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Media Fantasies versus Weather Realities

Posted on February 4, 2015 in Government, Tactical

Go Lean Commentary

Dateline Monday, February 2: It’s Groundhog Day again…and again…and again…*

The media swarms around this hibernating animal for prognosticating signs of what to expect for the rest of the winter weather season. This is a fantasy; an American media fantasy. On the other hand, there are many effective meteorological models that do an effective job of forecasting the weather, but many people think these are ignored in place of media hype; case in point: a Groundhog.

VIDEO – Punxsutawney Phil See His Shadow and Predicts 6 More Weeks of Winter – http://wapo.st/1BU7s23

A Groundhog?

Groundhogs, whistlepigs, woodchucks, all names for the same animal. Depending on where you live, you might have heard all three of these names; however, woodchuck is the scientifically accepted common name for the species, Marmota monax. As the first word suggests, the woodchuck is a marmot, a genus comprised of 15 species of medium-sized, ground-dwelling squirrels. Although woodchucks are generally solitary and live in lowland areas, most marmot species live in social groups in mountainous parts of Europe, Asia, and North America. (Source: http://blog.oup.com/2015/02/groundhog-day-urban-wildlife-institute/#sthash.c41AKDvb.dpuf)

The concept of weather forecasting requires hardware and software, not rodent animals. The Europeans have provided a good example for the Caribbean to model. Their hardware: satellites, are collaborative efforts to deploy, maintain and support, referred to as the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites or EUMETSAT; see Appendix below.

The software for weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a given location. These forecasts are made by collecting quantitative data about the current state of the atmosphere at a given place and using scientific understanding of atmospheric processes to project how the atmosphere will change. The chaotic nature of the atmosphere, the massive computational power required to solve the equations that describe the atmosphere, error involved in measuring the initial conditions, and an incomplete understanding of atmospheric processes mean that forecasts become less accurate as the time range of the forecast increases. The use of ensembles and model consensus help narrow the error and pick the most likely outcome.

A major part of modern weather forecasting is the severe weather alerts and advisories which a governmental weather service may issue when severe or hazardous weather is expected. This is done to protect life and property.^[75] Some of the most commonly known severe weather advisories are the severe thunderstorm, tornado warnings, as well as the severe tornado watches. Other forms of these advisories include those for winter weather, high wind, flood, tropical hurricanes, and fog.^[76] Severe weather advisories and alerts are broadcasted through the media, including radio, using emergency systems as the Emergency Alert System which break into regular TV and radio programming.^[77]

Among the notable models for Caribbean consideration are:

American Model: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
European Model: European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMRWF).

The scope of the American Model is weather affecting the American mainland and aligned territories. The European Model, on the other hand, has a similar scope for Europe, but starts their focus earlier with weather patterns in the Americas and Caribbean. (The “Jet Stream” brings weather from West to East across the US and then continues across the Atlantic on to the European continent).

The American and European models assume different strategies. The American model runs a short, mid and long range forecast. The European model considers mid-range only, running out only 10 to 15 days into the future.

This consideration aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean; this book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This empowerment effort represents a change for the region, calling on all 30 member-states in the region to confederate and provide their own solutions in the areas of economics, security and governance. Weather, as depicted in the foregoing VIDEOS, relates to all three areas. The CU/Go Lean roadmap has these prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines against “bad actors” and natural disasters.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, with a separation-of-powers between federal and state agencies.

The purpose of this commentary is to draw reference to the European Model, ECMWF, at a time when the American eco-system appears to be dysfunctional and filled with bad intent.

ECMRWF is renowned worldwide as providing the most accurate medium-range global weather forecasts to 15 days and seasonal forecasts to 12 months.^[2] Its products are provided to the European National Weather Services, as a complement to the national short-range and climatological activities. The National Meteorological Services of member-states use ECMWF’s products for their own national duties, in particular to give early warning of potentially damaging severe weather.

While many things the US do are good, there is also “bad intent” in the American eco-system, often associated with crony-capitalism. Many believe that media hype over weather forecasts spurs retail spending (surplus food, gasoline, generators, and firewood) to benefit the same companies that contract media purchases (advertising) with the media outlets. Consider the “blown out of proportion” sense in the following article:

About Juno: The how and why of a blown forecast http://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-juno-snow-dud-lehigh-valley-20150127-story.html

January 27, 2015 – Those Lehigh Valley commuters dusting the powder off their windshields Tuesday morning undoubtedly cast their thoughts back a day and concluded something had gone amiss in all the weather laboratories.

Wasn’t it supposed to snow 14 inches? Or was it six? Or two to four? They said something about a European model…

Well, off to work.

The storm that might have been is now the storm that wasn’t and no one will mention it again, at least until the next big miss by the weather services.

“Mother nature humbled us,” the Eastern PA Weather Authority wrote in a mea culpa Facebook post after its final call of 9 to 14 inches fell roughly 9 to 14 inches short.

What happened? As always, forecasters looked at a variety of models — the European model, famed for its precise forecasting of Superstorm Sandy, and many domestic models — and made predictions based on the data.

Mitchell Gaines, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, N.J., said there are about 10 commonly used models that make use of weather observations gathered around the world from satellites, balloons, ground stations and ships.
…
“We blew the call, and everyone blew it,” the Eastern PA Weather Authority post said. “(A)mending or lowering your original call is not nailing it either. No one got this right, plain and simple.”

Not quite no one. Adam Joseph, a meteorologist at the ABC station in Philadelphia, had predicted an underwhelming storm for the Philadelphia^# region from early on, saying on Sunday it had “high bust potential.”
…
New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio spent a couple of days making pronouncements so foreboding that he was parodied as an end-times prophet by [humor magazine] The Onion.

But instead of three feet of snow and blizzard winds, the city got about 8 inches of snow in Central Park. “Snore-easter,” the Daily News called it.

“This is an imprecise science,” New York^# Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a news briefing early Tuesday when asked about the forecast. He noted that last November, a storm that officials had not expected to be severe dropped seven feet of snow on Buffalo, in the western part of the state.

In New Jersey^#, Governor Chris Christie said it was better to err on the side of caution: “I was being told as late as 9 o’clock (Monday) night that we were looking at 20-inch accumulations in parts of New Jersey,” he said. “We were acting based on what we were being told.”
…
There was, too, something of a New York-centric slant in the media coverage. The storm was declared a “dud” because it largely spared Manhattan. But it slammed New England as advertised, with wind gusts approaching hurricane strength and smothering snow.

VIDEO – MONSTER BLIZZARD OF 2015 | New York Snow Storm Juno Forecast was an EPIC FAIL – https://youtu.be/Je6zr_K966A

Published on Jan 28, 2015 – Jan. 27, 2015 will go down in the annals of history as the day New Jersey came to a standstill for a blizzard in another state. Blizzard warnings have been lifted in the Garden State, projected snow totals more than cut in half and forecasters have apologized for what they’re describing as “big forecast miss.” …

Conspiracy, anyone?

The book Go Lean…Caribbean asserts that the Caribbean region must not allow the US to take the lead for our own nation-building, that American Crony-Capitalistic interest tends to hijack policies intended for the Greater Good. This assessment is logical considering that despite the reality of the 2008 Great Recession and the Wall Street complexity, no one has gone to jail! This despite the blatant “lying, cheating and stealing”, the millions of victims and $11 Trillion in economic setbacks.

Be kind, rewind …

In the fall of 2012, Super Storm Sandy devastated the Northeast American coast despite warnings and accurate forecasts from the European Model.

US vs. European hurricane model: Which is better?
By: Tamara Lush; posted May 29, 2013; retrieved February 3, 2015 from:
http://news.yahoo.com/us-vs-european-hurricane-model-better-164750199.html

When forecasters from the National Weather Service track a hurricane, they use models from several different supercomputers located around the world to create their predictions.

Some of those models are more accurate than others. During Hurricane Sandy last October, for instance, the model from the EuropeanCenter for Medium-range Weather Forecasting in the United Kingdom predicted eight days before landfall that the large storm would hit the East Coast, while the American supercomputer model showed Sandy drifting out to sea.

The American model eventually predicted Sandy’s landfall four days before the storm hit — plenty of time for preparation — but revealed a potential weakness in the American computer compared to the European system. It left some meteorologists fuming.

“Let me be blunt: the state of operational U.S. numerical weather prediction is an embarrassment to the nation and it does not have to be this way,” wrote Cliff Maas, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.
…
Experts also say the quality of a nation’s computer capability [for modeling] is emblematic of its underlying commitment to research, science and innovation.

Many felt that “the powers that be” did not want to overly alarm American citizens and affect the turnout for the Presidential Elections days later.

The foregoing articles/VIDEOs look at the repetition of Weather Forecast Dysfunction in 2012 with Super Storm Sandy and again, just last week with Winter Storm Juno. Compare this to the over-blown media hype of a Groundhog in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania…for weather prognostication.

Something is wrong with this portrayal. This is American crony-capitalism all over again. Like the Groundhog Day movie, the same patterns are repeating again, and again …

The Caribbean must do better!

This issue on weather is not the first instance of a “Big Bad American Bully” in the business world. This is just another reflection of American Crony Capitalism – where public policy is set to benefit private parties. Consider this chart from a previous blog:

Big Oil	While lobbying for continuous tax subsidies, the industry have colluded to artificially keep prices high and garner rocket profits ($38+ Billion every quarter).
Big Box	Retail chains impoverish small merchants on Main Street with Antitrust-like tactics, thusly impacting community jobs.
Big Pharma	Chemo-therapy cost $20,000+/month; and the War against Cancer is imperiled due to industry profit insistence.
Big Tobacco	Cigarettes are not natural tobacco but rather latent with chemicals to spruce addiction.
Big Agra	Agribusiness concerns bully family farmers and crowd out the market; plus fight common sense food labeling efforts.
Big Data	Brokers for internet and demographic data clearly have no regards to privacy confines
Big Media	Hollywood insists on big tax breaks/ subsidies for on-location shooting; cable companies conspire to keep rates high; textbook publishers practice price gouging.
Big Banks	Wall Street’s damage to housing and student loans are incontrovertible.
	NEW ENTRY
Big Weather	Overblown hype of “Weather Forecasts” to dictate commercial transactions.

The Go Lean book, and accompanying blog commentaries, go even deeper and hypothesize that beyond weather alerts, the American economic models are dysfunctional for the Caribbean perspective. The American wheels of commerce portray the Caribbean in a “parasite” role; imperiling regional industrialization even further. The US foreign policy for the Caribbean is to incentivize consumption of American products and media, and to ensure that no other European powers exert undue influence in the region – Monroe Doctrine and Pax Americana (Page 180).

The disposition of a “parasite” is not the only choice, for despite American pressure, countries like Japan and South Korea, despite being small population-size, have trade surpluses with the US. They are protégés, not parasites, and thusly provide a model for the Caribbean to emulate.

This broken system in America does not have to be modeled in the Caribbean. Change has now come. The driver of this change is technology and globalization. The Go Lean book posits that the governmental administrations must be open to full disclosure and accountability. The ubiquity of the internet has allowed whistleblowers to expose “shady” practices to the general public; think WikiLeaks.

The Go Lean roadmap provides turn-by-turn directions on how to forge this change in the region for a reboot of these Caribbean societal systems, including justice institutions. This roadmap is thusly viewed as more than just a planning tool, pronouncing this point early in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13) with these statements:

xvi. Whereas security [(Emergency/Disaster Management)] of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes…can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

The Go Lean book purports that the Caribbean can – and must – do better than our American counterparts. The vision of the CU is a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean to do the heavy-lifting of optimizing economic-security-governing engines. The book thusly details the policies and other community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the following strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to protect Caribbean society with prudent weather forecasting:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Privacy versus Public Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Whistleblower Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – Intelligence Gathering	Page 23
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Emergency Management	Page 76
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Meteorological and Geological Services	Page 79
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Benefit from Globalization	Page 119
Planning – Big Ideas – Integrating to a Single Market	Page 127
Planning – Lessons Learned from 2008	Page 136
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 169
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 171
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Intelligence Gathering & Analysis	Page 182
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters	Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Emergency Management	Page 196

The foregoing article/VIDEO relates to topics that are of serious concern for Caribbean planners. While the US is the world’s largest Single Market economy, we want to only model some of the American example. We would rather foster a business climate to benefit the Greater Good, not just some special interest group.

