Bearing Arms

The Constitution pretty clearly states that we have the right to bear arms, but at least here in MN there is already a lot of paperwork that includes a lot of information to the government involved. I wonder why the MSM and the left finds  the government listening to a cell call to a known terrorist number to be "a chilling infringement of constitutional rights", where the government gathering all kinds of data on a law abiding citizen exercising a specific constitutional right to be just fine? In fact, I strongly suspect that when the Democrats move to restrict that right even more in '09 or so, the MSM and the left won't find that "chilling" either. We decided that it was time to arm while the arming was good. 

Anyway, we now have a Beretta Tomcat .32 cal and a Springfield XD 9mm in the family arsenal. We picked up the 9mm today, and since it was warm we went out to the range and did some shooting. I was really surprised at all the handguns being shot out there today. This was the last of this model that they had at the local gun-shop, and when talking over at Cabella's as we were getting the Beretta, they said that they had broke all records for handgun sales in '07. 

The 9mm Springfield is a gun that puts an instant smile on your face. At 25', the first clip easily and comfortably all ended up in the plate, and it just got better from there on in. It is an extremely sweet little weapon with a 14 shot clip as one of the clips included. The gun is reasonably compact and light, but enough size and heft to make the 9mm recoil extremely manageable. I'm thankful that a buddy of mine let me shoot his .40 cal Springfield so that I was familiar with the piece, and a conversation with an ex-Marine Gunnery Instructor that works at the shop part time convinced me that 9mm was just fine for any potential defensive use that I might ever have for it. It is a gun that inspires instant confidence that rounds can be placed where you want them to go, it has a lot of capacity, 9mm ammo is relatively cheap and easy to get and the Springfield double safety system is hard to argue with. A great gun.

The Beretta .32 takes a little more getting used to. Ours has a Crimson Trace laser grip that is a nice addition to a weapon that may be used for self defense. Since the gun is smaller and lighter it is harder to shoot accurately, but after putting 100 rounds through it, my wife was able to shoot a couple of very nice groups at 25' as you can see from the picture. The potential to carry it in a purse or pocket much is of course the advantage to the small size and light weight.

I've only shot handguns a couple of times in the past and was surprised by how much fun these were (especially the 9mm). Since MN is a Concealed Carry state, we planning to avail ourselves of that right before the chance is passed forever. I still remember how crime was increasing rapidly in the 60's and 70's. I would hope that we would not return to those days (or worse), but one of the things that the left likes to do is remove the freedoms of law abiding citizens while reducing penalties for criminals and those kinds of policies often have predictable and unfortunate results. No doubt they will try to remove the rights of existing permit holders as well, but there is some chance that they might compromise at some "grandfather clause" for at least awhile.

In any case, it was a fun day and I'll have something else to do with my "spare time" as the weather warms this spring.

16 Year Itch

Great little Michael Barone analysis from the WSJ. I think the part in red is especially important. The median voter today doesn't know what bad times are, so is unafraid of them. Those of us who saw the '70s didn't even see how bad things could be after 8 years of FDR in the late '30s. WWIII might look like a "good idea" after 8+ years of Obama or Hillary, but for those for whom "bad times" are the "recessions" of 90-91 and 2000-2001, the definition of "bad" is certainly nothing to even consider. May as well "just take a chance".

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

My thought is that, over a period of 16 years, there is enough turnover in the electorate to stimulate an itch that produces a willingness to take a chance on something new.

Over time, the median-age voter in American elections has been about 45 years old. This means that the median-age voter in 1976 was born around 1931--old enough to have experienced post-World War II prosperity and foreign policy success, and then to have been disgusted by Vietnam and Watergate.

The median-age voter in 1992 was born around 1947 (the same year as Dan Quayle and Hillary Clinton, one year after Messrs. Clinton and Bush, one year before Mr. Gore). These voters came of age in the culture wars of the 1960s. They experienced stagflation and gas lines of the 1970s, and the prosperity and foreign policy successes of the 1980s. Mr. Clinton persuaded these voters to take a chance on change by promising not to radically alter policy. They rebuked him when he tried to break that promise, then for 14 years remained closely divided along culture lines as if the '60s never ended.

The median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1963, so he or she missed out on the culture wars of the '60s, and on the economic disasters and foreign policy reverses of the 1970s. These voters have experienced low-inflation economic growth something like 95% of their adult lives--something true of no other generation in history. They are weary of the cultural polarization of our politics, relatively unconcerned about the downside risks of big government programs, and largely unaware of America's historic foreign policy successes. They are ready, it seems, to take a chance on an outside-the-system candidate.

