Uber, the world’s largest taxi company owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media company, creates no content. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. We recognize technology is changing the way we live and interact with other people, businesses and the world around us. We need to embrace change and recognize new technologies.
New products and services can be our opportunity to differentiate and outperform competitors. We at Identifi have to challenge ourselves everyday to recognize change and create new opportunities for ourselves, our customers and Identifi.
Leadership is changing too. Leadership today is about sharing. One of the ways to share is to challenge those around you. We all know the grind. Sometimes it is all consuming. Pile on to the grind, a customer, boss or coworker presents us with something we don’t agree with for whatever reason, how should we respond?
We need more than company mission statements and vision statements to help us. We need reinforcement. We need core values to guide us.
Who better to define our core values than those of us who are hands-on people we can lean on, guiding you every day to make you successful? Toward that end we asked our Leadership team to craft them. We want to thank Chris Oppenheimer, Christie Russell, Jim Bryant, Matt Ullery, Stacy Paz and Tricia Lolkus for taking on the challenge and through months of meetings of minds produced Identifi’s Core Values. These Core Values also couldn’t have been done without the help of all of Identifi. We did an exercise whereby everyone at Identifi had an opportunity to whiteboard and choose the words that best define us. Our Core Values define our business and the people who are Identifi.
Check out our new Identifi website where you can find our Core Values on our new About Us page!
It’s time to put the brakes on government spending. The road to recovery lies with the success of small businesses, not with behemoth car companies and big labor. If we were going to bailout anyone, we should have bailed out the car dealerships and auto supply companies to allow them to remarket, retool and invest in new technologies. We should be growing our tax base, which is only going to happen if we fuel the small business private sector. Speaking of which, why are we not doing more to grow and keep promising small business technology companies and their technology jobs in the USA, where our best talent and our best jobs can remain right here at home?
"You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together." Henry Ford
We have Bill Gates and Microsoft, Larry Ellison and Oracle; and Eric Schmidt and Google, not to mention a plethora of phenomenal technology and software companies that started from nothing and today generate thousands upon thousands of high paying private sector jobs and tax revenues, all “Made in the USA.”
What’s more, most technology companies, in particular software companies, do little to harm our ecology (true green); they do not tax our ports, our roads, our bridges or our rail. This reduces our carbon footprint, while not adding to the tremendous and costly burden on the seemingly never ending and costly construction of our roads and our beleaguered transportation infrastructure.
Competition is increasing dramatically from foreign countries who wish to attract our talent, both foreign and domestic grads educated here in the USA, many getting their higher education with the help of US taxpayer dollars. The number of “propeller heads”, a.k.a., the savvy entrepreneurs and highly skilled workers “Made in the USA”, are leaving for a more favorable business climate or jobs overseas.
Our foreign competitors are offering much lower tax rates and hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives to technology business startups and to their highly paid - highly skilled employees. They are advertising a better quality of life, improved infrastructure and a lower cost of living. Our foreign competitors recognize what we increasingly take for granted, which is the huge tax and revenue potential from small business startups, in particular in the technology field; with their disproportionately high numbers and high salaries as it pertains to job creation. This is coupled with the minimal impact on their country’s costly transportation infrastructure.
The now and next generation of Bill Gates’, Larry Emerson’s and Eric Schmidt’s may find our politics too ambiguous, too costly and too unimaginative to breed success here in the USA. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs right now who are losing the battle against a poor economy accentuated by high taxes and ever increasing regulation. There are hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial ventures not even born yet that will never pass the incubation period.
Where should we, the United States of America, concentrate our efforts to keep our existing technology gurus and attract the next generation of “byte heads?” We need to provide education and programs that offer immediate and future tax relief to small businesses and their employees, like a payroll tax holiday. To do this we need to elect government representatives who want less government, who do less for Wall Street, who care less about big government and big union.
We need tech savvy, forward thinking, feet on the ground, “been there, done that” politicians who have missed a few paychecks like the rest of us and who want to do more for small businesses and the working class. Get started by offering existing small businesses and their employees, tax relief with a payroll tax holiday of 6 months or more. Offer new business start-ups, especially technology and software businesses who are Made in the USA and who are 1) less impactful on our transportation infrastructure; 2) provide green technologies; and 3) provide the high end wage earners, which is our future tax base, lower taxes and less government to stay and grow their businesses here in the USA.
"What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do some thing about them."
Henry Ford
