12 posts tagged “barack obama”

It's  a shame that the phrase 'nationalisation' has such negative connotations. 

Wikipedia explains 'Nationalization' as:

'the act of taking an industry or assets into the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to private assets, but may also mean assets owned by lower levels of government, such as municipalities, being state operated or owned by the state. The opposite of nationalization is usually privatization or de-nationalisation, but may also be municipalization. A renationalization occurs when state-owned assets are privatized and later nationalized again, often when a different political party or faction is in power. A renationalization process may also be called reverse privatization.

Why is the N word such a problem?  The American public are violently against every huger numbers being injected into so obviously incompetently run organisations such as AIG Group or Citibank because these institutions are tainted by the actions of the executives who run them - the 'bonus hungry Derivative traders' - 'the Fat Cats' - 'the wealthy and privileged.

These banks are purely a function of tens of millions of regular people who need to be able to earn money (that they save in a bank) or spend money (which they borrow from a bank in normal times, so they can pay for things over a period of time out of their earnings).

The public's opinion about Obama's handling of the banks has turned against him, as they see themselves rewarding the very people who've caused the problem.  This, of course, is only partially true - after all, if huge amounts of credit and debt hadn't been run up by citizens in the first place, then the banks wouldn't necessarily be in the place they find themselves.  As the saying goes 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people' - in a similar vein, 'Banks haven't bankrupted people, people have bankrupted people'.

So, surely the solution is this - make the banks and the entire US financial system the shared responsibility of the people.  Remove from executive office people who've run the banks, and put in their place a group of people with a shared responsibility for resolving the problem.  Lay out legislation that outlaws bonuses.  Recommend that other countries, most of whom of course are dependent on the USA for their countries' economy adopt the same approach. 

Lead by example.  Don't listen to people who try and argue the point if "you don't reward talent, it'll go elsewhere".  What talent, exactly?  And where will it go?  And whose money will they be able to use to be more successful?

Here in the UK, there is absolutely no reason why Lloyds Banking Group and RBS shouldn't enter public ownership.  There is no reason why these publicly owned companies can't compete more than adequately against their private counterparts, given that the resources available to them (ie taxpayers money) isn't up to the task of competing with privately raised money.

Ditto France.  DItto Germany.  China has already got it's act together - witness the largest bank in China - state owned of course.

Can you do it?  Of course you can.  Will the public applaud you for doing it?  With the right explanation, of course they will.

After all, banks are simply there for a purpose.  They're a means to an end.  Not their end.

Ours.

After the Gaza conflict, everyone will be expecting you to resolve this problem.  Israel must take a back seat - let Hillary get to work here first, whilst you denounce the atrocities of Robert Mugabe. 

Zimbabwe has no particular strategic imperative for the US, all the more reason you should bring to bear your African American sensibility on this brutal dictator.  He must stand trial for the decades of death & destruction he's responsible for.  No oil gain, no hidden agenda.  No reason other than "it's the right thing to do".

In a closed system, Kinetic Energy = Potential Energy x Coefficient of Friction.

To paraphrase John F Kennedy; "Ask not what your fellow Global Citizen can do for you, but what you can do for your fellow Global Citizen".  Or, as it will probably be spoken, American citizen look after American citizen.

If we all 'Embrace change as a constant' - then we will never have cause to fear Change".

Be the best you can be - be a (Martin Luther) King

E = OB squared.

Will, Providenciales, 19.01.09

I'm hugely confident that Barack Obama will not disappoint as the 44th President of the United States. 

Once in a lifetime someone like him comes along, a Black Swan, who is able to turn despair into optimism through projecting a quiet, determined, confidence to billions of people who need to be reassured that things are going to be alright.  From world leaders to street sweepers, all will be asked to 'be the best person they can be' in their role, and I know he will lead by example.  Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his book 'the Audacity of Hope', most particularly chapter 5, 'Opportunity', I feel that the 20th January 2009 will be a global turning point.

One extract from this book summarises why this man will be a Great man - do read it until the end.

The Audacity of Hope
Page 193-194: 

As the pace of change accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship becomes harder to maintain.  Jefferson was not entirely wrong to fear Hamilton's vision for the country, for we have always been in a constant balancing act between self interest and community, markets and democracy, the concentration of wealth and power and the opening up of opportunity. We've lost that balance in Washington, I think.  With all of us scrambling to raise money for campaigns, with unions weakened and the press distracted and lobbyists for the powerful pressing their full advantage, there are few countervailing voices to remind us of who we are and where we've come from, and to affirm our bonds with one another.

