Big Business and Republicans Part Ways
I’ve written about this before, and Newsweek notes it in a recent article: big business is parting ways with the Republican Party. I think this is long overdue, frankly.
Take health-care reform. From the time the bill hit Congress, Republicans found themselves opposite big industry interests. From the drugmakers to the doctors to the insurers, every major player in the health-care battle declared themselves willing to work with Democrats to enact some variant on reform. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, were almost universally opposed. Health-care reform advocates eventually dug up a handful of Republican notables to support reform, and in a radio address, President Obama singled out four for special notice: former health and human services secretaries Louis Sullivan and Tommy Thompson and former Senate majority leaders Bill Frist and Bob Dole. But, as reported by The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney, it turned out that each of those Republican defectors had direct financial connections to the health-care industry, either as lobbyists or corporate consultants. In other words, these were folks whose allegiances to industry trumped their allegiances to their political party.
Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Jim DeMint make the case for why…
That’s souring relationships on the Hill. Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the House’s most economically conservative members, says that he’s talking tougher with corporations than ever before. The problem, he argues, is that industry has drifted away from its support of free enterprise. "As long as big business was defending free markets, we didn’t have a problem," he says. The trend now is for individual businesses and industry groups to push for regulation that is structured in such a way that they come out ahead—or make competitors worse off.
Ryan and DeMint believe that the Republican Party bears the blame for the current state of affairs. While in power, Republicans became too used to making bargains with business, such as the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, which provided the pharmaceutical industry with a windfall at taxpayers’ expense. As a result, the party got "caught up in trying to win different industries by doing something for them," says DeMint. Now "established firms are used to cutting deals with the party in power."
Free markets are the key driver of prosperity for all and are the foundation this country has been built upon. Cutting deals for regulations that promote one industry or one company over another has nothing to do with either capitalism or free markets.
Best Super Bowl Ad Ever?
The Saints and Colts will be great to watch on Sunday, but with what I do in marketing, I’m equally looking forward to the ads.
Here’s one of my favorite Super Bowl ads ever, from 1994.
(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded video above.)
Question: What’s your favorite Super Bowl ad? (Post a YouTube link if you have one, otherwise, just describe it!)
The Geography of Unemployment
This is a fascinating unemployment chart showing the progression of unemployment during the “Great Recession” we’re experiencing.
(E-mail and RSS feed readers can click through for the video.)
Almost every one of us knows someone who is between jobs during these tough times. What are the best strategies we can use to help friends find their next job? Or if you’re one of the searchers, what strategies are you finding most effective to secure one? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Wanted
Wanted: CEO for a car company with billions of debt, old products that nobody wants, and no profits in sight.
Must greatly enjoy your every move being micromanaged and second guessed by the United States Government and the United Auto Workers union, who are your majority shareholders and can fire you at any moment. You must swiftly implement their decisions, which will make no business sense but fulfill their own parochial interests instead.
Pay is low, don’t count on your pension being there when you retire, and there will be absolutely no bonuses. Constant and merciless attacks for even accepting a salary will be a normal part of the job. Must travel regularly in a 1985 Chevy Citation to report to your bosses in Washington DC.
Complete and utter failure may result in you qualifying for a bailout worth billions of dollars. Especially in an election year when the President will need to carry Michigan.
Have We Hit Bottom Yet?
Here’s a chart from the Calculated Risk blog (a great read, by the way) showing four bad bear markets.
The gray line is the Great Depression, where the low was 89.2% from the top. Red and green are more recent (1973 oil crisis and 2000 dotcom bust) where the lows were about 50% before they turned around.
The blue line is this economic downturn today. Was 56.8% the low? Or are we headed for a double dip? (Similar to the one you’ll note on the Great Depression graph line.)
Time will tell. I sincerely hope the recovery has truly begun, but it’s still going to be a jobless (and translation to governments: “tax revenue-less”) recovery for a long time.
Do you think the economy has hit bottom yet? Or is there more to come? Use the comments below to share your opinion.
Getting to Inbox Zero: It Can Be Done
I deal with a huge amount of e-mail every day…usually 300-400 messages. A lot of those are spam, and many of them are not messages that require my personal attention, but I still manage to get my inbox to zero about once a week.
(There are some people I know who can do this once a day. Once in a while, I wish that I could do that — and once in a while, I do — but for the most part, getting to Inbox Zero on Friday afternoons is an achievable goal that still takes a lot of hard work to accomplish.)
So how do you get to Inbox Zero? I thought I’d share my tips for how I accomplish it. (This certainly has roots in the Getting Things Done methodology, but not all of that works for me, so this is my twist on it.)
Laying the Foundation
First, from my perspective, you can’t do Inbox Zero unless you have a task list. Whether it’s a to-do list on paper, Outlook tasks, or some other way of tracking your to-dos, it’s a simple fact that many of the e-mails you receive create work for you to accomplish.
You may say, “my inbox is my task list…every e-mail I leave there represents something I need to do.” Two points in response: first, it’s mixed in with a lot of other stuff, and that’s bad organization. Second, you’re wasting huge amounts of valuable time “reinterpreting” the e-mail into your action item over and over again. With a separate task list, you can do that once and it’s done forever. Don’t underestimate how many mental cycles you’re wasting trying to remember what you were supposed to do in response to that e-mail with the subject line of “Hey Bob” that is actually about the annual report.
Want to (Almost) Get Rid of Voice Mail?
