Target Corporation Quotes

Being Fair and Consistent is the Hallmark of Effective and Non-discriminating Policies. If you are going to set up rules that all have to abide by, then you have to enforce it to all. Or it becomes targeting and discriminating. For consumer brands, it means you lose your integrity as a brand. You lose your effectiveness to keep the loyalty of your vendors, authors, and partners. - Strong by Kailin Gow

As entrepreneurs, you need to deeply understand your target customers' needs, wants, and pain points.

Shoot for the biggest and boldest impact possible. If you need a full corporate makeover—do it. Moderation is just not going to cut it.

A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal “profile” for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience’s needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their “societal purpose” also requires that the media’s interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups.

Big data is transitioning from a tool primarily for targeted advertising to an instrument with profound applications for diverse corporate sectors and for addressing chronic social problems.

We are suspicious of those CEOs who regularly claim they do know the future—and we become downright incredulous if they consistently reach their declared targets. Managers that always promise to “make the numbers” will at some point be tempted to make up the numbers.

I live in a world were businesses have become "private corporations." Assassinations have become "target neutralisations." Being unfaithful now is "to sleep around..." How cute. The banks taking your money is now called a "stimulus package." I can go on and on and on...and that really saddens me.

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.

if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you have to form alliances, be strategic, outperform your targets, and be great at what you do.

A’ight, so what do you think it means?” “You don’t know?” I ask. “I know. I wanna hear what YOU think.” Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.” “Us who?” he asks. “Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.” “The oppressed,” says Daddy. “Yeah. We’re the ones who get the short end of the stick, but we’re the ones they fear the most. That’s why the government targeted the Black Panthers, right? Because they were scared of the Panthers?” “Uh-huh,” Daddy says. “The Panthers educated and empowered the people. That tactic of empowering the oppressed goes even further back than the Panthers though. Name one.” Is he serious? He always makes me think. This one takes me a second. “The slave rebellion of 1831,” I say. “Nat Turner empowered and educated other slaves, and it led to one of the biggest slave revolts in history.” “A’ight, a’ight. You on it.” He gives me dap. “So, what’s the hate they’re giving the ‘little infants’ in today’s society?” “Racism?” “You gotta get a li’l more detailed than that. Think ’bout Khalil and his whole situation. Before he died.” “He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.” “Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?” I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it.” “Right. Lack of opportunities,” Daddy says. “Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack than it is to find a good school around here. “Now, think ’bout this,” he says. “How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion-dollar industry we talking ’bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don’t know anybody with a private jet. Do you?” “No.” “Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they’re destroying our community,” he says. “You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them to survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can’t get jobs unless they’re clean, and they can’t pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That’s Thug Life.

It was a well-known problem in corporate America—performance targets were too often tied to short-term results.

If you wish to be a great family-man learn philosophy of people, if you wish to be a great businessman learn philosophy of finance.

Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too—but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.

On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them.

Across ideological differences, the femjnists have realized that a hierarchical ranking of human faculties and the identification of women with a degraded conception of corporeal reality has been instrumental, historically, to the consolidation of patriarchal power and the male exploration of female labor. Thus, analyses of sexuality, procreation, and mothering have been at the center of feminist theory and women's history. In particular, feminists have uncovered and denounced the strategies and the violence by means of which male-centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the female body, demonstrating that women's bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power techniques and power relations. and power-relations

And there was something familiar about the cadence of the words. The language. It was him. I wrote: I know who you are. I recognize your voice. by kidzero I felt a little dizzy after I sent it, maybe because I had been holding my breath. A new message pinged and the air rushed out of me like a deflated balloon. you shouldn't be talking to strangers anyway. who am I? by anonymous I didn't really know his name or anything about him, but I couldn't admit that now. I wanted to keep talking to him. I quickly typed: You are the Unidentified. The Unidentified refuses to be typecast, target-marketed, corporate-identified, defined. by kidzero

Like a vast, random experiment targeting the environment with health doomed to be collateral damage, chemicals have been released into the air, soil, and water since nineteenth-century industrialism. While some may shrug that the aerial release of chemical nanoparticles and nano-sensors, microprocessors, and biologicals under the classified Project Cloverleaf is just more of the same, nanoparticles able to breach the blood-brain barrier make it uniquely diabolical, as does the global conspiracy of power to turn the entire planet into an electromagnetic grid and plug everyone into it. War has gone corporate and all of life reframed as a battlespace of disposable noncombatants (civilians) redefined as potential “terrorists.” The military is no longer a protector but partnered with giant transnational corporations and wealthy dynastic cartels like that of Big Pharma and Big Oil.

An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. Even as a contemporary colloquialism, the term “eyeballs” for the site of control repositions human vision as a motor activity that can be subjected to external direction or stimuli. The goal is to refine the capacity to localize the eye’s movement on or within highly targeted sites or points of interest. The eye is dislodged from the realm of optics and made into an intermediary element of a circuit whose end result is always a motor response of the body to electronic solicitation. It is out of this context that Google and other corporate players now compete for dominance over the remains of the everyday.

I was targeting good real estate assets overburdened by excessive debt. Well, I began seeing similar scenarios unfold in the corporate world and realized I could provide equity to those companies for a stake at a discounted price, and that would help them position themselves for when the market recovered.

corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?

The gathering of information to control people is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, India’s government has embarked on a massive biometrics program, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information gathering projects in the world—the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor,” will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry?50 To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, Adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, numerical targets, and “scorecards of progress” as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.51

Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right wing has organized and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as social deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of “failed liberal policies,” immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people’s anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message…Right-wing populist themes are particularly effective at attracting working people disenchanted with the system.

were listening to Tupac right before . . . you know.” “A’ight, so what do you think it means?” “You don’t know?” I ask. “I know. I wanna hear what you think.” Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.” “Us who?” he asks. “Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.” “The oppressed,” says Daddy. “Yeah. We’re the ones who get the short end of the stick, but we’re the ones they fear the most. That’s why the government targeted the Black Panthers, right? Because they were scared of the Panthers?” “Uh-huh,” Daddy says. “The Panthers educated and empowered the people. That tactic of empowering the oppressed goes even further back than the Panthers though. Name one.” Is he serious? He always makes me think. This one takes me a second. “The slave rebellion of 1831,” I say. “Nat Turner empowered and educated other slaves, and it led to one of the biggest slave revolts in history.” “A’ight, a’ight. You on it.” He gives me dap. “So, what’s the hate they’re giving the ‘little infants’ in today’s society?” “Racism?” “You gotta get a li’l more detailed than that. Think ’bout Khalil and his whole situation. Before he died.” “He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.” “Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?” I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it.” “Right. Lack of opportunities,” Daddy says. “Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack than it is to find a good school around here.

And the United States has not poured endless federal and state dollars into public education campaigns aimed at regulating corporate food production, subsidizing nutritious foods, or ending poverty and economic instability—top predictors of individual health, according to the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.43 Instead, fat bodies themselves are targeted in the “war on obesity” and the “childhood obesity epidemic.

As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough about the corporations that profit from selling them. We spend a lot of time discussing unhealthy foods in terms of individual guilt and willpower and not enough looking at the morality of big food companies that have targeted some of the poorest consumers in the world with products that will make them sick, or the governments that allowed them to do so.

