MSNBC - Homeland Security changes expected soon

MSNBC - Homeland Security changes expected soon: "
MSNBC.com
Homeland Security changes expected soon
Creation of �policy shop� among top considerations
By Brock N. Meeks
Chief Washington correspondent
MSNBC
Updated: 12:48 a.m. ET June 24, 2005
WASHINGTON - Major changes could be in store for the massive Department of Homeland Security when the results of a long awaited top-to-bottom review of the agency’s mission, procedures and personnel are unveiled as soon as next week.

Department Secretary Michael Chertoff ordered the 60-day review when he took over from Tom Ridge. Eighteen teams will report on their “observations about where we have achieved, what we need to achieve, where we have fallen short, what our gaps are and how we might think of solutions, outcomes that would address those gaps,” Chertoff said Thursday at a meeting with the Homeland Security Advisory Council.



WASHINGTON - Major changes could be in store for the massive Department of Homeland Security when the results of a long awaited top-to-bottom review of the agency�s mission, procedures and personnel are unveiled as soon as next week.
Department Secretary Michael Chertoff ordered the 60-day review when he took over from Tom Ridge. Eighteen teams will report on their �observations about where we have achieved, what we need to achieve, where we have fallen short, what our gaps are and how we might think of solutions, outcomes that would address those gaps,� Chertoff said Thursday at a meeting with the Homeland Security Advisory Council.
�I�ve now begun the process of meeting with the groups and talking through some of the solutions and starting to task out things we might do to report on this,� Chertoff said. �I anticipate that I will have completed this process basically by the end of this month. And then as we move forward, I think we�ll begin to see the fruits of this process.�
Although DHS is just 2 1/2 years old, it�s drawn its share of criticism, both from the private sector and from Congress, for everything from cumbersome airline passenger screening procedures to its inability to funnel money to state and local homeland security agencies to its color-coded terror threat alert system.
Chertoff made it clear from the beginning of the review than everything in the department, from how it purchases office supplies to procedures for screening cargo and passengers to the terror alert system were on the table for change.
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Lateral thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lateral thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Lateral thinking is a term invented by Edward de Bono. He defines it as a technique of problem solving by approaching problems indirectly at diverse angles instead of concentrating on one approach at length. For example:"

Failure Is Part of Success

Failure Is Part of Success: "Nicholas Hall, serial entrepreneur and founder of Startupfailures.com, says succeeding involves bouncing back and overcoming self-doubt"

For This Author, Writing Is Only the Beginning - New York Times

For This Author, Writing Is Only the Beginning - New York TimesETNA, N.H. - Slouched on a sofa in a faded T-shirt and jeans, a tousle of dyed-auburn hair trending gray at the roots, Janet Evanovich looks less like the chief of a budding media empire than a mother trying hard to be her daughter's best friend.

And there, next to her, is the daughter, Alexandra, whose dyed platinum-blond hair befits her stint as a freelance graphics designer for a heavy-metal band's fan site and her love for her red Ducati motorcycle, looking nothing like a corporate marketing guru.

Yet the two women are all of those things - best friends, metalheads and meticulous businesswomen. Together with Janet's son and husband, both named Peter, who handle everything from investments to the packing of signed books for shipment to stores, they make up the family enterprise known as Evanovich Inc.
And they have transformed Ms. Evanovich, 62, from a failing romance writer who once burned a box of rejection letters on her curb into a mini-industry whose success is beginning to emulate the sprawling domains of authorial heavyweights like James Patterson.

Last year, she sold an estimated one million books in hardcover and three million more paperbacks, earning more than $3 million in royalties from the paperbacks and several million more in advances and royalties on the hardcovers. The empire now includes two continuing mystery series: one featuring the sharp-elbowed bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, published by St. Martin's Press, whose latest installment, "Eleven on Top" went on sale June 21, and a second, published by HarperCollins, which began last fall with "Metro Girl."

