The Broken Finance Industry: Credit, Crisis, Malfeasance and Broken Business Models

Dave Livingston — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:05:47 -0400

We have all had to learn more than we ever wanted to know
about the internal workings of the Finance Industry and its impacts on the rest
of the economy. After, literally, decades of viewing the industry as a magic
black box where super-intelligent wizards created wealth out of thin air we’ve
all learned, painfully, that the wizards had more in common with carnival
side-show hustlers out to make a fast buck by fleecing the next fool in line.
We’ve also learned, even more painfully and unfortunately, that Finance wasn’t

Hilbert Problems: Fundamental Performance Questions for Business

Dave Livingston — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:10:33 -0400

In the early part of the last century David Hilbert proposed a set of unsolved questions that shaped the research agenda for math ever since. And the state of the real world as well since many of the areas he suggested had immense practial applications. An e-friend (Tim Walker of Hoover's) suggested a similar approach to business which got me thinking and riffing. One of my primary interest, concerns and worries is the question of improving business performance. As anybody who's noticed that the Auto Industry is 4% of GDP and employs approx.

Hey Dude, Where's the Recession Already ?

Dave Livingston — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:25:55 -0400

Not sure how many folks who'll be on the FastCompany community pay
attention to the Economic indicators but I'd suggest it'd be very much
worth your while to pay a fair amount. Part of the problem is that just
going by the headlines can be very mis-leading. For one thing the
headlines are just about the most recent data point and don't tell you
what the trend is - which is more valuable. And since many of the data
series reported on are very noisy because of period-to-period
fluctuations it's easy to get lost in the noise. We can cure almost all

Welcome to BizzXceleration II

Dave Livingston — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:37:07 -0400

I've already got a rather extensive blog and while I may post from time-to-time here it's unecessary to duplicate the postings. You can see my blog at:

http://bizzxceleration.llinlithgow.com/

Some recent posts that you might find interesting include the following:

Fast Talk Response -

Dave Livingston — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:46:25 -0400

Actually I gave up cable years ago because of terrible customer service, billing errors and bad back office operations. And have been using on-line access since then for the limited programs I want to watch. There's a multiple set of major wars brewing in the technomediatainment industry not least of which is the bandwidth and fatpipe wars between phone and cable providers as well as the exponentiating content wars. The latter will be about the 4A's- Anyplace,..time...,...way and ...device/thing.

Comment on Node ant

Dave Livingston — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:31:37 -0400

An excellent, thorough and deep survey of the strategic status of HR. I've been as guilty as the next in neglecting its' importance though having grown up at Fedex where People were central to the company's strategy. But most of these diagnosis resonate with all my experience and reinforce it. So the real question, given the demonstrated important of good people and therefore good people policy to long-term success, is to make sure HR is part of the solution..and not the problem.