Coincidentally, I was listening to this old Bob Dylan tune as I ran on the treadmill the other day. Good song. Great poetry.
In any case, immediately after my run I encountered the situation of a person being vacated from his job by an organization. The official word was that this employee had been “released.” The less official word that he had chosen to leave in order to pursue other opportunities.
Maybe we all realize that “laid off” carries a specific legal meaning and “fired” a social stigma. So “released” is a relatively recent euphemistic salve.
Still, with Dylan’s aide, I couldn’t help but come to the implicit realization that if the employee is “released” then the organization casts itself into the role of zoo, hospital, (insane) asylum, addiction rehabilitation centre, or prison. Gotta be one of those to be released, no?

I’m not even sure what to think about this that I found in today’s Ottawa Citizen.  There are simply so many things “wrong” with the entire episode.

Texas draws line on death row final meals

Convicts on death row in Texas [where else?] are no longer free to pick the menu for their own last meal, after a white supremacist executed this week ordered a veritable feast. Lawrence Brewer raised eyebrows when he asked for two chicken fried steaks, a triple-bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelette, a big bowl of fried okra, three fajitas and a pound of barbecue before he was put to death. A pint of ice cream and half a loaf of white bread rounded out the menu–which was left uneaten–for the 44-year-old Ku Klux Klan member given a lethal injection on Wednesday for killing James Byrd, a 49-year-old disabled black man, in 1998. Death row inmates are now to receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit.

Can you say, “Keep your eye on the ball, folks”?

Recently, the reader of this outpouring may recall, I contributed to the Canadian innovation discussion, such as it is, with a lengthy letter to the Science, Technology and Innovation Council. That episode, which included some engagement on a LinkedIn forum as well, got me to thinking about how Canadian enterprises invest money that is provided via public largesse. It might be worth more consideration. If you feel like responding, feel free.  Here’s the notion:

Let’s say that your have a small business and that your household is financially solvent and able to do what it needs to get by day-to-day and perhaps even make some modest gains in the standard of living and wealth of the family. That is, you’re not having a hardscrabble life of hand-to-mouth where every penny available is a sustaining penny. Now let’s assume that some benefactor provides to you $1000/year to invest as you wish with only one condition:  whatever you invest in must be directed toward lifting your family toward a higher standard of living, nothing more.

Digression: because of the looseness of the definition, “lifting yourself to a higher standard of living” could mean making an investment that is expected to return some form of asset growth upon which you will eventually have considerably more income. It could also mean using the $1000 to increase your available cash flow by that amount–thereby increasing your standard of living. Only because it muddies the thought experiment, let’s say that everyone appreciates and pursues the first choice.

The question, then, is this:  What do you do with the $1000 per year that is essentially found money?  I’ve so far been able to identify four possible uses, although there may be more.  Ignore tax implications.

1.  You use it to pay down your debt, which will increase your bottom line because your monthly sustaining costs are being reduced.

2. You use it to buy guaranteed A or better debt, which will return a highly-certain but small ongoing addition to your annual income.

3. You use it to invest in stable, “blue chip” equities that are likely to go up within some reasonable range that is higher than the debt instruments but likely to average out not terribly higher on the whole.

4. You put $250 each quarter on a (potentially different every quarter) high-risk venture, all generally consistent with your business expertise and activity. To be clear, these are investments into relatively early innovations that seem like good ideas but are largely unproven sketches off the drawing board.

What do you do?  Why?

In a later post, I’ll reveal what I think should be done–knowing that the choice has a lot to do with the individual psychology of those responding:  stage of life, gender, experience, education, etc., etc., etc.

If anybody else wants to try, please feel free.

This article in the Globe & Mail (Does smoking pot make you skinny?) is too funny.  It quotes and references a study that indicates being a 3x per week dope smoker give you a higher probability of not being obese than your non-smoking friends.  Anecdotally, based on the size and shape of Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, John Lennon…, I’d say that the researchers need to step up their efforts to include heroin use.  The same might work for crack, though probably not cocaine use (caviar and Cristal are pretty high calorie munchies).

First session after the opening keynote at DreamForce ’11 is going on right now.  salesforce.com’s CEO, Mark Benioff is moderating a panel on “the digital agenda” with Vivek Kundra, Neelie Kroes, and Angela Ahrendts. Interesting how the two governmental representatives are speaking about how their governmental authorities are leaning toward social and cloud for different reasons.  In the first case, because they have no choice:  it’s happening, like it or not.  In the second, because it’s happened long ago behind the curtains of vendor relationships.  Oh yeah, and they’re broke too.  Very interesting.

So what’s depressing about that?

Nothing.

What’s depressing, to me, is that there is so much going on in this evolution of society, including government and business, and I’m dragging along behind.  Not that I don’t have the awareness or capacity, oh no.  That I have in spades (although I have been questioning if I’m already becoming generationally challenged for these evolutions).  But, how far and how quickly I am able to jump on and pursue these great developments is just a bit inhibited during the working day. That, despite the fact that the place I work is better placed than all but perhaps a small handful of other organizations to capture and even lead this change.

By the way, I was told that DreamForce and Benioff’s keynotes in particular were something to behold.  No kidding.  Moscone Centre opened in full, holding about 15,000 people, was the scene of what was part rock concert (complete with Neil Young in the audience), part old time evangelical revival meeting.  The people here, who were told by Benioff that they were part of what is now the largest technology conference in the world, are practically groupies.  It’s something all right.