Invest in learning

2021-08-10T09:46:00.001-07:00

Have not published anything for a long time. Have some ideas for posts, just no time.

10 Brands that are dead in 2012

2011-09-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

From Yahoo and 24/7.

24/7 Wall St. has created a new list of brands that will disappear, which includes Sears (NASDAQ: SHLD - News), Sony Pictures (NYSE: SNE - News), American Apparel (NYSE: APP - News), Nokia (NYSE: NOK - News), Saab, A&W All-American Foods Restaurants, Soap Opera Digest, Sony Ericsson, MySpace (NYSE: NWS.A - News), and Kellogg's Corn Pops. (NYSE: K - News).

Each year, 24/7 Wall St. regularly compiles a list of brands that are going to disappear in the near-term. Last year's list proved to be prescient in many instances, predicting the demise of T-Mobile among others. In late May, AT&T (NYSE: T - News) and Deutsche Telekom announced that AT&T would buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. The deal would add 34 million customers to the company and create the country's largest wireless operator.

Other 2010 nominees — including Blockbuster — bit the dust, while companies such as Dollar Thrifty are on the road to oblivion. Last September, after finally giving in to competition from Netflix and buckling under nearly $1 billion in debt, Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In April of this year, Dish Network acquired the company for $320 million. Car rental chain Dollar Thrifty is still entertaining buyout offers from Avis and Hertz. On June 6, the embattled company recommended that its shareholders not accept Hertz's recent offer, valued at $2.24 billion, or $72 a share. Meanwhile, on June 13th, Avis Budget announced that "it had made progress in its discussion with the Federal Trade Commission regarding its potential acquisition" of the company. Although Dollar Thrifty can remain choosy, a sale is a matter of when, not if.

We also missed the mark on a few companies. Notably, Kia, Moody's, BP, and Zale appear to be doing better than we expected.

Brands that have stood the test of time for decades are falling by the wayside at an alarming rate. For instance, Pontiac, a major car brand since 1926, is gone, shut down by a struggling GM. Blockbuster is in the process of dismantling, after it once controlled the VHS and DVD markets. House & Garden folded after 106 years. It succumbed to the advertising downturn, a lot of competition, and the cost of paper and postage. Its demise echoed the 1972 shutdown of what is probably the most famous magazines in history — Life. That was a long time ago but serves to demonstrate that no brand is too big to fail if it is overwhelmed by competition, new inventions, costs, or poor management.

This year's list of The Ten Brands That Will Disappear takes a methodical approach in deciding which brand would walk the plank. The major criteria were as follows: (1) a rapid fall-off in sales and steep losses; (2) disclosures by the parent of the brand that it might go out of business; (3) rapidly rising costs that are extremely unlikely to be recouped through higher prices; (4) companies which are sold; (5) companies that go into bankruptcy; (6) firms that have lost the great majority of their customers; or (7) operations with rapidly withering market share. Each of the ten brands on the list suffer from one or more of these problems. Each of the ten will be gone, based on our definitions, within 18 months.

1. Sony Pictures
Sony has a studio production arm which has nothing to do with its core businesses of consumer electronics and gaming. Sony bought what was Columbia Tri-Star Picture in 1989 for $3.4 billion. This entertainment operation has done poorly recently. Sony's fiscal year ends in March, and for the period, revenue for the group dropped 15% to $7.2 billion and operating income fell by 10% to $466 million. Sony is in trouble. It lost $3.1 billion in its latest fiscal year on revenue of $86.5 billion. Sony's gaming system group is under siege by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT - News) and Nintendo. Its consumer electronics group faces an overwhelming challenge from Apple. The company's future prospects have been further damaged by the Japan earthquake and the hack of its large PlayStation Network. CEO Howard Stringer is under pressure to do something to increase the value of Sony's shares. The only valuable asset with which he can easily part is Columbia which would attract interest from a number of large media operations. Sony Entertainment will disappear with the sale of its assets.
2. A&W
A&W Restaurants is owned by fast food holding company giant Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM - News) which has had the firm for sale since January. There have been no buyers. The chain was founded in 1919. The size of the company grew rapidly, and immediately after WWII 450 franchises were opened. The firm pioneered the "drive in" fast food format. A&W began to sell canned versions of its sodas in 1971 — the part of the business that will survive as a container beverage business which is now owned by Dr. Pepper/Snapple. The A&W Restaurant business is too small to be viable now. It had 322 outlets in the U.S and 317 outside the U.S at the end of last year. All were operated by franchisees. By contrast, Yum!'s flagship KFC had 5,055 stores in the U.S. and 11,798 overseas. Two massive global fast food chains are even larger. Subway has 35,000 locations worldwide, and McDonald's has nearly as many. A&W does not have the ability to market itself against these chains and at least a dozen other fast food operators like Burger King. And, A&W does not have the size to efficiently handle food purchases, logistics, and transportation costs compared to competitors many times as large.
3. Saab
The first Saab car was launched in 1949 by Swedish industrial firm Svenska Aeroplan. The firm produced a series of sedans and coups, the flagship of which was the 900 series, released in 1978. About one million of these would eventually be sold. Saab's engineering reputation and the rise in its international sales attracted GM to buy half the company in 1989 and the balance in 2000. Saab's problem, which grew under the management of the world's No.1 automobile manufacturer, was that it was never more than a niche brand in an industry dominated by very large players such as Ford and Chevrolet. It did not build very inexpensive cars like VW did, or expensive sports cars as Porsche did. Saab's models were, in price and features, up against models from the world's largest car companies that sold hundreds of thousands of units each year. Saab also did not have a wide number of models to suit different budgets and driver tastes. GM decided to jettison the brand in late 2008, and the small company quickly became insolvent. Saab finally found a buyer in high-end car maker Spyker which took control of the company last year. Spyker quickly ran low on money because only 32,000 Saabs were sold in 2010. Spyker turned to Chinese industrial investors for money. Pang Da Automobile agreed to take an equity stake in the company. But, the agreement is not binding, and with a potential of global sales which are still below 50,000 a year based on manufacturing and marketing operations, and demand, Saab is no longer a financially viable brand.

4. American Apparel
The once-hip retailer reached the brink of bankruptcy earlier this year, and there is no indication that it has gained anything more than a little time with its latest financing. It currently trades as a penny stock. The company had three stores and $82 million in revenue in 2003. Those numbers reached 260 stores and $545 million in 2008. For the first quarter of this year, the retailer had net sales for the quarter of $116.1 million, a 4.7% decline over sales of $121.8 million in the same period a year ago. Comparable store sales declined 8% on a constant currency basis. American Apparel posted a net loss for the period of $21 million. Comparable store sales have flattened, which means the firm likely will continue to post losses. American Apparel is also almost certainly under gross margin pressure because of the rise in cotton prices. The retailer raised $14.9 million in April by selling shares at a discount of 43% to a group of private investors led by Canadian financier Michael Serruya and Delavaco Capital. According to Reuters, the 15.8 million shares sold represented 20.3 percent of the company's outstanding stock on March 31. That sum is not nearly enough to keep American Apparel from going the way of Borders. It is a small, under-funded player in a market with very large competitors with healthy balance sheets. It does not help matters that the company's founder and CEO, Dov Charney, has been a defendant in several lawsuits filed by former employees alleging sexual harassment.
5. Sears
The parent of Sears and Kmart — Sears Holdings — is in a lot of trouble. Total revenue dropped $341 million to $9.7 billion for the quarter which closed April 30, 2011. The company had a net loss of $170 million. Sears Holdings was created by a merger of the parents of the two chains on March 24, 2005. The operation has been a disaster ever since. The company has tried to run 4,000 stores which operate across the US and Canada. Neither Sears nor Kmart have done well recently, but Sears' domestic locations same store numbers were off 5.2% in the first quarter and Kmart's were down 1.6%. Last year domestic comparable store sales declined 1.6% in the total, with an increase at Kmart of .7% and a decline at Sears Domestic of 3.6%. New CEO Lou D'Ambrosio recently said of the last quarter that, "we also fell short on executing with excellence. We cannot control the weather or economy or government spending. But we can control how we execute and leverage the potent set of assets we have." D'Ambrosio needs to pull a rabbit out of his hat soon. Sharex are down 55% during the last five years. D'Ambrosio's only reasonable solution to the firm's financial problems is to stop supporting two brands which compete with one another and larger rivals such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT - News) and Target (NYSE: TGT - News). The cost to market two brands and maintain stores which overlap one another geographically must be in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Employee and supply chain costs are also gigantic. The path D'Ambrosio is likely to take is to consolidate two brand into one — keeping the better performing Kmart and shuttering Sears.
6. Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson was formed by the two large consumer electronics companies to market the handset offerings each had handled separately. The venture started in 2001, before the rise of the smartphone. Early in its history, it was one of the biggest handset manufacturers along with Nokia (NYSE: NOK - News), Samsung, LG, and Motorola. Sales of Sony Ericsson phones were originally helped by the popularity of other Sony portable devices like the Walkman. Sony Ericsson's product development lagged behind those of companies like Apple (NYSE: AAPL - News) and Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM - News) which dominated the high end smartphone industry early. Sony Ericsson also relied on the Symbian operating system which was championed by market leader Nokia, but which it has abandoned in favor of Microsoft's Windows mobile operating system because of license costs and difficulty with programmers. In a period when smartphone sales worldwide are rising in the double digits and sales of the iPhone double year over year, Sony Ericsson's unit sales dropped from 97 million in 2008 to 43 million last year. New competitors like HTC now outsell Sony Ericsson by widening numbers. Sony Ericsson management expects several more quarters of falling sales and the company has laid off thousands of people. There have been rumors, backed by logic, that Sony will take over the operation, rebrand the handsets with its name, and market them in tandem with its PS3 consoles and VAIO PCs.
7. Kellogg's Corn Pops
The cereal business is not what is used to be, at least for products that are not considered "healthy." Among those is Kellogg's Corn Pops ready-to-eat cereal. Sales of the brand dropped 18% over the year that ended in April, down to $74 million. That puts it well behind brands like Cheerios and Frosted Flakes, each which have sales of over $200 million a year. Private label sales have also hurt sales of branded cereals. Revenues in this category were $637 million over the same April-end period. There is also profit margin pressure on Corn Pops because of the sharp increase in corn prices. Kellogg's describes the product as being "crispy, glazed, crunchy, sweet." Corn Pops also contain mono- and diglycerides, used to bind saturated fat, and BHT for freshness, which is also used in embalming fluid. None of these are likely to be what mothers want to serve their children in an age in which a healthy breakfast is more likely to be egg whites and a bowl of fresh fruit.
8. MySpace
MySpace, once the world's largest social network, died a long time ago. It will get buried soon. News Corp (NYSE: NWS - News) bought MySpace and its parent in 2005 for $580 million, which was considered inexpensive at the time based on the web property's size. MySpace held the top spot among social networks based on visitors from mid-2006 until mid-2008, according to several online research services. It was overtaken by Facebook at that point. Facebook has 700 million members worldwide now and recently passed Yahoo! (NYSE: YHOO - News) as the largest website for display advertising based on revenue. News Corp was able to get an exclusive advertising deal worth $900 million shortly after it bought the property, but that was its sales high-water mark. Its audience is currently estimated to be less that 20 million visitors in the US. Why did MySpace fall so far behind Facebook? No one knows for certain. It may be that Facebook had more attractive features for people who wanted to share their identities online. It may have been that it appealed to a younger audience which tends to spend more time online. News Corp announced in February that it would sell MySpace. There were no serious bids. Rumors surfaced recently that a buyer may take the website for $100 million. The brand is worth little if anything. A buyer is likely to kill the name and fold the subscriber base into another brand. News Corp has hinted it will close MySpace if it does not find a buyer.
9. Soap Opera Digest
The magazine's future has been ruined by two trends. The first is the number of cancellations of soap operas. Long-lived shows which include "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" have been canceled and replaced by talk shows, which are less expensive to air. The other insurmountable challenge is the wide availability of details on soap operas online. Some of the shows even have their own fan sites. News about the industry, in other words, is now distributed and no longer in one place. Soap Opera Digest's first quarter advertising pages fell 21% in the first quarter and revenue was down 18% to $4 million. In 2000, the magazine's circulation was in excess of 1.1 million readers. By 2005 it fell below 500,000 where it has remained for the last 5 years. Source Interlink Media, the magazine's parent, which also owns automotive, truck, and motorcycle publications, has little reason to support a product based on a dying industry.
10. Nokia
Nokia is dead. Shareholders are just waiting for an undertaker. The world's largest handset company has one asset. Nokia sold 25% of the global total of 428 million units sold in the first quarter. Its problem is that in the industry the company is viewed as a falling knife. Its market share in the same quarter of 2010 was nearly 31%. The arguments that Nokia will not stay independent are numerous. It has a very modest presence in the rapidly growing smartphone industry which is dominated by Apple, Research In Motion's Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung. Nokia runs the outdated Symbian operating system and is in the process of changing to Microsoft's Windows mobile OS, which has a tiny share of the market.
Nokia would be an attractive takeover target to a large extent because the cost to "buy" 25% of the global handset market would only be $22 billion based on Nokia's current market cap. Obviously, a buyer would need to pay a premium, but even $30 billion is within reach of several companies. Potential buyers would start with HTC, the fourth largest smartphone maker in the world. Its sales have doubled in both the last quarter and the last year. HTC will sell as many as 80 million handsets in 2011. The Taiwan-based company's challenge would be whether it could finance such a large deal. The other three likely bidders do not have that problem. Microsoft, which is Nokia's primary software partner, could easily buy the company and is often mentioned as a suitor. The world's largest software company recently moved further into the telecom industry though its purchase of VoIP giant Skype, which has 170 million active customers. Two other large firms have many reasons to buy Nokia. Samsung, part of one of the largest conglomerates in Korea, has publicly set a goal to be the No.1 handset company in the world by 2014. The parent company is the largest in South Korea with revenue in 2010 of $134 billion. A buyout of Nokia would launch Samsung into the position as the world's handset leader. LG Electronics, the 7th largest company in South Korea, with sales of $48 billion, is by most measures the third largest smartphone company. It has the scale and balance sheet to takeover Nokia. The only question about the Finland-based company is whether a buyer would maintain the Microsoft relationship or change to the popular Android OS to power Nokia phones.

Quest for Leadership

2011-09-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

In the quest for understanding what makes a good leader, I found some very quick, easy to understand, and valuable quotes. Take a look at the most important words about leadership:

o The six most important words: "I admit I made a mistake."

o The five most important words: "You did a good job."

o The four most important words: "What is your opinion."

o The three most important words: "If you please."

o The two most important words: "Thank you,"

o The one most important word: "We"

o The least important word: "I"

Posting Links for Companies

2011-08-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to make additional income from the internet. One of the ways is to create niche sites providing valuable content to people searching for information. Once you have created the sites, which many times can be done completely free, you add advertisements from Google or other companies.

