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| The Syrian White Helmets At Work |
One of the daily "must reads" for our team here @ #Outsiders is Fortune Magazines' Daily Powersheet. This is as we have been witness this morning to the desparation of migrants in Europe as Macedonia fired on migrants trying to push themselves to get into Greece and as Turkey is facing another election due to a failure in leadership. This is also as Brazil continues to be engulfed with a widening political scandal due to a widening corruption probe. . The company at the center of it all, Petrobas, is trying to deal with a crushing debt as Oil Prices continue their downward spiral.
There are indeed things to cheer about--as this excerpt below from Geoff Colvin Shows. For us, though, the story of the Syrian White Hats is also worthy of mention. As the story from Al Jazeera shows, they are the true heroes of the carnage in Syria that is one of the focal points of our team--available here by clicking on this link as we honor them here.
As we hope all enjoy this, we could not agree more with Geoff Colvin's thoughts as he noted, ".... they’re absolutely clear about their purpose, and they’re fulfilling it. They can cheer us up...."
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| August 21, 2015 | |
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| The world is sick and tired of its leaders, or so it seems this morning. -“China Blast Corrodes Faith in Leadership,” the WSJ headlines. In China, leaders aren’t supposed to let such disasters happen, especially when they damage middle-class homes; similarly, investors thought president Xi Jinping could stop the stock market from plunging and are bitter now that they find he can’t. -Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned yesterday, having done the exact opposite of everything the voters elected him to do in the economic crisis. -The U.K.’s Labor Party seems about to elect as its new leader Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed socialist and anti-leader who, as an MP, has voted against his party’s position some 500 times. -In the U.S., Republicans pondering their party’s next presidential nominee favorDonald Trump, who has never held public office. At a moment like this, it’s easy to forget there are actually plenty of admirable leaders performing excellently right now. Here are three I especially like. They’re all in business; they all run companies on Fortune’s new Change the World list of companies that are doing well by doing good; and they’re all less known than they should be. –Doug Baker runs Ecolab, a specialty chemical company that focuses on water management, hygiene, and food safety. He and Ecolab are constantly winning awards for responsibility and ethical standards; most recently, Baker was named Responsible CEO of the Year by Corporate Responsibility magazine. All of which is nice, but what makes him worth our attention is that he also runs a knockout business. The stock, near an all time high, has nearly quadrupled since he became chief 11 years ago. -Unless you have diabetes, you may not know Novo Nordisk. “We’re world famous in Denmark,” an executive once told me, wryly, at HQ in Copenhagen. Even if you know the company, you may not know the CEO, Lars Rebien Sorensen. For 15 years he has been directing the company’s longtime mission of helping people worldwide with diabetes, hemophilia, and other diseases. Independent research estimates that the company’s early efforts in China have saved 140,000 life-years from diabetes-related complications. And by the way, the stock is up by a factor of 22 during Sorensen’s tenure. -You certainly know Whole Foods Market, and let’s acknowledge right away that its stock is near a three-year low. But I don’t care—co-CEO and co-founder John Mackey, a free-spirited vegan contrarian, is as ardent a capitalist as I know while also focusing the company on health, fairness up and down the supply chain, and the social consequences of his business. He’s passionate about profit because he can’t do anything else without it. His net worth is an estimated $100 million; he pays himself $1 a year. I like all these leaders because they’re absolutely clear about their purpose, and they’re fulfilling it. They can cheer us up as we read the headlines. |
