Tethered Communities™ Finally Trademarked

Recently we won our Trademark approval for our seamless home to work environment process, Tethered Communities™. All of sudden I have a new found respect for small businesses that acquire that designation. I’m not talking about the hundreds and maybe thousands that merely use the Trademark (™) without having jumped through all the hoops fairly and legally battled to establish their products and services as something unique and not yet defined in the massive litany of Trademarks.

Clearly for our little company, this is a major victory. I don’t know that we will ever have the opportunity to produce an actual instance of this complex and incredibly powerful alternative to traditional work and labor force structuring. We are simply well ahead of the curve. I started building this concept over twenty years ago when I believed it was just a matter of time before we hit the “energy” wall and needed intelligent alternatives to “what going to work” looked like.

I began testing the program in the late 1980’s when I built the first of its kind work from home Telesales and Telemarketing company. Within a year I had over 500 people working from home and working on accounts like American Express, Lucent and even Ameritech. I’m not sure they knew exactly what they had gotten themselves into until it was too late but, once on board, my system worked so well that we were out performing any contractor these companies had ever known. We were more efficient, less costly and far more productive.

Before the Internet was even a thought, we were communicating weekly, and sometimes daily, with over 500 people working from home. I will admit those first years were crazy. We had grown so big, so fast that we consumed the top three floors of a deserted bank building. I remember that in the postal area of this old deserted bank they had this room with over a thousand mail slots. Every Friday afternoon the mail would come in or be dropped off by our 500 telemarketers. In their packages were their production reports, leads, hours and information on their project. And every Friday a small army descended on the “Mail” project.

I remember the color coded shopping carts – and I will never forget the squeaky wheels moving back and forth over the high gloss hardwood floors. First every package received had to be shoved into the right telemarketer slot in this enormous mailroom. The incoming packages had to contain all the information in the right order or they were tossed into another shopping cart to be sent back to the telemarketer who would have to fix the report and return it the next Friday (yup, they would lose a week’s work). We simply had too many people to allow them to make mistakes that we would have to fix during our very busy week. They learned quickly what had to be done and how it had to be done if they were going to get more work and, more importantly, get paid.

From the incoming packages that recorded all the work from the week prior, another group would scoop up over 500 packages in five painted shopping carts (one color for each client project) and deliver the first round of production recording where each package was opened, the contents analyzed, new leads prepared everything attached put into a color coded manila envelope which was then tossed into the coordinating color coded shopping cart. From there they moved to accounting. Here the envelopes were opened and, depending on their payment order, each telemarketer’s work was reviewed and calculated credits added to his or her profile in the computer (the old ones with the lead screen and green fonts). Credits made it easier to figure a telemarketer’s pay because they were paid in different formats; some hourly, others commission and some by appointments. The credit system allowed us to track the telemarketer by their job and the each credit equaled a dollar figure. The envelope was then filled with a revenue report that would be signed by the manager of that client and telemarketer, neatly tucked into the proper manila envelope and moved to the next department.

The Billing Department would then figure out what we were to charge each client. Using the production reports generated by the telemarketer, each accountant was trained on each client’s system of revenue. They would create the bill for the client and add that dollar amount into a separate report which logged telemarketer’s credits converted into dollars. This was a sophisticated report which I envisioned. It calculated the fixed and variable costs of the company for each preceding week. Our company flexed up and down considerably every week. One week we had 24 people in training, 16 people working sales, and a staff of eight or ten people to answer the phone, run errands, etc. and of course somewhere between 490 and 540 telemarketers working from home. I had built out a very complex but accurate spreadsheet that could account for all the factors - fixed and variable, from heating and AC to gas in the cars and pizza on Friday and Saturday nights which we would calculate to within a few dollars each week.

