Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our March issue of Inside Darley. You know, the headlines these days are all about the economy. You know, we’ve got inflation that’s at a 40-year high, and interest rates are going through the roof. We’ve got a stock market in flux. Hopefully, this issue of Inside Darley will help you manage that a little bit.
In fact, there was some good news that came out of the IMF. That’s the International Monetary Fund at their annual meeting just recently, and we’ve attached an executive summary of that that, at least on a global perspective it has some good news in there.
Domestically, with all the money that we’ve pumped into the economy, our government over the last couple of years might be a little bit different. And, in fact, inflation is on all of our minds. We’ve actually attached some great articles from Harvard Business Review on strategies to manage inflation that you might find of interest. Last year, Bloomberg actually predicted that the chances of a recession in 2023 here in America were 100%, if you can imagine. So, Bloomberg also has a government division, and they do a lot of research on Department of Defense spending, which is a large part of our business these days. And our third attachment here for you is actually a Bloomberg Government report on Navy contracting and spending in 2023 that you might find of interest.
We’ve had a lot of staff promotions here at Darley, and some of them took place in our Defense Division and our new Tactical Division over the last few months. Wanted to first extend our congratulations to Kyle Darley, who’s been named our Senior Director of our new Tactical Division. And in our Defense Division, we’ve named James Long is the President of that Division. Audrey Darley has been named Vice President.
George McCullough has been named our Vice President of Sales and Business Development. And Will Darley has been named our Director of Sales Operations. So a number of other promotions in our company as well, and congratulations to all those folks.
Here at Darley, we’re always looking for leaders. I love the story that Marcus Buckingham recently told on a podcast. Now, he’s a London School of Economics professor, and he does a lot of motivational speaking, and he was saying that he recently took his son to the circus, and he’s watching the circus master. He’s got these dogs walking around in the circle, and they’re on their hind legs and jumping up on boxes and wearing these hats and says to his son, “jeez, we can’t get our dog to do anything. I got to figure out how he’s able to do that.” So they go down at the end of the circus, and they talk to the circus master. They said, “How are you able to get those dogs to do that?” He said “It’s really simple. I go down to the dog pound and I look for dogs on their hind legs who are sitting there saying, pick me, pick me.” And I think the leadership lesson there is really two-fold. When we look at leaders in our organization or any organization I’m involved in, we really look, first to those who really want to be leaders, and secondly, those who have got the ability or the proclivity to be leaders.
So think of that story as you look within your own organization, on who might be good leaders. Now, a lot of our leaders are coming up to the Generation Z. Those are folks who were born in 1997 to 2010 and the next generation after them has just been released. It’s Generation Alpha or Gen Alpha for short. And those are folks who were born in 2010 or later, primarily young kids, but they’ll be in the workforce before you know it.
They’re the children of millennials and they are the first to grow up entirely in the 21st century and the first to grow up entirely with just electronics, social networks, streaming services and things of that nature. And lastly, we talked about Artificial Intelligence in our January issue. And since that time, Microsoft invested over $10 billion in Chat GPT that we talked about. And, actually the last article that we’ve attached for here are ten AI stocks you might want to take a look at, and Nvidia is one of them. They are up about 40% year to date. Dynatrace is up very similar, so you might find some interest in that.
So thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
Resources:
International Monetary Fund annual meeting executive summary (PDF)
Bloomberg Government report on Navy contracting and spending in 2023 (PDF)
Ten AI stocks you might want to consider (PDF)
Harvard Business Review on strategies to manage inflation
