Martin “Marty” H. Singer is Chairman and CEO of PCTEL, which develops antenna, scanning and other solutions for wireless networks.  Before PCTEL, Singer served as President and CEO of SAFCO Technologies, another wireless communications company.  He was also a Vice President and General Manager at Motorola and held senior management and technical positions at Tellabs, AT&T and Bell Labs.  With a Vanderbilt Ph.D in experimental psychology, Singer is a trained thinker.  He will share this space with other distinguished executive thinkers, who will offer occasional musings from “the corner office.”

By Marty Singer

In our personal lives, we seem to have no problem peering into the future.  Let’s say that you and your spouse are thinking about buying a house.  My guess is that you’ll talk seriously about what type of space and location you might need for the next 10 years.  You probably thought or are thinking about whether you need a place that accommodates your plans to have or expand your family.  If you’re my age, you might be thinking about your knees in 5 or 10 years and the advantages of first floor master bedrooms.

This decision, like so many others that we make as we move through life, is one that is made from the future.  You don’t focus on your current situation and plan from that vantage point.  Instead, you place the decision squarely in the future.  You ask questions about what you should do today in the context of what you believe to be true or close to the truth about the future.  You don’t claim to know the future, but you actively reduce uncertainty in your decision by constraining it with conditions that you borrow from a story you tell yourself about your future.

Making decisions about today’s actions in the context of a specific future applies, for example, to graduate school choices.  Hopefully, young graduates don’t apply to Law School because it’s a sensible, incremental step from majoring in Political Science or Public Policy.  One would hope that those who compete to get into decent schools and struggle through a demanding curricula do all of that in the service of a future practicing law or, even better, working in a specific area for which a law degree is essential to success.

I’m not sure exactly what happens when people walk through the looking glass doors of their companies, but something changes. (more…)

On Monday, April 15, satellite provider Dish Networks shook the wireless world with word of a $25.5 billion bid for mobile phone carrier Sprint Nextel. The offer is the latest in more than a decade’s worth of mergers and acquisitions in wireless, as rival carriers battle for position in what I believe is the most transformative industry on earth.

Dish’s bid has the Sprint board of directors in a quandary. On April 25 the board announced that it formed a special committee to “carefully evaluate” the Dish offer to acquire the company. What’s to consider? Well, as you might know, Sprint also has been presented with a $20.1 billion offer from Japan’s SoftBank for 70% of the company. That deal is currently under review by the Federal Communications Commission, whose decision is expected by the end of May.

I get it. With shareholders in mind, Sprint’s board has much to ponder. But outside the boardroom, one thing is certain: A deal that creates a bigger Sprint is best for you and me. Right now, Sprint is a distant No. 3 in wireless to AT&T and Verizon. Yes, there are millions of passionate Sprint customers across the country, but the truth is the U.S. wireless market is basically a duopoly. AT&T and Verizon control more than 65% of the market. They are the only providers who can effectively bundle nationwide wireless phone service with TV and broadband Internet service. And that means they can do pretty much as they please when it comes to pricing and programming.

If Dish succeeds in buying Sprint, it would create a formidable third competitor. Here’s why: (more…)

John Challenger is CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., a Chicago-based outplacement and consulting firm, which assists displaced workers in securing re-employment. Under Challenger’s leadership the firm also provides executive coaching and advises organizations on corporate change. Challenger served on the labor human resource committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2002. He also has delivered major economic addresses before the World Future Society, the Ethics Officers Association and leading business executives in Japan.

Challenger’s breadth of knowledge on the economy and workplace issues has made him a widely sought media spokesperson on corporate and economic issues. With the stock market and the housing market showing strong improvement, but unemployment remaining stubbornly high, Challenger paused from business in his downtown Chicago office to dig into the numbers and answer five questions about the unemployment picture and the economy overall. Here are edited responses:

1. There’s considerable debate about our national unemployment figures. Does the monthly data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reflect the truest picture of our employment situation?

