Weekend Digest: The Private Eye Edition

For our weekend business and political readers:

THE 25 MOST PROMISING COMPANIES OF 2014
Forbes has compiled a list of the 25 most promising companies of 2014.

It’s a combination of service and product-oriented companies ranging from helping workers and employers connect to free-lance blogging to hamburgers and frozen yogurt.

Access the list, which includes a firm with a big Arkansas connection, at this link.

THE AAA OF IPHONE REPAIRS
Meet entrepreneur AJ Forsythe, whose burgeoning business called iCracked wants to become the “AAA of iPhone repairs.”

After attempts at several other entrepreneurial endeavors, the high-energy Forsythe found a business model in a sideline talent.

Though a helpful skill for his own mishaps – he’s broken his phone nearly a dozen times since – he didn’t think to turn it into a business until an uninspiring career fair during his junior year in 2010. “I threw out all of my résumés, went to the library and started making neon-colored iPhone repair fliers on Microsoft Paint,” he recalls, and got five phone calls the next day. He charged students $75 a pop for repairs at his kitchen table.

That summer he teamed up with Anthony Martin, a recent UC Santa Barbara grad, to cofound iCracked. Flush with profits from Campus Radar, his textbook-rental startup, Martin invested $10,000, and the two spent the next year trying to recruit students, especially tutors, as iTechs across central California. Didn’t happen. Says AJ: “We would cold-call these guys, and they’d be like, ‘No, I don’t want to fix iPhones.’ ”

Before graduation in 2011, Forsythe and Martin teamed up with Leslee Lambert, a graphic designer, who replaced his amateurish fliers. They soon racked up $40,000 in credit card debt for replacement parts and packaging supplies, then moved to a rented basement in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Working from a basement? $40,000 in credit card debt? What happened next to give Forsythe and his partners their big break?  Click here to read more from Forbes.

CRAFTING A 15-WORD STRATEGY STATEMENT
Strategic planning and strategy making is a time-consuming proposition for many business leaders. The age-old adage of K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple, Stupid – seems to apply.

But how do you formulate a concise, compact strategy statement? Expert Robert Martin offers these two tips:

Focus: What you want to offer to the target customer and what you don’t.

Difference: Why your value proposition is divergent from competitive alternatives.

Read more of his take at this link.

WILL GOLD EVENTUALLY LOSE ITS VALUE
How’s that again?  Couldn’t happen. Never will happen. Daily Finance posts a scenario that is startling in its context, but the reality is it makes sense, and here’s the secret. “What gold did once, technology now does better.”

The demand and trade in gold created markets in the yellow metal, and naturally, derivative products such as gold futures and EYF’s were developed on the underlying commodity–securities which became staples of the financial services industry.

Stats for 2012–the most current year available–show that 90 percent of the gold produced each year is used for jewelry or investments, with only 19 percent of the gold produced going to industrial use. That means that almost all the demand is based on the archaic idea of gold as a universal store of value. But every day, the Internet and the free flow of data undermine that concept. It’s no longer necessary to store value in an inefficient and–for practical purposes–non-portable format like gold.

So are you intrigued now? For more on the radical, yet farsighted projection that “eventually gold will only have a worth based on industrial demand, and little, if any, intrinsic value,” go to this link.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLITICAL PRIVATE EYE
The grunt work of doing opposition research and vetting candidates for public office has its moments. It doesn’t involve following a candidate with a camera to catch him leaving a motel room with someone other than his wife.

Michael Corwin, a private investigator and opposition researcher in New Mexico, explains his job in this Politico piece.

I don’t do stakeouts. There’s no sitting in my car outside some seedy motel with a camera, waiting for a candidate and his mistress to emerge. For one thing, voters don’t care about that kind of stuff—at least not like they used to—and campaigns usually avoid using really personal information for fear it’ll backfire and make them look ruthless.

But more to the point: It’s not a good use of my time. “Oppo” may be a dirty word in politics but trust me: We investigators aren’t the dirty ones–and the reality is, documents are where you really strike gold.

Learn more about how Corwin’s efforts have impacted politics and how he got started in his career at this link.

BAD NEWS ABOUT OBAMACARE POETRY TO SOME
Washington Post opinion writer Kathleen Parker shares her thoughts on arguments surrounding the federal health care law, a.k.a. Obamacare.

She highlights a Congressional Budget Office report that won’t help in persuading critics of the health care overhaul to stick with it:

A Congressional Budget Office report issued this month estimates that by 2017, the workforce will be reduced by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs and 2.3 million by 2021 — because of Obamacare.

The CBO’s headline-grabbing news has parted the seas in new ways. Republicans, barely disguising their glee, remind us that they told us so. And this is actually true. Democrats remind us that those 2 million aren’t being forced into unemployment but have the opportunity to choose not to work. No longer will people have to stay in boring, unfulfilling jobs just because they need health insurance.

Parker concludes that Obamacare is indefensible. Read more of her arguments at this link.

OBAMACARE IS WORKING
Eugene Robinson, who also writes commentary for the Washington Post, concludes that the federal health care law is working, and because of that, it is the GOP’s worst nightmare.

The news that nearly 1.2 million people signed up last month for insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges is highly inconvenient for GOP candidates nationwide. It looks as if the party’s two-word strategy for the fall election — bash Obamacare — will need to be revised.

Cumulatively, 3.3 million people had chosen insurance plans through the state and federal exchanges by the end of January. That is fewer than the administration had originally hoped but well above the predictions of critics who believed — or hoped — that the program would never succeed. The Congressional Budget Office projects that 6 million people will have chosen plans through Obamacare when the initial enrollment period ends March 31, down from a pre-launch estimate of 7 million. Not bad at all.

Robinson states that despite Republican efforts to “sabotage” Obamacare, they will be in a political pickle in November, especially without an alternative plan to back up their opposition. Read his full thoughts at this link.

BIPARTISAN INTEREST IN THE PRESIDENT’S MyRA PROPOSAL
While President Obama’s State of the Union speech was troublesome to Republicans (and some Democrats), one proposal offered sparked bipartisan interest.

When President Barack Obama introduced a new retirement savings plan during his State of the Union speech last month, the Republican response was uncharacteristically muted. Although Republicans were upset about the president’s new reliance on executive authority to push his agenda, they had few harsh words about the details of the retirement idea.

Dubbed MyRA, Obama’s initiative is intended to allow workers who do not have access to other workplace savings plans to open an account overseen by the government that would invest in low-risk Treasury bonds. It’s a relatively modest proposal, one that would be entirely voluntary for employers and employees and would only guarantee low returns to minimize risk.

What are Republicans saying about the MyRA proposal now? Read more from Roll Call at this link.

OLYMPIC SKATERS THEN AND NOW
For many, figure skating is the pinnacle of any Winter Olympics. Millions will tune-in to watch the Sochi competitors skate for the gold.

It’s an obsession for many that began as kids. Sound familiar? Want to go back and remember how those stars looked then as compared to now?  Click on this link and enjoy “8 Olympic Figure Skaters You Were Obsessed With As A Kid, Then And Now.”

MONTY PYTHON’S JOHN CLEESE REFLECTS
Harvard Business Review interviews actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame. Cleese, who also has written a business leadership book, shares his thoughts on lessons learned in a life that has spanned 74 years.

In the interview, Cleese talks about being funny, collaboration, political correctness, and the notion that businesses should or shouldn’t be funny. He also reflects on his contributions to the world of comedy.

HBR: How did the Python team manage itself? Who made the final decisions?

Cleese: Python always was democracy run riot. There was no senior person, no pecking order, no hierarchy. It was always a question of reading things out, and if they made people laugh, they were put in the show. If people didn’t laugh, they almost certainly weren’t. That was the litmus test. Had we been trying to portray a philosophy or something like that, there would have been much more argument. When we made Life of Brian, which I think is definitely our best work, it just happened that we all pretty much agreed on what religion wasn’t. If we’d tried to agree on what religion should be, we would have always been arguing and unable to reach a common viewpoint. When you’re dealing with humor, it’s very simple: Is it funny or not?

You can read the full interview with Cleese at this link.