KENYA LOVES US, but Pakistan hates us . . . India? Loves us . . . Jordan? Hates us . . . Mexico? Loves us . . . Egypt? Hates us . . . France, after the messy breakup, has moved back in . . . And Muslims abroad aren't inviting us to brunch anytime soon . . . If Americans still wonder what the world thinks of Old Glory, check out recent congressional testimony by Andrew Korhut, president of the Pew Research Center . . . ("Restoring America's Reputation in the World.") . . . Researchers for the Pew Global Attitudes Project interviewed 200,000 people in 57 countries . . . That's a humongous sampling . . . Our image sank after the invasion of Iraq, and it bounced back in Europe when President Obama moved into the White House . . . We need to fix our country's reputation, our global brand, real fast . . . Far too much is at stake.
DIVERSITY STILL IS a dirty word to some, making them cringe . . . Others see the new reality and future, the evolving nature of the world . . . Those mutts, mulattoes and half-breeds that you shun on the streets are you and me: coworkers, neighbors, family and friends, classmates, cops and firefighters, emergency workers, military veterans . . . Luke Visconti, a Rutgers University trustee and former U.S. Navy officer, saw firsthand the value of diversity while recruiting young Latinos and African Americans for the military, according to the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.A.
IN 1998, VISCONTI co-founded DiversityInc. Media, which runs the DiversityInc.com Web site and magazine, plus conferences and benchmarking services for businesses . . . Barbara Frankel, senior vice president and executive editor, runs the first-rate editorial operations . . . The Visconti crew shows that diversity can be funny, tackling a heavy subject with a light touch, plus in-depth reporting when warranted . . . Visconti's column, "Ask the White Guy," takes a no-holds-barred look at diversity issues in the news . . . A how-to story teaches us "Five Things NEVER to say to Muslim Coworkers." . . . Another feature blasts Vanity Fair's magazine cover featuring all-white female film stars ( "Baloney Meter: The World According to Vanity Fair"): "Seriously, Vanity Fair? What alternate universe do you inhabit?" . . . (For recent U.S. arrivals, "Baloney!"doesn't mean sandwich lunch meat, but is old slang for "Bullshit!" My goodness, how quaint it sounds.)
DIVERSITY INC. MAY be best-known for its DiversityInc. Top 50 Companies for Diversity, led last year by Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, Ernst & Young, Marriott International, and PricewaterhouseCoopers . . . A new list comes out next week at Diversity Inc.'s conference in Washington D.C. on diversity going global . . . While big companies advertise with Diversity Inc., the magazine to its credit doesn't excuse Corporate America when it stumbles . . . (See "Black Men Bowing Down: Intel's Marketing Misstep" and "How Goldman Sachs Hurt Black, Latino, Female Households") . . . Business diversity coverage is mostly ignored by the mainstream media . . . The ethnic media and deep-thinking scholars fill the void, as do a handful of mainstream journalists when they can break away from feeding the beast . . . So great work, Diversity Inc. . . . You're a valuable resource on a topic that only will grow in import.
NOTE: This blog post on T. Boone Pickens, billionaire oil investor turned tree-hugger (sort of), ran during the 2009 Global Technology Symposium at Stanford University, where he spoke. Boone probably is one of the few men alive who could get Al Gore and Dick Cheney to the same salad bar. "Am I green?" he said. "I could pass the saliva test." Been waiting for Boone to invite me bird-hunting with his billionaire buddies. Never been, tho' once I plugged an old gator in Florida sure to die from disease or a fight with a younger gator. Call me, homie.
The annual tech symposium comes to Stanford on March 24-26, 2010. This year's gathering features former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett, former Reagan Administration counselor Clyde Prestowitz, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Google executive Marissa Mayer, and other business luminaries. The event is run by Alexandra Johnson, managing director of the DFJ-VTB Aurora venture fund, which invests in early-stage companies in Russia.
