It’s the same old communist push from progressives in the United States, politicians like Sherrod Brown from Ohio and Elizabeth Warren, the loser we know so well as the Indian claiming “Pocahontas.” We’re talking about their positions on CEOs, that they make too much money, many times more than the average worker. Whenever you hear some loser like them saying, “CEOs make 400 times more than the average worker, and that something needs to be done about it, what you are hearing is a know-nothing loser who has the economic maturity of a cat spaced out on catnip. I address this issue in some detail in the supplied video but let me spell it out briefly. CEOs make a lot of money because it is they who shoulder the risk for all the workers. There is nothing wrong with being an average worker, but there is also a lot of safety in earning a living. CEOs have no such comfort. It is they who make a company successful or not, and it is they who own the risk for possible failure, of whether there is a job to even punch a time clock to. There is no such thing as shared ownership of workers and creating a business, any business. Such thoughts that they are in any way come directly from the works of Karl Marx and are picked up by loser politicians like Sherrod Brown and exploited purely for political purposes by the ignorant and purposely malicious.
I have enough for my book to include this small sample from the upcoming Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. There is still a lot of editing to conduct and it will likely be a 2020 project at this point, but thought my audience here would enjoy it, since so many people have been asking how it is coming along. So enjoy this short sample:
The 25/25 Rule
There are many rules of practice that businesses use to manage their capacity, such as Warren Buffett’s 25/5 rule, or the International Journal of Production Research’s 25/25 rule. With Buffett, he states that out of the top 25 things that you want to do in life, you should only focus on the top five, until you’ve completed them. And with the 25/25 rule the goal is to reduce focus on the bottom 25% of your workload and to squeeze improvements in process out of another 25%. Thinking like a gunfighter however, these measurements in business are only new ways to present targets to hit and have their own sets of problems that unless looked at correctly, are useless. As I have spoke about, there are many weapons that gunfighters can use to do their business, guns are just one of them. Another is the bullwhip which I find has many direct correlations that apply to conceptual business matrixes such at the 25/25 rule.
As I have said about the bullwhip and in fast draw shooting in general, the primary objective is to do the most work with the most power in the shortest and most accurate time span possible. With bullwhips, to get the maximum impact out of the end of the weapon with the minimum effort it requires the handler to project that effort toward a target at a proper moment where the crack will occur in space and time. It is really quite an effort in physics to be able to crack out the flame on a candle with a bullwhip which among those who can call themselves experts, is a common act. When hitting targets with a bullwhip the effort looks effortless when done correctly as most of the action happens within a second’s time of measure. But there are many small steps within that second that must occur correctly to make such a thing happen, especially under the burden of timed pressure. Yet even just cracking out a flame on a candle with all the time to do it in the world takes a very timed approach to inflict the minimal effort to get the maximum results of cracking the whip so near the candle that the sonic boom created blows out the flame.
When companies utilize the 25/25 rule essentially what they are saying is that they are over capacity due to their sales departments over booking the facility and that they are picking the bottom end of their 25% of business portfolio to ignore so that they can focus on their top percent of valuable customers. The problem with this approach is that it allows bad management to hide behind a method of measurement and to use the analysis to disguise bad approaches to solving the problem. In the Cowboy Fast Draw competitions and Wild West Arts work that is like saying that the weapon handler needs more time to do a good job. But as we know in gun fights, the fastest and most accurate were the ones who won the duels. There were no rules for taking time to deal with the incompetence of the duelists. If the gunfighters were incompetent, they were killed. And the same holds true in business.
The aim of the Western Arts isn’t just to enjoy the historical nature of traditional weapons used in war within American culture but is to represent the necessities of living within a western society. The needs of American business is one of those requirements, and not connecting those proper metaphors to the function of business can lead to detriment, which for too many companies is a common occurrence. Such as the case with the 25/25 rule the way it has been proposed to help companies with their problems of overcapacity. The solution to those problems are experienced in western competition where speed and accuracy are measured. There are many very good shooters in the world and very good bullwhip artists who have trouble with the fast draw competitions of Western Arts. They look great when performing for audiences until the pressure of time is added, then things get tough and people start reacting poorly under duress, which is the point.
