Earlier this week in Boston, we ran a small, intimate workshop for about 20 of our 1to1 Media "insiders." These are folks who regularly access our Web site and Webinars, subscribe to the 1to1 Magazine or to our new journal, and so forth. We hand-picked the participants from our opt-in database, in order to ensure that the room would be filled with people who had their "fingers on the trigger" of analytics at their companies. What we wanted most were those folks who were wrestling with the problem of starting, upgrading, or just managing their companies' customer analytics functions.

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Dr. Dean (yes, he's an MD) did a session at Fortune Magazine's Brainstormtech last week in Pasadena, and one complaint he has about the current state of political discourse on the health care debate is that the Republicans just aren't being serious (in his opinion). Therefore, he says, the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, more moderate than their Pelosi-led House brethren, are at least keeping Congress honest. Dean says he's happy at least someone is raising the right issues, and of course one of the issues that greatly impacts the constituencies of many Blue Dogs is the Pelosi bill's initiative to "soak the rich" to pay for the increased costs of health care. According to Dr. Dean, this is an initiative that would send our own marginal income tax rates on the top brackets into the stratosphere, where we would be surpassed only by countries like Sweden and Denmark. (The top marginal rates proposed by Pelosi are greater than 50%! What are they thinking?)

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I attended a fascinating, intimate breakfast session at Fortune Magazine's Brainsstormtech Conference in Pasadena on Friday (Twitter #brainstormtech). This was maybe the most interesting session I attended at the whole three-day event. There were three presenters, from Cisco, Athena Health Systems, and mPedigree. The mPedigree guy, Bright Simons (pronounced "Simmons"), developed a technology and launched a company to help consumers in Africa verify the authenticity of the drug products they buy at pharmacies, using mobile phone technology.

Continue reading "Getting Serious About Fixing the Health Care Payment System" »

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If you think the economy is bad now, just wait until the new health-care legislation is passed. Income tax rates on high earning people (i.e., the most productive members of the economy, the ones who create the most jobs and generate the most innovation) will be increased to levels higher than all but a few of the European countries. The marginal rate on Federal income tax will be increased from 35% to more than 47%! Counting state and local income taxes, and the 2.9% Medicare tax, on average the marginal tax rate on the highest U.S. incomes will soon be 52%, which will be higher than the highest marginal rates in every other OECD country except Sweden, Denmark and Belgium!

Continue reading "Assisted Suicide for Our Economy" »

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I constantly hear from B2B executives that it's a challenge to develop strong relationships between the B2B sales staff and clients. But it doesn't have to be.

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Maybe Shakespeare's character had it right in King Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene II. ("The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.")

Yesterday I woke up at the Hilton Garden Inn in Norwalk, Connecticut, and on my way out I stopped at the breakfast buffet and asked the cook to do a couple of eggs for me, sunny side up, please. He told me he was no longer allowed to prepare eggs sunny side up, and had to do them over easy, instead. He seemed to think this was a new law or state regulation, although I suppose it might just have been HGI policy, promulgated by their attorneys to avoid liability for salmonella poisoning.

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