Siding With Sarah

Pigs must be aloft and they must be playing hockey in Hell today because I find myself in agreement with Sarah Palin regarding Newsweek’s cover photo choice.  It’s a cheap shot and one the magazine should have resisted taking.
It’d be one thing if she posed for Newsweek in this get-up, but the backstory is that [...]

A Developing Tragedy…

The first reports from Fort Hood are chaotic but are coalescing around a couple of truly horrific numbers – 12 dead, 31 injured in a shooting on the U.S.’s largest military installation.  Now comes word that the one of three possible shooters is Army Major Malik Nadal Hassan, age 39 or 40.
There is so many [...]

Premature Adulation

I’m a big Obama fan.  In fact, I admire President Obama more after 10 months in office than I did when he was candidate Obama.  He has been the kind of president I think we need in this very, very difficult time and I am glad that he’s the one wrestling with how many troops [...]

Brett Favre on Leadership

We don’t do a lot with sports here at the Crowd.  We occasionally talk about the business or the politics of sports, but none of us much shows our fandom – if we have any – in this forum.
I’ve decided I’m a Favre fan.  I say this despite all of the Hamlet drama of the [...]

New Tech Update

I’ve spent the morning playing with Google Voice and it seems like a fun, shiny new toy.
The concept is pretty simple: you create a master phone number – 612-234-5172 in my case – and then link to that one number all the other phone numbers of your life – home, work, cell, cabin, grandpa’s barn, [...]

The Power of Social Media

Captain Keliher and I are gearing up to give a presentation tomorrow on social media to a group of HR execs.  Our premise, not surprisingly, is that social media is not a fad nor is it simply another “channel” but instead a shift in the way we communicate with one another and as a society.  [...]

The Bully Pulpit…

It’s good to be king.
One of the great advantages of being president is the ability to nudge the national discussion in whatever direction you choose.  As President Obama spoke to Wall Street today, that ability was on full display on every cable news feed except the Weather Channel.
John Boehner is probably speaking somewhere right now.  [...]

Dianne T. Signer

Today marks the 8th anniversary of the death of Dianne T. Signer.  She most likely would have celebrated her 40th birthday this past March if not for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
I don’t know much about Ms. Signer; I only learned her name yesterday after reading about Project 2,996 in Bob Collin’s [...]

What’s Your Workplace?

What’s your preferred work environment?  Do you like silence and minimalism?  Stimulus and movement?  Do you write with pen and paper or in front of the keyboard?
I started thinking of these questions this morning when I stumbled across this picture of the AT&T “Global Network Operation Center” and it reminded me – again – that [...]

Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009

Love him or hate him, it’s hard to argue with the assessment that Ted Kennedy was one of the most influential politicians of the last 50 years.  He was on the front lines of some of our most profound policy debates around health care and employment and was an important contributor on much more.  He [...]