Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

The narrator will instruct you to count how many times players wearing white pass a basketball. Easy peasy.

But the trick — and you knew there was one coming, right? — is what you might not notice. An ample majority of viewers indeed do miss the misdirection in this 82-second video.

The point of the video, a staple of many motivational and team-building seminars, is what we don’t notice while we’re watching for something else.

That’s also one of the big messages in “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” the book by Simons and fellow cognitive psychologist Christopher Chabris. We silly humans believe our memories — and by extension, our perceptions — function better than they really do.

The implications for when we make decisions that affect the managing of our business are enormous. We think we’re so astute, but maybe a lot of our judgments are no better informed than if we had tossed a coin.

Here’s one example from “The Invisible Gorilla”: The authors give us a list of words. One page later, they ask you to recall them, with the aim of writing down all 15.

Most likely, they note, you probably won’t get every one — most likely some of the words from the beginning of the list and some from the end. The middle tends to fade.

But then here comes the true test: Was the word “sleep” among the word on the list, they ask. Some 40 percent of the book’s readers will say yes, the authors predict.

One of the messages in “The Invisible Gorilla” is that we believe our memories and perceptions function better than they really do. But they don’t. (Credit: Morguefile)

But it isn’t. The list includes “bed,” “doze” and “snore,” but not “sleep.” (I had to go back to double-check.)

The authors contend that, just as in the basketball video in which “people see what they expect to see, people often remember what they expect to remember.”

And we think what we remember is as exact as if written in stone. Or caught on film.

According to a national survey commissioned by the authors, 47 percent of respondents stated they believed once a memory has been formed, “that memory doesn’t change.”

Some 63 percent replied that memory acts like a camera that accurately documents events.

But Chabris and Simons argue memory doesn’t perform that way at all. It doesn’t store every detail of an event, and the pieces it does keep it “associates” with what we already know.

We saw “bed” and “doze,” but we recall that what we certifiably, hands-on-our-hearts read was “sleep.” Our memory plays word association, in effect.

And those associations — and, again, those faulty perceptions built from them — continually can mislead us as long as we are convinced have absolutely perfect memories.

It’s good thing to bear in mind while contemplating everything from personnel evaluations to year-end projections: What we think we perceive is colored by something other than the actual facts.

That’s the big gorilla in the room.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

During her tenure as Great Britain’s so-far only female prime minister, Thatcher, who died April 8, was reviled by detractors — and she had an abundance of them on her home turf — as Attila the Hen, Sandberg notes.

But, then, women executives have long been subject to a different mirror. When Ronald Reagan died — though his politics were fairly identical to that of his transatlantic pal Thatcher’s — criticism of his anti-union, pro-privatization views were darned-near more than whispers.

This double vision is part of Sandberg’s point. The Facebook chief operating officer cites a Harvard Business School experiment in which students were assigned to look at a case study on Heidi Roizen, a successful venture capitalist.

Except half the participants were given a report in which real-life Heidi’s first name was changed to “Howard.”

What happened next also isn’t a shocker: “Howard” came out well — what a guy. Heidi, however, was marked as unlikable.

Can’t you just hear the words “aggressive” and “pushy” on the lips of those students? Worse — and why Sandberg believes the topic is worth noting — is the study was completed in 2009, not way back in the unenlightened dark ages of the 1950s and cave paintings.

One of the more surprising issues the COO addresses is the gambit of asking job candidates if they envision taking time off have babies.

“Raising this topic in the workplace would give most employment lawyers a heart attack,” Sandberg admits.

Goodness gracious, yes.

“But after watching so many talented women pass on opportunities for unspoken reasons, I started addressing this issue directly. I always give people the option of not answering, but so far every woman I have asked has appeared grateful for a chance to discuss the subject. I also make it clear that I am asking for one reason: to make sure they aren’t limiting their options unnecessarily.”

She recalls having passed on a post at the U.S. Treasury in 1995, Sandberg told the person making the offer, because she didn’t want to live in the same city — even one as populated as Washington, D.C. — as her soon-to-be-ex-husband. She “leaned in” and shared.

This honest approach worked to her benefit as she was able to call back some time later to learn if the opportunity still was available — “If I had told Larry that I was passing on the job for professional reasons, I would have appeared impulsive when I reversed the decision.”

When Marissa Mayer was named Yahoo chief executive officer while she was entering her third trimester of pregnancy. She said that her maternity leave would last only a few weeks, “and I’ll work throughout it.” (McClatchy Newspapers)

Sandberg’s former Google colleague Marissa Mayer was named Yahoo CEO in 2012 while entering her third trimester of pregnancy. Mayer announced that her maternity leave would last only a few weeks, “and I’ll work throughout it.”

Sandberg argues no matter how long Mayer had decided to stay home with her newborn, she would have received criticism — which she did, from all sides.

And, yes, this is the same executive who flung workplace pundits into hyper drive by declaring Yahoo work-at-home employees will start reporting into the office come June. No more lattes and pajamas while scrolling through emails.

Commentators across the English-speaking globe wondered about turning back the clock, and opined that introverts as well as some “creative types” work better away from the herd.

That’s as may be. We’ll see how it works out for Yahoo’s bottom line.

But after scouring Sandberg’s book, I have to ask this: If a telecommuting ban had been proclaimed by a male executive, would the decision instead be viewed — not as controlling — but as tough and forward-thinking?

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

She’s smiling broadly, for all the world like Gene Autry astride his beloved horse, Champion, and waving to the camera in that World War II we-women-can-do-it-all pose so identified with the period when this picture likely was taken.

That’s about when my grandparents operated a farm in western Pennsylvania, and just before they moved to the city in Ohio where my grandmother drove a bakery truck and my grandfather repaired airplanes for the burgeoning war effort.

Though Betty Miller would not have cottoned to the term “feminist,” surely that’s what she was. Isn’t that what we mean, in the broadest sense of that word, when people make decisions for themselves, regardless of gender expectations?

Yet that word, and the whole concept of feminism, is tricky for us, even though its been in popular use for more than a generation. Toward the end of a lunch meeting just a couple years ago, after I’d made some passing remark about a national figure — I honestly cannot recall who — one 30-something business owner in attendance angrily denounced the person as “that feminist.”

And she proceeded to make it quite clear that, in her eyes, a feminist was below the social misfit who steals Bingo money from the local church.

Glorai Steinem

I asked if she didn’t agree that the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s had helped make it easier for more women — herself included — to own businesses today. But, given her even-more-heated response, in which she painted feminists as shrill troublemakers, you’d have thought I’d accused her of being a liberal … .

“Feminist,” for her, clearly was a dirty word.

So I was mildly surprised to hear Gloria Steinem at the standing-room-only Iowa Womens Leadership Conference in Coralville two weeks ago contend that more than half of American women today (and 30 percent of men) consider themselves feminists, in some form or other.

Moreover, Steinem said in the conference’s closing keynote, “Young women are more likely to call themselves feminists than older women.”

Afterward I asked Steinem, co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus as well as of “New York” and “Ms.” magazines, about this notion of women making headway in business today, if such a large number of its participants — men, too, remember — view themselves as feminists.

Steinem replied that women nowadays no longer have to prove that they deserve equal pay, that all employees should be paid for their comparable worth.

But she conceded the equality argument hasn’t been completely won. In her speech, she cited the value in unity: Women, Steinem said, still “need to support each other. We need to work on where it hurts. … We need to listen to each other.”

And for good reason, it would seem: Catalyst, the not-for-profit research organization, notes that in 2012 the median weekly earnings for full-time working women was $691. For men, it was $854.

For female managers last year, it was $951, while for male managers the figure was $1,328. Fresh numbers, same tune.

So what’s an unappreciated, under-valued employee — be that person a supervisor or client-facing worker, female

Martha Stewart answers questions about her new book "Living the Long Good Life" during the Iowa Women's Leadership Conference at the Coralville Marriott Hotel & Conference Center in Coralville on Tuesday, April 23, 2013. (Cliff Jette/The Gazette)

or male — supposed to do?

“Think very carefully,” advised Martha Stewart, who’s founded more than a handful of companies and remade herself through a series of career changes — starting out as a stockbroker (after a stint as a model), then becoming, in succession, a gourmet cook, corporate caterer, author, magazine publisher, newspaper columnist and a TV, radio and Internet star.

“It’s hard to be in a job you don’t like,” she said when we spoke just before her operning-day IWLC address, “and it’s not always possible to change. But being happy in your job is very important.”

One first step might be to take a look where you are now.

“Get help from the company,” Stewart said, as many businesses are open to internal mobility. Another position might be a better fit.

But still, it ain’t easy, no matter where you stand on the corporate ladder. The same week that IWLC brought Steinem, Stewart and other business professionals together at the Coralville Marriott, a Politico website columnist sparked another debate on the role of women at the top.

In this case, Jill Abramson, New York Times executive editor since September 2011, was described in an April 23 post as condescending and stubborn, when she wasn’t too busy being “uncaring” and disengaged. Her manner of speaking, it was pointed out, was “in a slow drawl.”

“Jill is very, very unpopular,” the writer, Dylan Byers, quoted an unnamed NYT staffer.

To which we have to ask: Are we talking about the head of one of the planet’s largest, most-respected and most-awarded newsgathering organizations — in April the paper won four more Pulitzers — or about a high-school prom queen candidate? Abramson is “unpopular”? Seriously?

The staff’s preferred leader, the story implies, is a guy, Managing Editor Dean Baquet, who admits he punches his fist through walls when things don’t go his way.

Subsequent website posts quickly took Byers to task. A Huffington Post response, in an Onion-esque hat tip, carried the headline, “Anonymous sources are mad at New York Times Editor Jill Abramson for trying to be their boss and stuff!”

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn,” Steinem wrote way back in 1970, in a Washington Post guest column. That was the year, she declared, of “women’s liberation.”

It seems we still have things to learn about how to work together, regardless of age, color, religion and, yes — still — gender. Whether we all think we’re feminists or not.

That was the case in April when not one but two famous connivers from Texas — one real and one fictional — let out one more shout to remind us of their many ill deeds and that they’re not quite yet done for.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

The fictional character was malevolent J.R. Ewing, that master trickster and smiling evil brother from the TV series “Dallas.” The prime-time soap opera ran for 13 years in its first incarnation, then was revived in 2012.

The new-version second-season finale’s revealed the late J.R. had pulled yet another fast one, in a long list of fast ones more enviable than that of Aroldis Chapman’s — this time having swapped oil land from the father of another character. (J.R.’s character was written out of the program to mark the death of its star, Larry Hagman).

As in the tradition of all long-running soaps, the twists and machinations over the years ranged from repetitive to preposterous: Who truly owns Southfork and loves Miss Ellie more? Who shot J.R.? Seriously, Bobby’s not really dead, he’s just taking a long shower? Really?

But before we dismiss the made-up subterfuges and second-act returns of this fictional villain and his kin as too preposterous, listen to this: Only days before the “Dallas” finale was aired, Reuters and other news agencies reported that a real-life miscreant from whom we thought we’d hear no more indeed might be back among us regular, non-criminal folk sooner rather than later.

Jeffrey Skilling, you’ll recall, was sentenced to 24 years in prison on a clutch of federal felony charges and fined $45 million. He and other executives had reported “profits” at Enron Corp. that hadn’t actually come into existence in the real world as you, I and honest accountants know it. (That is, he lied. Massively.)

Jeffrey Skilling’s lawyers contend they have new evidence they say should get his sentence reduced. (Reuters)

Oh, and he sold his own $60 million in Enron shares just before the Texas energy company’s stock price hit the canvas.

In 2001 Enron — for a time this planet’s biggest energy trader, and named America’s Most Innovative Company by Fortune magazine six years in a row — went bankrupt, shareholders saw something like $11 billion swoosh down the drain and 20,000 employees lost their jobs. The last of the giant organization’s remaining businesses was sold off in 2006.

And yet, seven years after Skilling’s conviction, the U.S. Justice Department said it is negotiating with the former CEO’s lawyers about letting him out of jail early.

Skilling’s lawyers contend they possess new evidence but have yet to reveal that might entail. (He’s actually an innocent bystander and it’s the fault, as he’s claimed all along, of short-sellers and, of course, the media? He in fact was off having drinks at Southfork while Enron’s numbers were being manipulated? He didn’t shoot J.R., really he didn’t?)

You just wait and see. Cue theme music.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

It isn’t simple happenstance that the theme music for “Mr. Selfridge,” the eight-part drama running on Iowa Public Television’s “Masterpiece Classic,” sounds for all the world like a big, bold Broadway musical.

