The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
B-TOWN – How Burien came into its own. (Trailer)
A sample of a documentary that shows the creative heart that sustains a community regardless of what happens. Grass roots democracy in action. Updated version.
Tip of the Hat to Anne M. Stadler in Lake Forest Park, WA.
Cost reduction for high-end markets
If you sell at the top of the market (luxury travel, services to Fortune 500 companies, financial services for the wealthy…) you might be tempted to figure out ways to cut costs and become more efficient.
After all, if you save a dollar, you make a dollar, without even getting a new customer.
Resist.
The goal shouldn't be to reduce costs. It should be to increase them.
That voice mail service that saves you $30,000 a year in receptionist costs–it also makes you much more similar to a competitor that is more efficiently serving the middle of the market.
Go through all the ways you serve your customers and make them more expensive to execute, not less. Your loyalty and your market share will both grow. People who can afford to pay for service often choose to pay for service.
Phi Beta Iota: What Master Seth is not making explicit is that HUMANS costs more than devices, and the REASON humans cost most is because at the high end, HUMANS offer creative adaptability, instant understanding of nuances, emotional calibration, and a deeply HUMAN connection to the client. Call centers are the high end of the low end. Capitalism took a wrong turn in commoditizing humans and treating labor costs as something to be reduced. It is the human web of knowledge that undergirds the advance of civilization, NOT the “things” that we buy and trash.
Review: Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition
Kyrgyzstan- Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states will help Kyrgyzstan stabilize the situation in the country's southern region, a source in the Russian Federal Security Service said 23 September after a regional SCO anti-terrorism council meeting, Interfax reported.
The council decided that law-enforcement agencies of member states will assist Kyrgyzstan maintain security by organizing information exchanges regarding regional militant activities, the source said. The source also said the council elected Chinese Deputy Minister for Public Security Meng Hongwei to chair the anti-terrorism council for one year. The council is set to meet next in Usbekistan in March 2011. Representatives from Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan attended the meeting.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The Moscow-centered Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) declined to undertake a more intrusive intervention mission. The Beijing-led SCO mission is primarily an intelligence exchange, but potentially affords China unprecedented access to information about central Asian security issues. The SCO will accrue positive publicity for its limited mission, upstaging the CSTO.
The Chinese-led organization looks cooperative. The Russian-led organization looks timid. This in fact confuses different missions and burdens, but the public perception is likely to favor the Chinese-led initiative in the Russian sphere of influence.
Kyrgyzstan-Russia: Issues between Russia and Kyrgyzstan over Russia's military bases in Kyrgyzstan have been addressed and an agreement will be signed, probably on the 24
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The Russians have four military facilities or bases in Kyrgyzstan, including Kant air base. Under the new agreement they will be consolidated in a single command structure and all will be governed by the new agreement, instead of four separate agreements. Russia's lease will probably be good for the next four or five decades.
Phi Beta Iota: Reference: Global Governance 2025 completely missed both the Hybrid and the Open models of governance that are displacing institutionalized ineptitude now characteristic of most governments, all unable to micro-manage complexity or achieve resilience. The above report suggests that Kyryzstan could be an early node where multinational information-sharing and sense-making is more influential, more effective, and more profitable, than standing military bases, but the two can co-exist. See also Worth a Look: Future of Business is Information Sharing. To appreciate such nuances one needs a strategic analytic modeland the inclination to actually understand the eight tribes of intelligence, “true costs,” and all other aspect of holistic reality.
By: Jon Walker Monday September 20, 2010 1:03 pm
A large majority of Americans, 58 percent, believe that the country needs a third major party to adequately represent the American people, according to a new Gallup poll. Only 35 percent think the Democratic and Republican Parties do an adequate job representing the electorate.
The desire for a third party is high because currently both parties are unpopular with the American people. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that both the Democratic and Republican Parties favorability numbers were negative. Perhaps more importantly, it found that overwhelming majorities disapproved of the job performance of Congressional Republicans and Democrats.
. . . . . . .
The problem is systemic.
See Also:
Event: 30 Oct Restoring Sanity Rally with Jon Stewart, Keep Fear Alive Rally with Stephen Colbert
Reference: Electoral Reform Act of 2009
2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig
Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Review: Running on Empty–How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (Paperback)
and also:
Continue reading “Journal: Third Party Desired by 58% in America + ReCap”
The map does not copy but is worth a look. Anonymity is not at all assured, but the concept is important.
Radical management: what to do when your customer is the government
One constraint on implementing radical management is that the customer is on a different path altogether. A frequent example is where your customer is a government bureaucracy. You are aspiring to delight your client, and your client is saying, “Don’t bother with me such questions. Just deliver what the specifications ask for.”
. . . . . .
…realistically, most government organizations are not even trying to practice radical management. One way of understanding how they function is to recognize that organizations operate at three levels, using a schema proposed by Ranjay Gulati in Reorganize For Resilience: Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009)
Level 1: “You take what we make.”
Level 2: “We believe that our offerings will be useful to you.”
Level 3: “We seek to understand and solve your problems with our offerings”
While radical management is operating at level 3, most government organizations are still stranded at level 1. They are paying scant attention to their stakeholders. Often they have not even taken any decision as to who their primary stakeholders are. As a result, no one really knows what the purpose of the organization is. The managers in such organizations typically follow rules and procedures, rather than systematically consider: how could we deliver more value sooner? These organizations are the quintessential bureaucracy, and the management is quintessentially Dilbertian.
Phi Beta Iota: The government is full of good people trapped in a bad system. We've decided that in addition to educating the five billion poor one cell call at a time, we have to give government employees an easy to use cell tether to a World Brain that helps them evolve the consciousness of government from the bottom up.
America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010 issue of American Spectator
EXTRACT 1: They [the bi-opoly two parties] think, look, and act as a class.
EXTRACT 2: The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
