BIG BUSINESS, BIG LIES: Part Two
before the September 10 Debate with Harris, and before the formal Sentencing for 34 Felon Charges on September 18, watch the decline of Trump in polls.
By Bruce Piasecki, author of Wealth and Climate Competitiveness. For insights into my two new books see https://medium.com/authority-magazine/purpose-before-profit-bruce-piasecki-on-the-benefits-of-running-a-purpose-driven-business-ddfea1012fec
They say someone in DC is writing a book on who mentored President Joe Biden, beside the house of hard knocks. This explores why I would read that book, and share it with many. Mentoring is cultural history in the making. Here is a hint on early Fall items.
- Remember two key September dates during the dog days of August.
- The debate against Harris, and the sentencing for 34 counts of felon.
- My bet these dates matter in social history. September 10 and September 18, the first the public debate and the second the sentencing.
In Part One of this Medium Series, I wrote about what I know about honesty, integrity, loyalty in business. That entry did not really cover politics, or my own mentors. This supplement will, part 2 of a six part series ending after the Election.
What both business and politics share in our vivid global post World War II demoncracy is scrutiny of the press. Domestic and global coverage.
Here is my key memory of the press:
The press, that relentless press, calling me the hour after I was elected to be in the bestseller list at the New York Times, to poke.
Is there a bigger story there than Piasecki being sold enough to hit the hard to get number 5 on the NY Times list? Well, the person who called me knew before I did that I was also about to make his Wall Street Journal bestseller list. “Big deal”, my mother in law said that night.
This typical press call came from my college roomates’ mate. He had met my wife at the wedding. My wife and mother went in my place, as I was chilled sick that day, and could not be a best man.
That was the journalists link to me, sitting at the best man’s table, and talking to my factory mother! Oh, but any way in for the press is worth trying.
Oh, so a week after the wedding, when my friend was still on his honeymoon, the journalist calls my private cell number! I can not remember all the details of my surprise. But I remember him calling me on my personal phone during a beach visit with my dauther and her girl friends. He was relentless, until I realized he was digging.
Now imagine the digging if you are a 52 year veteran and deal maker like Joe Biden or a media crazed counter of daily news like Donald Trump! They are worth the dig, in either case. I’d read every word about Joe Biden’s mentors.
The Times this week covered some of his top ten advisors, but who were his mentors that made such a generous and devoted civil servant of our nation? Joe reminds me of my Phd advisors Mike. He is more than a grandfather figure. He is the ultimate mentor.
This part is about what to look forward to from the press before our November Presidential elections arrive.
You should follow the press on the days after these September dates. To set context, please click on the larger Medium.com interview on purpose above. That piece organized by a Shawn, who owns Authority Magazine, and uses Medium.com like a platform for his network of leaders in business and society. Thanks Shawn for the click ahove on purpose, profit, and personal things like mentoring.
Remember big dates being stories after the sentencing (September 18).
That is most important. On a smaller more transient scale, do not forget the written press coverage for the September 10 scheduled debate between Trump and Harris.
Although many now in Washington DC are telling me Trump will back out of that debate, I think Trump takes no advise seriously for more than a day. Thus, I predict he will debate. He will fly with his big lies and big business failures right into the torrents of Harris’ well prepared prosecutorial manner.
Why do I expect trump to fail in the next debate? If he goes ahead and debates Harris, like he did the ailing President, I believe he will lost between 4 and 8 percent of his steadfast believers. It is hard to believe a felon, and hard to resist her arguments.
I am a reader of social history. I come from the great books tradition of teaching and reading. People like me, there are many of us in news rooms, universities, libraries, read 4 newspapers a day, and a half dozen trade alerts. I developed the trade alert habit during the days I ran my small but effective multinational change management firm.
I am used to briefings, like I suppose a Joe Biden, but his briefings mattered more each hour.
I am overall saddened by the shorter focus and lack of quality in the coverage in the FREE PRESS over the last year. I have recorded this discontent in some Medium.com reflections, where even the New York Times ran a column that claimed Donald Trump a man of history. Wrong.
How do WE keep perspective in a world of constant jabber in the press? You might ask yourself that question. For keeping perspective is about not falling prey to big lies and big busness imperatives.
