Lunch with Mike Panaggio, DME CEO
It’s always rewarding to meet entrepreneurial people who started something tiny and grew it to an enormous enterprise.
So it was great to meet Mike Panaggio for lunch a few weeks ago …
Mike is the founder and CEO of DME, a direct marketing firm in Daytona Beach, Florida. In 1982, he started it as a small printing company. Today, they have probably one of the largest concentration of digital presses in North America. But their business isn’t printing - it’s direct marketing.
The technology they’ve assembled for creating, managing, and tracking marketing campaigns via mail, phone, web, email, etc. is, frankly, amazing. I was impressed by Mike’s strategic thinking - and by how much money he was willing to invest to win accounts like Microsoft and Harrah’s.
There’s something about how really successful people carry themselves that I find fascinating. Really successful people have no need to impress anyone. Nor do they need your business. Rather, they have something really, really good that, if you’re interested, you can get in on.
Some people try to portray themselves this way, and some just are. Mike just is.
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On a related note, this is my first real close-up experience with direct marketing, and it’s a different industry than I thought it was. Direct marketing as an industry may bring to mind all the junk mail that we recycle every day … but nothing could be farther from the state-of-the-art that DME has refined it to.
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I have to say, this is one of the biggest benefits of my job: meeting cool smart people.
iPod Hi-Fi: Kinda ugly
OK, just first impressions. Kinda ugly, isn’t it?
All Canadians are criminals, officially
As you know, we are all criminals in Canada.
We steal music, ripping it from the skinny hands of starving artistes, leaving them and their 5 children and 3 spouses to the (rather tender, actually) mercies of the Canadian welfare system.
That is why the Copyright Board of Canada is re-introducing a levy on the sale of all blank media. It’s the least we can do for all those poor singers and songwriters out there. If they benefit even a tiny bit, we are happy to pay double or triple the actual cost of our CDs and DVDs:
As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).
Since all Canadians are criminals, we’ll just charge them all right up front.
Bloody thieves.
Dawn, and The Accident, by Elie Wiesel
Recently finished the second and third horsemen of the apocalypse, I mean the second and third novels in the quasi trilogy that follow Elie Wiesel’s Night.
I wonder if Dawn is based on personal experience, or just a short story. It’s the account of a Jewish terrorist who kills an English soldier in cold blood.
The Accident feels like reading John Paul Sartre’s Nausea, only slightly less nauseous.
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Last night I finished Friedman’s The World is Flat.
It’s a fairly wow big idea book; following are some of my notes and thoughts. This is not a review or anything like that; it’s just things I want to remember from the book.
Ten forces that flattened the world:
- Berlin Wall coming down, opening the iron curtain and creating the idea of one world market/community
- The dot-com bubble, with all the over-building of investment and infrastructure that resulted
- Common data languages and computer interoperability standards
- Open source software and community projects
- Outsourcing of work (kickstarted by Y2K)
- Offshoring of production (especially China)
- Supply-chaining - the science of coordination
- In-sourcing (hiring companies to perform traditionally internal company processes)
- In-forming (more and better data freely available for all
- “The steroids:” computing technology that is digital, mobile, personal, and virtual
The triple convergence:
- global, web-enabled collaboration: sharing of knowledge and work
- business process reorganization to take advantage of technologies: flattening of hierarchies, consolidating like functions, virtual companies, etc.
- China, India, and Russia joining the world markets at about the same time
On political and economic systems:
“Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.”
On China:
“China has more than 160 cities with a population of 1 million or more.”
“China is a threat, China is a customer, and China is an opportunity. You have to internalize China to succeed. You cannot ignore it.”
On international job competition:
“When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you [kids] is: ‘Finish your homework - people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”
On change:
“No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”
On staying competitive in the global job market:
“Average Joe has to become special, specialized, or adaptable Joe.”
On being in trouble:
“One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries … when memories exceed dreams, the end is near.”
Romans chapter 3 (in simple, modern English)
This is the third installment of what I hope to be a complete “translation” of Romans. Please note that this is not scripture; it is my understanding of scripture. Any with questions or concerns should check the original.
In Romans chapter 3, Paul starts to introduce a solution to the problem of being right with God: faith. (And, what God gives us through faith!)
