Creating a startup can be a wild ride, rocketing from the thrill of launch to crash-and-burn in a matter of months. A few decades ago, Fortune 500 companies could count on being around for at least a half-century. Most now last about 15 years. And the average startup? The lifespan is just three years.
Today's business environment demands speed and transparency, and the key to longevity is building a company that matters. Marketplace survivors have become the obvious choice -- to customers, investors, teams, employees and even competitors. Successful companies lead the pack without leaving it behind. They anticipate and embrace disruption in ways that enable their markets to grow.
Our research identifies seven key factors that help leaders successfully launch a business and position it for long-term success:
1. Build a Dream Team. Companies that matter need top-notch people who can quickly assess market needs, develop an elevated perspective and, most critically, execute on decisions. This isn't the time to hire your buddies. Talented people with meaningful insight will create the foundation for a company that takes off successfully and continues to soar.
2. Employ a Telescopic Lens. It's natural to want to celebrate every transaction, but keep your eyes on the long view. A company with a buy/sell mindset will be plagued by shortsighted decisions. Decision-making that considers the market, the community and society at large is critical to sustaining relevance. Keep a keen eye out for potentially disruptive evolutions, and quickly figure out how to make them work for you.
3. Anticipate and Share. Foresight and futurecasting are powerful assets that help you dominate your market by anticipating customers' needs and wants. Leaders must stay attuned to what the future holds -- and how to thrive in disruption. Openness to doing things differently is essential. And the best way to gain credibility and ensure the health of the market is to be willing to share that wisdom with others in your organization.
4. Partner Strategically. Companies that matter know how to connect with the right high-value partners and build trusting, open relationships. Don't waste energy on partnerships that don't clearly align with company goals. Remember that by definition, partnerships are mutually beneficial. Both sides get value out of identifying problems and creating solutions. Each invests in success for the benefit of both.
5. Fixate on Value. In today's marketplace, hungry competitors are constantly prowling. It's not enough to offer super products or great service. Envision a full spectrum of value, where customer problems are solved and changes in the industry are anticipated and addressed. Customers and clients will flock to companies that provide resources and solutions.
6. Attend to Growing Pains. From a market share perspective, a startup has different goals than a mature company. Startups are hungry and hard-driving. With growth and maturity, leaders must consciously shift the culture. It's essential that decisions and actions align with company aspirations. Successful leaders foster collaboration. This might mean altering organizational structures and taking the time to make sure everyone understands strategies and values.
7. Be courageous. Facing disruption, rather than fighting it, takes bravery and will. Companies that discover and deliver on new opportunities are investing in longevity. Consider Adobe, which saw its market dominance wane as technology changed and competitors emerged. Instead of digging in, the company redefined itself and seized the opportunities a disrupted market was providing. Adobe helped define the new market, and it became the obvious choice.
Startup companies need an expansive, wise perspective on the now and the future to successfully grow and create sustainability. While these tips can help a company get firmly established, they remain relevant as the company matures. A sustainable evolution -- from a hungry launch to a healthy enterprise -- means staying connected with the world you're growing into. By maintaining perspective, and making sure your company culture is aligning with your growth as well, you can get to the front -- and stay there.
The U.S. economy added nearly 2.5 million employed workers in the last 12 months, a growth of 1.7%. Employment is expanding even more rapidly in some parts of the country. Due to a variety of factors, employment growth in a number of cities was more than double the national growth rate. Together, the 25 cities with the fastest employment growth added more than half a million new jobs.
To determine the 25 U.S. cities adding the most jobs, 24/7 Wall St. compared employment levels in 387 metro areas in October 2016 with levels a year prior. Employment growth in these 25 cities ranged from 4.4% in Ithaca, New York to 7.6% in the Bend-Redmond metro area in Oregon.
National employment growth is often attributed to thriving industries. In the past year, the education and health services industry added the most workers, while professional and business services was the second biggest contributor to employment growth nationwide. Meanwhile, manufacturing was the biggest drag on employment, followed by the information industry.
Click here to visit 24/7 Wall St. and see the American cities adding the most jobs this year.
Click here to visit 24/7 Wall St. and see the American cities losing the most jobs this year.
These broad national trends, however, often do not reflect economic conditions within a given metro area. Many of the cities adding the most jobs have thriving manufacturing industries, and only four reported employment declines in their manufacturing sectors.
In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., Martin Kohli, chief regional economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, explained that steady manufacturing employment has been very important to certain cities on this list, particularly in Oregon and Tennessee. “The Portland area has actually got one of the largest concentrations of employment in computer and electronic product manufacturing,” Kohli said. Nashville, too, “has unusual concentrations of employment in electrical equipment and transportation equipment manufacturing.” Both the Portland and Nashville metro areas have either maintained steady manufacturing employment or added to the sector's workforce in the past year.
In many of the cities on this list, rapidly growing job markets often create something of a virtuous cycle. “When you have strong growth," Kohli said, "that will attract people and jobs.” It is perhaps no coincidence that labor force growth was within a percentage point of total employment growth in all but two cities on this list as people entered the workforce to fill newly available employment opportunities.
A rapidly growing labor force will have implications across many industries, often health care, education, and construction in particular. Of course, in return, these sectors add more jobs. Such seems to be the case in Oregon, where job growth in other industries also caused a construction employment boom. “Nationally, employment in construction and residential construction is still below where it was back in 2006," Kohli said, "so the fact that you're seeing 8% [employment] growth in construction in some of these areas in Oregon is remarkable.” More than one out of every four cities adding the most workers is in Oregon.
Unlike construction job growth, which is more unique to some growing areas, education and health care employment growth seems to follow the national trend. Much like across the country, the industry was a leading contributor to increased employment in 13 of the 25 cities adding the most jobs.
Strong annual job growth does not always mean a given area’s economy is especially healthy. Though the number of jobs in the Detroit metro has grown by 4.4% in the past year, faster than in all but 21 other U.S. metros, Detroit has been the poster child of the decline of American manufacturing in the last several decades. Similarly, though Yuma, Arizona’s job market grew by 6.8% since October 2015, the third highest rate in the country, the city’s 18.4% unemployment rate remains nearly the highest in the country.
To identify the cities with the greatest employment growth, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed metropolitan statistical areas with the largest employment growth from October 2015 through October 2016. Unemployment rates, the size of the labor force, and employment levels are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and are seasonally adjusted. Industry-specific growth rates for the same period are from the Current Employment Survey (CES), a monthly BLS survey. Educational attainment and median household income came from the 2015 American Community Survey (ACS) of the U.S. Census Bureau.
These are the top 5 U.S. cities adding the most jobs.
5. Salem, OR
Employment change: 6.01%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 179,402
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 190,190
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 5.4%
No state has more metro areas on this list than Oregon. In Salem, the number of workers increased by 6% last year, more than in all but four other metro areas. The city’s mining, logging, and construction sector, as well as the professional and business services sector grew the most rapidly. Employment in each grew by 6.7% and 17.5%, respectively, well above the industries’ 1.1% and 2.7% corresponding growth rates nationwide.
4. Prescott, AZ
Employment change: 6.57%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 92,552
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 98,637
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 4.7%
The number of workers in Prescott, Arizona has spiked by 6.6% since October 2015. Job growth in hospitality, education and health services, and trade, transportation and utilities each was more than double the corresponding national growth rate. Employment in the area’s manufacturing sector also grew by 2.9%, even as manufacturing employment nationwide fell by half a percentage point. Prescott is home to major manufacturing plants of firearm maker Sturm Ruger & Co. and of aircraft parts company Cobham Aerospace Communications.
3. Yuma, AZ
Employment change: 6.81%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 72,473
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 77,407
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 18.4%
Yuma’s employment increased more than any metro area in Arizona and all but two other American metros. The city added nearly 5,000 new workers in the last year, a 6.8% increase. While Yuma’s growth was rapid, the city’s overall economic picture is bleak. More than 18% of Yuma’s labor force is unemployed, the second highest share of any metro area in the country.
2. Cleveland, TN
Employment change: 7.31%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 53,770
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 57,700
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 4.7%
Cleveland is one of five Tennessee metro areas on this list and one of only two metro areas in the country with more than 7% employment growth. Driving employment growth was the area’s professional and business services industry. Employment in the industry grew by 20.3% between October 2015 and October 2016, more than in any other U.S. metro. Major employers in the area include Whirlpool Corporation and Amazon.com.
1. Bend-Redmond, OR
Employment change: 7.63%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 80,446
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 86,587
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 5.2%
The Bend-Redmond metro area had the most rapid employment growth of any U.S. metro over the past year. The 7.6% employment growth was more than quadruple the nationwide job growth. A former saw mill town, wood products still make up a significant share of the area’s economy. Last year, employment in mining, logging, and construction went up by 10.3%, more than in any other industry in the area. Strong growth in a number of other industries, including leisure and hospitality as well as professional and business services were enough to offset a 4.3% decline in the area’s finance industry.
