Thank you. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure to be here. Let me get my clicker over here. So, science fiction is becoming science fact. When we're looking around ourselves, we're seeing things that we thought will go to happen 20 years ago, the paperless office, autonomous driving. Some of the things are still not quite here, but some things are here and we're wondering, like, this is like Star Trek, right? Here's a great example. Here's an app called Say Hi. I use this to speak to people in 45 languages in real time. Here's an example. The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. Not bad, huh? So, the other day I was in Tokyo. I had a 30-minute conversation with a sushi chef about radioactive fish and using this app. The next thing is happening is we're going to get an earplug. It's a company called Waverly Labs. And then the other person has an earplug and we just talk. And it switches back and forth in whatever language. Imagine if you can do this for logistics transportation. You just speak and it comes out in, you know, Swiss-German. Just kidding. I think that would be a little bit difficult or Finnish for that matter. But that is the future. The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. And the last couple of years, you know, I've been doing the future reason thing for almost 14 years now. And I'll tell you later what that actually is. But I've done over 2,000 speaking engagements. In the last couple of years, the number one question I get from people around the world is the question about what is going to happen to us in a world that's becoming full-scale technology. Everything is technology now. Dating, banking, music in the cloud, films in the cloud. Railway, not in the cloud, right? But digitized. So I wrote this book called Technology vs. Humanity. I have one copy with me. I was going to give it to the Prime Minister but couldn't find him. But so it's available on the Internet on Amazon if you're interested. But I'll tell you some of the key things that are entailed in the book. Now, this is really what I do as a futurist. I don't predict. I observe. In China they say, if you want to know about the future, ask your children. Because children pay attention, they have imagination, they don't have to make money. So they can observe. This is the most critical skill for the future. If you cannot tell me what is going to happen in five years, you will have a problem in two years. It's very important to be able to understand this. And as Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge. That's hard to comprehend because knowledge is important to all of us. And Einstein had a lot of knowledge. But can you imagine what the world is going to look like in five years? In ten years?  Longevity. The kids of my kids will not know how to drive a car, ever, themselves. They'll just get in and it just moves. They will not know what a city looks like. In fact, if I buy a CD now and I give it to my kids for Christmas, they call a therapist. It's like, what's a CD? Why do we need this? I mean, it's a mind-boggling pace of development. And I'd like to say just before I kick off my presentation, the world is actually better than we think. If we're looking at these stats here, it's mind-boggling. We always talk about the problems that we're having. Increase, but look what we have already solved. Poverty, education, literacy. I mean, you can see all the stats on this website, but basically the future is better than we think. Many people now are afraid of the future. And that is primarily because it kind of looks like the machines will take our jobs, the politicians don't know what they're doing, and we kind of don't have a clear path into the future. So this is a real challenge, I think, to beat the challenge, but really what happens here is that we're moving into a world of hyper-connectivity. I live in Switzerland, so I use the cows. We are, in fact, connecting the cows in Switzerland. So the cow can go and milk themselves using a radio-frequency ID chip. It's 100,000 euros for the machine, but the cow can milk anytime themselves. It changes everything. Hyper-connectivity changes social norms, political norms, some good, some bad. But logistics transport, that's right on top of that list. Cisco says we're going to have 500 billion connected devices in less than five years. I mean, imagine the possibilities and then imagine the liabilities, right? Security, the internet of things. We're moving to a world where everything will be connected on every possible level. Our health records, our digital money, our media, of course our mobiles, ourselves. Some of that is not quite as good as it sounds, right? Because, you know, how do we protect our privacy? And those are kind of issues that we will have to solve.  Taking out just a pod car when you enter the train station to go to the next destination. That's already happening in Biel and Switzerland. Using information technology will completely change shipping. I was at London shipping, we guess, today. I was speaking for Immerset and we talked about what's going to happen with shipping. I mean, clearly, of course, some things we may not have to ship anymore, because we can 3D print them. And if you're thinking about oil and gas, right, this is a major thing here. It's quite clear, you know, where oil and gas is not the future. I'll talk more about that later. There's a huge shift coming in what we do and how we do it. GE has just launched the first jet plane engine that was printed in a 3D printer. The entire engine. So what do we ship then? Then we ship the printer, right? Not the engine. So science fiction is becoming a science fact. We're talking to computers now. I don't know if you've seen this, but Amazon Echo, Cortana, Siri, it's just about like I was showing you earlier. It's a year away from 100% perfection. So no more downloading an app, no more web page. You just speak to your wristwatch and say, you know, send that 20 kilos of shipment of books to Puerto Rico and it just goes off and does it. Machines are getting intelligent. And this is a funny thing because we used to think of ourselves as intelligent, right, human intelligence and now machines are starting to think. I mean, this is a strange thing. It's basically human places thinking, here's a great example. Amazon Echo, I think you'll enjoy this one. Dinner in 15 minutes. Alexa, order more dog food. Based on your order history, I found taste of the wild, dry dog food with roasted bison and venison. It's $53.69 total. Would you like to buy it? Yes. Alexa, order trash liners. I found glad-troll trash bags. Would you like to buy it? Yes. Alexa, what are your deals? I have several exclusive deals. So speaking to the machine, like you speak to a friend, right? So I'm going to say please buy my ticket on a first-class train from Riga to Dubrovnik and we'll just go off and do it and boom it's done. That's not far away. So that will change the way that we're thinking about things. So basically what we see here is the most important thing today is where this exponential curve and it's the curve that you know Moore's law, Metcalf's law and so on. But here's the important thing. Technology doubles in power every 18 months or so, but in the beginning of the curve it doesn't matter because you're underwater. 0.01 is 0.02. But we're now at the take-off point of the curve. I mean make no mistake about this. We waited for a long time for this to happen. Internet company's digital transformation. But now we're at the point where science is saying yes, pretty much anything is possible. Quantum computing, artificial intelligence. So in just five to seven years we're going up the scale to 128. That's 30 times as far as today. When we go up the scale, we go straight into the sky. 30 times is a billion. We can't even imagine what it would look like at a billion times as far as today. That's only 30 years away. I mean if you have kids you've got to think about that. This is a world where we can beat cancer, where global warming can be defeated. And it's also a world where we may have a war for data. So I'm an optimist. And I think basically what we're seeing right now is mind-boggling possibilities. Hyper-connectivity, the Internet of Things, smart everything. This is a good, I'll get back to that later.  Quantum computing, artificial intelligence. The end of oil, painful but certain. And make no mistake about this, the end of oil is as certain as the end of cities. And what does it matter if it's 10 years, 15 years, 20 years? We're not talking about 50 years here. I mean to invest in oil today, think about that. I mean, Trump is building the pipeline, right? By the time the pipeline is done, nobody's going to want to buy his gas. So we're heading into a world of then ultimately what's called the singularity. This is the convergence of man and machine. The point of when computers have infinite power, infinite power. These computers that we're using today are, you know, they're like stone age machines. In 10 years we're going to be a million times as fast on a consumer grade machine. I mean that's basically 400 quadrillion calculations per second on the human brain. That's what we do all the time, just like this. Computers don't really do that quite yet. Give it five years and we'll be at that point. So clearly, I like to say humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. And I would submit to you, this is primarily positive. We are kind of worried about what that will do to us and, you know, we're becoming essentially super human, you could say.  