Story Adz Man
Curving the Arc of European Politics and Yanis Varoufakis by Barbara Cerda #politics #Varoufakis, #EU
Something awesome happened during the period of the Greek economic crisis. Through the angst of monetary collapse, the nascent politics of FM Yanis Varoufakis’ came to be. It was a quiet emergence from a womb of bitter contention. Everyone understood that the Greeks were getting a raw deal. It was a matter of signing on the dotted line for that balloon payment that came due far to quickly. Fairness be damned, what creditors agree to renegotiate in the favor debtors?
An unnoticed uprising found its voice in the oft time boisterous but very handsome Yanis Varoufakis. Compelling because he’s smart and a rebel.
Compelling because he’s the elegant eloquent professor of a new Greece… the conscripted soldier of an economic over throw. His army is growing in the face of another upstart or …. a reawakened conservative movement. They are an opposing force, bound to collide. I think the outcomes will shape global economic futures. The BRICS will have to rethink trading agreements. FANG will become toothless in its formation of trading partners. And why you say? The monetary influencers, regulators, will focus on the biggest economic engine gaining steam, a politically mature and stable EU.
Led by Angela Merkel, the EU is growing in governmental and economic power. Even immersed in partisanship, the Germany collective mind is centric and owns sovereign pride. And it’s the leader of a block of countries that are economically united. Pinching one… the group yells ouch.
There’s a growing need within the populace of Europe to resist embracing the idiocies of the singularity in religions and the politics of “the other”. Neither mindset serves the greater purpose to increase power by way of sound economics and GDP growth.
This type mindset is heresy and is slowly eating at the economic marrow of the current global influencer, the United States. While Americans have allowed the corrosive politics to consume its confidence and economy, Europe is coming into its own. Professor Varoufakis gets this. And has preached this for over a decade. Now the young and liberal are excruciatingly slowly growing into a new European state.
The oligarchs of corrupted wealth are gazing nervously in their rearview mirrors.
Whether intentional, intuitive, or just the product of a financial upheaval, Varoufakis has become the leading nemesis of passé’ oligarchs. The Greek socio-economists has become the emerging leader in a world facing melting borders and monetary shifts.
Coupled with America and the UK’s tumble down the rabbit hole of sectarianism, the EU culture gains control. It’s becoming the stronger influencer of financial exchanges and sovereign border agreements.
DIEM24 is his love child.
Genuine politics is a powerful art. The owner of that talent wields global outcomes. In my opinion, a reconfiguration of global wealth can be anticipated… it’s a given. And history will note that SYRIZA versus Varoufakis was its impetus.
Supply Side Content Management
A Doji Candle chart is an indispensable tool in a day trader’s toolbox.
Whether they’re watching the markets for future’s trading opportunities or contemplating longer-term investments. Consideration of the supply side policies of a product/service is an important part of becoming a predictor of ROI outcomes.
It’s important to understand that outcomes, by its definition, are stories of past performances. What’s being communicated is what is already influencing millions of global businesses, the fundamentals of change are already set in place.
What fundamentals drive change?
At the end of a trading day those charts are mere indications of how much is won or loss…. or whether you correctly understood the economic environment. The default indicator is the cost of doing business. Changes to the cost of supplies of goods and services, drives the fundamentals and the end of year balance sheets. It defines ROI.
Did you get a great ROI or just good?
Charting is to brokerage what content management is to communication…. it’s a big part of business storytelling. Producing quality and volume of content comes second to understanding your market supply side environment. Here’s where your best content becomes re-purposeful and an important asset. It’s a precise snapshot in time an accurate relating of events. Great copy remains agile and smart over time and proves measurable in relevancy and value.
Valued re-purposed copy is a source of SEO rich long or short form to social media commentaries and well placed YouTube videos. A well-organized curated library can be useful to future content strategies. This is good stuff writing that remains renewable and adaptable. Valued re-purposed copy is an indication of an author’s understanding of business and the environment that it thrives in
The one stable dynamic on earth is the need to communicate.
What’s true in business today was not the truth yesterday. Content management must be agile enough to communicate immediate changes occurring in supply chain behavioral economics and growth. Change comes in the wink of an eye.
Content must own and hone agility.
This skill places you in the lead of anticipating customer needs before the customer.
Understanding the supply side dynamics that shift the costs not only influences your bottom line but those businesses that your products or services serve.
Not every content maker can track your supply side costs and produce clever creatives to explain it to stakeholders.
