MORE MAGA AND TRUMP MORONS

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Three Fundamentals of Better Planning

Making a business plan for the next year has never been so perplexing, given what we've been through. That's why you need to be realistic and disciplined as you look ahead and look for funding. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

Getty Images

It's getting to be that time of year when serious budgeting begins and business plans for next year are taking shape. In addition, millions of newly-minted entrepreneurs are running around hawking their business plans, trying to get while the getting is still good. But given all the uncertainties of the pandemic, today even the most established businesses aren't any better prepared than the newest startups to make serious and realistic projections about revenues over the next year or two because you can never really plan the future by the past. Especially the past that we've experienced for the last two years.

As a result, today we're all stuck in a world of lovers, liars and wishful thinkers and there aren't a lot of answers as to how best to proceed.

Some folks - the lovers - are the truest of believers in their businesses and think that trees grow to the sky and that there's no end to their exponential upsides. They're making rosy plans, expecting amazing results as the world rushes to their doors, and they intend to put the pedal to the metal and push on through. Few of them will make it much past the starting gates. Nothing good happens overnight these days.

Others - and you know who they are - know just how tough and tight things really are but they're either trying to get initial funding for their ventures (while the funding is still flowing like crazy) or attempting to raise follow-on funding to keep their doors open. To accomplish this, they need to pretty much keep their eyes closed, their fingers crossed, and say whatever the world needs to hear.

They're living by the old Trump doctrine that "a lie is not a lie if the truth should not be expected."  Shame on you if you were foolish enough to believe that I knew what I was talking about or that I meant what I said. Or as attorneys for former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell asserted in seeking to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against her, "no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact."

And then there are the wishful thinkers who haven't the slightest clue as to what they are signing up for or what the likely outcomes of their ventures will be but who are deluded captives of what I would call Excel exceptionalism. If the spreadsheet says it's so, then you take that for gospel and go forward. The truth is that in these cases, if you torture the numbers long enough, they'll confess to anything.

I was reminded of this particularly Pollyannish perspective recently when I saw an ad for a Neutrogena beauty product with a tag line that read "for people with skin." Now there's an exciting TAM (total addressable market) that's certainly worth chasing. Part of the problem, though, is that entrepreneurs are indoctrinated by shows like Shark Tank, where contestants appear with their products or prototypes and seek funding at crazy valuations based on using the new proceeds to drive increased sales. Only Mr. Wonderful is ever rude enough to ask about things like margins, marketing costs or market size.

But there are a couple of basic ideas that will help you - whether you're new to the process or an old hand - if you want to develop defensible numbers and projections that at least make some basic sense. While plans are basically useless, the planning process, properly done, is absolutely critical.

Solid, well-thought plans aren't guarantees but they will help you detect changes and make course corrections as you go forward. Keep in mind that they aren't anything more than today's best guesses because you can plan all the plans you want, but you can't plan results. For better or worse, you live the results of your old plans every day.  

First, do your homework. As amazing as it seems, far too many entrepreneurs jump into new markets without even the most basic understanding of the ground rules, regulatory environments, competitive offerings, etc. This is in part due to the curse of Uber, which taught too many newbies the idea of forging blindly and quickly ahead -- and then asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Even apart from the fact that the strategy doesn't work in all markets, it's a dumb approach and doomed to fail.

Second, start by building your plan backwards. Figure out first where you want to end up. Then determine the steps and the required growth and resources needed to get there. Finally, do a realistic inventory of your current assets and capabilities to see whether you have the funds and foundation required to complete the journey. You may discover that you simply can't get there from here and save yourself years of headaches, heartaches and hard times.

Third, remember above all that consistency is easier to defend than accuracy. You're going to need to "sell" your plan over and over to your own team, to your board, to customers and regulators, and to investors. It's hard to look smart with bad numbers. If you can't explain succinctly where your numbers came from and how they were arrived at, you can forget the whole drill. No one really knows what the future holds or what certain specifics will be down the line - costs, rents, taxes, etc. You can only do your best but it's crucial that your plan be built based on logical premises and straightforward assumptions. Anyone can argue the assumptions and change the numbers in your models, but it's your logic and approach that needs to be rock solid, consistent and clear.

Dream in years, plan in months, review weekly, and react immediately.

