It's been 13 years since the initial launch of my website, Levelfieldenterprises.com in 2010, and I have finally updated and relaunched it (along with writing my blog, "All Things Commercial"). Why the wait? Probably because I re-entered the W-2 work force in 2013-2020 to lead Indirect Procurement at Citrix Systems, Inc. (now part of privately owned Cloud Software group), and then decided to spend my time traveling the world post-COVID, watch my grandkids grow into actual people with personalities and talents, and play a fair amount of public course golf. But I got a little itchy, and I decided to complicate my life by writing a book (two books, actually).
The first book was a Fathers Day gift in 2022 of Storyworth, an opportunity to answer 52 questions, one per week, chosen by my kids, about my life and the events that shaped it. Honesty can be very cathartic, especially when it comes to things like detailing your relationships with your family and friends (and how you define a "friend"), and your career path, accentuated by moments of great joy and success, and those of huge disappointment and outright failure. After pouring my heart out and wearing it on my sleeve, I feel as though a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. So I did it again, only this time collaborating with one of the greatest Supply Chain professors in N. America, Rob Handfield of North Carolina State Univ., to tell THE TRUTH about how business really gets done!
The second book will be published (hopefully) by year's end, and it will capture what really goes on in the multinational commercial world when making decisions about buying and selling, especially in the inner sanctums of the functions that drive these processes - Sales, Procurement, Supply Chain, the C-Suite and functions of internal budget holders that need to buy goods and services from third party suppliers. In a world filled with incredible bibles of best practices, we will explore the real motivators and forces at bay that lead to so many suboptimal decisions, and as usual, the guilty get rewarded for their behaviors which are reinforced by bad metrics, and the innocent get punished and saddled with cleaning up the mess.
If all of this sounds like a bitch session, you can stop here...my intent is to "Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood"® - Stephen Covey's 5th of his "7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I always talk and write about timing and cyclicality ("Timing isn't everything, it's the ONLY thing"®), and how the pendulum swings from one extreme to the polar opposite extreme and back again in our lives. It's a very large pit within which this pendulum swings (sorry Edgar Allan Poe), and it includes our corporate policies, our politics, our country, the impact of religion (and music) on our culture and laws, and the world at large. I look back at what has happened, unbelieving that we are where we are right now and the path that has taken us here.
Just look at the list of topics and you can see for yourself:
- Going from the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that never passed, to Roe v. Wade (1971), to Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) and its impact on women's reproductive rights, access to abortion services, healthcare and birth control, insurance coverage, and state legislatures backing of the "Right to Life" movement despite majority opinion polls that favor the opposite;
- Climate change, global warming and carbon neutral goals, and a company's shareholder commitments and stances on Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG) issues (including issues of Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) in the workplace and Employee Resource Groups), virtually none of which existed 20 years ago and all of which is now being challenged by a growing conservative backlash;
- Going from "being in the closet", to LGBTQ+ rights, legalized Gay marriage, different pronouns and Pride Days with rainbow flags to those asserting religious rights to deny services to those with whom they have conflicts of moral/religious values, and denial of benefits and consumer boycotts of companies and brands that have taken a stance in these matters;
- Diversity challenges in court over colleges and universities admission policies (including policies for legacy admissions, ethnic mix and socio-economic backgrounds), now extending to teaching topics of diversity sensitivity in corporate settings that are designed to influence hiring and promotion decisions in the workplace, and the growth and contraction of the use of diverse suppliers;
- From the US being the melting pot of ethnicity with immigrants from all over the world, to significantly restricting legal immigration and imposing harder visa requirements (especially H-1B visas) that offer employment in the US to foreigners, even if they were educated in the US, thereby dampening the unique US advantage in innovation;
- From support for authoritarian rule that values "law and order" and maintaining the status quo, to a pro-democracy emphasis on civil rights based on principles of balance of power, "one man one vote" and majority rule with minority consent, back to gerrymandering voting districts to deny all of these and re-establish authoritarian rule;
- From freely targeting people in marketing campaigns, to issues of data privacy and restricting how Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is managed, to how data in apps is shared and stored but requires your permission to do so, to how PII is protected from cybersecurity hackers and ransomware attacks;
- The swing from free trade and enterprise to more highly enforced tariff regimes that erect barriers to commerce (back to the days of mercantilism and "beggar thy neighbor" protectionist policies);
- The movement to outsource/offshore everything to low cost countries (LCC), to reduce costs/increase profits/fight inflation, then to "right-sourcing", then to protecting supply chains as evidenced by their current backlash against sourcing in China and/or countries that violate human rights, child labor laws, and export conflict minerals, all of which is fueling the "near-shore" movement to bring home manufacturing production (microchips) and service delivery to our own country; and,
- The move of the technology revolution to generative artificial Intelligence (AI) that has the power to extremely improve productivity and shorten cycle times to market for new innovations. In the wake of ChatGPT, more and more companies say they are concerned about facing public criticism over their use of AI, thanks to the rising fears over the technology's negative impacts, including job displacements and the generation and spread of false information, and how we must balance between how technology can be used without upsetting their existing and potential customers and employees. As examples:
- The NY Times, which is contemplating legal action against AI providers, updated its Terms of Service on Aug. 3rd to forbid using Times content in "training a machine learning or AI system."
- Microsoft is updating its Terms of Service on Sept. 30th to both assert its right to use data for AI training while prohibiting others from that type of use. Microsoft chose to restrict Bing chat to Edge as its infrastructure wasn't capable of handling a wider release, but they will soon be making Bing's full AI chat features available on the more popular Google Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers.
- The Writers and Actors strikes in Hollywood over terms that include use of generative AI that can either substitute for their work or infringe on the unauthorized use of their likeness.
