Weekend Digest: The No Limits Edition

For our weekend business and political readers:

PUT SOME POP IN YOUR FACEBOOK TRAFFIC DESPITE THE BIG CHANGE
Are you one of the many “furious” people with Facebook because it has suddenly made marketing your businesses much harder?”

In early December, Facebook changed the way it decides which stories its users see in the News Feed. Facebook said it changed the feed so that more “high quality” news stories would show up. But lots of people who manage Facebook pages for brands and online stores said Facebook’s change actually did something else.

They said the change is forcing them to buy more Facebook ads. Specifically, these Facebook page managers say the change drastically reduced the number of people who see their posts — even though their pages still have the same number of “fans.”

Sound familiar?

But could you be going at it all wrong? One user thinks so, and his business has actually spiked since the Facebook overhaul. His name is Koby Conrad and Slate found out what he is doing right and wants to share it with you.

For your own personal Facebook overhaul, click on this link.

THE BIGGEST, BADDEST SPORTS AGENT OUT THERE
How many sports agents have ever been able to claim they represented both head coaches in a national title football game? Well, Jimmy Sexton can as he represented both Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher and Auburn’s Gus Malzahn who met in last Monday’s title game. And that’s just a start.

Few figures will loom larger over the game than Sexton. Not only does he represent the Seminoles’ Jimbo Fisher and the Tigers’ Gus Malzahn, but he also emerged as a central figure in the University of Texas’ coaching search. Sexton bristles at the perception of him as a “Darth Vader figure” — his words — lording over the sport, but his influence is real.

“In 2013, Sexton’s 14 college head-coaching clients made nearly $30 million in salary, according to USA Today’s coach salary database. In December, Sexton reset the market by getting Saban $7 million a year.”

But college football coaches aren’t his only clients. NFL, NBA, players, you name it. So how did Jimmy Sexton become the most powerful agent in sports?  Go to this link from SI.com for the whole story and you’ll also learn the unique way he managed to ink UCA’s Scottie Pippen for his deal with the Chicago Bulls.

WILL 2014 BE A BREAKOUT YEAR FOR WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS?
Forbes has posted 11 reason reasons why its staff thinks that will be true.

Female entrepreneurs have something to rejoice about. Even venture capitalists have increased their support of women-led companies. It’s still paltry, but the percentage of VC deals going to women-led businesses was 13% in the first half of 2013. That’s nearly a 20% jump over 2012, according to Pitchbook, a venture-capital research firm.

There is room for improvement, but the U.S. ranked #1 among 17 countries on having the conditions that foster high potential female entrepreneurship.

So what are those 11 reasons “women will crack the glass in 2014?” Go to this link to find out why it’s not a man’s world anymore.

DESIGN MERITOCRACIES
Ever heard of it? It’s where “products are brought to market based on proven interest from potential buyers, rather than just focus groups.” And Fast Company says, “It seems to be popping up everywhere.”

There’s Kickstarter, of course. Quirky crowdsources invention ideas, and works with its community to find out what they most want. Fab holds design competitions, and smaller outfits like the We’ve design collective let shoppers pre-order goods, so artists aren’t left with a surplus of things.

New York’s Hatch Hub is the latest in the category and it takes the concept to the next level.

Hatch Hub is “design challenge led. As in starting from an idea like, ‘I wish I had a table that was great for small living.'”

Learn more about how this innovative company and it’s grassroots approach at this link.

COULD IT BE THE BRIDGE OF DESTRUCTION?
Sometimes metaphors ring true, and in the case of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, his road to the White House may have collapsed after a burgeoning scandal involving intentionally blocked traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

This past week it all unfolded as it was revealed his aides had lanes blocked for four days in September on the George Washington Bridge causing massive traffic jams to spite a Democratic mayor who refused to support his re-election bid.

Christie blamed it on his deputy chief of staff and fired her Thursday, and during perhaps the turning point of his career, said he was “embarrassed and humiliated” during a news conference that same day.

In a meandering, two-hour news conference in his office here at the State Capitol, Christie said he was “embarrassed and humiliated” by an episode that left him feeling “heartbroken” and “betrayed.” Despite his reputation for “directness and blunt talk,” the governor said, “I am not a bully.”

Christie, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, also tried to tamp down allegations that he had nurtured a culture of intimidation in his administration and his political campaigns. “This is the exception — it is not the rule — of what’s happened over the last four years in this administration,” Christie said.

The Washington Post reports, “The office of U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced Thursday that it had opened a preliminary inquiry after a referral from the inspector general at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge.”

For more on the news conference and others involved in the scandal, click on this link.

HILLARY CLINTON’S ‘SHADOW CAMPAIGN’
Publicly, Hillary Clinton has made no commitments for a presidential run in 2016, but POLITICO reports:

“A shadow campaign on her behalf has nevertheless been steadily building for the better part of a year — a quiet, intensifying, improvisational effort to lay the groundwork for another White House bid.”

Some of the activity has the former first lady’s tacit approval. Some involves outside groups that are operating independently, and at times in competition with one another, to prepare a final career act for the former senator and secretary of state, whose legacy as the most powerful woman in the history of American politics is already secure.

For more on this “shadow campaign” and the people who are in her sphere of influence helping direct behind the scenes for the potential campaign, click on this link.

THE DOCTOR IS ‘IN’ FOR OBAMACARE
His name is Phil Schiliro and he’s not really a doctor. But he is sort of because the president has called on him to “fix” what ails Obamacare.

As President Barack Obama’s legislative director, Schiliro helped get the Affordable Care Act through Congress. Now, he’s back as the fixer.

Even with the website now working, many Democrats have run out of patience with an administration that has failed to anticipate and address problems before they become political disasters. Every day seems to bring a fresh challenge for the White House.

Shortly after his unexpected return last month, Schiliro met with more than a dozen Democratic senators to convince them the White House gets it. His message, according to a Senate aide present: I understand your frustration, and that’s why I’m here — to streamline coordination with the Hill, fix problems, deal with issues before they blow up.

So what does Congress think of this “methodical strategist” Dr. Fix It and what other avenues will Schiliro pursue in an attempt to turn the Affordable Care Act around? Go to this link to find out.

SOME STATES REVERSING DECISION ON MEDICAID EXPANSION
“Is you or is you ain’t? That’s the question facing conservative GOP governors who initially refused federal dollars to expand Medicaid, but now as the Daily Beast reports, may be doing a flip-flop.

Because it’s inevitable that some will – and as they do. the Republicans’ sabotage of Obamacare will be profoundly undermined and people’s concomitant opposition to the law will start to vaporize.

So how does all this breakdown? Click on this link for one experts analysis along with an “eye-popping” chart.

THE SKY IS THE LIMIT
The Kansas City Star calls it , “The No-Limit General Assembly.” And in Missouri because of it, lobbyists are very popular.

Campaign contributions? No limits.

Gifts to lawmakers? No limits.

Free World Series tickets from those whose fortunes often hinge on legislative outcomes?

Absolutely no limits.

No wonder, then, that lobbyists are popular in Missouri’s Capitol. They’ve got money to burn, goodies to share and bills to pass (or kill).

So what about ethics reform? “What I’ve seen it translate to is the reluctance of elected officials to upset those who are substantial donors,” said state Sen. Brad Lager, a Savannah Republican. “They (lawmakers) don’t want to shut off the gravy train.

Critics say money talks. Loyalists say there is little corruption and legislators still vote their convictions.

Being the only state without limits on campaign donations or how much an elected official can accept in personal gifts from lobbyists, could things change in Missouri in 2014?  Go to this link to find out.

‘A SCIENTIST OF COMEDY’
American icon Jerry Seinfeld is still doing his act, but he’s a perfectionist.

He shows up unannounced at some minor comedy club in New York or New Jersey, and inserts himself into that night’s lineup. He prefers – or feels compelled – to keep honing his act, trying a new line here, shaving a word off an old one there, analyzing the audience’s laughter: a scientist of comedy, painstakingly calibrating his equipment.

Although still cranking out the laughs, he gets them very different than almost any big time comedian. There’s something missing.

What is it?  Go to this link from The Guardian for Jerry’s monologue recipe he calls an “athletic challenge.”

NEW GALLERY DEVOTED TO ‘THE AIRPLANE AND STREAMLINED DESIGN’
The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has redone the Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery to include a section devoted to “The Airplane and Streamlined Design.”

To American industrial designers of the 1930s airplanes were not simply machines of transport, but emblems of technological innovation and progress.

From the time of George Cayley, a nineteenth-century British aeronautical experimenter who coined the phrase “solid of least resistance,” aircraft designers had searched for a shape that would create the least drag—the resistance to a body’s movement through air. The ultimate result was the Douglas DC-3 (an example of which is on view in the Museum’s America by Air exhibit at the National Mall building), the most advanced in a line of streamlined designs that went back to the Deperdussin Racer of 1913.

For more on the history of how these sleek aircraft evolved and to take a look at some of the exhibit, “fly” to this link.