SWOT & MACRO RISK
Investment in the 2020s so far has defied conventional wisdom & trends. Extremely rapid shifts of practices and priorities are now expected, leaving very few investments likely to pay as anticipated to 2030, 2035, 2040.
Obvious examples include 1. commercial real estate collapsing due to pandemic-triggered shifts to better and more distributed work practices 2. fleet transport, fuel and power grid investments shift to electric drive 3. DNN (deep neural network \”AI\”) radically changing roles of tools to be more like odd-minded collaborators. 4. Robots becoming agile & capable of displacing blue-collar workers 5. Dedollarization, crypto, derivatives & sanctions as such dominating factors in financial or industrial planning that every investor must be aware. 6. Effective segmentation of chipsets into the RISC-V (Eurasia) and x86/ARM (Western Hemisphere & islands & sovereign peninsulas) factions, with proprietary operating systems also forced often to choose one segment.
Timing/Issue/Position/Argument/Evidence/Source/Credibility
\”Outcome that occur by date X should be back-cast to a date half or a third back towards now to determine what conditions must be to get that outcome.\”
For over 20 years I\’ve practiced a simple effective tree structuring for meeting agendas, executive briefings, debate or meeting notes, legal negotiations and other complex conversations where you need to listen and address every point. Lawyers will recognize the structure. When preparing for court, the timing=deadline, issues=triable, position=clients list of fallback acceptable outcomes and characterizations of the facts, arguments = concisely stated relation of principles of law to those facts or ruling out all the unacceptable outcomes, evidence=admissible, source=sworn, credibility=prior cases at law or recognized expertise or eye witnesses. Basically the entire tree is required. But for meeting agendas, it is enough to have a deadline date, issue=agenda, positions as elaborated by or for those affected, arguments are as have been assembled before the meeting, and most likely evidence sources and credibility are presumed to be valid enough when presented by the persons invited. One may advertise all this for a few days before a meeting to maximize chance of persons who need to attend knowing, or those who can\’t adding in whatever they believe can\’t be ignored. Then after, the meeting minutes are simply an elaboration of the tree, at which time evidence demanded might be elaborated. The structure is persistent and ideally available to every participant or affected party and every change or comment logged.<br><br>Developing TIPAESA trees becomes worthwhile when decisions tend to require justification later, when new people need rapid briefings, when authorities or regulations are involved, or when abuses of process causing strife & non-compliance.<br><br>Tools to rapidly generate meeting minutes, debate or meeting briefings, presentations, even court documents and forms for regulators, become simpler to develop when persistent data structures are available. Training DNN will succeed more at producing documents that reflect nuances and details. Or if not, those details will be identified & be better elaborated.
Scenarios: Utopia/Bests/Trend/Worsts/Dystopia
\”Scenarios should include the outrageous, unexpected, disturbing, hopeful & fantastic. Someone believes in them.\”
\”Single scenario planning\” wisely insults the poor practice of assuming a particular future and just betting on it to occur as anticipated. When the bet succeeds or fails with an ability to cover it up or compensate for it, it can be tolerated. But unaffordably large bets causing unacceptable regrets should force scrutiny onto how well insured or \”hedged\” a decision was. That is, did it at least provide tolerable outcomes in unfavourable conditions? And, if a regret is missed opportunity, was it actually possible to imagine that outcome and put oneself in a position to benefit from it? Best practices vary but in very few cases would less than three scenarios (to reflect a single \”best\”, single \”trend\” and single \”worst\” environment) be enough to calculate the regrets on each and to determine what events to watch for, what hedges to make, or what disclaimers or caveats to include in a deal. Generally decisions over about USD $10M would require perhaps multiple bests or worsts for 4-6, and above $100M it would be foolish not to try to imagine extreme outliers (utopias, dystopias) that no one you trust believes could occur. Someone does think they can occur, and they may be right, and you wrong. Since other people\’s money is almost certainly at stake, you owe it to those others to consider judgments you disbelieve.<br><br>While the \”risk as regret\” framework has been used in financial engineering since the early 1990s, and was the core tech at the heart of frameworks like Algorithmics Riskwatch (later acquired by IBM then Fitch), along with other technologies for rapid calculation of future value of investments… only recently have scenario based portfolio tools become available for more ordinary business decisions. As these get incorporated into conventional single-scenario critical path & project management toolsets, the overlap between management and high level oversight or risk management increases. The manager who sees no value in anticipating unwelcome scenarios and hedging for them in his or her plan, isn\’t fit for the decision making environment of the 2020s. To be blunt, they add no value themselves, and need to be out of those roles.
