First Monday: April's economic signs awaited
— -- From TV to books to advice, here's your business briefing for April:
April 7-9: 41st International Advertising Association World Congress, "What's coming next?" Washington, D.C.
April 8: Morgan Stanley holds its annual meeting, providing an early sign of whether Wall Street firms' shareholders will hold directors accountable for subprime mortgage-related losses. Some shareholder advisory firms are recommending "No" votes on some director nominees.
April 10: Major retailers report same-store sales for March.
April 11-17: Actor Tim Robbins addresses the National Association of Broadcasters 2008 Conference and Exhibit, Las Vegas.
April 15: Labor Department releases the producer price index, a measure of the prices of wholesale goods.
April 16: Labor Department releases the consumer price index, a closely watched barometer of inflation.
April 30: Federal Reserve meets.
WATCH, LISTEN & READ
By Michelle Archer, Special for USA TODAY
ON TV:
Retirement Revolution
Airs on PBS, Monday, 10-11 p.m. ET (check local listings) or watch online at www.wttw.com/retirementrevolution
Paula Zahn and a bevy of financial experts urge Baby Boomers to take control of their retirement savings.
The good news? Boomers will enjoy healthier and longer lives than generations past. But making sure they don't outlive their money is almost solely up to them.
Or as one of the show's experts, Lisa Mensah of the Aspen Institute, puts it: "The big hope is you head into your retirement years with three legs of the stool — you have your Social Security, you have what you were able to build from your employer, and you have your private savings and the equity in your home. The sad part is that most people are headed in on pretty rickety legs."
Deadliest Catch, Season 4
Discovery Channel, April 15, 9 p.m. (ET/PT)
If a $40,000 paycheck for a couple weeks of deckhand labor sounds enticing, consider the dismal — and deadly — working conditions on a crab boat plying the tempestuous Bering Sea: bone-chilling temperatures, unforgiving winds that whip up giant waves, and backbreaking shifts that can grind on for more than 18 hours.
An equally dangerous — but probably less lucrative — job belongs to the camera operators who so vividly capture the grueling-but-captivating process of hauling in $85 million worth of Alaskan crab.
On deck this season to reel in viewers: injuries, greenhorn hazing and a 3,000-pound prank pulled up by the F/V Cornelia Marie. Discovery Channel airs a recap special Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT, the same day the book Deadliest Catch: Desperate Hours— which is full of salty captains' tales — lands on shelves.
Car of the Future
Airs on PBS, NOVA, April 22 at 8 p.m. ET/PT (check local listings) or watch online at pbs.org/nova/car beginning April 23
Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the boisterous hosts of NPR's Car Talk, crack wise on a road trip devoted to the technology behind tomorrow's cars. Highlights of the journey include a ride on a hydrogen-powered bus in Iceland and a confrontation with an auto-industry bigwig over the ridiculousness of a 500-horsepower gas guzzler.
With painful prices at the pump, one wonders how soon the super-efficient or alternatively fueled cars of tomorrow will become the norm. Amory Lovins, whose Rocky Mountain Institute is developing the Hypercar, an ultralight yet durable full-size hybrid-electric vehicle, says that development time is constrained by people and capital, not by value.
"So although higher oil prices do get people's attention and may help Hypercars to sell better, they can't get the cars to market much quicker," Lovins says.
BOOKS:
Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth (and Get Rich Trying)
By David Bach with Hillary Rosner (Broadway Books, $14.95); Tuesday
Bach, the prolific author behind the Automatic Millionaire and Start Late, Finish Rich, morphs into an environmental advocate who maintains a sharp eye on the bottom line.
"You can go green and save money," Bach says, "And if you invest green, you can get rich."
Among his tips:
•Save $580 per year and spare the environment 40 pounds of toxic chemicals each year by making your own cleaning products from baking soda, club soda, vinegar and salt.
•Get a reusable water bottle and fill it from the tap. Drinking the recommended amount of water (8 to 12 cups a day) in Aquafina costs about $2,500 a year, vs. $1 for the same amount of tap water.
The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today: 60 of the World's Greatest Minds Share Their Vision of the Next Half Century
Edited by Mike Wallace (Thomas Nelson, $24.99, April 15)
Veteran 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace compiles essays by Nobel Prize winners and other luminaries to reveal life in the year 2058: Coal and oil will be scarce; life expectancy will be 140 years; physical products like toasters will be "printed" by consumers on personal desktop molecular "nanofactories"; and people will no longer keep disease-causing cats as pets.
C-SPAN2 Book TV
Saturday (8 p.m.), Sunday (4 p.m.): Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistle-blower by Cynthia Cooper (Wiley, $27.95). Former WorldCom internal auditor shares her saga.
Saturday (noon), April 26 (9 a.m.): The Eccentric Billionaire: John D. MacArthur — Empire Builder, Reluctant Philanthropist, Relentless Adversary by Nancy Kriplen (Amacom, $24.00). Biographer delves into life of the extremely wealthy man behind "genius" grants.
CHECK IT OUT
By Gary H. Rawlins, USA TODAY
Obama's Internet offensive
A company trying to make use of the youthful digital pioneers that inhabit the Web 2.0 world could learn much from the tech-savvy presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Obama has deftly embraced — and been embraced by — the 18-to-30-year-old demographic that abounds on the Internet, writes Ellen McGirt in the April issue of Fast Company.
In particular, the campaign has plugged into social-networking sites such as Facebook. Its 24-year-old co-founder, Chris Hughes, has helped the campaign leverage online communities to raise funds, boost attendance at events and win votes. The campaign "made sure the message machine was providing the message where people were already assembled," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, in the article. That's a marketing formula that can heighten awareness of a new product or magnify the message of a presidential candidate.
Iraq + war = $3 trillion
Catch an excerpt of The Three Trillion Dollar War by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in the April edition of Vanity Fair. The authors calculate the full economic toll of the war in Iraq, arguing that spending on military operations is merely the tip of a vast fiscal iceberg. In the run-up to the war, the Bush administration suggested the cost would not exceed $60 billion.
Today, the price tag is approaching $800 billion. But that official number does not include relevant hidden expenditures, the authors say. The number does not include, for example, lifetime disability benefits for veterans, the cost of recruitment and the cost to the economy of higher oil. When these costs and others are calculated, the total cost is $3 trillion, they say.
High finance in the shadows
Bill Gross, arguably the nation's best-known bond fund manager, tells Kiplinger's Personal Finance that the American economy has never experienced anything like the current credit crisis. In an interview in the April edition, Gross observes that in the past five years, lending has been taken over by the shadow banking system.
That system, awash in complex financial instruments created to bypass regulations, has caused pain on Wall Street as lending has dried up. To bring back the spirit of lending, Gross says, the U.S. first has to rejuvenate the hedge funds, structured investment vehicles and financial conduits that make up the shadow system. That, he insists, won't happen soon.
Lessons of a mosquito's nose
To design better products, scientists are looking closely at the natural world — from the tiniest insects to huge humpback whales, according to an article in April's National Geographic. It's called biomimetics, and it involves applying designs in nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine and other fields.
Engineers are studying the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whales' flukes for ideas on improving airplane wings. Japanese medical researchers are making injections less painful by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito's proboscis, to minimize nerve stimulation.
5 QUESTIONS
Bill Kaplan ran the real life MIT blackjack team that won millions of dollars from casinos, although his character is replaced in the new movie 21 by a villainous fictionalized leader played by Kevin Spacey. Kaplan, CEO of FreshAddress, an e-mail services provider, plans to write a book on how the lessons of blackjack can be applied to management. Excerpts are edited for clarity and space.
Interview by Del Jones, USA TODAY
Q: What can business learn from blackjack?
A: Seeking opportunity and disequilibrium in the marketplace, managing and mitigating risk, generating returns in the long run without being beat by short-term swings. Pooling capital and human resources, because it can't be done with one person with a small amount of money. It's changing strategies as conditions evolve. We had one person whose job was to monitor casino openings throughout the world, and we would hit them in the first week or two when they were still figuring out how to run things. In the dot-com era, a lot of companies that went under didn't have business models, but some did. They took venture capital and hired 100 people and then burned through millions of dollars a month. They went back to the well, and there was no money even though they had a business idea that would have made it.
Q: So dot-coms were like blackjack card counters who made huge bets before the odds turned in their favor?
A: If you bet $500,000 a hand, even with a 1% advantage, you're going to get wiped out if you lose one or two hands in the short run. The variance is going to kill you, which is what happened to the dot-com companies.
Q: Is there a blackjack lesson to apply to the present subprime mortgage debacle?
A: They took unnecessary risk, because everyone was playing with someone else's money. We required our blackjack players to put some money in the bank so that they understood it from the investors' perspective. It was called the MIT blackjack team for a reason. It wasn't a club, it was a team, and everyone had a significant stake in the outcome.
Q:Wouldn't poker be a better game for business strategy and human nature? It also includes probability and risk with the added dimension of the bluff.
A: I guess it depends on whether you think bluffing is a part of doing business. We played with all cash and chips, so employee theft was a big risk. We ran their win rates through a computer simulation to see if what they won was within one or two standard deviations of what they should have won. It's hiring the right people, training them, motivating them, providing incentives, building a team culture.
Q: Do casinos still have to worry about blackjack teams wiping them out?
A: Even when we operated, it was kind of a non-issue for casinos. Even though we took millions, casinos make that much in a day. My guess is that there are just as many people trying as there always were, but 99.9% of them lose.
WHAT I READ ...
... with Shellye Archambeau, CEO of MetricStream
By Patrice Gaines, Special for USA TODAY
Shellye Archambeau is CEO of MetricStream, a business software company. She is also co-author of Marketing That Works and a guest lecturer at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Favorite books
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. It's a humorous tale combining the adventure of overcoming challenges with lessons about nature and small-town America. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I like it because it's serious, sad and funny at the same time.
What books appeal to her
I like a wide variety. I love business books that share key learnings or new perspectives. For fun, I enjoy action-packed mysteries, true-life inspirational stories and historical novels.
Books that have influenced her business career
Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth by David Thomson; High Output Management by Andrew Grove; Hope Is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale by Rick Page. Building a company is about creating a big vision, building and managing a team to go after it and remembering that nothing happens until someone buys something. These books helped me to remain focused on this.
What she's reading now
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil. This is a book about the future of artificial intelligence.
Last book given as a gift
I gave IlluStory (a make-your-own-book kit) to my niece. It's basically a guide (for children) to help them write and then illustrate their own story. She's very creative, and I wanted to encourage her.
Last books received as a gift
Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boomand the Lives of the New Rich by Robert Frank.
When she reads
On the elliptical machine during my morning workout, on the plane when I travel and while I wait for various doctors' appointments. I don't watch TV. I read magazines to relax.
What she reads for inspiration
Anything by Maya Angelou.