This image comes from When The Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s documentary about Hurricane Katrina:

I was in bed when my wife came in and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I remember walking into the living room and staring at the screen, trying to understand what I was seeing. I think the first thing I said is, “where’s the other tower?” I couldn’t see it [...]

San Diego Union Tribune: Kroll report details misconduct that lead to financial crisis

“Consultants investigating the city’s finances issued a detailed and critical report Tuesday documenting misconduct by former and current City Council members and former top administrators.

“San Diego city leaders ‘fell prey’ to the same type of ‘corruption of financial management’ that afflicted Orange County [...]

The New York Times published Public Pension Plans Face Billions in Shortages, the first in a series articles “that will examine actions of state and local governments that have left taxpayers with large unpaid bills for public employee pensions:”

Across the nation, a number of states, counties and municipalities have engaged in many of the same [...]

I Tivoed Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: Addicted to Oil which appeared on Discovery Times in June 2006. Finally got a chance to watch it this evening, and was floored by this statement1 by Shaunna Sowell:

“America can keep good manufacturing jobs, but we cannot do it the same way we’ve been doing it. We have to [...]

More opportunities there for regret.My problem with most of these projects still exists and wasn’t really addressed by the film: despite the laudable environmental purpose, the projects are not economic and don’t pay for themselves…. It’s feel-good marketing that seems totally ineffective in addressing the problems so effectively demonstrated by Inconvenient Truth.In the film, Gore shows there are only two industrialized countries that have have not ratified the Kyoto Accord: the United States and Australia.

apparently not!”In what is considered the most extensive analysis of its kind, the authors surveyed the top management teams at 128 companies averaging $6.5 billion in assets and 16,000 employees…. Then the authors compared their findings with the companies’ actual financial results—stock returns, returns on assets, returns on sales, returns on equity, and sales growth—before and after the arrival of the CEO.

I heard of the following rules from Dorothy Bowman who was my HR director years ago. Dorothy had experience in the federal bureaucratic wars (Navy if I recall correctly), but the rules work almost anywhere:

If it doesn’t say you can’t, you can.
It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.
Proceed until apprehended!

The rules work beautifully, but there [...]

Seth Godwin explains how not to waste time in meetings:”When the sales rep is giving you the specs on the steel pipes or the consulting services, challenge him…. Second, it’s more likely he’ll try hard for you the next time you need him to.”Of course, if you think an upcoming meeting will be a waste of time, cancel the meeting.

So organisations will copy the matrix management system of another company; outsource according to the same template; install the same total quality processes and, hey presto – the outcomes are completely different.It is very, very difficult to shake this assumption from the mindset of most managers…. It is therefore tempting to borrow from the world of engineering and apply numerical formulae as though we were dealing with objects.And then there’s this:Being generally nice people, human relations/human resources practitioners don’t like telling MBA lecturers, senior executives and investment bankers that their ideology is no more advanced or scientific than alchemy or witchcraft.One wonders if, collectively, they will ever be bold enough to say, as the little child in the Hans Christian Andersen fable did, that ‘The emperor has got no clothes’.