My Blog

Pot, Meet Kettle

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 08:18:12 -0400

Today, the Richmond Times-Dispatch lead article talked about the irrelevance of former Virginia governor Doug Wilder’s views on the Virginia gubernatorial race.

Few people noticed the article, since the newspaper is itself struggling with relevancy issues.

That a newspaper no one reads writes about a governor no one cares about is perhaps the funniest thing in the McDonnell/Deeds election.

Other than Creigh Deeds inability to string together a subject and an object in this clip, taken immediately after a recent debate.

Why I will miss Ted Kennedy

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:18:20 -0400

I imagine it’s unusual to see “Why I will miss Ted Kennedy” in the same blog as “Why I will miss Robert McNamara” and “The specter of protectionism.” I’m from Massachusetts.

Senator Kennedy’s life of service is something to be admired. His personal challenges, and the bad decisions he made, are best seen in the light of his ability to persevere. A shallow review of his life could simply chronicle those mistakes, but it would miss the man, and it would miss the real power of Ted Kennedy’s story.

Unlike his brothers, who most people under 40 know best by their initials and the monuments built to their life, Edward was human. He lived long enough that we saw through the facade built by his parents and carefully nurtured. He lived long enough that we saw his deep, abiding passion for humanity and a ferocious desire to help those who are less fortunate, or who are set upon by others.

His work in health care, his work in human rights, his work in civil rights, his work as a consummate dealmaker in a building where fewer and fewer deals are stuck, won’t be easily replaced. The people who built Ted Kennedy as a cardboard cut-out of liberalism eventually learned their characterization was flawed, and many found themselves allied with the senior senator from Massachusetts.

It’s as easy to be liberal as it is to be conservative. You shun all other points of view and regard those who disagree with you as deeply flawed, or less than human. We see this behavior in polemics from both sides. What we see only rarely is someone with the deep passion of an extreme position with the capacity to listen, to adapt to new information and to find common ground in a discussion, in a debate and in legislation.

I will miss Ted Kennedy because he reminds me of my father. His voice, his jaw, his accent. I will miss Ted Kennedy because our political world got a little more partisan today. I will miss Ted Kennedy because his model of public service becomes like that of his brothers - the stuff of monuments and speeches, and not the stuff of flesh and blood.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Speaking at Virginia FF Conference

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:40:23 -0400

On Thursday afternoon, I will be speaking with Dave Tesh and Jo Richmond at the 123rd Annual State Firefighters Conference in Hampton, Virginia. We’ll be speaking about ways to keep your department afloat, and to thrive in tough economic times.

The Virginia State Firefighters Association puts on a mammoth conference for the state’s firefighters each year. It’ll be fun -- and if you’re around, stop by and say hi!

The Worker, The Wallet and The Waystation
Why Keeping Your EMS Workers Is Harder Every Day

Thursday 1:30 pm Room 203

What’s your turnover rate? If the question makes you think of breakfast pastries and not retention, this is the session you need to attend! (If you thought about retention, you’re probably already coming.)

In this session, the speakers will discuss the realities of EMS worker retention in 2009. Whether paid or unpaid, an increasingly fragile economy and an increasingly fickle workforce make 30-year careers less and less a reality. Keeping your workers by building a culture of retention throughout your organization will be a key message from this session.

Join Dana Love and David Tesh as they explore the state, listen to funny examples of retention programs gone wrong, and hear tales of agencies that thought they were “the best at EMS”, right up until their staff fled. The speakers will introduce a solution to the retention problems we all face: A good first step is to use the answers and apply the principles found in Keeping The Best! series from the Office of EMS.

We’ll test the idea that the thing that separates those who struggle with retention and those who don’t is how well the implement retention principles.

Charlie Wilson in town

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:02:02 -0400

So how pathetic am I that when I saw this ad for Charlie Wilson appearing in Richmond on Friday, I was hoping for the former Congressman from Texas?

I know. Pretty pathetic.

Why I will miss Robert McNamara

Mon, 6 Jul 2009 09:02:00 -0400

The Washington Post just reported that Robert Strange McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, died last night. He was 93.

I met Secretary McNamara when I was a young man. He was president of the World Bank at the time, and was speaking about the benefits of systems analysis in public policy. In large measure, my interest in applying best practices across industries was born from that talk, and a few moments I had with him after the speech.

