Raise A Pint of Guinness to Jim!

I don’t even know if he drinks beer but if he does I’ll explain why it could very well be Guinness Stout. I am so proud of Jim Wilkerson and Duke University and Durham. While the bellyaching of so many enterprises makes me want to ask if “they would like to have some ‘whine’ with that cheese,” Jim is showing how to do the right thing.

As the head of Duke Stores, Jim pitched in lend DCVB a hand when I worked there, but I never met him in person or got to know him. I knew he has been a national proponent of better working conditions in factories around the world devoted to producing goods for sale in the US.

He also worked hard in coalition with Duke students to ensure that none of the products sold in Duke Stores were produced in overseas manufacturing operations employing child labor.

Jim had a breakthrough last year when he led an effort to open the first apparel factory in a foreign country to pay a “living wage”. He received a nice write up in The Durham News this week.

His observation quoted in the article epitomizes values in Durham’s overarching brand, "I've never seen more motivated, productive and appreciative group of workers in my life." Durham’s a very caring community.

I’ve never been a beer drinker. I learned during high school that even one drop reacts unpleasantly with my digestive system. I know now that it wasn’t the alcohol nor was it the stern silence of the stare I got from the top of the stairs from my father when I got home.

But I ‘m a big fan of at least one beer in particular after reading Stephen Mansfield’s 300 page book The Search for God and Guinness – A Biography of the Beer That Changed The World published just 12 or so weeks ago. It doesn’t have much to do with beer, really! Now don’t go all evangelical on me. The author is a former pastor, Christian speaker and I think he’s probably Republican. He’s written on both the spiritual journey of President Obama, whom he admires but did not support during the campaign and more recently Sarah Palin. So stick with me a minute.

I worked in part on behalf of truly small businesses for nearly 40 years. I know how they struggle and I think that they will be inspired by this book enough to shout down the rhetoric of the corporate-fueled anti-healthcare reform trying to manipulate them to lobby for repeal of the healthcare insurance reform act enacted last year.

Guinness was founded in 1759 in Ireland, just the year after one of my ancestors, James McCrory was born there. The company’s founding family had an uncanny grasp of how an economy functions. They understood the concept that good consumers are healthy consumers and live in clean communities and need time with family and what is given, goes around and what goes around, comes back around.

To give you just a “sip” from the book, Guinness regularly paid wages 10%-20% above the levels of the time and by the 1920’s the company was already providing unheard of benefits to workers, even by today’s standards. They didn’t dismiss them as entitlements, they granted them as “the right thing to do” and trusted the company would still be the beneficiary in the long run.

Here is a sample of what Guinness provided its workforce way back in the 1920s:

• Full medical and dental care
• Massage services
• Reading Rooms
• Subsidized meals
• A fully funded pension
• Funeral expenses
• Educational benefits
• Sports and fitness facilities
• Free lectures and concerts

source: The Search for Guinness And God – A Biography of the Beer That Changed the World

Under Guinness family leadership until 1986, the company also had an extraordinary sense of the importance of “place” and reinvested heavily into historic preservation, again just because it was “good business.” Today, nearly 2 billion pints of Guinness are consumed worldwide each year and it is arguably one of the most recognized brands anywhere on the planet.

Then, as today, it pays to do the right thing. Just ask Jim Wilkerson.

Internet Overtakes TV as News Source

For adults under 30 years of age, the Internet has eclipsed television in 2010 as the source for national and international news according to the updated study released Tuesday by the Pew Center.  Within a few years it is projected the web will become the most common  source of news for anyone under 50.

Cable news networks and Broadcast network news continued a general decline down to 36% and 22% of news consumers respectively.  Local television news at 16% is even with where it performed in 2002.

Pew working with the Poynter Institute also conducted an excellent analysis of advertising revenue broken down by medium.

To read Pew’s overview click on this link.

For a quick summary click on this link.

Our Last 20 Days Will Live Forever

Monday was significant for two reasons. It marked a year since I began a great new phase of my life following nearly four challenging and rewarding decades as a destination or community marketing executive.

Monday also marked the first anniversary of what turned out to be the final 20 days in the life of my first English Bulldog Toady.

She lived a long time, especially by Bulldog standards. She suffered from Alzheimer’s and creaky joints and her eyesight was nearly gone but she seemed elated to have me home all day during what turned out to be our final 20 days together.

Toady hated to walk so it is with irony that the image I posted with this blog taken during Monday’s walk reminded me so much of her. It is a photo of Rockwood Park, just down the hill from where I live in Durham and where I walk each morning with my my three-year old English Bulldog Mugsy.

Right up until that morning when she passed away suddenly during a routine visit to the Vet, Toady was more enthusiastic than usual, doing her rocking side-to-side “happy dance” each day when Mugs and I returned from a walk.

Toady’s life overlapped Mugsy’s by two years so in some way I guess I must have anticipated the transition. He very much was her “pup,” although not by birth, but the difference between Mugs and Toad is like night and day. He loves to walk. He lives in the moment and to ride with me to do errands in the Jeep. I’m contemplating a sidecar so he can go with me on the Harley Cross Bones.

