i got so much trouble on my mind

The Danger of a Single Story

2011-01-24T14:30:00.002-05:00

My boss sent this talk around and I thought was amazing. As someone who has written and even given a lot of attention to the craft of storytelling.

While it is good to start the idea of storytelling, once we start telling them we have an obligation to tell the entire story with an open heart and a responsible mind. With great power of storytelling comes great responsibility.

Chimamanda Adichie's talk has many high points, but one point rang true for me."The single story robs people of dignity ... Stories can break the dignity of people, but they can also repair that dignity."

Well said ... 19 minutes well spent.

What Snowboarding Can Teach Business Strategists

2010-10-13T23:36:00.001-04:00

There’s a lot that I’ve wanted to blog about in the last few months but the restrictions of my new job makes content that was more typical of IGSMTOMM a bit more difficult.

However, the combination of the forthcoming winter and my need to blog about strategy primed me to be moved by this recent photograph and caption that I saw in Transworld Snowboarding (a regular goldmine of strategic insight).

Here is a quick shot of the page from my phone:

The uncredited caption reads:

On sunny, powdery days, lots of time gets used up while you’re wondering. But when it comes to figuring out speed, gap distance, and danger—or just asking your friends if they think you’ll make it—time spent thinking is not time wasted. Ultimately, all these mental minutes add up working knowledge. They transform fear into focus. They help turn a leap of faith, into a calculated risk. And whether we ride away clean or ragdoll into oblivion, we’re always a little bit smarter afterward.

Well said. Reason #2,469 why snowboarding makes me a better (business)person.

Never let the situation get bigger than you

2010-07-19T07:49:00.000-04:00

This is what I have learned from the LeDecision incident. It has been
a few weeks now and I am finally starting to gain perspective on the
matter and trying to learn something from this to salvage something
for myself. So here goes.

There was a sports commentator on NPR (yes, they exist) who said
something to the effect of, I felt like was genuinely shocked up there
with Jim Gray. As if at the last possible minute he realized the
spectacle he created was a bad idea, and how bad the advice he
received was.

Even though he had decided long before, and the interview and his
answers were scripted, the situation was out of control.

He let the situation get bigger than himself. Even for the ex-King.

Although we bemoan scripted Supreme Court justice confirmation
hearings, or wish our President would show more spontaneous passion,
these indeed would be mistakes. All are in control of the situation.
Not to say bad things can't happen - just that they know they have are
in control of situations and not vice versa.

We can do the same in our lives.

A good salesperson knows a really important meetings outcome has been
scripted and socialized with all the stakeholders beforehand.

A good poker player will never see her chips as money, but as units.
As soon as she sees dollars, it's time to leave.

A band always keeps a few songs in its back pocket for its encore to
finish with a bang.

My wife scripted our wedding ceremony but adapted to the rain.

All of these moments have the illusion of spontaneity and fluidity,
but all require command of their respective situations with
calculation, practice and strategy. The big moments in your life
should never been unscripted, just seem that way.

LeDecison did none of that. But we all can be better in our everyday lives.

Yes, we all can act better than Lebron.

It's Official--cleveland Is a Verb

2010-07-08T22:17:00.001-04:00

cleve·land

[kleev-luh nd]

-- verb
1. to be the subject of a sports-based injustice. My kid's little league team had a 1 run lead and we got clevelanded by the umpire.

2. to defy statistically favorable circumstances and still yield an unfavorable result. e.g. snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Man, you prepared all day for that presentation and still clevelanded it up.

3. to remember any single or combination of the following people or events: Red Right 88, The Drive, The Fumble, the Shot, Jose Mesa, Art Modell, 2007 ALCS, or LeDecision. My friend and I clevelanded last night over a beer.

*never to be capitalized ... ever.

A Google Chrome Fail?

2010-05-03T10:28:00.000-04:00

Does anyone else find this funny? I mean, I use Chrome, Gmail and hell this blog is on blogger.com ... don't you think they should work together?

I am calling it ... Google-fail.

Should Schools Bribe Kids? Should Businesses Do It Better?

2010-04-14T18:55:00.000-04:00

** cross-posted at my day job at the the kasina Blog. I don't like to do this often, but I think that this really interesting in terms beyond asset management **

I know I am on this purpose and mastery-driven compensation kick in the last few months month, but it's everywhere I look. Time's cover story this month, "Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?" has a lot of interesting implications for our industry.

They cover the controversial work of Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, who is testing the effects of paying kids for school performance.

Fryer ran different experiments in paying kids to learn across the in 4 cities. The results are summarized in this graphic:

While I don't want to start a policy debate (Fryer himself has received death threats), it is very interesting to note that the classes in Dallas and Washington had more favorable results. For instance, the Dallas kids had reading scores that went up by .4 standard deviations, the equivalent of 5 extra months of schooling. Why? Because they are incentivizing behaviors, not results.

Kids may respond better to rewards for specific actions because there is less risk of failure. They can control their attendance; they cannot necessarily control their test scores. The key, then, may be to teach kids to control more overall -- to encourage them to act as if they can indeed control everything, and reward that effort above and beyond the actual outcome.

Or this nugget form says Joshua Zoia, who founded the much publicized KIPP Academy:

Our ultimate goal is to get kids to be intrinsically motivated. But we have to get kids hooked in. We have to meet them where they are.

In short, what if we substitute the word "kids" with "employees," can we learn something? Could we do something different in our compensation plans this year or next? To paraphrase Dan Pink, it's scary sometimes to look at what social science knows, and business ignores.

Please feel free to call/write to discuss!

The Hardened, Yet Green Fields of the Indians Fan’s Mind

2010-04-05T00:08:00.004-04:00

… with deep love and tribute to A. Bartlett Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind”

It breaks your heart. It’s designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, but for the last 62 years it has withered in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings with squalor and despair, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the Fall alone – only to be comforted by the idea that the Cleveland Frowns stand to take the Tribe’s place. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of pain and anguish coursing through your veins, and just then when the days are all twilight, when you can barely take the pain anymore, it thankfully stops. Today, at midnight of April 5, ending Easter Sunday, a day of filled with sun and hope, it starts, yet we know it will end quickly and the summer will soon be gone.

Somehow, the spring crept up on us this time. Maybe it was due to the Olympics which inserted an extra week of sports that allowed us Indians fans a week of reprieve as we watched Shaun White sail through the air in a blaze of red, white, and blue. Or it could have been the crazy upset-ridden March Madness which left our brackets in Cleveland-like wreckage. Whatever the reason, it seems to me that I have invested less and less in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps me fat, slow, and lazy. I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, where the Indians would at least be in contention and picked by the gurus at Sports Illustrated to finish at the top, only disappoint at the end, but this year we are picked to finish dead last. Nothing grand, but some things, a hope of relevant competition in the AL Central, and yet that work is just time wasted. The real activity is done in the AL East – the almighty, dollar-hungry, power division that controls most of baseball. There, in that elite corner, an old poet called Inevitability faithfully dwells.

And here on April 5, for Cleveland fans, where it figuratively rains all day, Dame Inevitability never loses. She was in Yankee Stadium last year with as the Bombers danced upon Yankee Stadium with arms outstretched. We traded our blue and white for Philly red to cheer on Charlie Manuel and Cliff Lee. Dame Inevitability, sensing our presence, delivered her justice swiftly after six games. The goddess looks at the hardened, yet quasi-traitorous Cleveland fans, and couldn’t help but smirk.

Today, Cleveland is on its heels, half sobbing, half laughing in hysteria, again, picked to finish dead last in the AL Central. The summer will not pass fast enough this year. Sighing, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1997, the seventh game of the World Series, they day after my 22^nd birthday, perhaps the greatest baseball game that could have been played in Indians history, when Jaret Wright, loose and easy, had pitched 6 1/3 on 3 days rest. Tony Fernandez hits a single that brings Jim Thome and Marquis Grissom home, and with it all hope began to spring forth. Not only was it to erase 49 years of baseball pain – they were on the precipice of vindicating a city for all of its sins. It was 2-1, two outs, bottom of the ninth, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm of your neck forever. Now Edgar Renteria, a product of the Marlins farm system, hits a soft shot over Charlie Nagy. Nagy’s glove just glancing a ball which brings Craig Counsel home and feeds the jaws of defeat – all those sins continue to rest on the shoulders of the Tribe, and grow heavier in the years to come.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game – not because in Florida or New York they could win because Cleveland lost, or that we couldn’t finish the Red Sox in the ALCS 10 years later. In all of this, there is a certain justice, and reminder to Indians fans of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it had promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

Make Them Right

2010-02-10T16:49:00.005-05:00

Like a crazy person, I have been training for my Level III Certification of snowboarding instruction and just recently completed a two-day preparation at the luxuriously posh Blue Knob Resort in Central PA.

While I was told I was not ready for the exam, I did pick up a nugget that I have been thinking a lot about.

During my teaching segment (where I had to teach about 9 other experienced instructors something to improve their riding), I asked an open question to the group, and one instructor gave me an unexpected response. I thought it was wrong, and I said, "I am still looking for an answer."

My examiner, Ted, would have failed my personal riding (boo), but passed my teaching segment. However, in my debrief, Ted gave me a bit of advice that has hung with me for the past week:

One part I didn't like is when you shut Evan down in your teaching segment. You need to find a way to make him right. You asked a question, and though he gave you a different answer than you expected, you need to find a way to build on what he said if you want him to improve during your segment. Otherwise, he will just shut down. He is a Level II instructor with 10 years of experience, so his answer makes sense to him. You need to make him right.

What great advice. If I have to do this in my $12/hour job, why can I do it in my regular job more often? In fact, why can't we all make those around us right more than we tell them they are wrong.

Still noodling on it ... good stuff, I say.

20 Things About Me...

2009-11-11T09:01:00.003-05:00

OK, so I am a year late to this post ... I was cleaning out my email and I found a draft of the 20 things about me that I was responding to on Facebook. It never got published, so for all 2 of you who read this blog and might care, here goes:

1) I am a pretty hardcore ENTJ.

2) Despite a Kantian philosophy education at “that school in Cambridge” I am changing from a rationalist to an empiricist. It bothers me and keeps me up at night.

3) I was pretty active in the New York underground poker scene about 5 years ago. I actually was allowed to play rake-free at the infamous, but now defunct Playstation (While on poker, I believe that the true World Series of Poker should be determined by a game of pot-limit SHOE rotation. The luck-skill ratio in no limit hold’em is just too slanted toward the luck side of the equation. For more on this see, Mason Malmuth’s work.)

4) I am a natural lefty, but I have Chinese parents – so I am a righty. That’s just how Asians roll.

5) I first hit on my wife at a dance she was putting on for Chinatown teens in Phillips Brooks House while she was a camp counselor. I am shameless.

6) She is pretty much the only person that can get me *really mad* -- but that’s because I love her. Consequently, we are huge fans of marriage therapy, and we’d recommend it to anyone. While I don’t know if it “saved” us, it surely has made our lives much better.

7) At this point in my career, I would totally be cool with being Mr. Mom. I love my kids so much that it sometimes paralyzes me. I am saddened by the truism that my boss, Steven, shared with me: “You will never love your parents as much as they love you.” I do believe that that it is a very poignant axiom. It has shaped my views on life and fatherhood immensely.

8) Despite now being a hardcore Democrat, I blindly worked for Martin Hoke’s campaign (a former Republican congressman) in high school. Why? Because everyone else did. It gets me mad that I didn’t have more of a spine to figure out what I believed in high school for issues ranging from politics to religion. I look back sometimes and see myself as such a lemming.

9) I wish I found Unitarian Universalism earlier in my life. It has filled a spiritual void for me in a way that I am better able to understand other religions, and has made my life richer. It is *so* not for everyone, but it totally works for me and makes me a more curious person … and it is nice to find other people who drive Subarus.

10) I wish I found snowboarding earlier in my life. I love being on the snow, but I have feet like a duck (wide/flat) and ski boots are a killer.

11) The two closest moments I have ever come to Heaven is waking up with my whole family in the same bed, and snowboarding on a clear day with nothing but you, a sheet of clean powpow, and an iPod full of tunes.

12) Despite Cleveland being an ex-steel football town that has LeBron James (for now), baseball is my first love as a fan. I was catatonic for a week after the ‘97 series and I still cry at the end of Major League (Harry Doyle: “The Indians win it … oh my god, the Indians win it.”) I don’t even play the damn sport … in fact, I suck at it. Weird.

13) I am conflicted because I love to box, but I am a huge supporter of Peace Games.

14) Despite flying over a million miles (literally), I still stare out of the window like a 7 year old schoolboy every approach into New York with wide-eyed wonderment. No really, how do they do it?

15) I credit my grandfather with my love of music. I will never forget when I was 8, he told me: “If you listen to 1 hour of music every day, you will be a happier person.” I’ve tried to follow that advice ever since.

16) I think the 7^th and 7^th chord are the most powerful sounds in music. They are both universal and diverse – from Count Basie, to Otis Redding, to Led Zeppelin, to the White Stripes. You can’t help but close your eyes and feel the music pull on your heart.

17) I may change this, but I think that Things Fall Apart may be the most perfect hip-hop album ever made.

18) The hardest class I have ever taken: Math 160’s at the U of C where 30 started the class and 6 finished it. I spent 4 hours on the final exam, only wrote 3 pages of proofs in my blue book and scored 28/100 … it was a B+. When I asked Professor Corti if I should go to Honors Analysis … he took a long drag of his clove cigarette, blew it in my face, and said, “Yes … but you will suffer greatly.” The second hardest – Mrs. Juergen’s 11^th grade English honors class. She gave me a D on a paper I wrote about Billy Budd and since then I dare not pick up Melville.

19) I fancy myself a pretty decent cook. My favorite thing is to rummage through random ingredients left in ones fridge/freezer/pantry and thinking what meals I can make out of it. Without this, I am convinced Katherine would have starved in med school.

20) My favorite restaurant in the city is Annisa. I would eat Anita Lo’s dumplings all day if I could afford it financially or physically.

Happy Christina Day

2009-09-11T15:49:00.002-04:00

I was at WTC today for work ironically, and felt incredibly sad.

Rather than dither on with an unncessarily long post, I will just say, Happy Christina Day.

Be good to each other.

A Sermon (really) on Storytelling

2009-08-21T20:16:00.008-04:00

Many, including myself, may find it hard to believe that I go to church. Moreover, it may be even more shocking that I gave a service earlier this month. There have been a few people from the society who have asked for the text of the service, so I am putting it up here on the blog.

-------

The Lost Art of Storytelling

Mike Ma

August 9, 2009

First Unitarian Society of Rockland County

Good morning! Since today’s service is about storytelling, I’d like to tell share with you a story told by my barber. Not sure any of you have caught NYT’s One in 8 Million series, but I was shocked to see that my barber, Joe, was featured a few months ago. Have a listen to his story as he tells it.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html#/joe_manniello

Isn’t that a great story? In about 2 minutes you learn all you need to know about Joe Manniello. For me, his fascinating story transforms the mundane experience of a haircut (in Port Authority of all places!) to the remarkable.

And in a nutshell, that is the power of stories. About 3 years ago I read a book by a guy named Dan Pink called A Whole New Mind. In it, he argues that to be successful today in business or in any other field, you need to be right brain oriented. From there he describes the skills of the right brain – play, empathy, meaning, design, symphony, and my favorite of the lot – story.

Much of what I am going to say is openly plagiarized from his book. I’ve bought his book several times for myself and others. I have hired him in the past as a conference speaker and paid him handsomely, so I will assume that I am welcome to an hour of indulgence to share with you. If you haven’t read it, you should.

So, I’d like to spend the next hour exploring storytelling with you in a few parts. In the first part, I’d like to frame how ubiquitous and universal storytelling is. In the second, I’d like to explore some of the forms of story telling and how they are changing. In the third, if I get there, I’d like to talk about why I think that this is important to us Unitarian Universalists.

