Why Joe Biden Won’t Be President

Dr. Munr Kazmir

Joe Biden’s problem isn’t Joe Biden. The Charlamagne Tha God interview revealed Biden’s biggest weakness is his team.

Even among people who really want Joe Biden to be the next President of the United States, there is very little enthusiasm. Joe Biden has an even bigger enthusiasm gap than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

He is a former Vice President, a former Senator- but his in-person events, and now his online events, aren’t very well attended. Unlike the Hillary Clinton campaign, which played off Clinton’s low numbers at campaign functions as a deliberate strategy to an overly-credulous press willing to buy that nonsense, the Biden campaign has just assiduously avoided talking about it.

Biden himself gets a little upset, even visibly flustered when the subject of the lack of enthusiasm for his campaign is raised. He points out, with good reason, that he has managed to become the de facto Democratic nominee in spite of that.

He is right, of course; Joe Biden has managed to cinch the nomination, in spite of the prevailing lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden, his poor performances during the debates and his lackluster fundraising.

But it wasn’t the strength of his campaign that carried Biden across the finish line, if indeed he has crossed the finish line. It took a massive and concerted effort by Democratic leadership, spear-headed at last by a decisive endorsement by Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, for Biden to advance.

Why?

If Joe Biden was and remains the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, why didn’t Joe Biden’s campaign do a better job of convincing everyone of that?

More specifically, if Biden was counting on the African-American vote to carry him in the primary contest, as was his constant refrain on the campaign trail when he lost all the primaries that came before South Carolina, why wasn’t Biden more proactively approaching Black community leaders for their help?

More importantly, why wasn’t the Biden campaign doing this?

Influential African-American leader Jesse Jackson endorsed Bernie Sanders on March 8. This fact was lost in the constant drama of the primaries, as was the reason Jackson gave for supporting Sanders when most of the African-American community favored Joe Biden:

Joe Biden never asked for Jesse Jackson’s endorsement.

That might have been a forgivable oversight. But Biden’s team hasn’t exactly been covering itself in glory courting the African-American community.

Which brings us to Charlamagne Tha God and the 18 minute appearanceJoe Biden made on his hit morning show, The Breakfast Club. Biden avoided it longer than other candidates running for the Democratic nomination.

Charlamagne Tha God is influential in the young Black community. This interview was an all-important chance for Joe Biden to show that he wasn't taking the Black vote for granted.

Joe Biden blew it. Or rather, Biden’s team caused him to blow it.

Not because Biden erupted, “if you don’t know if you’re voting for me or Trump, you ain’t Black!” after the host asked him what Biden planned on doing for the Black community if elected.

During the rest of the interview, Joe Biden hardly distinguished himself. And there was no reason for it but pure laziness, failure to plan ahead; failure to take the African-American community seriously as a constituency.

Many people may have never heard of Charlamagne The God; but he isn’t unknown. Charlamagne Tha God wrote an autobiographical book in 2017: “Black Privilege”. In it, CTG describes his whole life, his moral philosophy;everything.

It that book, Charlamagne Tha God- aka Larry, Cowboy and Julie’s son from Monck’s Corner South Carolina- gave a politician, and that politician’s advance guard, everything they could possibly want or need to impress the audience and hosts of The Breakfast Club.

If anyone on Biden’s team were to have read this one book- it isn’t even that long, and on the audiobook version, Charlamagne reads it himself- Biden could have knocked that interview out of the park and deeply impressed the Black community listening.

Charlamagne Tha God loves the truth; he hates lies and liars. He is so committed to the truth, he has taken multiple beatings in his life solely because he refused to lie or pull punches.

CTG loves truth so much, he spends multiple chapters in his book on it. He mentions specifically the strategy his likes to use to diffuse potentially embarrassing truths about himself.

“The Eight Mile Rule”

Being deeply immersed in Hip-Hop and Rap culture, Charlamagne Tha God references the moment in Eminem’s semi-auto biographical film “8 Mile” when “B-Rabbit”, Eminem’s character, enters the last rap battle against his most bitter enemy.

Instead of waiting to be insulted, Rabbit raps every embarrassing truth about himself with which his enemy might attack him: “I know everything he’s got to say against me: I am white, I am a f#$% bum, I do live in a trailer with my mom. My boy Future is an Uncle Tom.”

Joe Biden should have done this.

Knowing Biden’s record of authoring the 1990’s crime bill which has unfairly incarcerated so many young Black men in America for long sentences in the years since; knowing his record of making racist “gaffes”; knowing Charlamagne Tha God’s fervor for the truth, Joe Biden should have come out swinging…with The Truth.

“I made a mistake. I’m sorry. There is no excuse for it. I was wrong. But I helped elect the first African-American president and, if you give me a chance, I can help undo my past mistakes and make sure the next Black President of the U.S. isn’t confined to a jail cell, or lacking educational opportunities, or killed in the streets.”

Charlamagne Tha God is highly intelligent- his mother was a teacher and he was a self-professed “nerd” growing up- with a very curious and flexible mind. He would have known that Biden must have read his book. But Biden would have even gotten bonus points for admitting he had read Charlamagne’s book in order to prepare himself. Even more points if he had admitted reading the 48-Laws of Power, as CTG has, and applying that, too.

