In the go-go late 1990s, Ford went to similar lengths to recruit new talent. Now, its survival hinges on cutting its work force to match dramatically reduced demand for its cars and trucks.

WOW! Talk about a hard job to do. This goes against every grain of your body as a business person.

How 38,000 were enticed to leave Ford

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice cleared the roughly $80 billion deal on Oct. 11, declaring that there were no competitive concerns and opting not to require the combined company to divest assets or make other concessions.

Of course this is the biggest sham of the entire process, since the entire reason why this merger is a bad idea IS the fact that it will reduce competition and consolidate power in the telecom monopolies. Prices will go up. Innovation will continue to be shackled. And if net neutrality gets the boot, then you'll also have this hegemony spreading into other industries.

It will be supremely interesting to see what the standout committee members actually get in the discussion. They seem to be pointing towards pricing and service concessions, which to me feels like a 'too little too late' compromise.

As usual, when it comes to politics, they are completely missing the point. Both of these organizations should be charged with manipulating the market, robbing the public, and committing shareholder fraud.

FCC splits on ATT-BellSouth terms; merger vote put off

The 20 smartest companies to start now. Or alternatively, what businesses VC's think they can find a 3 year exit strategy for.

Here ya go brain trust at Memestreams...

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.

Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.

MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world’s financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream--chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot’s model of “wild” randomness. MacKenzie’s pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America’s financial markets have grown into their current form.

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

So begins the postcrash push, when all of this investment begins to pay off. Broadband Internet use in the United States jumped from 6% in June 2000 to more than 30% in 2003. Today, more than half of us have access to broadband at home or work. (Most of us, significantly, signed up for it after the dotcom crash.) Now, instead of engaging in theoretical thumb sucking about "what broadband will mean," we're doing something with it. And unlike the 1990s, when experiments failed because entrepreneurs misunderstood the Internet's usefulness, or because it simply wasn't ready, we're working with a known quantity. It took 30 years for electricity to have a serious impact on the U.S. economy, after all, but by 1930, virtually every home had juice and it was driving refrigerators, toasters, lamps, radios, and other appliances. As Henry Blodget put it, our exuberance, irrational or otherwise, builds industries.

I think the collective group here on Memestreams has been saying this for oh, about 5 years now.

Technology: Boom, Bust, and Beyond

First, technology adoption has continued at a torrid pace (and even accelerated at times) despite the bust. The dotcom business models of the 1990s may have been based on wild projections of broadband, advertising, and ecommerce trends. But the funny thing is, even after the bubble burst, those trends continued. These days, it's hard to find a technology-adoption projection from 1999 that hasn't come true. Meanwhile, the digital-media boom sparked by the iPod and iTunes has blown through even the most aggressive forecasts.

Amen. Despite the fact that it's in Wired's best interest to proclaim that we're entering (in?) a new boom, I have to agree that they are right.

The New Boom

A fairly serous reading list - directed more at the corporate revolutionary than at the corporate drone...If you find the range too broad and the selection on other pages too eclectic to be believeable...chances are you took the blue pill.

Business Books - for the corporate revolutionary

Peter F. Drucker, 95, who was often called the world's most influential business guru and whose thinking transformed corporate management in the latter half of the 20th century, died Nov. 11 at his home in Claremont, Calif.

A very sad day indeed.

Management Visionary Peter Drucker Dies

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

Thank you FCC for assisting innovation, competition, and growth. Please line up here to pay your transit tax to ATT.

At SBC, It's All About 'Scale and Scope' (read: monopoly power)

Still, another problem for investors is that nearly all of the major alternative-energy pure-play firms are early-stage companies with relatively small, albeit rapidly growing, sales and no history of earnings or expectations of profitability in the near future.

So the prices for these stocks look frothy to say the least. Capstone Turbine, for example, has a market value of $347 million even though sales are expected to reach just $24 million next year. So it's trading at 14.5 times estimated revenue.

14.5x isn't that bad when compared with tech stocks or healthcare right now.

Alternative energy stocks have soared during the past month.