While her success speaks to her tenacity and devotion to family, it owes as much to marketing prowess. When fans, impatient for her next novel, began asking her to recommend other writers like her, Ms. Evanovich hired one instead. Thus began a separate line of paperback romance-thrillers with Charlotte Hughes as co-author and St. Martin's as publisher. Four books in that series became best sellers.

And rather than risk having a previous publisher reissue her romance novels from more than a decade ago, Ms. Evanovich bought back the rights from Bantam, an imprint of Random House Inc., and resold them to HarperCollins, which has begun publishing them in a revised and updated format.

Ms. Evanovich acknowledges that her strategy is little different than it might be for selling toothpaste. "When you're trying to expand your business, it's about real estate in the stores," she said in an interview at her hilltop home in rural western New Hampshire, and more products in more categories mean more shelf space.

But while her relentless self-promotion has attracted more fans, it has also created some tensions. Michael Morrison, the president of HarperMorrow, the HarperCollins division that published "Metro Girl," said the interplay of multiple publishers and product lines is not ideal. "I'm a believer that a publisher and an author should have one primary relationship," he said. The sales of "Metro Girl" did not match Ms. Evanovich's previous best sellers, but Mr. Morrison said that over all he was pleased with her work.

"It's much easier to work with an author and orchestrate a publishing career if you have all of the books under one house," he said.

But Ms. Evanovich does not apologize for flooding the market with a new book every two to three months, nor for her calculated efforts to send her new novels straight to the top of the best-seller lists.

It has now become a rite of summer: each of the last five books in the numerical series featuring Stephanie Plum - from "Hot Six" in 2000 through "Ten Big Ones" last year - was No. 1 on The New York Times's hardcover best-seller list its first week on sale. Last fall, "Metro Girl" also had its debut at No. 1.

To put that feat in perspective, long-running series by James Patterson and Sue Grafton cannot match that current streak of immediate No. 1's.

Ms. Evanovich plots her first week of promotion to include book signings at big stores that report their sales to publications that publish best-seller lists. As in past years, the publication of the new Stephanie Plum novel will include a Stephanie Plum Daze festival in Trenton, the setting for the novels. Featuring live music, food, a character dress-up contest and historical-society tours of Trenton sites mentioned in the series, a festival on June 25 is expected to attract several thousand fans. Barnes & Noble will be there selling books.

She does not simply plan an event and expect people to show up, however. Evanovich Inc. constantly reminds its audience of a coming book, using its Internet site and a snail-mail newsletter, television commercials and radio spots. Ms. Evanovich oversees the design of book covers and the production of advertisements; she recently fired the agency that was devising commercials for "Eleven on Top" and enlisted her family and publisher to come up with a new pitch.

Behind the marketing machinations is Alexandra, 32, who writes the newsletter and illustrates both it and the Web site, www.evanovich.com. Until recently, she also managed the online store that sells hats, mugs and other paraphernalia, but its growth forced the family to outsource the job to a company in Florida.

The task of running Evanovich Inc. has grown so rapidly that last year the family decided it needed office space away from their hilltop home, where all four family members live at least some of the time.

Ms. Evanovich's son, Peter, 35, who manages the finances, oversaw the purchase of a $480,000 fixer-upper ranch-style house in Hanover near the Dartmouth campus for office space. Other recent family acquisitions include a $6.2 million waterside estate in Naples, Fla., and twin $1.6 million Boston condominiums - one for Mom, one for daughter - overlooking Boston Common.

Ms. Evanovich's husband of 40 years, the elder Peter, applies his Ph.D. in mathematics to the study of her contracts and the sales and distribution information generated by publishers and bookstores.