The music, as with the man upon whom the more-or-less true-to-life tale is based, is intentionally showy and brash. Every day is opening night — or, in the retailer’s case, opening morning.

As the series makes clear, Harry Gordon Selfridge (played by Jeremy Piven of HBO’s “Entourage”) saw retail as theater, and the giant store was his personal stage.

The initial episode begins with the ever-exhilarated Selfridge — based on the Wisconsin-born retailer who once worked for the Chicago chain that grew to become Marshall Field & Co. — in 1908 London detailing his plans to open “the biggest and best department store in the world.”

His notion — and this is what made him different from practically every other peddler of his day — was “the customer always comes first.” It was in following this then-shocking notion that Mr. Selfridge changed how we shop today.

After all, in turn-of-the-last-century England and America, “going shopping (was) not considered smart,” he’s warned.

In one of the first scenes, Harry visits an established London store and soon convinces a clerk to dump all the gloves on the sales counter — this is an era when merchandise was kept out of sight, and only a clerk could bring out each piece, so as to better advise the potential customer.

When he is chastised by a senior floor walker, Harry asks with a grin, “What if I said I was just looking?” This is not, the stuffy employee harrumphs in reply, “an exhibition.”

As employees prepare to open his own palatial store, he instructs merchandise to be laid on counters so customers can feel the items — even though he is cautioned by shocked employees that such open displays invite theft.

Harry’s response? Customers don’t know what they desire until they see it. (“That’s why we advertised,” my father, who spent his entire professional life in retail, told me after viewing “Mr. Selfridge.”)

Crowds reach for merchandise in today’s Selfridges in London. Mr. Selfridge would be pleased. (Reuters)

And a show Harry does bring: He hires a famous stage singer to be the “face of Selfridges,” he designs snappy military-style uniforms for elevator operators and, when Louis Bléroit crosses the Channel in 1909, Harry hires not only the French pilot himself to shake hands with customers, he also has the flier’s monoplane taken apart and reassembled on the store’s main floor.

Harry also came up with the novelty of “reductions” — though sales, too, were considered not the thing to do.

In his continual embrace of “modernity,” he rearranged how department store floor plans are laid out. In one long scene, he debates with his reluctant department heads about moving perfume — and eventually other beauty products, too — to the very front of the store. (The shrewd shift also helps mask the odor of horse droppings that waft in from the street outside.)

In creating what’s now known as the beauty counter, and thereby displaying “the inner workings of the boudoir for everyone to see,” Harry also promises, “It is a whole new way for women to shop.”

The entrepreneur recreated an industry.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

In the short walk between my house and the train station was what could be a golden triangle of retail possibilities — a Trader Joe’s next to a fair-sized Borders, both across the street from a Whole Foods Market. Rarely a workday went by that I didn’t drop by and spend far too much money in one or all of these establishments.

For those who’ve traveled to a Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, you know their key selling point: hard-to-find food items that also are sometimes healthy, sometimes organic and sometimes pretty darned tasty.

Now Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey has put out a book, titled “Conscious Capitalism,” that’s charged with “liberating the heroic spirit of business.” His co-author, Rajendra Sisodia, is co-founder of Conscious Capitalism Inc., a not-for-profit “designed to support the elevation of humanity,” according to its website.

Or, put another way, “Conscious businesses focus on their purpose beyond profit,” the site explains.

It’s with this lofty intent in mind, Mackey writes, that the Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods has tried to steer its course.

With more than 340 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, the publicly traded 33-year-old chain reported $11.7 billion in sales in fiscal year 2012.

But making the “right” business decision isn’t always easy or clear, Mackey notes. The tough test of leadership, he writes, quoting Joseph Badaracco, Harvard professor of business ethics, “is when ‘the choice is between right and right.’”

The answer, Mackey figures, is to ferret out a course that can “simultaneously fulfill multiple values.”

John Mackey, founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Markets, has written "Conscious Capitalism," with Bentley University marketing professor Raj Sisodia. (Austin American-Statesman/MCT photo)

He gives the example of Whole Foods’s stated commitment to selling a wide selection of “animal foods” — more than 95 percent of his customers want them — but also help customers improve their health. He points out the correlation between eating meat and obesity, heart disease and other unpleasant outcomes.

On top of this, he claims the chain wants to “improve animal welfare.”

The answer? First, the company tries to educate customers on the benefits of consuming minimally processed, unrefined plant foods. Second, the retailer pushes for better quality and welfare of the animal foods on offer — 100 percent grass-fed beef and lamb, for example.

As a vegetarian, I have to confess I’m uncertain how this amounts to a “win-win,” as Mackey writes, particularly for the animals on the receiving end of this approach.

But it is a good real-life example of what many businesses frequently face. Not so much having your cake and eating it, too, but being able to do good while doing well.

For too long, Mackey writes, businesses have been “stuck in a defensive and reactive posture.” He wants Whole Foods to be seen as creating a road map for other companies to follow, and for them to get on with it.

After all, he adds, the second best time to plant an oak tree is now.

Alex Taylor

Organizational change is often an overwhelming challenge for business leaders. The need for change — or changes — may be the result of market shifts, economic environment, technology advancements or changing work force skill-set demands.

But what does a leader do when all of this happens within a brief period of time? How a leader manages this collision of change can make the difference between organizational success and failure.

I recently discussed this with Bill Stamats, vice president at Stamats Communications. He understands the magnitude of change as it affects various aspects of his business — all at the same time.

Stamats was established in 1923 as a marketing services company. Since then, the business has expanded many of its services to include research, print and marketing consultation and production for its customers, primarily colleges and universities.

Consider this: The print industry is becoming more digital and continues to move away from traditional direct mail, catalog strategies, typesetting artistry, and offset printing. Today, college and university recruiting is more about research, data mining and targeted online marketing with customized/personalized collateral.

On-demand four-color products with complementary electronic deliverables for measurable results are the norm.

Today’s prospective students and their parents have different expectations when they research various colleges and universities, and Stamats has had to adjust — change — for these differences.

When I asked Bill how he helped managed his organization through these changes, I expected a turnkey formula to solve all things related to change. Instead, what he shared was in line with the old French adage: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

As Bill pointed out, and I agree, the fundamentals of business remain the same despite perceptive changes in our environments. For example, the four P’s of Marketing — product, price, placement and promotion — are still relevant.

What changes is how the four P’s are deployed, and who deploys them.

Five fundamentals

Bill’s approach to Change includes five fundamental components.

1. Create and maintain an environment for open dialog and transparency to exchange information with customers and employees.

2. Keep an open mind, really listen and pay acute attention to your customers as well as their customers.

3. Pay attention to employees. They, like customers, can be harbingers of business and industry change.

Employees are in the trenches, often with customers, so they really know what’s going on as the market adjusts to remain relevant, and as subsequent demands shift.

4. Continue to modify and update the strategic goals and vision of the organization. Long-term plans and vision should be evolutionary and flexible to adjust as the internal and external environment changes.

Conversely, organizational rigidity can often lead to irrelevance.

5. Corporate culture and innovation are strongly influenced by its leadership. Encourage customer service and be forward thinking.

When personal and organizational change is required, we sometimes can be our own worst enemy. Don’t panic and don’t make change complex.

Embrace change as inevitable, but remember the fundamentals of good organizational leadership shouldn’t waiver:

• Establish and maintain open communications with employees and customers
• Adjust long-term strategies and plans to remain relevant
• Focus on data-driven decisions and results-based practices
• Celebrate evolutionary success.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Warren Buffett, the business oracle of the 20th century and, so far, of the 21st, more than once has professed a love of newspapers.

And, as his company, Berkshire Hathaway, continues to pocket a clutch of publications here and there around the country, he has remarked that newspapers should stick to what they — theoretically at least — do best: local news.

“If you want to know what’s going on in your town, whether the news is about the mayor or taxes or high school football, there is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job,” the one-time newspaper-delivery boy said.

He’s right, of course. No other medium can do as good a job at taking the time to ferret out the details as to what’s going on, then distill that research into a comprehensive package for you to consider.

Business news, too, is all about learning what’s what, and how that news and information will help or hurt your profession or your company.

So why the heck do we bother filling up prime real estate on the pages of The Gazette with distant shrieks and gnashing of teeth from the likes of tiny Cyprus? Or, for that matter, any of the ongoing Grimms’ financial horror tales that come out of Europe?

The key reason is what happens over there indeed will reach our shores here, sooner or later, in some manner small or large.

To recap: Little more than a week ago the European Union and the International Monetary Fund agreed to bail out the cash-starved island nation with $13 billion, rather than booting it out of the EU. In exchange, Cyprus, an offshore financing hub, will close its second-biggest bank, decimating its uninsured depositors and bondholders, and will restructure its No. 1 bank.

So much for the concept of a unified, strength-in-numbers EU currency. Oodles of cash — some $5.38 billion of those uninsured depositors’ savings — as well as trust will be lost, never to return.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of eurozone finance chiefs, suggested that the Cyprus bailout plan could be “a template” for resolving bank problems elsewhere. (Reuters)

To spread the unease to other challenged EU member countries, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of the eurozone finance chiefs, suggested that this scheme could be “a template” for resolving bank quagmires elsewhere.

So, back to America: Kevin G. Hall, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, suggested that, “The levy on bank deposits will make treasurers of global American companies think twice about where they bank their foreign earnings and in what currency.”

Closer to wallets at home, Hall pointed out continuing European jitters have hurt U.S. carmakers — “Chevrolet, Ford and General Motors saw respective European monthly sales declines in February of 38 percent, 20.8 percent and 20.1 percent … .”

Here’s another home-front angle, this one from Melvin Rhodes, whom I’ve met a few times and who’s been out in the world, having worked in Rhodesia as a government district officer, among other locales.

In a recent blog post, he posited that something akin to the Cyprus precedent could be visited upon his own financially imperiled state. Michigan’s cities, he noted, are confronted with $12.7 billion in unfunded liabilities, mostly for health care and pension commitments.

Is it unthinkable, he wondered, that its citizens ultimately might be forced to share the pain of that state’s fiscal rehab?

I’ve no idea how Michigan will manage to fix its crushing problems, or what other painful, Draconian contrivances Europe might conjure up. Here in Eastern Iowa, we debate the value of business tax incentives and who should pay for them, how we’ll administer health insurance, and whether downtowns are worth our investments.

But to understand local issues, sometimes we need also to keep an ear open for what’s going in those distant time zones — if only to ensure it doesn’t happen here.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

“The Walking Dead,” a television series on AMC that’s based on a graphic novel (“adult” comic books with nicer binding), features new episodes on Sundays, repeats on other days, and older showings in black-and-white later in the week. (The season finale is Sunday evening.)

And right after the Sunday airing comes a program in which regular folk and “celebrities” chat breathlessly about “The Walking Dead.” For a full hour. It’s called “The Talking Dead.”

It is essentially a 60-minute infomercial for the show you just watched, with a goal not to sell bulky underwater wristwatches or exercise equipment that accomplishes pretty much the same thing as a bunch of sit-ups, but to extend eye contact with this particular show’s advertisers.

Now I really have no idea precisely what’s going on plot-wise on this program, other than dead people who aren’t really dead want to convert the few remaining living people to a similar line of work.

But right after I first witnessed this “Walking Dead”/“Talking Dead” marketing approach, my very second thought was, Why hasn’t someone done this before with TV drama? (Hasn’t sports been doing this here’s-what-you-just-saw piggybacking for years?)

Progress in brain mapping and in how social media change shape mass opinions, along with newer marketing approaches for TV, such as for “The Walking Dead,” could spell an interesting future for advertising. (AMC photo)

Right after an episode of “The Good Wife,” why not come on with an extended discussion of the sharp suits worn by the law firm of Stern, Lockhart & Gardner, sponsored by, gee, I don’t know, some clothing brand? Or about the casual wear on “Hawaii Five-O”?

Beyond fiction programming, marketers could further rally loyal consumers after a major political campaign pitch — hey, wasn’t that a great idea about debt reform put forward by candidate X? Let’s hear what this fan in Iowa has to say … .

Before you pass this off as futuristic marketing run amok, consider what the attendees at February’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston were talking about.

Some of the reports looked at progress on brain mapping. Through this work, molecular biologists and other scientists hope to achieve a better understanding of identifying human behavior and talents.

Elsewhere on the AAAS conference, social scientists discussed how a small group with one viewpoint could use social media and other mediums to transform the thinking of larger groups.

Too Orwellian, you say? Dirk Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and scientific coordinator of the FuturICT project, spoke about his organization’s work to put together a computer model of the whole of society. All of it.

As he explained at an earlier conference in San Francisco, self-described “complexity scientists” are bringing together data, models and people in a new age of hyper-connectivity, “to get a better multi-perspective view of complex matters … .”