The world is not fooled! “Tamarind, Sour Sap and Green Dilly, you musse think we silly” – Bahamian Folk Song

There are many Go Lean blog commentaries that have echoed this point, addressing the subject of the Caribbean avoiding American consequences. See sample here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3397	A Christmas Present for the Banks from the Omnibus Bill
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3326	Detroit’s M-1 Rail – Finally avoiding Plutocratic Auto Industry Solutions
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2887	Caribbean must work together to address rum subsidies
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2522	The Cost of Cancer Drugs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2465	Book Review: ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2435	Korea’s Model – A dream for Latin America and the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2338	How Caribbean can Mitigate the Dreaded ‘Plutocracy’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2259	The Criminalization of American Business
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2183	A Textbook Case of Industry Price-gouging
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1309	5 Steps to a Bubble
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1256	Traditional 4-year Colleges – Terrible Investment for Region and Jobs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1143	Health-care fraud in America; Criminals take $272 billion a year
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=798	Lessons Learned from the American Airlines merger
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=789	America’s War on the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=782	Open the Time Capsule: The Great Recession of 2008
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=709	Student debt holds back many would-be home buyers
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=658	Indian Reservation Advocates Push for Junk-Food Tax
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623	Book Review: “The Divide – American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=353	Book Review: ‘Wrong – Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn…’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We *Don’t* Want from the US – #1: American Self-Interest Policies

The book Go Lean…Caribbean posits that many problems of the region are too big for any one member-state to solve alone, that there is the need for the technocracy of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. The purpose of this Go Lean/CU roadmap is to make the Caribbean homeland, a better place to live, work, learn and play. This effort is more than academic; this involves many practical mitigations and heavy-lifting. While this charter is not easy, it is worth all effort.

Climate change is a reality … for the Caribbean; (despite many in denial, especially in the US).

In the Caribbean we need accurate weather forecasting and alerts. We need the public to respect these alerts and not question some commercial-profit ulterior motive. We need the European Model more so than the American one.

The Go Lean roadmap calls for some integration of the regional member-states, a strategy of confederation with a tactic of separating powers between CU federal agencies and member-states’ governments. The roadmap calls for the regional integration of all meteorological and geological professional services. The separation-of-powers tactic also calls for assumption of Emergency Management Agencies for the member-states. There is the need for weather and disaster preparation/response under the same umbrella, with a direct line of reporting. The roadmap posits that to succeed as a society, the Caribbean region must not only consume, (in this case weather forecasts), but also create, produce, and distribute intellectual products and services (property) to the rest of the world. We need our own Caribbean weather/forecast models, algorithms, calculations and formulas!

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the changes and empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean.

🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Appendix – EUMETSAT: European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites

EUMETSAT is an intergovernmental organization created through an international convention agreed by a current total of 30 European Member States: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. These States fund the EUMETSAT programs and are the principal users of the systems. The convention establishing EUMETSAT was opened for signature in 1983 and entered into force in 19 June 1986.

EUMETSAT’s primary objective is to establish, maintain and exploit European systems of operational meteorological satellites. EUMETSAT is responsible for the launch and operation of the satellites and for delivering satellite data to end-users as well as contributing to the operational monitoring of climate and the detection of global climate changes.

The activities of EUMETSAT contribute to a global meteorological satellite observing system coordinated with other space-faring nations.

Satellite observations are an essential input to numerical weather prediction systems and also assist the human forecaster in the diagnosis of potentially hazardous weather developments. Of growing importance is the capacity of weather satellites to gather long-term measurements from space in support of climate change studies.

EUMETSAT is not part of the European Union, but became a signatory to the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters in 2012, thus providing for the global charitable use of its space assets.^[1]Source Reference: 1. http://www.disasterscharter.org/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=23109&folderId=172718&name=DLFE-4704.pdf

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Appendix – ^# Winter Storm Juno Overblown Preparations: http://youtu.be/ivK6jtWfX-U

Blizzard 2015 !!! Winter Storm Juno Forecast “Northeast Snowstorm Ramping Up ” !!! Amazing Video

Published on Jan 27, 2015 – More than 35 million people along the Philadelphia-to-Boston corridor rushed to get home and settle in Monday as a fearsome storm swirled in with the potential for hurricane-force winds and 1 to 3 feet of snow that could paralyze the Northeast for days.

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Appendix – * Movie Reference: 1993 Movie Groundhog Day

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/?ref_=nv_sr_2

A weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again.

Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/?ref_=ext_shr_eml_vi#lb-vi1319829785

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Crony-Capitalism, Disaster, Model, Power, Security

New York Times Maledictions on The Bahamas

Posted on February 2, 2015 in Government, Locations, Social

Go Lean Commentary

In this context, the word malediction simply means “bad” or “damning” words. It is not calling down a curse on a subject, but rather the reporting of an unbecoming characteristic. The Bahamas has done “bad” and the New York Times is telling the world.

But this is New York, not the Bahamas; why should this matter?

The New York Times is more than just the newspaper for the Tri-State metropolitan area surrounding New York City (35 million people); nicknamed for years as “The Gray Lady“, the New York Times is long regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record“.^[6] The paper’s print version remains the largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States. Its motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, which appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page.

If a student wants to do research on the 1892 American Recession for instance, (the paper has printed continuously since September 18, 1851), this one only has to retrieve the archives of the New York Times for that period.

Over its history, the New York Times has been awarded 114 different Pulitzer Prizes for Excellence in Journalism. Pulitzer Prizes have previously been awarded to journalists reporting on human trafficking and illegal migrations – See VIDEO below – it is an ignoble accomplishment to be put into this focus.

A front-page story, above the fold, about a small 320,000 populated nation in this paper is by all means an earth-shattering occurrence. Bahamas, you have done “bad” to garner this type of coverage, right in the middle of your #1 tourist market during the peak tourist season.

The article print date is Saturday January 31, only a few days after vicious Winter Storm Juno pelted the Northeast United States, (shutting down all of Manhattan), now to be followed by another (Artic Blast) storm currently lambasting the Mid-West (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, etc.) but heading eastward towards NYC. Drawing attention to a tropical resort destination like the Bahamas in the middle of such uninviting winter weather should be a bonus of free publicity. But alas, the New York Times article is a malediction!

This is also “on the heel” of a demand to “boycott Bahamas tourism” by certain fractions in Miami, Florida.

The purpose of this commentary is more than just newspapers and maledictions, but rather the acknowledgement that perhaps, the boycott-cause is gaining traction. Anyone from this Caribbean country, as is the case of this writer, may be timid with the characterization of supporting a cruel, inhumane – though legal – regime in his homeland. The constitution in the Bahamas do not award citizenship to babies born in the Bahamas to non-national parents. This is the standard – jus solis – in the US and in Canada. This standard obviously shades the American newspaper’s view of the Bahamas domestic policies.

There are so many issues with this New York Times story that aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean. The book serves as a roadmap for elevating Caribbean society and the economic, security and governing engines. The roadmap introduces the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), asserting that the problems besetting the region are too big for any one Caribbean member-state to tackle alone. That rather, there is a need for a super-national solution. Considering the details of the following article, a number of countries have been struggling with this same issue: Bahamas, Turks & Caicos Island, Dominican Republic, etc. The actual New York Times story about Haitian immigrants is as follows:

Title 1: Immigration Rules in Bahamas Sweep Up Haitians
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/world/haitians-are-swept-up-as-bahamas-tightens-immigration-rules.html?mwrsm=Facebook&fb_ref=Default&_r=0
By: Frances Robles – January 30, 2015

NASSAU, Bahamas — Kenson Timothee was walking down the street when a uniformed officer asked him a question that sends Bahamians of Haitian descent like him into a panic these days: Do you have a passport?

Mr. Timothee, who was born in the Bahamas to illegal Haitian immigrants, wound up jailed in immigration detention for six weeks. He is one of hundreds of people swept up in a fiercely debated new immigration policy in the Bahamas requiring everyone to hold a passport, a rule that human rights groups say unfairly targets people of Haitian descent.

Mr. Timothee had proof that he was born in the Bahamas, but because he had trouble obtaining his absentee father’s birth certificate, his application for Bahamian citizenship was never completed.

“I showed them that I had applied for citizenship, but they said that wasn’t good enough; as far as they are concerned, you are not Bahamian, you are Haitian, and you need to get deported,” Mr. Timothee said. “I don’t know anything about Haiti.”

On Thursday, the Bahamian government announced that the new policy would go a step further: By next Fall, schools will be asked to ensure that every child has a student permit. The annual $125 permit and a passport with a residency stamp will be required even of children born in the Bahamas who do not hold Bahamian citizenship.

The tough new policy echoes similar stances around the region, where new citizenship policies and anti-immigration measures have overwhelmingly affected Haitians, who are fleeing the hemisphere’s poorest country and are the most likely group to migrate illegally in great numbers. The top court in the Dominican Republic ruled in 2013 that the children of illegal immigrants, even if they are born in the country, did not have the right to citizenship.

Facing an international backlash, the Dominican government came up with a plan to prevent tens of thousands of people from becoming stateless, but months later, few people had managed to complete the process. With few successes to tout, in October the Dominican government extended the application period for another three months.

In Turks and Caicos, a top immigration official vowed early in 2013 to hunt down and capture Haitians illegally in the country, promising to make their lives “unbearable.” The country had already changed its immigration policies in 2012, making it harder for children of immigrants to obtain residency. Last year, Turks and Caicos said it would deploy drones to stop Haitian migration.

In Brazil, politicians considered closing a border with Peru last year to stem the tide of Haitians, and last month, Canada announced that it would resume deporting Haitians.

Here in the Bahamas, Mr. Timothee’s arrest coincided with stepped-up immigration raids in predominantly Haitian shantytowns, where people who lacked passports or work permits were apprehended. When illegal immigrants ran from officers, the agents knocked down doors and took their children, and the photos of toddlers being carried away circulated widely on social media.

Since the policy took effect November 1, children born in the Bahamas have been deported with their parents, and others with Haitian-sounding names have been pulled from school classrooms, human rights observers said. The government acknowledges that even Bahamian citizens with French surnames are frequently arrested by mistake. In September alone, 241 Haitians were deported, according to government figures.

Though 85 percent of Bahamians support the new policy according to one poll, it has set off a round of international condemnation. A Florida legislator called for a tourism boycott of the Bahamas and organized a protest at the nation’s Miami consulate. Citing some of the more alarming cases, including that of a pregnant Haitian woman who gave birth on an immigration detention center floor aided only by other detainees, several international groups have asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene.

Immigration officials in the Bahamas say their policies do not target any particular group, provide a better sense of who is living in their country, and could deter thousands of Haitian migrants from taking to the high seas each year in boats that often sink.

“We had situations where 100 people were showing up every day; that’s unsustainable,” said Frederick A. Mitchell, the Bahamian foreign minister. “That situation had spiraled out of control.”

Annette M. Martínez Orabona, director of the Caribbean Institute for Human Rights, said she recently visited the Bahamas to investigate the new policy, arguing that it fit into a broad context of immigration crackdowns in the region.

“It’s all guided by discriminatory practices toward persons of Haitian origin,” she said.

Children like Mr. Timothee’s 5-year-old daughter are in a particularly precarious legal situation, she said. If nationality is passed down by blood and Mr. Timothee has no citizenship, then what passport would his daughter get?

“The third generation is in a black hole,” Ms. Martínez said.

In the Bahamas, the Constitution says that people born there to parents who were not citizens have the right to apply for citizenship between their 18th and 19th birthdays. In a country where one in 10 Bahamians is of Haitian descent, many people never apply, and others face years of administrative delays, leaving an untold number of people in the country without documentation.

The new policy forces them to apply for a passport from their parents’ country of origin. Americans who have children in the Bahamas regularly get United States passports for them, and this is no different, Mr. Mitchell said.

“There’s nothing wrong with being Haitian,” Mr. Mitchell said.

But the people affected by the new policy are leery of obtaining citizenship from Haiti, a country most of them have never visited.

“It’s a trick,” said Fred R. Smith, a civil rights lawyer in the Bahamas who has become the policy’s most vocal critic. “Once you apply for a Haitian passport, you’re already a citizen of another country, and you no longer fit into a category where the Bahamas is under an obligation to give you citizenship. You are no longer stateless.”

He said the government had routinely descended on an area, apprehended a few hundred people, and “hauled off” anyone who could not produce papers on the spot. The majority of detainees are released when their relatives or employers come to the detention center with their paperwork.

Some people have been deported even though they were born in the Bahamas. People like Mr. Timothee, whose citizenship status is pending, wind up in limbo. Others, like Rose St. Fleur, have been sent home with an admonishment to carry their paperwork.

Ms. St. Fleur, a 29-year-old Bahamian citizen, said she had been picked up twice since October. She was 32 weeks pregnant when neighbors watched agents drag her down the street onto a bus, she and her neighbors said.

“When they asked me my name and I told them, they said, ‘That’s a foreign last name,’ ” Ms. St. Fleur said. “I told them, ‘Yes, but I am a Bahamian citizen.’ ” She said they replied, “You still have to come with us.”

Many people have not been able to obtain documents because the paperwork required, including certified copies of both parents’ birth certificates, is difficult to obtain. The Haitian government, itself crippled by political infighting and a halting recovery from the earthquake five years ago, has been unable to speedily produce records for the hundreds of thousands of people in the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas who are suddenly in need of decades-old birth records.

Because of delays in obtaining Haitian passports, thousands of Bahamians are now at risk of having no nationality at all.