I. Story as necessary and universal

As children, and even as parents, we aren’t really taught the value of stories. Rather we are taught to esteem facts as knowledge. That Pi is 3.14592… (whatever). That there are 5280 feet in a yard, that the lake in Walden pond was 100.1 feet deep at its deepest point. I was forced to memorize all these things as they were deemed valuable things for me to know. Stories; however, we view as distraction from this. They daydreamer is considered to lazy, distracted, and unserious about her studies.

However, in the days of Google and the internet, facts are of little use or differentiation. You can be a Nobel laureate or a beggar in an internet café and basically have access to the same bit of information. Stories however, are the map that makes sense of fact – and as we get access to more facts I question if we have really ramped our story telling and listening ability to help make sense of all we can avail ourselves to.

Looking back, true learning was tied to story. I got a philosophy degree, and all the great thinkers used story to make their difficult analytical claims. Know Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and you can probably figure out why he thinks the Philosopher King should rule the Republic. Know Descartes’ schizophrenic talk with his Evil Deceiver, and you can trace how he gets to cogito ergo sum.

The use of story didn’t just stay with me during my academic life. In my business, strategy consulting, “hypothesis-driven analysis” is the most vaunted methodology used by McKinsey and Company. While effective, one can really a euphemism for being able to craft a quantitative story about what we think a client should be doing … and most likely, the consultants have come to that conclusion before we started the project. We are just cavemen with powerpoint and excel crafting a story.

Just turn on the TV, or the interwebs and you will see that Story is important. Two economists., Deirdre McLoseky and Ajo Kramer calculate that persuasion, advertising, consulting, etc, accounts for 25% of the US’ GDP. If story is half of those, then Story is worth about $1T to the US economy.

These are not egghead macroeconomics on a page – these have real, local effects. To illustrate, I buy all my wine from Grape D’Vine in Tappan. I strolled in to here after a library visit next door and struck up a chat with Joe Printz, the owner and now a dear friend of mine. “Why did you get in this business?” I asked him. “Mike, I’ve been searching my whole life for the 100 point, $20 bottle of wine.” That was my Jerry Maguire moment, you had me at hello. I have very rarely bought wine anywhere else since.

And it isn’t just business. As many of you know, my wife, Katherine, is a pediatrician, and so we spend a lot of time talking about healthcare these days. I’d hold that story may hold a key to reducing our healthcare costs overall. Let me ask you all a question. How long do you think a doctor lets you talk before she speaks? Guesses?

20 years ago, researchers videotaped doctor-patient encounters, they found doctors interrupted their patients after an average of 21 seconds. When another group did the same thing more recently, there was some improvement guesses? Anyone?

They now interrupted after 23 seconds. Doctors stunk at listening to people’s stories.

During Katherine’s second year, she was forced to take a class in narrative medicine. She read William Carlos Williams, I think, between her pharmacology lectures. The idea was that doctors needed to develop their right brain as well as their left. That listening would improve the quality of care and connection to the patient. That you through story and empathy, a physician could be a more complete healer.

So now instead of “What’s wrong with your stomach?” You will hear questions like “Tell me about your life.” And Columbia is not alone. Today, 3 out of 4 medical schools offer classes in humanities. Belleuve Hospital, in fact, actually publishes its own literary review.

Does it work? So far, the results look encouraging. Dr. Rita Sharon, has been at the center of this narrative medicine movement. To illustrate its efficacy, they developed “parallel charts” where on one chart, they have your regular medical stuff, and on the second, medical students write narratives about their patients and chronicle their own emotions. According to the study, those who did both charts had better interviewing and technical skills than those who did not.

Moreover, stories may make us safer. I was telling my father-in-law about this service. He is chief of police for Amtrak and he was moved by this idea of story as well. We were discussing the recent 60 Minutes piece on the TSA’s onerous screening processes. He only had one major complaint about the TSA, that they only screen for things, and do not interview travelers. He said, “Look people are always going to find a way to beat the scanner, but it’s harder to pull off a lie.” He believes that a story is probably the most important thing in screening a passenger. And that I think that this is true, if you have ever been to Heathrow airport, their immigration officers are some of the very best at that. “Tell me about your consulting firm,” “What firms will you be seeing today?”

So far, I’ve explained how stories can make us richer, healthier, and safer, and you may ask yourself, “So what?” I think I’d be leaving a lot out if I left it to that. Stories are good for the soul. They reach us in an emotional place where we can really understand what is or should be important to us. As E.M. Forster said, “The queen died and the king died” is a fact. “The queen died and the king died of a broken heart,” well, that’s a story.

I’d like to share with you a particularly poignant story that I got a lot from StoryCorps' web site. We will talk a bit more about StoryCorps later, but right now I’d like to focus on the message and lessons being exchanged from mother to daughter, and daughter back to mother.

http://bit.ly/bnk1v

Pretty powerful stuff. With that, I’d like to open this up to the group to share either how stories impact their lives today or if there have been particular stories that have shaped their life.

II. The Form of Stories

Many of you are familiar with the story of Harry Potter. A young orphan boy senses realizes he has magical abilities. He receives a calling to head to Hogwarts School of Magic to become the wizard he is supposed to be. There, he confronts the specters of his parents past and many more and takes his seat as the most powerful wizard ever known. In short, he leaves London, he answers his calling, and returns a man.

Many of you may be familiar with Joseph Conrad’s work, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” He argues that all myths that have survived the test of time have the same structure of the monomyth:

Departure – the hero answers the call.

Initiation – the hero answers a series of challenges

Return – the hero returns wiser and stronger to

That this is so pervasive and so widely shared across cultures does strongly indicate that there is some form that pulls on our heart strings in synchronized rhythm. This is the form from Jesus to Neo in the Matrix. From Luke Skywalker, to Sonia Sotomayor.

This form is so widespread and universal, there is an argument to be made that the form of the story is as important as the story itself.

Technology is also changing the form of storytelling. The clip I played for you before was from StoryCorps. Some of you may have heard this on NPR, but for others StoryCorps in short enables every day people tell their stories or interview people close to them. Head downtown to SoHo to the StoryCorp trailer with a loved one, and in an hour, you get a professional copy of your interview copy. Another copy of the story is archived in the Library of Congress as part of an oral history of America.

Technology has democratized storytelling, so it saddens me at times that we are blame technology for making us such bad storytellers and listeners. StoryCorps proves that we no longer need to be Tolstoy or Homer to tell stories. Every single person can do it and it every single person can listen and save their stories for posterity’s sake. What a wonderful asset to storytelling.

About two months ago, we were having a discussion about technology and how it has eroded the attention of our young people where they can no longer spend time reading books. Many members of this society were throwing Facebook and twitter under the bus, and I wanted to keep that moment since I knew I would have my day up here.

As I shared that same day, I think we are all better off to embrace technology ourselves in some form. Let’s try to find the space where we can share and connect with our younger generation’s use of technology – and storytelling is no exception. For instance, Hemmingway purportedly said his best story he ever wrote was only six words long: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”

I checked. That was 35 characters long, including punctuation, well within Twitter’s limit of 140 characters. Point is, we need to adapt the way we tell stories to other generations today. If we expect them to read Dickens, don’t we have an obligation to check out Facebook?

I’ve tried my hand at this and on my Facebook page, there is my six-word memoir. “Told you, not all philosophers starve.” This was cheeky retort to my very Asian parents who footed the bill of my expensive liberal arts education.

Luckily, there are much better examples of six-word memoirs and stories out there. Some are compiled in an aptly titled book, “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” Some favorites I had were Steven Colbert’s “Well, I thought it was funny.” Or Amy Sohn’s, “Gave commencement address. Became sex columnist.” An anonymous one made me laugh. “Premenstrual syndrome again. Hide the Nutella.”

While I can’t make everyone twitter, I’d like to see if you would explore a six word memoir or story with us. Let’s try to expand our storytelling muscles a bit here.

III. UU Implications

There’s rarely a service that goes by that we don’t ask the question, “How do you describe Unitarian Universalism?”

I am here because of a successful story. But it isn’t an elegant one. Two good friends of mine said that they started visiting a UU congregation in Boston where they live. I asked what it is like. They told me a story: “It’s a bunch of recovering Catholics and Jews who care about people and drive Subarus. You’d love it.”

With that, I am here with you a full year and a half later.

Other descriptions I’ve enjoyed as well. Rev. Jef who was with us in May shared that he described it to dying cancer patients and their families as “Believing in up to one god, and everyone gets in.” (You could rewrite that to a six word story “Maybe God. But everyone gets in.”).

We have no Bible, no Koran, no Torah, we don’t even have a little red book. We have the Library of Congress-like mishmash of spiritual excerpts, not exactly a rallying body of text. All we have is our stories.

In my very first meeting as a member in June, I was exposed to the idea of trying to grow this society and perhaps leave this building. While this is all fine and good, any idea of expansion without a cohesive story I fear will be quite futile. If we care about growing this society, it will be the work for a while to define what the story is. Not just for UUs, but for this particular society and our mission in context of the community here in Rockland County.

I’d like to open it to the floor to see if anyone has had good experience of telling the UU story.

IV. Closing

I will leave aside our megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur a second. I’ve explained challenges to our growth, but I’d like to share with you why I stay and come as often as I can. Mostly, because I enjoy hearing your stories. They enrich my life, and I believe make me a better person. So thank you for sharing your stories with me – I hope you continue to do so here and with all who touch your life.

Thank you as well for listening to mine.

Told You, Not All Philosophers Starve: Liz Coleman's views on Liberal Education

2009-07-28T00:13:00.004-04:00

The title of this post is my six word memior of my life to date. It is a tounge in cheek rejoinder to my parents who thought I was nuts to drop Biology to become a Philosophy major.

It runs in contrast to many of the conversations I have been having with my cousins and younger people who have their whole life mapped out in high school straight through to the degree that they are going to get to the job they hope to have. They are just "executing the plan."

Similarly, I have many personal friends who are quite successful in life who may understand all the nuances of purchasing commodities pricing and how it affects basic materials valuations, but may care or know little about healthcare reform.

This talk makes me sad.

Luckily, Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College, makes an incredibly compelling argument that we need to recast our view of liberal arts education at the TED conference earlier this year. She argues that it as a waystation to professional expertise, but rather a practicum to undertand how to connect to the civic good.

It evoked the feelings from my Orientation Week at the University of Chicago more than 15 years ago. There is a relatively odd tradition -- the Aims of Education Address during Orientation Week. Imagine the first or second night of a realtively socially awkward, and inebriated week. Nine hundred first-years, are carted into Rockefeller Chapel where we had to listen to some guy use the death of Socrates as the backdrop of why we were here and what the point of a truly liberal education was.

While the details of the talk escape me and I recollect hating have to have summer reading, I am thankful that this idea was impressed upon me so early in college. It was the first of many indellible marks on my life that came from my schooling: I was taught that education was there to make you a good citizen. To teach you to think for yourself as a human being. To inspire you to belive that you are not a nameless cog. To admonish you if you every become one, or think you are one.

There's hope, and I don't think you'll starve by commiting yourself (not too late as adults) and your loved ones to a liberal education.

This is worth a few minutes to listen to what the lady has to say.

St. John in London - My first real restaurant review

2008-12-04T19:15:00.017-05:00

So, I never do the food porn/restaurant review thing, but I was eating alone tonight and I had to keep myself occupied. So tonight, I kept tasting notes at the legendary St. John in Smithfield, touted as the #16 Best Restaurant in the World.

I am bummed to report that it failed those expectations by a solid margin.

Here is what I thought:

Ambiance/Scence -- The first thing you notice is the smell. It envelopes you, a well- pampered pig bathing in butter. Decorwise, St. John is the epitome of a "Clean, Well-Lit Place" -- in fact, I could see Hemmingway's short story being set there . It bathes in austerity -- the walls are white, The floor is gray, and you aren't sure if the white-clad servers are servers or were just butchering a pig in the back before saying hello. There is no art to speak of. Chairs are hard and uncomfortable. Tables are covered in butcher paper, as if to indict you as an accomplice to murdering meat.

Service -- is competent and perfunctory, but certainly nothing special. The place was continually busy, but my server's actions made her intentions clear -- she was there to put meat on the table, not even expeditiously. I agreed with this review that said it was "friendly, but slightly awkward."

Food -- OK, so here we go ... on to the show.

Appetizer -- Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad

I loved this dish. amittedly, I am biased since I have been dreaming about this since I saw it featured on A Cook's Tour. I think that this could be the appetizer to my last meal. I mean, so simple. Bone marrow? Just oven roast for 25 minutes and spread over perfectly toasted bread. So delicious, so elegant. The richness of this with the bitter parsley and the salty capers in the salad was just a wonderful combination of textures and tastes.

My only (minor) criticism is that you really have to watch how much of the sea salt and the parsley salad you add to the bread since it can get really too salty quickly. Ration it properly!

Main -- Middlewhite and Chard w/ side of Sprout Tops

First, let me say I love pork fat. I think it's wonderful. However, this peice of meat needed instructions. You needed to eat the pig in radians out from the center such that you get a piece of succulent lean meat with a piece of fat. In my hunger I accidentally ate an enormous peice of fat by itself, which just ruined the rest of my meal on a texture and taste basis. I learned the hard way. The bits of meat that I did get once I learned to layer my bites were wonderfully cooked, but again underseasoned.

In addition, the chard was overcooked and had a slightly burnt taste to the carmelization (too high heat?) while the Sprout Tops were basically an afterthought -- unevenly cooked with varying degrees of softness and bitterness and also underseasoned.

Not a good showing overall.

Dessert -- Apple Sorbet and Polish Vodka

Many of you may be asking, "Why would you ever order something like this? I mean, what are you some sort of daisy?" That's a fair question. My answer is that a) I felt the pork fat coming out of my pores after the entree and b) I thought the apple would go nicely with the pig taste in my mouth.

Wrong. The sorbet just doesn't stand up to the chilled vodka. I eneded up shooting the vodka (hey you can take the boy out of Cleveland, but ...) and then enjoying the sorbet, which was wonderful. Nice layers of cinammon and ginger to accent the apple, but not enough to save the dish.

In sum: A Respectful Meh

So in all, I treat it as a pilgrimage to the place that started the hole nose to tail movement, which I can respect and get with. However, it was too uneven in food and service to even given a mention in the best restaurants at which I have ever eaten. Glad I went, but never will repeat, especially at 66 quid for the meal.

Learning About My Own Learning: A Hearty Thank You to Rita Koklauner

2008-11-07T23:09:00.005-05:00

Usually, a facebook reconnect involves getting in touch with friends, but I had a recent friend who was able to reconnect me with ... well, me. At least my learning.

A distant friend that I vaguely remember, Chris Sanyk, wrote an incredibly detailed account of what it was like at Forest Elementary School in North Olmsted, Ohio. Through his words, I realize how lucky I was to receive the education that I did as a first and second grader. I really am so truly lucky.

I don't know how Chris remembered everything with such vivid detail, but it created an internal awakening of a time many years ago. He came from another school and described what we had described in the first time at Forest:

Our teacher, Mrs. Koklauner, was a nice old gray-haired grandma type, and had a very calm and wise air about her. On one of the first days of classes, we set up the rules for the class. At Pine, we had had a list of a dozen or fifteen rules such as "always raise your hand and wait to be called on before talking" and "don't chew gum" "don't fight" etc. Instead of making us memorize a bunch of dumb rules like that, we held a class discussion and worked out our own moral/ethical principles which we all agreed we should abide by. Our classroom had only three rules: Respect yourself, respect others, and respect that which does not belong to you.

Compared to the way things were at Forest school, Pine was a like a petty military dictatorship, and Forest virtually a Utopia. As students, even the youngest of us, we governed ourselves as we saw fit. If we felt that we needed permission for something, we asked for it. Those of us who were more independent were accorded that bit of self-authority that we needed. If absolutely necessary, we sometimes might have to get permission to do something retroactively. Requirements were only made of us in terms of doing our work, being prepared when our study groups had their meetings, and conducting ourselves in a manner which enabled everyone to get along and do what they needed to get done.