McNamara finished his MBA from Harvard in 1939, then went to work for Ford after the war. He found a company in need of reform, and he and nine peers -- dubbed the Whiz Kids -- put a series of modern business practices in place at Ford, the theory of which are still in place today, McNamara was promoted into the role of president. He was the first president to come from outside the Ford family, but he only served for a few months before the call came from President Kennedy.

Why will I miss Robert McNamara? He was a great boss. He was performance-measure driven. He was very focused on spending appropriately, and sought strict standards of effectiveness and efficiency in the spending of defense dollars. He was very focused on social equity - from racial and gender discrimination to poverty reduction to education and improved access to health care.

His life was a model for the things I wanted to achieve, and for some of the things I still want to achieve. Men like McNamara don’t come around often. When we’re blessed with their presence, we will feel their absence.

Thank you, Secretary McNamara. I will miss you.

Is secrecy better than transparency

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:51:30 -0400

One of the latest buzzwords in politics and corporate governance has been “transparency.” The New York Times reported on President Obama’s “new tone” of transparency, an academic research paper has in turn been written about the New York Times own level of transparency, and the idea of transparent corporate governance is all the rage today. Ironically, the only long-standing body seeing a long and sustained push for transparency has been the government, and the new government is failing.

So the government fights against it but pushes for it in corporate governance and newspapers lobby for it but try themselves to not be subject to it. This should instill confidence that transparency makes sense?

Vilified as the arch enemy of transparency, secrecy is eschewed as bad for shareholders, responsible for global warming and, well, perhaps the rot cause of President Obama’s smoking habit. It was also the pointed focus of a New York Times article on Apple.

But is secrecy a bad thing?

While the Times article identifies the challenges Apple has faced in their goal to keep internal matters private (and to be fair, “internal matters” to Apple seems to mean anything that happens inside any of their buildings, and maybe in the airspace above their buildings...they’re about as guarded as the NSA on new product development), the article also identifies a core truth:

Most governance experts do seem to agree on one point: that the secrecy that adds surprise and excitement to Apple product announcements is not serving the company well in other areas.

So that sounds complimentary, right? I did a quick search for the number of times MARKETING experts were asked about the benefits of GOVERNANCE....oddly, no relevant results were found. Apparently, governance experts are also great marketeers.

And why is secrecy not “serving the company well”? Other than the assertion that “transparency is critical”, there was little real insight. Here is my insight:

Everyone heard everything about the Palm Pre. Units sold in first weekend, 50,000.
The iPhone 3GS was kept under wraps and launched in typical Apple style. Units sold in first weekend, 1,000,000.

Now, I don’t have any advanced degrees in corporate governance and I’m not a lawyer. I’m an economist, a business consultant who focuses on market strategy, and a technologist. Here’s a complex formula:

1,000,000 > 50,000

Score one for the secrecy camp.

What a crummy pricing plan

Tue, 9 Jun 2009 19:31:46 -0400

At Monday’s WWDC 2009 keynote address, Phil Schiller looked nominally less lousy than the last few times he’s spoken. It’s pleasant that Steve Jobs is expected to return to work by the end of the month, since Schiller really never showed the chops to serve up the same excitement and buzz of Jobs.

In full disclosure, following Steve Jobs onto an Apple stage would be like having the Rolling Stones as our opening act. It’s a rare group who could exceed expectations. For Schiller, though, it was likely his best chance to show his board a capacity for being the public face of the organization. Though not a failure, few would call Phil’s performance a success.

Was the product less interesting than previous launches? It would be unfair to compare Schiller and Jobs if one had a materially more interesting thing to launch. Here, Phil gets some leeway -- since the new iPhone pricing and American launch is so screwed up that I’m left wondering how Tim Cook still has a job.

Let’s look first at the pricing plan. The major challenge is that AT&T won’t subsidize upgrades (in full disclosure, this includes both my 3G iPhone and my wife’s 2.5G iPhone) for most existing customers, which leaves those millions with an interesting problem:

Do we pay AT&T $175 (or less) to cancel our contracts, then get a $200 discount on the new iPhone, or do we pay $200 more than the announced price to Apple to get the new iPhone.

In the realm of pricing, this is a colossal bungle. Sure, it’s a partnership. Sure, AT&T wants to make money on the iPhone usage. Sure, Apple should get paid for delivering a cool product. But when the network carrier’s subsidy is more than the cost to cancel, someone is in for an ugly shock.

