The white screen of death plague that hit us was NOT an attack. We finally deactivated the Minify link and compression engine and that cleaned it up. The latest WordPress release evidently put Minify into a massive disconnect.
There are residual effects–some, not all, of the links in various posts are broken. We expect that problem to go away but in the interim, simply copy the link words and paste them into the search box, that generally leads straight to the desired item.
Cuba will host the 13th International Colloquium on the life and work of U.S. writer, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) from June 16 to 19, with the attendance of nearly 20 experts on his life from several countries.
I just came across an excellent piece in the Harvard Business Review thanks to my colleague Larry Pixa. Published in 1999 by Stanford professors Pfeffer and Sutton, “The Smart-Talk Trap” (PDF) is even more pertinent in today’s new media world where user-generated content is ubiquitous. The key to success is action but the authors warn that we are increasingly “rewarded for talking—and the longer, louder, and more confusingly, the better.” This dynamic, which substitutes talk for action, is responsible for what Pfeffer and Sutton call the knowing-doing gap. The purpose of this blog post is to assess this gap in the context of social media and to offer potential solutions.
Phi Beta Iota: We would merely observe that this problem is characteristic of virtually every US Government element, and every major corporation including the so-called innovators like Facebook which could actually fold sometime soon as alternatives come out of the BRICS. What Brother Patrick does not address is the reality that in both government and in corporations, the rotation and retirement of people often destroys all accountability for their failure while in any specific office. The stovepiping of everything makes it even more difficult to address “true cost” information, or to measure effectiveness in context. We do not lack for money in this world, we lack for applied intelligence and the integrity to connect truth to product.
Pioneering Book by Personable Authors, May 26, 2011
I was shocked to see the scorching negative comment on this book. I met one of the authors tonight at a Microsoft job fair, she is one of their Human Relations recruiters (probably has a broader portfolio than that), and we talked about the book, the emergence of “lists” at which this book was a pioneer, and the total concept of women as distinct from men and both the obstacles and challenges that women face, and the enormous value that women bring, best reflected for me in another book I have reviewed, Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education.
Stephen E. Arnold and ArnoldIT have consistently been a decade or more ahead of the curve. IntelTrax is one of his new offerings and is highly recommended. Information about advanced intelligence systems is the focus.
A few current items: Data Analytics by Academics .. Big Data vs. Big Legislation .. Low Cost Analytic Help Becoming Big Business .. Analytic Surveillance Proves Unsettling .. Microsoft and Others Ramp UP BI Activity ..
So…here's what I wrote. It's missing a handy chart where it depicts the average Wells employee's hourly salary vs. the CEO's salary, but you get the gist.
Full disclosure, I had been working here for a few months and this was to be my last week. I wouldn't recommend anyone else do this, but I gotta admit, it felt damn good and maybe someone will step up and do something about it.
Good Morning All,
Last week a friend of mine was fired for sending an inappropriate email to pretty much the whole building. Despite the fact that it was harmless, accidental, and largely ignored message, she will now join the ranks of the unemployed. If she is your average unemployed Oregonian she will remain unemployed for at least 18 months and when/if she gets rehired somewhere it will be for less money than she was making here.
Now my friend was definitely in the wrong, and I’m not writing this email to argue her situation. However, in an attempt to hold our company to a similar standard consider the following:
We work for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, we are essential to its operations, yet economic security is completely at the mercy of its senior executives. They are squeezing our salaries, reducing our benefits, and lobbying our politicians to make it harder for us to improve our financial positions despite our contributions to Wells Fargo’s successes. It means more profits for them, but less choice, less freedom and more importantly, less money for us.
In 2010, our CEO, John G. Stumpf received $18,973,722 in total compensation. By comparison, the median worker made $33,190 in 2010. John G. Stumpf made 571 times the median worker's pay.
Phi Beta Iota: We note with interest that this executive is only 220th on the Forbes executive pay rankings. We hold the corporations blameless in one sense: they get to do this because the US Government has lost its integrity and has not been in the business of the public for decades, Grover Cleveland may have been the last truly honest holistic President. What that says about the American public is for reflection. At the same time, we point to William Greider's book Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country in which he discusses the documentations on how the financial industry (Mr. Stumpf's industry) inflated by 17 times base value while the “real” asset-based economy inflated by five times. This means that Mr. Stumpf and his colleagues cheated the US and global customers by 12 times….and for this, the government bails them out and nobody goes to jail. See also Matt Taibbi's Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.