And this part made me laugh:

"Mike Ma was my chess playing nemesis. Out of all the kids in the class who played chess regularly, he was the only one who I could never seem to beat. Other than that, we didn't really do much. He was a year younger than me, and I think moved away or something because after I went to third grade I don't remember hearing anything about him."

A few things I take from this:
1. I am reaffirmed in the fact that I am sending Sean to a Montessori School. I basically think what I was doing was a Montessori school on steroids now.

2. Traditional classrooms suck. I moved away from North Olmsted to Westlake. My new school system didn't know what to do with a 3rd grade kid who was doing 6th grade math and 5th grade english ... so they just made me repeat everything. I remember being bored from 3rd grade to high school, with the exception of all four years of honors english at Westlake. I think perhaps this is where my intellectual impatience stems from ... so many years of being bored.

3. Thank your teachers now ... today. Yesterday. This stroll down memory lane promted me to google stalk Mrs. Koklauner, but unfortunately, all I found was that she passed just 11 months ago. Damn.

For entrepreneurs, it's a new, old day

2008-11-05T08:40:00.007-05:00

While I woke up this morning with a large helping of disbelief, wonderment, and tears at what I saw last night, I now find myself sitting at my desk. It's like any other morning. I am here to do work. To help build a great company.

For entrepreneurs, it is indeed a new, old day.

For entrepreneurs, be you red or blue, I bet your day, today, looks a lot like mine. Trying to figure out your cash flow or secure capital. Retaining your customers. Keeping your troops motivated.

I was reminded of this flying back from Las Vegas last week and the man sitting next to me saw the image of McCain on my laptop as I was watching his appearance on Meet the Press. He interrupted me with a light tap on the shoulder. With misplaced trust, he asked me with a clear Texas drawl, "He doesn't have a chance, does he?"

"I don't think so. But you really never know," I replied.

From there, we began to trade stories of building businesses. We had totally different businesses (me in consulting and hi-tech, him in marinas and boats), and I am convinced we shared vastly different political views.

However, we shared shockingly similar stories about how we were both down on luck at times with our backs against the wall. How it affected your self-esteem. How it affected our family lives. How we cared about winning, more than money. How business was the best game we ever played.

Like the ongoing war between skiers and snowboarders, I realize that for entrepreneurs, the differences are, writ large, petty. That we may have different views of the mountain, but we both love the mountain.

As I wrote on the kasina blog and to quote the new president-elect, we are not as divided as our politics suggest.

Time to get the lead out, entrepreneurs.

Go.

Why I Like David Brooks

2008-10-15T22:36:00.007-04:00

My college roommate Sam has asked me why I like David Brooks. His comment to my last post was this:

But I can't believe that Brooks is your idol. My dad said this about him the other day: "All his columns are the same. They go right...then left...then right...then left...then RIGHT!!!" Picture my dad moving his hands back and forth and shouting on that last one. You should do another post on why he's your idol.

First, Sam's dad is a very prominent academic. And I mean very with a capital VERY ... so let me tread lightly. For my money, if David Brooks has written something, I almost always think that it's worth 10 minutes of my time. As far as his politcs go, he is to the right of me, but I will always read his columns ... people don't have to be Keith Olbermann for me to like them.

Hell, I read the Drudge Report.

Back to Brooks, and why...

1. He places a premium on ideas -- In his columns, I can see the internal discourse that is happening. While I may end up a partisan, I do not go there unreflectively. A lot of my thoughts and feelings are developed through dialogue, and that to me, is a good thing. I go to him to satisfy that philosopher in me, and I am happy about that.

For instance, you can look at this column "The Class War Before Palin," and you can see how while he values the intellectual inquiry more than the output.

On a non-partisan issue, I thought his post on China, "Harmony and the Dream," was one of the most insightful pieces on China that I have ever read.

2. He does take stands -- I mean ... read "Hoping It's Biden." or "Why Experience Matters". for instance, he writes:

I would have more sympathy for this view [of the everyman in public office] if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

3. You don't know where he's going ... and he's insightful without being preachy - Contrary to Sam's dad's views, I don't think he is so predictable. He can do 1) and 2) and do it in an accesible way for everyone. He makes me laugh and think at the same time. See "Suprise Me Most":

The candidates probably won’t take this kind of advice. But remember: Weirdness wins. Surprise me most.

I have no problem with people being centrists. These are hard issues that people are calling, and there is an internal dialogue that needs to be asked for a thorough examination. For me, he is the intellectual conscience of democratic liberty. If you want to follow what I think you can check me out on del.icio.us.

Or to say another way, I think of David Brooks on my shoulder whispering, "Yeah you all can vote, but you have to really think to earn it ... let me help."

That's worth 10 minutes for me. I mean, who's better?

Prediction: The Right Brained Person Will Win Tonight's Debate

2008-10-15T13:00:00.005-04:00

I actually don't know who it will be tonight, but I had a feeling who it has been.

During last week's second debate, I posted on Facebook that I was shocked how often I felt McCain focused on saying "I" a lot, and how much Obama focused on "you."

I wanted to check this, and did a quick word count on the 2nd debate transcript and here is the breakdown:

	I	You
Obama	127	107
McCain	153	106

This is a very narrow test, but it confirms my gut feeling and I think the larger political critique of McCain's seeming disconnected with voters, especially in a town hall meeting.

This was supported by my columnist idol, David Brooks, surely no liberal, who explained this about Obama's right brained empathic abilities:

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he's a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, 'David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you're only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.' And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

Casting my personal politics aside (I am admittedly in the bag for "That One"), I would caution against the idea that the financial crisis has moved this debate and election is really about hard core left-brained pocketbook policy ideas.

I would say this has always been much more about the right brained abilities. I hope my author idol/BFF, Dan Pink, would agree.

I actually don't care what the New York Times says, that's what I am watching for tonight, regardless of who "wins."

Scraping through the New Yorker veneer

2008-10-08T15:56:00.010-04:00

When I lived in the West Village, I once knocked over a small, elderly lady in a grocery store. I turned the corner from the pasta aisle to the oil aisle and then my very large 25 lb. backpack hit knocked her over mid-turn.

Obviously, she was irate and I remember the following line, "How can you walk like that? That's like another person in there!"

I looked at her and said, "Ma'am, I am sorry. But it looks like you are going to live."

She looked at me blankly at first. And then burst in to enormous laughter. And then I joined in. I saw her later at the seafood counter, and we shared another good laugh.

It was definitely a New York moment -- one that I will never forget.

* * * * *

I was watching the Daily Show and I was reminded how much I would really like to take issue with the people that people are rude. Watch this clip of Sarah Vowell of NPR fame. (sorry for the crappy embedding)

I realized that I felt the same way.

I too went to public schools.

I too grew up in, well not Wasilla, but in Ohio.

I too came to New York grudgingly. In short, my wife made me, or it was curtains for our relationship.

I too believed that the city was dirty, people are rude, and its cost prohibitive to have fun.

But now I am in that latter camp that Sarah mentioned, I don't understand why every dumps on New Yorkers as a bunch of arugula-eating elitists.

I think that it's just that most think that New Yorkers are rude, and I'd like to dispell that.

What my fellow Midwesterners need to realize that New Yorkers live in a paradoxical quandary of space. Basically, we have none to ourselves. So, we all have defense mechanisms .... they can be sunglasses, our iPods, or sometimes a just pretending we are talking on our cell phone.

But it is just a veneer. We don't have space of our own, so we have a natural inclination to defend. However, you can imagine one thing that New Yorkers are good at as another consequence is that we are great at sharing. I mean, how else are you going to pack 8 million people into a city (oh and by the way, make it the safest big city in America, so sayeth the FBI)?

Of course, we could reach out, and I personally do my part to try and help lost tourist souls midtown. We need to be more proactive in that end, and we are working on that.

But in the meanwhile, please don't be afraid to approach us, or ask us for help. We are some of the best sharers in the world. Yes we have our quirks, but who doesn't.

My encouragement to everyone is to just scrape through the New Yorker veneer. On the subway, in Times Square, at Ground Zero-- ask us a question. I think you too, might be suprised.

Internet Snakes on a Plane

2008-10-07T07:47:00.003-04:00

(I admit the title has nothing to do with the post ... I've been wanting to say it for a while)

Currently flying to San Francisco, and I am heartened by the fact that I have finally been able to get wireless access on a place, and it is pretty decent via GoGo.

Bandwidth results from Speakeasy ...
Download Speed: 2792 kbps (349 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 216 kbps (27 KB/sec transfer rate)

Let's see how it impacts productivity ... could be up or down ...

Rest Well, Robert Hughes

2008-08-27T18:04:00.003-04:00

Cross-posted from the kasina blog

It is with a heavy, sad heart that I am writing to inform friends of kasina that Robert Hughes has passed. We knew him as Robert Larson-Hughes, as he was a Principal of the firm and also has served on our Board of Advisors after he left us in 2005.

Anyone who has been to our office should feel his presence. In addition to a number of other things I'd like to talk about below, he designed our office space.

Larry Cecil of Van Kampen paid us one of the best compliments that makes me think of Robert. Larry said, "This is exactly what I thought kasina's offices would look like."

Of course. It was designed by my friend, Robert Hughes.

In his short tenure with us, he left an indelible mark on our firm and me personally. I credit him with a lot of what I know about consulting and business. He challenged me on improving our process across the board for our clients. I still can hear him repeat one of his favorite Robert-isms, "All we sell is a process. So it better be good."

However, if I limited his credits to that I would be doing him a great disservice.

He taught me the value of surrounding yourself with a vibrant, passionate community. He was previously Steven's boss at McGladrey and came to work for his former employee because he thought Steven would stimulate him the most. He didn't need the money. He wanted to be in New York for personal reasons and wanted to be challenged. He thought we were the best fit. I don't know of many people whose pride would take such a back seat to his commitment to passion, learning, and community.

As I mentioned earlier, he also impressed on us the value of physical space. An MIT-trained architect, Robert graced us with his ingenious eye. If you have been here, you will realize that he placed a premium on community and elegant simplicity. He was a noncomformist who was savvy enough to conform when appropriate. He was a master of working with what was there and making it better.

All the things I love about kasina in our office. All Robert.

As you may see, I always sensed a kindred connection with him and it was solidified when he chose to move to Vermont after leaving us, not more than a few miles from me. It afforded me the luxury of seeing him more often than most others here at kasina. For that, I am grateful.

Robert, we will miss you.

Please hug your loved ones extra hard tonight. I know I will.

The Best Block at Home Plate Ever

2008-07-23T08:48:00.006-04:00

If you love baseball, and if you love kids, you have to love Adam Bender.

What's more, if your eyes don't well up ... hmm ... perhaps you need to get that lump of coal you call a heart looked at

Gnar Wars!

2008-07-01T08:51:00.004-04:00

I must be going batty because this summer weather is making me daydream about riding. So much so that I have watched Gnar Wars more times that I care to admit.

shralp! reports that it took two days to shoot and about a month for the editing, but none of this makes me as happy as the fact that I can report that Darth Isri rides goofy!

Check the lift scene, it's priceless.

Little Russ is dead, I cry inside

2008-06-13T18:23:00.004-04:00

God, if you exist,

Please double check all your facts,

Russert is coming.

My udder olma matter

2008-06-12T14:03:00.005-04:00

Ironic. While I was pondering the merits of Harvard "education,"my other alma mater made national news. Westlake High School (Josten's actually) printed the word "educaiton" on its diplomas this year.

It's easy to make fun of this, and the local media has had a field day. I'd like to say that I received a first rate education at Westlake -- and in particular the English department.

I recall my first paper I ever wrote in college was on the Iliad, and it was graded by Jamie Redfield, pretty much the world's leading Classics scholar. He wrote, "Mr. Ma, this is probably the best paper in the stack." (I still have the paper.)

I fully attribute this to my teachers -- Mss. Wilder, Gordon, Jurgens, and Montain. I had them in that order, and the were all fantastic teachers that frankly kicked my ass. (Ms. Jurgens, I will never forget the D on my exam of Billy Budd.)

Thanks for that, Westlake. I don't care what they write about you.

That [Harvard] kid in the corner, ten years later

2008-06-10T14:22:00.014-04:00

I've spent the last 2 days processing my 10th year reunion weekend. I've been thinking that there is some major thought or epiphany here, as I have felt something digging at my soul -- a pebble that just won't go away.

After a lot of introspection, I realized here is what it is: I liked Harvard.

I know I see the disappointment in your face (“All that buildup for that?”) But it has taken me ten years to the day to get the words out of my mouth. Many of you may be asking, "WTF? Nice, blogger boy, you liked Harvard ... thanks for the update." But let me share a couple things with you that may at least mildly alter your vantage point.

1. I’ve previously been pretty critical of Ivy education – … and particularly Harvard, which really mailed it in with regard to undergrad education during my time (they have changed a lot of these things). No time abroad. No real dedication to science and mathematics. Big group lecture hall lectures supported by graduate students with questionable teaching skill. A hilarious excuse for academic counseling. The list goes on and on.

2. I’m Midwestern – It’s hard for me to say that I went to Harvard openly. "I went to school in Boston" is the typical response from me. And after a decade of practicing and perfecting the onedownsmanship of my undergraduate education, you begin to believe that it wasn't anything special, or that great of a place.

3. I saw the worst parts of Harvard politics far too early, far too young -- I was embroiled in one of the worst possible political battles that you can imagine where the University threatened to kick my student organization off campus. I was angry at a lot of people and the stakes were really high ... 10,000 clients in Boston and Cambridge were supported by 1700 volunteers running 72 social service and justice programs with a $5M budget. This battle between my fellow students and countless Harvard deans and professors cost me a lot sleep, friendships, health, and my grades ... the least of which was my love for the University which suffered an extraordinary toll during this time of my life. I felt that no 21-year old should have to do bear that burden. To this day, I am still a little bitter about the whole thing and partially blame Harvard for these causalities.

4. I always felt like I was an outsider -- I was a transfer student from the U of C. I went to public school (or as we say on facebook ... I Went To A Public School ... Bitch). I had to live in pre-randomization, aesthetically imposing, jock-dorm of Mather House while not being an athlete. No, I didn't stick a pat of butter on the Union. No, I didn't live in the Yard. No, you don't recognize me from FUP -- that was some other Asian kid. I still feel like “that kid in the corner.”

But this past weekend, I got pretty damn nostalgic. I realized I went to school at a pretty amazing with some pretty freakin’ amazing people. What Harvard did well, was find interesting people and if you put them together in a place (even with bad infrastructure and support), that great things will happen.

In every conversation that I had with my classmates, I found very few if any people who weren’t passionate about what they were doing. Very few were mailing it in, watching the clock. It didn’t matter if they were banking, teaching, acting, community organizing around world health, or running a major league baseball team (one is, btw). No matter where they were, or what they were doing … pretty much everyone was engaged.

You have to give it up to the people in the Admissions office. For them to get it right 10 years later is pretty impressive. Hell, headhunters get paid if they are able to keep people for 1 year. Harvard Admissions has a longer track record on something far more important than someone keeping a job. It’s about keeping passion.

So for that I give credit, where credit is due. My wounds have healed. Ten years later, I can really say that I liked Harvard without gagging.

What can I say, I’m growing.

My son to Dems: Couldn't we share?

2008-04-23T10:35:00.007-04:00

Sean is nearly three, and has started giving me advice. This past Sunday, I spilled a glass of wine at dinner and he said, “It’s OK, everyone makes mistakes sometimes.”

Another thing he says from time to time, “It’s good to take turns, Daddy. I am a good sharer.”

As I sit exasperated by this prolonged, dirge-like slog we call the Democratic primary, I wonder if we could ever apply that advice to this election.

If you really wanted a message for change, imagine this: Hillary and Barack said something like:

“We are going to share. We are going to flip for it and whoever wins this year will run top of the ticket, and then we are going to switch in the next election. Yes, we know this is not normal, but we feel we can rise above this because it is in the best interest of our country and party. We are going to change the idea of ‘I win, you lose.’ That’s just not how we are going to roll in 2008. We believe we can share nicely and hope you all support us in that.” (big group hug follows)

I am not naïve enough to believe that this would ever happen in a million years, but I am so sick of this election that I can’t even stomach Meet the Press anymore. Forgive me, I am delirious.