Once you have the idea for a website or information niche site, you could use some of the following:

Blogger - free from Google
Hubpages
Wordpress

You also need to learn a bit about what people are searching for, and after practicing at attracting visitors, you could purchase a domain name from GoDaddy.com

GoDaddy.Com

Check out my next article to learn the next step in the process - identifying the niches to target by learning about Search Engine Tools like GoogleAdwords (keyword research tool).

The Shift - looks like an interesting read

2011-08-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

BOOKS | Lynda Gratton advises us not to waste time trying to figure out what the future of work will look like. She believes that it is already here and happening right now.

According to Lynda Gratton’s latest book, “The Shift: The future of work is already here”, five forces will fundamentally shape how we work during the next 10 to 15 years: globalization, society, demography, technology and longevity, and energy resources. She should know. Gratton is a professor of management practice at London Business School. In 2008, The Financial Times identified her as the business thinker most likely to make a real difference over the next decade and The Economist recognized her as ‘leading the world’s top 200 business minds to predict the future of work’.

Her main advice: the future of work starts now by making three big ‘shifts’ in your life:

• From “shallow generalist to serial master”: Being a ‘jack of all trades’ means jack (little or nothing) in a world of Wikipedia and instantly accessible information at our fingertips. The key is to become specialized masters with the ability to respond as conditions around us change.

• From “isolated competitor to innovative connector”: Building strong, deep relationships with people in different communities around you will be key to working successfully in the future. These include ‘your posse’ of people you’ve known for a long time who have the same expertise as you who can provide just-in-time advice, feedback and perspective), the ‘big ideas network’ of people who are completely different to you who inspire you and give you new ideas and ‘the regenerative community’ of people who help you relax and enjoy life.

• From “voracious consumer to impassioned producer”: Gratton writes that people have to pursue work that is innovative and inspiring makes them productive, fulfilled and proud.

In Gratton’s words, “the challenge is to lead a more purposeful working life, where we can create a stronger sense of who we are and what we care about, and the choices we face and their possible consequences”.

It’s an exciting possibility that the world could become a completely different and more interesting place if only we take her advice to heart.

Check out the link to her book:

The Shift Book Webpage - Lynda Gratton

How to create an Apple App

2011-08-29T06:54:00.000-07:00

I have been searching for a tool to help create 'free' apps for the Apple Iphone, Ipad, & Ipod. You will have to buy a tool to do this - and there are many good sites you can find that describe the process. Basically there are two ways to go - brainstorm your idea, then start to learn the system.

Here’s how our process basically works:

You come up with an idea for your app
You write that idea down, then make a rough sketch of how it will work and how it will look
Hand it off to a low-cost App Developer Team who will create the app for you
Submit your app to Apple who will review it and then post it to the App Store
After approval - you would then be eligible for people to download it

You will not have to spend anything on a development kit from Apple, however you will need to spend $99 to upload it to the Apple Store, and you will also need a way to test it. I think they recommend having a Mac, otherwise testing will be difficult.

Another way is to try a few tools like this -

App Dev Toolkit

App Toolkit for non programmers

Electronic Warranties - Are they worth it?

2011-08-28T22:31:00.000-07:00

I have been in the electronics industry and specifically in the warranty side of things. The question is are extended warranties for electronics worth it?

I would say it depends on the manufacturer, the type of product, who uses it and the cost of replacement. Now this requires a little math - basically take the cost of replacement - times the chance it needs to be replaced.

Fortunately, there are providers out there that can help reduce the cost of replacement. This is especially good if you are buying something that is critical and also prone to loss. Think IPods, Ipads, Nintendo DS, Blackberry's, etc.

Check out SquareTrade - it is the best deal out there for coverage, which you can buy after the fact or from Amazon.

Square Trade Warranty

More information on Science Projects

2011-08-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the information below, which is adapted from an article I found on the net.

Key Info

The scientific method is a way to ask and answer scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments.
The steps of the scientific method are to:
- Ask a Question
- Do Background Research
- Construct a Hypothesis
- Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
- Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
- Communicate Your Results
It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. A "fair test" occurs when you change only one factor (variable) and keep all other conditions the same.

Overview of the Scientific Method

The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions. Scientists use the scientific method to search for cause and effect relationships in nature. In other words, they design an experiment so that changes to one item cause something else to vary in a predictable way.
Just as it does for a professional scientist, the scientific method will help you to focus your science fair project question, construct a hypothesis, design, execute, and evaluate your experiment.

What is the scientific method?

2011-08-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

I have 3 children and we have to do elementary school scientific projects each year. Each and every year, we struggle to find appropriate science projects that we can do. Two things: what is the scientific method?

Here is a definition:
A systematic approach to solving a problem by discovering knowledge, investigating a phenomenon, verifying and integrating previous knowledge. It follows a series of steps that evaluates the veracity or the feasibility of a prediction through research and experimentation from where the information obtained will be used as a basis in making conclusions.

Supplement
The fundamental steps of scientific method are:
(1) Identifying the problem to solve
(2) Formulating a tentative answer or hypothesis
(3) Testing the hypothesis
(4) Gathering and analyzing data
(5) Making conclusions

Finding Science Experiements:
Here are a few sites that you can use to quickly find great science experiments, if you are parent and need something to help kickstart your program:

Science Experiments Link 1

Scientific Experiments Link 2

Scientific Experiments Link 3

Scientific Experiments Link 4

Who invented the lightbulb?

2011-08-28T20:36:00.000-07:00

Who Invented the Lightbulb? Let's find out...

Edison's incandescent lamp lit the world, but did he really invent it? (Copyright Lee Krystek, 2002.)

It was Thomas Edison in 1879, wasn't it? That's what many people think and were taught in school. Like most stories, however, there is a lot more behind the creation of this important and ubiquitous object than just Mr. Edison..

The story of the lightbulb really starts almost seventy years earlier. In 1806 Humphrey Davy, an Englishman, demonstrated a powerful electric lamp to the Royal Society. Davy's lamp produced its illumination by creating a blinding electric spark between two charcoal rods. This device, known as an "arc lamp," was impractical for most uses. The light, similar to that of a welding torch, was simply too bright to be used in residences and most businesses. The device also needed a tremendous source of power and the batteries which powered Davy's demonstration model were quickly drained.

As time went on, electric generators were invented that could feed the arc lamp's need for power. Iit found its way into applications where a brilliant source of light was needed. Lighthouses and public assembly areas were obvious uses. Later arc lamps were used in war to power huge searchlights used to spot enemy planes. Today you can see such searchlights lighting up the sky near movie theaters or at the opening of a new stores.

The Incandescant Light

Some 19th century inventors wanted to find a way to "subdivide" the light from Davy's arc lamp so that it could be used in the home and office. Other scientists thought that a completely new technique for making electric light held more promise. This method of generating light was known as "incandescence."

Scientists knew that if you took some materials and passed enough electricity through them, they would heat up. They also knew that if the material got hot enough, it would start to glow. The problem with this method of making light was that before long either the material would burst into flame or melt into a puddle. If incandescent light was to be made practical, these twin problems would have to be solved.

It occurred to inventors that one way to keep their incandescent "burners" from catching fire was to not let them come into contact with oxygen. Oxygen is a necessary ingredient in the combustion process. Since oxygen is in the atmosphere, the only way to keep it away from the burners was to enclose the burner in a glass container, or "bulb," and pump out the air. In 1841 a British inventor named Frederick DeMoleyns patented a bulb using just this technique in combination with burners made of platinum and carbon. An American named J. W. Starr also received a patent in 1845 for a bulb using vacuum in conjunction with a carbon burner. Many others, including an English chemist named Joseph Swan, improved and patented versions of bulbs using a vacuum with burners of various materials and shapes. None, however, proved practical for everyday use. Swan's lamp, for example, used carbonized paper that would quickly crumble after being lit a short time.

Edison Joins the Fray

It was obvious, though, that incandescent lighting would be a huge financial success if it could be perfected, so many inventors continued to work on finding a solution. It was into this environment that the brash, young, inventor Thomas Alva Edison entered the race to make-a-better-bulb in 1878. Edison was already world famous for having created and commercialized several items, including a better stock market ticker and the phonograph. In October of that year, after working on the project for only a few months, he declared to the newspapers "I have just solved the problem of the subdivision of the electric light." This rash pronouncement was enough to drive the stocks of the gas companies (whose lamps supplied the current form of lighting) down into the ground.

As it turned out, Edison's announcement was premature. He had an idea of how to solve the problems of the electric incandescent light, but had not yey perfected it. His idea was to enclose a platinum burner in a vacuum. When other inventors had done this the platinum melted, but Edison thought he had solved that problem by building a temperature-sensitive switch into the bulb that would cut off the current when the temperature got too high. This was a great idea, but unfortunately it didn't work. To keep the bulbs cool enough, the switches had to cut the current off very quickly. This resulted in a constant flickering which made the bulbs unusable (this same switching principle is currently used in Christmas tree bulbs to make them blink on and off).

It was soon obvious to everyone working on the incandescent light at Edison's Menlo Park laboratory that another approach was needed. Edison decided to hire a young physicist named

The brash, young inventor Thomas Alva Edison.

Francis Upton from Princeton University to work on the project. Up to this point Edison's staff had been trying idea after idea to get the bulb to work. Under Upton's guidance, they started looking at existing patents and research to try and avoid repeating other people's mistakes. The staff also started doing basic research on the properties of the materials they had been working with.

One of the results of testing the properties of the materials was the realization that any burner chosen would have to have a high electrical resistance. All materials have an amount of electrical "friction" that resists electricity moving through it. This is known as the material's electrical resistance. Materials with high resistance more easily get hot when electricity passes through them. Edison soon realized that any good burner would have to have a high electrical resistance, otherwise too much electricity would be needed to warm the material to the point where it would give off light. This revelation meant that Edison's staff need only to test high-resistance materials to find the one they wanted.

This information also started Edison thinking about the electric lights not only as an end to themselves, but how they fit as part of a whole electrical system. How big would the generator need to be to light a neighborhood? What voltage should be delivered to a house?

By October of 1879 Edison's workers began to see some results. On the 22nd of that month a thin, cotton "carbonized" thread burned for some 13 hours during an experiment. Longer times were achieved by modifying the vacuum pumps and creating a better vacuum inside the bulb (less oxygen inside the bulb slowed the burning process). More carbonized organic materials were tested and Japanese bamboo proved to be the best. By the end of 1880 Edison's carbonized bamboo burners, now called filaments because they were fashioned into a long, thin thread, were burning in bulbs as long as 600 hours. The "filament" proved to be the best shape to increase the materials electrical resistance and physical strength.

The carbonized bamboo had a high resistance and fit well into Edison's scheme for building a whole electrical power system to provide lighting. By 1882 he had established the Edison Electrical Light Company which had a generating station located on Perl Street, providing New York City with electrical lighting. In 1883 Macy's in New York City became the first store to install the new incandescent lamps.

Edison Vs. Swan

Meanwhile over in England, Joseph Swan had again gotten involved in working on the lightbulb after he saw that new pumps made it possible to produce a better vacuum. Swan made a lamp which worked well for demonstrations, but was impractical in actual use. Swan's burner was made of a thick carbon rod that gave off gases that soon covered the inside of the bulb in soot. Also, the low resistance of the rod meant that the bulb used up too much power. After seeing the success of a high resistance, thin filament in Edison's lamps, Swan incorporated this improvement into his own bulbs. After founding his own company in England, Swan found himself sued by Edison for patent infringement. Eventually the two inventors decided to stop fighting and join forces. The company they formed, Edison-Swan United, became one of the world's largest manufacturer of lightbulbs.

An early Edison power generation plant.

So did Edison invent the lightbulb? Not really. Others had produced an incandescent light before him. He did, however, create the first practical lightbulb along with an electrical system to support it, certainly a significant achievements in their own right.

Of all the inventions Edison was involved in - the stock ticker, the phonograph, the telegraph and the mimeograph - only the incandescent lightbulb remains in general use today. It is a testament to how great a job Edison and his workers at Menlo Park did in taking this invention out of the laboratory and putting it into the home.

Ways to earn money Posting Links On Google!

2011-08-28T16:50:00.001-07:00

How to make money Posting Links On Google! The Quick Way to Earn More Money Online.

Recently I have been seeing advertisments and links everywhere that proclaim that you can earn money posting links on Google. I also got some personal emails quizzing me whether I understand how to make cash by posting links in Google.

Well, I certainly am learning how to make money ’posting links’ on Google. If you’ve seen these ads before and want to learn ( or want to simply know what this means ), this explanation is for you.

Here’s How It Works

Google is a very profitable company, with a strategy way beyond the search engine. As a company it makes a lot of money, and they do that primarily by offering advertising spots on their search website. That’s the reason why when you visit Google.com and try a search, you mostly see a handful of sponsored ( paid ) ads. Google is paid when people click the sponsored lists as they have deals with many thousands of companies that are willing to buy the traffic that comes from the clicks. Each company pays for individual clicks from Google.

In order to make more profit, Google made a program that permits people that have sites to post Google’s sponsored ads for a chunk of the profit. Google pays about 50% of the profit to the person who posted sponsored links on their website. The program is called Adsense, and it’s free to use.

How to create Google Adsense code for your internet site or blog

(step-by-step Instructions on ways to setup Adsense )

As long as you can put up an internet site that gets traffic, you can post Google’s links on the site’s pages and Google will cut you a check every month for your chunk of the revenue. I like earning this way because it occurs twenty-four hours a day, week after week. Many have proclaimed, that each and every morning they wake up with cash in their Google account and it continues to come in during the day. Each month Google sends them the funds via direct deposit ( they can do a check if you prefer that ).

I see ads all of the time on Facebook and elsewhere saying make money by posting links on Google’. The companies that write the advertisements write them this way because ‘make money with Adsense’ doesn’t make sense to a person that hasn’t been told of this concept before.

How Do I Actually Post Links On Google?

You post links on Google by making blogs for your internet site that are related to what folks are on the lookout for. For instance, I made this article because I knew you would be hunting for it. Google found it and linked to it in their search results, and that led you here.

More to come. In the meantime, check out a few great links to get you started. I recommend the Micro Niche Finder tool, along with anything by Josh Spaulding, or or Pot Pie Girl.

Micro Niche Finder Tool
Micro Niche Finder Tool

$5.00 Mini Site
Profit from mini sites

How to make money on Google

2011-08-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

How to make money on Google.
The primary way to make money using Google, is through two key methods.

1. Create content and using keywords, create traffic to your site.

2. Create links to you site, whether it be a blog or website in hopes that someone will then click to a "sponsored link".

I did create this blog a few years ago, and keep seeing ads that say it is possible. At this point, I am now not sure what to believe. I want to see if this first post will drive people to the site, and then hope for the best.

I plan to do a little more research on the subject and will get back to you all to see if my Adwords account grew overnight as many of the websites said it will. Update: I am definitely getting traffic to come to the site. I also found this free link on how to make money by posting articles and monetizing them.

