fromjumpstreet.com – Learning and Relearning Computers and the Web

I commented on this story: Stricter Regulations Will Keep Reckless Banks from Killing American Jobs and my comment vanished.

“Has anyone noticed that the Teamsters got what they wanted in all of this. They’re still standing, and the company survives with them. How ironic that the force that so many think tears down companies (and the manifestation of that force that most people believe to be the most hard-core, intransigent and even violent) …is the one that SAVED the company.

Teamsters have no need of the NLRB–they kick ass by themselves. And if you think they’re incompatible with competitiveness, look at Costco … it’s unionized, and the union there is the Teamsters.

Americans need to unionize against banks that get their money at 0% and charge 30%. And YouTube phenom Ann Minch’s debtors revolt http://www.debtorsrevoltnow.comm) is the vehicle. An American version of Mexico’s “el Barzon” will pwn these bad banks.

If you personally have money troubles, you need to take a free look at this book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/25443175/Debt-Hope-Down-and-Dirty-Survival-Strategies-Evaluation-Version-Complete

The following mysteriously vanished from the comment thread of an article I commented on:

“I’m going to make a point about the housing bubble I haven’t seen made. Briefly, blame it on 9/11. The economic repercussions of the attack on the U.S. made it unthinkable that there would not be an economic response that assured continued strong growth, at least until 9/11 could slip from being fresh in the memories of the American public and our enemies abroad. In short, we took a hit of a powerful drug so that nobody could see how badly they hurt us, knowing full well that there would be a hangover later. The Bush administration rightly did what they had to do to keep the economic wheels from coming off.

Waitaminit…rightly? Yep. Imagine how emboldened the Arab street would have been if the U.S. had been plunged into economic chaos by the fall of the twin towers. Unfortunately, that drug became powerfully addictive. If you want to lay it all at someone’s feet, blame Zbigniew Brzezinski who influenced Afghanistan in the late ’70s to repudiate the USSR and caused the invasion that we had to counter with the mujahedin, which later morphed into the Taliban and metasticized into Al Qaeda. Without that chain of events we would not be where we are now.”

Dean Baker wanted to blame Bernanke, I pointed out that the failure chain leads back to Brzezinski.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/yes-virginia-it-is-bernan_b_383185.html
The Huffington Post makes clear that comments are moderated, but for the life of me I can’t see what was wrong with mine. But I’ve heard that another thing they don’t like is the word “hoax” used in any climate change thread.

In the early days of the web, it was said that internet users would consider any form of censorship “damage” and respond by rerouting around it. I submit that the Huffington post is “damaged” and that readers need to question the credibility of what they read there.

George Will undoubtedly needed a provocative piece to keep his name in the news, so echoing  a Wall Street Journal diatribe by Daniel Akst he has assaulted an American shibboleth: blue jeans, calling them “the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances” and childish to boot. He blames them for what’s been going wrong with the world since the French Revolution, as though things were perfectly peachy when Marie Antoinette thought the solution to peasant starvation was for them to eat cake. Indeed, his thoughts remind me of Lady Bird Johnson proposing a beautification program in America’s ghettos (singer Eartha Kitt told her off right in the White House, and Will needs to get an earful too).

Of course, the antithesis of blue jeans (for daily purposes anyway) is the power suit. Dark blue, grey or black, pinstriped or chalkstriped, accessorized strictly in accordance with John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success and its spiritual progeny, it has brought America such blessings as Worldcom and Enron, Fannie Mae and Bear Stearns and ultimately the entire financial crisis and near-depression. Among the schemers, thieves and fraudsters you’ll hardly find a pair of Levis … no, all of these jokers wore Brooks Brothers suits on Wall Street and in the halls of Congress. Meanwhile, young people in blue jeans rejected communism and were the ruin of the Soviet empire.

The guys who show up to work every day at GM and Chrysler to build the crap cars that have had the souls that were put in by talented engineers and designers ripped out by suit-wearing bean counters wear–you guessed it: blue jeans. The people at Apple who design and sell products that provide one of the few bright spots in our economy go to work in what else?: blue jeans. Same goes for Microsoft. George Will decries the false egalitarianism that blue jeans seem to provide and perhaps he has a point. Maybe we would all be better off if that investment banker had to give up his disguise. Because this time, people who call themselves businesspeople really were the perpetrators of massive financial crimes, and it’s the people in blue jeans who are having to live with their consequences. He seems to want us all to disguise ourselves as them so they can once again blend in … or at least to put a pretty face on a sick patient.

Maybe he thinks he can revive the rag trade. Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada deftly humanized and explained the raison d’etre for an otherwise monstrous woman as providing a little excitement in the lives of ordinary women while keeping the factories and printing presses humming. After all, you can get a good five years out of a pair of blue jeans, and that just doesn’t juice up consumption.

George Will has had his say. And I doubt he has swayed a single American to give up blue jeans. We’ll wear our blue jeans because we strive to be a classless society, knowing that classes, castes and other social divisions were what made Europe and other parts of the world sick places that decent people wanted to escape. That big statue in New York Harbor has nothing on its plaque about skimming the cream of the crop from countries content with their quality of life. We’re looking for the people who want to strive for something better. And the suits better watch out: we’ve got our eyes on you!

