Persevere

Has this been a good week for you? Most of us probably remember something that could have gone better. Here's some wisdom from Mac Hammond to remind you that failure is not final.

Arby's

“Arby's performance is among the worst in modern restaurant history," said an analyst in 2010. He was talking about sales, which declined three years in a row.

A new CEO was hired in 2013 to turn things around - and he did. Individual restaurants are now doing 25% higher annual sales than before he came.

How would you turn around a restaurant chain? In 2013 they rolled out a brisket sandwich "which lifted sales 12% and became the company’s most successful product." 

Before CEO Paul Brown, they introduced 2 new products every year; since Brown came, they now introduce twelve every year. The new product is launched with a discount, then up to regular price. "If the item can hold steady at 3 - 6% of sales, it earns a permanent place on the menu. Otherwise it’s gone."

And of course you've heard the Arby's commercial, "We have the meats!" That's Ving Rhames ("Mission Impossible") doing the voice.

Gen Z thinks

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Generation Z has Jeff Meyers' full attention. Dr. Meyers interacts with hundreds of students every year in his profession of running two-week worldview encounters.  He has a lot of wisdom about these students that goes beyond retailers' drive to analyze them.

photo: gfs.com

He says, "The most common misunderstanding is that young adults don’t care about anything besides themselves. I think they do care."

"Today’s young adults can only embrace truth in the context of relationship. Truth without relationship leads to arrogance. Relationship without truth leads to apathy."

Gen Z

After all the attention paid to analyzing millennials, now there's another generation coming - Generation Z. They will include those born 1995 or later, and they will account for one-third of U.S. population by 2020, in just three years.

Naturally, it's their turn to be analyzed. HuffPo offers their take on it. How they are different as a group from the millennials' generation:

1. They're used to continual updates & revisions, so they may be less focused
2. They can function with multiple distractions, may be good multi-multi-taskers
3. They're less interested in coupons, maybe less interested in good deals
4. They're often "early starters," may choose to opt out of higher education
5.  They are entrepreneurial; "72% of teens say they want to start a business someday"
6. They expect more
7.  They seek uniqueness in all walks of life, customization
8. They are "global," world-conscious, expect diversity

Apparently this generation will be better educated and healthier too with a 40% drop in teen birth rates, 38% drop in alcohol/drug abuse, 28% drop in teens failing to graduate from high school on time.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Food to Eat

Street food is big in New York city. But the food vendors are mostly very small businesses. "For me, the mission has always been how can I help these amazing small food vendors grow their businesses?" So says native New Yorker Deepti Sharma.

Upon finding out that NYC food trucks needed help to expand the catering side of their businesses, she started a business of her own to act as a "marketing arm" for them.

Her company, Food to Eat, works with office managers to help them find local food providers for catered lunches or to provide meal benefits for employees. She wants corporate food business to go to local smallish food providers.

Fire survivors

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Not all those who suffered from the fire were ranchers. One who lost his home was John R. Erickson, author of dozens of children's fiction books about Hank the Cowdog. He's not exactly a rancher as his primary profession, but still an owner of cattle - and a Texan.

On March 6 John and his wife received a call warning that fire had broken out near his home. With winds gusting to 50 mph, they grabbed a couple of valuables and escaped safely. A day later they returned to find their home in ashes. Even with insurance, he says, "it’s tough to see your front porch under a pile of rubble … my writing office vaporized, all my books … all the quilts Kris [his wife] had made.” (Click on the photo to see it bigger.)

photo: world.wng.org

But sadder was the story of three men south of them who didn't make it. They "died while riding to open gates so their cattle could escape. One of them, Sloan Everett, placed a call to his pregnant wife and their two other children, advising them to leave their ranch immediately. They left, but never heard back from Everett and his friends."

Fire recovery

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

The Gardiners of Ashland KS have been a ranching family for generations. Ten days after the biggest fire in Kansas history, he was still burying cattle. "One by one, an orange loader scooped them off the bare sandy soil and trundled them to a pit being dug by a backhoe."

Insurance and government aid will help these ranchers, but there are caps on the amounts they can get, and of course it may not come as soon as they'd like. Prairie grass is what the cattle feed on, and cattle that survived still need to eat - but hundreds of thousands of acres are now charred.

So communities pitch in to help. "Thousands of donated hay bales . . have been rolling into town on the backs of tractor-trailers." Fencing has been donated. "Members of 4-H clubs and National FFA Organization chapters drove down to help with the cleanup, sleeping in guest bedrooms and on living-room floors around the towns of Ashland, Meade and Protection."