Most of the crime-ridden minority neighborhoods in New York City, especially areas like East New York, where many of the characters in Eric Garner’s story grew up, had been artificially created by a series of criminal real estate scams. One of the most infamous had involved a company called the Eastern Service Corporation, which in the sixties ran a huge predatory lending operation all over the city, but particularly in Brooklyn. Scam artists like ESC would first clear white residents out of certain neighborhoods with scare campaigns. They’d slip leaflets through mail slots warning of an incoming black plague, with messages like, “Don’t wait until it’s too late!” Investors would then come in and buy their houses at depressed rates. Once this “blockbusting” technique cleared the properties, a company like ESC would bring in a new set of homeowners, often minorities, and often with bad credit and shaky job profiles. They bribed officials in the FHA to approve mortgages for anyone and everyone. Appraisals would be inflated. Loans would be approved for repairs, but repairs would never be done. The typical target homeowner in the con was a black family moving to New York to escape racism in the South. The family would be shown a house in a place like East New York that in reality was only worth about $15,000. But the appraisal would be faked and a loan would be approved for $17,000. The family would move in and instantly find themselves in a house worth $2,000 less than its purchase price, and maybe with faulty toilets, lighting, heat, and (ironically) broken windows besides. Meanwhile, the government-backed loan created by a lender like Eastern Service by then had been sold off to some sucker on the secondary market: a savings bank, a pension fund, or perhaps to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage corporation. Before long, the family would default and be foreclosed upon. Investors would swoop in and buy the property at a distressed price one more time. Next, the one-family home would be converted into a three- or four-family rental property, which would of course quickly fall into even greater disrepair. This process created ghettos almost instantly. Racial blockbusting is how East New York went from 90 percent white in 1960 to 80 percent black and Hispanic in 1966.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger. Among the multitude of documents we found in writing this book were Bad Science: A Resource Book—a how-to handbook for fact fighters, providing example after example of successful strategies for undermining science, and a list of experts with scientific credentials available to comment on any issue about which a think tank or corporation needed a negative sound bite.14

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

Why should anyone trust a government that has condoned torture, spied on at least thirty-five world leaders, supports indefinite detention, places bugs in thousands of computers all over the world, kills innocent people with drone attacks, promotes the post office to log mail for law enforcement agencies and arbitrarily authorizes targeted assassinations? Or, for that matter, a president that instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get government employees to spy on each other and ‘turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches,’ which includes ‘any unauthorized disclosure of anything, not just classified materials.’” Some say this program was designed to turn government employees, such as your postman, into an army of snitches. The

We have seen mass protests about military invasions and about injustices of many kinds, but we are now entering a new era of understanding and for the first time we are going to see people protesting in large numbers about the conspiracy itself and not just its individual expressions, like globalisation and wars. It is a time when the irresistible force (the human awakening) is going eye-to-eye with what it thinks is the immovable object (the agenda for global control). Immovable it is not, as we shall see in due course, but it is not going to go quietly. We need to be strong and refuse to acquiesce to these control freaks under any circumstances, no matter what the scale of intimidation and provocation. The Illuminati families may have the money, governments, banks, corporations, police and military, but the humanity that they so mercilessly target has the sheer numbers.

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other. The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.

So you could say that one alternative to the free market system is the one we already have, because we often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free-market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful. For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement.

In their ongoing war against evil capitalists, some vengeful Democrats have their eyes on banks, which they blame for making millions of loans that resulted in foreclosures and the 2008 financial crisis. Never mind that it was progressives who forced the government to make these loans to low-income borrowers with poor credit ratings through the Community Reinvestment Act and anti-discrimination laws. They promoted minority home ownership without regard to the owners’ ability to repay, and the result was catastrophic. But being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry—just pass a misguided policy and blame everyone else when it predictably fails. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, emboldened by Democrats recapturing control of the House, issued a stern warning to bankers before the 2019 session began. “I have not forgotten” that “you foreclosed on our houses,” she said, and “had us sign on the line for junk and for mess that we could not afford. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”62 How’s that for good governance—using her newfound power as incoming chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to punish bank executives for the disaster she and her fellow Democrats caused? Waters is also targeting corporations for allegedly excluding minorities and women from executive positions. Forming a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion, she immediately held a hearing to discuss the importance of examining the systematic exclusion of women, people of color, persons with disabilities, gays, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups.63 Why concentrate on policies to stimulate economic growth and improve people’s standards of living when you can employ identity politics to demonize your opponents?

also been a white-collar worker in my career. In my experience, there are two types of people who do this type of work: Achievers and Hiders. Achievers are the people who want to perform at a high level. They are ambitious, motivated and energetic. They are full of ideas and want to move up the corporate ladder, which are great attributes to have. But there is a downside for the Achiever. The moment a person decides to be an Achiever, they become a target. Their boss sees them as threatening to their job, so they start to hold them down or take shots at their reputation. Their peers see them as a person who will either embarrass them or keep them from getting a promotion, so they start to do what they can to undermine their accomplishments. So, to remain an Achiever and survive in this hostile environment, a person must become good at one thing that has nothing to do with their productivity—and that’s politics. They must learn how to navigate the political world by diminishing their enemies and strengthening their relationship with powerful people. In fact, some of the most successful people in the corporate world aren’t Achievers at all. They are pure politicians. So if you decide to work in the corporate environment and to be an Achiever, you must accept the fact that you must become a good politician also. Now, let’s talk about the Hiders. These are the people who HATE politics, but still need a job. They learn not to be the ambitious Achiever. They don’t stand out. They don’t speak up in meetings. They don’t bring new ideas. They HIDE. They keep their heads down and do as they’re told. They do just enough so that they aren’t talked about negatively. They survive. And this has worked for decades. But in the New Economy, it’s becoming much more difficult to hide. And people are running out of time. So, back to our Perfect Career List: Can a white-collar job deliver on the list? Again, the clear answer is no—certainly not in very many areas. Sales

Most charities already target the poorest people in our communities: the homeless, the chronically unemployed, the unskilled, those living well below the poverty line. I think that's important and necessary. My philosophy as Good Sam is this. It's not only those who've hit rock bottom who deserve help. Corporate mergers, globalization, recessions, tax cuts for the super wealthy - these all the effect of punishing all Americans. What about those who appear to be getting by on their own? The man who works two jobs to put a roof over his family's head, who pays his taxes, yet still fights to makes ends meet?He doesn't qualify for food stamps or low-cost housing or handouts from charities. He's laboring longer, earning less, and has fewer job protections than he did twenty-five years ago. Yet few government programs or charities address his needs.... I gave to people in a wide variety of professions and financial circumstances. But most of the money went to the people who keep the factories and stores running, who fix our cars and our plumbing, who bake our bread and serve our coffee, who teach our children in school. They are the soldiers in our everyday lives, and they cannot and should not be forgotten.

Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, McDonald’s—which makes its uniforms in prison—AT&T, Starbucks, which manufactures holiday products, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, JC Penney, Sears, Walmart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, and Target. Prisoners

If any of the news coverage had drawn blood, Meta wasn’t going to show it. Zuckerberg told the company’s People Planning team to bring him an aggressive hiring target for 2022. When they brought him an unprecedentedly ambitious plan to bring on 40,000 new staffers that year, Zuckerberg took the one-page document—known as “the napkin”—and then passed it back with a handwritten instruction to hire 8,000 more. “If we don’t hit these targets it’s game over,” Recruiting VP Miranda Kalinowski told the managers on her staff. To handle the deluge of hiring, Meta brought on an additional 1,000 recruiters between the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of the following year. Few of the new staffers would be slated to go into integrity work. Zuckerberg had declared that the company’s existing products were no longer its future, and Haugen’s document breach had solidified a sense that researchers and data scientists working on societal problems contained a potential corporate fifth column.