With this model, they then would have a better handle on guessing how people would react to external events — to a stock market crash, a rise in grocery prices or a choice among political candidates (my examples, not Dr. Helbing’s).

Put all this together, and are we so very far from smoothing the path to thinking good thoughts about a zombie apocalypse? Sounds like advertising to me.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Douglas Braunstein, Chase’s ex-chief financial officer, and Ina Drew, former chief investment officer for the mega bank’s trading strategy, among others, were summoned to try, once more, to help the Senators get some sense as to how Chase lost $6.2 billion.

Their drop-by came a day after the subcommittee released a 300-page report that claimed the fiasco was the fault of Chase’s top executives.

Moreover, the document contended, officers — including the previously untainted CEO Jamie Dimon — intentionally had “understated” to federal examiners last year the bank’s 2012 first-quarter losses. (“Understated” is cordial choice of words.)

Investment chief Drew told the senators, when it came her turn at buck-passing, that “The number I reported (to the regulators) was the number that was given to me.” Drew had trusted those figures as they’d been compiled by “well-trained and well-educated Ph.D.s,” she offered.

She accepted no personal responsibility, and blamed the mess on a derivatives trader in London.

Senators Ron Johnson (from left), John McCain and Carl Levin listen to testimony from current and former JPMorgan Chase officers in Washington, D.C., on March 15. (Reuters)

Sen. John McCain expressed the frustration of many who have followed the shenanigans of big bankers and Wall Street over the past half-dozen years when he asked what sort of punishment had been meted out to Chase big shots once these errors in judgment were discovered.

Braunstein replied that his own compensation had been “reduced.”

From what to what, prodded an exasperated McCain.

From $9.5 million in 2011 to $5 million in 2012, Braunstein answered.

McCain’s nonverbal response, there for all to see on C-SPAN, was a mixture of incredulity and a near-loss of consciousness. He did not utter what he so clearly wanted to say.

The irony here is that this recent performance comes 80 years to the month after passage of the Emergency Banking Relief Act, pushed through by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and 100 newly installed Democratic members of Congress.

During the grim, economically shattered days of the Great Depression and after a procession of bank failures, the Act enabled the president to seize “absolute control over the national finances and foreign exchange” in case of a national emergency. It also led the way for a later bill that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

It was 80 years ago this month then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Relief Act. (AP)

Many Americans then started dragging their money out from under their mattresses and putting it back into their local banks.

In his first inaugural speech, given only five days before passage of the Emergency Banking Relief Act, and with his hand on his family’s Dutch-language Bible, FDR had declared that, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.

“We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths: The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

Not everyone agreed with that philosophy in 1933, of course. And clearly a lot of folk have no intention of doing so today, either.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

The general idea behind something called Amdahl’s argument, though, sounds more familiar.

Named for computer architect Gene Amdahl, this “law” refers to how much improvement you’re going to get in an overall system when you’ve upgraded only part of that system. In parallel computing, they worry about this sort of thing when trying to determine how fast they can get answers while running lots of processors at the same time.

Amdahl might suggest that while you’ve made some bits better, the parts that are still dysfunctional — that is, broken — in time will mess up everything else.

Which brings us to the colossus soon to barrel down on businesses known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The sheer heft and complexity of this beast undoubtedly will produce consequences we’ve yet to fathom.

(See: Law of Unintended Consequences, as conceived by 18th century philosopher and economist Adam Smith. Or as could be interpreted in contemporary parlance, Tag, you’re it.)

Here’s one possible future fork in the health-care road: A number of companies have stated they’re seriously contemplating getting out of the health-benefits racket. HR company Mercer found that more than 20 percent of businesses with fewer than 500 employees (the official definition of a small business) are pretty certain they’re going to drop health benefits; lots of bigger companies are giving it a ponder, too, according to the consulting company’s July 2012 survey.

So here’s my question: What then will happen to all the wellness programs that have become ingrained into our daily work lives? The meetings with health “coaches,” the lunchtime walks with co-workers, the smoke-outs, weigh-ins, gym discounts and other strength-in-numbers activities?

If we aren’t required to participate to receive a discount on an employer-sponsored health program, will we still care about counting carbs or skipping that cigarette as we walk to the parking lot?

And what’ll become of all those brightly colored, self-congratulatory T-shirts?

(Meana/Morguefile.com)

Something like 80 percent of large companies today offer some kind of wellness program, Morgan Downey, editor of the Downey Obesity Report blog, told NPR last month. And in 2014, companies will be allowed to fatten the amount of the discount on your health premiums if you meet wellness goals — by 30 to 50 percent. (The cap is 20 percent today.)

That is, of course, if they’re still offering health benefits.

An entire consulting industry has thrived over the past couple decades from the notion of workplace-encouraged wellness activities. Some provide excellent guidance and monitoring services into health concerns that, let’s face it, lots of us otherwise would ignore.

The well-meaning point of the Affordable Care Act was to make us more healthy — or at least less unhealthy. Long-lived, less-costly citizens.

This particular consequence could come to be known as the Amdahl’s Law of Unintended Inches.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Early on in Orson Welles’s mostly magnificent 1942 movie, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” Joseph Cotten shoehorns himself into a contraption no larger than a Big Wheel, but with far more levers and handles — a prototype of what will become the automobile — and sputters off along the turn-of-the-last-century town’s main street.

The camera cuts to disapproving townsfolk, who proclaim with great certainty the invention of the noxious motorized vehicle will never replace the horse and carriage.

The moral of the movie is that those who fail to see tomorrow’s potential — both its benefits and drawbacks — are in danger of being run over by it. Or at the very least, left abandoned on the side of the road.

Indeed, the coming of the car — and the then-unimagined changes it will make to the town, culture, business and the world — casts a shadow over the movie’s entire tragic tale.

As with those fictional townspeople, it’s not every day we clearly can see what the future offers. In “The Graduate” one of Dustin Hoffman’s father’s friends advises him to keep in mind “just one word” that will ensure his professional success — “plastics.” (Hoffman, as far as we know, doesn’t heed the recommendation.)

Movies don’t always get the future right. Science-fiction pictures used to depict the far future as being conducted by wall-filled computers with massive reel-to-reel tapes — even though Texas Instruments had filed for a patent for miniaturized electronic circuits back during the Eisenhower administration.

We can miscalculate in real life, too.

For fiscal year 2012, J.C. Penney reported a loss of $985 million. CEO Ron Johnson admitted mistakes had been made. (Dallas Morning News)

In February 2012, Ron Johnson, less than three months on the job as CEO of J.C. Penney, announced the Plano, Texas-based retailer would halt the some 600 sales it promoted a year, and pull down prices in its stores by 40 percent. (It already had begun to phase out its catalog operation.)

Competitors, industry observers and shoppers responded with, “Huh?”

On top of this new strategy of everyday low prices came a marketing blitz that served more to confuse than motivate. Would-be customers were shown in TV spots opening their mailboxes and then, well, screaming.

It was unclear why they were screaming. But the J.C. Penney logo is what appeared on the screen.

Its print pieces more recently moved in another direction, adopting the kind of sophisticated look you see in catalogs from J. Crew — a very different clientele than Penney’s shoppers who buy on price.

Results for J.C. Penney have been frightening. For fiscal year 2012, the chain reported a jaw-dropping loss of $985 million.

Johnson admitted “mistakes” were made. Sales, he added, would return.

What’s the future for J.C. Penney, its stakeholders and employees? It intends to continue remodeling 700 of its 1,100 stores in hopes of reviving customers’ interest.

But it’s not J. Crew, with its stylish, big-ticket clothing. Nor is it Walmart, which is perceived to have bragging rights to the low-price merchandise crown. It’s not even somewhere-in-the-middle Target.

So where does it go? If the chain’s brass doesn’t figure a way ahead soon, it could be left on the side of the road — or worse.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Perhaps channeling an “Ally McBeal” character, Tjan advocated what he deemed a “slow conversation movement” — an effort to get back “to real, authentic and live conversations.” Fewer screens, more face time.

From this new, old-fashioned approach, organizations can set better priorities and develop more successful collaboration, Tjan suggested.

He’s right. No doubt we all could benefit from less angst translating Mississippi River-long email streams — “When you wrote A, did you mean B …?” — and fuller conversations with actual humanoids.

But I also can see the increasingly insistent urge to swerve for the fast lane. Right now, today, the list of unfinished chores that affect how we do business is growing to staggering proportions.

Here’s just a small sampling of festering concerns:

•  President Obama has proposed raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015. Is this a good thing?

Advocates contend this would give more money to folk who’ll have to spend it — on food, clothing and shelter — and thus circulate more cash in the economy. Moreover, if you pay workers better, they’ll stick around, reducing employee churn.

President Obama has proposed raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015. (AP Photo)

But small businesses in particular reply that bottom-line common sense says forcing them to pay more in wages simply means they’ll hire fewer people. And during the latest recession they’ve learned to achieve more means with less — economists call that “labor displacement.”

David Neumark and William Wascher, who wrote a book titled, of all things, “Minimum Wage,” agree. They say that their research into 20 years of data indicated that higher pay benefits those who keep their jobs — but overall it reduces employment opportunities for less-skilled workers, a reviewer for the MIT Press wrote.

On the other hand, all those not working equals more burden on government jobless ledgers, right?

•  Our federal government, pick any administration, has never had a definable, consistent manufacturing policy. What’s important to us as a nation, and what isn’t?

So when automakers get in trouble, we revisit the debate as to our collective obligation. When China allegedly steals our stuff, we get in a huff at WTO meetings about trade restrictions and intellectual-property theft.

Or when another trade partnership is tendered, we start yelling about more jobs going overseas — even if that’s not always what would happen. Is a deal with the European Union is good idea? Heck if I know.

•  We can’t keep having this never-ending budget blood feud.

How is anyone supposed to plan when you don’t know what’s coming around the bend? Many businesses have offered this federal fog as an excuse to hold tight on spending.

But, gosh, we surely should be able to peer far enough to get our bearings. As shenanigans in Washington, D.C., have stood, four years, even a couple quarters, of predictability has been too much to expect.

•  And I haven’t even mentioned guest-worker programs, immigration or cap-and-trade.

Did we elect smart leaders to make good policy or did we send forth stubborn warriors to do battle for narrow ideologies?

I think I need to take a moment here ….

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Knowing plumbing was not his area of expertise, he partnered with a guy he’d met who claimed to be handy with a wrench. They set to work, and by the appointed deadline their functional art was in place.

So I was surprised one afternoon a few weeks later to discover the very same fountain, dry as dust, resting smack in the middle of his living room.

He confessed that they’d figured out how to get water to the fountain and have it burble prettily into the pool. What they’d overlooked was what was supposed to happen after that.

Upon installation, the fountain’s pool had filled with water but, without any sort of outlet, continued to pour up over its lip and out onto the expensive, newly laid hospital lobby floor. And apparently for quite some time until someone thought to shut off the water.

Lawsuits ensued.

When I asked my friend what why he hadn’t foreseen this possibility — I mean, where did he imagine the water would go? Outer space? — he angrily replied, “Well, he was supposed to be the plumber!”

Don’t kid yourself, these are complicated times and we need all the geniuses we can get.

In “Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius,” former New York Times correspondent Sylvia Nasar takes a look at a score of smart folk through history who contemplated turning “the tables on economic necessity — mastering rather than being enslaved by material circumstances.”

Winston Churchill is one of the many geniuses, from a wide range of backgrounds, that Sylvia Nasar mentions in her book, “Grand Pursuit.” (AP photo)

What’s particularly intriguing about her approach is she includes “geniuses” from several fields (a notion my friend appreciated but, oh, if only he’d chosen more wisely).

Nasar starts with men of conscience such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus before taking up with the economic oracles of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Walter Bagehot and Beatrice Potter (Potter came up with the concept of the think tank), then moving onward to Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Joan Robinson, Friedrich von Hayek, Irving Fisher and Milton Friedman, among many other shining lights.

Nasar also touches on other souls from somewhat further afield, including aviation engineer-philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, statesman Winston Churchill, evil madman Adolf Hitler, philosopher Bertrand Russell, ballerina Lydia Lopokova — who married Keynes and became “the love of his life” — and Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey.

It’s a crowded book. Think of the cocktail party these people would have made.

But the key take-away from Nasar’s deftly written book, I think, is that we need all these myriad perspectives to tackle the increasing complexities of today’s world:

Reality has mostly outstripped imagination. Even Schumpeter (1883-1950) could not have imagined that the world’s population would be 6 times greater but 10 times more affluent ….