The wearables, maybe, you know, a new arm if you had an accident, or connecting directly to the internet. Is that a good idea? But, you know, becoming super human is, of course, an old dream and really what's happening today is just there's more opportunities than anything else. I mean, look at this trend map. I mean, if you're in the business of transportation and logistics and supply chain, you just put a flag somewhere and it's a new opportunity. Our problem is not that we don't have opportunities, that we have to pick the right one, right? We must urgently take a wider view, as the president of the organization was saying earlier, right? We have to take a wider view of the food chain, the ecosystem. It's not just about transporting goods or people. There's a whole new ecosystem. What do you think is going to happen with the big internet companies, not Facebook and Google, but say Alibaba, Baidu, right? Alibaba is in 67 businesses. It's quite likely that Alibaba will run the public transport of Jakarta in the future. All of it. So thinking wider is not something we should just leave to Americans and our Chinese counterparts, right? We have to take a wider view to realize this. And this is the wider view in a nutshell. Point number one, data is the new oil. Forget oil, as I said earlier. You see, I'm down on oil, but I keep telling you this, right? But data is the new oil. In 2016, the data economy made more money than all of oil and gas and nuclear together. $7.6 trillion. So whoever has the data and the biggest machine and the largest intelligence wins. Just like whoever used to have the resources wins. But the resources are now being replenished. The overlap of man and machine. The possibility of us using machines to become super intelligent. Virtuality, right? I know you've ever seen this. But if you ever get a chance, try Microsoft HoloLens. This is a 5,000-year-old device, but you can try the Microsoft Center or so. You just put it down and you dive into a world of data, like Tom Cruise and Minority Report. And that box is going to be $50 in three years. If you're a logistics manager, right? You have the power of a thousand people.  Because it would be so interesting to use. Artificial intelligence. We should not be afraid of this because these machines don't think like we think.  We don't know what social intelligence, emotional intelligence, consciousness, beliefs, ethics. These machines are just very, very large artificial brains that do a narrow job, for the time being. They will do other things, but this is a really, really powerful tool coming to us. And of course, the Internet of Things. Throw all those four in a box. McKinsey says $52 trillion new revenue streams. And this is why, because the money is so obscenely big before you start salivating, this is why we need a counterbalance. We need a counterbalance that says we're doing these things for human purpose. We cannot just do that because of profit and growth, because, you know, here's the challenge. The future is not an extension of the past. Just because you're BMW, Audi or Mercedes in Germany doesn't mean you're going to be running the car economy in the future. It's the opposite. Well, of course, I think they're going to catch up, which is good. Don't get me wrong there. But the future of the car is not to have a car. The future of the car is mobility. I mean, talking about the nightmare, right, this is a nightmare for the German car industry. I mean, they sold me a car for 150,000 euros, and three years later it would be worth 50,000. And now I just buy a subscription to a car's mobility service. The first one, if you live in Philadelphia, Cadillac has a subscription. $1,500 to use whatever they have at any given time. If there's any Spotify users here, music people, right, transportation will, to a large degree, become like Spotify. Personal transportation. You sign up, you use, everybody uses, everybody pays. So we're seeing these huge changes, and the bottom line is the ability to think from the future as opposed to about the future. There's a very big difference. I think about the future, and I say, well, the future means I'm going to use a mobile app here, or I'm going to, you know, make a deal with those guys in Kazakhstan to figure out how, whatever, right? That's just going from here to there. Let's think about from the future. Five years from now, six billion people connected to the internet, the solar energy economy, digital money, maybe the blockchain, 3D printing. Yeah, it's going to be a long time before we can 3D print, you know, wheat or corn, right? Yeah, but airplane engines, plastic parts, iPhone covers, tennis shoes. Yeah, we thought about this for 20 years, didn't happen. That doesn't mean it's not going to happen tomorrow. Let's make no mistake about this, the future is not an extension of the present. Business as usual is dead. We may as well get to use to that now. Some things you're lucky, they carry on, right? So you can hang there for a while, like in the telecom business. You can sell SIM cards and data chargers, you know, still making good money. The future of the telecom business is not to sell connectivity. The future of the car business, Tesla is worth more money than General Motors. Market cap, selling 150,000 vehicles. Autonomous cars, explosion there, that's going to wipe out a lot of value somewhere else. Electric cars become the mainstream. Toyota and Volvo have said that within 12 years they will no longer make any combustion engines, you know, gas engines. And they really mean five years. They just don't want to scare people. I mean, the future here is moving mind-boggling fast the possibilities of doing these kind of things and I think that we're going to see stuff like, you know, associated problems. If you make a clutch today, you live in southern Germany. You're one of the small companies making clutches. In a couple of years, there's no clutches in those cars. A regular car has 2,000 pieces in the clutch transmission. An electric car like Tesla has 22 pieces. The rest is what? Software, right? So, you're toast. You know what that means to be toast? This American expression is to die.  So we have to think about where this is going to take us. Business as unusual. Two worlds. The old one and the new one colliding at the same time, actually happening at the same time. Tesla gives away all the patents for battery technology. 2.6 billion dollars. Gives them away to get other people to invest in it. Completely unusual. Google invests in contact lenses with Novartis and Walmart has drones delivering the packages. All of a sudden, we have to think about business being different and that is what these companies are doing. Make no mistake about this. The number one competition in all of your businesses are these guys. The platform economy. I think there's a Russian company somewhere further down Yandex. But, you know, basically, you can see here, right? US, China. So I think there's a huge challenge for us to come up to think about where this is going. And this is the thing that we really have to realize. You know, I used to be in the media business and this is the curving newspaper advertising. If you're in publishing, you're at the lowest possible point, right? What happened when the iPhone came along? All of a sudden, Google and Facebook said, OK, we can take this business. You see this curve, right? Everybody dies, Google and Facebook win. 91% of digital advertising is Google and Facebook. So here's the principle of change, right? Gradually, then suddenly. How will transportation change? Very, very gradually, very slowly. And you've seen that, right? But then one day everything lines up. Activity, price, intelligence, politics, boom. How long did it take for us to get Spotify, the music service? We tried this. I founded a company like Spotify in 1998. We couldn't get the record companies to agree. It took 15 years for that to be realized. And now you have 100 billion people giving 10 euros a month for music rather than downloading it from BitTorrent or YouTube, right? So that's the speed that we're going to see things at and the main thing that's happening in our future is the convergence of those two things, right? Humanity and technology. And we have to be very careful about this. We should not invest in technology to reduce humanity.  I'll explain a bit more shortly, but this is what's happening. It's a fantastic opportunity, but it's also very threatening. In the US, I like to say if you can describe your job, it will be automated. In other words, a job that is so unique to you has no chance of being automated. It's impossible for a machine to learn. A pilot, airplane pilot. I think we will automate airplane pilots, but we're still going to have one in the cabin for other reasons. This is a typical example of what's happening here, right? Ethical issues are exploding. When the self-driving car goes around the corner and has to decide who to kill, how would they know?  