The End of the Professions…Got a “Mayday” Button?…TED: Eight Years of Sharing….Anthony Bourdain on “The First Ten Minutes of Your Day”….Econ Recon: Whither Profits?….The Dollar-Still Almighty

“Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.”

Plato

The End of the Professions

Baby boomers will well remember their parents urging them to pursue one of the professions (medicine, law, architecture, journalism, etc.) as safe career paths. Business and the arts were deemed by many parents as too risky to be a good life choice.

Before long, it may well be that even the professions are no longer the sure thing that they were once perceived to be. Before a young person in your life makes a decision about devoting time and money to train in one of them, share this article with him or her from the Guardian which warns that Robot doctors, online lawyers and automated architects will be the future of the professions.

Can Your Customer Service Dept. Handle a “Mayday” Button?

Pilots send out a mayday message on the radio when their plane is in trouble. Amazon’s Customers can now push a “Mayday” button on their Kindle Fire Tablets to summon a customer service rep (CSR) in less than 10 Seconds. CRM provider Sales Force will soon offer an SOS button that aspires to the same response time. Will your CSRs be able to response in like fashion? Check out this short article Amazon’s Mayday response time at 9.75 seconds: What it means for customer service

TED: Eight Years of Sharing

In 1984, the Technology, Education and Design Conference was born and soon came to be known as TED. True to its tag line of “Ideas Worth Sharing”, TED has presented hundreds of short videos by people who have something to say and started sharing those on the web on June 27, 2006. In celebration of its eighth anniversary of so doing, TED created a special page with the first six videos it shared. Thanks, TED!

The First Ten Minutes of Your Day

Get your Monday off to a good start with this quick read from HBR on how to spend The First Ten Minutes of Your Day with advice from that time management expert…Anthony Bordain! (author of “Kitchen Confidential” and celebrity chef). These common sense suggestions from a great chef may make a difference to your day, your week and perhaps your life!

Econ Recon:

Whither Profits?: Vistage Staff Economist and ITR President Alan Beaulieu takes a careful look at the swing in first quarter Corporate Profits and sees more than the unusually harsh winter weather at work in the year over year decline and muses on the implications for the economy later in the year. Check out his take on Corporate Profit Blues.

The Dollar: Still Almighty: The antics of the Fed, government spending and excessive regulation have led many to think that the dollar is on its way to losing its status as the world’s reserve currency. Not to worry says economist Brian Wesbury in a one page executive summary….whatever problems we have, he makes the case that the Dollar Ain’t Losing its Reserve Status.