The default expression on his huge, flat face is dead-pan. He’s extremely affectionate and loveable, a big “galumph” as my friends and neighbors call him.

While the saying goes, “English Bulldogs aren’t slow, they just think things through very carefully,” Mugs isn’t reflective. But he seemed permanently frozen to the floor below the Vet’s table after Toad died; and once I had held her tight and kissed her goodbye and they had taken a cast for me of her huge paw print, I had to carry him away, all 50 lbs.

Within a week he seemed to get over Toad but not a day has passed this year without her crossing my mind. She had huge eyes and usually a big smile. She’d sway from side to side to country music. She had a great, teasing, sense of humor.

Her many moods were always duly noted and she instinctively knew when to use her “quiet voice.” Mugs doesn’t.

She has a forever place in my life filled with lots of happy memories, but I had it easy. During a 10 month span in his sixth year, my grandson, who loves all-things-dog, lost Toady, his mom’s dog Shelby and his aunt’s dog Frazier, all to old age. But kids are resilient, especially after he and his brother got to know Mugsy up-close-and-personal when we visited them during our 6,000 mile cross country road trip last Fall.

Here’s to Toady, one year later. R.I.P. sweet girl.

Sneaking 1,000 People Into Durham Undetected!

In 1989 I had never heard of Research Triangle Park but I knew by looking at a map that it was located in Durham, North Carolina. Little did I know as I arrived here to help jump-start the community’s first official marketing agency that another community, two towns over, named Raleigh North Carolina had been steadily and successfully usurping the identity for that part of Durham, right up to within four miles of Downtown Durham.

The news media had fallen victim, business executives had fallen victim, visitors and convention planners had fallen victim and the national news media had fallen victim to the charade. Even the Raleigh Chamber had fallen victim to the misinformation it perpetuated at the time and tried to hold its annual membership banquet in Durham but of course without admitting it was in Durham.

Even the destination marketing counterpart there had in violation of a mutual code of ethics played along with the myth.

Can you say “in your face.” You can see why over the years I was always a little susicious about the real intentions of people who preached regionalism when so many used it merely to justify this type of win/lose “over-reaching.”

Job #1 for the fledgling Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau was to back that nearby community off and reclaim southeast Durham including not only the world class research facilities but thousands of hotel rooms, stores, restaurants and residences that were actually, physically located in the City of Durham encompassing three sides of the special Durham district created for Research Triangle Park.

We came a long way before I retired twenty years later to the next stage of my life but a sense of Déjà vu came rushing back this week. Once a bully feels entitled, you can never turn your back.

If you believe the Raleigh-based state associations hosting the event, the Raleigh newspaper, nation-wide disseminations by the Raleigh-based Associated Press office for North Carolina and statewide WUNC public radio, the 1,000 people attending the prestigious North Carolina Economics Forum met this week in Research Triangle Park somehow without ever stepping foot in Durham.

Only one problem, the hotel in which the event was held is located in the City of Durham. It merely uses the also Durham-based RTP as a locator. But Durham was kept invisible by the event and hosts and the news media covering it with only the Durham Herald-Sun newspaper publishing the accurate location.

So a prestigious State-wide event with national news coverage visits Durham, meets in Durham, drinks Durham water, uses Durham streets, seeks relief in Durham “facilities,” eats Durham food, drinks Durham booze but pretends the location isn't Durham.

What does it matter, some will scoff? Others may try to dismiss the snub by suggesting that somehow the head of the Raleigh-based host for more than 20 years now somehow never grasped where Durham is?

No, this fiction is perpetuated purposefully. What’s newsworthy is that the hoax is now so rarely pulled off. If you want to test the validity of the concern, just try suggesting in reverse that the State Capitol be identified without noting it is located in Raleigh. Oh, now it makes sense!

Unless you count the Raleigh organizer of the Martin Luther King prayer breakfast held at the same Durham hotel. Although “clued in” many times over the years by attendees to the event including the Mayor of Durham, he insists on being even more egregious by publicizing that same Durham hotel as being in Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, as though his hometown is a state of mind that supersedes his actual physical location at any given moment.

Need I say that his arrogance regarding another community is ironically contrary to the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King? His feeble argument one year was that people in Raleigh wouldn’t know where the location is if he publicized that it is in Durham. Obviously he gives attendees from other communities more credit for geographic acumen.

Others who feel stupid or embarrassed will ask what difference it makes which in turn should make them feel stupid and embarrassed but here are a few obvious reasons this makes a huge difference:

• Durham is robbed of association with a prestigious event
• It signals that it is okay to treat Durham “differently” from all other host communities
• Realizing RTP is a business park not a city, people grasping for the location will assume it is in Raleigh
• National and regional meeting planners will be confused into thinking the communities are one and the same and deny Durham a rotation
• Executives relocating here will get the impression they are going to work in Raleigh
• Businesses relocating here will assume Durham assets should be attributed to Raleigh or attributed to specific locations in Durham without actually acknowledging the community in which they are located
• Travelers will be confused if not inconvenienced when arrangers assume they should stay in Raleigh
• Databases will be polluted with misinformation and in turn they will pollute maps and other resources

I could list a hundred more and regardless, the issue is that there is absolutely no excuse for purposely misidentifying a location for failing to accurately identify a location…ever.