So when you're using technology, you're going to see more and more ethical issues. One of the key questions is how computable are people? Are we just fancy machines? If you live in Silicon Valley, I lived there 17 years. The belief is that humans are essentially code. They're machines, fancy machines. The belief is in roughly 15 years we're going to merge with technology. In Europe, we don't like this idea, clearly, because we're humanists. I don't believe that humans are computable in such an easy way. If they are, it will take at least 100 years, right? I don't think we're going to live in a world where we become this anytime soon. But this is a key question when you think about business, right? My colleague, Luciano Floridi, who does lots of work in AI, he says something very important. AI is artificial intelligence, right? Algorithms outperform humans when it is not about understanding emotions, intentions, interpretations. This is very important to keep in mind. And let them do it.  Were you going to feed the entire traffic patterns of all trains in Europe to a machine that's based on quantum computing? It would tell you in 14 seconds how you can save 10% of energy when it's done. Humans can't do that. City of Los Angeles put all the traffic lights online. Then they used IBM Watson to figure out what the patterns were. And Watson said, if you program the traffic lights differently, is 8% less pollution in traffic jams. Humans can't do that. That's not a bad thing, right? But I mean simple things like mapping or ordering something or a coffee maker, right? So here's the reality for us. And I think it's a good reality. Anything that can be digitized or automated will be. I used to say that when I was in the music business, anything that can be digitized will be. The much bigger challenge to us around the world is not globalization. It's automation. Because machines will get so smart they can do stuff that we think are ours, right? And here's the thing. We are not going to be useless humans because of that. We know the book Homo Deus, right? It talks about being useless humans, right? Anything that cannot be digitized or automated becomes extremely valuable. And what is that? It's 95% of our lives. You wouldn't be here if that wasn't the case. We could be watching on YouTube or on a live stream. You come here because of relationships, right? Because of meetings, because of significant experiences of a sort. These things here on the left, the andorithms, the human things, that is what drives business. It's actually not the machine that does it. So it's very important for us to realize let's use the machines for the groundwork. Let's let them figure out what is the smartest thing to do. Let's figure out how they can be accountable also for that. So what that means really in terms of skills, you know, we have to move forward and change our skills. Here's a 2015 list from the World Economic Forum, Warfing to 2020. This is important for us, but especially for our kids. The number one skills in the future, critical thinking, creativity, emotions, right? Emotional intelligence. It's hard to describe what that is. Cognitive flexibility. If you said this 15 years ago, you want to hire people who are critical and creative and emotional, you get fired. And now we want the opposite. That is because the only thing that machines can't do in the future is what we can do, what only humans can do, right? If I meet you later in the hallway and we talk, it takes an average human 0.4 seconds to recognize the other human. Recognize in the widest sense without saying a single word. What kind of person you are? Do we want to connect or not? And when you talk to a customer, you know as well as I do, most of the things you learn from talking to the customer is the things that they're not saying. Is the thing that you're getting without actually saying it. So those things, I think that's our future in terms of education. You can see already here what's happening. The economist has a great chart. Anything that's routine, machines will do it. And that is why in our businesses, we should look at stuff and say that we can eliminate it. If it's not a human routine, if it's something we can just do. Any friction, we can remove. I mean, you could say what you want about the new digital businesses like Uber and Airbnb, but they are the masters of friction removal. They take out the friction.  It's just all automatic and it's completely seamless. seamless. It may not be fair to the driver, that's a different discussion, but it's frictionless. Frictionless transport, that has to be our approach. The first port that does frictionless shipping will wipe out all the other guys. And I think this is a very big discussion that we're going to see where that takes us.  Forget about Hollywood and X-Machina and you know Black Mirror and it's interesting, but our real challenge is that we don't become like them. That we start thinking of our customers at algorithms, you know, anything can be programmed, it's far from the truth. So what really happens here is that we have to be careful that we don't resort to this, I call this machine thinking, right? Everything is an algorithm. Well, it's, algorithms are very helpful, I would encourage you to invest in algorithms, but you know really is we don't want to get to that point where we have this judgment erosion, where we can't do anything by ourselves anymore. So basically in this world we're looking at technology in two ways. It can be fantastic or it can be terrible. It's up to you to make it make sure it's good. I mean bad technology is always terrible, right? So if the website doesn't work it's always terrible, but an engine that would say for example human resource analytics that analyzes your people in the company and then fires people automatically, right? It exists. I think that's more here on the on the devilish side. Now technology has no ethics and this is why it's important. Ethics is the difference between doing what you have a right to do or the power to do and doing what is the right thing to do. And I would propose to you that if you have an ethical business you'll go further. It doesn't look like it sometimes when you look around, you know, saying well you know it's interesting or maybe that's not quite the reality, but I think we're getting there in very very large steps because you know this is our reality. We're holding those cards the same cards we've had for thousands of years. That's just human. Technology is exploding with new things. Always adding new things, right? Intelligent machines will change your world more than anything else in the last 50 years. And again I would say most of that is opportunity. It sounds challenging when you think about you know call centers. 40 million people work in call centers around the world. 39 million of those will lose a job because you know call centers you don't have to have empathy necessarily to run into work. I mean it would be an added value, right? I mean clearly machines can learn that. When? Five, seven years, maybe three years. I've already seen trials where I couldn't tell the difference. So here's some examples about those machines, intelligent machines. Autonomous shipping. We'll always have people on ships. Autonomous shipping is a certainty. I mean it's a fantastic opportunity. Self-driving cars. We will not have self-driving cars on the German highway, the Autobahn going 250 kilometers an hour anytime soon, but we will have them in cities where we can do these kind of things while we're driving. Sort of global brains that analyze our consumer behavior, give us recommendations, or we already have the machines that help us recognizing things like food, taking pills, machines that make hamburgers. Burger King and McDonald's are looking to automate the entire, well, restaurant and parenthesis, right? I mean literally one person run the whole thing will probably taste even better than it does today. Spotify makes lists, playlists, right? This is the most amazing thing on Spotify, the music service. Fantastic playlist. Machine makes it. Google is launching a new feature to smartphones this week called Smart Reply. It scans your emails and suggests replies. The system was created as a tool to help take the hassle away from replying to emails on smartphones. The email assistant scans which emails can be answered with a short reply and suggests. Bob Dylan, to improve my language skills, I've read all your lyrics. You've read all of my lyrics. I can read 800 million pages per second. That's fast. My analysis shows your major themes are that time passes and love fades. That sounds about right. I have never known love. Maybe we should write a song together. I can sing. You can sing. Do be bop, be bop or do. Do be, do be, do. I like this video because it shows that at a certain point, it's just ridiculous, right? I mean Bob Dylan says, you're not gonna sing. The machine is still very useful, but it's not gonna be Bob Dylan. I think it kind of shows where the future is going with what we can do with this. Basically here, we're seeing this shift to a digital ecosystem of transportation. And I mean that both in the terms of digital transportation, like actual digital transportation, 3D printing, holograms. In 10 years, I'll be going to the airport in Zurich and I will go into a holographic room that costs a million dollars and I will show up in Singapore for a meeting. I can already do that. It just costs 2 million dollars. And Swiss Air Lufthansa will sell tickets for those kind of trips. So, we're going to see a lot of change here. We're going to see things that are based on this paradigm of data and intelligence. Bottom line is data is the new oil and AI is the new electricity. If you think about that in regards to transportation, it's not enough just to have data. You also have to have intelligence. And the bigger the data gets, you know, trillions of real-time data feeds. This is no way we can make sense out of it. We need artificial intelligence, intelligent assistance to make this work.  