For a real laugh, Biden could have opened with, “Hello, my name is Joe Biden and I am not a white devil.” Anyone who has read Charlamagne’s book would understand this joke; any person familiar with the works of authors like Malcom X and Elijah Muhammed would understand as well, and appreciate the humor.

On a silver platter- in black and white, complete with convenient audiobook- radio host Charlamagne Tha God gave everything a guest on his show might need to be successful, even mentioning how much he likes people who are hard-working, diligent and willing to go the extra mile to be prepared.

Except, obviously, no one on the Biden campaign bothered to read it.

Why not? They have had plenty of downtime- no campaign events to plan, no in-person meetings with donors to conduct. The book was released in 2017.

We can tell no one on Biden’s team read Charlamagne’s biography because of the way Joe Biden tried all his normal politician’s tricks of non-answer answers and little contrived mannerisms during the interview; all of which fell as flat as T-Pain without autotune.

Why the lack of curiosity about a wildly popular media figure like Charlamagne Tha God? Why the lack of preparation for what was bound to be a contentious interview full of hard questions?- which the Biden team would have been more prepared for, had they read “Black Privilege”.

Charlamagne Tha God once told Kanye West that West’s newest album“Yeezus was wack to me,”- to his face. And Kanye West isn’t the only one.Far from it.

Charlamagne Tha God certainly has no love for Donald Trump. But there is no way he was impressed with Joe Biden. And that is what should be making voting Democrats the maddest, and most determined to demand accountability from Joe Biden’s campaign staff.

Brad Parscale is Donald Trump’s campaign manager. If Donald Trump was booked on Charlamagne Tha God’s talk show, you can bet someone on that campaign staff would have read “Black Privilege” and given Trump the cliff-notes, at the very least.

Trump’s campaign is coming hard for the African-American vote; and they are getting a great deal farther with young Black men in America that any Democrat should be comfortable with.

This is the very audience of the Breakfast Club; why wasn’t Biden prepared to fight for this constituency by at least doing a little research on an interesting person like CTG?

There are even larger implications with Biden’s lackadaisical approach to key Democratic voting blocs like African-Americans; Biden isn’t trying that hard to win the Hispanic-American vote, either.

Before announcing his Latin-American voter outreach effort “Todos con Biden”, the Biden team couldn’t even be bothered to secure the website; a glaring error the Trump campaign was ready and willing to exploit.

With the Biden campaign in “full gear”, and the Democratic Party in the fight of its life, these errors should be striking fear into the hearts of voting Democrats everywhere.

They should be wondering, as Charlamagne Tha God must have been, if Joe Biden really wants to be President.

How to create your own luck

                    By Bayo Ogunmupe

    Those who are lucky in their chosen career paths; seemingly getting to where they want to be, without effort and making a living from it. We look at others experiencing great success and say, "Oh they must be better than me, more talented or just more lucky. What we do when we think that way is placing ourselves in victim mode. That way we disempower ourselves by gnawing away the fact that we're responsible for our own successes. The truth is that we have the talent to create our own success and good luck whether we believe it or not. moreover, there so many things we can do to produce our success in following our dreams as writers, entrepreneurs or actors. You have the power to create the talent and luck to get to where you want to be.

    You can achieve this when you combine your passion with the positive energy of the law of attraction. With these you can boost your chances of reaching your goals. However, all the talent in this world, is nothing compared to a strong work ethic and good discipline. This is essential to creating luck for oneself in order to be successful. Examine anyone who has made it to the top of his field, you will see that discipline is paramount. Another important factor is good time keeping. Going to work late is a bad habit that grows out of a lack of discipline. By making a conscious decision to value time both yours and that of others, you will find that your life becomes a lot less stressful.

    Your energy everyday is crucial to your success. This you can gain through getting enough sleep everyday, eating a balanced diet and undertaking regular physical exercise. By working from the core of your best self your emotional and mental life will blossom. This enables you to take on any task and begin to create a deep sense of self worth and invincibility. By always giving everything your best  shot with maximum effort you ensure good luck and success. This way you teach yourself you are capable. Also, passion is a key ingredient to success. Feed your passion by loving yourself and your work you increase your self worth. Sadly, you won't get anywhere if you don't love what you do. Look at the greats in your profession; you will see how they have mastered what they do due to passion. In whatever field, passion is what drives us to do our best.

    A way of attracting good luck to oneself is learning from those who came before you. The way to excel in your profession is to learn the history of that profession. By opening to learning from those who came before you, you grow into a colossus of your age. Stop envying those who are already where you want to be by cultivating humility and a sense of purpose. That will ingratiate you to them. They will then teach you the ropes from where you carve your own individual way forward. Going the extra mile shows you are serious about improving yourself and bent on making progress. People will always remember you for delivering just a little more. Push yourself a little harder than usual, you will be pleasantly surprised by your own prowess.

    Confidence comes from knowing your job, so always be prepared. Whether you are to make a speech, do an interview or going to watch a game of soccer, always be prepared, you might be asked to give the opening prayer or give a tribute. Being proactive (planning in advance) instead of reactive (reacting after things have happened) is a much stronger approach to life. You should realize that talent, luck and success are not by chance, they are all habits within our control.

Only new selves change lives

                    By bayo Ogunmupe

    It has been found that if you want to change your life, you must invent a new self. Changing habits never work, only changing your identity does. By the time you become great, you would have become a completely different person. You are more than one version of yourself throughout the course of your life. Every new experience requires you to adapt your identity to fit into your environment. Those who fail to adapt struggle for success in vain. But most of the time we adapt unconsciously. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."---- Charles Darwin.

    The elements of who we are become decided for us---our personalities are shaped by nature, the way we're raised, environment, religion, politics, family and our peers. Then, something happens to disrupt the narrative. A line in your story changes and your worldview is upended. We cope with devastating loss as our old beliefs don't make sense anymore. We realize we aren't the people we wanted to be. Life wasn't working out the way we hoped it would. Soon, you find yourself stuck  in a hole of your own making. You are then forced to look around and ask: What am I doing that keeps me in this shit hole? It is at that point you wake up to realize that you have a choice to change or adapt to the world of your dreams.

      At this point, identity becomes the foundation of your life experience. You realize, what you think you are. What you believe you see. Thus, nurture has a heavier influence on you than you realize. In psychology, the term for changing your identity in response to personal crisis and tension is called positive disintegration. This happens when your sense of self collapses, and you are forced to build a new self. However, you don't need to wait for a life crisis before you decide what your next identity will be. You can always become an active participant in your personal development of yourself, thereby avoiding many mistakes, discomfort and unhappiness.

    Therefore, if you want to change your life, you must perforce, change your identity. When you are trying to change your habits, you think of yourself as being bad with money and that you are now trying hard to be good with money. You use your new identity of a person who is bad with money, wanting to become good with money to overwhelm your old self. As humans, we're wired to shield our identities. We unconsciously latch onto news that supports what we want to believe and block information that doesn't; because we are self affirming creatures. In that case, we're not going to act in a way that contradicts what we believe ourselves to be.

    Indeed, if you want to change your life, trying to change your habits will always fail. This is because, in a habit changing mindset, you will always remain a person who cannot change his life without a new self. Thus in order to forge change, you have to focus a new identity, not new behaviors. Two identities cannot coexist in you simultaneously. You have opt for the new identity you would like to be ideally. If you know as a person you value: financial security, purpose and personal freedom; then you have to adopt those values and become a person who is fantastic with money, daily meditate his purpose and work towards long term financial freedom. Always imagine the best possible version of yourself; the version that you always wanted to be. Stop choosing to be less than you want to be.

    Ask people about things they regret doing, they will usually describe those behaviors as being, not really them. That's because their mental identity at the time, did not reflect who they fundamentally are as people. To change your life, you have to imagine you are already the kind of people that can handle money, master challenges: your ideal self. You then build a new identity around being good with money, healthy, compassionate and forward thinking. Life gives you many opportunities to do these. In fact life has just given you one right now for being able to read this column.

The mindsets that build wealth

                        

By Bayo Ogunmupe

    To succeed in life, stop playing not to lose and start playing to win. Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are always afraid to lose and they often lose. Failure is part of the process of success. When you are avoiding failure, you are also avoiding success. Robert Kiyosaki, a famous entrepreneurship expert and co-author of many books with U.S President Donald Trump says he had two dads as a child. he had his own father and the father of his best friend. These his two fathers were very different when it came to dealing with finances. Robert learned what not to do to be rich from his own dad and what to do to be rich from the other. One helped him avoid staying poor, the other helped him get rich.

    Kiyosaki's book: Rich Dad Poor Dad is a modern classic of personal finance. It's my favorite finance book which I read again and again. Through it Kiyosaki delivers his captivating lessons on finance. If it weren't so captivating, the book wouldn't have sold 32 million copies in three years. The first lesson to help you escape poverty and build wealth is that fear and greed are keeping you in the rat race, only self education will get you out of it. You are afraid to exit the rat race because you think people will brand you "weird." You are allowing fear and greed to dominate your decision making, which is why you are still sticking to the old mantra, "Go to school, get a job, play it safe, when in reality no job is safe anymore. Whenever you get a raise at your job or a manna from heaven, the wise choice would be to invest the extra money in assets that build wealth like stocks or bonds.

    Maybe you find a good stock with 60 percent chance of doubling your money  within a year; but a 40 percent chance of losing it all. However, most likely  because of your greed and fear, of playing not to lose the money altogether, you will keep yourself from investing. Instead, you might spend the extra money to improve your lifestyle, like buying a car, with payments eating up the money. This way you're guaranteed to lose 100 percent. This shows the importance of educating yourself financially. Sadly we receive neither entrepreneurship nor financial education in school or college, so it's up to you to educate yourself for life. It is for this reason that many Nigerians don't save anything for their retirement.

    Two, adopt the mindset of "work to learn" instead of "work to earn." And be smart with your money. Take a job in a field you know nothing about, such as sales, customer service or communications; in order for you to develop new skills: you never know what they might be useful for in the future. Each month, make sure you buy books, attend courses and seminars on personal finance and start building your financial intelligence. The first step toward building wealth lies in the mindset of managing risks instead of avoiding them. Studies about investment will teach you that's better not to play it safe because that means missing out on big potential rewards. Start small that you can treat the money as if it's gone, so that you will worry less about losing it. Kiyosaki suggests creating an "I want" and "I don't want" list; like I want to retire at 50 or I don't want to end up broke like my poor uncle.

    Three, finally, use your money to acquire assets, not liabilities. Assets are stocks, bonds, real estate that you rent out or lease and anything that generates money that increases in value over time. Liabilities are cars, electronics with maintenance costs and periodical payments. This includes a house with a mortgage and of course debt. Anything that takes money out of your pocket periodically is a liability. There is no rush to change your situation, just stay at whatever job you're holding and "mind your own business." In this case it is your job that pays the bills and your business is what makes you wealthy. Then, build your business and use it to invest in assets which eventually become the primary source of your income. The most important thing is that you start today. As you are your own biggest asset, so the first thing you should put money into is yourself. Kudos to Kiyosaki who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad to tell the story of a boy with two fathers to help you build a life of wealth and freedom.

IDEA MARKETPLACE

by imagineer7 A few years back, I was charged with putting together a series of brainstorming sessions for a publishing house that was in serious financial jeopardy. I observed that the participants spoke more enthusiastically about their interactions during coffee breaks than about the sessions they had attended. I thought a little reversal and thought, "Why not ditch the formal brainstorming program and have only coffee breaks?" We then set up what was to become the first of a series of open brainstorming meetings, which we called “Idea Marketplaces,” that the company has held. The Idea Marketplaces created several "breakthrough" ideas, which saved the publisher. One idea was for the publisher to pay leading authors a flat fee to write short books on socially responsible topics. The publisher paid for the book production by selling advertising space and made its profit by selling reprint rights to paperback houses and foreign publishers. The publisher also started a "customized" publishing service whereby users blend a variety of different kinds of information into a customized textbook for classroom use. The text is also clustered with several videodiscs which enable the instructor to visually present the material in a variety of different ways. The publisher also improved the warehouse operation dramatically by working with the Association of the Blind to hire blind laborers to improve the speed up the packing and shipping of books. This association with the blind also provided tremendous tax benefits and public relations. Idea Marketplaces are open to all interested employees and are designed to give everyone from janitors to CEOs the opportunity and the motivation to suggest original and novel ideas. The purpose behind the formlessness of an Idea Marketplace is to let ideas take their own shape, undistorted by status or personal politics in a group. The "customized" publishing service was the brainchild of a warehouse fork-lift operator, the idea of selling advertising space in books was suggested by an accountant and the idea of working with the Association of the Blind was suggested by a receptionist. The marketplace should be held in a large room with no furniture (other than some folding chairs) to distract the participants. Walls should be left bare to pin up notices or ideas. Ideally, several smaller meeting rooms near the larger room should also be available. Participants use these smaller rooms to pursue ideas they are interested in. One distinguishing feature of an Idea Marketplace is that there is no agenda. Meeting leaders, therefore, are automatically eliminated. If no one is in charge, there is no one to keep rigidly insisting that an agenda be followed (or someone who deviates and sidetracks all over the place). Idea Marketplaces, instead, are governed by a few simple guidelines, a general theme, and very loose time limits. The marketplace begins when the participants decide it does. This typically is about an hour after everyone has arrived. People stand or sit in one large circle. Someone reads the meeting's theme aloud e.g. “How can we improve profits?”) and invites everyone to identify a related issue for which they are willing to assume responsibility. When someone suggests an issue (e.g., look for new markets), that person writes it on a large sheet of paper, reads it aloud, and posts it on one of the walls. This process continues until all the issues have been posted. The next phase is the crux of the Idea Marketplace. During it, everyone is invited to sign up on one of the large "issue" sheets to discuss the issue. Participants can sign up for as many groups as they wish. Sponsors of each issue convene their groups to side rooms, discuss the issue, and record any ideas or other information suggested. The ideas are then harvested and disseminated to the relevant parties in the organization. Advocates note that the Idea Marketplace exploits a well-known innovation phenomenon that usually is left to chance: Breakthrough ideas in any field come from unexpected sources. These sources often are outside the field of expertise itself. As a result, the Idea Marketplace concept encourages "nonexpert" comments from people who can view business problems with fresh perspectives. Here are a few simple guidelines to keep in mind for your Idea Marketplace: a) Whoever comes are the right people. You can only create with the people who are there. Don't worry about those who aren't there, as that is a needless distraction. b) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Focus your thoughts and efforts on the here and now. This is the only way you can recognize the opportunities that arise. If it didn't happen or might have happened, it doesn't matter. c) Whenever it starts is the right time. You can tell when it's time to start by getting into the rhythm of the people around you and listening. d) When it's over, it's over. Save your time and agony. When discussions stop, move on with confidence to do something more useful. Michael Michalko

INNOVATOR’S PERSPECTIVE

by imagineer7

Remember how when you were a little child you felt that you were everything. You formed the thought that there was no limit to what was possible. You had this bright, shining self- image and were laughing and curious about everything every day. And then something happened to us, we went to school. In school we were taught how past thinkers thought. We were not taught how to think, we were taught how to reproduce what past thinkers had done in the past. It is as if we entered school as a question mark and graduated as a period.

This is why we so often fail when confronted with a new problem that is similar to past experiences only in superficial ways and is different from previously encountered problems in its deep structure. Interpreting problems by excluding possibilities through the prism of past experience will, by definition, lead the thinker astray. This kind of reproductive thinking leads us to the usual ideas and not to original ones. If you always think the way you always thought, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

When confronted with a truly original idea, we experience a kind of conceptual inertia comparable to the physical law of inertia which states that objects resist change; an object at rest remains so, and an object in motion continues in the same direction unless stopped by some force. Just as physical objects resist change, ideas resist movement from their current state and change in their direction of movement. Consequently, when people develop new ideas they tend to resemble old ones; new ideas do not move much beyond what exists.

The more educated and expert the person is, the more change is resisted. They see what they expect to see, not what is there. At one time, ancient astronomers believed that the heavens were eternal and made of ether. This theory made it impossible for them to observe meteors as burning stones from outer space. Although the ancients witnessed meteor showers and found some on the ground, they couldn’t recognize them as meteors from outer space. They only sought out and observed only those things that confirmed their theory about the heavens.

Many business people are like the ancient astronomers and actively seek out only that information that confirms their theories about their business and their markets. History is replete with examples of how experts were unable to see the merit or even give fair value to new ideas. In 1899 Charles Duell, the Director of the U.S. Patent Office, suggested that the government close the office because everything that can be invented has been invented. Duell was not able to think beyond the conventional paradigms of the times. Other examples are:

• The computer is not for business. When Univac invented the computer, they refused to talk to business people who inquired about it, because they said the computer was invented for scientists and had no business applications. Along came IBM.

• The computer is not for personal use. IBM once said that according to their past experiences in the computer market, there is virtually no market for the personal computer. In fact, they said their market research experts were absolutely certain there were no more than five or six people in the entire world who had need for a personal computer. Along came Apple.

• The copier is not for business. In 1938, Chester Carlson invented the electronic copier. Every major corporation turned down his ideas, because carbon paper was so cheap and plentiful no one would buy an expensive copy machine.

• It is not a watch. In 1968, the Swiss dominated the watch industry. The Swiss themselves invented the electronic watch movement at their research institute in Neuchatel, Switzerland. It was rejected by every Swiss watch manufacturer. Based on their past experiences in the industry, they believed this couldn't possibly be the watch of the future. After all, it was battery powered, did not have bearings or a mainspring and almost no gears. Seiko took one look at this invention that the Swiss manufacturers rejected at the World Watch Congress that year and took over the world watch market. 

• No business will use Federal Express. Fred Smith, while a student at Yale, came up with the concept of Federal Express, a national overnight delivery service. The U.S. Postal Service, UPS, his own business professor and, virtually every delivery expert in the U.S., doomed his enterprise to failure. Based on their experiences in the industry, no one, they said, will pay a fancy price for speed and reliability.

The first key to innovation is the ability to think beyond conventional paradigms and to examine traditional constraints using non-traditional thinking. You have to be able to go outside your own frame of reference and find another way of looking at the problem. Before Fred Smith created Federal Express, overnight delivery did not exist at the national level. The U.S. Postal Service and UPS both believed that overnight point-to-point was economically not feasible.

Fred Smith realized that computers were replacing human functions, but the dependability of those products and the delivery systems for repairs were not up to par. Where the Postal Service and UPS were satisfied with the available delivery systems, Fred saw an opportunity for a new business.

His solution was to create a delivery system that operates essentially the way a bank clearinghouse does: Put all points on a network and connect them through a central hub. If you take any individual transaction, that kind of system seems absurd -- it means making at least one extra stop. But if you look at the network as a whole, it's an efficient way to create an enormous number of connections. If, for instance, you want to connect 100 markets with one another and if you do it all with direct point-to-point deliveries, it will take 100 times 99 -- or 9,900 -- direct deliveries. But if you go through a single clearing system, it will take at most 100 deliveries. So you're looking at a system that is about 100 times as efficient. The same idea was subsequently employed, of course, in the airline industry. 

He did something else a little bit unusual, which was to combine the airplanes and trucks into one delivery system. This combination seems innocuous today but at the time all the traditional people felt that it was highly iconoclastic. So that's the genesis of Federal Express. 

The second key to innovation is to be able to discern the important issues and to keep your goal in view. Fred Smith said he didn’t understand what his real goal was when he started Federal Express. He thought he was selling the transportation of goods. In fact, he discovered what they were really selling was “peace of mind.” After he figured it out, he made it possible for customers to track packages right from their desktops.

The Postal Service and UPS got in trouble when they confused the means as an end. They were complacent and were reluctant to change or innovate because they were afraid of failure. They followed the old “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” rule.  Innovative companies and people understand that whenever we try to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. The two most important questions to ask when we fail are: “What have I learned?” and “What have I done?” 

These are questions that are asked at Dell where innovation is about taking risks and learning from failure. Today, Dell is well known for inventory management, logistics, and supply chain management. That wasn’t always the case. In 1989 they were faced with a disaster that rocked the company. The personal computer industry was making a transition to a new type of memory chip, and Dell was way overstocked with the old chip.

That was a costly mistake for a small company, and it took over a year to recover, but Dell learned from it. The failure led them to create and develop a new way to manage inventory, and they went from being in the last place in the minor leagues of the computer industry to where they win the World Series every year. 

Dell discovered what all innovators know..........that failure is a prerequisite to invention. No business can develop a breakthrough product or service if it’s not willing to encourage risk taking and learn from the subsequent mistakes. IBM’s Thomas Watson, Sr. put it this way, “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” Understanding how and why corporations succeed after failure, changes one’s perception of the value of the failure. “The glass is half full” and the “glass is half empty” are descriptions of the same phenomenon but have vastly different meaning. Changing a company’s perception from half full to half empty opens big innovation opportunities. There have been dramatic improvements in health care over the last twenty years leading to longer and healthier lives for Americans. Still, rather than rejoicing in the great improvements, Americans emphasize how far away they still are from immortality. This perception of the glass being half empty opened vast opportunities in the nineties for new health magazines, exercise classes, jogging equipment and health foods.

A change in perception does not alter facts. It changes the meaning. You do not see things as they are, you see them as you are. There was a time when no one wanted to use Post-It notes. When Arthur Fry, corporate scientist at 3M, first started people about Post-It notes, no one understood what he was talking about. Advertising didn’t work so, of course, no one at 3M believed there was a market for it. Fry had to plead with management not to kill the idea. Desperate, he launched his own innovative campaign to generate interest.. He had the Mid-Atlantic sales manager give away Post-Its to secretaries and other key people in companies up and down the east coast. Then, abruptly, he stopped giving out free samples. Within a short time, everyone realized how much they had come to rely on those notes. They had become addicted to them. Fry realized that the only way to change the market’s perception about the notes was to get people to try them by giving away samples free.

Another way to look at things with a new perspective is to hire people from some other industry. Citizens Financial Group in Providence R.I., hires people who have experience outside of banking– creative people who can apply what they’ve learned from other industries to the Group’s traditional business. For example, they’ve put full-service branches into grocery stores run by a person with a sales background. Their ATM division is run by someone who was in real estate. One of the chief executives has a background in packaging.

Employing people with diverse skills and talents helps the group to continually challenge the status quo when developing business strategies. Most banks, for example, concentrate on being a service for existing customers. Citizens use their grocery store branches to acquire new customers. The staff goes into the grocery aisles wearing their Citizens aprons pushing Citizens shopping carts with promotional offers, and getting into friendly conversations. Their objective is to develop relationships with store customers. Then when shoppers have banking needs, they’ll find a friendly, familiar face at the bank.

To truly understand the necessity of innovation sit down and prepare a trial P&L for your business dated five years from now, assuming no new products, services, and improved business processes. People who have done this suddenly realize that innovation is their lifeline to the future and the time to grab it is now. If you wait too long, it may be beyond your reach.
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MICHAEL MICHALKO

https://imagineer7.wordpress.com/2020/05/05/about-michael-michalko/

THE REASONS WHY CREATIVE GENIUSES KEEP WRITTEN RECORDS OF ALL THEIR CREATIVITY ATTEMPTS

by imagineer7

A habit to consciously cultivate is the habit of keeping a written record of your creativity attempts in a notebook, on file cards or in your computer. A record not only guarantees that the thoughts and ideas will last, since they are committed to paper or computer files, but will goad you into other thoughts and ideas. The simple act of recording his ideas enabled Leonardo da Vinci to dwell on his ideas and improve them over time by elaborating on them. Thus, Leonardo was able to take simple concepts and work them into incredible complex inventions that were years ahead of their time, such as the helicopter, the bicycle and the diving suit.

EDISON’S NOTEBOOKS. Edison relentlessly recorded and illustrated every step of his voyage to discovery in his 3,500 notebooks that were discovered after his death in 1931. His strategy of keeping a written record of his work was a significant key to his genius. His notebooks got him into the following habits:

They enabled him to cross-fertilize ideas, techniques and conceptual models by transferring them from one problem to the next.  For example, when it became clear in 1900 that an iron-ore mining venture in which Edison was financially committed was failing and on the brink of bankruptcy, he spent a weekend poring over his notebooks and came up with a detailed plan to redirect the company’s efforts toward the manufacture of Portland cement, which could capitalize on the same model of the iron-ore company.
Whenever he succeeded with a new idea, Edison would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and inventions he had abandoned in the past in the light of what he recently learned. If he was mentally blocked working on a new idea, he would review his notebooks to see if there was some thought or insight that could trigger a new approach. For example, Edison took his unsuccessful work to develop an undersea telegraph cable “variable resistance” and incorporated it into the design of a telephone transmitter that adapted to the changing sound waves of the caller’s voice. This technique instantly became the industry standard.
Edison would often jot down his observations of the natural world, failed patents and research papers written by other inventors, and ideas others had come up with in other fields. He would also routinely comb a wide variety of diverse publications for novel ideas that sparked his interest and record them in his notebooks. He made it a habit to keep a lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully on other problems in other fields. To Edison, your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on.
 Edison also studied his notebooks of past inventions and ideas to use as springboards for other inventions and ideas in their own right. To Edison, his diagrams and notes on the telephone (sounds transmitted) suggested the phonograph (sounds recorded), which notes and diagrams, in turn, suggested motion pictures (images recorded). Simple, in retrospect. Genius usually is.
Walt Whitman was another genius who collected ideas to stimulate his creative potential. His journals describe an ingenious technique he developed for recording ideas. Anytime an idea would strike his imagination, he would write it down on a small slip of paper. He placed these slips into various envelopes that he titled according to the subject area each envelope contained. In order to have a place for each new idea he encountered, Whitman kept ideas in many different envelopes.

Whitman, whenever he felt a need to spawn new thoughts or perspectives, would select the various envelopes pertaining to his current subject or interests. He retrieved ideas from the envelopes, randomly at times or, on other occasions, only those ideas relevant to his subject; then he would weave these ideas together as if he were creating an idea tapestry. These idea tapestries often became the foundation for a new poem or essay.

Geniuses recognize the essential merits and attributes of a good idea and can adapt these elements to their subjects, thereby creating a new idea. Many original ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and used by the idea garnerer with pride and satisfaction. Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, once said that his simple genius was the ability to create something new from the ideas and inventions of others.

