Wring in the New Year
Well, it’s the beginning of 2012 and we’ve been reading and talking about this year in virtually every capacity and category there appears to be. Frankly, this year’s conversations of final doom are rivaled only by the great computer date-rollover debate of Y2K. You remember that one, right?
So what will it be? Do we believe a rock tablet dug out of the rainforest predicting the end of the corn people? Or, are we inclined to look at our economic future with a cynical eye and wonder when and if we will finally recover; if “recover” is even the right word (hint and spoiler “it is not the right word”). Are these the days of the apocalypse or the days of the some miraculous halcyon beginning? Like most prognostications, the answer is more like a little from “column A” and a little from “column B”.
I’m going to make this short - a pleasant change from my previous writings, huh? Consider this a New Year’s gift from me to you. So unto the question at hand; are we in the last days or the first? Are we counting down on the Mayan calendar to utter doom or are we in the final throes of the most devastating economic meltdown in the history of the vast majority living today?
To address the first question is absolutely mandatory. Every generation since man first became man has believed that they were living in the end days. If you read the New Testament the writers and the readers were convinced that they were witnessing the final days. Surely they felt that way during the collapse of Rome, Bubonic plague, the Little Ice Age, World War I, The Great Dust Bowl, World War II and even Y2K. Have to do a shout out to my man Harold Camping who has not once, not twice, but thrice (look it up) predicted man’s demise. Yet, in every case we humans have muddled through and carried on. So is the myth of end times just that, a myth?
I don’t think so. If anything is consistent about the story of life it’s that to every season there is a beginning, a middle, and sadly, an end. I think we can all agree on two things; there will be an end and we are really, really bad at predicting when that end will come. So, for the purposes of this blog we will address the next year respectfully submitting that the Mayans meant something far different than the end of mankind. And, if the end comes, well, not enough people read this blog (2012 coincidentally but that’s including me at two different email addresses) that my words will come back to bite me that bad.
Show me the beef!
Does anyone remember Clara Peller’s raspy inquest? Well, for those reading who are television advertisement challenged, Clara’s friends were admiring a big fluffy bun when they lifted the top bun to reveal a miniscule patty evoking Clara’s wrath and the iconic phrase, “where’s the beef?” The ad was an enormous success for Wendy’s and entered American lexicon permanently when later that year Mondale leaned over when Gary Hart repeated his “new ideas” phrase to hear Mondale respond “where’s the beef?” Thus was born a phrase and a classic argument in politics. I hear what you’re saying about this latest blog...So where’s the beef?
Rabbit out of the Hat Trick
Think back and recall the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency, when he muscled through a bill he called the “Stimulus Package”. He got that money, remember? He got three point four trillion dollars. I remember seeing graphs trying to explain to me what 3.4 trillion dollars looked like. Hey, I’m a working stiff - you don’t have to convince me it’s a lot of money. But what happened to all that money. You haven’t you seen much of that 3.4 trillion spread around, have you? No? I didn’t think so. As a matter of fact I don’t know anybody who can account for even a fraction of that money.
As the legend is told from Capitol Hill, that stimulus money, which we not only did not have but based on our famous “faith” economics, could not - even in our wildest dreams- possibly asseverate, was handed over to three or was it five major banks to be used to stimulate our battered economy nearly four years ago. So where’s the money? If the banks kept it and are not obligated to explain to the President what they did with it, we may be up a three trillion dollar creek without a proverbial paddle.
If on the other hand, as I strongly suspect, Obama has kept a big stash of that cash for right now, we are about to see the biggest rabbit pulled out of the hat trick ever played out in front of a barely alive global audience. I think Mr. Obama knew all along that he would need something extraordinary to renew a sagging presidency in his end days – he kept that money for exactly this moment in history. If I am wrong and he is not as bright as he appears then he has squandered the money or it never really had the value he thought it would. Either way, if there is no money for the rabbit in the hat trick we are in for a very, very bad 2012.
Year after year, fiscal quarter after fiscal quarter, we watch our hazy half-heartened government officials pull out their pink paint rollers and attempt to paint a rosy economic picture. Didn’t the White House tell us last year that unemployment had finally stabilized and we could count on the American economy to start a slow but steady recovery? That wasn’t quite true, was it? In fact in the last three years there have been 8 (count'em 8!) government presentations to different sub-committees promising that the great recession had ended and bright days lay just around the corner. And after three years, eight different studies, analyses and conclusions we are still sinking in the most toxic economic nightmare we have ever witnessed. If they said it eight times and meant it then they are very stupid. If they said it eight times and didn’t mean it, then they are very cold blooded. Either of those two options do not bode well for you and me.
Joblessness, homelessness and hopelessness -oh my!
The fact is that jobs have hit a low we can’t even compute any longer. Many people don’t realize that in the jobless count given to you by the government they do not list all the people who have simply run out of benefits. Nor do they mention the tens of thousands of independent contractors who are no longer working but never showed up on the unemployment ranks because they are not counted in those numbers. When housing went down it took with it all the ancillary businesses that support housing - and that’s just about everything in America. Years ago we got out of the “making it” business and into the “servicing it” business. We do not have the huge steel mills, car manufacturers or clothing factories – they’re gone.
I promised to keep this short so I won’t go into the whole history of American manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution and the shortsighted avarice of outsourcing in the last two decades. Let’s just say we are very much like a soldier who has long since fired his last round and now faces the enemy swinging wildly with the butt end of his rifle.
Clara eventually found the beef!
In a 1985 commercial Clara Peller, who made “where’s the beef” popular, sold the phrase out to Prego when she declared in their sauce she had finally found the beef. So what is it Mr. President? Have you found the beef?
I suspect Mr. Obama is as bright as he appears. My guess is we are about to ramp up from candle light to nuclear blindness – overnight and just in time for a re-election. Let’s say for the sake of argument that our newly minted president understood in 2008 that no one he knew (and he kept company with a rather intellectual bunch) the depth or constitution (no pun intended) of the economic misery we had stepped in when that mortgage bubble burst. And let’s further say that when he took office he had the wits about him to acquire that money not for some instantaneous and frivolous state funded fribble but to do exactly what he needed to get done – bring him a second term.
The Statue that blinks
If I am right we will suddenly see an influx of cash on a scale that will make the Statue of Liberty blink. The great and not so late President will turn out cash like a drunk on a spending spree. Remember Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions (forgettable maybe but ironically similar)? In Brewster’s Million’s Pryor has a set amount of time to give away a million dollars in order to inherit the equivalent of ten times that.
In this scenario Mister Obama has a few months to flood the economy with so much money that, unless you are deliberately nailed into a dungeon and buried under three feet of fresh cow dung refusing to work, there will be a job for you. Now I’m betting he doesn’t know or care whether this errant dump of feloniously acquired cash will start our economic engine but more to the fact it will get him re-elected. We have to put on our politician hat to understand a politician who can see no further than his or her next term. For the President the stakes of this gambit are ever greater.
So, if I am right. Be prepared to be dazzled. The next four months will see America come to life. If Obama is smart, the money gets invested in the small business engine which is the life blood of our economy. If he is in bed with big business, it will be consumed (inhaled like a junkie on a line of coke) by the greedy Fortune 500 who will promise him employment through his re-election. After that the jobs will dwindle away and the fortunes kept in the top offices of America’s most despicable CEO’s - a trillion to get us up and working and two trillion to keep their lifestyle when the money and the jobs evaporate like water in a shallow puddle on the Texas panhandle in mid- July.
If by err of heart, will of mind or blind luck it ends up in the hands of entrepreneurial America then, just by mistake, Mr. Obama may restart the American engine and slowly relight this darkened world. If he is like most politicians, he will do this with blind ambition or blind abandon but either way look for a good 2012 and 2013. If he decides that even though he can’t have a third term and wants for the good of all mankind saying “what the heck, let’s throw the peasants some cake” – then who knows - he might just become the most beloved President since FDR.
Either way…unless he’s blown the wad, it’s a going to be a good year…a very good year.
God Bless
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
frankb@thebossongroup.com
P.S. Sorry, Jaffe but I am a Christian first, an American second and a business guy third. So if you don't want to do business with my signature then I guess I don't need your business.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
The Inferred-Structure Part 2
America is Falling Apart – Literally!
Roads and Highways
Americans drive 3 trillion miles a year, spending 44 hours stuck in gridlock. Moving over 47 thousand miles of Interstate roads built over fifty years ago, we access another estimated 4 million miles in connecting roads that run through our countryside, small towns and primary cities. All of this is a part of a mad collection of criss-crossing paved and unpaved travel ways built or trodden down over the last four hundred years to make this the most complex road system in the world.
The only time in history anyone ever attempted anything on this scale was 2,000 years ago when the Romans built over 83,000 miles of roads and that was built over a similar period of four hundred years. Their roads, ostensibly built to accommodate troop movement over vast spaces in record time, connected all parts of the known world to the ancients. At that time, all roads truly led to Rome. What started out as a means of moving armies brought civilizations from throughout the known world together for the first time in history. This troop movement strategy was not lost on the eyes of the modern leaders when Adolph Hitler used the German Autobahn to move his troops during his infamous Blitzkrieg. So impressive was that tactic that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as President Eisenhower, signed into law an Interstate Bill of 1956 that would, for all practical purposes, allow American troops to move quickly from one end of the continent to the next; east to west, north or south - to defend our freedom.
No other program in history matched the ambition and sheer volume of this task. Nobody moved more dirt…not the pyramids…not the wall of China – No one! Today, of course, many countries, including China, are working feverishly to construct the roads and highways they will need to connect their empires. China may end up with a far larger highway system than any country including the United States. However, fifty years from now, as fortunes change - and they will - China will face the same dilemma we are facing today.
Patch And Pray
No, it’s not a bumper sticker or a clever political axiom. It is the current U.S. policy toward road construction, reconstruction and repair. Across our country, as our dismal political planning and pathetic greedy corporate façade slowly peels away, we are facing the grim reality of a highway system that is not only broken, it’s crumbling beneath our feet. Cities and states that are bereft of any meaningful government assistance rely on “luck” to keep their roads operable. Over 100,000 bridges in America are in decay and some have risen to alarming emergency need levels. Of the estimated 200,000 bridges in America, both private and public, at least 77,000 need repairs right now! More importantly, 20 major bridges, estimated to access nearly 10 million commuters daily are in desperate need of immediate repair and range from the smallest of the 20; Colorado’s South Platte River Bridge over I-25 with a daily commuter load of 208,353; to the largest; New Jersey’s Route-21 Bridge over the I-80 corridor (the busiest bridge corridor in America) with more than 518,000 daily commuters. That’s over 725,000 daily commuters for just two bridges that are considered to be at emergency level need of repairs. Millions of people go to work every day with the pavement beneath their cars in critical condition – conditions that could give way any day!
It doesn’t end there. As we see more and more streets crippled by degrading pavement, sinkholes, potholes and rusted rebar poking through our bridges all decaying from asphalt to gravel right before our eyes, we have to face the sobering reality that there is no money to fix these problems. America relies on these roads to move all of her products from point of origin to the corner store. Whether it’s tools, office supplies or food for our local grocery stores, everything we rely on to build this empire upon, to comfort ourselves with or satisfy a nation’s growing hunger is, at some point, on a truck stuck in traffic on streets that are disappearing beneath their wheels. And what is our current method of dealing with these critical situations?
“Patch and Pray” was first spoken to life by The American Society of Civil Engineers former Executive Director Patrick Natale. He wasn’t just talking about roads. Nope - the American Society of Civil Engineers had issued its report card on America’s total infrastructure and things don’t look so good. For “Patch and Pray”, Natale was referring to local government’s current policy toward fixing serious road, dam and bridge problems. There is no scheduled maintenance – no ten year plan – no step by step strategy…there is only “Patch and Pray”. Do what you can on the things that you can no longer avoid and pray that something else doesn’t fail. Road and bridge failure is reality of our times that is quickly becoming a certainty.
Electrical Grid
Our electrical grid is an archaic monstrosity which mixes fiber optics with metal cabling and copper wire to create an unstable power core that is on the brink of utter collapse. No one who has any affiliation on a professional level with our electrical grid denies that we have powered through, built over and combined technologies that are not only unable to communicate with one another but, in some cases, can cause failure by association with one another. When one set of protocols from the forties touches off another technology from the nineties, watch out!
No one is saying that we could have, at some point, stopped everything and said “let’s tear this all down and rebuild a new infrastructure in its place”. Undoubtedly this was going to occur as technology outpaced existing construction. Something had to give. The problem is not so much that we couldn’t stop and build it all properly. We didn’t stop to talk about co-existing codes of behavior and put a plan in place to marry these technologies. What was fiber optics going to mean to overhead electrical grids? What are we going to do two hundred years from now with spent nuclear fuel rods? At what point do we begin the process of shutting down sections of this out-of-date grid and bear a slight inconvenience for certain reliability in the future?
There were three major recent blackouts in New York City - 1965, 1977 (I was there for that one) and 2003. In 2003, a switch in Ohio overloaded a system that brought down a third of the east coast and plunged New York City into darkness for two days. Enron engineered power consumption, processing enormous overcharges throughout California. Californians stoically reached out to one another during these manufactured travesties to lend aid to the elderly in danger and hospital patients who faced grim conditions during rolling brownouts.
10,000 power plants of all sizes and shapes, from coal and natural gas to nuclear connecting 164,000 miles of power lines, dot a countryside littered with outdated transformers and unmanned control stations. We suffer 200 minutes of blackouts to Japan’s 6. With America’s electrical needs increasing by 20% per year and the ability to repair our existing grid at only 6-8% yearly, you don’t have to be a math whiz to see where this is headed.
Dams
Nobody knows for sure how many dams there are in America but the number is in the tens of thousands. Most of these dams get little if any inspection. Thousands are orphan dams left behind by coal companies that have long since left their coal camps and are no longer supervised. Thousands of levees like those in Louisiana are attended to by local farmers. Hundreds of earthen dams in North Central California are the only thing keeping the ocean from mixing with our fresh water supply in California and contaminating a water supply that would take years to recover.
In Texas there are seven inspectors for 7,400 dams and they inspected only 239 in 2007. Iowa has one full time and one part time inspector for a recorded 3,344 dams (they estimate) and they inspected only 128 in 2007. The list goes on and on. For states like New York and California the numbers are worse - much worse.
Drinking Water
Americans drink more water in a day than all of Africa consumes for any reason in a month. Potable water is a major concern according to The World Health Organization. Some estimates say that one third of earth’s population does not have or has limited access to suitable drinking water. As disturbing as that may be, we are using up this finite resource at an alarming rate. Not because fresh water doesn’t in some ways replenish itself, certainly it does at least in most advanced industrial nations including Europe, United States, Australia and Canada for example, but in many parts of the world it does not. And despite our best efforts water is becoming more important and harder to access in satisfying quantities.
We are consuming more water of poorer quality than ever in our history. More people putting more demands on limited resources and the natural ecological changes in global freshwater distribution make the future of available drinking water frightening. We read about floods consuming towns adjacent polluted rivers like the Mississippi and areas with normally sufficient rainfall experiencing drought; but because we can still turn on our tap and see water flowing we figure everything is okay. It may not be a problem right now but in the next two decades as more people live longer and birth into our growing population all reaching for potable water while surface quantities diminish, water will become big business. It’s the next fossil fuel where we will see extraordinary pricing.
And why is water suddenly an issue? Water in itself is not but pollution by a strained sewage system that is aging rapidly and seeping into our drinking water is a problem! America has to wake up to the fact that keeping Southern California green in lawns and gardens and the lavish, wasteful use of expendable fresh water to green Las Vegas simply cannot continue unchecked.
The average age of the American sewer system is 50 years old. The 85 mile Delaware Aqueduct is 70 years old and provides half the drinking water for New York City. Because it is leaking up from the ground at the rate of 25 million gallons a day it is literally sinking from below the small town of Wawarsing in upstate New York. Because there is no alternative source for shutting the water down, this town will eventually succumb to the rising waters and simply cease to exist. And because 25 million gallons of water a day to a city the size of New York is such a tiny number compared to what the aqueduct delivers, it simply doesn’t make sense to shut it down to fix it. Unfortunately for the big picture thinkers this is a self-correcting problem. Eventually the aqueduct will collapse, at least in the Wawarsing, area and the flow will be stopped by an act of ignorance.
Will we drink our own sewage? Yup. In fact in some countries recovering waste water to provide drinkable water is already a matter of fact. Here in the United States as our sewage system breaks down we will be forced to make that choice. Contaminates in some water are so bad that towns like Maywood, California (just outside Los Angeles) have only brown water to drink. The government tells them it’s safe to drink. Would you drink brown water with a metallic taste?
It sounds like something straight out of The Wizard of Oz…”Sinkholes, Sewage and Bridges, Oh my!” But we are good at listing our problems, if nothing else. Who has solutions?
Rather than going on with all the particulars of America’s decline, I will simply post the 2009 report card given on our infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
2009 Grades
Aviation D
Bridges C
Dams D
Drinking Water D-
Energy D+
Hazardous Waste D
Inland Waterways D-
Levees D-
Public Parks and Recreation C-
Rail C-
Roads D-
Schools D
Solid Waste C+
Transit D
Wastewater D-
America's Infrastructure GPA: D
Estimated 5 Year Investment Need: $2.2 Trillion
The Crime of Redundancy
Sooner than later we will have to put people back to work adding more cars to an already unstable highway system and insufferable gridlock. These expanded commercial areas will be placing more demand on our electrical system and calling for more sewer and water delivery. Dramatically off balance from decades of irreversible fluctuations in everything from market conditions to architecture, stretching our infrastructure thinner is not a solution we can abide.
The biggest crime in all this is not so much our needs but our insufferable ignorance and systematic abuse of the environment and the existing resources at our disposal. The Bosson Group has a plan to reduce the pressure on all these structures and provide immediate temporary relief. Believe it or not we have a program of abatement that will allow us to catch our collective breath and continue to support our economic appetite. We can reorganize and redirect our capital to fix the most badly affected portions of our infrastructure while reducing gridlock, dependency on fossil fuels and the demand for property needs including more unnecessary connections to water, electricity and road wear and tear.
