OPENING PERSPECTIVE - DAY ONE
MARSHALL DAVIS JONES
PANEL DISCUSSION
CLOSING PERSPECTIVE - DAY ONE
MARSHALL DAVIS JONES
HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Thursday, September 08, 2022
Wednesday, September 07, 2022
A Familiar Story
This has become a familiar story: Because Trump was so unethical, so corrupt and so unrestrained by any notion of propriety or shame, we have to keep coming up with new rules to prevent future officials from doing what he did in areas where no rule had seemed necessary before.
We didn’t think we needed legislation such as this, because we
always assumed every president, no matter their party or ideology, had a
baseline of respect for the office they occupied, the laws that bound them and
their obligations to the country.
The latest Trump revelations should
prompt more talk of reform
By Greg Sargent
and
September 7, 2022 at 5:53 p.m. EDT
As more revelations emerge about documents that Donald Trump hoarded at Mar-a-Lago, the political debate is centered on what should and will happen to the former president himself. The Post heightened the urgency of such questions with its latest scoop that one of the documents described “a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.”
But this whole controversy raises another set of questions: What should we do to prevent this in the future? Even (or especially) if Trump manages to skate away from accountability with the intercession of some friendly judges, is there a way to stop a future president from doing this all over again?
As it happens, there is already legislation in Congress that could do a lot in this regard. Introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), the Promoting Accountability and Security in Transition Act would clarify and update the rules around preservation of presidential records and what occurs during a presidential transition.
Among other things, the bill would give the National Archives much greater oversight of the president’s compliance with existing laws in the treatment of presidential documents (which Trump routinely violated). It would create new standards for the presidential transition to ensure that records are maintained and involve the archives much more directly in that process.
“This legislation is all about creating much clearer and more enforceable standards on the appropriate retention of documents,” Murphy told us, adding that, “We need clear rules with real consequences.”
Murphy originally introduced this bill in late 2020, when many feared Trump would merely destroy documents. At that point, no one dreamed of the scenario that did unfold — i.e., Trump hoarding boxes and boxes of documents, including ones containing highly classified national security secrets, and rebuffing months of efforts to retrieve them by the National Archives and FBI.
So
Murphy says the bill will need revision in light of the full range of
misconduct by Trump — which is still to be determined — to make it more focused
on how to prevent the theft and hoarding of documents.
“Trump is challenging our imaginations when it comes to the ways a president can abuse power on the way out of office,” Murphy told us. The senator hopes for a vote on such legislation this year, but he isn’t optimistic that it will happen.
Murphy
allows that such a law probably wouldn’t have dissuaded Trump. But Murphy
points out that it would require much more coordination between the White
House, the archives and Congress with regard to presidential documents as a
presidency ends.
That alone could potentially mean misdeeds might be identified by other institutional players earlier in the process, Murphy argued. He added that his bill would have consequences, such as denying funding for post-presidential salaries and staff.
This has become a familiar story: Because Trump was so unethical, so corrupt and so unrestrained by any notion of propriety or shame, we have to keep coming up with new rules to prevent future officials from doing what he did in areas where no rule had seemed necessary before.
We didn’t think we needed legislation such as this, because we always assumed every president, no matter their party or ideology, had a baseline of respect for the office they occupied, the laws that bound them and their obligations to the country.
And Trump has revealed gaping holes in our system that badly need reform on numerous fronts. In some cases, House Democrats have stepped up: Late last year, they passed the Protecting our Democracy Act, a package of measures that strengthened congressional subpoenas of the executive branch, enhanced oversight of potential presidential manipulation of the Justice Department and required presidential candidates to release tax returns, among other things.
Those reforms were responses to various degradations Trump inflicted as president. Yet almost no House Republicans voted for it, and it could not pass the Senate over a GOP filibuster.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of senators is still negotiating reforms to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, again to plug holes that Trump sought to exploit while attempting to overturn his 2020 loss. Those may yet pass, but that’s not certain.
The
bottom line is that, viewed in light of the vulnerabilities in our system Trump
exposed, Congress’s efforts at reform — because of GOP opposition and the
refusal of a handful of Democratic senators to reform the filibuster — are falling
woefully short.
After
Watergate similarly revealed a series of huge holes in the system vulnerable to
corrupt exploitation, Congress passed a broad range of reforms in
response. Nothing close to that appears to be happening this time, and that is
unlikely to change no matter how jarring the latest Trump revelations become.
Tuesday, September 06, 2022
NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN
Founders Don't Know Everything--They Just Think They Do
You may think you're really good at
marketing--and sales, and ops and HR. But smart bosses concentrate on what they
do best and outsource what someone else does better.
BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
It’s probably a given that, in most startups and early-stage
businesses, the founding CEO - if he or she had the time, inclination, and
patience - could do any other team member’s job as well or better than they
could. Of course, no one has the time to mind everyone else’s business and no
CEO I know would have the patience or concentration that it takes to do many of
the tasks that are important parts of making any organization run. But plenty
of them would have the inclination because that comes with the territory.
Every CEO is a master - in their own mind - of sales, marketing,
advertising, design and just itching for the opportunity to show their stuff.
But that’s a bad bet and a waste of time and energy and, most
importantly, it’s demonstrably not the highest and best use of the boss’s time
even apart from the chaos it can cause, and how demoralizing it can be for the
other members of the team. It’s bad enough when other staffers try to “lend a helping hand” to their peers and make things
worse. But it’s a total debacle when bosses try to bigfoot
their way into the process, and no one really wants to tell them not to.
I’m sure that no specific area of any business is totally exempt
from this problem although I do think that most CEOs understand that they
aren’t great artists or graphic designers. But every one of them thinks that
they can write rings around anyone else when it comes to describing the
features, functions and economic benefits of their products and services. In
most cases, largely because they love the sound of their own words, they’re too
verbose, far too zealous, and not especially credible.
Even though it’s hard for them to imagine (and harder still to
convince them to believe it), creating concise and consistent content
marketing, as well as the strategy to get the “word” out to the right channels
is a complicated task. So complicated in fact that it should almost always be
left to outside experts who can be objective and who are willing to withstand
the slings and arrows from the C suite as they do their work. Losing a client
or a project is certainly scary for any contractor but losing your job because
you tell the boss the truth about something is a lot worse. As Samuel Goldwyn
used to say: “I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs him his
job.”
The good news about using an outside firm - I call this a
“managed marketing solution” -- to help your team design, develop, deliver, and
measure the results from content marketing initiatives is that the proof is
absolutely in the pudding. There’s no fudging the facts; there’s no one
unwilling to tell the Emperor that his deeds are duds; and no one is stuck
beyond the basic engagement with non-performers. In addition, outside experts
focus on the full story and are less likely to fall in love with the fluff.
In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that young firms make is
spending the vast majority of their bucks on fancy booklets, brochures,
banners, and other pretty things to brag about - like a big expensive booth at
the annual industry conclave - and fail to focus on documenting and dissecting
the results of their marketing efforts. The entire analytical process - start
to finish - is essential to success. Am I reaching the right people? Is my
message getting thru to them? And, most importantly, are they
reacting/responding in the desired manner? Reach, resonance, and response.
Interestingly enough, these questions and concerns became even
more urgent during the last two years of the pandemic because firms that had
traditionally relied primarily or exclusively on offline marketing campaigns
discovered quite quickly that their traditional lead flow and new prospect
numbers fell off radically. They weren’t reaching their usual suspects and
prospects and their sales were suffering accordingly. They needed to move to
new online solutions, but they didn’t really have the in-house talent or
expertise to get the job done. This presented a typical and time-sensitive
“build or buy” dilemma.
A number of them turned to firms like Tempesta
Media, which had basically become a one-stop shop for
businesses that figured out that it makes a lot more sense for them to farm out
these new online marketing tasks to an experienced firm with all the latest
tools and technology so that: (a) they could pay more attention to running
their basic business; (b) they could keep their CEO from thinking that he’d
turned into Leo Burnett or David Ogilvy overnight and could do it all himself,
and (c) they could avoid wasting their people’s time and their company’s money trying
to learn to create effective content that they’d never do well and shouldn’t be
doing in the first place. Not everyone’s cut out to be Mad Men.
The results in a couple of cases that the company shared with me
were impressive. The managed content solutions which Tempesta developed were
not huge, not overly complicated, and not particularly expensive, but they were
very effective for the clients in a relatively short period of time and the
bottom-line numbers spoke for themselves.
One company used a performance-based, digital marketing program
that Tempesta developed --- after thoroughly analyzing the business and
confirming its primary needs and objectives -- to drive a 50% plus jump in
leads in the first 90 days along with huge gains in referrals and awareness
measures. In looking back at the initial phase of the project, what was clear
and what drove the immediate success wasn’t really any magical approach or
secret sauce (although Tempesta’s proprietary analytical tools are pretty
impressive); it was basically that the necessary work and the ultimate job got
done. There wasn’t a lot of conversation, disruption, false starts, diversions,
or disagreements - Tempesta took the bit, ran with it, and delivered the goods.
There are many other competent firms around which can help you
in better telling your story - although what struck me about Tempesta was how
fully integrated their system was with critical measurement and outside metrics
- but the real message isn’t who you choose, it’s why it’s important to do your
homework and find a good firm willing and able to help you in the process.
