formulas were meant to analyze up to a three year period. I was saying in 2007 that the bottom would not be evident until 2012. As we approach my markers and they remain true and consistent, it’s my belief that my analysis remains unquestionably valid. But natural disasters are a wild card and remain a fluke in my analysis no matter how I re-run the numbers. After all, who could have predicted BP’s oil spill in the Gulf, right?
So…to the point
In the four years since I started making my predictions it seems now I am being asked for more than analysis of the future markets. The number one question I get asked is “Where should I put my money?”
The answer is simple, even if the process by which I acquire my results is anything but simple. During the years prior to 2006, I had concocted my own quantitative process for the evaluation of a client’s market position to coincide with strategies which would Break]
1.) Reduce company costs while creating a more fluid and adaptable business environment
2.) Structure an ongoing growth anticipation and cost control strategy
3.) Increase sales through a combination of thorough market analysis, closing techniques and eclectic marketing processes singular to the client’s particular parameters
Over the course of a decade I honed this proprietary process to behave in the manner of an economic predictor. Normally I use my formula (nTelegenz(tm) to put my clients unto a playing field in which they are the lopsided favorites to win contracts, increase distributor sales, reduce costs and create a sleeker, far more efficient business profile. I look at my programming as a break through in business genetics. I approach my client’s position in the market the way an aeronautics engineer looks at designing a jet fighter for speed and stealth. Converting it (nTelegenz(tm)) at least in part to act as my own economic predictions model was done to make my programming more accurate over the long haul for my clients. My programs make businesses more competitive in tougher economies and the addition of this piece made sense for that purpose. It is now becoming something of its own command and providing authoritative disclosures for independent economic objectives.
The long and short of this is that I can and do populate a number of specific and non-specific data fields (recent events, natural disasters, market history, competitor structure, people, etc.) which allow me to identify the problems solely unique to my client. The mirror image of my work shows me the place, methods, modes and madness that my client will exploit to carve out their share of the market. At the same time the process allows me to map out a strategy using both a traditional and non-traditional approach that moves my client to occupy unchallenged frequencies of communication with their buyers; accelerating their sales and reducing company costs (the principle of “less friction brings about faster acceleration”). Using this process I have almost always been correct (no one is perfect) and flawless in my strategies.
As it turned out, my last client brought me into the heart of the mortgage banking business where I polished my skills and techniques while educating myself on the work of an economist. I will not slander the work or the efforts of the really honest and clever economists – no one can dispute the years of education and devotion one must have to become successful in this field. But, and I say this with the utmost respect, I have always and continue to state simply that, in my opinion, the reason today’s economists continue to make awful and clearly inaccurate predictions stems more from the fact that they are approaching the problem incorrectly then they have previously been and this economic collapse has merely exposed them for what they are. They are now more like weathermen in how they go about what they do and how they conclude what they see. I say this because they are using an incorrect set of questions, populating the wrong fields of data and arriving at conclusions that have nothing to do with our current reality.
They do not know what will happen next because at every turn in today’s economy we arrive at a place we have never been before.
Look it at like this –all economists use a very similar formula (very much the same for each with tweaks and slight variations on the theme to favor their peculiar idiosyncratic views). This sort of thinking has, until now, produced acceptable levels of accuracy - sort of like a weatherperson viewing a particular cloud cover and anticipating what should be the normal weather for that day. But, say that same weatherman was unaware of the earthquake that would consume the area at the same time the rainstorm hit. No one could blame him or her for not anticipating an earthquake. No…of course not! But what they can expect is that once the earthquake becomes a factor they would have the common sense to change the weather report to reflect the impact of the quake at least through the life of the seismic event and the time immediate following. For as long as the quake impacts the area it impacts the weather in that area as well.
Economists are simply denying or are unaware there has been an economic earthquake. As long as they ignore the immense and ongoing damage from the quake and continue to give us weather updates that exclude the gaping hole in the center of our village they will never get the magnitude or the extent of the economic ruin we are finding ourselves buried beneath. All of this leaves me with my formula which was first created to work in a competitive environment rife with change and unexpected interruptions, interferences and influences. My process is data rich, mathematical and observational; structured to work in a highly unpredictable and dynamic environment. It isn’t a “fill in the blanks” process - it’s a hands-on and minds-in game of business chess.
My program incorporates a host of unusual parameters normally not associated with the traditional data common to the field of economists. My conclusions result from data and performance as they relate to the American industry (historical commonalities and evolving social and business trends), sales, marketing and even employment. It wasn’t long after I started to use my own quantitative formula in 2006-07 that I could see the popular economists, who were predicting all sorts of recovery dates from late summer 2007 to early 2010 while revising their predictions as each economic marker passed, that I finally understood they had no clue what they were talking about.
That brings me to the question at hand and where I stand on any answer. More Americans are emptying their savings, raiding retirement funds, finding their home values upside down, dipping into Social Security just to stay afloat and unable to find any source that can give them definitive answers on questions ranging from “How bad will this get?” to “What will our economy look like in 2012?”
