American Exceptionalism–And An ‘Exceptional’ President

For nearly four centuries, we as a people have believed that America has a special and unique role to play in the world. Here is a land of new beginnings and new promise, not merely one nation among others. But we have to ask: Do our leaders still believe this?

Americans have believed in American exceptionalism since John Winthrop wrote 380 years ago that America would be a «city on a hill,» shining for all the world to see. When de Tocqueville visited the young United States in the 1830s, he concluded that we were a «unique» nation. He pointed to the truly democratic nature of our government and society and the opportunities America provided to its immigrants at that time.

Later, historian Frederick Jackson Turner set forth the thesis that America’s uniqueness stems from its spirit developed on the Western frontier. And after World War II and during the Cold War era, America served as the symbol of and protector of freedom and democracy for the whole world.

But in a new era without an American frontier or even a Cold War or the Apollo moon program, do our leaders believe that America has retained its unique American spirit and destiny? And what are the consequences for our nation if they do not?

This idea of American exceptionalism is so fundamental to our identity as a nation that even President Obama had to address it. At the NATO Summit in Strasbourg, France, in 2009 President Obama said, «I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.» But despite his stated belief in our uniqueness, his implication here is that our national self-confidence will not protect us from decline–just as similar beliefs in national destiny did not protect Britain and Greece. Why didn’t the president use China or India as a more positive example?

And let’s look at the president’s deeds, not just his words. President Obama favors global summits in which we participate humbly among large groups of the world’s nations. He has embraced meetings of the G-20 group of countries, including China and Russia, as a more «global» replacement for the G-7 meetings of the seven largest industrial democracies. He also embraces global, rather than national, solutions to the current economic crisis. European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet recently paid a visit to Washington to call for regulation of financial services across national boundaries. Is global regulation or even global taxation as some Europeans have proposed, on the president’s agenda?

How far we have come in such a short time! Where is President Truman’s belief that «America was built on courage, on imagination, and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand»? Where is John F. Kennedy’s stirring inaugural address, full of possibility and of an unshakable belief in America’s unique role in leading the world? Both, it should be noted, were Democrats: The belief in American exceptionalism has, until recently, been truly bipartisan.

President Obama may be the first American president to lack faith in our special history, our special spirit and our special mission in the world. This difference alone makes Barack Obama an exceptional president. He is exceptional in the literal meaning of that term–an exception because of his views on America’s limited role in the world. Thankfully, millions of ordinary Americans disagree, and for millions of ordinary people around the world, America remains, in Lincoln’s words, «the last best hope of earth.»

Then-Vice President Bush put it well in 1988, while running against Michael Dukakis: «My opponent … sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. I see America as the leader–a unique nation with a special role in the world.»

Now, the Dukakis view of the world seems to have been adopted as an unofficial, if unspoken, policy of this administration. The policy elites all seem to believe it, and they act daily on that belief. Our leaders take a cramped view of our own country, its history, and its possibilities. I’m extremely concerned about the implications of our debt and budget crises for our future, but I’m still confident in America and Americans.

I still believe in American exceptionalism. But I am concerned that if we are not lead by leaders who believe in our unique American spirit and mission, then we will not be able to remain an exceptional nation for long. And we will not be able to retain what President George H.W. Bush described as our «special role in the world.»

And in this new era, does the idea of American exceptionalism need to be reinterpreted in order for the United States to remain a truly unique nation? We are now lead by an administration that has consistently denied our special gifts and our special responsibilities. And afterward we will need a leader who–like President Ronald Reagan–can help understand ourselves, our strengths, and our example for the world again and in a new light.

Mallory Factor is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Economic Roundtable and cofounder of The Monday Meeting, an influential meeting of economic conservatives, journalists and corporate leaders in New York City. He can be reached at . You can follow him on Twitter at @malloryfactor .

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America’s 21st-Century Business Model

Current attitudes aren’t too kind to the old American way of doing business. In our globalized economy, the most enthusiastically touted approaches are those adopted by centralized, state-dominated economies such as China, Brazil and Russia as well as–somewhat less oppressively–those of the major E.U. states.

