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I realize that Steve Jobs is revered by his disciples but he must have been a horrible boss.

I know that, despite how he treated them, most of his former employees say positive things about Steve. But that reminds me of a guy I once worked with who embraced a Marine bootcamp approach when training new employees. He first took every opportunity to publicly humiliate them. Then, once their self-esteem was at or below ground level, he would feed them the occasional compliments so that they came to rely on him for their sense of self worth. I’m not accusing Jobs of being that consciously manipulative but the results of his behavior seem similar.

Giving Steve is due, the guy was an astute visionary and an amazing salesman. He understood how to be a messiah to his geek constituency and he did set the bar high for the rest of us.

All of that said, I don’t want to give the impression that I have a negative attitude about the guy. As his wife observed, he was a flawed and complicated man; at times cruel and hard-hearted, at times teary and vulnerable.

Some of the quotes and insights which I jotted down while listening to the audiobook:

*Stand at the intersection of humanities and science.
*The various religions are different doors to the same house.
*Form follows emotion
*The journey is the reward.
*Today isn’t liberal vs. conservative. It’s constructive vs. destructive
*One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
*Prune to keep the tree strong.
*If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying. (Bob Dylan)

Full disclosure: I’m a PC, not an Apple (Although, I do now use an iPhone). So, I until I read this book, I didn’t know much about Steve Jobs except for his legend. Like most, I was saddened when he died and I got emotional when I watched the YouTube clip of his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

But this was not a warm & fuzzy guy.

Steve Jobs was a guy who behaved like he believed he was a chosen one. And, because he had a genius for design, an ability to intimidate (he used that intense stare you see on the book cover to great effect), and a gift to persuade, we enabled him.

That’s a cause for mixed emotions about the man but Steve Jobs’ positive impact on society is undeniable.

I can still remember when it hit me. After 13 hours of labor, my wife had given birth to our daughter at 1:15am on May 27th, 1994. A few hours later, I was home in the shower and it suddenly struck me. I finally understood the meaning of the word “commitment”. That’s when I learned what it meant to be a father and that realization helped me to appreciate my dad.

Earl N. Brindle died on a Saturday night in early December, 2006 just a few weeks shy of his 87th birthday. He and my mother started dating when they were 16 and had been together for 71 years. The only time they were apart was for four years during World War II. They were married 70 years ago this month.

Dad was born in Raynham, MA., the son of the late Thomas H. and Gertrude (Smith) Brindle. He was a resident of the small Rhode Island village where I grew up since 1947 where he had owned and operated the former Earl N. Brindle Insurance Agency.

Dad served as the Treasurer of the Greenville Vol. Fire Dept., a trustee of the Greenville Baptist Church, he was the first chairman of the Smithfield Sewer Authority (He was amused that the town named the sewage processing plant after him), he served on the Board of Directors for the Greenville Public Library, and in 1999, was inducted into the Smithfield Heritage Hall of Fame. He was also a WWII Army Aircorp Veteran serving in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater as part of the ground crew which took care of the cargo planes which flew over the hump from India to China.

That’s my father’s official bio. But it doesn’t really tell you much about the man.

Something I discovered after my father’s death was that in the summer of 1929 when he was 10 years old Dad and his best friend hitchhiked from Cranston, RI to Raynham, MA and then back home again. That’s a distance of more than 30 miles. And it was back in the day when cars were still relatively rare and most roads were either dirt or two lanes. Today’s equivalent would probably be a couple of 10 year olds hitching a couple of hundred miles from home.

When Dad was a boy, some kid threw a rock which hit my father in the head and all but blinded him. From that day forward, he had to wear glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottle bottles and his dream of becoming a pilot was ended. Dad didn’t complain about it. He just “made the best of it.”