Imagine what would happen if people cheered you on for a little stumble rather than humiliated you. Imagine how you’d approach things if you treated them as experiments, where failure would be just as valuable as success. Might you now see the game of life slightly differently? Suddenly, the stakes are lower. And suddenly, you can afford to play around a little. If your goal is to find a fulfilling career and your hypothesis is that a corporate role might be fulfilling, then your data collection process might be to sample careers through internships and job placements. With an experimental mindset, an internship that you end up hating wouldn’t be a ‘failure’ or a ‘waste of time’; it’d just be another data point to help you realise that that’s not what you want. If your goal is to build a successful business, then your data collection process might involve testing different business ideas, products or services. With an experimental mindset, a product launch that doesn’t meet expectations wouldn’t be a failure or a disaster; it’d just be another data point to help you refine your strategy and better understand your target market.

Charles Koch gained confidence from the pulp mill experiment. He was so confident that just a year after buying the pulp mills, Charles Koch was considering a plan to buy all of Georgia-Pacific outright and take the company private. Koch Industries could apply the same techniques to the entire company: 10,000 percent compliance, targeted investment, and flexible management that didn’t focus on quarterly results. But Georgia-Pacific wouldn’t come cheap. The company would cost at least three times the $4 billion Koch paid for Invista, and it would require multiple billions of dollars in debt. Charles Koch hated debt.

To make a debt-fueled deal work, private equity firms hunted for companies that were struggling, but produced a lot of cash. The equity firms then borrowed huge sums of money to take the target company private and then used the cash flow to pay down the debt. The plan was brilliant in its simplicity—the private equity firm borrowed other people’s money, then used other people’s companies to pay that money down. Once the debt was paid down, the private equity firm still owned the company itself.

The Target Company Had to Be Distressed Koch was only interested in buying companies or assets that had fallen on hard times. Part of the logic behind this was simple: distressed companies were cheaper. They could be purchased at a discount. But the company had to be distressed in the right kind of way. Ideally, the firm should to be distressed because of managerial negligence or poor decision-making. That way, Koch could reverse the poor strategies when it was the owner. The goal was to improve operations and profits at the distressed firm to boost its value. When that happened, Koch could hold on to its new profit-making machine or sell it. 2. The Deal Had to Be a Long-Term Play Koch wasn’t looking to buy and flip companies. The deal needed to make sense over the five-, ten-, or even twenty-year time frame. This played to Koch’s advantage as a private firm. It could hold an asset through the stormy weather of commodities cycles, improving the underlying investments along the way until they were worth much more. This long-term strategy would open the door to a raft of acquisitions that other firms would not consider. Publicly traded firms, and even private hedge funds, looked for deals that showed a return within one to two years. Koch would face far less competition for the deals that paid off over many years later. 3. The Target Company Had to Fit with Koch’s Core Capabilities In the new era, Koch would stick to its knitting. It would expand into new industries only if the new line of business closely resembled something Koch already did. If Koch didn’t know how to do a certain business process better than its competitors, then it would stay out of that business. New acquisitions had to build on Koch’s expertise and had to branch out from the company’s current strength.

Herbert Allen Jr. had convinced himself that appearances were important. Having calculated incorrectly around the first of the year that the press coverage would (as Ray Stark had put it) “blow over in two weeks,” Herbert and most of Columbia's boardroom directors (the majority who blindly aligned their interests behind Herbert's and Stark's; Resulting in facilitating their David Begelman debacle) eventually had seized upon a new and equally superficial appraisal of their dilemma: We have a PR problem. The solution? Obvious. Hire a public relations firm. Columbia Pictures already employed a capable public relations director, Jean Vagnini, whose work was considered excellent by objective observers outside the company, as well as many inside. The board of directors, however, had lost confidence in Vagnini's ability to handle the continuing media onslaught alone. They also suspected that Vagnini's loyalty, in the continuing animosity between Alan Hirschfield (Columbia's CEO), and the board, was to Hirschfield -- the lone voice of reason throughout the board's mishandling of Begeleman's check forgeries. Since she was young, relatively inexperienced, and female, she was a convenient target for a group of men who did not want to confront the true source of the "PR" problem—themselves and their own actions.

I adored my best friend. Reyna Vargas was the most genuine, kindhearted person I’d ever met. I’d felt an urgent need to take her under my wing the first day she joined our school at the start of senior year. She was so soft-spoken and delicate that she would need protection if she was going to survive the hallways of Xavier Catholic School, where privilege was the backbone of the curriculum and the air itself was infused with the fresh leather scent of entitlement. The kids at my school were carbon copies of their CEO fathers and corporate counsel mothers. They’d been trained since birth to smell blood in the water from a mile away. Xavier bullies could teach the CIA innovative new torture tactics. Reyna had been a brand-new shiny target in a plaid pleated skirt until I took her in my arms and claimed her. No one at school had dared touch her after that.

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Trolls may be destructive and callous; they may represent privilege gone berserk; they may be a significant reason why we can’t have nice things online. But the uncomfortable fact is that trolls replicate behaviors and attitudes that in other contexts are actively celebrated (“This is how the West was won!”) or simply taken as a given (“Boys will be boys”). Trolls certainly amplify the ugly side of mainstream behavior, but they aren’t pulling their materials, chosen targets, or impulses from the ether. They are born of and fueled by the mainstream world—its behavioral mores, its corporate institutions, its political structures and leaders—however much the mainstream might rankle at the suggestion.

The fact that costs rise faster for arts organizations than for other industries is often misread as “artists don’t handle money well” or “artists are wasteful.” Many board members believe that if an arts organization were managed carefully, it would turn a profit. They cannot understand why an organization that makes something people like should run at a perpetual deficit. This corporate prejudice can affect the way they govern their arts organization, encouraging them to try to cut budgets or to avoid addressing annual fund-raising requirements. Such board members start from the belief that arts managers are doing something wrong. They think that if corporate managers could run the arts organization, then it would become profitable, that if arts managers were smarter, fund-raising targets could be lower. They are simply wrong.

The objective of adding more hours is to achieve the targets and not vice versa.

Ignorance is not bliss; it is defeat. If you are a Christian, you are the target. If

Surprise long-range helicopter assault operations against targets deep within enemy territory, supported by the ground attack aircraft, became a hallmark of EO operations, as did the use of pinpoint suppressive fire with mortars and follow-up pursuit of ambushes.

People who have seen the latest Greek plan said Athens was proposing new savings in the pension system — the biggest sticking point — which will amount to about 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product this year and just over 1 per cent next year. But this is short of the 1 per cent savings this year and next that Greece’s creditors had demanded. It also relies on higher employer contributions which, alongside proposed tax changes targeting corporate profits, could crimp economic growth, some creditor officials fear. The two sides also remain at loggerheads over rates of valued added tax on electricity and processed food. According to officials who attended the eurogroup meeting, Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund chief, was particularly tough.

But as bold as it was, Hu Shuli’s voice no longer stood out as distinctively as it had when she launched her first magazine twelve years earlier, simply because so many other voices now contended alongside hers. The corporate misdeeds and corruption that had been the main targets of her work were now revealed, day by day, by ordinary people who had no tools but an Internet connection. Tycoons who once gave exclusive interviews to Hu Shuli were now taking to the Web to express themselves.

The campaign drew heavily from the American anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, which led to the dismantling of racial segregation programs in South Africa by targeting the one thing which—unlike protests or letters or phone calls—no government can ignore: money ... SHAC set out to make Huntington the South Africa of the corporate world. They identified banks, suppliers, customers and employees—anyone with any financial ties to the lab, from Fortune 500 companies to toilet paper suppliers. They focused on businesses with no vested interest in animal experimentation, either philosophically or economically; Huntington needed them, but they did not need Huntington.