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The Laws of Simplicity

The subject book by John Maeda is a little book about a subject that is very important at the start of the 21st century. More about the subject can be found at www.LawsOfSimplicity.com.

The ten laws are:

1. Reduce - The simplest way to simplify
   
2. Organize - Makes more appear as less
   
3. Time - Saving time feels simpler
4. Learn - Knowledge simplifies all things
5. Differences - Simplicity and Complexity need each other (Wave function)
6. Context - What is peripheral is important
7. Emotion - More is better
8. Trust - You must trust the simplification
9. Failure - As in learning that it can't all be simpler
10. The One - Subtract the Obvious, add the Meaningful.
    

There are also three actions to be used to achieve these laws:

SHE: Shrink, Hide, Embody
BRAIN: Basics, Repeat, Avoid, Inspire, Never
SLIP: Sort, Label, Prioritize

The example of the Apple iPod is used very frequently throughout the book, and as a fairly recent convert to the "Apple Kool-aide", I agree that it is an excellent object lesson in the miracle of simplicity in the modern world. I need to get a Blog out on the Apple Experience here very soon, and when I do, I hope to link it.

The copy of this book that I read was borrowed from the company library, but my own copy is on order to be marked up, further understood and probably re-blogged.

Maybe I'm an Edwards Guy?

John Edwards Vows To End All Bad Things By 2011

Who could possibly be against ending all bad things? Only some nasty negative Republican!

Blocking Bush

Senate holds 12-second session to block Bush

This has been reported on CNN pretty much every day over the holiday season. AGAIN, if this was actually how actions by BOTH SIDES would be reported, I'd have no problem with it with the exception of the use of "Bush" vs "The President".

To report this correctly, one either says "Senate DEMOCRATS block Bush" or "Senate blocks PRESIDENT". The use of "Senate" takes the taint of "partisanship" out of it, and since Bush has low opinion numbers, the MSM can see that it will generally be seen as a "good action". The idea of the news ought to be to tell us what is happening, NOT to tell us what to think about it.

It is rather amazing how "partisanship" seems to have become a thing of the past in '07 as far as the MSM is concerned, with the only exception being a Senate filibuster. One would think that blocking recess appointments could be seen as unusual, and at least my search of the web leads me to believe it may be HISTORIC! I couldn't find any other examples of it being done! One might draw the conclusion that we have reached new high water mark for partisanship and that "historic levels of partisanship" would be newsworthy? Oops, I guess it can't be that, because Democrats are doing it!

Stumbling on Happiness

One of the foolish pop psychological books that I tend to enjoy for no particularly rational reason. Human nature is a slippery item, yet for some reason Mooses seem to be fascinated with it!

"Human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed." Note though that "control" isn't as simple as one might expect-how one achieves "control" may be by having a high position, making a lot of money or even being an invalid. Of course none of us ACTUALLY have control but, but humans are generally pretty good at being able to stay in an illusion that they like.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this idea that we ought to "steer our own boat" isn't correct for a lot of different reasons. One of the reasons is that we tend to recall and rely on unusual instances. "Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire (or might admire) doesn't always pay clear dividends".

Another reason is that we have a huge tendency to misconstrue how we will feel about regret of action vs regret of inaction. "Studies show that about 9 out of 10 people expect to feel more regret when they foolishly switch stocks than when they foolishly fail to switch stocks, because most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies also show that 9 out of 10 people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret the things they did."

"Because we do not realize that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge oru best when we should blunder forward." A piece of wisdom that has been apt for thousands of years, but one which is hard to truely learn.

One of the more memorable parts of the book was a discussion of Siamese twins. Society and the rest of us are of course "absolutely certain" that Siamese twins CAN'T be happy, so it is worth even huge risks to separate them. However (and rather disconcertingly), Siamese Twins that reached maturity universally think the their condition is BETTER and they don't want to be separated! To which we respond "they don't really understand what it means to be happy".

The book has a sort of chilling little paragraph: "If they haven't had our experiences, then we haven't had theirs either, and it is entirely possible that WE are the ones with the "squished language"-that when we say we are overjoyed, we have no idea what they are talking about since we have never experienced the companionate love, the blissful union, the unadulterated agape that Lori and Reba (the example twins) have." The "squished language" is a reference to "happiness being relative"-the idea that if you experience more happiness, you get a new "happiness set point".