Neighbors understand the importance of the cattle herds to these ranchers. Three of the deaths in Texas during the fire were ranchers trying to get their cattle to safety.

Fire losses

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Roughly two million acres burned in the plains states earlier this month. It was the biggest fire in the history of the state of Kansas.

Ranching families now face "years of cleanup and crippling losses after wind-driven wildfires . . devoured homes, miles of fences and as much as 80 percent of some families’ cattle herds." Those ranches are both their homes and their income.

A cow would bring about $2000 at auction, but each is also "an engine that drove their farms and finances, giving birth to new calves every year .  .  ."

Then there was the fencing of all those acres. "[A]t about $10,000 per mile . . new fencing alone may cost [one] ranch about $2 million."

"We’re not asking for freebies here,” [a rancher] said. “We’re going to work our tails off to get this thing rebuilt. We’re going to get the blisters on our hands and roll up our sleeves and do the labor.”

(cont'd tomorrow)

Grass fire

The American Great Plains suffered a huge grass wildfire two weeks ago.  (This is the first I've heard about it, so I wonder about media coverage: was it un-important because it's not Trump-related?)

Colorado - five homes and 30,000 acres burned
Texas - four deaths and 480,000 acres burned
Kansas - eleven deaths, 40 homes and 650,000 acres burned
Oklahoma - one death, 882,000 acres burned

photo: travelksok.co.uk

Killing the fatally maimed cattle was just one of the unpleasant jobs to follow all this destruction.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Saved Ford

(cont'd from Friday's post)

Car companies were rocked by effects of the 2008 recession. GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. But their major American competitor, Ford, did not. Chairman Bill Ford credits their employees for making the difference.

He recently said, "“Why didn’t we go bankrupt? Well, you could say we made certain good decisions, but it was our employees. They would not let us.”

"Ford attributes his workers’ loyalty and grit for helping to allow the company to refuse government bailout money . . . 

“Our people were working, Saturdays, Sundays, until 1-2 a.m. in the morning, no extra pay, in fact not even sure they were going to have a job the next morning. In fact, some of them didn’t have jobs the next morning. But they were willing to do whatever it took to pull us through,” he said.

"Ford said that it was truly “awesome” to be able to hire most of those people back after it paid off its debt."

Ford Level 4

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Ford CEO Mark Fields is specific about his claim to put an autonomous car on the road by 2021.

He says in yesterday's video that this car will be "level 4" on the autonomous scale, which means that the car is driving itself but the driver must be in the driver seat and ready to take over in an emergency. "Level 5" would mean that the driver can "disengage (like, go to sleep)".

As I wrote in posts last fall (here and here), a level 5 autonomous car is thought to be much further out in the future compared to level 4 which is Ford's goal for their billion-dollar investment.

Ford Motor Co. has another interesting story to tell, this one not about their cars but rather about their employees . . 

(to be cont'd next Monday)

Ford daring

Ford Motor Company  is making an audacious investment. It's a daring bet of a billion dollars  over 5 years on the autonomous car concept.

They're going to partner with a start-up artificial intelligence company that will develop "the brains - a virtual driver system" for their self driving cars. The company is Argo AI, and its two founders are not new-comers to this technology.

One of them is Bryan Salesky, who headed up hardware development for Google's self-driving car project. The other is Pete Rander, a former engineer at Uber Technologies.

Their goal - to bring a fully autonomous Ford vehicle to market in . . 2021.



(cont'd tomorrow)

Conversions

Hundreds of Muslims have been turning to Christianity in Europe, but some churches are cautious about that. There could be at least three reasons for the uncommon conversions.

Churches have generally been welcoming and charitable, so the Muslim conversions could be from just a sense of gratitude and a desire to assimilate.

A second reason could be that they hope for a better chance of being granted asylum and not being transported back to their native country.

But in at least some cases, the reason is heart-felt faith.

"By getting baptized we have to say goodbye to our home country because we can never go back. But we accept this. The Muslim god in Iran was angry and strict, but Jesus accepts us as we are.” 

photo: timesofisrael.com

DST

World War I marked the first implementation of daylight savings time (DST) in Germany, then Great Britain and the U.S., for the purpose of conserving energy. Because of its "fantastic unpopularity," it was dropped after the war.

Though brought back for the Second World War, it was still unpopular, especially with farmers. But America adopted the policy after the Chamber of Commerce fought for it:

"That’s right. National daylight saving policy wasn’t developed for the benefit of farmers, it was actualized based on lobbying on behalf of department stores."