I can’t tell you that and no one else on earth can either. We, as a global population have never been where we are going. It means that as many adjustments as we will need to make, we will make. As much as we need to bend we will bend. But in truth, only God knows whether we will simply bend or whether we will break.
Matthew 24
36"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,[f] but only the Father. 37As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
So, to answer those who ask me…”Where should I put my money?”, let’s wait and see what money is left in 2012 and what that money is worth. Avoid debt, pay down outstanding high interest obligations and, if you can work and you can find work, go back to work until we not only bottom out (2012) but for up to five years beyond as we fabricate our new economic language. Pray if you are so fortunate to have faith in these difficult times I know it helps me. Keep your eye on my blog and I will reveal more about how I come to know what I know and what more there is for you to know.
Frank Bosson (From his series “A New Day Dawns…Sort Of!” CEO, The Bosson Group frankb@thebossongroup.com www.thebossongroup.com
Saturday, May 22, 2010
As an American citizen I have the right to choose whichever candidate I believe to be the right person in whatever capacity they are petitioning to assume – whether in Congress, the State Capitol, the City Council or even the Presidency. My choice is my business and as a voter I respect the fact that this privacy is the right afforded all voters. The moment the elections are over, the person who occupies that seat in government from President down to County Sheriff becomes the person I pray for. It is my belief as Christian that if a man or woman has been elected it is more than the will of the people; it is the will of our Creator. We are required by our faith to not only pray but to support and challenge him or her to make decisions as they affect people, knowing that even as the President of the United States, he has a boss (God). That’s what we believe.
So look beyond the messenger here and into the message. Government is notoriously slow catching up with the real needs in American society. I know a good deal of people who think all politicians are dishonest or at least most and there is a good deal of evidence to support that theory. But they are not all dishonest and not always incompetent. They are dreadfully slow in finding the corrective actions that our society needs to stop the financial losses and cure rampant unemployment. But that is typically because few if any have had any real life business experience.
Here President Obama is stating what has become the obvious if not elusive answer; work from home. Once again we are talking about what we can see (I say “we” because I am certain, like every other politician in the White House that preceded him, that Obama had some help putting this speech together - whether directly or indirectly). The real need is to not just get people to work from home; it is to expand the corporate mindset to envision a world where companies are not defined by the real estate they inhabit; a thought process that sees beyond cubicles and walls.
As we enter these last few years of what I am touting as the global “economic clock reset”, we will emerge as a country that will either be in the process of redefining the classic roles of employment or we will be members of a evolutionary group that has already embraced the idea of “corporations without walls”. These companies will have in place:
• Strict but fair guidelines for interpreting job functions that can be “webbed” in
• Tested personalities that will succeed from home
• Structured remote environment specifics that assure that functions are properly equipped and environed
• Transition services to smoothly help move people to homes and homes to connect to corporations
• Management processes that can account for time remotely and make at-home people feel included on the company team (sports, weekly attended meetings, a desk visit every week, etc.)
• Accountability and predictability in work performance through processes and programs that include quantitative evaluations and insightful observation
• Policy and procedures to managed tethered communities
But these programs will not materialize on their own accord. The fact that we are sending people home to work is not necessarily going to, in itself, design an intelligently functional and remote workforce. In fact, letting it evolve on its own will do just the opposite, creating a disparate patchwork of people and functions that vary without reason or deliberation. Then corporations will be making each new at-home position one of chance and inferiority. You would no more break ground on a building by starting with the roof then you should enter into the grand transformation of telecommuting by arbitrarily and capriciously sending people home.
The perspective and programs for such a complex reshaping in workspaces and workforces has to be the result of an enlightened and capable group specializing in the development of at-home communities. If we can all conclude that there needs to be some fundamental changes to the way we approach, retain and maintain workforces and in how we make abstract departments like sales and marketing more predictable and computable, then we have to look for the solution programs that bring the requisite skill sets to each uniquely staffed and singular corporate culture.
We are at a crossroads and we are locked in gridlock. Entire populations are stranded miles from declining business centers; where there is work, travel to and from city and suburb has become a national nightmare. Sprawling campuses once built to house more relaxed work centers by developing our buildings around zip codes empty out as the economy declines. Following this, the zip codes become vacant of the talent that these companies once needed and will once again look for in their resurgence.