That was the subtext of a debate in early 2006 when a bribery scandal triggered new efforts to curb the influence of lobbyists in Washington.  One of the proposals would have ended the practice of letting senators fly on private jets at the cheaper first class commercial rate.  The provision had little chance of passage.  Still, my staff suggested that as the designated Democratic spokesperson on ethics reform, I should initiate a self-imposed ban on the practice.

It was the right thing to do, but I won't lie, the first time I was scheduled for a four city swing in two days flying commercial, I felt some pangs of regret.  The traffic to O'Hare was terrible, when I got there the flight to Memphhis had been delayed.  A kid spilt orange juice on my shoe.

Then, while waiting in line, a man came up to me, maybe in his mid thirties, dressed in chinos and a golf shirt and told me that he hoped Congress would do something about stem cell research this year.  "I have early-stage Parkinson's disease" he said, "and a son who's three years old.  I probably won't ever get to play catch with him.  I know it may be too late for me, but there's no reason somebody else has to go through what I'm going through".

These are the stories you miss, I thought to myself, when you fly on a private jet.
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

You've got to hand it to Pepsi.  Going for a fully fleged rebrand and relaunch, neatly tying in with Barack Obama's call to action 'Change'.

Inspired by some, hated by others - but given they have to compete with Coke (always pretty good with marketing after their New Coke shocker), they're challenging for change.

Just like us.

The US car companies, which largely make outdated, outmoded, fuel-inefficient cars which no one really wants (witness the rise of Honda, Toyota, Nissan globally since the 1970's) should be left to fail.

They are inefficiently over-unionised, run by bosses who put their jet ahead of their peoples' jobs, have performed spectacularly badly over the past two decades and represent all that is bad in manufacturing Main Street USA.  The igntiion must be turned off, the companies must go into administration, for the greater good.

Yes, this will mean their UK subsidiaries suffer.  Yes, sadly, tragically in some cases, people will lose their job.  But this is a process of renewal.

But we live in a closed system.  There will be an (as yet unknown) equal and opposite reaction, where goods and brands people want will be created.  Not yet (as Barack Obama continues to resolutely and sensibly point out - "there are no quick fixes" but there will be.

After all, people need cars.  But they need less model choice, more fuel economy and importantly, cars that thrive on alternative power, such as electric & hydrogen.

California leads the way with planning for hydrogen cars, but at the moment, there is no refuelling infrastructure in place.  Put the redundant workforce to work building a new charging infrastructure, and take the best of these companies R&D and start, in a year or two's time, making new, better, cleaner cars.

After all, like every product in the world, they wear out.  Are scrapped, recycled.  Demand for 'new and better' will build up.  The corner will be turned, the ignition switch will be once again turned, but it won't be an ozone depleting, carbon making car powering into life, but one of a new breed.  One for which the planning, so long in execution, can start once Barack Obama is in power.

And regarding the UK economy, IMHO Gordon Brown is right to keep momentum going in the UK economy, and David Cameron is wrong to say 'don't spend to support it'.  The UK economy is a sophisticated, hybrid system of supply and demand.  Products must be made to be bought, you simply must keep the fuel flowing through the UK's retail channels - and these red blood cells are human beings who 'make, sell & buy'. 

Momentum, the product of mass and velocity of an object (the UK economy) must not be allowed to glide to a halt.  Anyone who has tried to move a heavy object (imagine a boulder in a small hollow at the top of a hill) knows how hard it is, how long it takes, to rock the boulder slowly back and forth, building up momentum, until finally, eventually, it comes out of the hollow it can have rested in, and start rolling.

People - it's time to embrace 'Change as a Constant' and always be changing, evolving, innovating, improving, always restless witih 'Worry' that things can always be done better.

This is how King of Shaves has thrived, rather than survived, in the face of what people would see as impossibly difficult competition from Gillette & Schick-Wilkinson Sword.

When the going gets tought, the Tough get growing.  Change.  It's a good thing.

Someone in the BBC's planning department has a strategic sense of humour.

Armageddon, the 'America saves the World' space flick featuring Bruce Willis (or John McClain when he's playing Die Hard) was an 'inspired' choice for today's BBC film replacing the temporarily (?) axed Tonight with Jonathan Ross.

I bet Paddy Power would only offer evens on next week's film being Superman.

What a week.

Interesting times we live in.

My business partner went to a gay wedding today.  Just 10 years ago, this would be seen as 'unusual'.

A Black man is in the White house.  Just 7 years ago, this would be seen as 'impossible'.

Old thnks a Recession is bad.  New thinks a recession is "a filter for what's good & bad".  Most of my (youngish) employees were mid-teens during the last recession.

Old practices (save for a rainy day) is the new New (save for a rainy day).

