“Free” shouldn’t be

Sitting around the massive ash conference table were over thirty people who represented, and I am not exaggerating, a millennium of experience and knowledge.  At least a thousand years of practical, priceless information.  Free for the asking.  The instant question in my mind was, why aren’t entrepreneurs from far and wide lining up ten abreast and a mile deep to take advantage of this incredible resource?  If you were a budding business builder, risking many years of your life, many nights of lost sleep and most of your worldly assets, wouldn’t you want to learn from people who had succeeded, failed and succeeded again in the world of entrepreneurship?

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High fidelity board decisions

A thousand families.  When I think of Chieftan Corporation, and the role I played as Chairman of that company, that’s what I think of.  If you apply the typical family size of about four people, that’s four thousand individuals.  And if you multiply the economic impact of the spending of the company and those four thousand individuals by the average ratio, we’re talking about 28,000 people whose livelihoods are affected by the activities of Chieftan.

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Providence

Inertia is a powerful thing, as any physicist will tell you:  “A body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body in motion tends to continue its motion along its trajectory.”  In other words, the power of the status quo.  If one tries to apply forces to change a body’s inertial state, whether relatively at rest or relatively in motion, the power required is directly proportional to the direction of change intended.

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Asleep on the bridge

As a group, Americans are not known for planning ahead.  We have had a negative savings rate in this country for many years, until the Great Recession demanded we rethink our profligate ways.  We’re borrowing against our futures as a country, in both the public and private sectors.  If you ask a random sample of people what their long term plans are, they typically talk about events within a one to two year horizon.  If you ask a random sample of stock analysts the same question in the morning, they will describe their observations and projections before lunch.  So now that the advent of a slowing and possible downturn in our economy is upon us, the idea of planning ahead for current events seems contradictory.  But that doesn’t stop someone from picking up the binoculars once the ship is on the rocks.

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