Pictured above is St. Paul’s, a 150 year old Catholic church located in Wilmington, Delaware. I used to drive past it every day on my commute to work. Between the exit ramp off the highway and the commuter lot in the commercial district where I worked there were a few blocks of gritty urban neighborhood to drive through, with this church planted in the midst of it, like a watchtower, or a fortress. This quick drive by provided a glimpse…
Someone at work left the company, which means the mandatory going away lunch happened. I remember at a previous position I was invited to a going away lunch in my first week on the job. It was just assumed that I knew that guy who was leaving. It was a strange way to start a gig, but of course I went along with it. Anyway, at my current job, you may realize if you are following this blog that I…
In January I posted a series of “Strategy Reviews” where I examined the thinking of several authors who analyzed the state of politics and war at the beginning of this century. These were Thomas P. M. Barnett with the Pentagon’s New Map that divided the world between Core and Gap, Philip Bobbitt and the market state as defined in The Shield of Achilles, and John Robb with his Brave New War fought in a networked world. Each author’s viewpoint provided…
In my most recent posts I looked at the strategic theories of two different authors. The first was Thomas P. M. Barnett, who divided the world into functioning, integrated Core states, and their danger-producing opposites, the Gap states. His mantra was “disconnectedness defines danger.” The second was Philip Bobbitt, who divided history into epochs in which different forms of the state ruled. He taught us that the nation state is on its way out, and the new market state is taking its…
In front of our house there is a little round planter area which is full of tulip bulbs. They’ve done really well this year, as you can see from the picture to the right. They’ve created this lovely riot of pink blooms, with some red thrown in for highlight, which you can admire every time you step out front. They reminded me of this book I read a while back, called Tulipomania, about the infamous tulip bulb market bubble in the…
We’ve recently been watching Mad Men (available on Amazon Prime with our AMC+ subscription), a TV show about New Yorkers in the advertising business in the 1960s. It clearly is attempting to paint a portrait of what life was like in that bygone era, and how social mores were so much different back then. For example, everyone is constantly lighting up cigarettes, in any context, even in front of kids. The men unabashedly treat women like sex objects, and the…
Four years ago, a young woman gave a victim impact statement against a man convicted of criminal sexual conduct. It was a high profile case, because the criminal conduct had been ongoing for decades and involved hundreds of adolescent girls. The woman, Kyle Stephens, confronted her victimizer and made a powerful statement which included these resounding words: “Little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world.” It was a landmark moment in…
You may have seen a chart like the one on the right, which I took from Wikipedia’s page on workforce productivity. It shows labor productivity growth compared to wage growth since the end of the Second World War. What’s remarkable about it is how the two statistics track one another for a period of two decades or so, but then suddenly veer off, dramatically so for non-managerial workers. Workforce productivity starts growing much faster than nonsupervisory workforce compensation, as the…
My latest reading escapade has me perusing The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by Tim Wu. He is a law professor who is currently an official in the Biden White House, specializing in technology and antitrust. He is also, in fact, the coiner of the term “net neutrality,” which is just the legal concept of a “common carrier,” as has been applied to telephone communications, but extended to the Internet. In The Master Switch, Wu analyzes…
This is the last of three posts where I review the book Ruling the Waves, by Debora L. Spar. This actually took me nearly two years to do, which is not my usual pattern at all, but this was as much a research project as a good read. The goal of the project was to relate the thesis of the book – that ground-breaking technology goes through four phases of development before becoming commonplace – to the cycles of four turnings in…