If they wanted my son’s theoretical vote, both candidates would have to up their game. This fact makes me happy and sad at the same time.

Practice begins ...

2008-04-09T18:50:00.004-04:00

"Practice begins the first time that your guest gets it right."

This was a tip I got from my examiner, when I got my American Association of Snowboard Instructors Level I certification a couple weeks ago.

This little tip has permeated a lot in my life. Be it with my co-workers, my clients (both the ones with the snowboards, and the other ones with the powerpoints), and even my family.

We are so quick and eager to "progress" sometime, we forget how much practice true mastery requires. If it is 10,000 hours, as Maclom Gladwell suggests, what role do we have as teachers in getting our students there? Is it peppering them with 10,000 new concepts at 1 an hour or is it giving them enough for them to begin to play with concepts themselves?

Probably the latter, which is why practice begins the first time you/your student/peer/managee gets it right.

Think about it.

The Apple Experience: "Meh"

2008-04-01T10:28:00.007-04:00

I finally got on the Apple bandwagon. Especially after my good friend Jake gave it such a big rating. I was given an old school flat panel iMac from back in the diz-ay. I forced myself for two weeks to use it exclusively while working on it from home.

It wasn't that great. I mean, it's OK, but I wasn't doing cartwheels or anything. I couldn't install the Leopard DVD (why make the DVD dual-layer?), it isn't compatible with our VPN, and the Office integration left much to be desired (can't see comments in ppt). It also still crashed more than a couple times, despite what Applemaniacs attest and there have been 2 "security patches" to my version of OS X. So, it can't be supremely safe, can it? I mean, someone is out there hacking it.

I thought Molly Wood at CNET's Buzz Report summed it up best with this most recent report ... go to 2:10 for the bit about "Apple Is Like My Bad Boyfriend"

Unlike Molly, the I have no love for dorky guy either either. Been using a floater laptop with Vista on it. It still sucks, even with SP1. I now realize why there are so many linux heads out there ... I think I am going install Ubuntu or gOS on my next machine.

Verizon Fi-NO-OS: A running commentary in futility

2008-01-03T12:00:00.000-05:00

... in Jack Bauer voice ... *This blog post is being written to you in real time for the events depicted on January 3. I am currently on hold with various groups responsible for installing Verizon's FiOS service.*

I would like to share with you easily the worst customer experience I have ever encountered--and for me that is saying something.

Say hello to Verizon FiOS everyone! I was lured by the free LCD TV offer (or $200 in Best Buy gift certificate) offer for signing up with new service. However, I am realizing that it is not worth it.

Let me recount this for you on a date by date basis:

Dec 4 - I call and have an order placed at 9PM ET. I receive the following email at 1AM a few hours later.

from volconsumer@verizon.com
to xxxxxx
date Dec 5, 2007 1:35 AM
subject Fios Consumer Order Summary
mailed-by verizon.com

hide details 12/5/07

Reply

Dear Mike,

Congratulations! Your home is about to be upgraded to the power of Verizon FiOS. Soon you'll be able to download purchased music in a flash, watch flawless streaming video and get the edge in online gaming with FiOS Internet Service. . And, with FiOS TV you will get a 100% digital picture*, room shaking sound, that allows you to watch a recorded show in one room while someone else uses the same DVR in another room.

Here is a summary of your FiOS order:

o Scheduled Installation Date -- 12-17-2007
o Scheduled Technician Arrival Window -- 13:00-17:00(Hrs)EST

Dec 6 - I receive the following email asking for further information ... I think it's ridiculous, but I do it anyway, especially since I am a Verizon customer in Vermont. They should know who I fricking am already!

from ecenter@verizon.com
to ,
date Dec 9, 2007 4:49 AM
subject Re:Verizon.com Tracking Number 21980659 Billing Telephone Number 8xxxx FINAL NOTICE [#17669312]
mailed-by verizon.com

hide details 12/9/07

Reply

Verizon.com Tracking Number: 21980659
Billing Telephone Number: xxxxx

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Dec 17 - Installation day -- I get a call saying that they can't come because they didn't receive my information

Dec 18 AM - I resend information. See here for the fax cover sheet.

Dec 18 PM - I speak with Julie in the Service Center at 888-553-1555 at 3PM and she can't figure out why there is a problem. She returns my call via voicemail at 5:36PM and said that she had to "refer the order" and will be back to me the next day

Dec 19 - January 1 - I go on vacation. Julie never calls me back

Jan 2 - I resend the fax with my ID ... again, just for good measure.

Jan 2 PM -- I am on hold for an hour and finally get through to the sales and billing office to reschedule. They send me to the "Welcome Center" (read: Unwelcome center) to verify my information ... that is the same information that a) I faxed to them 3 times and b) that they should have already had since I am a VZ customer!). Apparently, because I was already Verizon customer, that was the source of the problem. OF COURSE! Nothing like those returning customers here to mess up your business!

Then they have to transfer me from the Welcome Center back to Sales and Billing to schedule the appointment. I ask for other numbers in case I get hung up on and I was given 866-326-7937.

And then I get hung up on in the transfer. Seriously.

Jan 2 PM part 2 - I call back at that 7937 to the VZ customer service center and on hold for another hour. I have to leave for home and can't wait anymore.

Jan 3 -- Today I come resolved to make sure to document all my names and times. I place my first call at 10:35 AM. After a 41 minute hold time, I finally get to someone who "doesn't cover New York." He is very nice (heretofore Nice Guy), but has to transfer me to a person (who is a Jerk) who says "there is no order for you, and you have to go to the Welcome Center." In fact, the two VZ people were talking to each other and Nice Guy tries to explain to Jerk what happened, and Jerk cuts off Nice Guy and just hits the transfer button. I lose Nice Guy in the transition.

I get transfered to the Welcome Center and speak with a Mrs. Hall at 11:28 AM. She said, "I see no reason why you are here since there are three order numbers that are 'identified and approved' (14202534, 14202951, 14203124) I have no idea why I am at the Welcome Center."
She has to transfer me back to Sales and Billing department.

11:48 I get transfered to "Michelle" who says that she "doesn't do FiOS, but she does all other sales and billing information. I get transfered again.

12:07 - I get transfered to a Mr. Vee who can't find any of my old orders, despite giving my numbers and has to start another order from scratch. I finally get one done at 12:34 PM and theoretically someone is coming next Friday to install the service. Order #N1****98!

*end realtime blogging*

This was incredibly unreal. In total, this order will have taken:
- over 45 days of calendar time (and it still isn't guaranteed to be installed yet.
- over 8 hours of talk/hold time
- 5 orders placed (1 in 12/5, the 3 on 1/2, and 1 on 1/3).
- 3 hangups in VZ transfers
- 3 faxes of very personal information
- about 12 transfers between e-Center, Sales and Billing and the ... my favorite ... "Welcome Center"

In all honesty, it wasn't worth it. It still isn't. I really just completed the exercise to see how bad it could really be. It was amazingly the worst customer experience ever, and unless they are trolling blogs, I doubt anything will come of it. I will send this off to VZ and post back with any "results."

(I use that term loosely).

I am a little less pretentious than Chuck Klosterman

2007-12-22T14:38:00.002-05:00

Legendary rock critic (and one time Ohioan!) ... Chuck Klosterman wrote a noteworthy piece on music in last month's Esquire that I was lucky enough to peruse on a flight from JFK-LAX.

In "Me, On Shuffle" he describes the manner in which he answers the question "What kind of music do you like?" At first blush, he gives a music nerd, Lester Bangs type of response ...

"Music that sounds like the opening fourteen seconds of Humble Pie's 'I Don't Need No Doctor,' as performed live on their 1971 album Performance: Rockin' the Fillmore."

He continues with a similar musical gross anatomy lesson of a few of his favorite things. Most of the blogosphere has flamed him for the piece, but not this dude. Na-uh - no way.

It was one of the fricking most brilliant pieces that I have read on music.

The 5 of you who read this blog regularly know I love albums, and I am no fan of the single serving, 99 cents a track culture. So why do I condone such a fine analysis of music that minces tracks down to their basic elements?

The answer is because you have to think about music. I owe it to the artists. And frankly, they owe it to me to make something worthwhile listening to.

Why? Basically, I feel blessed by music. That it it is one of the few things in life that truly makes it worth living. To hear people searching for one catchy track that everyone has is, in my view, a blasphemy. And those who make that kind of music, well ... hmmm ... I dont think they are charlatans ... but more like the makers of Yellow Tail. (Go ahead ... crack it open, and I dunno, go watch CSI or something.)

It is a really interesting exercise that was fun to do yourself ... here are a couple things in my "kinds of music I like" repertoire (sorry, no links, I don't have any interns for IGSMTOMM to rip samples.)

Jeff Buckley's hushing croon on "Hallelujah" ... just the thought of the song gives me goosebumps.
The last 25 seconds of "White Room" where Ginger Baker goes nuts on the drums.
Hearing Jay Z spit ... "Sensitive thugs, y'all need hugs" in "Heart of the City" was a milestone for me that he was going to be something entirely different
The build up to the first 45 seconds of Justice's "D.A.N.C.E"
The opening 25 seconds of Pharoahe Monch's "Desire" with violin riffs introducing a heavy track, and heavier vocals
The melodically unfinished, a capella end to Corinne Bailey Rae's "Just Like a Star"
I mentally sing the the big, bold, brassy chorus to "Take the A Train" almost every I ride the A, as it was the first jazz song that I got to play (well) on my trombone.
Otis Redding's raspy high notes in the last chorus of "That's How My Strong My Love Is"
The visually stunning opening guitar riff to Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Snow."
Hearing Billy Corgan repeat "... and she knows" in different inflections in "Rhinoceros"
The "OW!" at the beginning and "We'll kick your asses" at the end of "Get What You Give" by the sadly short-lived New Radicals
The horn section in "Into the Mystic"
The third verse to Common's "I Used To Love H.E.R."
Black Thought vociferously skatting on "Essawywhaman"
Any Maynard Furgeson high note that lasts what I feel is a few asphyxiating days.

Klosterman wasn't able to find a common theme in his picks and I didn't think I could either. Not until I tried to find where I got that CSI line I used above and found my previous post, "Dying a little through your iPod."

That was it. In an odd way, I think I hear all my artists die a little in their performance of these tracks. I swear I did the list and an now am writing this after the fact. I was afraid I would just become some easy PlatinumBlue statistic and some indy record exec could figure me out, but I think that there is hope.

So now my answer is to what kind of music you like is "Music where I hear the artist die a little" ... (all respects to Frank Sinatra who is rumored to have said of Judy Garland, "Every time she sings, she dies a little.")

OK, that's morose, but I think you get where I am coming from. I will work on it, but I hope that also sound a little less pretentious than Chuck Klosterman. Just a a bit.

I'd love to hear some faves of others out there and see if you can make anything hang together.

Shoes. Bag. Laptop - A Better Way to SimpliFLY

2007-11-23T06:30:00.000-05:00

This is the mantra that I remember when I enter airport security. Now, say it to yourself:

Shoes.
Bag.
Laptop.

The TSA's new SimpliFLY campaign is a ri-donkulous effort to get people to pack a) neatly, and b) one layer of neatly folded clothes alternating with a layer of neatly coiled electronics. BWAHAHAHAHAAHA.

I feel I have some road warrior cred (1.5MM miles, though I am a small fry compared to others), and let me offer a more pragmatic and useful tip. When choosing what to put through the machine first, let me offer this as a faster way to get through the line.

Shoes - shoes go in the first bin. Here you put your jacket or other clothing as well.
Bag(s) - whatever rollerboard, briefcase or backpack you are carrying. Put this second. I stash my belt, cell, watch key, change, and wallet in my bag as well. Much better than just throwing it in a bin. (Don't be that guy digging his nickel collection of out of the bin. Not cool.)
Laptop - Your laptop should be last. If you are traveling overnight, put your plastic baggie of CVS goodies next to it here.

When you are through (don't forget your boarding pass!):

Throw shoes on ground. Place feet inside, and don't bother tying until you are clear, if you can help it. Put jacket on, if brought.
Open bag to accept laptop and CVS baggie.
Insert laptop and baggie.
Scurry to a place to tie your shoes and redress yourself to desired comfort.

Everyone will thank you for being out of there sooner. I certainly will.

Shoes. Bag. Laptop.

Now go write that 50 times.

The iPod - I told you so

2007-11-21T07:46:00.000-05:00

And while we are speaking about iTunes, let me say something about the new iPod Classic. I had to buy a new one since my car was broken into a couple of weeks ago and now there is a thug in Hartford that is well outfitted with music.

Well, my silver lining (quite literally, since the silver 80GB model is deliciously thin) has been the new iPod. There have been several improvements to the UI that yours truly advocated for. Two years ago, I complained about the difficulty to shuffle and they have finally fixed it.

From the "Now Playing" screen ... just click the center wheel a few times and then you get this screen.

At the botton you see the suffle icon with buttons "Off, Songs, Albums."

Finally! Woohoo!

The Album

2007-11-21T07:36:00.001-05:00

I was so refreshed by Jermaine Dupri's recent article on The Huffington Post about a topic near or dear to my heart -- the album. All 5 regular readers of IGSMTOMM know I rarely bite off other blogs, but it was just too pithy to pass up.

Specifically, his title "A good album is more than just a collection of singles" gets right at a topic I talked about in January of this year., "Is it really the best album of the year?"

Any music fan and registered iTunes user should read it.

The Attack on Ivy-ish Education

2007-11-20T07:23:00.000-05:00

One of the things that I have been most challenged with in the last few months is hiring and managing people. As anyone can attest to -- it's damn hard.

A standard recruiting playbook would say, "Scour Harvard, Yale, Stanford and a number of other elite institutions for the next 'rock star.'" The problem is that most of them (and I want to stress that this is not all) ... ahem ... well, how do I say this ... are jerks. (I say this as a recovering "jerk.")

The more politically correct recruiting parlance is to say that they are "not a culture fit." But there is a selfish immediacy to the way that I see a lot of recruits approach their work. As if they are too good for the work that they may get. And while I think entrepreneurial vigor is to be admired, there is something that has been offputting and I think there is something to the way that elite institutions educate.

Basically, we are taught analytical skills but business is really a synthetic exercise. To put it another way, an Harvard grad can give you a Hoopes Prize thesis on why Humpty Dumpty shouldn't have fallen off the wall (or been on the wall in the first place!), but business requires us to think about the quarterly project plan on how to get him back (or outsourced overseas for 1/10 the cost!).

This is the attack on Ivy-ish education.

Causes? Well, I think it is how we are taught. That is, we are taught to try to deconstruct these great theorists we read about as part of our formal education. Say, pick apart Descartes' proof for the existence of God. Most of what we are taught is how to pick things apart. Pick. Pick Pick.

Fast forward to work, what happens when you take your first entry level job? Your boss is a ten year veteran with a BS from Ohio State. Surely, I must be smarter than that him, no? And so begins the professional picking ... pick pick pick. But this time, no A's are given. You are most likely laid off or opportunistically downsized. (I was ... though the CEO of a former employer actually wanted to fire me for being a smartass, but I made it to the next round of layoffs).

One of the things that I am proud of at kasina is our Book Club and weekly book reports. Each week we present a book and figure out what we can learn. They have been invaluable to me in my development as a businessperson and a person in general.

However, one of the common criticisms is, "This book is crap." "They are not that smart." Or just ..(cover your ears) ... "Bullshit." It takes an inordinate amount of retraining and reprogramming our people to see the value in these works in a way that doesn't reduce to picking at them like an academic work. But should we be surprised given how we educate at the elite institutions?

We need more synthetic tolerance in our higher education. Personally, I've found the more effective approach has been to really force yourself to think about how do you apply this concept to what you are doing today. What is the unique thing that someone else can teach me? The Ivy arrogance has got to go.