CHAPTER FIVE Collateral Damage “In an ordinary war, we differentiate between combatants and civilians. Not everyone is part of a nation’s army. But what about a corporation? Surely security and fleet forces are combatants in the traditional sense. Are executives valid targets? Paying taxes is generally compulsory for a nation’s citizens, but are shareholders equally detached from a military effort? Are they collaborators? Where does one draw the lines, or are there any?

The most important task in specifying value, once the product is defined, is to determine a target cost based on the amount of resources and effort required to make a product of given specification and capabilities if all the currently visible muda were removed from the process. Doing this is the key to squeezing out the waste.

What is the muda-free cost of this product, once unnecessary steps are removed and value is made to flow? This becomes the target cost for the development, order-taking, and production activities necessary for this product.4

( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) such as the Integrity Assessment, Anti-corruption Competitiveness Evaluation, and Corruption Impact Assessment, and has been targeting the central and local governments and the public corporations of Indonesia since 2008.

When the U.S. government turns to domestic spying and illegal harassment of citizens, it rarely if ever has been known to go after billionaires, corporate CEOs, or their advocates; it has a track record of using its spying powers domestically on, among others, law-abiding and nonviolent dissident groups that challenge entrenched wealth and privilege. When one sees how peaceful Occupy protesters have been made the target of Homeland Security covert scrutiny here in the United States—while the bankers whose dubious shenanigans helped drive the economy off a cliff waltz free—the dimensions of the problem grow stark.

Sun had hit $1 billion in sales within four years. McNealy did it by smartly targeting a customer base that had money to spend—corporate R&D departments, the U.S. military, and the National Laboratories, a less glamorous but much more affluent set of customers than the universities Steve went after. Sun next went after Wall Street, which was just beginning to discover the power of using computers to identify quick trading opportunities. These customers didn’t much care what the computers looked like, as long as they had big screens and could handle multiple computing threads simultaneously. Sun succeeded by identifying the market’s real need, by delivering just that product, and by keeping its machines reasonably affordable. NeXT failed at all of that. In fact, NeXT didn’t actually sell its first computer until almost a year after that splashy debut in Davies Hall—four full years after Steve had started the company.

Expository preaching will impact your congregation, because it helps you be faithful to the text and be relevant to your context in regular ministry implement a strategy for equipping and energizing your people for long-term faithfulness to God and the ministry overcome your tendency to target a sermon to a particular person or group and be protected from that charge avoid skipping over what does not suit your taste or temperament on any given day carry on a cohesive ministry in the middle of multiple dimensions and demands on you as a pastor enhance the dignity of the pastoral work since you stand under the authority of God’s Word as you preach integrate the conversation of the church around the message of the week communicate the intentions of God for your congregation as seen by its human leaders orient people around a common vision, thus helping you surface the voluntary labor force needed to achieve the vision motivate people to action in implementing the program of the church with God’s sanction garner the credibility needed to lead the church to change model effective ministry to present and future teachers and preachers outline the agenda for corporate spirituality make your congregation biblically literate

An accurate budget must be built on a base of thorough research. You must do research on your community to find out what it will cost to get a church off the ground. You need to solidly answer questions such as:, What will the cost of living in this community be?, What will my salary be? How about salaries for additional staff?, How much will it cost to rent space for the church to meet in?, How much will it cost to operate a business in this city (office rent, phones, computer equipment, copy equipment, and so on)? Talk with other pastors in the community. Find out what their start-up costs were and what they are currently spending to maintain and operate the church. Other pastors can be a valuable resource for you on many levels. The worst mistake you can make is to start the budget process by viewing economic realities through a rose-colored lens. If you speculate too much or cut corners in this area, you’ll end up paying dearly down the road. Remember, God never intended for you to go it alone. There are people and resources out there to help you prepare. Ask others for help. God receives no glory when you are scraping the bottom to do His work. So don’t think too small. Church planting is an all or nothing venture. You can’t just partially commit. You have to fully commit, and often that means with your wallet. Don’t underestimate the importance of having a base of prayer partners. You need prayers as desperately as you need money. You need prayers as desperately as you need money. An unhealthy launch may occur when a new church begins as the result of a church split, when a planter is disobedient in following God, or when there is a lack of funding or solid strategy. Finding the right teammates to help you on this journey is serious business. The people you bring on to your staff will either propel you down the road toward fulfilling the vision for your church or serve as speed bumps along the way. You should never be afraid to ask potential staff members to join you—even if it means a salary cut, a drastic position change or a significant new challenge for them. When you ask someone to join your staff, you are not asking that person to make a sacrifice. (If you have that mentality, you need to work to change it.) Instead, you are offering that person the opportunity of a lifetime. There are three things that every new church must have before it can be a real church: (1) a lead pastor, (2) a start date, and (3) a worship leader. Hire a person at the part-time level before bringing him or her on full time. When hiring a new staff person, make sure he or she possesses the three C's: Character, Chemistry & Competency Hiring staff precedes growth, not vice versa. Hire slow, fire fast. Never hire staff when you can find a volunteer. Launch as publicly as possible, with as many people as possible. There are two things you are looking for in a start date: (1) a date on which you have the potential to reach as many people as possible, and (2) a date that precedes a period of time in which people, in general, are unlikely to be traveling out of town. You need steppingstones to get you from where you are to your launch date. Monthly services are real services that you begin holding three to six months prior to your launch date. They are the absolute best strategic precursor to your launch. Monthly services give you the invaluable opportunity to test-drive your systems, your staff and, to an extent, even your service style. At the same time, you are doing real ministry with the people in attendance. These services should mirror as closely as possible what your service will look like on the launch date. Let your target demographic group be the strongest deciding factor in settling on a location: Hotel ballrooms, Movie theaters, Comedy clubs, Public-school auditoriums, Performing-arts theaters, Available church meeting spaces, College auditoriums, Corporate conference space.

Very few people writing about this new industry in the mainstream press truly understood how personal computers had already begun to revert to institutional machines. This was mainly because it was easier for most journalists of the early 1990s to envision and get personally excited about the potential of educational software, or of managing their personal finances, or organizing their recipes in the “digital” kitchen, or imagining how amateur architects could design funky homes right on their home computers. Who wouldn’t be excited about more power in the hands of people, the computer as an extension of the brain, a “bicycle for the mind,” as Steve put it? This was the story of computing that got all the ink, and it was a story no one unfurled as well as Steve. Bill Gates wasn’t swayed by that romance. He saw it as a naïve fantasy that missed the point of the much more sophisticated things PCs could do for people in the enterprise. A consumer market can be an enormously profitable one—put simply, there are so many more people than businesses that if you sell them the right product you can mint money. But the personal computers of that time still didn’t have enough power at a low enough price to excite the vast majority of consumers, or to change their lives in any meaningful way. The business market, however, was a different beast. The potential volume of sales represented by all those corporate desktops, in all those thousands of companies big and small, became the target of Bill Gates’s strategic brilliance and focus. Those companies paid good prices for the reliability and consistency that Windows PCs could deliver. They welcomed incremental improvement, and Bill knew how to give it to them. Steve paid lip service to it, but his heart wasn’t in it. He thrilled only to the concept of how a dramatically better computer could unlock even more potential for its user.