Levers: Transform/Mindset/…
\”Investing more time with greater leverage, and less without, pays.\”
Since the 1990s, systems theory has focused on attention: Where should the executive devote their precious time? When considering acknowledged \”visionary\” business leaders like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, we see an extreme focus on how to disrupt and \”transform\” the mindset of individuals with executive power in the organizations in which they are involved: Thus Apple, Pixar, Tesla, SpaceX, etc, tend to outperform competitors and produce memorable and strategic products, commanding extraordinary product reviews and stock prices, as a direct result of how well they attract the best talent, the most loyal long term investors, and are able to either impress or intimidate regulators into letting them do their best.<br><br>However, mindset isn\’t success: \”The Secret\” is a lie. Below the \”diplomatic\” level where people believe and \”attract\”, the strategic tactical and logistical levers remain: the boring daily work of slight improvement between conceptual leaps.
Capital Asset Types: Natural/Infrastructural/Financial
Vs Human (Instructional/Social/Individual)
\”Instructions (bits) aren\’t individuals (bodies) nor social connections (bonds).
Broad consensus emerged in the 2000s that natural capital was means of production thats value exceeded that of human-built infrastructure, and that financial capital historically reflected its implicit food & clothing productive value. Thus \”land\” in micro-economics back to Smith, the primary store of value for all aristocracies to this day, was mostly a reflection of land value. industrial capitalism brought other forms of physical \”capital\” with increasing productive value, through the medium of human labour. Regardless of how one feels about the role of inventors, managers, investors, or \”reacters\” (testers or critics or reviewers or just noisy users), neoliberal and Marxist analysis both agreed these existed & that enterprises needed natural (\”land\”), infrastructural (\”physical\”, \”manufactured\”), and financial (\”credit\”, \”fiat\”, etc.) to amplify the value of the human instructional (plans, degrees, patents, software, diagnostics), social (trust relationships as reflected in brands/trademarks and sociocultural institutions) and living individuals (with talents that die with them).<br><br>Even the most controversial and seemingly hard to anticipate major legal decisions tend to reflect these distinctions eg refusing to recognize copyright in AI art output because only the input has come from an individual\’s unique talents that die with them, or failure to uphold exclusivity or over-renewable copyrights over now-socially-propagated cultural icons.<br><br>For major investments, explicit categorization of capital asset types and how maintained, improved and kept exclusive to the investors (to whatever degree is optimal for overall value) helps set investment levels in training, recruiting & retention and refocus the enterprise away from generally devalued infrastructural assets (like office buildings or fleets of combustion vehicles) towards strategic instructional integration, social trust building and attracting talented individuals by flexible (including completely remote) work options. No, there will be \”back to the office\” except for the criminals who plan their dirty deals in a Faraday cage. And no, \”hybrid work\” still prevents you from hiring the best across the world. So cope: The future of human capital is teams connected by electronic empathy & secure links to build great instructions that onboard new and even more talented individuals so rapidly that they feel like they are part of a new online cult/ure.
Implicit, augmented, ubiquitous: infrastructure as ideology
\”How we work is who we are. How we play is who we want to be.\”
Augmented reality – including heads-up displays for driving biking unicycling walking or site-specific jobs – comes due in the 2020s after decades of research that began in earnest in 1986-93 before the first ACM conference on it occurred (yes I was there in Boston, and at the first two \”Cyberspace\” conferences that preceded it, in Austin and in Santa Cruz).<br><br>Ubiquitous \”Wifi\”, \”LTE\” and \”5G\” Internet solved the most difficult problem we identified at that time: ubuiqity.
