Steve Pilgrim: Critical Thinking

RELOCATION NOTICE - WE'RE MOVING!

This may not work, but assuming it does, you need to change your bookmarks, favorites and blogrolls. It is 11:50pm CDT on Saturday, July 20, 2002. If all goes well, this site will be relocated within the next few hours.

This weblog is leaving http://radio.weblogs.com/0100740/.

Look for it at: http://www.rodentregatta.com/

Thanks, Steve Pilgrim

A REAL ESTATE OR HOUSING BUBBLE?

John Robb: "The gain in homes over the next decade will make your head spin." [Scripting News]

Andrew is liberal in some ways that I cannot begin to fathom, but in personal finance and money management, he's been rock solid for an awfully long time. Take a look at Andrew Tobias's notions. Here's an excerpt.

Andrew Tobias: I get The Van Eck-Tillman Real Estate And Bank Letter, billed as “Adrian Van Eck’s Confidential Letter On The One-Half of U.S. Wealth in Real Estate” ($90 a year, call 800-219-1333). From its June 6 letter:

From coast to coast, the American real estate bubble has been puffing up ever more dangerously in the past 30 days. My gosh, when I think about the several boom-and-bust cycles I have observed and reported on in the past 40 years, I wonder just how high this one can go and how much longer it can last before it begins to come apart. When it will end is still hidden from us mortals. But the fact that it will end and end badly cannot be in doubt or dispute.

Will Rogers. "Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what's going to happen to us with both a Senate and a House?" [Quotes of the Day]

REFLECTION

My military ambition. Not so long ago -- in response to my throwaway remark that the German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn looks like a Panzer commander -- someone commented: [Jonathon Delacour]

WE'VE SPENT THE LAST COUPLE OF DECADES
Where have all the leaders gone?

tearing down the command-and-control thinking that won two world wars and built a prosperous nation. In our zeal to rid ourselves of tyrants in leadership positions, we also ridded ourselves of many benevolent dictators who could build strong businesses.

We replaced them with pop-psychology management thinking that, while often sound in theory, is difficult to put into practice. Poorly practiced these fads or leadership-by-bestseller concepts lead to some horrible failures. Drucker, Deming, Juran and others had it right. In far too many places, we simply missed it or we allowed endless government intrusion to sap the optimism of our business leaders! Lately, we value style over substance.

The talent myth. I couldn't help being reminded of the steady deterioration in corporate and political leadership over the last twenty years while reading The Talent Myth, Malcolm [Jonathon Delacour]

THERE'S BUSINESS BLOGGING TO BE DONE

Building Business Relationships via the Blog. If you read only one post today, make it this one. [Blunt Force Trauma]

DOES YOUR BUSINESS HAVE A SURVIVAL STRATEGY?
Does your management team know how to develop one?

"There is nothing in sight that will provide an impetus for a spike in growth,'' writes economist William Dunkelberg in his midyear scan of the small business horizon. Call this the desert island economy. As you do all you can to survive, each day brings renewed hope of recovery. Are you going to let the media's mood determine your business success? # [John Henry on Business]

HE WAS MISERABLE
Shallow, phony and uninformed

WARNING STRONG LANGUAGE AHEAD: Maybe He Should Have Stayed In Retirement. I didn't see the show, and I'm not Ann Coulter's most rabid fan, but jeebus, Donahue comes off like the... [Dailypundit]

AN OPEN LETTER TO INVESTORS

BROOMFIELD, Colo., July 19, 2002 - The following statement can be attributed to James Q. Crowe, chief executive officer of Level 3 Communications, Inc.(Nasdaq:LVLT):

Read the statement. It clarifies this.

HAVE A NICE WEEKEND?

Retirement crisis looms [USA Today : Front Page]

GOIN' FOR FOUR

Armstrong wins stage and yellow jersey [USA Today : Front Page]

A COUPLE OF OLDER COMPANIES PRESENT GOOD NEWS

Union Pacific's net surged 25% for the second quarter, led by higher volume in a sign that the economy is slowly improving. [Wall Street Journal]

Sears also posted some decent numbers.

Sir Winston Churchill. "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." [Quotes of the Day]

Christopher Morley. "There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

CLEVER ADS ALONE WON'T 'SWITCH' THE CRITICAL MASSES
Apple needs the Unix switchers and a software switching incentive for Windows users

In Midst of a PC Slump, Apple Still Aims for Growth. A prosperous future for Apple depends on persuading legions of personal computer users to switch from Microsoft Windows to Apple's Macintosh technology. By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Technology]

STORIES LIKE THIS ONE

strike some kind of vigilante justice nerve somewhere within me. Prosecution seems too good for one who would do this sort of stuff. Anyone with children must know the sickening feeling Rob mentions.

Sick individual. Furious. That's how I feel right now. A man kidnaps a five year old girl and kills her. The police had better find him before the general public does, otherwise there may not be much of him left to prosecute. Sickening, just sickening. [Rob Fahrni, at the core.]

WE MAY NOT BE WOWED BY THE DELIVERY, BUT THE WORDS RESONATE
He's done it again only better!