Yesterday I got a credit card application from a major bank with a variable rate of 12.99% to 20.99%. Such a deal. And what if I fall on hard times and lose my job? So, I wrote them a return letter: Dear major bank, Thank you for the opportunity to express how I really feel about your corporation. What I do appreciate, is that there is no stamp required for your return envelope. After tearing off all my personal information, so some dumpster diver doesn’t fill out your application for me, and find out he picked the wrong target; I just wanted to make one comment: Your practice of usury is despicable, along with crashing the global economy. Danny - I think I have my grandmother’s charm and wit. Too bad she’s not here to share it with. Maybe if every disgruntled person would use that free envelope and apply their creative talent, they might get the picture that we’re tired of this bullshit. Marcie, there are so many people you could visit and test your information extraction program on, so what are you people doing here? Is this just a practice run? Well, you wanted to know what I was thinking. And you wonder why I look to God for solutions. Wake me up when it’s over. Marcie - You are a crazy SOB. You want me to use my system to play Robin Hood. Danny - You’d make an excellent Robin Hood, make sure you get your merry band to sign on. Maybe that’s the reason we were connected by design. How much materialism do you really need? Some people take what they need from the orchard and other people pick the orchard clean. Marcie - You’re wondering what I’m thinking. I don’t want to mess your mind up with what I’m thinking, so let me simply say, I don’t approve of what some of these people have been doing for decades. Who do you think I am? Danny - Someone who frustrates me, don’t we have enough guessing games in life? Marcie - Marcie is a miracle worker, so what does that tell you? You do not even know what to make of me, someone who keeps coming back for you, someone who won’t let go of you. Danny - Why is it that there’s only a handful of words for truth and over 100 synonyms and derivatives for deception? Marcie - Are you surprised? Danny - It puts it in a different light when you start reading through the list. You may as well add amygdala hijacking. Marcie - Has Danny been bamboozled? Danny - You picked one with an unknown origin. Marcie - That is the best way to start a mind game. Danny - Okay, just for kicks, try saying synonym - cinnamon 10 times as fast as you can. From - "The Mind Game Company - The Players

Nuclear colonialism began in New Mexico, where the nuclear weapons complex began. If Spanish colonialism brought Spanish colonizers, and U.S. colonialism brought American colonizers, then nuclear colonialism brought nuclear colonizers—scientists, military personnel, atomic bomb testing, and nuclear waste among them. This book exposes nuclear colonialism as both the third major settler colonial period in New Mexico and as an “ism,” that is, a “form of doctrine, theory, or practice having, or claiming to have, a distinctive character or relation.”4 Rhetorician Danielle Endres defines nuclear colonialism as “a system of domination through which governments and corporations disproportionately target and devastate indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process” (Endres 2009, 39). I would add to this definition what Patrick Wolfe (1999) says about settler colonialism: “the colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (2). In their essay “Rethinking Settler Colonialism,” Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita (2014) define colonization as a “state-sponsored settlement” and follow Wolfe’s rationale that settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which “the colonists displace or eliminate the natives wholesale” (1041). Nuclear colonialism and settler colonialism share many of the same characteristics, but there is one major distinction: nuclear colonialism is a neocolonial framework that targets not only Indigenous people but also other ethnic minority groups in poor economic situations that have become disenfranchised because of state occupation of their homelands.5

show that THC has “potent anti-cancer activity,” and can significantly “target and switch off” pathways that allow cancers to grow.

Quoting page 74-75: The ability of the minority rights interest groups to win control of the new agencies of civil rights enforcement established in the 1960s followed a traditional pattern in the politics of regulation that students of public administration called “clientele capture.” The practice is as old as Jacksonian democracy, which set the American tradition wherein party patronage ruled the civil service and mission agencies were expected to cater to the needs of their organized constituencies: farmers, veterans, laborers, and business interests. By the 1960s, journalists referred to these arrangements as iron triangles.” They were three-way coalitions of mutual back-scratching, operating in Washington and in state and municipal governments throughout America. Three points of the triangle were organized interests which lobbied legislators to establish or expand programs beneficial to their members; legislative committees, which obliged the lobbyists by authorizing and funding programs for the mission agencies to manage; and government bureaucrats, who expanded their empire building service programs to benefit the interest groups. To complete the triangular cycle, interest groups supported the legislators. … because environmental and consumer protection regulation is cross-cutting and horizontal—covering pollution, for example, from all industrial sources, rather than single industry and vertical … it is a difficult target for capture. The new agencies of civil right regulation, however, were different in ways that made them highly vulnerable to capture. Most important, the cost-benefit structure of civil right regulation is the opposite of that found in environmental and consumer protection regulation. Benefits (jobs, promotions, admissions, contract set-asides) are narrowly concentrated among protected-class clienteles (racial and ethnic minorities, women, the handicapped). Costs, on the other hand, are widely distributed (government and corporate budgets).

A CHARTER FOR LIFE ON EARTH Listed in Alphabetical Order Right Action: Join and support organisations and political parties dedicated to the welfare of the Earth. Dissent skilfully about war, environmental destruction, economic targets and corruption in governments and corporations affecting the lives of people and animals. Dissent about harm and destruction of natural resources, land, water, and air. Engage in ethical investments and support worthwhile projects. Support and develop, as fully as possible, spirituality, religion, arts, science and philosophies that support the Earth and all its occupants. Right Conservation: Save energy. Use less oil. Conserve water. Wear more clothes at home and work out to keep warm rather than turning up the heating. Examine every area of your home and the rest of your life to see where you can save energy. Apply the principles of conservation to every area of your life. Campaign for switching off lights and energy at night in government and business offices, large and small.

The indirect harvesting of valued-per-click leisure time by corporations has led many technocapitalists to support projects like the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would free up users’ time which could then potential y be spent generating valuable data and content on their own platforms. The driving force of this trend is the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns that have grown simultaneously with corporations like Google over the last 15 years, but now the value of the click is not based only on the likelihood of purchasing success, as older models of Google AdWords and other targeted ad campaigns functioned. Instead, the click is conceptualised as a data-point that connects two or more actors in the network. It is those moments of connection between subjects and objects that have potential value to data-driven companies from corporate advertisers to election meddlers like Cambridge Analytica and policy influencers like Palantir. This only works because the user can be libidinally motivated to conduct the ‘free labour’ constituted by the click. The situation was prophetically predicted by one of the most historically influential Marxists still alive, Mario Tronti. His 1966 book Workers and Capital gave rise to the concept of ‘neocapitalism’, which anticipates the environment in which the digital worker operates today. For Tronti: At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production. In this environment, the data-point connecting two people, generated at the moment of every click between social media pages, connects the social relation itself to a relation of production in real time. Seeing this in his own future, Tronti worried that society itself would run by the logic of the factory. Each interaction between individuals would incorporate a surplus value turned to profit by the class owning the means. dream lovers of social production. If the factory workers could be made to relate to each other in a way that was productive for the factory owners, so too could the entirety of social life be modified and edited for the profit of the capitalists. The whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.

Their efforts are insidious. Do you know why you aren’t charged to use social media platforms? Because you aren’t the customer. You’re the product.” “Meaning what?” said Ashley. “Meaning these companies are selling you. Data on every aspect of your lives. Your every purchase, every utterance, and so on. We’re now immersed in what’s being called The Attention Economy. Because the real end game of so many corporations and tech titans is to capture your attention. Addict you so you can be precisely targeted by advertisers, politicians, and others who want to influence or manipulate you.

Corporate vision provides a context within which people at all levels can make decisions. The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. A shared vision is like having a compass and distant destination in the mountains. If you give a group of people a compass and destination point and then turn them loose in the mountains to reach that destination, they will probably figure out a way to get there. They may encounter obstacles, detours, bad turns, and side canyons along the way. However, with the general directions of the compass, a clear end-goal, and the belief that they are working towards a worthy destination, they will probably reach the target. In contrast, companies without a shared overall aim have no context, and their people wander aimlessly in the side canyons and take detours to nowhere.

Part of the process is Apple’s overall corporate strategy: What markets does it target, and how does it target them? Part of it is keeping abreast of new technology developments and being receptive to new ideas, especially outside the company. Part of it is about being creative, and always learning. Part of it is about being flexible, and a willingness to ditch long-held notions. Part of it is about being customer-centric. And a lot of it is trying to find the simplest, most elegant solution through an iterative, generate-and-test design process. Innovation at Apple is largely about shaping technology to the customer’s needs, not trying to force the user to adapt to the technology.