My father was in the insurance business but he wasn’t a hard-sell kind of guy. Dad was a little ahead of his time because his approach was what would be described today as “consultative”. Of course, he wanted to do a good job for his company but he felt that the best way to accomplish that was by doing what was right for his customer. It wasn’t uncommon while I was growing up to have the phone ring at midnight or 2AM with someone calling to say that they had been in an accident or that there’d been a fire at their home. When that happened, Dad would help them through it and make sure that his customer got what they were owed from the insurance company.

Dad wasn’t really a social kind of guy. He was friendly, amusing and a good conversationalist in a social setting when he had to be. But my sense is that he was somewhat of a loner and, given the choice, would have avoided social scenes. Nevertheless, Dad was generous with his time and several people became his clients when he stopped to give them a helping hand with a flat tire or some other car problem.

When he was a young man, Dad had joined a local Providence insurance firm and had been a rising star in the company. After 20 years with the firm, Dad asked for a raise. My brother and I were heading off to college and , although Dad appreciated some of the perks and small salary increases that he’d been given over the years, he still felt that he was being underpaid. His employer interpreted Dad’s request as ungrateful and impertinent, fired him and then sued my father for potential business he might take away. Amazingly, the judge upheld the company’s position and ordered my father to pay the company $10,000 (approx. $ 40,000 in 2010 dollars) for potential business that he might take away. It was an unjust and devastating decision especially with two kids about to head off to college but Dad just hunkered down and started his own business.

My father was a man who had the courage of his convictions. He tried to be open-minded and just. And he tried to accept others on their own terms as who and what they were. Nevertheless, he wasn’t afraid to speak out about what he considered to be right and wrong.

When Dad was chairman of the Smithfield Sewer Commission, an unpaid position, he devoted a lot of time and energy to make sure that the town got the best and most economical system available. Some cynical folks accused him of being corrupt because they assumed that anyone in that position must be taking bribes. I’ll always remember one meeting which I decided to attend when I drove home for a visit. My father didn’t know I was there but during a break in the meeting he went to the lobby for a drink of water. While he was there alone, a group of 7 or 8 men who were about half my father’s age approached him menacingly. They disagreed with his position on whatever issue was being discussed and they were trying to bully him. As I watched, the group started closing in on my father and I thought I was going to have to step in. But Dad just stood his ground, stayed calm, explained his opinion and walked away. It was quite a performance and I was proud to be his son.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve started to notice similarities between myself and my father. Our body types are more alike than I’d once thought. I like learning new things and sharing information with others that might help them to increase their understanding or improve their life. Although perceived by some to be an outgoing socializer, my nature is to be somewhat of a loner. At home, I’m not handy. Neither was he. But I know it and hire experts. He tried to do it himself. Then we brought in the experts!

Through his actions and his words, Earl N. Brindle taught me about being a generous and compassionate friend and neighbor, about being a trustworthy and equal partner in marriage, about being a good parent and about being focused on getting the job done right.

My dad. His life ended five and a half years ago but his spirit is with me on this Father’s Day.

The Frugal Dad blog recently posted this infographic which traces the development of technologies which have disrupted culture, society, or our daily lives. What do you see here that’s directly impacted your life?

Source: FrugalDad

Let me begin by stating my belief that, whether you’re having a conversation, writing a book, posting a blog, sending a Facebook message, tweeting, doing a radio show, podcasting, or making a movie, it’s all about story-telling.

A recent article in Miller-McCune magazine reports that, based on scientific research, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has determined the beliefs you and I hold are really more the result of our genes and environment rather than immutable truths. Having established that ideology isn’t based in rationality, Haidt and his colleagues have come up with a framework of 5 moral foundations. They are care/harm, which makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; fairness/cheating, which alerts us to those who might take advantage of us; loyalty/betrayal, which binds us as team players; authority/subversion, which prompts us to respect rank and status; and sanctity/degradation, which inspires a sense of purity, both literally (physical cleanliness) and symbolically. The conviction that abortion, euthanasia, or gay marriage is immoral arises from the sanctity impulse.