“The person who may have a delay in getting papers is not stateless,” Dwight L. Beneby, the Bahamas’ assistant director of immigration. “It’s not that we’re trying to get rid of people or trying to get out of giving them citizenship. If you are here, let’s know who you are.”

Francois Guillaume II, who was Haiti’s minister of Haitians living abroad when the policy was announced, said the new policy came without warning.

“It’s troubling when we have cases of people who have never lived in Haiti and are sent to a country that is completely foreign to them,” said Mr. Guillaume, who lost his position in a recent ministerial shuffle. “It must be traumatizing for them.”

Most of the Bahamian-born deportees were children, but one was 18 years old, and it was unclear why she was not given the opportunity to seek legal residency, he said.

“I don’t think there is an anti-Haitian sentiment in the area; I believe there are countries experiencing social pressure and are trying to look for solutions,” Mr. Guillaume said. “Some solutions are rash. Sometimes they are politically motivated. Nonetheless, we hope the solutions respect international norms.”

Though the Bahamas immigration/nationality enforcement is “legal” per the country’s constitution, not everyone in the homeland approves of this policy. Note to the New York Times: “The round-up of Bahamian-born Haitians is not universally concurred in the country”. This is a policy of the current government administration. There are non-government organizations (NGOs) and elected opposition officials that are vocal in their disagreements of this enforcement. (This Go Lean commentary remains apolitical). See a news article (snippet) here in that vein:

Title 2: Call To Bring Immigration Legislation to Parliament –
(Retrieved 01/30/2015 from: http://www.tribune242.com/news/2015/jan/30/call-bring-immigration-legislation/)

ST ANNE’S MP Hubert Chipman yesterday renewed calls for legislation to be brought to Parliament to support the government’s new immigration policy.

Mr. Chipman, shadow minister for foreign affairs and immigration, said the only person who had a clear understanding of the policy was Immigration Minister Fred Mitchell, and questioned how the new policy has affected the department’s backlog of citizenship applications.

He said officials have put the “cart before the horse” by targeting migrant communities before modernizing infrastructure to process individuals.

These articles reflect the heavy-lifting burdens that the Caribbean member-states must address regarding nationality and immigration. Underlying to this issue among all the affected Caribbean member-states is the failing disposition of Haiti. The Go Lean…Caribbean book presents a Marshall Plan to re-boot Haiti. The consequence: a better Haiti to live, work and play. Only then will the citizens of Haiti, and the Caribbean as a whole, be less inclined to flee the homeland.

The Go Lean roadmap provides perhaps the ultimate resolution to this perplexing nationality processing problem, that of a regional entity, the CU, to streamline application processing. This would be an extension of the current CariCom passport process.

A key problem with this nationality issue is the current sensitivities of Jus soli (Latin: right of the soil) versus Jus sanguinis (Latin: right of blood). These points were detailed in a previous blog.

In the middle of the winter, the New York Times should be inciting its readers to flee the bitter cold and enjoy the hospitality of the Bahamas, Turks & Caicos and the Dominican Republic, yet instead the front page article is exposing the human rights shortcomings of these states’ nationality policies.

The Go Lean book and blogs addresses ways to better protect human rights. While this subject is not tried-and-true economics – the usual focus of this roadmap – there is a correlation of satisfactory human rights records and American trade. The roadmap seeks to elevate all the engines of Caribbean society for a better homeland for the 42 million residents and 80 million visitors, across the 30 member-states. The CU, applying best-practices for community empowerment and human rights, has the following 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance, with consideration for minority equalization, to support these engines.

The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize the region’s economic landscape:

Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Integrate region into a Single Market Economy	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Homeland Security	Page 75
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Planning – 10 Big Ideas … in the Caribbean Region – Haiti & Cuba	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Ways to Model the EU – From Worst to First	Page 130
Planning – Reasons Why the CU Will Succeed – Germany Reconciliation Model	Page 132
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Cuba & Haiti on the List	Page 134
Planning – Lessons from East Germany – European post-war rebuilding	Page 139
Planning – Lessons from the US Constitution	Page 145
Planning – Lessons from Canada’s History	Page 146
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Empowering Immigration – Case Study of Indian Migrants	Page 174
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 178
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora	Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Cuba	Page 237
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Dominican Republic	Page 237
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

The message to the Caribbean leaders and planners is straight-forward: The US, New York Times and all American media, are watching and judging, based on their own standards. The goal of the Go Lean roadmap is to formulate the Caribbean region to be better American neighbors, a protégé status rather than the current parasite status. There is the need to re-focus on our populations in general – majority, minority, Black, White, French, English, etc.. Countries like the Bahamas, and Haiti for that matter, need “all hands on deck”, not less hands. Economic growth requires a growing population; (a previous report disclosed 70,000 Bahamians living illegally in the US).

We do not want to encourage migration nor facilitate it. Just the opposite, we simply want to encourage and facilitate citizens staying and contributing to their native homelands. We do not want to “fatten frogs for snake”, we want to elevate our own communities to be better places to live, work and play.

Now is the time for all the Caribbean to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap for Caribbean economic, security and governance elevation. Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to learn the lessons from other communities, (think Apartheid in South Africa). It is guaranteed: once the human rights issues are resolved, your society/community will soar.

🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

———

APPENDIX – VIDEO: Pulitzer Prizes on Human Trafficking

Direct Link: http://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000002825879/reuters-journalist-jason-szep-celebrates-pulitzer-prize.html

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How to Train Your ‘Dragon’ – Freeport Version

Posted on January 30, 2015 in Government, Industries, Locations

Go Lean Commentary

The term ‘dragon’ has a deep and rich meaning in all of literature; see Appendix A for a list of different cultures with dragon mythologies.

Needless to say, there is no such creature, apart from the adorable Komodo Dragon, a big lizard native to South Pacific and Australasia region.

Even in scripture, the great Enemy, Satan the Devil is depicted as a Dragon; (Revelation 12:9). This commentary is not labeling any one person as a “Dragon”, but rather assigning the term “Dragon” to a “Dependence on Foreign Investors” or DFI.

So figuratively, the term “dragon” refers to an adversarial creature. This is where the relevance is to this commentary for the promotion of the book Go Lean…Caribbean. The book calls for the elevation of Caribbean economics, security and governance. It assesses many “dragon-like” challenges that stand in the way of progress and have resulted in near wholesale abandonment of so many communities.

One city of focus for this commentary is the 2^nd city in the Bahamas, Freeport/Lucaya. This town is now undergoing a crisis in all three challenge factors (economics, security, and governance), and yet the book maintains that this “dragon can be trained’ see VIDEO below. Part of this crisis is the fact the certain tax-free provisions, real property tax and Business License, of the Hawksbill Creek Agreement (that led to the private development of Freeport) will expire on August 4, 2015. The national government is pondering renewal and extension; the ongoing stalemate, exacerbates the municipal crisis.

The book opens with the declaration that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. For the Caribbean region there is not just one issue, but rather many negative/downward triggers, all which are addressed in the Go Lean book. While these challenges abound through out the region, Freeport’s exposure to these following triggers are more heightened than elsewhere:

Climate Change and threats from natural disasters
Decline of the American Middle Class, since the 2008 financial crisis
Decimation of the tourism product – measured decline in amenities like Golf and Casino Gambling.
Failure to diversify the economy with any industrial base
Emergence of powerful elite, the One Percent.
Bureaucratic hindrance of Foreign Direct Investors
Security threats from border encroachments of illegal immigrants.
Security threats of immigrants assimilating their adopted societies.

Harsh realities have now come to fruition in the Caribbean, but the town of Freeport have been hard hit with the full force of all of these dynamics. The book therefore posits that there is a need to re-focus, re-boot, and optimize the engines of commerce so as to make all the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. While all the Caribbean needs to create jobs, this town of Freeport, has a greater need, more so than others.

Ship-building, in its many genres, is being promoted for adoption and incubation. This is just one of the advocacies identified, qualified and proposed in the Go Lean book. In total, there are 144 advocacies, catalogued in the areas of Community Ethos, Strategy, Tactics, Implementations, Planning, Economics, Government, Industries, Social, and Locations.

Normally DFI refer to Direct Foreign Investment, but in this case the “Dependence on Foreign Investors” is portrayed as a negative factor or pest – a dragon – unless “trained”, caroled and controlled to harness the energy in a positive way.

Consider these news articles that describe the business climate and players for the Freeport landscape:

1. Freeport Plutocratic Benefactor – Sir Jack Hayward:

Sir Jack Hayward, British Businessman, Property Developer, Philanthropist and Sports Team Owner was memorialized by fans of his football team Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C.. He passed away last week (January 13) at age 91. He was loved and hated in different circles, some even compared his racism to Adolf Hitler – perhaps a hyperbole. Sir Jack was also a principal owner in the Grand Bahama Port Authority*. So he wielded power as to the municipal affairs and economic development of this city.

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/wolves-football-pundit-barry-glendenning-8481522

2. Fleeing a “sinking ship”:

Sir Jack Hayward Jack arrived in Grand Bahama in 1956 to promote the development of Freeport and became a Vice-President of the Grand Bahama Port Authority; eventually he assumed the Chairmanship of the Board of Directors (after 2004). Until the convalescence before his death, he continued to play an active role in Freeport. Sir Jack was in negotiations to sell his family’s 50 per cent stake in the GBPA Group of Companies. Now that provisions of the Hawksbill Creek Agreement (HCA) need renewal from the national government, multiple “dragons” are now circling the City of Freeport.

http://www.tribune242.com/news/2015/jan/28/sir-jack-port-sale-talks-passing/

3. At the precipice:

Community leaders in Freeport have declared that it would be “disastrous” if the national government fail to pursue HCA extension and allow the levy of real property taxes on GBPA licensees; “this would be another nail in Freeport’s coffin”. Freeport is now at the precipice – dragons are circling.

http://www.tribune242.com/news/2015/jan/08/freeport-disaster-if-property-tax-imposed/

4. Roadmap for economic empowerments:

The Go Lean roadmap is not a work of fiction or mythology; it is based on the reality of the Caribbean disposition. It is what it is, the book declares. It is only by accepting reality that real solutions can be forged: discovered, designed and deployed. The book, and accompanying blogs posit that “dragons can be trained”. The sad state of affairs in Freeport can be turned around by the embrace of a “double down” strategy on the island’s nascent ship-building industry.

http://grandbahamashipyard.com/facilities/drydocks/

The current disposition for Freeport, Grand Bahama is dire. But there is a glimmer of hope with this industrial development of ship-building. A previous blog/commentary pushed hard on the idea of ship-building/ship-breaking for the Caribbean region; now this commentary advocates adding ship-breaking to the ship-building model for Freeport, and then “double-down” on this industry space … with incubators, stimulus grants, angel investors, R&D and other initiatives. This is the heavy-lifting described in the Go Lean book.

In this vein, the book Go Lean… Caribbean, serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) with the charter to facilitate jobs in the region. We want to explore all the strong benefits of the ship-building/ship-breaking industry. This aligns with the CU charter; as defined by these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

Early in the Go Lean book, the responsibility to create jobs was identified as an important function for the CU with this pronouncement in the Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 14):

xxvi. Whereas the Caribbean region must have new jobs to empower the engines of the economy and create the income sources for prosperity, and encourage the next generation to forge their dreams right at home, the Federation must therefore foster the development of new industries, like that of ship-building, automobile manufacturing, prefabricated housing, frozen foods, pipelines, call centers, and the prison industrial complex. In addition, the Federation must invigorate the enterprises related to existing industries tourism, fisheries and lotteries – impacting the region with more jobs.

The CU will facilitate the region’s eco-system for Self-Governing Entities (SGE) for shipyards. This approach calls for the establishment of industrial parks, corporate campuses and research parks in bordered territories; these structures would be inviting to the super-rich (One-Percent) and their resources. These entities would be governed solely by the technocratic CU. The approach is not to punish the One-Percent for their success nor cower to any special interests group at the expense of the greater population.

This roadmap explains how all 30 Caribbean member-states can elevate the economic engines (direct and indirect spin-off activities), by allowing the CU to assume jurisdiction for SGE’s in the region and the Exclusive Economic Zone (the 1,063,000 square miles of the Caribbean Sea). Freeport is ideal for SGE’s for ship-building/ship-breaking yards, with its vast array of canals and waterways.

The Go Lean book also details the principle of job multipliers, how certain industries are better than others for generating multiple indirect jobs down the line for each direct job on a company’s payroll. The shipyard industry has a job-multiplier rate of 3.0. So the creation of 15,000 direct jobs for the shipyard industry in the Caribbean region can have the multiplier effect of 45,000 jobs. That economic impact is the result of “training the dragons”.