If you are new to internet marketing - take a look at this tool - it will save you a lot of time in learning.

Micro Niche Finder

Micro Niche Finder Review

2011-08-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

Here is a great tool that I found to help you find and create your ideal money generating niche. It basically does many things you would have to do manually, and automates them.

For example, it rapidly allows you to find profitable niches based on a keyword searches. You first enter in your keyword, then the tool starts to go to work. You can identify the keywords with the most opportunity, then start to narrow it down from there.

After you have started to narrow it down, you can also size up the competition, determine which domain names are available, all with a click of a few buttons. Once you have the niche, competition strength, and domain availability identified, you can click on more important factor - which determines the commercial viability of the combinations. This is the factor that helps you monitize the niche, because a high score in this factor indicates customers willing to buy.

Check the tool out - it is worth it and there is some free content that helps you learn and understand this powerful tool.

Micro Niche Finder

Internet Marketing - Josh Spaulding Website

2011-08-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone interested in niche marketing or internet marketing should check out what Josh Spaulding has published. I found his site a few months back and have been learning a lot about internet marketing. For example:

-He shows how to find a niche
-He gives free information about creating mini-niche information sites
-He writes extensively about how he did it

There are a lot of sites out there, but his is one of the best for ethical marketing on the internet.

His site link is below: Josh Spauldings Website

Great language learning article from Tim Ferriss - 4 hour workweek

2011-08-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

For those of us trying to learn a language, Tim Ferriss, of four hour work week has some interesting information and observations. I am in the midst of learning Spanish and thought the information was quite helpful.

Link below:

Tim Ferris

Gustave Eiffel - Engineer with an artistic flair

2011-02-12T19:55:00.000-08:00

Remember the Eiffel Tower - well I have visited it many times. It is a marvel of engineering and a testament to someone with determination and flair. Gustave was a designer and artist, surprisingly, he was also not a workaholic. Cheers to those who possess a balance between work and life.

Adapted from an article by James Detar, 2/11/11.

Gustave Eiffel was born in 1832 in Dijon, France, steered to bridge building, landed the tower contract in 1886 and had it done three years later.

Gustave Eiffel learned how to make sturdy and yet beautiful arches while drawing up plans for railroad bridges around the world.
The engineer took that knowledge and used it to build works that stand the test of time.
They include the Eiffel Tower and the inside of the Statue of Liberty. Although he was a well-trained and brilliant engineer, Eiffel (1832-1923) wasn't a bookworm. When he wasn't creating designs or with his close-knit family, he was swimming or practicing his fencing skills.

Early in his career, while he was supervising construction of one of his bridges, he used his swimming skill to save the life of one of his workers. "When one of his bridge riveters fell into the river, Eiffel, a strong swimmer, plunged right in to rescue the man from drowning," Jill Jonnes wrote in "Eiffel's Tower." "When they were both safe, he said calmly, 'Please be good enough to attach yourselves carefully in the future.'"
Not long after, Eiffel saved another man and his three children from drowning when their boat capsized, this time in a raging storm.
He cared about his workers to the point where he had the names of the over 200 workers who built the Eiffel Tower inscribed on it.

He had people who worked with him his whole career. Eiffel's willingness to plunge in — into a river to save a life or into designing monuments like the 81-story Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty's interior frame — made him a titan. "First of all he was a genius," Jonnes said. "But he was also a genius who loved a challenge. If someone said something couldn't be done, he was interested in that."

Edward Berenson, a professor of French history at New York University, says Eiffel was so bold because he believed in his creativity.

"He came up with solutions to engineering problems that were unique," Berenson said.
One example is the Statue of Liberty, designed by fellow Frenchman Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi. Eiffel designed its internal frame, which holds off the elements. "It was a remarkable work of engineering," Berenson said. "There's no way such a huge statue could have been built to stand in New York Harbor without the kind of work Eiffel did."

Statue Of Liberty's Base
The idea for the statue stemmed from France's struggles. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the French government and declared himself emperor in 1852. Bartholdi, a prominent sculptor, led a campaign to create the statue to celebrate freedom in America and France. By the time construction began in the mid-1870s, Napoleon III was out, and a republican government was in place.

The Eiffel Tower, standing just over 1,000 feet in Paris, is the most visited paid monument in the world, with more than 6 million visitors a year. AP View Enlarged Image

The statue rose the next 10 years.
"Fully assembled, the 151-foot Liberty loomed high over the Paris rooftops. When it was dismantled for shipment in 1885, Parisians would miss it," Berenson said. The statue was rebuilt and dedicated in New York Harbor in October 1886.
The design for the inside of the statue paved the way for Eiffel's monumental tower. "It's only a slight exaggeration to say the Statue of Liberty has an Eiffel Tower skeleton inside," Berenson said.
Eiffel was born into a middle-class family in France and spent his childhood in Dijon. His parents expected that he would run his uncle's vinegar and paint factory. A falling out between his sister and uncle put an end to that prospect.
Eiffel was drawn to the emerging field of railroad engineering. "Just as someone ambitious today would work in the world of Internet and social media, the comparable thing of that day was the railroads, and he began making those railroad bridges," Jonnes said.

In 1862 Eiffel married Marguerite Gaudelet, whom he had known since childhood. They were madly in love and in quick succession had five children. Eiffel was stunned when Marguerite died of a chest ailment in 1877 at the age of 32.
His oldest daughter Claire, 14 at the time, assumed the role of caring for her younger siblings while Eiffel built his company. Eiffel never remarried, and formed a close bond with his oldest daughter. When she married, she and her husband — who became a partner in his firm — lived with Eiffel.

Eiffel's firm grew into a huge enterprise, building structures in Europe, the Americas and Asia.
In June 1886 he learned he had won the coveted commission to build a centerpiece that would serve as the archway entrance to the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. He didn't celebrate long. The government had talked about underwriting the whole thing. But it changed its mind and said it would pay only about a third of its estimated $1 million cost. Eiffel eventually committed to raising or paying the rest himself.

Throughout, Eiffel was confident he could build the tower, which would be the largest structure in the world. It would eclipse the recently completed, 555-foot-tall Washington Monument in America's capital.
Then came (1) a debate over where to put the tower and (2) a lawsuit by a resident near the World's Fair site worried the 1,000-foot tall structure might tip over. The commission in charge of the fair put construction on hold.

While he waited, Eiffel's production shops produced more than 5,000 drawings of the skeleton and other parts of the tower. "Gustave Eiffel spent the cold and snowy December of 1886 in a mingled agony of frustration and indecision," Jonnes wrote. At one point, he nearly gave up. He wrote a letter meant for his friend and supporter on the commission, Edouard Lockroy, saying he had to withdraw from the project. The delays had made it impossible to build the tower in time for the fair.

Then Eiffel changed his mind and put the letter in a drawer. "Instead, he threw all caution to the wind," Jonnes said. He wouldn't give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him retreat from the field. First, he agreed to indemnify the government against any settlements from lawsuits by Paris residents, and against any consequences in the event the tower fell. Then he agreed to raise all funding beyond the one-third the government was prepared to put in. It worked. The logjam broke, and he could finally begin work.
Just making the tiny iron pieces the workers used daily for the tower's modules consumed agonizing hours. The company had to design each piece separately, calculating places for rivets to within one-tenth of a millimeter.

Throughout, Eiffel saw the tower as a way to demonstrate his French pride. "It was kind of an artistic achievement," Berenson said. "He wanted to show off his own engineering genius and the engineering genius of France."

Convincing Product
When the fair — and the tower — opened in 1889, the result was a monument that erased doubt in the minds of his detractors — jealous rival architects, artists who detested its appearance and fearful Paris residents who lived near the site. Most people, even those who once opposed it, realized what a brilliant piece of engineering it was, Berenson says.

In his later years, Eiffel turned his keen mind to the study of weather and aviation. The field of flight was emerging, with wind — which Eiffel had mastered while building railroad bridges, the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower — crucial. "He made significant contributions" to research on the effects of weather on aircraft, Jonnes said. "He won a medal from the Smithsonian for his pioneering work in aviation."
Eiffel died at home, reportedly while listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Today, the Eiffel Tower is the most visited paid monument in the world, with more than 6 million visitors a year. And in the U.S., 3.2 million visit the Statue of Liberty annually.

Interview with John Sculley on Steve Jobs

2011-02-01T20:49:00.000-08:00

Here’s a full transcript of the interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs.

It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things.
It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

UPDATE: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to”) but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52 minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link; or right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).

Q: You talk about the “Steve Jobs methodology.” What is Steve’s methodology?
Sculley: Let me give you a framework. The time that I first met Jobs, which was over 25 years ago, he was putting together the same first principles that I call the Steve Jobs methodology of how to build great products.
Steve from the moment I met him always loved beautiful products, especially hardware. He came to my house and he was fascinated because I had special hinges and locks designed for doors. I had studied as an industrial designer and the thing that connected Steve and me was industrial design. It wasn’t computing.
I didn’t know really anything about computers nor did any other people in the world at that time. This was at the beginning of the personal computer revolution, but we both believed in beautiful design and Steve in particular felt that you had to begin design from the vantage point of the experience of the user.
He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s experience going to be? But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days, who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people, “What did they want?” Steve didn’t believe in that.
He said, “How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.” He believed that showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go because it was just too big a leap.
Steve had this perspective that always started with the user’s experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression. And he recruited me to Apple because he believed that the computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an outrageous idea back in the early 1980′s because people thought that personal computers were just smaller versions of bigger computers. That’s how IBM looked at it.
Some of them thought it was more like a game machine because there were early game machines, which were very simple and played on televisions… But Steve was thinking about something entirely different. He felt that the computer was going to change the world and it it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.” It would enable individuals to have this incredible capability that they never dreamed of before. It was not about game machines. It was not about big computers getting smaller…
He was a person of huge vision. But he was also a person that believed in the precise detail of every step. He was methodical and careful about everything — a perfectionist to the end.

If you go back to the Apple II, Steve was the first one to put a computer into a plastic case, which was called ABS plastic in those days, and actually put the keyboard into the computer. It seems like a pretty simple idea today, looking back at it, but even at the time when he created the first Apple II, in 1977 — that was the beginning of the Jobs methodology. And it showed up in the Macintosh and showed up with his NeXT computer. And it showed up with the future Macs, the iMacs, the iPods and the iPhones.

What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist.

I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewelry… Go back to my lock example, and hinges and a door with beautiful brass, finely machined, mechanical devices. And I think that reflects everything that I have ever seen that Steve has touched.

When I first saw the Macintosh — it was in the process of being created — it was basically just a series of components over what is called a bread board. It wasn’t anything, but Steve had this ability to reach out to find the absolute best, smartest people he felt were out there. He was extremely charismatic and extremely compelling in getting people to join up with him and he got people to believe in his visions even before the products existed. When I met the Mac team, which eventually got to 100 people but the time I met him it was much smaller, the average age was 22.
These were people who had clearly never built a commercial product before but they believed in Steve and they believed in his vision. He was able to work in multiple levels in parallel.
On one level he is working at the “change the world,” the big concept. At the other level he is working down at the details of what it takes to actually build a product and design the software, the hardware, the systems design and eventually the applications, the peripheral products that connect to it.
In each case, he always reached out for the very best people he could find in the field. And he personally did all the recruiting for his team. He never delegated that to anybody else.
The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.
The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team. So if you wanted to add someone you had to take someone out. And the thinking was a typical Steve Jobs observation: “I can’t remember more than a hundred first names so I only want to be around people that I know personally. So if it gets bigger than a hundred people, it will force us to go to a different organization structure where I can’t work that way. The way I like to work is where I touch everything.” Through the whole time I knew him at Apple that’s exactly how he ran his division.
Q: So how did he cope when Apple became bigger? I mean, Apple has tens of thousands of people now.

Sculley: Steve would say: “The organization can become bigger but not the Mac team. The Macintosh was set up as a product development division — and so Apple had a central sales organization, a central back office for all the administration, legal. It had a centralized manufacturing of that sort but the actual team that was building the product, and this is true for high tech products, it doesn’t take a lot of people to build a great product. Normally you will only see a handful of software engineers who are building an operating system. People think that it must be hundreds and hundreds working on an operating system. It really isn’t. It’s really just a small team of people. Think of it like the atelier of an artist. It’s like an artist’s workshop and Steve is the master craftsman who walks around and looks at the work and makes judgments on it and in many cases his judgments were to reject something.

I can remember lots of evenings we would be there until 12 or 1 o’clock in the morning because the engineers usually don’t show up until lunchtime and they work well into the night. And an engineer would bring Steve in and show him the latest software code that he’s written. Steve would look at it and throw it back at him and say: “It’s just not good enough.” And he was constantly forcing people to raise their expectations of what they could do. So people were producing work that they never thought they were capable of. Largely because Steve would shift between being highly charismatic and motivating and getting them excited to feel like they are part of something insanely great. And on the other hand he would be almost merciless in terms of rejecting their work until he felt it had reached the level of perfection that was good enough to go into – in this case, the Macintosh.
Q: He was quite conscious about that, right? This was very well thought out, not just crazy capriciousness?
Sculley: No, Steve was incredibly methodical. He always had a white board in his office. He did not draw himself. He didn’t have particular drawing ability himself, yet he had an incredible taste.
The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.
Whether it’s designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design and even things like how the boards were laid out. The boards had to be beautiful in Steve’s eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box because he didn’t want people tampering with anything.
In his level of perfection, everything had to be beautifully designed even if it wasn’t going to be seen by most people.

That went all the way through to the systems when he built the Macintosh factory. It was supposed to be the first automated factory but what it really was a final assembly and test factory with a pick-to-pack robotic automation. It is not as novel today as it was 25 years ago, but I can remember when the CEO of General Motors along with Ross Perot came out just to look at the Macintosh factory. All we were doing was final assembly and test but it was done so beautifully. It was as well thought through in design as a factory, a lights out factory requiring many people as the products were.

Now if you leap forward and look at the products that Steve builds today, today the technology is far more capable of doing things, it can be miniaturized, it is commoditized, it is inexpensive. And Apple no longer builds any products. When I was there, people used to call Apple “a vertically-integrated advertising agency,” which was not a compliment.
Actually today, that’s what everybody is. That’s what HP is; that’s what Apple is; and that’s what most companies are because they outsource to EMS — electronics manufacturing services.

Q: Isn’t Nike a good analogy?
Sculley: Yeah, probably, Nike is closer, I think that is true. I think if you look at the Japanese consumer electronics in that era they were all analog companies.

The one that Steve admired was Sony. We used to go visit Akio Morita and he had really the same kind of high-end standards that Steve did and respect for beautiful products. I remember Akio Morita gave Steve and me each one of the first Sony Walkmans. None of us had ever seen anything like that before because there had never been a product like that. This is 25 years ago and Steve was fascinated by it. The first thing he did with his was take it apart and he looked at every single part. How the fit and finish was done, how it was built.

