True, a cover story I wrote for this magazine seven years ago, contending that the era of tiny, convenient, and relatively affordable jet airplanes was at hand, won an Article of the Year award from an aviation lobbying group. But it would be fair to describe the broader reaction as: Oh, sure! (“Freedom of the Skies,” June 2001, was excerpted from my book Free Flight.) New and more fuel-efficient jet engines; new, quieter, and more comfortable small airplanes; new and more-automated ways of routing aircraft around bad weather and away from congested areas—these and other innovations, I wrote, might make a new kind of air travel more practical for more people. This wouldn’t mean personal aviation in the Jetsons sense—a plane in every garage, people zooming around at will. But it might provide business travelers with something that until then only the truly rich had enjoyed: a fast and personalized alternative to the ever less delightful experience of travel on commercial airlines.
Most readers thought that personal airplanes, like personal yachts, would always be the playthings of the very rich. The familiar (and aptly named) Airbus or Boeing aircraft would have to do, as would impenetrable modern fare structures and the grind of big-airport congestion. It obviously didn’t help that three months later, the use of passenger airplanes as terrorist tools put aviation in general under new limits and scrutiny. Allow new routes and possibilities for air travel? Ha! Everything air-related was destined to be more controlled.
Category: Business
Waterloo’s Crave Brothers Featured on NBC Nightly News
Roger O’Neill video takes a look at the Crave Brothers use of methane – from their cow poop – to power the farm and 120 neighboring homes. The farm includes a cheese factory.
Addressing: The Revenge of Geography
Pondering a future for location intelligence is a speculative journey through geographic permanence and human transience that ends with proving location intelligence to be evermore crucial to businesses and governments.
The Canadian postal context
The post office has a natural connection to location and an unbeatable advantage over geo-matics, spatial mapping and so on: postal carriers go regularly to all locations.
Opened in 1755, the first Canadian post office facilitated commerce and nation-building at a time when locating people and places among the buffalo and beaver was a real challenge. By 2005, Canada Post was delivering 11.1-billion letters and packages – about 37-million pieces every day – to over 31-million individual Canadians plus over 1-million businesses and institutions at some 14-million points-of-call.
Canada Post has established an electronic pedigree as well. epostTM serves about 4-million subscribed Canadians, delivering electronic bills for over 90-percent of Canadian large volume mailers. Canada Post also provides both an electronic courier service to securely transmit large electronic documents and an Electronic PostMark.
Let’s Talk About Your Big But But
My December 31, 2007, blog entry was called What Do You Listen For? I wrote that if you listen for errors and offense, you will find them, but if you listen for truth and meaning, you will find them instead.
How can you tell when someone is not listening for truth and meaning? One sign is the word, “but,” which suggests one has listened only for something to contradict. The Entrepreneurial Investor co-author Dean Zatkowsky calls the expression “yeah, but…” a “reflexive rebuttal,” a knee-jerk need to trump another’s point with one of your own.
Evaluating the Proposed Delta/Northwest Merger
Doug Parker had a vision. His successful America West had completed a merger agreement with bankrupt US Airways Group on May 19, 2005. With this deal he planned to become the dominant low cost carrier in the country as the new US Airways (NYSE: LCC). And he would be its CEO. The next day CNN reported that “Parker thinks he can buck history and make a success out of merging his more successful airline with one in bankruptcy.” The company’s press release said:
Building upon two complementary networks with similar fleets, closely- aligned labor contracts and two outstanding teams of people, this merger creates the first nationwide full service low-cost airline.
On September 29, 2005 trading began for Mr. Parker’s new carrier. On that day its stock closed a little above $20. Then in a remarkable run-up to November 24, 2006 it was trading at around $63. Doug Parker seemed close to realizing his vision. Close, but no cigar. The run-up was followed by a steady erosion in shareholder value that on Friday March 7, 2008 saw his stock close at just under $11. That represented an 82% loss in value from its peak and a 46% loss from its initial price. What went wrong?
Northwest is Madison’s largest carrier. This proposed merger, combined with high oil prices that will dramatically reduce the number of small jets servicing airports like ours may require rethinking local air service.
The “500 True Believers”
The deal is, we’ve been told, that CEO pay is so high because demand for the 9-sigma talent of these Water Walking Wonders, so very beyond your and my shriveled imaginations, wildly exceeds supply when it comes to the 500 jobs as Fortune 500 CEOs. I contend that there are exactly 500 Guys (almost all guys, hence I can safely use the term) who believe that line of reasoning—namely the 500 CEOs of the F500 companies. (I guess I could also throw in the heads of the biggest search firms, who unearthed many of these so-far-beyond-the-pale dudes, which perhaps puts the total at 505 True Believers.)