How would the Caribbean create 45,000 jobs in the course of the 5-year roadmap? By adoption of different community ethos, plus the executions of key strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies. The following is a sample:

Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth	Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development	Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Around – Recycling and Demolition Industries	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Mission – Facilitate a Shipbuilding Industry	Page 46
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Tactics to Forge an $800 Billion Economy – High Multiplier Industries	Page 70
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Self-Governing Entities	Page 80
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities	Page 105
Implementation – Ways to Re-boot Freeport	Page 112
Planning – Big Ideas – Confederation with Sovereignty	Page 127
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Emergency Management – Processes and Systems	Page 196
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Develop/Grow a Ship-Building Industry	Page 209
Appendix – Job Multipliers	Page 259

The CU will foster industrial developments in support of alternative options to tourism. An important ingredient is the willingness of the people to engage. The CU/Go Lean will message to the Caribbean people, that the region is ready for this industrial challenge of ship-breaking.

The Caribbean is arguably the best address on the planet, but jobs are missing. With jobs, communities like the City of Freeport will be able to retain more of their citizens and suffer less abandonment. It’s all about people; Freeport has lost people and populations in the last few decades. The imagery of pests – dragons – come to mind that sneak away with young people during the night.

Time now for a change; time to train the dragons!

Whereas dragons are mythical, the Caribbean disposition, and Freeport’s, is no fairytale, no myth; this is real life. 🙂

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

————-

Appendix VIDEO: How To Train Your Dragon: “Official Trailer” – http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1158218777/

This commentary asserts that Freeport, Grand Bahama would be analogous to the fictitious Town of Berk in the movie.

This movie/snippet is owned by Dreamworks Entertainment. No copyright infringement intended. Apologies for the references to Nordic Culture, and any negative stereotypes projected.

Appendix A – Cultures with Dragon Mythology

Nordic (Viking)
Greek
Slavic (Romania, Russia)
Egypt
Ancient India
Persian
Jewish
Chinese dragon
Japanese
Korean
Bhutan
Manipur
Vietnam

————–

Appendix B– * Grand Bahama Port Authority (GBPA)

The Port Authority is a privately held corporation that acts as the municipal authority for Freeport, Grand Bahama Island, The Bahamas. The GBPA was created by the Hawksbill Creek Agreement of 1955. The GBPA is horizontally integrated with property development, municipal services, airport ( world’s largest privately owned airport), harbor operations, and shipyard concerns.

The Grand Bahama Port Authority is jointly owned by Sir Jack Hayward (50%) and the family of the late Edward St. George (1928 – 2004).The Ownership Structure also features a partnership with Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa on the container port operations, and the resort area in the Lucaya section of the City.

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Watch the Super Bowl … Commercials

Posted on January 29, 2015 in Industries, Social

Go Lean Commentary

The publishers of the book Go Lean…Caribbean encourages you to watch the Big Game on Sunday (February 1, 2015), Super Bowl XLIX from Phoenix –area, Arizona, between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. Pull for your favorite team and enjoy the half-time show (Katy Perry). It’s all free! It’s being paid for by the advertisers.

So as to complete the full economic cycle, be sure to watch the commercials; because this is Big Money; Big Stakes and a Big Deal. The 2014 version, Super Bowl XLVIII on FOX Broadcast Network was the most watched television program in US history with 111.5 million viewers.^[15][16] The Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bruno Mars was the most watched ever with 115.3 million viewers.^[15][16] Now, it’s not just TV, but “second- screen” (computers, tablets & mobile devices) as well; this is now tweet-along-with-us programming; notice the #BestBuds Twitter identifier in the following Ad:

VIDEO – http://youtu.be/EIUSkKTUftU – 2015 Budweiser Clydesdale Beer Run

Published on Jan 23, 2015 – It’s time for your Super Bowl beer run. Don’t disappoint a Clydesdale. Choose Budweiser for you and your #BestBuds on epic Super Bowl weekend!

For $4.5 million per 30 second ad, an advertiser had better get the “maximum bang for the buck”; but 30 seconds is still only 30 seconds. Enter the “second-screen”; now advertisers can stretch the attention of their audience by directing them to internet websites, Twitter followings and even YouTube videos and Facebook videos.

See these related stories, (sourced mostly from Variety.com – Hollywood & Entertainment Business Magazine; (retrieved 01-29-2015):

1. WATCH: Super Bowl 2015 Commercials

Audiences no longer need to wait until the Big Game to watch Super Bowl commercials, with an increasing number of marketers opting to release their spots days before kickoff. This year is no different, with Budweiser, Budweiser, Bud Light, Kia, Mercedes-Benz USA, T-Mobile, Victoria’s Secret, BMW, even Paramount with “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” among those having already posted their ads online [on sites like YouTube].

The reason? The high cost to play the Super Bowl promo blitz is one. At around $4.5 million per 30 second ad, buying time during the match up between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots is at record levels. NBC is airing the game February 1.

2. Super Bowl Ads: NBC Turns to Tumblr to Post Spots After They Air on TV

NBC Sports has launched a new Super Bowl page on Yahoo’s [social media site] Tumblr that the programmer will use to feature Super Bowl XLIX’s TV ads immediately after they air on NBC on Sunday, February 1.

The new NBC Sports Tumblr page, accessible via NBCSports.com/Ads, will be populated with original content ahead of Super Bowl Sunday created by the NBC Sports’ marketing media team, as well as from re-blogging NFL-related Tumblr posts. On game day, the page will convert into a hub for Super Bowl TV ads.

3. NBCU Will Use Super Bowl XLIX Free Live-Stream to Promote Pay-TV Online Services

NBCUniversal will launch an 11-hour free digital video stream — centered around live coverage of this year’s Super Bowl — in a bid to get users to log in to its “TV Everywhere” (TVE) services across its broadcast and cable portfolio the rest of the year.

The Peacock’s “Super Stream Sunday” event will include NBC’s presentation of the Super Bowl, as well as the halftime show toplined by Katy Perry. The live-stream will kick off at 12 p.m. ET on Feb. 1 with NBC’s pregame coverage and concludes with an airing of a new episode of primetime drama “The Blacklist” at approximately 10 p.m. ET.

Ordinarily, access to the NBC Sports Live Extra and NBC.com content requires users to log in using credentials from participating [Pay] TV providers. The free promo is aimed at driving usage of TVE, to ensure those subscribers keep paying for television service.

“We are leveraging the massive digital reach of the Super Bowl to help raise overall awareness of TV Everywhere by allowing consumers to explore our vast TVE offering with this special one-day-only access,” said Alison Moore, GM and Exec VP of TV Everywhere for NBCU.

NBC does not have NFL live-streaming rights on smartphone devices, which the league has granted exclusively to Verizon Wireless. As such, the “Super Stream Sunday” content will be available on tablets and desktop computers.

4. Facebook may be the big winner of this year’s Super Bowl

For retailer Freshpet, a new ad campaign video was released to both YouTube and Facebook this past December. It quickly went viral. That wasn’t that surprising. The surprising part was the disparity between views on YouTube compared to Facebook. On YouTube, the video has racked up around 7.5 million views so far. On Facebook, the figure is 20 million. “It was fairly eye-opening,” he says. “Things are evolving really quickly.”

With stats like that, this might be the first year in which views of Super Bowl ads on Facebook eclipse those of YouTube.

No wonder then that many advertisers in the big game are looking to go Facebook native.

Show-business has changed. Sports has changed. TV has changed…

… there is now time-shifted viewing (DVR) and on-demand platforms offering an alphabetical menu of shows.

These changes are where this commentary relates to the Caribbean. The changing TV landscape affects the Caribbean region as well, or at least it should. This book Go Lean… Caribbean, serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The roadmap has 3 prime directives:

Optimization of economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines and marshal against economic crimes.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The roadmap recognizes and fosters more sports business in the region. The genius qualifiers – athletic talent – of many Caribbean men and women are already heightened. The goal now is foster the local eco-system in the homeland so that those with talent would not have to flee the region to garner the business returns on their athletic investments. This Go Lean economic empowerment roadmap strategizes to create a Single Media Market to leverage the value of broadcast rights for the entire region, utilizing all the advantages of cutting edge ICT offerings. The result: an audience of 42 million people across 30 member-states and 4 languages, facilitating television, cable, satellite and internet streaming wherever economically viable.

Early in the book, the benefits of sports and technology empowerment is pronounced in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13 & 14), with these opening statements:

xiii.      Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

xiv.      Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.

xv.      Whereas intellectual property can easily traverse national borders, the rights and privileges of intellectual property must be respected at home and abroad. The Federation must install protections to ensure that no abuse of these rights go with impunity, and to ensure that foreign authorities enforce the rights of the intellectual property registered in our region.

xxxi.      Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism – modeling the Olympics.

The region has the eco-system of free broadcast television, and the infrastructure for internet streaming. So the issues being tracked for this year’s Super Bowl have bearing in the execution of this roadmap.

The Go Lean roadmap was developed with the community ethos in mind to forge change and build up the communities around the sports world, plus the execution of related strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to make the change permanent. The following is a sample of these specific details from the book:

Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius	Page 27
Community Ethos – Promote Intellectual Property	Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategic – Vision – Consolidating the Region in to a Single Market	Page 45
Strategic – Staffing – Sporting Events at Fairgrounds	Page 55
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Sports & Culture Administration	Page 81
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Fairgrounds Administration	Page 83
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities – Fairgrounds	Page 105
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – #5 Four Languages in Unison / #8 Cyber Caribbean	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Education – Sports Academies to Foster Talent	Page 159
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Local Government – Parks & Recreation	Page 169
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Events	Page 191
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds	Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology – Intellectual Property Protections	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Empower Women	Page 226
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth	Page 227
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Sports	Page 229
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Sports Leagues	Page 234

This commentary previously featured subjects related to developing the eco-systems of the sports business, as sampled here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3999	Breaking New Ground in the Changing Show-business Eco-System
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3641	‘We Built This City on ‘ …Show-business
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3414	Levi’s® Stadium: A Team Effort for the Big Business of Sports
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3244	Sports Role Model – Broadcasting / Internet Streaming: espnW.
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2222	Sports Role Model – Playing For Pride … And More
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2171	Sports Role Model – Turn On the SEC Network
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2152	Sports Role Model – US versus the World
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1446	Caribbean Players in the 2014 World Cup
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1341	Sports Role Model – College World Series Time
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1148	Sports Bubble – Franchise values in basketball
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1092	Aereo – Model for the Future of TV Blending with the Internet
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1020	Sports Revolutionary: Advocate Jeffrey Webb
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=318	Collegiate Sports in the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We Want from the US – # 10: Sports Professionalism
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=60	Could the Caribbean Host the Olympic Games?

The Go Lean book focuses primarily on economic issues, but it recognizes that sports and its attendant functions can build up a community, nation and region. But the quest to re-build, re-boot and re-tool the Caribbean will be more than just kids-play, it must model the Super Bowl and act like a Big Business.

The Go Lean roadmap describes the heavy-lifting activities for the many people, organizations and governments to accomplish this goal. But the goal is conceivable, believable and achievable. We can make the region a better place to live, work and play.

🙂

Download the free e-book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Sir Sidney Poitier – ‘Breaking New Ground’

Posted on January 28, 2015 in Ethos, Industries, Social

Go Lean Commentary

Movies are an amazing business model. People give money to spend a couple of hours watching someone else’s creation and then leave the theater with nothing to show for the investment; except perhaps a different perspective. That is all!

But no one wants to live in a world without this art-form, without movies. Those few hours can entertain, engage and transform; sometimes even “break new ground” and change the world. So movies and movie stars can be extremely influential in modern society. This is the power of the arts, and this art-form in particular.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean stresses the arts as equally as it does the sciences, for empowering and transforming Caribbean society. While the Caribbean may not have any Nobel Prize winning scientist, we do have an Academy Award winning artist/actor, Sidney Poitier from the Bahamas. He has been able to capitalize on the influence of this art-form for over 65 years and pursued the Greater Good. So his accomplishments transcend the movie screen and impacts real-life.

For this accomplishment, he has been honored and knighted by British Monarch Queen Elizabeth II as a “Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE)”. We thusly refer to him now as Sir Sidney Poitier.

He has also received a similar accolade from the US President, the highest civilian honor: the Presidential Medal of Freedom*.

He has received many more honors and awards; see Appendix A for a sample list of Top Honors.

In focus for this commentary is his 1964 Oscar win for the 1963 movie Lilies of the Field. This was a big deal for Sir Sidney and the entire African Diaspora – people of color. Or as the BBC reported then: “he broke new ground”.

No new ground is being broken in Hollywood this year. The biggest stunner of the 2015 Academy Award nominations for films released in 2014 was that not a single actor of color or female director was included, sparking immediate criticism about Hollywood’s failure to include minorities in its most elite ranks. While this is a valid criticism, Hollywood may actually mirror society in general, where minority participation may be lacking in so many attendant functions – senior positions – of this business eco-system.

(Click on the Photo to Enlarge)

While there may be some catch-up that this industry must still make, there are times when the movie-business will “boldly go where no one has gone before”. The Sir Sidney 1964 break-through was one such moment.