Last Friday I traveled to Orlando with a family friend to Inc. Magazine’s Grow Your Business Expo (known as Growco) as an invited guest. I had been contacted by Athena Schindelheim and asked if I could pass the word along in some way so I included mention of Growco with the billings I send for my annual registered agency renewals. Later I was contacted by Brent Williams, the Marketing Manager and he offered to comp me and a guest or two, so I included Tina Walker of First Data/Colonial Bank when I went on Friday. First Data is a large credit card processor. 

The venue was the JWMarriott Grande Lakes not too far from Universal Studios. It is a massive hotel with first-class conference facilities. Inc. Magazine was sharing about half the facility with Holland & Knight, the undisputed 800-lb gorilla of Florida law firms.

I wish I could comment on Thursday’s program, but I just couldn’t spare two days out of my schedule. So let’s get straight to Friday. First up at 8:30 was Keith McFarland, author of “The Breakthrough Company,” which explores exactly what it takes for a growing company to achieve market dominance and tremendous growth, and “Bounce”, about companies that have survived tough times. One observation he made was that many of these companies are one and the same … those that break through typically have had to develop extraordinary discipline and focus to survive one kind of existential threat or another. After a short video that illustrates perceptual distortions in business, Keith described the manager’s role as that of absorbing the troops’ anxiety about what’s going to happen to them and replacing it with anxiety about what’s going to happen to them if they can’t effect change in the company, as well as managing money appropriately by cutting things that aren’t working early rather than cutting late and across the board in a misguided focus on perceived “fairness”.  

He pointed out that in many cases the company will need a facilitator to draw out the employees’ real knowledge and wisdom. As an example, he pointed out that a contestant on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire will improve his position to 50% accuracy if he uses the 50/50 option for help. Phone-A-Fried is right 60% of the time. But polling the audience produces the correct result 90% of the time. However, only with a facilitator will the company have the right process to get the right result.

As for the makeup of those employees, Keith pointed out that the best companies spend 10% of their effort finding the right people and 90% of their effort grooming and retaining those poeple for years and years.

Keith was followed by a panel made up of Inc.’s Bo Burlington, World Poker Tour founder Steve Lipscomb and Jack Stack, the CEO of SRC Holdings Corp.

Steve describe how World Poker Tour has had to reinvent itself, because the TV money is gone and so they are now entirely sponsorship based. He bemoaned the fact that the Justice Department is making minimal efforts to enforce the anti-internet gaming laws on the one hand, while as a publicly traded, legitimate company he can’t get involved in it at all on the other hand. For his part, Jack described competitors who cut too much during tough times as the competitors who will be outsourcing their functions to your company when they can no longer service their customers as they once could.

Tina and I attended a breakout session by Mike Faith, the founder of Headsets.com, who described how to grow through Customer Love. Essentially, his company had plateaued and he realized that you’ve either got to charge twice the price or give half the service. He decided to focus on service. As a result, he began to measure customer satisfaction and to focus on choosing phone reps who could stand to sit still all day on the phones and smile while doing it, as well as pass periodic tests about product lines and policies. Instead of measuring the length of their calls and driving them to keep them short, he measured whether customers thought they gave outstanding service and got rid of the ones who didn’t–including the automatic attendant. He put all of his key staffers’ names and e-mail addresses right on his website for any customer who had a problem or question to contact. Every year he sends customers a thank-you letter–minus any sales pitch. Mike also advocated being your own customer … calling and using your own website to make an order from start to finish (actually receiving and inspecting the package rather than abandoning the cart before checkout).

Finally (for us) we attended another panel sessionwith Christos Cotsakos, founder and CEO of Pennington Ventures and Gay Gaddis, CEO of T3. Gay recommended highly LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, and described her internal social network, “The Tank” built on Jive software’s platform. Cotsakos recommended converting the unproductive time that employees are surfing the internet and playing games into social networking time … the employees will still be recreating rather than working, but their recreation will have benefits for the business. He mentioned that social networking’s next frontier is mobile phones because there is a 4-1 ratio of mobile phones to PCs. Although Cotsakos didn’t discuss it, Korea is the undisputed leader in this area … their mobile phones will alert you to the presence of a member of the opposite (or same) sex nearby whose dating profile dovetails with yours and even cause both phones to ring. Also you can have a feature on your mobile phone there that will pick out your friends as dots on the map. Cotsakos pointed out that it’s free to be on social networks and that they provide extremely low-cost marketing platforms to any business. He cited the surprising statistic that at 175 million users, Facebook would be the world’s 5th largest country. He advocated collecting prospects’ e-mail addresses and delivering periodic e-mails that they would find valuable … if opt-out ratio creeps above 1%, the messages are either too frequent or not helpful enough to the recipient.  Gay stressed updating a website’s content frequently because search engines like new content, and also adding Google Analytics to the site. She pointed out Angie’s list, Yelp and Citisearch as websites important to businesses. She pointed out that video blogging could best be done with a $300 Flip Video camera that is designed for immediate uploads to websites like YouTube. She also advocated website owners spend the money for an SEO Audit and described ihandy.biz as a site she admired for its simple, focused approach.

Tina and I unfortunately had to return to Tampa and our respective family responsibilities before we could hear Ping Fu, a computer pioneer who worked on the Mosaic project that ultimately became the Netscape Navigator browser and who has founded a company that amazingly can take a 2-d photograph of an object and render it as a 3-d engineering drawing. Since she did so without the benefit of formal schooling, I’m sure it would have been a fantastic story to hear.

I’m also leaving out a handful of very interesting people we met among the vendors and at our lunch table … one of the contacts I made could well affect what you see on TV in the near future (don’t worry, you won’t have to look at me).