Yet the U.S. may well be constructing the best sustainable business model for the 21st Century. It is an approach built on the country’s greatest enduring strength–an innovative business culture driven increasingly by a diverse pool of immigrants.

This model, of course, lacks the kind of centralized control beloved by many pundits. Yet its virtues are also missing from statist-oriented European or East Asian capitalism. These other regions’ systems may be more disciplined in their thinking, but they do not draw as well on the diversity of human experience and connections that drive America’s post-racial economy.

This is not to suggest that state-based, national capitalism is inferior, but that it may not apply so well to this vast, highly diversified economy–just look at the stimulus. If the U.S. wants to retain pre-eminence, it needs to go with what makes it a great country: its protean national and increasingly post-racial business culture.

This evolution is increasingly evident at the very top of our economy. Between 1990 and 2005 immigrants started one quarter of all venture-backed public companies. Large American firms are also increasingly led by people with roots in foreign countries, including 14 of the CEOs of the 2007 Fortune 100. Even the top tier of corporate America–once the almost-exclusive reserve of native-born Anglo-Saxon–increasingly reflects the diversification of the larger society.

Already, for example, eight Indian American CEOs run U.S. corporations with over $2 billion in sales, including companies like Citicorp, Adobe Systems (nasdaq: ADBE – news – people ) and Pepsico. Pepsi’s (nyse: PEP – news – people ) historic rival, Coca Cola (nyse: KO – news – people ), is now run by Muhtar Kent, a native of Turkey. Foreign CEOs also include Kellogg’s (nyse: K – news – people ) Australian-born David Mackay and Ethan Allen’s M. Farooq Kathwari, yet another native of India.

This process will intensify in the coming decades. Take for instance the case of Li Lu, a former Tiananmen Square activist now widely expected to take the helm of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway when the old billionaire retires. Imagine if a former American radical was placed in charge of one of China’s huge state-supported enterprises. Not likely.

One critical harbinger can be seen in the current crop of students at top U.S. business schools. Between one-third and one-half all students at Stanford, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago and UC Berkeley come from abroad. These schools are training camps for immigrants transitioning into careers as American entrepreneurs.

Equally important, immigrant commerce also thrives at the grassroots level. It manifests most visibly in the proliferation of small stores, restaurants, food-processing businesses, garment factories and trucking lines. Overall, immigrants are 60% more likely to start a new business than native-born Americans. The number of self-employed immigrants has grown even in New York City, where the number of self-employed among the native-born has dropped.

Immigrant businesses have thrived by providing basic services, such as banks, insurance agents, funeral homes and grocery stores. Some of these businesses arose because the mainstream community had failed to identify opportunities in these markets or had consciously decided to exclude them.

This follows a historical pattern. In the past many immigrants succeeded by focusing on an economic specialty–Jews in the garment industry, Chinese in laundries, Greeks in diners, and Italians in green groceries, barbershops and fish stores. Ultimately, some moved beyond these niches and began to develop whole new business models. One clear example is A. P. Giannini’s Bank of Italy in San Francisco, which eventually became Bank of America (nyse: BAC – news – people ), a pioneer in mass market branch banking. Other ethnic businesses, often drawing on ways of doing business brought from abroad, have propelled the growth of whole industries, such as the garment industry in New York and later Los Angeles.

There is clearly something in the immigrant experience that encourages innovation–one can call it the advantage of non-acceptance. Take the founding generation of the film industry–Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor. They had their roots in the Jewish enclave economy in the eastern cities. The great historian Irving Howe notes that the immigrant need to find an unoccupied or underserved niche shaped these often «vulgar, crude and overbearing» men. That they became founders of the nation’s premier cultural industry, Howe noted, «was something of a miracle and something of a joke.»