"I feel like I never would have been a success and gotten published without my family," Ms. Evanovich said. Throughout the years collecting rejection slips, and even as she began to earn a few thousand dollars per book for her early romances, "they never said, 'Why don't we go on vacation like other families?' " She added, "They just told me, 'You take your time and write.' "

The fans clearly love it. According to Nielsen BookScan, they bought nearly 300,000 copies of "Ten Big Ones" and 175,000 copies of "Metro Girl" from traditional book outlets. Ms. Evanovich's publishers say the numbers are far higher, perhaps twice as much, because a large portion her fans buy their books at Wal-Mart, Sam's Club and other stores that are not counted by BookScan. Clearly, her sales are big, though still well short of the levels reached by the likes of Nora Roberts, Mr. Patterson and John Grisham.

The critics have sometimes been less than enthusiastic. Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin said Ms. Evanovich's works were "the mystery-novel equivalent of comfort food." And more than once, her writing has been called formulaic.

Ms. Evanovich does not deny that; she simply wonders what is wrong with it.

"I'm a writer, but this is a business," she said. "You have to look at it in the way you would look at any business. You have to have honesty to the product. You have to meet consumer expectations. You give them value for their money and give them a product that they need. I don't see anything wrong with all these things. And I don't think it's a bad thing to meet consumers' expectations."

Take Up a New Career at 50? In Syracuse, Life After Layoffs - New York Times

Take Up a New Career at 50? In Syracuse, Life After Layoffs - New York TimesIf this were 10-plus years ago, a majority of these people would have simply hit the interstate and headed south and gotten a job there," Mr. Davis said. "The interesting thing is some 500 of these workers have returned to school, and that shows they think there is opportunity here."

Roger A. Evans, an economist with the state Labor Department, was bearish about this city's prospects. "This area is doing very well outside the manufacturing sector," he said, noting that the number of nonmanufacturing jobs in the area had risen by 8,700 to 287,400 in the last three years, while factory jobs fell by 5,200 to 33,000.

Some workers have scoured the Internet to find industries that are hiring. A Web search convinced Chris Fiacchi, 34, that he should study respiratory therapy.

"A lot of us chose medical fields," he said. "With all the aging baby boomers, there's going to be a large increase in medical staffing. You don't have to worry about layoffs there."

Thirty years ago, Barbara Ann Goss left Syracuse University after her freshman year and went to work at Carrier. Now she has returned to college to study health information technology.

Example Mission Statement - Free online personal mission statement builders

Example Mission Statement - Free online mission statement builder

A wizard will take you step-by-step through the process of creating a unique, personalized Mission Statement to guide your life.
http://www.franklincovey.com/missionbuilder/

"People with goals succeed because they know where they are going. It's as simple as that." - Earl Nightingale

http://www.nightingale.com/tMission_ExampleStatement.asp?Source=INTGOOGAD03

Drucker Foundation Self-Assessment Tool: Content: How to Develop a Mission Statement

Drucker Foundation Self-Assessment Tool: Content: How to Develop a Mission Statementhanging the mission -- or creating an organization's first mission statement -- is a process of gathering ideas and suggestions for the mission and honing them into a short, sharply focused phrase that meets specific criteria. Peter Drucker says the mission should "fit on a T-shirt," yet a mission statement is not a slogan. It is a precise statement of purpose. Words should be chosen for their meaning rather than beauty, for clarity over cleverness.

Ex-Tyco Execs Convicted in Second Trial

Ex-Tyco Execs Convicted in Second TrialNEW YORK (AP) -- L. Dennis Kozlowski, accused of looting hundreds of millions of dollars from Tyco International Ltd. to fund a lavish lifestyle of parties and extravagant purchases, was convicted Friday of grand larceny and other charges.

Sarbane-Oxley Resources: A Collection of Helpful Tools - Deloitte & Touche USA LLP

Sarbane-Oxley Resources: A Collection of Helpful Tools - Deloitte & Touche USA LLP: "The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 changed the way we conduct business in the United States for the better—but the law is complex and can be confusing. Find below articles, publications and tools to help you understand the law's requirements."