Didn't see your city? Click here to visit 24/7 Wall St. and read the full list of cities adding the most jobs.
Click here to see the 25 cities losing the most jobs.
Click here to see the cities with the longest life expectancy in every state.
Click here to see the cities with the shortest life expectancy in every state.
The U.S. economy added roughly 2.4 million workers over the past year. Over the same period, the unemployment rate fell from 5.0% to 4.9%, close to the lowest it has been in nearly a decade. The 1.7% employment growth nationwide was not uniform, and some areas lost a substantial share of workers.
To determine the cities that lost the most jobs, 24/7 Wall St. analyzed employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most cities added jobs in past 12 months, and most have posted unemployment declines. In 75 metro areas, however, there was a net loss in total employment. The Lafayette, Louisiana metro area had the greatest loss workers, with total employment falling by 4.5% since October 2015.
One major factor driving employment changes across the United States is industrial composition. Continued outsourcing and automation has lowered international demand for American manufacturing, and the downturn in the price of petroleum has hurt the oil and gas sector. Nationwide, the worst performing sectors were manufacturing, information, and mining, logging, and construction.
Click here to see the American cities losing the most jobs this year.
Cities with economies that heavily depend on these industries tended to have the most job loss. In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., Martin Kohli, chief regional economist at the BLS, explained that a “large concentration of employment in energy and construction-related industries has definitely been negative in the last few years for communities.” In many cases, a major round of layoffs or plant shutdowns contributed to employment declines in the past year.
People are not likely to move to a city without a job or some other opportunity available. As a result, the distribution of employment growth across the country mirrors today’s domestic migration patterns. Kohli added that residents of the Northeast and Midwest, where a majority of the metro areas are losing workers, have been relocating to major cities in the Sun Belt, which is gaining the most workers.
Employment tends to increase as unemployment declines. In metropolitan areas losing the most workers, employment declines contributed to labor force declines and a rise in unemployment. In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, for example, the 14,200 workers lost in Oklahoma City was among the most of any metro area. At the same time, the labor force shrank by a total of 9,000 workers, while area unemployment rate rose from 3.6% to 4.4%.
To identify the cities losing the most workers, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed metropolitan statistical areas with the largest employment decline from October 2015 through October 2016. Unemployment rates, the size of the labor force, and employment levels are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and are seasonally adjusted. Industry-specific growth rates for the same period are from the Current Employment Survey (CES), a monthly BLS survey. Educational attainment is from the 2015 American Community Survey (ACS) of the U.S. Census Bureau.
These are the cities losing the most jobs.
5. Mansfield, OH
Employment change: -2.33%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 50,576
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 49,399
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 5.6%
Cities without a talented, educated workforce often rely on one dominant, low-skilled industry and may be more vulnerable to changes in commodity prices and other market shifts than more diversified economies. Nearly one in five workers in Mansfield works in manufacturing, and just 14.4% of adults in the metro area have at least a bachelor’s degree. As demand for American manufacturing continues to decline, Mansfield’s reliance on the industry may have partially caused accelerated employment decline over the past year. The number of employed workers in the city decreased by 2.3% in 2016, more than nearly any other metro area.
4. Shreveport-Bossier City, LA
Employment change: -2.35%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 180,977
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 176,731
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 6.8%
Employment in the Shreveport-Bossier City area decreased by over 4,200 workers in the past year. During the same period, nearly an equal amount of people left the labor force.
Following the statewide trend, the Shreveport area is losing workers in the oil and gas sector. Unlike other areas in Louisiana that are more dependent on the oil and gas industry, however, Shreveport has a more diverse economy, and employment losses in this industry have had a less dramatic effect on the area's overall employment. Still, due to falling oil prices and reduced natural gas production at the Haynesville Shale -- a rock formation rich in natural gas -- the industry's job losses accounted for a sizable share of the area's 2.3% employment decrease.
3. Houma-Thibodaux, LA
Employment change: -3.74%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 91,738
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 88,311
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 6.7%
The number of employed workers in the Houma-Thibodaux area decreased by around 3,400 in the past year. While area employment declined by 3.7%, the number of workers increased by 1.7% nationwide. A large share of the area’s employment decline resulted from a shrinking oil and gas sector. Following a drop in oil prices and the first decrease in North American oil production in years, many oil workers nationwide have lost their jobs. The effects of these industry declines are exaggerated in Houma-Thibodaux, where a large share of residents are employed in the sector.
2. Casper, WY
Employment change: -3.77%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 40,156
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 38,644
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 6.6%
The Casper metro area lost around 1,500 employed workers in the past year. This 3.8% decrease was largely caused by a declining coal mining industry in Wyoming. During the first quarter of 2016, coal production nationwide was the lowest it has been in 35 years, with Wyoming among the regions whose production has declined the most. The Casper metro area is around 100 miles from America’s two largest coal mines. Earlier this year, both of these mines announced large layoffs.
1. Lafayette, LA
Employment change: -4.46%
No. of jobs Oct. 2015: 210,224
No. of jobs Oct. 2016: 200,845
Unemployment rate Oct. 2016: 7.1%
The Lafayette metro area lost around 9,400 workers in the past year. Employment in the area fell by around 4.5%, even as nationwide employment increased by 1.7%. Following a trend of declining manufacturing employment nationwide, Lafayette’s manufacturing sector shed the most jobs of any industry. The employment declines likely led to a large share of residents giving up looking for work or leaving the area. The overall labor force decreased by nearly 8,500 in the past year. This 3.8% decline in labor force was the largest of any U.S. metro area.
Say you’re a retail worker. You aren’t sure if you’ll be needed at the store tomorrow, but your employer wants you to keep your day clear just in case. You won’t know if you’re working until you call in that morning. The situation makes it nearly impossible for you to plan your day.
This practice is known as on-call scheduling, and it’s been coming under fire from worker groups and even state prosecutors recently. On Tuesday, six retailers agreed to stop the practice after they received inquiries about it from a group of state attorneys general. They join a growing number of retailers who have vowed to ditch on-call scheduling and give their employees more predictable hours.
Aeropostale, Carter’s, David’s Tea, Disney, PacSun and Zumiez all said they would stop requiring workers to call in each morning to find out if they’ll be working that day, according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, one of the top prosecutors who made the inquiry. Four of those retailers ― Carter’s, David’s Tea, Disney and Zumiez ― have also agreed to set schedules at least one full week ahead of time so that workers can plan around them.
In a statement, Schneiderman applauded the retailers for “stepping up to the plate” and leading by example.
“On-call shifts are not a business necessity and should be a thing of the past,” he said. “People should not have to keep the day open, arrange for child care, and give up other opportunities without being compensated for their time.”
The retailers couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Monday night.
On-call scheduling might conflict with New York state law, which is why Schneiderman had the leeway to hassle retailers about it. New York has a “call-in pay” statute that requires employers to pay workers for at least four hours if they have to report for work at all. That helps discourage companies from forcing employees to show up for work, only to tell them to go home because business is slow. A number of other states have similar laws on the books.
Last year, J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Gap and Victoria’s Secret also agreed to stop on-call scheduling after Schneiderman and his fellow attorneys general started asking questions.
Around 17 percent of U.S. workers have erratic schedules, according to an Economic Policy Institute report, and they’re employed disproportionately in low-wage fields like retail. A number of cities have moved to force businesses to offer workers more stable schedules. San Francisco passed what’s known as a “retail worker’s bill of rights” in 2014. Under that law, large retailers have to post their employees’ schedules at least two weeks in advance and must still pay them if their shifts are suddenly canceled without warning.
The debate over false and fake news continues, as it has for millennia. It will no doubt flare up as the means of information distribution get ever more efficient. And who knows? One day the Pinocchio effect might actually be realized, as embedded chips in our brains cause physical changes to our bodies if we fib...
Yet the spread of DIGIBABBLE, which is not false news, but rather skewed reporting, continues unabated and frankly, in my view, limits our true understanding of the amazing advances being made in the world where technology is actually changing people's lives, as opposed to "disrupting" shopping.
What set me off this week was the widely reported story of Amazon's first actual drone delivery of goods to a customer. The Wall Street Journal reported:
Amazon last week made its first customer delivery by drone, carrying a package containing popcorn and a Fire TV video-streaming device several miles to a two-story farmhouse near Cambridge, U.K., in 13 minutes...
The delivery marks the start of operations for Amazon's drone program after three years of skepticism and regulatory hurdles. Prime Air, as the initiative is known, aims to get packages to customers within 30 minutes...
Drones are just a part of the online retailer's long-term plan to develop its own transportation network to control more of its deliveries and one day compete with UPS and FedEx Corp., according to people familiar with the matter.
All of which fits nicely with Jeff Bezos' interview on CBS's 60 Minutes in late 2013, in which he said 86 percent of the orders the online retailer ships weigh less than 5 pounds. That's lightweight enough to be delivered by drone.
So now drones join ocean freighters, jetliners, trucks, cars, bicycles, stores and people in Amazon's arsenal of delivery, giving them control of air, land, sea and point of origin to point of usage.
All amazing and inspirational, truly...but....
Single-item drone delivery is a great story for investors and stock prices. I find it almost absurd that in the rush to gush there is no questioning of pricing, logistics, staffing needs and on and on.
Also no thought as to how do you, as the buyer, collect your goods.... setting up a little landing site right before they're delivered is so WWII English-French spy network...n'est-ce pas ?:
Clearly there is an argument and a good one to be made for unfettered creativity and development, and I could not agree more!
In fact, I am inspired. My mind is reeling with the potential for drone use and more not just the potential, but the amazing things we can learn and be inspired by...none of which are "disruptive" but rather are changing the world.
To be clear, a day doesn't go by when we don't hear about drones delivering death from afar, without endangering the sender. We all know that telltale movie cue when the bad guy looks up:
via GIPHY
Like many innovations, military needs speed up technology, but true human advancement is to take that need and #changetheworld.
A number of years ago at the Kinnernet unconference, I heard a military drone expert talk about his vision...not of enhanced mayhem but of commercial possibilities.
He believed that one day all commercial planes will be flown by pilots sitting comfortably in remote locations, well rested, frequently relieved, using the most advanced technology, which when taken into aggregate consideration will make flying safer than ever before as it will reduce the human factor. NB - I just watched the movie Sully and I have met Captain Sullenberger and listened to his personal telling of the amazing landing in the Hudson - sometimes the human factor is what makes the difference - give me Sully any day.
But again, that is in the future - but why not? Driverless cars are here...no?
Yet, as I started by saying, we are sadly shortchanging what is really happening in the world and I'm more inspired by what is in this instance than by what might or not be.
So allow me to share some examples courtesy of Consumer Reports and I hope that you get inspired, too:
Agriculture
...Farmers have discovered that drones are very useful for monitoring the health of their fields. "It would cost me a couple hundred dollars an hour for a plane or helicopter," says fourth-generation grain and apple farmer Jeff VanderWerff. "With my [DJI] Phantom 3 drone, a device I paid $1,200 for, I can fly it every day."
...Aerial imagery from a drone equipped with an NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) camera could help him accurately estimate the yield of a crop in July, rather than waiting until harvest in October. With special software he could analyze that imagery, spotting crops beset by diseases, weeds, and flooding while there's still time to save them. And he could then use the drone to efficiently apply fertilizers and pesticides...
Humanitarian Aid
Some 1.3 billion to 2.1 billion people on the planet don't have access to essential medicines, the World Health Organization says, often because they live in hard-to-reach places. To address that concern, California drone maker Zipline signed a deal with the government of Rwanda last February to shuttle supplies to remote areas on demand...
"We are already delivering more than 40 percent of the transfusions for the entire country," says Zipline founder Keller Rinaudo. "These are cases where, if bad roads or lack of supply prevents deliveries, people die."...
First Responders
In February 2015, the Michigan State Police received FAA approval to fly a SkyRanger quadcopter made by Canada's Aeryon Labs for public safety efforts. A week later, troopers used it to investigate a suspicious fire in Jenison. According to Aeryon CEO David Kroetsch, the craft can also be used to conduct search-and-rescue operations, gather aerial intelligence for SWAT teams, and even map accident scenes. That last task usually involves an officer on foot measuring the crash site and sketching the details on graph paper--a system ripe for inaccuracy, given the time constraints. With a drone and a laptop, he can instead stitch together a series of geotagged photos and even film fly-throughs to determine what drivers might have seen in the moments before impact. "That's evidence-grade data," Kroetsch says, "and it can be done in 15 minutes." By completing the mapping quickly, officers can reduce the length of lane closures on busy highways, potentially sparing hundreds of thousands of dollars in tolls for a state, he says.
Better yet, aerial footage provided by drones keeps early responders out of harm's way. In a SWAT scenario, for example, a camera-equipped craft with a powerful 30x zoom lens can give officers a close-up look at a compound where hostages are being held--while they remain 1,000 feet away. And, likewise, a fireman can fly a drone with thermal-imaging and video-streaming capability over a four-alarm blaze and determine, in real time, where to direct his colleagues and where to help them avoid trouble...
Safety Inspections
Drones are exceedingly effective at finding structural flaws, not only because they can quickly and efficiently take high-resolution images and laser scans but also because they can get up close in treacherous spaces, such as the underside of an offshore drilling rig or the top of a cell tower.
Boeing's drone-making subsidiary Insitu is working with BNSF Railway to test rail-inspection possibilities in New Mexico. "If there was a lot of rain overnight," says Jon Damush, the company's vice president and general manager, "we could send an unmanned sentry out before the first train of the day and see if there was a washout."
Insurance:
"Let's say a hailstorm rolls through Texas and damages 2,000 roofs in its wake," says Dan Burton, founder of DroneBase, an Uber-like service that connects businesses with independent drone pilots. "We could go take some pictures and then say, 'Based on the damage to this roof, there's a 98 percent chance you will pay a claim. On this other one, it's 80 percent.'"
With that in mind, most of the major insurance companies are now experimenting with drones, some by hiring outside contractors, others by sending out aircraft of their own. If you're a claims adjuster, it saves you time and money, and reduces the risks of climbing ladders and walking on damaged roofs. But if you're the customer, that might not translate to lower insurance premiums...
Internet Access
Well over half the planet's population--some 4 billion people--currently has no internet access. A full 1.6 billion live in areas too remote for mobile broadband. That means no Facebook, of course, but also no email, no world news, no information and instruction from YouTube, and no access to online commerce. And without a huge investment in satellites and cell towers, that's mighty difficult to change.
Google has floated a plan to fix the problem by relaying internet signals via a network of giant, high-altitude balloons, but the company is also reportedly looking into drones as a solution. Facebook is headed that way, too.
In the latter company's vision, a series of lightweight drones with the wingspan of a Boeing 737 will cruise high above normal airspace delivering connectivity to people within a 60-mile radius. Powered by batteries and solar energy, they will remain aloft for three months at a time. The company can't say when the project will be operational--"significant advancements in science and technology will be needed," a spokesperson says--but last June a full-scale prototype (shown at the top of this article) made a successful test flight of more than 90 minutes over southern Arizona...
Hurricane and Tornado Forecasting
In the future, when a severe tropical storm approaches Florida, as Hurricane Matthew did last October, autonomous aircraft developed by defense contractor Raytheon Missile Systems could fly right up to the maelstrom to take measurements for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Originally created for anti-submarine warfare, the small, fixed-wing crafts known as Coyotes launch from the bottom of hurricane hunter planes, which often fly in the upper reaches of a storm, often more than 10,000 feet in the air. The Coyotes can, by contrast, maneuver around at 500 feet--right at the dangerous boundaries of the storm, where the most dramatic atmospheric changes occur...
Wildlife Conservation
In recent years, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts have used drones to monitor the health of humpback whales off the coast of Cape Cod, even capturing from their blowholes breath samples flush with DNA that can be analyzed for wildlife studies. The U.S. Geological Survey has also dispatched them to observe sandhill cranes in Colorado. But to date, the tech's most profound contribution to wildlife protection might be unfolding in Africa, where drones are policing vast tracts of land to catch poachers hunting rhinos and elephants. The horns and tusks of those animals can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars from Asian crime syndicates...
Some more inspiration if you still think disruption is about delivering toothpaste. From The Guardian:
"Rwanda is essentially a rural country. Lots of blood products cannot be stocked at every health centre. At best it can take four to six hours to get supplies through," says the technology minister, Jean Philbert Nsengimana...
Enter Zipline, a California-based robotics company which has designed a fixed-wing drone to deliver medical essentials to rural health facilities. The "zip" - with a two-metre wingspan - releases a small, parachute-equipped payload that drifts down into a dropzone without the zip having to land...
In its first phase, Zipline plans to make 50 to 150 deliveries of blood a day to 21 transfusing facilities within a 47-mile (75km) radius, later adding vaccines and other urgent supplies. Each zip, operating from bases called nests housing 15 autonomous devices, can fly a 75-mile round-trip on a single battery charge, including in wind and rain.
And UNICEF and others are beginning to use drones in other innovative ways to save lives:
Drones are being tested in other emerging economies. Matternet, another Silicon Valley startup, has run pilots moving samples from rural clinics to a laboratory in Papua New Guinea and is launching a small medical delivery network in Dominican Republic. The company is also working with Unicef in Malawi to develop a project using UAVs to carry blood samples from infants born to HIV-positive parents, underscoring the physical and geographical challenges that are present across much of the continent.