We are now witnessing a continuation of this process, and on a scale simply not seen in other countries. In 2005 the U.S. swore in more new citizens than the next nine countries put together. The national immigration debate may focus largely on low-skilled newcomers, but more than half of all skilled immigrants in the world also come to the U.S. Even with the continent’s slow-growing population, Europe continues to be a major source of American immigrants, particularly skilled workers, with some 400,000 E.U. science and technology graduates residing in the U.S.

These newcomers are a prime source of entrepreneurial vitality. In the 21st century Asians, like the Jews and Italians before them, have concentrated in specific niches and expanded outside the boundaries of historic ghettos. Indians from the subcontinent, who arrived in large numbers starting in the 1970s, specialized in hotels and motels across the country. Koreans opened up green groceries in New York and Los Angeles. Vietnamese became well-known for nail parlors, and Cambodians for owning doughnut stores. Overall Asian enterprises expanded roughly twice the national average through the first several years of the new century.

This pattern can be seen particularly in food-related businesses. In Houston, once dominated by Southern cooking, nearly one in three restaurants serves Mexican or Asian cuisine. Together they account for more establishments than hamburger, BBQ and Italian restaurants put together. Nationwide, as pizza, hamburger and «traditional» fast-food restaurants have stagnated, new chains that sell quick, inexpensive Mexican or Asian food have flourished. Immigrant-founded firms such as El Pollo Loco, Wolfgang Puck and Panda Express, are emerging as the McDonalds (nyse: MCD – news – people ) of 21st-century America.

The emerging post-racial economy provides two distinct opportunities for American business. First the newcomers offer a new domestic «emerging» market. Taken together, purchases by African-Americans, Asians and Native Americans, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, have exploded, growing far more rapidly than the national average. Combined with Latinos, these minorities could account for over $2.5 trillion by 2010, close to $1 in every $4 in total U.S. consumer spending.

But perhaps even more important may be the uniquely international cast of American business. Heads of corporations and senior executives of many leading American firms will not have to go to graduate school in international training; they will have received theirs at home, talking to parents or grandparents who migrated from Mexico, Cuba, Russia, Iran, China, India, Israel or a host of other countries.

This diversity will allow Americans to tap the global market, and culture, in ways other countries and their state-based enterprises just can’t match. It is in this model, not in imitating foreign ones, that American business can find the path to greater success in the globalized, dispersed economy of the 21st century.

Joel Kotkin is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Legatum Institute in London and serves as executive editor of newgeography.com . He writes the weekly New Geographer column for Forbes. His latest book,The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 , was published in February 2010 by Penguin Press.

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Labor Day By The Numbers

Tough times can’t keep down the American instinct to throw a good party. Despite their thin wallets, millions of Americans will spend big this weekend on a final summer fling–like a big Labor Day road trip or cookout.

In fact, the parties and vacations could be their own indicator of economic recovery: With many households more flexible about spending and traveling this summer, it’s a good sign that the average American family is enjoying a stronger economic position this year than last.
In Pictures: Labor Day By The Numbers

On the Road Again
Americans are certainly more willing to spend on time away from home. The American Automobile Association predicts that 34.4 million people will be traveling at least 50 miles away from home this year over the Labor Day weekend–a nearly 10% increase from last year. The 2010 Labor Day holiday travel period is defined as Thursday, Sept. 2 to Monday, Sept. 6.

Most of those travelers–91% or 31.4 million people–will be traveling via car to their destinations, according to a AAA report, which was conducted by IHS Global Insight. But airlines are seeing a bump too: 5% of weekend travelers will fly to their destinations, or 1.62 million people, up from 1.54 million last year’s.

«It is encouraging to see more Americans planning to travel to visit family, friends and exciting vacation destinations,» says Glen MacDonell, director of AAA Travel Services.

Opening Their Wallets
Holiday travelers won’t be spending big bucks, but they are spending a little more than last year. AAA projects that median spending for the holiday will be $697, up about 7% from last year’s median of $650. Their top three expenditures? Dining (63%), shopping (47%) and visiting with friends and relatives (43%), according to AAA.