Some of the work that Malcom Gladwell's work around persitence and cooperation is instructive (10,000 hours to mastery, regardless of field). Also, Dan Pink's work about A Whole New Mind is as well.

Why does baseball make me cry?

2007-10-22T00:10:00.000-04:00

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart." -- A. Bartlett Giamatti

Thanks Bart. Mission accomplished. I find it ironic these are the words that I have repeated several hundreds of times and today the Red Sox sit on both sides of this quote. From Oct. 2, 1978 and Buddy F'ing Dent who hit a wall to deep left to win the AL East Playoff ... to today ... watching the vanquished Tribe lay listless ... helpless ... beaten by a better team.

The ghost of Bart Giamatti lingers on, as does the curse of Rocky Colavito. I bet they are playing pinochle somewhere up there ,yucking it up.

I am going to go cry some more now.

How not to get your ass kicked at a visitng stadium

2007-10-05T12:41:00.001-04:00

I am ok with LeBron being a Yankees fan. Really, I am. This isn't another hate LeBron post. In fact, I give him credit for at least admitting and standing up for the fact that he is partisan. No Hillary alternating Cubs-Yankees BS here.

I just think he could use a few pointers.

Who are you to judge?, you may ask. Well, I've spent my adult life watching the Indians and other Cleveburg sports teams in visiting stadiums. Living a year in Chicago, five years in Boston and six in New York has taught me to try to not get my ass kicked at a game.

(I only came close once where I led a charge of J-E-T-S! SUCK SUCK SUCK! on a NYC Browns Backers pilgrimage to the Meadowlands. I may have had a few beers.)

My top 10 pointers:

DON'T EVER take off your hat or other paraphernalia, no matter how bad the score gets. You only make yourself a magnet for more criticism. Stand proud, take the loss stoically like a good fan should. (LeBron violated this in the 6th inning).
DO come informed, really know your stuff. The burden of information is 2x for outsiders for stadium cred. e.g. "Yanks may have a tough time with CC. Torre left all the lefty batters in the lineup."
DO throw any potential hecklers one compliment for their team. e.g. "I am much more comfortable with Rivera v. Borowski in a 5 game series."
DON'T overly cheer for a great play when you are losing. You just become that guy.
DO applaud great plays for both teams. e.g. "You just gotta tip your hat on that one."
DON'T get obliterated. No matter how bad the score is, you will not be able to get drunk enough fast enough on stadium beer to numb a blowout and continue watching. Just leave. I've tried this and I can't reiterate this fact enough.
DO smugly gloat when winning. A smiling "aww yeah" head nod and some standing clapping goes a long way.
DON'T continue to taunt in the tunnel on the way out. The visiting fan hit-and-run is just too easy to execute here.
DON'T taunt in Philly. While Boston and New York are tough, I find most real fans respectful of what you are trying to do. In the 215, you might not make it out of there alive.
DON'T taunt in LA. No one cares about sports there. It's just not worth the effort.

Enjoy not getting your ass kicked. Your spouse or sig other will thank me later.

Guest Blogger: Ethan Koehler - Tribal Predictions

2007-10-04T15:52:00.000-04:00

Today, I am too paralyzed today to think of anything pithy to say about the 2007 Indians postseason campaign. Luckily, my best friend from high school, Ethan Koehler, has the following predictions that I wanted to share with you in this guest blog.

(IGSMTOMM claims no responsibility for Ethan's content or its vulgarity. He sent it to Bill Simmons, and of course it'll be rejected, so I put it up on a little piece of the internet for him. I love the guy, and there are some great nuggets in here. But seriously, he's nuts.)

* * * * *

What do you think, fellow Tribesmen? I've gotta start by saying I LOVE being in New York for this series. It's really fun to trade barbs with Yankees fans--they don't get true fandom and they know it after about 30 seconds of debate. Plus, I'm feeling very strongly about this year's team.

Everyone keeps talking about Borowski's balloon like ERA--any way to slice it, he's tougher than Mesa, doesn't walk as many as Wickman and doesn't throw 90 mph straight down the center like Ker Plunk or Riske.

I think:

Hafner continues to rake and carries this team a la Vlad G a few years ago.
Martinez is the MVP of the series, even though Hafner will really deserve the honors. Martinez is gets stroked by all the media outlets. It shall continue.
CC and Carmona shut this lineup down at home.
Wang gives up 4 runs in 6 innings. We win 4-2.
Pettite pitches well, but loses 5-3. Carmona has 27 groundouts.
Westbrook doesn't make it out of the fifth.
Clemens doesn't make it out of the second.
Tribe loses a barn burner as Borowski gives up 14 in the 9th. Tribe 34, Yankees 35.
Joba Chamberlein pitches lights out all series long until game 5. He proceeds to sh*t the bed.
Playing Doug Mentkeiticz at first is going to come back to bite Torre at the plate.
A-Rod: if he gets a hit in his first at bat, you walk him EVERY time he's up with a man on.
Guitierrez has a monster series.
Garko plays so well, everyone in NY talks about the Yankees getting him in 2010 when his Indians contract is up.
Abreu sprains his labia trying to steal first.
Cano KILLS us
Jeter gets caught on camera with his man-love
Torre cries
Posada gets a splinter in the second game due to refusing to wear batting gloves and is shut down with an infection from pine tar in his blood stream. He dies days later.
Johnny Damon and Kenny Lofton have a pregame contest on who has the weaker outfield arm. Lofton wins with a long toss of 5 feet. Damon breaks his right arm forcing a throw to second base after catching a fly ball out.
A Rod, after losing, falls in love with Indians organization and promises to take an 80% pay cut in order to play here (there). Shapiro and Wedge decline, citing poor morals (mistresses) and team chemistry concerns. A Rod signs with the Giants for $35m a year and never plays in another October.
Paul O'Neil turns out to be the "other" man in the Jeter photo.
Steinbrenner cedes control to his former son in law who signs Brian Cashman to a lifetime contract, guaranteeing the Yankees won't see another Series title for at least another 30 years as Cashman is the WORST general manager in professional sports. The world rejoices.
Cerrano lights Jobu's cigar which lifts the curse of Cleveland Municipal stadium,t he Indians finally win the World Series. This is after the CIA kidnaps Tony Fernandez and Mesa and takes them some random eastern European country in an effort to ensure they can't f*ck us TWICE.
Tribe in 4 if they start CC twice.
Tribe in 5 if Byrd gets the ball in game 4. He'll give up 234,243 runs in 1/3 of an inning.
Go Tribe!

Panel Redux 2007: Define Knowledge, Be Brief

2007-10-03T17:08:00.000-04:00

One of the most trafficked posts on this blog is something I wrote a year and half ago on how to moderate a panel. Since I am helping organize a few panels and conferences this season, I'd like to update this with some tactical recommendations on how to present on a panel when you are asked to show how you do something at your firm.

Typical industry panel presentations of this ilk go something like this:

1. Introduction of the firm one represents (located in New York, 1000 employees, $54B under management)
2. Description of a process at their firm (how we do CRM, how we structure our sales team, etc,)
3. [Results ] - I bracket this, since it is rarely presented.

Sigh. Reaching for your blackberry yet? Perhaps strategizing on your cocktail hour attack? Trolling through the attendee list? I'd bet most likely so. Conference goers are a cynical lot, aren't they? (we?)

Most panelists wait for the last possible moment to share the thing that people most want to hear. I say change that. Front load it and give them a little instant gratification. Here is a generic plan.

1. R.POV/8. What is your Remarkable Point of View in 8 words or less? Throw that up there as your first slide. Why are you or your firm there? What do you believe? You have to let us know why you are up there and the rest of the hundreds or thousands of us are down here listening!

2. What are the results? That goes next. Quick! Before you lose them. How did you get there? How much money did you save or make? What happened to the % increase in customer satisfaction? Time reduced in lead time? How much closer did you get to a six sigma error rate? Give me numbers, please! Show me the scoreboard!

3. What were the three factors to success? Most panelists cherish completeness to tell the whole process they or their firm goes through. Give me the "Keys to the Game." Oh, and I mean 3.

4. Give me screenshots, a demo, or the internal documents. Let me see the real McCoy. If your CRM system is so great, give me a test drive. I want to see how you did it and what it looks like? Don't worry about competition, it is all about execution anyway. That I can see what another firm does and their strategy doesn't make it any easier for me to viably, and commercially duplicate as my own.

I am admittedly attention deficient these days, but I think that these principles can provide benefits for all of us in attendance. I will try to do the same myself. See you out there on the conference circuit.

cross posted at the kasina blog

Pappa's Got a Brand Blue Bag

2007-09-03T13:28:00.000-04:00

I've been carrying a bag around for the last few months in order to reduce shopping bags. We have several of these IKEA bags.
It is becoming more commonplace in the city, but up here in burbland, all the soccer moms look at me quizzically when I bag my own groceries at the supermarket.

I've loved doing it. In addition to all the ecological reasons, let me offer you three other reasons to start trying it, especially for groceries:

You consume less. When you have to haul it yourself, you make sure whatever you are going to buy isn't going to end up rotting as a choad-infested bacteria nest at the back of your fridge.
You don't have to mess with shopping carts. What a pain, right? From the broken wheels, to aisle crowding, to people parking too close to you to fit your cart in, you can just go, shop, and git.
Your food tastes better. You cook with better, fresher ingredients. I end up shopping and cooking my stuff that day. I don't think it's a coincidence that my wife thinks cooking has gotten better recently as well. Furthermore, an extra dimension of pride is added when you not only washed, prepped and cooked your food yourself, but also hauled it with your own blood sweat and tears (anyone who has hauled a lot of stuff on the subway has definitely given all three).

Pappa Nees A New Pair of ... Everything!

2007-09-03T13:25:00.001-04:00

My new daughter Elizabeth Youmei Ma was born this past Wednesday at 439 AM. She's "ample" at 9lb 12.6 oz and 20 inches. Everybody shout, woohoo!

Dying a little through your iPod

2007-08-20T17:28:00.000-04:00

I've been obsessed with the shuffle feature of my iPod recently. I've been arduously tagging and scrubbing all my music. I've even forced myself to star rate every song that I encounter. with the hope that one day that I can just set the right of data personalization such that my my all-knowing white box will just play what I want. It's hard work. No version of CDDB or even iTunes has this figured out.

When it works, it's blissful. There is something to having your iPod being your spontaneous DJ -- the music just sounds better when you didn't choose it yourself. Picking it yourself is a little like self-massage. Yeah, it works, but ...

So, I am an ardent user of CDex and Mp3 Tag Tools. However, I kept thinking, "Isn't this a lot of preparation to create a spontaneous moment? Aren't I just a little ridiculous?"

I thought I was just abnormally obsessive compulsive, until I read "They Came From Hollywood" by Charles Arnold in this month's edition of SPIN:

Frank Sinatra is rumored to have said of Judy Garland, "Every time she sings, she dies a little." And that's what we want from our musical heroes -- not that they die, but that they give everything they have to their music.

Because if you're a true fan, especially when you're young and maddeningly confused, music is so powerful that it can call your entire existence into question. And when you're deeply moved for the first time by a band or a song -- and exclaim, "Fuck, yeah, this is it!" -- well, you can spend the rest of your life aching to recapture that feeling.

That quote totally summed up how I feel about music. I feel a bit vindicated and retro-justify my time scrubbing my music.

As my good friend Lee has said about himself, "OK, I'm a dork. But whatever."

Me too.

(For those who know him, there is a very funny story behind Lee's quote. Email me and buy me a beer. The story is funnier after a few drinks).

My Son, the Aesthetic Philosopher

2007-07-03T07:42:00.003-04:00

I got a chuckle this morning when I found a rock that Sean put in my pocket this past weekend at the beach. He was dutifully beachcombing and stumbled on this rock and said, "Da-dee, buuuuuuu-tiful."

Here it is on my desk:

I kept trying to figure out why I found that moment particularly satisfying. My guess is that I was proud that he just saw something for what it was. It wasn't candy he could eat, or a toy he could play with. Just something that he saw beauty in of itself. It was pretty cool.

I found it particularly amazing, given all the parenting books have me prepped for the terrible twos. That is to say, that most of child rearing and is based on trial and error, conditioning, and cause and effect. "Don't give candy for sitting nicely, don't cheer when he goes potty, etc."

While pragmatic for a new parent, it's disheartening for a(n ex-?) rationalist philosopher.

In college, I had to scrap an thesis based on the ideal of rationalist moral development in children, and this little rock sometimes gives me a glimmer of hope. I took very little aesthetics in school (very little = harvardspeak for "none"), but I recall hearing that Kant talking about the fact that beauty has to be disinterested. His position is well summarized here on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

[Beauty] “pleases,” certainly, but in a distinctive intellectual way. Pure beauty, in other words, simply holds our mind’s attention: we have no further concern than contemplating the object itself. Perceiving the object in such cases is an end in itself; it is not a means to a further end, and is enjoyed for its own sake alone

(So what, I had to look up a summary. Do you think I am cracking open the Critique of Pure Judgment (e-text, enjoy) at this stage of my life?).

This idea of aesthetics also opens up the philosopher to a little more interpretation that Kantian moral theory. Beauty isn't necessarily a property of an object, but rather the relation of the object to the observer, so long as the person is reasonable, Kant would hold that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I tried to spend some time finding what Sean found in the pebble, and this was the best that I could come up with:

I get a glimmer of hope sometimes in that Sean is making value judgments that are innate and disinterested. This all works with the idea of empathy, consequence, and other more traditional ways of parenting. I think that a 2 year old can think and has reason in some capacity.

We just have to work to find it, and cultivate it in appropriate doses.

Anyhoo, it was damn satisfying as a parent philosopher.

Cavs Fans Have No Class

2007-06-15T00:04:00.001-04:00

So another major sports championship has slipped through (ran through, more accurately) the desperate grasp of Cleveland sports fans. Everybody sigh, but you all knew it was coming.

The only thing that was more painful than watching the Cavs shoot 38% from the field was the abhorrent behavior of the fans. During the trophy and the MVP presentation, the rude booing of the Spurs by the Q fans was completely uncalled for.

It was damn embarrassing.

You boo the Steelers. You boo the Pistons. You boo the White Sox, particularly that jerk A.J. Pierzynski. These are people we can actually compete against. They are dirty. They deserve to have things thrown at them.

However, the Spurs are nothing but a class act that trumped our asses. They are not dirty, they do not taunt, they are not any rival to speak of ... they just win efficiently and effortlessly. We didn't even deserve the right to boo anyone. It was an exhibition series.

I've always marked myself proudly as a Cleveland sports fan because I always argued the fact that Cleveland sports fans were the best in the league. Phily fans get thrown in jail. Boston fans are whiny, even when they win championships. New York fans are too entitled. Chicago fans live in the past. LA fans ... is there even such a thing? Until tonight, I believed that Clevelanders uniquely appreciate greatness on either side of the ball, though we prefer it be ours.

I've felt this way since I was 12. I remember a baseball game that left an indelible mark on my sports watching memory. I saw a no-name journeyman Brewers pitcher named Odell Jones take a perfect game into the 9th inning against my Indians in 1988. I had no idea who this guy was, nor did anyone. Even a pro writer I sat next to (Bob Kravitz, then of the Plain Dealer) had to frantically shuffle through his game notes around the 5th inning to find who the hell this guy was. When he left the mound, Municipal Stadium gave him a genuinely long, warm standing ovation. Furthermore, Bob Kravitz wrote a glowing piece in the next morning's PD. The talk of the town was not about the loss, but the amazing performance we were almost all witnesses to -- a perfect game.

It was a treat to be 12 and really be a witness to ... ahem ... class.

From that moment on, I took pride in carrying the mantle of "good sports fan". I always nodded smugly when a visiting sports announcer would say, "This town has the best fans in the [insert league here]. They really know [insert sport here]."

I was sorely proven wrong tonight.

Come on Cleveland, class it up a bit. If we can do that for Odell Jones, the Spurs deserve better. Mr. Longoria, I mean Tony Parker, surely deserves better. He was better than Mark Price and World B. Free put together.