"[D]epartment stores . . loved the extra hour of daylight in the evening. They saw “a huge uptick in business” as laborers headed home from work had more time to stop and shop without worrying about returning home in the dark. 

"“At Congressional hearings on daylight savings in 1985, 1986, the golf industry– by itself– said that one extra month of daylight savings would be worth $400 million in additional green fees and equipment sales. The barbecue industry said it would be worth $200 million in additional sales of grills and barbecue briquettes.” 

Now you know.

Flat tax

Have we achieved tax fairness in America? If everyone above a certain income were taxed 17%, without exceptions or deductions, maybe that would be fairer.

Steve Forbes (yes, that Forbes) untangles some of the complexity around our income tax structure here:

Motivating #2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A genuine plan to take people to Mars has captivated - even electrified - some people. That's because no serious, credible problem-solver has ever taken on this mission and promised a completion date so soon. Elon Musk is unique.

Those two volunteers who paid mega-bucks to hold their place on the first crewed mission to Mars (yesterday's post) are betting their lives that it will really happen. 

Here's a comment posted when SpaceX made the announcement on its fb page:

"Make this happen while it still can. I don't want our descendants to see us as the only civilization that could have colonized Mars, but in the end didn't bother, but instead sat around watching streaming video on their phones."

Peter Diamandis, head of X Prize Foundation, says SpaceX "has a mission and transformative purpose to make the human race a multiplanetary species . . That vision is intoxicating and powerful.”

Motivating

"What’s the number one work motivator for Millennials? Making an impact."  Every millennial working for Elon Musk at SpaceX, Tesla, or Solar City must be convinced that his or her company is making an impact.

Their boss has been very public from the start about what drives him: protecting earth from fossil fuels, and going inter-planetary for humanity's future.

From the website of SpaceX:

"SpaceX is like Special Forces… we do the missions that others think are impossible. We have goals that are absurdly ambitious by any reasonable standard, but we’re going to make them happen. We have the potential here at SpaceX to have an incredible effect on the future of humanity and life itself."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Elon Mus

To the moon

As a followup on my February 21 post, here is some new information coming from SpaceX.

Not only do we know that they intend to send people into space in 2018, but we may soon know some of their names, as announced on the website:

"We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the Moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a Moon mission." (dependent on health and fitness tests as well as some training)

"Designed from the beginning to carry humans, the Dragon spacecraft already has a long flight heritage. These missions [several cargo/crew planned missions this year and next] will build upon that heritage, extending it to deep space mission operations, an important milestone as we work towards our ultimate goal of transporting humans to Mars."

2nd religion

In sheer numbers, Christianity is still the biggest "religious tradition" in each state. The graphic below shows which other religion follows Christianity in numbers:

You might have guessed that Judaism would be second in many states. But would you have guessed Islam would be second in 20 states? Or Buddhism in 13 states?

Click on the image enlarge it.

Hero grandma

She saw a policeman in a struggle with a suspect as she was driving by. She stopped, called 911, then got out of the car and jumped on the suspect to help the policeman, who is much bigger than she is.

Who would do that?? A hero.

Cat Cafe

This is business "innovation" - in a different sense. The Blue Cat Cafe of Austin, Texas, inspires both lovers and haters (who "defaced the property with obscene graffiti and glued the door locks shut" on the cafe's first anniversary).

Surprisingly, the source of this passion is just cats, supplied by the local humane society. They have the run of the place. Food is prepared outside in a food truck to comply with health regs, and tables and floors are wiped down morning and evening. 

The owner says she “wanted to provide a positive place for people and cats—and to get the cats adopted.” Since the cafe opened in 2015, over 200 cats have found a home.

A Canadian student enjoys cat cafes in Japan:

Paul Revere

"Paul Revere," does that name sound familiar? It may not - if you  had a public school education in the last decade or two.

This post will acquaint you with a story from America's founding. If you are an American, you have a right to know the stories involved in your heritage.

Lunar XPrize

Last month Google's XPrize announced the five teams that will continue to compete for their Lunar XPrize. The teams are privately funded (at least 90%) and come from India, Japan, Israel, America, and include an international team.

The grand prize will go to the first team that:

• lands a spacecraft on the moon's surface which then:
• travels 500 meters and:
• "transmits high-definition video and images back to earth"

That team will receive $20,000,000, while second place will receive $5,000,000. They have until the end of this year to launch.

Who are these people who competed in the Lunar XPrize? Some of them talk about their project and their passion below, in one of several videos about the competition: