You can take the girl out of the English Department, but you can’t
take the English Department out of the girl. I LOVE words and always
have. This made me LOL.

Here is the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational which once again asked
readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding,
subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.  Here are
the 2009 winners:

       1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the
subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

    2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

       3.. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until
you realize it was your money to start with.

        4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

        5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows
little sign of breaking down in the near future.

        6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose
of getting laid.

        7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

        8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the
Person who doesn’t get it.

        9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running
late.

        10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
credit.)

        11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these
really bad vibes, right?  And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like,
a serious bummer.

        12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.

        13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

        14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter
when they come at you rapidly.

        15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

        16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into
your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

       17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm
in the fruit you’re eating.

        The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to
its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings
for common words.  And the winners for 2009 are:

        1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

        2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one
has gained.

        3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

        4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

        5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

        6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing
only a nightgown.

        7.  Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.

        8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

        9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has
been run over by a steamroller.

        10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.

        11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.

        12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by
proctologists.

        13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

        14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with
yiddishisms.

        15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul
flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

        16. Circumvent, n . An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by
Jewish men.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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So I have given this post a somewhat hyperbolic title. But not as much as you would think. The Senate Finance Committee voted down the public plan today, and because I was driving around Maricopa County for a good part of the morning, I heard the good, the bad, and the ugly about the debate. Snippets that I caught included:

"There is no competition among insurance plans in 95% of the states. Two insurers rule the market."
"The doctors, at least the ones I've talked to, don't want to  be paid Medicare rates."
"Medicare has a $37 trillion unfunded liability. Does anyone even know how much money that is?"
""A public option won't mean government run health care this year, or maybe even next, but just wait until 2013 or 2014."

A few hardy Democrats tried to say the people wanted a public plan, but they were beaten back by one Senator saying
"I don't even think these people shopping for a public plan or a private plan even know what they're buying."
And someone else said, "the person whose doctor says get an MRI is in no position to judge whether he needs iit or not. He has to trust the doctor."

These snippets tell me we are nowhere near a consensus on what health care should be like in America, much less how to get there.

Eons ago, Steve Gillmor told me that if we got nothing out of reform but an end fo rejecting people for pre-existing conditions, we would have achieved a lot. At the time, I thought that was nothing. I now totally agree with him, and believe that in the current climate, the Democrats are lucky to escape with their shirts.

The lack of a coherent plan that people could rally around has left Obama in the dubious position of violating his own dictum: "Strategy first, then resources." If that's good enough for Afghanistan, it should be good enough for health care. If we pass reform this year, we will be throwing resources at a non-strategy.

You can tell I'm a registered Independent, or as that is translated in Arizona, "no political party." Having a choice of Republican, Democrat, Green or Libertarian, I opt out.

 I agree that there is no competition among health plans. I remember when there was, and no one could get enough traction to justify the expenses of operating, so different plans gradually withdrew from certain states, other companies merged and acquired and consolidated, and now we have what we have.

I also agree that Americans cannot have everything and pay nothing, and that rationing is a part of every health care system and should be brought out into the open and discussed.  It's not the province of the public plan; in fact, one reason that Medicare has so much financial trouble is that Medicare rations much less viciously than private plans.

We've had almost a year of debate based on half truths, circumlocutions, slogans, and bull-oney. Now we're here. No matter what happens henceforth, the Democrats will lose in 2010, probably Obama will lose in 2012, and health care costs will continue to rise.  We have wasted an entire year of lobbyist time, company money, and consumer trepidation for nothing. All we've done is show that on the health care side our government is as broken as it is on the banking side.

Is your credit card interest rate 29.99%  Is your house under water? Can you get in to see a doctor? Is your doctor happy with his or her occupation?

Money wins.  Doctors and patients lose. And I am disappointed because I really thought Obama was talking change.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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October is breast cancer awareness month and TweetsforBoobs.org, which went live Friday September 25, is participating in the effort to raise awareness and donations for breast cancer. TweetsforBoobs.org makes pledging money to the Susan G. Komen foundation effortless and public. When the hashtag #tweetsforboobs is used the site detects it, and a pledge of $1 is recorded for that Twitter account. Each person is responsible for donating their total amount pledged. At the end of the month donations will be collected through http://www.info-komen.org/goto/tweetsforboobs, which go directly to the Susan G. Komen foundation.

Chase Granberry (http://twitter.com/chasers) and Joshua Strebel (http://twitter.com/strebel) wanted to use Twitter to help raise awareness for breast cancer during October. They started discussions with the Phoenix branch of the Susan G. Komen foundation in an effort to pull in sponsors who would simply match $1 per tweet with the hashtag #tweetsforboobs. The idea only came to them about three weeks before October and it was difficult to find sponsors willing and able to commit that quickly. About a week before October they decided to take another route and let people use Twitter to pledge donations during October. This way, no sponsor was needed, the strategy still used hashtags to raise awareness and there was no intermediary collecting donations. 

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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The United Nations meeting yesterday stunned me. I grew up thinking the UN was one of the pinnacles of global achievement. And I thought disrespectful debate was the province of the USA until I heard Gadhafi and  Ahmadinejad. Now I wonder if the UN is worth stopping NYC traffic for.

I'm pretty much a disciple of Ghandi, so I understand why Obama would address the United Nations, trying to "be the change" he wants to see. But I also wonder if when the US media calls out these guys as "crackpots," we are seeing things through our own eyes and those of our allies, or through the eyes of their constituents. How do I know how much credence to give these unfamiliar-behaving world leaders?

I'm troubled by the fact that, even in the Internet era, I can't get a good fix on whether these guys represent mainstream opinion in their countries, or are indeed the lunatic fringe. Ghadafi, who wanted to pitch a tent on Donald Trump's lawn because he doesn't like elevators, is a little easier to dismiss than Iran's president, but he, too, seems not to be an accepted leader in his own country. And Karzai? Another crooked election?

So is the UN outdated, bloated, and OVER? I suspect so.  By having these meetings, we are showcasing people who would be marginalized if we didn't bring them an audience of global media. Or are we showing different points of view about the world that need to be aired? How crooked are our own elections?

At times like these, I think I don't get out of my comfort zone enough, and that perhaps I should go to places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Iran before I accept the judgment of the cable news networks that I so readily dismiss on issues like health insurance reform, where I possess enough information to form my own judgment. Knowledge is power.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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Shoutout to @dgurrie and Sheila Kloefkorn of KEO Marketing for the inspiration for this one. Because of my female angel post on Marty's blog yesterday, I got a tweet from @dgurrie asking me how to get investors.  And then I got an email from Sheila asking me to contribute to Eileen Rogers' project to build a well in Mali, Africa for schoolchildren sick from dysentery. Who is @dgurrie, who is Eileen Rogers, who is Sheila?

Dani is a woman from Maryland who follows me on Twitter. I don't know her, and my advice to her was "go to people who know you."  I didn't mean it unkindly. It's just true. The likelihood of getting investment from someone you email with a business plan out of the blue is next to nil.

Eileen is a woman who goes on philanthropic trips to Africa as I have. Sheila is a mutual friend of Eileen's and mine. I will donate to the well because Sheila asked me and because it's Eileen's project. The merits of the projects may be equal (I have no idea what Dani's doing), but I will always choose to invest in someone I know. I probably won't even ask details of the project. I trust Eileen, and I trust Sheila.

The long and short of it: people are investing in you when they invest in your company, your project, your cause. That's why it's so tough to get people to do it.  No one likes to give up their money. And giving it to a stranger is unthinkable, even for professional investors.