Ah yes, a perspective that doesn't fit into what our "collective consciousness" thinks. IS there any human "collective understanding"? There is a "bee collective", but as a Moose I'd like to point out that humans are not a herd (or hive) creature. Maybe "individual" (or possibly Siamese Twin, or agape heterosexual pair) is "as good as it gets" as defined by either God, or 100's of millions of years of evolution. Who would know? Certainly not a scientist since "happiness" is an irreducible experience of INDIVIDUAL consciousness-so not even a lefty collectivist can decree what happiness is! It may be politically incorrect, or possibly even RELIGIOUS!

I enjoyed the book. I'm not sure that we really have the capacity to operate on meta-knowledge about our human makeup, but it is fun to acquire anyway.

Harold Bloom, Fallen Angels

Harold Bloom is an author that I read every chance I get, and this tiny little work was a bit like an appetizer. He is a literary "critic" in the sense of the term of being able to summarize, connect, and explain the great works of literature from history. 

"As Kafka prophesied, our one authentic sin is impatience: that is we are forgetting how to read. Impatience increasingly is a visual obsession; we want to see a thing instantly and then forget it. Deep reading is not like that; reading requires patience and remembering. A visual culture cannot distinguish between fallen and unfallen angels, since we cannot see either and are forgetting how to read ourselves, which means that we can see images of others, but cannot really see others or ourselves."

I would not limit mankind to only a single sin, but one can say that "impatience" may well be at the core of the original sin and much of the sin of modern religion. Adam and Eve wanted "Godhood" NOW-instantly, no development, no maturity, no "good time". Many Christians want salvation as an "event vs a process"-full assurance TODAY with no need to live a walk for a lifetime with constant interaction with Grace AND human frailty and sin.  

"Our most creative impulses thrust us further into a confrontation with the mirror of nature, where we behold our own image, fall in love with it, and soon enough fall into the consciousness of death. Though I call such angelicism "fallen", it is the inevitable condition of whenever we see to create anything of our own, whether it be a book, a marriage, a family, a life's work."

This short sampling of a book whets my appetite yet again to try to find the time to dive into the world of Shakespeare and other great literature to at least get a glimpse of the vast storehouse of human history that has been locked away by the largely left-leaning academic Western academia, lest their carefully developed savages glimpse the storehouse of culture and human truth and fail to dine at the trough of modern lefty "culture".

The Seventeen Traditions (Ralph Nader)

There is having an open mind and there is being an idiot! Clearly my picking up this book with any thought of gathering useful information proves that I am an idiot, but at least I realize I'm an idiot, Nader seems to think he is profound. What are the traditions?

1. Listening
2. The Family Table
3. Health
4. History
5. Scarcity
6. Sibling Equality
7. Education and Argument
8. Discipline
9. Simple Enjoyments
10. Reciprocity
11. Independent Thinking
12. Charity
13. Work
14. Business
15. Patriotism
16. Solitude
17. Civics

I'm not sure there is anything "wrong" with the 17 "traditions" in abstract, other than the entire discussion meanders between the trite, the meaningless and the ridiculous. Ralph was raised in a family that owned a restaurant, bar / bakery combination in which the restaurant sat 200 people. It sounds like a significantly successful operation and one of the values of the family was frugality, so it is pretty clear that Ralph didn't have any real financial issues to deal with as a child. One of the themes that comes through the book is that almost everything ill with America has somehow to do with "the market", but the alternative to that market is never stated. Although it sounds like Ralph had some religious background, the role of any sort of faith in a higher power seemed to be minimal at best.

I'm reminded of a company that I know well that used to have a "policy" of full-employment, then the rhetoric changed to "a tradition" followed by "a history", meaning that it laid off people just like everyone else. Ralph is all the way to "tradition" before he gets started, and with no transcendence involved, it seems clear that these "traditions" are fluid at best, to the extent they can be discerned at all.

His Daddy had an idea that people should be able to make and spend all they wanted up to $1 million dollar net worth (although certainly with plenty of at least sales taxes on their way there), but then the WEALTH would be "heavily taxed" (didn't really say how much). The idea was that "this would somehow balance wealth and civic virtue". The fact that dear old Dad had this brilliant insight and that it was discussed a lot was critical to Ralph becoming all he is today. Which, BTW is a pretty amazing story. Due to his running for President in 2000, we know that at that point he had personal holdings of over $3 million in stocks and bonds! This from old Mr anti-corporate author Ralphie Nader! What would old Daddy say? Well, no doubt nothing, Ralph became a good lefty, so consistency isn't an issue.