There will likely be a few other costs, too. In a study conducted by Worthington, Ohio-based BIGresearch, 62.8% of Americans said they expected gas prices to go up over the holiday weekend.

Though gas prices usually rise during any holiday, Americans won’t be discouraged from traveling to a celebration, said Pamela Goodfellow, senior analyst at BIGresearch.

«Back when gas prices were upwards of four dollars a gallon, many people were really worried about budgets,» Goodfellow said. «But over the past few years, we’ve changed our travel routes a little bit, we’re taking just a weekend trip instead of longer vacations.»

Drivers should be especially careful on the road this weekend. Labor Day had the second-highest fatality rate of any holiday in 2008, with 544 average fatalities per year since 1982, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Marking the Occasion
For the first Labor Day celebration in 1882, Peter J. McGuire, a Carpenters and Joiners Union Secretary, organized a parade of 10,000 workers in New York.

Today the federal holiday–which is meant to honor the 154.4 million individuals over the age of 16 in the U.S. labor force–is most widely celebrated with an outdoor cookout.

«During summer holidays, it’s much more fun to cook a meal outdoors with relatives or with your friends,» said Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association spokeswoman Leslie Wheeler. «Because it’s more expensive to go out to a restaurant, people are opting to stay home and have friends over for a cookout instead. Barbecues are easy, fun and people think the food tastes better.»

In fact, Labor Day is the third most popular occasion to barbecue, with 55% of all American households expecting to bring out the grill for the holiday, according to HPBA’s State of the Barbecue Industry report. (On the most popular occasion to host a barbecue–the Fourth of July–Americans spent nearly $2 billion on cookouts alone, according to BIGresearch.)

End of the Season
Summer doesn’t end–meteorologically speaking–until Sept. 22, several weeks after Labor Day. But many households keep with the yearly tradition of enjoying the unofficial end of the season over the three-day holiday weekend.

They’re just taking more care this year about how they do it. «People will travel and celebrate anyway, but prices have fluctuated so much over the past couple of years, people are still going to be careful about how much they spend,» says Goodfellow.
In Pictures: Labor Day By The Numbers

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Bernanke Out Of Bullets But Not Bombs

There is an abundance of market pundits squawking about the Federal Reserve being out of bullets. They believe that since interest rates are near zero, and commercial banks have a superfluous amount of reserves, that Fed Chairman Benjamin Bernanke has been rendered financially impotent.

They contend there would be no impact in the battle against deflation if the Fed were to add on yet more excess reserves and there is nothing Bernanke can do to increase the money supply because banks aren’t lending and consumers aren’t borrowing–despite near-zero interest rates. Therefore, they contend that expanding the Fed’s balance sheet would have no affect on markets or the economy.

They are 100% correct in believing that the Fed can’t help the economy by printing more money. But that’s not because the Fed is out of bullets, but because the Fed has always been incapable of engendering viable growth; its ability, rather, is limited to manipulating the purchasing power of money. While it is true that further quantitative easing would once again hurt the economy, it does not mean the Fed’s impact on the value of the dollar would not be profound.

The truth is the Fed may be out of traditional bullets; that is to say, it has worn out the usefulness of purchasing short-term Treasuries from primary dealers to bring down short-term rates that nudge the entire yield curve lower. But the Fed is never, ever out of ammo. In fact, according to Bernanke himself, he may be about to unleash the heavy artillery.

Our central bank controls the printing presses, which gives it the ability to create money from nothing and then buy anything it so desires. It can and does purchase longer-dated Treasuries and other bank assets like loans. The Fed can also buy stocks and real estate from the public. That’s why any discussion of Bernanke being unable to fight deflation is ludicrous and absurd.

The Fed could buy a trillion-plus dollars worth of Standard & Poor’s 500 stocks while pledging to keep the overnight lending rate between banks near zero. Consumers who sold stock to the Fed would receive a central bank check that would have to be deposited at their banks. The M1 money supply would boom as demand deposits surged. But banks would continue to pay near nothing in interest on their deposits. So Americans would be faced with a choice; earn zero on their savings accounts or take cash out and jump on board the soaring stock market.