Haidt says that American liberals respond most strongly to the care/harm and fairness/cheating impulses and tend to dismiss the others whereas conservatives (and the majority of people in the rest of the world) take all 5 moral foundations into account. Another way of interpreting this information might be that liberals tend to be more optimistic and see the glass half-full while conservatives tend to be more pessimistic and see it as half-empty.

There’s little doubt that Michael Moore is more influenced by the care/harm and fairness/cheating factors than by the others described. He waves his symbolic “freak flag” proudly and merely mentioning Michael Moore’s name provokes viscerally negative reactions from political conservatives and many independents, too. He’s viewed as a caricature of an old, unwashed, left-wing hippie troublemaker.

So it will be easy for those who disagree with Moore’s politics to reject this book as irrelevant. I think that would be a mistake.

I was surprised by the humanity that emanates from this collection of stories. I listened to the audiobook , which Moore narrates himself, and was struck several times by the thought that those who despise this man might gain some useful insights from hearing his stories about growing up in working class Flint, MI, his staunchly Republican mother, his encounters with Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Harry Chapin, and John Lennon. And the life experiences which shaped Moore into the Quixotic documentary filmmaker that he is today.

You might laugh, you might cry, slam the book shut or shout at the dashboard, but you won’t be bored by the stories in HERE COMES TROUBLE.

Jim Stengel is the former head of marketing for Proctor & Gamble. The ideas he expresses in this book are consistent to those being expressed by Daniel Pink in “A Whole New Mind” and Jim Collins in his latest book, “Great By Choice”.

Stengel preaches that it’s essential for business leaders to combine ideals and artistry, very right-brained functions, with rigorous left-brained analysis in order to create a brand leading product or service . He collaborated with WPP’s Millward Brown Optimor’s neuroscience unit to use MRI’s to measure how quickly people associate ideals with brands.

The Stengel 50 list was created from this research. These companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 400% over the first decade of this century. Most importantly, they discovered that associations with a brand’s perceived ideas have a strong relationship with consumer preference, consideration and choice.

According to Stengel, a Brand Ideal is the essence of the business which is embraced by everyone in the company , from the CEO to the receptionist, and is amplified by everything that the company does. In these cynical times, that’s a tough order. So, like Jim Collins’ concept of “the right person in the right seat on the bus”, Stengel has found that the leaders in his Stengel 50 companies devote a lot of time and attention to recruiting with the idea that one bad hire can be highly toxic.

Daniel Pink talks about the need to think “symphonically”. Apparently, Stengel agrees. He believes that CEO’s need to be “whole-brained” which , I believe, means that they need to take a holistic approach and to think in terms of decades rather than months, quarters, or years. He introduces the concept of the Brand Artist, someone who is accountable for the soul of the brand and its ideal. Stengel says that a company needs to measure its progress on the ideal not only with customers but with employees as well.

According to Stengel , a brand’s success relies on its ability to satisfy one of the following fundamental values: elicit joy, enable connection, inspire exploration, evoke pride, or positively impact society. Bottom-line: your brand has to walk the walk as well as talk the talk in a world that demands transparency and authenticity.

One company on the Stengel 50 list is Chipotle. I’ve never been to one of their restaurants and I thought of Chipotle as another Taco Bell-type franchise. Then, I saw their TV spot during the SuperBowl
and my attitude towards the Chipotle brand changed.

As usual, I “read” the audiobook version. At times, I found the writing to be a bit stilted. Nevertheless, I think you’ll find the stories about the various brands and the concepts in this book to be both useful and enlightening.

The first time I learned about Jim Collins’ work was several years ago during my first job interview in a decade. I prepared for my interview by reviewing Harvey MacKay’s classic suggestions for responses to interview questions and doing my due diligence about the medical facility to which I was applying. However, when the interviewer’s first question was about how, in my position in the marketing/PR/communications department, I’d improve a patient’s experience, and then talked about getting the right people in the right seats on the bus, I knew that things had changed in the HR world.