The moral of the story to me is that the old cliche about “if
you want something done right and quickly, give it to someone who’s busy” is
way off the mark. The truth is pretty much the exact opposite. If you don’t
have the time or talent in your firm to do what needs to be done, find someone
outside who’s good, quick, fairly priced, and results-oriented and let them run
with the ball.
I realize that marketing is a sensitive and strategic part of
any business and that it’s hard for owners and operators - who believe that
they absolutely know their businesses better than anyone else - to let go, but
in cases like this, it’s the smartest thing to do.
Do your due diligence, prepare, and deliver careful and clear
directions, delegate the supervision to someone other than yourself, and then
stand back and get out of the way so the experts can get to work. Knowledge is
being aware of what you can do; wisdom is knowing when not to do it.
Monday, September 05, 2022
Trump wildly misses the point of notorious Mar-a-Lago picture
Trump
wildly misses the point of notorious Mar-a-Lago picture
Responding to a brutal
image, Donald Trump has spent part of the week missing the point of the
scandal. The issue has nothing to do with who made a mess.
Sept.
2, 2022, 11:58 AM CDT
By Steve Benen
The Justice Department’s court filing in the Mar-a-Lago
case on Tuesday night was devastating. Officials explained in brutal
detail that it not only found highly classified materials at Donald Trump’s
glorified country club, it also argued that it gathered evidence “that efforts
were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” with government
records “likely concealed and removed” before the FBI’s search.
But it was a single photograph included in the court filing
that proved tough to forget. At issue was an FBI photo showing documents and
“classified cover sheets recovered from a container” in the former president’s
office. The image featured documents marked “secret,” “top
secret” and “SCI” — a designation for highly classified “sensitive
compartmented information.”
It wasn’t surprising that Trump would feel the need to
respond to the fact that the public could see the picture. What was surprising
was his actual response.
The day after the Justice Department filing, the
Republican, by way of his Twitter-like platform, wrote, “There seems to be confusion as to the
‘picture’ where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released
photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when
they broke into my home. Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them
around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them. They dropped
them, not me.”
Yesterday, as HuffPost noted, he went further down the same road.
As you might expect, Donald Trump is not happy
that the FBI photographed all those classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, but the
reason he’s angry seems a little bizarre ― even for him. No, he wasn’t angry he
might face charges related to failing to return the documents. What really
pissed him off ― he claims ― is that the FBI wanted to make him look “like a
slob.”
The former president spoke to a conservative outlet called
Real America’s Voice and emphasized that he’s “a very neat person,” who’s
bothered that FBI agents “took documents and they put them all over the floor.”
Trump added, “A lot of people think that when
you walk into my office, I have confidential documents or whatever it may be ―
all declassified ― but I have confidential documents spread out all over my
floor, like a slob, like I’m sitting there reading these documents all day long
or somebody else would be.”
For the record, he didn’t appear to be kidding.
First, the idea that the materials were “all declassified”
continues to be a claim so ridiculous that Trump’s own lawyers are afraid to
raise it in court.
Second, as The New York Times reported, the way in which the FBI agents laid
out the materials for the photograph was “in keeping with standard protocols for
how federal agents handle evidence they come across in a search.”
Third, Trump has apparently moved on from the “planted
evidence” talking point, choosing instead to seemingly confirm that these
materials really were in his possession. In the process, he appears to have now
contradicted — in writing and on the air — claims from his own lawyers about
having previously returned all of the classified materials he’d previously
taken.
Fourth, the clarification was wholly unnecessary: The
Justice Department’s court filing doesn’t claim that the materials were found
on the floor. Rather, it says the documents were “recovered from a container”
in Trump’s office.
And finally, it doesn’t matter how they ended up
on the floor. Trump has spent much of the week wildly missing the
point of the entire scandal.
The question has nothing to do with who made a mess. The
Espionage Act doesn’t include any provisions related to who may or may not look
“like a slob.”
Imagine the police execute a search warrant at a suspected
jewel thief’s place and officers find missing loot. Then imagine the thief
responds, “Everyone can rest assured that I didn’t leave the jewels on the
floor.”
That’s nice, I suppose, but it’s
not altogether relevant to the subject at hand.