Don't make me listen to Taylor Hicks ... Save Net Radio!

2007-04-19T09:39:00.000-04:00

Because of Pandora, I've legally downloaded over 10GB of music and heard artists that I would have probably not discovered on my own (I don't see 7L & Esoteric playing up in Rockland County any time soon). But all that is in jeopardy due to the absurd royalties that the Copyright Royalty board is making small internet broadcasters pay to stream songs.

Please click on this link to fax your Congress representative to investigate this matter and unfair burden being placed on the people who are actually playing good (independent) music.

Some facts from SaveNetRadio.org:

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision increases the royalties that Internet webcasters pay to play music by nearly 300% for the biggest webcasters and up to 1200% for small webcasters.
The CRB rates are retroactive to January 1, 2006 and payable on May 15, 2007. This decision could bankrupt many Internet radio services immediately on that date, even if it is effective for only one day.
Past due royalties alone will be enough to bankrupt virtually all small and mid-sized webcasters, many of whom are the hallmarks of programming diversity.
The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) reports that less than 10% of terrestrial radio performances are independent music but more than 37% of non-terrestrial radio is independent music.
According to Arbitron and Bridge Ratings, between 50 and 70 million Americans listen to internet radio a month.
Bridge Ratings & Research estimates that the Internet radio audience will double by 2010 and grow to nearly 200 million monthly listeners by 2020.
Internet radio listeners are 20% more likely to have purchased downloadable music than the average American. (Arbitron)

Below is a message I got from Pandora which turned me on to the topic.

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,

I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.

I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

Race and Music and Jin

2007-03-30T09:55:00.000-04:00

One of the things that I love about music is how it crosses race, socioeconomic status and class. As a Chinese kid who listens to a lot of hip-hop, I am a bit ashamed to say I just discovered Jin, an American-born Chinese rapper who made his way up by freestyle battling. He was inducted in to Freestyle Friday Hall of Fame on BET's 106 & Park by winning 7 weeks straight. Check this out:

The Best Of Freestyle Rapper MC Jin Videofunny video

And I wasn't sure which I envied more in this clip ... his "disfigured you with my figure of speech" line or his Hiero robe (damn, I'd start wearing robes if I had that):

P.S. There's a lot of good free and legal music out there. Check the "And Justus For All..." mixtape by Mick Boogie and Little Brother. Skillz's "06 Rap Up" is worth a listen ... (Dick Cheney, crazy with a 12 gauge / and everybody and their momma got a myspace page). All his previous rap ups going back to 2002 are worth a listen too.

The Value of Philosophy

2007-03-29T08:20:00.000-04:00

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts to make my ass-long commute more tolerable and I stumbled on The Philosophy Podcast which has been refreshing to hear. It may be a bit nerdy, but I was truly inspired by the latest podcast by Bertie Russell on “The Value of Philosophy.” It’s worth a listen, and while a non-philosopher could probably only stomach the first 5 minutes of it, I think it’s five minutes well spent.

He posits lots of arguments, but here are a couple I found compelling:

- Many “useful” sciences started as problems in philosophy including astronomy and psychology

o I’d add computer science to the list since the whole computer thing was really a product of Turning’s theories on computation, ergo, philosophers invented the internet(s).

- People who look down on philosophy are judging the wrong thing – they are looking for answers. The value of philosophy is the string of questions that shows what is possible. It allows observation of the usual and everyday to lead to extraordinary, or at least unusual, insight.

- Philosophical theories that are developed around the idea of man as the Copernican epicenter of the world are inherently flawed and will never advance any true thought. The only true quest for knowledge exists in looking at the outside world (Russell’s “not-self”) … through that exploration the self grows from looking at the not-self.

It was inspiring to hear and it reminded me why I did study philosophy and continue to “use” it in my everyday life … it shows what’s possible.

Now not all of my podcasts are this heady … I’ve also take a liking to Ask A Ninja … from “College Tips” … “If you don’t play the guitar – learn. Trust me, you want to be that guy.”

My Most Honest Moment

2007-02-05T17:57:00.000-05:00

I did an icebreaker for a meeting I ran last week and asked people, "Pick one to answer. 'What was your most honest moment?' or 'Which person, living or dead, would you like to have lunch with?"

I answered the lunch question and it was easy -- having lunch with my Sean. However, I realize now that it was the answer for both.

Yesterday, Sean was sick with diarrhea and diaper rash to the point that he only slept 2-3 hours Sunday night. No appetite all morning and crying and whining all the time -- it was miserable ("Da-dee, noooo! Da-dee, noooooo!") He finally wanted to eat around 2pm and I made him some chicken noodle soup in the kitchen. I could tell hunger finally gotten a hold of him when he looked up at me and the crying got worse, and worse, and worse.

So I just dropped right to the ground on the kitchen floor. Sat cross-legged, and Sean sat right down, mouth open for his first bite of soup.

I then hear this sound ... and a warmth on my leg ... "Yup, he crapped on me."

He kept eating for another 15 minutes, and I kept feeding him.

This was my most honest moment in life -- sitting on the kitchen floor, Sean on my lap, crap on my leg, chicken noodle soup in hand.

It was a different version of honesty than the return-a-wallet-with-all-the-cash-in-it honesty. It was a moment where all the craziness of my life and the past few months, is snapped into razor sharp focus with a very honest, humble moment that entailed lunch -- with my son.

Is It Really The Best Album of the Year?

2007-01-19T08:26:00.000-05:00

I feel that I am one of the last people in the world to download entire albums. In our single serving world, the $.99 song purchase rules.

When I buy music, I listen to the whole album at least once front to back. I am still searching for that next great album. The truly great artist and the truly great album have a story to tell. It doesn't always have to be a concept album like a Flaming Lips or Drive-By Truckers (well, like the ones they used to do). Nor does it have to be an over the top political album like Neil Young.

Rather, a great album can weave a patchwork that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. There's a difference between an album and a bunch of songs that I like - and there's nothing wrong with the later. To me, I can have my iPod shuffle all songs by the White Stripes, the Black Keys, Jay Z, and good times invariably ensue.

But you can't shuffle great albums. Can you imagine Abbey Road starting with anything other than "Come Together"?

Or how about Exile on Main Street not starting with “Rocks Off”?

Or for hip hop fans, try this one for size … Imagine The Low End Theory starting with "Jazz" and finishing with "Skypager" instead of starting with the stripped down bass line of "Excursions" and finishing with the lyrical orgy of "Scenario"?

Here were a few albums in 2006 that I thought had a story to tell …

Beck - The Information – I either love or hate Beck albums – but you have to say that each one is an album, and you either love or hate the whole shooting match. I guess that Beck feels like I do about music and technology – it’s has made it totally different. So he plays with technology in each track of The Information, and then delivers what I feel is a big F U to the technology-enabled, single-serving consumption of music with a mishmash of songs in his last track.

The Coup - Pick a Bigger Weapon –The Coup can weave political statements with joyous, smooth fun about life in a way that resonates with how I feel these days … from “Uncle Sam ain’t the baker, he is the butcher/ We’re all on Punk’d with Ashton Kutcher” to “Ijustwannalayaroundalldayinbedwithyou”, to “I want to laugh, love, f***, and drink liquor, and help make a revolution come quicker.” And yes, there is enough there for the head boppers to get their fill of beats and guest appearances on tracks like “My Favorite Mutiny," where Talib Kweli and Black Thought shine.

Bob Dylan - Modern Times – It’s easy to pick a Dylan album, isn’t it? But this isn't an exercise in paying homage to a comeback king, especially in the shadows of other recent and forthcoming comebacks by so many (New York Dolls, The Who, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies, The Fugees). What drew me to this album is that it's the anti-comeback. You get a musically impressionistic insight into his life these days from the album. Before I read the interview in Rolling Stone, I could get that he really embraces his elder status. He’s not trying to “comeback” or recreate something that has long since past. For instance, compare this album’s tale of a salve loving owner in “Nettie Moore” to the judgmentally righteous tone and lyrics of “The Ballad of Hattie Carroll.” If you want to hear a unique musical story of a legend’s life – this is it. And you just gotta love a guy who is 65 who’s sends a semi-creepy shout out to Alicia Keys.

Joanna Newsom – Ys – This album was hard for me to listen to. It was like reading Kant for me. I’ve listened to it about a dozen times and I am still trying to soak in the poetry and the harp and the zangytwangy voice of hers. But there’s a story there. Like Kant, I am still trying to digest it all. Like Kant, it is dense, thoughtful, insightful, and appreciated by few.

The Roots – Game Theory -- They really need no notes. If you don’t like them, then you have bad taste in hip hop. Perhaps bad taste in music -- and they get the album thing. In fact, the one of the best "Best Album" lists IMHO was from ?love himself ...

Happy listening, everyone. And please ... listen to the whole album.

The most unexpected upgrade a.k.a. more fun in Subarus

2007-01-10T07:31:00.001-05:00

I typically rent the cheapest class of car possible when I travel. When I travel alone on business, I really couldn’t care if I drive a Kia or a Jag. I stepped to the Columbus Hertz desk this Monday and I was a bit beside myself when the agent handed me the keys.

A Subaru. In fact, a Subaru Forrester S.

Yes, for IGSMTOMM faithful, it was the same car that I crashed on Christmas with my son in it. I thought it was the damndest thing.

Was it that improbable? I mean, I have been upgraded dozens of times before and haven’t thought anything of it. Why was this time different?

I don’t believe in fate, and lean closer to the free will side of the world. But there I stood standing like Earl Hickey, asking karma why she would do such a thing?

I got in the car and drove to my friend Andy’s house tentatively at first. I gingerly steered and accelerated the car around I-670 until I built faith again. Faith in the car. Faith in my driving. The car is fun. I got back on the proverbial horse. Lesson learned.

Do I believe that this was karma? No.

What I do believe is something that I am thinking of as philosophical or spiritual appetite. I think my mind, spirit, (whatever) just knew what it needed. It needed to find a symbol for a lesson. If it wasn’t going to be the Subaru in Columbus, it was going to be my friend Steve who blacked out during a skiing accident and got back up the mountain the next day. If not that, then something else.

I call it “spiritual appetite” because of my father-in-law. He was watching me feed Sean unsuccessfully this past weekend. He knows that Sean’s lack of appetite stresses me out, and just said to me:

“Relax. His body will tell him what he needs, and when he is ready to eat.”

While I haven’t bought into that theory totally yet for Sean, I did think that this had some application to the ideas of karma and randomness. The spiritual and philosophical fuel is all around you, it just requires the right time to set the table ...

... And eat.

I have two jobs

2007-01-03T12:09:00.000-05:00

I recently took a job as a part-time pro teaching snowboarding at Mount Snow in Vermont. It's actually made me better at my day job, and wrote a post how on the kasina blog.

I don't normally like to mix my work and personal blogging, but the convergence of these two parts of my lives have led to a lot of thought.

Thinking About Infiniti(y) in a Subaru

2007-01-03T08:12:00.001-05:00

So some people have written to ask me more about rolling my car. The story is a simple, but scary one. Man drives car north in rain on Christmas night. Rain turns to sleet, sleet turns to uncontrollable slush (even in a Subaru) and I fishtailed. I couldn't recover, so my car spun 180 across the road and I rolled 90 degrees down into a ditch--not more than 6 feet from a riverbed.

Sean was in the car. He didn't cry at all for about 5 seconds -- the scariest moment of my life. Hands down.

Despite having several James Kim episodes, all was OK. I was rescued by a good Samaritan (who happens to be a fellow instructor at Mt. Snow), and Sean and I escaped without a scratch. In fact, even the Subaru was in pretty decent shape all things considering.

I've learned a lot from the incident; anything problem fixed with money is not a real problem, drive incredibly slow in bad weather (I was doing 30 in a 50 with an AWD car), people are genuinely good and helpful. The thing has kept me up the most is learning how to apply what I call the Infinite Loss Rule, or I think of as just the Infiniti Rule (to put it in proper auto context). Basically, the idea if there is an expected outcome that has infinite loss, it pays to invest infinite resources in its prevention.

I used to deny that such a rule existed. That I just didn't think clearly enough in calculating the odds out and apply it appropriately. That fear got in the way of another complex pot odds calculation.

I was wrong. And perhaps it is silly that I have lived so long and become a parent without fully internalizing it. It's probably common sense to most of you out there.

I know it exists and I felt it. Even world-class tournament poker players face an all-in where they are sure they have the best of it, but still feel compelled to fold. And their kid isn't (directly) at stake. Just money.

Are they cowards? Am I? I am inclined to think no in both cases, though I am inclined to care less about the latter.

I think the key lies in two questions that I don't have the answers to yet:

1. When do you apply the Infinti Rule? If always, you will be paralyzed to stillness. If never, well then you may not get pulled out of that Vermont ditch alive. Or worse.

2. Once you enact it, what is a reasonable prevention? Just how far do you take it? Ask an insurance salesman or watch parents a Babies-R-Us deciding if that $200+ Britax Roundabout is worth it (firsthand I say yes now, but I know I am not a good sample subject).

I don't have any of the answers, but I sure am asking the questions these days.

Trouble on my mind about trouble on my mind

2007-01-02T10:24:00.000-05:00

So if you haven't noticed (and judging by my traffic logs, you haven't), I've been a little lax on blogging during the last few months. Part of it is that I got busy, but the other half is that I got writer's block. I guess I do it annually where I start reconsidering the purpose of this blog.

I go through this dilemma about once a year.

I said to myself when I started blogging that I was not going to be just a collection of daily links I think are cool. I think my friend ThatKid said it best during a dinner we had when he said, "I blog so people can just tune in whenever they'd like a get a piece of me."

To be frank, it's hard to do that well. As Malcom Gladwell wrote in a post about Vince Carter and Bill Simmons ... Go ahead, try to do that everyday. Try getting the prose just right day in and day out.

I did get a really nice comment to my Christina Day post recently and these are the types of things that have rejuvenated by desire to write. There's been plenty in my life recently (move to the burbs, I rolled my 1 week old Subaru on Christmas night with my son in it, I have a 2nd job as a snowboarding instructor), so look for a new, revitalized IGSMTOMM coming in the next few days.

Thanks again for reading. Please drop me a line if anything speaks to you.

Honey, I Almost Ate NBC

2006-09-20T14:37:00.000-04:00

Deal or No Deal has received a lot of press as a window into game theory. Just this past May, a WSJ article highlighted how some economists are using Deal or No Deal to get a better understanding of human behavior.

Now I thought that it was interesting to see how the other side of the bargaining table works. Typically in the 3rd or 4th round of the game, the Banker typically will offer approximately 50% of the mean expected value of the remaining cases.

In the season opener on Monday, a very large Teamster from Staten Island took about $670K from NBC. Subsequently, the Banker divulged what he would have done with the case where he only had 2 cases left ... $3M and $.01. The offer would have been $1.6M, a $100K premium to the mean expected value. I don't watch it regularly, but it was the first time that I saw a premium to the mean expected value.

The message was clear, that at that point, it would have financially hurt NBC (er, GE) to pay out at that point, or at that point the guys at SwissRe take the wheel from the Banker. It is worth an extra $100K to get that guy to stop.

It's interesting to note that our appetite for extreme, circus-like notariety would rive a network to a point where it could actually hurt the network to pay out. I remember the days where a 5 day winner in Jeopardy walked away with $100K in 1999 (~$150K in today's dollars) and we thought, "Wow, that's a lot of money."

None of this has really scared NBC though, they are off and running with a $6M prize.

What do I know? Perhaps I just watch for the models.

Happy Christina Day

2006-09-11T13:31:00.003-04:00

I've been stuck watching every damn 9-11 special, and I get depressed for all the reasons you could anticipate. The pain and the loss of life still hollows my soul. All this is exacerbated by the fact that I have no way to make sense of what it all means. Personally, I had a loss that has had some profound emotional impact for me, but I think today, I've made some headway in thinking something useful, and hopeful -- at least to me.

