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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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from Gilder Publishing,
for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 319.0/December 7,
2007
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HEADLINES:
- The
Week / The Global Warming Myth
- Friday Feature / Christensen: Is Your Strategy Sticky?
- Friday Blogger Bonus / Playboy
(& George Gilder) changed my life
- Readings /
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The
Week /
The Global Warming Myth (video)
George Gilder speaking at the 11th Annual Gilder/Forbes Telecosm
Conference: The issue of global warming has become acute in recent years.
Arthur Robinson was the man who first alerted me to the possible flaws in the
case for human caused global warming and he later alerted much of the world
with a paper that he distributed signed by some 17,000 scientists around the
world. This became one of the most quoted and significant papers criticizing
the claims of human caused global warming. Now he has a new paper that he wrote
with his son, Noah, who is going to begin this evening’s presentation.
Dr.
Noah Robinson
speaking at Telecosm 2007: Global warming is a controversial subject. I
think you’ll see from the data I am going to present, all of which is contained
in the paper which all of you should have copies of now, that there really is
no scientific basis to the claim that humans are warming the planet.
This
first slide is the temperature measured in the Sargasso Sea (measured by
measuring isotope ratios of marine organisms that gradually accumulate at the
bottom of the ocean). It’s a 2 million square mile section of the Atlantic
Ocean.
Several
interesting things about this graph: First you can see that the temperature
varies widely with time; it isn’t at all stable. Currently the temperature’s at
about the 3,000-year average. So, the temperature is not unusually warm; it’s
actually about average.
You
can see that about 1,000 years ago we had a period which is called the Medieval
Climate Optimum—a period when the climate was unusually warm and actually more
benign. Since then it has fallen off into a period know as the Little Ice Age,
about 300 years ago when temperatures were unusually cold, and then its been
climbing gradually out of this Little Ice Age and temperature have been
gradually getting warmer. It was about 1 ºC warmer 1,000 years ago and 1 ºC
colder 200-300 years ago….
View the video of Noah Robinson’s Telecosm 2007 remarks:
http://www.discovery.org/v/30
[NOTE: Noah Robinson holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute
of Technology and is a Scientist at the Oregon Institute of Science and
Medicine.]
Download the Global Warming lecture prepared
by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine:
http://www.oism.org/oism/s32p686.htm
COMING
SOON TO THE FRIDAY LETTER:
Dr. Arthur Robinson’s Telecosm 2007 keynote address.
|
The Gilder Telecosm Forum To
learn how to join this powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and
thinkers online daily to debate, discuss, and decode new and emerging
technologies and share valuable and actionable investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com today. |
Friday Feature / Is Your Strategy Sticky?
Clayton Christensen, Forbes.com: Whit Alexander, a co-founder of Cranium, the company that manufactures
the hit Cranium board game, recalls a time that he called a Chinese
manufacturing partner to discuss a concept for a new plastic game piece. The
piece would be purple and made of multiple parts that would need to be glued
together. The Chinese manufacturer balked. "It's not
CHIFF,"
he said. Alexander was astonished. His supplier, halfway across the globe, had
just corrected him using Cranium's own strategic language. And the supplier was
absolutely right.
CHIFF is an acronym that stands for "Clever, High-quality, Innovative,
Friendly, Fun." The CHIFF concept defines Cranium's strategic
differentiation in the extremely competitive board game market. CHIFF informs
decisions across the organization, from branding to package design to the
content of individual questions. The Chinese manufacturer had chastised
Alexander for his kludgey idea for a game piece. Glued-together? That's not
particularly "innovative" or "high-quality"; the feel of
the piece would be all wrong. The manufacturer came back with a novel, smooth
design, not only improving the quality, but also making the game piece
"fun."
This
is a board game manufacturing success story. More importantly, though, it is a
strategy success story, because the executives of Cranium developed a way to
communicate a crucial element of the company's strategy--its
differentiation--in a useful, comprehensible way. "CHIFF" is simply a
very clear, very actionable statement of strategic differentiation. Cranium
employees, suppliers, and channel partners all use CHIFF to make hundreds of
on-the-ground decisions that defend Cranium's competitive differentiation.
Let's
face it--there is no clearer proof that a strategy has been communicated
properly than when a manufacturing supplier--in another country, with a
different native language--uses it to correct, rightly, the founder of the
company.
What
makes CHIFF work? The secret isn't the acronym. And it isn't a solution that's
unique to the board-game industry. The secret is that it respects the
principles that make ideas "sticky"--understandable, memorable and
effective in changing thought or behavior.
These
principles can be used to transform the way strategy is communicated within a
firm. When pursuing disruptive innovation, in particular, a company's strategic
intent is likely to be vastly different from previous modes of thinking, making
clear communication that much more important.
Talking
Strategy Effectively
A
strategy comes to life through its ability to influence thousands of decisions,
both big and small, made by employees throughout an organization. A strategy
is, at its core, a guide to behavior. A good strategy drives actions that
differentiate the company and produce financial success. A bad strategy drives
actions that lead to a less competitive, less differentiated position.
A
lot of strategies, however, are simply inert. Whether they are good or bad is
impossible to determine, because they do not drive action. They may exist in
pristine form in a PowerPoint document, but if they don't manifest themselves
in action, they are irrelevant….
Read on:
http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/26/costco-bp-cranium-pf-guru_cc_1126christensen_print.html
________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / Playboy (& George Gilder) changed my life
Ron Baker, Verasage Institute blog (12/4/07): In August of 1981, my worldview was about to be
punctured permanently, albeit quite gradually, indeed, imperceptibly at the
time. Looking back, Playboy magazine may be most responsible.
No,
not for the prurient reasons you are forgiven for immediately thinking of, but
a far more banal explanation. As a barber, my father was an inveterate
reader of Playboy’s interviews, which are excellent if you have ever
bothered to read one with someone in whom you have an interest. The
roster of interviewees is quite impressive—world leaders, politicians, writers,
and so forth—some of whom, no doubt, are self conscious about appearing in such
a publication.
As a matter of fact, when devout Catholic William F. Buckley, Jr. was asked why he would write for such a magazine, he wittily answered, “I write for Playboy because it is the fastest way to communicate with my 17-year-old son.”
In any event, my father read the interview with George Gilder in that August 1981 issue, which impressed him. Gilder had written Wealth and Poverty, a book Ronald Reagan was photographed with, along with giving it to members of his cabinet.
Fortunately for me, my father purchased a copy of Gilder’s book, convincingly insisting I should read it. I did. In one sitting. It changed my life. It opened my eyes to an entire new worldview that is beyond my capacity to describe in so brief a space.
I came to recognize I was ensconced in the accountant’s worldview, a belief system and body of knowledge that cannot really explain how wealth is created—it can only record it after the fact. Accounting is not a theory, so it cannot help us peer into the future; it can only provide assurance on the past. It understands nothing but itself, since it is an identity equation.
Worse, it leads businesspeople to believe they can only manage what they can measure, as if weighing ourselves more frequently will change our weight. It confuses cause and effect, and results with process. It can audit the drunk’s bar bill, but cannot change or explain his behavior. Even more pernicious, it focuses businesspeople on solving problems and fretting over yesterday, rather than pursuing opportunities and creating our futures, resulting in a costly mediocrity.
Thus began a passionate study of value, effectiveness, intellectual capital, along with the real source of profits, all represented in the new business equation at the top of this Web site. The Philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “You cannot step in the same river twice, because by the second step it will already have changed.”
Thus began my crossing of the river to reach the other side, seeing the world from a different direction—one of value, opportunity, and risk taking, rather than history, costs, problem solving, and an increasingly irrelevant accounting equation. I must say, this side of the river is more wondrous and panoramic, allowing me to explain to myself with much greater clarity how the world really works.
Gilder
explains the ultimate source of wealth in his book Men
and Marriage:
Demand, whether avaricious or just, is impotent to impel growth without
disciplined, creative, and essentially moral producers of new value. All
effective demand ultimately derives from supply; a society’s income cannot
exceed its output. The output of valuable goods depends not on lechery,
prurience, lust, and license but on thrift, sacrifice, altruism, creativity,
discipline, trust, and faith.
Greed, in fact, impels people to seek first their own comfort and
security. The truly self-interested man most often turns to government to
give him the benefits he lacked the moral discipline to earn on his own by
serving others....Any system that does not uphold the value of freedom of
individuals, however lowly, will miss most of the greatest technical and
economic breakthroughs.
I have had the great good fortune of meeting Mr. Gilder at several conferences and he never ceases to amaze me with his prescient insights, usually far ahead of their time. His recent talk at the Telecosm 2007 Conference can be viewed at the Discovery Institute’s Web site, where Gilder is a senior fellow. As usual, Gilder makes some brilliant points, even quoting Peter Drucker from his last speech, before he passed away, in Seattle.
As
usual, Gilder pays homage to the entrepreneur, stating that knowledge is about
the past while entrepreneurialism is about the future. Having just read Prophet of Innovation, the life story of Austrian
economist Joseph Schumpeter—famous for the phrase “creative destruction” and
also positing that the little-understood entrepreneur is the chief source of
growth and dynamism in any economy—Gilder’s talk is a theme that needs to be
repeated often.
Check
out the Verasage Institute blog:
http://www.verasage.com/index.php/community/comments/george_gilders_exacosm
__________________________________________
Readings /
Imsys
announces high precision IEEE 1588 MCU and module
http://www.automation.com/store/p1030details25180.php
Weekly GTI Index
http://www.gtindex.com/
Ho Ho CEO
http://www.forbes.com/home/leadership/2007/12/06/northpole-ceo-christmas-lead-manage-cx_mk_1206santa.html
International Hunt for Missing
Backpacker Harnesses Blog Power
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/12/missing_backpacker
As Intel Surges, PC Makers Prop Up Its
Main Competitor
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/12/intel_monopoly
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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