Challenger: The unemployment rate of 7.7% (in February) doesn’t count people who have looked in the last month. If you add in the number of unemployed and those that have looked in the last year, but not last month, and those working part time for economic reasons—meaning they want a full-time job but haven’t found one, or their hours were cut back. That unemployment rate is 14.3%, down from 15.0 a year ago.  They’re both real rates. This second figure is often called the “under-employed” rate, and some people use this number as truer picture of the unemployment rate.

Q: So the under-employed rate is twice as high. Other segments of the population are worse off as well, right?

Challenger: Yes. The unemployment rate is 6.8% for whites, but 13.8% for blacks, 9.6% for Hispanics and 6.1% for Asians. Forty percent of people that make up the unemployment rate make up the long-term unemployed—people out of work more than 6 months. In total, we have 12 million people who are out of work, and 8.1 million who are working part-time for economic reasons. Another 2.6 million people are not counted as unemployed because they have not looked in the last month. There are far too many people unemployed. (more…)

Does this cover image (left) make you cringe? It ought to. Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s February 25, 2013 cover depicts a cast of black and Hispanic characters whose exaggerated features evoke caricatures from 19^th century black-face minstrel shows. The insidious cover imagery is, I must say, journalistically shameful!

The illustration shows these housing residents wallowing in cash inside a two-story home above the headline, “The Great American Housing Rebound.”  The subhead: “Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns. What could possibly go wrong?”

Well, what went wrong was Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s editorial judgment. The cover image is, in fact, insensitive and discriminatory for its hint of minstrelsy—an ugly American musical tradition in which white entertainers painted on black faces and thick red lips to lampoon African Americans as a dim-witted, buffoonish, happy-go-lucky people. Blacks, and Latinos, however, do not look like the wide-eyed, fat-lipped characters on the cover. Presumably, Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s editors were attempting to be provocative. But the magazine is not a comic strip with license to exaggerate for a laugh.

So, the cover rightly has been widely criticized, not only by readers of color and liberal-minded people of all races, but by media analysts as well. As Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum wrote, “It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process.”

He and others have noted that race has been a key backdrop to the subprime crisis. But in illustrating a story about real estate “flips,” no-look bids and high returns, Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s cover flips reality on its head. While the cover depicts people of color flush with cash, the opposite was true of the housing crisis. (more…)

With Republican leaders presenting a “Plan B” tax proposal and the President declaring that he will veto any bill that doesn’t do enough to balance spending cuts and tax increases, we’re still hanging from the proverbial cliff. In less than two weeks a series of tax hikes and automatic budget cuts could push the U.S. economy toward a so-called “fiscal cliff” and trigger another recession. Ouch! Partisan politics are one thing, but with so much at stake, I’m wondering: What on earth are these folks in Washington doing? So, I decided to ask someone familiar with tough, partisan negotiations between the White House and Congress to tell me what might be happening behind the Beltway’s closed doors.

Frank Raines served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1996, a critical Cabinet-level position with responsibility for all federal finances. He was charged with helping a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) and a Republican-controlled Congress (led by Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich) resolve their differences and regain control of the burgeoning budget deficit. At the time, my former colleague, BusinessWeek correspondent Howard Gleckman, predicted Raines would “find himself in the midst of Washington’s ugliest political brawl–the battle to balance the budget.” Sound familiar? Despite the ugliness, in 1998 Raines led the parties to the first balanced budget the government had approved in nearly 30 years.

Now, you might be asking yourself: Isn’t Frank Raines the former CEO of Fannie Mae, who was forced to retire from the mortgage-finance giant in 2004 amid accusations of securities fraud? (more…)

Joe Ferra is Chief Wireless Officer of Fidelity Investments, the nation’s largest mutual fund company and a major provider of financial services. Ferra has spent more than 20 years at Fidelity, and is responsible for helping lead Fidelity into the wireless age. While his job extends beyond the technical, in his current role Ferra oversees the strategic direction of Fidelity Anywhere, an innovative wireless technology that allows Fidelity investors to monitor the markets and manage their portfolios from just about … well, anywhere. Ferra is one of the few, if not the only executive, sitting in the C-suite of a global organization, who has company-wide responsibility for mobile strategy and execution. Before joining Fidelity, Ferra was a vice president with Drexel Burnham Lambert in New York from 1988 to 1990. Previously, he was a second vice president with Smith Barney in New York.

Ferra, who was a top-ranked pole-vaulter in his younger years, took time out from bounding between meetings to discuss what he affectionately calls the wireless revolution and it’s impact on our lives. Despite snow flurries filling the autumn sky above his Boston area office, Ferra talked about a wireless future that seems pretty bright. Check out his edited responses to five questions I asked about mobile technology and financial services.

1. It wasn’t long ago that most professionals resisted being connected from anywhere. Now, most of us can’t put down our smart phones and tablets. How did we get here so fast?

Ferra: People used to ask about the wireless evolution. Now we talk about the wireless revolution. It shows the growth that has occurred. What changed things was when networks got faster. That’s when the hockey stick occurred. When 3G was launched we started to see transactions happening wirelessly. We saw people finally enjoy watching a movie on their mobile device. With that everything else kind of fell into place. More types of capabilities were introduced to leverage the faster speeds.

So it wasn’t simply the availability of user-friendly devices like the iPhone?

Ferra: Of course that helped. But remember when they used to say content was king? Well, that’s turned on a dime and now context is king. Service providers, retailers, financial services companies said, “I don’t want to flood you with information.” Instead, we focus on things that are relevant to your world. And when that’s happened, that is when we see the user satisfaction level going up. (more…)

The nation’s business leaders have converged on Washington in recent days to do their part in helping the government avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” in early January. President Obama met with a dozen corporate CEOs on Nov. 14 and also sat down with small business owners Nov. 27 and 28 to listen to the concerns of business and to share his agenda in the budget talks with Congress.

What a relief. We need business leaders to engage creatively and constructively with our politicians on this topic. The fiscal cliff is the top economic issue facing the nation. Going over the cliff at the end of this year could mean a 2% tax increase for workers, the end of certain tax breaks for businesses, shifts in the alternative minimum tax that would take a larger bite into what tax payers owe, the end of the tax cuts from 2001-2003, and the beginning of taxes related to President Obama’s health care law. At the same time, the spending cuts agreed upon as part of the debt ceiling deal of 2011 will begin to go into effect. Over 1,000 government programs, including the defense budget and Medicare are in line for steep cuts.

What worries me is not that business leaders are traveling to Washington, but that these meetings are not quite as constructive and genuinely cooperative as we’re being led to believe. Handsomely paid executives have been lobbying against paying higher taxes, which President Obama believes is the right course in order to avoid overburdening middle- and lower-income Americans. And for months, these executives have suggested they are holding back hiring and business investment because they’re worried about Washington gridlock over the fiscal cliff.  That sort of behavior has helped keep the brakes on our skidding economy. (more…)

By Tony Bara, Editor, The Xavierite

Two of the most well-known analysts on the American political landscape treated hundreds to a lively discussion about the 2012 presidential election at Chicago’s Saint Xavier University Thursday, Nov. 1.

Mary Matalin (left in picture) a conservative commentator and the former campaign director for President George H.W. Bush, joined Donna Brazile (right in picture) a liberal commentator and campaign manager for former Vice President Al Gore. During their chat—“Both Sides Now,” part of the university’s annual Voices and Visions lecture series—Matalin critiqued Obama’s jobs record and painted Romney as the savior, while Brazile assured the largely Democratic crowd that president Obama had America on the right track. Their talk was the latest in a series of lectures that has attracted some of the world’s most influential figures, including Hon. Madeleine Albright, Gen. Colin Powell and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel.

The women kicked off their visit to Saint Xavier, a Catholic university in the Evergreen Park neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, with an exclusive meeting with 17 student leaders in the university’s fourth floor boardroom. Both women now live in New Orleans, although Matalin grew up in Calumet City. Despite their divergent political views, they consider each other close friends, who talk and visit on a regular basis. (Brazile, Matalin said, even taught Matalin’s daughters how to dance!) Brazile was humorous and down-to-earth. Matalin, a bit more reserved, offered a more subtle joviality throughout the evening.