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA -- The times they are a changin', sang a famous folk troubadour from the 1960s. Ain't that the truth. A few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine legendary Texas oil investor T. Boone Pickensgetting chummy with Al Gore and other hardcore environmentalists. But borders are tumbling, and creative destruction and disruption are hallmarks of the new global economy. Last summer, Pickens launched a highly-publicized crusade called The Pickens Plan to end America's addiction to foreign oil. Is he a capitalist crusader a la Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, or a modern-day Don Quixote tilting at solar windmills? I'm betting on him to help save the world, or at least push politicians and the energy sector in the right direction.
PICKENS REMINDS US that the U.S. is the biggest energy hog by far, spending $475 billion in 2008 on foreign oil and using 25% of the 85 million barrels of oil produced each day. (See video below, from www.pickensplan.com/media/) But he says wecan realistically change our environmental fate by boosting our production of natural gas and using the cleaner fuel in trucks, 18-wheelers and other big business fleets. That'll buy us time -- at least 25 years -- before the glaciers melt like ice cubes at the beach. By then, solar, wind, clean-tech energy sources will have grown to a larger scale to make a real difference. Companies are gradually buying in; AT&T just announced that it plans to run 8,000 of its fleet vehicles on natural gas within five years.
LIKE PRESIDENT OBAMA, Pickens is aiming for a younger, Internet-savvy demographic. In the tradition of civil rights marches on Washington, Pickens is promoting an online "virtual march" on Washington April 1-3 (2009) with his "New Energy Army," some 2 million people who've signed up to send emails to Congress and to promote the Pickens Plan through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social- and professional-networking sites. Is Pickens spot on or what? An avid birdhunter, Pickens and his advisors know how to lead his target -- in this case, reaching green generations under 40 that will shape politics and business over the next several decades. He's also spreading his message the old-fashioned dead-tree way, promoting his new book, The First Billion is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future.
On his new clean energy reputation: "Am I green? I could pass the saliva test."
On trying to persuade Sen. John McCain to support natural gas, not oil: "He said, 'You're trying to get me to pick a winner.' I said, 'You don't understand, this isn't a multiple choice question. This is the only thing we have. A battery won't move an 18-wheeler. Natural gas is the only thing that makes an 18-wheeler go that's abundant in this country."
On energy leadership: "One thing that's been missing for 40 years is leadership. If this administration, this leadership, can put the American people together not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans . . . it can be accomplished. In New Delhi, they were choking to death on diesel fuel, so they mandated no diesel . . . Eighteen months later, they switched over to natural gas, and now people are not dying on the streets from diesel fuel . . . It's a war without guns, and we have to move as fast as we can." (See Cool Global Biz video clip below from Stanford conference.)
On drilling: "I'm for anything that's American. (We should drill on) the East Coast, West coast, Gulf of Mexico . . . Throw it all in. It won't fix it, but it'll help. There isn't a silver bullet. Put it all together and we can solve the problem. Nuclear (energy), sure, I'm all for it."
On risk-taking and entrepreneurship: "I've drilled more dry holes than anybody you want to know. I've also found a lot of oil. In the oil business, I'd probably be in the Top 10. But what did it cost you? That's the big balancer in my industry . . . Entrepreneurs will all go down that trail at some point . . . You have to be smart enough (to know) it's time to walk off. At some point, you run out of rig, you run out of pipe, you run out of money, so you're going to plug it and leave it with tears in your eyes."
On leaving a clean energy legacy before the planet dies: "It's not about this guy (himself). I can make it to the finish line, but I'm not so sure about our grandchildren. For generations to come, this has got to be fixed."
THE MORE THINGS change, the more they stay the same, even in fast-moving, forward-thinking techland. Excellent recent stories in the San Jose Mercury Newson the slowdown in diversity hiring in Silicon Valley companies. ("Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies" and "Five Silicon Valley companies fought release of employment data and won," both by Mike Swift.) Praise to the Mercury News for pursuing an important issue often ignored by the mainstream media, including journalists and media execs -- liberals and conservatives alike -- better at window-dressing and muttering excuses than at practicing true diversity in their own industry.
