This afternoon I’ll be leaving to study in Berlin. Before I go, I thought this would be the perfect time to let my friends know how much they have meant to me. This year, each morning, coffee in hand, I began my day posting a daily bloom on the Kierkegaarden, often before sunrise. Next I began reading and sharing the news on various topics that I found interesting on Twitter, Friendfeed & Facebook. Apparently, many others shared my interests and found my posts to be of value and followed them.

Since I posted so frequently, I avoided posting too many personal comments, but that did not stop me from getting to know you. I’ve read yur posts and enjoyed them immensely. I’ve learned so much from you. Many of you responded to me and we got to know each other via DM’s and email. I really appreciate the connection and thought you should know . I hesitate to mention names here for fear of missing someone, but @ YOU and I know who you are. Some of you greeted me with a sun filled hello every morning. Some of us communicated personally by phone & email. Many of you sent tweets of gratitude and encouragement, confirming the value of my efforts by oh so frequent retweets. You have brought me great joy, and it has been a pleasure to ferret through the news and choose from a plethora of headlines to determine what may be of mutual interest and import. We’ve shared so muc together.

While I am away, although I will have internet access, I’m unsure how much time I wil have to continue as it has been my custom. However, I do plan to keep in touch as I can and take up where I left off upon returning. I’ll be taking my camera and Flip Mino with me and intend to blog about my travels.

I hope that you will stay and virtually join me on my European Journey. This represents a lifelong dream for me and has been a long time coming. I’m so excited, I can hardly breathe. I’m looking forward with great anticipation not only to the travel and study experience, but to meeting new friends and reuniting with those I’ve had the privilege of meeting on my last brief visit. I can’t wait to see them! That’s the best part of all.

Meanwhile, don’t let anyone tell you that Social Media is silly or meaningless. I’ve made some wonderful and VERY meaningful business and personal relationships here. It’s whatever you make it. My two cents to newbies… be honest, be open, be yourself, be kind & considerate. There are wonderful people in the world just waiting to get to know you.

Again, many, many thanks. Hang in there with me. Soon I’ll be greeting you from the other side…of the Atlantic, that is!!! Have a lovely summer. I’m sure I’ll be having a blast. Life is good.

Photo courtesy of Starbucks

by Jim Donald, former CEO of Starbucks and Pathmark

“Good morning, general store managers, assistant store managers, VPs and all 26,000 employees…Jim here…

It’s Wednesday morning and the merchandising message today is–and you are not going to believe it– but I am telling you that it is OK to steal.”

It was 5:30 a.m., and I was on the phone, in my kitchen, sending out my daily voicemail. As I paused for effect, I was thinking that the supermarket industry has one of the strictest employee honesty codes in the world.  Because of the large number of employees, the vast number of items and the low profit margins, it’s an absolute necessity to have zero tolerance for employee theft. I hadn’t informed my senior team that I would be sending out this message…hmm…better think about how to handle that one…

“You heard correctly…despite what you might think about controlling losses and theft, I am saying to all of our associates, it’s now time to start stealing…stealing market share, that is.“

Call it hokey, but this is how I needed to deliver my message to my 26,000 associates. I wanted to convey that the power of the company comes associate by associate, item by item… and it’s up to them to translate that power into sales. So I finished my broadcast this way:

“That’s my message for today…it’s OK to steal…steal market share, that is. Thanks, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

That’s how I communicated though a crisis almost a decade ago when I was CEO of Pathmark Supermarkets. The economic crisis back then wasn’t as bad as today’s. But Pathmark was barely hanging on, just like a lot of companies now. Once the giant grocery chain in the New York metro area, it was one the longest living LBOs from the 1980s and still strapped with $1.6 billion in loans and junk bonds. Employee morale was at an all-time low. It was no longer a price leader. And our suppliers worried that we wouldn’t be able pay the bills.

I learned a lot at Pathmark—and during my time at Albertsons, Safeway, Wal-Mart (WMT) and Starbucks (SBUX), where I was the CEO until January of last year. Since I have some experience in crisis and now I have some distance, too, let me share just a few ideas with you:

Communicate, communicate, communicate. Especially at a time of crisis, make sure your message reaches all levels, from the very lowest to the uppermost. When Pathmark was in dire straits, I began to send out my daily message to all employees. Make sure too that you give them an opportunity to reply.

Reach deep for answers. Sam Walton once said to me, “Jim, if you ever want to know what is troubling your business, ask your front-line employees. They know, and they will tell you.” It’s true, your people on the front line are your real marketing experts. Take advantage of the fact that they’re closest to your customer everyday.

Beware the success trap. Success breeds risk aversion. And what happens when we become risk averse? We stop innovating. And we lose our best people because they become restless and even bored. Various studies by McKinsey and others lists three things that employees want from a company today: an open and honest work environment, the opportunity to be stretched and valued, and the ability to make decisions. Especially today, when so many companies are frozen by risk aversion, giving your people freedom to fail could be your competitive advantage. Complete Story….