Ethics: The Next Generation

Ethics: The Next Generation Excerpts from a Sunday Address, October 3, 2004, Kate Lovelady

A Culture of Cheating.....
Now back to Generation Y, the youth of today. Some data say they’re taking fewer drugs than the previous generation and waiting longer to become sexually active. I suspect that, rather than being less interested in sex and drugs, they just don’t leave their computers long enough to indulge in nondigital vices.

Another book that’s come out recently is called The Culture of Cheating, and it details the context in which these kids are growing up: whatever you have to do to get rich you’d better do if you don’t want to be a “chump.” Everyone cheats: Martha Stewart, Ken Lay, the president lied about weapons in Iraq, priests are creepy, reporters make things up, executives fire people while giving themselves raises, and so on and so forth. Two million Americans now have offshore bank accounts to avoid paying taxes. So if ethics are contextual, and America has become a cheating culture, we are in trouble. If we want a more ethical culture, we have to take very seriously the challenge of creating a new context for the coming generations.

This cynical theme of Looking Out for Number One seems to run through the split between private and public ethics in our culture. We even sell our moral messages by appealing to enlightened self-interest: don’t do illegal drugs because they’ll hurt you and get you in trouble, practice moderation for your own good. What about other people’s good? What if I got up here and said, “Sure, taking care of your health has benefits for you, but the main reason you should take better care of yourselves is so that the community won’t have to spend its resources on your bypass surgeries and instead can wipe out poverty.” Would you be more motivated to eat your greens and take the stairs? That’s not how we think as Americans. We probably don’t even believe that any human beings think that way, since our individualism is so woven into the fabric of our personalities and our culture.

Three Factors that Lead to Ethical Behavior
There is a now famous study done in the 1980s by Samuel and Pearl Oliner. Samuel was a Polish Jew whose life was saved by a Christian who hid him from the Nazis. Samuel became a sociologist, and 40 years later, with his wife Pearl, he undertook the Altruistic Personality Project. Over 700 people who lived in Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy during the Nazi occupation were interviewed. The interviewees included those who did and those who did not rescue Jews during the Holocaust. The Oliners wanted to know what it was that had compelled some people to become rescuers—for no money (usually) and in the face of death if caught.

They found that those who became rescuers didn’t share any particular philosophy, religion, or belief or nonbelief in god or an afterlife. Rather, the Oliners found that most rescuers had been raised in a certain kind of family and community context. Part of the context included some basic values, primarily to care for and commit to actively protect and enhance the well-being of everyone, reaching far outside the individual’s family. The Oliners called these “extensive” values, and they contrasted them with what they called “constricted” values of detachment and exclusivity. Today we might say that these were not “family values,” but rather “humanity values.”

Learning to Empathize with Others
Based on their research of rescuers during the Holocaust, the Oliners described the social context that is likely to teach these humanity values and to create an altruistic person. I want to share three with you. The first is learning to empathize with others. There’s a nice summary of the Oliner rescuer study in the book Ethical People and How They Get To Be That Way by Ethical Leader Arthur Dobrin. Dobrin explains that ethical people were raised by caretakers who gave empathic reasons for rules. Their parents said don’t hit other people, not simply because it’s bad or because that’s the rule, but because hitting people causes pain and fear and unhappiness—and treating others kindly makes them happy. Several studies have shown that ethics are emotional before they are rational; that is, if the ability to empathize with others isn’t there, a million facts won’t make someone care. Ethical Societies are communities and not simply lecture series because ethics are more than words, ethics develop in a caring community that nurtures and feeds empathy as well as presenting information.