“Great By Choice” is Jim Collins’ collaboration with his former student, Morten Hansen, to discover the facts and the myths about why certain organizations far exceed those of seemingly equal competitors. Collins and Hansen compare eight organizations: Southwest Airlines/ Pacific Southwest Airlines, Stryker/United States Surgical Corp., Progressive Insurance/Safeco Insurance, Intel/AMD, Microsoft/Apple, Amgen/Genetech, Biomet/Kirschner, and the 1911 Amundsen and Scott expeditions to reach the South Pole.

Collins and Hansen describe the high performers in their study cases as “10Xers” because these organizations didn’t just succeed but beat its industry index by at least 10 times. They identify three key characteristics of 10X leadership: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. 10X leaders are passionately driven by a cause beyond themselves. As the authors note, all organizations experience both good and bad luck. It’s what one does with the luck they get which matters. They then offer their ideas about the characteristics which describe a “luck event”.

Collins and Hansen confront some entrenched myths to determine their validity. For instance, there’s the concept that a threat-filled world favors the speedy (“You’re either quick or dead”). Instead, the authors suggest that it’s better to figure out when it’s best to go fast and when it’s best to go slow. Also, there’s the firmly held belief that radical change on the outside requires radical internal changes. Collins & Hansen observe that just because an organization’s external environment is experiencing dramatic change it’s not necessarily a good idea for the organization to radically change itself.

“Great By Choice” presents some interesting concepts such as the “20 Mile March”, “Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs”, “Return On Luck”, “Moore’s Law”, and SMaC. Collins’ and Hansen’s research presents useful answers to the question: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, while other’s don’t?

No matter whether your endeavor is personal, public service-oriented, or in business, you’ll find the insights provided by this research to be helpful.

Remember when you were a kid and it seemed to take forever for the holidays to arrive?

Now, every year seems to go by faster than the one before. Chalk it up to perception. When you’ve lived only 13 years, one year equals 1/13th of your life. When you’re thirty-five, a year equals 1/35th of your life. You get the picture.

I can’t say that the first year of the second decade of the 21st century has been my favorite year. But, as I reflect upon my personal experiences, I’m surprised at how many high points there are.
2011 marked a couple of significant anniversaries. My wife, Molly and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary in July. It amazes me that I’ve been married this long. In fact, it’s hard for me to think of myself now as not being married even though I maintained my bachelorhood longer than most.

This year also marked the Big 3-0 birthday of MTV: Music Television where I was privileged to be part of the channel’s original management team. It was fun to do some radio and print interviews about those early days at a channel which paved the way for television as we know it today. It was also nice to have my contribution acknowledged in the book, “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution” by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum which was released in conjunction with the 30th anniversary.

Some other memories from 2011:
*My mother and younger brother spending the Christmas holidays with us in Saratoga.
*Our family vacation to Los Angeles and San Diego in March to visit with my wife’s cousin, John Woodcock and his wife, Susan. We were awakened at 8AM one morning at our beachfront hotel in San Diego by my daughter’s boyfriend in Saratoga who told us about the tsunami that hit Japan and was threatening America’s west coast. We’d gone to bed early and were oblivious to the situation. We certainly gained some perspective about what it’s like to live in Southern California.
*While in California, we were able to get some business done. Molly visited her client at TVG and met with the VP/Marketing at Santa Anita Raceway. I was able to meet with staff members at Loyola Marymount University’s student-run radio station, KXLU and to discuss media opportunities with former Albanian, Kevin Callahan while visiting him at KSON-FM, San Diego.
*Western Swing and Salsa dance lessons for Molly and me by our friend, David Levesque of Dancin’ Time. (She was good. Me, not so much.)
*Elton John with Leon Russell at Madison Square Garden in March. The tickets were a gift from my stepdaughter, Jessica.
*Being interviewed for Russian radio about American culture and media by my friend, journalist Vladimir Abarinov.
*Our youngest daughter, Sarah successfully transitioning from public high school to the private all-girl Emma Wilard School and embracing the experience of her senior year.
*The relief of learning that Sarah passed her driver’s test after being denied a passing score on her first 2 attempts.(I was dreading having to deal with an emotionally overwrought teenage girl who failed to pass on her 3rd try.)
*College campus visits with Sarah in July and October to New England, northern & western New York as well as the New York Finger Lakes region. I really enjoyed the conversations with my daughter and having the chance to watch her evolving maturity in handling the different situations we encountered during our trips.