Christina Ryook was a high school classmate of mine who died five years ago today atop the World Trade Center. I think of her this time every year in rememberance and sorrow. For the first time in several years, I decided to crack open my high school year book to have a look at her picture and see what she had to say. This was her senior quote:

"Outward actions should always reflect inward intent."

As far as I can tell, the words were hers, and hers alone. The more I think about it, it fit her and I'd bet that she chose these words very carefully. It was about integrity. At a very young age, Christina exemplified it and most were not able to appreciate it. By all accounts of the cruel and twisted high school social circles, Christina was probably considered by most to be a nerd, a band-o, too quiet to be noticed by the "cool kids."

Amongst friends, she was spunky, warm, a leader, and had a laugh that still brings a smile to my face.

I think her quote reminded the self-conscious, Clueless teen movie-like high school elitist suburbia snobs of two things. First, it reminded us of Chistina's own quiet strength that those who knew her well came to love and respect.

Second, and more importantly in context of 9-11, I think it reminds us to try and retain that short-lived goodwill that we would like to act on for the few days or weeks that follow a tragedy like 9-11, the Asian tsunamis, or Katrina. As citizens, we are a little short on long-term integrity.

I remember the days that followed 9-11. New York was a warm place, all things considered. kasina was displaced out of our downtown offices and we graciously housed by the now defunct Silicon Alley Reporter and Gaspedal Ventures (my first "desk" at kasina was a ping pong table at the SAR). They bought us breakfast. They told us, "Use whatever you want: phone, fax, email, internet, computers. They're yours."

I remember exchanging stories with the other businesses who were displaced as well, and laughing and crying at these offices. I remember giving (very very detailed) directions to tourists looking for Ground Zero. I remember just smiling at people on the subway who would normally crowd me in to the A train.

Whatever that was, it was beautiful. It felt good.

I forget that now, and I bet you do too. I see it everyday. I bet you do too. Not holding the elevator, yelling at a taxi cab driver, rolling at your eyes at dad who brought their crying baby in seat 4B. I am guity of it. I bet you have been as well.

The everydayness of life has crept back into our habits.

The thing is, I think we all still inwardly feel the ~3,000 lives that were lost that day. The physical void at the WTC site for me is just a reminder that we all share that loss. That is my "inward intent" -- to act in honor of those who died that day.

I think she'd think her congressional memoriam was nice, and I think she'd be proud to see that there is a Christina's Corner at the pre-school area of our local library:

But what I really think what Christina would have wanted would be for people to mine some good out of this scenario. In short, I could think she'd want us to do consider doing some of the following things (just for a start):

To play music, such as the clarinet or the mellophone.
To laugh after hours of AP Calculus.
To listen to the quiet kid.
To hug the ones you love.

I think she'd just like us to make our outward actions match our inward intent. It's right there in black and white.

Happy Christina Day, folks.

You're Annoyed? I Feel Better

2006-09-08T12:40:00.000-04:00

So, I just went through my 10th Treo yesterday. From the 300 to the 600, to the 650, and now the 700p ... I just have had a tough time with this device.

This time ... Earpiece shot, speaker shot for no reason whatsoever. No dropping, no water, no torture imposed by my son. I found out that I am not the only one.

I had a magical service moment yesterday when I entered my local Sprint location. After explaining what happened to my phone, the customer service rep looked at me and said.

"Oh my god. Now, I am annoyed, too."

After that, I felt immediately better. This made up for a lot, namely:
1) That this was the 10th time that I have replaced a Treo

2) I received average service after they fixed the phone (still made me wait 2 hours rather than just fixing it immediately, as has happened 2x before)

3) That she tried to cross sell me for home long distance

4) That she had a lot of difficulty programming the new phone to activate it.

Point is, empathy goes a long way. Instead of being defensive, most good customer service would say understanding the customer is key. But how different would have my reaction been if she just said, "I understand your situation."

Every picture tells a story, don't it Andre?

2006-09-01T00:28:00.000-04:00

I have to believe that I am watching one of the gutsiest performances in professional sports tonight in the Agassi/Baghdatis match. 23 points in the ninth game of the fifth set. Unreal. To me this ranks up there with Chang-Lendl, Court-King, McEnroe-Becker, even the grand daddy McEnroe-Wilander at 6.5 hrs, which I remember watching.

While the whole crowd is cheering for Agassi, myself included, you have to feel for how lonely this kid must feel out on that court. Hurting. Tired. Every single New Yorker chanting against him. After every cramp, he'd just swing harder.

I can't think of a lonelier picture than this (snapped right off my TV)

You really have to admire how sports really brings out the rawest depths of the psyche and pays homage to how wonderful the human spirit is.

My heart just bled, so I wrote and wanted to share it with you. I hope we all give credit where credit is due. As magnificient as Andre is, I hope we all realize that he had a special partner tonight that made it possible tonight. I hope we pay some respect as well to him.

As John McEnroe said not long after this point, "We are watching pure magic." I feel lucky to have seen it first.

Like Father, Like Son

2006-08-11T08:09:00.000-04:00

Apologies to the many fans of IGSMTOMM for the haitus ... life has been crazy but I have my blogging boots back on.

I've been amazed by how far children's TV shows have come since I was growing up. Two of Sean's favorites have been Jack's Big Music Show and Pinky Dinky Doo. These shows match up with two of the things that I have been known for at kasina which is my love of music (and er, sharing of) and the need for storytelling. For any readers who have kids, I really recommend them both, particularly Jack's. For instance, Jack was anticipating the King of Swing, and who comes out? Holy $&*%& ... it was Buddy Guy.

I guess it's no suprise that Sean likes them ... like father, like son after all.

However, I think that there is somethign deeper than that. I think these shows are in contrast to what I grew up with as a kid. It is amazing that they focus on complex, right-brained activities such as expanding music, learning narrative, character development, and understanding rhythm and beat.

Think about what we grew up with as kids. Who remembers the one word spanish lesson on Sesame Street, or the infamous Electric Company (1-2-3-4-5 ... 6-7-8-9-10 ... 11-12!)? Very left-brained thinking.

I think yesterday was a very left brained view of education versus, the above shows, which are more right brained or (R-Directed Thinking), as Dan Pink would say in A Whole New Mind.

I am drinking Dan Pink's Kool-aid these days, and I truly believe that the adoption of this at an early age is going to make kids more ready to compete for success in the future. I think those people at Noggin really get it and are adapting their shows to help make kids like Sean successful.

As Pinky would say, "That's exactly what happened ... pretty much."

Top of the World, Ma!

2006-06-23T14:21:00.000-04:00

Today, I finally feel like I accomplished something. I am the top hit on Google for the result "Mike Ma." Go ahead, look for yourself.

This isn't any small task, there are people who live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, have masters' degrees, or just want to talk to their Ma. Over 59MM results. (Lee only has 12K I think).

I used to be able to stay relatively obscure and remain immune to google-stalking, but now I realize my celebrity may have its consquences.

However, what of the other Mike Ma's that are out there ... what are they up to?

Well some are as you expect, a network administrator, a chinese tour guide, ... but there are some other Mike Ma's that are characters.

Take this guy who tricked out his Scion and got in a multi-page spread about it.

Or this photographer who has a pretty odd sense of humor.

Or this frisbee golfer who finished 5th at 2003 Rumble in the Jungle.

Ok, enough self-indulgent google stalking ... I have to go to my celebration party now.

If there are any Mike Ma's out there who get a link back ... drop me a line, I'd love to connect.

Daddy Says Prof. Gilbert is Full of Hooey

2006-06-22T15:34:00.000-04:00

In hawking his new book, Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert takes the position that father's aren't really happy at all. This was point of his most recent essay in Father's Day issue of Time. In it, he sides with economisits and psychologists who state that parenting doesn't contrbute to our overall happiness, in fact, it detracts from it. He reconciles what we feel vs. what is measured by these studies for three reasons

1. The Armani Argument - That parenting is expensive and we retrojustify our views -- that fool ourselves to thinking that we are getting happiness for all the work and money we put into parenting

2. The Memory Argument - That the moments of children-produced hapiness are very infrequent. We only remember the last cute thing, but most of the time the kids are a pain in the ass.

3. The Heroin Argument - That kids are like heroin -- heroin makes you feel good but you lose all other perspective on other normal facets of happiness. Or to compelte the analogy, children may make us happy, but they are so consuming that they force us to lose all other facets of happiness -- that "movies, theater, parties, travel--those are just a few [things] that parents of young children quickly forget" and therefore detract from my happiness.

While I buy that love does not necessarily imply happniess, I just don't buy his argument.

There would be two ways to levy a counterattack on his argument. The first is to call in question the relevance of day to day happiness which values a frequency of happiness rather than intensity of happniess -- an argument of utility.

Basically, I could say that the 2 hours I am really able to spend with Sean a day are such intense hapiness (a 10 hapniness points per hour, let's say for a total of 20) that they outweigh the 10 hours I spend at work (which is 1 happiness points / hour, or total 10) ... but that utilitarian argument requires a relatively difficult quantification.

Still, his three explanations are so ridiculous, I can't help myself. I realize that refuting them wouldn't prove the economic and psychological findings wrong, but it would satisfy my position that he is full of crap. So here goes:

1. Refuting the Armani Agument -- "If I spent money, it has to make me that happy"-- The amount I spend on parenting vs. my rent isn't even a contest--New York rents are more expensive than raising a kid. Let's assume my rent of $2750 increases at 3% year for the next 30 years, it'd be about $839K. Cost of raising a child according to babycenter.com = $816K. No way that my apartment brings me as much joy as Sean. It's not even close.

2. Refuting the Memory Argument -- I am just digging in my heels here in that I really enjoy the time I spend with Sean. From the messy diapers, to the teething, to the bumps and cries while learning to walk, it is mostly fun for me, even on a time-frequency basis. Perhaps I am new to the parent thing so it hasn't its lustre, but that's all I know so far.

3. Refuting The Heroin Agument -- This was just silly. People can live a normal, well-adjusted life when they are parents and married. I can think of dozens of my fatherhood-indoctrinated friends who go out with single friends and think ... "God, that sucked!" Or a good friend of mine recently told me, "Don't travel without your kids on long vacation, it just isn't fun, I come back missing them so much, I can't focus on work when I return. When I take vacations with my kid, I come back refreshed." To me, that sounds functional, not dysfunctional. That the kids add to functional happiness (in this case, taking a vacation to relax. With kids = mission accomplished!).

Look, some of my arguments are silly, but they certainly are no more silly that those put forth by Professor Gilbert. I understand that he is selling a book, so putting out controversial themes makes sense. But to me, the way he handles it is a bit exploitative.

And by the way, in addition to my happiness from fatherhood, I am happy to say that I think his essay is a load of hooey.

My Poker MBA Cost $150

2006-05-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

A poker hand that I recent played has highlighted an "area of improvement" (e.g. weakness) that has come through in a recent performance review of me. My area of improvement has been not being swayed by a great client meeting, or bad weekly performance ... basically, stop being so impetuous.

This particular hand added some thoughts on how I can stop being so impetuous, so I thought I would share it with you.

I was playing an interesting small no-limit game at the 101 Casino in Petaluma, CA when I was on vacation (btw, it's a dump ... makes the NYC rooms look like Bellagio or the Borgata). The blinds $2-$5 and a max buy in of $100. For those who play poker, you know the blinds are high. Although it is a cash game, not a tourney, you can view it as an M rating of 14.3, or putting it in Harrington's Yellow Zone). If you don't play, it just means that you need to make aggressive moves due to the structure of this game.

I played for an hour and action was loose and the game was good. Lots small preflop raising and calling on the flop and later streets. My table image was good, I played 3 pots in the hour and showed a winner once and took the other two without a showdown.

This hand, a loose UTG doubled the blind to $10, a regular occurence in this game. Four other players flat called. The small blind to my right made it $50 to go. I was in the big blind and saw:

The pot was $105 and I had about $220 in chips in front of me. She had about $100 left after her raise. At this point, I assumed that she was trying to buy a relatively large pot preflop ... a pretty good move I thought for the timidness of this game. I became enamored with countering her good move with a great move. Plus, the game structure was so aggressive, I was convinced she was just making a move. And I had her outchipped, so I was going to show her ... you can't push me around...

I pushed all-in. She called immediately, and I knew I was toast. Of course she flipped:

I didn't improve and she took a $315 pot, a big pot for that game.

Here's what I learned from that hand, which I think applies to business and poker.

1. Suspend optimism when doing analysis -- I assumed that she had AK, AKs, or something like that where I would be a small favorite statistically, so she would have to fold when faced with her whole stack. I saw that hand because I wanted to see her in that hand. Worse yet, I did see she was a tight player who rarely made a move unless she had the nuts. I said that to myself in previous hands I played with her. Not that it meant I knew that she had KK, AA, or some other dominating hand here, but I should have skewed my range probable hands toward higher quality. I saw it, but in this case due to optimism, I chose not listen.

We had a similar scenario at kasina, where we hired someone who didn't match what we were really looking for and missed certain criteria; however, myself and another partner were so insipred by him we steamrolled the other two partners in the hiring because we chose not to listen.

Structures and processes need to be pristine. You can take some qualitative interpretation later, but you cannot be overly rosey-eyed when you do the actual analysis.

2. Don't make great moves for the sake of making great moves -- I wanted to make the great move. I wanted to use all that knowledge that I've read about in my poker library. "I am going all in ... default M=14.3 ... YES!"

I had this problem when I started playing. My friend Glen used to call me "Asian Action" because I fell in love with checkraising when I first learned about it. I thought I licked it. Guess not.

The same thing has happened over the years in business. For example, consider some meetings with clients. Sometimes I feel compelled to try to get that one last content point in to prove I am smart, or do that extra cutesy presentation graphic, or sometimes I have created that extra complicated deal structure. I find you need less of that the further I get in my career. One of my old bosses captutred this sentiment with this thought, "If it's important, it will come up again."

3. Always leave yourself outs -- There was no reason for me to push all in, I was lucky because I had her outchipped, but I exposed myself to all sorts of problems ... what if someone else called as well since there were others who had me out chipped. Then I was putting more than the $150 than she had, but the whole $220 that I had ... another $70 of risk that I didn't need to take. Either raising her another $50 or putting her all in would have been a right move.

As we think about growing our business and branching into new practices, territories, etc., you always need a contingency plan if it doesn't work. We have been betting on new growth areas for kasina in building new practices and relationships and have invested heavily to make them successful.

I thought the following quote from Rounders summed up my thought properly, which is good advice for the poker table or the conference room table.

You don't hear much about guys who take their shot and miss,
but I'll tell you what happens to 'em.
They end up humping crappy jobs on graveyard shifts,
trying to figure out how they came up short.
See, I had this picture in my head.
Me sitting at the big table, Doyle to my left,
Amarillo Slim to my right, playing in the World Series of Poker.
And I let that vision blind me at the table against KGB.
Now, the closest I get to Vegas is west New York,
driving this lousy route handed down from Knish...
to rounders who forget the cardinal fuckin' rule...
Always leave yourself outs.

This Nigel's for you ... and you and you and you

2006-05-11T11:55:00.001-04:00

I am always amazed at pricing sometimes ... I find it funny ... for instance, this recent ad I got from Wine.com, which I love:

90+ under $20 Reds
90+ under $20 Whites
90+ under $20 All Wines
94+ point wines under $94
94+ point wines under $94 All Wines

Now, aren't the extra four points REALLY expensive?

But I don't think you can find more odd pricing than the world of minor league sports trades. For instance, this one takes the cake from the world of minor league baseball's Northern League:

05/01/2006 Schaumburg Assigned the contract of RHP Nigel Thatch (Rookie) to Fullerton of the Golden Baseball League in exchange for 1 pallet (60 cases) of Budweiser beer.

However, the most famous player for equipment trade was in 1973, where minor leaguer Pete Perdue was traded for a bag of baseballs, and the baseballs got a better return.