This is exactly what Alan Mulally walked into when he took over as the new CEO at Ford in 2006. Ford was in serious trouble, and Mulally was brought in with the hope that he could save the company. Much as Chief Cauley had done at the CRPD, Mulally made it his first order of business at Ford to find out as much as he could about the current state of things from the people who worked there. The task, however, proved more difficult than he expected. To keep a pulse on the health of the organization, Mulally introduced weekly business plan reviews (BPRs). All his senior executives were to attend these meetings and present the status of their work against the company’s strategic plan, using simple color coding—green, yellow and red. Mulally knew that the company was having serious problems, so he was surprised to see that week after week every executive presented their projects as all green. Finally, he threw up his hands in frustration. “We are going to lose billions of dollars this year,” he said. “Is there anything that’s not going well here?” Nobody answered. There was a good reason for the silence. The executives were scared. Prior to Mulally, the former CEO would regularly berate, humiliate or fire people who told him things he didn’t want to hear. And, because we get the behavior we reward, executives were now conditioned to hide problem areas or missed financial targets to protect themselves from the CEO. It didn’t matter that Mulally said he wanted honesty and accountability; until the executives felt safe, he wasn’t going to get it. (For all the cynics who say there is no place for feelings at work, here was a roomful of the most senior people of a major corporation who didn’t want to tell the truth to the CEO because of how they felt.) But Mulally persisted. In every subsequent meeting he repeated the same question until, eventually, one person, Mark Fields, head of operations in the Americas, changed one slide in his presentation to red. A decision he believed would cost him his job. But he didn’t lose his job. Nor was he publicly shamed. Instead, Mulally clapped at the sight and said, “Mark, that is great visibility! Who can help Mark with this?” At the next meeting, Mark was still the only executive with a red slide in his presentation. In fact, the other executives were surprised to see that Fields still had his job. Week after week, Mulally would repeat his question, We are still losing tons of money, is anything not going well? Slowly executives started to show yellow and red in their presentations too. Eventually, it got to the point where they would openly discuss all the issues they were facing. In the process, Mulally had learned some tricks to help build trust on the team. To help them feel safe from humiliation, for example, he depersonalized the problems his executives faced. “You have a problem,” he would tell them. “You are not the problem.

Don't open the door or talk to strangers," "Unless they're selling something.Then allow them to disclose what they are selling and see if its something which might be useful. First say a 'No' upfront, that's taking charge of the situation from beginning. Make them explain, do not react at all till they finish, but listen carefully. Now pretend that hypothetically you might like it but not sure if it can be beneficial to you in this life. Without delay, even the sound of interest in another life work as a charge-up for salespeople, they will continue product explanation with enhanced passion. Even so, don't open-up your cards, just restart the game, ask about the first thing they explained than the second. Steer them around in circles by submitting the similar question in altered manner. Its always good to exhaust your opponent, make them so tired mentally that they wont be able to hide any fact or benefit. Once you see them fatigued start bargaining about the cost, remember instantly they either want to run away or slap you hard, but...Its a big but...The targets on their head will not allow them that option so they will listen to every demand, call their boss and offer you the second most reasonable price... Do not say yes yet...Tell them you will buy it but still need some time to think...They are at present in a flightless state, so they will promptly offer you the most competitive price possible and secure the deal. Although you can still ask for a corporate goody like a calendar, diary, pen T-shirt or a cap for me, now they might or might not possess anything big, but even a free pencil is a bonus. Our standards aren't that high when it comes to a gift.

Given the obvious “will to power” (as Friedrich Nietzsche called it) of the human race, the enormous energy put into its expression, the early emergence of hierarchies among children, and the childlike devastation of grown men who tumble from the top, I’m puzzled by the taboo with which our society surrounds this issue. Most psychology textbooks do not even mention power and dominance, except in relation to abusive relationships. Everyone seems in denial. In one study on the power motive, corporate managers were asked about their relationship with power. They did acknowledge the existence of a lust for power, but never applied it to themselves. They rather enjoyed responsibility, prestige, and authority. The power grabbers were other men. Political candidates are equally reluctant. They sell themselves as public servants, only in it to fix the economy or improve education. Have you ever heard a candidate admit he wants power? Obviously, the word “servant” is doublespeak: does anyone believe that it’s only for our sake that they join the mudslinging of modern democracy? Do the candidates themselves believe this? What an unusual sacrifice that would be. It’s refreshing to work with chimpanzees: they are the honest politicians we all long for. When political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated an insuppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes. Observing how blatantly chimpanzees jockey for position, one will look in vain for ulterior motives and expedient promises. I was not prepared for this when, as a young student, I began to follow the dramas among the Arnhem chimpanzees from an observation window overlooking their island. In those days, students were supposed to be antiestablishment, and my shoulder-long hair proved it. We considered power evil and ambition ridiculous. Yet my observations of the apes forced me to open my mind to seeing power relations not as something bad but as something ingrained. Perhaps inequality was not to be dismissed as simply the product of capitalism. It seemed to go deeper than that. Nowadays, this may seem banal, but in the 1970s human behavior was seen as totally flexible: not natural but cultural. If we really wanted to, people believed, we could rid ourselves of archaic tendencies like sexual jealousy, gender roles, material ownership, and, yes, the desire to dominate. Unaware of this revolutionary call, my chimpanzees demonstrated the same archaic tendencies, but without a trace of cognitive dissonance. They were jealous, sexist, and possessive, plain and simple. I didn’t know then that I’d be working with them for the rest of my life or that I would never again have the luxury of sitting on a wooden stool and watching them for thousands of hours. It was the most revelatory time of my life. I became so engrossed that I began trying to imagine what made my apes decide on this or that action. I started dreaming of them at night and, most significant, I started seeing the people around me in a different light.

Here’s how it worked: The federal government would cap the amount of greenhouse gas companies could emit, leaving it up to each company to figure out how to hit those targets. Companies exceeding their limit would pay a penalty. Companies that stayed below their limit could sell their unused pollution “credits” to less-efficient businesses. By setting a price on pollution and creating a market for environmentally friendly behavior, a cap-and-trade approach gave corporations an incentive to develop and adopt the latest green technologies; and with each technological advance, the government could lower the caps even further, encouraging a steady and virtuous cycle of innovation.

You run the engineering analysis department at an architectural firm, and in the past your staff’s salaries have been included in COS. Now the finance folks are moving all those costs out of COS. It’s perfectly reasonable—even though your department has a lot to do with completing an architectural design, a case can be made that it isn’t directly related to any particular job. So does the change matter? You bet. You and your staff are no longer part of what’s often called “above the line.” That means you’re going to show up differently on the corporate radar screen. If your company focuses on gross profit, for instance, management will be monitoring COS carefully. It will try to ensure that departments affecting COS have everything they need to hit their targets. Once you’re outside of COS—“below the line”—the level of attention may be significantly lower.

You do a rally in his backyard. You get lots of people to call his office and say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ E-mails, phone calls. You have them confronting him when he goes out to the diner. Again, this is where teaching people how to be good activists comes in. Most people don’t know what to do,” Lonegan said. “So, I would teach people.” The purpose of Lonegan’s effort was not necessarily to drive the Three Taxateers out of office. All three of them kept their seats. The goal was to send a message to the US senators. AFP targeted conservative Democrats such as Senator Max Baucus, who had a significant fossil fuel industry presence in their states. It also targeted wavering Republican senators. By tormenting the New Jersey congressmen, AFP showed that there was a steep price for supporting climate change regulations.