With a date-of-birth of February 20, 1927 (age 88 on his next birthday), what does this screen legend do on his downtime? In addition to serving as patriarch of his family of 6 daughters and 6 granddaughters, he summons world leaders to him for consultation. (Sir Sidney serves as the Bahamas non-residential Ambassador to Japan). See this VIDEO here of his entertaining the Prime Minister of the Bahamas in a recent visit.

VIDEO – Downtime with Sir Sidney Poitier – http://youtu.be/xYv5QUT_zKI

Published on Jan 21, 2015 – In a special interview with ZNS News, legendary actor Sir Sidney Poitier challenged Bahamian political leaders to take the country to the next level.

The publishers of the book Go Lean…Caribbean recognizes the life contributions of Sir Sidney as an role model for excellence in the arts and also as an advocate of civil rights and social justice. He definitely demonstrates a love for his Caribbean (Bahamas) homeland and seeks to impact its development on the world scene. Though not a direct quotation, he has called for the elevation of Caribbean life and culture. This book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to help the region become a better place to live, work and play. There is a role for the arts (including film-making) in this empowerment roadmap.

Unlike the current dread of “Black and Brown” among the Oscar nominees, the Go Lean roadmap seeks to put Caribbean people in a place of better command-and-control of their circumstances, to develop the community ethos of assisting each other to advance in our own lives, in our individual communities and in the Caribbean as a whole. The book posits that a unified Caribbean Single Market of 42 million people and a GDP of $800 Billion can foster a “domestic” film industry, much like the formations of Bollywood in India (Page 346) and Nollywood in Nigeria. Deeper exploration of this amazing business model (movies/show-business) can create jobs and garner local returns from the necessary investments.

These previous blog/commentaries drilled deeper on this quest to better foster show-business; below are some examples:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3641	‘We Built This City …’ on Music and Show-business
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3568	Forging Change: Music Moves People
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3292	Art Basel Miami – a Testament to the Spread of Culture
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3078	Bill Cosby – Sir Sidney’s Frequent Co-Star – Accusations abound
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2726	Caribbean Role Model for the Arts/Fashion – Oscar De La Renta: RIP
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2415	How ‘The Lion King’ roared into history
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1909	Role Model Berry Gordy – No Town Like Motown
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1037	Humanities Advocate – Maya Angelou: RIP
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=866	Caribbean Music Man: Bob Marley – The legend lives on!

The quest is to elevate Caribbean society with many industrial developments, including the arts. This was stressed in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13) with this statement:

xxi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

This impact and overall benefit of this roadmap is pronounced in the CU‘s prime directives, identified with these 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The roadmap specifically encourages the region, to lean-in and foster the next generation of Sidney Poitier’s with these specific community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies:

Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 24
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius	Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Intellectual Property	Page 31
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Celebrate the arts, people and culture of the Caribbean	Page 46
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – Tourism and Film Promotion & Administration	Page 78
Implementation – Integration of Region in Single Market of 42 million people	Page 95
Anatomy of Advocacies – Ability to Change the World	Page 122
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Caribbean Single Market	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Better Manage Image	Page 129
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Education – Foster Performing Arts	Page 159
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Hollywood	Page 203
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage	Page 222
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth	Page 225
Advocacy – Ways to Improve the Arts	Page 230
Appendix – A Summary of Bollywood Movies	Page 346

The Go Lean posits that the CU should foster the genius potential in Caribbean artists and incubate the related industries of show-business. The roadmap pronounces that with the participation of many advocates on many different paths for progress, the Caribbean can truly become a better place to live, work and play. We, along with the whole world, owe a debt to Sir Sidney for leading us along this path.

Yes, Hollywood must change and acknowledge more diversity; but this is out-of-scope for this roadmap. The Caribbean must change … to adapt to a changing world. This is within our scope. While no Caribbean member-state may be able to compete and excel alone, together and collaboratively, we can stand up proud and present the world the beautiful contributions of Caribbean people and art. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

———

APPENDIX A – Sidney Poitier Honors & Awards

1958 British Academy Film Award for Best Foreign Actor for The Defiant Ones
1958 Silver Bear for Best Actor (8^th Berlin Film Festival) for The Defiant Ones^[39]
1963 Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Lilies of the Field
1963 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama for Lilies of the Field
1963 Silver Bear for Best Actor (13^th Berlin Film Festival) for Lilies of the Field ^[40]
1974 Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE)
1982 Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award ^[41]
1992 AFI Life Achievement Award
1995 Kennedy Center Honors
1997 Appointed non-resident Bahamian Ambassador to Japan
1999 SAG Life Achievement Award
2000 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special for The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn
2001 NAACP Image Award – Hall of Fame Award
2001 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album – Rick Harris, John Runnette (producers) and Sidney Poitier for The Measure of a Man
2002 Honorary Oscar – “For his extraordinary performances and unique presence on the screen and for representing the industry with dignity, style and intelligence”
2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom^[42]
2011 Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala Tribute^[43] honoring his life and careers

——–

APPENDIX B – * Presidential Medal of Freedom

This award is bestowed by the President of the United States and is — along with the comparable Congressional Gold Medal, bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award of the United States. It recognizes those individuals who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors”.^[3] (Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom)

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Google and Mobile Phones – Here comes Change

Posted on January 27, 2015 in Ethos, Industries, Locations

Go Lean Commentary

The American company Google Inc. is shaking up the telecommunication industry … again. Whereas their structure originated as a software/Search Engine/ICT* company, they have since branched out into wireless/networking and mobile hardware.

This is not surprising! Google has been a maverick from the beginning.

Their mission statement from the outset, according to Wikipedia, was …

“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,”^[11] and its unofficial slogan was: “Don’t be evil.”^[12][13] Rapid growth since incorporation in 1998 (as of January 2014, the market capitalization had grown to $397 billion^[60]) has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine. It offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive), YouTube video-sharing, an office suite (Google Docs) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS^[15] for a netbook known as a Chromebook. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers ^[16] in the production of its “high-quality low-cost”^[17] Nexus devices and acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012.^[18] Also in 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.^[19]

Despite American incorporation, headquarters and funding, Google has a R&D/QA^# presence in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico). This is a good start for what the book Go Lean…Caribbean envisions for the Caribbean region. The book describes initiatives from top-to-bottom in the Information Technology/ICT industry space, asserting that the region cannot only consume, but must create, develop and produce as well. So Google is a good role model for the future – yet undefined – industrial expressions in this industry. The book Go Lean…Caribbean, serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This CU roadmap is designed to elevate the economic, security and governing engines of Caribbean society; this vision is defined early in the book (Page 14) with the opening Declaration of Interdependence:

xxvii. Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.

The Google QA activity is highlighted in the following news article:

Title #1: Google Is Testing Its New Modular Smartphone on this Caribbean Island
By: Caribbean Journal staff – Caribbean Journal – Regional News Site (Posted 01/14/2015; Retrieved 01/27/2015) – http://www.caribjournal.com/2015/01/14/google-is-testing-its-new-modular-smartphone-on-this-caribbean-island/#

Google’s revolutionary new smartphone project is getting its first test in the Caribbean.

The global tech giant will be launching the pilot test of its Project Ara smartphone in the Puerto Rico market, the company announced Wednesday.

Project Ara is a modular smartphone, which allows users to swap out individual components of the phone, from the camera to the speaker to the lights.

The aim is a totally customizable phone — almost turning the phone into a collection of “physical” apps.

“A phone is part of it. Part of it is a phone,” is how Project Ara describes it.

Project Ara is part of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group. The phone will run the Android operating system.

Pricing is not yet known.

See more in the video below:

VIDEO: Project Ara: Part of it – http://youtu.be/intua_p4kE0 – Published on Jan 14, 2015

There is an obvious advantage to testing a revolutionary product in a place like Puerto Rico: it is homogenous. Everyone on the island meets a certain consistent profile, an adequate educational accomplishment, American cultural assimilation, bilingual efficiency. If the Google test is successful here, then the product will be proven for the entire Western Hemispheric market. This Google Ara phone should emerge from these tests as a “lean”-mean consumer machine, ready to shock the world of mobile communications – here comes change!

The concept of “lean” is very prominent in the Go Lean book (and movement), even adapting the title, Go Lean, for the quest for excellence in Caribbean economic empowerment and governing efforts. The label “lean” is indicative of this quest; the word is used as a noun, a verb and an adjective. This point is pronounced early in the book (Page 4) with these statements:

The CU will lean on, lean in, lean over backwards, and then lean towards…

The CU will embrace lean, agile, efficient organization structures – more virtual, less physical, more systems, less payroll.

This following news article demonstrates Google’s next strategic step, establishing more of a footprint in the North American mobile communications market. See story here:

Title # 2: Google Inc Could Wreak Havoc on Its New Wireless Partners
By: Adam Levy, January 27, 2015

If you’re looking to switch wireless carriers, you may soon have another option.

Google is reportedly working on a mobile virtual private network, or MVNO, that uses access to the Sprint (NYSE: S ) and T-Mobile (NYSE: TMUS ) wireless networks. While the agreement with Google will generate additional revenue for the wireless carriers, it represents a serious threat to their core businesses.

With a price war already in full swing among the major industry players and the cost of airwave spectrum rising well above expectations, Google could cause more headaches for Sprint and T-Mobile than it’s worth.

Selling excess capacity
MVNO agreements are typically very valuable for carriers, as they can sell excess capacity and achieve high margins without the need to do any sales or marketing work — this Google deal is no exception. Macquarie Securities analyst Kevin Smithen believes the search giant could pay out $1 billion in service fees to the carriers in 2018.

Both companies have plenty of spare capacity, too. T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray told investors earlier this month that it has more spectrum per subscriber than both of its largest rivals. Sprint, however, has even more excess capacity, which leads Smithen to predict it will take about three-fourths of Google’s MVNO business.

Those revenues will allow Sprint and T-Mobile to reinvest in their networks, which will help attract new customers and prevent current customers from leaving. On the flip side, any improvements to their networks will also improve the Google service making it even more attractive.

And there lies the big risk
While Google’s plans are still extremely vague, it seems like the biggest goal is to make wireless data networks fast and cheap. To that end, it makes sense for Google to offer a high-value option through its MVNO, similar to what it has accomplished with the rollout of Google Fiber.

Google can afford to offer things like unlimited high-speed data at near cost — the company is expected to pay $2 per GB — because it makes money almost any time a smartphone user accesses the Web. Google took an estimated 37% of total mobile ad spending last year, so it stands to gain from making data access as inexpensive as possible.

While Sprint and T-Mobile have done a good job undercutting the competition on price, Google could do so even further.

The risk seems greater for Sprint, which appears to have little to compete on besides price. T-Mobile is more focused on providing a valuable customer experience for its subscribers with the Un-Carrier initiatives to differentiate itself. Of course, there is little holding Google back from offering similar perks as the Un-Carrier (potentially with a focus on Google services like YouTube and Google Play).

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sprint has put limits in place to prevent the Google MVNO from growing too large. That should be a smart move considering the carrier is likely to lose at least some customers to the new service. There is no indication, however, that such a stipulation exists in the T-Mobile agreement.

Still, if Google hits that volume trigger, there is little stopping the company from licensing capacity from another network. And there is no guarantee that if Google’s network coverage suffers, customers will leave for Sprint — the company is best off renegotiating at the best rate it can get at that point.

A prisoner’s dilemma
With significant risk involved in allowing Google into the wireless market, the only explanation for why Sprint or T-Mobile would agree to license their capacities is that Google played one off the other. Thinking it would be better to at least get something out of the deal than to just lose customers to another Google upstart, both companies agreed to a deal. The fact that Google will rely on their networks should neutralize most of the potential impact from the new service.

Source: Motley Fool Investor Advisory Site (Retrieved 01/27/2015) –
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/27/google-inc-could-wreak-havoc-on-its-new-wireless-p.aspx

From being non-existent 20 years ago to now executing a strategy to dominate the mobile communication eco-system, shows how quickly a well-executed roadmap can impact the world.

This lends confidence to the viability of the revolutionary changes being proposed by the Go Lean roadmap. We can succeed in transforming our society in short order; the roadmap is a 5 year plan. Previous blogs/commentaries also exclaimed societal benefits from pursuits in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Consider this sample of previous blogs:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3915	‘Change the way you see the world; you change the world you see’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3889	RBC EZPay and other Banking Automations – Ready for Change
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3490	How One STEM Entrepreneurial Start-up Can Rally a Whole Community
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3276	STEM/Medical Role Model Shaking Up the World of Cancer
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3187	Robots help Amazon tackle and dominate Cyber Monday
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2488	Role Model Jack Ma brings Alibaba to America
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2126	Where the Jobs Are – Computers Reshaping Global Job Market
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1743	Google and Novartis to develop ‘smart’ contact lens
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1698	STEM Jobs Are Filling Slowly
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1416	Amazon’s new FIRE Smartphone
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1277	The need for highway safety innovations – here comes Google
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=888	Book Review: ‘Citizenville – Take the Town Square Digital & Reinvent Govt’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=554	Cuban cancer medication registered in 28 countries
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=308	CARCIP Urges Greater Innovation

The Go Lean book posits that technology and ICT can level the playing field of competition and trade with the rest of the world. Surely this entire Google commentary demonstrates the advantage of leading with technological innovations. We do not have to be in Silicon Valley to have an impact. No, an innovator can be on a beach in the Caribbean homeland, with a great idea and support of his community. “Lightning in a bottle” is a valid analogy.