So, as we strain to incorporate - into the pre-2006 thinking - the real estate solution for American employment- as reasonable as it sounded less than a decade ago- we realize that it is sorely out of date with what we know about employees and employment today. Instead of trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, why we don’t we just acquiesce to the obvious future employment template of telecommuting and telesales? Just take a deep breath and begin the metamorphosis into what we can easily predict of a process which will:
• Move with the corporation anywhere on the globe
• Expand and contract without the need for extraneous real estate
• Insure that key talent will always remain with the same company, eliminating the crushing cost of re-hiring and re-training
• Link disparate elements of the company’s core talent through the population of relevant and ubiquitous technology
• Significantly reduce costs allowing corporations to hire Americans and remain competitive globally while providing more money for the research and development departments where we can use our ingenuity and renown genius to maintain a leadership role throughout global markets
Sometimes we get so close to the problem we can’t see the forest through the trees. We must reset our now archaic concepts of where and how corporations look and work to transform ourselves into something more malleable and expeditive: a community without a doubt more competitive. No matter what you think of our President, his message is timely. Those who cannot hear this will end up struggling to manage an accidentally pockmarked work from home community by default. Or, you can make sure that from the onset you are in control of the how, why, where and when the tethered community will grow so that you maintain control over every aspect of its evolution. It won’t be something you have to fix tomorrow…it will be something fixed today to work tomorrow.
Sounds like a no brainer.
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
The Bosson Group
Reshaping the way America works...
www.thebossongroup.com
Psalm 33:12
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord
(don't you just love psalms)
frankb@thebossongroup.com
209 642 2821
The Bosson Group provides a complete solutions package for the design and execution of telecommuting for corporate America. Blending research, testing, management and technology, we can offer you a complete solution for your telecommuting needs from consultation to execution including our own remote management programs for your new 1099 contractors. We will incorporate a connected culture with specific rules, processes, technological structural elements and routine self-reconciling assessments. Combining our exclusive quantitative and observational tool nTelegenz™ with practical experience, we can provide your company with a stable telecommuting environment that can flex with the growth or compression of all economic demands.
The Bosson Group understands the needs and technology of today’s workplace and we are constantly working with, and researching out, what workplaces and technology will look like in the future. We are with you today and tomorrow to solve your evolving business model evolutions; keeping one step ahead of what you can and will provide your remote workforce.
So look beyond the messenger here and into the message. Government is notoriously slow catching up with the real needs in American society. I know a good deal of people who think all politicians are dishonest or at least most and there is a good deal of evidence to support that theory. But they are not all dishonest and not always incompetent. They are dreadfully slow in finding the corrective actions that our society needs to stop the financial losses and cure rampant unemployment. But that is typically because few if any have had any real life business experience.
Here President Obama is stating what has become the obvious if not elusive answer; work from home. Once again we are talking about what we can see (I say “we” because I am certain, like every other politician in the White House that preceded him, that Obama had some help putting this speech together - whether directly or indirectly). The real need is to not just get people to work from home; it is to expand the corporate mindset to envision a world where companies are not defined by the real estate they inhabit; a thought process that sees beyond cubicles and walls.
As we enter these last few years of what I am touting as the global “economic clock reset”, we will emerge as a country that will either be in the process of redefining the classic roles of employment or we will be members of a evolutionary group that has already embraced the idea of “corporations without walls”. These companies will have in place:
• Strict but fair guidelines for interpreting job functions that can be “webbed” in
• Tested personalities that will succeed from home
• Structured remote environment specifics that assure that functions are properly equipped and environed
• Transition services to smoothly help move people to homes and homes to connect to corporations
• Management processes that can account for time remotely and make at-home people feel included on the company team (sports, weekly attended meetings, a desk visit every week, etc.)
• Accountability and predictability in work performance through processes and programs that include quantitative evaluations and insightful observation
• Policy and procedures to managed tethered communities
But these programs will not materialize on their own accord. The fact that we are sending people home to work is not necessarily going to, in itself, design an intelligently functional and remote workforce. In fact, letting it evolve on its own will do just the opposite, creating a disparate patchwork of people and functions that vary without reason or deliberation. Then corporations will be making each new at-home position one of chance and inferiority. You would no more break ground on a building by starting with the roof then you should enter into the grand transformation of telecommuting by arbitrarily and capriciously sending people home.
The perspective and programs for such a complex reshaping in workspaces and workforces has to be the result of an enlightened and capable group specializing in the development of at-home communities. If we can all conclude that there needs to be some fundamental changes to the way we approach, retain and maintain workforces and in how we make abstract departments like sales and marketing more predictable and computable, then we have to look for the solution programs that bring the requisite skill sets to each uniquely staffed and singular corporate culture.
We are at a crossroads and we are locked in gridlock. Entire populations are stranded miles from declining business centers; where there is work, travel to and from city and suburb has become a national nightmare. Sprawling campuses once built to house more relaxed work centers by developing our buildings around zip codes empty out as the economy declines. Following this, the zip codes become vacant of the talent that these companies once needed and will once again look for in their resurgence.
So, as we strain to incorporate - into the pre-2006 thinking - the real estate solution for American employment- as reasonable as it sounded less than a decade ago- we realize that it is sorely out of date with what we know about employees and employment today. Instead of trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, why we don’t we just acquiesce to the obvious future employment template of telecommuting and telesales? Just take a deep breath and begin the metamorphosis into what we can easily predict of a process which will:
• Move with the corporation anywhere on the globe
• Expand and contract without the need for extraneous real estate
• Insure that key talent will always remain with the same company, eliminating the crushing cost of re-hiring and re-training
• Link disparate elements of the company’s core talent through the population of relevant and ubiquitous technology
• Significantly reduce costs allowing corporations to hire Americans and remain competitive globally while providing more money for the research and development departments where we can use our ingenuity and renown genius to maintain a leadership role throughout global markets
Sometimes we get so close to the problem we can’t see the forest through the trees. We must reset our now archaic concepts of where and how corporations look and work to transform ourselves into something more malleable and expeditive: a community without a doubt more competitive. No matter what you think of our President, his message is timely. Those who cannot hear this will end up struggling to manage an accidentally pockmarked work from home community by default. Or, you can make sure that from the onset you are in control of the how, why, where and when the tethered community will grow so that you maintain control over every aspect of its evolution. It won’t be something you have to fix tomorrow…it will be something fixed today to work tomorrow.
Sounds like a no brainer.
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
The Bosson Group
Reshaping the way America works...
www.thebossongroup.com
Psalm 33:12
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord
(don't you just love psalms)
frankb@thebossongroup.com
209 642 2821
The Bosson Group provides a complete solutions package for the design and execution of telecommuting for corporate America. Blending research, testing, management and technology, we can offer you a complete solution for your telecommuting needs from consultation to execution including our own remote management programs for your new 1099 contractors. We will incorporate a connected culture with specific rules, processes, technological structural elements and routine self-reconciling assessments. Combining our exclusive quantitative and observational tool nTelegenz™ with practical experience, we can provide your company with a stable telecommuting environment that can flex with the growth or compression of all economic demands.
The Bosson Group understands the needs and technology of today’s workplace and we are constantly working with, and researching out, what workplaces and technology will look like in the future. We are with you today and tomorrow to solve your evolving business model evolutions; keeping one step ahead of what you can and will provide your remote workforce.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The Summer of 2011
What will it be remembered for? I’m afraid that it will be remembered for the final revelation of all that is corrupt about us and in us. Bumper stickers and pale entreaties from people who can do much but do little more than talk will quietly run its course. Goldman Sachs cries foul and the SEC flounders with guppies chasing sharks as a corrupt government hides the massive decay in our banking system and our overall investment packages crumble like the sand castles that house them. The rich see the writing on the wall and abandon the stock market, Wall Street loses confidence and the general state of the economy is revealed for the ravaged condition it hides and we finally tip the scales.
The end? Hardly. It’s the beginning of a long, slow reconstruction. It is the day that America stops hiding behind its pomposity and decadence and gets down to the business of rebuilding this country. I have no doubt we will do just that. We have no worries of utter collapse and chaos – nor do we need to worry about some imminent invasion. As we go so goes the world. In some ways it is a sad epitaph but it is certainly no reflection on the great generations that built this country.
I remember the summer of 1963 when I was just 12 years old and Pope John XXIII died. That was huge to me and millions of Catholics who loved him as he brought us the Second Vatican Council and the beginning. His vision for the church maintained the dignity of the older generation’s piety, which I so loved as an altar boy and seminarian, but brought to the youth of the world a new evangelism. The population of the world was about half of what it is today at just over 3 billion and the United States had 189 million people. So when we said the world was smaller then, it was - smaller by size and by how far and just how much you could communicate with people further than a few miles away, never mind across the globe. The dreaded Dodgers beat the Yankees in just four games but our beloved Boston Celtics beat the newly California based L.A. Lakers. Late that same summer Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington and delivered his “I have a dream” speech.
On June 26th the President we all so loved, John F Kennedy, delivered his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin during a 4-day visit to West Germany. Later that year, but not much later, in November in the far west city of Dallas, our President was shot and killed…by a lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, who despite buying his Italian made rifle through the mail, shot to kill three times from six hundred feet away and six stories up. I’m a really good a shot and I couldn’t do that with my rifle and it’s got a five hundred dollar scope. The Beatles swept America, Doris Day stole my heart, “It’s My Party” by Leslie Gore hit number one on my birthday, June 1st, and the summer ended with “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the Angels. I remember I had a crush on my babysitter – Denise Anazesky.
It was a great summer for horseback riding, sneaking into drive-in movies, swimming in the lake and the start of kissing girls. In reflection I guess we should have known the end was coming when it became unconstitutional and therefore against the law to say the Lord’s Prayer in school. Some people I know never lived to understand that…I have lived longer than I wish to see what the beginning of that meant in the way of losing our faith and our constitutional connection to God. I love my Lord and God…I love Jesus Christ and I know what that means and it doesn’t have anything to do with loving a guy who lived two thousand years ago – well, not in the way people who don’t love Him think. Anyway, 1963 was another summer in the endless days of glory post World War II.
