Recent View from the Prairie Articles

December 2024

The New Railroads

The hope of small towns when the West was being settled was to have the railroad come through the town. Towns thrive on trade. Farmers are very dependent on getting crops to market via rail, road, and boats. Later on, the Farm to Market Road system was vital to connecting people into towns. Today, high speed Internet serves the same role of connecting towns to the rest of the world. Having a connection to the broader economy is key to a town's survival. Small towns without this connection are fading away fast. The Internet is today's "new railroads."

Hire the Best

The most important thing a manager can do is to hire the right people. That means people with not just the skills, but the attitudes and integrity to be part of the team. A team runs on trust between the members, trust that things will get done, trust that bad ideas will be challenged, trust that everyone is working towards the same goals. The goal is to find people who are open to new ideas, to their ideas being challenged, and willing to adopt new paradigms.

The Second Time is not the Same

Fast food franchises spend a lot of time doing site research. They check traffic patterns, demographics, etc. Yet, the newly opened restaurants can and do fail. Things don't always work the second time. The world is a complex place and humans are equally complex. Simple answers may work once but rarely a second time. Innovations are followed by imitators and then by idiots whose greed undermines their efforts.

Rule of Law

Back in the Wild West, it was a mark that a town was becoming civilized when they could afford to hire a sheriff. Instead of each person enforcing what they believed to be right, the sheriff would enforce written laws and bring violators before a judge. The "rule of law" is a mark that an area is safer for business. Today, some states are experimenting with allowing individuals to enforce what they believe should be right. This breakdown of the "rule of law" is not good for the business environment.

Creating Business Value

In many a presentation to venture capitalist by people wanting investment, they present optimistic forecasts of lots of money some time down the road. These are so common that it is even called a "hockey stick" financial presentation. The vast majority will fail. When these forecasts fail repeatedly, they generate a series of financials that can be called a "hairy back." They fail both in making lots of money and in creating value. It is time to look at creating value in business. Making lots of money is not necessarily creating value.

Data is cheap, Information costs

Do you remember every detail of your latest drive? Nobody can. Often, we drive almost on "auto-pilot" with eyes seeing things that we forget, ears hearing sounds we forget, and thinking about other issues while navigating through traffic. We get flooded with data that we throw away. We quickly evaluate it and throw most away. The same is true with electronic data. Most of that data needs to be discarded because it is noise and we have to extract information out of that noise. Determining which data is noise and which is information is an expensive action. We want information to be free. It can't be.

Truth Detection Skills Needed

For thousands of years, written material was so expensive that people could basically trust what was written. When Gutenberg invented movable type, books and propaganda became cheap and people fought wars over competing claims. For years, TV news was trustable but today, "news" stations have people stating things that they know to be false. For years, we have been trained to trust what the computer told us but today, with AI, we can't trust what the computer gives us. A very important skill today is the ability to find truth amid competing claims. Our "untruth" detectors need to be on high alert especially when hearing something that we want to be true.

Go For Quality

Back during the Great Depression, auto sales dropped hard. The result was that automakers tried to out innovate their competition. A simple picture comparison of cars before 1930 and after 1940 shows vast changes in the "standard models". When a business is suffering, focusing on innovation and quality is a better survival strategy than cost cutting.

Building the Remote Team

The "Return to Office" didn't fully work. There are some people still fully remote. Others are "quietly hybrid." Now, what to do? It is time to focus on how to manage remote teams and teams that are partially remote. It takes effort to make a mix of in office and remote people into a team. It takes a commitment to make everyone on the team have the tools, equipment, communications channels, and opportunities to fully participate. This is different from simply hiring a bunch of people who work remotely. A team is built upon mutual respect, mutual trust, communication and mutual purpose.

Sleep Deprivation

A truck driver pushing the limits almost falls asleep at the wheel. A famous boss has texted managers at 2 AM demanding immediate responses and claims that sleeping at the factory will make things better even though there are quality problems. Any newborn father knows of the many sleep interruptions. Many people chasing the money often do not get enough sleep and their mental acuity suffers. Some studies claim that many people in our modern world are operating on a sleep deficiency. Books of ancient wisdom long knew that we need rest.

Businesses Need Policing

The East India Company, once one of the most powerful English corporations, cost England the American colonies, plundered India, created the opium fields in Afghanistan, smuggled opium into China, and caused two wars with China which still have repercussions today. When it appealed to the government for a bailout, its actions came to light and the English government eventually took over its operations. Many businesspeople want less government, but to protect our national interests government needs to be policing businesses.

Burn to Prevent Wildfires

Wildfires burning out west leaving black stumps, burned out vehicles, and only foundations from where houses once stood. We can prevent these, but it requires frequent small scale burning which clear out small trees and brush. A landscape that is fire resistant looks far different than the dense greenery that we love to look at. The same is true for business. A business that is resilient to troubles operates differently than one that is optimized for profit and doesn't give the CEO the same opulent salary, benefits, and office building.

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