When a work process changes to rely on a more advanced tool, it can actually degrade performance with the older tools: A carpenter skilled with automated screwdrivers tends not to have the calluses and wrist muscles to perform without.<br><br>Ultimately, movement of photons and electrons through the power and fiber grid is required to run modern systems:<br>As transport & heat electrify, and dirt cheap renewables proliferate, we expect challenges in matching power use to supply, including deferring loads like washers or charging electric vehicles. When optimally charged not just for travel but to back up home and/or grid, they make a community more resilient against outages. Large scale offshore wind & building integrated solar now dominate new power generation. Fleets of autonomous trucks will soon prowl highways. Resilient homes will sit out disasters for weeks in comfort. Safer, cleaner, quieter. And we will see or hear what\’s going on without a bunch of tablets or phones in the way, overlaid directly on our lenses or whispered subtly in our ears.<br><br>Don\’t forget basic human body risk: Electrical, fire and safety regulations exist for a reason and will not be changing fast. Increasingly, competitive advantage in infrastructure will turn on how harmonized and coordinated the fire, power and emergency health (\”paramedic\”) services are: How well did the fire department or power utility anticipate the future, ask for professional input on simple standards for common problems, issue recommendations and inform insurers of these? Why should anyone take even a single digit % risk of living next to a burning wooden house that Aunt Tilly has to call in?
Similarly, the \”back to the office\” ideology reflected by owning more commercial workspace than is needed for expensive devices and physical training activities, is not viable in the 2020s: Top talent has other options, so you simply cannot retain them even in a so-called \”hybrid\” workplace that requires them to live within a several-times-weekly commute. Since remote workers need to attend any meeting anyway, maintaining this \”hybrid\” also costs significantly more & does not bring back any camraderie or team spirit shared by eating the same food or using the same bathroom.
It\’s criminal organizations, wary of any possible recording of meetings, that always will lead the charge \”back to the office\”. Thus, joining that parade makes your organization look criminal. The ideology of infrastructure is not negotiated, not fair, not explicit. It\’s in how you are afraid to work.
Basic research: (Bio)chemistry, materials & components
\”Your water belongs to the tribe.\”
2020s see increasing breakthroughs in biologically derived materials, and those (like graphene and borene) composed of common (\”free\”) molecules (like carbon and boron and silicon) that do what living things cannot. In any scenario analysis involving infrastructural/manufactured/physical capital or material stocks and flows of molecules, its deficient not to consider substitutions and radical replacement of brittle heavy expensive material with cheap light free stuff we got from the sewage or garbage. Hint: If they talk about a \”water shortage\”* you need to just slowly back away.<br><br>As major manufacturers like Apple commit to more recycled content, materials science evolves new fantastic options. Some made from former waste materials that were landfill sites or polluting land and water areas; Even difficult waste like wind turbine blades & lithium ion batteries are now recycled reliably into useful products. Tailings ponds are mined for rare Earth ores. Heavy oil becomes a membrane, lubricant & plastic feedstock rather than being burnt. Scifi structures like space elevators and giant solid state \’monolith\’ computers are on the drawing boards today, with only manufacturing costs in the way. We know what the future is made of, chemically. We need only make it cheaper. <br><br>*Back to water, it\’s among the most abundant compounts (H20) but also amongst the easiest to conserve & re-use in industrial & agricultural processes: agrisolar shading, osmosis, condensation capture, vertical farming, and to simply locate a hugelkultur within the catchment area of a well, are all simple ways to ensure that water supplies are enough. A \”water shortage\” is an infrastructure deficit. And that, too, is an ideology.
Selling the future: given/recent/in/out/next
\”What we all know, what we should know, what we can do about it, why we shouldn\’t wait any longer, and what to do next.\”
Decision-makers and boards under ESG reflect diversity of customers, stakeholders & regulator concerns. Less shared history & context means you need a more focused pitch to sell anything, let alone a strategic high-risk option.
I find that five minutes in five slides is enough to lay out the case for almost anything:
1. The given context that everyone in the room likely already knows.
2. Recent events – citing evidence – of more trends in those directions.
3. A proposed plan, intent, service, investment that should be \”in\” the budget, strategy, technology or etc.
4. All known objections to 3 with a pithy but polite rebuttal, limitation, refutation or denial, again citing evidence.
5. Assuming 4 is adequate, what next steps are required to pursue 3 and remain aligned to profit from all trends identified in 1 and 2.
Thereafter, welcome genuinely new objections but deal more concisely with issues in 4. Find & clear all the barriers to 5, or expect to rewrite every given/recent/in/out/next page and try again. Maybe next year.