That final telemarketing report was neatly folded and put into the same manila folder, tossed into the appropriate shopping cart and then brought to my office. An enormous room; my office had a grand oak desk and seating area by a large window in the far corner. In the center of the office there was a huge conference table. There I would sit with the ten top managers and we would pore over every telemarketer report both those on the computer and those in the manila envelopes with the color circles pasted on the front. Are the hours right? Was the compensation to the telemarketer correct? Were new leads in the package? Were the hours accounted for? How much were we charging the client? Had the cash count been right (Oh, yes, we would always bring in somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars in cash every week) What was the telemarketer grade (Each week they were graded on performance - three bad weeks and you did not hear from us again)? Once we had all this done I would sign each and every report which would then go to Bob. Good old Bob, who would sift through all these payment and billing reports to match against my giant spreadsheet to enter in all the data and prove out the week. By Monday morning I would know, within pennies, how much money we had made or lost the preceding week and when you’re billing in excess of $100,000.00 a month that was no small feat.

Once the leads left my room, they were rushed over to the mail room in the appropriate color coded shopping carts. There, once again, the “Mail” army would begin putting every completed envelope in the corresponding telemarketer’s mail slot on the other side of the massive mail room.

Finally, by end of day Saturday, over 500 packages had been received, calculated, audited, refilled with new work, organized, billing completed, pay calculated and were ready to go back out. The march would begin on Sunday morning. Car after car drove up to the vacuum tubes that used to send deposits back and forth from the bank and now served another purpose. A telemarketer drove up, put his or her telemarketing ID in the tube and it was sent off to Monica in the little glass room. She handed the ID to one of ten runners who would dash off to the mail room, one floor up and over, find the appropriate slot, match it against the name and run the envelope down to Monica. Monica would take out the agreement sheet and read to the telemarketer his or her account balance. Once they agreed, the paper was sent out for their signature and then back to Monica for her signature. Then, at long last, the tube, now filled with the telemarketer’s work, was swooshed out to the waiting telemarketer who emptied the tube and sent it back to Monica to repeat the process. This same process would occur over 500 times until the late evening Sunday. On Monday morning we started the process once again.

Those were the first ever Tethered Communities™. They existed about five years before the Internet. I sold the company. I didn’t want to but the price was too good to ignore and the work was exhausting. Even back then I knew America needed to start developing an intelligent process for moving people from office work to work from home and that they would need to create sound and accountable environments where managers would be assured that their people were productive. We were smartly reducing the need to overbuild structures while continuing the senseless migration of talent moving like nomads across the American landscape looking for each new corporate mecca. We put 500 people to work from home and not one of them lived further than 30 miles from the office and we could have sold anything, anywhere.

I miss the days when my life was that busy and that much fun. I know that I’ve had some amazing adventures in my life because I always wanted to try what I thought no one else had. I never stopped believing that someday America would wake up and start looking for an alternative to the way we conduct work in an effort to reduce in-house costs, gridlock, and dependency on foreign fuel and as a means to stabilize our economy. We are at that place. I can only hope that someone sees this, reads about Tethered Communities™ or decides that the way we do business needs to be recalculated. I’ve been ready for 20 years…now I guess it’s up to someone with the vision and guts to match mine.

Tethered Communities™ is the process of deconstructing everything in a singular fixed job function - or department or elements of a function- from the hardware and software to the emails and conversations to recreate them more efficiently in a remote structure. I created the proprietary mathematical process “nTelegenz®”, which calculates statistical as well as organic values to take apart a work position and reassemble it to be more effective; removing redundancies, compressing activity and eliminating dead time to reduce costs and making them more productive. The real value is that you can pick a Tethered Community up and set it down anywhere and it will operate more effectively than ever. Our program invites companies to move these positions to home offices to create seamless home to work environments but they can work just as well in hotels, airports and even cars.

By creating the proper Tethered Community you are reducing over all pay, easing gridlock, reducing dependency on fuel, creating flexible key positions allowing your company to have a global reach without the cost of global presence while stimulating local home building activity and by way of economics eliminating our need for overseas employment. This is easily one of the smartest economic moves America's corporate entities could approve. The argument of maintaining control and exercising management becomes moot when you compare moving positions to homes in America as opposed to moving offices to India.