The Inspiring Invincibles! Chuck Prince (Citigroup, formerly head of)! Stan O’Neal (Merrill Lynch, formerly head of)! Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide, formerly head of)! Tough cookies, each one. And yet, somehow, on their watches, The Three Geniuses allowed their firms, through grotesque negligence—maybe silliness or Theaters of the Absurd would be better words if the stakes weren’t so high—to get into positions in which tens upon tens of BILLIONS of greenbacks had to be written off from their books of account. Dodger, my 5-year-old Aussie, could have done a better job. (He could have bitten anybody who tried to make a $500K loan to someone who had never had a job or paid a bill and signed his name with an “X”; and peed on the pants of any 22-year-old University of Chicago PhD who said, “With my clever algorithm I’ve designed what’s called a ‘derivative’—it’ll make risk a thing of the past.” Yes, had Dodger bitten and peed on schedule, the likes of Citigroup would be ten or twenty billion ahead of their current position.) But, since the demand is so strong for the 500 different-from-mere-vice-presidents-Monumental-Management-Marvels, and the supply is so short, The Three Geniuses, on the basis of “Upside Potential,” were able to chalk up about a half BILLION buckaroos on their pay stubs over the last five years, while busily installing the tools necessary for Global Economic Meltdown. Well, I guess that means they’re “excellent” at something. Isn’t there some line about wool & eyes & pulling? (In most cases, their pay deals, especially the parts about “if you turn out to be an idiot, we’ll pay you a king’s ransom to clean out your desk,” were effectively set before they set foot in the executive suite. Wow, I wanna piece of that action!)
Has the Pyramid Inverted?
The term media has many different definitions. Published media is any media made available to the public. Mass media refers to all means of mass communication. Broadcast media refers to communications delivered over mass electronic communication networks.
News media refers to mass media focused on communicating news. Media meshing refers to the act of combining multiple independent pieces of communication media to enrich an information consumer’s experience. New media refers to media that can only be created or used with the aid of modern computer processing power.
The history of “media” has been designed, developed and pushed from a few at the top to the masses at the bottom. This model has been used to influence public opinion about anything, everything and everywhere. The old model was an important factor in driving historical economies.
“Google’s Addiction to Cheap Electricity”
“Don’t be evil”, the motto of Google, is tailored to the popular image of the company–and the information economy itself–as a clean, green twenty-first century antidote to the toxic excesses of the past century’s industries. The firm’s plan to develop a gigawatt of new renewable energy recently caused a blip in its stock price and was greeted by the press as a curious act of benevolence. But the move is part of a campaign to compensate for the company’s own excesses, which can be observed on the bansk of the Columbia River, where Google and its rivals are raising server farms to tap into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. The blueprints depicting Google’s data center at The Dalles, Oregon are proof that the Web is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.
I wonder how the economics and energy consumption details compare between growing web applications and legacy paper based products?
Microsoft will pay high price for failing to learn history lessons
It’s the metaphors and similes that get me. It’s a shotgun marriage, declared one commentator, ‘with Google holding the gun’. Putting Microsoft and Yahoo together, said another, was like trying to produce an eagle from an alliance of two turkeys.
T his is unfair. Microsoft isn’t a turkey, but a profitable, boring mastodon that entertains fantasies about being able to fly. Yahoo, for its part, is an ageing hippy who invented hang- gliding but aspired to fly 747s and then discovered that he wasn’t very good at it. The mastodon hopes that by employing the hippy it will learn to hang-glide. The hippy’s feelings about the whole deal are plain for all to see.
Microsoft’s $44.6bn offer of cash plus shares for Yahoo has got everyone in a spin, partly because of its sheer size but mostly because they fondly imagine it heralds an exciting future. At last, they think – something that might stop the inexorable advance of Google toward world domination! If that’s what they’re hoping for, then this ain’t it, alas. This isn’t the opening of a new chapter in the history of the computing business, but – as John Markoff observed in the New York Times – ‘the final shot of yesterday’s war’. And even if the merger does take place in a reasonable timescale – and if it can be made to work – it won’t make much of a dent in Google.
Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work
WE’VE all heard the tales of the apple falling on Newton’s head and Archimedes leaping naked from his bath shrieking “Eureka!” Many of us have even heard that eBay was created by a guy who realized that he could help his fiancée sell Pez dispensers online.
The fact that all three of these epiphany stories are pure fiction stops us short. As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us.
Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.
“The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems,” explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, “The Myths of Innovation.” “Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn’t the magic moment: it’s the end result of a useful innovation.”