Still, Nasar adds, “There is no going back. Nobody debates any longer whether we should or shouldn’t control our economic circumstances, only how.”

It’s a big, global challenge, and the numbers keep shifting. Goodness, a few more geniuses wouldn’t go amiss.

Tim Sieck and Mindy Seiffert are co-owners of Shores Event Center in the basement of the Shores Central Park, a former industrial building on 16th Street NE in Cedar Rapids. (Cliff Jette/The Gazette)

Tim Sieck and Mindy Seiffert have a shared passion for historic buildings.

They created historicbuildingarchives.com, a website dedicated to storing information about historic properties around the country.

But when the business partners came across the space in the basement of the restored Shores Central Park building on Cedar Rapids’s northeast side in spring 2011, they decided they’d have to come up with a business plan for using the space in a way that celebrated its historic features.

“The event center idea just came to us. But neither one of us has a background in this,” recalled Sieck, noting he came from the world of organizational development and coaching and Seiffert has experience in marketing.

From March through September of 2011 they renovated the space before hosting their first event — a Facebook Friends Party.

Thus far, weddings have been their primary business at the center, followed by holiday receptions for companies. They also offer rentals for business meetings.

“We came into this thinking we’d have a dry spell, that we’d suffer through the first year,” Sieck said.

The Shores Event Center is seen at the Shores Central Park Building in northeast Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

But on Jan. 1, 2012, for example, they had three weddings booked for the year, and ended up hosting 30 weddings for the year.

“For 2013 we already have 30 weddings booked,” he added.

Seiffert and Sieck have embraced their niche market.

“You definitely have to love old buildings,” Sieck said.

The center can hold about 150 people for a seated dinner, or 225 at banquet tables, and features exposed brick and concrete.

“Our center is a blank canvas,” Seiffert said.

“On event days, one of us here is by 6 a.m., and then someone will be here through the event, sometimes until 2 a.m.,” Sieck said. “But we’re in a happy business. No one is ever angry when they come to us to book our space.”

Sieck said at Shores they also look to maximize the use of the space during non-peak wedding times.

“We scour Living Social sites in big cities to see what is happening there,” he said. “Our philosophy is to offer events and experiences that aren’t typical here in Cedar Rapids.”

So far, they’ve started a successful Cork and Canvas series, a Wine and Yoga series and will

When business partners Tim Sieck and Mindy Seiffert came across the space in the basement of the restored Shores Central Park building on Cedar Rapids’s northeast side in spring 2011, they decided they’d have to use the space in a way that celebrated its historic features. (Cliff Jette/The Gazette)

host their first Cork and Cupcake event in April.

• Name: Tim Sieck and Mindy Seiffert
• Title: Co-owners
• Company: Shores Event Center
• Address: 700 16th St. NE, Suite L100, Cedar Rapids
• Phone: (319) 775-5367
• Website: http://shoreseventcenter.com

Know a manager or business doing innovative things that should be considered for “My Biz”? Contact business editor Michael Chevy Castranova at michael.castranova@sourcemedia.net.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

My parents used to engage in this whimsy, before gasoline prices started their climb to the moon earlier this century, of slipping into their car on an unpremeditated sunny afternoon to “go for a drive,” as they would call it. And before they’d decide to turn around to head home, they’d often find themselves several states away.

It became not that unusual on some of these spontaneous jaunts to fetch up in, say, Washington, D.C. — some 300 miles from their starting point in northeastern Ohio. Or Boston, which last I checked is about 600 miles distant.

I’m reminded of my parents’ adventurous sense of not always knowing where you’re going before you start as we get closer to the impending vote on a casino in Linn County. Barring a massive asteroid crashing down on the city, that decision from the citizens will occur March 5.

The investor group pushing for the new casino claims the venue would show some $80 million in gross revenue, as the crow flies, with an estimated one percent growth per year.

Research fronted by those investors contends the gaming center also would contribute a heck of a lot of tax money hereabouts — approximately $30 million in gaming, sales and property tax to the city, county, state and school district, plus an additional $2.4 million to the Linn County Gaming Association to aid local not-for-profits.

In these uncertain economic times, who’d gripe about such tantalizing numbers?

The Cedar Rapids investors have agreed from the get-go that their casino will suck away about $18 million from existing gambling halls in Iowa, and half of that from the Meskwaki Nation’s establishment in Tama County.

And while Cedar Rapids Development LLC released a list of almost 60 investors’ names a couple weeks ago, the Just Say No Casino folk complain we still don’t who will manage the venue nor exactly where the heck this thing will be built.

A dealer places the marker on the roulette table at Riverside Casino. (Liz Martin/The Gazette)

(For the record, the Just Say No people acknowledge existing casinos have contributed to its ad campaign. And it’s possible we’ll know sooner rather than later about the intended casino site.)

About that site: I was in the room last month when Steve Gray, Drew Skogman and other investor representatives spoke with The Gazette editorial board. Rick Smith and Todd Dorman of this newspaper each tried to pry more details about the intended site from them.

More than once, but with no success.

Now, for the record, I’m all for financial uplift. Times are tough — for some more than others — and the economic future is as certain as is whether my 16-year-old Toyota, with 158,000-plus miles on its odometer, will start on our next below-freezing morning.

And I can see the potentially dark side of the issue of sanctioned gambling’s effects on a community, too — an issue, frankly, that deserves more serious discussion.

But I’m baffled by comments on TheGazette.com by residents who claim they’ll vote against the casino solely because they’re certain it’s to be constructed downtown and they’re tired of the “whole downtown disaster.”

Aside from the lingering damage done by the flood almost five long years ago, which “disaster” would that be? More hardworking companies springing up in our shared economically vital business core? The splendor of the reopened Paramount and the excitement of the people who attend shows there? A shiny hotel-entertainment complex that will bring more money to our community?

Economics 101 tells us you need to invest before you’ll see returns.

••••

On the other hand, I do have to say Gray and company sure seemed confident during that mid-January meeting. Gray proclaimed himself to be “cautiously optimistic” for success come March 5.

“Eighty percent of success is the unnatural belief you can make things happen,” Daniel Reed, the University of Iowa’s vice president for research and economic development, said during his keynote at the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance gathering at Hawkeye Downs in January.

Gray, as one of the public faces of Cedar Rapids Development, knows projecting confidence is good for business. And it does make sense that disclosing where they want to build before they buy could drive up property costs.

But in some ways this is sort of like going for a drive with my parents: I’m fairly certain we’ll arrive at our destination — wherever that is — and I don’t doubt the good intentions of all concerned.

I’d just like to know a bit more, please, before I get in the car.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

One of the ways you can tell something is a great idea is when, in hindsight, we smack our foreheads and declare, gosh, why didn’t someone else see that coming?

Nate Silver says lots of forehead-smack-worthy things in “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t.” His book offers shrewd insights for those interested in predicting the markets, unemployment, political horse races, terrorist attacks, earthquakes or the World Series.

You probably heard of Silver at the tail end of last year’s presidential election — he’s the clever guy who correctly forecast the red-or-blue outcome of every state. (He was right about 49 states in 2008.)

A one-time statistician for KPMG, Silver’s turned his hand to calculating the performance of baseball teams, poker — where he did exceptionally well, thank you — and, more recently, political campaigns on his FiveThirtyEight.com site. His book’s premise is that most talk-show pundits, scholars and — sigh, I saw this one coming — journalists don’t really have the slightest notion what the heck they’re taking about.

Reporters, Silver remarked during a November 2012 interview for Authors @ Google (you can look it up on YouTube), tend to write as if the poll cited in their story is “the only poll in the world” and rarely mention any of the dozen other samplings that might conclude entirely different propositions.

And pollsters, especially for political campaigns, “when they talk to the press put things in the most favorable light,” he commented. Narrative — like TV sports coverage — is what they’re peddling.

In his book, he examines, among other things, how the Federal Reserve was blindsided by the housing bubble and the subsequent recession. In fact, a quarterly poll released in November 2007 by the Fed in Philadelphia anticipated economic growth in 2008, at a tad under 2.8 percent

Here’s why so many predictions are worthless:

If I asked you to forecast the total that will be produced when you roll a pair of six-sided dice, the correct answer is not any single number but an enumeration of possible outcomes … . Although you will roll 7 more often than any other number, it is not intrinsically any more or any less consistent with your forecast than a roll of 2 or 12 … over the long run.

That is to say, the range of possible outcomes over the course of time can be a pretty wide swath, and telling the future isn’t as simple as picking a solitary magic number.

Nate Silver, in his book “The Signal and the Noise,” suggests that most polls — for political races or the future economy — are just so much tomfoolery. (Associated Press photo)

How often have these economic tea-leaf readings been wrong? Forecasts from 1968 to 2010 by “experts” on the actual value for GDP, Silver demonstrates, “fell outside the prediction interval” almost half the time.

And he has charts to prove it.

The National Weather Service, he contends, has become far better at recognizing “the importance of communicating uncertainty” than economists.

Silver surely is right about how much salt we need to ingest with these prognoses, for politics or the future of our economy. The more numbers involved, the broader spectrum of probabilities we need to bring on board.

When I was about eight or so, my Uncle Scuppy — yes, that really was his name — used to take me with him into his favorite corner tavern so he could place bets on my being able to correctly guess coin tosses in exchange for free shots. (He’d drink the shots, I’d keep the pennies. I had an interesting childhood.)

My success was down to one naïve principle: I’d determined the odds each time were 50-50, so I called “heads” repeatedly, only occasionally opting for “tails.”

We’d do reasonably well, until some bleary soul would figure out my method was not so much sophisticated statistics or psychic skill but more like tenacious optimism. (Or until one of my parents would track us down.)

What Silver seems to want us to learn most of all, in his oft-stated goal to make us more data literate, is that we foolishly “think we are better at prediction than we really are.” This new millennium, after all, has been rocked “with one unpredicted disaster after another.”

It’s just not as easy as guessing heads or tails, up or down, yes or no. In the real, adult world of economics — or politics, sports or climate science — we need to consider the much bigger, more complex picture.

More is better, right?

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

She has skyward of 1,000 “friends” on Facebook.

Which means when the Cedar Rapids-based marketing agency chief commented on the social media site earlier this year about witnessing what appeared to be a “very drunk” restaurant operator — she wasn’t certain if he was the owner or manager — accosting the band, lots of folk read about it.

And they likely told many more.

You know the old retail axiom: A happy customer will tell one person about the experience, but a dissatisfied one will carp about it to 10.

Consider what happens today with the frightening planetary reach of Facebook, Twitter and other bare-all Internet gab sites. Managers today almost need eyes in the backs of their heads.

Soon after my wife and I first moved to Eastern Iowa, we frequented a tiny restaurant that featured some pretty tasty Middle Eastern dishes. But the take-away stuff was never ready on time. Not once.

I’d drive over, eventually learning to arrive past the time the food was to be ready … and still wait. And wait.

Our BFF relationship with this particular establishment came to a screaming halt one evening after I’d arrived home and opened the boxes to discover completely different items from what we’d ordered. Hey, where’s my falafel …?

When I telephoned, the employee sleepily replied that they’d run out of what we’d requested. So, what the heck, he’d just tossed into the boxes whatever they’d had in the kitchen.

Guess how many friends and co-workers I’ve told about this?

(Credit: MorgueFile.com)

My father spent his entire professional life in retail, and I recall tales of customers wanting refunds for items long beyond their natural life expectancies: “I bought these shoes for my teenage son here last year and now they don’t fit.”

So even if the customer isn’t truly always right, merchants need to at least begin the conversation proffering the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s one more true restaurant story:

Our waiter, several minutes after taking our order, came back to our table to report the restaurant didn’t have those actual selections today.

We chose other items from the menu.

A few minutes later he returned to tell us they were out of those things, too.

We asked what the restaurant might have. He tromped back to the kitchen, from where we soon heard him complaining about us.

A short while later a man we guessed to be the owner came to our table. He jabbed his index finger at us and said: “Let me explain something to you. We sold many things at the farmers market yesterday.”

He did not say: “Let me check with the kitchen to see what might be available.”

He did not say: “Please try us again some other day.”

He then left the building.

Guess how many times we’ve gone back there?

At the very least, as managers cannot be at the helm every hour of the day, they need to set a good example.

And even if not every potential customer is a Facebook friend with our marketing executive, being reasonably sensible is probably an excellent idea, too.

Sandy Freese at Karen Marie Jewelers in Cedar Rapids. Freese and her husband decided to open their own jewelry business after their hunt for a unique jewelry piece to commemorate their 20th wedding anniversary came up empty. (Stephen Mally/The Gazette)

Sandy Freese recalled that she and her husband, Rick, had been shopping for a memorable piece of jewelry for their 20th wedding anniversary. They weren’t having much luck.

