• BUSINESS LEADERSHIP IN TODAY’S ENVIRONMENT now demands showing empathy for employees, “who have different needs and want different things. Recruiting and retaining people is not just about money, and strong leaders will step back to ask questions that get to the heart of people’s motivations… Keeping all that in perspective while keeping teams focused on the broader goals is really hard,” and a critical factor in successful leadership is always the leader’s level of authenticity – demonstrated by believing their decisions are right. Others won’t like everything said or done, but if the objective is for everyone to be happy, effective leadership is doomed from the start. DCG experience can greatly assist strategy for employee motivation & retention, as well as performance. [EXCO LEADERSHIP – 2/22]
  • WHATEVER ‘NEW NORMAL’ TURNS OUT TO BE, the future is about minimizing and balancing risks which stem from two years of pandemic. “There will always be one risk or another; pick your poison: that’s the choice life offers.” The most likely substantial unintended consequences from Covid on business, consumers & culture include: (1) Employee hiring & retention practices, given the “troubling situation of simultaneous low employment and high job vacancies”; (2) Inventory management, as supply chain problems torpedoed both Lean Manufacturing and Just-in-Time costing; (3) Collapsing retail storefronts, from both online shopping/ delivery/ curbside pickups, and from failure of businesses (family and/or local branches of major companies) which will not reopen; (4) Ongoing price inflation which reduces purchasing power for most Americans; (5) Education practices & curriculum, from K-12 students losing out on academic skills (especially STEM), stunted emotional development, and interpersonal skills; (6) College student loss of opportunity “to find themselves within an away-from-home setting and prepare for a rewarding career… Attempt to ‘solve’ for X while letting the other 25 letters of the variable alphabet run wild, brought a myopic lens for a peripheral vision party. The list of unintended consequences will continue to grow, with likely collapse of entire industries, governments and cultures as we move forward.” [THOMAS FREY]
  • REMINDER FOR E-COMMERCE/ SAAS/ WHOLESALERS/ DIGITAL GOODS COMPANIES: Many California localities (including LA, Santa Monica, San Francisco) now impose a tax on businesses due by February 28, which is no longer based on office location payroll, but rather on apportioned revenue only earned while employees worked from home. Penalties can be substantial and Los Angeles has hired 30 additional tax auditors looking for physical presence.
  • CRAZY AUTHOR OF THE MONTH, ON “WHITE SUPREMIST PATRIARCHAL WORLDVIEW: If we’ve learned anything from the inhabitants of Planet Looney Tunes over the past couple years, it’s that anything & everything the Left doesn’t like is systemically and inherently racist, misogynistic, or worse. The latest: ‘White Maleness Causes Meat-eating.’  White supremacists weaponized eating meat (along with eggs & dairy) to reclaim their wounded masculinity, delusionally argued by the latest book (Sexual Politics of Meat) that ‘the act of eating animal corpses’ is massaged by euphemistic language, like hamburgers/ steak/ bacon… with ‘proof source’ somehow including the 9/11 attack, a ‘black man’ elected U.S. president, and baiting of liberal men as ‘soy boys’.” Wow, enlightening.  [RED STATE – 2/14/22]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

     Artificial Intelligence facial-recognition software is now converting ‘cartoon character’ faces into photoreal portraits, paintings & busts. Check this out:   https://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/artists-uses-ai-to-create-photorealistic-versions-of-disney-and-simpsons-characters-213045.html?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter

          “Capitalism is not a redeemable system, since it represents an absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental and social cost, run by an elite minority with privatized control over what we eat and how we fuel our society, who can control massive markets that they dictate and can capture governments.” – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez