It's no crime in open source to do initial idea development in small groups out of the public gaze. Nor to ask for others to join in a design discussion as you see fit. That should be true for all aspects of any organisation that supplies and depends on open source communities. This is a very different culture to commercial entities, and it's very dangerous to think like one when you're the other.

In the words of Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. It is to open source's great advantage that it can align its organizational cultures to those of its communities far more easily than can shareholder-bidden corporations. When strategies and cultures are in tune, then real magic can happen – and when they don't, things get seriously Rusty. ®

When you’re a small business owner trying to choose the right title to fit your position, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed by the number of choices you have—or to think your only options for business owner titles are “owner” or “CEO.”

Business titles for small business owners should be consistent with the company’s goals and objectives, but they should also feel personal. You’re the owner of your small business, but you also wear many other hats—and your business title should reflect your multifaceted role.

On arrival at Kenya's biggest seaport, Mombasa, the container is loaded onto a ship for a voyage to Europe of around 30 days. Despite their lengthy journey, they will still be sold to European shoppers with a vase-life of about a week.

So, how is this possible?

"The flowers will be kept at a temperature of 0.5 degrees celsius throughout the journey," says Elizabeth Kimani, the manager of quality and standards at Sian Flowers.

As well as controlling the temperature, the atmosphere system in the container reduces the oxygen level from 20% to 4%, while increasing the carbon dioxide level from 0.4% to 4%.

This technology is all part of the elaborate process of preserving the blooms for as long as possible. //

But flowers destined for such a long voyage need extra attention to prepare them, as soon as they are picked.

"We harvest them early in the morning, when it's still cool and they will be the first to go into the cold room," explains Linda Murungi from grower, Sian Flowers.

Freshly-harvested roses, for instance, are then dipped into a chemical mixture to protect them from the fungus, botrytis.

After that, the stems are put into buckets to absorb a hydration solution so they can survive the thirty days without water. They are also put in a solution that curbs the growth hormone, ethylene, which causes the ageing of the flowers.

Once that process is completed, the flowers are then packed into cartons with holes in the top and bottom, which allow air from the container's system to circulate. //

Kenya has become one of the world's biggest flower exporters thanks to its equatorial location, high altitudes and relatively cheap labour, it competes for dominance in the market with Colombia and Ecuador.

For years, the two Latin American countries have been exporting about 10% of their flowers by sea freight to North America and Europe.

As these flowers are at sea for a much shorter period of time, firms exporting from Latin America do not use controlled atmosphere, or post-harvest treatments.

Kenyan exporters however, have to be extra-careful. There is no direct shipping route in to Europe, instead, containers are transferred in the Middle East from smaller vessels to much larger ones.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
Who do you trust less? Real question.
Politicians 75.7%
Billionaires 24.3%
3,399,953 votes
·
Final results
7:54 PM · May 26, 2022

Elon Musk @elonmusk
Replying to @elonmusk
.@aoc I dare you to run the same poll with your followers
8:01 PM · May 26, 2022

David Weissman @davidmweissman
Let's prove how phony the right’s ridiculous polls are by doing one of our own. Who do you trust more @elonmusk @AOC
Elon Musk 81.2%
AOC 18.8%
375,365 votes
·
Final results
6:28 PM · May 27, 2022

David Weissman @davidmweissman
Replying to @davidmweissman
Not sure how this poll flipped but I won’t delete it and will take the L.
11:19 PM · May 27, 2022

The bill exemplifies a liberal mindset, one not confined to California, of vapid virtue signaling over measures genuinely effective in shattering the glass ceiling. Increasing female participation at a high corporate level does not start by demanding inclusion regardless of qualification. Instead, it begins at the grassroots level. The wise business finds and develops talent within itself. An employee well versed in a company’s purpose and methodology is that company’s greatest asset. Gender plays no role in job qualification, pro or con. White knighting while wearing aluminum foil armor on behalf of businesswomen benefits no one. In capitalism, the best companies and accompanying employees are known for their success. The best anti-discriminatory path the government can take is getting out of the way. But, playing the faith healer who met the blind person and sent them away lame is what government does best.

Over the decades, corporations and Madison Avenue have used this event as a significant launching pad for exposure, dropping fortunes on reserving time during the game, spending exorbitant amounts on productions, and hiring top-flight Hollywood directors to helm their 60-second epics. But, this was not always the case with the Super Bowl, and we can trace this advertising furor to a specific moment in history. It was 1984.

That was the year that Apple Computers caused a sensation with a cinematic minute that was jarring, arresting, transformative, and — most important — successful. The company wanted to distinguish itself in a marketplace dominated by a titan, and parlayed the timing of a literary classic to deliver a commercial that delivered the goods. Apple’s “1984” to this day is recognized as an advertising classic, and became the very revolutionary spot that altered the parameters of the Super Bowl.

And it very nearly never happened. //

The commercial has gone on to become regarded as one of the greatest of all time. In a move of cagey self-interest, Chiat/Day ran the commercial themselves weeks earlier, in a solitary local market in Idaho. This was done in order to have the commercial qualify for that year’s advertising awards. “1984” won every award it was nominated for, and it went on later to be declared the best commercial of the decade. To this day, it is regarded as one of the classics to ever run on television.

As perhaps its second-greatest accomplishment (after successfully selling the Apple Macintosh as an important computing breakthrough), the spot launched the elevated importance placed on Super Bowl advertising. It is commonplace today for corporations to invest heavily in their presentations on this day, sometimes spending an entire year gearing up for the event.

Raab, who runs the campaigns for GEICO, agrees that insurance ads need to evolve. “Our competition isn’t just other insurance brands,” he says. “It’s any entertainment brand. To compete, we must be as captivating as Netflix, Marvel, Fortnite and the millions of endlessly inventive content creators on TikTok.”

But Kolt disagrees with this “self-absorbed” approach.

To be successful, he said, advertisers just need to “tell the truth. Advertising on TV works,” he added. “Sometimes even bad advertising.”

Businesses are simply not in the business of fair dealing. Those prioritizing their own concerns are simply doing what the law or the software license allows. The problem is not payment; it is permission – many popular open-source licenses are extremely permissive while lacking the reciprocity requirements of copyleft licenses. Licenses like the Apache license and the MIT license offer a lot and ask very little.

"Open source maintainers create massive amounts of value and capture almost none of it," said Feross Aboukhadijeh, an open-source developer who runs Socket, in an email to The Register. "Many of the most important open source projects that power the Fortune 500 are maintained by volunteers in their spare time, after work hours.

"The software industry needs to find a way to help maintainers start capturing at least a portion of the value they create so they can continue to write new features, fix bugs, improve documentation, and most importantly, fix critical security issues in a timely manner.

Aboukhadijeh added that the Log4j incident also illustrates how almost no company using open-source code in their applications bothers to review it.

"At the end of the day, companies are responsible for ensuring the code they ship to production is safe, secure, and reliable," he said.

Elisha
@ElishaKrauss
We had two fireplace/chimney experts over at our house this morning. Both 67, both considering retiring. Both told my husband he had an eye and a brain for the business and that “no one under 60 does this anymore.” Our generation needs guys like this. Where are skilled workmen?
2:07 PM · Dec 7, 2021 //

Republicans need to go and get those voters. Conservatives need to be shouting the virtues of hard work and the trades class. It’s a recipe for a double whammy of success – rebuilding an America that does not solely depend on foreign goods and labor, and welcoming in disenfranchised voters looking for a political movement that will foster their chosen path in life.

A thriving industry of skilled workers is the key to a thriving and independent American future.

To better compete in the country’s northeast corridor, the two airlines teamed up and decided to share flight lanes and revenue. In this region, American and JetBlue were underdogs against United and Delta, and they did as underdogs do: joined forces to increase their market share and better serve customers. //

It should be noted that this agreement was sent to the Trump administration’s DOJ for its blessing — where it passed, because the administration knew this was just how business works in the United States. //

And on the merits of the anti-trust action itself? This one’s easy: The United States does not currently have a problem of concentrated corporate power. We have fresh evidence for this. In the last few months alone, massive, multi-billion-dollar companies — GE, Toshiba, and Johnson & Johnson — have announced that they are splitting up into component, independent firms. They’re doing so because of business strategy, but the fact that they’ve done so is all the evidence we need that the US market economy is functioning as it should. Put more directly: Market forces are doing just fine without Merrick Garland’s guiding hand to help us.

The trick isn’t to convince the CEO of a conglomerate to become an edgy thrillseeker. Instead, the job of the internal innovator is to communicate a bigger picture to leadership in a way that acknowledges their command over the present and shows them the path ahead. “The management of your company may be very good at their business without understanding innovative ideas created by new generations,” Fujino says. “You need to help them understand the future.” //

Honda’s then-CEO Takeo Fukui gave the HondaJet the commercial green light after intense deliberation. But it wasn’t the 20 years of research, the substantial investment or even the public accolades for the HondaJet prototype that convinced him.

It was the fact that Fujino successfully planted the idea that the HondaJet was a natural, logical and necessary part of Honda’s portfolio. And telling that story took a lot of groundwork and advocacy. “It took years to reach the CEO, and every time I spoke with him I took the opportunity to raise the subject,” Fujino said in a previous interview.

That approach worked so well that, as Fujino remembers it, “He spoke as if he were convincing himself. ‘Honda is a mobility company. We should pursue the future through the HondaJet.’”

Kirby was then asked what advice he’d give Parker, and his answer was quite something:

“And I’ll keep any advice to myself. Plus I’m afraid he would follow it. I’d rather [he] keep doing what he’s doing.”

Win says:
October 4, 2021 at 8:56 am
Mr. Woolman, founder of Delta Air Lines, said it best, “Consideration is an extension of safety. It begins with the first contact with our passengers, no matter where this is—reservations, porter, ticket agent or wherever. Make the customer feel special. There’s more to flying than just buying a ticket.” Do we sometimes fail, of course. But we try to learn from our mistakes and correct them. Delta’s management stresses that our success is based on Mr. Woolman’s philosophy of hiring the best people to do the job, paying them a good wage, appreciating their work and treating us with respect. In my years with Delta, I’ve had some issues…every family has issues. But, in the end, the fair treatment of our passengers is a direct result of management’s philosophy of… “stay within the box” but if you must go outside of the box, do what is right and we’ll back you up. The key is “back you up” SouthWest and Alaska both run great airlines because they empower their people to do well. They don’t belittle their employees. Ask any AA employee if they remember when “Dougie” got a DUI or when he told them that they have nothing to do with the company’s profitability. Jerry Grinstein said it best when he told Delta employees that we have everything to do with profitability.

As Buffett once said, "I really have only two jobs. One is to attract and keep outstanding managers to run our various operations." //

We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. //

Take a hint as to which of the three Buffett prioritizes first. In his own words, "If they don't have [integrity], the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb."

Without integrity, intelligence, drive, energy will only get you so far. Hiring without it is also a big business risk. //

Psychologist and best-selling author Henry Cloud wrote the book on why integrity matters and sheds good light on the topic. In Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality, he says, "Who a person is will ultimately determine if their brains, talents, competencies, energy, effort, deal-making abilities, and opportunities will succeed." //

1. Be accessible
   A person of integrity keeps the lines of communication open with everyone in the organization. He or she gives access for others to express concerns or raise questions that can be addressed in a timely fashion. He or she knows that open and honest communication is not only the ethical thing to do; it's what builds trust and increases value so work gets done efficiently, and without barriers, bureaucracy, or politics.

2. Be your word
   Do you practice what you preach? Follow through on your promises or commitments? Leaders walking the talk deliver on "doing the right thing" and set a good example. //

3. Be true to yourself
   How would you feel if, every day, you said what you meant, stayed true to yourself, and behaved in accordance with this? Imagine the self-respect you'd feel. Being true to yourself is far less stressful than being someone you are not.

Boeing's Fatal Flaw' is an investigation of the flawed 737 Max jet and the crashes that killed 346 people. Photo: Paul Mailman for Frontline (PBS). //

“Boeing was a culture that, for the better part of a century, had really been focused on engineering and run by engineers,” Gelles continues. “I think as recently as the ’70s and ’80s, the CFO famously didn’t even have that much interaction with some of the institutional shareholders. Boeing was really regarded as an engineering-first company that was going to produce its best airplanes, and the shareholders would get a fair return. But it wasn’t a company that was being run for quarterly profits.

“That did start to change with the arrival of executives from McDonnell Douglas, who themselves had come from GE, where they had studied with Jack Welch.” McDonnell Douglas was a “fading domestic rival” that Boeing acquired in 1997. Within four years of the merger, Boeing had moved its headquarters to Chicago from Seattle, where its passenger jets were manufactured, divorcing Boeing’s leadership from its engineering culture, as the writer Jerry Useem has argued. //

In the case of the 737 Max tragedies, several factors interfered with that primary goal of safety, possibly including the structure and incentives of publicly traded companies. “If companies go about their business maximizing short-term gains and running their companies with the explicit interest of investors on Wall Street, it’s not hard to see how things like safety wind up coming second, or wind up getting less consideration than quarterly dividends,” says Gelles.

“That doesn’t always mean that a plane’s going to crash. But in the most extreme examples, it’s not impossible to draw a line from a culture where engineering ultimately took a back seat to finance, and arrive where we tragically have.”

My goal was not to depress you if you or your loved ones are in any of these industries. It is just to get you thinking about the future so that you can be on the forefront of the new world with new job opportunities.

This can make for great dinner conversation with your kids. Ask them what they see in the future and what jobs will disappear and what others will be created. Part of being a parent is to help our kids to be resilient to change.

Remember the words of Albert Einstein; “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

Over two decades ago, Warren Buffett lectured at the University of Florida's school of business and gave students life lessons on happiness, careers, finances, and relationships.

Buffett urged students to do the things they know will enjoy throughout their lives and gave good counsel about making business connections with likable people. "I only work with people I like," Buffett told students. "If I could make $100 million with a guy who causes my stomach to churn, I'd say no."

I urge you to work in jobs you love. You're out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it'll look good on your résumé.

Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the "chain of command." Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

Musk adds, "If, in order to get something done between departments, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be OK for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen." //

Set your people free

In a knowledge economy, top-down hierarchical management styles that direct traffic one-way -- up the chain -- will collapse, especially since knowledge workers typically know more than their managers about their own areas of specialization.

The right approach here is to give smart people the keys to solving problems on their own. You'll find that in high-performing organizations that empower their knowledge workers, information is shared openly across fewer reporting levels, and people are able to use it to make the right decisions quickly.

The starting point is to empower workers by giving them autonomy to make decisions in the moment. Workers need the right data, insights, and technology to make high-quality decisions. Putting this trust and power in the hands of workers is seen as critical to agility and success.

It starts with leadership

Arming workers with the power of making decisions and acting with the data they have requires big changes in both process and culture, and senior leaders must drive this change from the top by providing their full support and leading by example.

When your enterprise grows big enough to require management that is not involved in the daily operations of the enterprise, you lose information about what’s happening at the “production line” and decisions are made according to what little information percolates up through the system. The same thing happens when someone new buys a business and then attempts to learn the ropes from the top down. In both cases, the growing business loses basic functions and becomes blind.

In attempts to gain more information, the management applies measurements and metrics which attempt to simplify things down to some key variables and averages easily understood by managers, not by people making or using the product. The product of your enterprise is then made to cater to these metrics – not to actual customer demands or needs. This is seen by the management as rationalizing the business, cutting out the fat, etc. while the customers see loss of features and loss of responsiveness from the company.

“the system has a severely censored and distorted view of reality from biased and filtering sensory organs which displaces understanding of the actual real-world which pales and tends to disappear. This displacement creates a type of sensory deprivation and a kind of hallucinogenic effect on those inside the systems, causing them to lose common sense. In addition to negatively affecting those inside the system, the system attracts to it people who are optimized for the pathological environment”
-John Gall, Systemantics, 1978

The Brazos Electric Power Cooperative filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 1, 2021 after receiving a bill from ERCOT totaling $2.1 billion after ERCOT raised the price of wholesale electric power to $9,000 per megawatt hour during the February 2021 winter storm that hit Texas. //

Brazos Electric Power Cooperative Executive VP Clifton Karnei was a ERCOT board board member until Feb. 25; when the cooperative received a $2.1 billion bill from the manager of Texas’ power grid. //

Karnei was on the ERCOT board when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a report urging Texas’ power grid to winterize. The 357-page report detailed nine separate findings that showed exactly what happened inside ERCOT’s power grid that left millions without power for so long.

According to the FERCE report, the single largest problem during the cold weather event was the freezing of instrumentation and equipment.