SOME COMPANIES HAVE made progress, while others haven't over the past decade. (I wrote a similar story back then: "Race issues shake tech world: What looks like meritocracy can brim with bias, experts say as more lawsuits are filed," USA Today, July 24, 2000.) Some tech firms, claiming competitive reasons, declined to release their diversity data to the Mercury News after it filed a Freedom-of-Information Act request with the U.S. Department of Labor. But most willingly agreed, including Intel, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, EBay, AMD, Sanmina and others. "There's nothing to hide, in our view," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told the Mercury News. "We just felt that we're very proud of the (diversity) programs we have in place and the efforts we put forth, and we don't have any trouble sharing it."
NUMBERS ARE just one benchmark, though. More important is hiring the best by merit and need, not by color, gender or creed. And if companies are practicing real diversity, without cultural biases and blinders, then the numbers will take care of themselves. Corporations need only look to pro sports and the Olympics to see diversity in action, with the best athletes making the teams. Or to TV, Broadway, and Hollywood hits -- Grey's Anatomy, the CSI crime drama series, the High School Musical movies, MTV's America's Best Dance Crew, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, American Idol, Slumdog Millionaire, the musical Rent and others -- that have no problem finding talent of all hues. Or even to symphonies that audition performers hidden behind screens, so hires are made on pure musical talent -- not on stereotypes of technically-skilled Asian musicians who lack artistry. The administrations of Presidents Obama and Bush have been more reflective of the United States than the boardrooms of many businesses.
TO THEIR CREDIT, more smart, open-brain companies -- the Intels and IBMs of the world -- gradually keep moving ahead. In a generation or two, the diversity hiring issue will cease to exist for them; it will have become a natural, breathing part of their winning DNA and global strategies. Other companies hire only hires cut from the same cloth, who look and think like them. Blinded by confirmist cultures, they can't see that talent knows no boundaries. Managing the outliers, harnessing many views, is beyond their ken. They need to evolve, or they'll slowly wane or drift into the arms of stronger, more diverse rivals. Death by demographics and globalization.
ONE OF THE most visionary executives I've ever interviewed was Dee Hock, the brilliant founder and former CEO of Visa who lived in the green foothills on the California coast, near San Francisco. Before cash became digital, before business became virtual, this former Bank of America executive created that blessed and cursed thing, the international credit card, nearly a half-century ago. Go, Dee. A planet of consumers thank you. During our interview in the late 1990s, the retired and grandfatherly Hock -- who would go unnoticed at a party of today's Web 2.0 hipsters -- joked that his grandchildren ignored him, until they learned that he started Visa. A true business prophet, Hock foresaw the future of commerce in words and concepts that only he grasped before Visa was launched. The "cloud" and the Internet didn't exist then; the cloud was in his mind.The brick-and-mortar crowd missed it badly. But Hock knew that Visa and a world of global, borderless finance would be the future.
JUST YESTERDAY, CHINA'S huge sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corp., disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC's Edgar database here to look up company filings) that it had invested $10 billion of its $100 billion-plus investment treasure chest in U.S. companies, including Morgan Stanley ($1.8 billion) and Blackrock ($714 million), plus Apple, AIG, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Motorola, Northern Burlington Santa Fe and others. But what leaped out at me was the fund's $354 million in Visa stock. Not some vast global energy or tech firm, but the Visa credit card company, which is more a global association of virtual bank members. Like T.S. Eliot wrote, everything comes full circle, back to the beginning. And visionaries like Hock see it clearly from the start, decade s before the brain dead bozos who hog up so much mindshare. Hail the visionaries.
MEANWHILE, IF YOU think China's red-chip investment fund will raise an iron fist over our markets, here's testimony from Heritage Foundation analyst Daniella Markheim at a U.S. government hearing last year ("Implications of Sovereign Wealth Fund Investments for U.S. National Security"): "The rise of sovereign wealth funds carries implications for global financial market stability and U.S. national interests. There is no question that America must ensure that the laws and procedures governing foreign investment are robust, up-to-date, and functioning effectively . . . However, the relatively small share these funds represent in U.S. and global financial markets . . . reduce the likelihood that foreign investment will bring more harm than good to the U.S. economy . . . Properly monitored and regulated, sovereign wealth funds are not a threat to America’s national and economic security."
