Weekly Newsletter - Thoughts & Tips
Fellow Vistage Chair Allen Hague publishes a weekly newsletter that I find thought provoking and informative. Thought you might too.
For Your Edification and Enlightenment:
- What?Makes Us Americans - Two Big?IT Threats - The Infinite Job:?Mindsets and Methods - Dear Boomer.......Love, Gen Z - Covid Tracker:?Are you a Variant Factory? - Econ Recon:?Trees to the Sky? - For our?Friends Outside the Family
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Though the fireworks are over, take ten minutes (it won’t take more)?and expand your citizenship IQ regarding what all the fuss was really all about 245 years?ago??
It’s only 1,320?words in length?(about three pages ) and offers an enlightening list of the?many grievances that drove the Founders to take the existential risk of declaring independence from the greatest power on earth at that time.?
These grievances against a government they did not choose will make many of our complaints pale in comparison;?especially since we are also blessed with a constitution that allows peaceful change without violence; something that the extremists on the Left and Right of today appear to have forgotten.?We also have a mechanism for change that the Founders did not enjoy but risked their lives to establish for us.?They understood, as many today do not, that the Declaration and the Constitution made it possible for to have our say, but not always to get our way; and when we don’t, to work for it peacefully.
The signers were the ultimate protesters; rebelling against the mightiest nation on the planet with the best standing army in the world at the literal risk of their lives. As Benjamin Franklin, one of the signers, remarked at the time of the irrevocable choice they had just made,?“We must all hang together or most assuredly, we will all hang separately.?“??They made the very act of protesting a right for which they deserve our undying thanks.
Take a few minutes to study one of the greatest documents ever written. You may be surprised what’s in it…and you’ll probably be one of the few Americans who’ve actually read it start to finish.?I hope you’ll?study?it as well.???
It’s what makes us Americans.?Please share, especially with the young people in your life.
?As the holiday weekend approached, the world was hit with two new IT threats.??Vistage IT Security Speaker and Expert Mike Foster provides a quick overview and advice on?The PrintNightmare Attack????This affects ALL versions of Windows.??Here’s more info from PC Magazine.??
?Much more worrisome?if?you use an outsourced managed service provided (MSP), they y may have placed?an agent on your laptop called “Kaseya” to manage your system that has just been infected by REvil ransomware.?Mr. Foster sent me the following urgent message on Saturday”:
?“If you or anyone you know has a computer consulting company that uses Kaseya, you need to immediately shut down all of your computers.?REvil ransomware infected software, called Kaseya, that many MSPs use. If the word “Kaseya” sounds familiar, you should:
?If your MSP does not use Kaseya, this attack will not affect you.”
?Here’s additional info from PC Magazine on the Revil threat??This hit on Friday so it’s possible your IT staff may not be aware of this.
?Kaseya just put up a?link with updates on this situation.???Mr. Foster told me this morning that “?at least one Vistage company (they called me yesterday) that had all the files on their network encrypted because their outsourced computer consulting company fell prey to the attack, and so did all of their customers. “
?I came across?an article several years ago that?stated?“The CEO’s job is like no other in the organization.?It is infinite. Senior executives are, by definition, ultimately responsible for every decision and action of every member of the company, including those decisions and actions of which they are not aware. CEOs—even new ones—are allowed few mistakes.”
?The job may be infinite but CEOs are not.?With so much to manage, the only way CEOs can succeed is by managing themselves first.???An excellent (and a little long but worth the read) article from McKinsey provides an executive summary?of a long running study involving thousands of CEOs which extracted“The Mindsets and Practices of Excellent CEOs.”???There is also a self-assessment that will help you determine if your mindsets and practices are aligned with those in the study.
If you’d like a quick overview of what Mindset really is to whet your appetite for the above article.??Check out this four minute video?from Vistage’s best speaker on Mindset, Dr. Eve Meceda.
领英推荐
Peter Drucker once remarked that succession was the CEO’s most important job.?With the war for talent a fever pitch,?many leaders wonder if they will be able to attract enough younger leaders and managers for the leader to depart with the company in good hands.
?HBR offers some insights that may help Boomer CEOs do that.??It goes without saying that many Boomers perceive that the values and work ethic of Gen Y and Gen Z are very different than their own.?Understanding these differences are key to attracting and mentoring tomorrow’s talent.?If you’d like to hear it from Gen Z directly, here’s a letter to HBR in which one of that cohort shared the following:?
?“Gen-Zers will soon take over Corporate America. We are coming in with high standards for ourselves; we want to contribute to the companies we join and the societies of which we are a part. My hope is that this “straight talk” is a step toward building a bridge between generations and mindsets, so we can collectively create an inclusive and prosperous future.”???Check out the rest of his letter Dear CEOs:?A Gen Zer’s Open Letter to His Future Employers.”
Check out Dr. Brian Wesbury’s?FINAL???Covid tracker as of June 29,?2021.??My thanks to Dr. Wesbury for this weekly executive summary and presentation of various Covid metrics during the pandemic.??Dr. Wesbury included a final commentary on his Covid Tracker which appears beneath my signature below.
Another good source is?https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?and the oft cited?IHME (Institute for Health Metrics) Projections.??Both offer data and projections by country and state.
Are you a Variant Factory?:?99% of all new Covid cases are unvaccinated and many are due to the new variants, especially the Delta variant that is 40% to 60% more transmissible than the original Covid virus.?If you’re not vaccinated, you’re not only at risk, but as this CNN report states,?Unvaccinated people are ‘variant factories’?who may unwittingly create new variants
?The Covid Recovery:?Be skeptical of the?news;?follow the?data.?Check out Dr. Brian Wesbury’s?economic?Recovery Tracker as of June 29 .???It’s interesting how many of these metrics turned around early in the year and are at or near their?2019 pre-Covid levels.
?Trees Don’t Grow to the Sky:???A very human characteristic is to make linear projections of the current situation into the future, even though we know that the economy is cyclical and nothing goes up?(prices, wages)?or down (employment or GDP) forever.??Lauren Saidel-Baker of ITR Economics offers some sage advice about?how to manage ourselves and our businesses in light of price increases.
Much of this material is not available to non-members.?However, there’s great information curated by the Vistage Research Team that is available to all on our public site
“ A superior who works on his or her own development sets an almost irresistible example.”-?Peter Drucker
What is a Life of Climb??Learn more about the CEO journey here.
Have a Great Week.
Always interested to learn about you and your goals & challenges,
Mark Balestra Chair, Vistage Silicon Valley 408.781.9443?Direct [email protected] www.vistage.com/chairs/markbalestra www.dhirubhai.net/in/markbalestra
? PUBLISHER ? GHOSTWRITING ? INFLUENCER DESIGN ? FUTURE-PROOF MARKETING ? PERSONAL BRANDING
3 年Interesting Mark?thanks for sharing.