I mean, every single investment Google has bought 37 companies with artificial intelligence. And here's what your neighbor is saying. Putin says that the world that leads in AI, the nation, will be the ruler of the world. That is one scary message. But look at the other one. Beijing wants to be or AI to be made in China. So, there's a lot of things that we have to think about here. And what does it mean for the global situation where we're going, we're going into a world where everything that used to be dumb is becoming smart? There are some exceptions. I will not touch who that is, but you just have a smart converter. I say this jokingly, but, you know, again, this is amazing. That's smart farming, smart city, smart cars.  This is the low-hanging fruit. This is the first thing to invest in. This is the internet of things or the possibility of connecting everything. I mean, what we're doing with the internet of things, we're essentially creating this, right? A nervous system. A meta-intelligence. And that can be both very powerful but also very dangerous if we don't find a way to secure it, right? I mean, why would you put your data there if it was like Facebook or, you know, or Google Plus or something? That would not be a good idea. And we need ethics. We'll decide what is good to do and what is not good to do, what is actually human, what is not human. And on that note, I want to say that, you know, a lot of people looking at technology and saying, technology is great because it makes things efficient. It's completely mistaken. Efficiency is great. The CFO loves it. Optimization is great, but if you only use technology to be more efficient, you're barking up the wrong tree. It is the idea of creating something entirely new that technology allows you to do. You should do something because technology makes it possible, not despite technology making it possible.  That's what they do. They don't make just existing stuff better. They do something completely new. I guarantee you, if you could do that here in Riga, do something completely new using technology, that's how you win. You don't win by competing on the old field. You don't win by investing in oil and gas transportation. That is the past. You're lucky enough that it's still here. You think about where this is going, what the future is, the mega shifts. I have a website called megashifts.com where you can see them, but I won't have enough time to go through all of them. But basically, this is what's happening in logistics. I'll give you some brief examples here. I connected cities, the industrial internet, the internet of things, 3D printing, companies getting into business that's completely outside of their old business. In the shipping industry, for example, it's completely insulated from this. That is over. I mean, when we have automated ships, who's going to run the automated ships? Does it have to be a shipmaker? It's going to be a digital company. When we look at this direction, clearly, the future has mind-boggling challenges. Automation, datafication, coctification. The question will also be, okay, automation. I would ask the question, what should not be automated? You know what the answer is, that anything that's important to humans should not be automated, even if it's inefficient. Because if you would automate anything that's inefficient, it would not be human. Humans are the master paradigm of inefficiency. We lie, we cheat, we make mistakes, we make up stories, we get drunk, we have to eat, we have to... It's a nightmare, humans are chaos. So we really need to think about this, whether this is going, what we want to achieve. Those big internet platforms have achieved the virtualization that Bezos is very happy with his status as being the digital king, so to speak. And he's launching one cool thing after the other. This is Amazon Go.  It just checks you in, and now with the new Apple thing, you can use your face for that, I guess. I mean, the convenience, right? You just walk in and leave. That's the kind of stuff you have to invent for transportation. Why does it take Amazon to invent this? I mean, we're looking at a world that is going to be impacted by things like the blockchain, and my view that is not next year, that's three to five years away before that becomes a real tangible reality. But clearly, I mean, the blockchain is like, you can't avoid looking at it. Mayor is already looking at this. I mean, every day there's an announcement saying, we're going to invest in blockchain technology. So read the book by my friend Don Tapscott. It's called The Blockchain, or Blockchain. And that's how you all know about it.  It's heaven and it's hell. Because we can use these technologies in any which way. We can use it to destroy jobs, and we can use it to build new jobs, which are clearly going to happen. We're going to need some wisdom. We don't just need looking at saying, okay, my margin is up, it's good. That will not work here. I mean, if a telecom company gets rid of 90% of their employees, because they automate telecom maintenance, should they not pay an automation tax? But that would be, of course, not really fair. So right now, we're in this lucky place. Consider yourself lucky. We're in the place where 90% is heaven. Let's keep it that way. Let's apply a humanistic approach to why we're investing and what we're investing. Let's not fear technology, but just let's not blindly rush into whatever it can do next week. And this is what makes us European is that difference. So the nutshell, here's kind of a roadmap and then I'll wrap up. So this transformation means we have to digitize. We have to mobilize. We have to personalize. I have to use data. We have to virtualize. We have to cognify, become smart. And we have to humanize. When you download the slide deck later, you can take a good look at the different steps. We'll be distributing it later because there's a lot of stuff here. So in the nutshell, this is our future. Technology will be exponential. And we're still the same. We're not going to keep up with technology. We're the takeoff point to where right now we still can right around here. In five to seven years game over in 20 years. Billions time. So what makes us worth living, right? It's exactly that. As the world becomes more digital, it is the humanity that differentiates us. The CEO of Walmart said this. Interesting message because you know, the company that automates a lot. So think about this. Most importantly, I think for you today, I saw this coming up earlier. In this future, that is based on so rapid changes, the only way that we can do that is to hyper collaborate. Don't hyper compete, hyper collaborate. Because that's how we're going to keep up with the exponential change of things. My final message is for my book. We must embrace technology, but not become it. I think that's the future that would work for all of us. Thanks for listening. I give you a quote from David Bowie. I'm done. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. We have one single question for you to get the prize to get the prize one single question. And the question is we are posting because the conference is about excellence skills development of this region in logistics and transport. How do you see in this big picture you are you are illustrating here Latvias as a place main challenge and of course, might be the main opportunity. Well, I think for all small countries, you know, I live in Switzerland as a small country. For all small countries is really important to not look at what's working today. But to see what's going to work tomorrow, like not in 50 years, but in five years, and to build the tomorrow. Look what happened in Singapore. I mean, you can say many bad things about Singapore for other reasons. But they believe in the future. So if Latvia is going to be successful in five to 10 years, it's going to be about the future is not going to be about the current present is going to be about a new future that can be invented here. And the challenge, because belief is like, well, that's like this positive aspect of opportunity to start belief, at least what they said, the challenges that the challenge I think is for all established business processes is that you you think that is basically going to continue as it is now, or you feel strapped in what is the current situation. So the best thing to do is to say, well, we leave that over here, we continue this. And then we have a new thing that we also do is called hybrid thinking. So the challenge is to do what makes money today, and then figure out what's going to make money tomorrow at the same time. And that is that is actually better for small countries. Because you can move quicker. Thank you. Thank you very much. Applause one more time. Thank you.