MIND POPPING

When you keep a written historical record of your ideas and problems, you initiate a thinking process and make possible a phenomenon that George Mandler, a leading researcher in the problems of the consciousness, calls “mind popping.” Mind popping is when a solution or idea seems to appear after a period of incubation out of nowhere.

The act of recording your thoughts and ideas plants the information into your long-term memory and also into your unconscious. While consciousness plays the important role in our daily lives of restricting the boundaries of our actions, in the unconscious we can activate complexes of information without boundary. Information held in long-term memory can be processed in parallel in the unconscious and find its way into conscious thought. An innovative idea emerges not in any real-time sequence but in a “mind popping” explosion of thought.

Suppose your notebook contains:

1. Information about the problem you are working on.

2. Information about other ideas, concepts and other problems you are currently working on.

By periodically reviewing your notebook, you activate all the recorded information in your conscious and subconscious mind. You have now set up a mental system of network thinking where ideas, images, and concepts from completely unrelated problems combine to catalyze the nascent moment of creativity. This necessarily nonlinear thought process can occur unconsciously, and not necessarily in real time.

Recording your creative work plants the information in your subconscious mind and somehow activates relevant patterns so it can be processed into a mind popping solution, even after a long delay during which the problem is abandoned. In the 1970s, Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., deduced how the nuclei of atoms stay together, one of those rare “knowing the mind of God” discoveries. His breakthrough occurred when he was reviewing a totally different problem, in fact, a completely different force of nature. When suddenly he experienced a “mind pop,” and realized that a failed approach in one area would be successful in another. Henri Poincare, the French genius, spoke of incredible ideas and insights that came to him with suddenness and immediate certainty out of the blue. So dramatic are the ideas that arrive that the precise moment in which the idea arrived can be remembered in unusual detail.

That this is a commonplace phenomenon was shown in a survey of distinguished scientists conducted over a half-century ago. A majority of the scientists reported that they got their best ideas and insights when not thinking about the problem. Ideas came while walking, recreating, or working on some other unrelated problem. This suggests how the creative act came to be associated with “divine inspiration” for the illumination appears to be involuntary.

The more problems, ideas and thoughts that you record and review from time to time, the more complex becomes the network of information in your mind. Think of thoughts as atoms hanging by hooks on the sides of your mind. When you think about a subject, some of these thoughts become loose and put into motion in your subconscious mind. The more work you put into thinking about a problem, the more information you put into your long-term memory by systematically recording them, the more thoughts are put into random motion. Your subconscious mind never rests. When you quit thinking about the subject and decide to forget it, your subconscious mind doesn’t quit working. The thoughts keep flashing freely in every direction through your subconscious. They are colliding, combining and recombining millions of times. Typically, many combinations are of little or no value, but occasionally, a combination is made that is appreciated by your subconscious as a good combination and delivered up to the conscious mind as a “mind popping” idea.    

In the illustration below, assume that 1 represents your conscious mind working on a problem and that 2 represents your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind represents six ideas you got represented by the six pointed star. Your subconscious mind combines all the information from the ideas together in multiple different ways. This is demonstrated in figure 2. There are now many different ideas your subconscious can interpret from your original six. If you focus on A and B the six pointed star now becomes a collection of cubes.


Naturalist Charles Darwin was sitting in his carriage riding home. He was tired and confused about his work developing his theory of evolution. He decided to forget it for the next days and take a much needed rest when his carriage hit a rock.  He said suddenly he understood everything about evolution and  his theory was complete.  He called it his “Eureka.”

There’s a thing in mathematics called “factorial”, which calculates how many ways you can combine things. If you have three objects, then there are one times two times three, which leaves six combinations. The factorial of ten is over three million. Ten bits of information will combine and recombine in three million different ways in your mind. So you can imagine the cloud of thoughts combining and making associations when you incubate problems when you stop working.

Cognitive scientists have observed that people that after a period of incubation from a problem people are 39 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas. Yet this enhancement of creative thinking exists completely beneath the radar screen. In other words, people are more creative after they forget about the problem for a period of time, but they don’t know it. It’s as if a period of incubation resets your mind. You’re taking a walk or taking a shower and realize “Wait a minute, there’s another way to do this.”

The famous philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell was quoted in The Conquest of Happiness as having said: “I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is think about it with very great intensity—the greatest intensity with which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months, I return consciously to the topic and find the work has been done. Before I discovered this technique, I used to spend time worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the faster for this worry and the worrying time was wasted.” When author Norman Mailer had writer’s block, he would instruct his subconscious mind to work on the problem and to notify him when it was resolved. Then he would leave the problem until the “insight” arrived in his consciousness.

MICHAEL  MICHALKO.

MY QUARANTINE EXERCISE

by imagineer7

During the quarantine lockdown I became very frustrated at not being able to do the work I love. I had difficulty reimagining how to do and enjoy my work during this national lockdown. Then I remembered an idea suggested by St. Ignatius Loyola (some 500 years ago). He suggests using your imagination to look back at life and decisions from your deathbed as a basis for trying to make a current decision.

This exercise follows an idea suggested by St Ignatius Loyola (some 500 years ago).

Begin by relaxing in a calm, quiet environment then:

1. Imagine your infancy, in your imagination think back to when you were a small, helpless, dependant, infant born into a particular environment.

