An essay on the decline of Michigan and the Mackinac Island Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Conference.

A reflection on "whistling past the graveyard."

Recalling when Bob Lutz took on cowardice at GM

Recalling when Alan Mulally took on Polite Dysfunction at Ford.

Ever walk past a cemetery late at night? That chill you feel is older than language itself. Fear. And somewhere in America's long love affair with optimism, someone decided the antidote was to whistle. Project confidence. Fake boldness until it became real. It worked well enough that the phrase stuck. Whistling past the graveyard. But the meaning quietly flipped. Somewhere along the line, the meaning changed. It stopped meaning "courage" and started meaning "denial.”

A reflection on how Michigan lost to Mississippi in reading.

In the early 2000s, Bob Lutz noticed something strange at General Motors. The presentations were world-class. PowerPoint Perfect. (And this was before AI.) The cars were not. Meetings ran on 80-slide decks. Market data. Cost curves. Focus groups. Everyone nodded. No one said the obvious. Which meant one thing: The slides were doing the talking. Not Reality. Inside GM, this had a name without being named: The “PowerPoint shield.” It let people sound smart without being

A reflection on how Nice Is Not Good

A day on local roads is instructive. Not the potholes (that’s another post). The gas prices. Or more precisely, the spread. Gas stations don’t gouge. That’s settled. Prices move with global oil prices, and here in Michigan, about 70 cents per gallon goes to taxes. The rest is local. So, why the gap from city to suburb? It isn’t the oil market. It’s the business environment. Costs are lower in the suburbs. Gas becomes cheaper. In the city, costs stack up: Taxes

A reflection on West Michigan Nice using an example that harms children.