Need a Speaker?

One thing that really confuses employees is when the manager pursues a long, painful “values/mission/charter/vision/strategies/objectives/goals” exercise.  First of all, what does all this stuff mean, and second, why take many months when the problems/opportunities are typically obvious. The strong leader cuts out all that complicated jargon and simply explains that the vision is WHAT we […]

I am reading the book Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng, whose father was one of the thirty-six million people that starved to death during 1958-1962 in China. The devastation was driven by the program called the Great Leap Forward engineered by Mao Zedong. The leap forward was to achieve increases each year in food production since food was scarce. Quotas were set up in each village and county and continually raised, while all peasants were stripped of their land and possessions and assigned to highly ineffective commune farms where chaos caused the food production to drop each year. Peasants were to eat at commune kitchens, which soon ran out of food. Anyone caught hoarding any food suffered severe physical punishment.

The America’s Cup yacht competition held in Fall, 2013 featured only two yachts, one from New Zealand and one from the U.S. Both used exotic technology enabling the boats to attain speeds of 50+ miles per hour. Specifically, each had the capability, when they get to a certain speed, of lifting literally out of the water, moving along on four foils, like surf boards, reducing drag and causing speed to dramatically increase.