It was good to make new friends during the past year and to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances such as: Joe Templin, Charles Warner, Scott Bingham, Dale Brooks, Michael Grace, Rosemary Young, Monica Mahaffey, Eric Strauss, Ray Patterson, Judi Clements, Bob Buchman, Jessie Scott, Mike Lembo, Batt Johnson, Pam Green, Rob Sisco, Hatem Dammak, Neerav Patel, Bill Polk, Susan Arbetter, Jay Werth, Bilel Besbes, Cindy Sivak, Rose Giangiobbe, Sierra Julie Sullivan, Dan & Jen Austin, Dick Heatherton, Joan Myers, Leslie Leventman, Tom Freston, George Gerrity, Holly Greene, Dale Willman, Ray Zoller, Joe Condon, Patrick Ryan, Michael Vallone, Joe Reilly, Dawn Dawson, David Levesque and Terry McNiff.

From a business standpoint, 2011 marked another year of evolution for Brindle Media with projects for Siena College and the New York Racing Association. My former boss at Albany Broadcasting, John Kelly asked me to work with Siena’s nationally-recognized radio station, WVCR-FM on focusing its programming product and strategizing for future development. During the summer, I once again worked with NYRA at world-renowned Saratoga Race Course to enhance the customer experience (CX) for and increase customer usage of the track’s computerized Self-Service Terminals (SSTs). In the Fall, I also created two targeted online newspapers using Paper.li, Buzz4Boomers designed for members of the Baby Boomer generation and 12866Buzz intended to provide news of neighborhood and social community interest for residents of Saratoga Springs. At this point, they’re both works in progress.

I tried to take advantage of as many learning opportunities as possible during the past year either by attending events such as Amy Mengel’s Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley, attending webinars, and reviewing audio or video interviews. Some webinars and interviews which I found enlightening this year included:

*Dan Zarella’s Hubspot webinars “Most Legendary Marketing Showdown”, “The Science of SEO”, “New Science of Social Media”, “The Science of Analytics”, “The Science of Timing” , and “The Science of Email Marketing”. www.Hubspot.com

*Reach Personal Branding’s Entrepreneurial Training Series www.ReachPersonalBranding.com

*Reach Personal Branding’s William Arruda’ss interviews with Tony Beshara, Gina Rudan, Seth Godin, Ken Blanchard, Stever Robbins, Bernadette Martin, Kevin Eikenberry, and Dr. Samantha Collins.

*Greig Well’s “Linkedin Insider Secrets” webinar.

*John Souza’s Social Media Magic University series about blogging, email marketing, PPC Marketing, Mobile Marketing, and SEO. www.SocialMediaMagicUniversity.com

*David Siteman Garland’s “Rise To The Top” interviews with Blogcast FM’s Srinivas Rao, Diamond Candles co-founder Justin Winter, social media legend Chris Brogan, author Steven Pressfield, and entrepreneur Lewis Howe. www.TheRiseToTheTop.com

*Daniel Pink’s “Office Hours” interviews with “Great By Choice” author Jim Collins and “The No A**-Hole Rule” author Bob Sutton. www.DanPink.com

*Edison Media’s Tom Webster’s presentation “Turning Social Media Monitoring Into Research”.

