Job titles get quirky

Four Legacies Mortgage customers don't work with a loan officer. Instead, they are connected with the company's chief motivation officer or its wealth creation specialist.

"We wanted to be creative with our titles," said Brent Rauch, chief inspiration officer at Four Legacies in West Des Moines, Iowa. "And I help inspire financial freedom for customers."A growing number of companies are looking at clever job titles to create a buzz and set themselves apart from competitors. And it's not just the technology and advertising firms that are ditching traditional titles in favor of fun and funky ones.Companies sometimes use nontraditional titles to mix things up at a company, said Paula Morrow, marketing professor at Iowa State University. Or it signals a change in leadership in which executives are trying "to show they are different than what's been in the past," Morrow said.Computer repair chain the Geek Squad, a division of Best Buy Inc., hires special agents, field marshals and mission controllers to operate on the front lines, while back-office operations still are conducted by the chief executive and a bevy of presidents and vice presidents.Food service employees tend to have unique job titles.



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Building wealth: Truth or consequences

Above the strains of "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and beneath the fragments of light spilling from an enormous crystal chandelier, 244 fortune hunters file into a Toronto hotel ballroom on a cold and dim February morning. They're here to brighten their financial futures through Donald Trump's "Way to Wealth" seminar, which, according to materials promoting this event, will reveal the secrets of real estate investing and business management.

Could it possibly be so simple? You bet, says "personal Trump instructor" Rick Brown, upon taking the stage and congratulating attendees on the "tremendous step forward" they've taken. It's not long before Brown is unleashing a flurry of tidy platitudes from the stage, such as "Money's a game; you know the rules, you win." He also confides that most people's biggest mistake in the business world is to fail to give themselves a "consequence," defined roughly as an investment of time or money in an objective, such that one's failure to work toward that objective will result in a material loss.


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Faith matters

Tony Blair gave an extraordinary lecture at Westminster Cathedral in London the other day. It was a speech that outed him, so to speak, as a man of deep spirituality.

Not that he had ever made a secret of his religiosity when he was Britain's Prime Minister, openly converting to Catholicism after he left office. But, as he explained to his Westminster audience, for various reasons connected with the culture in Britain and parts of Europe, politicians are not expected to "do God".

Freed from those constraints, however, Mr Blair spoke, with characteristic eloquence, in terms of faith "giving the use of reason a purpose and society a soul and human beings a sense of the divine".

This is a life purpose, he said, "that cannot be found in constitutions, speeches, stirring art or rhetoric.


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Gary Snyder wins $100,000 poetry prize

Gary Snyder, a poet known for his verse about nature and spirituality and a former member of the beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. .


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UF: Consumer confidence in Florida hits 16-year low

Consumer confidence in Florida fell in April to its lowest point in 16 years, according to researchers at the University of Florida.

Confidence fell four points to 66, passing a previous 16-year low recorded earlier this year in January and March.

"Consumer confidence in Florida is now at the same recessionary levels as it was during the 1990-91 recession," said Chris McCarty, director of UF's Survey Research Center. "Unlike the relatively mild recession of 2001, the recession of 1990-91 resulted in a longer time to recover. This is a likely scenario for the current economy."

Four of the index's five components fell in April with the biggest decline being the nine-point drop to 79 in perceptions of personal finances a year from now. The only component that rose was the perception about whether it is a good time to buy a big-ticket item, which climbed three points to 67.


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Santana plays what's on his mind at UCF Arena

Carlos Santana likes to tell wanna-be guitar heroes to find out what's inside his head if they want to imitate his sound.

On Tuesday at the UCF Arena, Santana opened his mind, as well as his musical soul, in a show that was both skillful and generous.

"We believe in the concept of live your light," he told a multi-generational audience that almost filled the hall.

He talked about "pollinating" the world with positive energy and about the notion that everyone is part of a "beam of light that comes from the mind of God."

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Opposing view: 'Dangerous thinking'

Opposing view: 'Dangerous thinking' Best way to reduce U.S. costs is to stabilize Iraq, raise our oil output.

By Samir Sumaida'ie

The Iraqi government understands its responsibilities. We have already taken over practically all costs associated with our security forces and reconstruction by the American government.

But some people are going a little bit too far looking at the Iraqi surplus and the gigantic American deficit and putting two and two together and saying, "Let's fix one with the other." This is dangerous thinking.

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