Most consultants in the United States and Europe are following similar methods of reducing push systems and instead incorporating pull, where one element of a supply chain does not ship until the downstream source is needed. The 25/25 rule is an element of this thinking and it essentially dances around the true villain which is incompetence. If a manager either upstream or downstream just can’t handle the pressure and has a hard time recruiting and retaining good employees, they will obviously have trouble doing the required job. The 25/25 rule gives them some cover to then focus only on their valuable customers and letting the less valuable fall off the portfolio. This might look great for the internal measures of a production environment, but it doesn’t equal the task of the sales department that is trying to book work and help a company profile with new business. The incompetent managers within an organization might be angry toward sales for bringing in more work than they feel comfortable handling. And that is the core of the problem. Many of the Lean consultants do have good ideas but they try to use peer pressure to level load a facilities production output instead of focusing on making the individual contributors better.
I have seen many really good bullwhip artists struggle with the speed and accuracy competitions that are in the Western Arts events, because the rhythm and pressure of a timed competition throws off everything and they would argue that if the rules were not so rigorous, if only they had more time, they could do better. Well, who couldn’t? The point of timed pressure is to sort out the good from the bad and in business that is certainly the case. Thinking like a gunfighter, anything less than fast and accurate would mean death, and it does to businesses also.
It is up to the weapon handler, such as in the case of the bullwhip artist to get better and to acclimate themselves to the conditions of the battlefield. If doing a speed and accuracy competition with bullwhips between 15 to 12 seconds is the parameters needed to win, then that is up to the bullwhip artists to get better to compete in those parameters. In the case of businesses where sales provide jobs and the various program managers within the organization determine that the scope of work fits within the company portfolio it is not up to the weaknesses of production to decide that they can’t live up to the expectations. They must get better to meet the needs, not hide behind some bounty hunter rules created to make their business thrive while the businesses that hire them suffer under their own incompetence. Rather than try to force the industry to deal with the artificial constraints created by bad management, companies should strive to get 25% better to meet those market needs and to create value for their customers. What if a town sheriff stated to the population looking to them for protection that to be a good representative of the law that the criminals needed to be 25% slower in their threats and actions of aggression so that the sheriff could handle the danger? Instead, it is up to the sheriff to get faster, and to be better. And if more bandits come to town, and are smarter and faster yet, it is up to the law to get better to keep the peace. So, it is with any business. The customer needs what they need, it is up to the company to give it to them, or to figure out how to without going out of business in the practice. And that only happens when you force everyone to get better, not playing to the weaknesses of the workforce managed poorly by the incompetent.
I was quite excited to learn that George Lang was running for the Senate seat that Bill Coley had been occupying in Ohio for several years. The seat itself was terming out and George let me know that on Monday at noon he was going to announce his run for it, and it brought a lot of joy to me. I first learned of his candidacy while on vacation with my family in Charleston, South Carolina touring sites that many were reviewing as the best in the world. I kept hearing while on my weeklong stay in Charleston that this neighborhood, this beach, this restaurant, this shipping lane, this and that were the best anywhere. I had to admit that everything was very nice. Property values were certainly great, and shipping vessels seemed to come into the harbor every 30 minutes loaded to their max. Even at 3 in the morning from our Mt Pleasant home I could hear the cranes working and I found all that economic activity very exciting. Yet the town of Mt Pleasant across the harbor from downtown Charleston was quiet and very chic at that time of night, just as it was all other hours of the day. The people there were prosperous and happy, no crime was in sight. Prosperity tends to do that to a community. So I was a little sad to leave and come home, but then for comparison as my family hit Cincinnati starting at Florence then going up I-71 to avoid the traffic on I-75 it was a startling comparison which culminated into our last moments of the journey travelling down Butler County Regional Highway where for as far as the eye could see, there was prosperity, especially in West Chester. After coming from an extremely wealthy area full of vibrant economic activity, it was obvious that my hometown of Butler County, Ohio was even greater and that is something the rest of the nation hasn’t been talking about. And for the last twenty years, it was my friend George Lang who has had a tremendous hand in that success, which was why I was elated that he was running for that Ohio Senate seat.
