DGrant Gibson

Big decisions must rest upon the answer to small questions. This original yet profound statement by well known and respected Alaska Pioneer Bud Helmericks was written in his book, The Last of The Bush Pilots of which was published in 1969.

I have been a pilot for many years and highly respected Bud Helmericks as a true role model for Alaskan aviation pioneering and true leadership. I have had a copy of this book for years, read it and flipped through it reading short passages, reading this statement every time, yet missing something profound. This year I once again picked up the book from my library shelf after reading about the death of this great man.

Where would you find one of the most perilous air routes in the world? Colombian pilots fly through extreme storms and hot days in 2nd world war Douglas DC-3’s over dense forests to deliver food and goods to villagers isolated from the rest of the world…

Gear up in the wells point is Villavicencio, a city in the foothills of the Andean Cordillera. There destination? Any one of the number of native Indian villages scattered throughout the jungle, cut off from civilisation.

The sound of the plane’s arrival in the villages is a major event. Landing here only once or twice a month, its cargo comprising vegetables, beds, dogs, chicken, TV sets.

But the greatest danger is not storms, mechanical faults or extreme heat, it’s the amazon jungle below. Known as a green hell. A green hell twice the size of Texas. With no space to land…

There’s a certain cadence that you can feel when you spend time hanging any well-run startup company. The management team has to have a bias toward making decisions. They know that a 70% accurate decision made quickly and based on sound principles is better than a 90% decision made after careful consideration.
The startup entrepreneur knows that they’re going to be wrong often. They’re flexible and willing to admit when they’re wrong. They don’t create a culture of punishment for mistakes. They live be the credo that if you’re never making mistakes you’re not trying hard enough’. This is an excerpt from a great article on TechCrunch…

Beth Wheeler, a 36 year old women from the UK, weighed 308 lbs when she got engaged. In planning for her marriage one year later, she ordered a size 12 wedding dress, which was 18 sizes smaller than her usual clothes purchases, knowing the only way she would fit into it was to commit to a health regime/weight loss program to lose 140 lbs before the special day. Her future husband James Wheeler’s proposal was the catalyst that motivated Beth to join a local Weight Watchers group. She made the decision to…

Need inspiration? Need to view things differently? Observe the ingenuity, creativity and strength of character to master a hostile environment. Deep in Bolivia’s jungles and steep cliffs the Yungas people do not walk. They fly. On ropes. Like birds. Faster than astronauts. These ‘birds’ are known as cocaleros, or coca harvesters. They use ropes to swing across the narrow valleys, suspended from ancient rusting pulleys. Consider the terrain…

Ralph Waldo Emerson states that the one thing mankind seeks with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our own propriety. To lose our sempiternal memory, our eternal/dateless memory, and do something without knowing how or why; in short draw a new circle. As nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm and spontaneity , we can only draw into a new circle by letting go through the energy of abandonment. This letting go

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Signal-to-noise ratio is defined as the power ratio between a signal (meaningful information) and the background noise (unwanted signal)…

How does this affect you and I? A great deal it turns out! If you are like me, wanting to put your attention to only important stuff only to find distractions occurring frequently that interupt the flow of concentration, then you are getting more noise than signal in your daily activities. In physics, power is the rate at which work is performed or energy is converted. In business, power is the rate at which work is performed or energy converts into momentum. Smart entrepreneurs/business people can do less work and achieve more in a given time frame…

Robert Shiller, a Professor of Economics at Yale University and Chief Economist of MacroMarkets LLC, is a frequent writer on market bubbles. He is one of several writers sharing intelligent economic views which can be read here . He is often asked where the next speculative market bubble is likely to be. Housing? The stock market? He admits he does not know for certain but does have some hunches. Robert’s Shiller’s view is that bubbles are social epidemics, fostered by a sort of interpersonal contagion. He states that a bubble forms when the contagion rate goes up for ideas that support a bubble. But he further states that contagion rates depend on patterns of thinking, which are difficult to judge. Besides the obvious choices for a bubble, Robert sees a favorite dark horse candidate for such an event- land values. Our preconceived notion that the housing market and farmland always move together are inaccurate. Robert states that,from 1911-2010, in the US, the co-relation between annual real growth of prices of homes and farmland was only 5%. Real farm prices have only fallen 5% from their 2008 prices levels vs. the 37% decline in real home prices since their peak in 2006. Since food abundance/shortages are the flavor of new stories, attention is directed to it with emotion.

So, why am I putting attention to this?

I notice in my wanderings on the net a good thing happening through the voice of the web community. There is a resurgence of the desire to validate the importance of blogging full articles vs. the route of short spontaneous bits by tweeting. Yes, I’m a tweeter guy. As a matter of fact, this post will be sent to my tweet voice as well, but as an invite to come here and read more. I see a lovely marriage of

“David Cameron today announced the most ambitious change to the welfare system since it began, promising to re-introduce a culture of responsibility that he said had been lost.

The Welfare Reform Bill will replace the complex array of benefits with a single Universal Credit, strip benefits from those who repeatedly turn down job offers and introduce new health check-ups for those who claim a disability stops them working.

Speaking in east London alongside the architect of the reforms, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, the Prime Minister said: ‘Never again will work be the wrong financial choice. Never again will we waste opportunity. “

This is an excerpt from an article written in the Daily Mail about the massive changes taking place in the UK. This new normal I believe will become the economic standard round the world to aid in the correction of countries stretched to the breaking point in their local economies.