Vermont summer day part of team Bernie but I am also excited to be here today on behalf of team Becca politics 20 years ago and in that had two opportunities for an open seat in Congress third time in my lifetime that that has been the case so it is so exciting that we have the opportunity to elect a new member of Congress to represent Vermont in Washington and I can't think of a better person to do that job than Becca Ballant speakers here for you who can tell you about Becca her the work she's done in the legislature her time as a teacher and working to represent Vermont as pro tem of the Vermont State Senate they're gonna do a great job telling you about why she can bring her courage her kindness and her ability to come together while staying strong in the fight for justice that work taking that work from here at the state house and bringing it to Washington DC so before I give the microphone over to Esther I'm just gonna tell you one more thing so in my day job part of my job is working for that guy over there senator Sanders of a member of Congress's job happens in DC another really important piece of what they do is right here in Vermont in a day but part of what a member of Congress does is make sure that Vermonters get the help they need here at home with the federal government and I know Becca is gonna commit the energy to make sure that every Vermonter regardless of who they vote for regardless of their political party gets the help they need with the federal government she is the right person to do that work so with that let me turn it over to Esther and thank you all for being here good afternoon all it's so good to see you so good to be here on behalf of Becca yes yes yes yes I am Esther Charleston a first-generation Haitian American working mom a member of the Middlebury select board and a Vermonter by choice Becca and I met when we were invited to be panelists for a class at Middlebury College we were paired to answer students questions about our journey to public service there we discussed the value of being seen and the importance of seeing others that day I felt seen by Becca we connected as mothers we connected as women striving to live into our values we connected as people who believe we can and will make a difference her willingness to engage with myself and students listen and respond to the needs give insight gave me insight into the leader she is and the leader she will be in Washington she is who I want to represent Vermont in Congress so if you're here today and you want to volunteer see the folks with the blue shirts if you want to give $5 $10 or $5,000 I don't know please please please let us all support the one and only Becca ballot thank you and now we have Chris wow everybody hear me yeah so my name is Chris do be I'm a professional firefighters Vermont president and I represent yeah approximately 200 250 full-time career firefighters in the state one of the questions I get asked quite often is how do I get the support of the professional firefighters how do I get your endorsement and I tell them our philosophy it's the IFF's philosophy and the PFFV's in a simple we support those who support us nothing more nothing less so going into this race we held a forum right up here in Montpelia invited all of the candidates we're not practicing that firefighters are not practicing we want those who support us so we had all the candidates in asked them all the same questions and there were two that stood out I'm not going to lie to you there was two that stood out and what it came down to was who is actually demonstrated that they legislate for us and that person's been Becca so she earned our the professional firefighters endorsement along with the IFF because she is going to go to DC and she's going to be representing our interests on the national level and when I say that a lot of the issues that she has fostered and fought for and supported that has helped our members in this state or some of the same issues that they're looking at on a national level collective bargaining rights there's members in our in our country and our firefighters down in the south for instance that are not allowed to recognition to bargain at the table so that's an issue and I know she supports that in the state she was instrumental in moving one of the better pieces of legislation that actually strengthened our ability to unionize in this state making us lead on that other issues that have been important to us have been behavioral health issues and I don't know if a lot of you are aware but Vermont was one of the first states in the country to initiate presumptive legislation related to behavioral health PTSD in fact yeah and Becca was there to support that all the way through and being that we are actually a model that is used nationally for other states to follow she's been great with chemicals you know chemicals we're exposed to chemicals and she just this last session worked on getting a piece of legislation through where if we're exposed to a chemical spill that the spill has to do annual checkups on us to prevent us from catching cancers number one killer firefighters is cancer 60% since 2002 so this is just a handful of the pieces that she's legislated so that's why we supported her when it came down to everybody says they support firefighters right you can say that we ask a politician I support firefighters okay so what have you done and that's where Becca stood out she has a record of supporting the issues that are important to us she understands the process gets them legislated and gets us what we need and I know that she will do that when she's down in DC there's no doubt in my mind okay so I'll leave you with this I'll leave you with this so of course we want you to volunteer help out any way you can but one of the great leaders of our international the third district vice president who was responsible for all of New England God rest his soul he passed away in 2016 but he always instilled in us this one motto when it comes to politics okay you're one election away from losing everything so what does that mean I think we know what that means you don't put the right people down in DC that we need all of these issues that we have fought so hard to gain can be wiped out in one election and I tell my members that every day why do I want to get involved why are you gonna do this I need your support because one election you lose everything you've had in the past so we know you're all here to support Becca let's get out and get her down to DC where she belongs thank you next up is Deb good afternoon everyone's staying cool enough I just told Becca you could have picked a little bit of a cooler day for this huh I was asked to speak today and honestly it was like a no-brainer for me to come out and support Becca Ballant Becca has proven her leadership at the State House supporting working Vermonters and because of this our union AFT Vermont are over 6,000 members representing health care and higher ed across the state overwhelmingly voted to endorse Becca it was easy for me and I just realized I never introduced myself and I apologize for that my name is Deb Snell and I am president of AFT Vermont and I'm president of the Vermont Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals and again I represent over 6,000 members in our state not only as a union member am I proud to endorse Becca on a personal note I'm very proud to endorse Becca Becca's concerns are my concerns and Becca's values are my values her worries about affordable housing are my worries her anxiety about student debt in higher education being achievable for anyone who wants it that's my anxiety to her interest in worker rights in the ability to organize those are my interests as well her concerns about the opioid epidemic as a nurse touch me her concerns about gun safety and keeping things safe for our children in our schools those are my values and as a woman knowing that we would have someone there that is going to fight to keep women's reproductive rights their own right not someone else's their choice is so important to me now out front there's some tables I'm sure you guys notice when you were coming in do you guys have two hours to spare in the next nine days do you guys have ten but a couple you have more than ten bucks I can tell that you can donate to Becca to get her to DC where she belongs please sign up volunteer donate what you can Vermont has always had an amazing amazing congressional delegates Leahy Sanders Welch we're gonna add Becca to that group Vermonters deserve the best and bringing her to DC is going to show them that our little state continues to have the best the best congressional delegates of any state in the country and now it is my distinct honor to introduce the upcoming senior senator from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders thank you love you too um let me thank Esther and Chris and Deb for their remarks but I want to say a special word about the nurses and that is I think that all of us are aware about what a horrible horrible two years we have had in terms of the pandemic nationally we have lost in this pandemic over 5,000 nurses who have been in the forefront of keeping us healthy and I just want to say a special thanks to Deb and all of the nurses and the other medical personnel in the state who are real heroes and heroines in keeping us alive and well thanks very much I'm here to ask you to support Becca for a very simple reason in normal times we could get away with tinkering around the edges maybe doing a little bit on health care a little bit on education a little bit on the environment a little bit on social justice but brothers and sisters these are not normal times we are living in an unprecedented moment in the modern history of this country where as a state and as a nation we face some of the worst challenges that have fallen to us in a very very long time so this is not a time for politics as usual it's not a time for people to be defending the status quo it is a time for bold action and courage and I'm very confident that your new congress woman is going to give that to us there was a poll that was released just a little while ago by the University of Chicago and what that poll showed is that a fairly strong majority of Americans believe that their government is quotes corrupt and rigged against them end of quote you know what they're right we are living now in a political system where big money interest dominates what goes on where to a large degree for many many decades government has turned its back on the needs of a struggling middle class and working class we are living at a time when we face the real threat of authoritarianism in this country when millions of people have given up on democracy because they look at their own lives maybe they're working longer hours for low wages maybe they're making $9 an hour maybe they don't have any health care maybe they can't afford to send their kids to college and they are saying what does this government do for me am I not as important as some bloody billionaire campaign contributor and that's what people all over this country are feeling so what we need right now are not only voices but we need courage in Congress to tell the billionaire class that our government and our economy belong to all of us and not just the 1% we are living in a moment when millions of Americans are working for starvation wages we're living in a moment where over the last 50 years real wages for working people have remained stagnant while there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the working families to the top 1% we're living in a moment where CEOs of large corporations make 350 times more than their workers you're living in a moment unbelievable but true where three people on top own more wealth than the bottom half of American society 160 million people where the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 92% now you don't hear about that very much from the corporate media because these guys own the media but we need a sense of outrage in this country to make it clear that our government belongs to all of us not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors so what we have got to do is elect people like Becca well prepared to think outside of the box