I have had two great mentors in my life as business owner and book writer: M. H. Abrams and Bill Novelli. They help me keep things in perspective. 😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎❤
M.H.Abrams:
The first mentor, man in tweed with pipe, has a rich humorous literary Wikipedia page, the late great M. H. Abrams. Please look at this link to his Wikipedia page. It has grown, this Wikipedia page, since his passing.
We’d call him MIKE before Jordan and Nike said “Be Like Mike.” I spent the first half of my career as writer and business owner trying to be like Mike, Mike Abrams that is.
And my disseration colleagues at Cornell, where I was beginning to learn how to lecture and how to speak beyond Long Islandese, — all were in awe of Mike, faculty included. Some credentials of this mentor:
- During WWI, this Ithaca Jew broke code for our national agencies, and after he left Harvard— his disseration (on cocaine and the British Romantic movement) became his first book, and that a small book indeed……I read it secretly with glee. It was a prof writing about cocaine, like Freud did. Why I wondered.
- That small book morphed, in the hills of Ithaca above the lake, into his giant titles The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism. Wikipedia will show that these two foundational books of culutral and literary history are considered “the twin towers of 20th century literary criticism.”. Mike never mentioned a single award to me; he kept the converations focused on my future, my work, my plans. Amazing mentor.
- These books, and his personality, had a big impact on great literary minds. Mike Abrams may have been one of the top 10 cultural historians in his century. The Wikipedia pages are beginning to take note.
- Yet much of his influence was in shaping others, like me. Across sixty years at Cornell, M. H. Abrams took in select Phd candidates like Harold Bloom (still productive after 100 books plus at Yale).
- Mike kept our feet in the real world. After I buzzed thru my Cornell National Scholarship as an undergraduate in three years, Mike invited me to meet a CIA representative in his office.
- When I said “hell no, I am a full disclosure kind of guy Mike,” he invited me to write and stay at Cornell on full funding to write my disseration. Mike first mentored me on writing “something booklength.”
- I was a horribly self indulgent writer back then, nothing like Abrams’ admiration of E. B. White’s Elements of Style. Yet by good fortune, Mike liked ex-baseketball stars. Mike liked A-level competitive Athletes, all athletes at Corenell. It did not matter what sport. Thru Mike, I met the key athletes that became pros at Cornell during my ten years there, from Christopher Reeves to lesser remembered greats for Ivy play.
- Besides service to the nation, and a liking for athletes, Mike was old school.
- Thinking about sentencing guidelines, and TV based debates, I would not like them. Why? I got a classical education, and instrutions on how to keep key things secret and discrete, while appearing open.
- This led to my appointments during Phd as a lobbyist in training at Cassidy and Associates, a top run Appropriations firm run by a Cornell lawyer, John Cassidy. That is another way Mike’s restrained articulate power mentored me for life, and helped me create my corporation now recorded in my Memoir DOING MORE WITH ONE LIFE: A WRITER’S LIFE.
- At his life celebration at Cornell, when he passed at 104, crowds including me came back to campus to “think thru again what Mike left us.”
- There I met the new publisher of the Norton Anthology and Norton publishing ventures, since Mike invented the first breakthru edftions of the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. I am sure his children are still making millions in the sales of this required Freshman purchase in most colleges. It is the RED anthology, thick, on you shelves. That is M.H. Abrams, my mentor.
By rigor and suggestions, Abrams taught me to pay attention to what will happen in the press after THE DEBATE with Harris, and after the September 18 sentencing. That is the stuff of social history that matters.
GIVING BACK
AThe best a mentor can do is to help you establish wealth, influence, and concern about the world, and then pass the batons to others. I’ve thought more about that than ever, when four years ago, at age 65, I created this family fund in the spriti of Mike. See our ICON is the open book, and the wiggling pen, with laurels. The laurels matter less than the open book.
MY SECOND MENTOR IS BILL NOVELLI
In the second half of my career, Bill Novelli, the former CEO of AARP, became my second mentor. Since I am writing a biography on him, I’ll save the details for that book called THE VOICE OF THE CEO. The second on Novelli will be called THE GOOD BOSS. You can get an idea of where I am heading in this new Medium posting by the business leader and owner of AUTHORITY MAGAZINE. He like Abrams and Novelli understand the power in smart brevity.