A
Getting to 2030 alive & thriving: Risk, finance, insurance
\”To build wealth, avoid large losses.\”
While it\’s easy to get pessimistic when nuclear and biological war are actually in the daily headlines along with 1984-ish propaganda (\”We have never been at peace with Eurasia and Eastasia. We have always been at war with both.\” etc.) the majority of great fortunes have grown in chaotic and uncertain times. This is no different. It\’s actually just even more so:<br>
Investors face unprecedented risk & uncertainty investing in any area exposed to new technology, unstable climate, geopolitical tension or labour/popular unrest. Which is to say, investing in anything at all! We recommend a disciplined scenario-based approach to anticipate future averted regrets and a rational risk threshold to respect an investors true constraints and commitments. And, where this is impractical, a full disclosure of the uncertainty a project faces and how it could recover if the worst occurs. If property is at risk due to changes in law or an ideology rising, appropriate means of civil and criminal enforcement may have to be planned far in advance. And, the odds of sanctions or enforceable brand or patent licenses might have to be considered when pondering investment, because you can\’t collect from \”the enemy\”.<br><br>Unless, of course, you found a way to set up your most critical corporate entities in neutral countries, like oh Singapore or Panama or the UAE or… well that would be telling. The Swiss & English are also not done with their vast network of havens, despite recent scrutiny (collapse of Nazi banker Credit Suisse, City of London losing Russian to gain the Ukrainian scams).
issues, scenarios, levers, assets…
Timing/issue/position/argument/evidence/Source/Credibility
For over 20 years I\’ve practiced a simple effective tree structuring for meeting agendas, executive briefings, debate or meeting notes, legal negotiations and other complex conversations where you need to listen and address every point. Lawyers will recognize the structure. When preparing for court, the timing=deadline, issues=triable, position=clients list of fallback acceptable outcomes and characterizations of the facts, arguments = concisely stated relation of principles of law to those facts or ruling out all the unacceptable outcomes, evidence=admissible, source=sworn, credibility=prior cases at law or recognized expertise or eye witnesses. Basically the entire tree is required. But for meeting agendas, it is enough to have a deadline date, issue=agenda, positions as elaborated by or for those affected, arguments are as have been assembled before the meeting, and most likely evidence sources and credibility are presumed to be valid enough when presented by the persons invited. One may advertise all this for a few days before a meeting to maximize chance of persons who need to attend knowing, or those who can\’t adding in whatever they believe can\’t be ignored. Then after, the meeting minutes are simply an elaboration of the tree, at which time evidence demanded might be elaborated. The structure is persistent and ideally available to every participant or affected party and every change or comment logged.
Developing TIPAESA trees becomes worthwhile when decisions tend to require justification later, when new people need rapid briefings, when authorities or regulations are involved, or when abuses of process causing strife & non-compliance.
Tools to rapidly generate meeting minutes, debate or meeting briefings, presentations, even court documents and forms for regulators, become simpler to develop when persistent data structures are available. Training DNN will succeed more at producing documents that reflect nuances and details. Or if not, those details will be identified & be better elaborated.
Scenarios: Utopia/Bests/Trend/Worsts/Dystopia
\”Single scenario planning\” wisely insults the poor practice of assuming a particular future and just betting on it to occur as anticipated. When the bet succeeds or fails with an ability to cover it up or compensate for it, it can be tolerated. But unaffordably large bets causing unacceptable regrets should force scrutiny onto how well insured or \”hedged\” a decision was. That is, did it at least provide tolerable outcomes in unfavourable conditions? And, if a regret is missed opportunity, was it actually possible to imagine that outcome and put oneself in a position to benefit from it? Best practices vary but in very few cases would less than three scenarios (to reflect a single \”best\”, single \”trend\” and single \”worst\” environment) be enough to calculate the regrets on each and to determine what events to watch for, what hedges to make, or what disclaimers or caveats to include in a deal. Generally decisions over about USD $10M would require perhaps multiple bests or worsts for 4-6, and above $100M it would be foolish not to try to imagine extreme outliers (utopias, dystopias) that no one you trust believes could occur. Someone does think they can occur, and they may be right, and you wrong. Since other people\’s money is almost certainly at stake, you owe it to those others to consider judgments you disbelieve.
