Life is beauty and worth fighting for. This is a sentimental first line, but it resonated while I was reading your story "A Design for Living" (August), which I very much enjoyed. Most of all, your story provided inspiration. The protagonist, Michael Graves, is ultimately a practitioner of design as a life force. He's transforming the sentiment of the first line into a way of life, which must remain design's drive and destiny. Thank you for a meaningful and warm piece of writing for all practitioners of not only the discipline of design but of living.
Nate Burgos
Principal
Nate Burgos Inc.
Chicago, Illinois
We all thought Amazon.com ("Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos," August) would collapse. But we all also thought there was a lot to learn from it. The story's argument on fact versus gut feeling proved that. With Amazon now showing a profit, it's a great positive learning example in the New Economy.
Dantus Joseph
CEO
JumpLearn
Pune, India
Your insights into Jeff Bezos the person provided moral support and inspiration. My business partner and I both have reputations for being a bit "out there." It's nice to know that we are in such good company!
Jack G. Ellis
Managing member
Invictus Integrated Logistics LLC
Sacramento, California
I think Jeff Bezos is remarkable in many ways, but his comments about using facts in decision making are, like so many management bromides, too facile to be of much use.
Mary Guhin
Rochester, New York
As an ardent fan of your magazine, I was taken aback by "The Labor-Shortage Myth" (August). The writer's thesis disagrees with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, well-regarded organizations such as Intel, and all of the research I've done this past year that concluded that we are about to have a worker crisis. The article alludes to the fact that the labor shortage is all about retiring baby boomers. There is another statistic to consider: the birthrate dropped by 40% between 1955 and 1973. Also, there are myriad reasons that so many people no longer want to work for corporate America. They continue to increase the numbers of entrepreneurs starting their own businesses. In another article, Anthony Carnevale, former chairman of the National Commission for Employment Policy said, "We are about to face a demographically driven shortfall in labor that will make the late 1990s seem like a minor irritation." That article also stated that executives at Cigna, Intel, Sprint, SAS, Whirlpool, WPP, Adecco, and the National Association of Manufacturers agree with him.
ÊI do concur with Alison Overholt's conclusion, though: Companies need to "invest in the right technologies and their own employees to stay ever more productive."Ê
Gloria Dunn
CEO and president
North Bay Management Academy Inc.
San Rafael, California
Linda Tischler's piece ("The Good Brand," August) showed some tired thinking on branding, now an almost meaningless buzzword and certainly one of the least understood topics in business today. Most of the future "trends" she purports to predict for us are either rehashes of well-established marketing knowledge or mushy brand-speak. With all due respect to Tom Peters, brands are not people, they are labels for commercial products and services. Saying that the "line between entertainment and brands will blur" is like letting us in on the fact that the Pope is Catholic. The line between public and private ownership of our country is what's blurring, and the implications are disastrous. Implying that America's ruined foreign relations is a marketing problem is ludicrous and an indication of how we now so easily think of effective political action as the responsibility of corporations rather than of government.
Clifton Lemon
President
BrandSequence
San Francisco, California
Your article about how brand trends have changed is well written and technically accurate, but it's just semantics. Brands are about what they've always been about: Save me time, or money; leverage my risk; or entertain me. Coke or Pepsi? It's not about the red can or taste tests. It's about Coke finally getting it that a lot of people like cola with lime. It's about having me carry home one less thing from the grocery store.
Cheryl Gidley
Managing partner
Gidley Consulting LLC
Tower Lakes, Illinois
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