Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

From television news to the Wall Street Journal we've heard the comparisons of this economy to The Great Depression. This is a historically tough economy, but the Second Great Depression? Seriously? I know Nashville fares better than many communities in good times and bad, but I pass a lot of $40,000 vehicles on the way to restaurants with full parking lots. I don't recall a robust restaurant industry from video footage of the Depression. There's a serious disconnect between news reports of "how bad things are" (which is the big story of the last several news cycles leading up to the election) and the number of people without jobs and incomes. Examples of manipulated or hysterically inaccurate news reporting on this economy would make a great doctoral dissertation. The limits of the blog format and my attention span won't allow for that. Here, however, is just one instance of a "fact" offered as evidence of "how bad things are" drill...

We are moving all Nashville office staff and leadership into the Corporate Office building. There we have five secret weapons that, if unleashed, can shorten iteration loops for almost every process. We can react quicker, bring products to market faster and smarter, and cut the man hours it takes to do almost everything. I learned how to wield these powerful weapons from a Japanese executive for whom I worked in the 90's. I offer those to you, gentle reader, that your career and our company might flourish. The guru of wielding these secret weapons was "Mr. Oba". I don't know that I ever knew his first name, because the emphasis was on the "Mr." He was the second most powerful man on the org chart when I was a pup. He was the top ranking member of management from one of our joint venture partners and we heard that he was the highest ranking manager from that company ever posted in the U.S. Our President didn't cross him. He stood about 4' 11" in ...

The following message was sent last week from Nashville Mayor Karl Dean regarding the Special Election this month on English Only. His message is on-target so I yield this blog post to our Mayor. Many thanks to David Leach for sending it my way. Dear Friends, I hope that you and your family enjoyed the holidays and were able to take some time to reflect and appreciate the year gone by. As I have had the opportunity to say many times over the last year, Nashville is a great city. I enjoy being Mayor and I am grateful to the citizens of Nashville for allowing me the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. It has been an exciting year for the city. We’re making progress on my plans for education reform. We’ve added over 100 new officers to our police force. And plans to build a new downtown convention center are well underway, which when completed will give our city a huge economic boost. We face many challenges, but I truly believe that our best days are yet to come. As ...

Most of you who read this blog by now know that by the end of January we will close our Lakeview offices and move almost all office jobs to the Corporate Office Building. This is a tremendous opportunity for our company in terms of savings, teamwork, and tightening iteration and product development cycles, but that's a subject I'll take up in another blog in a few days. For now I want to address how the move to corporate, which was one of my goals for WFH, changes this program going forward. It was a significant downsizing, not WFH, that made this move possible this quickly but I'll take it however it comes. In my opinion, the move of all office operations into one building leaves us no choice but to accelerate the program into the space sharing phase. It is my understanding that we're getting LVP employees into the Corporate building with about 3 open spaces to spare; that's all. Those spaces will most likely be used for temporary workers and the occasional contra...