It goes without saying then that I endorse George Lang for the Senate District 4 seat in Ohio, fully. I could tell stories all day about why he’s qualified, but the best part of his resume is in this opening paragraph. I had spent a week in one of America’s most prosperous communities and coming directly home to West Chester, where I work, and Liberty Township where I live it becomes obvious that we have it better than most anywhere else in the country and that is due to the very pro-business environment that Lang has championed for many years starting as a trustee in West Chester. Even when Lang was outvoted 2 to 1 on most issues in West Chester by the much more liberal trustees who were there at the time, Lee Wong being one of them, George managed to be a change agent for the betterment of business and the results are obvious today, and the spill over has poured over into neighboring Liberty Township and other regions connected directly to West Chester very positively.
I remember well when George benefited from Mark Welch getting elected into that second trustee seat knocking out a longtime incumbent so that a second vote could be obtained, and real growth could occur for business. For a few years George Lang and Mark Welch opened West Chester to a very positive pro-business culture that is now carrying over into our current conditions which rival any of the best in the entire country and now George wants to bring that culture to all of Ohio. When George was elected into the 52nd House of Representative seat, this was his ultimate goal which he has been working toward. However, as a Senator, he will have much greater leverage to make that pro-business platform more prominent and to take it above the noise of all the other political matters that permeate the state.
George really doesn’t have any competition for this spot, his rivals during the upcoming primary are Candice Keller out of Middletown, who I think is a wonderful person. But when it comes to experience, George has many of the same positions as her on conservative ideas, but his understanding of business and his pro-business platform just puts him on a higher level. Then as I’ve said about Lee Wong, he’s the kind of guy who is a liberal in a conservative area. He has no choice but to run as a Republican. His policy decisions are very much that of a Democrat. If he were running for office in Hamilton County or even Dayton, he’d be a Democrat without question. It was Lee who stood in the way of many of the growth ideas that George wanted to implement in West Chester. I seem to remember Wong’s campaign slogan was that you “Couldn’t go wrong with Wong.” Well, yes you can, in a big way. He’s a nice guy but he’s not on the level of Lang, in any category. In many ways Lee stood in the way of growth, it was George and Mark who broke through his resistance to give West Chester the great prosperity that it sees today.
So, if there is a theme to all this, management does matter and who we elect into these positions has a major impact on all our lives. Obviously in Charleston South Carolina they have a lot of good things going on. Essentially there they have a deep and rich history to draw from which has put politics on the efforts of preserving that history, and not getting in the way of businesses wanting to capitalize off that deep history. In West Chester, Ohio the situation was harder, while Butler County does have a great history going back to before the Revolution, just as Charleston does, we had to be good the old-fashioned way, in the middle of the country with great highway access. We needed our politicians to make the most of those advantages with low cost compliance and protections on upfront investment for businesses. In West Chester, George Lang alone for a long time, then later with a good support staff from a very good Republican Party presence, have created an economic boom that plugs straight into the Trump administration. There is a reason that President Trump enjoys coming to the southern Ohio area so much, and George Lang is more a part of that success than just about anybody. Not in what he has done, but in what he hasn’t.
Most politicians measure their success by what bills they sponsor and ultimately by how much they grow government. In George’s case, it’s the opposite, he measures his success by how much he can get government out of the way of business, allowing them to spend their time and energy on being profitable, which then allows a high quality of living for everyone. For people who have lived in the Butler County area for many years, its easy to take for granted just how good it is. But if you have traveled, the benefits are obvious in comparison. I am very excited to see George Lang do for Ohio as a Senator what he has done for West Chester. I personally think Ohio has an opportunity to become one of the great economic powerhouses of the world and it will take people like George to make it happen. So he has my endorsement and then some. I simply can’t wait to get him in that seat so he can start the work, for which we will all benefit.