He was fascinated by the Sony factories. We went through them. They would have different people in different colored uniforms. Some would have red uniforms, some green, some blue, depending on what their functions were. It was all carefully thought out and the factories were spotless. Those things made a huge impression on him.
The Mac factory was exactly like that. They didn’t have colored uniforms, but it was every bit as elegant as the early Sony factories that we saw. Steve’s point of reference was Sony at the time. He really wanted to be Sony. He didn’t want to be IBM. He didn’t want to be Microsoft. He wanted to be Sony.
The challenge was in that era you couldn’t build digital products like Sony. Everything was analog and the Japanese companies approached things and you can read Prahalad’s book, from University of Michigan, he studied it. (Note: Sculley is referring to C.K. Prahalad’s “Competing for the Future” (1994))
The Japanese always started with the market share of components first. So one would dominate, let’s say sensors and someone else would dominate memory and someone else hard drive and things of that sort. They would then build up their market strengths with components and then they would work towards the final product. That was fine with analog electronics where you are trying to focus on cost reduction — and whoever controlled the key component costs was at an advantage. It didn’t work at all for digital electronics because digital electronics you’re starting at the wrong end of the value chain. You are not starting with the components. You are starting with the user experience.
And you can see today the tremendous problem Sony has had for at least the last 15 years as the digital consumer electronics industry has emerged. They have been totally stove-piped in their organization. The software people don’t talk to the hardware people, who don’t talk to the component people, who don’t talk to the design people. They argue between their organizations and they are big and bureaucratic.
Sony should have had the iPod but they didn’t — it was Apple. The iPod is a perfect example of Steve’s methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system.
It was always an end-to-end system with Steve. He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else.
If you look at the state of the iPod, the supply chain going all the way over to iPod city in China – it is as sophisticated as the design of the product itself. The same standards of perfection are just as challenging for the supply chain as they are for the user design. It is an entirely different way of looking at things.
Q: Where did he get the idea for controlling the whole widget? The idea to be in charge of everything, the whole system?
Sculley: Steve believed that if you opened the system up people would start to make little changes and those changes would be compromises in the experience and he would not be able to deliver the kind of experience that he wanted.
Q: But this control extends to every aspect of the product – even to opening the box. The experience of opening the box is designed by Steve Jobs.
Sculley: The original Mac really had no operating system. People keep saying, “Well why didn’t we license the operating system?” The simple answer is that there wasn’t one. It was all done with lots of tricks with hardware and software. Microprocessors in those days were so weak compared to what we had today. In order to do graphics on a screen you had to consume all of the power of the processor. Then you had to glue chips all around it to enable you to offload other functions. Then you had to put what are called “calls to ROM.” There were 400 calls to ROM, which were all the little subroutines that had to be offloaded into the ROM because there was no way you could run these in real time. All these things were neatly held together. It was totally remarkable that you could deliver a machine when you think the first processor on the Mac was less than three MIPs (Million Instructions Per Second), which today would be — I can’t think of any device which has three MIPS, or equivalent. Even your digital watch is at least 200 or 300 times more powerful than the first Macintosh. (NOTE. For comparison, today’s entry-level iMac uses an Intel Core i3 chip, rated at over 40,000 MIPS!)
It’s hard to conceive how he was able to accomplish so much with so little in those days. So for someone to build consumer products in the 1980s beyond what we did with the first Mac was literally impossible. In the 1990s with Moore’s Law and other things, the homogenization of technology, it became possible to begin to see what consumer products would look like but you couldn’t really build them. It really hasn’t been until the turn of the century that you sort of got the crossover between the cost of components, the commoditization and the miniaturization that you need for consumer products. The performance suddenly reached the point where you could actually build things that we can call digital consumer products. Because Steve’s design methodology was so correct even 25 years ago he was able to make a design methodology – his first principles — of user experience, focus on just a few things, look at the system, never compromise, compare yourself not to other electronic products but compare yourself to the finest pieces of jewelry — all those criteria — no one else was thinking about that. Everyone else was just going through an evolution of cheap products that are getting more powerful and cheaper to build. Like the MP3 player. Remember when he came in with the iPod, there were thousands of MP3 players out there. Can anyone else remember any of the others?
His tradeoff was he believed that he had to control the entire system. He made every decision. The boxes were locked.

Steve Jobs circa 1984. Illustration by Matthew Phelan

Q: But the motivation for this is the user experience?
Sculley: Absolutely. The user experience has to go through the whole end-to-end system, whether it’s desktop publishing or iTunes. It is all part of the end-to-end system. It is also the manufacturing. The supply chain. The marketing. The stores. I remember I was brought in because I had a design background and because I was a marketer. I had product marketing experience. Not because I knew anything about computers.
Q: I find that pretty fascinating. You say in your book that first and foremost you wanted to make Apple a “product marketing company.”
Sculley: Right. Steve and I spent months getting to know each other before I joined Apple. He had no exposure to marketing other than what he picked up on his own. This is sort of typical of Steve. When he knows something is going to be important he tries to absorb as much as he possibly can.
One of the things that fascinated him: I described to him that there’s not much difference between a Pepsi and a Coke, but we were outsold 9 to 1. Our job was to convince people that Pepsi was a big enough decision that they ought to pay attention to it, and eventually switch. We decided that we had to treat Pepsi like a necktie. In that era people cared what necktie they wore. The necktie said: “Here’s how I want you to see me.” So we have to make Pepsi like a nice necktie. When you are holding a Pepsi in your hand, its says, “Here’s how I want you to see me.”
We did some research and we discovered that when people were going to serve soft drinks to a friend in their home, if they had Coca Cola in the fridge, they would go out to the kitchen, open the fridge, take out the Coke bottle, bring it out, put it on the table and pour a glass in front of their guests.
If it was a Pepsi, they would go out in to the kitchen, take it out of the fridge, open it, and pour it in a glass in the kitchen, and only bring the glass out. The point was people were embarrassed to have someone know that they were serving Pepsi. Maybe they would think it was Coke because Coke had a better perception. It was a better necktie. Steve was fascinated by that.

We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality you have to be able to create the perception. We did it with something called the Pepsi generation.

I had learned through a lecture that Dr. Margaret Mead had given, an anthropologist in the 60’s, that the most important fact for marketers was going to be the emergence of an affluent middle class — what we call the Baby Boomers, who are now turning 60. They were the first people to have discretionary income. They could go out and spend money for things other than what they had to have.

When we created Pepsi generation it was created with them in mind. It was always focusing on the user of the drink, never the drink.
Coke always focused on the drink. We focused on the person using it. We showed people riding dirt bikes, waterskiing, or kite flying, hang gliding — doing different things. And at the end of it there would always be a Pepsi as a reward. This all happened when color television was first coming in. We were the first company to do lifestyle marketing. The first and the longest-running lifestyle campaign was — and still is — Pepsi.
We did it was just as color television was coming in and when large-screen TVs were coming in, like 19-inch screens. We didn’t go to people who made TV commercials because they were making commercials for little tiny black-and-white screens. We went out to Hollywood and got the best movie directors and said we want you to make 60-second movies for us. They were lifestyle movies. The whole thing was to create the perception that Pepsi was number one because you couldn’t be number one unless you thought like number one. You had to appear like number one.
Steve loved those ideas. A lot of the stuff we were doing and our marketing was focused on when we bring the Mac to market. It has to be done at such a high level of perception of expectation that he will sort of tease people to want to find out what the product is capable of. The product couldn’t do very much in the beginning. Almost all of the technology was used for the user experience. In fact we did get a backlash where people said it’s a toy. It doesn’t do anything. But eventually it did as the technology got more powerful.

Q: Of course, Apple is famous for the same kind of lifestyle advertising now. It shows people living an enviable lifestyle, courtesy of Apple’s products. Hip young people grooving to iPods…
Sculley. I don’t take any credit for it. What Steve’s brilliance is, is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put into the context of his design methodology — everything is design.
An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Microsoft hires some of the smartest people in the world. They are known for their incredibly challenging test they put people through to get hired. It’s not an issue of people being smart and talented. It’s that design at Apple is at the highest level of the organization, led by Steve personally. Design at other companies is not there. It is buried down in the bureaucracy somewhere… In bureaucracies many people have the authority to say no, not the authority to say yes. So you end up with products with compromises. This goes back to Steve’s philosophy that the most important decisions are the things you decide NOT to do, not what you decide to do. It’s the minimalist thinking again.
Having been around in the early days, I don’t see any change in Steve’s first principles — except he’s gotten better and better at it.
Another example, which has been brilliant, is what he did with the retail stores.

He brought one of the top retailers in the world on his board to learn about retail ( Mickey Drexler from The Gap, who advised Jobs to build a prototype store before launch). Not only did he learn about retail, I’ve never been in a better store than an Apple store. It has the highest revenue per square foot of any store in the world but it’s not just the revenue, it’s the experience.

Apple stores are packed. You can go to the Sony center — go in the San Francisco center at the Moscone. There’s nobody there. You can go into the Nokia store, they have one in New York on 57th St. There’s nobody there.
But other people have the stores. They have the products to look at. You can touch and feel them but you walk into an Apple store and it’s just like an amazing experience. It is as much the people who are there shopping alongside you.
Again, it is like necktie products. It’s like being in an Apple store says, “here’s how I want you to see me. I’m here. I’m at the genius bar. I’m trying out the products. Look at me: I’m like the other people in the store.”
The user experience is taken all the way from the experience of using the product, to the advertising of how it is presented, to the design of the product. Steve is legendary for his fit and finish requirements on a product. Looking at the radius and parting lines and bezels and all these little details that designers pay attention to.
He will reject something which no one will see as a problem. But because his standards are so high, people sit there and say, “How does Apple do it? How does apple have such incredible products?”
I remember one of the things we talked about, Steve used to ask me: “How did Pepsi get such great advertising?” He asked if it was the agencies that you picked? And I said what it really is. First of all you have to have an exciting product and you have to be able to present it as an opportunity to do bold advertising.
But great advertising comes from great clients. The best creative people want to work for the best clients. If you are a client who doesn’t appreciate great work, or a client who won’t take risks and try new stuff, or a client who can’t get excited about the creative, then you’re the wrong kind of client.
Most big companies delegate it way down in the organization. The CEO rarely knows anything about the advertising except when it’s presented, when it’s all done. That’s not how we did it at Pepsi, not how we did it at Apple, and I’m sure it’s not how Steve does it now. He always adamantly involved in the advertising, the design and everything.
Q: Right. I hear Lee Clow flies up to Apple every week to meet with Jobs.
Sculley: Once you realize that Apple leads through design, than you can start to see, that’s what makes it different. Look at the stores, at the stairs in the stores. They are made of some special glass that had to be fabricated. And that’s so typical of the way he thinks. Everyone around him knows he beats to a different drummer. He sets standards that are entirely different than any other CEO would set.
He’s a minimalist and constantly reducing things to their simplest level. It’s not simplistic. It’s simplified. Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.

If you are someone who doesn’t care about it, you end up with simplistic results. It’s amazing to me how many companies make that mistake. Take the Microsoft Zune. I remember going to CES when Microsoft launched Zune and it was literally so boring that people didn‘t even go over to look at it… The Zunes were just dead. It was like someone had just put aging vegetables into a supermarket. Nobody wanted to go near it. I’m sure they were very bright people but it’s just built from a different philosophy. The legendary statement about Microsoft, which is mostly true, is that they get it right the third time. Microsoft’s philosophy is to get it out there and fix it later. Steve would never do that. He doesn’t get anything out there until it is perfected.

Q: Let’s talk about advertising, which is so important to Apple. In you book you talk about ‘strategic advertising’ – advertising as strategy. That’s a very interesting idea…
Sculley: At the time I came to Silicon Valley there was no advertising… The only one who was really interested in doing advertising was Apple. H-P didn’t advertise in those days. No one advertised in those days on a big brand basis. One of the things that I was recruited to Apple to help do was to bring big brand advertising to Apple.
…
The Apple logo was multicolor because the Apple II was the first color computer. No one else could do color, so that’s why they put the color blocks into the logo. If you wanted to print the logo in a magazine ad or on a package you could print it with four colors but Steve being Steve insisted on six colors. So whenever the Apple logo was printed, it was always printed in six colors. It added another 30 to 40 percent to the cost of everything, but that’s what Steve wanted. That’s what we always did. He was a perfectionist even from the early days.
Q: That drives some people a little bit crazy. Did it drive you crazy?
Sculley: It’s okay to be driven a little crazy by someone who is so consistently right. What I’ve learned in high tech is that there’s a very, very thin line between success and failure. It’s an industry where you are constantly taking risks, particularly if you’re a company like Apple, which is constantly living out on the edge.
Your chance of being on one side of that line or the other side of the line is about equal. Sometimes… he was wrong tactically on a number of things. He wouldn’t put a hard drive in the Macintosh. When someone asked him about communications, he just threw a little disk across the room and said, “That’s all we’ll ever need.” On the other hand, Steve led the development of what was called AppleTalk and AppleLink. AppleTalk was the communications that enabled the Macintosh to communicate to the laser printer that enabled… desktop publishing.
AppleTalk was brilliant in its day. It was as brilliant as the Macintosh. It was another example of using a minimalist approach and solving a problem that no one else thought was a problem that needed to be solved. Steve was solving problems back in the 80s that turned out 15, 20 years later to be exactly the right problems to be working on. The challenge was we were decades away from when the technology would be homogenized enough and powerful enough to be able to make all those things mass market. He was just, in many cases, he was way ahead of his time.
Looking back, it was a big mistake that I was ever hired as CEO. I was not the first choice that Steve wanted to be the CEO. He was the first choice, but the board wasn’t prepared to make him CEO when he was 25, 26 years old.
They exhausted all of the obvious high-tech candidates to be CEO… Ultimately, David Rockefeller, who was a shareholder in Apple, said let’s try a different industry and let’s go to the top head hunter in the United States who isn’t in high tech: Gerry Roche.
They went and recruited me. I came in not knowing anything about computers. The idea was that Steve and I were going to work as partners. He would be the technical person and I would be the marketing person.
The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring and he focuses on the stuff he brings.”
Remember, he was the chairman of the board, the largest shareholder and he ran the Macintosh division, so he was above me and below me. It was a little bit of a façade and my guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?
My sense is that when Steve left (in 1986, after the board rejected his bid to replace Sculley as CEO) I still didn’t know very much about computers.
My decision was first to fix the company, but I didn’t know how to fix companies and to get it back to be successful again.
All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they have to this day. We developed the PowerBook… We developed QuickTime. All these things were built around Steve’s philosophy… It was all about sales and marketing and the evolution of the products.
All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.
I made two really dumb mistakes that I really regret because I think they would have made a difference to Apple. One was when we are at the end of the life of the Motorola processor… we took two of our best technologists and put them on a team to go look and recommend what we ought to do.

They came back and they said it doesn’t make any difference which RISC architecture you pick, just pick the one that you think you can get the best business deal with. But don’t use CISC. CISC is complex instructions set. RISC is reduced instruction set.

