• FAMILY-OWNED BUSINESSES ARE SELDOM MANAGED in a manner compliant with best business standards and practices – mostly because controlling owners find it uncomfortable to balance their multiple roles; family members have expectations, envy, ego, insecurities or entitlement issues; communication is often stifled by emotional entanglements; and/or all of the above. So creating business efficiencies and effectiveness in structure & operations is always a challenge. Decades of DCG experience suggest five critical areas of conflict: (1) Job titles unsupported by clear responsibility, accountability & authority; (2) Compensation levels unsupported by market prices with a realistic performance evaluation process; (3) Training programs to develop next-generation management & leadership skills; (4) Communication structure which clarifies operating principles, culture and relationships; (5) Protective mechanisms (prenuptials, wills, Trusts). When companies mix family and business without effective structure for separating and clarifying these crucial and often incompatible areas, disaster can ensue. Call us for courtesy consultation before your reality check bounces!
  • U.S. NEWS MEDIA INCREASINGLY FOSTER SOCIETAL DISINTEGRATION through constant interruption from “limitless quantities of news ‘flashes’ which are bright-colored candies for the mind.” For many, flashy dramatic ‘news’ is actually toxic, “leading to fear & aggression, hindering creativity and ability to think deeply” because of mis-focused and misleading perspective by: (1) over-rating importance of sports, accidents or violence which “leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads” instead of awareness for the underlying causes, stresses and true issues that merit changes in personal direction or behavior; (2) exacerbating ‘confirmation bias’ through stories that “make sense even though they don’t correspond to reality” – simple and stupid explanations of world events which result in overconfidence and/or misjudgment; (3) inhibiting thinking and stifling creativity by usurping concentration which disrupts comprehension, learning and imagination; and (4) promoting “learned helplessness” since news stories are “overwhelmingly about things we cannot influence, so their constant repetition makes us passive, grinding us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.” Is media news civilization’s nemesis? [THE GUARDIAN – May 21, 14]
  • WHILE CONGRESS DITHERS AND THE OBAMA/COURT DANCE MARATHON CONTINUES, illegal immigrant families are streaming across the southern border at record pace – double last years flow (some 32,000 already this year) and 40% higher than the previous record in 2014 – in response to increasingly relaxed enforcement policies and the increasing chagrin of Border Patrol Officers. Newest Pew Research Center analysis found over 55 million Latinos now in the U.S. (over 17% of the population), that the “vast majority” are of Mexican origin, representing one in five millennials and those under 18 the largest group, “a demographic fact likely to influence the future of the country.” [LEVINE BRIEFING NOTES – Apr 23, 16]
  • AND MORE EXEC BRANCH WISDOM: Every week, some 500 Salvadorans who illegally entered the country are deported back to El Salvador. Our government, in order to help “facilitate reintegration and support their enterprises,” budgets an obscure agency (the Inter-American Foundation) to spend $50,000 annually on deportees’ “financial education, technical assistance & business plans,” and the Small Business Administration (SBA) gives loan guarantees to U.S. banks & lenders who then provide seed money to the deportees. Meanwhile, U.S. small businesses struggle for financing support, and Border Patrol officers complain of “faulty radios and equipment shortages that compromise their effectiveness.” [FOX NEWS – Apr 16, 16]
  • “THE DREAM OF PERSONAL FLIGHT AS A DAILY ROUTINE IS NOW VIABLE.” VOLOCOPTER, a personal aerial vehicle with up to 60 mph capacity, has received a ‘permit to fly’ from German authorities and is on the way to production, to the air sports market (same path as for the gyrocopter & helicopter), then to air taxi services and within a few years available for individual and public transport – subject to the political process for establishing international regulations. The copter takes off and lands vertically, hovers, runs on quiet and emission-free all-electric motors… We’re now head towards entire transportation systems in the third dimension.”  [ASM INTERNATIONAL.ORG – Apr 14, 16] 

DCG: UTILIZING GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE FOR OPTIMAL STRATEGIC & FINANCIAL DIRECTION, MANAGEMENT, NEGOTIATION & MEDIATION