The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to foster great contributions from Caribbean technology innovators. The list is as follows:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – Governing Principle – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principle – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius	Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Promote Intellectual Property	Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development	Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Bridge the Digital Divide	Page 31
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Mission – Exploit Globalization – Producers & Consumers	Page 46
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers	Page 71
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media	Page 111
Planning – Big Ideas – Cyber Caribbean	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 136
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Education – STEM Promotion	Page 159
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce	Page 198
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Main Street – Mobile Apps: Time and Place	Page 201
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth	Page 227
Appendix – CU Job Creations	Page 257
Appendix – Copyright Infringement – Protecting Intellectual Businesses	Page 351

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to lean-in for the empowerments in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. This is a big deal for the region. The benefits are simply too alluring to not commit to this cause:

Optimization of the economic engines; growing the regional economy to $800 Billion & creating 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The region needs this delivery. Without the equalizing effects of technology/ICT, we will be rendered inconsequential on the world scene. No wait: we are already! For this reason, we cannot and have not been able to retain our young people to commit to their Caribbean homeland, but rather we are only “fattening frogs for snake”.

This roadmap declares: Enough already – time for a change!

Now is the time to deliver the Caribbean as a better place to live, work and play… for today and for the future. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

————

Source References:

* ICT = Internet Communications Technologies

^# QA = Quality Assurance – the cycles and processing to testing the quality on hardware, software and services.

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Art and Science of Collaboration

Posted on January 26, 2015 in Ethos, Government, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

The book Go Lean…Caribbean opens with the thesis (Page 3) that the problems of the Caribbean are too big for any one member-state. So rather, solutions should be sought by accepting interdependence; shifting the responsibility to a region-wide, professionally-managed, deputized technocracy that can result in greater production and greater accountability. This deputized agency is the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The book therefore advocates that all Caribbean member-states (independent & dependent-territory) lean-in to this plan for confederacy, convention and collaboration.

Confederacy refers to the federation, the legal structure that will represent/include all 30 Caribbean member-states in an integrated entity to forge the required solutions.

Convention is easy! Convening … means “showing up”.

On the other hand, collaboration is hard! For the purpose of this commentary, collaboration is defined as “a group of people who represent different aspects of an issue, working together to explore their differences and come up with solutions that couldn’t be achieved on their own”. This effort is definitely heavy-lifting, especially in this age of complexity where it is difficult to build consensus and compromise. This effort is hard, but not impossible! To succeed, the required hard-work or heavy-lifting must be guided by prudence and best practices.

It is hereby acknowledged that collaboration is an art and a science. The following summary applies:

Art

Consider the perspective of a constitutive communication approach:

Everyone involved in a collaborative effort has a different perspective…

How we see ourselves and others, and how others see us…

What we say is less important than how we say it…

Science

Collaborative Advantage – Good things that come from the success of the effort

Collaborative Inertia – Bad things that can come from a lack of this effort, the natural state of affairs

Collaboration Design

Structure – Get the right people in the right setting

Process – How people interact

This Art and Science of Collaboration is gleaned from this featured VIDEO here:

VIDEO – The Collaborative Challenge: Making Quality Decisions Together in the Age of Complexity – http://youtu.be/iN_A7keXtVg

Published on Dec 13, 2012 – This video was developed by Matt Koschmann, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. The purpose is to explore the topic of collaboration and explain a constitutive communication approach to enhance our understanding of collaboration.

This and many other blog/commentaries drill deeper, double-down, on this quest for collaboration as necessary for long-term Caribbean solutions. The book and blogs posit that collaboration in spirit equals sharing in action. As a result, a lot of focus has been concentrated on sharing schemes, the Sharing Economy, that would be apropos for Caribbean implementation.

The quest to elevate Caribbean society includes embracing collaboration and sharing tools. If we are able to marry the efforts of all member-states in unison, a lot can be accomplished and the impact can be profound. This impact is pronounced in the CU‘s prime directives, identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book promotes “sharing” and collaboration as a community ethos, so as to mitigate the perils of “going at it alone”. This alludes to the emergence of the Sharing Economy that now proliferates due to advances in technology. These previous blog/commentaries detailed some examples:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2571	More Business Travelers Flock to Airbnb
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1364	Car-Sharing Uber Demonstrations Snarl Traffic from London to Berlin
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=486	Incubator firm (Temasek) backs Southeast Asia cab booking app GrabTaxi

The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic CU. This roadmap posits that many issues and challenges for a Sharing Economy can only be managed with feasible economies-of-scale; thusly there is the need to master the art and science of collaboration. While the stakeholders, 30 member-states and 42 million people, should be able to unify and resolve many common problems, it is not the general public that is expected to lean-in to these principles, but rather their leaders: politicians and civil servants. This is part of the Go Lean effort to improve leadership and foster better leaders.

This is the theme of another book, a Bible-like publication on collaboration, The Collaborative Organization by Jacob Morgan. This author is the principal and co-founder of Chess Media Group, a management consulting and strategic advisory firm on collaboration. This 2012 publication serves as a strategic guide for executives and decision makers seeking to deploy emerging technologies and strategies in the workplace.

The About the Book summary from the Author is published as follows:

I believe that Collaborative Organizations can make the world a better place. We keep talking about and hearing about the value of collaboration for businesses but that’s selling it short. Collaboration can positively impact the lives of people inside and outside of the workplace. If we can create greater engagement among employees, make their lives easier at work, connect them to people and information from anywhere, and provide a place of growth and learning then we go far beyond just business benefit. Employees will feel less stressed out at work and at home, argue less with their spouses, feel a greater sense of purpose and belonging at work, and have more time to spend with their loved ones and families.

I realized that while this idea was unique and powerful it was not enough to drive action within the enterprise. I knew that in order to go from idea to action that business leaders needed something more. This is why I wrote The Collaborative Organization which is the first comprehensive strategy guide to emergent collaboration in the workplace. This book was written not just to benefit the organizations but the employees as well.

The book is supported by data from a research project that Chess Media Group (my firm) conducted and includes dozens of case studies as well as mini guest contribution pieces from executives and leaders who are leading collaboration at their organizations. Inside this strategy guide you will learn:

How to map uses cases to feature requirements

How to evaluate and select the right collaboration tools for your organization

How to structure collaboration teams to lead this initiative

How to deploy tools and prioritize features

How to gain and sustain employee adoption

Measuring success

How to evaluate your organization’s maturity in collaboration

How to structure governance

How to market and roll out this initiative to your company

How to evaluate and mitigate risks

and much more

(Source: http://www.thecollaborativeorganization.com/about-the-book/)

In line with the foregoing VIDEO, the Go Lean book details the applicable community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementation and advocacies as a roadmap to foster this empowerment among the business and governmental leaders in the region to fully explore collaboration and the Sharing Economy:

Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Return on Investments (ROI)	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius – Nurturing Leaders	Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship – Incubator Support	Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Negotiations	Page 32
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Confederate 30 Caribbean Member-States	Page 45
Strategy – Customers / Stakeholders – Governments, Businesses, and Citizens	Page 47
Strategy – Competition – Shared Systems –vs- Premise based	Page 51
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Foster a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Shared Portal: www.myCaribbean.gov	Page 74
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Caribbean Postal Union (CPU)	Page 78
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Bicameral Legislature – Compromise Conferences	Page 91
Implementation – Year 1 / Assemble Phase – Consolidate Organs into CU	Page 96
Implementation – Trends in Implementing Data Centers – CoLocation Operations	Page 106
Implementation – Assume Mail Operations – Collaborate/Share for all Caribbean	Page 108
Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media	Page 111
Implementation – Ways to Benefit from Globalization – Level Playing Field with ICT	Page 129
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Shared/Single Currency – Cooperative Central Bank	Page 127
Planning – Lessons Learned from the West Indies Federation – Collaboration Quest	Page 135
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract – Share e-Government systems	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Leadership	Page 171
Advocacy – Ways to Manage Federal Civil Service	Page 173
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Improve Homeland Security – Shared-Collaborative Defenses	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce	Page 198
Advocacy – Ways to Reform Banking – Cooperative/Collaborative Central Bank	Page 199
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Foundations – NGOs to Share Delivery of Social Agenda	Page 219

The roadmap posits that the CU should foster and incubate features of the Sharing Economy and other expressions of collaboration. The Go Lean book quotes the assessment of a scholar (Kent State University Professor Emeritus Dr. Kwame Nantambu) on Caribbean affairs and the need for collaboration (Page 135): “History has shown that only when a people come together to address issues that affect them collectively can they ever hope to resolve their problems. Caribbean people have common problems so that common sense should dictate that the only way to solve those problems is to come together collectively to address them. There is no other option.”

The Caribbean must change … to adapt to a changing world. We cannot compete alone, but together, collaboratively, we stand a fighting-chance to “snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat”. Failure is not an option; our Caribbean children are counting on us. Otherwise, more and more of them will be Canadian children, and American children, and British children, and so on…

The trends are already there. The Go Lean book opens with the declaration (Page 3) that the Caribbean is already in crisis. For some member-states, their population has declined or been flat for the last 3 decades. This is only possible if despite new births and the absence of war, people are fleeing. This scenario, human flight, is a constant threat to prosperity for all the Caribbean despite their colonial legacies. Our youth, the next generation, may not be inspired to participate in the future workings of their country; they may measure success only by their exodus from their Caribbean homeland.

As echoed in the foregoing VIDEO: “if there was ever a time to think differently about how we do things, this is it!

A collaborative approach to forging solutions to this common problem is perhaps our best hope. We can do the heavy-lifting; we can make the Caribbean, a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Success Recipe: Add Bacon to Eggs

Posted on January 25, 2015 in Ethos, Locations, Social

Go Lean Commentary

Question: In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the Chicken and the Pig?
Answer: The Chicken is involved, but the Pig is committed!

The book Go Lean…Caribbean opens (Page 5) with the acknowledgement that despite having the “greatest address in the world”… the people of the Caribbean have no commitment, shared or National Sacrifice in support of their beautiful homelands.

This term National Sacrifice was introduced in a previous blog, and defined as the willingness to die for a greater cause; think “King/Queen and Country”. The blog/commentary posits that this spirit is currently missing in the recipe for fomenting the Caribbean homeland. This despite the fact that no one is being called on to “die”, but rather to simply live-work-play in their homeland.

The publishers of the Go Lean book wants to forge change in the Caribbean; they want to change the attitude of commitment for the entire community, country and region. This is not a wild fantasy as this has been done before in the US during WW II. But the Caribbean region has an alarmingly high societal abandonment rate, where 70% of college educated population in the English states have left in a brain drain, while the US territories have lost more than 50% of their overall populations.

Surely there is no debate that Caribbean people’s commitment to their homeland is lacking. Consider more fully the Chicken-Pig fable here:

Encyclopedic Referenced Source
Title: The Chicken and the Pig
The fable of The Chicken and the Pig is about commitment to a project or cause. When producing a dish made of ham and eggs, the pig provides the ham which requires his sacrifice and the chicken provides the eggs which are not difficult to produce. Thus the pig is really committed in that dish while the chicken is only involved, yet both are needed to produce the dish.

The fable of the Chicken and the Pig is used to illustrate the differing levels of project stakeholders involved in a project. The basic fable runs:^[1]

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.
The Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”
Pig replies: “Hmmm, maybe, what would we call it?”
The Chicken responds: “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”
The Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved!”

Logically, this story/fable is at times presented as a riddle.

Interpretation and lessons
The fable has been used mostly in contexts where a strong team is needed for success, like in sports or in “Agile Software Development”^*.

Agile Project Management
The fable was^[2] referenced to define two types of project members by the Scrum Agile Management System:^[3] pigs, who are totally committed to the project and accountable for its outcome, and chickens, who consult on the project and are informed of its progress. By extension, a rooster or gamecock, can be defined as a person who struts around offering uninformed, unhelpful opinions. This analogy is based upon the pig being able to provide bacon (a sacrificial offering, for which the pig must die in order to provide) versus a chicken which provides eggs (non-sacrificial).

For a Scrum project the Scrum Master and Team are considered as people who are committed to the project while customers and executive management are considered as involved but not committed to the project.