The Fed could also create another bull market in real estate. Think about how rich consumers would feel once again because of Maestro Bernanke’s new asset bubble. The dollar would tank and the dreaded risk of deflation would be vanquished. Investors would be forced once again to abandon savings and chase runaway prices in houses and stocks.

If you think I’m using hyperbole, read these three quotes from Banana Ben’s speech last week from Jackson Hole Wyoming. First there’s this gem; «The FOMC will strongly resist deviations from price stability in the downward direction [deflation],» Then Ben explained how committed he is to running our currency into the dirt when he said the U.S. central bank «will do all that it can » to ensure a continuation of the economic recovery and that more securities purchases may be warranted if growth slows. He then cued investors into just how strongly he desires a return of rampant money supply growth and asset inflation when he said; «The Committee is prepared to provide additional monetary accommodation through unconventional measures if it proves necessary, especially if the outlook were to deteriorate significantly.»

By using the phrases «will do all that it can» and «unconventional measures,» Bernanke doesn’t just mean purchasing more mortgage backed securities or longer-dated Treasury debt because he has already done those things in spades. He means that the Fed will not only monetize assets held by banks but will purchase assets directly from consumers and bypass the banking system entirely.

The Federal Reserve has openly laid its cards on the table, and Bernanke has put away his toy pee shooter and has broken out the missiles and bombs. Our central bank can never run out of bullets because it has an infinite supply of ammunition that costs nothing to produce. And what most on Wall Street fail to understand is that the Fed is not limited to purchasing assets from banks but can purchase assets directly from consumers in an unlimited fashion. Therefore, it is time investors stop fighting phantom deflation fears and prepare their portfolios for the real upcoming battle, which will be with intractable inflation.

Michael Pento is a senior economist at Euro Pacific Capital.

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Making Cars With A Conscience

Ethisphere recently spoke with John Viera at Ford, about the automaker’s approach to corporate social responsibility. He talked about how Ford encourages its suppliers to create their own CSR programs, how cost should never be an impediment, and the advantages of getting employees involved in ethics.

The following is an abridged version of our interview.

Tell us a little about your background and your current role at the company.

I’ve been at Ford for 26 years–a long time. I’ve been in my current position for three. I spent the previous 23 years on the operations side. I think part of the reason Ford put me in this position was to ensure that the strategies we developed really could be implemented in our operations.

As my title, director of environmental and sustainability policies, suggests, our group focuses on two areas. The first, the sustainability portion, boils down to the ways Ford implements environmental, social and strategic goals in our products and manufacturing facilities. We work with our various operations to drive strategic goals in their near-, mid- and long-term plans.

We look ahead to determine the type of transportation the world will require five, ten or fifty years out. We then determine what we’ll need to do to deliver on that. This means considering things like the kinds of fuels our vehicles will run on. Since our group also has the environmental slant, obviously we want to consider more environmentally friendly options.

Then on the manufacturing side we work with our facilities to use less energy, to reduce the amount of waste that we send to landfills and to reduce the amount of water that we use. There again we lay out long-term objectives so our facilities can begin planning for delivering on those objectives in the near, mid and long terms.

How do you encourage suppliers–from large ones to small ones that might not have anyone dedicated to compliance or CSR–to get involved and really embrace CSR and sustainability initiatives?

We approached a lot of our larger suppliers first, because they did have expertise and resources to apply to sustainability and environmental initiatives. We also began with them because they have a lot of suppliers too, and they can cascade information down that chain.

As we began to move away from our larger suppliers, we found out that our smaller ones didn’t necessarily have the resources to put all our programs in place. But we’ve been able to share our Code of Working Conditions with them and encourage them to adopt it or develop similar ones of their own. We lay out how to do it so they can take it and run with it quickly. Once they have a roadmap to put their own code together, we do a lot of benchmarking to determine what approach and programs will be most successful for them.

Do your suppliers generally support these programs? Has there been any pushback?

We’ve found them to be very supportive. That said, there is always skepticism about whether implementing new CSR programs is going to cost a lot. Also we get questions about how to change behavior working in countries with governments that aren’t always ethical. But our suppliers have realized that these aren’t spending programs. Often when we talk about working conditions and doing things the right way, it’s just about doing things differently.

When we lay out examples of how the suppliers can just do things better without spending more money, they’re absolutely on board, because then they can talk about all the good things they’re doing, and how they’re treating workers, and that brings them a lot of positive buzz.

Do you receive any pushback from the board, senior leadership or shareholders arguing that CSR and sustainability programs are just too costly and hinder short-term profits? If so, how do you convince them that this is all in the company’s long-term interest?

Cost comes in two forms, money cost and time cost. We haven’t come across any action that was prohibitively expensive. But our challenge isn’t money; it’s time. One would have to be a little bit nae to think we could implement actions that achieve 100% of our goals right away. Often there’s a particular approach we’d like to have implemented tomorrow, but you need time to train and change procedures. It can’t happen right away. That really is our bigger challenge. Not the financial cost, but how we get some of our programs implemented faster.

Ford’s CSR department is involved in some programs that have nothing to do with the auto industry, such as the Zoo Atlanta Rain Forest. How do you decide what outside programs to become involved with? How does that play within the company?

We don’t have a lack of programs to participate in. Our challenge is deciding which. One organization that we work closely with is the Ford Fund, the philanthropic arm of Ford Motor Company. It focuses on working within communities. It has charitable money that it gives to various organizations. Because our group has so many strong ties to the Fund, we do a lot of joint work.

The Atlanta zoo project is one example. Also the Ford Fund works with a lot of universities. We sent out a sustainable community program to most of the major universities in the U.S., and their students came up with projects that would help improve the environment in particular communities. Five projects were chosen and each given $50,000 to work with. One of them was at Florida A&M University, where we collaborated on urban parking in a way that would create urban gardens to produce fuel crops to run diesel vehicles.

That’s on the environmental side. On the social side we contribute to programs for at-risk teens. We contribute not only from a money standpoint but also in kind, with Ford employees working with those organizations in their communities.

What’s next for Ford in terms of sustainability and ethics?

We can do much more to utilize our employees. One employee made our print literature more sustainable by finding ways to increase the recycled content we print on without spending more. There’s a huge opportunity to get our employees more involved in accelerating sustainable actions, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. I think that’s the next area within the four walls of Ford. The other opportunity is going beyond our four walls.

Being an ethical company or being a leading company in sustainability includes affecting those around you–communities around you and other companies that support you. Are we taking all the good things we’re doing and sharing them with our supply base? Are we sharing them with our dealerships, which aren’t part of Ford Motor Company? That’s the other huge opportunity for us, going outside the walls and having the largest possible impact there.

What advice can you give to those responsible for environmental and sustainability programs at other organizations?

Doing the right thing doesn’t have to cost money. I think that was a mental constraint for me initially. I thought we weren’t going to be able to take on a lot because of cost. We found out what you need isn’t more money but a different kind of approach. When you have that mindset, it’s amazing the opportunities you find that you can implement that don’t cost. They are still the right thing to do, they make employees feel good, and they are self-reinforcing. And as you demonstrate victories in being able to implement actions, more and more opportunities come out of the woodwork. So don’t be afraid that doing things ethically will cost money. That’s just not the case.

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A Better Way To Manage All That Virtual Paperwork

With SharePoint 2010 in combination with Office 2010, you can control precisely what happens to documents within your organization well after someone hits «Save.» In this article, we’ll explain the key building blocks of SharePoint, drill down on key capabilities for growing businesses, and outline the business case.

A Brief Primer On SharePoint
Suppose you’ve painstakingly compiled an Excel workbook containing a list of retail outlets worldwide that sell your brand-new product. If you’re a sole proprietor, you might stop there. If you’re a small business with a few employees, you might pass the Excel workbook around via email as needed, or better yet, put it in a shared folder on an Internet server so that employees can access the data at any time. To ensure data quality, you could use Excel’s data validation features to confirm that each retail outlet had an employee assigned as the customer’s main contact. Then, if you want to create a «Where to Buy» Web page, you can export the data from the spreadsheet into a format that can be uploaded onto a basic website.

But what happens when your company grows? Before you know it, you’re managing multiple workbooks for each product, the employee assignments fall out of sync, and the process of manually uploading information to your website becomes a much bigger task than you had anticipated. And as your company grows, you’ll have other lists, data and documents to manage, with each business requirement spawning a separate project on the IT to-do list. Ultimately, you’ll face a motley collection of point solutions that add up to an expensive and hard-to-manage IT infrastructure.

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The SharePoint approach anticipates and supports the spread of data within a growing enterprise through a comprehensive approach to storing, managing and sharing information. As companies grow, they need to: capture a wide variety of content; provide access to employees and partners through intranet sites; serve customers, suppliers and other stakeholders through external-facing websites; and manage the work flow associated with the content. While the specifics vary, the fundamental data requirements of an enterprise are reasonably predictable, and SharePoint implements a technology stack and methodology to deal with all but the most specialized business needs.

Let’s revisit the aforementioned example with a deployment of SharePoint Foundation 2010, a free version of SharePoint that works with a licensed copy of Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) SQL Server. You’ll start by installing a server farm containing a database server and a Web server. Within the Web server, which will have its own URL for use only within the company intranet, you’ll set up what’s called a «Site Collection,» with its first site containing one item, your original list of retail outlets. That’s five levels of hierarchy if you’re keeping track (server farm -> web server -> site collection -> site -> list), just to replicate information that used to reside within a single Excel file.

But now you’d have a scalable infrastructure that could easily incorporate other sources of data–both structured and unstructured–into a comprehensive enterprise repository. In SharePoint 2010 a list can contain not just text and numbers, but also multimedia elements including audio and video, Office 2010 documents, and other binary objects.

Out of the box, a SharePoint installation includes blogs, wikis, team workstations and document libraries. You can set item-level permissions, enable employees to check documents in or out, and have the ability to retrieve previous versions of documents for auditing and revision control. From within Office 2010 your users would be able to create their own lists and store their own documents online, your department managers could create their own sites, and your IT department can deploy new site collections as needed. Although moving that first list to SharePoint may take significant effort, building successive lists and sites gets easier and easier.

Furthermore, because the underlying data is being stored on the enterprise server farm instead of on an isolated PC, you can easily point external and mobile users to versions of shared data. You’d be able to create a parallel list containing just the data elements that you want to make public. That list would be contained within a site collection on an externally facing Web server, tapping into the shared database server on the enterprise server farm.

However, this transition from the private intranet to the public Internet does require an upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010. There’s only so far you can go with the free version of SharePoint, and if you’re truly taking an ECM (enterprise content management) approach, you’ll hit the limits soon enough.

The power of SharePoint as an ECM tool stems from its ability to assign metadata to Office 2010 documents and other items, to trigger automatic actions based on that metadata, and to enforce approvals, sign-offs and other collaboration and work-flow rules.

Metadata can be associated with a document in several ways:

In Midst Of 3Par Fight, HP Coughs Up $55 Million Fine

Hewlett-Packard has agreed to pay a $55 million fine to settle claims it paid kickbacks to the government.

The Justice Department said late Monday Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ – news – people ) paid the fine in relation to influencer fees to employees in the government for recommendations to purchase its products.

The fine pales in comparison to the $2 billion HP offered yesterday to acquire data storage company 3PAR (nyse: PAR – news – people ) in a bidding war with Dell (nasdaq: DELL – news – people ) .

Dell has yet to fire back with a new offer.