Ralph is sort of the white version of the Jessie Jackson / Al Sharpton racial blackmail approach. They do a great job of shaking down corporations and individuals on racial issues for many dollars that go into the organizations that they draw salaries and under which their living expenses are covered ("Rainbow Push" for Jackson). "If you give me so much money I won't call you a racist and have your product boycotted". Nader is a smarter guy, he doesn't limit himself to a single issue, he will blackmail them over environmental, safety, labor relations, finances or I'm sure anything that comes to his mind. I guess the core of being "anti-wealth and anti-market" is that you make certain that you avoid producing anything of value yourself and make certain that you keep a large percentage of your blackmail money for yourself.

One little quote "... history shows that economies with a more equitable distribution of wealth were far more prosperous with bigger markets". Nice statement-naturally, there were zero supporting facts for this bold assertion. So the USSR vs USA? USSR had REALLY "equitable income" with nearly everyone approximating zero. The USA has huge differences between the top and the bottom, YET, we are in the top 10 for prosperous and by far the largest market in the world. So how does somebody write such a thing in a book with a straight face?

I guess what the book shows is that when one is a lefty, you reach complete exemption from having to even CONSIDER that you would practice anything you might preach, or that your pronouncements would have any relation to reality. Other than idiots like the foolish Moose, nobody with any rational/conservative bent is going to crack your little book, and lefties are just not prone to critical thought, other than the self-congratulatory fallacies that Ralph talks about under tradition 11.

CNET 8 Business Trends

Eight business technology trends to watch | CNET News.com

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business.

Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.

Managing relationships
1. Distributing co-creation

The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Today, in the high-technology, consumer product, and automotive sectors, among others, companies routinely involve customers, suppliers, small specialist businesses, and independent contractors in the creation of new products. Outsiders offer insights that help shape product development, but companies typically control the innovation process. Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders--co-creation--in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.
Wikipedia could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers.

Information goods such as software and editorial content are ripe for this kind of decentralized innovation; the Linux operating system, for example, was developed over the Internet by a network of specialists. But companies can also create physical goods in this way. Loncin, a leading Chinese motorcycle manufacturer, sets broad specifications for products and then lets its suppliers work with one another to design the components, make sure everything fits together, and reduce costs. In the past, Loncin didn't make extensive use of information technology to manage the supplier community--an approach reflecting business realities in China and in this specific industrial market. But recent advances in open-standards-based computing (for example, computer-aided-design programs that work well with other kinds of software) are making it easier to co-create physical goods for more complex value chains in competitive markets.

If this approach to innovation becomes broadly accepted, the impact on companies and industries could be substantial. We estimate, for instance, that in the U.S. economy alone roughly 12 percent of all labor activity could be transformed by more distributed and networked forms of innovation--from reducing the amount of legal and administrative activity that intellectual property involves to restructuring or eliminating some traditional R&D work.

Companies pursuing this trend will have less control over innovation and the intellectual property that goes with it, however. They will also have to compete for the attention and time of the best and most capable contributors.

2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also co-create with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers. But the differences between the way companies co-create with partners, on the one hand, and with customers, on the other, are so marked that the consumer side is really a separate trend. These differences include the nature and range of the interactions, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them.

As the Internet has evolved--an evolution prompted in part by new Web 2.0 technologies--it has become a more widespread platform for interaction, communication, and activism. Consumers increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds. Companies can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their economic benefit.

OhmyNews, for instance, is a popular South Korean online newspaper written by upwards of 60,000 contributing "citizen reporters." It has quickly become one of South Korea's most influential media outlets, with around 700,000 site visits a day. Another company that goes out of its way to engage customers, the online clothing store Threadless, asks people to submit new designs for T-shirts. Each week, hundreds of participants propose ideas and the community at large votes for its favorites. The top four to six designs are printed on shirts and sold in the store; the winners receive a combination of cash prizes and store credit. In September 2007 Threadless opened its first physical retail operation, in Chicago.

Companies that involve customers in design, testing, marketing (such as viral marketing), and the after-sales process get better insights into customer needs and behavior and may be able to cut the cost of acquiring customers, engender greater loyalty, and speed up development cycles. But a company open to allowing customers to help it innovate must ensure that it isn't unduly influenced by information gleaned from a vocal minority. It must also be wary of focusing on the immediate rather than longer-range needs of customers and be careful to avoid raising and then failing to meet their expectations.
3. Tapping into a world of talent

As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence. Much as technology permits them to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks.