Guest Post: Former Starbucks CEO’s tips for tough times – Postcards.

Editor’s note: A nationally syndicated columnist, Roland S. Martin is the author of “Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith” and “Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.” Visit his Web site for more information. For the next few months, he will be hosting “No Bias, No Bull” at 8 p.m. ET on CNN while Campbell Brown is on maternity leave.

Roland Martin says rules in the U.S. should be loosened to encourage adoption of American children.

(CNN) — Pop star Madonna is back in the news; this time, heading back to the African nation of Malawi to adopt her second child.

You might remember all of the drama a few years ago when Madonna adopted a Malawi boy. Now she wants to adopt a girl, and a judge has said she will have to wait until Friday to see if she will get the go-ahead.

Madonna has been quoted in the Malawi newspaper Nation as saying, “Many people, especially our Malawian friends, say that David should have a Malawian brother or sister. It’s something I have been considering, but would only do if I had the support of the Malawian people and government.”

It seems that anytime we hear about celebrities like Madonna adopting, the children are from another country. I’m not at all opposed to children being adopted from Africa, China or any other country, but it does raise the question: What’s wrong with adopting American children?

Now I’m not against anyone providing a secure, loving home for a child, but it seems to me that these stories often reinforce a growing public image of adoption for many Americans: that of a rich, famous individual going to a developing country to adopt a child.

According to various adoption and governmental agencies, more than 500,000 American children are under foster care, and many of them are waiting for adoption. From coast to coast, babies to toddlers to teens are desperately looking for a home where they can be loved, nurtured and provided for.

Now, it would be easy to blast these celebrities by saying it’s the hip thing to walk around with an international child, but truth be told, we’ve got a serious adoption problem in this country.

Single mothers have a difficult time adopting a child, and several I know personally have gone overseas. And let’s not even talk about the red tape and bureaucracy!

American parents are made to jump through enormous hoops, and the process takes years, instead of months. And all too often, single people and married couples simply grow disenchanted with the process.

We can sit here and criticize Madonna all day, but enough with ripping her. Our energy should be put into a call for massive adoption reform. Don’t just bang out an e-mail or blog and get caught up in the celebrity hype.

If you think it should be easier to adopt American children, demand that your local, state and federal election officials clear the pathway to make the process easier. And let’s have more consistency. Having 50 different states set their own policy, is frankly, nonsense. With so many rules, no wonder folks throw their hands up and move on.

The goal of adoption is to put children in loving homes and not have them be the responsibility of the state. Making it harder to adopt affects you in your pocketbook because taxpayer money is spent to care for the children. So changing the laws not only helps the child, but also is fiscally prudent.

So what are you prepared to do?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland Martin.

Commentary: Why aren’t celebrities adopting U.S. kids? – CNN.com.

REMEMBERING The historian John Hope Franklin took pains to remind us of how much of his and our history we would like to forget.

When he was a boy in segregated Oklahoma, where he was born in 1915, John Hope Franklin used to indulge in a subversive bit of wordplay like a small act of public and private theater.

“My mother and I used to have a game we’d play on our public,” Dr. Franklin said not long ago, his voice full of artful pauses, words pulled out like taffy. “She would say if anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States. And just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun, just saying it.”

Even in a country where the far-fetched, for better and for worse, so often becomes reality, few historians achieved the stature, both as scholars and as moral figures — and as combinations of the two — that Dr. Franklin did. When he died last week, at the age of 94, an American epoch seemed to vanish with him.

Dr. Franklin was first and foremost a major historian, whose landmark book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” first published in 1947, was a comprehensive survey that sold more than three million copies. The book also permanently altered the ways in which the American narrative was studied.

“What distinguishes his history or historiography is that he, like few other historians, wrote a book that transformed the way we understand a major social phenomenon,” said David Levering Lewis, the New York University historian, who like Dr. Franklin studied under Theodore Currier at Fisk University in Nashville.

“When you think of ‘From Slavery to Freedom,’ there’s before and there’s after, there’s the world before and then we have a basic paradigm shift,” he said. “Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”

Dr. Lewis and others argue that Dr. Franklin’s work helped empower not just African-American studies, but the whole range of alternative stories — of women, gays, Hispanics, Asians and others — now so much a part of mainstream academia.

Dr. Franklin accomplished this not through advocacy but rather through the traditional means of scholarly inquiry. In his discussion, for instance, of the intersection of race and imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Franklin observed: “The United States, unlike other imperial powers, had a color problem at home and therefore had to pursue a policy with regard to race that would not upset the racial equilibrium within the United States. In Puerto Rico, for example, approximately one-third of the population was distinctly of African descent, and many so-called white Puerto Ricans had sufficient black blood in their veins to qualify as African-Americans in the United States.”

Complete Story Here…

John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness – NYTimes.com.