How many people will it take to cancel their contract and buy a new phone before Apple and AT&T realize they’re both screwed? Do the math:

What’s the cost to cancel a contract? It’s more than zero, since it involves a variety of systems. Then the cost to subsidize the phone is likely less than the stated $200 discount. AT&T collects money that Apple could be collecting itself, but is spending money and causing customer churn to do it.

The pricing gets even less attractive given many of the new features won’t work on the AT&T network!

MMS? Great feature. It’ll work by late summer, at best, and requires a manual update...of the millions of iPhone accounts

Tethering? Super idea. Not available at this time.

Faster network? Yeah, let’s hope they get this one right.

The irony that AT&T has done such an impressive job at expanding their network while Apple takes an innovative product and launches it in a half-assed way is a total role reversal. Who would ever think they’d see that?!

So, will I get the new phone? Is Verizon Wireless really going to be offering them soon?

Website troubles resolved

Sun, 8 Feb 2009 07:26:51 -0500

The website was a touch overloaded on Friday evening, due to increasing demand for the EMS Leadership Topics podcast. We’ve corrected the problem, and by 8 PM ET on Saturday, the site was back up and fully functional.

I had no idea the demand for a cross-industry viewpoint in the ambulance industry was so needed, and would be so well received. It’s cool that it is!

We’re looking at peeling the podcast off to its own site mid-year. We’ve reserved the domain (if you watch the podcast, you can figure it out) and have been getting ready for a seamless move.

Busy month

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:51:16 -0500

My December has been very busy. I hope yours has been busy, and pleasant. As the year ends - happy new year, everyone! May your worst day in 2009 be better than your best day in 2008.

The podcast is going gangbusters. The site receives thousands of hits each month from the Apple iTunes browser, which speaks to the nearly 1,000 subscribers we’ve accumulated since starting the audio podcast in March. We’re still learning about video, but the sessions are getting more interesting as we’re trying more interesting things. Next year we’ll start two person interviews and group discussions, in addition to the giant talking head of Dana.

Work is fascinating, and as the economic news for governments and private sector clients gets more grim, we’re finding great opportunity to inject value into our discussions. Our consulting method has always been a little weird - less focused on the ornate process and more focused on surgical precision. Our way is what doctors call triage - a hard-nosed, pull-no-punches approach to setting, managing and completing priorities. The traditional way is more like a full physical exam - it takes a lot longer, the information is presented more kindly, and a lot of decisions about importance and prioritization are left to the patient.

Though arguments about “the company knows best what their priorities should be” have some validity, the company went looking for outside advice and consultation. What they don’t want to hear is “the answer is inside you!”

Faith’s proving to be a knitting fiend. She made the Jayne hat I wear in one of the podcasts, but don’t let that fool you -- she’s knitted a variety of amazing things. Sweaters, socks, throws, hats...even fingerless gloves (I guess Polish burglar gloves is impolite today, isn’t it?) for a friend who works outdoors.

She’s also helping a lot on the podcast production side. Too much to do, and we’re accelerating!

So looking back at my blog, it occurred to me that I’d been spreading doom and gloom a bit. So, no doom. No gloom. Just happy holidays.

But damn, did you see the stock market performance since November?

Continued Trouble For Municipalities

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:15:59 -0500

Municipal-bond fund shareholders might feel like they've lost the key to the city.

The credit crisis is striking state and local governments hard. Normally these entities would issue tax-exempt bonds to offset the shortfall and continue to finance public-works projects and daily operations. Accordingly, muni-bond funds are considered supersafe investments, since a government is less likely to go bankrupt than a company.

With the economy in the dumps, local governments' fiscal needs are greater than ever. Trouble is, buyers are scarce even for top-drawer debt.

And when there's too much supply and not enough demand, there's only one natural outcome: Prices of muni bonds are tumbling, along with the shares of mutual funds that invest in them. Some muni-bond funds are down 30% and more so far this year.

So what does this mean for city and county governments? Fewer fire stations, a tougher time building (and staffing) schools, public works projects go unfunded, and other reductions in service, expansion or renovation.

If there's a silver lining to this, it's that muni-bond funds may be oversold. Bargain-hunting managers can upgrade their portfolios with more of the highest-quality debt -- investments that likely will continue to hold up better in this downturn and come through the storm intact.

Admittedly, that's small comfort to money-losing muni investors, and even smaller comfort for the public sector workers themselves. With apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer: Oh, somewhere in this favored land, the sun is shining bright... But there is no joy in Mudville -- its bond holders have struck out.