We’ve come a long way from color coded shopping carts and an army of “Mail” room specialists. Now we use the Internet, math and analytics to reduce real costs by as much as 3-8% and increase net profits by 2-6%. It was just an idea in the 80’s now it’s a certainty –America will adopt some form of work from home regiment. How we get it done will determine whether we get it right or fumble with the process until someone figures out what we at The Bosson Group already know. You can read about Tethered Communities™ on our website, learn about it in my many white papers or now, you can look us up in the USPTO. Who knows, maybe someone will see this and wonder whether it all makes sense to try it. If you do, contact me. I don’t have the painted shopping carts anymore but I've got the program down to a science. An actual and real science. How cool is that?

Frank Bosson
President, The Bosson Group
209 642 2821
frankb@thebossongroup.com
www.thebossongroup.com
www.alphabyters.com

Something rotten…

There is something so Sinatra about these days…

“Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again too few to mention…
I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption…
I planned each chartered course, each careful step along the highway…”

As 2011 ends and the election year of 2012 begins we face again the grim reality of an economy that at its best is stalled and at its worst without denial, still declining. So what is the President to do?

He had hoped that this economic quagmire he stepped into when he was sworn into office, would by sudden chance or by way of this vaporous economic “cycle” economists trout out like a powerful thoroughbred kicking at the sand and snorting into the face of all detractors, declaring “see everything comes back around…it’s just a cycle” But alas it did not, in some mysterious and unexplainable way – “Advance to “GO and collect your money” - resolve itself. Had it, he would then stand proudly at the bow of this mighty economic super ship, throw out his arms wide as if he alone embraced and represented all the solutions to our problems , while tucking the blindfold he has worn for all these years swiftly and adeptly into his back pocket, proclaiming to a recovering nation that finally, he, President Barack Obama, brought us back from the brink of fiscal annihilation and we could, with our new found wealth, once again clog the highways and discuss our lousy jobs at some distant Starbucks,

“And more, much more than this, I did it my way…”

He would throw back the curtain of OZ and humble himself deceitfully

“Yes, there were time I’m sure you knew…
I bit off more than I could chew…
But through it all I had no doubt…
I ate it up and spit it out…I face it all and I stood tall…

In 2008 a man who had nothing to lose went for broke. He had some pretty clever people helping him understand this magic trick he would have to pull off – but that’s all you need…the right people with enough smoke and mirrors and you can make anything look like it’s gone away.
But the economy was not on some ridiculous invisible clock that rolled around with curious precision to reset itself at “good to go” every time it failed. Sometimes, like in 1929, it fails and that’s just about it. But he had another curtain further back and he stuffed this curtain with a few trillion dollars. He tucked that money away like an old gypsy woman filling her mattress because she could not nor would trust the banks. His mattress – very intricately woven into his plan- was ironically what that poor old woman so dreaded, and for good reason…they were Obama’s five banks.

The Washington Post lead with this headline last week (Jan11-2012)

Obama defies Congress with ‘recess’ picks

Nominations could provoke constitutional fight

And the article went on to say (in portion)

“Pushing the limits of his recess appointment powers, President Obama on Wednesday bypassed the Senate to install three members of the National Labor Relations Board and a director for the controversial new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — moves Republicans said amounted to unconstitutional power grabs.

Mr. Obama said the appointments, which he previewed during a campaign-style speech in Ohio, were necessary because Senate Republicans have blocked him at every turn. But in making the move, he rejected three precedents, including two in which he played a part,that would have blocked the appointments.”

“For what is a man, what has he got…
If not himself than he’ has “not…
To say the things he truly feels…
and knot the words of one who kneels”…

And with the swoop of a very underhanded and controversial move he appointed his personal liaison to the five big banks where he had stuffed our money those many years ago. Now he had a person he, himself had put in place - his personal goon - setup to go out and get those nasty banks, now very, very wealthy from the interest three trillion dollars can get you over three years, to get onboard his plan and whip this economic disaster and turn it around once and for all, by golly. And so we arrive at the second part to Mr. Obama’s 2008 re-election plan. Otherwise known as,” now that I have stolen 3.4 trillion dollars and hidden it from the public – how do I get it back into the public and take full credit for it?”