Top talent for a range of activities--from finance to marketing and IT to operations--can be found anywhere.

Top talent for a range of activities--from finance to marketing and IT to operations--can be found anywhere. The best person for a task may be a free agent in India or an employee of a small company in Italy rather than someone who works for a global business services provider. Software and Internet technologies are making it easier and less costly for companies to integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders, and this development opens up many contracting options for managers of corporate functions.

The implications of shifting more work to freelancers are interesting. For one thing, new talent-deployment models could emerge. TopCoder, a company that has created a network of software developers, may represent one such model. TopCoder gives organizations that want to have software developed for them access to its talent pool. Customers explain the kind of software they want and offer prizes to the developers who do the best job creating it--an approach that costs less than employing experienced engineers. Furthermore, changes in the nature of labor relationships could lead to new pricing models that would shift payment schemes from time and materials to compensation for results.

This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it. As companies move in this direction, they will need to understand the value of their human capital more fully and manage different classes of contributors accordingly. They will also have to build capabilities to engage talent globally or contract with talent aggregators that specialize in providing such services. Competitive advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks.

4. Extracting more value from interactions

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration--tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total U.S. employment, up from 40 percent today. Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.
Web 2.0
Big app on campus
Educators see the lure of notoriety through Web 2.0-style social tools.

The application of technology has reduced differences in productivity between transformational and transactional employees, but huge inconsistencies persist in the productivity of high-value tacit ones. Improving it is more about increasing their effectiveness--for instance, by focusing them on interactions that create value and ensuring that they have the right information and context--than about efficiency. Technology tools that promote tacit interactions, such as wikis, virtual team environments, and videoconferencing, may become no less ubiquitous than computers are now. As companies learn to use these tools, they will develop managerial innovations--smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions--that will be difficult for their rivals to replicate. Companies in sectors such as health care and banking are already moving down this road.

As companies improve the productivity of these workers, it will be necessary to couple investments in technologies with the right combination of incentives and organizational values to drive their adoption and use by employees. There is still substantial room for automating transactional activities, and the payoff can typically be realized much more quickly and measured much more clearly than the payoff from investments to make tacit work more effective. Creating the business case for investing in interactions will be challenging--but critical--for managers.
Managing capital and assets
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation

Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What's more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.

During the late 1990s FedEx and UPS linked data flowing through their internal tracking systems to the Internet--no trivial task at the time--to let customers track packages from their Web sites, with no human intervention required on the part of either company. By leveraging and linking systems to automate processes for answering inquiries from customers, both dramatically reduced the cost of serving them while increasing their satisfaction and loyalty. More recently, Carrefour, Metro, Wal-Mart Stores, and other large retailers have adopted (and asked suppliers to adopt) digital-tagging technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), and integrated them with other supply chain systems in order to further automate their supply chain and inventory management. The rate of adoption to date disappoints the advocates of these technologies, but as the price of digital tags falls they could very well reduce the costs of managing distribution and increase revenues by helping companies to manage supply more effectively.

Companies still have substantial headroom to automate many repetitive tasks that aren't yet mediated by computers--particularly in sectors and regions where IT marches at a slower pace--and to interlink "islands of automation" and so give managers and customers the ability to do new things. Automation is a good investment if it not only lowers costs but also helps users to get what they want more quickly and easily, though it may not be a good idea if it gives them unpleasant experiences. The trick is to strike the right balance between raising margins and making customers happy.
6. Unbundling production from delivery

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever smaller increments cost-effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services. It also gives independent software developers opportunities to buy processing power on its IT infrastructure so that they don't have to buy their own. Mobile virtual-network operators, another example of this trend, provide wireless services without investing in a network infrastructure. At the most basic level of unbundled production, 80 percent of all companies responding to a recent survey on Web trends say they are investing in Web services and related technologies. Although the applications vary, many are using these technologies to offer other companies--suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem participants--access to parts of their IT architectures through standard protocols.

Unbundling works in the physical world, too. Today you can buy fractional time on a jet, in a high-end sports car, or even for designer handbags. Unbundling is attractive from the supply side because it lets asset-intensive businesses--factories, warehouses, truck fleets, office buildings, data centers, networks, and so on--raise their utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to achieve competitive marginal costs. For companies and entrepreneurs seeking capacity (or variable additional capacity), unbundling makes it possible to gain access to assets quickly, to scale up businesses while keeping balance sheets asset-light, and to use attractive consumption and contracting models that are easier on their income statements.