So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them… (but) we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. In the 1990s, the processors were getting powerful enough that you could run all of your technology and software, and that’s when Microsoft took off with their Windows 3.1.
Prior to that you had to do it in software and hardware, the way Apple did. When the processors became powerful enough, it just became a commodity and the software can handle all those subroutines we had to do in hardware.
So we totally missed the boat. Intel would spend 11 billion dollars and evolve the Intel processor to do graphics… and it was a terrible technical decision. I wasn’t technically qualified, unfortunately, so I went along with the recommendation.
The other even bigger failure on my part was if I had thought about it better I should have gone back to Steve.
I wanted to leave Apple. At the end of 10 years, I didn’t want to stay any longer. I wanted to go back to the east coast. I told the board I wanted to leave and IBM was trying to recruit me at the time. They asked me to stay. I stayed and then they later fired me. I really didn’t want to be there any longer.
The board decided that we ought to sell Apple. So I was given the assignment to go off and try to sell Apple in 1993. So I went off and tried to sell it to AT&T to IBM and other people. We couldn’t get anyone who wanted to buy it. They thought it was just too high risk because Microsoft and Intel were doing well then. But if I had any sense, I would have said: “Why don’t we go back to the guy who created the whole thing and understands it. Why don’t we go back and hire Steve to come back and run the company?”
It’s so obvious looking back now that that would have been the right thing to do. We didn’t do it, so I blame myself for that one. It would have saved Apple this near-death experience they had.
One of the issues that got me fired was that there was a split inside the company as to what the company ought to do. There was one contingent that wanted Apple to be more of a business computer company. They wanted to open up the architecture and license it. There was another contingent, which I was a part of, that wanted to take the Apple methodology — the user experience and stuff like that — and move into the next generation of products, like the Newton.
But the Newton failed. It was a new direction. It was so fundamentally different. The result was I got fired and they had two more CEOs who both licensed the technology but… they shut down the industrial design. They turned out computers that looked like everybody else’s computers and they no longer cared about advertising, public relations. They just obliterated everything. We’re just going to become an engineering type company and they almost drove the company into bankruptcy during that.
I’m actually convinced that if Steve hadn’t come back when he did — if they had waited another six months — Apple would have been history. It would have been gone, absolutely gone.
What did he do? He turned it right back to where it was — as though he never left. He went all the way back.
So during my era, really everything we did was following his philosophy — his design methodology.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t as good at it as he was. Timing in life is everything. It just wasn’t a time when you could build consumer products and he wasn’t having any more luck at NeXT than we were having at Apple — and he was better at it than we were. The one thing he did do better: he built the better next-generation operating system, which eventually was merged into Apple’s operating system.

Q: People say he killed the Newton – your pet project – out of revenge. Do you think he did it for revenge?
Sculley: Probably. He won’t talk to me, so I don’t know.

The Newton was a terrific idea, but it was too far ahead of its time. The Newton actually saved Apple from going bankrupt. Most people don’t realize in order to build Newton, we had to build a new generation microprocessor. We joined together with Olivetti and a man named Herman Hauser, who had started Acorn computer over in the U.K. out of Cambridge university. And Herman designed the ARM processor, and Apple and Olivetti funded it. Apple and Olivetti owned 47 percent of the company and Herman owned the rest. It was designed around Newton, around a world where small miniaturized devices with lots of graphics, intensive subroutines and all of that sort of stuff… when Apple got into desperate financial situation, it sold its interest in ARM for $800 million. If it had kept it, the company went on to become an $8 or $10 billion company. It’s worth a lot more today. That’s what gave Apple the cash to stay alive.

So while Newton failed as a product, and probably burnt through $100 million, it more than made it up with the ARM processor… It’s in all the products today, including Apple’s products like the iPod and iPhone. It’s the Intel of its day.
Apple is not really a technology company. Apple is really a design company. If you look at the iPod, you will see that many of the technologies that are in the iPod are ones that Apple bought from other people and put together. Even when Apple created Macintosh, all the ideas came out of Xerox and Apple recruited some of the key people out of Xerox.
Everything Apple does fails the first time because it is out on the bleeding edge. Lisa failed before the Mac. The Macintosh laptop failed before the PowerBook. It was not unusual for products to fail. The mistake we made with the Newton was we over-hyped the advertising. We hyped the expectation of what the product could actually, so it became a celebrated failure.
Q: I want to ask about Jobs’ heroes. You say Edwin Land was one of his heroes?
Sculley: Yeah, I remember when Steve and I went to meet Dr Land.

Dr Land had been kicked out of Polaroid. He had his own lab on the Charles River in Cambridge. It was a fascinating afternoon because we were sitting in this big conference room with an empty table. Dr Land and Steve were both looking at the center of the table the whole time they were talking. Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?
Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed – it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery. Steve had huge admiration for Dr. Land. He was fascinated by that trip.
Q: What other heroes did he talk about?
Sculley: He became very close with Ross Perot.
Ross Perot came and visited Apple several times and visited the Macintosh factory. Ross was a systems thinker. He created EDS (Electronic Data Systems) and was an entrepreneur. He believed in big ideas; change the world ideas. He was another one.

Akio Morita was clearly one of his great heroes. He was an entrepreneur who built Sony and did it with great products — Steve is a products person.

Q: How about Hewlett-Packard? Jobs has said in the early days that HP was a big influence when he worked there briefly with Woz.
Sculley: HP was not a model for Apple. I’ve never heard that. HP had the “HP way,” where Bill Hewitt and David Packard would wander people would leave their work out on their desk at night and they’d wonder around and look at it. So it was very open and it was an engineers company. Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company. HP was never in those days known for great design. It was known for great engineering, not great design. No, I don’t remember HP being a model for Apple at all.
Q: Didn’t Jobs also manage by walking around?
Sculley: He did that. Everyone did that in Silicon Valley. That was what HP contributed to the way Silicon Valley does business. There are certain characteristics that all Silicon Valley startups have and that’s one of them. That clearly came from HP.
HP was the father of the walking around style of management. And HP was the father of the engineer being at the top of the hierarchy in companies.
Engineers are far more important than managers at Apple — and designers are at the top of the hierarchy. Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware.
Q: Steve Jobs is famous for being a student of design. He’d run around looking intently at all the Mercedes in the Apple car park.
Sculley: Steve was a fanatic on looking at how things were printed: the fonts, the colors, the layouts. I remember once after Steve had left, one of our tasks was to go and build the business in Japan. Apple had a $4 million of turnover and we were being sued by the Japanese FTC and people saying we ought to close the office down — it’s losing money. I remember going over and to make a long story short, four years later we were a $2 billion dollar business and the number two company in Japan selling computers.
A big part of it was that we had to learn to make products the way the Japanese wanted products. We were assembling products in Singapore and sending them to Japan. And the first thing the customer saw when they opened the box was the manual, but the manual was turned the wrong way around – and the whole batch was rejected. In the United States, we’d never experienced anything like that. If you put the manual in this way or that way — what difference did it make?
Well, it made a huge difference in Japan. Their standards are just different than ours. If you look at Apple and the attention to detail. The “open me first,” the way the box is designed, the fold lines, the quality of paper, the printing — Apple just goes to extraordinary lengths. It looks like you are buying something from Bulgari or one of the highest in jewelry firms. At the time, it was the Japanese.

We used to study Italian designers when we were looking for selecting a design company before we selected Hartmut Esslinger from Frog to do what was called the Snow White design. We were looking at Italian car designers. We really did study the designs of cars that they had done and looking at the fit and finish and the materials and the colors and all of that. At that time, nobody was doing this in Silicon Valley. It was the furthest thing on the planet from Silicon Valley back then in the 80’s. Again, this is not my idea. I could relate to it because of my interest and background in design, but it was totally driven by Steve.

At the time when Steve was gone and I took over I was highly criticized. They said, “How could they put a guy who knows nothing about computers in charge of a computer company?” What a lot of people didn’t realize was that Apple wasn’t just about computers. It was about designing products and designing marketing and it was about positioning.
People used to call us a “vertically-integrated advertising agency” and that was a huge cheap shot. Engineers couldn’t think of anything worse to say about a company than to say it was a “vertically-integrated advertising agency.” Well, guess what? They all are today. That’s the model. The supply chain is managed somewhere else.

Allan Pinkerton

2011-01-06T21:50:00.000-08:00

This leader really had two things, a keen eye for detail, and hatred of crime. Let's talk about the detail portion for a minute. Even before reading to the end of the article, I found that Mr. Pinkerton had reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. If you have read Sherlock Holmes, you will note that the key to solving the crimes he investigated was approaching the case with no bias, and assuming nothing. He basically took everything in, missing nothing, and through deduction and logic was able to solve the case. Pinkerton was also the same way, and was able to understand people.

Today's leader teaches us about having a keen eye for detail and when observing something, keeping an objective perspective and noticing things others may not keep an eye on.

Allan Pinkerton Had A Keen Eye For Security

Adapted from an article by SCOTT SMITH

Allan Pinkerton had a thriving business as a barrel maker near Chicago.
One day in 1846, cutting wood on an uninhabited island, he noticed an area that had been torched.
"This might not have seemed out of the ordinary to most people, but for him it was a portent of wrong-doing," James Mackay wrote in "Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye." "Later in life, this sixth sense enabled him to anticipate a crime even before it had happened. This was allied with a persistence that refused to be worn down by disappointment."

Pinkerton returned to the island a few nights later and watched counterfeiters light a fire to do their work. He returned with the sheriff, who arrested them.
This and other crime-solving exploits led to his being appointed Chicago's first detective in 1849.
Pinkerton (1819-84) went on to create the first private detective agency in the Americas, developing many of the investigative techniques that became standard for the profession.

"He single-handedly built what was the 19th-century version of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Richard Wormser wrote in "Pinkerton: America's First Private Detective."
Growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, Pinkerton learned the cooper (barrel making) trade and was a fearless organizer in the movement for worker rights before moving to America at 23. He was made a detective at 30.

Pinkerton's Keys

Created the forerunner of the FBI.
"My idea is to never lose heart, never think for a moment of giving up the ship. I am bound to go through, sink or swim."

In his first case, he tracked down two kidnapped girls and rescued them. After a year, he grew tired of the police force's corruption and wanted to be free of influence by politicians. He partnered with attorney Edward Rucker to set up shop.

Awake On The Job
Calling it the Northwest Police Agency, Pinkerton gave it the motto "We Never Sleep" and the logo of an open eye, which led to its agents being called private eyes. A year later, Rucker left to become a judge, and the company was renamed Pinkerton's National Detective Agency.
Many of his operatives had never done police work; some had worked only as clerks, farmers or jewelers. Pinkerton didn't mind. He felt honesty was the top quality he needed.

He also looked for those with natural instincts about people and common sense. He could train them to read faces, look for clues, act a part and keep secrets.

"He was a maverick in detective work," Judith Pinkerton Josephson (no relation), author of "Allan Pinkerton: The Original Private Eye," said. "Many of the techniques he created — shadowing, surveillance techniques, disguises, code names, hiring women agents — were later used as the model for agencies that came after him."

"He investigated cases in a manner that was worthy of Sherlock Holmes," Wormser wrote. "He followed every lead, analyzed every clue, took nothing for granted and made keen deductions based on the evidence he gathered. Some of his most successful cases were solved because he noticed the way a picture hung on a wall, discovered a charred piece of cloth in the fireplace or overheard a chance remark by a stranger."
One of Pinkerton's innovations was the Rogues' Gallery, pictures of thousands of known criminals and suspects, with notations about their physical characteristics and personal habits. Police nationwide heard about it and fed him information.

Pinkerton also made enemies and barely survived plans to kill him.
He charged high fees, but business was strong, most of the work coming from corporations, wealthy individuals and government agencies. As railroads laid 2,000 miles of track in Illinois alone from 1851 to 1856, trains became targets for robbers and needed Pinkerton's help.
While working for the Illinois Central Railroad, he met two men who would be crucial to his career and the country: the railroad's attorney, Abraham Lincoln, and the firm's vice president, George McClellan, who would command the Union Army.

The Exception
Pinkerton believed in absolute obedience to the law except when it came to helping fugitive slaves. He provided a stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves and funded militant abolitionist John Brown.

In February 1861, Lincoln was to travel by train to Washington, D.C., to be inaugurated as president. With no Secret Service back then, the owner of the railroad asked Pinkerton to guarantee no danger.
He went undercover, posing as a financial adviser sympathetic to Maryland's slaveholders. He discovered that militant secessionists aimed to assassinate Lincoln when he changed trains in Baltimore.

He had the president-elect put on a disguise and take a different train. His agents waved lanterns at points along the way that indicated the tracks had been checked for safety.
During that covert train ride, Pinkerton advised Lincoln, "Sir, I beg of you, no matter what the circumstances, never attend the theater."

Pinkerton did intelligence gathering for McClellan when the general commanded troops from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio in the opening months of the Civil War. Then, after the Union loss at Bull Run in July 1861, Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Army of the Potomac.

Lincoln asked Pinkerton to head the Union Intelligence Service. The agent's operatives quickly fanned out over the Southern states. Pinkerton pretended to be a Southern gentleman or an English lord, letting him mingle with rebel leaders.

In one of his first cases, he busted a spy ring run by a D.C. socialite who gathered information at her parties.
McClellan was made supreme commander of Union forces in November, but he refused to go on the offense because of what he thought were overwhelming rebel numbers.

Political enemies blamed Pinkerton for delivering this false intelligence, but Mackay wrote that "nowhere in the voluminous reports is there a shred of evidence to support these suppositions."
Lincoln had enough of McClellan's delays by November 1862 and axed him. That was Pinkerton's cue to return to Chicago to rebuild his business. In April 1865, five days after the war's end, the president was shot at Ford's Theater and died.

"Pinkerton wept, feeling that he could have protected his friend," Josephson said.
A new kind of crime flourished after the war, with bands of relatives and their friends robbing banks, stagecoaches and trains. One of the worst was the Reno gang in the Midwest. Pinkerton had arrested all its members by 1868.

Staying Alive
Twice he was nearly killed by assassins, one sent by Canadian bandits, the other from rival detectives.
By 1869, Pinkerton had a business that brought in $1 million a year, with 20 detectives and 60 guards. Although assisted by his sons, Robert and William, Allan insisted on making every decision. The workload at age 50 contributed to a stroke. Expected to never speak or walk again, he did both in the next two years.
Just as he returned to work in 1871, a fire burned down much of Chicago, including the Pinkerton offices.

The Rogues' Gallery, the files from heading up Union Intelligence and 400 volumes were destroyed.
While the buildings were still smoldering, Pinkerton began rebuilding and reopened in a year.
Meantime, the agency boomed with the demand for guards to protect buildings from looters.
"Tenacious and driven, Pinkerton and his sons chased Jesse James and his gang for 16 years, though they never caught them," Josephson said. "This intense attitude extended to everything he did, including coping with tough economic times, such as the economic depression of the 1870s."