The article told us the rest…

“I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Mr. Obama said in Shaker Heights, drawing applause from his audience. “When Congress refuses to act and as a result hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.”

end quote from article...

And with these words and his previous dirty deed, the checkmate was put in place. Now these noble men moving to the marching orders of this brave and independent political figure will somehow manage to get trillions of dollars into the economy and spark employment like tossing a Molotov cocktail into the dried wood of a southern California forest.

We are about to see the magic. Get ready…Get set…

“The record shows I took the blows…
and did it my way …”

It sure was slick – good going B.O.. For the rest of Americans fooled by this terrible deception it is once again time to mosey up to the government’s sloppy seconds trough and feed; at least through this year and most of next. Kinda’ like that chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral – it don’t get better than this!

“Yes, it was my way”

He didn't just beat all republican contenders, he separated himself from his own party choosing to throw them under his fast moving bus and become the President of the people. In all fairness others have trodden this pathway - some not so righteous others more so - from the famous to the infamous. No doubt our beguiling Mr. Prez B.O. put a whole new swagger on this dagger. Oh’, don’t it hurt so good!

Frank Bosson

CEO, The Bosson Group

Wring in the New Year

Well, it’s the beginning of 2012 and we’ve been reading and talking about this year in virtually every capacity and category there appears to be. Frankly, this year’s conversations of final doom are rivaled only by the great computer date-rollover debate of Y2K. You remember that one, right?

So what will it be? Do we believe a rock tablet dug out of the rainforest predicting the end of the corn people? Or, are we inclined to look at our economic future with a cynical eye and wonder when and if we will finally recover; if “recover” is even the right word (hint and spoiler “it is not the right word”). Are these the days of the apocalypse or the days of the some miraculous halcyon beginning? Like most prognostications, the answer is more like a little from “column A” and a little from “column B”.

I’m going to make this short - a pleasant change from my previous writings, huh? Consider this a New Year’s gift from me to you. So unto the question at hand; are we in the last days or the first? Are we counting down on the Mayan calendar to utter doom or are we in the final throes of the most devastating economic meltdown in the history of the vast majority living today?

To address the first question is absolutely mandatory. Every generation since man first became man has believed that they were living in the end days. If you read the New Testament the writers and the readers were convinced that they were witnessing the final days. Surely they felt that way during the collapse of Rome, Bubonic plague, the Little Ice Age, World War I, The Great Dust Bowl, World War II and even Y2K. Have to do a shout out to my man Harold Camping who has not once, not twice, but thrice (look it up) predicted man’s demise. Yet, in every case we humans have muddled through and carried on. So is the myth of end times just that, a myth?

I don’t think so. If anything is consistent about the story of life it’s that to every season there is a beginning, a middle, and sadly, an end. I think we can all agree on two things; there will be an end and we are really, really bad at predicting when that end will come. So, for the purposes of this blog we will address the next year respectfully submitting that the Mayans meant something far different than the end of mankind. And, if the end comes, well, not enough people read this blog (2012 coincidentally but that’s including me at two different email addresses) that my words will come back to bite me that bad.

Show me the beef!

Does anyone remember Clara Peller’s raspy inquest? Well, for those reading who are television advertisement challenged, Clara’s friends were admiring a big fluffy bun when they lifted the top bun to reveal a miniscule patty evoking Clara’s wrath and the iconic phrase, “where’s the beef?” The ad was an enormous success for Wendy’s and entered American lexicon permanently when later that year Mondale leaned over when Gary Hart repeated his “new ideas” phrase to hear Mondale respond “where’s the beef?” Thus was born a phrase and a classic argument in politics. I hear what you’re saying about this latest blog...So where’s the beef?

Rabbit out of the Hat Trick

Think back and recall the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency, when he muscled through a bill he called the “Stimulus Package”. He got that money, remember? He got three point four trillion dollars. I remember seeing graphs trying to explain to me what 3.4 trillion dollars looked like. Hey, I’m a working stiff - you don’t have to convince me it’s a lot of money. But what happened to all that money. You haven’t you seen much of that 3.4 trillion spread around, have you? No? I didn’t think so. As a matter of fact I don’t know anybody who can account for even a fraction of that money.