As I have said, I have been working on a new book called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and I’m about halfway through it. For my readers of a long time here who have been sending me a lot of emails missing the daily articles, they will return. But I offer this little sample of this “gunfighter” project to give a taste of what is to come.
The concept of getting “satisfaction” from a personal insult went a long way to establishing honor and proper conduct among business transactions, in the time before modern rules as we know them today. As we have seen often where various religions and their value are not unified, and therefore cannot be expected to hold up in a court of law, there needs to be a mechanism that brings about honor and to hold it into the context of moral conduct where villainy will quickly grow like a weed in a garden of dreams. Dueling in the classic sense, especially in the New World during the time of the American Revolution was an answer to this problem. And if there is an argument against the American Constitution for changes, it was in the original rules of the nation that mechanisms of honor were already established before the courts were needed.
In doing business in the orient, particularly in Japan where honor is still a respected trait, business transactions are accelerated because the interactions mean something with one another. This is obvious at the airports around Tokyo among men and women as respect is a universal language that makes interactions between people start on common ground. In the West we have allowed our own culture of respect to drift away into the more centralized regulation of the state which outlawed the practice of dueling essentially so that lawyers could profit off the instillation of justice. The cost was that individual satisfaction for an insult did not get the respect it deserved while the emphasis was on protecting society from itself by settling matters in a court of law. This has led our culture to adapt into a more passive aggressive society where trust isn’t always easy to find in other people. It could be argued that we were all better off when we tried to openly kill each other to protect a slight against our individual names.
Dueling was so common at the start of America that the governor of South Carolina wrote a book on it to make sure everyone did it right called The Code of Honor: Or Rules for the Government of Principals and Second in the Art of Dueling in 1834 by John Lyde Wilson. Dueling in the time of the Revolutionary War was quite common. While it was slowly going out of style at the start of the invention of a republic form of federal government once George Washington took office, in the South, particularly in Charleston, South Carolina where so many important battles occurred in defining freedom during the start of the new nation, dueling was so common that the governor felt compelled to create some legal means of settling disputes, which sounds barbaric compared to our modern legal system, but in hindsight seemed to generate more responsible people on an individual level. This certainly helped in business commerce, because if a business deal went bad, the parties may find themselves in the streets fighting to the death to obtain their satisfaction.
The important aspect of satisfaction is that the emphasis was on the individual reputations of the participants. It wasn’t some third party “state” that decided justice, it was the people at the heart of the conflict, and in many ways, society was more honorable. People had to treat each other individually better as a result. The more the states intruded on management of the affairs of people the more passive aggressive disputes have become leaving business conduct to suffer greatly. After the Civil War it was particularly immigrants from the South who moved West in search of gold and other opportunities, and they took with them the concept of dueling that had been very much a part of early American life. Dueling with fast draw had with it a way of bringing honor where there wasn’t yet law and it forced people to treat each other better and more honorably which is why there is still reverence for it.
At the state level we can all see today that the concept of taking honor and responsibility for good conduct away from individuals has been a mistake. While dueling was a violent concept the amount of people who died from it were arguably much less frequent than the kind of violence we see in modern times. That is why thinking in the way of the gunfighter is better than in the modern context of leaving disputes to be settled by those not directly responsible for the conduct, such as lawyers and the state as a legal entity. These days instead of getting satisfaction for an honor tainted we say “see you in court” instead of settling the matter right then and there. Then of course those who can pay for the best lawyer become the winners in most cases and the state enjoys the revenue and job opportunities that come from settling disputes. But what is lost is the individual responsibility for the actions taken and the merit of an honorable exchange. Taking the example of the famous duel between General Gladsten and General Howe in 1778, both Generals in the Revolution and were in a dispute over troop possession. They took to the streets of Charleston, South Carolina where many such duels were taking place at the time and when the time came stared each other down waiting for the other to make a move. After taunting each other for a good bit of time finally General Howe fired his pistol and clipped the ear of Gladsten. Gladsten in response, who was thought to be the John Adams of the south and inventor of the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag deliberately fired his shot into the ground inviting Howe to try again. Eventually the two men shook hands and that settled their dispute with only a minor injury occurring to Gladsten’s ear. Otherwise, the business between two major Revolutionary War figures was settled respectfully, something that certainly wouldn’t have occurred if the two had fought it out in court with lawyers acting as their pistols and fancy words spoken in legal jargon as bullets.
The point of the matter is not that dueling is a desired trait, or even that we should bring it back in the form that it was. Killing another person isn’t a desirable outcome for any dispute, but the finality of it tended to put in the participant’s minds the seriousness of an issue and this mindset certainly set the West and its expansion ablaze with activity that couldn’t have been regulated by any legal system at the rate that human ambition was expanding at the time. Honor was preserved by the potential for dueling and this threat allowed for proper respect when a nation needed it most. We could learn a lot from this period today where honor among business transactions is desperately lacking, particularly within the American borders. Other countries have their honor driven rituals and it is noticeable during business transactions. In the United States however, we have allowed our laws to be governed by lawyers and judges who take away the responsibility for personal conduct and place it in the hands of the state, and many of our businesses have followed. The impact has been a loss in honor among business interactions that has not been desirable. Yet honor could be restored if only we stepped back into hindsight and dusted off the values that did emerge from dueling and upgraded that sentiment for our modern needs which starts in thinking like a gunfighter.
Whether she realizes it or not, Joan Powell’s core philosophy is very similar to Bonito Mussolini’s chief architect of fascism, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. There is a reason that politically left thinking people do not talk about the father of Italian fascism and attempt to use transference to distance themselves from all forms of Marxist European failures be it that of communism, socialism or fascism. Gentile stated “everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” and he tried to implement those terms in Italy until the Allies landed and captured Mussolini. Hitler immediately freed the fascist leader and was given parts of the German empire to rule where he immediately moved toward the socialist terms identified by Gentile. As Dinesh D’Souza identified in The Big Lie, a book everyone should read that is in book stores right now, the story is told quite effectively of how the political left took the political platform issues that they were guilty of committing that were essentially right out of the Nazi and fascist playbook and have used their control of our education system and our media companies to erase history and attribute those traits to a bunch of slack-jawed Republicans who didn’t know how to defend themselves until Donald Trump took over the party. If you know your history you would find that Bonito Mussolini’s political beliefs were essentially the same as Joan Powell’s. Read her thoughts on her own website cited below.
People never reveal themselves as villains, but with Joan Powell we have her history as a Lakota school board member to use as a means to gage her performance. By her nature Joan Powell is a big union protector, which is how she got into the race in West Chester as union radicals fearful of the ultimate reality of Right to Work in Ohio was discussed in a West Chester board meeting. The discussion about Right to Work of course was centered on trying to entice more businesses to locate in West Chester. In many cases the high taxes from Lakota schools are enough to scare away business investment so the current Trustees have had to get very creative in finding reasons for business to think about making considerable investments into the region. In the world of Bonito Mussolini totalitarianism designed to bring about a true socialist state as outlined in the 1919 document Fasci di Combattimento universal suffrage was established as a value. When Joan Powell was president of the Lakota school board she led her followers to cut busing and sports programs to hold tax payers over a barrel until she obtained her tax increase. That is aligned with the mentality of Mussolini fascism. They also under fascism wanted to lower the age of voting to eighteen so they could access the youth freshly taught socialism in schools to give more power to the state. Joan Powell did this by using the The Spark magazine at Lakota to inspire the children of the school system to go into the community and vandalize dissidents to the tax increase and fully exploited them in the media for the same end—not directly of course, but she did this through her minions—people I called latté sipping prostitutes. Now to be fair to Joan, most public schools do these things because they are government-run schools and they teach school board members these methods. Just Joan comes from that very socialist system and has been formed to it through her 16 years as a school board member. She may not fully understand why she knows what she knows, but based on her actions, she