Countdown
The last major operation Pinkerton headed was against the Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society among coal miners in Pennsylvania.

A former labor activist himself, Pinkerton refused to suppress union organizing but thought the Mollies were thugs. He broke up the gang, but this hurt his reputation among some Irish-Americans.
Pinkerton decided to semiretire and wrote popular books, including "Thirty Years a Detective," about his exploits and those of his agents.

In 1884, Pinkerton slipped on ice and died from his injuries. He had been working on a system that would centralize all information about criminals, a database that is now maintained by the FBI.
After his death, his sons did engage in strike-breaking on behalf of big business, which gave its agents, known as pinkertons, a bad reputation among workers.

Today, Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations has global operations as a subsidiary of Stockholm-based Securitas AB. "In his 28-year career, Allan Pinkerton and his agents investigated over a thousand crimes," Wormser wrote. "To some he was a superhero, to others a villain. But even his enemies conceded he was the best private detective of his time."

Percy Spencer - the innovator of the microwave oven and other things

2011-01-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard of Percy Spencer? This is the person who noticed magnetrons generated heat that could be used to cook food. He was standing near a magnetron, when the candy bar in his pocket melted. He then started putting things together and created the first oven, called a Radar Range.

Besides his numerous innovations and inventions, Percy Spencer only had an education until the age of 12. So, what was his secret? Persistence = yes, Innovation = yes, but also curiosity about how things worked. He was basically a self educated man, who through trial and error and reading, created one of the most helpful home appliances in history.

Read on, his story is interesting because he did not get all the "tools" by getting a formal education.

Adapted from an article by Brian Deagon

Early in World War II, British scientists developed radar to detect Nazi Luftwaffe planes at night.
The system helped thwart devastating raids. But they couldn't perfect its crucial magnetron, which converts electrons into microwaves. Britain asked America for help, which led to a meeting with Percy Spencer, an engineer at defense manufacturing firm Raytheon. Spencer, a man with only a grade school education, listened as British scientists described their magnetron production, a process he said was awkward and impractical.
The British trusted Spencer to the point they let him take its most valuable secret weapon home.
Smart move. Within days, Spencer came up with radical changes that simplified manufacturing and improved its performance.
"He had a reputation for thinking outside the box," said Rod Spencer, a grandson of the inventor who would develop the microwave oven. "He was totally driven to create new things and had an intuitive sense for how things worked."

Spencer's Keys

Designed radar systems in World War II that paved the way for the microwave.
"He was totally driven to create new things and had an intuitive sense for how things worked," said grandson Rod Spencer.

The British method of building a magnetron required the machining, drilling and reaming of copper blocks to accurate dimensions. One slight mistake and it was trashed.
Flippin' Genius
The spark for Spencer's reinvention came from his coins.
"While stacking the coins, the idea came to him how to make the magnetron," said Rod Spencer, founder and CEO of CouplerSystems.com, a developer of automation software.
His grandfather wrote in 1960: "I conceived the idea of stamping out sheets of copper, stacking them with silver separators and putting them through a furnace."
He also swapped out electronic parts with more advanced systems, refining them to make radar systems far more effective in combat.
The result: Raytheon produced 2,600 magnetrons a day, up from 17 per week, with Spencer managing hundreds of people. Raytheon radar systems could detect enemy planes, submarines when they surfaced and German warships at long distances for successful destruction. Raytheon accounted for 80% of the magnetrons produced for the war effort.
For his service, Spencer was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal, the U.S. Navy's highest civilian honor.
His best commercial invention, the microwave, was still to come.
Born in Howland, Maine, in 1894, Spencer was just 18 months old when his father died in a sawmill accident. His mother then left Spencer and another son in the care of an impoverished aunt and uncle.
His uncle died when he was 7, and his formal education ended when he was 12. After working at a spool mill, he learned that a local paper mill was going to use electricity.
Even though Spencer knew nothing about electricity, he signed on to install the system. He learned entirely by trial and error and studied textbooks by night. When the project ended, he was a skilled electrician.
The Titanic's SOS failure and sinking in 1912 added up to a turning point. It dramatically popularized wireless telegraphy operators. One of those hooked was Spencer, who joined the Navy to learn the craft.
To make up for his limited schooling, "I just got hold of a lot of textbooks and taught myself while I was standing watch at night," he said. He learned trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, physics and metallurgy.
By the time he joined Raytheon in 1925, Spencer had a reputation as one of the best electric tube designers who "could make a working tube out of a sardine can," said a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist.
In The Know
In a 1958 Reader's Digest article, an MIT scientist suggested Spencer's lack of schooling was a plus: "The educated scientist knows many things won't work. Percy doesn't know what can't be done."
Following the end of World War II in 1945, Spencer wrote about his time at Raytheon, saying, "We found ourselves with zero business in the microwave tube field. It was in this period that I got the idea of cooking with microwaves."
The magnetron device used for radar caused a stream of electrons interacting with a magnet to resonate in a specially shaped, high-powered vacuum tube. The result was microwave radiation.
Hot Stuff
Scientists knew that magnetrons generated heat when molecules reacted to microwave frequencies.
As the story goes, Spencer was at a lab where magnetrons were being tested. As he stood close by one, he recognized that a candy bar in his pocket had melted.
He had an itch to find out more.
At the time, Raytheon revenue was plunging and needed to develop products for the civilian market.
CEO Laurence Marshall pulled together his top engineers. Spencer suggested they should build a microwave oven. He had solved some of Raytheon's greatest challenges. Now Marshall told him to go for it.
Spencer built a box with a magnetron in it and put popcorn kernels inside. In short order the kernels popped. An egg was next. Spencer began using it to reheat his lunches.
The development of the microwave grew from these observations, and in 1947 the first microwave oven hit the market.
The primitive unit was 5 1/2 feet tall, 2 feet wide and deep, and had to be water-cooled. It weighed nearly 800 pounds and cost about $3,000.
Raytheon named the monster the Radar Range. It wasn't a big seller, since it was practical only for restaurants, airline companies and other commercial operations.
Spencer needed help to design and build an oven for the home market. His teammate was Marvin Bock, a young Raytheon engineer who contributed plenty to shrink the size.
Other companies were working on a microwave oven as well. The first such device for the home was introduced in 1955 by Tappan Stove Co. under license from Raytheon. It faced similar problems: too big, bulky and expensive, at $1,300.
Raytheon, with Spencer in the hub, developed a new model in 1964, and in 1965 bought Amana, a developer and marketer of brand-name household appliances. Two years later Amana introduced the Radarange, the first countertop microwave oven geared specifically for the consumer market.
Boom
By 1975, sales of microwave ovens exceeded those of gas ranges.
Spencer died in 1970 at age 76 with more than 150 patents to his name.
"He passed away before microwave became popular, so he had no idea it would take off the way it did," said his grandson.
A 1992 survey by R&D Magazine listed the microwave oven as one of the top 30 products that changed our lives, rating No. 2, just behind the personal computer.
Spencer entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1999.

Netflix - Innovation and making it look easy

2011-01-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

Netflix is one of the top stocks for 2010. However, I do remember being part of the service way back in 2001 or so. I traveled a lot for work at the time, and thought it would be nice to have movies waiting in the mail for me when I got back. On the plus side, the movies were not due back at any specific time.

Fast forward about 10 years, and look at the changes. There are very few brick and mortar rental places left, and Blockbuster went bankrupt. Recently we obtained a Boxee Box from D-Link and again, this could be another game changer as it almost seems that it could replace the cable box for us.

The founder of Netflix is an interesting guy, he spent time in the peace corps and as a programmer. The most interesting things I think he brings to the table are vision, and innovation. He really was ahead of his time, and I do not think he had this in mind when he founded Netflix. At the time, the value proposition was no late fees and a reasonable price to rent movies.

The only real problem that needs to be overcome now is that Netflix delivers its content over the internet, which is fine until you get about to the last 100 yards to the home. Now, the cable companies want a piece of the action, because Netflix is taking up bandwidth and of course revenue from movie rentals and people having less use for the set top boxes. It should be an interesting battle, hopefully the best technology and innovator wins.

Read though the article, it gives you some good insight into the leadership style and thinking of this key innovator.

CEO Reed Hastings Teams The Net And Flicks

Adapted from an article by Patrick Seitz.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings always envisioned his company as a provider of streaming video over the Internet, despite its beginnings as strictly a DVD-by-mail service. That's why the firm was named Netflix (Net as in Internet, flix as in movies) and not DVDsByMail.com, Hastings says. He envisioned the delivery of movies over the Internet as the future for the company back when he started planning it in 1997.
Since then, Netflix has vanquished retail chains Blockbuster and Movie Gallery. Now it's a major force in the movie rental business, providing a convenient and cheap alternative to making round trips to the video store.
Netflix has 16.9 million subscribers who pay for its service of DVDs by mail and streaming video.
The story of Netflix in 2010 was about the company successfully making the transition from discs by mail to digital delivery of movies and TV shows.
"By every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD by mail," Hastings said on Oct. 20 after reporting third-quarter financial results.
The company's growth "is clearly driven by the strength of our streaming offering," he said.

Hastings' Keys

Founded online movie subscription service Netflix after selling Pure Software, another company he started; successfully transitioned Netflix from primarily DVDs by mail to primarily streaming video.
"You have to have a never-give-up perspective. You have to be irrationally determined."

Netflix's success in streaming drove the company's stock to new heights, rising over 200% in 2010.
In the third quarter, 66% of Netflix subscribers watched more than 15 minutes of a TV episode or movie streamed online vs. 61% in the second quarter and 41% a year earlier.
In the fourth quarter, Netflix expected that its subscribers would watch more content streamed from Netflix than delivered on DVD. Netflix also forecast ending the year with 19 million to 19.7 million subscribers, up 58% from 2009.
Ready To Go
Hastings had a long-term plan for Netflix from the start, says Ted Sarandos, the company's chief content officer. Sarandos has worked for Netflix for nearly 11 years.
"At our very first meeting he talked about Netflix almost exactly as it exists today — this model of DVDs by mail and streaming," Sarandos said. "One of the big ah-has for him and the whole company was this push-play-and-watch behavior that was developing on YouTube."
Netflix pursued streaming while many in the industry focused on developing business models where customers would download videos to rent or own.
Hastings saw how people gravitated to the simplicity of YouTube's watch-instantly service, which debuted in February 2005. Hastings' decision to get away from video downloads, which consumers find complicated, and move to streaming was a "brilliant flash point for all of us," Sarandos said.
Hastings set a direction for the company in terms of the technology to develop and what video content rights to secure. The CEO knows history is full of companies made obsolete by new technologies. He points to America Online as a cautionary example of a company that failed to adjust its business to stay relevant. AOL stuck to its low-speed dial-up Internet roots when it should have been transitioning to high-speed broadband service.
Hastings is "very focused on not missing the transition to a new technology," said Anthony Wood, CEO of Roku, which makes a popular Netflix set-top box. "He created a culture where that was a big goal to make sure (the company switched to streaming video) even if it meant cannibalized their existing business."
Hastings said that he viewed video streaming as a certainty. "We knew that broadband would grow and eventually you'd be able to stream movies," he said. "It was just a matter of time."
Netflix added a streaming video option for personal computers in January 2007 and directly to TVs in May 2008, starting with a Roku box.
Hastings saw a shift where older customers would want DVDs and younger consumers would prefer streaming video, says Mark Greenberg, president of premium movie channel Epix, which signed a major content deal with Netflix in August.
"For Reed, it's being entrepreneurial and recognizing that he has two audiences," Greenberg said. Hastings sees "an opportunity of developing a younger audience for electronic transfer. He's been aggressive in going after that."
Hastings also figured out that it was best to get the Netflix service to as many consumer electronics devices as possible, rather than sell a dedicated set-top box. Today Netflix is available on a host of Internet-enabled devices, including TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, digital video recorders and video game consoles.
Early on, Netflix adopted a subscription business model, setting it apart from rivals. Instead of paying for each video watched, customers could buy an all-you-can-eat plan.
Now they can watch as many DVDs and streaming videos as they'd like for one monthly fee. Subscription plans start at $7.99 a month for streaming, $9.99 for streaming and one DVD out at once.
As its business shifts to streaming, the Los Gatos, Calif., company has been steadily signing deals with Hollywood studios and other video producers for content.
In 2010 alone, Netflix forged licensing deals with Warner Bros., NBC Universal, 20th Century Fox, Relativity Media, Epix, Nu Image/Millennium Films, FilmDistrict and Disney-ABC Television Group.
Emboldened by the success of its Netflix streaming business, the company began offering a streaming-only service in Canada in September and in the U.S. in November.
A native of Boston, Hastings, 50, earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1983. After graduating, he joined the Peace Corps and taught math in Swaziland for two years.
Upon his return to the States, he earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1988. After graduating, he took a job as a software engineer at high-speed networking company Adaptive in 1989.
In his spare time, Hastings developed a software product in 1990 called Purify, a debugging tool used to detect errors in programs. It would become the first product for his startup company Pure Software, founded in 1991.
Company Shift
Hastings built Pure into one of the world's 50 largest public software companies. Rational Software, now part of IBM, bought Pure in 1997. Hastings came up with the idea for Netflix in 1997 after he returned a videotape of "Apollo 13" to a store six weeks late and was hit with a $40 late fee. He figured there had to be a better way to rent movies.

Netflix launched in May 1998 soon after DVDs debuted. "I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. I didn't get an MBA. I never thought that's what I'd be doing," Hastings said.
Netflix didn't become the success it is today without some missteps. But Hastings was persistent.
"You have to have a never-give-up perspective," Hastings said. "You have to be irrationally determined."

General Sherman

2010-12-29T20:51:00.000-08:00

I have always been fascinated by the leaders of the Civil War, not just the North, but also the South. In this instance, I am highlighting General Sherman, who has a reputation of steamrolling the south, basically leaving a path of destruction as he moved deeper south towards the end of the war.

In the end, he did rout out the enemy, and took Atlanta and later Savannah. I thought it was interesting that he held to his convictions about war, which he basically said is "Hell". He did not glorify war at all. He realized that destruction and cruelty were part of the war and that war itself could not be refined.

I think I would characterize General Sherman as a wise man, who used strategy, and stern measures to complete his objectives.

From an article adapted from Sean Higgins.

After William Tecumseh Sherman's troops captured Atlanta in 1864, the general ordered most civilians to evacuate the city.

He figured they were a security risk to his men.

Civilian leaders protested, calling it a hardship for those families.

Sherman was unmoved. He believed the South had brought this on itself by starting the war and said so.

"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it," Sherman wrote to the officials, adding: "The only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride."

If they ended the hostilities, he assured them, "you may call on me for anything" and he would defend their families and homes "against danger from every quarter."

It was vintage Sherman: blunt and uncompromising, yet also cool, rational and psychologically shrewd.