Unfortunately while many people or organizations who should speak up on behalf of Durham sit back instead and equivocate or worry about the consequences of demanding the truth, it will probably fall to DCVB to continue to do the the heavy lifting because that organzation is the defender of Durham’s image and brand and unique sense of place and this responsibility is at the heart of visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

Those Who Have The Marbles Make The Rules!

Where did all of the money go? In just a quarter century, Americans generated half of the entire amount made in our country’s history. At the time of the 1976 bicentennial this nation’s promise was confirmed in the 20/80 rule with 20% held by the wealthiest 1% of Americans but 80% distributed among the rest.

Today is puzzling. The wealthiest 1% has expanded its share by 75%. Some say they just worked harder and smarter but really…enough to now hold 35% of all wealth? In fact, conservative vitriol aside, a calm, thoughtful backgrounder is the careful work by NYU economist Edward N. Wolff as published by the Levy Economics Institute showing that 1 in 5 Americans possess 93% of the wealth and the rest of us have 7%.

The current situation doesn’t sound much like the land of opportunity I love. It is naïve to think that this all occurred from working hard and smart and taking risks although those are important.

I think the gap has more do with a theory with which a good friend would console me during each of the times I was turned into “road kill” while standing up for my community in the face of powerful external interests – “he who has the marbles makes the rules.”

I’m a capitalist, a free-market believer and I know from experience the importance of rewarding good talent and performance in the marketplace, but I also know that government “rules” play a significant role in making sure the “playing field is level.”

I also don’t buy that President Obama is bent on redistributing wealth…any more so than the extent to which this country has always done with things like education, roads, school lunch programs, corporate subsidies etc. His words and deeds clearly signal a belief that education, access to opportunity and technology are answers.

In digging down past news summaries and op-ed hyperbole about the wealth issue, I’ve been reading the reports behind the reports and I wasn’t surprised to find out that people right here in Durham or who formerly lived here are some of the excellent resources I’ll be referencing in this blog.

Durham is indeed “where great things happen” but we also struggle with issues of wealth disparity.

The issue isn’t just taxes although it is intriguing, given how much some people bellyache, that the wealthiest bracket of Americans pay a tax rate of 17.17% today compared to 42.4% in 1961.

While taxes constitute only a portion of these “rules” that are supposed to “level the playing field” of opportunity, it would help if more than half of us actually paid any taxes at all or that all products and services were taxed equitably.

Hopefully people who are wealthy don’t just work harder and smarter but they should also proportionately put back into the taxpayer-funded system that in large part underpinned their success.

I like the way multi billionaire Bill Gates and his father think and not so much the miserly way the hugely wealthy founder of Amazon and the current head of Microsoft reacted to a state income tax on income above the first million dollars in income and intended to improve education.

A good, quick read is Free Lunch by Pulitzer-winning, former tax reporter for the New York Times and current Syracuse University law and business professor David Cay Johnston who also writes a column entitled Tax Notes.

Especially after the Supreme Court’s reversal of precedent last year resulted in unlimited and anonymous corporate campaign contributions, there is even more evidence today that the “rules” of the past 30 years betrayed a “level playing field” and fueled instead what a great Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt termed in his day as a “combination of business (corporations) with politics and the judiciary which has done so much to enthrone privilege in the economic world.”

Apparently, I’m not the only American who didn’t perceive the massive shift in wealth. A professor who teaches here in Durham at Duke University, Dan Ariely along with Michael Norton at Harvard conducted an excellent nationwide public opinion survey to reveal both what Americans perceive is the distribution of wealth to be and what we would consider ideal.

The chart shown in this blog (click to enlarge) illustrates 1) the actual distribution, 2) what we perceive it to be and then the really positive news, 3) what we think as Americans it should be.

Americans aren’t selfish nor unrealistic. Despite being badly misinformed about the current state of disparity, across all income groups, we tend to agree in general and regardless of ideology or income group on what the disparity should be.

Collectively we perceive that the wealthiest 20% of Americans possess slightly less than 60% of all wealth. Actually, it is in excess of 80%. We pretty much all agree it should ideally be just more than 30%.

The issue now is how to reset the “rules” (Wall Street and Healthcare insurance report, passed in the last session of Congress is good start.)

The new Congress has an excellent opportunity to cut waste, reduce or restrain government, increase access to opportunity including technology and reduce the deficit all at the same time.

They can do this by a bipartisan reset of the “rules” including closing all loop holes, dramatically overhauling the tax code and fueling research and innovations in education with the goal of achieving what Americans agree is the ideal distribution of wealth.

Another excellent summary of sources is written by Duke graduate Bill Domhoff, a research professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Bill definitely has an ideological perspective but doesn’t dilute his easy-to-read summaries with it.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find sources by advocates of the current distribution that go beyond just huffing and puffing or saying “it ain’t so” but we would all do well to heed the warning I included earlier in this post from T.R, who himself was raised in privilege but like Bill Gates by an altruistic father..

A better distribution of wealth can be achieved without entitlements and without forsaking “personal responsibility.” It is the American way.