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.

White Orchid

It’s such a nice feeling to receive a gift from one of your children, especially when there is no special occasion. I don’t know much at all about taking care of orchids, but I’ll cherish this one and do my best. Unfortunately, we don’t have an awful lot of light so I’m a bit concerned. The blooms are beautiful and I’m hoping they will last a while.

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.

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.

CHRIS PALADINO, a Microsoft employee who was hired in 2006, didn’t worry too much about his job when the economy began to sour last fall. The company employs nearly 90,000 people.

“I thought Microsoft was so stable, it wouldn’t be touched,” he said. Now, as one of the 1,400 employees who received layoff notices in January, Mr. Paladino is worried — about making the mortgage payments on his home.

Mr. Paladino gathered user feedback for the Xbox games division of Microsoft. This month he started his own consulting company, Promethium Marketing, with two colleagues who were also laid off.

But, “I would never have chosen to leave Microsoft,” he said. “I had a great job. I worked with a great team.”

Leaving the company has not always been so traumatic. Microsoft has a long history of making employees part-owners of the company, by granting them stock and stock options.

From executive to secretary, many employees received thousands of stock options. Microsoft’s stock price rose from about $2.50 a share in 1992 to almost $60 in 1999, and roughly 10,000 of those employees became millionaires.

When employees left the company in those days, it was overwhelmingly by their own choice. They were off to a new adventure, starting a business or a charity, or just planning to have fun, said Rob Horwitz, the chief executive of Directions on Microsoft, an information technology analyst firm that has been tracking the company for 17 years.

Notable alumni from that time rebuilt the Professional Bowlers Association; created the charity Room to Read, which builds schools in poor countries; and founded the Cranium game company (which was sold to Hasbro).

Other Microsoft alumni started venture capital firms or followed more personal dreams, creating enterprises like the Cameron Catering Company of Seattle, which focuses on green events, or the Casa Cupula, a bed-and-breakfast for gay travelers in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. One alumnus built his own airplane and another rode along with Russian cosmonauts on a space mission. The sky was literally the limit.

The economy has changed all that. With Microsoft’s stock price now below $20 a share, any stock options granted in the last 10 years have little to no value, and the outright stock grants have lost value.

So rather than leaving on their own terms for a new adventure, some recently separated employees are now looking for any professional job they can get. (Microsoft declined to comment for this article.)

Read More…

A New Crop of Job Hunters, With Microsoft Résumés – NYTimes.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.

WASHINGTON — The White House said more than 64,000 people watched President Obama answer questions on Thursday in the first live Internet video chat by an American president. But in declaring itself “Open for Questions,” on the economy, the White House learned it must be careful what it wishes for.

More than 100,000 questions were submitted, with the idea that Mr. Obama would answer those that were most popular. But after 3.6 million votes were cast, one of the top questions turned out to be a query on whether legalizing marijuana might stimulate the economy by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug.

“I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Mr. Obama said, drawing a laugh from an audience gathered in the East Room, which included teachers, nurses and small-business people. “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.”

The marijuana question later took up a good chunk of the daily White House press briefing, where Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, suggested that advocates for legalizing marijuana had mounted a drive to rack up votes for the question.

Those advocates included Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which urged supporters to “let the president know that millions of American voters believe that the time has come to tax and regulate marijuana.”

But however the marijuana query rose to the top of the White House list, it provided one of the livelier moments in the mostly staid 70-minute event.

Mr. Obama did make a sliver of news, disclosing that he intended to announce in the next couple of days what kind of help his administration would give the auto industry. A senior White House official said no decision had yet been made; Mr. Gibbs hinted that the announcement would most likely occur on Monday.

“We will provide them some help,” Mr. Obama said, as he has in the past, while also talking tough, as he has done previously, by insisting that the auto makers would have to make “drastic changes” to restructure the way they do business.

Full article…

Obama Makes History in Live Internet Video Chat – NYTimes.com.

Last year, Leo Laporte became a Twitter quitter.

The host of one of Silicon Valley’s most popular podcasts was none too excited that of all the names in the world, the burgeoning message service had picked one that hit piercingly close to home. The online broadcasting network that Laporte owns and runs out of his house in Petaluma is called TWiT.tv, after his company’s flagship show, “This Week in Tech.”

The rise of Twitter has long been a favorite topic of conversation on TWiT, and with an audience of around 150,000, Laporte found himself in a strange pickle: The more he talked about Twitter on his show, the more followers he accrued — and the more publicity he gave his brand rival.