When Lonegan hosted rallies, he and his team were ready to record the e-mail address of anyone who shared it. They made phone trees and hosted volunteer training sessions. They passed out the phone numbers of local congressmen to activists and coached them on the best time to call. (Late night was sometimes best so that volunteers could leave voicemails, which would be waiting in big batches when the politician showed up for work the next day.) They taught volunteers the fine art of calling talk-radio programs and getting on the air, coaching them to mention the right website address or phone number when they were on the air. Lonegan and his colleagues did more than just get Tea Party activists to focus on the Waxman-Markey bill. Americans for Prosperity also helped direct the activists’ passion toward a very specific group of targets: Republican politicians. Attacking the Republican party was one of AFP’s central strategies from the earliest days. In 2006, Lonegan attended a private AFP event hosted by Charles and David Koch, in Aspen, Colorado.

Once the ACCF’s study was published, Koch Industries carried out the next phase of its echo chamber system. The study was quickly promoted by a think tank called the Institute for Energy Research, which sent out a press release on August 13 that highlighted the study’s findings. The IER was an outgrowth of the Institute for Humane Studies, the libertarian think tank cofounded by Charles Koch.IV By 2009, the IER was funded by Koch Industries and other companies, and a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Wayne Gable sat on IER’s board of directors. After the study was promoted by the IER, it was then recycled by another Koch Industries–affiliated think tank. This one was called the American Energy Alliance, and it was essentially the political action arm of the IER. The AEA was organized under the tax code in a way that it could be directly involved in politics, while the IER was organized as an “education” foundation that could not lobby or get involved in political campaigns. Where the IER was high minded, the AEA was something more of a street brawler. The AEA was headed by a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Thomas Pyle, who remained in close contact with his former colleagues at Koch’s lobbying shop. The AEA produced a series of political radio advertisements that were based on the new ACCF findings, along with other statistics that highlighted the potential economic threat of a cap-and-trade bill. A narrator in one of the radio ads intoned: “This tax will further cripple our already struggling economy—costing more American jobs. . . . Higher taxes and more job losses—what could Congress be thinking?” A corresponding fact sheet for the ad cited the ACCF for this claim. The AEA political ads were targeted in a way that benefited from keen knowledge of how the Waxman-Markey bill was then working its way through the Senate. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was a particular target. “Why would Senator Lindsey Graham support a new national energy tax, called cap and trade?” one advertisement began. Citing the ACCF study, the advertisement claimed that “cap and trade . . . could significantly increase electricity bills, gas prices, and cost American jobs.” In all of these statements and advertisements, the same set of numbers were used again and again: More than two million jobs lost. Electricity prices would be 50 percent higher by 2030. These facts were also carried into Congress in the form of direct testimony. When the Senate Finance Committee sought to learn more about the economics of climate change, the committee invited Margo Thorning to testify. The ACCF study was submitted as evidence beforehand.

Start by redistributing a chunk of your own authority. Step back from critical decisions and let your team decide. (We’ll say more about this in chapter 15.) If your company doesn’t have a profit-sharing plan, lobby for one and make sure it’s available to every employee. In a good year, profit sharing should raise average compensation by 10 percent or more. Wherever possible, disaggregate big units into small ones. In general, keep operating units to fewer than fifty people. Give every unit a full-fledged P&L. Minimize corporate overhead allocations and avoid building targets around detailed KPIs. Expand the decision-making prerogatives of frontline operating teams. Give them responsibility for decisions around unit strategy, operations, and people. Roll back legacy policies that have truncated the freedom of frontline units. Give businesses the right to negotiate the price of centrally provided services and opt out if they don’t think they’re getting a good deal. Once every unit has a genuine P&L, significantly increase the proportion of individual or team compensation that’s at risk. Ensure that above-average performance brings above-average rewards.

you don’t want a lot of assets in one LLC (or LP). An LLC that holds ten properties is a much bigger target than ten LLCs each holding one property. In the first case, a fall at one property exposes the other nine properties to attack.

By using separate LLCs we have the certainty that assets in a remote LLC will not be exposed to claims brought against a target LLC. The series LLC does not offer such certainty.

creditors will go after the easiest target with the deepest pockets.

Wealthy people and corporations often give money to both sides in an election. They do this for insurance, because they cannot afford to offend the people who win political power. It is often an error to say they “put Hitler in power,” etc. People with assets need to avoid offending ambitious politicians. The wealthy contribute to many politicians if only to safeguard their interests. It is dangerous to be the target of government prosecution, antitrust, etc. All businesses are potential targets of government. J.R.Nyquist

In 1976, the same year that Jensen and Meckling published their pathbreaking analysis, President Jimmy Carter initiated the first significant efforts to radically align the corporation with Wall Street’s market metrics, targeting the airline, transportation, and financial sectors with a bold program of deregulation.

A platform is a raised, level surface on which people or things can stand. A platform business works in just that way: it allows users—producers and consumers of goods, services, and content— to create, communicate, and consume value through the platform. Amazon, Apple’s App Store, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pay- Pal, YouTube, Uber, Wikipedia, Instagram, etsy, Twitter, Snapchat, Hotel Tonight, Salesforce, Kickstarter, and Alibaba are all platform businesses. While these businesses have done many impressive things, the most relevant to us is that they have created an oppor- tunity for anyone, even those with limited means, to share their thoughts, ideas, creativity, and creations with millions of people at a low cost. Today, if you create a product or have an idea, you can sell that product or share that idea with a substantial audience quickly and cost-effectively through these platforms. Not only that, but the platforms arguably give more power to individuals than corporations since they’re so efficient at identifying ulterior motives or lack of authenticity. The communities on these platforms, many of whom are millennials, know when they’re being sold to rather than shared with, and quickly eliminate those users from their con- sciousness (a/k/a their social media feeds). Now, smaller organizations and less prosperous individuals are able to sell to or share their products, services, or content with more targeted demographics of people. That’s exactly what the modern consumer desires: a more personalized, connected experience. For example, a Brooklyn handbag designer can sell her handbags to a select group of customers through one of the multitude of fashion or shopping platforms and create an ongoing dialogue with her audience through a communication platform such as Instagram. Or an independent filmmaker from Los Angeles can create a short film using a GoPro and the editing software on their Mac and then instantly share it with countless people through one of a dozen video platforms and get direct feedback. Or an author can write a book and sell it directly from his or her website and social channels to anyone who’s excited about it. The reaction to standardization and globalization has been enabled by these platforms. Customers can get what they want, from whomever they want, whenever they want it. It’s a revised and personalized version of globalization that allows us to maintain and enhance the cultural connections that create the meaning we crave in our lives.

The following outline can be used for researching on any company, not just Amazon. 1. The Mission-Vision of the Company 2. Corporate Culture and Values within the Company 3. Main Products and Services 4. Target Market 5. Major Competitors 6. Composition of Management 7. Basic Metrics and Company Financial Data 8. Future Plans of the Company and Possible Threats 9. The Company in the News

Who You Write For: Do you write for millennials? Maybe new parents? How about corporate executives? Maybe stressed out managers? Or middle-aged men that want to get back in shape. The point is you want to call out your audience specifically - it’s even better if you’re actually a part of your target audience. That way your readers know that you’re the real deal.