So they decided to start their own jewelry store.

“I was working as an insurance clerk for a family practice at the time,” Sandy Freese said. “Opening this store was my husband’s idea.”

Being a well driller, Rick had a natural interest in all things geological, Sandy said.

“We used our two daughters’ middle names in naming the business,” Freese explained.

That first Karen Marie Jewelers store, in 1990, was located in a small strip mall behind the Springhouse Restaurant on Center Point Road. The business also did a short stint in a building next to Panera on Collins Road, before the building was sold to Panera and taken down for parking.

In 2008 they moved to their current location near Target on Blairs Ferry Road.

Today, Rick is the nighttime jewelry repair person and manages two other business concerns while Sandy runs the day-to-day operations, with the assistance of their two daughters, Alethea and Alicia, and one other part-time employee.

Alethea, who holds a diamond degree from the Geological Institute of America, does most of the custom jewelry design work for the store. Alicia is a graduate gemologist.

“People tell us that our jewelry is unique,” added Sandy, “and most of the pieces we design go out the door,” she added, noting they are not on display in their cases.

“We sell a lot of wedding sets and right-hand rings along with the repair work and changing watch batteries or shortening watchband links,” Sandy said, “but the custom jewelry design part of our business has grown.”

The custom work, in fact, has increased by 50 percent, according to Sandy and Alethea.

“I love making the piece that a customer has envisioned,” Alethea added.

The Freeses go to market once a year for buying — “The big one is out in Las Vegas and, of course, the gem stones market is out in Arizona.”

Freese said their store doesn’t buy from any one particular supplier, but works to market their own store’s name.

“We would rather brand our store than another jeweler’s,” she said.

• Owner: Sandy and Rick Freese
• Company: Karen Marie Jewelers
• Address: 1100 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Suite 116, Cedar Rapids
• Phone: (319) 393-1370
• Website: The store can be found on Facebook

Know a manager or company in business for more than a year that should be considered for “My Biz”? Contact business editor Michael Chevy Castranova at michael.castranova@sourcemedia.net.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Observant readers will have noted we’ve been writing more about regionalism in Business 380 of late.

So we thought it might be a good time to bring back Ms. Trendingdata to learn what residents might think about the matter. We last spoke with the researcher-consultant back in November on the subject of chief customer officers.

(Attentive readers also will recall that Ms. Trendingdata is fictional. By which I mean I made her up. We’ve also asked her back to ensure satire is still a healthy contact sport.)

So, Ms. Trendingdata, from your focus groups, what do people think about Corridor cooperation?

“Well,” she replied, consulting her printouts, smartphone, laptop, tablet and iPad — and with a furtive peek at what appeared to be a paperback edition of “Fifty Shads of Grey” tucked in her backpack — “there does seem to be what we call a ‘mixed result.’”

Meaning not everyone agrees?

“Let’s not get ahead of our statistics, shall we?” she cautioned. “Approximately 38 to 49 percent think better together is a good idea. However, approximately 16.5 to 23.2 percent have, well, questions.”

Did you say 16.5 to 23.2?

“Approximately.”

Approximately. But what questions do they have?

“In that core group,” Ms. Trendingdata continued, warming to her numbers, “we found 46.7 to 51.9 percent were wondering what we might call such a region.”

We already have a name, I replied — the Creative Corridor. It’s the assertion that whatever sort of talent a company might need, we have the skills and know-how to make it happen.

“Yes, well, we found that 6 to 8 percent of Johnson and Linn county residents preferred something along the lines of ‘JoLinn.’ But then 5.3 to 12.4 percent wondered if they then would have to call themselves ‘JoLindians’ or ‘JoLinnites.’”

Ms. Trendingdata cheerily forged ahead: “In addition, in response to deeper questioning, 11 to 49.1 percent of respondents aged 16 to 29 suggested some slogans.

(Morguefile.com)

“Among the recommended slogans,” she continued, pausing to scan her printouts, smartphone, laptop, tablet and iPad, “were ‘Kernels of Corn’ and ‘Kernels of Knowledge.’”

Seriously?

“Yes, I see what you mean — too many K’s.”

By this point I wondered if Ms. Trendingdata’s firm has put in a good-faith effort. In response, she began to rummage through her briefcase, eventually pulling out an already opened bag of sunflower seeds.

Listen, I insisted, forget about JoLindians and corn. This is important stuff. Did you actually ask anyone about the idea of the Corridor communities working together?

“My firm has tried to stick to financial guidelines you set, so we couldn’t get to everything on your list.”

Is that the same as no?

“Well, yes. No.”

Did you, I continued, ask anyone who doesn’t actually work in your office?

“Well, actually, no.”

My head spinning, I got up to leave.

But Ms. Trendingdata had one more chuck of data to share.

“We did find a sizable group who had a different direction in mind,” she offered.

And what is that?

“It seems 4.3 to 6.1 percent,” she said, “strongly believe we should secede from the United States ….”

KCRG should be back on DISH soon after 2 p.m. today.

DISH Network subscribers in Eastern Iowa have been without access to KCRG since the last retransmission agreement extension expired at noon, Dec. 18, 2012.

KCRG is owned by The Gazette Co., which also owns The Gazette.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Once upon a time I had this boss who insisted that I show up each morning at 7:30.

After all, he reasoned, he was there at 7:30 every day, hefting large amounts of caffeine, so I should be, too.

I would point out that none of the writers I supervised were in until 8 at the earliest and, as we didn’t want to pay them extra, that likely was the soonest we’d ever see them. In fact, hardly anyone in the entire home office of some 7,800 souls was there before 8:30.

In addition, the various folk we interviewed for our corporate publications — spread as they were across the country — surely would be nowhere to be found at 7:30 Eastern Time.

Besides, I suspect he just wanted company.

But more than once I also wondered: Does he not really get what we do here?

A general appreciation of your employees’ tasks — even if you personally couldn’t perform those same duties quite as well — is one of the key items that turns up on lists of tips for retaining talent in today’s shifting world of work.

In a December 2012 column on the Forbes website, contributor and N2growth Managing Director Mike Myatt contended that more 30 percent of employees believe they’ll be working someplace else within a year. One reason is more than 70 percent “don’t feel appreciated or valued by their employer,” he wrote.

Moreover, a survey by MSW Research and Dale Carnegie Training suggests that workers — especially those millennials upon whom we seem to have pinned so many hopes to keep future economic engines running — no longer subscribe to the sentiment that, gee, they’re just so happy to have any old job.

I’m not certain if I’m convinced of that latter claim, but 70 percent is a scary number. So here are a few hands-on suggestions, culled from a variety of sources, that might help to keep the folk you’ve taken time to recruit and train on the job.

Use the smarts you have, sometimes:

When a story-planning meeting of editors was called for a small chain of newspapers where I worked a few years back, I asked our publisher if I could bring along a couple reporters. I valued their insights and, besides, I’d just tell them everything discussed in the meeting anyway.

He asked if I wouldn’t rather “filter” the main points to them later.

My reply was we’d hired really smart people. Why wouldn’t we want them involved in strategy? (Yes, they got to attend.)

Myatt noted that many bosses fail to give their talented people a voice. If you don’t listen to them, he wrote, “someone else will.”

(Morguefile.com)

So maybe, when appropriate, we should ask.

You can set the destination, but they might have some ideas on how to draw the map:

One reporter never tired of citing a passage from Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War”: During the battle of Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee reportedly ordered Lieutenant General Richard Stoddert Ewell to “Take that hill, if practicable.”

As it turned out, Ewell didn’t “take that hill” — he apparently didn’t think such action was “practicable” — but you get the point.

As that reporter wanted me to understand, the manager indeed should set the goals. But the people on the ground might have some worthwhile notions on how and when best to achieve them.

Common sense looks good on most everyone:

Robert J. Murray, global chief executive for iProspect, a marketing agency, told the New York Times of how, earlier in his career at a consulting firm, he’d spend three weeks on a project only to have it trashed by an up-until-then-absent boss at 5:30 on the day before it was to be presented.

More than once, Murray and his group would stay the night reworking the presentation to have it ready the next morning. This is did not make for loyal worker bees.

The lesson here is more than simply to stay engaged.

Back at that big corporation where my boss kept nagging about my not sharing early morning chats over coffee, a director once called me and one of our video producers into his office.

Great news, he proclaimed: He’d chosen us to develop a new promotional video.

He then cheerily told us we had until tomorrow at this time to finish our prototype. That way he could give it to one of the vice presidents, who’d have two weeks to look it over.

(Said vice president, the director pointed out, had not requested a new promotional video. This would be a surprise.)

The video producer hit, as they say, the roof. He had a crushing load of other projects that were due now — and certainly it would make more sense if we had two weeks and the vice president had 24 hours to watch it.

The director didn’t budge on the time frame. So the two of us carved out 30 minutes that afternoon to hurriedly contemplate how to proceed, I then wrote some perky copy and the producer did his best to find some stock footage and make it all look and sound pretty.

The next day the video was duly handed over to the director, who in turn passed it upstairs.

And we never heard another word about it. No promotional video ever materialized.

The moral? If you’re the passenger, on occasion it makes sense to listen to the driver. That person just might have some good ideas on how to get where you want to go.

You never know.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Remember, before the SEC started building regulations, corporate reporting on income, assets, expenses, liabilities and the like was akin to the Wild West.

So “insiders” had what historian David Nasaw in his new biography, “The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy,” calls, with some understatement, “an unfair advantage.”

And Joe Kennedy surely knew how to take advantage. The blue-eyed Irish charmer learned how to make connections and how to use them — and by “use,” Nasaw means flatter, entice, cajole, manipulate or bully.

With the knowledge he garnered from his growing range of contacts in banking, shipping, Hollywood, whiskey imports and practically everything else, Kennedy bought where he reckoned he could profit.

“His ability to juggle numbers and accounts was remarkable,” Nasaw writes. “So too was his capacity to profit from a booming market.”

He became more savvy in the ways of early 20th century capitalism, and his appetite grew:

Joe Kennedy was learning how to skate along the edges without falling in. As president of Columbia Trust (for example), he had immediate access to capital and credit, which he used not only to finance his mortgage and real estate dealings, but to purchase stock. As the economy righted and then boomed in early 1915, his fortunes soared.

… “I was afraid the market would close before I had all I wanted.”

He “bought on bad news, sold on good news,” Nasaw notes.

By 1928, Kennedy was a multimillionaire. He enjoyed a life Jay Gatsby might have envied.

And none of what he did to reach this pinnacle, Nasaw continues to point out, was considered unethical or against the law. That is, until Joe Kennedy made it so.

FDR and Kennedy had become pals, of sorts, during World War I when the future president was assistant secretary of the Navy and the father of a future president was general manager of Bethlehem Steel.

Joseph P. Kennedy (center) and his family. (AP Photo/Boston Globe)

FDR viewed the SEC as a means to national recovery from the Great Depression. He believed Kennedy, a moneymaking scoundrel of the first order, an ideal candidate to contend with all those other Wall Street characters.

The president was right. Kennedy knew all the fraudulent, questionable backroom ways of stuffing the pockets of finance’s fattest fat cats. Who better?

But Kennedy’s other goal during his two years as SEC chairman — along with tying up as many nasty loopholes as he could get his fingers around — was to make corporations feel good again about doing business.

Corporations distrusted FDR, the father of the New Deal. But Joe Kennedy was truly one of them.

“Do business as usual,” Kennedy urged Chicago business executives in 1935.

Kennedy outlived four of his children, and spent his final years disabled by stroke, able to speak only a single word: “No.”

A few years ago, around the time of some well-publicized reshuffling at a place where I was working, I’d gone to a movie at a theater run by a friend of mine.

As I walked in, he grabbed me to ask, as he was short-staffed, if I’d stand in the lobby to take tickets for just a few minutes while he changed a reel.

Hostess Brands received approval last month to fork over to its chief executives $1.8 million or more in bonuses for attaining budget goals during liquidation. (AP Photo)

It was while I was tearing tickets that a writer I knew came in. Writers can be imaginative types, so as she passed me her ticket, she laid her hand on my arm and whispered, “I am so sorry.”

Now, as I recall, I didn’t tell I wasn’t actually employed at the movie house. After all, it’s not every day young women put their hands on my arm and murmur anything remotely sympathetic.

Instead, I just nodded and, eyes downcast, mumbled something about how grateful I was for the free popcorn ….

Now, I don’t mean to suggest there’s a single thing wrong with that line of work. But I was surprised by how easily she’d seen me as a movie theater ticket taker.