And a host of other actual projects and applications some already standard in their areas of operation:
The Construction Industry Is in Love with Drones (Fortune, Sept. 13, 2014)
Walt Disney World announces its first drone light show (MarketWatch, Nov. 7, 2016)
GE Drones Are Coming to Squeeze More Savings From the Oil Patch (Bloomberg, Oct. 5, 2016)
Allstate Just Used Drones to Inspect Homes in Texas (Fortune, Sept. 2, 2016)
Relatively cheap drones with advanced sensors and imaging capabilities are giving farmers new ways to increase yields and reduce crop damage (MIT Technology Review, May 2014)
And even companies like Measure, which "operates turnkey drone solutions to deliver cost-effective actionable data to enterprise customers."
Of course the DIGIBABBLE irony is that while drones are actually being used commercially in so many different ways, as I have tried to show package delivery is ways away. From The Wall Street Journal, "Package-Delivery Drones Likely Years Away From Federal Approval."
And there you have it.
If you think that the future of the world is dependent on Prime Air delivering you popcorn...sorry I wasted your time.
But if you believe, like I do, that drones are already making an impact and can do way more follow some of these initiatives and fight back against DIGIBABBLE...#changetheworld...listen:
"We need to embark on a human revolution. A revolution where our reality is not replaced by drones but augmented by technology to do better." - Vishal Sikka
So, my dear readers, PEOPLE FIRST...with drones to help...and your popcorn will just have to wait...
What do you think?
Read more at The Weekly Ramble
Follow David Sable on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DavidSable
Will Tucker also contributed to this story, which is cross-posted on Ecosystem Marketplace
The city of Chicago is planting millions of trees and "greening" its alleys to mop up stormwater and reduce the urban "heat island" effect, while the City of Hoboken, New Jersey - which took the brunt of Hurricane Sandy's impact in 2012 - is restoring marshes and turning vacant land into a "resiliency park" that will mop up at least one million gallons of floodwater.
Both cities are featured in a working paper called Roadmap to Support Local Climate Resilience, which grew out of October's Rising Tides Summit in New Hampshire, where 36 mayors from cities in 18 of the 23 coastal US states gathered with federal disaster relief officials to chart a course towards resilience in the age of climate change.
The mayors came from across the political spectrum - nearly half, 17, were Republicans, while 16 were Democrats, and three were Independents - but all agreed that sea levels were rising because of man-made climate change, and that nature-based "green" infrastructure - such as mangroves for coastal protection and wetlands for flood management - is part of the solution.
Unfortunately, they also identified a massive funding gap, and this was before the election of Donald Trump as President opened a perceived leadership gap as well.
"We need either the state - which doesn't want to get involved because the governor doesn't believe in sea-level rise - or the federal government to come up with funds," said James C. Cason (R), Mayor of Coral Gables, Florida, during a media call arranged by the World Resources Institute (WRI), publisher of the Roadmap paper.
"As people come through our redevelopment process, we require them to consider green infrastructure," said Dawn Zimmer (D), Mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, who tapped the federal Environmental Protection Agency to fund its resiliency park. "We're encouraging it as people go through our planning boards and our zoning boards, but we're also looking at ways that we can incentivize it and make it happen across the board."
"Several cities are embedding nature-based solutions into their resiliency planning," said C. Forbes Tompkins, who compiled the report for the World Resource Institute. "But they don't know where the funding is going to come from."
Some cities have begun tapping their water fees to develop green infrastructure. Philadelphia, for example, funnels sewage fees into programs that turn concrete "gray" infrastructure into absorbent systems that better handle water runoff, while Denver puts its water fees into forest conservation to keep the surrounding watershed healthy.
New research shows a growing willingness on the part of cities and even the private sector to invest in such initiatives worldwide, and may offer insight into challenges faced by coastal cities.
Alliances for Green Infrastructure: State of Watershed Investment 2016 Report Webinar
$25 Billion For Watershed Investment
In a separate report called Alliances for Green Infrastructure: State of Watershed Investment 2016, also released today, Forest Trends' Ecosystem Marketplace looks strictly at investments in watershed protection or enhancement which involve a clear transaction of payments in exchange for ecological services. Such programs appear to work best when a clear environmental benefit can be translated into a clear economic benefit.
The "buyers" and "sellers" vary from place to place, and can involve a government paying landholders a direct subsidy to reward good land stewardship practices, or it could be a beverage company paying local farmers near its water source to reduce their pesticide use, alleviating the need for costly on-site water treatment. Or it might look like multiple water users - for instance, a city government, the local water utility, and companies - paying into a "water fund" for greater impact.
Once considered obscure, such programs have now matured to the point that, when asked to identify the biggest barriers to "scaling up" watershed investments, only 11% of program administrators reported having a difficult time securing demand (e.g., finding willing "buyers").
"A lot of programs are telling us that capacity is an issue: things like managing funds and identifying project sites, demonstrating benefits to stakeholders and potential buyers," said Genevieve Bennett, lead author of the Ecosystem Marketplace report, during a launch webinar this week.
"In this space there's a common wisdom that the constraint is money - that people aren't willing to pay for green infrastructure," Bennett explained. "But one of the things we saw this year...is that there actually is quite a lot of finance waiting in the wings for green infrastructure. At minimum, it's hundreds of millions of dollars, and it might be much higher."
Bennett said there's a clear need for more "shovel-ready projects" that are prepared to accept that funding.
Speaking at the same event, Daniel Shemie, Director of Strategy for Water Funds within The Nature Conservancy's Global Water team, agreed that while it's tempting to diagnose a lack of finance as the biggest constraint for programs, the real bottleneck is capacity.
"It's a little counterintuitive," he said. "You would think that at the very top of operating programs you'd say 'money, money, money.' But once you're in a program, your challenge is much more around implementation. It's always a temptation to think that, 'well, if we only had money,' but there are major challenges in implementing large, landscape-scale investment."
Steve Zwick is Ecosystem Marketplace's Managing Editor. He can be reached at szwick@ecosystemmarketplace.com. Will Tucker is Senior Communications Associate at Ecosystem Marketplace's publisher Forest Trends. He can be reached at wtucker@forest-trends.org.
What trend or opportunity are you most interested in as an investor, today? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark, Dad, aspiring Cellist, on Quora.
I don't invest in trends. I know it sounds a bit too-cool-for-school but what I've found is that you get far more insight from purpose than from trends. So, for example, in the case of Docker, I invested in Dotcloud (which became Docker), in the purpose of this radical, intense leader, Solomon, who wanted to give the world's programmers superpowers, tools of mass innovation. In the case of Yelp, it was Jeremy's purpose to allow for the truth of great (and bad) local businesses to be visible to all. Or when I met Jack in 2007, he had this unstoppable purpose for Twitter to "bring you closer". Sometimes that purpose is just this raw force, an energy, like it was in the case of Shay at Elastic in 2012. When I feel like the trend, the space, the concepts vs the tactile reality of a purpose forms the narrative of the investment I lose all interest.
Another way to look at this is that I've found the best entrepreneurs have discovered preconditions that enable their purpose, that make it possible today versus in ten years. To increase the odds of finding the extraordinary, it helps to have a point of view about the most dynamic preconditions. As my partner Matt Cohler says, "to see the present most clearly". Obviously mobile ubiquity is the major precondition today, with the additional attributes of GPS, high quality cameras, and ever improving networks. I don't think we've even started to realize the potential of this enhanced mobile ubiquity. Another precondition is social behavioral norms, our readiness to share, to engage expands in what feels like a geometric way when the conditions are right. An "all cloud" world is another precondition -- it forces every layer of the technology stack to be reconsidered and in many cases reinvented for the cloud. Mass compute and mass storage is a precondition for machine learning at scale.
To make this more concrete, take the example of Houseparty. Ben's an extraordinary entrepreneur, he's moved by a purpose to make you feel closer to your friends when they're not physically present, and he has a fresh, new approach using live video. The preconditions of live video open up this world of exploration and the right entrepreneurial mind figures it out. I deeply regret not being his investor!
This question originally appeared on Quora. - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
More questions:
Investing: What companies outside of your portfolio are you most bullish on?
Business: What are some of the smartest business moves made by tech startups and companies recently?
Venture Capital: What do you do differently than a vast majority of other VCs?
You probably recognize many of the companies on the first of the two lists we'll be examining today - like Colgate Palmolive, L'Oréal, and McDonald's, which are household names. You might not know the others - like Marfrig Global Foods and Bunge - but they're equally massive, and they depend on sustainable supplies of palm, soy, cattle, and timber & pulp - the "big four" forest risk commodities responsible most of the world's deforestation. These four commodities account for 24% of the cumulative income of 187 companies surveyed for a new report called "Revenue at risk: Why addressing deforestation is critical to business success", and their supplies could be disrupted if deforestation continues.
Produced by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) at the behest of 365 institutional investors, the report concludes that disruptions in supplies of forest risk commodities could cost $906 billion per year.
There's another list, too: the Forest 500, which names and shames the 500 entities that can end deforestation. Half those entities are companies, and many of them have pledged to end practices that kill forests. The list is compiled by the Global Canopy Programme (GCP), which ranks those pledges and gives credit for good ones. GCP also published a report today, and it's called "Sleeping giants of deforestation".
