Category: Commerce

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SharpInsights #53: Modern Advice From a Long-Dead Roman

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman dramatist, Stoic philosopher, politician, and history's earliest proponent of competitive intelligence. Wait…what?

One of Seneca's most famous quotes is a management mantra: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” For executives making decisions in a recession-battered marketplace, “preparation” means more than skimming last year's sales figures or catching up on trade magazines.

Competitive intelligence reveals the current, comprehensive, objective truth about your product or service, brand, company, customers, and industry. The cold hard truth can lead to a warm fuzzy feeling for managers who apply their CI preparation to opportunity.

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Journal: 10% Foreclosures, 1-2% Mortgage Default

06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Foreclosures in Las Vegas

The Huffington Post is doing a very fine job of raising key issues, but in isolation and out of context.  Here is one story they have brought forward.  As Cleveland found out when they had to raze to the ground 11,000 abandoned units, foreclosures come with very heavy social and financial costs.  It is not to late to stop all foreclosures and evictions as we recommended in October 2008, to no effect.  America is going through a multi-dimensional crisis without any leadership whatsoever.  One way to understand the crisis is to study the Revolution Matrix and the Negative Book List.  The Positive Book List requires some semblance of leadership and legitimacy, at this time not to be found in America, outside of the Virtual Cabinet at The Huffington Post, which does not really exist–it could, but it does not.

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Journal: Army Shines with Bee Deaths But Case Still Open

01 Agriculture, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Military, Mobile
Full Article Online

Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found

The New York Times

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: October 6, 2010

DENVER — It has been one of the great murder mysteries of horticulture: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Phi Beta Iota: This is a very exciting story, and a real accomplishment by the US Army team applying Cold War bio-chemical skill sets to what may be the single greatest threat to US agriculture other than vanishing water.  The Times did not, however, reference other causes of bee disorientation and dysfunction, such as cell phones and other electromagnetic pollutants.

See Also:

Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons (April 24, 2007)

Journal: Electromagnetics, Bees, & Agriculture

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Journal: Leveraging Local Entrepreneurs

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Methods & Process, Non-Governmental
Hisham Wyne

Hisham Wyne

Writer, columnist and armchair sociologist

Posted: October 1, 2010 12:35 PM

Social Entrepreneurs and Change in Dubai

An event revolving around the UN Millennium Goals, TEDx Change Dubai, recently gathered three hundred participants at the creek side Dubai Chamber of Commerce. Melinda Gates, wife of billionaire philanthropist and once Microsoft overlord Bill Gates, asked a pertinent question while streaming live from New York.

How is it that Coke can sell 1.5 billion servings daily and dispense to far flung areas that NGOs, Quangos and aid agencies have difficulty reaching with aid or vaccines? It's simple. Coke's distribution takes advantage of local entrepreneurs. NGOs often don't. Entrepreneurs are by nature both disruptive and generative. They distress the fabric of large business through hyper-local knowledge. They nimbly pounce on small market opportunities, or even build them from scratch. They catalyze economic spurts and the birth of cultures and sub-cultures as microcosms of activity appear around them. Their knowledge and drive can often be a powerful catalyst for social improvement.

Read balance of article…

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Worth a Look: Citizens, Banks, and Coal Mining

05 Energy, Civil Society, Commerce, Earth Intelligence

Phi Beta Iota: We decided to post a long email about helping a major international bank decide not to fund mountaintop removal coal projects for the following reasons:

1)  It illustrates the emergent power of focused citizen advocacy.

2)  It documents the modified behavior of select major banks.

3)  It highlights the complete fragmentation of citizen advocacy–all over the lot with no strategic analytic model, no information-sharing network, no ability to co-evolve and achieve multiplication effects.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Citizens, Banks, and Coal Mining”

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Journal: Finally, A Break in Foreclosures

03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government

JPMorgan Suspends Certain Foreclosures As Doubts Grow Over Legality

Even as August saw more Americans lose their homes to foreclosure than in any other month on record, there are growing concerns over the legality of many of those proceedings.

JPMorgan Chase has suspended legal proceedings on 50,000 foreclosures, due to concerns about the validity of the foreclosure documents, a spokesman for the bank told CNBC Wednesday (hat tip to Zero Hedge).

JPMorgan spokesman Tom Kelly confirmed to the AP Wednesday that “employees signed some affidavits about loan documents without personally verifying the files.”

The decision is the latest signal of a potentially massive stall in the nation's foreclosure process. Last week, after GMAC Mortgage halted its foreclosures in 23 states, the Washington Post reported that one of GMAC's employees hadn't read the roughly 10,000 foreclosure documents he approved each month (and now Colorado wants to be added to that list of states). It then turned out that the “robo signer” might not have been alone.

Phi Beta Iota: We called for a freeze on all foreclosures and evictions back in October 2008, instead of bailing out Wall Street where one $10 million bonus could cover an astonishing number of mortgage payments among the poor and lower middle class.  The US Government failed to assure justice for all those who have been evicted to date.  This move by JP Morgan is a good one, and also reminds us once again how important INTEGRITY is at every stage of every process.  The reality is that most final “holders” of aggregated mortgages never had the actual loan note to begin with.  The Department of Justice should have known that and should have advised all relevant policymakers and politicians of this fact, but in the rush to bail out Wall Street, the public interest was ignored, demeaned, and betrayed.