*Adam Metz’s webinar, “The Social Customer and The Art of War”. www.AdamMetz.com

*Mark Ramsey’s conversations with Ishita Gupta (from Seth Godin’s Domino Project), Livio Radio’s Jake Sigal, JINX’s Sean Gailey , Marketing Profs’ Ann Handley, Triton Media’s Jim Kerr, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Mandalay Entertainment Group chairman Peter Guber, Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stetzner, broadcast consultant & author Valerie Geller, KCRW-FM general
manager Jennifer Ferro, and advertising guru/author Jon Winsor. www.MarkRamseyMedia.com

I’m not a particularly fast reader so I rarely find time to read books. When I’m reading, it’s usually magazine articles or blogs. So, I’m a big fan of audiobooks. Some of my favorites this year were:

*David Brooks’ “The Social Animal”
*Tom Friedman’s “That Used To Be Us”
*Steven Levy’s “In The Plex”
*Tina Fey’s “Bossy Pants”
*David McCullough’s “The Greater Journey”
*Simon Winchester’s “Atlantic”
*Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken”
*Sebastian Junger’s “War”
*Dick Cavett’s “Talk Show”
*Michael Lewis’ “Boomerang”
(I’ve just started listening to this book and I’m hooked).

You can read my reviews on my Linkedin account (www.Linkedin.com/in/REBuzzBrindle)

My favorite movies this year: “The King’s Speech” and “The Help”

In September, I drove downstate to NYC to see the play, “War Horse” at the Lincoln Center. I thought play itself was a bit trite but the design of the horse puppets and the puppetry itself were amazing. I’m debating whether or not to see the movie version.

My favorite TV shows remain CBS Sunday Morning, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report although my enjoyment of Colbert’s show is on the wane. It’s getting too predictable (like Rush Limbaugh’s talk show). This year, I’ve become a fan of NBC’s “Meet The Press”. With all due respect to the late Tim Russert , David Gregory has made the show much more interesting. “30 Rock” reruns have hooked me and I’m now looking forward to the show’s return in early January.” Saturday Night Live” is back on track. There’s a lot of talent in the current cast. I have to admit to enjoying the song & dance routines on “Glee” (talented cast, strong production). And PBS American Masters series ran a terrific documentary about Woody Allen this Fall. Watching “Midnight In Paris” is on my New Year’s Eve to-do list.

Best wishes for enlightenment, surprise, joy, good health, and prosperity in 2012.

Happy New Year!

In the spirit of transparency, let me tell you that I believe that capitalism’s impact on America has been mostly positive however I’m not a proponent of the selfish capitalism endorsed by Ayn Rand and her acolytes. It seems to me that we need to grow into an era of “Conscientious Capitalism” which encourages and rewards individual achievement, risk-taking, and entrepreneurial spirit and also embraces the “noblese-oblige” spirit of FDR and Nelson Rockefeller.

Personally, I endorse raising the age for Social Security eligibility to 75 (which would negatively effect me), increasing taxes, re-evaluating bureaucracies to eliminate waste, zero-based budgeting to reduce spending, and programs which encourage Baby Boomers to remain economically productive and contributing to the country’s tax coffers rather than retiring and taking Social Security. We’ve got to face the music sometime and there’s no sense in procrastinating.

In his Bloomberg BusinessWeek review of Tom Friedman’s latest book, David Camp takes Friedman and his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum to task for not recommending big, bold solutions to the problems and issues they discuss in the book but I’m not sure that that’s the authors’ job. However, Camp does commend them for doing a solid job of evaluating America’s current situation in the 2nd decade of the 21st century and bringing our challenges to light.

My daughter is a high school senior so we’ve been in college tour mode since July. Something I’ve noticed that’s emphasized at all the colleges we’ve visited is their focus on attracting students from outside of the US. Of course, each college’s freshman class has a finite number of openings and if a higher percentage of those positions are filled by international students the fewer that will be available to American kids. On the one hand, I don’t doubt that part of the schools’ strategies is to address globalization and broaden the scope of their institutions. But I also don’t doubt that part of the plan is to attract international students from wealthy families to make up for American students whose families may no longer to be able to foot the annual bill for these institutions.

