Lots more to see and experience there so please jump on over. I'll be shutting down this site eventually as well and there will be no further posts to this site after this 1/14/2009.

For the webbies among you, I decided to go with WordPress, an open systems platform that really rocks!

During my undergrad years a group of my friends and I loved Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. We would discuss endlessly the many possible meanings of the two characters plight as they waited for a meeting with Godot, something that would never happen. The play appealed to us, in part, because we were all in that odd but blissful academic purgatory were we could stay sequestered from the real world as we waited for the promise of some wonderful and yet distant state of achievement, lurking just beyond our mind's reach.

I've been thinking alot about that play lately.

A new year is traditionally a time to look forward. A time of renewal. A clean slate to start fresh, make promises to ourselves about how we will do better and shed bad habits that hold us back. We welcome the New Year with the anticipation of a milestone achieved. Heck, it's not as though we did much more than survive another year, bust sometimes that is accomplishment enough. And as with most milestones, getting past it means we can say goodbye to all the crap we put up with in getting there.

Nothing would be more welcome on this New Year's day than the ability to say goodbye to the economic mess of 2008 and all of the misery it has created in its wake, not to mention the hard earned wealth it has taken with it. Yet that's as unlikely as a papal blessing and a presidential pardon for Bernie Madeoff.

The reality is that we are in the midst, perhaps even at the leading edge, certainly not at the end, of the economic turmoil that started with the subprime crisis and has since encircled the globe in financial uncertainty. The latest exuberance around the drop in mortgage interest rates and home refinancing may buy us some more time, and offer a little near-term hope by pumping money into the pockets of home owners, but that does little if anything to change the underlying problem of distrust that has now gripped the economy. 

So how do you restore trust? In a word, "slowly."

As we continue to bail out sectors of our economy that are already well past their natural demise we will only increase the sentiment that something is very, very wrong with the underpinnings of the US financial and industrial systems. This is not going to be an easy or quick process. We will have to face some awful truths that do not sit well with main street American psychology. Truths such as the fact that manufacturing just can't survive, or that despite that last point we have started heading down the slippery slope of subsidizing to nationalizing the automobile industry, or that we need to radically change our public K-12 school system to prepare our kids to compete in the global marketplace.

I know, it sounds as though I'm painting the picture of an impossibly complex crisis. I'm not. In a perverse way I'm glad we are here - although I certainly would not have chosen to take this path, my sentiment echos that of Rahm Emanuel, chief-of-staff for President-elect Barack Obama, "You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste; it's an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid."

But the sense from most people I talk to is that we are wallowing en masse and glad to just keep doing so until something happens to break us free of our collective plight. Trying to be upbeat about something, anything, these days will get you in trouble and makes you feel as though you have been caught whistling a Disney tune at a funeral. We are waiting for some event to give us license to be optimistic, but we just don't know what.

What are you waiting for?

Are you wating for an end to the war? This war has no end. We can pull out of Iraq, Afganistan and every other global conflict. But that does not stop terrorism, elsewhere or at home. Terorism has no end in a world as fluid, interconnected and interdependent as ours.

Are you waiting for Detroit to re-invent itself? In the words of Peter Drucker, "There is no more difficult task than to keep a corpse from rotting."

Are you waiting for the stock market, home prices, and jobs,  to bounce back? They will, while you sit back and drain your savings, 401K and 529s.

Getting the message? Stop waiting. There is no single event nor any combination of events that will mark the end of this era, at least none that are worth waiting for.

In many ways that is the defining aspect of this age. Our challenge is not to eliminate uncertainty and its impact on us, that would be nice but not likely for some time. Our goal should be to learn to live with uncertainty while shedding the accompanying despondence and desperation; to stop acting as if Godot is just around the corner.

If I recall correctly, in the last scene of the play the two main characters decide to hang themselves using a belt or a piece of rope. But the rope breaks so they agree to wait until tomorrow and, if Godot does not show up, try again. Such is the miserable state of their intolerable existence, which they accept without any protest.