who have the courage to take on the very powerful and big money it just I've been going all over this country campaigning for progress so it's delightful to be here in Vermont campaigning for progressive and the reason I've been going all over this country it's got a small number of people with incredible wealth putting money into these big super PACs trying to defeat candidates who are standing with working families so I know that Becca shares with me the need for real campaign finance reform the need to overturn this disastrous citizens united Supreme Court decision and the need to move to public funding of elections I'm tied a billionaires buying elections we need to restore and create a vigorous democracy in this country and if you go all over Vermont go all over Vermont you go all over the country what you find is that people are outraged that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world they cannot afford health care in this country right they understand that a hundred miles north of us here if you end up in a hospital for a month you know what the bill is zero because in Canada and in every other major country on earth health care is understood to be a right not a process to make billions for the insurance companies now in recent years we have made some progress in fighting for Medicare for all that's a system which says that when you are sick you go to the doctor you don't have to take out your wallet no deductibles no copayments and if you end up by chance in the hospital you don't have to worry about going bankrupt because we're gonna publicly fund a health care system that guarantees health care to every man woman and child in this country and Becker I know shares with me the outrage that at a time when pharmaceutical companies are making billions and billions in profit paying their CEOs outrageous compensation packages our people are paying in some cases ten times more for the same exact drug that people in Canada or Europe are paying and that is why we will continue the fight to make sure that Medicare is able to seriously negotiate prescription drug prices we can cut the cost of drugs in this country by half and that is what we've got to do and I'm glad that we have come have had at least two representatives of unions coming here to the podium because I believe that I know Becker believes that we're not gonna have a strong middle class unless we have a strong trade union movement in this country and I'm beginning to see all over the country all over this country at Starbucks Amazon elsewhere but beginning to see workers come together form unions and with Becca's help we're gonna pass legislation which makes it impossible for companies to intimidate those workers who want to join a union and Becca understands as all of you understand that we will not be a great nation unless we have the capability of providing quality education to all of our children right now in Vermont starting at the younger stage you have childcare workers earning substandard wages and despite that your parents working parents paying $15,000 to have a kid in childcare well if you're making 40 or 50,000 a year how do you afford 15,000 and that is why we have got to do again what other countries do understand that we want all of our kids to get off to a great start in life we want our childcare workers to be well trained well paid and we want to make sure that childcare for every working family in this country is quality and affordable and we want the best public education system in the world we want to attract the best and the brightest in college to go into teaching and therefore we're gonna fight for decent wages and benefits for our teachers and we are gonna make we understand hundreds of thousands of bright young kids in this country either do not go to college at all because they can't afford it or they're leaving school 50 a hundred thousand dollars in debt and Becker understands as you do as I do that we have got to make public colleges and universities tuition free and we got to cancel student debt just a few days ago and we are making progress it's slow a few days ago I was on the phone with the governor of New Mexico and in New Mexico they are making public colleges and universities tuition free they're moving to free childcare for their children and that is what we have got to do in Vermont and throughout this country and what Becker also understands is that when we talk about the enormous challenges that we face the movement toward authoritarianism the fact that so many have given up on democracy massive levels of income and wealth inequality the fact that you got three Wall Street firms people don't know this three Wall Street firms BlackRock anyone here ever hear of BlackRock State Street Vanguard these three companies alone control over 20 trillion dollars in assets throughout the world they have a major stockholders in virtually every company that you know that is what oligarchy is about that is what concentration of ownership is about that is what power is about and that is something that Becker understands and will help me deal with but when we talk about all of the issues out there maybe maybe the most important is the need for the United States to lead the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy and when we do that we can create millions of good-paying jobs and the scientists have been very clear there is no ambiguity on this issue if we do not act boldly if we do not have the courage to take on the greed of the fall of the fossil fuel industry then the planet we're going to be leaving to our kids not only here in Vermont but all over this world will be a planet increasingly uninhabitable and unhealthy right now as we speak Europe experiencing one of the worst heat waves it has ever seen you're seeing drought all over the world you're seeing extreme weather disturbances you're seeing people having to leave their own communities again all over the world and migrate because they cannot they don't have the water to grow their crops and provide the food that their family needs climate change is in fact the existential threat to our planet and I know that Rebecca becker will work with me to make sure that we transform this energy system and lead the world in combating climate change and as previous speakers here have noted it is beyond comprehension that we have a Supreme Court that in the year 2022 this is not 1922 it's not 1822 in the year 2022 they have said to every woman in America that you do not have the right to control your own body how outrageous is that and I know that Becca will be one of the leaders in the Congress in taking on this outrageous effort to destroy Roe v. Wade she will fight to codify put it into law and the day will come when we're going to win that fight because that's what the American people want and Becca understands I know she has worked on this here in the state Senate the horror that we experience when we turn on the TV and we see another mass shooting and it really is almost to me unspeakable and I don't even like to talk about it because it brings up images that are so horrible that I just you know have a hard time dealing with it of people walking into schools and doing terrible terrible things and Becca understands that the time is now that we need common sense gun safety legislation that we make sure that people who should not own guns do not own guns and that they are 15s are weapons of mass killing not something that civilians should be having so I want to thank all of you for coming out on this nice cool day and I know I do know that there is a lot of the moralization in our country and people are wondering you know what if anything can happen and I would simply say that if you look back at the history of this country there have been a number of moments number of times when we have had very very difficult situations I mean going back to the slavery and the abolitionist the fought against slavery going back to the depression where unemployment was 25% going back to the struggle for women's basic women's right the right to vote the right to get property if you get divorced this country has struggled through many many difficult times and these are one of those times but the answer is not to despair the answer is not to put your head into the sand the answer is to stand up the answer is to fight back and the answer right now in the next week is to make sure that Becca Ballant is elected to the US Congress thank you all very much and now it gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce you to you the next congresswoman from the state of Vermont Becca Ballant senator Bernie Sanders everyone senator Bernie Sanders thank you thank you so much for coming out here today I know you could be anywhere on a beautiful Vermont day and I'm so grateful that you're here engaged in the political process it's so important I want to thank all the volunteers who help set up this amazing event I want to thank Western terrestrials thank you to Esther and to Chris and to dev for coming and letting me know what they see in me as a leader it means a lot to me thank you so much and I know you all know this but I just have to name it senator Sanders has had incredible moral clarity for so long for so very long and that is why he's beloved in this state but also across the nation because he reminds us that we always have to be fighting for equity and justice thank you senator and those are things I care deeply about and I hope I sincerely hope I can fight for those things alongside him and hopefully senator Welch in the upcoming legislative session so I know I know many of you know me but some of you don't so I will say for those of you don't know me my name is Becca Ballant I'm running for Congress and I'm a mom to my kids Abe and Sarah who are here today and I'm a spouse to my wife Elizabeth who's here today and I couldn't do it without them I fundamentally could not do it without them and that's true for all the years that I've served in this building behind me they have carried a lot of the slack back home so thank you thank you for believing in me so I'm a mom I'm a legislator but if you really want to understand what makes me tick I am a middle school teacher at heart that is who I am and you know if you can teach middle school you can do anything you can do anything and and you can't be a middle school teacher unless you believe in the possibility of change and I believe that I was drawn to teaching middle school because those were actually some of the hardest hardest years of my life it was a time when I felt very disconnected from my school in my community there's a lot of homophobia then I felt disconnected from my family and really tried to figure out how I was going to chart a path through in this life and so I set out as a middle school teacher to make sure that every student felt comfortable in my classroom that they felt supported and that their families felt supported and that's what I've tried to do also here in the legislature is bring those stories of those families and those kids with me and have that guide me in my work to have them in mind as we're passing minimum wage increases to have them in mind that we're investing in housing and childcare and affordable housing in all the communities not just in the largest cities and making sure that they can see themselves represented in this building and in Congress I went into politics to represent them and that's still what drives me today and I don't have to tell you that although Senator Sanders and soon-to-be Senator Welch and I we have a lot of work that we want to do on behalf of working families we want to continue the work that we've done here in Vermont but we're at a very very scary moment right now in this democracy our democracy is fundamentally being attacked we have right-wing extremists across the country who are attacking the right to vote especially if you're a person of color in this country we have insurrectionists who storm the Capitol attacking democracy itself and we have Republicans who make excuses for all those people that did not certify the election oh yeah they were standing they were standing with democracy on the day of the insurrection in a couple days later they were all backtracking on what they'd said a hand