It shows that 57% of the companies on the Forest 500 either have no policies to end deforestation or none that the organization deems credible, while the CDP report shows that just 42% of the companies on the risk side have even bothered to investigate the ways that supply disruptions could impact their business.
On top of that, the Forest Trends Supply Change project tracks the progress that companies are reporting on their deforestation pledges and shows less than half of them are even reporting progress.
Add the findings up, and you find a global agriculture sector facing an existential threat and partially acting on it, but mostly hobbled by poor traceability and weak governance or blinded by apathy and overconfidence and frustrated by shortages of certified raw materials.
The GCP report looked at countries, too, and found many of those on the supply side - the rainforest countries that export forest risk commodities - were beginning to take action, while those on the demand side - the developed countries that import them - aren't. Paradoxically, while developed countries often funded sustainability efforts in tropical countries, only two of the importing countries on the Forest 500 - Germany and the Netherlands - formally support national sustainability efforts among consumers.
The Bright(ish) Side
It's not all doom and gloom.
Supply Change also found that those pledges with publicly-available disclosure were, on average, more than 70% of the way towards completion; and while many companies are certainly avoiding disclosure to hide bad performance, others have taken productive actions that are just difficult to quantify.
Danone, for example, is helping small farmers around the world shift to sustainable farming, and progress on that front won't show up incrementally the way shifting to certified commodities does. Likewise, Norwegian consumer goods group Orkla implemented a three-pronged sustainable palm oil policy in 2014 and recently saw their Forest 500 rating jump from three stars to five, as did two other companies: Colgate Palmolive and Marks & Spencer.
Orkla has been working for years to replace palm oil with options that are healthier and not associated with deforestation, and they launched their sustainable palm oil policy in 2014. That involved renegotiating their contracts with key suppliers and becoming a member of the RSPO at Group level.
"We have a regular dialogue with suppliers about the progress of the work," says Ellen Behrens, the company's Vice President for Corporate Responsibility. "We only work with suppliers who have good plans for sustainable improvement. Examples of supplier activities include the use of satellite-based risk assessments, fire alert systems and various types of training programs."
Like Danone, they're also looking to drive complex changes on the ground.
"We look for suppliers who engage in training of mill management and of farmers, and who engage in awareness-building in local communities," she says.
The final component, she says, is certification, which among others is important to monitor compliance with important aspects such as working conditions and the use of pesticides. Their most recent disclosure document shows that 40% of the palm oil, blends, and derivatives they purchase are either certified as sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) or have their impacts offset by Green Palm certificates.
"Certification is the easiest activity to communicate in a quantified way," says Behrens. "We're currently looking into how to verify other activities."
That's something to keep in mind as you explore the group's Supply Change profile: companies whose only pledge involves certification will show more "quantitative progress" than those undertaking more complex strategies, so it pays to heed the milestones embedded in the profiles as well.
Radical Transparency
The reports come in as a flurry of new transparency tools are also coming on line, as we covered in a recent edition of the Bionic Planet podcast, which is available on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, and here:
Perils and Possibility
The CDP report uncovered a disturbing sense of confidence among companies with high exposure to the big four commodities, with 72% of them expressing confidence in their ability to source them in the future - even as 81% of companies in the Agricultural Production sector reported impacts related to forest-risk commodities in the past five years.
On the other hand, many also seemed unaware of the potential for growth that a shift to sustainable sourcing could offer.
"Investors are poised to capitalize on the opportunities that await," wrote CDP CEO Paul Simpson in the foreword. "Some of the biggest index providers in the world, including S&P and STOXX, have created low-carbon indices to help investors direct their money towards the sustainable companies of the future. Investors see opportunities in sustainably managed timberland, and are beginning to direct funding to innovative approaches to protect forests, such as REDD+ credits."
This story is cross-posted on Ecosystem Marketplace. Read the original.
I got my work permit when I was 15; I’m 28 now. In that time, I’ve experienced all types of leaders and organizations. I’ve seen people reorganize entire departments just to give themselves better titles. I’ve seen people fired for personal issues, sexism, and paranoia. I’ve seen people cheat on their spouses to get ahead. I’ve worked with people who threatened their teams instead of supporting them.
If you’ve experienced emotionally abusive practices at work, I hope you know that it doesn’t have to be that way. I also hope you know that you’re not abnormal for being affected by it.
When I joined Lessonly, I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with workplace trauma, because I knew Max (our CEO) and Conner (our COO) so well beforehand. Still, I worried that the organizational and leadership behaviors I’d experienced in the past might be inevitable. I wondered whether you had to be a jerk to get a leg up in this world, and I dreaded that I would one day succumb to jerk behavior just to climb that next rung.
Said another way, I had doubt. I doubted that our culture was actually as amazing as it felt. I doubted that the people I was working with genuinely had the integrity I thought they did. And I doubted that we could forever avoid making foolish decisions solely for personal gain or ego.
I have zero doubt now.
My hope is that by being honest about my trauma you might deal with and overcome yours faster than I did, allowing yourself to reduce your recovery time and enjoy a healthy culture around you faster.
Workplace trauma is real
Workplace trauma happens when you work in a toxic environment where the negative aspects of a company’s culture overcome the positive ones. Toxicity is in the eye of the beholder: We all have different expectations when we approach our work. Toxic doesn’t necessarily mean something extreme happened, and it definitely isn’t basic pettiness (i.e., you just don’t get along with someone).
Simple acts can cause trauma. Someone may consistently marginalize you or your work in a manner that’s not constructive. Or maybe you witness two married coworkers engage in an affair. Such an experience, while not involving you directly, can be emotionally disturbing. Again, it depends on your worldview and your expectations, but it’s important to recognize that bad things can happen in a work environment.
What’s most important is how you deal with the bad stuff.
If you are currently immersed in an uncomfortable, unhealthy, or unsafe culture, I urge you to fix it or leave. Sometimes the reward just doesn’t outweigh the effort, and it’s time to move on. If you do make the choice to change environments, I recommend looking for these characteristics in the people you’re evaluating:
respect
integrity
growth
candor
passion
work ethic
healthy competition
drive
compassion
flexibility
second chances
Notice, I said people. I didn’t say rules, procedures, benefits packages, or geography. It’s all about the people you surround yourself with. Connect with as many of them as you can, on as intimate of a level as you can, to uncover the truth of their culture—before you decide to join their organization.
Speed up the recovery process
If you’ve experienced trauma in the past but are fortunate to now be in a healthier environment, don’t take your past experiences out on your new coworkers. Figure out how to process your past, let it go, and move on. Most importantly, enjoy the lack of toxins in your new circumstance.
I find the exercise of writing my thoughts down can cleanse and clarify my mind. Grab a pen and paper, or your nearest computer, and clearly articulate your thoughts regarding your past experiences. Think through these questions:
What did I hate about my old culture?
What did I love about it?
What did I learn not to do?
What did I learn to do?
Who do I need to forgive?
Who do I need to apologize to?
What do I love about my new culture?
Am I going to let my past define me, or am I going to choose a positive future?
If you spend 30 minutes journaling through those prompts, I promise you’ll feel better and will be able to contribute with greater impact than ever before. As my pastor always says, “Only hurt people hurt people.” Make time to heal, and please let me know if I can help.
Since his first day in office, Secretary of State John F. Kerry has maintained that economic policy is foreign policy and vice versa. This principle recognizes that the bellwether for a country's success depends squarely on the soundness of its economic policies and whether it allows businesses - within and without its borders - to operate in environments of transparency, consistency, and predictability.
Combating corruption is critical to establishing and maintaining such environments. Corruption poses a major threat to global prosperity and it undermines the rule of law, government institutions, and human dignity. The World Bank has estimated that $1 trillion of transactions worldwide are tainted by bribery each year.
The United States has been robustly engaged on a wide variety of fronts to address corruption, from legislative efforts at home, to foreign assistance and bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. But while governments can take a leading role in addressing corruption, other stakeholders also need to step forward, including civil society organizations, businesses, the media, and ordinary citizens, so we can collectively take action to fight the root causes of graft.
That is why, as we mark International Anti-Corruption Day, I want to bring attention to a critical weapon that is gaining recognition in the fight against corruption. This is the principle of corporate liability, which can play a key part in ensuring international business is conducted in an aboveboard manner, free of corruption and bribery.
Corporate liability ensures that companies and corporations can be held responsible for the illegal actions of their employees. In other words, companies can be held just as liable for wrongdoing as the individual officers, employees, or agents involved in the offense.
When a legal system embraces corporate liability, the effects can be profound. For example, in the United States, the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) authorizes regulators, including the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission, to hold corporations liable when their employees engage in foreign bribery.
Because corporations are on the hook for the actions of their employees, they have a real incentive to discourage employees from engaging in bribery or other corrupt behavior. In effect, this makes corporations themselves instrumental agents in the fight against foreign bribery.