I was born to a smaller world in a simpler America. In 1963 we were still an emerging power from World War II. We had converted 250 billion dollars in manufacturing assemblies of war into factories that produced refrigerators, cars, stereos and everything a rebuilding world needed. I was a young man during that summer when we were still trying to supply a consuming country and hungrier world. And, of course, I was a young man when that world hunger ran its course and America’s factories were all of sudden antiquated and Japan was beginning to dominate the market. I was a working man when America suddenly stopped competing and started hoarding, hating and mortgaging its future.
So I asked myself what it was like in the summer of 1869 when Goldman Sachs was founded. The population of the United States was only 38 million people, up 7 million from 1860 - mostly because of the influx of poor immigrants. But the population explosion corresponded with an economic boom not altogether like the boom of the 1990’s. Both booms were fueled largely by the government. Obviously the railroad boom f the 1860’s had significantly different consequences than the bust of the dot com. In 1869 a rail line from Sacramento, California crossed the Rockies and connected a rail line from Omaha, Nebraska at Promontory Point, Utah. This was the start of the Great Transcontinental Railway. The industrial revolution was underway; something historians mostly agree was one of the top ten events in the history of mankind.
Today I am standing on the edge of the end. Goldman Sachs was accused of fraud. Simply put, the SEC says they deliberately sold financial products (specifically bad mortgages) so that some people would profit and others would be left holding an empty bag. The government controls something like ninety percent of the banks and won’t divulge their business or the government’s business in the banks to the public. So, this thing with Goldman Sachs is either an anomaly or the tip of a very ugly iceberg. Which do you suppose it is?
I know it was a long time ago that this great society seemed to awake on the shores of the northeast but we were never anything more than what we are. The only color that matters is the color that profits the greater community. There are millions of people struggling on the fringe of our society (black – white - red - brown – grey – whatever) and just barely getting by with the help of thousands of good hearted and decent Americans. But there is a tidal wave coming and those on the fringe will not be able to get out of the way. Those people hanging on by their fingertips will be sucked under this great ugly end. We, the people, will be angry and outraged at all this screaming at one another - “how could such terrible avarice be tolerated for so long?” But, in the end, we will be so busy scooping water out of our own sinking dingy to do anything more than be aghast.
How I miss those misty hot summer days when a Coca Cola was a quarter and a Big Meal was when we all got together over Sunday dinner. I’m glad I have those memories though. I will need them soon. They will be much of what I and most Americans like myself will have little left of the great society. I feel sorry for those people who don’t have at least those memories. So here’s to the end my friend. At least the end of the way we have been living and the beginning of something altogether new. I’m not sure what it will look like in the next five years. but I can tell you this…if we don’t start learning to play together fairly and nicely it will get real ugly, real quick.
Frank Bosson, CEO The Bosson Group excerpt from his paper “I’m drowning…someone throw me a rock!”
What will it be remembered for? I’m afraid that it will be remembered for the final revelation of all that is corrupt about us and in us. Bumper stickers and pale entreaties from people who can do much but do little more than talk will quietly run its course. Goldman Sachs cries foul and the SEC flounders with guppies chasing sharks as a corrupt government hides the massive decay in our banking system and our overall investment packages crumble like the sand castles that house them. The rich see the writing on the wall and abandon the stock market, Wall Street loses confidence and the general state of the economy is revealed for the ravaged condition it hides and we finally tip the scales.
The end? Hardly. It’s the beginning of a long, slow reconstruction. It is the day that America stops hiding behind its pomposity and decadence and gets down to the business of rebuilding this country. I have no doubt we will do just that. We have no worries of utter collapse and chaos – nor do we need to worry about some imminent invasion. As we go so goes the world. In some ways it is a sad epitaph but it is certainly no reflection on the great generations that built this country.
I remember the summer of 1963 when I was just 12 years old and Pope John XXIII died. That was huge to me and millions of Catholics who loved him as he brought us the Second Vatican Council and the beginning. His vision for the church maintained the dignity of the older generation’s piety, which I so loved as an altar boy and seminarian, but brought to the youth of the world a new evangelism. The population of the world was about half of what it is today at just over 3 billion and the United States had 189 million people. So when we said the world was smaller then, it was - smaller by size and by how far and just how much you could communicate with people further than a few miles away, never mind across the globe. The dreaded Dodgers beat the Yankees in just four games but our beloved Boston Celtics beat the newly California based L.A. Lakers. Late that same summer Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington and delivered his “I have a dream” speech.
On June 26th the President we all so loved, John F Kennedy, delivered his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin during a 4-day visit to West Germany. Later that year, but not much later, in November in the far west city of Dallas, our President was shot and killed…by a lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, who despite buying his Italian made rifle through the mail, shot to kill three times from six hundred feet away and six stories up. I’m a really good a shot and I couldn’t do that with my rifle and it’s got a five hundred dollar scope. The Beatles swept America, Doris Day stole my heart, “It’s My Party” by Leslie Gore hit number one on my birthday, June 1st, and the summer ended with “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the Angels. I remember I had a crush on my babysitter – Denise Anazesky.
