• CYBERSECURITY IS NOW #1 ON THE U.S. DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE’S LIST OF THREATS, according to the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command. The Pentagon alone now reports more than ten million attempts at intrusion every day! “Accustomed to the elegant theories of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ that evolved during the Cold War, agencies are struggling to develop a doctrine  for an entirely different form of conflict, in which there are countless potential attackers and multiple gradations of destructiveness –from sovereign countries (Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea), sophisticated hackers and WikiLeaks. “Given the sheer number of cyber aggressors, defense seems doomed to lag behind offense… The Three Rules of computer security devised by an NSA cryptographer are: 1- Do not own a computer; 2- Do not power it on; and 3- Do not use it… The most we can do is build our networks so that the ravages of Cyberia cannot trigger a complete outage.” DCG are members of the Leadership Council for ‘Secure the Village,’ an organization serving Cybercrime, Cyber Privacy and Information Security challenges. We can help your company best protect its profitability, financial position and future.  [THE BOSTON GLOBE – Mar 13, 17]
  • BUREAUCRACY & ADMINISTRATION KILL AMBITION, SAP ENERGY, AND DEMORALIZE MANY EMPLOYEES… by creating ‘organizational drag’ – all the practices, procedures & structures that waste time and limit output, like too much process, too many meetings, meaningless goals, and time wasted on work that no one will ever care about.” The result is incapacity to optimize productivity or profitability. Trimming complexity is the first step to improved performance. While top-line growth may be impacted during transition, when executed effectively to “surgically eliminate” redundant process, procedure and slower-growing or less strategically-aligned parts of the business, sustainable long-term results almost always emerge. DCG have decades of expertise in helping businesses increase bottom-line profitability and valuation; call us for courtesy consultation. the first step to improved performance  [HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW – Mar 13, 17]
  • “ECONOMIC FORECASTING IS GUESSWORK.” A major study by the Federal Reserve compared the last decade of predictions on important indicators by the Fed, Congressional Budget Office, Blue Chips and Survey of Professional Forecasters on unemployment, inflation, interest rates, gross domestic products, etc. Actual outcomes showed “widespread huge margins of error” – with examples up to 40% in either direction – and that the “gap between prediction and reality may be widening… with too many moving parts, too much unknown, people wrongly thinking the future will resemble the past and not foreseeing political, economic & technological change… The bedrock lesson is as old as time: the future is too complex to be predicted.” The elaborate computer models which Government and Private Sector forecasters utilize are “condemned to make mistakes, misreading the future with predictions that are no better than in the 1920s.”  [ROBERT SAMUELSON, WASHINGTON POST – Mar 8, 17]
  • THE U.S. CORPORATE TAX RATE IS AMONG THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD but generates lower revenue as a percentage of GDP by generating incentive for companies to abuse ‘loopholes’ – like relocating headquarters and allocating Intellectual Property to low-tax foreign havens. President Trump is now leading an initiative for actual revolutionary change to a fundamentally new system called Border Adjustment Taxation (BAT) which: (1) lowers the rate from 35% on global profits; (2) allows deduction for cost of goods produced in the U.S.; (3) denies deduction for cost of goods foreign-produced; and (4) applies zero tax on exported products. BAT effectively taxes cash flow so “it doesn’t matter where a company is headquartered or I.P. is housed. All that matters is where it produces and sells products… essentially subsidizing exports and penalizing imports which should have the effect of strengthening the value of the U.S. dollar by as much as 25%… raising an extra $1 trillion in federal revenue over a decade,” and bolstering American jobs.  [TIME – Mar 27, 17]
  • THE WORLD’S SPIDERS EAT AS MUCH ANIMAL PREY AS ALL OF THE OTHER HUMANS ON THE PLANET, some 400 to 500 million tons based on known food requirements per unit of body weight. A recent study on arachnophobe dining habits, published in Science of Nature, reports that “spiders collectively consume between 400 to 800 million tons of insects every year (in forests, grassland, fields of crops, etc.) while leaving people alone… Without spiders there would be an awful lot more of creepy-crawlies around.” [THE ECONOMIST – Mar 18, 17]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK: “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the Truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”  – Richard Dawkins

           Clever engineering design, but some people need to get a life — https://www.youtube.com/embed/QQ9gs-5lRKc?wmode=transparent