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