AUG 31, 2021

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

No more compassion for the stupid unvaccinated morons

 

Op-Ed: As a doctor in a COVID unit, I’m running out of compassion for the unvaccinated. Get the shot

 

BY ANITA SIRCAR

AUG. 17, 2021 9:28 AM PT 

 

My patient sat at the edge of his bed gasping for air while he tried to tell me his story, pausing to catch his breath after each word. The plastic tubes delivering oxygen through his nose hardly seemed adequate to stop his chest from heaving. He looked exhausted.

He had tested positive for the coronavirus 10 days ago. He was under 50, mildly hypertensive but otherwise in good health. Eight days earlier he started coughing and having severe fatigue. His doctor started him on antibiotics. It did not work.

Fearing his symptoms were worsening, he started taking some hydroxychloroquine he had found on the internet. It did not work.

He was now experiencing shortness of breath while doing routine daily activities such as walking from his bedroom to the bathroom or putting on his shoes. He was a shell of his former self. He eventually made his way to a facility where he could receive monoclonal antibodies, a lab-produced transfusion that substitutes for the body’s own antibodies. It did not work.

He finally ended up in the ER with dangerously low oxygen levels, exceedingly high inflammatory markers and patchy areas of infection all over his lungs. Nothing had helped. He was getting worse. He could not breathe. His wife and two young children were at home, all infected with the virus. He and his wife had decided not to get vaccinated.

Last year, a case like this would have flattened me. I would have wrestled with the sadness and how unfair life was. Battled with the angst of how unlucky he was. This year, I struggled to find sympathy. It was August 2021, not 2020. The vaccine had been widely available for months in the U.S., free to anyone who wanted it, even offered in drugstores and supermarkets. Cutting-edge, revolutionary, mind-blowing, lifesaving vaccines were available where people shopped for groceries, and they still didn’t want them.

Outside his hospital door, I took a deep breath — battening down my anger and frustration — and went in. I had been working the COVID-19 units for 17 months straight, all day, every day. I had cared for hundreds of COVID patients. We all had, without being able to take breaks long enough to help us recover from this unending ordeal. Compassion fatigue was setting in. For those of us who hadn’t left after the hardest year of our professional lives, even hope was now in short supply.

Shouting through my N95 mask and the noise of the HEPA filter, I introduced myself. I calmly asked him why he decided not to get vaccinated.

“Well, I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anything. I was just waiting for the FDA to approve the vaccine first. I didn’t want to take anything experimental. I didn’t want to be the government’s guinea pig, and I don’t trust that it’s safe,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I can pretty much guarantee we would have never met had you gotten vaccinated, because you would have never been hospitalized. All of our COVID units are full and every single patient in them is unvaccinated. Numbers don’t lie. The vaccines work.”

This was a common excuse people gave for not getting vaccinated, fearing the vaccine because the Food and Drug Administration had granted it only emergency use authorization so far, not permanent approval. Yet the treatments he had turned to — antibiotics, monoclonal antibodies and hydroxychloroquine — were considered experimental, with mixed evidence to support their use.

The only proven lifesaver we’ve had in this pandemic is a vaccine that many people don’t want. A vaccine we give away to other countries because supply overwhelms demand in the U.S. A vaccine people in other countries stand in line for hours to receive, if they can get it at all.

“Well,” I said, “I am going to treat you with remdesivir, which only recently received FDA approval.” I explained that it had been under an EUA for most of last year and had not been studied or administered as widely as COVID-19 vaccines. That more than 353 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been administered in the U.S. along with more than 4.7 billion doses worldwide without any overwhelming, catastrophic side effects. “Not nearly as many doses of remdesivir have been given or studied in people and its long-term side effects are still unknown,” I said. “Do you still want me to give it to you?”

“Yes” he responded, “Whatever it takes to save my life.”

It did not work.

My patient died nine days later of a stroke. We, the care team, reconciled this loss by telling ourselves: He made a personal choice not to get vaccinated, not to protect himself or his family. We did everything we could with what we had to save him. This year, this tragedy, this unnecessary, entirely preventable loss, was on him.