By strategically deploying our telecommuting program, we can intelligently move large sections of Americans to work from home positions. Tethered Communities™ are seamless home to work environments that reduce employer costs, increase productivity and reduce the demand on power and fuel. These awful problems which are compounded by unemployment will become intolerable with a major shift toward employment.
As Americans we will have to face a grim reality and change our selfish “have it your way” attitude. We are going to have to learn to share and play nice with one another. By using Tethered Communities™ we can begin to ease the burden of redundancy. And in the end redundancy is the single largest factor contributing to our crumbling structure.
For more information contact Frank Bosson at frankb@thebossongroup.com or call 209.642.2821.
Roads and Highways
Americans drive 3 trillion miles a year, spending 44 hours stuck in gridlock. Moving over 47 thousand miles of Interstate roads built over fifty years ago, we access another estimated 4 million miles in connecting roads that run through our countryside, small towns and primary cities. All of this is a part of a mad collection of criss-crossing paved and unpaved travel ways built or trodden down over the last four hundred years to make this the most complex road system in the world.
The only time in history anyone ever attempted anything on this scale was 2,000 years ago when the Romans built over 83,000 miles of roads and that was built over a similar period of four hundred years. Their roads, ostensibly built to accommodate troop movement over vast spaces in record time, connected all parts of the known world to the ancients. At that time, all roads truly led to Rome. What started out as a means of moving armies brought civilizations from throughout the known world together for the first time in history. This troop movement strategy was not lost on the eyes of the modern leaders when Adolph Hitler used the German Autobahn to move his troops during his infamous Blitzkrieg. So impressive was that tactic that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as President Eisenhower, signed into law an Interstate Bill of 1956 that would, for all practical purposes, allow American troops to move quickly from one end of the continent to the next; east to west, north or south - to defend our freedom.
No other program in history matched the ambition and sheer volume of this task. Nobody moved more dirt…not the pyramids…not the wall of China – No one! Today, of course, many countries, including China, are working feverishly to construct the roads and highways they will need to connect their empires. China may end up with a far larger highway system than any country including the United States. However, fifty years from now, as fortunes change - and they will - China will face the same dilemma we are facing today.
Patch And Pray
No, it’s not a bumper sticker or a clever political axiom. It is the current U.S. policy toward road construction, reconstruction and repair. Across our country, as our dismal political planning and pathetic greedy corporate façade slowly peels away, we are facing the grim reality of a highway system that is not only broken, it’s crumbling beneath our feet. Cities and states that are bereft of any meaningful government assistance rely on “luck” to keep their roads operable. Over 100,000 bridges in America are in decay and some have risen to alarming emergency need levels. Of the estimated 200,000 bridges in America, both private and public, at least 77,000 need repairs right now! More importantly, 20 major bridges, estimated to access nearly 10 million commuters daily are in desperate need of immediate repair and range from the smallest of the 20; Colorado’s South Platte River Bridge over I-25 with a daily commuter load of 208,353; to the largest; New Jersey’s Route-21 Bridge over the I-80 corridor (the busiest bridge corridor in America) with more than 518,000 daily commuters. That’s over 725,000 daily commuters for just two bridges that are considered to be at emergency level need of repairs. Millions of people go to work every day with the pavement beneath their cars in critical condition – conditions that could give way any day!
It doesn’t end there. As we see more and more streets crippled by degrading pavement, sinkholes, potholes and rusted rebar poking through our bridges all decaying from asphalt to gravel right before our eyes, we have to face the sobering reality that there is no money to fix these problems. America relies on these roads to move all of her products from point of origin to the corner store. Whether it’s tools, office supplies or food for our local grocery stores, everything we rely on to build this empire upon, to comfort ourselves with or satisfy a nation’s growing hunger is, at some point, on a truck stuck in traffic on streets that are disappearing beneath their wheels. And what is our current method of dealing with these critical situations?
“Patch and Pray” was first spoken to life by The American Society of Civil Engineers former Executive Director Patrick Natale. He wasn’t just talking about roads. Nope - the American Society of Civil Engineers had issued its report card on America’s total infrastructure and things don’t look so good. For “Patch and Pray”, Natale was referring to local government’s current policy toward fixing serious road, dam and bridge problems. There is no scheduled maintenance – no ten year plan – no step by step strategy…there is only “Patch and Pray”. Do what you can on the things that you can no longer avoid and pray that something else doesn’t fail. Road and bridge failure is reality of our times that is quickly becoming a certainty.
Electrical Grid
Our electrical grid is an archaic monstrosity which mixes fiber optics with metal cabling and copper wire to create an unstable power core that is on the brink of utter collapse. No one who has any affiliation on a professional level with our electrical grid denies that we have powered through, built over and combined technologies that are not only unable to communicate with one another but, in some cases, can cause failure by association with one another. When one set of protocols from the forties touches off another technology from the nineties, watch out!
No one is saying that we could have, at some point, stopped everything and said “let’s tear this all down and rebuild a new infrastructure in its place”. Undoubtedly this was going to occur as technology outpaced existing construction. Something had to give. The problem is not so much that we couldn’t stop and build it all properly. We didn’t stop to talk about co-existing codes of behavior and put a plan in place to marry these technologies. What was fiber optics going to mean to overhead electrical grids? What are we going to do two hundred years from now with spent nuclear fuel rods? At what point do we begin the process of shutting down sections of this out-of-date grid and bear a slight inconvenience for certain reliability in the future?
There were three major recent blackouts in New York City - 1965, 1977 (I was there for that one) and 2003. In 2003, a switch in Ohio overloaded a system that brought down a third of the east coast and plunged New York City into darkness for two days. Enron engineered power consumption, processing enormous overcharges throughout California. Californians stoically reached out to one another during these manufactured travesties to lend aid to the elderly in danger and hospital patients who faced grim conditions during rolling brownouts.
10,000 power plants of all sizes and shapes, from coal and natural gas to nuclear connecting 164,000 miles of power lines, dot a countryside littered with outdated transformers and unmanned control stations. We suffer 200 minutes of blackouts to Japan’s 6. With America’s electrical needs increasing by 20% per year and the ability to repair our existing grid at only 6-8% yearly, you don’t have to be a math whiz to see where this is headed.
Dams
Nobody knows for sure how many dams there are in America but the number is in the tens of thousands. Most of these dams get little if any inspection. Thousands are orphan dams left behind by coal companies that have long since left their coal camps and are no longer supervised. Thousands of levees like those in Louisiana are attended to by local farmers. Hundreds of earthen dams in North Central California are the only thing keeping the ocean from mixing with our fresh water supply in California and contaminating a water supply that would take years to recover.
In Texas there are seven inspectors for 7,400 dams and they inspected only 239 in 2007. Iowa has one full time and one part time inspector for a recorded 3,344 dams (they estimate) and they inspected only 128 in 2007. The list goes on and on. For states like New York and California the numbers are worse - much worse.
Drinking Water
Americans drink more water in a day than all of Africa consumes for any reason in a month. Potable water is a major concern according to The World Health Organization. Some estimates say that one third of earth’s population does not have or has limited access to suitable drinking water. As disturbing as that may be, we are using up this finite resource at an alarming rate. Not because fresh water doesn’t in some ways replenish itself, certainly it does at least in most advanced industrial nations including Europe, United States, Australia and Canada for example, but in many parts of the world it does not. And despite our best efforts water is becoming more important and harder to access in satisfying quantities.
We are consuming more water of poorer quality than ever in our history. More people putting more demands on limited resources and the natural ecological changes in global freshwater distribution make the future of available drinking water frightening. We read about floods consuming towns adjacent polluted rivers like the Mississippi and areas with normally sufficient rainfall experiencing drought; but because we can still turn on our tap and see water flowing we figure everything is okay. It may not be a problem right now but in the next two decades as more people live longer and birth into our growing population all reaching for potable water while surface quantities diminish, water will become big business. It’s the next fossil fuel where we will see extraordinary pricing.
And why is water suddenly an issue? Water in itself is not but pollution by a strained sewage system that is aging rapidly and seeping into our drinking water is a problem! America has to wake up to the fact that keeping Southern California green in lawns and gardens and the lavish, wasteful use of expendable fresh water to green Las Vegas simply cannot continue unchecked.
The average age of the American sewer system is 50 years old. The 85 mile Delaware Aqueduct is 70 years old and provides half the drinking water for New York City. Because it is leaking up from the ground at the rate of 25 million gallons a day it is literally sinking from below the small town of Wawarsing in upstate New York. Because there is no alternative source for shutting the water down, this town will eventually succumb to the rising waters and simply cease to exist. And because 25 million gallons of water a day to a city the size of New York is such a tiny number compared to what the aqueduct delivers, it simply doesn’t make sense to shut it down to fix it. Unfortunately for the big picture thinkers this is a self-correcting problem. Eventually the aqueduct will collapse, at least in the Wawarsing, area and the flow will be stopped by an act of ignorance.
Will we drink our own sewage? Yup. In fact in some countries recovering waste water to provide drinkable water is already a matter of fact. Here in the United States as our sewage system breaks down we will be forced to make that choice. Contaminates in some water are so bad that towns like Maywood, California (just outside Los Angeles) have only brown water to drink. The government tells them it’s safe to drink. Would you drink brown water with a metallic taste?
