“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.”

So were some of the first words in President Barack Obama's inaugural speech, given last month before throngs of supporters spread out across the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was a superbly delivered speech that was inspiring yet sobering, with equal parts optimism (“We can do this!”) tempered only by cold realism (“Yes, it's that bad.”). I don't know about you, but taking over a country with an economic system in such a state as ours is a problem with which I'm more than willing to let our new President wrangle, and that's just item number one on very long to-do list.

The day of President Obama's address, Claims staffers took a brief respite from the rushed nature of conducting final edits for this month's issue to listen, watch, and to be together with others from National Underwriter and Summit Business Media. After all, it's a rare event in which one obtains the exact time and place that history will unfold. Because this month's cover story from Senior Editor Christina Bramlet was so fresh in my mind — I had put the final touches on it just before heading to our auditorium to watch — I found many of President Obama's statements reverberating with me in some small way to the matter-of-fact approaches the two companies featured in this month's main feature have undertaken.