The burden of this pandemic now rests on the shoulders of the unvaccinated. On those who are eligible to get vaccinated but choose not to, a decision they defend by declaring, “Vaccination is a deeply personal choice.” But perhaps never in history has anyone’s personal choice affected the world as a whole as it does right now. When hundreds and thousands of people continue to die — when the most vulnerable members of society, our children, cannot be vaccinated — the luxury of choice ceases to exist.

If you believe the pandemic is almost over and I can ride it out, without getting vaccinated, you could not be more wrong. This virus will find you.

If you believe I’ll just wait until the FDA approves the vaccine first, you may not live to see the day.

If you believe if I get infected I’ll just go to the hospital and get treated, there is no guarantee we can save your life, nor even a promise we’ll have a bed for you.

If you believe I’m pregnant and I don’t want the vaccine to affect me, my baby or my future fertility, it matters little if you’re not alive to see your newborn.

If you believe I won’t get my children vaccinated because I don’t know what the long-term effects will be, it matters little if they don’t live long enough for you to find out.

If you believe I’ll just let everyone else get vaccinated around me so I don’t have to, there are 93 million eligible, unvaccinated people in the “herd” who think the same way you do and are getting in the way of ending this pandemic.

If you believe vaccinated people are getting infected anyway, so what’s the point?, the vaccine was built to prevent hospitalizations and deaths from severe illness. Instead of fatal pneumonia, those with breakthrough infections have a short, bad cold, so the vaccine has already proved itself. The vaccinated are not dying of COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has mutated countless times during this pandemic, adapting to survive. Stacked up against a human race that has resisted change every step of the way — including wearing masks, social distancing, quarantining and now refusing lifesaving vaccines — it is easy to see who will win this war if human behavior fails to change quickly.

The most effective thing you can do to protect yourself, your loved ones and the world is to GET VACCINATED.

And it will work.

Anita Sircar is an infectious-disease physician and clinical instructor of health sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine.

 

FIRE!!

 

Four rules for returning to the office

 