As of 2011, the fable has been removed from the official Scrum process.^[4]

Sports
The fable also is used as an analogy for levels of commitment to a game, team, etc. For example, variations of this quote have been attributed to football coach Mike Leach who said, on the officials in the 2007 Tech-Texas game in Austin: “It’s a little like breakfast; you eat ham and eggs. As coaches and players, we’re like the ham. You see, the chicken’s involved but the pig’s committed. We’re like the pig, they’re like the chicken. They’re involved, but everything we have rides on this.”^[5]
Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia – Retrieved 01-25-2014 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig

———-

* Agile Software Development (Scrum) – a group of software development methods in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU); a confederation to bring change and empowerment, to the Caribbean region; to make the region a better place to live, work and play for all stakeholders (residents, visitors, businesses, and institutions).

This quest relates a commitment so vital to a community that everyone should be willing to sacrifice and lean-in for the desired outcome. This shared sacrifice was previously advocated in Bermuda (one of the 30 member-states) in the following editorial/commentary:

News Article Title: The fallacy of Bermuda’s shared sacrifice
By: Anthony Richardson, Guest Columnist
Bermudians often latch on to catch phrases and before long there is a unique Bermudian variation or the phrase is taken out of context. A recent incarnation is the notion of ‘shared sacrifice’.

To help explain the correct context, I had to search the recesses of my mind and ask several friends. And then I found the answer… the fable of the Chicken and the Pig dating back to 1950.
…
If you think the sacrifice is shared, try asking the pigs after breakfast!!

As a typical Bermudian, I want to add my own variation to the fable:

There was a sick farmer who needed eggs, bacon and milk to survive.
All the farm animals got the chance to decide whether or not the farmer would get his breakfast.
The cows and chickens spoke first — milk and eggs… no problem.
Then some of the other animals spoke – the farmer should try just eggs and milk.
Others — what will happen if he dies? The goats spoke — we will provide milk if needed. The turkeys spoke — are we sure he is sick, did he get a second opinion, has he been sick before, what caused the sickness; provide the bacon so he can get better!!
The donkeys tried to speak but were shouted down.
Next the pigs spoke – we understand that the farmer is sick. How much bacon is needed? We will provide it if absolutely necessary. Our only request is to meet privately to decide how we will provide the bacon!!
Then the farmer spoke. I am getting worse, please hurry up and decide.
He noticed a small group of animals standing aside and asked what they thought. They were speaking quietly. Apparently brain storming, conducting focus groups, talking to the elder animals and doing some online research. After a brief pause, they said we have at least one ‘outside the box’ suggestion. Is turkey bacon an option!!
The turkeys were completely stunned and ran for the barn.

Bermuda’s lessons:

• There is no dispute that the farmer is sick (Bermuda will run out of cash) but not unto death (Bermuda will not go bankrupt). Any new borrowing will be expensive.

• The proposed sacrifice for the pigs, chickens, cows and other animals are not shared equally (public service salaries, government programmes, parliamentary salaries and the private sector).

• Do not shout down the donkeys; listen to the quiet observers and consider all options — genuine shared sacrifices… involve the community in the solution (OBA, PLP, employers, grocers, IB, banks, BELCo etc).

• There are some turkeys amongst us (lots to say until we realize the need for personal sacrifices equal to the pigs).

• The farmer’s good health is critical to the survival of the farm.

What kind of animal are you? Chicken, Cow, Pig, Goat, Donkey, Turkey or general farm animal?

I repeat my recommendation for Premier Cannonier and PLP Leader MP Bean to jointly chair the Tripartite Economic Committee (‘The TEC’) arising from Public Employees’ salary negotiations.

Turkey bacon anyone?!
Bermuda Sun Daily Newspaper – Posted 10-25-2013; Retrieved 01-25-2014 – http://bermudasun.bm/Content/OPINION/Opinion/Article/The-fallacy-of-Bermuda-s-shared-sacrifice/4/135/71440

This Go Lean roadmap is realistic as to reasons why people have left their homeland: the Caribbean is in crisis. The book details that there is something wrong in the homeland, that while it is the greatest address in the world, instead of the world “beating a path” to these doors, the people of the Caribbean have “beat down their doors” to get out, this is due mainly to the lack of economic opportunities. The Caribbean nations must expand and optimize their economic landscape to offer more opportunities to their citizens, especially the youth.

So the purpose of the Go Lean book/roadmap is more than just the embedding of new community ethos, but rather the elevation/empowerment of Caribbean society. In total, the Caribbean empowerment roadmap has 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance and industrial policies to support these engines.

The roadmap details the following community ethos, plus the execution of these strategies, tactics, implementation and advocacies to forge permanent change of commitment and shared sacrifice for the homelands in the region:

Definition – Lean in Business / Production / Service Delivery	Page 4
Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Choose	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – The Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact a Turn-Around	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederate 30 Member-States	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Enact a Defense Pact to Defend the Homeland	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Keep the next generation at home	Page 46
Tactical – Confederating a Permanent Union	Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers Between CU & Member-States Governments	Page 71
Anecdote – “Lean” in Government Improvement Process	Page 93
Implementation – Assemble – Incorporating all the *existing* regional organizations	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Planning – 10 Big Ideas for the Caribbean – Confederation Without Sovereignty	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Lessons Learned from the West Indies Federation – Lack of Popular Support	Page 135
Planning – Ways to Measure Progress and Correct Course – Six Sigma Quality Delivery Process	Page 147
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Communications	Page 186
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage	Page 218
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth	Page 227
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Sports – Community Commitment and Oversight	Page 229

Previously Go Lean blog/commentaries have considered repercussions and consequences of good and bad community ethos. The following sample applies:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3915	‘Change the way you see the world; you change the world you see’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3780	National Sacrifice – The Missing Ingredient
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3533	Bad Ethos: No Fear of Failure – Case Study: Bahamasair
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2830	Bad Ethos: Jamaica’s Public Pension Under-funded
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2809	A Lesson in Bad Community Ethos: East Berlin/Germany
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2480	A Lesson in History: Community Ethos of WW II
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2152	Sports Role Model – Fully Committed US versus the World
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1918	Philadelphia Freedom – A Community Ethos
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623	Only at the Precipice, Do Communities Change
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=353	Book Review: ‘Wrong – Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn…’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We Want from the US – # 10: Sports Professionalism
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=228	Egalitarianism versus Anarchism – Community Ethos Debate

The purpose of this subject is more than sacrifice, it also relates to delivery. The Go Lean roadmap details the turn-by-turn deliveries over a 5-year period. The right people and process must be engaged to deliver on time, within budget and with a measurable quality. This area of technocratic delivery – project management – also requires a commitment from stakeholders and not just involvement. This point has been elaborated in this VIDEO here:

VIDEO 1: Commit Like a Pig – https://youtu.be/39O9y9g4CO8

[Edited Dec 6, 2016] Published on Jun 21, 2015 – Commitment and trust are the backbone of all organization. Commitment is like the bacon in an egg and bacon breakfast, the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed!

This commentary therefore also focuses on the art and science of Group Work. The Go Lean roadmap calls for the strategy of a confederation of all 30 Caribbean member-states. The structure allows for a full commitment by all states and communities. There is no re-distribution of the region’s economic pie, but rather the creation of a new pie, that is then shared and promoted for the Greater Good of all regional citizens. The tactical approach calls for 2 pies, a separation-of-powers between this CU Federal agencies – the new pie – and existing member-states. The roles/responsibilities assumed by the CU pose no conflict with the states; for example Air Traffic Control or Meteorological & Geological Administrations. This CU structure will require a commitment, shared and national sacrifice.

The lack of commitment/sacrifice was the flaw in the previous regional integration movement, in particular the West Indies Federation, circa 1958 – 1962. According to the Go Lean book (Page 135) that ill-fated Federation only had luke-warm acquiescence from it’s 10 member-states; no one wanted to sacrifice or dedicate their time, talent or treasuries to the cause of regional integration. As a result the West Indies nation-states carried on alone. Now after 50 years, the learned-lessons and conclusion is that the region could have been much more successful than the current failed or failing dispositions.

Is this too harsh a criticism? Refer back to the societal abandonment rate. Not only are West Indian people not willing to die for their country, they are not even willing to live for their country … or in their country.

Time now for a re-boot and remediation! Let’s try this (regional integration) again. This time, we try “pork-esque” commitments, rather than a “chicken-esque” involvement.

All in all, there is a certain community ethos associated with populations that have endured change. That ethos involves commitment more so than involvement. As for the publishers of the Go Lean…Caribbean book and those inclusive in this movement, here is our declaration: “We are Pigs”! For the chicken in that “bacon and eggs” fable, it only takes some involvement to just lay the eggs; but it takes total committment for the pig to provide bacon as there is no going back!

VIDEO 2: Chicken or Pig? A Self-Empowerment Story – http://youtu.be/O2JAQMahlBc

Published on Jun 4, 2012 – Self-empowerment equals success and to be fully self-empowered, you need to be fully committed to living your purpose. Discover the power of your purpose today and find out if you’re the chicken or the pig in your life story.

Now is the time to lean-in, full commitment and “present some bacon”, to this roadmap for Caribbean change, as depicted in the book Go Lean…Caribbean. All the mitigations and empowerments in this roadmap require people and institutions to fully commit.

Oink-oink 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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‘Change the way you see the world; you change the world you see’

Posted on January 24, 2015 in Ethos, Industries, Planning

Go Lean Commentary

Drawing reference to this quotation:

“No flying cars, no dinners in a pill, and certainly no cool rocketing off to space cities in the required outfit of the future. We seem to have failed the expectations of the most wild-eyed seers from the past – futurologists who were for the most part in love with a supercharged, technologically sexy future where science would free us from the daily grind, for holidays on the moon or underseas. But here we remain, plodding along … in a familiar world that is neither utopia nor dystopia.” – Go Lean…Caribbean (Page 26)

As evident in the above quotation, the Go Lean book focuses heavily on the future. But now that it is 2015, many people are disappointed that the future they had envisioned has not materialized. “The future ain’t what it used to be” – the book quotes this phrase as originating from Yogi Berra, the iconic Baseball Hall-of-Famer known for his eclectic phraseology.

There are many organizations that are focusing on future innovations, one of them is computer software giant Microsoft. As follows is a VIDEO featuring the company’s new hologram offering. This will change the way we see the world and with it we can change the world we see.

This quest aligns with the Go Lean book, in its mission to change the Caribbean, to elevate its society by optimizing the economic, security and governing engines. See this related VIDEO:

VIDEO – Microsoft HoloLens Review, mind blowing Augmented Reality! – https://youtu.be/ihKUoZxNClA

Published on Jul 21, 2016 – Microsoft HoloLens review, AR- mind blowing! By James Mackey!

My expectations were already high, but when I tried the HoloLens, my mind was blown at how outrageously good it is.

I show you Microsoft Office 365 running through my HoloLens, accessing Excel and Word as Holograms. I then access Microsoft Edge for web browsing plus YouTube, just incredible; AR for business.

I run some extremely cool HoloLens apps such as LSrD (wow, imagine the DMT trips you could simulate on this!) and then Galaxy Explorer to see our Solar System including the Sun and Saturn at very close up range.

I then run a Beta 3D simulation of a shark, once again, absolutely incredible. I zoom into the shark hologram whilst it’s swimming around my living room.

It’s without doubt the hand gestures need some work as it’s hard to manipulate objects when at a distance. The only other problem is the field of view is small, but once this has been resolved through future iterations of the HoloLens, AR is set to change the world.

Then, to go a step further with my futurist hat on, consider the Softcell Lens (AR in a contact Lens) and the EyeTap and the future really looks exciting, I see AR impacting every part of our lives. If we want it to of course.

I also link to my blog in the video where I discuss AR street dating, volumetrically captured video conferencing, AR shopping, facial and emotion recognition, and much more; http://www.mackie.xyz/james-mackie-pu…

I discuss emails, text messages and phone calls delivered through AR, the replacement / death of mobile phones and the personal computer. Death of the mouse & keyboard, eye-tracking, field of view, Adaptive Focus (Magic Leap) and even, imaginary friends!

AR | HoloLens | Microsoft HoloLens | Augmented Reality | futurist

Category: Science & Technology

License: Standard YouTube License

The book Go Lean…Caribbean champions the cause of building and optimizing the Caribbean eco-system. There are a lot of expectations for technology in the region, to aid and assist with all aspects of the Go Lean prime directives, defined as follows:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), a technocratic federal government to administer and optimize the economic/security/governing engines in the homeland of the region’s 30 member-states. The CU strives to elevate all of Caribbean society and culture. The Go Lean…Caribbean clearly recognizes that holograms will contribute to cultural development of any society. The Caribbean does not only want to be on the consuming end of these developments; we want to create, develop and contribute to the innovations. This starts by fostering genius in Caribbean stakeholders who demonstrate competence in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). This may apply more to the youth markets.