It sounds like something straight out of The Wizard of Oz…”Sinkholes, Sewage and Bridges, Oh my!” But we are good at listing our problems, if nothing else. Who has solutions?
Rather than going on with all the particulars of America’s decline, I will simply post the 2009 report card given on our infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
2009 Grades
Aviation D
Bridges C
Dams D
Drinking Water D-
Energy D+
Hazardous Waste D
Inland Waterways D-
Levees D-
Public Parks and Recreation C-
Rail C-
Roads D-
Schools D
Solid Waste C+
Transit D
Wastewater D-
America's Infrastructure GPA: D
Estimated 5 Year Investment Need: $2.2 Trillion
The Crime of Redundancy
Sooner than later we will have to put people back to work adding more cars to an already unstable highway system and insufferable gridlock. These expanded commercial areas will be placing more demand on our electrical system and calling for more sewer and water delivery. Dramatically off balance from decades of irreversible fluctuations in everything from market conditions to architecture, stretching our infrastructure thinner is not a solution we can abide.
The biggest crime in all this is not so much our needs but our insufferable ignorance and systematic abuse of the environment and the existing resources at our disposal. The Bosson Group has a plan to reduce the pressure on all these structures and provide immediate temporary relief. Believe it or not we have a program of abatement that will allow us to catch our collective breath and continue to support our economic appetite. We can reorganize and redirect our capital to fix the most badly affected portions of our infrastructure while reducing gridlock, dependency on fossil fuels and the demand for property needs including more unnecessary connections to water, electricity and road wear and tear.
By strategically deploying our telecommuting program, we can intelligently move large sections of Americans to work from home positions. Tethered Communities™ are seamless home to work environments that reduce employer costs, increase productivity and reduce the demand on power and fuel. These awful problems which are compounded by unemployment will become intolerable with a major shift toward employment.
As Americans we will have to face a grim reality and change our selfish “have it your way” attitude. We are going to have to learn to share and play nice with one another. By using Tethered Communities™ we can begin to ease the burden of redundancy. And in the end redundancy is the single largest factor contributing to our crumbling structure.
For more information contact Frank Bosson at frankb@thebossongroup.com or call 209.642.2821.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Forged in America
Forged in America
I mean to say that not only are we broke but we’re busted. In every way imaginable we have abandoned any sense of principle or decency in pursuit of wealth. We have totally lost the concept of success and morphed it into some grim decadence that sees no salient value in the hard work and passion that once dominated our business acumen. Whether we are talking about badly managed Fortune Companies, patently lifted names, celeb-brats or forgeries, we are still in the grisly grip of greed. And, if forgery and greed aren’t enough to shame our Fortune empires, just remember that GE had a $3.2 billion dollar profit in 2010 and paid no taxes.
And so we have arrived at that time and place where we get to discuss, in considerable depth, those aspects of today’s business and social culture that are impacting this country’s economic position as it relates to business; especially new business. Keep in mind that I will avoid the classic mistake of the many economic gurus who spew impassioned articulations that seem to say “the louder and more aggressively I say this the more likely it is to be true!” I will stick to the facts.
The Patriarchal System
The Patriarchal System for defining the preeminent successful business model dates back to prehistoric times. This structure has been the manner in which we have forged relationships and built America’s most powerful empires. The name comes from the father of the family who would increase his power and wealth by breeding an enormous family - more sons and daughters to make more sons and daughters, who would inherit, trade, make war and plunder more wealth, camels, crops and so forth. But so much of the ancients’ fate relied on two things: fertility and fertility - great crops and great families. Families of the ancients would often spread out over great territories to mitigate the possibility of failing to cultivate and maintain either and both. The ancients were not nomadic simply because they loved to travel; they moved to accommodate crops and flocks. They spread out to cover long distances, hoping to hedge their risks, as we see in the Bible story of Jacob being sent to his Uncle Laban for a wife some 400 miles away. That’s what spreading the risk looks like to the ancients.
In the Book of Judges we see the Israel tribe threatened by Midianite nomads who moved into their fertile valleys when seasons changed to take care of their extraordinary crops and families. They did this because they could. Israel left them uncontested as they stripped their crops and grazing lands. This left them free to travel back to their own lands without having them over-grazed or over-cultivated.
Israel’s favorite son Joseph was sold by his brothers to Midianite nomads who then sold him into slavery in Egypt. A couple of well translated dreams later he is running the show in Egypt.
As the number two man there, he had prepared the country for a severe and protracted drought. His family, stuck in the drought-stricken region of Canaan, was forced to come to him for grain. The fact that he had managed to store the over-abundance of seven years of crops for an entire country left him in control of the only reliable food source in the region. Fortunately for his family, Joseph did not hold a grudge or history may have turned out much different. But, of course, like Fibonacci’s spiral proves, nothing happens by chance. Just because we can’t see the road up ahead doesn’t mean there is no turn. And those who insist there is no road ahead because they can’t see it will turn the wheel at the appropriate moment or drive off the cliff.
Why the pyramid looks so familiar
But enough pontificating - where was I going? Oh yes…The Patriarchal System. The ancients survived by a system of natural growth. Families may have drifted apart in geography but never in loyalties. The understanding for each clan was very clear; the success of my brother is my success. If people stayed in one place…if families didn’t grow and prosper in 2500 B.C., an empire could be made or lost within a few seasons. The story of Abraham and Sarah holds so much truth about our relationship with our Creator, but in that is a look at the power brokering of the Middle East in the third millennium BC. Having a large family meant access to more lands, crops, herds and men with which to ally and make war. As Hagar drifted off into the desert, God’s angel told her not to worry about her son Ishmael. He would prosper, she was told, but in the same breath warned that he would be eternally at war with his brother. His brother Isaac married the beautiful Rebecca and both men came together to mourn their father’s death.
Hagar’s lineage is allegedly rooted in the Muslim faith. We know Isaac had Jacob, later named Israel, and the rest of the story starts in the Book of Exodus. Today, fourteen million Jews sit surrounded by a billion Muslims. If Sarah had only known what kicking Hagar out of the camp would have meant…the choices we make.
As remote and removed as that story seems to us today, it is absolutely relevant to who we are and what has happened to the structure of what all that meant. For us in America, the Patriarchal System is relevant to how we created the dynasties we still celebrate today. Names like Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan and Winchester resonate with every American entrepreneur as much as Gates and Cuban. For many first generation Americans, the American dream was just that, a way to take your family from abject poverty to exceeding wealth; whether you did it like Astor with real estate, Carnegie in steel, Crocker in rails or Buchanan in tobacco. All made huge fortunes, not only for themselves but for their entire lineage for generations to come. Did you know that 72 families own 95% of all of the Hawaiian Islands? Seems the American dream was a nightmare for indigenous people everywhere we (Caucasians) went.
Thus, the pyramid was born. No, not as a scam but as a process that evolved through an entrepreneurial society that rewarded industrious, hardworking, newly minted Americans whose success was passed along to each new generation. The fathers built the name and future generations were to keep hammering at the goldstone until they had gathered all the fortune there was to mine. Most did…at least for a time. The hard work ethic faded sometime during the rise of the Baby Boomer. Now we seldom see empires changing hands from father to son. Think about Disney or Gates - you don’t see their children running empires of like names.
Forgeries
Understanding where our business model fails is as easy as reading any popular tabloid of the day. Empires were built by guys like Conrad Hilton and James Fisk. No one is going to say these guys were saints. They were not. Much of their empire was not built for them but for their heirs. How sad, huh? What a testament to diluted gene pools. Paris Hilton has as much to do with hotels as Tony Pinto has to do with exploding Fords*. There is nothing in a name. Paris is a forgery and forgeries have been with us and affected us since man figured out he could make money by making something up rather than actually discovering or accomplishing something for himself. Paris Hilton became a success just by inserting herself into society using the family name. In affect she is a forgery to the extent that she certainly is not a hotel magnate nor has she proven that she could be a successful hotel desk clerk (if I’m wrong Ms. Hilton, get a job and prove it).
*Tony Pinto is fictitious and not meant as a racial slur. I am extremely sensitive to name jokes. As an Italian American I hear the Mafia thing all the time. For the record, I was too short and failed the gun test. And yes, to the folks at Ford, I know it was all a big mistake and you owned right up to it…in court…after the memo was discovered.
But this is what we have evolved into as a society of forgeries. At some point in our recent history, as technology began sweeping aside business after business - it all became a mad blur of failures, mergers and buyouts in what we call “doing business”. Companies barely out of the womb were either bought out or run over with a multitude of semi-original ideas buried in the rubble that was the 90s high-tech movement. Thus, an opportunity was born. People saw that if you came up with the right idea you could sell it with little investment of your time and money and make huge amounts of money. Some very clever people took advantage of this sudden, enormously foolish glitch in Fortune corporation culture. In the climate of this “doing business”, very little business was actually being done. It is funny how quickly we become accustomed to “money for nothing and checks for free”.