I’ve long followed the management notion that every person views herself or himself as the hero of the novel. And that she or he expects to be treated that way.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder what sort of novel some folk think they’re in.

Hostess Brands received approval last month to fork over to its chief executives $1.8 million or more in bonuses for attaining budget goals during liquidation.

This despite the fact that the company failed under their watch, a organization that has produced some of the most famous brands on this planet.

This despite the fact that some 18,000 employees are losing their jobs.

We can see this curious self-perception at the other end of the corporate spectrum, too. I’ve sat in on more than a few interviews in recent years with job candidates who arrived late, offered no explanation or apology, and dressed as if they’d just come from a leisurely stroll through the mall.

Michael Chevy Castranova

They seemed to miss the point that this was their principal opportunity to act and dress the part in a novel in which the scene is already set and, just maybe, they aren’t yet perceived as the key protagonist.

Who do they think they are?

And there’s this: Some 70 percent of employers who responded to the HireRight 2012 Employment Background Screening Benchmarking Report contended they’d “uncovered a falsehood on an applicant’s resume.”

These fabrications, I imagine, ranged from slight sins of omission/confusion (oh, yeah, I forgot I was at that last job for only six months, not a full year) to wholesale concoctions (an unearned degree, say, from a school visited once for a football game — and then, if you must know, just for the tailgating and a few beers afterward).

In a good company and good book, everyone has a significant part to play. Manages just need to want to figure what that is. And all of us have to take some personal responsibility.

Inquiring man: “But what do you say?”

Elizabeth Lane: “Oh, I’m inclined to agree with them.”

I almost missed the deadline for New Year’s resolutions. But, you know, journalists are pretty famous for missing deadlines.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Resolutions are born of hope for the future predicated on mistakes and/or omissions of the past. And 2012 was a mixed year for the business of journalism.

For one thing, the Newspaper Association of America reported advertising revenues were down by some 5.1 percent for 2012’s third quarter. While that tally was better than its two preceding quarters, advertising has shrunk for 26 consecutive quarters.

On the other hand, the NAA also noted that digital advertising was up 3.6 percent in that same quarter. (See what I mean about optimism?)

Leonard Pitts Jr., the Miami Herald writer whose columns appear in The Gazette, complained a few months ago that digital income isn’t enough to compensate for print hemorrhaging. He specifically blamed the years-ago notion to shovel content onto the Internet free of charge on English majors who, he wrote, knew nothing of how to run the business.

(As a former English major, I took umbrage at this and wrote to tell Mr. Pitts so. He has yet to reply, but I’m hopeful.)

Meanwhile, we appear to be witnessing a decline in hearty souls willing to enter the profession.

Lyle Muller, former editor of The Gazette and now executive director of the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, mentioned this a few weeks ago: He hears from journalism educators that many parents discourage their college-aged children from going into the field because it’s perceived as a dead-end career.

All of which, to my mind, is wrong-headed.

It’s like “Christmas in Connecticut,” which, like New Year’s resolutions, makes the rounds this time of year.

One take-away from this very funny 1945 movie is to note how just about every character is a trickster.

The protagonist, Elizabeth Lane (played by Barbara Stanwyck), is a nationally popular magazine writer who enthralls readers with tales of how she prepares bountiful meals for her husband and child on their bucolic Connecticut farm. Her features sing such fluff as “the charms of watching an attractive woman … preparing flapjacks.”

But in fact, Lane lives in a Manhattan apartment building and possesses no husband, child nor farm. Her cooking skills are nonexistent. (Don’t bother to learn now, her restaurateur uncle advises — it would ruin your writing.)

Unacceptable behavior in real life, to be certain. The plot takes off when her unwitting publisher decrees she take in a just-returned war hero during the holidays.

The lesson I prefer to learn from this story is how Lane, her editor (who’s also worried about losing his job if the ruse is discovered) and other city folk band together to make this Connecticut fantasy a reality — at least for a few days, and until Lane and her sailor find their romantic footing.

They determine what’s needed, then they figure out how to deliver. And at the end of the day, the truth wills out.

So call me an optimist.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Ben Franklin “discovered” electricity by flying a kite outdoors during a storm? Wrong.

You can see the Great Wall of China from outer space? Nope.

Money was “invented” so vendors and their customers wouldn’t have to haul cumbersome and sometimes still-squawking items for barter to the market?

David Graeber, author of the entertaining “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” just released in paperback, writes that, well, it’s just not true.

Graeber is not some dry economist, mind you, but an anthropologist — he teaches at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College. He contends complex systems of debt and payment have been part of human commerce for a long time — as long as there have been farms and people who want to trade for the goods produced on them.

He notes, for example, that Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century philosopher, pointed out that the German word “schuld” means “debt” as well as “guilt.”

So when you were behind in your financial obligations, you also were considered by society as guilty. That’s why it was acceptable in earlier times for debtors to be physically punished — so much in arrears for that grain you took home a few weeks back now equals one finger, or damage to your good eye.

(Jail time for debt wasn’t made illegal in this country until at least 1831.)

Sin, it seems, needed redemption. So ways to calculate repayment were contrived.

Today we call that money.

The trick became how to agree what was worth what. Shop owners in 1664 London, for example, created their own IOUs, Graeber writes — which was fine as long as his customers didn’t try to use the coins in other merchants’ stores.

And what to do about even larger marketplaces? If you’re Roman Emperor Tiberius, you have your face stamped on the coins and they’re good for credit — regardless of how much silver they contain.

“One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces in a given time and place by what sorts of things were acceptable as currency,” Graeber suggests:

In much the same way that colonial Virginia planters managed to pass a law obliging shopkeepers to accept their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fees and customs duties … actually payable in wine, cheese, peppers, chickens, eggs and even herring ….

Graeber’s book also details a fascinating history of humankind’s getting and spending — from the Catholic Church’s opposition to usury to how Cortés viewed his conquests of land, property and people all through the lens of cost-benefit analysis. He also touches on Homer, the prophet Nehemiah, King Nebuchadnezzar, Shakespeare, William Jennings Bryan and Richard Nixon — the last of whom removed America from the gold standard in 1971 and made money essentially a promissory note from the U.S. government.

What is debt? Graeber concludes it’s a promise — but “a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

When I was a teenager, we had a dog in the neighborhood called Petey Banks.

Small, friendly and of indeterminate breed, Petey Banks, in his retirement years, was blind in one eye and probably couldn’t see all that well out of the other. He was best known for walking out into the middle of the road, then lying down for a nap.

Folk who lived in the neighborhood knew enough to drive gently around him. But people passing through often would stop their cars and get out to shoo Petey Banks onto a sidewalk.

By the time these kindhearted souls got back behind the wheel, though, Petey as sure as God made little green tomatoes and willful pets, would have trotted back out into the roadway and resumed his napping position.

This passed for many an afternoon’s entertainment for us.

Amtrak reminds me a lot of Petey Banks. We like the idea of it, but we’re not terribly sure what to do about it.

Like beat-up, old Petey Banks, the passenger rail service sometimes seems more of a good-news-bad-news kind of prize:

•  For fiscal year 2012, Amtrak had an operating grant of $466 million. That’s about $1.48 for each American, according to Amtrak calculations.
•  Amtrak President and CEO Joseph Boardman told the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in September that for FY 2011 Amtrak recovered 79 percent of its operating costs from fare box revenues — up from 76 percent in FY 2010.
•  When you include other, net revenues — such as real estate and contracted commuter services — Boardman contended overall revenues cover closer to 85 percent of operating costs.
•  Ridership is on the upswing nationwide by 44 percent since 2000, Boardman said.l On the other hand, Congress back in 1981 proclaimed Amtrak should learn to break even. It has yet to do so.
•  Amtrak has lost $834 million in its food-and-drink service over the past 10 years, the Government Accountability Office reported in August, primarily due to waste, employee theft and crumby oversight.

This is all worth thinking about now as public meetings are held this month in Iowa cities along a proposed Chicago-Omaha route. Henry Posner III, chairman of the Iowa Interstate Railroad’s board, is on board (ha) with working with Amtrak.

The IIR and Amtrak plan to reestablish the Chicago line to Moline by 2015. It seems logical, supporters suggest, to push west to Iowa City.

Iowa House Republicans are on record as being less friendly. They object to the $3 million annual price tag for the state.

Amtrak ridership is on the upswing nationwide by 44 percent since 2000. (Steve Gravelle/The Gazette)

So the short-term-reasoning side of our brain tells us it’s far too much cash to hand over simply so Iowans can ride to Chicago to shop.

But the long-term portion might consider the economic-development benefit of being able to move people and services easily to and from other metro areas.

And dare I, as a once frequent train passenger, even mention the words “carbon” and “footprint”?

It’s like the dog in the middle of road. Someone needs to take responsibility, and that’s most likely got to be us.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Not that long ago I worked for a highbrow, nationally distributed industry magazine that insisted with virtually each story it published that everything wrong with the world could be laid at China’s doorsteps.

That nation’s sins, according to the publication, were like an immense bowl of weeks’ old Halloween candy — reach in and you’ll grab something disagreeable: trade imbalance, “dumping,” economic pushiness, squabbles over Tibet, intellectual-property piracy, currency manipulation, corruption, its environmental record, its one-child policy, poisonous paint on toys and, what the heck, bad-hair days.

The moral was always, “You see, it’s all China’s fault.”

But now comes what may be a New Age.

Just last month, China began a leadership transition. The old gang of the Special Communist Party began to relinquish their titles to a younger generation of secretly selected leaders, headed by Xi Jinping.

Xi Jinping (pronounced shee jen-ping) became the party’s new general secretary in November and, by 2013, will succeed Hu Jintao as president.

Xi came up through the ranks in the 1980s, after China’s market reforms. He has experience dealing with private enterprise and foreign investors, the Wall Street Journal reminds us.

He is also, it seems, Gov. Terry Branstad’s BFF.

When Xi dropped by Iowa in February, he kicked around a family farm in Maxwell and climbed up into a John Deere. Farming, Xi noted, held “a special place in my heart,” as he’d worked for seven years as a farmer.

Moreover, Xi had visited a farm in Muscatine during a 1985 visit as a party official, and hung with the governor then.

Branstad and Xi are planning to hook up next year in China.

“I told him I’d like to be the first U.S. governor to meet him when he is president,” Branstad cooed after Xi’s February visit. “He said that he would like that ….”

Keep in mind Iowa exported some $575 million worth of product to China in 2011, according to the U.S.-China Business Council. So being pals with the head guy makes good business sense.

But before we start counting our unhatched eggs, keep in mind that all the huffing by that magazine where I used to work about China’s many transgressions wasn’t entirely misdirected. (Branstad’s office cautioned human rights was not going to be on the list of talking points for that February visit.)

And Xi has some hefty challenges on his plate.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping talks with Rick Kimberley, right, as they sit in the cab of a John Deere tractor while touring his family farm, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012, in Maxwell, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, Pool)

For one thing, China’s peasants are still miserably poor, though things have gotten marginally less awful, observers contend. Plus, its growing middle class has started to question why it has little say in central government decisions.

And the old-schoolers there fear a breakup like the one that dismantled the Soviet Union and, historians will add, the Roman Empire.

So is it a new dawn for U.S.-Sino relations? Or for Iowa-Sino business deals?

Or will it be a continuation of frustrating spats over steel imports and treatment of dissidents, with the occasional bucolic tractor photo-op?

In any case, for all good intentions, it likely will be a hard row and slow road.

Her assertion — which I received via a press release, not an entire book — is that “yesterday’s business cards are today’s books.” Being an author establishes you as an expert in your field.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

Now, Friedman knows the world’s cup overflows with books no one beyond the author’s mother or ex-spouse — searching for snide references, a libel lawyer on speed dial — would stay up nights to read.

So she cautions that “a poorly conceived, poorly designed, poorly written or poorly promoted book is worse than no book at all.”

But here’s where I get caught up in this book-as-business card/resume concept. Call me an old-fashioned, Underwood-admiring, Mark Twain-loving purist, but I’ve always thought books should be conceived from the inside out.

That is, you write the book because you have something you have to say.

(On the other hand, Sam Clemens toiled at more than one book project over his long career because he was convinced the public would dish out money for them. Exhibit A: “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians.” Yes, really.)

Maybe I’m wrong about this. But. either way, writing ain’t easy.

As sports columnist Red Smith once reportedly described writing, “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

Back when I was in Michigan, a publisher with the parent company said if I wrote enough columns similar to what I’d been running in the business newspaper where I was editor, he’d consider collecting them in a book.

A real book, the kind with words and everything.