To those who understand and begin to adapt, dare I say embrace, this fundamental shift into a prolonged era of uncertainty, to those who are starting businesses and building jobs instead of waiting for better times, to those who are investing in hope rather than trading it in at half price, to those who see opportunity now rather than wait for it, to those who REFUSE to waste the crisis - HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As for the rest of you , well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow. BTW, don't forget to bring better rope. - tk

When I was 15 I lived through a military coup-de-ta. For three days we all had to stay locked up in our homes watching a government owned TV channel broadcast the national anthem with intermittent breaks of propaganda. If anyone was caught outside after curfew in groups of three or more they could be shot on site, questions later.

Luckily it was a "bloodless" coup, at least so we were told. I heard otherwise from more than a few parents of university protesters whose children where overrun by tanks. But as far as coups go it was certainly among the least violent.

Even still, let me tell you, for a young American kid full of the arrogance of youth and more specifically that unique blend of American youth, it was an eye opener to see how quickly freedom could be taken away.

Three years later when I attained the privilege to vote I didn't walk to the polls, I ran. I've been doing so ever since. Sorry to be so sappy about this but I still get goosebumps when I fill in that little oval, pull the lever, or pop a chad! For me entering a voting booth is a near sacred experience.

So it was serendipity when I got an invite a few months back to return to the same place where I had experienced that military coup so many years ago to deliver a keynote address to a few hundred execs. At the dinner with my hosts on the night before the conversation turned to politics and the upcoming US presidential election. In a moment of uncharacteristic public political commentary I launched into a tirade about how many of my friends had no interest in voting, how they saw it as a futile, even silly gesture. If I recall correctly my exact words were, "It makes me sick."

One of my hosts shot back instantly, "I don't vote. Why bother. They [the candidates] all suck." He was referring to the candidates in his country not the US, but I've heard this same refrain all to often from my stateside friends. It seems this is a universal background chorus in all democracies.

I believe passionately that every vote does make a difference, in terms of what it says about or country collectively and what it says about us as individuals. If "they all suck" then pick the one that sucks the least. Do you avoid making decision in life because and ideal choice is not always one of your options? (If you answered yes, I'm amazed you read this far!) Of course not. Life is a constant series of choices among less than ideal options. And if they "all suck" that bad, write someone in, write yourself in and tell your kids you ran for President.

I'm not naive, I understand that a voice, many voices, can be manipulated by the influence of charisma, media, money and short sightedness. But, at the same time no real progress of mankind, no righteous revolution has ever been achieved through silence nor through complaining and whining.

Democracy is not efficient, it is fluid, it ebbs and oscillates, sometimes wildly, in short, it's far from perfect. The problem, in Winston Churchill's words, with being part of "the worst form of government except all others that have been tried," , is that there is never an end to how many ways we can find to be victims, to criticize the process of democracy. Yes, it is flawed. Yes, it will never, by design, satisfy many of us. Yes, it demands that politicians play to the whim of the people, however, near term that whim may be. Yes, it is a dizzying, constant back and forth of power and policy, finger pointing and blame.

Get over it. Sitting on the sidelines does nothing.

Voting, it is still the most brilliant example of how, through the choice and the voice of individuals,  great ideas and great people can occasional rise from the din of undifferentiated chaos and crisis.

Whatever you chose, what it says, quite simply, is that you understand and accept that you have a right (constitutional) and an obligation (moral) to make your voice heard. No matter the outcome, the process of involvement alone makes a difference by creating a voice where there would otherwise only be silence, but for the whining and complaining of victims.

Silence abdicates power and choice.

Silence creates victims.

Silence is not a choice.

If I'm overdue for a posting it's only because like everyone else in the known universe I've been trying to keep myself as busy as possible to avoid coming up for air to read the headlines. It's a mess - no doubt about it but we are living through an era that will go down in history as a prime example of how we not only repeat the mistakes of the past but add to the magnitude of those mistakes each time we do. The question on everyone's lips is, of course, how did we get into this predicament? (Read on...)

