Earlier this week I made a post on William Yeh, a man who personifies disintermediation, in this case the final step of disintermediation in the stock brokerage business. Since that time, people have asked me about why he could do what he is doing, how he could stay in business with prices that are more […]
As regular readers of this blog know, I have been exploring the subject of disintermediation. It is a dynamic force that has and will be reorganizing our culture and economy. In an early post on the subject, I pointed out that in the late 1990s the Internet acted as the agent of disintermediation for the […]
Back in April, I took a futuristic look back as the price of gasoline from the vantage point of April 2009. The point was to suggest how the price of a gallon of gas got to $7.33. In that post, I wrote: “July 2006 There was general outrage at the pump and on the airwaves, […]
Across the full spectrum of human endeavor, it is often hard to see what the future might be. Trend lines can be seen, and directions understood, but specific pictures of the future can be vague. However, our future shows up most clearly in the area of technology. Technology lets us see new potential. It shows […]
Compassion and Wealth Together Given the last post on this blog, this weeks announcement of the astoundingly magnanimous and generous gift that Warren Buffett made to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is worthy of comment. Simply put, Warren Buffett, the second wealthiest man in the United States, after Bill Gates, gave more than 80% […]
The announcement last week that Bill Gates would, over the next two years, relinquish day to day oversight of Microsoft made me think about history and the future. The first thought of course was that in some way it was the end of an era. The second thought was, well, what era, where does that […]
This is a departure from most posts here as it is not ruminations about some event or trend or prediction about the future gleaned from developments in the world. Instead it is taken from a personal experience that was unique, pleasant and perhaps an idea to be embraced by individuals and companies alike. To set […]
The post today is an interview I recently did with Nonprofit Online Learning Update, which is being published on-line today. The interviewer was Jeff Cobb, a leader in the field of on-line learning for non-profits. Non-profits provide an incredibly valuable function in today’s world and can be even more influential in the future as they […]
“The political party, as currently defined in America, feels like an out of date, anachronistic apparatus whose value is in the past, not the present and certainly not something aligned with the future. If it is to survive, it must reconstitute itself or crumble under its own dead weight.” -www.evolutionshift.com 5/31/06 When I set aside […]
I read an interesting article in the New York Times the other day. The headline was “New Campaign Shows Progress for the Homeless” and the sub-headline quote was “Cost -benefit analysis may be the new expression of compassion”. OK, lets read this. A little known, formally dormant, office in the Federal government called the United […]