knows it, and her mode of philosophic reckoning is socialism—specifically Bonito Mussolini style fascism. Additionally it was Bonito Mussolini who championed an eight-hour workday, which became the unionized model that we have all had imposed on us in the United States. This was an attack on the mechanisms of capitalism to begin giving workers management approval over productive output which led to eventual worker participation in industrial management and essentially the nationalization of entire industries. During the Lakota levy campaigns Joan’s levy minions attacked private businesses that did not support the tax increase publicly extorting them with bad publicity if they did not fall in line with the totalitarianism of the Lakota levy tax increase. It wasn’t Joan and her school board that was in charge, it was the radical LEA union that put Joan in place as their mouth piece and they used her to perpetually obtain step increases year after year mandating further tax increases on private property. Mussolini would go on to propose that there be an 85% tax on war profits and had strong anti-clerical policies including no religious instruction in the schools. Under Joan Powell’s years as a school board president there was a strict adherence to policies against religion in the school system for fear that state money might not come to Lakota by Governor Strickland if Lakota didn’t comply. But perverts who were teachers who sexually abused kids were given a free pass and in many cases had everything covered up in defense of the school, and not the children as individuals—all of this in perfect alignment with Italian fascism in World War II right in West Chester, Ohio in the modern-day.
It was never anything personal with Joan Powell when she and I had many public fights through the media. But I know history and I know what I see and understand how things became that way. Donald Trump is the opposite of fascism, Nazism, racism—and flagrant socialism. Joan Powell is a defender of all those things and she came out in favor of Hillary Clinton (a known criminal) during the last election. Yes they played nice music on her ad for Hillary and she proclaimed that she was afraid that Donald Trump was too angry to be president of the United States. But why are we so angry, even hostile at people like Joan Powell? Because they keep messing with us and seeking to apply socialism through taxation and expanding government into all aspects of our lives—progressives are afraid of hostility because they don’t want it leveled at them when we catch them in all these lies and manipulations. They would rather keep everyone dumb and subdued than to deal with an educated voting population who knows the difference about fascism and free market capitalism which is how West Chester has obtained so much success lately, because Mark Welch and George Lang have shrunk government, taken away a tremendous amount of tax burden and made zoning much more friendly to new business lowering their cost of compliance.
When Cathy Stoker and Lee Wong were the two to one vote on the West Chester Trustee Board before Mark Welch was elected a few years ago there was a lot of abuse with the zoning board punishing some companies over political affiliation. If it became known that a company was affiliated with the Tea Party the zoning board would harass them until they eventually went out of business. That was certainly the case with the Grand Ol’ Pub in West Chester. They were constantly picked on by the zoning board and that direction came from the trustees Wong and Stoker. Meanwhile, Willie’s across the street got by freely and was actually a meeting place for pro levy Lakota people. In that place of business Lakota coaches and teachers would bend the ear of 700 WLW personality Bill Cunningham who owned the place, to lobby against my effective on-air campaign against them. Bill tried to stay out of it but behind the totalitarianism of the Joan Powell led school board and the radical levy supporters he was convinced to come after me and a lot of controversy was blown in my direction—and it was Joan who was the one doing the blowing. If I had been a normal person my career might have been over and the public shaming might have destroyed me. But I’m unique, there is no such thing as bad publicity and it caused me to sell enough books to take my family on a nice vacation that year—so thanks Joan. On my part I used the nature of Joan Powell to my advantage because I understood who I was dealing with. Now I’m telling voters of West Chester—this is the person who wants to run your community. Because if she gets elected and she has slack-jawed Lee Wong there as a second vote—Joan essentially wants to do to West Chester what Mussolini did to Italy—and that isn’t an inflated statement. It’s based on a factual analysis of her actual behavior, and that is something that should concern everyone.