It was a great summer for horseback riding, sneaking into drive-in movies, swimming in the lake and the start of kissing girls. In reflection I guess we should have known the end was coming when it became unconstitutional and therefore against the law to say the Lord’s Prayer in school. Some people I know never lived to understand that…I have lived longer than I wish to see what the beginning of that meant in the way of losing our faith and our constitutional connection to God. I love my Lord and God…I love Jesus Christ and I know what that means and it doesn’t have anything to do with loving a guy who lived two thousand years ago – well, not in the way people who don’t love Him think. Anyway, 1963 was another summer in the endless days of glory post World War II.
I was born to a smaller world in a simpler America. In 1963 we were still an emerging power from World War II. We had converted 250 billion dollars in manufacturing assemblies of war into factories that produced refrigerators, cars, stereos and everything a rebuilding world needed. I was a young man during that summer when we were still trying to supply a consuming country and hungrier world. And, of course, I was a young man when that world hunger ran its course and America’s factories were all of sudden antiquated and Japan was beginning to dominate the market. I was a working man when America suddenly stopped competing and started hoarding, hating and mortgaging its future.
So I asked myself what it was like in the summer of 1869 when Goldman Sachs was founded. The population of the United States was only 38 million people, up 7 million from 1860 - mostly because of the influx of poor immigrants. But the population explosion corresponded with an economic boom not altogether like the boom of the 1990’s. Both booms were fueled largely by the government. Obviously the railroad boom f the 1860’s had significantly different consequences than the bust of the dot com. In 1869 a rail line from Sacramento, California crossed the Rockies and connected a rail line from Omaha, Nebraska at Promontory Point, Utah. This was the start of the Great Transcontinental Railway. The industrial revolution was underway; something historians mostly agree was one of the top ten events in the history of mankind.
Today I am standing on the edge of the end. Goldman Sachs was accused of fraud. Simply put, the SEC says they deliberately sold financial products (specifically bad mortgages) so that some people would profit and others would be left holding an empty bag. The government controls something like ninety percent of the banks and won’t divulge their business or the government’s business in the banks to the public. So, this thing with Goldman Sachs is either an anomaly or the tip of a very ugly iceberg. Which do you suppose it is?
I know it was a long time ago that this great society seemed to awake on the shores of the northeast but we were never anything more than what we are. The only color that matters is the color that profits the greater community. There are millions of people struggling on the fringe of our society (black – white - red - brown – grey – whatever) and just barely getting by with the help of thousands of good hearted and decent Americans. But there is a tidal wave coming and those on the fringe will not be able to get out of the way. Those people hanging on by their fingertips will be sucked under this great ugly end. We, the people, will be angry and outraged at all this screaming at one another - “how could such terrible avarice be tolerated for so long?” But, in the end, we will be so busy scooping water out of our own sinking dingy to do anything more than be aghast.
How I miss those misty hot summer days when a Coca Cola was a quarter and a Big Meal was when we all got together over Sunday dinner. I’m glad I have those memories though. I will need them soon. They will be much of what I and most Americans like myself will have little left of the great society. I feel sorry for those people who don’t have at least those memories. So here’s to the end my friend. At least the end of the way we have been living and the beginning of something altogether new. I’m not sure what it will look like in the next five years. but I can tell you this…if we don’t start learning to play together fairly and nicely it will get real ugly, real quick.
Frank Bosson, CEO The Bosson Group excerpt from his paper “I’m drowning…someone throw me a rock!”
Monday, April 19, 2010
Too Little Too Late
Too little to date?
So nobody can say I didn’t warn them…I have and will continue to do just that. The passage of what is being touted as healthcare reform in America is probably the most destructive policy ever introduced by our government any time in our history. Not only is the program itself a boondoggle but it’s a policy catastrophe waiting to be perpetrated on an American public that, I can only suspect, is by now like a drowning person resigned to their fate.
Not only is this healthcare reform a total debacle that will never see the light of day but it has totally consumed our seemingly detached President and Legislature from doing what we elected them to do in the first place – find jobs. Get America back to work Mr. Obama and then if you have time and you want to discuss health reform fine – start with your own house and give up smoking! Here’s a guy purportedly so understanding of the health care needs of Americans that he devotes nearly half his presidency to creating a Frankenstein bill (a bill made up so many different parts and pardons that it clearly is a grotesque mutilation of any really good idea that it might first have resembled ). But forget that for a moment. Is healthcare the number one concern of Americans today? NO! By an overwhelming majority, Americans are worried about JOBS!