“I thought, jeez, I’m building value in this company that is ultimately vying for my trademark,” he said recently via phone. “So I left.”

But in spite of his absence, Laporte still became the most-followed user on the service, beating out front-runners like then-Sen. Barack Obama for the top spot, with more than 30,000 followers. Walking away from a megaphone that big just didn’t seem like good business. So he came back.

“They kind of have you,” said Laporte, who now has more than 100,000 followers on the service. “The same way that Facebook has you: because you have to go where the community is.”

Still, being in thrall to Twitter hasn’t stopped Laporte from joining a conversation that’s taking hold on the service’s fringes. As this group of Web subversives sees it, the once-tiny Twitter has grown like a magic beanstalk into a full-fledged communications medium — taking its place alongside Web pages, e-mail and maybe even television. And though the 30-person, San Francisco start-up is not exactly General Electric, digital trust-busters believe the same rules apply: One company shouldn’t have a monopoly…

…on an entire medium — even if it invented it.

“Those of us who are participating are pumping value into this closed system and trusting that Twitter will do the right thing with it,” said Laporte, referring to the tweets users pour into Twitter’s databases every day by the million.

People love the convenience and reach of social media systems like Twitter, he said.  “But what they ignore is that there’s a dark side to all of that, which is that these companies have a huge amount of control over what’s going on.”

Dave Winer, a Berkeley-based entrepreneur and Web innovator, sounded a similar note on a recent podcast posted to his Scripting News blog.

“It’s a very dangerous network because it’s all centralized,” he said, “not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers — but it also goes through one set of business interests that’s anything but transparent.”

Danger may sound a bit overzealous for a Web service that barely existed two years ago, but for a media landscape in the middle of a profound shift, two years can be the span between eras.

Twitter is becoming a major source for news, commerce and free expression and, as with a free press itself, defenders don’t want a few profit-motivated individuals making all the decisions about how it should evolve.

Like Facebook and YouTube before it, Twitter is now transitioning from a freely available, much-loved Web service to a well-funded business venture looking to cash in on the audience and cachet it built in its freewheeling early days.

A few weeks ago, Twitter created a page of several dozen suggested users to help newcomers decide whom to follow. If you weren’t sure how to proceed, you can follow CNN, Lance Armstrong or Britney Spears. Being recommended by Twitter, it was quickly discovered, translated into tens or hundreds of thousands of new followers, and anointed accounts have since shot to the top of the Twitter hierarchy. The giant, instant audiences Twitter bestowed on these select users are thought to be so valuable that Web businessman Jason Calacanis offered Twitter $250,000 for a two-year ride on the list.

As visibility and influence gets funneled upward to the companies, celebrities and politicians that already have plenty of both, Twitter risks inviting a comparison to the overinflated economy — it’s creating a bubble at the top, and potentially alienating regular users who labored to build their audiences over months or years.

Well-known tech figures like Laporte and Winer don’t exactly represent the voiceless online rabble, but neither are they the types of guys you want leading a charge against you.

Winer recently wrote a post called “Why it’s time to break out of Twitter,” where he said of the service’s management, “we need to get that power out of their hands.” Laporte told me, “I’m more interested in seeing if we can go beyond Twitter — a more open system would be a better system.”

Complete article @

There’s Twitter the company, and twitter the medium | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

Sarah Wade, Cavalier Daily Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, March 18 2009
Human history is as much a product of forgetting as it is of remembering. What actually goes down in the pages of history can be unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary.

Listen to Beethoven’s famed Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47, commonly called the Kreutzer Sonata after the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. It is sometimes assumed that Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to Kreutzer. In reality, Kreutzer never could perform the sonata.

Instead, he reportedly told Beethoven the piece was “impossible to play” — a notable complaint, given that Kreutzer was considered one of Europe’s top violinists at the time.

But it was not impossible. By this time, Afro-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower had already played the sonata, said Creative Writing Prof. Rita Dove, who recently wrote a book about the musician.

Bridgetower was a Mulatto violin virtuoso. His musical talent was so impressive that Beethoven originally wrote the piece for him, not Kreutzer, Dove said. Why, then, did Beethoven rededicate the sonata to Kreutzer, a violinist who refused to play it? Also, why did history subsequently forget George Polgreen Bridgetower?

Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, said she aims to recover Bridgetower’s lost significance in her latest book of poetry. “Sonata Mulattica” dramatizes in lyric verse the life of the violinist and the different factors that led him to historical obscurity rather than fame.
“I wanted to discover [Bridgetower], Dove said, “and poetry was the way I wanted to discover him.”