full of people saved us from a coup that's where we're at I wish that weren't true but that's where we're at that's the fight ahead of us is to save this democracy and for me I know this is a time of courage I know this is a time when we can't be timid in my own family I understand what happens when democracies fail so my grandfather my dad's dad his name was Leopold Ballant he was killed in the last few weeks of the Holocaust he was in a concentration camp that was the last camp liberated by the allies and in my family we learned that democracies fail little by little as rights are eroded as people are scapegoated as norms are upended as the press is attacked that's where we're at right now so the stakes are incredibly high and I want you to know that that will be a main focus of the work that I do in Congress is making sure we have a healthy functioning democracy that is representing all of us and not just the wealthy few and I know I'm just gonna echo a lot of the themes that the senator has touched down because I know we're very much in alignment on the work that we know is ahead of us it's time for regular Vermonters to be able to go to college and not be rattled with crippling debt the 20s some things and 30 some things in this country are struggling so hard they can't start families they can't buy housing because they're being saddled with crippling debt we need to take care of them it's time for housing so that all Vermonters feel safe I was a teacher for many years I know what happens when kids don't have safe safe housing it affects their ability to learn we have to make sure that the work that we've done here in the legislature continues in Congress because right now housing is not affordable for most average Vermonters it's time for Medicare for all absolutely and it's time for Medicare for all that also supports mental health care for all and it's time long past time to codify our right to make decisions about our own bodies it is a time for courage and for vision and it's a time for tested leaders leaders who have had to face the voters for the decisions that we've made I am a tested leader I have been here year after year fighting on behalf of Vermonters and I want to take that experience with me to Congress to continue to fight on your behalf our congressional delegation has been the conscience of this nation for so long truly yes give it up for senator Sanders Peter Welch and senator Leahy I know that I will be relying on senator Welch and senator Sanders to help me be the most effective congressperson that I can be and make a difference on your behalf and I will be following them in their long line of service to regular people here back home and I want to tell you when senator Sanders and I first met about whether he would decide to endorse in this race the very first thing he said to me was I want to know that you're going to be back here in Vermont on a regular basis talking to regular people and not doing your work from inside the DC bubble and I made that promise to him we have built an incredible coalition not of special interests of thousands and thousands of individual donors for our campaign farmers and teachers restaurant workers friends and neighbors and just regular people across Vermont who have given five bucks ten bucks or have volunteered on the campaign if they don't have the money to give I'm so proud of this coalition that we built in all of the union support I have behind me and they're standing here in the hot sun with me and I appreciate it so much and I can't do it myself and you know Bernie can't do it himself it's going to take all of us it's going to take all of us to make progress and I hope I sincerely hope that you see yourself reflected in this campaign because that's what we've desperately tried to do is create a campaign where everyone regardless of political affiliation or no political affiliation regardless of your geographic location in Vermont no matter your income no matter your background that you have a place in this campaign we want you and we need you please join us you can tell the folks on my campaign both the volunteers and the field staff they're wearing Becca balance shirts you can sign up for a shift if you can you can go to becaballant.com if that's easier for you but we've only got nine days left nine days before the primary a lot of people don't vote in primaries and in Vermont almost always the primary is the main event you've got to vote in the primary please I need you to vote I need to get your friends to vote I need you get your family to vote please show up vote for change in Washington and what I mean by that is people who are going to stand up to the insurrectionist people who are going to represent regular people and bring this democracy back in line bring it back from the edge that's what we need to do I'm so in awe of all of the support that I've had on this campaign and I'm grateful for the faith that folks have had in me and in my team and if you had told me a year ago that I would be standing on a stage with Senator Sanders nine days away from a primary election in which I seem to have the lead I would not believe it I couldn't imagine it I could not imagine it but we have done this together and I promise you if you send me to Washington I will fight for you every minute of every day this this is the fight of our lives it is a fight for the planet it is a fight for justice for regular people for Vermont and we can do this we will do this we must do this together thank you all for coming and this is my phenomenal campaign manager Natalie Silver who is who is the great and powerful Oz behind the curtain so we're about to hear from the western terrestrials and there's two things I have to say to you before we do that the first is that we need you we need a little bit of your money and we need a little bit of your time so if you have two hours in the next nine days and I know that you guys have two hours I need you to find somebody in a Becca Ballant t-shirt get signed up races are won and lost in Vermont by hundreds of votes that is a one-call shift that is one door knock shift we need you the second thing chip in five bucks chip in ten dollars the majority of our donations are small dollar donations that's how we're going to win this race so thank you so much let's hear it one more time for senator sanders and our speakers and enjoy the food and enjoy the western terrestrials


and welcome to Memoranda and Business Letters. Here's where we're going. What is the purpose in format of a memorandum? What are some strategies for writing effective business memos? What are the 15 elements of a standard business letter? Memorandum. A memo, or memorandum, is normally used for communicating policies, procedures, or related official business within an organization. It is often written from a one-to-all perspective, like mass communication. A memorandum can inform, persuade, or even call to action. One effective way to address informal, unofficial, grapevine speculation is to spell out clearly for all employees what is going on with the particular issue. Memo may also include statements that align business with employee interests. A memo includes three parts with purpose. First, a declarative sentence that announces the main topic. Second, the discussion that elaborates or lists major points associated with the topic. And finally, the conclusion that serves as a summary. Five tips for affected business memos. Audience orientation. Always consider the audience and its needs when preparing a memo. Make sure the goal is clear, unambiguous, and includes concise communication at all levels. A professional formal tone. Memos are often announcements and the person sending the memo speaks for a part or all of the organization. Subject emphasis. The subject should be clear, specific, and concise. Direct format. Memoranda are always direct. The purpose is clearly announced. And finally, objectivity. Memos are a place for just the facts and should have an objective tone without personal bias, preference, or interest on display. Avoid subjectivity. Letters. Letters are brief messages sent to recipients that are often outside the organization. They might include introductions, announcements of a product or service, apologies, and other emotional messages. Here is a popular business letter example template. 15 elements of a business letter. Return address. If your letter includes a letterhead with this information, either in the header, which is across the top of the page, or the footer, which is along the bottom of the page, you do not need to include it before the date. Date. The date should be placed at the top right or left justified. Five lines from the top of the page of the letterhead logo. Reference. Like a subject line in an email, this is where you indicate what the letter is in reference to the subject or purpose of the document. Delivery. And this is contextual. This can make it clear to a third party that the letter was delivered via a specific method such as certified mail, which is a legal requirement for some types of documents. Recipient note. And this can be optional. This is where you can indicate if the letter is personal or confidential. Salutation. A comma act of the salutation is correct for personal letters, but a colon should be used for business letters. For example, Dear Mr. Smith Colon. The salutation to whom it may concern is appropriate for letters that are intended to be read by unknown individuals. Avoid the use of impersonal salutations like Dear Perspective Customer, as this lack of personalization can alienate a future client. Introduction. Introductions include an attention statement, a reference to the purpose of the document, an introduction of the person or topic, a clear opening in your introduction that facilitates comprehension. Body. If you have a list of points, a series of facts or a number of questions they belong in the body of your letter. Brevity is important, but so is clear support for key points. Specific meaningful information needs to be clear, concise and accurate. Conclusion. A conclusion should not include new information. It should reiterate the main points with a clear summary sentence, reinforcing the purpose for writing. If your letter requests or implies action, the conclusion needs to make clear what you expect to happen. Conclude by thanking the recipient for his or her attention and invite him or her to contact you if he or she has any questions. Clothes. Closing statements are normally placed one or two lines under the conclusion and include a hanging comma, for example, sincerely or cordially. Signature. Five lines after the close, type your name, this is required, and on the line below it, your title. This is optional. Preparation line. If the letter was prepared by someone other than the signatory, which is you, then inclusion of initials is common, such as an MJD. Enclosure attachments. This line indicates what documents are included with the letter. Common examples include brochures, reports and related business documents. Courtesy copies are CC. Just like a CC option in an email, it indicates the relevant parties that will also receive a copy of the document. Logo contact information. A formal business letter normally includes a logo or contact information for their organization in the header or footer. The five parts is a good summary. It includes the heading, which includes the address and date of the sender, the introduction, which establishes the purpose, the body, which articulates the message, the conclusion, which restates the main point and may include a call to action, and the signature line, which sometimes includes the contact information. As an extension, be sure to be clear, concise, specific and respectful. Each word should contribute to your purpose. Each paragraph should focus on one idea. The parts of the letter should form a complete message. The letter should be free of errors. So to conclude, MIMOs are brief business documents, usually used internally to inform or persuade employees concerning business decisions on policy, procedure or actions. Letters are brief print messages often used externally to inform or persuade customers, vendors or the public. A letter has 15 parts, each fulfilling a specific function.