Okay, that said. I have constantly warned you about the complete failure of our American markets by 2012. It is time to start setting some milestones. To be fair I can only predict far into the future and then I have to wait for those “event horizons” I keep going on about. The healthcare bill is not the domino that will cause the fall of all the others. Not so much by what it will impact, because like I said, this thing will never get out of the lab let alone be permitted to impact any population, at least by any responsible state legislature, but rather for what it failed to do – get America back to work. Like my daddy used to say the easiest way to get out of debt is to never get into it. That being said the next best thing from preventing a collapse of the country is not to spend more money but to make more money. And, no Mr. Obama, I don’t mean literally “make” more money as in print it. I mean “make” as in earn it.
Sadly, Washington is so consumed with this totally irrelevant black hole of idiocy that it has failed to note the country was gathering steam for a collapse in banking, markets and credit, the liked of which it has never seen before and will probably never recover enough to see again.
I am not going to bore you with the entire minutia because frankly there is simply too much to talk about in any one paper. The banks have been sitting on an investment from the treasury that was supposed to bail the country out, but banks are notoriously shortsighted. The fact is that they held on to the money until they inadvertently used it up – I am saying that the next brick to hit the glass will be the banks. The top investment banks will start crying ‘insolvent” in the summer of 2011 or as late as the fall of that same year. The persistent and totally underestimated joblessness will cause the next major shutter when consumer purchasing will cease. The final nail in the proverbial coffin will be the insolvency of the government after running up a four trillion dollar. For you bad on math if a million seconds ago was just 12 days and a billion seconds was only about 32 years then a trillion seconds ago was almost 32,000 years ago. Any of this sinking in? Well let me help you. If the United States could pay back this debt at a billion dollars a year it would take more time than it took for the universe to form. When I say a billion dollars a year in payback of course it would have to be surplus. But what if we don’t have a billion dollars a year in surplus income to pay this debt? Well, what would happen if you borrowed a million dollars and the loan shark came looking for you because you couldn’t come up with an extra $100,000 a year (that’s on top of all the income you need to survive that year)? You would find yourself between a rock and a hard place that is exactly where we will be when the clock strikes midnight and 2011 rolls over to 2012 – broke and with no hope of ever paying back a debt we should have never allowed ourselves to make.
Nobody knows for sure what will happen when this occurs. We’ve never been there before. We have been building up to it for decades but the piper has never come looking for his fee. He will. We won’t be able to pay and that’s just the beginning of a grim and disturbing disintegration of the American way of life. The infrastructure will crumble with failing bridges, highways and electric grids. The Internet will become slow and unresponsive and significantly more costly as government and business seek new revenues. Teachers, police, firemen and hospital workers will dwindle to below emergency levels. Crime will rise as will disease and finally, in the greatest irony of all, the voracious greed that marked the era of the baby boomer will catch up with them as they age (and age poorly) with no money for their care and a generation of their children who could care less (yes, even less than they did) the Baby Boomers will make a very messy fuss in their sad and dismal departure.
You may have heard that all the mega-stars of Hollywood have long ago found new digs in places like southern France and Tuscany. They can read the handwriting on the wall. They love the money we give them but frankly the neighborhood is a bit rundown for their tastes. Moving to more pristine views with less rubble and poor relatives hanging about is simply more comfortable. They have made peace with the fact that the money train may soon come to an end but they have enough stowed away to keep their chestnuts roasting for as long as they live…so what’s to worry about for Brad Pitt and Angie Jolie visiting with Clooney and Depp over a bottle of Chianti?
I know this harsh visit to reality will be troublesome for some and ridiculous to others but it is the reality nonetheless. I don’t know if there is anything to be done about this seemingly inevitable ending but, voting all those idiots out of Congress is a good start. Even if we can’t save ourselves we can put those thieves in the same sinking rowboat. However, I think Americans have suffered too much shell shock to rebound from the epic travesty of poor government and greedy corporations. I think we are just going to let the car roll off the cliff. I don’t know about you but when I go I want to go like my grandfather…in his sleep; not like the passengers in his car kicking and screaming.
So get ready for the banks to start folding in summer 2011.
Frank Bosson, CEO The Bosson Group excerpt from his paper “If you think it’s darkest before dawn…watch Congress pass a bill on a sunny spring day!”
For other papers including:
“If it looks like a duck…shoot it!”
“Knock...knock…whose there?”
“Billionaires and politicians are on your side…the side where you keep your wallet!”
“Didn’t I just ask you for the money?”
“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, run for your life!”
Request copies from frankb@thebossongroup.com
So nobody can say I didn’t warn them…I have and will continue to do just that. The passage of what is being touted as healthcare reform in America is probably the most destructive policy ever introduced by our government any time in our history. Not only is the program itself a boondoggle but it’s a policy catastrophe waiting to be perpetrated on an American public that, I can only suspect, is by now like a drowning person resigned to their fate.