But Fortune companies today are forgeries as well. They are seldom run by the inherited name of some far gone ancestor from Ireland that stretched his poor arms to gather together ideas, money and grit to make his fortune (remember that is how the Fortune Companies originally got the moniker). Today’s Fortune Company is run by some hired assassin or bean counter whose biggest decision is which foreign country they will use to exploit our ideas and jobs. The lot of them have proven to be apathetic to the country’s needs - incompetent or illegal.
Take the failure in 2009 of Colonial Bank after it was discovered that Lee Farkas, the majority owner of Taylor Bean & Whittaker, once the nation’s second largest mortgage company, was convicted in less than an hour on all 14 counts of bank fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy. I don’t see his name on the company logo. But his personal avarice was so extreme that he and his merry band of fraudsters caused the sixth largest bank failure in American history. He is, unfortunately, the way many young, over-zealous execu-teens are beginning to form their thoughts about business. How do we insert ourselves in the middle of the deck so we can enjoy the fruit of our labor today? The heck with the kids… let them steal their own millions, right?
Having a lot of definitions to define your business does not give your business a lot of definition
So…to get back to the idea at hand, the Patriarchal System isn’t bad – bad people just exploited the natural flaws in an otherwise sound principle. But, as a business owner today, you should be aware that there is a better and more intelligent way to devise and expand your company. The principle is to take your idea and begin the process of radiating your sales and the culture of your mindset and ethics as you simultaneously look for like minds and personalities that leverage your full potential. Not a bunch of “yes men” but rather a smartly blended concert of balancing labors and vanities with the same honest enthusiasm for your idea, products and plans. Look for people of sound integrity and offsetting skills to join your effort. Pay them if you can - that’s better than having to share the idea, but share the idea if you must. Keep in mind it is no longer the day of competing against others who are hard at work and honest. It’s the days of forgery and your idea is as good as any. If someone can lift it with little effort and claim it for his own, why not do just that? It will not matter to them that they are just standing on your shoulders to steal your rightful reward. There are too many dishonest people out there. If you attempt to compete against that thinking you will not find a level playing field; not that there ever was such a thing. But today, more than ever as markets become global and your germ of a company needs to ramp up, the idea of a single mastermind is dangerous. Sure, some megalomaniacs make good use of their dictatorial and narcissistic tendencies but they are more often the rarity then the norm.
Forged is not forgery (not always anyway)
As you integrate into the business world there are more than enough forgers out there who will corrupt your idea before you can bring it to fruition. To get ahead of them you will have to think like them without being like them. It’s a tightrope to walk I admit, but it’s one you can walk nonetheless. In the end it will actually be about inserting your unique character and passion through your associates and employees to impact your market. In a later part to this series I will cover company cultures and how they affect who you are and how your personality affects a very specific market sector, even years after you are removed from day to day operations.
Today, the Ponzi scheme once associated with the likes of Bernie Madoff includes most banks, the government and many well respected Fortune 500 Companies. If the criteria for Ponzi is to build a worthless organization by stealing from Peter to pay a little to Paul only to steal from twice as many Pauls who then steal from three times as many Ralphs, then our entire system - from the over-valued and grossly revered athletes, actors and Fortune CEOs who bilk their companies for hundreds of millions as they quietly slip off into the night - is suspect.
Forgeries in some form or another have been around forever. Check back in history and it wasn’t too long ago that Moses Shapira in Israel forged an entire ancient nation and all their history (Google Moses Shapira for some interesting reading). Even before Shapira we have a long history of men profiting off forgeries, whether in the way they do business or the way they count their beans. Sometimes these forgeries make it past even the best detectors for a while and fundamentally change what we know about history and society. They change what we think about the moral values we used to treasure.
We have idiots like Charlie Sheen proudly announcing that he “bangs 7 gram rocks of crack because that’s the way I roll…” and networks are trying to put this guy back on primetime television. Come on parents, what does this tell your children? Can you possibly say “Yeah, let’s sit down and watch ole lovable Charlie as he uses the props to keep his balance because he has been out all night doing drugs”? If we don’t stop the nonsense and say “no more” then these amoral maniacs are going to continue to exploit your children, our business and our country. That is not okay! Say it!
I’m certain you don’t want to read my rants on this societal perversion so I’ll steer back to what is relevant. For every forged piece of crappy business that some lazy con artist tries to pass off on industry, there are hundreds of legitimate businessmen and women working very hard to promote genuinely authentic ideas. New products and services are emerging from our entrepreneurial population at a pace never before realized in the rich history of the American business world.
And although there is still a long way to go before we can actually call ourselves “in recovery”, I think we are at a place where we can begin to ask the right questions about our future after this economic Armageddon such as…What should we look like as a business if the old business model is no longer valid? How do we reverse this perversion of pounding out these ridiculous buyout numbers to stabilize our economy? How do we stop, or at least discourage, forged business models looking to take advantage of our generous system of freedom of information without the benefit of working hard for their money?
THE UPCOMING SERIES
Over the coming weeks I will be looking at all aspects of the business environment and economy in America – both as a retrospective to give you some balance and points of reference and as it looks and behaves today. In every section I will provide three elements. First, I will be exploring the historical roots of our country’s business. Second, I will provide relevancy in analytics, both statistically and organically, as they relate to business owners today. Finally, and most importantly, in every section I will frame simple but practical solutions you can use to secure your business, invest in productivity moving forward and provide for the general stability of your own market and profitability.
These next weeks will reveal some of the most intimate and important aspects of how America came to be what she is today in terms of her business modeling. It will be a wonderful opportunity for new owners to acquire a strong historical perspective on our markets; where they came from and where we think they may be going. And, of course, it will always be controversial as well as informative. I sincerely hope you will come back for more. Don’t hesitate to send me comments both good and not so good – I welcome all.
Frank Bosson
CEO The Bosson Group
frankb@thebossongroup.com
www.thebossongroup.com
O-209 333 7786
C- 209 642 2821
Frank will be taking excerpts from his various papers, advanced training courses, talks and his most popular business satires. These are the comments and opinions of Frank Bosson and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of other individuals at The Bosson Group or our contractors or clients.
I mean to say that not only are we broke but we’re busted. In every way imaginable we have abandoned any sense of principle or decency in pursuit of wealth. We have totally lost the concept of success and morphed it into some grim decadence that sees no salient value in the hard work and passion that once dominated our business acumen. Whether we are talking about badly managed Fortune Companies, patently lifted names, celeb-brats or forgeries, we are still in the grisly grip of greed. And, if forgery and greed aren’t enough to shame our Fortune empires, just remember that GE had a $3.2 billion dollar profit in 2010 and paid no taxes.
And so we have arrived at that time and place where we get to discuss, in considerable depth, those aspects of today’s business and social culture that are impacting this country’s economic position as it relates to business; especially new business. Keep in mind that I will avoid the classic mistake of the many economic gurus who spew impassioned articulations that seem to say “the louder and more aggressively I say this the more likely it is to be true!” I will stick to the facts.
The Patriarchal System
The Patriarchal System for defining the preeminent successful business model dates back to prehistoric times. This structure has been the manner in which we have forged relationships and built America’s most powerful empires. The name comes from the father of the family who would increase his power and wealth by breeding an enormous family - more sons and daughters to make more sons and daughters, who would inherit, trade, make war and plunder more wealth, camels, crops and so forth. But so much of the ancients’ fate relied on two things: fertility and fertility - great crops and great families. Families of the ancients would often spread out over great territories to mitigate the possibility of failing to cultivate and maintain either and both. The ancients were not nomadic simply because they loved to travel; they moved to accommodate crops and flocks. They spread out to cover long distances, hoping to hedge their risks, as we see in the Bible story of Jacob being sent to his Uncle Laban for a wife some 400 miles away. That’s what spreading the risk looks like to the ancients.
In the Book of Judges we see the Israel tribe threatened by Midianite nomads who moved into their fertile valleys when seasons changed to take care of their extraordinary crops and families. They did this because they could. Israel left them uncontested as they stripped their crops and grazing lands. This left them free to travel back to their own lands without having them over-grazed or over-cultivated.
Israel’s favorite son Joseph was sold by his brothers to Midianite nomads who then sold him into slavery in Egypt. A couple of well translated dreams later he is running the show in Egypt.
As the number two man there, he had prepared the country for a severe and protracted drought. His family, stuck in the drought-stricken region of Canaan, was forced to come to him for grain. The fact that he had managed to store the over-abundance of seven years of crops for an entire country left him in control of the only reliable food source in the region. Fortunately for his family, Joseph did not hold a grudge or history may have turned out much different. But, of course, like Fibonacci’s spiral proves, nothing happens by chance. Just because we can’t see the road up ahead doesn’t mean there is no turn. And those who insist there is no road ahead because they can’t see it will turn the wheel at the appropriate moment or drive off the cliff.
Why the pyramid looks so familiar
But enough pontificating - where was I going? Oh yes…The Patriarchal System. The ancients survived by a system of natural growth. Families may have drifted apart in geography but never in loyalties. The understanding for each clan was very clear; the success of my brother is my success. If people stayed in one place…if families didn’t grow and prosper in 2500 B.C., an empire could be made or lost within a few seasons. The story of Abraham and Sarah holds so much truth about our relationship with our Creator, but in that is a look at the power brokering of the Middle East in the third millennium BC. Having a large family meant access to more lands, crops, herds and men with which to ally and make war. As Hagar drifted off into the desert, God’s angel told her not to worry about her son Ishmael. He would prosper, she was told, but in the same breath warned that he would be eternally at war with his brother. His brother Isaac married the beautiful Rebecca and both men came together to mourn their father’s death.