At the outset, the Go Lean roadmap recognizes the value of harnessing STEM career options. This intent was pronounced early in the book with these statements in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12 & 14):

xiii. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

xxvi. Whereas the Caribbean region must have new jobs to empower the engines of the economy and create the income sources for prosperity, and encourage the next generation to forge their dreams right at home, the Federation must therefore foster the development of new industries, like that of ship-building, automobile manufacturing, prefabricated housing, frozen foods, pipelines, call centers, and the prison industrial complex. In addition, the Federation must invigorate the enterprises related to existing industries like tourism, fisheries and lotteries – impacting the region with more jobs.

xxvii. Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.

xxviii. Whereas intellectual property can easily traverse national borders, the rights and privileges of intellectual property must be respected at home and abroad. The Federation must install protections to ensure that no abuse of these rights go with impunity, and to ensure that foreign authorities enforce the rights of the intellectual property registered in our region.

xxx. Whereas the effects of globalization can be felt in every aspect of Caribbean life, from the acquisition of food and clothing, to the ubiquity of ICT, the region cannot only consume, it is imperative that our lands also produce and add to the international community, even if doing so requires some sacrifice and subsidy.

The hologram system in the foregoing VIDEO is a combination of hardware and software, an appliance from Microsoft. But according to their press release, Independent Software Vendors will be partnering with Microsoft to develop and deploy software solutions. The Go Lean roadmap posits that the Caribbean must contribute software solutions for applications in this industry space. We cannot only consume; so a recommended community ethos for the region to adapt, “Return on Investments” (Page 24), calls for embedding incentives and inducements to encourage students and apprenticeships in this field. Imagine forgive-able student loans, on-the-job training employment contracts, paid internships, signing bonuses, etc. This ethos also translates into governing principles for federally sponsored business incubators, R&D initiatives, grants, entrepreneurship programs and the regional implementation of Self-Governing Entities (SGE).

The book estimates 64,000 new direct and indirect technology/software jobs in the Caribbean marketplace.

The Go Lean roadmap was constructed with the community ethos in mind to forge change and build up communities, plus the execution of related strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to make the change permanent. The following is a sample of these specific details from the book:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Choose	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – The Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius	Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Intellectual Property	Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development	Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Bridge the Digital Divide	Page 31
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Around	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederate 30 Member-States	Page 45
Strategy – Vision – Invite Diaspora Back to the Caribbean Homeland	Page 46
Strategy – Mission – Exploit the benefits and opportunities of globalization	Page 46
Tactical – Confederating a Permanent Union	Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities	Page 105
Implementation – Trends in Implementing Data Centers – Creating the ‘Cloud’	Page 106
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media – Caribbean Cloud	Page 111
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate to the Caribbean	Page 118
Planning – 10 Big Ideas for the Caribbean Region – Cyber-Caribbean	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 136
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Education – STEM Promotion	Page 159
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance – e-Government & e-Delivery	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Communications	Page 186
Advocacy – Ways to Enhance Tourism – Internet Marketing	Page 190
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce	Page 198
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Main Street	Page 201
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth	Page 227
Advocacy – Ways to Improve the Arts	Page 230
Appendix – CU Job Creations	Page 257
Appendix – Copyright Infringement – Protecting Intellectual Businesses	Page 351

This Go Lean roadmap calls for the heavy-lifting to build-up Caribbean communities, to shepherd important aspects of Caribbean life, so as to better prepare for the future, dissuade emigration and encourage repatriation.

These goals were previously featured in Go Lean blogs/commentaries, as sampled here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3641	‘We Built This City … on Music, Entertainment and Leisure Businesses’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3490	How One Internet Entrepreneur Can Rally a Whole Community
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3384	Plea to Detroit: Less Tech, Please
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3187	Robots help Amazon tackle Cyber Monday
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2953	Funding Caribbean Entrepreneurs – The ‘Crowdfunding’ Way
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2126	Where the Jobs Are – Computers Reshaping Global Job Market
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1698	STEM Jobs Are Filling Slowly
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1487	Here come the Drones … and the Concerns
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1416	Amazon’s new FIRE Smartphone
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1277	The need for highway safety innovations – here comes Google
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=673	Ghost Ships Emergence – Autonomous cargo vessels without a crew
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=308	CARCIP Urges Greater Innovation

The Go Lean book focuses primarily on economic issues, and it recognizes that computer hardware, software and appliances, like the hologram system in the foregoing VIDEO, is the future direction for industrial developments. This is where the jobs are to be found. The Go Lean roadmap describes the heavy-lifting for people, organizations and governments to forge these innovations here at home in the Caribbean. The Caribbean is no Silicon Valley nor Silicon Beach, but a nascent industry can still be fostered and nurtured into fruition.

A Big Dream? No, this is a conceivable, believable and achievable business plan. The Go Lean book offers the turn-by-turn directions for strategies, tactics and implementations. With the right commitment of time, talent and treasuries, we can make the region a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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RBC EZPay – Ready for Change

Posted on January 23, 2015 in Economics, Industries, Locations

Go Lean Commentary

It’s time to introduce the Caribbean Dollar (C$) as a regional currency. Though there will be coins and notes, the primary focus will be on electronic transactions. This is the future!

Electronic Payments schemes (card-based & internet) are very important in the strategy to elevate the Caribbean economy, bring change and empower people, process and profits.

According to the subsequent news article, the regional banks – in this case the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) – are ready for this change.

Roseau, Dominica – RBC Royal Bank today unveiled its new RBC EZ Pay Wireless Terminals, a wireless device that can be used to complete credit card transactions anywhere where a cellular phone can be used.

“This product is ideal for car rental companies, as well as for use at restaurants, tour and taxi operators, local outdoor markets, trade shows and even community and festive events,” said Mr. Yuri Lazare, Country Head, Dominica. “We are proud to be the pioneers of this technology in Dominica, providing a payment solution that is limitless in terms of where it can be used; effortless in that it is so easy to set up and use; and completely wireless, allowing merchants to accept payments wherever their customers are.”

RBC is the first financial services company in Dominica to offer this innovative product, which has many features. RBC EZ Pay is a high-speed, cordless point-of-sale terminal with an integrated antenna and printer. It has the ability to process Visa, MasterCard, Diners Club and Discover credit cards. It also has a backlit display, a secure network and a rechargeable/removable battery.

“Retailers who have previewed the RBC EZ Pay Wireless Terminal like it because it provides flexibility to set up temporary payment locations, such as at sidewalk sales and special events. The device also gives restaurant owners the flexibility to take payment from their customers wherever they are seated, even on outdoor patios or bars,” said Dave Legge, Manager for Commercial Financial Services, Eastern Caribbean. “With this system, car rental companies and other on-the-go vendors can now accept credit payments, which can help expand their business.”

This new product launch continues the long tradition of leadership that RBC has displayed in Dominica. “In March this year, RBC celebrated 95 continuous years of doing business in Dominica and we look forward to continuing this partnership for many years to come” said Mr. Yuri Lazare, Country Head Dominica. “We appreciate the many opportunities we have had to play a role in the national development of the country. Today’s launch is historic and evidence of our dedication to delivering innovative product solutions that create an environment in which Dominicans can maximize their entrepreneurial potential.”

Business persons interested in learning more about this new product and obtaining pricing can visit our Roseau branch or call Ermine Darroux at 255 – 1803.
Dominica News Online – Website for Daily Newspaper- (Posted 06/11/2010; Retrieved 01/23/2015) –
http://dominicanewsonline.com/news/homepage/news/business/rbc-unveils-rbc-ez-pay-wireless-terminals/

This point is detailed in the book Go Lean…Caribbean, a roadmap for the introduction of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) and the Caribbean Central Bank (CCB). This Go Lean roadmap has 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

This Go Lean/CU/CCB roadmap looks to employ electronic payments schemes to impact the growth of the regional economy. There are two CU schemes that relate to this foregoing news story, as they require the demonstrated POS terminals:

Cruise Passenger Smartcards – The Go Lean roadmap posits that the cruise industry needs the Caribbean more than the Caribbean needs the industry. But the cruise lines have embedded rules/regulations designed to maximize their revenues at the expense of the port-side establishments. The CU solution is to deploy a scheme for smartcards that function on the ships and at the port cities.
e-Commerce Facilitation – The Go Lean roadmap defines that the Caribbean Dollar (C$) will be mostly cashless, an accounting currency. So the Caribbean Central Bank (CCB) will settle all C$ electronic transactions (MasterCard-Visa style or ACH style) and charge interchange/clearance fees. This scheme allows for the emergence of full-throttle e-Commerce activities.

The focus of these schemes is not technology, its economics. These electronic payments provide the impetus for M1, the economic measurement of currency/money in circulation (M0) plus overnight bank deposits. As M1 values increase, there is a dynamic to create money “from thin-air”, called the money multiplier. The more money in the system, the more liquidity for investment and industrial expansion opportunities.

An additional economic benefit is the mitigation of Black Market “under-the-table” transactions that proliferate in a cash-only environment. These neutralize government revenue schemes: sales tax, VAT, etc.

Though the foregoing article refers to the Royal Bank of Canada, the currency in focus here is not the Canadian dollar, but rather the new Caribbean dollar. This Canadian bank, along with others – Bank of Nova Scotia, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) / FirstCaribbean – support local currencies, like the Bahamian dollars, Jamaican dollars, T&T dollars, etc. In fact, in whichever country RBC operates, they transact in local currency. The Go Lean roadmap calls for that same participation with the new C$ regional currency.

If the Caribbean member-states already have currencies, why is there the need to transform to a new currency regime?

The Go Lean book posits that the Caribbean is in crisis, and that this “crisis is a terrible thing to waste”. The region has been devastated by currency mis-management over the decades; (for example, the Jamaica dollar was trading 87-to-1 at the end of 2009 and conditions have only worsened since then). In most cases, local Caribbean currencies have been pegged to the US Dollar, but even American stewardship have hurt Caribbean fortunes, the dollar has lost value compared to other bread-basket currencies (Euros, British Pound Sterling, Swiss Franc, Japanese Yen, Chinese Yuan, etc.), meaning that the global buying power has dwindled more and more for the average Caribbean resident due to no fault of his own. These internal and external currency factors have contributed to the Caribbean economic crisis, and the urgent need for reform, re-boot and remediation.

The book posits that to adapt and thrive in the new global marketplace there must be more strenuous management, technocratic optimizations, of the region’s currencies. This is the charge of Go Lean roadmap, opening with the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13) and these pronouncements:

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

xxv. Whereas the legacy of international democracies had been imperiled due to a global financial crisis, the structure of the Federation must allow for financial stability and assurance of the Federation’s institutions. To mandate the economic vibrancy of the region, monetary and fiscal controls and policies must be incorporated as proactive and reactive measures. These measures must address threats against the financial integrity of the Federation and of the member-states.

Creating the CU/CCB governance is “Step One, Day One” in the Go Lean roadmap. The strategy is to implement the bank and C$ currency with the appropriate regulatory framework, tools and infrastructure, to facilitate the electronic schemes identified above.

The foregoing article, demonstrates that this regional bank (RBC) is ready for this change, but evidence abounds that the other banks are equally competitive. See VIDEO sample below for the bank-neutral “The Square Credit Card Reader”.

The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to foster the proper controls for electronic payments/virtual money in the Caribbean region:

Community Ethos – Economic Principles	Page 21
Community Ethos – Money Multiplier Principle	Page 22
Community Ethos – “Light Up the Dark Places”	Page 23
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Promote Intellectual Property	Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Bridge the Digital Divide	Page 31
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Central Banking	Page 73
Implementation – Assemble Central Bank Cooperative	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media	Page 111
Planning – Ways to Better Manage Image	Page 129
Anecdote – Caribbean Currencies	Page 149
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Black Markets	Page 165
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Cruise Tourism – Smartcard scheme	Page 193
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce	Page 198
Advocacy – Reforms for Banking Regulations	Page 199
Appendix – Alternative Remittance Modes	Page 270

The points of effective, technocratic banking/currency stewardship, were further elaborated upon in these previous blog/commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3814	Lessons from the Swiss unpegging the franc
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3582	For Canadian Banks: Caribbean is a ‘Bad Bet’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3090	Lessons Learned – Europe Sovereign Debt Crisis of 2009
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2930	‘Too Big To Fail’ – Caribbean Version
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2074	MetroCard – Model for the Caribbean Dollar
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1350	PayPal expands payment services to 10 markets
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=906	Bitcoin virtual currency needs regulatory framework to change image
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=833	One currency, divergent economies

There are so many benefits to deploying the e-Payment functionality of the C$:

More Cruise Tourism Spending
Fostering e-Commerce
Increase of M1
Mitigation of Black Markets

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people, the banking establishments and governing institutions, to lean-in for these empowerments described in the Go Lean/CU/CCB roadmap. The benefits are too alluring, and far overdue, a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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VIDEO – How To Use The Square Credit Card Reader With Your Phone. Get It For Free. http://youtu.be/-RtmHsLxcrA

Published on Jun 28, 2014 – Using The Reader. Take Credit Card Payments With Your Phone. Signing up, getting and how to use the Square credit card reader by Square Up with a Samsung Galaxy Note III. Tutorial. Great for small businesses.

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