I really dislike voice mail. So much so that my outbound voice mail message suggests you send me an e-mail if it’s urgent to reach me.
For those who still leave me voice messages, I’ve recently replaced my standard-issue cell phone company voice mail, first with YouMail, and then with Google Voice. As a result, my voice messages now come to me as e-mail (or SMS text) messages with an imperfect, but good enough, transcription of the message.
First, YouMail. It’s a great service. It will cost you about $6 per month to get basic transcription service, which only covers the first 15 seconds of the first 50 messages you get every month. It’s a nice service and I’d use it again.
That said, Google Voice is also great, and it’s free. They just added transcription, and while the transcription quality is nowhere near as good as YouMail, it’s probably good enough for most.
Here’s the thing about Google Voice: they intend you to change your phone number, and have people calling your Google number to then ring into your mobile or office phones. That’s great if it works for you, but I simply wasn’t in the position to change my number.
So instead, I forwarded my cell phone voice mail to my Google Voice mailbox. Here’s how you can do it with your carrier (replace 5305551212 with your Google Voice number in the instructions):
- AT&T: *004*15305551212#
- Verizon: *715305551212
- Sprint/Nextel: Call customer service and request they change your forwarding
- T-Mobile: *004*15305551212#
If you decide to change your mind and go back to your regular voice mail, here’s how you do that as well (replace 5305551111 with your cell phone number):
- AT&T: ##004#, then *004*15305551111#
- Verizon: *73 or *710
- Sprint/Nextel: Call customer service and request they change your forwarding
- T-Mobile: ##004#, then *004*18056377243#
Enjoy (almost) no voice mail!
Crazy, Hectic Life = Disneyland
For the last two months, life has been incredibly hectic and crazy. Lots of travel, lots of deadlines. I just counted them up, and I’ve been in the process of managing no fewer than 30 simultaneous product upgrades that will finally be complete on or about October 22.
We’ve been “waiting” to take a breather from all of this until we leave for Ethiopia to bring Emma home. (We’ll be in Rome for a couple of days on the way there…added that on for $39!) But with that trip delayed until at least December, Cacey and I looked at each other and said “we need a break!”
I’m learning my own patterns: I tend to get into the zone, focus, put my head down and work until I’m burned out and exhausted, which isn’t a good feeling. Now I’m starting to realize that I can do the 14 hour days for a while if I have a defined end to the “tunnel” and schedule some time to go recharge with my family. (Then of course, it’s on to climbing the next mountain!)
So, that’s what we’re going to do in about a week. This crazy set of projects wraps up on October 22. On the 23rd, after a meeting at Sierra College in the early afternoon, we’ll take off for Southern California to take Spencer to Disneyland for the very first time! (My birthday is the 24th, so we get one day free that way.)
By the way, I booked that trip with the world’s best hotel rewards program, Hilton HHonors. We’re saving points to use in Rome, but we booked one free night near Disneyland. The thing I love about HHonors is they don’t do blackout dates or try to make points unusable with deadlines and such – they’ve earned my loyalty with very customer-friendly policies.
So the moral of this story (primarily for myself) is that it’s okay to take on big things for a while, but make sure they have an identified end – and then make time to go charge up with your family before the next big thing. Time passes quickly, my little boy is growing up, and I’m looking forward to watching him enjoy meeting “Mickey and Donald” as he keeps saying. 
37Signals Pokes Fun at the VCs
Startup software company 37Signals, which makes a variety of well-designed business software applications on the web, decided to poke some fun at venture capitalists after Twitter closed a $100MM financing at a $1 billion valuation.
(For those who don’t know what that means, investors paid $100 million to Twitter in exchange for owning 10% of the company. That means they believe Twitter is worth $1 billion dollars right now — and of course, it also means that they believe Twitter will be worth a lot more down the road.)
37Signals, on the other hand, is valued at much less, even though they have a variety of different products that they charge real money for, and they appear to be profitable. So they decided to have some fun with the venture community and issued a press release announcing that they had just sold 0.000000001% of their company for $1, giving them a valuation of $100 billion.
Another great part of the release:
A $100 billion value for 37signals is “not outlandish,” says Aanandamayee Bhatnagar, a finance professor and valuation guru at Grenada State’s Schnook School of Business. Bhatnagar points to a leaked, confidential corporate strategy plan that projects 37signals will attract twelve billion users by the end of 2013.
How will the company overcome the fact that there are only 6.8 billion people alive today? “Why limit users to people?” said Bhatnagar.
Great sense of humor. I’m glad they didn’t wait until April 1 of next year to put this out.
Steve Ballmer on “The New Normal”
More people are saying it: we shouldn’t expect a quick recovery back to the economy’s baseline when the recession started. Here’s Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the subject:
In all the talk about the economy, one term that comes up more and more frequently is something called “the new normal.” I like this phrase because it speaks to the fact that economic reality has undergone a fundamental shift over the course of the past 12 months.
So what is the nature of this shift? After years of economic expansion fueled by unrealistic rates of consumption and unsustainable levels of private debt, the global economy has reset at a lower baseline level of activity. Today, people borrow less, save more, and spend with much greater caution.
Ballmer goes on to explain how technology can allow people to do more with less, and of course he’s right, but the underlying point is clear: organizations need to adjust their thinking and figure out how to thrive, not just survive, in the new normal.
The ones who do will be the big winners when things get back to the old normal many years down the road. Sierra College needs to be one of them.