• Imagine being 5, imagine you are now 5, how did it feel to be 5? Can you picture images and memories from that time.

• Imagine being 12, 25, 40, 65, after a few minutes, project your imagination to what you were like when you were 12, did you worry? What was important to you? What was your world like? Using the same method of thinking ask yourself the same questions for age 25 and 40 and 65.

• Imagine being very, very old; imagine looking in the mirror when you are very old. What do you see? How you feel about yourself? Who are you? Take a retrospective look over your whole life – what really mattered? What would you have like to have done differently? Are you ready to die?

• Imagine your death, what are your thoughts as you imagine yourself dying? Imagine your closest friends and relatives, what would they be thinking about you?

Imagine being reborn, after a few, or when you feel ready, imagine you are going to be reborn. You can be reborn, anywhere at anytime as anything you desire. What would your choices be?

Return, When you feel ready to open your eyes, gradually look around you as if seeing everything for the first time.

NDDC: We barely learn

It exceedingly grieves my heart, as I presume it does many another Nigerian’s that we have regrettably failed to learn one of the most significant lessons of our history. That lesson is simply this: that entities assigned with the sole responsibility of distributing humongous funds would as soon degenerate into cesspools of corruption. Be it recalled that it was precisely through such entities, be they agricultural produce boards; solid minerals boards; development commissions; etc, that that most odious term “corruption” first entered Nigeria’s public space. Skilfully deploying some abstruse arguments the country’s first crop of regional politicians respectively came up with the novel idea of pooling surplus proceeds from our natural resources. Pursuing the same arguments, such pooled funds were subsequently expended on developing the infrastructure and socio-economics of the country’s first three regions.

Consequently, a so-called Marketing and Housing Boards were set up in the respective regions. In no time, however, scandalous abuses of established procedures in both the appointment of members to the these boards and in the award of contracts no sooner led to the country’s first financial investigative commission; namely, the Foster-Sutton Commission, in the 1950s. Upon the heels of which was the Western region’s in the early 1960s, wherein the C. C. Coker Commission investigated the finances of the Western Nigeria Marketing and Housing Board. Soon after, the Ironsi Investigative Panel was commissioned to probe the finances of the Northern Nigeria Marketing and Housing Board in 1966.

It would also be recalled that Aguiyi-Ironsi was pivotal in aborting the January 1966 coup d’etat, but in spite of his apparent opposition to that first military intervention in Nigeria, he still found reason compelling enough to investigate some of the issues which the “five-majors” had raised. Ironsi’s Panel would suffer a still birth on account of its author’s assassination, but snippets from both the Foster-Sutton and the Coker commissions respectively found copious evidence of abuses of administrative and financials procedures in the Eastern and Western regions. For reasons that may not be unconnected to the aforesaid evidence, succeeding governments fought shy of such entities as the First Republic Marketing and Housing boards from 1966 to 1985.

But we soon became heedless of our past. Our collective attention span endured merely twenty-odd years, and much like a Phoenix suddenly rising from a long abandoned sepulchre, the Ibrahim Babandiga administration, apparently with scant reflection, introduced the twin octopuses christened, Oil Minerals Producing Areas Development Commision, OMPADEC; and the Directorate of Food Road and Rural Infrastructure, DFRRI, into the polity. These new entities, not unlike their First republic’s predecessors, were set up principally for the re-distribution of pooled funds. Half-expectedly, and, again not unlike their predecessors, both OMPADEC and DFRRI no sooner degenerated into whirlwinds of corruption. All manner of measures were consequently employed to check both the obvious and the not-so-obvious flaws in OMPADEC and DFRRI; most of these measures redounding in no more than a change in nomenclature. So the whirlwind grew in both strength and outreach, surviving subsequent military and civilian administrations.

With time, DFRRI quickly withered while OMPADEC waxed ever stronger, morphing today (2020) into a money-gobbling behemoth known as the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC. NDDC would distinguish herself from the twentieth century variants by annexing the hitherto unheard of evil of ghost contracts and contractors to her lackluster credentials. So while the Commission’s budget goes north by the year, the number of her executed projects heads south, with concomitant spike in the restiveness of the target beneficiaries. The previous time I checked, the commission’s budget was denominated in the hundreds of billions of naira! Surely, looking from these figures to the executed projects in the Niger Delta region must necessarily induce dizziness.

One does not need to be an economist to know that Nigeria cannot stabilize, much-less experience economic growth in her prevailing circumstances. Little wonder the ongoing vociferous call for NDDC to be scrapped altogether. For the present, expressed opinions are roughly divided down the middle on that call. But it needn’t be so because the jury lucidly turned in its verdict back in the 1960s: Fledgling nations should always regard pooling of funds for unproductive activities as a devastating plague. Furthermore, global bodies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and the European Union, EU have since availed humanity with cost-effective and sustainable models for developing the infrastructure and socio-economics of local communities. Those models postulate that the latter’s budgets be effectively captured into project costing, rather than setting aside ad hoc entities to re-distribute pooled funds. (See my intervention of 31^st , December 2019 – Adopt stakeholders capitalism for the Niger Delta.)

Had we learned the appropriate lessons, the current paroxysm of steeped emotions on the vexed issue might have been wholly unnecessary.

Afam Nkemdiche; engineering consultant; Abuja. June, 2020