Companies that make their assets available for internal and external use will need to manage conflicts if demand exceeds supply. A competitive advantage through scale may be hard to maintain when many players, large and small, have equal access to resources at low marginal costs.
Leveraging information in new ways

7. Putting more science into management

Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From "ideagoras" (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.

Leading players are exploiting this information explosion with a diverse set of management techniques. Google fosters innovation through an internal market: employees submit ideas, and other employees decide if an idea is worth pursuing or if they would be willing to work on it full-time. Intel integrates a "prediction market" with regular short-term forecasting processes to build more accurate and less volatile estimates of demand. The cement manufacturer Cemex optimizes loads and routes by combining complex analytics with a wireless tracking and communications network for its trucks.
Environments that celebrate making choices on a factual basis must beware of analysis paralysis.

The amount of information and a manager's ability to use it have increased explosively not only for internal processes but also for the engagement of customers. The more a company knows about them, the better able it is to create offerings they want, to target them with messages that get a response, and to extract the value that an offering gives them. The holy grail of deep customer insight--more granular segmentation, low-cost experimentation, and mass customization--becomes increasingly accessible through technological innovations in data collection and processing and in manufacturing.

Examples are emerging across a wide range of industries. Amazon.com stands at the forefront of advanced customer segmentation. Its recommendation engine correlates the purchase histories of each individual customer with those of others who made similar purchases to come up with suggestions for things that he or she might buy. Although the jury is still out on the true value of recommendation engines, the techniques seem to be paying off: CleverSet, a pure-play recommendation-engine provider, claims that the 75 online retailers using the engine are averaging a 22 percent increase in revenue per visitor. Meanwhile, toll road operators are beginning to segment drivers and charge them differential prices based on static conditions (such as time of day) and dynamic ones (traffic). Technology is also dramatically bringing down the costs of experimentation and giving creative leaders opportunities to think like scientists by constructing and analyzing alternatives. The financial-services concern Capital One conducts hundreds of experiments daily to determine the appropriate mix of products it should direct to specific customer profiles. Similarly, Harrah's casinos mine customer data to target promotions and drive exemplary customer service.

Given the vast resources going into storing and processing information today, it's hard to believe that we are only at an early stage in this trend. Yet we are. The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall.

Leaders should get out ahead of this trend to ensure that information makes organizations more effective, rather than less. Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures. Environments that celebrate making choices on a factual basis must beware of analysis paralysis.
8. Making businesses from information

Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.
A retailer using digital cameras to prevent shoplifting could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores.

Frequent contributors to what economists call market imperfections include information asymmetries and the frequent inability of decision makers to get all the relevant data about new market opportunities, potential acquisitions, pricing differences among suppliers, and other business situations. These imperfections often allow middlemen and players with more and better information to extract higher rents by aggregating and creating businesses around it. The Internet has brought greater transparency to many markets, from airline tickets to stocks, but many other sectors need similar illumination. Real estate is one of them. In a sector where agencies have thrived by keeping buyers and sellers partly in the dark, new sites have popped up to shine "a light up into the dark reaches of the supply curve," as Rich Barton, the founder of Zillow (a portal for real-estate information), puts it. Barton, the former leader of the e-travel site Expedia, has been down this road before.

Moreover, the aggregation of data through the digitization of processes and activities may create by-products, or "exhaust data," that companies can exploit for profit. A retailer using digital cameras to prevent shoplifting could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores, and could also use these insights to improve its layout or placement of promotional displays. It might also sell the data to its vendors so that they could use real observations of consumer behavior to reshape their merchandising approaches.

Another kind of information business plays a pure aggregation and visualization role, scouring the Web to assemble data on particular topics. Many business-to-consumer shopping sites and business-to-business product directories operate in this fashion. But that sword can cut both ways; today's aggregators, for instance, may themselves be aggregated tomorrow. Companies relying on information-based market imperfections need to assess the impact of the new transparency levels that are continually opening up in today's information economy.

Shaping the outcome

Creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies. These trends are best seen as emerging patterns that can be applied in a wide variety of businesses. Executives should reflect on which patterns may start to reshape their markets and industries next--and on whether they have opportunities to catalyze change and shape the outcome rather than merely react to it.