BCScontent.com is the solution to content intention.
Elon Musk and Tesla Branding by Barbara Cerda
If you’ve been blessed to attend an Elon Musk interview you realize that people come away with their own interpretations of his newest concept explanations.
Most folks that are inherently geeky always enjoy the content. Because Mr. Musk has the innate ability to speak to the nerd in all of us. I like to think of him as the “What if guy” or the “Genius solution provider”, ‘cause that’s what he does best.
Thinkers and wish takers always find value in his bells and whistles that create his amazing new toys, problem solvers and drawing board concepts that become fodder for the next Sci-Fi novel. But most of all – the world wants to know what makes him different and how can they become the next universal “problem solving genius”.
What I’ve noticed most is that he spends an inordinate amount of his talent and resources on the following;
- Innovation that serves the masses.
- Concepts that improve communication
- Simple solutions that address complex challenges.
And then I wonder what features make his branding so sexy and compelling? And my take on this is the following;
- He manages to make geeky a valuable and sexy commodity
- He addresses his audiences in simple English
- There’s a sense of honesty in his body language, gestures and manner of speaking
- Most important he’s persistent. These are traits everyone values… persistence produces stability.
In composing content, I take in consideration a few of these observations.
Storylines created about the maker of a product or service should be compelling and attractive, drawing on the readers imagination.
The language should speak to the audience in plain simple words. The content, whether visual or articles, should convey a sense of unforced honesty.
The marketing strategy must be consistent and constantly innovative.
The Alternative Energy Universe is Upon us and Your Business is….?
This is a good time to reorganize the logistics of physical deliverables for future projects and step up your game when it comes to how you view and understand how alternative energy works.
It’s alive. The alternative future is here.
Scrum Ways that Led to 3G iPhones
One spring day in the year 2002 Chicago’s AWS (AT&T Wireless Services) FSA One’s, OMC (Operations Management Center) was tasked to lead in the data migration project from the outdated reporting software to new. Failure of the project would result in regional disruption of service for three states. This data dump to its upgrade followed the implementation of the 3G roll out in the prior year
The OMC quant data reports detail the activities of field operations. This includes its personnel, fleet information, switch and cell site locations and tower and cell site leasing agreements, RF Engineering data, and their relationship for three states. And most important the system transmits alerts to field operatives and management of potential issues. There’s a prescribed time limit to respond. It was understood this regional updating would also be impactful to the NOC (National Operations Center) in Washington State.
Not only were we tasked with being the lead in this rollout, we had two weeks to formalize and test our work within the new untested software environments. With the help of NOC personnel and as project lead my focus and project description was to gather and migrate as much operational data as possible, into the new reporting system. I decided on a dry run deliverable within five days, understanding that predictable good outcomes were problematic.
This was post 9/11 and the new 3G footprint implementation environment. All these intended and unintended upheavals and company wide tensions high.
After four days of data migration, checking rechecking reports I left the Chicago OMC offices after initiating the new monitoring system. We had six days before expected completion and I was fully prepared for fall out.
I was project lead… and had confidence in the hands of kind strangers…. the NOC techs. They were the first to monitor for notification of any out of the ordinary alarms from cell sites or switches and the first line before escalation.
The wait was not long.
Two hours later found me shopping for a new personal phone when my AWS iPhone began to beep, that familiar tone that says a switch is having a hard time reading incoming data and we’re escalating in a few minutes.
Speeding down a busy Kennedy going north, night time highway lights flashing by and I’m taking agitated call after agitated call. The fixes resulted in late nights for all concerned. The morning reveal was this.
The solutions turned out to be small and fixable, simple manual data entry of omissions of contact data for a few field operatives…. contractors for cell site maintenance.
The early software runs had little or no impact on consumer service. Cell and switch alarm protocols set in place worked to suppress exposure to failure. The new reporting software captured the outer tendrils of the spider web of data.
By the morning of the great reveal we were eager to lean forward during the conference calls. We participated in lively and productive coast to coast conversations centered around how the system worked, its flaws, and what to look forward to in the series of national rollouts to come.
Shorten timelines on deliverables helped to benchmark potential failures that included reports detailing the problems and subsequent fixes. The final rollout ran as smooth as glass.
Although the process was at times stressful, especially in moments of alarms and the confusion of gathering missing data. Protocols mimicking Scrum helped in ferreting out hidden worries and risks while offering ample opportunity to apply solutions.