While the \”risk as regret\” framework has been used in financial engineering since the early 1990s, and was the core tech at the heart of frameworks like Algorithmics Riskwatch (later acquired by IBM then Fitch), along with other technologies for rapid calculation of future value of investments… only recently have scenario based portfolio tools become available for more ordinary business decisions. As these get incorporated into conventional single-scenario critical path & project management toolsets, the overlap between management and high level oversight or risk management increases. The manager who sees no value in anticipating unwelcome scenarios and hedging for them in his or her plan, isn\’t fit for the decision making environment of the 2020s. To be blunt, they add no value themselves, and need to be out of those roles.
Levers: Transform/Mindset/…
Since the 1990s, systems theory has focused on attention: Where should the executive devote their precious time? When considering acknowledged \”visionary\” business leaders like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, we see an extreme focus on how to disrupt and \”transform\” the mindset of individuals with executive power in the organizations in which they are involved: Thus Apple, Pixar, Tesla, SpaceX, etc, tend to outperform competitors and produce memorable and strategic products, commanding extraordinary product reviews and stock prices, as a direct result of how well they attract the best talent, the most loyal long term investors, and are able to either impress or intimidate regulators into letting them do their best.
However, mindset isn\’t success: \”The Secret\” is a lie. Below the \”diplomatic\” level where people believe and \”attract\”, the strategic tactical and logistical levers remain: the boring daily work of slight improvement between conceptual leaps.
Capital asset types: natural/infrastructural/financial
vs human (instructional/social/individual)
Broad consensus emerged in the 2000s that natural capital was means of production thats value exceeded that of human-built infrastructure, and that financial capital historically reflected its implicit food & clothing productive value. Thus \”land\” in micro-economics back to Smith, the primary store of value for all aristocracies to this day, was mostly a reflection of land value. industrial capitalism brought other forms of physical \”capital\” with increasing productive value, through the medium of human labour. Regardless of how one feels about the role of inventors, managers, investors, or \”reacters\” (testers or critics or reviewers or just noisy users), neoliberal and Marxist analysis both agreed these existed & that enterprises needed natural (\”land\”), infrastructural (\”physical\”, \”manufactured\”), and financial (\”credit\”, \”fiat\”, etc.) to amplify the value of the human instructional (plans, degrees, patents, software, diagnostics), social (trust relationships as reflected in brands/trademarks and sociocultural institutions) and living individuals (with talents that die with them).
Even the most controversial and seemingly hard to anticipate major legal decisions tend to reflect these distinctions eg refusing to recognize copyright in AI art output because only the input has come from an individual\’s unique talents that die with them, or failure to uphold exclusivity or over-renewable copyrights over now-socially-propagated cultural icons.
For major investments, explicit categorization of capital asset types and how maintained, improved and kept exclusive to the investors (to whatever degree is optimal for overall value) helps set investment levels in training, recruiting & retention and refocus the enterprise away from generally devalued infrastructural assets (like office buildings or fleets of combustion vehicles) towards strategic instructional integration, social trust building and attracting talented individuals by flexible (including completely remote) work options. No, there will be \”back to the office\” except for the criminals who plan their dirty deals in a Faraday cage. And no, \”hybrid work\” still prevents you from hiring the best across the world. So cope: The future of human capital is teams connected by electronic empathy & secure links to build great instructions that onboard new and even more talented individuals so rapidly that they feel like they are part of a new online cult/ure.
Implicit, Augmented, ubiquitous: infrastructure as ideology
Augmented reality – including heads-up displays for driving biking unicycling walking or site-specific jobs – comes due in the 2020s after decades of research that began in earnest in 1986-93 before the first ACM conference on it occurred (yes I was there in Boston, and at the first two \”Cyberspace\” conferences that preceded it, in Austin and in Santa Cruz).
Ubiquitous \”Wifi\”, \”LTE\” and \”5G\” Internet solved the most difficult problem we identified at that time: ubuiqity. When a work process changes to rely on a more advanced tool, it can actually degrade performance with the older tools: A carpenter skilled with automated screwdrivers tends not to have the calluses and wrist muscles to perform without.
Ultimately, movement of photons and electrons through the power and fiber grid is required to run modern systems:
As transport & heat electrify, and dirt cheap renewables proliferate, we expect challenges in matching power use to supply, including deferring loads like washers or charging electric vehicles. When optimally charged not just for travel but to back up home and/or grid, they make a community more resilient against outages. Large scale offshore wind & building integrated solar now dominate new power generation. Fleets of autonomous trucks will soon prowl highways. Resilient homes will sit out disasters for weeks in comfort. Safer, cleaner, quieter. And we will see or hear what\’s going on without a bunch of tablets or phones in the way, overlaid directly on our lenses or whispered subtly in our ears.