In addition to our country's enforcement of the FCPA, I am pleased to note that because of the Anti-Bribery Convention - the world's foremost international agreement to address foreign bribery - and the peer review of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Working Group on Bribery, many countries have adopted corporate liability laws for the first time.
This is real progress considering that 16 of the 41 Convention Parties had no established system for corporate liability prior to the Convention. And while the Convention obligates its Parties to establish corporate liability only for bribery of a foreign public official, many Parties have either adopted a broader form of corporate liability, or started with foreign bribery and then widened the scope.
These developments are helping to foster greater corporate responsibility in a range of areas, including environmental, tax, competition, and customs law. And thanks to the concerted efforts of the United States and the other Parties of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, we are deterring crime and allowing more businesses to do what they do best: create jobs and economic opportunity around the world.
Sometimes it pays to look a gift horse in the mouth. Even a cheap gift horse.
In October of 2007, a group called Good Jobs First released a report titled Rolling Back Property Tax Payments, which charged that Walmart methodically plotted to lower its property taxes by challenging the assessments of its stores and distribution centers.
The group said Walmart "drains vitally needed funds from communities by regularly challenging the valuation put on its properties by public officials. When the company succeeds in one of these challenges, it diminishes the funds available to pay for education, police and fire protection, and other essential services provided by local governments."
Based on a national sample of Walmart stores and distribution centers as of the beginning of 2005, Walmart had filed assessment challenges at more than one-third of its facilities around the country. At many facilities there were appeals over multiple years. Good Jobs First estimated that Walmart had filed more than 2,100 property tax challenges nationwide.
"These systematic property tax challenges are part of a larger pattern of state and local tax avoidance by Wal-Mart," GJF noted. "They are consistent with the company's reported use of a real estate investment trust gimmick to dodge income taxes in many states."
The Good Jobs First report found that the Walmart had won a total of about $30 million from those appeals over a decade. Although Walmart's campaign to rollback its property tax payments has been blunted in some states, the company has won big tax cuts in certain individual communities. In 2004, for example, Walmart asked that the assessment of its distribution center in Tomah, Wisconsin be lowered from $43.6 million to $23 million. The city settled the matter by agreeing to drop the assessment to $31.4 million and refunding the retailer more than $300,000 for each of three years -- a total of $949,000 in lost revenues to the city.
This week, a report by Fox 6 News in Milwaukee, Wisconsin concluded that "local municipalities are losing millions each year, and thousands of dollars are being spent on legal fees" due to property tax abatements filed by big box stores like Walmart, Target, Nordstrom and Lowe's.
The Mayor of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, Kathleen Ehley, went so far as to say that big box stores were bad business for local cities and towns. "It would make me very hesitant to support a big box coming in," Mayor Ehley admitted. Her community is facing no less than 12 big box property tax appeals. Wautatosa has spent $1.1 million in legal fees to fight these appeals over the last 4 years.
Wauwatosa has been sued by Target, Lowe's and Firestone, using a scam called "the dark store theory." Big box stores are pressuring local assessors to value their property the same as a closed store. "Now all of a sudden,' one assessor told Fox 6, "just for property tax purposes, we have to consider using sales of vacant or abandoned locations as evidence of value for good-thriving locations. If municipalities begin lowering values because of this dark store strategy, there will be a shift in taxes."
Lawyers for the big box stores argue that operating stores should be assessed like similar-sized stores that have closed down. In Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, Target built a store a decade ago for $16 million, but now the retailer wants the village to value it at $6.5 million, roughly half of what the assessors think its worth. The typical residential taxpayer in Pleasant Prairie would see their taxes rise by $900 if Target wins its case.
It is absurd for big box stores to steal from local communities by saying a store that is performing well should be taxed at the same market value as an empty store. When a Walmart shuts down and goes on the market, it will sell for a lot less. Sometimes they have to give the store away and take a tax write-off. Sometimes towns have to tear the store down at their expense. But a live store is worth much more than a dead one.
"Intuitively it doesn't make any sense," an official with the League of Wisconsin Municipalities told Fox 6. In locations where Walmart or other big boxes rent their space, the rent charged to an open store is much higher than a dead store. The landlord charges the store a flat base rent, plus a rent tied to the level of sales at the location. Higher sales, higher rent. In cases where the big box owns the building, the value of their property should include a market factor based on sales. When the store is closed, only then should their tax bill be lowered due to reduced sales output.
The city of Wauwatosa is under siege. Local officials are draining property tax revenues defending their assessments. Companies like Walmart sucker local communities into providing a candy store of incentives -- like infrastructure grants, tax incremental financing, and sales tax rebates -- and then turn around and appeal their property tax assessments.
Most Mayors in America think they've won a gift horse when Walmart rolls into town. But inside the gift horse is a tax abatement.
"People do need to be aware of this," Mayor Kathleen Ehley warns.
Al Norman is the founder of Sprawl-Busters. He has been helping communities fight big box sprawl since 1993. His latest book is Occupy Walmart.
MIAMI - In the tug of war that is television advertising, programmers pull the traditional ratings window beyond 30 days while advanced TV specialists grapple with more precise targeting. Somewhere in the middle lies a holistic view of all advertising impressions that buyers can bid for, but it's a galaxy far, far away.
This is one takeaway from a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016 on the value of advanced TV advertising. Moderated by Tim Hanlon, CEO and Founder of The Vertere Group, the discussion began with an examination of the usefulness of addressable advertising and ended with a critique of legacy ratings.
To Jonathan Bokor, advanced TV is defined as addressable, audience index programmatic and over-the-top. "These are three very distinct and different tools," observed the SVP and Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest | Spark. "They are not currently easily melded together. That's where we have to go."
Larene Mantel, the Director of Advanced TV at Cadreon, said it "might not make sense for all advertisers to be in the addressable space," a sentiment echoed by Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media. "On average, about a third of every addressable analysis we do for an advertiser the recommendation back to them is this isn't the right approach," said Bologna.
Nonetheless, all three panelists agreed that addressable can be a valuable, bottom-funnel tactic and that in general, TV needs to be more effective, efficient and accountable. "This is really an opportunity to deliver more frequency against your best prospects," said Bokor. "And as a consequence, to spend a little bit less on demo-targeted media that has a lot of waste associated with it."
But there's still the top of the funnel, which is why traditional TV isn't going away anytime soon.
"There's always going to be that top of the funnel and there's always going to be the mass GRP's being pushed there," said Bologna. "But now that most of these advertisers understand who their real target is, we can balance it."
Added Mantel, "It's finding the balance" and for advertisers "not caring where your airing but who you're reaching and that you're reaching the right person."
Asked by Hanlon to reconcile increasingly longer Nielsen ratings windows like C30 with the move toward more targetable impressions, Bologna said that both are needed. "It's absolutely both. There's nothing wrong with improving the legacy metrics."
Bokor was hard pressed to assign a value to C30. "The market forces that are applied to determine the value are really insufficient," Bokor said. "We have a marketplace that doesn't truly reflect the actual value of each impression. C30 is going backwards in the extreme."
Bokor would like to be able to bid on every advertising impression, a situation that Bologna suggested would result in "all hell is going to break loose" because the CPM's could skyrocket.
"I want a holistic marketplace so that it's not just about TV," said Bokor. "I want to look at the entire marketplace of all advertising impressions and find where the value is. And if I can truly get that, then I know exactly what I'm paying for and I might be willing to pay more."
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
During the campaign Donald Trump boasted that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn't affect his standing among his supporters. Whether or not this is true, this appears to be the approach that Trump and his fellow Republicans are taking to their role in governing. The basic story is that they can rip off the public as much as they want, because ain't no one going to stop them. They could be right.
The most immediate issue is Donald Trump's refusal to sell his assets and place the proceeds in a blind trust. This was a practice followed by every president in the last half century. The idea is that the president should be making decisions based on what they think is good for the country, not based on what they think will fatten their pocketbooks.
Trump's proposal in this area is essentially a joke. The idea is he turns over the operation of his empire to his kids. It's not clear how this helps at all. His kids will never discuss any business issues with him and also have no opportunity to discuss policy with their father or father-in-law?
Perhaps more importantly, he knows what properties are in his empire. This means that if he decides to make an issue of the crackdown on opposition by Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, it is likely that Erdogan will retaliate against the Trump resorts in Turkey. The same applies to his dealings with many other countries.
We shouldn't have to rely on a "trust me" pledge from the president that the financial interests of his family will not be a consideration in his foreign policy. That is exactly why prior presidents put their assets into a blind trust. And, there is little reason to believe that Donald Trump is more honest than our past presidents.
It is also important to realize that divestment of Trump's empire is not an insoluble problem. The key is to have an appraisal process, which would set a value on his assets. Trump can then lock in this price by buying an insurance policy, which would protect him from the risk that the assets may be sold off at a lower price than the appraisal. The proceeds from the sale of properties would be put directly in a blind trust. Any extra funds go to a designated non-Trump affiliated charity.
From the point of the appraisal forward, Trump would have no financial stake in his empire. That would end this huge conflict of interest problem.