Fight back against ageism
 | ||
 Fight back against ageism It’s very real, but you don’t have to make a meek exit. You’ve forgotten more than most of the youngsters know. Learn how to turn yourself into a survivor. 4-Sep-22 – I just finished reading the latest in a series of posts by older folk who – much to their surprise and chagrin – were recently and abruptly laid off after what they described as decades of gainful and often exemplary employment. Some were at relatively new businesses that were retrenching, and others were at long-established firms that were seizing on the pandemic to streamline staffs that had grown too large. These things are always somewhat of an unpleasant surprise, but I’m not sure that all these events came as quite as much of a shock as they’ve been depicted, for two primary reasons. First, because anyone over a certain age – call it 50 years old – in just about any business (whether it’s growing or going slowly away) finds themselves regularly and somewhat worriedly looking over their shoulders at the people coming up behind them and alternatively looking somewhat longingly at the exit door and wondering if it’s time to think about calling it a career. They wonder if they can still compete (or really want to) and they aren’t sure that their painfully acquired skills still have value. Sadly, experience is sometimes what you get when you don’t get what you want. And some experiences don’t toughen you up or make you wiser, they just tire you out. These moderately enervated folks are part of a growing, aging crowd who have come to understand that, while experience and expertise are regarded as valuable in any organization, the rules are changing. Especially in startup and tech environments, the driving vision of the organization is far less predicated on skill and execution and far more based on “creativity,” which is to say buying into the vision that’s driving the dream. If you’re intent on changing the way things have always been done, you don’t really care about how well someone did it in the past. Talking a good game is sometimes more important today than walking the walk and getting the job done every day. Blind faith in the bright future trumps brutal facts and frank realism, in many cases.
Rather than faith, you have experience, but this isn’t a conversation that many people are interested in having these days. Caution, care, and patience aren’t in high demand or always welcome in the rah-rah entrepreneurial world, where the prime mantra is often: “sometimes wrong, but never in doubt.” Second, it’s increasingly difficult to comfort and console yourself as well as alleviate some of your anxieties based on your prior efforts, service, and even proven results. Your work still has meaning to you, but it’s not necessarily appreciated or valued by the powers that be. You feel like the goalposts keep getting unfairly moved, the new metrics and measurements are somewhat foreign and a little too techy for you, not to mention the fact that the teams, players, and decision makers around you all keep getting younger. But whether the layoffs were shocks, surprises, or maybe even overdue, they are part of a much larger and serious issue particularly for ill-equipped startups. Fast moving and quickly growing entrepreneurial businesses don’t have the luxury of extensive historical processes to address these kinds of involuntary attrition issues. They don’t have large HR departments to manage people into and out of the business. And, perhaps most importantly, they have relatively poor, anecdotal documentation regarding the actual contributions of individual employees which, if available, would clearly help senior management make the right hiring, promoting, and firing decisions. Too many growth-stage businesses in today’s scaling-back economy – where definite cuts and aggressive belt tightening are now required – are discarding seasoned professionals and dumping “theoretically” expensive and older talent for three primary reasons: 1 They’re using age as a quick and dirty shorthand for assumed obsolescence because it’s easier than looking more deeply into individuals’ actual contributions. 2 They’ve never seen really hard times so they don’t appreciate that the folks who get you through the rough patches aren’t the newbies – they’re the ones who’ve seen the movie before. 3 They’re in such a hurry to cut their costs and reduce their burn rate that they’re sacrificing years of customer connections, vendor relationships, and legacy knowledge, which are even more meaningful right now as the business world is still shaky and remains relatively remote. In fearful times, clients, and customers fall back to friends and familiar faces – not five-year-olds.
First, keep learning. Growth stage companies are so consumed by the day-to-day emergencies that they lose sight of the need to invest in the future, which means in part investing in their people. They don’t like to hear about training, out of town conferences, or extracurricular activities; they want everyone to be heads-down and working every day. But ultimately the keepers in any business are the ones who keep learning and growing rather than standing still. Only you can prevent forest fires. Second, remember that computers and machines show us how powerful they are only when they stop working. It’s almost always the gray hairs who get things going again because they have the institutional knowledge about the skeletons in the closet, and the willingness to wade through the legacy systems and the spaghetti code that the core of the business is still built on. Don’t forget to discretely remind the boss that you fixed things the last time they broke. There’s no compression algorithm for experience – we learn and get better over time and through constant iteration as well as plenty of mistakes. Third, the folks who are building the future technologies are vital, but the business today always depends on the teams that keep the trains on the tracks, and the clients and customers satisfied and secure in the knowledge that there are responsible grownups in the room at crunch time. Anyone in a new client meeting who hasn’t watched the prospect immediately gravitate to the oldest person on the team simply doesn’t appreciate how the world works. Fourth, don’t sell yourself short. If you’re not invested in yourself and your future, why would anyone else? As you age, you either become your best or worst self. It’s largely up to you. You’ve got a lot to share with the younger members of the team and frankly you’re the most likely veteran to keep the kids from building the greatest software never sold or developing a new solution for no known problem. Vision and wisdom are two radically different skill sets. The best teams take advantage of their people’s relative strengths in each area. Rampant activity may be a cure for an entrepreneur’s anxiety, but busy-ness isn’t the same as business. It’s hard to preach patience in an impatient world. But planning and prudence still have a great deal to do with building a business that will be around for generations.
• Contact Howard Tullman at h@g2t3v.com |
Sunday, September 04, 2022
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