Think about it for a moment. If you are a VC, you are probably using someone else's money. At the end of the day, you have to account for them about how and why you spent it, and they will ask the tough questions.  If you are an angel, you are using YOUR OWN MONEY, and you aren't likely to want to lose that, either.  So you have to know as much as possible about the person who asked you for it.

That's why the first round of investment, the round I'm usually asked for –the round that seeds the company, is usually done by that class of investors called "Friends, Family and Fools."
Those are the people who, if your company goes nowhere, or outright fails, will still love you at the end.

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Yes, I know it sounds like a bunch of initials to you. But to me, to CEO Robert Johnson, and to Robert's wonderful group of long-time employees at ESS, it's a gift. You see, we've all cashed out at last. The acquisition press release  tells, as usual, almost nothing of the back story, because the acquiring company is public and it only cares that it has

acquired a leading provider of environmental, health and safety (EHS) and crisis management software for enterprise sustainability, for approximately $59 million, net of cash acquired. The purchase price represents about three times revenue and a high single-digit multiple of forward adjusted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization).

“With this acquisition, our worldwide customers have access to best-in-class products and services from IHS that meet their growing need to manage environmental, climate change and compliance issues – all from a single provider,” said IHS Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jerre Stead.

Bu in this case, it's more than true. I don't know Jerre Stead, but he's one lucky guy.

I met Robert Johnson in 1999. He had founded a small company, Environmental Support Solutions. His goal: to help companies manage the refrigerants they were using. He had a strong concern for the environment even then, and legislation was being passed to limit VOCS. He wasn't a geek, so he hired someone to write some software, put it on a floppy disk, and he mailed  it to customers.

When I met him, he had a small, dark office in Mesa Arizona, but he soon convinced me of his vision. He could only pay me $1000 a month for PR. I did it anyway. Coming out of Intel, I was searching for a product with meaning and purpose, and an enterpreneur who wanted to change the world.  Robert wanted to save the planet.

From the beginning, Robert was a visionary.  He's a high strung, very intense guy, and he saw the internet's potential impact clearly. He was ahead of his customers in online access to his products, in CRM, which he bought as soon as he found out it existed, and in platform development. His first foray outside refrigerant management was indoor air quality management.

Robert decided he wanted to acquire other mom and pop environmental software companies in other niches, like crisis management, health and safety, Of course he couldn't afford to do that without outside money.

I soon fell in love with his vision and became more than a PR person.  I actually introducted him to his first investors, friends of mine who were looking for something other than real estate to try. (They stuck with him until the payout, by the way.)

When they came in to the deal, I also became an investor, compensated for putting the deal together  in shares of ESS. Soon after, the dot com bust came, Robert was saddled with the overhead of a half dozen acquisitions that weren't really integrated into the company, and he was forced to "lay me off" in the PR department. We had a pretty tough couple of years.

But I never went away. I continued to help, advise, wish him well, and be his friend, believing in his vision, which I had first seen ten years earlier on a white board in Mesa.

And when he had the opportunity (more than one) to sell the company, he took the offer that assured him none of his long-time employees would be let go and everyone would get not restricted stock, but immediate cash. Many people who have been with Robert since the beginning just got proof of his gratitude.

What a brilliant man.  And what a sweetie.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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Because I was a young adult in the work force in the 60's — in fact I was working at J. Walter Thompson in New York City in 1963, my first year out of grad school and the year in which this season of the show occurs, I am fascinated by Mad Men.  My early career experience bears an almost preposterous relationship to this show, from me being the woman with two Ivy League degrees  typing  ad copy, to my watching  the men's lunchtime drinking bouts, to being part of the disconnect between the generations, amd observing the blindness of powerful Americans to their own culture.

 I knew something was happening when John F. Kennedy was elected president. I also knew the world nearly ended during the Cuban missile crisis. And I knew the Civil Rights movement was coming because one of my college classmates, Mickey Schwerner, had already been active in the movement. He would be killed the following year in Mississippi. Cornell and Columbia, the two schools I had already attended (the third would come after my flirtation with advertising, which I had always thought would be my career), were liberal activist hot beds. As always, I was more considered and tentative than most of my contemporaries, who jumped in with both feet while I had one foot in revolution and the other on Madison Avenue.