Hagar’s lineage is allegedly rooted in the Muslim faith. We know Isaac had Jacob, later named Israel, and the rest of the story starts in the Book of Exodus. Today, fourteen million Jews sit surrounded by a billion Muslims. If Sarah had only known what kicking Hagar out of the camp would have meant…the choices we make.
As remote and removed as that story seems to us today, it is absolutely relevant to who we are and what has happened to the structure of what all that meant. For us in America, the Patriarchal System is relevant to how we created the dynasties we still celebrate today. Names like Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan and Winchester resonate with every American entrepreneur as much as Gates and Cuban. For many first generation Americans, the American dream was just that, a way to take your family from abject poverty to exceeding wealth; whether you did it like Astor with real estate, Carnegie in steel, Crocker in rails or Buchanan in tobacco. All made huge fortunes, not only for themselves but for their entire lineage for generations to come. Did you know that 72 families own 95% of all of the Hawaiian Islands? Seems the American dream was a nightmare for indigenous people everywhere we (Caucasians) went.
Thus, the pyramid was born. No, not as a scam but as a process that evolved through an entrepreneurial society that rewarded industrious, hardworking, newly minted Americans whose success was passed along to each new generation. The fathers built the name and future generations were to keep hammering at the goldstone until they had gathered all the fortune there was to mine. Most did…at least for a time. The hard work ethic faded sometime during the rise of the Baby Boomer. Now we seldom see empires changing hands from father to son. Think about Disney or Gates - you don’t see their children running empires of like names.
Forgeries
Understanding where our business model fails is as easy as reading any popular tabloid of the day. Empires were built by guys like Conrad Hilton and James Fisk. No one is going to say these guys were saints. They were not. Much of their empire was not built for them but for their heirs. How sad, huh? What a testament to diluted gene pools. Paris Hilton has as much to do with hotels as Tony Pinto has to do with exploding Fords*. There is nothing in a name. Paris is a forgery and forgeries have been with us and affected us since man figured out he could make money by making something up rather than actually discovering or accomplishing something for himself. Paris Hilton became a success just by inserting herself into society using the family name. In affect she is a forgery to the extent that she certainly is not a hotel magnate nor has she proven that she could be a successful hotel desk clerk (if I’m wrong Ms. Hilton, get a job and prove it).
*Tony Pinto is fictitious and not meant as a racial slur. I am extremely sensitive to name jokes. As an Italian American I hear the Mafia thing all the time. For the record, I was too short and failed the gun test. And yes, to the folks at Ford, I know it was all a big mistake and you owned right up to it…in court…after the memo was discovered.
But this is what we have evolved into as a society of forgeries. At some point in our recent history, as technology began sweeping aside business after business - it all became a mad blur of failures, mergers and buyouts in what we call “doing business”. Companies barely out of the womb were either bought out or run over with a multitude of semi-original ideas buried in the rubble that was the 90s high-tech movement. Thus, an opportunity was born. People saw that if you came up with the right idea you could sell it with little investment of your time and money and make huge amounts of money. Some very clever people took advantage of this sudden, enormously foolish glitch in Fortune corporation culture. In the climate of this “doing business”, very little business was actually being done. It is funny how quickly we become accustomed to “money for nothing and checks for free”.
But Fortune companies today are forgeries as well. They are seldom run by the inherited name of some far gone ancestor from Ireland that stretched his poor arms to gather together ideas, money and grit to make his fortune (remember that is how the Fortune Companies originally got the moniker). Today’s Fortune Company is run by some hired assassin or bean counter whose biggest decision is which foreign country they will use to exploit our ideas and jobs. The lot of them have proven to be apathetic to the country’s needs - incompetent or illegal.
Take the failure in 2009 of Colonial Bank after it was discovered that Lee Farkas, the majority owner of Taylor Bean & Whittaker, once the nation’s second largest mortgage company, was convicted in less than an hour on all 14 counts of bank fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy. I don’t see his name on the company logo. But his personal avarice was so extreme that he and his merry band of fraudsters caused the sixth largest bank failure in American history. He is, unfortunately, the way many young, over-zealous execu-teens are beginning to form their thoughts about business. How do we insert ourselves in the middle of the deck so we can enjoy the fruit of our labor today? The heck with the kids… let them steal their own millions, right?
Having a lot of definitions to define your business does not give your business a lot of definition
So…to get back to the idea at hand, the Patriarchal System isn’t bad – bad people just exploited the natural flaws in an otherwise sound principle. But, as a business owner today, you should be aware that there is a better and more intelligent way to devise and expand your company. The principle is to take your idea and begin the process of radiating your sales and the culture of your mindset and ethics as you simultaneously look for like minds and personalities that leverage your full potential. Not a bunch of “yes men” but rather a smartly blended concert of balancing labors and vanities with the same honest enthusiasm for your idea, products and plans. Look for people of sound integrity and offsetting skills to join your effort. Pay them if you can - that’s better than having to share the idea, but share the idea if you must. Keep in mind it is no longer the day of competing against others who are hard at work and honest. It’s the days of forgery and your idea is as good as any. If someone can lift it with little effort and claim it for his own, why not do just that? It will not matter to them that they are just standing on your shoulders to steal your rightful reward. There are too many dishonest people out there. If you attempt to compete against that thinking you will not find a level playing field; not that there ever was such a thing. But today, more than ever as markets become global and your germ of a company needs to ramp up, the idea of a single mastermind is dangerous. Sure, some megalomaniacs make good use of their dictatorial and narcissistic tendencies but they are more often the rarity then the norm.
Forged is not forgery (not always anyway)
As you integrate into the business world there are more than enough forgers out there who will corrupt your idea before you can bring it to fruition. To get ahead of them you will have to think like them without being like them. It’s a tightrope to walk I admit, but it’s one you can walk nonetheless. In the end it will actually be about inserting your unique character and passion through your associates and employees to impact your market. In a later part to this series I will cover company cultures and how they affect who you are and how your personality affects a very specific market sector, even years after you are removed from day to day operations.
Today, the Ponzi scheme once associated with the likes of Bernie Madoff includes most banks, the government and many well respected Fortune 500 Companies. If the criteria for Ponzi is to build a worthless organization by stealing from Peter to pay a little to Paul only to steal from twice as many Pauls who then steal from three times as many Ralphs, then our entire system - from the over-valued and grossly revered athletes, actors and Fortune CEOs who bilk their companies for hundreds of millions as they quietly slip off into the night - is suspect.
Forgeries in some form or another have been around forever. Check back in history and it wasn’t too long ago that Moses Shapira in Israel forged an entire ancient nation and all their history (Google Moses Shapira for some interesting reading). Even before Shapira we have a long history of men profiting off forgeries, whether in the way they do business or the way they count their beans. Sometimes these forgeries make it past even the best detectors for a while and fundamentally change what we know about history and society. They change what we think about the moral values we used to treasure.
We have idiots like Charlie Sheen proudly announcing that he “bangs 7 gram rocks of crack because that’s the way I roll…” and networks are trying to put this guy back on primetime television. Come on parents, what does this tell your children? Can you possibly say “Yeah, let’s sit down and watch ole lovable Charlie as he uses the props to keep his balance because he has been out all night doing drugs”? If we don’t stop the nonsense and say “no more” then these amoral maniacs are going to continue to exploit your children, our business and our country. That is not okay! Say it!
I’m certain you don’t want to read my rants on this societal perversion so I’ll steer back to what is relevant. For every forged piece of crappy business that some lazy con artist tries to pass off on industry, there are hundreds of legitimate businessmen and women working very hard to promote genuinely authentic ideas. New products and services are emerging from our entrepreneurial population at a pace never before realized in the rich history of the American business world.
And although there is still a long way to go before we can actually call ourselves “in recovery”, I think we are at a place where we can begin to ask the right questions about our future after this economic Armageddon such as…What should we look like as a business if the old business model is no longer valid? How do we reverse this perversion of pounding out these ridiculous buyout numbers to stabilize our economy? How do we stop, or at least discourage, forged business models looking to take advantage of our generous system of freedom of information without the benefit of working hard for their money?
THE UPCOMING SERIES
Over the coming weeks I will be looking at all aspects of the business environment and economy in America – both as a retrospective to give you some balance and points of reference and as it looks and behaves today. In every section I will provide three elements. First, I will be exploring the historical roots of our country’s business. Second, I will provide relevancy in analytics, both statistically and organically, as they relate to business owners today. Finally, and most importantly, in every section I will frame simple but practical solutions you can use to secure your business, invest in productivity moving forward and provide for the general stability of your own market and profitability.
These next weeks will reveal some of the most intimate and important aspects of how America came to be what she is today in terms of her business modeling. It will be a wonderful opportunity for new owners to acquire a strong historical perspective on our markets; where they came from and where we think they may be going. And, of course, it will always be controversial as well as informative. I sincerely hope you will come back for more. Don’t hesitate to send me comments both good and not so good – I welcome all.