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As Consumer Lending in the U.K. Contracts, Pound Slides

Forbes China’s Top 10 Stock Picks For 2010

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Tuesday Sector Laggards: Midwest Regional Banks, Education & Training Services

In trading Tuesday, Midwest Regional Banks shares were relative laggards, down on the day by about 1.6%. Helping drag down the group were shares of CFS Bancorp off about 5.8% on the day.

Also lagging the market Tuesday are Education & Training Services shares, down on the day by about 1.4% as a group, led down by Strayer Education (nasdaq: STRA – news – people ) , trading lower by about 8.6% and China Distance Education Holdings , trading lower by about 4.6%.

Market News Video produces and distributes online videos about stocks and investing.

The Morning Morsel-Greece Breaths, Bernanke Warns

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How «Green» Is Your Car?

The FuelEconomy.gov website allows consumers to research the fuel economy and environmental impacts of the majority of vehicles available today. However, not all consumers take the time to research a vehicle online and instead rely on what the sticker says.

While the car sticker reveals information about the vehicle’s fuel efficiency, environmental impact data is not readily available. If proposed changes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation are accepted, this will soon change.

The two agencies have jointly proposed that all car stickers be printed with a vehicle’s environmental grade, from A+ to D, beginning with model year 2012 vehicles. The new grades will allow consumers to compare a conventional vehicle’s environmental impact with that of a hybrid. The same comparison can be made between hybrid and electric vehicles , providing consumers a more comprehensive look at the environmental impact of newer vehicle technologies.

«New technologies such as battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are entering the American market in greater numbers,» said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. «We need to provide consumers with labels that include fuel economy and environmental information so that buyers can make better informed decisions when purchasing new vehicles.»

There are currently two different label designs under discussion. The first will feature a large letter grade that encompasses a vehicle’s fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions. The label will also provide consumers with the estimated five-year fuel savings when compared to an average gasoline-powered vehicle.

The second proposed design just adapts the current label to include more environmental data, including tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions and other smog-forming pollutants. Both proposed labels include information directing consumers to an interactive Web-based tool for more information. This website would be smartphone friendly so today’s tech-savvy consumer can have instant access to the additional data.

The DOT and EPA have opened a 60-day public comment period in which everyday consumers can submit their feedback on the proposed label changes. For more information, visit the EPA’s Fuel Economy website.

Melissa Hincha-Ownby blogs for the Mother Nature Network.

See Also:

Costco’s New Electric Car Opportunity

Hawaii’s Electric Car Conversions Demand Will Exceed Supply Of Electric Cars

New Yorker’s Koch Profile Misses The Point

A Smart House at Drexel University in Philadelphia Is a Living Laboratory of Sustainability

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Google’s New Enterprise Weapons

The latest feat out of Google Labs isn’t mapping another planet or another way to drunk-proof late night e-mails. Enterprise Labs’ 12th and 13th products are business weapons aimed at taking out its enterprise search competition and annexing more market share.

The Internet giant on Wednesday released two new tools that enhance its Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) Search Appliance and Google Mini devices. The first, called Side-by-Side , is a free download that allows businesses to compare any two search solutions–like, say, Google’s appliance against the ones from Oracle’s WebCenter or Microsoft’s (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) FAST. The second announcement is a new suite of «connectors» that extend Google Search Appliance to data repositories like Salesforce, a popular CRM system.

Combined, the new tools could placate critics of the Google Search Appliance. The first tool downplays the importance of advanced search features by emphasizing the relevance of default results. The second shows that Google engineers, not just third-party developers, are moving quickly to extend the reach of Google Search Appliance. (See «Google’s Latest Newest Search Box.» )

See Also:

Google’s Enterprising Moves

Google: ‘We’re Very Sorry’

The Big Deal: Google’s Marissa Mayer

Facebook Wins Patent For Social Search Results, Could Use It To Threaten Google

VMworld 2010: A Chat with Xsigo CEO Lloyd Carney

Infrastructure:
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