FIRST A FEW WARNINGS AND A DISCLAIMERS:
I AM NOT AN ECONOMIST ( I like being right more than half the time)
I AM NOT A PESSIMIST (But I'm about to sound like one if you don't read all the way to the end of the post)
I AM NOT STUFFING MY MATTRESS WITH CASH (Yet)

Where to start? Well I'm not an economist, and that may be a good thing in this case, since the collective brainpower of the world's economists, a handful of Nobel prize winners, and the smartest of the smartest financial minds did little to keep us out of harms way. In fact they drove us into the midst of the storm. And I have to admit, unabashedly, that I too believed that they were all smart enough to keep us and our 401Ks safe.

What's clear now is that the danger of where we are and where we are going has much less to do with what we have learned about the past and so much more to do with what we don't know about the future. It's what for years now I've termed "The Uncertainty Principle." I've written about it, talked about, and consulted on how to deal with it. Yet, I still didn't think we would be so blind to uncertainty as we have been.

Maybe I should have listened to Drucker. In a conversation we had nearly eight years ago he said to me, "Tom, we are not in the middle but in the beginning of a period of great uncertainty." His advice to me was simple (and I still have the audio recording to listen to!) "Stay liquid." He felt every business needed at least 12 months of solid cash to weather the storm.

So what's my take on the problem at hand? Well first of all I'm sick of the continued line of crap we get whenever we hear a Wall Street expert being asked this same question. If you listen it's easy to see how wound up most of these "experts" are in their own web of complexity. It isn't that complex and we don't even need to get into political head-banging to explain which side of the isle is to blame.

The problem is that there is "no place left to hide." That's all there is to it. It used to be that we could weather a financial crisis by moving money elsewhere and covering up the tracks of the previous mess. Soon enough the next growth market would eclipse the last and onward we would go. And if the mess was large enough there was always an ocean or a continent or two to cross and find safe haven - can you spell E-U-R-O?

But two things happened to change the rules of the game.

First, in case you haven't heard, the world is flat, or at least close enough to flat to make visibility across and into other economies much more likely. By the way, when I say "visibility" I'm talking about the impact of sentiment and perception as much as anything else. When we react now we do so as a global population of lemmings heading to a single global precipice -nice imagery, eh?

Second, the smart folks who made a living covering their tracks by wrapping a small mess in an ever bigger more complex mess, and who convinced themselves and everyone else that complexity equaled value got very, very, very good at doing just that. The financial instruments that were being sold were simply impossible to understand. Wall Street had Nobel Physicist writing formulas to make the world appear not only utterly complex but through that complexity to convince us that there was some unknown law of the universe at play guaranteeing that they had the insight inaccessible to us simple minded mortals. I think insight of that magnitude is better termed delusion, but again what do I know, I'm no economist.

So here we are and there's why. So what? Well, again keeping it simple, "learn to live with it!" The biggest failing of the current crisis goes to the root of my Uncertainty Principle, which says that "as uncertainty increases the time to respond decreases." Simply put if you wait you're screwed, but you REALLY want to wait. We can't. If we wait to act we fuel global perception that uncertainty has triumphed. Any action is better than inaction - and yes, I understand the risk. But, the only relevant question in my mind is "does the risk of action outweigh the risk of inaction?" Just look around you right now to see.

This is probably the greatest financial mess most of us over the age of 30 will see in our lifetime (sorry to those under 30, but your turn will come!). But here is the god news (the optimist emerges from the chaos) It's also the greatest opportunity we will ever have to make some fundamental changes in how we operate in this new transparent, uncertain, flat, interconnected, crowded world. I'm convinced that when we look back on this we will see it as a fundamental turning point in how we built the foundation for the next 50 years of economic growth. I want to be part of that - and that's exciting!

Oh, but did I mention that I'm not an economist?