King Arthur Movie Tristan: THE PASSING OF TIME ALSO BRINGS CHANGE FOR US AND FOR CORPORATIONS

Thursday, September 8, 2011

THE PASSING OF TIME ALSO BRINGS CHANGE FOR US AND FOR CORPORATIONS

Posted by st at 2:48 AM

Some have perished or gone because of their irrelevance…others have risen to prominence by virtue of remaining innovative and evolving.

Certainly the telegraph became obsolete with the advent of the telephone. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually knows or even have studied the Morse code. But Western Union evolved and has remained a viable and vibrant company throughout the years. Sure, they don’t send telegraphs any more…not even those singing ones…but they transfer money for you and perform many other useful functions.

Wells Fargo is not your great-grandpappy's horse drawn courier any more...it is a powerful and successful financial institution and an example of how a corporation can evolve to become relevant. From the wild West horse-drawn carriages to state of the art electronic finances...that is Wells Fargo today.

But just as we see the success some companies have had in remaining relevant…we also see others that have perished…a good example and one that I personally greatly miss is PANAMERICAN AIRWAYS (PANAM) which was mismanaged and suffered the final blow to its integrity when one of their 747s was blown up in the skies over Scotland.

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I learned to type in one of those manual typewriters one only finds in museums today. It was necessary to strike the keys with force and as a consequence you typed castigating the keyboard…which translated into numerous mistakes when the electric typewriter became the norm.

But back then, nobody thought that writing would become obsolete. I remember my tortuous and boring Palmer handwriting courses where you had to write sentences over and over until you copied the style and format of the Palmer method to the most insignificant detail. I had perfect penmanship then. But then I went to college and because you have to take notes when attending lectures, you had to relax that Palmer method, find shortcuts, simplify the letters…adopt a kind of shorthand if you will and now my writing is barely legible. (Doctors are notorious for their illegible scribbles and taking notes in college is one of the reasons for this)

Sure, throughout my educational years there wasn’t a single person who knew anything about computers…it had been invented, yes, but it was still a couple of decades away and then when it came it worked with cards! The functions and memory of those early computers are so dwarfed by today’s behemoths…where the whole Library of Congress can be compressed into a little black box. It is mind boggling that today you can actually obtain an advance college degree from the comfort of your home.

So it is not surprising that when we have computers in our homes and offices there is no longer the need for the printed word…newspapers are closing shop left and right…book publishers are hanging it up and libraries closing not just because of lack of public funds but also from lack of patronage…Kindle is now the new-fangled novelty.

Banking too is one of the functions that used to be tortuous and time consuming. When Bank of America first came into being there were deposit slips with carbon copies…(who can explain carbon copies to the youngsters of today?) and now banking transactions take seconds…all done through computers that are linked to one another and what used to take days now has become almost instantaneous.

Edifices for banks had to be built solidly and impressively to give the depositors a sense of security and permanence…oftentimes very elaborate and the neo-classical style was the preferred architectural style. Now bank buildings are sleek, steel and glass skyscrapers that only compete in height for their message of importance…the taller the building the better the bank.

The Bank of America was formed in the latter part of the 1920s as the result of a merger between the Bank of Italy (based in San Francisco) and the Bank of America, whose business interests were solely based at that time in Los Angeles. The merger resulted in a rebranding of the expanded Bank of America company leading to the merged bank being called BankAmerica. BankAmerica was headed by Amadeo Giannini (founder of the Bank of Italy) and co-chaired by E. Monette (founder of the Bank of America).

But one of the areas that is regrettably lagging behind in going electronic is that of the process of voting. There are countries where it is possible to vote on line…and please don’t tell me that it is not secure because if we can trust banks to do all our transactions worth billions electronically then voting could be done with complete transparency. Needless is to say that Republicans will oppose it because they won’t be able to disenfranchise voters or discourage people from voting…remember the elections of 2000 with the “hanging chards”? It is in the best interest of the Republicans to have an ignorant population and one that doesn’t exercise their right to vote…they want less participation, not more and to manipulate the voting process to their advantage.