In a joint concert with Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley, Dove will celebrate the release of “Sonata Mulattica”  Friday evening as part of the 15th Annual Virginia Festival of the Book. The blending of poetry, music and conversation will begin at 8 p.m. in the Paramount Theater.

“[When] Dove mentioned that Boyd Tinsley was cited in one of her poems … we all agreed that it would be fantastic if there could be a joint program,” said Nancy Damon, program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Kevin McFadden, the festival’s associate director and a former University student, said he felt that there would be “large interest” in the program, and eventually the festival invited Dove and Tinsley to perform together at the Paramount. Dove used Tinsley’s name in her poem, “The Bridgetower,” describing him as one of today’s gifted people forgotten by time. She said she contacted him after finishing writing “Sonata Mulattica” to let him know he was featured in it.

Dove and Tinsley enjoyed working together on the upcoming event, Dove said. “He works similarly [as] I do … on improvisation,” Dove said, adding that both are artists who experiment with their craft to expand its scope and range of expression. Combining the two crafts of poetry and violin music to share one message is in itself a chance for improvisation.

“It’s been a great process of getting to know one another,” Dove said of her collaboration with Tinsley, who, like Dove, is a Charlottesville resident. Dove added that Tinsley wants people to remember what happened between Beethoven and Bridgetower in 1803. Both Tinsley and her aim to “connect the dots from Bridgetower all the way up to Tinsley,” Dove said.

Damon said she anticipates that the event will be “a very exciting combination of words and music which fits perfectly into [the festival’s] goal of encouraging people to read.” She added that “with any success, the story contained in Dove’s book and Tinsley’s music — the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower — will encourage people to explore what they read more deeply, to examine the personal significance every story offers them.”

Dove said her initial decision to versify Bridgetower’s 200-year-old story happened largely by chance. As a former cellist, she heard Bridgetower’s name long ago but did not give it much thought. That changed years later when she glimpsed a portrayal of Bridgewater’s genius in the 1994 film, “Immortal Beloved.”

By the age of 10, Bridgewater, already a prodigy, was on the road performing.

“That was really interesting — a little boy, half-black and half-white, playing in concert halls across Europe,” she said.

As a young man, Bridgetower came to Vienna, where he impressed and befriended the already legendary Ludwig van Beethoven. The friendship, however, was short-lived.

“The Bridgetower,” which was printed last November in the New Yorker, explains why: In May 1803, Beethoven and his new friend first performed their new sonata together with the German on pianoforte and the Afro-European on violin. The performance moved the composer so deeply that he “leapt up to embrace his ‘lunatic mulatto,’ the playful nickname he had given Bridgetower.

“[But then they had a] falling out over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows.”

Bridgetower apparently insulted a woman who was one of Beethoven’s acquaintances. In response, the composer chose to dedicate the sonata to another musician. The pair would never renew the friendship.

How might racial categorization both in and beyond classical music be different if Bridgetower’s fame had survived the first round of history’s cuts? How many more figures like Bridgetower might there be today if their names were better remembered? His own mulatto identity literally bridged African and European cultures, and his technical abilities surpassed even those of the famous Kreutzer. Beethoven’s sole reason for renouncing Bridgetower had nothing to do with music and everything to do with emotion. But because of a chance combination of factors, Bridgetower “has kind of dropped out of history,” Dove said. Remembered here and there, maybe, but more as an interesting detail than as anyone historically influential, she added.

For Dove, obscure stories like Bridgetower’s history point out the shortcomings of history and the need for something beyond it that can be used to remember human life.

Around every famous historical figure, there are countless other people — “living, breathing people,” Dove said — who were just as significant. Perhaps these nameless contributors would be the ones in history books instead if a few circumstances had worked out differently.

For those select few that history does remember, it seems to do so incompletely, which offers the world only small, scattered windows into past lives as vibrant as the ones that people are living now, Dove noted.

“What has always fascinated me [is] the realization that we all have interior lives,” Dove said. “What history does is to point out, rather graphically, just how little of that interiority can be passed down through generations.”

This is one of Dove’s main reasons for writing poetry, she said. She aims to acknowledge and explore that interiority with the intent to expose the personal, emotional side of history.

“History … tells us what happened. It doesn’t tell us why it was worth it,” Dove said. “That’s the job of poetry.”

via Cavalier Daily.