Friedman and Mandelbaum make some disturbing points in comparing American students with their Chinese counterparts. They talk about how we in America tend to reward our kids’ efforts whereas in China a student is rewarded only for accomplishment. Chinese students are expected to acquire strong math and science skills. In America, our education system is designed more to push the students through the pipeline than to encourage/demand excellence in specific skill sets when they reach high school graduation time. The Chinese see education as an economic issue. In America, we see it as a social issue. Friedman & Mandelbaum tell a sobering story about a small, obscure liberal arts college in the Midwest whose freshman class has a few hundred openings but which received applications from 900 Chinese students all of whom had perfect SAT math and science scores. Our kids need to be able to compete with these challenges.
The book talks about the types of employees that American businesses are seeking in order to be competitive as we move forward. We need creators and we need servers who add value which is unique and irreplaceable such as abstract analysis skills. The authors note that there are four catagories of workers :
1. Creative Creators
2. Routine Creators
3. Creative (inspired) Servers
4. Routine Servers
The Routine Creators and Routine Servers will be at the most risk of having their positions eliminated.

Just to get interviewed for a job these days, a candidate will need the following abilities: critical thinking skills, the ability to accomplish non-routine tasks, and the ability to work collaboratively. To get hired, a candidate will also need the ability to enhance, refine, and invent along with a proven ability to innovate. (“What was your best innovation during the past year?”, “ What projects are on your drawing board?”). Think Google.

Our schools need to teach and encourage students to visualize, identify, decide and direct within a competitive learning environment. They need to understand how to adapt and to innovate.

The books cites Carlson’s Law: “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” It’s all about collaboration. This sounds like the theory that Gen. David Petraeus employed in Afghanistan.

I love the observation cited in this book by former Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm that “the electric car will be an iPad on wheels”.

Someone else makes this suggestion. Why not offer companies located anywhere else in the world five years of local, state, and federal tax relief if they open and maintain factories in the US which create jobs for that 5 year period.

It’s no surprise to anyone who reads Friedman’s columns that he’s a strong proponent for America to get past its oil fix. To Tom Friedman, “talent is the new oil”.
The 24 hour news cycle has made it even more attractive for journalists to turn national politics into theater. It’s all become a “who’s up/who’s down” game. Friedman & Mandelbaum talk about the impact of gerrymandering which is a process of dividing up political districts in order to provide political advantage to the party in control of the process. As the authors describe it, gerrymandering essentially assures the party in power that its candidate will win the primary election. Since most states allow only registered Republicans and Democrats to vote in primary elections, those of use who prefer to remain politically independent are excluded. That allows the rabid partisans to control the elections. Given the cost of multi-platform message distribution in the media these days, that leaves the winning candidate no choice but to placate the zealots. (Witness what’s been happening with President Obama and the left-wingers in the Democrats and Mitt Romney with the Republican Tea Partiers). The majority of Americans who want to see our politicians collaborate and compromise are left out of the conversation. Friedman & Mandelbaum favor a Teddy Roosevelt/Ross Perot-type third party candidate who has no hope to win but can influence the Presidential election. It wouldn’t surprise me in the 2012 Presidential election to see Barack Obama, the Republican candidate, and independent party candidates representing zealots on the left and right.

“That Used To Be Us” says that America’s fate in the 21st century depends on how we deal with the following challenges: globalization, the IT revolution, the deficit and energy consumption.

I found Tom Friedman’s last book to be somewhat tedious. This book is disturbing, enlightening, and inspiring.

The 2011 World Series was supposed to feature the National League’s Philadelphia Phillies versus either New York’s Yankees or Boston’s Red Sox representing the American League. Oops! Those of us who are underdogs in business, life, or both should take heart that this year’s World Series champs might turn out to be Tigers or Brewers.

Postscript: Given the way things have been going in the playoffs so far, it’s doubtful that we’ll be seeing the Tigers or the Brewers in this year’s World Series.

I believe in improving the customer experience (CX) and in “making lemonade out of lemons”. If that’s not your approach, I don’t really want you on my team.