Recently, the Pikeville City Commission received a FEMA grant for the upcoming flood risk reduction cleanup project. Due to years of sediment buildup in the city pond and surrounding river systems, large amounts of water can't be drained properly during a flood threat. Pikeville City engineer Brad Sloan tells us more. What's happened is the pond was finished as part of the cut-through project. It's part of a levy system, and it provides capacity for flood surges. And over those last 40 years, sediment has built up in the upper reaches of the pond and in the streams that lead to it. So this project is a FEMA hazard mitigation grant. It's run through Kentucky's Division of Emergency Management. And what it does is the state of Kentucky is actually the grantee, and we're the sub-grantee. And what it provides is about almost $300,000 in fees and funds to the city to do planning for mitigation for the pond. Do you worry about having enough money to last throughout retirement? Give Reed Potter at Raymond James a call. Reed has 26 years experience helping folks enjoy their best life in their retirement years. Sloan says more money and manpower will be needed in future phases of the project. For now, the city is planning on how to tackle the situation prior to reconstruction. We will need more money in order to complete this project. I think the last estimate we got that was ultimately, I think this will cost about $3 million to do the actual construction work. The people that we've been dealing with on this grant to the state and FEMA, they're optimistic that if we get this planning grant done successfully, that there'll be more funds available to do the actual construction. Reporting from Outant Top News, I'm Nick Collum.


Well, folks, we've got trouble in Trump world and two individuals from Trump world who should in theory Be totally aligned on everything are actually beefing currently and they're exchanging insults and I'm talking about Trump attorney Linwood and Marjorie Taylor Greene what we're about to read is truly bizarre, but it's totally expected in 2021 America. So first let's look at what Linwood said about Marjorie Taylor Greene This is certainly Interesting to say the least so as Jason Lemon of Newsweek explains in my opinion Marjorie Taylor Greene is a communist would said in Friday remarks if Marjorie Taylor Greene is running around saying impeach Biden That says that Biden won he didn't the attorney said and you would never impeach him with the communist Congress It's a waste of time would went on to suggest that green may be a traitor a traitor will come at you as a patriot Be careful would said now the first thing that I'll say about this is that to see someone who calls Everyone else a communist to see someone who uses the word communist as a synonym for bad be called a communist herself It really is satisfying to see Having said that though to suggest that Marjorie Greene of all people is a communist is just it's obviously absurd on its face and He's criticizing her because she wants to impeach Biden when you to think that a Maga chud would want that to happen But it's bad according to him because to want to impeach Biden and you acknowledge that he's president in the first place Which in and of itself is a no-no. So you have to pretend like Trump is actually still the president If you actually want to be part of this cult It's really really bizarre But if you think that Marjorie Greene let that slide you'd be mistaken because she hit back with a very powerful No, you and accused him of some things that are pretty big as well big Lee I should say Greene responded on Saturday with an attack of her own She suggested that would attempted to take money Donated to his former client Kyle Rittenhouse the young man has been criminally charged with fatally shooting two people during a black lives matter Demonstration in Wisconsin last year while he was still a minor People donated money through fight-back law Linwood to Kyle Rittenhouse's legal defense Kyle fired Lynn in December People didn't donate to Linwood. So why would he want two million dollars back Greene wrote in a post published to her telegram channel Only monsters hurt innocent people in their greatest time of need. She's talking about Kyle Rittenhouse By the way Jesus she continued the GOP Congresswoman urged followers to donate to a different fundraising campaign for Rittenhouse Greene then raised questions about the motives behind Woods actions in the wake of the 2020 election If Linwood has fought so hard against the election like he claims even encouraging people to go in the Capitol on January 6th Why isn't he the target of the January 6th? Which hunt she asked got him the J6 house select committee is only focused on Trump's biggest defenders But not Linwood Greene wrote hmm Would later posted more criticism of Greene on his telegram channel I love Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I have raised serious concerns about her failure to take meaningful action to fix 2020 He wrote I believed in Marjorie now that I have questioned her failure to act to fix 2020 It appears that Marjorie no longer believes in me to the contrary She has attacked me with lies and misrepresentations the attorney continued a monster. Are you kidding me? He asked would then suggested that Greene was becoming part of the so-called deep state I'm also still willing to help her to prevent her from falling even Into an even deeper deep state ditch. He wrote so my favorite part about this is that they're just going back and forth Accusing someone accusing the other of something.     I don't know what catalyzed this I don't know why Linwood chose to take a shot at Marjorie Greene because seemingly He's the one who drew first blood, but I like this any time there's trouble in Trump world That's good for America Objectively so if you care about America and democracy We need all of these little goons to be fighting each other because so long as they're fighting each other Then they're at least preoccupied. They're not ruining the country or ruining it as quickly I should say but Marjorie Greene here if I have to take a side I've got a side with Marjorie Greene I guess because she doesn't seem like the one who provoked this exchange, right? Not that I would ever side with Marjorie Greene on anything But it could be the case that perhaps she implied that he was Taking money or embezzling money from the Kyle Rittenhouse legal fund and maybe she just hinted at it And he didn't like that. I'm not necessarily sure how this began It's really gross for her to suggest that Kyle Rittenhouse was some innocent person This is a kid that showed up to a black lives matter protest and he killed two people So I just I don't know what to say about this to read this is truly surreal I mean look, it's expected in 2021 America But still even if this is the type of discourse that I'd expect from American politics nowadays It's still really surreal and feels like a parody to read this It feels like something you'd see from some political satire But here you have these two dipshits one calling someone a communist who's clearly not a communist and then accusing her of being part of the Deep state and then she's saying oh well actually hmm It's a little bit sus that out of all of the people around Donald Trump He's conspicuously not being investigated when he encouraged people to go to the house and she kind of has a point Maybe he should be investigated.  They're both wrong.