It appears that Donald Trump's indifference to problems of conflict of interest is likely to extend to his top appointees as well. Politico reported on evidence that Steven Mnuchin, Trump's nominee as Treasury Secretary, used the money from a tax exempt foundation under his control, to engineer a lobbying campaign. According to the article, when Mnuchin was chair of the bank OneWest, he used funds from the bank's foundation to make payments to non-profits that later lobbied on the bank's behalf.
If Politico's information is accurate, and the payments were in fact made to support a lobbying campaign, then it would be a clear case of tax fraud. A nice twist to this story is that as treasury secretary, Mr. Mnuchin would be responsible for overseeing the I.R.S.
We have yet to see the full list of top level appointees, but it is already clear that it will include some of the richest people in the country. Wlibur Ross, the billionaire private equity fund manager, is slated to head the Commerce Department. His pick for secretary for the Department of Education is Betsey DeVos, an heir to a multi-billion dollar fortune.
If Trump refuses to hold himself to the same ethical standards as past presidents, it is difficult to believe that he will pressure his cabinet and top advisers to avoid conflicts of interest. And given the wealth of some of his appointees, there will be plenty of opportunity for conflict.
In fact, it looks like the tidal wave of conflicted government has already spilled over to the legislative branch. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell announced that he will not recuse himself from voting on Elaine Chao, Trump's pick to head the Department of Transportation. Chao also happens to be McConnell's wife.
When it comes to ethics in government, presidents usually start out setting high standards which they don't always live up to. By refusing to put his holdings in a blind trust, Donald Trump is starting in the sewer. It is likely to go down from there.
How intelligent automation can improve the customer experience for brands
The bot economy has arrived. These days, chatbots are on the tip of everyone’s tongue and at our fingertips. Easier to build and distribute than mobile apps, bots are invading the mobile messaging platforms of choice for consumers today.
While it’s still early, thousands of bots are now available. Consider the fact that Facebook Messenger had zero bots in February of 2016 and by November of this year had over 34,000. Today bots allow consumers to do everything from call an Uber, book a flight or make a restaurant reservation, to review an e-commerce order or ask for the latest news or weather forecast.
While many bots are more annoying than helpful, 2017 represents the turning point where we’ll see more companies leverage bots for customer service and to aid consumers in making buying decisions. That could mean fewer Google searches for consumers in the future, allowing them to get the information or help they need directly from brands in a more conversational and engaging way.
Chatbots offer brands a chance to be where consumers are: messaging. While smartphone owners only use a handful of apps, messaging apps are the platform of choice for consumers with more than 2.5 billion global users this year. And this trend is set to continue, with messaging apps now outpacing social media networks in growth.
Without a doubt, mobile messaging is a channel brands absolutely must embrace. And chatbots, if done the right way, offer businesses an opportunity to create a better real-time experience for customers. That said, not all examples of chatbots we’re seeing right now are good ones. In the case of Microsoft’s Tay earlier this year, we saw how disastrous an open-ended AI bot system can be. Tay showed us what can go wrong when there are no guardrails in place to prevent comments outside the scope of what would be helpful to a customer.
As we head into 2017, one of the biggest misconception about chatbots is they can answer anything and everything. The belief that automating conversations in an open-ended way will in itself add value for customers. The reality is the most effective bots are purpose-built to solve very specific problems for customers–making common customer service requests and commerce easier, while ensuring customer privacy.
In other words, less is more. The focus of any bot should be intelligent automation of existing business processes delivered in a conversational way. And it’s critical to keep the customer experience in mind.
Delivering a great experience through intelligent automation
At the end of the day, chatbots should improve customer service, save customers time or help them with their buying decisions - such as customizing a product order or helping with a specific request. The experience and use case has to make sense and add value to the conversations customers are already having. How will a bot relate to customers? What specific problems will it solve? How will it improve existing processes for customer service, communication and commerce?
The ideal approach is to analyze customer communication and transactional processes, then identify areas where automation is both easy and effective. An example of this is the range of frequently asked questions that require a repeated and often scripted response from a live agent. Instead of having the customer go through the process of speaking with an agent, a chatbot can easily handle this conversation and transform an otherwise annoying experience.
Solving for these low-hanging-fruit issues first with bots allows brands to learn how to effectively automate their business, and over time they can increase the complexity. But keeping it simple is key, initially. We’re only just starting to see the ways in which chatbots can improve customer relationships. Any new technology needs to be implemented strategically and mastered over time, in gradual increments. Trying to do too much, too soon, often results in poor customer experiences.
Our approach at Pypestream reflects this philosophy. When we deploy bots for businesses we assess specific conversations and look for the repeatable interactions and apply business rules that a chatbot can handle with ease. From there, we grow and expand the chatbot’s capability using both business and behavioral data. Eventually, the chatbot can handle the majority of conversations allowing for lightning fast interactions and happy customers.
Customer service: the sweet spot for bots
Customer service is a natural for chatbots. Most often we see about 80-90% of customer service inquiries are for the same issues and require the same responses. These repetitive interactions are easily automated and streamlined with chatbots. The desired result is a reduction in operational costs for businesses while improving the speed and efficiency of customer service. In addition, chatbots can be triggered to proactively address real-time issues avoiding the costs of inbound calls. For example, alerts to a cable outage with instructions on how to reset the modem; where is my insurance claim in process and when can I expect my payment or storm notifications with safety instructions around down power lines and updates on when power will be restored.
Given how fresh chatbot technology is right now, the best outcomes are those that combine bots with humans. This is particularly true for customer service interactions. It’s difficult to predict or plan for every potential customer inquiry. Therefore, live agents are still needed to field the questions and inquiries that fall outside of a chatbot’s parameters - the more complex, higher touch interactions.
Overall though, for customers, the ideal experiences with businesses are intuitive and easy. The less friction, the better. That’s the central idea for the use of bots: convenience. When customers send a message to businesses to resolve problems, schedule appointments and make secure payments, the customer service experience is streamlined, frictionless and, well, easy.
Expect chatbots to continue to grow in popularity
Mobile messaging is steadily becoming the most popular means of communicating, as indicated by the staggering number of people on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and other p2p applications. Chatbots offer a way for businesses to enter the messaging era and join the conversation. New platforms will emerge to support issues of privacy and security that are so essential to customer communication. But ultimately, as investment in the technology increases, we can expect to see more companies ditching traditional communication models for messaging.
If done the right way, conversational technology and bots have the potential to make a dramatic and positive impact on the customer experience, but only if brands take the right approach through intelligent automaton.
MIAMI - In the tug of war that is television advertising, programmers pull the traditional ratings window beyond 30 days while advanced TV specialists grapple with more precise targeting. Somewhere in the middle lies a holistic view of all advertising impressions that buyers can bid for, but it's a galaxy far, far away.
This is one takeaway from a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016 on the value of advanced TV advertising. Moderated by Tim Hanlon, CEO and Founder of The Vertere Group, the discussion began with an examination of the usefulness of addressable advertising and ended with a critique of legacy ratings.
To Jonathan Bokor, advanced TV is defined as addressable, audience index programmatic and over-the-top. "These are three very distinct and different tools," observed the SVP and Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest | Spark. "They are not currently easily melded together. That's where we have to go."
Larene Mantel, the Director of Advanced TV at Cadreon, said it "might not make sense for all advertisers to be in the addressable space," a sentiment echoed by Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media. "On average, about a third of every addressable analysis we do for an advertiser the recommendation back to them is this isn't the right approach," said Bologna.
Nonetheless, all three panelists agreed that addressable can be a valuable, bottom-funnel tactic and that in general, TV needs to be more effective, efficient and accountable. "This is really an opportunity to deliver more frequency against your best prospects," said Bokor. "And as a consequence, to spend a little bit less on demo-targeted media that has a lot of waste associated with it."
But there's still the top of the funnel, which is why traditional TV isn't going away anytime soon.
"There's always going to be that top of the funnel and there's always going to be the mass GRP's being pushed there," said Bologna. "But now that most of these advertisers understand who their real target is, we can balance it."
Added Mantel, "It's finding the balance" and for advertisers "not caring where your airing but who you're reaching and that you're reaching the right person."
Asked by Hanlon to reconcile increasingly longer Nielsen ratings windows like C30 with the move toward more targetable impressions, Bologna said that both are needed. "It's absolutely both. There's nothing wrong with improving the legacy metrics."
Bokor was hard pressed to assign a value to C30. "The market forces that are applied to determine the value are really insufficient," Bokor said. "We have a marketplace that doesn't truly reflect the actual value of each impression. C30 is going backwards in the extreme."
Bokor would like to be able to bid on every advertising impression, a situation that Bologna suggested would result in "all hell is going to break loose" because the CPM's could skyrocket.
"I want a holistic marketplace so that it's not just about TV," said Bokor. "I want to look at the entire marketplace of all advertising impressions and find where the value is. And if I can truly get that, then I know exactly what I'm paying for and I might be willing to pay more."
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This story is cross-posted on Ecosystem Marketplace.
Kevin Rabinovitch stands straight and speaks in clear, clipped tones - more like a naval officer than a corporate quant - as, on the screen behind him, a daunting mass of threads and whorls illustrates the global flows of Brazilian soybeans from thousands of individual municipalities across Brazil, through specific exporters and importers, to countries around the world.
"We buy a lot of soy from Brazil," he says. "But we also buy things that eat soy in Brazil before we buy them," he continues, referring to the chickens and cows that end up in pet food manufactured by food giant Mars Inc, where he's Global Director of Sustainability.
Known for its ubiquitous Mars and Milky Way candy bars, privately-held Mars, Inc also makes Whiskas cat food, Wrigley's chewing gum, and dozens of other products that require tens of thousands of tons of cattle, soy, and palm oil - all of which are packaged in products derived from pulp & paper.
These are the "big four" commodities responsible for most of the world's deforestation, and they achieved that status because thousands of companies buy them from hundreds of thousands of farmers around the world, and many of those farmers chop forests to make way for plantations.
But a relative handful of companies have been acting more like environmental groups than for-profit entities, largely because unsustainable agriculture means unsustainable business. Mars, for example, recently teamed up with Danone to launch the Livelihoods Funds, which invest in sustainable small-scale farms around the world, and it's one of 56 companies to endorse the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), which aims, among other things, to purge deforestation "from the production of agricultural commodities such as palm oil, soy, paper, and beef products by no later than 2020."
Even before endorsing the NYDF, Mars had established concrete goals for improving the way it gathers raw materials, and it set tight deadlines for achieving them. Now it's reporting solid progress on two of them: the Forest Trends Supply Change project shows Mars reporting it is 91% of the way towards achieving its palm oil goal and 89% of the way towards achieving its packaging goal.
But the company hasn't yet publicly reported progress on its soy or cattle pledges, both of which have 2017 due dates, and Rabinovitch says the task is proving more difficult than he and most corporate sustainability directors imagined.
"Privately amongst ourselves - and even publicly in forums - there's a lot of head-scratching that goes on," he says. "We know we want to end deforestation, but it's not obvious how we're going to do it, and it's critically important to have the data community step up and say, 'Here are tools that can help you.'"
That massive blob on the wall behind him could be one of those tools (see "How it Works", below).
Further Coverage on Bionic Planet
Scroll down to continue reading, or hear more on the latest episode of of Bionic Planet, which is available on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, and elsewhere. The latest episode features extended interviews with the team that developed Trase, as well as a walk-through of the platform.
Trasing the Globe
It's called "Trase", which stands for "TRAnsparence for Sustainable Economies", and was developed jointly over the past two years by the Global Canopy Programme (GCP), the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), and the European Forest Institute (EFI).
It's designed to help companies and watchdogs track the impact that the purchases in one part of the world are having on the ground in other parts, and it works by tracking soybeans from every Brazilian municipality that produces them - more than 2,000 in total - through brokers, exporters, and importers, and then providing an overlay to compare the supply chain with environmental conditions in the municipality of origin.
"Traders tell us that they need to be able to filter the threats and opportunities quickly to be able to prioritize those places - and the other actors associated with those places - where they need to be acting first, and with the highest priority," says Toby Gardner, an SEI Research Fellow who demonstrated the portal at year-end climate talks in Marrakesh, Morocco.
The demonstration came just days before Climate Focus presented an assessment report consolidating data from 12 transparency initiatives, including Supply Change and GCP's Forest 500, as well as interviews with corporate sustainability officers, finding a disturbing lack of transparency around progress among NYDF companies.
Tedious Research; Simple Interface
Trase lets users view both a supply-chain map and a geographical map, and the data driving it was cobbled together over two years using bills of lading, customs declarations, and other documents generated in the harvesting and transport of soybeans. Many were purchased from trade intelligence companies.
"Tellingly, this is data that already existed, but it was not tapped by the sustainability community," says Gardner. "We were looked upon with bemused astonishment when we approached trade intelligence companies to use these, and I wonder how many other useful sources are out there just waiting to be tapped."
They plan to expand the portal to include other Latin American countries, then to facilities that crush soybeans into meal and oil, as well to feedlots that turn soybeans into chickens and beef, and finally to the other big four commodities. Internally, they assign confidence ratings to many of the "threads" in the supply-chain map, which is constantly being improved through site-specific research.
"If a company declares that they have a production farm in a given municipality, that's something we can take into account," says Clément Suavet, who lead development of the platform. "As we gain more information, we can add certainty incrementally, and we would like to make this available on the site as well."
Yin and Yang
The platform is designed to blend with others that show different parts of the supply-chain puzzle. Trase, for example, ends at the port of import, which means it doesn't yet show end retailers and manufacturers. Supply Change, on the other hand, begins with end retailers and manufacturers, as well as brokers.
"Each of our platforms are tackling different parts of the puzzle, and there are many others coming at it from other angles as well - from supply chains transparency and data collection tools such as CDP Forests Program to the sustainable commodity certification agencies such as RTRS and RSPO," says Stephen Donofrio, Supply Change's Senior Advisor. "As Supply Change relies solely on self-reported commitment declarations and progress updates, then in a sense, Trase compliments this in that it could provide a ground-truthing, or spot check, against what companies are saying in their own documentation."
Rabinovitch says that, as more entities shine more transparency on supply chains, good companies will be more willing to show their cards, leading to virtuous cycle of more and more disclosure.
"The default mindset of corporate entities is, 'If I share data, something bad could happen; someone could figure out something about my business,'" he says. "But as soon as a number is out there, a customer or supplier says, 'I'm assuming that number applies to you, because Trase says it's the deforestation number of companies in your country,' so good actors now have a motivation to say, 'Whoa, hang on. Disaggregate us from that lot. These are our numbers,'"
Thomas Sembres works with the UN REDD Facility and EFI. He contributed to the platform's development and sees such tools providing support to cash-strapped regulators, and cites the European Union's long development of the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative, which is designed to identify sustainable sources of timber coming into the EU.
"If this type of platform had existed when we were negotiating FLEGT, we would have been able to identify much more sharply the key actors from the private sector, as well as the key jurisdictions that have a stake in the trade between countries, and incentivize progress along the way," he says, adding that good actors are already becoming dramatically more transparent.
"We're seeing transparency becoming a competitive advantage," he says. "We've struggled for so many years to try to convince the private sector to release more data on supply chains, but we've never had a complete picture."
And that complete picture is critical, because transparency can be a double-edged sword, according to Rosa Maria Vidal, Executive Director of the Governors' Climate and Forests Fund.
Use and Abuse: To Flee or to Fix?
Vidal says she's a big believer in transparency, but she cautions that it can backfire if disclosure scares companies away from problematic municipalities instead of encouraging them to engage productively.
"We're working to build new partnerships across 35 subnational jurisdictions responsible for 30% of the world's deforestation," she says. "These are jurisdictions that have promised to reduce deforestation 80% by 2020 by bringing benefits to communities, but they haven't seen any finance yet."
If the emerging transparency efforts shine a light on companies that are sourcing material from high-deforestation areas, she says, they should encourage those companies to actively improve conditions rather than pull up and move elsewhere.
"If we don't facilitate this dialogue - if we just say, 'It's a risky jurisdiction' - it will mean more deforestation because of fewer jobs and opportunity," she says - and Gardner agrees.
"It's unrealistic for all companies to just pick up and move to where there are no problems, and if they tried, no one would ever meet their commitments," he says. "But companies often don't even know their impacts, and this makes it possible for them to know where they need to invest."
How it Works
The address is www.trase.earth, and the portal offers introductory tutorials at the bottom of the page. Or you can click on "explore the tool" and see where your mouse takes you:
The first layer shows all known soybean flows from Brazilian municipalities, through trading companies and exporters in Brazil to importers working in other countries.
You can color code to highlight supply chains by various criteria - in this case, the type of biome from which the soybeans come:
The Amazon may be Brazil's most famous biome, but the country has six of them, and some are more fragile than the forest.
Or you can filter it to one or several countries - in this case, China:
China is the leading importer of soybeans.
Filter to one trader - Bunge - and you get this:
Bunge is the largest soybean trader operating in Brazil.
You can then reduce it to one importer - Guangxi - and you get this:
Now you can trace all the flows through Bunge and Guangxi into China.
Finally, you can expand the municipality bar to see where Bunge gets the beans that it sells to Guangxi. In this case, hundreds of strings appeared, but we highlighted just four. The municipalities you select will show up on the map, and you can begin layering in factors like deforestation rates, reported rates of forced labor, and water scarcity.
Bunge buys from hundreds of municipalities in Brazil, but here we have highlighted four of them. Note their appearance on the map. You can also layer in various risk factors, such as rate of deforestation or reported cases of slave labor.
For now, TRACE includes 320,000 unique pathways, and that will increase exponentially as the portal grows to include other countries and commodities.