		76 °

Four rules for returning to the office There’s a lot of angst out there about who has to come back, and when. The need to return isn’t necessarily fair to everyone, but it does need to be communicated honestly and clearly. By Howard Tullman 29-Aug-21 – As if we didn’t have enough angst and division in this country, the newest emerging conflict is between the WFHomers and their employers, the RTOers, who are intent upon and insisting on increasing the amount of time staffers need to spend in the office each week. While plenty of companies are pushing back the start dates for the grand return – some of the main tech companies are already targeting early next year – it’s clear that there’s a widening employee expectation gap, which is likely to expand even further as the Delta variant and its progeny spread. And the most disappointed team members aren’t necessarily who you’d expect. It’s the folks stuck in the middle who have the blues. What’s especially concerning about the arguments on the right way to return is how quickly this debate is morphing into an economic class and caste struggle. It’s already become challenging for even the best-intentioned management teams to explain, try to empathetically justify and, ultimately, to honestly break the sad news to certain important groups of their employees that life still isn’t fair, and that one size and one solution still doesn’t fit everyone. Telling people things they don’t want to hear is never easy. Years from now, when we all look back on this time and the pandemic in its entirety, one of the most discouraging realizations will be how disproportionately and unfairly COVID-19’s burdens were borne by people in different economic strata. Executives across just about every industry will need to quickly figure out how to explain to their people, the media, and the world that many of their lower-paid workers need to be on site even though the company isn’t going to require others with different job responsibilities and requirements to do likewise. Worse yet, they’re going to have to tell a bunch of mid-level workers who clearly thought otherwise – and believed that they had a lot more flexibility and control over their lives than the folks on the factory floor – that they too are expected to show up. This latter news is likely to be the rudest of all the awakenings because it’s as emotionally bound in matters of perceived status as it is with regard to commuting costs, productivity, and other domestic issues. Some of the companies that have tried to make the new requirements applicable across the board have found that – unlike the lower-level blue-collar and no-collar folks who pretty much knew that they were screwed since the pandemic started – the folks in the middle are already raising the biggest stink and threatening to go elsewhere, which is really the last thing these firms can afford at the moment. Unfortunately, a lot of these “knowledge” and creative workers believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have many other alternatives rather than forlornly marching back to their cubicles. We’ll know soon enough whether their confidence is well-warranted or sadly misplaced. My own guess is that a lot of these folks will find that the type of positions and salaries they’re looking to replicate aren’t exactly abundant in the newly streamlined economy. And the ones wrapped in the idea of simply starting their own businesses are even more likely to end up unhappy. Another key part of the problem is that many of the senior people making these decisions have ridden out the crisis with minimal disruption, smoothed and softened by a robust stock market, so they don’t necessarily understand or appreciate just how radically millions of lives and circumstances have been changed, uprooted, and transformed. Nor do they get just how long and painful the return to whatever the new normal is likely to be for families concerned with continuing health and housing issues, their kids’ education, rearranging and resuming child and pet care, and supplementing lost spousal incomes. Management has neither time nor the option to see what competitors are doing or how the variants are progressing when the day-to-day demands of the workplace and the requirements of the reinvigorated economy require clear and consistent answers and directions for their people. Now is the time to bring people back to reality as well as the office, because, if you aren’t structuring and leading the “back to work” conversations, you can bet that the vacuum will be promptly filled with commentary, complaints, and criticisms that aren’t likely to be helpful in any way. While there aren’t any perfect answers, here are four important ideas to keep in mind as you craft a policy and, more importantly, as you try to honestly communicate it to all members of your team. 1 Explain what applies to everyone. These conversations should start by making clear that the overall policies of the company are generally applicable to everyone – as they always have been – and that everyone is expected to comply. There will be exceptions based on a variety of reasons and criteria – as there also have always been – but no group of employees is being specially treated or afforded privileges that don’t have a clear business-related purpose and value to the firm. 2 Note that there have always been variable shifts, seasons, and schedules. In many respects, once we return to the “new” normal, the way that the business will operate won’t be materially changed for most of the employees, and it’s important to make this clear. If the company’s basic policy is going to be “all hands on deck,” which it always was pre-pandemic, then there’s not really much left to discuss. It’s just getting back to business. 3 Make sure your distinctions are meaningful and matter. You can be sure that everyone in the firm will know exactly who is being asked to do what. That means it’s very important that you have a precise and ready rationale for each group of employees who are treated differently in some respect. Having your senior team lead by example and make it their business to be on site and visible will be very important. 4 Focus on what you can fix. It’s essential to show all team members that the company is being proactive and helpful in addressing and providing assistance and solutions for the various recurring issues that many will be dealing with. Flexible hours, including early departure times, pet friendly offices, in-office COVID-19 testing, and vaccinations, are some of the common remedies. But be ready to improvise. Howard Tullman is General Managing Partner for G2T3V, LLC – Investors in Disruptive Innovators, and for Chicago High Tech Investors, LLC. He is also the author of You Can’t Win a Race With Your Mouth: And 299 Other Expert Tips from a Lifelong Entrepreneur. By Howard Tullman | Loop North News | h@g2t3v.com

JUST TO BE CLEAR, RUMP SURRENDERED TO THE TALIBAN LONG BEFORE BIDEN WAS PRESIDENT

Trump never believed Afghanistan was worth fighting for: as early as 2011 he advocated its abandonment. Once in office, his early infatuation with “my generals” gave the Pentagon latitude to dissuade the president from exactly the kind of rush to the exits we’re now seeing in Afghanistan. Trump wanted to abandon the war in Afghanistan, but he understood atavistically that it would damage him politically to have a terrorist attack or a Saigon comparison attached to his policy choices.

Thus the impetus for a negotiated settlement. The problem with  Trump’s Taliban deal wasn’t that the administration turned to diplomacy. That was a sensible avenue out of the policy constraints. The problem was that the strongest state in the international order let itself be swindled by a terrorist organization. Because we so clearly wanted out of Afghanistan, we agreed to disreputable terms, and then proceeded to pretend that the Taliban were meeting even those.

Trump agreed to withdraw all coalition forces from Afghanistan in 14 months, end all military and contractor support to Afghan security forces and cease “intervening in its domestic affairs.” He forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters and relax economic sanctions. He agreed that the Taliban could continue to commit violence against the government we were there to support, against innocent people and against those who’d assisted our efforts to keep Americans safe. All the Taliban had to do was say they would stop targeting U.S. or coalition forces, not permit Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations to use Afghan territory to threaten U.S. security and subsequently hold negotiations with the Afghan government.

Not only did the agreement have no inspection or enforcement mechanisms, but despite Trump’s claim that “If bad things happen, we’ll go back with a force like no one’s ever seen,” the administration made no attempt to enforce its terms. Trump’s own former national security adviser called it “a surrender agreement.”

FACTS DON'T MATTER

 

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual.

 

Our democracy is under attack. 

Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual.

By 

Margaret Sullivan

Media columnist

July 28, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy.

In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage.

Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the now-in-vogue terms “both-sidesism” or “false equivalence,” but they laid out the problem with devastating clarity (the italics are mine):

“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

Nearly a decade later, this distortion of reality has only grown worse, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s rise to power and his ironclad grip on an increasingly craven Republican Party.

Positive proof was in the recent coverage of congressional efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

The Democratic leadership has been trying to assemble a bipartisan panel that would study that mob attack on our democracy and make sure it is never repeated. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been trying to undermine the investigation, cynically requesting that two congressmen who backed efforts to invalidate the election be allowed to join the commission, then boycotting it entirely. And the media has played straight into Republicans’ hands, seemingly incapable of framing this as anything but base political drama.

“ ‘What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week. “After a whiplash week of power plays . . . tensions are at an all-time high.”

Is it really a “feud” when Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy performatively blames Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to seat Republicans Jim Jordan and Jim Banks — two sycophantic allies of Trump, who called the Jan. 6 mob to gather?

One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And its Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.

“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed. (“Can it really be lost on the Post that the Republican party has acted in bad faith at every turn to undermine every attempt to investigate the events of Jan. 6?” a reader complained to me.)

The bankruptcy of this sort of coverage was exposed on Tuesday morning, when the Jan. 6 commission kicked off with somber, powerful, pointedly nonpolitical testimony from four police officers who were attacked during the insurrection. Two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even defied McCarthy’s boycott to ensure their party would be sanely represented.

Law officers became truth seekers about who was responsible for the Capitol attacks

This strain of news coverage, observed Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review, centers on twinned, dubious implications: “That bipartisanship is desirable and that Democrats bear responsibility for upholding it — even in the face of explicit Republican obstructionism.”

This stance comes across as both cynical (“politics was ever thus”) and unsophisticated (“we’re just doing our job of reporting what was said”). Quite a feat.

Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.

There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:

Toss out the insidious “inside-politics” frame and replace it with a “pro-democracy” frame.

Stop calling the reporters who cover this stuff “political reporters.” Start calling them “government reporters.”

Stop asking who the winners and losers were in the latest skirmish. Start asking who is serving the democracy and who is undermining it.

Stop being “savvy” and start being patriotic.

In a year-end piece for Nieman Lab, Andrew Donohue, managing editor of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, called for news organizations to put reporters on a new-style “democracy beat” to focus on voting suppression and redistricting. “These reporters won’t see their work in terms of politics or parties, but instead through the lens of honesty, fairness, and transparency,” he wrote.

I’d make it more sweeping. The democracy beat shouldn’t be some kind of specialized innovation, but a widespread rethinking across the mainstream media.

Making this happen will call for something that Big Journalism is notoriously bad at: An open-minded, nondefensive recognition of what’s gone wrong.

Top editors, Sunday talk-show moderators and other news executives should pull together their brain trusts to grapple with this. And they should be transparent with the public about what they’re doing and why.

As a model, they might have to swallow their big-media pride and look to places like Harrisburg, Pa., public radio station WITF which has admirably explained to its audience why it continually offers reminders about the actions of those public officials who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Or to Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn’s letter to readers about how the paper and its website, Cleveland.com, refuse to cover every reckless, attention-getting lie of Republican Josh Mandel as he runs for the U.S. Senate next year.

These places prove that a different kind of coverage, and transparency about it, is possible.

Is it unlikely that the most influential Sunday talk shows, the most powerful newspapers and cable networks, and the buzziest Beltway websites will change their stripes?

Maybe so. But, to return to Ornstein and Mann in 2012, it’s a necessity.

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” they wrote.

They probably couldn’t have imagined the chaos that followed November’s election, the horrors of Jan. 6, or what’s happened in the past few weeks.

The change they called for never happened. For the sake of American democracy, it’s now or never.

WHAT SOUL? THEY'RE A BUNCH OF SCUM AND BOTTOM FEEDERS