Greenspan Coins a New Phrase. The man who gave us "irrational exuberance" is back, with a phrase that sums up the late 1990's even better than that one did. "Infectious greed." By Floyd Norris. [New York Times: Business]

ABOUT AS EXPECTED

I.B.M. Posts Sharp Drop in Quarterly Profits. I.B.M. said it eked out a second-quarter profit of just a few pennies a share as it took a $1.4 billion charge to cover job cuts and write-offs. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]

WHILE THERE IS EXCELLENT POLITICAL PUNDITRY
Keep an eye on the comments to this post; things might get interesting
as someone attempts to gain notoriety!

in these links, I have to admit that part of my fascination with some of the high-traffic bloggers has to do with their site designs. You see, I'm trying to inch closer to the renaming of this weblog and its move to a new domain. Ideas seem to flood in when reading all of these non-techie weblogs.

IS IT POSSIBLE FOR LIBERALISM TO BE RIGHT EVEN IF KATIE COURIC ISN'T? Mickey Kaus dares to ask the question, as he notes that Ann Coulter was right about the "airhead" issue. Plus, Jack Shafer zeroes in on hypocritical crony capitalism by The New York Times.

I have to say, I find the "airhead" controversy even less enlightening than the "trifecta" controversy. But hey, I'm on vacation, so this stuff seems less important to me than usual.

The Times story is likely to have legs, though, and illustrates why it's going to be harder than many pundits think for the left to pillory Bush and the Republicans for financial chicanery -- the left sold its financial soul long ago. They're down to trading puts and calls on it now.

UPDATE: If you're less bored with the "trifecta" story than I am (like, you know, if you're not on vacation) Brendan Nyhan has an update over at SpinSanity.Com. I have to say, I find the Al Gore trifecta story the funniest part of this whole long-running affair. [InstaPundit]

FIGHTING OFF THE SALES SLUMP

For many small businesses, the summer months mean a sales slowdown. New prospects become hard to locate, and current deals become: "I'll have to think it over" or "I'll get back to you in a week or two." How do you handle that? Here are a few pointers, which can help. [John Henry on Business]

IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME
Human nature often says, "make up some facts!"

It's funny how the subconscious fills in detail, even when no information is present. [Scripting News]

THE RAT RACE

can be defined in a variety of ways. We define it as:

keeping up with the Jones's

materialism as a path to happiness

everyone knows we've got to get more

climbing the corporate ladder to say you did it

working all day and going home too tired to pursue your dreams

letting the liberal media tell you how things really are

There's more, but that gives you the essence. One of the corporate myths has to do with measurement, compensation and 'getting results.' Nine out of ten organizations don't have metrics that really cause the results they seek. In fact, those metrics cause results that have to then be 'fixed.' Steven and Joel capture those notions with these posts!

Measurement Dysfunction. "As a result, workers began doing just about anything to get customers off the phone" Boy, does that sound familiar. "If you're in a helpdesk or call center, for example, and you're measuring your people on the number of calls they're taking, that's what they're going to do - take calls. [16-Jan]

Today, Joel writes about the oft-seen but (mostly) un-planned-for effect that measurements can have upon individuals' and organizations' performance. We call it "getting just what you measure," and too often the measurements are the only thing looked at by mid-level management. This "metric of the month" leaves employees feeling powerless to really do what's best for the customer; when they do they get 'dinged' by their manager for making the weekly stats look bad. Beat that horse too often and he'll just give up on the customer entirely.

What? You don't want your customers given up on? The trick is to find the measurements that really encourage the behaviour you want... not just the ones that are easiest for "the system" to give you (like number of calls taken, or time per call). [Steven's Weblog]

HERE'S ANOTHER REASON THAT TELECOM COLLAPSE AND REBIRTH IS INEVITABLE

Few people debate the fact that all of us use the phone at home, in business and on-the-go more than we did even ten years ago. Few people argue with the notion that we will be using one or more of these to an even greater degree in the future. We probably won't stop at Blockbuster, but we may 'order' a movie feed from Blockbuster. Those same phone calls may become video calls. Demand for bandwidth is a given!

The industry is facing the death throws of a 100-year old legacy, copper-based network. This centrally-planned, government subsidized relic is currently operated by a relative handful of monopolists or executives from the monopolists' ranks. Their rule is coming to an end. Some of them don't even know it.

Replacing that old network and its kings and lords will be a modern, continuously upgradable fiber optic network that passes IP packets end-to-end. Running that network will be a group of people who understand Moore's Law, rapid time-to-market and the concept of price-elasticity-of-demand. They're anything but monopolists!

I had an experience similar to the one mentioned below when one of our daughters phoned home from Boston while dancing with the Boston Ballet for a month or two. Little did we know we were facing a $700+ bill until after it arrived. We had done our homework in advance, fortunately, had documentation for the rates we had been quoted and got adjustments made to the bill. The relief was not easy to get nor was it immediate, but in an age of $0.045 per minute long distance rates, $700+ was not going to be paid!

Other than the airline industry, where you can be arrested for inquiring about the sobriety of the pilots, no industry treats its customers the way the telecom industry has. Better times are on their way, though!

SprintPCS Nightmare. I'm broke. I barely have enough money to get by through the next month. And my "royalty" check I received this weekend was only 36.00 - I was expecting 1000.00. Still, I can manage. I can manage...until today. Don't worry... [Burningbird]

John Andrew Holmes. "Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both." [Quotes of the Day]

SYMPATHY IS HARD TO MUSTER
But, desperation can be an ugly thing

Silicon Valley Without Trimmings. Having already gone from boom to bust, many dot-commers are coming to something worse. Now, in Silicon Valley, a part of the dot-com class is being defined by what it needs to return. By John Markoff and Matt Richtel. [New York Times: Business]