As the legend is told from Capitol Hill, that stimulus money, which we not only did not have but based on our famous “faith” economics, could not - even in our wildest dreams- possibly asseverate, was handed over to three or was it five major banks to be used to stimulate our battered economy nearly four years ago. So where’s the money? If the banks kept it and are not obligated to explain to the President what they did with it, we may be up a three trillion dollar creek without a proverbial paddle.

If on the other hand, as I strongly suspect, Obama has kept a big stash of that cash for right now, we are about to see the biggest rabbit pulled out of the hat trick ever played out in front of a barely alive global audience. I think Mr. Obama knew all along that he would need something extraordinary to renew a sagging presidency in his end days – he kept that money for exactly this moment in history. If I am wrong and he is not as bright as he appears then he has squandered the money or it never really had the value he thought it would. Either way, if there is no money for the rabbit in the hat trick we are in for a very, very bad 2012.

Year after year, fiscal quarter after fiscal quarter, we watch our hazy half-heartened government officials pull out their pink paint rollers and attempt to paint a rosy economic picture. Didn’t the White House tell us last year that unemployment had finally stabilized and we could count on the American economy to start a slow but steady recovery? That wasn’t quite true, was it? In fact in the last three years there have been 8 (count'em 8!) government presentations to different sub-committees promising that the great recession had ended and bright days lay just around the corner. And after three years, eight different studies, analyses and conclusions we are still sinking in the most toxic economic nightmare we have ever witnessed. If they said it eight times and meant it then they are very stupid. If they said it eight times and didn’t mean it, then they are very cold blooded. Either of those two options do not bode well for you and me.

Joblessness, homelessness and hopelessness -oh my!

The fact is that jobs have hit a low we can’t even compute any longer. Many people don’t realize that in the jobless count given to you by the government they do not list all the people who have simply run out of benefits. Nor do they mention the tens of thousands of independent contractors who are no longer working but never showed up on the unemployment ranks because they are not counted in those numbers. When housing went down it took with it all the ancillary businesses that support housing - and that’s just about everything in America. Years ago we got out of the “making it” business and into the “servicing it” business. We do not have the huge steel mills, car manufacturers or clothing factories – they’re gone.

I promised to keep this short so I won’t go into the whole history of American manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution and the shortsighted avarice of outsourcing in the last two decades. Let’s just say we are very much like a soldier who has long since fired his last round and now faces the enemy swinging wildly with the butt end of his rifle.

Clara eventually found the beef!

In a 1985 commercial Clara Peller, who made “where’s the beef” popular, sold the phrase out to Prego when she declared in their sauce she had finally found the beef. So what is it Mr. President? Have you found the beef?

I suspect Mr. Obama is as bright as he appears. My guess is we are about to ramp up from candle light to nuclear blindness – overnight and just in time for a re-election. Let’s say for the sake of argument that our newly minted president understood in 2008 that no one he knew (and he kept company with a rather intellectual bunch) the depth or constitution (no pun intended) of the economic misery we had stepped in when that mortgage bubble burst. And let’s further say that when he took office he had the wits about him to acquire that money not for some instantaneous and frivolous state funded fribble but to do exactly what he needed to get done – bring him a second term.

The Statue that blinks

If I am right we will suddenly see an influx of cash on a scale that will make the Statue of Liberty blink. The great and not so late President will turn out cash like a drunk on a spending spree. Remember Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions (forgettable maybe but ironically similar)? In Brewster’s Million’s Pryor has a set amount of time to give away a million dollars in order to inherit the equivalent of ten times that.

In this scenario Mister Obama has a few months to flood the economy with so much money that, unless you are deliberately nailed into a dungeon and buried under three feet of fresh cow dung refusing to work, there will be a job for you. Now I’m betting he doesn’t know or care whether this errant dump of feloniously acquired cash will start our economic engine but more to the fact it will get him re-elected. We have to put on our politician hat to understand a politician who can see no further than his or her next term. For the President the stakes of this gambit are ever greater.

