I love it, a big company learning to act like a startup. After selling his Equity Office Trust for $39 Billion, billionaire Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company for $8.2 Billion last year, with $8.0 Billion of other people’s money, and is now focused on one of the largest experiments in organization behavior ever. He is trying to change the way that the employees think about their business by instilling a bottom line thinking, a sense of urgency and focus on the customer. In the end he is also using the financial engineering he performed to drive his discipline home.

“If the Tribune deal doesn’t work, it ain’t going to change my lifestyle,” he told Tribune staffers in Chicago. “It really isn’t. But if the Tribune deal doesn’t work, or if it does work, it’s really going to change your lifestyle.”

There is a great video embedded in this article. He also does not seem to have much patience for senior managers who are seemingly not on the same page and for journalists that seem to have missed the whole Zell story.

Hillary Clinton recalled arriving in Northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996, 4 months after the Bosnia war ended, under extreme conditions where they had to cancel a welcome ceremony and run for the car.  Very impressive example of her international experience except for the inconvenient reality as captured on video. 

Wow, are we having a JFK or Gettysburg Address moment? Obama may have delivered the speech of our lives:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787…. ” My favorite line - “As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity”

Listen here

Source: Wikipedia

During a special TED conference session today Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Carl Bernstein blamed the decline in the quality of U.S. news reporting on Rupert Murdoch "the decline began in the 80’s after he bought the NY Post".   Bernstein was a member of a panel organized by the BBC exploring the impact of new media on the quality and comprehensiveness of news reporting.