In total, four students managed to ask the women questions during their 55-minute session, as both Brazile and Matalin gave long and thorough responses. The questions ranged from the election, to student loans, to the American prison system. (more…)

Bob Knowling is Chairman of Eagles Landing Partners, which specializes in helping senior management formulate strategy, undergo organizational transformations and re-engineer their businesses. His journey through corporate America, chronicled in his book You Can Get There From Here  has made him a sought after advisor to CEOs across the globe. After working his way up the ladder in the Bell telephone system in the late 1970s and ‘80s, Knowling became a top executive at Ameritech and US West in the 1990s. In 1998, he became CEO of Covad Communications, then a highly touted Silicon Valley-based telecom competitor. In 2001, Knowling was recruited to take over as CEO of the New York City Leadership Academy, a non-profit corporation created by Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to develop the next generation of principals in the New York City public school system. After much publicized success running that program, Knowling returned to the business world as chief of tech-industry up-and-comers SimDesk Technologies and Telwares. In addition to consulting, he is now the lead director of Ariba, a business commerce solutions company, and a member of the board of directors of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.

Always an early riser, Knowling spoke to me at 7 am from his hotel in Mexico City, where he was on a CEO-consulting assignment. Wall Street was still abuzz about the disappointing debut of Facebook on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Knowling are about as different as two leaders can be, but I knew Knowling could relate to the young executive’s position. More than a decade ago, Knowling had overseen the IPO of Covad, which was a smoking hot broadband Internet provider back in 1999. While Wall Street cringes over Facebook’s tepid stock performance, Knowling enlightens with a different perspective. This man is as honest, smart and direct as leaders come. Check out his edited responses to five questions I asked about technology, leadership and education.

1. Bob, why have recent Internet IPOs been so unsuccessful?

Knowling: I’m not so sure that that I would call them unsuccessful. Some have been huge in the amount of capital that they have raised. (Facebook raised $16 billion, making it the third-largest IPO in U.S. history.) But the euphoria that comes with huge gains in the price is what we have come to expect in tech IPOs, and it’s not there today. (Google jumped 18% on its first day in 2004 and professional networking company LinkedIn Corp. surged 49% a year ago.) So, people say the IPOs are duds. I think we need to reset our framework. If an IPO goes out and still gets the capital it is looking for, then from the company’s perspective it was successful.

2. When you were CEO of Covad, your company and several others competed against big telecom carriers. How would you assess the competitive landscape in today’s telecom services industry?

Knowling: We have two mega companies driving services, AT&T and Verizon. Then we have T-Mobile USA and Sprint. But they are not close to the scale of the big two. The proliferation of devices such as tablets and smartphones is creating an insatiable appetite for bandwidth. So, you are starting to see that others are entering the space. Whoever thought that a Google, which once focused on search, would essentially become a telecom company and acquire a device maker such as Motorola Mobility? The thing that will drive telecom carriers such as AT&T and Verizon is the appetite for bandwidth and the need for backhaul services. It’s only going to increase.

So, who wins in the battle between the Internet/Social Media companies and the big telecoms when it comes to ownership of the consumer? (more…)

True, there is only one Silicon Valley–the nerve center for technology invention and investment. Many have celebrated the remarkable spirit evident among the Valley’s entrepreneurs. Well, I recently witnessed a similar sort of esprit de corps. Israel ranks among the world’s top investors in R&D as a proportion of GDP. It is becoming a magnet for venture capitalists. And according to the authors of the 2010 best-seller, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, Israel has attracted “over twice as much venture capital investment as the U.S. and thirty times more than Europe.”

Israel’s dedication to fostering business innovation, and promoting it, is to me a model for other communities to follow–from American municipalities to African villages. Bluntly put, Israeli officials don’t have their heads in the sand. It’s clear to them, for example, that mobile technology is perhaps the most important space on the economic landscape. That’s why they have been relentless in promoting Israel’s mobile startups, seeking to connect them with business partners and customers from Europe and the United States. (more…)