So, if I am right. Be prepared to be dazzled. The next four months will see America come to life. If Obama is smart, the money gets invested in the small business engine which is the life blood of our economy. If he is in bed with big business, it will be consumed (inhaled like a junkie on a line of coke) by the greedy Fortune 500 who will promise him employment through his re-election. After that the jobs will dwindle away and the fortunes kept in the top offices of America’s most despicable CEO’s - a trillion to get us up and working and two trillion to keep their lifestyle when the money and the jobs evaporate like water in a shallow puddle on the Texas panhandle in mid- July.

If by err of heart, will of mind or blind luck it ends up in the hands of entrepreneurial America then, just by mistake, Mr. Obama may restart the American engine and slowly relight this darkened world. If he is like most politicians, he will do this with blind ambition or blind abandon but either way look for a good 2012 and 2013. If he decides that even though he can’t have a third term and wants for the good of all mankind saying “what the heck, let’s throw the peasants some cake” – then who knows - he might just become the most beloved President since FDR.

Either way…unless he’s blown the wad, it’s a going to be a good year…a very good year.

God Bless
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
frankb@thebossongroup.com

P.S. Sorry, Jaffe but I am a Christian first, an American second and a business guy third. So if you don't want to do business with my signature then I guess I don't need your business.

The Inferred-Structure Part 2

America is Falling Apart – Literally!

Roads and Highways

Americans drive 3 trillion miles a year, spending 44 hours stuck in gridlock. Moving over 47 thousand miles of Interstate roads built over fifty years ago, we access another estimated 4 million miles in connecting roads that run through our countryside, small towns and primary cities. All of this is a part of a mad collection of criss-crossing paved and unpaved travel ways built or trodden down over the last four hundred years to make this the most complex road system in the world.

The only time in history anyone ever attempted anything on this scale was 2,000 years ago when the Romans built over 83,000 miles of roads and that was built over a similar period of four hundred years. Their roads, ostensibly built to accommodate troop movement over vast spaces in record time, connected all parts of the known world to the ancients. At that time, all roads truly led to Rome. What started out as a means of moving armies brought civilizations from throughout the known world together for the first time in history. This troop movement strategy was not lost on the eyes of the modern leaders when Adolph Hitler used the German Autobahn to move his troops during his infamous Blitzkrieg. So impressive was that tactic that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as President Eisenhower, signed into law an Interstate Bill of 1956 that would, for all practical purposes, allow American troops to move quickly from one end of the continent to the next; east to west, north or south - to defend our freedom.

No other program in history matched the ambition and sheer volume of this task. Nobody moved more dirt…not the pyramids…not the wall of China – No one! Today, of course, many countries, including China, are working feverishly to construct the roads and highways they will need to connect their empires. China may end up with a far larger highway system than any country including the United States. However, fifty years from now, as fortunes change - and they will - China will face the same dilemma we are facing today.

Patch And Pray

No, it’s not a bumper sticker or a clever political axiom. It is the current U.S. policy toward road construction, reconstruction and repair. Across our country, as our dismal political planning and pathetic greedy corporate façade slowly peels away, we are facing the grim reality of a highway system that is not only broken, it’s crumbling beneath our feet. Cities and states that are bereft of any meaningful government assistance rely on “luck” to keep their roads operable. Over 100,000 bridges in America are in decay and some have risen to alarming emergency need levels. Of the estimated 200,000 bridges in America, both private and public, at least 77,000 need repairs right now! More importantly, 20 major bridges, estimated to access nearly 10 million commuters daily are in desperate need of immediate repair and range from the smallest of the 20; Colorado’s South Platte River Bridge over I-25 with a daily commuter load of 208,353; to the largest; New Jersey’s Route-21 Bridge over the I-80 corridor (the busiest bridge corridor in America) with more than 518,000 daily commuters. That’s over 725,000 daily commuters for just two bridges that are considered to be at emergency level need of repairs. Millions of people go to work every day with the pavement beneath their cars in critical condition – conditions that could give way any day!