My son (nearly 9) thinks he wants to be a "CEO who asks scientists to design him a game he can 'be inside'.  When i ask him if "he's sure" he replies with a confident "Yep".  But he still likes going to bonfire night and being reassured that "the bed bugs won't bite".

At 9, I was worried about wearing shorts to school.

Life - it is a changing.  For the better.  It may not look like it,  But it is.

Today.  Tomorrow.  It's getting better.

It is.

Black Swans

I'm halfway through reading Black Swan a book whose premise is that wholly unimaginable, unexpected, unpredicted, unpredictable) events mean that the future can never be expected to follow past or historical trends.

8 years ago, Barack Hussein Obama was a universally unknown junior senator in Chicago, George Bush, a scion of the highly politicised Bush family was universally known.  In 2000, it looked like 'nothing could go wrong' with the world, the dotcom boom (v1) was still in full flow and no one knew who Osama bin Laden was, let alone what would happen just a year later with 9/11 - a Black Swan event if ever there was one.

Looking back (pre 9/11) history would predict A) the White House would always be occupied by a White Man and B) the world's economy would continue in a spiral of virtuous growth fuelled by domestic consumption of cheap goods from China.

Black Swan event 1 (9/11) then led to this predicted (and continuing) model imploding.  The world was instantly unsafe, world markets crashed, two wars were started and America, from being viewed relatively benignly, developed an arrogant belligerence that set in train Black Swan event 2 (the ascendance of African American Barack Obama to President Elect).

Barack Obama & King of Shaves - Black Swan phenomena?

The creation of King of Shaves shaving oil in 1993, was in its own small way a Black Swan event.  With a degree in engineering, a background in selling marketing services and no entrepreneurial backstory, no one could have predicted that following redundancy, my creation of a tiny bottle (10ml) of shaving oil with just £300 of sales in year one, would, within a few years lead to the creation of a brand that is actively challenging the (assumed future dominance) of "Wilkinette" in razors, blades as well as shaving gels, foams.

People would (you would believe) carry on buying increasingly expensive, increasingly bladed cartridge razors ad infinitum, accepting that these were 'the best a man can get'.  Whether Wilkinson Sword (Schick) Quattro or Gillette Fusion, these would be the razor of choice of great shaving public.

Apart from, there's now a Barack Obama brand of razors, the King of Shaves Azor.  A razor that promises a close shave, that lasts longer, and costs less.  If George W Bush drove a car, it would be a truck or an H1 Hummer, if Barack Obama drove a car, it would probably be a VW Beetle, the 'peoples' car.

Where George Bush would view 'more as more', Obama would take the countercurrent 'less is more' approach, and seek to cut down on the complexity of what surrounds him, so he can 'cut through' to the people he has promised change to (which will be both for the better AND the worse) and explain it to them

Fusion = Republican McCain?  Azor = Democrat Obama?

As I sit here today, maybe 20% of UK shavers are aware of King of Shaves and our new Azor.  80% don't really know about it, haven't yet tried it.  Yet sales in just a few months of the Azor are approximately 15% of system handle sales (from a standing start) and exit polls post shaving suggest many people are enjoying the 'King of Shaves' without the ransom.

We are where Barack was 8 years ago, and are promising 'Change YOU need'.  You don't need to spend £2.50/$5.00 on a cartridge for a clean, close, comfortable shave.  You don't need to carry around a battery powered, over-engineered vibrating razor in your toilet bag.  You don't need to pay for multiple sports superstars, all attempting to lend one particular brand their personality.  You don't need to be told, via TV advertising that 'the razor you're using isn't the one you should be using, even thought it's made by the same company'.

What you do need to know is that Change is good, Change brings advancement and Change delivers better.  As Apple would say, "Choose Different, Shave Better"

The King of Shaves Azor is the epitome of "shaving simplicity" and comes without the cost.  Go on - try it - if you like it, tell your friends about a new brand that promises to disrupt and improve the shaving business in the same way that brand 'Barack Obama' will do in Politics.

Here's to Black Swans.  Because the unpredicted will determine the future.

Thank goodness I hated shaving back in 1993.  And used a natural oil (lubricates), not a canned gel (chemical, overpackaged, not as goo), to begin King of Shaves with.

Apple would term it nUSA but I think the captial 'N' is deserved.

Barack Obama will be the new POTUS (President of the United States) and I hope he will bring confidence and commonsense to the USA, married with charisma, thought and much needed balance.

Per my earlier post, congratulations to all the Americans who have proved the value of Democracy in evolving the world to the 'next stage'.

Go Obama - deliver on your promises, lead, don't dictate and ensure you communicate the importance of 'Change' to your people.

C'mon America, let's commit to change for Good.