Please read 2016 Founders Day speech

For all of you that are looking for answers, please read and re-read the 2016 Founder's Day Speech that was emailed to us.

In a nutshell, Michael Tipsford is revealing that State Farm does not have the technology to keep up with artificial intelligence and robotics. He is indicating that insurance is not going to be what keeps State Farm going into the future. Furthermore, leadership does not have a vision in order to maintain the success of State Farm. He says his vision is not detailed.

Friends, we know what this is called in its most fragrant yet odorous, warm, smell that sometimes is accompanied by a vibrating sound which varies in tone and may leave a brownish stain in a person's underwear. This speech which garnered applause is nothing more than a fart or a queef, an ode to the past glory days. For just as flatulence prognosticates a possible coming bowel movement, this speech, I think, exemplifies such a movement coming down upon the employees. Please forgive me, if I am being a bit obtuse, but you can be the judge of how to define the 2016 Founder's Day speech.

IF State Farm had to answer to shareholders, maybe shareholders would have replaced the CEO by now. I will provide the pertinent portions of the speech below:

"Allow me to share just a couple thoughts on how I see the world to give you a sense of the confluence of trends that are driving the decisions we make as an organization. There are far too many of these to cover in todayís session, but allow me to highlight three key trends that are at the top of my list.

The first trend: Technological advancements and the profound impact on our business. This issue has been at the top of our list for some time and rightly so. We are experiencing what some refer to as the fourth industrial revolution which signals a profound change in who we are and how we collaborate. We are seeing increased impact in cognitive applications, the way people actually think. This is driven by the number and confluence of technological advances.

Think of things like: global hyper-connectivity, artificial intelligence, robo-advising, autonomous vehicles and robotics, the internet of things, 3D printing and big data analytics"

The second trend Iíd highlight: Consider the implications of the change in what I would call macro trends that have benefitted State Farm in the past in the 94-year history that weíre celebrating today and whether those trends will exist going forward. So what am I talking about?

In part, the success of our company can be linked to a variety of macro trends that actually coincided with our own history.

So think over this 94-year history about the explosion of the middle class, the development of the interstate system, the population growth particularly the baby boomer generation, peopleís desire to own a home and have a garage filled with cars, the rate of economic growth and forces of capitalism. As America grew and prospered, so too did State Farm.

Now consider the following trends and consider how well we are positioned to actually respond to these trends. Things like globalization, climate change, change demographics, slowed rates of overall growth, natural resources, the availability and the consumption.

Think about this notion of sharing ownership of homes and vehicles as opposed to owning them outright. Wealth accumulation and transfer that is going to occur but itís going to be concentrated in the most wealthy, job destruction and job creation and class consequences, particularly on the middle class.

As you reflect on that list, its clear that the macro trends that were so instrumental in our earlier success are going to no longer exist. This, in turn, prompts all sorts of questions about how we position State Farm to benefit from today's and tomorrow's trends.

I am often asked to give a detailed articulation of my vision for the future of State Farm. People want to know down to the details, down to the specific roles and activities they will be performing in the future. I understand the desire to have a sense of certainty about our individual futures. But that isn't how I think about our vision about our future of State Farm.

"And, so right now, the monitors have gone dark, and so we're going to be ad-libbing all along the way. OK?

So we're just going to jump into this. When I think about this company and what I want us to be, the future I see for us, folks, I think it's just unbelievably unlimited. But we should never lose sight of how well we have done over time."

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Isn't State Farm setting itself up to be an information company?

My point certainly was not that SF does not need technology. Just to be clear.

One of my points was that State Farm is forgetting how to be an insurance company. The Claims experience is awful, and apparently our entire apparatus for evaluating and paying claims has become sub-par. No technology can save us if we can't fix our business problems.

Furthermore, technology is always the easy part. I say this as someone who has designed, developed, and deployed technology solutions for nearly two decades. The hard part is ALWAYS the business, organizational, and political landscape. And since CDE, those problems have only gotten worse. And if we think they're bad now...

Great - thanks for sharing this

Very pungent analogies here. The issue I see having to pay out more than they take in is a huge smelly risk, the driverless vehicles are scaring the p--p out of SF, and bloated employee salaries are biting SF in the butt. I'm not saying everyone is overpaid, but I know many Systems Ba internals just don't have the skill sets to justify being paid six-figures for what a contract employee overseas will do for a fraction of that scat. CAT is now utilizing overseas workers, so why wouldn't SF try to reduce its bottom-line? (I really hope you see what I did there). And SF does need technology, like a toilet needs water to work. If you think they don't, your brain has been flushed (in Kool-aid). What Tipsord is saying in that speech is, I know that we were on top (because baby boomers), but now I don't know how to get us back there (because Millennials and all the kids after them). And that's tough toots for many internals who are so used to being told exact maxims to work by. Those former prognostications don't work anymore from this brave new world. And that's the rub. If Tipsord doesn't know, who does? Nobody. ICP, and then CDE, was supposed to save everyone from this dirty mess, but they were filthy, expensive flops. IMO what SF thinks will clean up this pigsty is some fresh thinking a la young, skilled technology workers. (I'm not so sure it will be enough since the odorous culture of inefficient hierarchy doesn't want to budge.) So leaders are doing the thing they know will appease shareholders and salvage profits, cut off the dirty diaper of excess. And remove the inconvenient turds for some managers who must be told what to do and keep asking for solutions SF doesn't have and won't have anytime soon. Skid row. Busted.

And also like a fart, it's completely full of sh--. And unfortunately, far too many employees have bought into it. For example, the notion that we are "way behind technologically" and that we can't compete with technologies like artificial intelligence.

Friends, right now artificial intelligence, as it pertains to insurance, is smoke and mirrors. Yes, I realize that great strides have been made in A.I., but the problem is that every vendor in the world is attempting to capitalize on the hype. Case in point: Going from IBM's advertising and in-person sales pitches, you'd think that Watson was some super-intelligent A.I. that could revolutionize how data is crunched and interpreted. The Truth: It's not. The only unique feature of Watson is that it's got a nifty built-in natural language interpreter to help make sense of unstructured data. How well that works remains to be seen. Given the quality of software products we've seen from IBM in the past, I am not optimistic.

Bottom line: It's certainly not a threat to State Farm, even if every single one of our competitors implements it tomorrow.

Another point: The things that State Farm needs to do technologically to "keep up" are far less complicated than people think. The problem is leadership. We did not need to blow billions of dollars on CDE to give customers an improved, more all-encompassing online experience. The hurdles there were more business than technology. All the money we spent and changes we made actually made it harder to give the business what it needs to "keep up."

So what this speech tells me is that Tipsy has no f---ing idea what he is talking about at all.

If State Farm wants to remain competitive, it needs to stop pretending it's a technology company and to get back to being an insurance company. It is rapidly forgetting how to do that. Unless the goal is to drastically reduce the number of policy holders.

And come to think of it, there are a number of reasons why the company might, in fact, want to do that, especially if it wanted to get out of the game completely.

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Please read 2016 Founders Day speech

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