It doesn’t end there. As we see more and more streets crippled by degrading pavement, sinkholes, potholes and rusted rebar poking through our bridges all decaying from asphalt to gravel right before our eyes, we have to face the sobering reality that there is no money to fix these problems. America relies on these roads to move all of her products from point of origin to the corner store. Whether it’s tools, office supplies or food for our local grocery stores, everything we rely on to build this empire upon, to comfort ourselves with or satisfy a nation’s growing hunger is, at some point, on a truck stuck in traffic on streets that are disappearing beneath their wheels. And what is our current method of dealing with these critical situations?

“Patch and Pray” was first spoken to life by The American Society of Civil Engineers former Executive Director Patrick Natale. He wasn’t just talking about roads. Nope - the American Society of Civil Engineers had issued its report card on America’s total infrastructure and things don’t look so good. For “Patch and Pray”, Natale was referring to local government’s current policy toward fixing serious road, dam and bridge problems. There is no scheduled maintenance – no ten year plan – no step by step strategy…there is only “Patch and Pray”. Do what you can on the things that you can no longer avoid and pray that something else doesn’t fail. Road and bridge failure is reality of our times that is quickly becoming a certainty.
Electrical Grid
Our electrical grid is an archaic monstrosity which mixes fiber optics with metal cabling and copper wire to create an unstable power core that is on the brink of utter collapse. No one who has any affiliation on a professional level with our electrical grid denies that we have powered through, built over and combined technologies that are not only unable to communicate with one another but, in some cases, can cause failure by association with one another. When one set of protocols from the forties touches off another technology from the nineties, watch out!
No one is saying that we could have, at some point, stopped everything and said “let’s tear this all down and rebuild a new infrastructure in its place”. Undoubtedly this was going to occur as technology outpaced existing construction. Something had to give. The problem is not so much that we couldn’t stop and build it all properly. We didn’t stop to talk about co-existing codes of behavior and put a plan in place to marry these technologies. What was fiber optics going to mean to overhead electrical grids? What are we going to do two hundred years from now with spent nuclear fuel rods? At what point do we begin the process of shutting down sections of this out-of-date grid and bear a slight inconvenience for certain reliability in the future?
There were three major recent blackouts in New York City - 1965, 1977 (I was there for that one) and 2003. In 2003, a switch in Ohio overloaded a system that brought down a third of the east coast and plunged New York City into darkness for two days. Enron engineered power consumption, processing enormous overcharges throughout California. Californians stoically reached out to one another during these manufactured travesties to lend aid to the elderly in danger and hospital patients who faced grim conditions during rolling brownouts.
10,000 power plants of all sizes and shapes, from coal and natural gas to nuclear connecting 164,000 miles of power lines, dot a countryside littered with outdated transformers and unmanned control stations. We suffer 200 minutes of blackouts to Japan’s 6. With America’s electrical needs increasing by 20% per year and the ability to repair our existing grid at only 6-8% yearly, you don’t have to be a math whiz to see where this is headed.
Dams
Nobody knows for sure how many dams there are in America but the number is in the tens of thousands. Most of these dams get little if any inspection. Thousands are orphan dams left behind by coal companies that have long since left their coal camps and are no longer supervised. Thousands of levees like those in Louisiana are attended to by local farmers. Hundreds of earthen dams in North Central California are the only thing keeping the ocean from mixing with our fresh water supply in California and contaminating a water supply that would take years to recover.
In Texas there are seven inspectors for 7,400 dams and they inspected only 239 in 2007. Iowa has one full time and one part time inspector for a recorded 3,344 dams (they estimate) and they inspected only 128 in 2007. The list goes on and on. For states like New York and California the numbers are worse - much worse.

Drinking Water

Americans drink more water in a day than all of Africa consumes for any reason in a month. Potable water is a major concern according to The World Health Organization. Some estimates say that one third of earth’s population does not have or has limited access to suitable drinking water. As disturbing as that may be, we are using up this finite resource at an alarming rate. Not because fresh water doesn’t in some ways replenish itself, certainly it does at least in most advanced industrial nations including Europe, United States, Australia and Canada for example, but in many parts of the world it does not. And despite our best efforts water is becoming more important and harder to access in satisfying quantities.

