Earlier this week I made a post on William Yeh, a man who personifies disintermediation, in this case the final step of disintermediation in the stock brokerage business.  Since that time, people have asked me about why he could do what he is doing, how he could stay in business with prices that are more than 50% lower that all the ‘low cost’ brokers.  Mr. Yeh gave an interview to a fellow blogger, Grant Wittenborn and his blog the other day.  I just read it and recommend it to those who have a curiosity about how William Yeh …

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been exploring the subject of disintermediation.  It is a dynamic force that has and will be reorganizing our culture and economy.  In an early post on the subject, I pointed out that in the late 1990s the Internet acted as the agent of disintermediation for the travel and stock brokerage business.  It became possible for people to buy and sell stocks on-line at a fraction of the cost they had incurred even years earlier.  This helped launch the day trading phenomenon.

Well, it now seems that the last bit of …

The post today is an interview I recently did with Nonprofit Online Learning Update, which is being published on-line today. The interviewer was Jeff Cobb, a leader in the field of on-line learning for non-profits. Non-profits provide an incredibly valuable function in today’s world and can be even more influential in the future as they can become networks of like minded people, organized around ideas, issues, professions and agendas.

As the biographical note at the top of the interview points out, my father, Cyril O. Houle was not only the man who most popularized the phrase ‘life …

“The political party, as currently defined in America, feels like an out of date, anachronistic apparatus whose value is in the past, not the present and certainly not something aligned with the future.  If it is to survive, it must reconstitute itself or crumble under its own dead weight.”   -www.evolutionshift.com 5/31/06

When I set aside any personal and political points of view and look at the state of electoral politics and the two party structure in the United States, I absolutely believe the above statement to be true.  As mentioned in earlier posts, we are in one of those historically