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Zhivago and Road to Serfdom

In our recent focus to attempt to catch up on some of the more classical films, my wife and I are watching the three hours and twenty minutes of Dr Zhivago. It so happens I'm just about through with my 3rd reading of "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich von Hayek, one of my all-time favorites. It was amazing to see the history of destruction wrought by the policies of the left actually shown in a Hollywood film. "Your personal life is dead, it has been replaced by history". A very apt line, well understood by Hayek to be the near certain eventual result of collectivist policy.

After the fall of the USSR, the differences between N and S Korea, the differences between East and West Germany prior to the wall coming down, Hong Kong, the results of Reaganomics after the Carter disaster of the '70's --- and many more examples, HOW do people still believe that "The State" re-distributing wealth at the point of a gun and trying to run the economy by a central bureaucracy works "better"?

The biggest points of the book revolve around the fact that traditional liberalism means liberal ECONOMIC freedom and INDIVIDUAL freedom and responsibility in as many aspects of life as possible. The theft and confusion of the term "liberal" to mean the OPPOSITE of it's historical meaning and become "collectivist, redistributionist, central planning and control by huge government is propaganda in itself (changing the meaning of words to hide the real meaning). Even worse, the misidentification of the National SOCIALIST (Nazi) government as a "movement of the right" is a completely bold faced propaganda lie.

The collectivist movement of the Communists, Socialists and Nazis ("Socialist and Nazi are really redundant as in "National Socialist") has been able to use the apparatus of the media and the state to rename itself (amazingly) to "liberal", when in fact like all collectivist movements, it is totalitarian by its very nature. It seeks to remove the freedom of individuals under the claim that life will be "better for all" (except of course the individuals that need to "sacrifice"). We have seen the result of collectivist movements fail miserably again and again in extreme manners where millions of people are starved or slaughtered, and every phase of life becomes controlled by the state.

Why? Envy is is a powerful emotion, but unlike "greed" it isn't self-limiting. While the modern world lets one consume a lot, there are still only so many hours in a day and so many ways to attempt to pile up or consume wealth. "Worse", all the legal ones require work, risk or both. Not so with envy -- umbrage and outrage know no limits, and no extra intelligence or focused thought is required to be envious. The "poverty" of today is beyond much of the "plenty" of even the 1940's, let alone the start of the 20th century, but as long as wealth has not be allocated as some lefty "feels is right", then they feel it is only "moral" to attack the very sources of the current plenty.

The desire for power is also not wanting in the world, and no matter how many millions demagogues like Jon Edwards have been able to chase down from passing ambulances, there is always the prospect for power to go with the wealth.  Always ready and waiting envious masses with their noses pressed up against the glass store windows to listen to someone tell them that "the system is broken", and a guy that is worth millions and gets $400 haircuts REALLY has their best interests in mind! There are always plenty of feeble sheep willing to believe any propaganda dumped in their manger so that they may truly serve on their knees as serfs.

There are no doubt a significant number that have at least some dim awareness that what is proffered as "justice" is really tyranny, but their envy has grown so great that even actions which hurt the entire population are deemed desirable as long as they at least seem to "hurt the rich the most". As in Zhivago however, the individual that accepts their responsibilities and even their flaws as their own, without trying to blame others remains more praiseworthy, even if the envious succeed in even their execution. There are worse fates than death, especially since it awaits us all anyway. Living with an ideology that has had to steal it's name and is unwilling to admit to either it's history or ultimate objectives would be one.

The book is relatively accessible and is one Margaret Thatcher strongly encouraged all her staff to read. It is a MUST read for anyone that wants to understand the most important political issue of our times. 

christmas eve eve

Sitting in a Caribou coffee with a rare eggnog latte. I usually avoid the flavors, but, it's Christmas, and I like eggnog. Delivered a ton of BBQ meatballs to the Ronald McDonald cancer home for kids and their families, and my wife is serving dinner. They got rid of me as to not scare the kids.

This is my 2md attempt at a blog from the iPhone-I don't think keyboards are in danger yet!

Anyway, I've been reading up a storm lately, hopefully I will have the writing muse to get some blogs done as well.

A Good Year for Bush?

Here is a hard to find view on Bush. Do I think it is 100% accurate? No, not at all, it is "the fringe" of a positive view on '07 for Bush, BUT, in the world of "truth and information" as opposed to "propaganda and lies", one looks for multiple points of view to try to put some bounds on reality.

Something like 80% of the people were totally for the War in Iraq when we went in. I suspect that something close to that number were against the Surge and thought it was "hopeless". It didn't take all that much courage for Bush to go to war with 80% on his side. It took a tad more leadership and courage for him to do the Surge with a very high percentage of the people against him. To date, it has worked. The Democrats will do all they can to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and they may still make it happen-and of course the MSM will be a willing accomplice through it all. They may well still succeed in making Iraq a disaster, but it looks much less of a sure thing than it did last year at this time.