Breaking China’s Firewall: U of T doing Google’s work
A week ago the story broke that researchers at the University of Toronto were working on technology that would allow internet users in China to access anything they wanted, anywhere on the web, without being traced.
The beauty of their technology is that it uses the same networking port that all ecommerce runs on … so authorities won’t be able to shut it down without lobotomizing their internet traffic. This is exactly what a company like Google should have invented. (Or Yahoo!, or Microsoft for that matter).
Why?
Reason #1
Why should Google have done this? Their mission, so they say, is to make all the world’s information accessible. That, in itself, is reason number one.
Reason #2
Plus, their motto is “do not evil.” It’s been sneered at often, and with good cause. It is sophomoric and silly. Not for the usual reasons - that they’re a company, after all, or that corporations have no business inserting themselves in moral conversations.
Rather, it’s sophomoric and silly because simply refraining from doing evil is not nearly enough. To be good, you must do good … not simply withhold from doing evil. As Edmund Burke said, “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” However, silly as it is, it’s reason number two.
Reason #3
It’s great that the University of Toronto researchers are coming out with a tool that can help ordinary Chinese access any information they want on the web, without government censorship.
But Google should have come out with that tool. Why? Google could bring instant scale to a tool like that. Google’s adoption of anything puts it in the spotlight. Who knows whether the U of T’s tool will become well-known or popular in China? If Google did this, China’s censors would have been swamped. China’s people would be given much more free access to information, and that would have enormous consequences, over time, on China’s political situation.
Sure, China would have countered, somehow. But Google is the smartest company in the world, supposedly. They could have stayed one step ahead. Probably more steps ahead than some post-doc researchers at the U of T.
China would have had two choices: cut the physical pipes, or accept continual, high-level leakage. Cutting the pipes would have been economic suicide: China’s lifeline is commerce and commerce does not exist without network connectivity.
So when, finally, China’s government would have thrown in the censorship towel, Google would have owned the Chinese market. They would be the very company whose technology had forced the Chinese government to accede to their own people’s desire for information. Information from Google, and other providers. And that’s the very prize that Google is now selling its soul to win.
Which is the third reason why Google should have created the tool that infiltrated the Great Firewall of China: they could have won without doing evil.
They could have won by doing smart good.
World’s largest Windows error message
When you’re using Windows to power a 2-story high Times Square video billboard, you’ve got to be prepared for nonsense like this:
(That’s a screenshot of Addam Gaffin’s pic.)
We shoulda sent the juniors
A couple of days after our women won their second straight gold, Canada’s men’s hockey team is out of the Olympics after an embarrassing 6-game run that included losses to Switzerland (well known hockey power, ahem) and Finland.
Today they were knocked out in the semis by Russia.
I don’t blame the players - I think every player really was trying. But they just never jelled as a team. And I don’t think they had the intensity that Canada almost always brings to international hockey.
I almost think we should have sent our juniors - who recently won the 2006 World Junior Championships in Vancouver.
Ten to one they would have done better.
We’re only going to kill him if it doesn’t hurt
Okay, am I the only one who thinks this whole story is just completely bonkers?
A CONVICTED murderer in California was due to be put to death with a new kind of injection in the early hours of this morning after a federal judge ruled for the first time that the usual method may inflict “excessive pain”.
The execution of Michael Morales, who has spent 23 years on death row for the torture, rape and murder of a teenager, had been due to take place 24 hours earlier but was thrown into turmoil after the anaesthetists suddenly refused their services on ethical grounds.
Apparently the concern is that the drug they were going to use would cause the convicted killer some pain - possibly agonizing pain - while they were killing him.
How modern this is: it’s not the killing that’s the problem, just the pain that accompanies it.
Unbelievable.
If you’re going to go so far as to execute a convicted criminal, in most cases and in reasonable circumstances that is the most violent and painful and permanent punishment you can possibly impose on him. A few minutes of pain, frankly, is no big deal compared to dying. Even agonizing pain.
On the other hand, if you are so squeamish that you don’t want to be causing any pain at all, why on earth are you killing people? That’s the worst pain - when you define pain as negative stimulus - that you can imagine.
I’m reminded of Spider Robinson’s characterization of the years leading up to the millenium: the crazy years.
These are crazy years too. We’re only going to kill people if it doesn’t hurt.
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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