Sherman (1820-91) aimed to finish the Civil War. He devised a strategy based on battlefield success and cracking the enemy's will. Part of that involved reminding Atlanta's leaders that their city was occupied because they supported secession.

Sherman's Keys

A West Point graduate who rose to major general in the Union Army during the Civil War, he distinguished himself at the first Battle of Bull Run, Shiloh and Vicksburg, then captured Atlanta and Savannah in 1864.
"I want peace and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect an early success."

Such psychology combined with his innovative troop maneuvers cause military scholars to tag him as the first modern general. He grasped that wars were won on multiple fronts: battlefields and minds.

Ruin And Union

Sherman remains controversial, his name synonymous with wanton destruction. Yet his efforts were key to the North's victory and saved lives too. His campaigns were less bloody than those of other generals because the battles had less fighting.

He was born in Lancaster, Ohio. His father gave him a middle name for Ohio's famous Indian chief because he was "a great warrior."

Sherman attended West Point and graduated in 1840, sixth in a class of 42. He would've ranked higher but amassed several demerits, reflecting his willingness to bend rules.

His career as an Army officer had a slow start, as postings in Florida and California caused him to mostly miss the Mexican-American War.

Sherman left the Army and tried his hand at banking before accepting the post of civilian superintendent at a Louisiana military academy. He resigned in 1861, viewing Southern secession as treason. He rejoined the Army and accepted a commission as a Union colonel.

Steven Woodworth, author of "Sherman," proffers that the Ohioan's years in business benefited him as an officer. He became an excellent manager and organizer, especially when it came to logistics.

Sherman's civilian years also broadened his perspective, helping him think of new solutions that would ensure battlefield success.

"Sherman was highly intelligent as well as having a very restless mind," Woodworth told IBD. "He was at his worst at periods of low activity. His mind would wander. High-pressure situations made him focus."

This helped make him an excellent front-line commander, braving enemy fire to rally the troops at 1861's First Battle of Bull Run. He was shot twice, but his wounds were minor and his cool under fire kept his units together while other generals' outfits fell apart. Soon he was promoted to general.

Sherman nearly quit when he suffered an apparent nervous breakdown in Kentucky.

He recovered and came through at Shiloh in 1862. He was again shot twice, losing two horses in the process, and survived.

Amid that bloody battle in Tennessee, he held his troops in line, preventing a Confederate victory.

Riding High

"I remember how glad we were to see General Sherman, with a (bandage) on his hand, ride along our lines," said a soldier quoted in Woodworth's book.

Shiloh cemented his friendship with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. At a time when the top ranks were torn by rivalries, egotism and political maneuvering, Sherman and Grant came to trust each other completely.

"He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk. And now, sir, we stand by each other always," Sherman was famously quoted as saying.

Union Tide At The Mississippi

During the Vicksburg campaign in 1863, Grant wanted Sherman to pretend to attack Confederate forces near the Mississippi city, then retreat. Grant hoped it would draw the rebels away in pursuit, letting the commander's forces attack.

He asked for instead of ordering the diversion, knowing the press might report it as a Sherman loss.

"His friend's reply was a virtual snort of contempt at all ink-stained busybodies," Woodworth wrote. "If Grant thought the feint helpful, Sherman would carry it out, newspapermen be hanged." It worked, and Vicksburg surrendered on July 4.

When President Lincoln made Grant his No. 1 general in 1864, Sherman became Grant's top officer.

Grant planned to engage Gen. Robert E. Lee's army of Northern Virginia while Sherman marched into Georgia to fight Gen. Joe Johnston's army of Tennessee.

Throughout the drive South, Sherman moved his troops with a series of flanking maneuvers. These were traditionally done to hit the enemy's weaker sides. Sherman expanded the concept to cover more distance.

He couldn't attack the enemy this way. Even so, Johnston couldn't strike him without handing all of the defensive advantages to Sherman. Johnston held off, and Sherman pushed to Atlanta.

Sherman stretched beyond his supply lines, so his men took food from local farms. They also destroyed anything — factories, mills, arsenals — that could aid the South. They wrecked railroads, even tying rails around trees. "Sherman's neckties," they were called.

"What Sherman did was to show that maneuvering against the enemy's weaknesses could be expanded beyond the immediate battlefield and could take place on the strategic level," Woodworth said. "Sherman was showing that you could also strike at the enemy through his industry and economy and infrastructure."

This hard war kept the South from supplying its troops.

"Whether we get inside of Atlanta or not, it will be a used-up community by the time we are done with it," Sherman said during the march.

In September 1864, he captured Atlanta. The triumph had huge repercussions. It proved that the North was winning the war and gave Lincoln enough of a boost to beat his former top general, George McClellan, in the presidential election.

Sherman then marched to Savannah using the same tactics, arriving just before Christmas and leaving a trail of destruction. The war would end the following April.

In Charge

Sherman was appointed commander of the whole Army in 1869 by Grant, who was now president. Under Sherman, the Army fought Indians as America expanded westward. After retiring in 1883, he wrote a highly regarded memoir and refused to enter politics. "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected," he said in 1884, creating the Shermanesque standard for presidential disavowals.

As successful a soldier as he was, Sherman refused to romanticize warfare. The price of victory was exorbitant, and his use of hard war was done with the intention of ending conflicts as quickly as possible.

"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell," he told a Columbus, Ohio, audience in 1880.

Sherman died in St. Louis.

Who was St. Nick?

2010-12-26T14:16:00.000-08:00

Thought I would share an interesting story about St. Nicholas. One of the interesting things is that the story of St. Nicholas has survived so long. St. Nicholas a 4th century Bishop of Myra. He was reputed to have worked many miracles and is the patron saint of many different groups. I was simply amazed at the number of works he accomplished in his life, and that he had such an impact on the lives others.

This is a short article about St Nick that I found, but also I provide a link to Wikipedia as it is a very detailed account of his life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas

Adapted from an artical by Michael Mink:

Nicholas of Patara didn't like what he heard. A man he knew lost money in a bad business deal. With no money, the man couldn't afford his three daughters' dowries. That meant the girls couldn't marry and would likely end up destitute.

The father reluctantly decided that if he sold one of his daughters as a servant, at least he could help his other daughters.

Born into wealth in what's now Turkey, Nicholas (270-343) didn't know poverty, but he knew sadness; he lost his parents to plague. Raised by an uncle who was a bishop, he had soaked up the message of compassion. So when Nicholas learned of the family's trouble, he acted fast. "All his life Nicholas was known for moving into action when the need was greatest," wrote Joe Wheeler and Jim Rosenthal in "St. Nicholas: A Closer Look at Christmas."

Nicholas went to the man's home at night, climbed on the roof and dropped a bag of gold down the chimney. The money made it possible for the eldest daughter to marry. When it was gone, Nicholas repeated his act of anonymous kindness so the second daughter could marry.

When the money ran out a third time, Nicholas again anonymously made his donation. This time, the bag of gold he tossed through an open window landed in a stocking or on a hook on the fireplace.

The father was awakened by the noise, and he raced out of the house to catch up to his unknown benefactor and thank him. When he did, he dropped to his knees to kiss Nicholas' feet. Nicholas raised the man, told him God was the one who should be thanked and made him promise not to tell what happened as long as he, Nicholas, was alive.

It was one of many selfless actions Nicholas took. Those moves made him one of the most revered philanthropists in history and served as the inspiration for Santa Claus.

Nicholas was the bishop of Myra who tried mightily to live his life by the lessons of Jesus Christ.

Nicholas' Keys

A champion and protector of children, the dispossessed, the falsely accused and all those in need.
"To the people of his time, if anyone deserved to be called a saint, it was he," wrote Joe Wheeler and Jim Rosenthal.

Nicholas' daily aim was to alleviate suffering. He set an example that many followed. "Nicholas always insisted that no credit or thanks be given to him, but to God only. In this, Nicholas was responding to Christ's repeated injunction that each of us should give in secret," wrote Wheeler and Rosenthal.

"In holiday terms, (he) points to the true essence of Christmas and the child in Bethlehem rather than himself," said Rosenthal.

As a youngster, Nicholas decided to dedicate his life to Christ. To learn as much as he could about Jesus, he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and walked the same places Jesus walked. He prayed he could live up to Jesus' example.

On his return to Turkey, he obeyed Jesus' words to "sell what you own and give the money to the poor" and started giving away the money he'd inherited from his parents.

Stories that detail his giving "tell the impact ... made by a real personality who could not be forgotten or ignored," Michael Ramsey, an archbishop, said in 1956. "The crop of legends has fact behind it."

"The compelling evidence of (St. Nicholas') generosity ... both reflects and encourages the generosity we are all capable of, regardless of the season," wrote Marianna Mayer in "The Real Santa Claus."

Nicholas' devotion to God was so great, he was recognized as a saint before the Catholic Church began regular canonization.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

2010-12-23T09:58:00.000-08:00

One of the most memorable parts about growing up was watching Charles Schultz' "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Many of you probably remember this wonderful program and story. Do you remember the music?

There are two very famous pieces in the program, performed by Vince Guaraldi. One of the instrumentals is called "Linus and Lucy", and other one is called "Christmas Time is Here". I never knew anything about the composer, and just recently learned it was Vince Guaraldi. Linus and Lucy is such a catchy song, just about everyone remembers it.

Anyway, I wanted to share an article about the composer that I recenty read. I think this is another story of persistence, which has kind of the been the theme of this and last article I posted.

We all need to remember to keep on keeping on, even in the face of many obstacles.

Check out the Vince Guaraldi Website here: http://www.vinceguaraldi.com/

Or pick up the music for "A Charlie Brown Christmas from Amazon."

From an article adapted from PETE BARLAS, Posted 12/22/2010

Vince Guaraldi made a habit of beating the odds.He overcame the effects of a broken home, the Great Depression, a wartime sickness, a near-debilitating injury and early career misfires to become one of the world's most acclaimed jazz composers and pianists prior to his death at age 47.

Although Guaraldi (1928-76) appeared on more than 50 albums as solo artist and sideman, he is perhaps best known for providing the music for 16 Peanuts cartoon TV specials that aired from 1965 and 1976.

Guaraldi's instrumental compositions such as "Linus & Lucy" and "Christmas Time Is Here" pumped up "A Charlie Brown Christmas," the first holiday TV special from Peanuts creator Charles Schultz. Those tunes keep the Charlie Brown show alive at Christmas to this day, says Lee Mendelson, Peanuts' executive producer and former Guaraldi collaborator.

"The bottom line to all of this is that the shows would never have been as successful without that music, so he has probably done more to popularize jazz than anybody else," he told IBD. "I don't think anybody in history had this impact because every holiday season you have another 30 to 40 million people still hearing that music."

The Attraction
Though Guaraldi was a Grammy winner prior to the Peanuts work, his "Linus & Lucy" and other songs on the TV shows resonate the most, says George Winston. The jazz pianist and composer recalls running out to the store at 16 years old to buy the record of the Christmas special after it aired on TV.

Guaraldi's Keys

Composed and performed the music on 16 animated Peanuts TV specials from 1965 to 1976, won a Grammy Award in 1963 and has appeared on more than 50 record albums.
"I don't think I'm a great piano player, but I would like to have people like me, to play pretty tunes and reach the audience. And I hope some of those tunes will become standards. I want to write standards, not just hits."

"People know and love 'Linus & Lucy,'" said Winston, one of many artists, including Mariah Carey, to record the Guaraldi composition. "The first time I heard it I went crazy and it turns out I wasn't the only one."
Guaraldi isn't a household name like John Coltrane or Miles Davis. But the two-handed Guaraldi technique on songs like "Linus & Lucy" is unmistakable, says Derrick Bang, a columnist in Davis, Calif., working on a Guaraldi biography.

"There is the driving rhythmic left hand, which always establishes not just a strong but an interesting beat, and then Guaraldi's melody line; although it sounds very simple, the melodies themselves are very catchy, very infectious," he said.

Guaraldi was born in San Francisco. He never knew his father. Vince assumed the name Guaraldi when his mother remarried. His stepfather, Tony Guaraldi, helped Vince's mom run a creamery in San Francisco in the 1940s and '50s.

Young Vince had at least one role model. An uncle, Maurice "Muzzy" Marcellino, was a musician and bandleader on the Art Linkletter radio and TV Show, "House Party." "Muzzy wrote my father a lot of little notes while he was on the road," said Vince's son, David Guaraldi, who manages a Web site devoted to his father's music.

Vince took piano lessons and played in bands as a teen. He also stood near the stage to watch acts like the Woody Herman Band perform, said Bang: "He could absorb the music as closely as possible, but also pay attention to how it was being played, what each of the musicians was actually doing."

Following high school, Guaraldi attended San Francisco State College from 1948 to 1949, according to school records. In 1949 he joined the Army and worked as a cook on a ship during the Korean War. Around 1952 he came down an illness so deathly, "they measured him for a casket," said his son.

Back in America, Guaraldi worked in a printing press in San Francisco and almost ruined his future career. "He almost accidentally cut his finger off. From then on he was a musician (full time)," said David. Guaraldi's first important appearance came in the early 1950s when he served as an intermission pianist at the Black Hawk nightclub in San Francisco. Guaraldi was subbing for renowned pianist Art Tatum.
"It was more than scary," Guaraldi told one interviewer.

Soon he was working with vibraphonist Cal Tjader and appeared on at least 10 Tjader records.
Then it was off with his own band, the Vince Guaraldi Trio, but two albums didn't sell well.
In 1956 Guaraldi joined Herman's band, then reunited with Tjader, performing a legendary set at the 1958 Monterey Jazz Festival. The next year came inspiration. In watching the French/Portuguese film "Black Orpheus," Guaraldi got caught up in the Brazilian rhythms.

By 1962 he had a new trio and a new sound in his "Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus" LP.
Guaraldi's producers released a single for the record. On the B side was a Guaraldi original, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind." The hit won a Grammy award as the best instrumental jazz composition for 1962.
Requests for the song poured in during live gigs. "It's like signing the back of a check," Guaraldi said.
Guaraldi's career began to soar.

Charles Gompertz, a reverend in San Francisco, heard "Cast" on the radio. He hired Guaraldi to write a jazz mass to be performed at the city's newly built Grace Cathedral. Guaraldi spent 18 months writing the music for his trio and a 68-voice choir. The score, performed live in May 1965, was a unique blend of jazz, Latin music and waltz tempos, said Bang: "It had not been done in the U.S. up until that time."

A radio broadcast of "Cast" also led to another job. Mendelson heard the song and hired Guaraldi in 1963 to provide the music for "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," a documentary film on Schultz. Mendelson had trouble lining up sponsors. But when Coca-Cola asked whether he could put a Peanuts holiday special on the screen, he jumped.

"They said, 'Do you have a Christmas show?' and I said yes, and I called Schultz and he drew up an outline the next day and we sent it to Coca-Cola and they bought the show about a week later," he said.

Mass Appeal
Roughly 50% of all American TVs were tuned to the Charlie Brown Christmas show the first night it aired, Dec. 9, 1965. CBS was convinced; it ordered four more Peanuts shows. Guaraldi provided music for 16 Peanuts shows and the movie "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," released in 1969.

Mendelson believed right away that Guaraldi's music was a perfect fit for Peanuts. "I thought that it had that quality that would appeal to both adults and kids," he said. "It was jazz, but it was very childlike."
Guaraldi wrote the music while looking at story boards and sketches for the shows. He also played guitar and provided vocals on some tracks. The work was painstaking.

"He would bring in ideas and we would discuss it; sometimes the music worked and sometimes it didn't and we moved stuff around," said Mendelson. "It was the same for all 16 shows."

Guaraldi died after his aorta artery burst. He was staying in a Menlo Park, Calif., hotel preparing to play at a nightclub next door. Recording artists continue to feature Guaraldi's music on their albums. Snippets of songs also show up in commercials. He may have achieved his goal to write standards instead of just hits, said Bang: "Hits are only performed by the people who write them; standards are covered by other people."
Winston offered a more blunt analysis: "'Linus & Lucy' is one of the best known and most beloved songs in the history of the planet; 'Jingle Bells'? Who wants to hear that? It's kind of worn out."

Sir Francis Drake - A lesson in persistence

2010-12-21T21:24:00.000-08:00

Sir Francis Drake, that name sounds vaguely familiar if you have studied any history of England and its mighty naval fleet of the 1500 and 1600's. Francis Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world and the key leader in destroying the dreaded Spanish Armada.

Francis Drake never gave up, he is a true lesson in persistence. See, he failed on a voyage, and it cost him dearly. He never forgot that failure, and he used it as his weapon and reason for much of what he did and accomplished.

The Spanish destroyed one of the ships he sailed, but he survived. He was financially held responsible for the loss of several ships, however, he never forgot the loss. He vowed to recover the loss from the Spaniards, and made it his business to go after the wealth they were shipping from South America and other places. Eventually, he conquered enough and accomplished enough to be knighted.

Now, he is not the perfect example of a person engaged in 100% legitimate activities, but you gotta respect the man for persistence and seriously knocking out one of the greatest naval fleets ever (that of the Spanish Armada).

Adapted from an article by J Bonasia,

Francis Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world, completing the three-year journey in 1580.

Upon returning home, his ship loaded with treasure, Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I.

Decades earlier, a Portuguese crew under Ferdinand Magellan became the first one ever to circle the globe. Yet Magellan died along the way in the Philippines in 1521.

Drake (1540-96) survived the punishing voyage to earn his courageous place in nautical history. He was a skillful navigator who beat back the Spanish fleet over many expeditions in the late 16th century.

"Drake was considered either a great privateer or a great pirate, depending on which side you were on," said William Cogar, CEO of The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va., and a former history professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

British history often portrays Drake as a brave leader who extended the nautical reach of Elizabethan England against its colonial rivals Spain, France and Portugal. Drake clearly overcame many hardships, from raging storms and mutinies to plain starvation and illness.

To Spaniards, Drake was a rogue buccaneer who attacked their undefended vessels and looted hard-won riches. They called him El Draque, or Draco the Dragon. Some saw him as a wizard with devilish powers.

So many fantastic myths grew up around Drake's legend that scholars find it hard to separate facts from folklore, says Jennifer McNabb, a history professor at Western Illinois University.

Drake's Keys

He was England's first captain to sail around the world, earning him a title of knighthood and fabulous riches.
He never let fame or wealth slow his relentless attacks on the Spanish fleet, England's greatest enemy at the time.

"Drake was certainly an accomplished sailor and strategist and politician. At the same time, it's hard to escape the sense that he was a plunderer," said Jennifer McNab. "As for whether he was a scoundrel or a hero, he seems to have been a bit of both."

The Start

Drake was born into a large family in Devonshire, England. He honed his seafaring skills as a teen, and in 1567 he became captain of a commercial trade ship in the Caribbean islands. He served under his relative John Hawkins, a renowned sailor and illicit slave trader.

The next year, Spanish ships attacked Hawkins' fleet. He and Drake escaped with their ships, but they lost five other vessels, erasing all profits from the trip.

Returning to England, Hawkins and Drake were denied financial redress by the government. That painful loss fueled Drake's enmity and desire for revenge against the Spanish. He and Hawkins vowed to wage marauding expeditions against Spanish commerce along the shores of Central and South America.

These two crafty sailors became known as sea dogs. They competed for the favor of the capricious Queen Elizabeth. She played their successes and charms against the best efforts of Walter Raleigh, another talented courtier.

By the early 1570s, Drake was again prowling the warm waters of the Caribbean. He made several forays into the West Indies, attacking Spanish shipping lanes and raiding Spanish-controlled ports.

In 1573, he captured a Spanish mule train in Panama that was hauling 20 tons of Peruvian silver and gold to King Philip II of Spain.

That success led Queen Elizabeth to sanction Drake in 1577 as a privateer on her behalf. This meant she would fund his long voyages.

In return, he brought back vast riches plundered from Spanish colonies — jewels, precious metals, coins and exotic spices.

Drake's greatest adventure involved his harrowing trip to the Pacific Ocean. He was seeking Spanish treasure on the coast of Peru.

One of his ships was destroyed in the violent ocean passage around Cape Horn, at the tip of South America. Another ship missed a rendezvous and had to turn back.

"God, by a contrary wind and intolerable tempest, seemed to set Himself against us," he wrote in his log.

Drake emerged into the Pacific with just one ship, the Golden Hind.

Yet his fearless men pressed on with their plan to raid Spanish ports on the South American coast.

In 1579, Drake captured a Spanish ship off Ecuador. The lucrative take included 26 tons of silver bars, 13 chests of silver coins, and 80 pounds of gold and jewels.

The dazzling payload prompted Drake to seek a speedy route back to England. He sailed up in search of a fabled Northwest Passage that was said to stretch eastward through Alaska and Canada.

Yet frigid waters and storms blocked any progress. The ship had to winter off the Pacific Coast.

The exact location of Drake's Bay on that rocky, foggy coastline has been a point of debate ever since. Some claim it was in Northern California, others in Oregon.

Wherever they landed, Drake's men knew they had to sail westward over the Pacific before crossing the Indian Ocean to get home.

The sailors spent over a month repairing the Golden Hind and storing supplies. They were helped by friendly Coast Miwok natives.

Off to sea, the ship reached Indonesia's Spice Islands, where it ran aground on a reef. The shipmates freed themselves by dumping some cargo overboard.

When the Golden Hind reached England, the Spanish ambassador urged Elizabeth to hang Drake as a pirate and thief. But the queen was eager to build her own empire. She shot back that Drake's actions were a fair recourse for prior Spanish incursions into Ireland and England.

Rather than hang Drake, Elizabeth made him a vice admiral and top naval adviser. Suddenly he was England's political agitator and nautical presence in the New World.

Drake's ascent on the world stage represented the rise of England's emerging Protestant empire against its more established Catholic neighbors, Cogar notes.

"Drake helped define England as a less powerful upstart country against the mighty Spanish empire," the historian said.

Drake was appointed to Parliament and became the mayor of Plymouth, England. Yet he couldn't resist the lure of the high seas for long.

He returned to his ship in 1585 and spent the rest of his life warring with the Spanish fleet.

The most famous naval clash for Drake and Hawkins came in the spring of 1587, when they attacked the port of Cadiz, Spain, and sank, burned or hauled 37 Spanish ships.

This attack on Cadiz hobbled the Spanish Armada's planned invasion of the English Channel, set for that summer. Drake joked about "singeing the beard of the king of Spain."

Spain's Wane

The raid weakened Spain's feared onslaught. When the Armada did attack in 1588, it lost to England and took down Spain's empire with it.

In 1595, Drake set off with Hawkins for one last failed mission to the West Indies. Hawkins soon died near Puerto Rico. The next year, Drake died of dysentery off the coast of Puerto Bello, Panama. He was buried at sea in a lead casket that has never been found.

"Drake seems to have been a master strategist and risk taker," McNabb concluded. "He remains a fascinating figure to this day because his achievement is so closely identified with the nascent phase of British imperialism.

Abraham Lincoln, one of the truly great leaders of all time

2010-12-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

Lincoln was one of the best leaders of all time. I have studied his actions, especially how he dealt with the war. He was a chess player no doubt and studied much about the opponent, and knew what he ultimately had to do. He had hired many Generals to do the work, however, it was only General Ulysses S. Grant that got the job done because he undestood that it wasn't about pushing Lee out of the area, it was about decimating him. If he did not, he would not have won the war and the great US of A, may have been two countries. Notice how Lincoln gives all of the Generals a chance, but it was the General from Illinois who truly understood only a complete victory over Lee would win the war.

This article is adapted from Timothy Johnson, but it really gives a good picture of the key turning point of the Civil War.

When Robert Lincoln arrived at the White House on the afternoon of July 14, 1863, he found Abraham Lincoln in tears. It was the only time the son ever saw his father cry. What had brought about the president's display of anguish? As Gabor Boritt explains in "Lincoln's Generals," he had just received word that the Confederate army had successfully retreated from Pennsylvania to Virginia.

It was a week and a half after the Battle of Gettysburg and the Union Army, although victorious, had just missed another chance to finish the rebels and end the war. One of the most vulnerable times for an army is when it is retreating, especially after the kind of devastating defeat that Robert E. Lee's men had suffered in the Keystone State.

Here was a chance to pursue the men in gray and crush them before they reached the safety of home soil, but Union Gen. George Meade lacked that killer instinct.

Missed Moment

Lincoln's Keys

Defeated the Confederate states' rebellion.
"You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was."

Part of President Lincoln's despair was because he understood a golden opportunity had been lost but his commander in the field did not.

By the second year of the Civil War, Lincoln had emerged as a sound strategist who sometimes understood military necessities better than his generals. That is nowhere better illustrated than in the aftermath of Gettysburg.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson, author of "Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief," after the battle "Meade issued a congratulatory order to the Army of the Potomac and declared that their task would not be completed until the enemy was driven completely out of Pennsylvania."

When Lincoln saw the order, he exclaimed: "My God, is that all?"

He clearly understood the changing nature of the conflict, that it had become a total war, and that to win, the Confederates had to be wiped out, not merely driven away. Meade's timidity let the enemy escape to fight another day.

Lincoln (1809-65) had not always been so astute. His military strategy evolved during the war "from a concept of a limited war to suppress an insurrection and restore the status quo ante bellum to an all-out war to destroy not only the enemy's armies, but also the infrastructure of its society," McPherson wrote.

In 1861 and 1862, Lincoln's limited military strategy involved capturing key locations as a way of forcing the South to acknowledge defeat. Thus the battle cry "On to Richmond!" in the opening weeks of war. Results: the First Battle of Bull Run, the push up the Cumberland River and the capture of Nashville, Tenn.

Some Union generals had the mistaken impression that if they won a battle or two and captured a couple of cities, the Southern rebellion would collapse. Such objectives required the North to gain favorable positions, outmaneuver enemy forces and occupy geographic areas.

This represented a classical strategy, which to Lincoln seemed to be sufficient at the outset. Such an approach had the advantage of limited destruction of the Southern landscape, with political benefits in a postwar reunification process.

Yet as the war dragged on, Lincoln saw that limited war was not enough. Holding key positions would not force the Confederacy to capitulate.

Victory would come only when the North used its superior resources and manpower to crush the South's military. A clear indication that Lincoln had progressed beyond the "on to Richmond" strategy came prior to Gettysburg when Gen. Joseph Hooker proposed yet another advance on the enemy capital.

The president's blunt response was, "I think Lee's army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point." He went on to suggest ways Hooker might bring Lee to battle.

He Had It Right

Seizing the initiative and taking advantage of opportunities are always traits of successful commanders. What separates a good strategist from a bad one is sometimes as simple as recognizing when an opportunity presents itself. As illustrated by two examples in 1862, Lincoln had a knack for such recognition even when his generals did not.

During Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign, 17,000 rebel soldiers out-marched and out-fought three Union armies totaling 52,000 men.

During the battle, Lincoln sent his field commanders instructions on how to do the obvious: trap Jackson in the valley and slay his small army.

Union forces failed to close the trap that Lincoln described, but the episode is illustrative of the president's superior strategic grasp.

Three months later in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, Lee retreated from Maryland into the Shenandoah Valley.

For a time, the Confederates were farther away from Richmond than Gen. George McClellan's Union troops, says Joseph Glatthaar, a history professor at the University of North Carolina and author of "General Lee's Army."

More Frustration

"Lincoln implored McClellan to advance rapidly, blocking mountain passes and drawing supplies along the various east-west rivers, which functioned like spokes of a wheel," Glatthaar told IBD by e-mail.

Such a move would serve the Union cause well, but, said Glatthaar, "McClellan simply would not budge," and the North lost another opportunity.

These examples underscore that Lincoln developed a sophisticated battlefield outlook. That he felt comfortable enough to give his generals such instructions indicates his confidence and conviction as well as his growing suspicion that he possessed a better strategic mind than some of his commanders.

Lincoln quickly saw the North's need to use its numerical advantage.

Union forces in the Eastern and Western theaters often acted without coordination. One army would advance and fight while another retreated or remained stationary.

Such lack of harmony allowed the less numerous rebels to shift troops fast to meet threats. "Lincoln realized that with overwhelming manpower and strength, the Union needed to launch simultaneous and coordinated offensives to exploit that overwhelming strength," Glatthaar said.

Numerous times Lincoln tried to get his generals to understand this obvious principle. At one point he wrote Gen. Don Buell, pleading for him to use his greater numbers to advance against several enemy points simultaneously in order to find and exploit Confederate weaknesses.

Through the first three years of the war, Lincoln searched in vain for an aggressive general who would use the full force of the North's superior resources. An understanding of this frustration explains why the president was distraught to the point of tears in the aftermath of Gettysburg.

Lincoln was steelier when it came to poorly performing subordinates. He hired and fired numerous generals in his search for competence, and by 1864 he had found his man.

What Lincoln liked about Ulysses S. Grant was that this general never complained. He took what he had, went after his opponent and won. So the president promoted him to commanding general of all federal forces in March 1864.

Winning Duo

When Grant reached Washington, Lincoln discovered that they shared the same strategic mindset. Beginning in the spring of 1864, Union armies advanced on all fronts simultaneously and for 11 months pounded Confederate forces in a war of attrition.

This was now total war, and despite the harsh criticism from Northerners sickened by the bloodletting, Lincoln supported Grant to 1865's bitter but successful end.

What began in 1861 as a limited conflict to pacify the South and preserve the Union was three years later part of Lincoln's aim to level the South's forces and its slave-dependent social order.

That flexibility contrasted starkly with his counterpart, the rigid Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Lincoln's pragmatism and astute grasp of strategy prompted historian David Potter to assert that if the North and South had switched presidents, the South might have won.