"It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for
  their presentation is provided or available."           Thomas Mann, 1896

Letter from the President

January 10th, 2003

John Hathaway-Bates
President & Executive Director

The year 2003 appears to be off to a good start for us, with meetings booked in cities up and down the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle.  So if all of our old friends can get back into the Business Forum habit on a diligent basis (a New Year’s Resolution?), we will be able to maintain a momentum right back to where we were before the car hit me.   For a listing of upcoming meetings Click Here.

Then there is the amazing spread of our web site hits from across the world.  For that I can only thank our members, friends and supporters, because our web site is advertised nowhere and never has been, so even if all of the recipients of our emails went on our site every week our hits would only equal about 20% of those we actually receive.  If you would like to help us, you can do so by forwarding our site on to two of your friends or associates by sending them an I recommend this site Email.

The fact is that people in 75 countries went on our web site last month - which essentially was only a 15 working-days month!  So I thank you all for continuing to forward our Emails and this website on to your friends each time we send out an update.  We could not have done it without you!  December 2002 World Hits.

My annual Holiday Season Missive last year developed more return emails than anything since the previous year's Etiquette piece.  I did get replies from three people that it made absolutely furious; however the majority who responded understood that it was just whimsy, and there were even those who let it actually begin a thought process, I learned from their replies.  Fascinating how a little joking for the benefit of lightening the pressures we all face today affects different people.  The Business Forum has always had two sides to it.  The main objective of our group of course is to allow decision makers to join together and ask questions about new technologies, services, products and ideas with the experts that are launching them - but the other side (which I think personally is why we are still going strong after 21 years) is a socio-economic one, in that we have managed to develop a support group the length of the west coast (and now it would seem the world in many cases) to overcome that "it is lonely at the top" feeling we all get from time to time.

On another note:  Sometimes I wonder why what appears so simple to the decision-makers that I have lunch with every month, seems so difficult for the powers-that-be to implement.  For years I have been touting a Mag-Rail transportation system for the Pacific States of America – one which would run from the southern most tip of Baja to the western most tip of Alaska.  In my opinion Northrop-Grumman, Boeing and our many other aerospace and infrastructure corporations could build one without missing a step.  The benefits are obvious to anyone who has ever driven on a freeway, or flown between cities, on the west coast at some time or another – yet the first such high speed train is going to be built in China – not the United States!  How is it possible that a country where the GDP is less than $800 (compared with our $32,800 GDP) is able to beat us to it? Bureaucracy, Lobbyists and Political Donators are probably involved, but who wants to create any bad feeling?  Not I for sure.

Another bit of advice I was just given will be worth looking back on a year or so from now.  The advice was - Sell any property you have, move into a rented apartment and wait until you can buy it back at really great savings – or watch the real estate market (led by the REITs) do what the NASDAQ did in 2000-2001.  Obviously owning little property after several heart attacks and a couple of divorces, this advice only interested me in the way predictions of the pending Technology Bubble Collapse in 1999 did.  But if anyone has an opinion, I would love to hear it.

If you have not already done so, please take a moment and update my database for me at: http://www.bizforum.org/sessions/database.htm  Other than that – I wish everyone a New Year where they get what they want out of life for at least twelve months.

My very best wishes,

Hope to see you at lunch soon,

President & Executive Director

You can email me at john@bizforum.org 

You can telephone me at 310-550-1984 

or Fax me at 310-550-6121

Previous Letters from the President

April 2001
May 2001
June 2001
July  2001
August 2001
September 2001
October 2001
November 2001

     December 2001   
The Etiquette of Formal & Business Dining

---

January 2002
February 2002
April 2002
May 2002
June 2002
July 2002
August 2002
September 2002
October 2002
November 2002

December 2002

 A tongue-in-cheek treatise on the many benefits that a country gains simply by being founded by the descendants of populations who were most often raped, pillaged and looted by the Vikings.

Registration Form for Invitations and Up-Dates

Disclaimer

The Business Forum, its Officers, partners, and all other
parties with which it deals, or is associated with, accept
absolutely no responsibility whatsoever, nor any liability,
for what is published on this web site.    Please refer to: