• BE CAUTIOUS OF NEW APPS WHICH SPAM ALL YOUR CONTACTS. “Growth Hacking’ is the term which describes “what happens when developers go beyond merely building in social hooks that help products go viral, and instead try to force virality at the expense of the user. They indiscriminately ‘select all’ when posting to contacts, forcing you to publicly endorse the product just to get access. They also send misleading messages using your name without giving you a chance to see or edit first” – in most cases annoying your friends and contacts with a barrage of marketing promotion or ads. [FAST COMPANY – Jun 14] 
  • “THE TRICKY THING ABOUT A DISRUPTIVE BUSINESS MODEL is that it doesn’t arrive usually with a great announcement or is necessarily seen at first as even a great threat… Disruptive innovations are happening with greater frequency today and what’s so dangerous is that past performance is not a predictor of future performance.” It’s critical to ensure that management decisions are focused around strategy which is based on sound assumptions of current business & economic environment, and any change in underlying assumptions should trigger assessment of the strategic direction. Well executed evolving strategy is almost always safer than sticking with non-adaptable (even if more sophisticated) strategy which fails to address the risk of disruptive change. DCG has decades of experience in strategic planning; let us help.  [NACD DIRECTORSHIP – Jul/Aug 14] 
  • “A DEMOCRACY IS ALWAYS TEMPORARY IN NATURE; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship… The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:  From bondage to spiritual faith, to great courage, to liberty, to abundance, to complacency, to apathy, to dependence, back into bondage.” – Alexander Tyler – 1887.  “The United States is now somewhere between the ‘complacency and apathy’ phase, with more than 40% of the nation’s population already having reached the ‘governmental dependency’ phase…In aggregate, the map of the territory Romney won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country. Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare. If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals, and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.” – Joseph Olson – Hamline University Law professor.   It’s a strange and discouraging time in America today: Half the population is subsidized… becoming poorer, more dependent, and believing they are victims… while consuming and acquiring material things that people in other countries only dream about… but protesting for America to be more like those other countries… and oblivious to the fact that it’s the people they vote for who run the government.  [Internet quotes & references may or not be accurate]    
  • 3-D PRINTING IS NO LONGER A NOVELTY; it is now “ushering in an era of personalized medicine and surgical reconstruction. Instead of fitting the patient to the implant, it’s now fitting the implant to the patient” – hip & knee replacements, cranial plates, splints, heart valves, even robotic limbs (at a cost of $200 versus $70,000). Several dozen medical centers now use 3-D printers and Nat’l Institutes of Health (NIH) now hosts an “exchange that allows users to share and download files… facilitating the potential to revolutionize medicine… The holy grail is to print a living organ from human cells & living tissue, for transplant using a patient’s own cells, predicted to be just a couple of decades away.”  [WEB M.D. MAGAZINE – Sept 14]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:   Last year, the U.S. Treasury Dep’t spent $55 million to produce pennies – once composed of copper but now 97% zinc which costs 60% more than the penny it becomes!

       A politically incorrect but hysterical video on HOW SPORTS TEAMS CAME TO BE: http://www.youtube.com/embed/eqLB8wyrE_A

DUITCH CONSULTING GROUP – UTILIZING GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE TO PROVIDE OPTIMALSTRATEGIC, FINANCIAL, OPERATIONS AND MANAGEMENT PLANNING & POSITIONING