• ‘FAMILY’ BUSINESSES COMPRISE SOME 90% OF ALL AMERICAN COMPANIES and represent over 80% of all jobs, but only 30% survive transition to the second generation, and only around 3% make it to the fourth generation. Multi-generational families have the greatest degree of conflict, stemming predominantly from absence of clarity in long-term strategy and/or Business Plans. The priority areas of dysfunction arise in (1) Founder transition from ‘builder’ to ‘mentor’; (2) Millennial perspective on work commitment, ethics & work/life balance; (3) Dynamics of governance, policies, and culture. DCG has decades of experience & expertise in creating & sustaining Value in family owned/managed businesses.
  • ALSO, 40% OF TODAY’S FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES WILL LIKELY BE GONE IN TEN YEARS. ‘DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY’ is the mantra for most of what’s coming. Regulations will present stumbling blocks, but Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are way past the point of no return. “Think libraries in an age of Google, traditional wired landlines in an age of mobile telephony, taxis in this age of Uber, long distance in an age of Skype… Eventually the buggy-whip manufacturers died off as the automobile came on the scene.” Finance is one of the industries in flux, as middleman advisors & brokers are being outmoded by computer applications. Around the corner are AI systems “using advanced machine learning and data mining techniques…to monitor your social media and the global marketplace to perform algorithmic trades on the stock market that no human will ever match… based on a world of a trillion sensors atop 100 billion connected devices… allowing you (or your AI) to know anything, anytime, anywhere.”     [PETER DIAMANDIS BLOG -Sep 6, 15]  
  • “THE WORST OF THE FIRE SEASON IS YET TO COME IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA…still facing unprecedented fire behavior and fuel conditions,” according to CAL FIRE, the state’s authority. Pervasive drought and record temperatures this year, resulting in low snowpack & early runoff, have already burned over 8.5 million acres in the west from some 43,000 wildfires.  “July was the warmest month ever physically recorded on planet earth…and the U.S. Forest Service predicts that fires will likely double by midcentury…occurring one year out of every two…as a result of our overheated world amplifying drought from increased atmospheric evaporation which draws water from soil, shrubs & trees…literally sucking the forests dry.” Not to panic, but this has been one of the six worst fire seasons in over five decades and Governor Jerry Brown, pushing for more restrictions on carbon emissions, warns that our “climate is unstable and if the drought was to continue for a year or several years, California could literally burn up.”   [ROLLING STONE – Sep 24, 15]
  • BUT THE ‘INTERNET OF THINGS’ IS LOADED WITH CYBERCRIME POTENTIAL which, for the most part, is without a realistic likelihood of protection, for varying factors: (1) “Many of the manufacturers making these newly connected widgets have little experience with the arcane world of computer security…Their mechanical engineers are suddenly trying to become security developers and cryptology experts; (2) Since writing secure code is almost impossible, firms adopt ‘openness’ as the best defense… treating ‘white-hat’ hackers as friends and often running ‘bug bounty’ programs which pay rewards to hackers for disclosing problems (thus giving firms time to fix)” but the world is also full of ‘bad hat’ hackers, too often a step ahead. (3) “Many devices lack even the ability to be patched; their manufacturers cannot use the internet to distribute fixes for security flaws that come to light after sale; (4) For now, companies have few incentives to take security seriously. As was the case with the internet in the 1990s, most threats are still ‘on the horizon’ and worries are theoretical, which means that getting security wrong has no impact on a firm’s reputation or its profits.” It’ll get a lot worse before getting better. [THE ECONOMIST- Jul 18, 15]
  • GEOLOGISTS AND SCIENTISTS BELIEVE, based on radio-isotopic dating, that the Earth is over four billion years old, and that evolution of mammals & humans occurred in a fractional percent of that time. For a fascinating series of videos on state-of-knowledge as to how & why life began and how Earth fits within the universe, check out; http://www.economist.com/sciencebriefs
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK: Handling Hillary Clinton’s ‘private Email’ fiasco now involves a State Department Ambassador with 70 full-time and 30 part-time federal workers assigned to “coordinate & assess Freedom of Information Act requests and decide if information may be declassified and released to the public.”

“America is not, and will never be, at war with Islam” says Barack Obama.   Reality check:  https://www.youtube.com/embed/MioNZBRrKZg

 

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