Don\’t forget basic human body risk: Electrical, fire and safety regulations exist for a reason and will not be changing fast. Increasingly, competitive advantage in infrastructure will turn on how harmonized and coordinated the fire, power and emergency health (\”paramedic\”) services are: How well did the fire department or power utility anticipate the future, ask for professional input on simple standards for common problems, issue recommendations and inform insurers of these? Why should anyone take even a single digit % risk of living next to a burning wooden house that Aunt Tilly has to call in?
Basic research: (Bio)chemistry, materials & components
The 2020s see increasing breakthroughs in biologically derived materials, and those (like graphene and borene) composed of common (\”free\”) molecules (like carbon and boron and silicon) that do what living things cannot. In any scenario analysis involving infrastructural/manufactured/physical capital or material stocks and flows of molecules, its deficient not to consider substitutions and radical replacement of brittle heavy expensive material with cheap light free stuff we got from the sewage or garbage. Hint: If they talk about a \”water shortage\”* you need to just slowly back away.
As major manufacturers like Apple commit to more recycled content, materials science evolves new fantastic options. Some made from former waste materials that were landfill sites or polluting land and water areas; Even difficult waste like wind turbine blades & lithium ion batteries are now recycled reliably into useful products. Tailings ponds are mined for rare Earth ores. Heavy oil becomes a membrane, lubricant & plastic feedstock rather than being burnt. Scifi structures like space elevators and giant solid state \’monolith\’ computers are on the drawing boards today, with only manufacturing costs in the way. We know what the future is made of, chemically. We need only make it cheaper.
*Back to water, it\’s among the most abundant compounts (H20) but also amongst the easiest to conserve & re-use in industrial & agricultural processes: agrisolar shading, osmosis, condensation capture, vertical farming, and to simply locate a hugelkultur within the catchment area of a well, are all simple ways to ensure that water supplies are enough. If you are talking about a \”water shortage\” and don\’t know about all these things, you probably need to do some reading.
Getting to 2030 alive & thriving: Risk, finance, insurance
While it\’s easy to get pessimistic when nuclear and biological war are actually in the daily headlines along with 1984-ish propaganda (\”We have never been at peace with Eurasia and Eastasia. We have always been at war with both.\” etc.) the majority of great fortunes have grown in chaotic and uncertain times. This is no different. It\’s actually just even more so:
Investors face unprecedented risk & uncertainty investing in any area exposed to new technology, unstable climate, geopolitical tension or labour/popular unrest. Which is to say, investing in anything at all! We recommend a disciplined scenario-based approach to anticipate future averted regrets and a rational risk threshold to respect an investors true constraints and commitments. And, where this is impractical, a full disclosure of the uncertainty a project faces and how it could recover if the worst occurs. If property is at risk due to changes in law or an ideology rising, appropriate means of civil and criminal enforcement may have to be planned far in advance. And, the odds of sanctions or enforceable brand or patent licenses might have to be considered when pondering investment, because you can\’t collect from \”the enemy\”.
Unless, of course, you found a way to set up your most critical corporate entities in neutral countries, like oh Singapore or Panama or the UAE or… well that would be telling. The Swiss & English are also not done with their vast network of havens, despite recent scrutiny (collapse of Nazi banker Credit Suisse, City of London losing Russian to gain the Ukrainian scams).
WHO I was / COMPETE WITH
\”Do not ask me who I am, and do not ask me to remain the same.\” – Michel Foucault. To characterize oneself as a resume from the past reflects only the \”trends\” of the recent past. It doesn\’t say much about what you will be in future. While you can review [my CV] on request, it\’s more useful here to say who my competitors are: Robert Kagan (PNAC), George Friedman (STRATFOR), Peter Zeihan, Marianne Williamson, \”Perun\”, William Spaniel. My past collaborators include Ron Dembo, Ralph Nader, Ursula Franklin, David Miller, Jack Layton, many even more amazing folks you never heard of like Dan King, Tooker Gomberg, John Godfrey, Willi Nolan, Francis McDougall, Sean McShane, Geert Siemons, Kim Fox, Sandy Bell, Earl Epstein, Paul Shields, Paul van Frassen, David Walmark and Steve Rapaport.