Acquiring a deep understanding of the target customer should not be short-changed — by anyone writing sales copy, at any time, for any purpose. As I was writing this edition of this book, I was writing copy for a long-time client, the Guthy-Renker Corporation, for their hugely successful Proactiv® brand of acne products. There are three different people to talk to about this — the teen sufferer, the teen's mom, and playing the odds, the adult female sufferer. This had me reading past and current issues of nearly a hundred magazines, including all the teen and preteen magazines, all the mom magazines, and all the women's magazines, having copious online research done for me, doing “conversational research” directly with people in all three groups, and even hiring a dozen freelance readers — teens, parents of teens, and young women — to critique my copy. Also, as I was writing this edition of this book, I began work on copy aimed at highly successful, professional financial and investment advisors, financial planners, and top-performing life insurance and annuities agents, which required a similar investment of time and energy in crawling inside their psyche, tribal language, daily experiences. Freelance writers worth their salt know they must do this sort of thing, and do. The danger for the business owner writing copy for himself and for his own business is ingrained assumption — encouraging shortcutting or altogether neglecting this step. The only sure way to keep your own accumulated but untested opinions and beliefs about your customers from sabotaging your sales letters is to start anew, from scratch, and to engage in getting to know the customers just as if you were arriving to write for them for the first time, with no foreknowledge.

Do we need protest? After decades of asking politely and getting nowhere, we have a full-scale emergency on our hands. We have to have change. And it must be now. If the right kind of protest is what it takes, then that’s what we must have. I do not write this as someone who feels instinctive joy at the thought of taking to the streets, but these are serious times. There is compelling evidence that the right kind of protest clearly works. When, in 2019, the UK tightened its carbon targets to ‘net zero by 2050’, it wasn’t far enough, but it was a big step in the right direction. And it looks pretty clear that the political space to make that possible was opened up in no small part by protesters; by Greta Thunberg, by armies of school kids, and by Extinction Rebellion (XR). My work with tech giants, investment bankers, energy companies, an airline and many other corporations tells me that these straight-talking, non-violent direct actions made possible conversations in boardrooms that seemed unthinkable just 18 months before.

Many of the more than one billion Facebook users would be horrified to learn that the NSA has co-opted the website in order to monitor citizens who have not been accused of any crime. According to internal government documents leaked by Snowden and reported by journalists Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald, “In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with malware, which can be tailored to

NSA “hunts” system administrators who control computer networks and servers, then targets their private email and Facebook accounts to gather information useful for hacking into their computers and gaining access to the entire network of computers they control.

They create in our present-day a “structure of feeling,” as Raymond Williams put it, a system of sentiments combining “elements of impulse, restraint and tone”) that can span the generations.[60] This historically created structure of feeling routinely makes today’s politics of corporate and carceral devastation viewable as “normal” and “tolerable”—but only so long as the devastation is visited upon those whom the nation is accustomed to see targeted (black and brown bodies) and usually only so long as the ones viewing the devastation as “tolerable” are not themselves among the targeted!

It seemed as if any claim about debt financing, no matter how illogical, could be made with a straight face. Andrew Sigler, for example, warned of the "billions in equity taken off corporate balance sheets" by successful acquisitions. The inevitable consequence of withdrawing equity, Sigler concluded, was to weaken companies and leave them unable to compete. But equity does not "disappear" when one firm acquires another. The target may cease to exist as an independent entity, but its assets remain intact and are simply transferred to the acquirer. Nothing is lost. And when measured by market value, the total value of corporate equities increased dramatically during the 1980s.

In the weeks and months after Immelt left GE in 2017, a parade of negative stories and embarrassing disclosures revealed major problems that sent the company’s stock into a long decline. Conversations about what happened inevitably shifted to blame, and Immelt was the obvious target. He had spent sixteen years at the top and, regardless of what Welch had left for him, he’d had plenty of time to fix it. But there was plenty of blame to go around. Perhaps most of it should be placed on the board of directors, the independent group that oversees the CEO. Board members claimed to have been unaware of problems and to have gotten bad guidance from external advisers, and they said they didn’t understand how the company went from good to bad seemingly overnight. Some directors had no experience in GE’s business lines, others had trouble staying awake during meetings, and many stumbled away from GE’s collapse wondering, How could we have known? It had been their job to know, however, and their job to ask the hard questions that weren’t fully answered, or were never asked at all. It was their job to oversee management, and it was their job to protect investors from fatal hubris. Still, the path ultimately leads back to Immelt. As chairman, he was also responsible for steering the board. There is no doubt that GE’s size and complexity, which grew exponentially under Immelt, made it difficult or even impossible to manage. The CEO of a company is responsible for its daily functions and for managing its operations, however vast. The chairman guides the board, which is responsible for overseeing management and the CEO. When the board chair and CEO are the same person, the top executive is essentially his own boss. It can only get worse with time if a chairman remakes the board to his own liking. Simply put, it is terrible governance to give so much power to a single person and so little voice to shareholders. That is one reason this governance structure has been slowly fading from corporate America since the Enron era.

And if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you have to form alliances, be strategic, outperform your targets, and be great at what you do.

For once the callous heart of the corporate state is exposed, so is the callous heart of its liberal apologists. And the rebel, who has few friends, is the constant target of the liberal establishment

Over the next seven years, the group [Weather Underground] claimed credit for more than two dozen bombings of high-profile targets such as the Pentagon, numerous courthouses and police stations, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and several corporations involved in the coup in Chile or colonialism in Angola. Weather articulated a politics of solidarity that demanded a high level of sacrifice by whites in support of Black and other revolutionary people of color. This support emanated from a strategic belief, pioneered by Che Guevara, that U.S. imperialism could be defeated through overextension; bombings were an attempt to pierce the myth of government invincibility and draw repressive attention away from the Panthers and similar groups. It also reflected a political position that said white people had to side with Third World struggles against the U.S. government—and had to do so in a similarly dramatic way.

The fact is that despite liberalization of the economy, benefits are not reaching everyone. Yes, they reach the top 10 per cent. However, the other 90 per cent are still untouched. In fact, these people get the worst of badly implemented capitalism—inflation kills their savings and purchasing power, their land gets stolen by corporate houses and their politician cares only about the rich guys. They are not in any advertiser's target group so the media dismisses them and they don't get a voice. Every now and then, a politician tosses cheap rice or wheat at them, keeps them alive on drip feed, and hopes to swing some votes. Our rural poor never see the benefits of liberalization. Add to this, poor education, archaic caste-based social discrimination, poorly implemented welfare policies and a general lack of job opportunities, and it leads to a kind of passive frustration that urban citizens can never understand. The leaders of these movements apparently do, and that is why a youth, with his whole life ahead of him, takes up arms against the state and becomes a rebel. The Wrong Diagnosis, page 25 and 26

Work like a start-up, but mean it With the culture in place, and a process for change in place, how hard can this be? Well, now you have to get people working like you. I’ve worked with a few large clients over the years, and while they loved the idea of working like a start-up, it was a bit like wanting to go to Glastonbury, but only if you got to avoid everything about a large music festival. The allure of working like start-ups, but in a sort of polite, 9–5, big corporate backing kind of way. They wanted to work like a start-up, but had $100 million to spend. They wanted to be agile and nimble, but with a complex approval process. We want to challenge everything, but with the data to support it. Let’s go crazy, but please use existing marketing partners, let’s break new ground but ‘our competitors haven’t done it yet’. ‘We’re going to act like a start-up’ is a new corporate mantra. What would the founders of Klarna do here? How would Spotify market this? How can we replicate WeWork’s approach? Yet it never works that way. Spreadsheets need to be filled in showing target user numbers, someone back-fills profitability requirements, someone calculates projected revenue, and automatically an investment level is found. All with no idea that this is all the antithesis of start-ups. Start-ups hustle, they ask favours, and they use the limitation of money to force themselves to try risky things.

He didn’t understand how this “Microsoft Corporation” could have become so dominant in die andere Zeit. He found their products to be annoying, and entirely unreliable.