As he was sober when he made this declaration, I took him at this word. So every evening for about a year, I’d rework material that had appeared in the business paper, contacted publishers of magazines for older features I wanted to repurpose and — one drop of blood at a time — wrote new stuff.

The book came out a few weeks before Christmas 2002. I did radio interviews and bookstore signings. A reviewer in my hometown newspaper deemed the book amusing but found some of the sentences too long (a charge I could live with).

Courtesy of Morguefile.com

A snug box of those shiny paperbacks still sits in my garage.

But the moral of the story? A few weeks ago I tested a search engine — to see if was better than my usual choice — by putting in my name.

Bubbling to the top came citations for some ancient stuff I’d done two states back, then links to LinkedIn and Facebook, then Facebook in French, for some reason.

As I was about sign off, I saw at the bottom of the screen a listing for my book. I clicked on it, and found myself at a remainder book site.

And there was an image of the cover, with my smiling younger self.

The price? $2.05.

There, ladies, gentlemen and budding authors, can be the price for fame.

I’d left home with plenty of time, departing while it was still seriously dark to reach Muskegon, Mich., some 90 miles north, for a dog-and-pony show for the business newspaper we’d just launched.

My role in the program was to say a few words about our mission to bring business news to western Michigan, then introduce our publisher.

My error, it seemed, was one of misplaced faith: I had relied on one those online mapping services for directions.

So imagine my anguish when the instructions assured me I’d arrived at my destination, but what I could see out my windshield on that numbingly cold January-in-Michigan morning was one gas station and a defunct barbershop.

And, yes, the X that marked the spot for the conference center placed it smack in the cross hairs of an intersection.

By the time I found where I really was supposed to be, the publisher had introduced himself, attendees were already exchanging business cards and locating their car keys, and I was doomed for years to come to be tormented with lectures that began with, “As I said that morning in Muskegon, which if you had been there you would have heard….”

So since then I’ve come to a few conclusions about maps.

One is, successful employment of maps — things that instruct you in how to get somewhere, whether we’re talking about geographic maps or long-term business plans — has a lot to do with where you start.

James S. Aber, Emporia State University professor of geology, notes on his “Brief History of Maps and Cartography” website that maps have been in use since 2300 B.C., when Babylonians consulted clay tablets. (I wonder how they folded those chunky things to cram them into their glove compartments.)

Professor Aber also points out that where you resided, or where your philosophical bent was anchored, determined the heart of earlier maps. During Medieval times, for example, Jerusalem was depicted at the center, reflecting the period’s religious ardor.

(courtesy photo)

This sort of egocentric perception, I suspect, explains why maps can show a tiny Greenland contrasted with, say, North America and Europe. Part of the reason has to do with distortions of size for cartographers as they shift away from the equator and closer to either pole.

Another excuse was that Greenland — though about a quarter of the size of the United States — is some 80 percent ice and, let’s face it, no one goes there anyway.

This “misrepresentation” even has a name — the Greenland Problem.

The Greenland Problem also might apply to, among other issues, the delay in having begun work on an Iowa-based health insurance exchange, an issue that will affect consumers as well as small businesses, health-care providers and insurance companies.

One can hazard a guess that Gov. Terry Branstad’s assumption was that a.) Mitt Romney would win the presidential election, and that b.) the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act thus would be repealed some day in the not-too-distant future. So who needs the fuss of creating an exchange, right?

Reality worked out differently, however, and 10 days after the election Branstad confirmed to the feds that, oh, all right, Iowa will build its own exchange.

He added, though, that yet more details for the interminably discussed, nationally debated, long-agonized-over program were needed to do the job.

Remember Y2K? What a phenomenal amount of gnashing of teeth there was in the run up to that big deal, too — about the increased costs, the overtime payments and indeed its actual necessity.

(You might also recall some talk about the whole “Y2K bug” being a conspiracy for global domination and/or for the End of the World as We Know It.)

But business large and small, once they figured out what was what and where they stood, put together their own plans — a road map, if you will — to mend their computers and systems applications.

Around $308 billion (in 1999 dollars) were spent worldwide. But come Jan. 1, 2000, airlines still flew in the sky, banks could account for their holdings and utility companies continued to provide light and heat.

A map works best when you know where you’ve started, and when you’re committed to getting somewhere.

Michael Chevy Castranova, business editor

My next thought was, I can check off the box in my calendar for coming up with a topic for my next column.

Gawande uses medicine as his jumping off point. He writes that a doctor can see some 250 different primary diseases and conditions during a single year’s office practice.

Moreover, he adds, “Clinicians now have at their disposal some 6,000 drugs and 4,000 medical surgical procedures ….”

“It is,” he writes with amazing understatement, “a lot to get right.”

Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all.

“The Checklist Manifesto” discusses how in a world with “complexity upon complexity,” something as low-tech as a checklist not only can make us more efficient, it can save lives.

Gawande details how in 1935 U.S. Army Air Corps test pilots in Dayton, Ohio, concluded that flying the latest batch of Boeing 299s “was too complicated to be left to the memory of any one person, no matter how expert.”

So they wrote down a list of step-by-step cockpit chores — on an index card.

The author notes that by the time we get to plucky Chuck Yeager and the rest of “The Right Stuff” gang of the 1950s, “checklists and flight simulators had become more prevalent and sophisticated,” and thus the dangers had dropped considerably.

Gawande also looks in on finance, speaking with investors who adapted those methods pioneered in health care and aviation to create Warren Buffett-like checklists. One example: Confirm that you’ve considered whether revenues might be over- or understated because of temporary market conditions.

I confess I felt validated by Gawande’s book: By packing a calendar annotated with daily checklists, I’ve come to believe don’t have to carry as much in my head. It’s the mental equivalent of traveling light.

My system is pretty straightforward: Almost everything is written in pencil, then checked off when completed or erased if canceled. Special events require special colors — birthdays in blue, soccer matches for which I’ll need to set the DVR in red.

I try to avoid the clutter of stars and asterisks.

Occasions that if missed could result in joblessness, dismemberment or divorce are highlighted. (No particular color, I’m not obsessive about this or anything.)

Sometimes, though, I’ll admit the system breaks down. I’ll find an entry either I cannot decipher — blame it on decades of using a keyboard — or simply makes no sense.

One recent Friday noted “GCI: Information.”

Was that something I was supposed to do? A place I was intended to be? Please don’t let it have been an anniversary ….

The best I can offer, dear reader, is that if I was scheduled to telephone you on a Friday or show up somewhere, blame it on the checklist.

Good, now I can mark off that blanket apology.

If Harry Brod, University of Northern Iowa professor of philosophy and humanities, author of the just-released “Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice and the Jewish-American Way” and lifelong comic-book lover, could pick one superpower, what would it be?

His answer has more to do with his background as a philosopher, he replies, than his stash of comic books.

“All the way back in the ‘Republic,’ Plato tells the story of Gyges’s ring, which can make its wearer invisible,” Brod says. “He uses it to teach a lesson about ethics, about how the truly virtuous person would not do immoral things even if they knew they wouldn’t get caught.

“The idea has held my imagination ever since I first heard it. So I would choose as my superpower the power of invisibility, coupled with the strength to resist the temptation that power brings with it.”

The fact that Brod cleverly picks two superpowers ties in with the duality he examines in his new book.

Jewish writers and illustrators, children of immigrants who were denied work at 1930s advertising agencies, newspapers and publishing houses, helped forge the fledgling art form of the comic book. How they went about presenting these tales of courageous crime fighters was not that different from what Jews were doing at the same time in Hollywood.

“They created a super-idolized image of the American dream,” Brod explains, “then fed it back to America — images that mirror that dream.”

They took the Everyman and made him faster, smarter and stronger, then dressed him up in a proud colorful costume, so he could outwit and outfight those who would do us harm.

But here’s the twist, and it’s the very heart of “Superman Is Jewish?” These writers and cartoonists — Jack Kirby (nee Jacob Kurtzberg), Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber), Joe Simon and Bob Kane (Robert Kahn), among others — incorporated into the mix what Brod calls “a Jewish sensibility.”

The man of steel’s creators, Cleveland, Ohio-born Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, “were Depression-era teenagers,” Brod notes. “They were Clark Kent-types — they were nerdy, they didn’t get dates, they were reporters on the school newspaper.

“But the moral (of Superman, begun in 1932) is, ah-ha, underneath, little do they know.”

The true man, Brod emphasizes, is superpowered Superman — nebbishy Clark Kent is the disguise.

“Superman sided with the little guy, he was the champion of the oppressed,” Brod says.

The subtext, he explains, was that the larger-than-life costumed crusaders were fighting anti-semitism on behalf of their authors.

Sometimes not so-coded, though: Simon and Kirby’s Captain America, in his first comic book cover in 1941, is shown valiantly “socking Hitler on the jaw,” Brod says.

Subsequent comic-book characters retained that outsider Jewish attitude. The X-Men, for example, are clearly a persecuted minority.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, is a bit more subtle. This angst-ridden hero represents “a post-holocaust” view, Brod contends — the preventable death of his Uncle Ben stands as a metaphor for the guilt suffered by those who believed they “didn’t do enough to save their families” from Nazi death camps.

“I’m not saying Stan Lee had this in his mind (when he and Steve Ditko came up with Spider-Man),” Brod says. “It was in his subconscious …. You can pick up what’s in the air.”

Over time, comic-book superheroes became more like “super cops,” Brod says. “They became more authority figures.”

Comic-book characters today “don’t need to be coded. DC Comics rebooted their characters last year, and Batwoman is now a Jewish lesbian.”

But for all its history and its life lessons, Brod’s book is “not about Jews in comics. This is about Jewish-ness in comics,” he says.

Plus, readers will “have fun with it,” he says.

• What: Harry Brod reads from “Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice and the Jewish-American Way”
• When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
• Where: Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City
• Cost: Free

A reaction from one of the other cartoonists in attendance can’t be printed in a family newspaper. Let’s just say he implied he was humbled by the game-raising breadth of the idea.

“Building Stories,” published in early October, comes in a box large enough to serve as luggage for a weekend trip to Chicago, packed with 14 separate books. And by “books” I mean some are perfect-bound, a few are in a newspaper format, three are stapled, two are printed as posters, another two are 28-inch-long strips and one folds out like a game board.

No helpful starting point is given, and there is no particular order to the tales, most of which involve a woman who lives in Oak Park, Ill., Ware’s hometown. The narratives shift backward and forward in time, often using deep memories and tragic dreams to drive the story.

And that’s the thing about Chris Ware. His work continually surprises the reader with the detail to his elegant and precise drawings.

Ware has confessed to working without thumbnails, except maybe to rough out a main central image for each page. He starts in the upper-left corner of a page and draws “organically,” he said.

Which brings us to the other key element of Ware’s art. Gosh, his stuff is sad.

Always through his stories runs a powerful undercurrent of sorrow. As the protagonist of “Building Stories” confides, “I am entirely, 100 percent, horrifying alone.”

Yow.

But at the end of the day, despite all the truly unhappy, disconnected characters who push their way through life, it has to be said that “Building Stories” is a truly amazing, unmistakable thing of beauty.

The job of the CCO seems pretty intuitive — to determine what makes the customer happy, then convince the C-suite to give it to them.

So I thought, what better business to benefit from a CCO than The Gazette, a communication organization, right? But, as this is Iowa and not Illinois, I could see us deciding to start small.

Very small.

Instead of having our CCO shepherd the concerns and wishes of the audience for our entire operation, it might be concluded she should begin with just one employee.

Me.

After several weeks of meeting with readers  as well as poring over my weekly Business 380 columns and the business stories I’ve edited for The Gazette, the CCO — let’s call her Ms. Trendingdata — and I would have our first official tete-a-tete.

“My focus groups show you do have a core of regulars readers who are aware of your column every Sunday,” she might begin.

“Well, that’s good,” I’d reply hesitantly, suspecting a trap. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I do have some … um, suggestions … that have come from my conversations,” she’d continue, consulting her notes. “For one thing, a few readers commented that some weeks you’re quoting serious-minded economists from major universities and think-tanks, then the next you’re writing about Cary Grant and Hedy Lamarr.”

“That’s what I call the big-tent theory,” I’d say, feeling on relatively safe ground. “To bring more readers to the business pages, folk who might not otherwise look there, I’ve tried to introduce some topics on a lighter note, if you see what I mean.”

Long silence.

“I think,” Trendingdata finally would say, closing her notebook, “we need to work on your delivery.”

“My ‘delivery’? You mean my punchlines?”

“No, your actual delivery. How readers receive your column.

“I thought, starting next week, we could try some new methods to contact readers more directly.”