We are consuming more water of poorer quality than ever in our history. More people putting more demands on limited resources and the natural ecological changes in global freshwater distribution make the future of available drinking water frightening. We read about floods consuming towns adjacent polluted rivers like the Mississippi and areas with normally sufficient rainfall experiencing drought; but because we can still turn on our tap and see water flowing we figure everything is okay. It may not be a problem right now but in the next two decades as more people live longer and birth into our growing population all reaching for potable water while surface quantities diminish, water will become big business. It’s the next fossil fuel where we will see extraordinary pricing.

And why is water suddenly an issue? Water in itself is not but pollution by a strained sewage system that is aging rapidly and seeping into our drinking water is a problem! America has to wake up to the fact that keeping Southern California green in lawns and gardens and the lavish, wasteful use of expendable fresh water to green Las Vegas simply cannot continue unchecked.

The average age of the American sewer system is 50 years old. The 85 mile Delaware Aqueduct is 70 years old and provides half the drinking water for New York City. Because it is leaking up from the ground at the rate of 25 million gallons a day it is literally sinking from below the small town of Wawarsing in upstate New York. Because there is no alternative source for shutting the water down, this town will eventually succumb to the rising waters and simply cease to exist. And because 25 million gallons of water a day to a city the size of New York is such a tiny number compared to what the aqueduct delivers, it simply doesn’t make sense to shut it down to fix it. Unfortunately for the big picture thinkers this is a self-correcting problem. Eventually the aqueduct will collapse, at least in the Wawarsing, area and the flow will be stopped by an act of ignorance.

Will we drink our own sewage? Yup. In fact in some countries recovering waste water to provide drinkable water is already a matter of fact. Here in the United States as our sewage system breaks down we will be forced to make that choice. Contaminates in some water are so bad that towns like Maywood, California (just outside Los Angeles) have only brown water to drink. The government tells them it’s safe to drink. Would you drink brown water with a metallic taste?

It sounds like something straight out of The Wizard of Oz…”Sinkholes, Sewage and Bridges, Oh my!” But we are good at listing our problems, if nothing else. Who has solutions?
Rather than going on with all the particulars of America’s decline, I will simply post the 2009 report card given on our infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

2009 Grades
Aviation D
Bridges C
Dams D
Drinking Water D-
Energy D+
Hazardous Waste D
Inland Waterways D-
Levees D-
Public Parks and Recreation C-
Rail C-
Roads D-
Schools D
Solid Waste C+
Transit D
Wastewater D-

America's Infrastructure GPA: D
Estimated 5 Year Investment Need: $2.2 Trillion

The Crime of Redundancy

Sooner than later we will have to put people back to work adding more cars to an already unstable highway system and insufferable gridlock. These expanded commercial areas will be placing more demand on our electrical system and calling for more sewer and water delivery. Dramatically off balance from decades of irreversible fluctuations in everything from market conditions to architecture, stretching our infrastructure thinner is not a solution we can abide.

The biggest crime in all this is not so much our needs but our insufferable ignorance and systematic abuse of the environment and the existing resources at our disposal. The Bosson Group has a plan to reduce the pressure on all these structures and provide immediate temporary relief. Believe it or not we have a program of abatement that will allow us to catch our collective breath and continue to support our economic appetite. We can reorganize and redirect our capital to fix the most badly affected portions of our infrastructure while reducing gridlock, dependency on fossil fuels and the demand for property needs including more unnecessary connections to water, electricity and road wear and tear.

By strategically deploying our telecommuting program, we can intelligently move large sections of Americans to work from home positions. Tethered Communities™ are seamless home to work environments that reduce employer costs, increase productivity and reduce the demand on power and fuel. These awful problems which are compounded by unemployment will become intolerable with a major shift toward employment.

As Americans we will have to face a grim reality and change our selfish “have it your way” attitude. We are going to have to learn to share and play nice with one another. By using Tethered Communities™ we can begin to ease the burden of redundancy. And in the end redundancy is the single largest factor contributing to our crumbling structure.

For more information contact Frank Bosson at frankb@thebossongroup.com or call 209.642.2821.

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’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

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