Children's Participation in Altruistic Activities
The second and perhaps most important context in creating altruistic people was participating as a child in altruistic activities with family and community. It was not specific beliefs that were taught, but actions by relatives, friends, and community groups that made the difference. Deeds above creeds. These deeds were not necessarily big. Simply watching out for neighbors, taking food to an elderly relative, pitching in with community projects, was enough to create in the children a habit of altruistic activity. It’s usually not enough to want to act ethically; humans are creatures of habit and it can be uncomfortable to try something new. At the Riverdale-Yonkers Society where I was the Leader Intern last year, they host homeless men overnight once a week. As the folks who run the shelter here know, it can be difficult to find volunteers; most people feel nervous or awkward around people who seem different, they don’t know what to expect. One of the families in Riverdale that cooks and stays over with the men once a month includes six-year-old Nicolas. And when you see Nick helping to inflate the mattresses and sitting down at the table to eat with the men, you just know how confident he’ll be as an adult in reaching out and making connections with people. He’s very inspiring. Sierra is also part of an ethically engaged family; she and her sisters take part in doing good deeds for neighbors. Sierra recently read her poetry at an antiwar rally in their hometown, and no doubt she’s going to help her dad with his next project, to build an Ethical Culture meetinghouse on their property.

Nick and Sierra have fun with their activities, but one of my favorite findings about altruistic people was that although they took part in ethical projects as children, they didn’t necessarily like it. We tend to think that requiring our kids to do things will make them hate those things, but in fact requiring altruistic behavior, as part of family and community projects, creates habits that resurface later. I emphasize family and community because children learn a lot more from watching than they do from listening. “Do as I say, not as I do” has never worked. Several Ethical Societies recently decided to accept kids into their Sunday ethics program only if the parents also agree to be an active part of the community. Of course, every once in a while there’s an emergency, and some parents work Sundays, but the point is that caretakers need to understand that children learn what we value from what we do. Some parents would rather be home reading the Times while the next generation supposedly learns to value ethical community. But kids aren’t stupid, they’ll know that to their parents ethical community isn’t really as valuable as staying home alone reading the Times. And more than likely that’s what they’ll value too when they grow up.

Values Education
The third and final context I want to mention in creating ethical people is values education. Although participation by caretakers and community in action is vital, rules and principles do have an effect, particularly if they are expressed in a variety of ways. Values are transmitted to the next generation if they’re a part of the varied fabric of a community, part of not only lessons and lectures, but also songs, plays, stories, traditions, and rituals. All the research says that if you want your values to be passed on, you have to do more than talk about them. You have to explore and celebrate them in as many ways as you can think of. And you have to act on them, visibly and continually, inside as well as outside... as a form of ethical action, building a context of a strong, vibrant, diverse ethical community.

Will the Next Generation Create an Ethical Culture?
Over the last few decades there’s been a move away from traditional religion, certainly in Europe, to a lesser extent in America. But many “unchurched” people eventually find that the lack of real community in their lives makes it harder to hang onto their ideals, and especially difficult to pass them on to their kids.

Is the Offshore Sun Setting?

Is the Offshore Sun Setting?: "According to a survey just out from consulting firm DiamondCluster International (Nasdaq: DTPI - News), several trends have begun to gain strength, merge, and push back at that famous 2004 election-year bugaboo: offshore outsourcing, or 'offshoring.' Collecting the results of interviews with more than 450 tech and outsourcing company executives, DiamondCluster's 2005 global IT outsourcing study arrives at some startling suggestions on where the offshoring trend may be heading."

Senate may be ready to help airlines on Yahoo! News

Print Story: Senate may be ready to help airlines on Yahoo! NewsA key Senate lawmaker said on Tuesday he was ready to help airlines close pension gaps, as chiefs of two carriers warned that legislative action is needed soon for their companies to avert possible bankruptcy.

Sen. Charles Grassley (news, bio, voting record), the Iowa Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said he was willing to let airlines stretch out pension payments, but airlines should freeze plans so no more benefits are promised that they cannot pay.

Gerald Grinstein, chief executive of Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL - news), and Douglas Steenland, chief executive of Northwest Airlines, earlier told Grassley's committee that pensions covering more than 150,000 workers and retirees are unmanageable and could push each into court protection.