Pretty much the same for the economy. The Democrats and the MSM have a lot to say about it being bad, but econimics is pretty much about numbers in the real world, and the best real analysis is that the economy is "good to excellent". Inflating fuel prices caused by worldwide demand for fuel hasn't killed it, and the sub-prime real estate bubble has failed to scuttle the economic ship as well.

Seem like there are a lot of prospects for a Happy New Year, but I'm sure that this will be the darkest election year in my lifetime.

Tony Blair Converts to Catholicism

Interesting to read the MSMs view of Blair's conversion. The left might well do well to create a state religion beyond secular humanism. While they no doubt consider it "quaint" that 72% call themselves, it seems clear that with less than 10% attending church regularly, their "christianity" is having scant affect on their lives. It commonly seems that the MSM in this country finds anyone whose religion is actually a significant part of their life as a bit of a "nutter".

The former prime minister told the BBC this year that he had avoided talking about his religious views while in office for about 10 years for fear of being labeled "a nutter."
In England's last census, 72 percent of people identified themselves as Christian. 

Many are Anglicans affiliated with the Church of England, which was created by royal proclamation during the 16th century after King Henry VIII -- who married six times -- broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church in a dispute over divorce. 

The Church of England has said that less than 10 percent of its members are regular churchgoers. Britons often are surprised by people who openly and fervently discuss their religious views, and the degree to which faiths such as evangelicalism can influence U.S. politics

Everything Is Miscellaneous

Finished the book by David Weinberger and at least for an information technology long-term Web denizen it wasn't all that enlightening, but it did name some concepts well I guess. The idea of "order of order"; 1st order is physical, how things are ordered on a shelf in a drawer or in a store, in the physical universe, you get a single order. The second order is "index order" or "map order"; the card catalog at the library being the classic example.

The third order of order is in some degree "disorder" in the human sense, but it is what the Net is all about. Freed from the physical limits of things like cards and paper maps we can link endlessly and order in any way we see fit. Playlists on iTunes, Google, Blogs, etc. Lots of focus on the commonly used tree structure of many of our classifications, with the example of the Linnaean classification of the world of living things, and how we are finding that it really isn't that tidy.

I wouldn't really recommend the book for anyone very serious about understanding the phenomenon of digitization and the Web. It might be a good intro, but it seemed too "Pop" to me.

The Official Democrat Platform for Election

Uh, well, from 1864, against that warmongering Republican Abraham Lincoln. I guess they only seem to have inconsistency in the short view. When one considers historic willingness to cut and run before the job is done, they really ARE a lot more consistent that I give them credit for. They really DO love that Constitution-unless they are of course trampling it with Federal regulation of business, finding new Federal rights like abortion, taking away specific enumerated rights like that of bearing arms, etc. It is very much worth the short read, some things indeed never change:

Resolved, That in the future, as in the past, we will adhere with unswerving fidelity to the Union under the Constitution as the only solid foundation of our strength, security, and happiness as a people, and as a framework of government equally conducive to the welfare and prosperity of all the States, both Northern and Southern.

Resolved, That this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.

Resolved, That the direct interference of the military authorities of the United States in the recent elections held in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware was a shameful violation of the Constitution, and a repetition of such acts in the approaching election will be held as revolutionary, and resisted with all the means and power under our control.

Resolved, That the aim and object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of the States unimpaired, and they hereby declare that they consider that the administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution — the subversion of the civil by military law in States not in insurrection; the arbitrary military arrest, imprisonment, trial, and sentence of American citizens in States where civil law exists in full force; the suppression of freedom of speech and of the press; the denial of the right of asylum; the open and avowed disregard of State rights; the employment of unusual test-oaths; and the interference with and denial of the right of the people to bear arms in their defense is calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union and the perpetuation of a Government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.

Resolved, That the shameful disregard of the Administration to its duty in respect to our fellow citizens who now are and long have been prisoners of war and in a suffering condition, deserves the severest reprobation on the score alike of public policy and common humanity.

Resolved, That the sympathy of the Democratic party is heartily and earnestly extended to the soldiery of our army and sailors of our navy, who are and have been in the field and on the sea under the flag of our country, and, in the events of its attaining power, they will receive all the care, protection, and regard that the brave soldiers and sailors of the republic have so nobly earned.