“You mean, like take up a paper route?” I’d ask.

“We’re thinking you could call your readers. On the telephone.”

“What, all four of them?”

(The Gazette)

“You could read each of them your column. This way, our customers could tell you right then what they think of that week’s column.

“You’d be proactive,” she’d smile in what probably would be intended as a “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” inclusive moment.

“This newspaper reaches a lot of people,” I’d point out. “And our readers already have suffered through months of annoying, out-of-the-blue intrusions at home from callers who think they should be leader of the free world.

“Can’t we come up with some other idea?” I’d implore, hoping she’d detect the sincerity in my earnest blue eyes.

And, indeed, the CCO and I surely would come up with a compromise. So, soon, somewhere in the Corridor you’d find me.

I’d be the fellow waving the big sign: “Will opine for feedback.”

Specific street corners still to be determined.

I panicked. We had a small staff and couldn’t afford to have any pieces go MIA.

He’d come with glowing recommendations, and he’d been an editor at a fair-sized newspaper, so surely he possessed some sense of responsibility.

And certainly he had some comprehension of what the consequences would be — the “hammer-boot” analogy Nick Fury mentions in “The Avengers” movie.

Michael Chevy Castranova

As it turned out, when I got him on the phone later, he confessed he had a severe headache, for which lying down was the only remedy. He’d be back bright and cheery the next morning and, no, he’d never vanish again without letting me know.

Over the years he turned out to be one of the best hires I’d ever made. He went on to run a paper in Eastern Europe and now reports for a West Coast business newspaper.

Another reporter I hired a few years later also had presented himself with excellent references and spotless writing samples. But within a matter of months there would be whole chunks of the day when he supposedly was visiting, say, a manufacturing plant, but officials there have no idea where he was — certainly not at their facility.

It turned out — and I learned this from a friend working on the other side of the state who’d heard from an acquaintance of hers — that my errant reporter had taken a job with another paper. He hadn’t bothered to tell me this, nor inform his new employer he was spending time pretending to write stories for me.

Yikes.

All of which, I guess, just goes to show what a tricky business hiring can be.

It’s true fresh employees take chances — learning the expectations, spoken and otherwise, adapting to the corporate culture, sometimes even moving great distances to take the job.

Managers view it from the other end: They invest time and money recruiting and then training new folk, all on a gamble they’ll catch on, do well and — with a bit luck — stay for more than a year or two.

And by golly no one enjoys spending precious hours you don’t really have sifting through resumes, making calls and sitting through sometimes mind-numbingly painful interview sessions — “Surely you can think of one reason why you want to work here, can’t you?”

Early 20th-century Antarctic explorer Ernest Shacklteon once said about hiring for a crew upon whose life you might have to depend: “You don’t need a long interview. You need an intense one.”

But like the joke about the guy who tells the psychiatrist why he won’t divorce his wife who believes she’s a chicken — because, he points out, he needs the eggs — we hire to keep the wheels turning at our companies and in our economy.

Yet our misgivings about the interview process can’t be the primary reason why so many companies confess, in this time of economic high anxiety, they refuse to bring on more people.

JPMorgan told The Economist magazine that 61 percent of its American clients are hesitant to take on new help because of the looming catastrophe that is the so-called fiscal cliff. (Justine Griffin/Sun Sentinel/MCT)

Reasons given have been myriad, but here are some highlights:

•  They can’t find skilled workers. We’ve been hearing this lament for at least two decades, particularly in manufacturing.

Managers contend job candidates aren’t up on the evolving technical skills. Worse, the people who show up at job fairs can’t do even basic math and couldn’t tell you how many inches are in a foot to save their necks.

•  Today’s younger would-be workers don’t posses the so-called soft skills.

They don’t know how to think through problems, or how to work collaboratively. Nor do they know they should call in when they’re going to be late for work.

In short, they don’t know enough to come in out of the rain, to hear some hiring managers tell it.

•  Though many company officials won’t up and say it, they don’t want to expend the time and resources to train new employees to develop of the above-mentioned skills. (I’ve deemed this as asset hoarding © in other columns.)

What the heck, look at the cash you can keep in the tiller with fewer folk out on the floor.

•  And, more recently, employers are afraid of the fiscal cliff.

JPMorgan told The Economist magazine that 61 percent of its American clients are hesitant to take on new help because of the looming catastrophe that is the so-called fiscal cliff — the massive mix of new taxes, returning taxes and whopping government spending cuts for thousands of programs that could come in the new year, unless Congress decides to actually do its job, if it’s not too much bother. (Some estimates put the potential damage at a frightening five percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.)

David Cote, head of Honeywell, told The Economist that “Everybody’s nervous.” As John Schlifske, chairman and CEO of Northwestern Mutual, said to me when he was in town in September, his company is conserving its “resources.”

So here we sit, with national employment stuck in a very bad part of the woods — no matter which calculations you chose to accept as gospel. (My bet: Don’t get attached to any of them.)

Leaders need to lead, not wait for politicians in Washington, D.C., Brussels or China to check which way the wind is blowing.

Waiting for things to get better won’t make it so. That’s your job.

This one recounted part of a 1937 adventure from “Little Orphan Annie,” in which a terrified Annie witnesses the apparent brutal slaying of her protector, “Daddy” Warbucks, and his friend, the Asp. The accompanying drawing showed the Asp, his clothes in tatters, desperately slashing away with a sword and firing a gun against an overwhelming number of thugs.

It’s a frightening image.

That entire hair-raising tale is included in volume 7 of IDW Publishing’s “The Complete Little Orphan Annie,” which came out in 2011 (with strips from 1936 to 1938), and volume 8 (1938-1940), released this past June (294 pages each).

Harold Gray’s phenomenally influential “Little Orphan Annie” flourished at a time when big cities had more than one daily paper, and many readers chose their paper based on the comics it carried. His dark panels — far from the sunny Broadway musical — were packed with self-sacrificing heroes and murderous villains.

As these resurrected strips show, no one ever topped Gray for mood and pacing. And his tales still pack a wallop.

It’s great stuff.

A reaction from one of the other cartoonists in attendance can’t be printed in a family newspaper. Let’s just say he implied he was humbled by the game-raising breadth of the idea.

“Building Stories,” published in early October, comes in a box large enough to serve as luggage for a weekend trip to Chicago, packed with 14 separate books. And by “books” I mean some are perfect-bound, a few are in a newspaper format, three are stapled, two are printed as posters, another two are 28-inch-long strips and one folds out like a game board.

No helpful starting point is given, and there is no particular order to the tales, most of which involve a woman who lives in Oak Park, Ill., Ware’s hometown. The narratives shift backward and forward in time, often using deep memories and tragic dreams to drive the story.

And that’s the thing about Chris Ware. His work continually surprises the reader with the detail to his elegant and precise drawings.

Ware has confessed to working without thumbnails, except maybe to rough out a main central image for each page. He starts in the upper-left corner of a page and draws “organically,” he said.

Which brings us to the other key element of Ware’s art. Gosh, his stuff is sad.

Always through his stories runs a powerful undercurrent of sorrow. As the protagonist of “Building Stories” confides, “I am entirely, 100 percent, horrifying alone.”

Yow.

But at the of the day, despite all the truly unhappy, disconnected characters who push their way through life, it has to be said that “Building Stories” is a truly amazing, unmistakable thing of beauty.

Logic tells us, however, that for the most part good followers don’t necessarily grow into good leaders.

Michael Chevy Castranova

This notion came to mind during Rebecca Ryan’s talk to the Iowa City Area Economic Development Group’s annual meeting earlier this month. (The self-described “one part economist, one part futurist and one part humorist” spoke to the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance the day before.)

The subtext of Ryan’s chat was about developing the next generation of leaders. Indeed, “next gen” is her shtick.

During her presentation, the Madison, Wis.-based consultant (you saw that coming, right?) reminded her audience that work needs to be done on an economic as well as on a community level to attract and retain these young folk, often referred to as millennials (though Ryan didn’t use that term).

One reason we want them living and working in Eastern Iowa rather than elsewhere is the talent dividend: For every one percent increase in residents with a bachelor’s degree there is a $763 uptick in annual regional per capita income, she calculated.

But here’s the counterintuitive bit: Despite the shortage of jobs most everywhere, where millennials live is as important to them as what job they have, she said.

“Location still matters,” Ryan said.

Their hearts favor cool ZIP codes — Austin, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and Omaha. Tall buildings rather than tall cornstalks.

And they’s willing move at the drop of a hat. It’s no wonder they aren’t remotely as loyal to their employers as their parents have been: They’ve witnessed too many right-sizings and reductions in force — mainly to their parents and their older siblings — to be fooled by platitudes from companies that contend they cherish their workers.

One reason we want millennials living and working in Eastern Iowa is the so-called talent dividend. For every one percent increase in residents with a bachelor’s degree there is a $763 uptick in annual regional per capita income, Rebecca Ryan figures. (Seattle Times/MCT)

Now is the time, during what Ryan described as a winterlike “era of survival,” that we need to plan “what we should do … for our children come spring.”

We must invite the next generation to the table to determine solutions for the challenges of today and tomorrow, she said.

And she’s right. But I wonder how much of a disservice managers do to these future leaders, and to themselves, as we continue to paint these 20- and early 30-somethings as “me first.”

We’ve all heard that millennial-inspired concept that work should be fun as we spend so much time at it. A contrary view holds that, sure, that would be nice, but even if it’s not a laugh a minute around the ol’ office, isn’t that why we get paid?

I think good leaders, regardless of whether they can name all four of the Beatles, want to lead. They want to learn about what came before, what worked and what didn’t, and they aspire to succeed.

Amongst all our talk about groovy office culture and flexible work schedules, let’s also give thought to mentoring and real-world management development.

Someone has to teach them, and I imagine that means us.

That’s the way to propagate more generals and field officers and fewer clueless privates.

Or, to put it another way, the markets and all the cosmic factors that come into play — the economic speculations and prognostications from more sources than there are stars in the heavens, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s latest hints and pronouncements, trouble in Greece, trouble in Spain, trouble in Portugal, trouble in France, still more trouble in Greece — well, it’s just all too much.

Michael Chevy Castranova

That seems to be one of the morals of the story from James Owen Weatherall, a mathematician, philosopher and assistant professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of California-Irvine. He’s also author of “The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable,” to be published in January by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

See, here’s the problem, as he sees it:

Imagine you are trying to putt a golf ball. The hole you are aiming for is only slightly larger than the ball itself. And yet, if you miscalculate by a fraction of an inch, and you hit the ball a little too hard or a little too softly, or you aim a little to one side, you would still expect the ball to get close to the hole, even if it doesn’t go in.

That’s because we imagine that the world is an ordered place.

But you’d be wrong.

Here Weatherall brings in Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist and author of what’s come to be called the Chaos Theory. You know, the idea that one little occurrence can lead to more significant events.

(Cliff Jette/The Gazette)

It goes something like this: You can’t find your car keys, so you’re late for work, therefore your major presentation isn’t given that morning to an important client, who angrily drops your company as a vendor, thereby forcing your employer to trigger huge layoffs, pulling down its stock price, which in turn signals an industrywide decline that affects world markets, and so on until the extinction of life on Earth as we know it.

The plots of countless sitcoms are based on this notion, as well as a recent series of commercials for satellite TV reception.

Lorenz’s 1972 conference paper in which he put forth his theory carried the title, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

As Weatherall notes in his discussion of how we try to chart the whimwams of the markets, “You can never account for all the flaps of all the butterflies across the globe.”

Of course, stock market analysts admit what they do isn’t for the faint of heart. But they aren’t going to concede it’s impossible, either.

So they continue to consult quarterly statements, annual reports, financial models, dowsing rods and tea leaves, all in hopes of wisely guiding their clients. Or aid those loyal customers enough for them to still be able to pay their fees.

Weatherall suggests adding more science into the process would help. But even he admits that, in the end, we simply don’t know enough about butterflies.

Chuck Peters, ICAD board chairman.

The goal of a meeting set for the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance and the Iowa City Area Development Group  (ICAD)  next month will be to determine “how to be better together,” said Chuck Peters, ICAD board chairman.

As part of an “exploratory conversation” requested by Metro Economic Alliance and ICAD investors, the economic-development agencies will meet Nov. 19 at the Kirkwood Center to discuss ways to improve how they recruit new businesses, grow existing companies and foster startups, he said.

In a letter announcing the meeting, Peters noted the agencies and investors would discuss “ways to better coordinate efforts between the organizations up to and including some sort of merger.”

“We need to rethink how we do economic development,” said Peters, president and chief executive officer of SourceMedia Group, parent company of The Gazette.