There I sat, at the black Remington typewriter, with the carbon paper and the onion skin for copies (JWT didn't have a Xerox yet when I was there), pounding out copies, consuming vats of White-Out to correct my errors on the original, and using an eraser on the copies. When I didn't have stuff to type, I had literally nothing to do, and was not really encouraged to leave my desk and walk around, so I polished my fingernails under the desk and read books.

After about six months of that, I had an "Are you kidding me?" moment and quit. Fortunately, I had taken the LSATS and the GMAT and scored well, and could walk right into a Ph.D program. Changing agencies, as Peggy is thinking about doing, from Sterling Cooper, the WASP agency to Grey, the Jewish agency, wouldn't have done it for me. And by the way, I quit about two months after Kennedy's assassination. A general revisiting of priorities found advertising pretty low on the list of important considerations. So I left it for academe.

Don's about ten years older than I would have been in 1963, and I would have worshipped him. In fact, I would have sought him out. And he would have ignored me because I wasn't quite conventionally pretty enough, but he would have understood that I had talent. 

And done nothing about it. I made $80 a week at JWT. I think Peggy Olson already makes more than that.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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From: francine hardaway <luckilypuppily@me.com>
Date: September 16, 2009 7:03:46 PM PDT
To: “post@posterois.com” <post@posterois.com>
Subject: Erika FeimbergCEO of ActiveForever.c

A marketing genius with a heart of gold speaks to Fasttrac in Gilbert.

Her energy is so vibrant she could never fail, especially in a “helping business.”

Francine Hardaway, PhD
Stealthmode Partners
602.910.5622
Http://www.stealthmode.com

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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There's a long story behind this launch post. I'm on the advisory board of EmpowHer.com, a women's health site founded by a friend of mine, Michelle Robson, who had an awful experience with the health care system and decided to become a patient advocate in a world-changing way.  Michelle is no ordinary woman; she's not only a businesswomen on her own, but the wife of my greatest business mentor — the person who told me in 1980 to get a Mercedes and a cell phone instead of an office. We all go back a long way, and when I heard Michelle was launching this company, I prostrated myself to become a part of it (well….I'm given to hyperbole but you know what I mean).

EmpowHer has needed very little guidance from me to become a powerhouse. It rides the wave of Health 2.0, patient empowerment, the rising tide of women in business, and the need for reform in the American health care system.
Today it launches Health Events, Michelle's dream of a clearinghouse for free patient education information. And no, it's not in Silicon Valley.

Health Events features nearly 1.7M events in all 50 states from over 560 providers including Maxim Health Systems, CVS, Walgreens, Curves, and The Red Cross, among others, offering low cost and free health events, flu shot clinics, blood drives, exercise classes, yoga, support groups and more. Michelle has personally gone out and partnered with everyone to bring this big database online. Her goal is to give women the right information about a health issue, support for their own health condition or care for their families regardless of their location, economic circumstance or health condition.

Health Events is simple to use, giving women the ability to search by city, state or zip code and / or by health topic. Users can browse listings of events by state, and can also sort their search results by date and distance from their location. Additionally, Health Events has a location auto-populate tool that will automatically drop in the user’s location based on her IP address eliminating the need for the user to re-enter her information each time she uses Health Events. Providers can learn how to publish their health events to EmpowHer.com at providers.empowher.com.

Go check it out. It's pretty awesome because of the level of content the team has assembled for the site. They go all over the country taping interviews with experts in every field that concerns women. And by the way, many on the team are men, and Michelle even hired a male CEO, Shahi Ganem, formerly of DivX. There's an equal opportunity need for good health information.

Posted via email from Not Really Stealthmode

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