Frank Bosson
CEO The Bosson Group
frankb@thebossongroup.com
www.thebossongroup.com
O-209 333 7786
C- 209 642 2821
Frank will be taking excerpts from his various papers, advanced training courses, talks and his most popular business satires. These are the comments and opinions of Frank Bosson and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of other individuals at The Bosson Group or our contractors or clients.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
I’m going to deviate from my normal discourse on economics and my discussions on improving your corporate model to talk about something that is far more important. A few days ago Japan experienced, for the second time in its recent history, devastation that raced across her countryside obliterating an entire infrastructure and taking thousands of lives.
What must they be thinking right now? How resilient will this nation have to be? These people in this horror must find a way to rise again and look this most terrifying reality straight on, survive through it and thrive even when they think they cannot. And they must do so with a sense of purpose and resolve the rest of us could not understand because they will find this strength in a place they have visited within themselves once before. Which of us can imagine the face of such morbid fury? And for almost everyone living in Japan and growing up in the long shadow cast by two bombs dropped over sixty years ago upon a society that could have never imagined the horizon of devastation that lie ahead, they now, once again, have that black sun rising upon their innocent faces.
I was just a child reading about the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and we, as school children, were elated as the teacher told us about the evil empire of Japan that once existed and how we were forced to do this terrible thing to stop them from continuing a war that was strangling the world - a war we were told that the Japanese showed no interest in surrendering to even in the face of certain defeat. As a child I wondered why they had to bomb not one but two cities. Wasn’t there some island…some remote location where they would witness this horror without being subject to the barbaric and cataclysmic effects of this inhuman atrocity? This was to be capitulation through the evaporation of women, old men and children. There were no soldiers of any consequence in either city
Years later, as a Marine facing the docks that would take us all to Viet Nam, I strangely thought back to that moment and how that once evil empire was now one of our greatest allies. They would become the only country to draft into their own constitution a law that would prevent them from ever developing the outrageous power of atomic bombs and nuclear destruction. They would not pursue - even though they have proven they could very well have done just that – the same brutal technology which had been perpetrated upon them. They as a country, people and a government would never participate in the fury that came with the end, not just of their soldiers fighting in the trenches, but the women and children left behind in the nearly empty cities. Cities that were probably filled with people who, like many of us, were struggling to make sense of this war after so many years…a war that left them hungry and desperate. The letters from the front telling them as they told us that this one died or that one has gone missing. We were right to fight this war but we cannot deny that ordinary people suffered grievous personal loss brought about by a group of men who decided a fate that would engulf a nation…a world.
I wondered, would Viet Nam one day become our friend? Would all the lives that were being tossed into this death pyre be suddenly neutralized by the country we now so hated when it became a friend of America’s at last? Well, it did end as I had expected and the result is much the same. Today tourism to Viet Nam is a fascination for many Americans. Do they not realize the ground they walk on is soaked in the blood of so many young Americans…the blood of Mark? More about him in a minute.
The world was different in each case and for each war. The war against Hitler, Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito was different than the war against the unknown names of the north versus South Viet Nam. The people of the United States were not in favor of this southeastern Asian war. They protested, ran away to Canada, burnt draft notices and spit on soldiers. They blamed the soldiers as they returned as if they themselves had sat down one day at some large table and said – “You know I don’t like being here in the beautiful countryside enjoying a Coca-Cola on this peaceful summer Sunday afternoon - let’s go kill strangers!”
The soldiers were every bit as much the victims as were the people of Viet Nam. Names today are a blur…General Giap, Hanoi Jane, General Westmoreland, President Johnson - so weary from all the blood on his hands he ended up saying “I will not seek nor do I intend to run for President a second term.” Of course, his first term was actually the result of our beloved President Kennedy being killed by some strange, over-zealous, insignificant radical who bought his gun through a magazine!
A lucky shot brought all this about. Kennedy had said only a few months before his death “We should not get involved in sending troops to Viet Nam. I am opposed to sending our boys to fight a war there.” Had he lived would we not have gone? Would Mark still be here and would we still be buddies?
Now about Mark Pulisiano. He was handsome, strong, funny and my best friend. He got me busted for sneaking a candy break when he was on fire watch during boot camp at Paris Island which was every bit as scary as any war could ever be. We fought about it…then laughed about it. I waited for the right opportunity and got him busted for hiding cigarettes…it was a beautiful thing. We fought about that and then laughed about it. He didn’t die in Viet Nam so his name is not on the wall. I found this out from a client who visited the wall and could not find his name. I have never been to the wall and don’t expect I will ever go. But the war killed him as sure as it killed any name on that wall. He was blown up by a mine, shot then stabbed and left for dead. They took seven hours to get to him but somehow he managed to stay alive. He stayed alive for several years…well he hung onto to life for several years. In the end the wounds overcame him and he died. His family moved away and they drifted apart. They were all just fatigued watching Mark slowly lose his battle to ever fully return. I lost touch with them and just about everybody in my life.
Now what does this have to do with Japan and the tsunami? Everything! Wars and natural disasters are very much the same. They take from the left and the right, the front and the back, the good and the bad, the rich and the poor. They are indiscriminate in their sheer grim delivery of death. They don’t care – like bullets and bombs – tsunamis just do what they do. How many Marks are missing in Japan this very night? Men and women who are the best of friends, dearly loved by so many and loved so completely by a very few, like I loved Mark.
I remember the viral video with the woman and the phony parking space where she pulled down the fake sign and rolled up the plastic tarp…remember that one? It was unbelievable. She was so inventive. How many of us wanted to make our own space downtown and here she was filmed by a couple of young men waiting for her space laughing as it disappeared. That was Tokyo wasn’t it? Were people killed there? Is she okay? Are the people who took the video okay? If you are please post another video and let us know you’re doing okay…we are watching for you.
Sixty-five years ago the most awful thing we thought could happen to anybody happened to everybody in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did they understand the leaflets falling from the American planes that told them to leave? Or, did the government tell them not to worry, like ours did so many dishonest times over the years? How many Marks listened to them and stayed? How many families hung onto the sick and dying until they finally - in terrible pain and grim fashion –passed… before the families themselves, exhausted from the journey this kind of grisly death exacts, gave up and just bowed their heads said some innocuous last words to one another and moved on after throwing the last bit of dirt on the grave of a loved one. Like Mark - who could have been a great dad, grandfather, great-grandfather and my best friend. How different would his life have been? How about mine?
Japan, for the second time in the lifetime of the country’s memory, is digging through unimaginable ruins for the remains of the people that made up their lives and, in some strange way, made up ours. The land is drunk with the blood of the love so many have lost. The ground is bloated with the corpses of children, women, young men and old alike – loved and unloved…known and unknown. They will be digging for a long time. And long after the news stops, they will be talking about the dark days of this horrible catastrophe in Japan and many will still be digging - maybe not through the hard rubble of the boards and bricks - but through the snapshots of the memories they will cling to ruthlessly, protecting for themselves alone, desperately bitter for the moments they were denied; the mothers of sons and daughters and the children of the many parents. Lest we forget the prisoners who could not be moved, the sick washed away in the hospitals, the fishermen trying to save the precious boats that measured the income their family needed to survive…all lost. Lifetimes lost in a moment; a moment we pray we will never understand.
Many people will ask “where is my God at this horrible moment?” Some will scream “this is what sin brings”. Others will wax philosophically about some “great plan”. Atheists will shout “this is just more proof”. It is proof alright; just not proof of an absent Creator. In the end, the mother whose lifeless baby rests in her muddy hands will only have the one question…”why her and not me?” She will never get that answer. I have never gotten mine.
I have often passed the grave of the one I loved without as much as a tear. I have cried myself out. I have drunk my guilt to death. I have hated myself to death and back and I have never fixed the broken part of me. I can tell that mother that she will never fix hers. No comfort there I guess; just a sad, awful truth. There are some things we cannot understand – they are so far beyond our wildest imagination they defy human comprehension. They smell of mad and ugly chance. They build cathedrals for atheists to stand in and pound their podiums just to say “I told you so!”, but they have no more of an answer than the ones that utter inane platitudes about Noah’s ark.
I believe that Jesus came to save us all. He came to save Mark from his grisly life. He came to save me from my suffocating guilt and he came to save the poor people in Japan from their staggering loss. He didn’t come to stop these things. He came to say “I will love you despite them and through them. I will love you through your despair, your anger, your misery, your terror and your own end”. You cannot choose the things that will happen to you in the dark of night as the world unleashes her violence or old men decide to send young men to war. But you can choose how to respond to them. I will respond to this with money, tears and prayers. There is nothing else I can do.
I did not choose to be this man…
I did not choose to fight this fight…
to suffer this confusion that drowns me…
to end up on this road all alone…
But I do choose you, my Lord.
I will not, in my time, understand the sun’s setting upon the good and the bad…
But I do know that you chose us…not in our times of wealth and fame but in our moments of grief and loss.
You chose us not when the sun was at its warmest in the fullness of our youth with the whole world ahead of us and the possibilities endless…
You chose us when the sky turned dark and there was no tomorrow from where we stood that day…
And because you choose me at my worst, I chose you at my best.