And the NOC had full disclosure for production of procedural manuals in how and what to anticipate in future rollouts of reporting systems.
I look back on the days of pre-Scrum and now appreciate its principles. I wonder why it took so long to formalize these concepts into something coherent and usable across all industries. The Scrum process is important to building trust within lean project teams while developing confidence in reporting systems. Both are vital tools of Project Management.
My experiences during this project made living with 3G much more comfortable.
We Were Eight Years in Power By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Book Review
Impressions
It is thought that the first documented African slaves arrived on these shores in the year 1612.
This book is so rich in historical benchmarks and telling(s) of times and people that sculptured who we are as a nation. There’s little space in this review to highlight all the points discussed. They are all so very relevant. So, I’ll speak to a few.
I was waiting a long time for this journal and the writing is better than I’d hoped. In each generation an African American author presents to the world a treatise that paints a vivid picture in eloquent terms that speaks to the heart. This compilation points the way to understanding the deeper aspects of our culture. The results of Mr. Coates’ research is a brilliant and honest body of work and art.
He began with our most recent history
We saw Barack Obama as the quintessential choice for POTUS 44. This was a prideful offering representing how we view not only African America but America’s values. Our gratification did not stem from just the color of his skin, rather the fact of his bona fide, the character with which he conducts his life.
The author captures this sentiment superbly.
To many of us in Chicago Barack Obama is the incarnation of what the old dreamers back in the day and just up from the south envisioned as what was possible. Barack is considered an expression of all that is good in our culture. Mr. Coates’ details of the times and social conditions that surrounded that election is brilliant journalism. His firsthand account of the primary and general, of Michelle’s roles during those history making moments should be a must read for aspiring journalists. It goes beyond simple social studies.
We’re the hidden American culture
The book explores candidly how Michelle Obama’s middle-class upbringing seemed to be a subject of discovery for many Americans. The debates about whether she was a proudful American or not grew into a national phenomenon. It raged on explaining how the anathema amongst the White populist justified the events leading to the formation of the Tea Party. This aspect of American cultured cannot be defined or explained enough. Coates clarified in painful detail this false narrative that helped propel theories as fact that the first African American President is not a true American, in some quarters he lacked human attributes. It’s a painful reminder.
This book peels a way so much of what White American has chosen not to address or understand about our post World War II parentage. Come up from the south they built communities where our doctors were black, the lawyer, real estate brokers, grocer and butcher were all people of color. It was considered disrespectful to patronize a white business when there were “our people” needing the work. African America enjoyed with pride insular communities. The author captures this recollection with care and great understanding.
“The South Side was almost a black world unto itself, replete with the economic and cultural complexity of the greater city. There were debutantes and cotillions as well as gangs and drug addicts, Mostly, there were men like Fraser Robinson, black people working a job, trying to get by. The diversity and the demographics allowed the Robinsons to protect their kids from the street life, and also from digest, personal racism.”
Reparation; to make amends, to bring whole what was taken.
Coates’ views on the “banditry” of African Americans debates brilliantly the reasons for his heartbreak on this subject. The robbing of African Americans of heritage and vows of reparations is explored in this book. He explains the machinations surrounding broken promises made of forty acres and a mule to the various failed social reforms I’ll address later in this review.
The only thing missing in this chapter is the harsh reality of the lack of economic value our country still holds for its African American communities. I’ve not to date viewed a plausible quant study on the cost to the Negro culture. It is indeed worth taking a knee for. According to the statistics in this book there’s continued harshness visited upon the African American, we’ve certainly earned the right to peacefully protest these egregious symptoms of imbalance.
It is hard to convey how needful it is for everyone to understand that we are not a “Photonegative of each other” – Ta-Nehisi Coates
Honesty
Coates uses as example social economists like Patrick Moynihan who lent his brilliance to creating various iterations of social programs meant to alleviate the Negro plight. Most failed and instead of them becoming teachable times, they more than often created deeper chasms of social wrongs. These social experiments have left indelible societal scars that will last for generations.
The end of marginalization is a many generational and much wish for event. And yet here we are again…more “the other” than ever…. or so it sometime seems.
Story/Plot/Conflict
Where do we go from here? This story seems ageless but this writing will rank among the finest example of journalism.
The plot is yet to be discovered. Not until the current American culture comes to understand the nature of marginalization and its hideous influence on socio-economics and sovereign survival. Will this “plot” ever be understood.