Not only is this healthcare reform a total debacle that will never see the light of day but it has totally consumed our seemingly detached President and Legislature from doing what we elected them to do in the first place – find jobs. Get America back to work Mr. Obama and then if you have time and you want to discuss health reform fine – start with your own house and give up smoking! Here’s a guy purportedly so understanding of the health care needs of Americans that he devotes nearly half his presidency to creating a Frankenstein bill (a bill made up so many different parts and pardons that it clearly is a grotesque mutilation of any really good idea that it might first have resembled ). But forget that for a moment. Is healthcare the number one concern of Americans today? NO! By an overwhelming majority, Americans are worried about JOBS!
Okay, that said. I have constantly warned you about the complete failure of our American markets by 2012. It is time to start setting some milestones. To be fair I can only predict far into the future and then I have to wait for those “event horizons” I keep going on about. The healthcare bill is not the domino that will cause the fall of all the others. Not so much by what it will impact, because like I said, this thing will never get out of the lab let alone be permitted to impact any population, at least by any responsible state legislature, but rather for what it failed to do – get America back to work. Like my daddy used to say the easiest way to get out of debt is to never get into it. That being said the next best thing from preventing a collapse of the country is not to spend more money but to make more money. And, no Mr. Obama, I don’t mean literally “make” more money as in print it. I mean “make” as in earn it.
Sadly, Washington is so consumed with this totally irrelevant black hole of idiocy that it has failed to note the country was gathering steam for a collapse in banking, markets and credit, the liked of which it has never seen before and will probably never recover enough to see again.
I am not going to bore you with the entire minutia because frankly there is simply too much to talk about in any one paper. The banks have been sitting on an investment from the treasury that was supposed to bail the country out, but banks are notoriously shortsighted. The fact is that they held on to the money until they inadvertently used it up – I am saying that the next brick to hit the glass will be the banks. The top investment banks will start crying ‘insolvent” in the summer of 2011 or as late as the fall of that same year. The persistent and totally underestimated joblessness will cause the next major shutter when consumer purchasing will cease. The final nail in the proverbial coffin will be the insolvency of the government after running up a four trillion dollar. For you bad on math if a million seconds ago was just 12 days and a billion seconds was only about 32 years then a trillion seconds ago was almost 32,000 years ago. Any of this sinking in? Well let me help you. If the United States could pay back this debt at a billion dollars a year it would take more time than it took for the universe to form. When I say a billion dollars a year in payback of course it would have to be surplus. But what if we don’t have a billion dollars a year in surplus income to pay this debt? Well, what would happen if you borrowed a million dollars and the loan shark came looking for you because you couldn’t come up with an extra $100,000 a year (that’s on top of all the income you need to survive that year)? You would find yourself between a rock and a hard place that is exactly where we will be when the clock strikes midnight and 2011 rolls over to 2012 – broke and with no hope of ever paying back a debt we should have never allowed ourselves to make.
Nobody knows for sure what will happen when this occurs. We’ve never been there before. We have been building up to it for decades but the piper has never come looking for his fee. He will. We won’t be able to pay and that’s just the beginning of a grim and disturbing disintegration of the American way of life. The infrastructure will crumble with failing bridges, highways and electric grids. The Internet will become slow and unresponsive and significantly more costly as government and business seek new revenues. Teachers, police, firemen and hospital workers will dwindle to below emergency levels. Crime will rise as will disease and finally, in the greatest irony of all, the voracious greed that marked the era of the baby boomer will catch up with them as they age (and age poorly) with no money for their care and a generation of their children who could care less (yes, even less than they did) the Baby Boomers will make a very messy fuss in their sad and dismal departure.
You may have heard that all the mega-stars of Hollywood have long ago found new digs in places like southern France and Tuscany. They can read the handwriting on the wall. They love the money we give them but frankly the neighborhood is a bit rundown for their tastes. Moving to more pristine views with less rubble and poor relatives hanging about is simply more comfortable. They have made peace with the fact that the money train may soon come to an end but they have enough stowed away to keep their chestnuts roasting for as long as they live…so what’s to worry about for Brad Pitt and Angie Jolie visiting with Clooney and Depp over a bottle of Chianti?
I know this harsh visit to reality will be troublesome for some and ridiculous to others but it is the reality nonetheless. I don’t know if there is anything to be done about this seemingly inevitable ending but, voting all those idiots out of Congress is a good start. Even if we can’t save ourselves we can put those thieves in the same sinking rowboat. However, I think Americans have suffered too much shell shock to rebound from the epic travesty of poor government and greedy corporations. I think we are just going to let the car roll off the cliff. I don’t know about you but when I go I want to go like my grandfather…in his sleep; not like the passengers in his car kicking and screaming.
So get ready for the banks to start folding in summer 2011.
Frank Bosson, CEO The Bosson Group excerpt from his paper “If you think it’s darkest before dawn…watch Congress pass a bill on a sunny spring day!”
For other papers including:
“If it looks like a duck…shoot it!”
“Knock...knock…whose there?”
“Billionaires and politicians are on your side…the side where you keep your wallet!”
“Didn’t I just ask you for the money?”
“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, run for your life!”
Request copies from frankb@thebossongroup.com
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