America’s prayers are with you Japan.
We are on our knees.
Our hearts are broken.
Your loss is felt.
Peace be with you…the peace that only God can give. Let the noise subside as you get through this terrible time; to come out to a time of peace, quiet and hope…blessed, sweet, soothing hope.
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
What must they be thinking right now? How resilient will this nation have to be? These people in this horror must find a way to rise again and look this most terrifying reality straight on, survive through it and thrive even when they think they cannot. And they must do so with a sense of purpose and resolve the rest of us could not understand because they will find this strength in a place they have visited within themselves once before. Which of us can imagine the face of such morbid fury? And for almost everyone living in Japan and growing up in the long shadow cast by two bombs dropped over sixty years ago upon a society that could have never imagined the horizon of devastation that lie ahead, they now, once again, have that black sun rising upon their innocent faces.
I was just a child reading about the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and we, as school children, were elated as the teacher told us about the evil empire of Japan that once existed and how we were forced to do this terrible thing to stop them from continuing a war that was strangling the world - a war we were told that the Japanese showed no interest in surrendering to even in the face of certain defeat. As a child I wondered why they had to bomb not one but two cities. Wasn’t there some island…some remote location where they would witness this horror without being subject to the barbaric and cataclysmic effects of this inhuman atrocity? This was to be capitulation through the evaporation of women, old men and children. There were no soldiers of any consequence in either city
Years later, as a Marine facing the docks that would take us all to Viet Nam, I strangely thought back to that moment and how that once evil empire was now one of our greatest allies. They would become the only country to draft into their own constitution a law that would prevent them from ever developing the outrageous power of atomic bombs and nuclear destruction. They would not pursue - even though they have proven they could very well have done just that – the same brutal technology which had been perpetrated upon them. They as a country, people and a government would never participate in the fury that came with the end, not just of their soldiers fighting in the trenches, but the women and children left behind in the nearly empty cities. Cities that were probably filled with people who, like many of us, were struggling to make sense of this war after so many years…a war that left them hungry and desperate. The letters from the front telling them as they told us that this one died or that one has gone missing. We were right to fight this war but we cannot deny that ordinary people suffered grievous personal loss brought about by a group of men who decided a fate that would engulf a nation…a world.
I wondered, would Viet Nam one day become our friend? Would all the lives that were being tossed into this death pyre be suddenly neutralized by the country we now so hated when it became a friend of America’s at last? Well, it did end as I had expected and the result is much the same. Today tourism to Viet Nam is a fascination for many Americans. Do they not realize the ground they walk on is soaked in the blood of so many young Americans…the blood of Mark? More about him in a minute.
The world was different in each case and for each war. The war against Hitler, Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito was different than the war against the unknown names of the north versus South Viet Nam. The people of the United States were not in favor of this southeastern Asian war. They protested, ran away to Canada, burnt draft notices and spit on soldiers. They blamed the soldiers as they returned as if they themselves had sat down one day at some large table and said – “You know I don’t like being here in the beautiful countryside enjoying a Coca-Cola on this peaceful summer Sunday afternoon - let’s go kill strangers!”
The soldiers were every bit as much the victims as were the people of Viet Nam. Names today are a blur…General Giap, Hanoi Jane, General Westmoreland, President Johnson - so weary from all the blood on his hands he ended up saying “I will not seek nor do I intend to run for President a second term.” Of course, his first term was actually the result of our beloved President Kennedy being killed by some strange, over-zealous, insignificant radical who bought his gun through a magazine!
A lucky shot brought all this about. Kennedy had said only a few months before his death “We should not get involved in sending troops to Viet Nam. I am opposed to sending our boys to fight a war there.” Had he lived would we not have gone? Would Mark still be here and would we still be buddies?
Now about Mark Pulisiano. He was handsome, strong, funny and my best friend. He got me busted for sneaking a candy break when he was on fire watch during boot camp at Paris Island which was every bit as scary as any war could ever be. We fought about it…then laughed about it. I waited for the right opportunity and got him busted for hiding cigarettes…it was a beautiful thing. We fought about that and then laughed about it. He didn’t die in Viet Nam so his name is not on the wall. I found this out from a client who visited the wall and could not find his name. I have never been to the wall and don’t expect I will ever go. But the war killed him as sure as it killed any name on that wall. He was blown up by a mine, shot then stabbed and left for dead. They took seven hours to get to him but somehow he managed to stay alive. He stayed alive for several years…well he hung onto to life for several years. In the end the wounds overcame him and he died. His family moved away and they drifted apart. They were all just fatigued watching Mark slowly lose his battle to ever fully return. I lost touch with them and just about everybody in my life.
Now what does this have to do with Japan and the tsunami? Everything! Wars and natural disasters are very much the same. They take from the left and the right, the front and the back, the good and the bad, the rich and the poor. They are indiscriminate in their sheer grim delivery of death. They don’t care – like bullets and bombs – tsunamis just do what they do. How many Marks are missing in Japan this very night? Men and women who are the best of friends, dearly loved by so many and loved so completely by a very few, like I loved Mark.
I remember the viral video with the woman and the phony parking space where she pulled down the fake sign and rolled up the plastic tarp…remember that one? It was unbelievable. She was so inventive. How many of us wanted to make our own space downtown and here she was filmed by a couple of young men waiting for her space laughing as it disappeared. That was Tokyo wasn’t it? Were people killed there? Is she okay? Are the people who took the video okay? If you are please post another video and let us know you’re doing okay…we are watching for you.
Sixty-five years ago the most awful thing we thought could happen to anybody happened to everybody in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did they understand the leaflets falling from the American planes that told them to leave? Or, did the government tell them not to worry, like ours did so many dishonest times over the years? How many Marks listened to them and stayed? How many families hung onto the sick and dying until they finally - in terrible pain and grim fashion –passed… before the families themselves, exhausted from the journey this kind of grisly death exacts, gave up and just bowed their heads said some innocuous last words to one another and moved on after throwing the last bit of dirt on the grave of a loved one. Like Mark - who could have been a great dad, grandfather, great-grandfather and my best friend. How different would his life have been? How about mine?
Japan, for the second time in the lifetime of the country’s memory, is digging through unimaginable ruins for the remains of the people that made up their lives and, in some strange way, made up ours. The land is drunk with the blood of the love so many have lost. The ground is bloated with the corpses of children, women, young men and old alike – loved and unloved…known and unknown. They will be digging for a long time. And long after the news stops, they will be talking about the dark days of this horrible catastrophe in Japan and many will still be digging - maybe not through the hard rubble of the boards and bricks - but through the snapshots of the memories they will cling to ruthlessly, protecting for themselves alone, desperately bitter for the moments they were denied; the mothers of sons and daughters and the children of the many parents. Lest we forget the prisoners who could not be moved, the sick washed away in the hospitals, the fishermen trying to save the precious boats that measured the income their family needed to survive…all lost. Lifetimes lost in a moment; a moment we pray we will never understand.
Many people will ask “where is my God at this horrible moment?” Some will scream “this is what sin brings”. Others will wax philosophically about some “great plan”. Atheists will shout “this is just more proof”. It is proof alright; just not proof of an absent Creator. In the end, the mother whose lifeless baby rests in her muddy hands will only have the one question…”why her and not me?” She will never get that answer. I have never gotten mine.
I have often passed the grave of the one I loved without as much as a tear. I have cried myself out. I have drunk my guilt to death. I have hated myself to death and back and I have never fixed the broken part of me. I can tell that mother that she will never fix hers. No comfort there I guess; just a sad, awful truth. There are some things we cannot understand – they are so far beyond our wildest imagination they defy human comprehension. They smell of mad and ugly chance. They build cathedrals for atheists to stand in and pound their podiums just to say “I told you so!”, but they have no more of an answer than the ones that utter inane platitudes about Noah’s ark.
I believe that Jesus came to save us all. He came to save Mark from his grisly life. He came to save me from my suffocating guilt and he came to save the poor people in Japan from their staggering loss. He didn’t come to stop these things. He came to say “I will love you despite them and through them. I will love you through your despair, your anger, your misery, your terror and your own end”. You cannot choose the things that will happen to you in the dark of night as the world unleashes her violence or old men decide to send young men to war. But you can choose how to respond to them. I will respond to this with money, tears and prayers. There is nothing else I can do.
I did not choose to be this man…
I did not choose to fight this fight…
to suffer this confusion that drowns me…
to end up on this road all alone…
But I do choose you, my Lord.
I will not, in my time, understand the sun’s setting upon the good and the bad…
But I do know that you chose us…not in our times of wealth and fame but in our moments of grief and loss.
You chose us not when the sun was at its warmest in the fullness of our youth with the whole world ahead of us and the possibilities endless…
You chose us when the sky turned dark and there was no tomorrow from where we stood that day…
And because you choose me at my worst, I chose you at my best.
America’s prayers are with you Japan.
We are on our knees.
Our hearts are broken.
Your loss is felt.
Peace be with you…the peace that only God can give. Let the noise subside as you get through this terrible time; to come out to a time of peace, quiet and hope…blessed, sweet, soothing hope.
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
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