The conflict lies in the need to dismiss and not read books like this that bring some understanding to the why of our selective ignorance about each other.
Critiques This work is a must read for everyone. No matter the country or culture there are lessons in this book that are needful to humanity. Ta-Nehisi Coates joins the esteem ranks of this generation’s finest author.
Thank you, Mr. Coates
“Consistent Emotional Labor”
Defining authenticity
Today Seth Godin was in my email box and that’s a normal good thing…it’s my wake-up words for the day. Sometimes his commentary rings clear and at others it comes just clever. But today it came spot on.
Seth Godin’s comments on defining authenticity as doing what you must with panache. Since writing every day is what I must and is my pleasure. A smug smile hung on my lips while digesting his words.
If hanging out at the beach I am either writing or jotting down thoughts for composition later.
Before writing for a living I searched for reasons to compose in previous employments where writing wasn’t the mandated task. So, I know of days when composing relevancy has its moments of challenge.
In our drive as business writers we stifle our egos into whatever business or client we’re writing for. I wondered just how does a writer truly brand themselves.
The reveal for me, in this Seth moment was this,
“We call a brand or a person authentic when they’re consistent, when they act the same way whether or not someone is looking. Someone is authentic when their actions are in alignment with what they promise.”
Composing copy each day with words that titillate, captivate, make a reader salivate is not always easy. But if you enjoy writing, if you’re compelling incentive is to create prose, if every fiber of your being looks forward to putting pen to paper…then self-branding should come easy.
If thing one is writing as your raison d’etre, then thing two is where branding should become inevitable.
How, for me, does the term “consistent emotional labor” apply to the everyday job of composing content.
A writer’s choice of terminology and style reveals their brand. It becomes a brand by way of consistency. Whether selling compelling innovative copy, that motivates, or drive quant data solutions.
We must scrub our thoughts each day for words that compose thought filled and rewarding content.
Showing up with great copy every time makes your style of writing shine through. That to me is branding wrapped in “consistent emotional labor”.
The Earth May Come to an End But Marketing will Survive
Imagine preaching to a global audience in 2017 that the Earth is flat. And while imagining, did you know that the Rapper B.o.B is the iconic voice of this growing movement. He’s crowdfunding and promoting this premise. What’s most amazing? Is that there are more than a few willing followers ready to embrace his “reasoning”.
Now….I realize that we live in a world where intelligence often diverge onto paths of – shall we say – unintelligent rambling. But this gifted artist has set upon a vigorous campaign to enlighten the world. He goes so far as to propose that NASA covertly guards earth’s flat borders.
This bit of news caught my attention because of the sublime simplicity in its proposition and the admirable ROI. Obviously, what this artist is promoting is absurd…but his marketing efforts are working…people are listening.
Perhaps we should rethink our content marketing strategy.
I’ll name this marketing concept “the flat earth hypothesis”. People need to believe that there’s something new and exotic in their world, even if that thing is a misconception from uninformed eras. But clearly, this is where a business story can become a best seller.
And then there’s the reality of hurricane destruction.
Global financial markets wait with baited breath for utterances from the world’s money regulators. Janet Yellen, Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, Ben Bernanke, Christine Lagarde to name a few. They are the guardians of the stuff that dictates the behavior of money.
While the world evolves around economic downturns and corrections, a relative few global banks have acquired an ever-expanding independence. Long ago governments relinquished their ownership of banks. Although regulations and regulators act as overseers, the world’s largest, banking institutions have become the rock stars of cultural and societal influencers.
There are a few things to consider post Harvey, Irma, and Maria as a Content Marketer whose business depend on the availability of money.
Thing one is that you know the current nature of your client business or market niche performance.
But the advent of destructive storms has and will unleash new money into our economy. The rising cost of replacing destroyed infrastructure will last for decades. Rising cost of rebuilds will tax insurance and government coffers. In the role of marketing professionals, tasks of exploring new and testing old channels will also change.
Following the golden brick road
The will of the banking sector will hold sway and content makers should prepare for increased marketing dollars. Financial shifts within the ranks of consumer giants like Home Depot and Walmart is a given. But there is more to this story.
Thing two, where in the feeding chain are your clients. And are they in need of stepping up their content marketing campaigns.
Up and down the manufacturing food chain…lumber, machinery, metals for tools, real estate markets, changes in financials, and the flow of cash will impact fuel consumptions and consumer buying.
All these things influence businesses large and small requiring new content marketing strategies.
Just sayin’