Greatest Challenge?

Rapid technological change is the greatest threat facing big business.

Fortune Magazine sent a survey to all the Fortune 500 CEOs and one question they asked was: What is your company’s greatest challenge? 

“The rapid pace of technological change” topped the list, besting “cybersecurity” (a close second), as well as other popular business bogeymen, such as “increased regulation,” “shareholder activism,” and a “shortage of skilled labor.” Moreover, a whopping 94% of those who responded said their companies would change more in the next five years than in the past five.

Today’s CEOs clearly recognize that new technologies are going to radically change the way they do business. And they know they need to figure it out before their competitors do.

Fortune 500 companies would prefer to be private.

The vast majority (84%) of CEOs who responded to the survey agreed with the statement: “It would be easier to manage my company if it were a private company.” Frustration with the pressures of public markets is clearly on the rise. Surviving the new technological revolution requires long-term thinking and smart investment. But public shareholders, searching for better investment returns in a zero-­interest-rate world, are demanding short-term results. Public-company CEOs are caught in the crosshairs.

If success is a hot-air balloon, then what are the sandbags hanging off the basket, weighting us down and keeping us from rising to the height where we’re designed to fly? 

What is Positive Self- Expectancy?

Positive Self- Expectancy:

Synonyms: Optimism, enthusiasm, hope

Antonyms: Pessimism, cynicism, despair

The most readily identifiable quality of a successful leader is an overall attitude of personal optimism, hope and enthusiasm.

Proverb: “That which you fear or expect most will likely come to pass. The body manifests what the mind harbors.”

By expecting the best, as a way of life, you are preparing yourself physically as well as mentally for the demands of success.

Free Trade Means More Jobs

A critical rap against the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership is that it will destroy jobs, which is the argument labor unions always use to oppose free-trade agreements like this one. Nonsense. What destroys jobs is innovation and productivity. When allowed to do so, people always look to find new and better ways of doing things–or to come up with new things altogether. Who had heard of an iPad or the process we call streaming just a few years ago? In the constant turbulence of free markets some jobs are eliminated, but the overall number and quality of jobs improve.

People today wax nostalgic over manufacturing, just as they did over farming before that. In reality, both, until recent decades, involved backbreaking manual labor. Remember the criticism that factory work was soulless and repetitive? Factory assembly lines are largely a thing of the past in this country.

It’s human nature to look for and lash out at targets when our lives are disrupted by economic change. But when barriers to progress aren’t put in the way, most people quickly land on their feet.

The problem today is our own government, which has hobbled us with a horrific tax code, a destructive monetary policy and a tsunami of opaque rules regarding health care and everything else and prevents us from focusing our energies on productive activities that would benefit us all.

Read the entire article at: 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2015/05/27/hey-congress-free-trade-means-more-jobs-so-pass-tpp/

One of the ironies of life is that we acquire love as we give it away; we increase in knowledge as we dispense what we have. It is a reflection of the parable of the talents. 

Additional video link: https://goo.gl/Igonjl

Majority opinion doesn’t determine what is good and true.

We need to remember that democracy is not an end in itself. Majority opinion doesn’t determine what is good and true. Like every other form of power, democracy can become a means of repression and idolatry. When we divorce our politics from a grounding in virtue and truth, we transform our country from a living moral organism into a kind of golem of legal machinery without a soul.

This is why working for good laws is so important. This is why getting involved politically is so urgent. This is why every one of our votes matters. We need to elect the best public leaders, who then create the best policies and appoint the best judges. This has a huge impact on the kind of nation we become. Democracies depend for their survival on people of conviction fighting in the public square for what they believe—legally and peacefully, but zealously and without apologies. That includes all of us.

-Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop of Philadelphia. This essay is taken from an address delivered at BYU on Jan. 23, 2015. For the full address see more.byu.edu/chaput

Have You Paid The Price?

Have you counted the cost of achieving your goals? Have you been paying the price, or did you hope you could avoid it? 

If you play now, you’ll pay later. But if you chose to pay now, you’ll be able to play later! Regardless, you always have to pay.