The tighter financial constraints of the minor leagues sometimes lead to deals you would never see at the top levels of the sport. In 1973, the Single-A Lafayette Mud Hens were scheduled to play a doubleheader at home against the Tuscaloosa Otters. At the conclusion of first game, Howard Lejune, equipment manager and second baseman for the Mud Hens, noticed that the team was dangerously low on baseballs and would likely be unable to play a second game. Unwilling to forfeit (as the Mud Hens were part of a tight pennant race), team owner Catfish Long quickly traded right-fielder Pete Purdue to the Otters in exchange for a bag of baseballs the Otters had stowed on their team bus. The trade turned out to be brilliant: Purdue broke his foot in the first inning of the second game, while the bag of baseballs went 3 for 4 with two doubles and a homerun. The Mud Hens won the League Championship, with the bag of baseballs hitting an astonishing .435 down the stretch.

Go ahead, be a laughing stock

2006-05-11T11:00:00.000-04:00

I had the pleasure of traveling with Cynthia Enns. In addition to being kasina's distribution partner in Canada through Credo Consulting, she and her husband David are winemakers and owners of Laughing Stock Vineyards.

Theirs is a great story, and I admire how they have been able to "marry" all parts of their life together from finance to wine and do it together.

Some great snippets from their site that tell their story (I am a ham, and love these)
- "This winery is our vow of poverty."
- The flagship wine is their "Portflio"
- Their purchase program is named "Futures"
- Each bottle is stylish, with the a ticker-like LFNG and stock quotes from the S&P on the day of the wine's release
- "Our Small Cap program is an opportunity to participate in our smaller market plays. "
- There are more great marketing slogans/promotions to come

The authentic story works ... look at all the buzz they've been able to generate. And they use it to enhance their personal relationships with Credo clients. In addition to tasting great wine (Lee and I shared a bottle), Credo clients get to live vicariously through David and Cynthia, while simultaneously getting to know them as people. They get to participate in David and Cynthia's story. Brilliant.

Cheers to David and Cynthia who really walk the walk.

Baby Boomer Products

2006-05-11T10:38:00.000-04:00

I recently wrote a post on the kasina blog about Baby Boomer Products. I am linking here since I see that there are still a lot of financial service firms tracking this site every now and then, butI don't want to bore my other friends with it. Enjoy.

My Last Night of Immigrant Vacation

2006-05-02T01:37:00.000-04:00

Today, a Google search for the term "poor huddled masses" (with quotes) yields the following as the top 2 results.

Result 1 from Liberty State Park
Result 2 from Mens News Daily

The first link reminded me of things that I have long since forgotten -- that Emma Lazarus was the author of "The New Colossus" which dubbed the Statue of Liberty the Mother of Exiles.

The second link is tried to teach me something new. Basically, America's full --go home foreigners. The one thing that was semi-substantive was a link to Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). I wanted to hear their point of view and this argument on its Web site (sorry, I just can't get myself to link to it):

Mass immigration depresses the wages of poorer Americans.
The gap between rich and poor in America continues to widen. Job competition by waves of new immigrants depresses the wages and salaries of American workers and hits hardest at minority workers and those without high school degrees. America’s focus must be on training our own labor force to face competition from abroad, not on importing new workers to compete for jobs at home.

Interesting, so I gave a quick look on census.gov, and here is what I found on the most recent figures on wealth distribution (these are measured in a Gini index -- basically, 1 is totally unequal, and 0 is totally equal distribution of wealth)

Format: figure, 2003, 2004 (sorry, Blogger formatting sucks)

Money Income, 0.450, 0.450
Market Income, 0.492, 0.496
Post-Social Insurance Income, 0.446, 0.449
Disposable Income, 0.405, 0.400

Basically, wealth looks pretty much the same. Mind you it is only one year of data, but it must be important if as FAIR's site states were are "letting in 1.1MM immigrants a year!" But the rich aren't earning any more than they have been (money income) ... they are just learning how to invest it better (market income). In fact, disposable income is closing, or the lowest are learning to spend less and save more. The data just doesn't seem to validate FAIR's claim.

So perhaps it is race ... and FAIR just isn't able to say it so overtly for political reasons -- that the new flood of immigrant workers are really stealing jobs away from "natives." For the purposes of this post, let's just call a spade a spade, and say that the influx of hispanics will be taking money away from whites or other groups.

It was hard to find an easy table of data to run analysis on, but here is what I was able to find from a 1993 report, which was most amenable to an excel analysis (mine). I am sure that there is more complete data available, but I am too tired and annoyed with census.gov to find it.

Pretty flat, no? I guess I just don't get it. Furthermore, I thought it was interesting to note that there were no huge effects either after the 1986 Amnesty either. There were many Chicken Little arguements made after its passage which have yet to be seen on a race/income basis.

Why am I going to all this trouble on my vacation? Well, this stuff hits home for me. I watched these people who told their stories and I will be honest, I cried as I heard dozens talk about their struggle to make it in the States as a labor of love.

I was never a good history student, but one lesson in 10th grade left an indellible mark upon me, which I was reminded of today.

From May 6, 1882 to December 17, 1943, the moniker "Chinese-American" would get you searched for papers, deported if you didn't have them, and ostracized or killed if you did. The Chinese Exclusion and Geary Acts were finally repealed only after the US was embarrased on the world stage after China's help in World War II.

The world stage that saved the Chinese immigrants doesn't exist today. We're pretty much an embarrasement already and it hasn't yielded any fruitful policy. Thus, the search for the immigration answer has to come from us, and rightfully so.

As a million Latinos marched today for immigration rights, I kept thinking, Who is going to embarrass into the right thing today? Who is going to remind us that we are a nation of immigrants, that Lady Liberty is the Mother of Exiles asking for our poor huddled masses?

The French gave the Statue of Liberty to us. But if we can't figure out how to do the right thing, then perhaps we need to bestow Lady Liberty to a country who can fulfill her mantle.

This is how I am spending my last night of vacation.

Hybrid Autos - Don't Price Like This

2006-04-28T04:22:00.000-04:00

I am on vacation in California, where we have been driving between San Francisco, Tahoe, and the Wine Country--a lot of miles, and Hertz was kind enough to give me a gas guzzling Buick. With all the brouhaha about hybrids(being the car, not the wholesaler). I went "Windows shopping" on CarsDirect, and here is what I found.

Does something seem wrong to you here? Isn't one of ideas behind hybrids (not the only of course) is to SAVE you money? But here is the truth:

1. The tax benefit is not as good as you may think, especially those susceptible to AMT. I am going to go out on a limb and say that the marketing demographic for hybrids is likely to have AMT liability.

2. Manufacturers are lying. For instance, this MSN Money article points out that the Chevy Silverado Hybrid and the GMC Sierra each get only ONE mile per gallon more efficiency than their gas counterparts. And even the good eggs such as the Prius really get nowhere near the touted 60mpg.

So we are left with the gas savings to help us justify a $14,528 premium. A quick calculation at MixedPower shows us this (I used 30mpg as the average EPA on the conventional Accord, from its own stats):

It would take about 116+ years at $3/gallon and 12,000 miles/year?!?!? You may disagree with the exact assumptions, but almost anyway you slice it, it doesn't save you money to get a hybrid.

Why do the auto makers do it ... because for the time being they can (for now). They are pricing their products at antithetical ends of their intent. It also implies that they don't really care about the environment or rising fuel costs, they care about capitalizing short-term profits.

But someone will figure out that this is a pennywise, poundfoolish strategy and create an economical, available, atuentic hybrid that will speak to car buyers everywhere.

The Vacation Inbox Challenge

2006-04-24T19:42:00.000-04:00

Today was my first day of vacation ... and a picture of my Inbox is on the left. I am particularly proud of this for you will notice that "Inbox" is not bolded and you see "0 items" in the lower left hand corner.

I have envied Lee for quite a number of years since he is an anal retentive Outlook loser, I mean, user. But for the first time since my first day of college I have an Inbox of zero, and I aim to keep it that way.

People say, "Stop checking your mail ... go relax." Well, I posted before about Breaking Vacation Rules and this is going to be another one. I am going to check my email and keep the Inbox at 0. It will only take a few minutes a day. And as one of my client said, "What is the point of going on vacation if you see 9,546 unopened emails waiting to be read when you get back? How relaxed will you be then?"

Seems like an easy trade off to me ... but I am a geek who's blogging on my vacation.

Consulting Process on South Beach

2006-04-13T09:46:00.000-04:00

I had coffee yesterday with a friend of mine, John Raguin. He is president of GuideWire Software and we got to talking about what we can learn from each others' businesses.

One of the things that we struggle with here is deadlines and heroic efforts to get some of our projects done. We talked about how GuideWire uses Extreme Programming (the call it "Sprinting") to reduce their production time and keep their team wholly engaged in a project. It is one of the new lightweight software development methodologies.

I broached this topic before when I talked about Jamming, which was a way to blow through the intellectual challenges of a problem, but not neccsarily the production aspects of a solution or a project.

Some of our consulting and research methodologies are already "lightweight" ... namely customers must always be available, using user stories to create a back drop, etc.

But I know we can do more ... I think there is opportunity to use this in every type of knowledge business to work smarter and not harder.

Mass. Healthcare - an exercise in customer segmentation

2006-04-12T08:41:00.000-04:00

After talking with two of my blog's fans (perhpas the only two!) and consulting StatCounter.com, I realize that there is traffic here and thus, I am cross posting a piece I put up on the kasina blog yesterday.

* * * * *

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney wrote an Op-Ed piece in the WSJ today (subscription required) that explains how they found a way to provide health care for (nearly) everyone in the state. As a former Mass resident and a longtime advocate of public health care, I was intrigued by the piece.

In essence, he explains how they were able to achieve this without incurring a huge tax burden on Mass residents. Basically, it came down to a good knowledge of their customer segements and providing cost-effective solutions against it. He cites:

- 20% of the uninsured population qualifed for Medicaid, but never signed up. Solution? Build internet portals in hospitals and clinics. If an uninsured shows up, they get signed up.

-40% of uninsured earn enough to buy insurance but instead use emergency care as "free" healthcare. Solution? work with insurers to provide products approximatly 50% less expensive.

- "another group" (his numbers don't add to 100%) has working people who make too much for Medicaid but not enough for insurance ... so they have developed a sliding scale subsidy that draws on the $1B the state already allocates to its uninsured fund.

My point is not a political one (although, bravo Massachusetts), but that this cost-effective hypothesis is all born out of a simple thing that we at kasina have be advocating and consulting on ... build a strong customer segmentation strategy and develop programs that answer those specific needs instead of applying a one-size-fits-all strategy.

If a government can figure this out, surely us in the private sector should be able to figure out how to apply this as well.

The kasina blog launches

2006-04-11T10:20:00.000-04:00

The kasina blog has recently been launched ... from this point forward, I will be placing business related posts there and more of my personal stuff will be here ... some stuff may be cross-posted as well.

I don't know how I am going to maintain two blogs, but will be giving it a shot.

Baseball and fatherhood

2006-04-02T20:06:00.000-04:00

In a scene from last week's West Wing, Toby Zeigler puts replaces an O's hat on his children with Yankee's hat and says: "Trust me -- you'll be happier."

Toby is missing the point. The tears that fans shed are the things that connect us to our humanity. And that is what I loved about baseball more than any other sport. That the champions bust their butts for at least 173 games in a year makes you realize how bad they want it ... they want it as bad as you do, or vice versa, or something like that.

As an Indians fan, I feel insulted by various Sports Illustrated covers (see below), angry at Jose Mesa in 1997, cry at the end of Major League and at the trading of Jim Thome.

(Read: Believe It! Cleveland is the best team in the American League ... final record ... 61-101)

However, I realize that these were all selfish points ... things *I* liked about baseball, wanted from baseball. I just wanted my team to win. But now Sean adds a whole new dimension in terms of what I want from baseball.

What I want to get out of baseball is passion and humanity. I want Sean to learn and to love, and to get hurt and to learn and love even more. I find it hard to find a better venue than baseball. Next time you are at the game ... watch how many kids bring mits, score games, and cry at the end of the season. That is what I want to surround myself with.

I know this quote from Bart Giamatti's "The Green Fields of the Mind" is famous, but now I like to think that this was something he would have said to his son ... or as baseball commissioner, consoling a group of kids (and parents) after the major league season ... or little league season.

It still makes my eyes well up every time I read it.

“It's designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone.

... It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun. "

I fancy myself as someone who hasn't learned yet, and I hope Sean and others remain simple creatures of summer.

Does high impact corporate philanthropy mean direct service?

2006-03-24T08:07:00.000-05:00

My answer: I don't think so.

We are currently doing site visits to evaluate programs for the kasina Youth Foundation (kYF). I was at the READ Foundation's site at PS 277 in the Bronx, which by the way is a fantastic program with amazing results.

One of the challenges that I have had is thinking how we can incorporate the second mission of the kYF with a program like READ. Our mission is to work with organizations in giving more than money. While I feel a strong urge to be part of the direct service model (i.e. work with kids), I am pretty sure that this is usually not the way to go for foundations like ours.

However, how do you participate in direct service with a program like READ, which already has a very tight, well-executed service delivery model? They teach teens to teach 1st and 2nd graders to read. They have excellent training, staff and volunteer oversight already in place with over a 1000 volunteers working in 25+ schools in NYC.

The notion that anybody can volunteer and pitch in is only partially true. At kYF, we believe that we need to solve serious problems in the education system, therefore, it makes sense that these serious problems require very well-trained, talented people on the frontline delivering the service.

I fancy myself as someone who has had some exposure to the teaching and running other social service nonprofits -- but I can't do it anymore either. For example. a few years ago, I was a volunteer teacher at Bailey House teaching GED-level mathematics. I have had a few years of teaching and some formal training and I felt that I was inadequately supporting my students. I thought that I could just rely on my previous experience and plan lessons on the subway there ... but it just doesn't work as well as it should.

So, my point, and again, I do have one ... is that I really would like to look for more effective ways to work with nonprofits that are focused on the strategic goals or their lack of resources. A couple ideas that brewed in discussions during the site visit.

Interviewing and evaluating the effects of the program on their teen volunteers
Serving as college guidance mentors to their teen volunteers
Helping the acquire books as rewards from industry contacts

Basically, these were things the program needed and didn't have the resources, talent, or time to do. Some of these have a direct service element, and some not ... but that's OK with me and still worthy of the "high impact philanthropy" moniker.

We can always be about direct service. Otherwise, it isn't for the kids at all. We'd just be selfish for our own "need to do good."

Buzzing and being there

2006-03-24T07:58:00.000-05:00

One of the best bits of advice I have received this year has been to turn off "New Mail Alerts" on Outlook and your handheld buzzing at every email. This was the advice of our FranklinCovey trainer, Sydne Kalet, and this tip was worth her fee alone.

It has helped with "being there," a concept that I intellectually understand but have had to work on. My mind goes in several directions at once, and any distraction like my Treo, just exacerbates the problem.

It really has worked and I highly recommend it to anyone. Also, I recommend Sydne as well.

Why aren't there steezy mutual fund tools

2006-03-21T12:03:00.000-05:00

After 2 years of converting from skiing to snowboarding, I am in the market for a snowboard of my own. For those who fear snow, fresh air, or gravity, the benevolent brand giant is Burton. Like most newbies to riding, I just found it too confusing to find the gear I needed, so I used their product selector.

It was a thorougly enjoyable experience throughout, but the kicker for me was the final question:

I fancy myself someone who is relatively hip, but I admit that I didn't know what steezy meant before this, (for a fuller discussion try wikipedia). I guess this is what you get when the third question you are asked is structured with the following choices:

In any case, it did a great job of e-Commerce Marketing 101 ... take the user from implicit needs to explicit products. In fact, Burton does that doesn't just filter, it actually will educate you along the process. (I think that I dabble in steez, but many may disagree)

So I googled "Fund selector" and the top legitimate hit looks like this (no links to protect the innocent):

We leave the investor to do all the work. Even if you look at one of the best sites on the market, you will find something that looks like this:

Which still leaves a lot of knowledge and work to the investor.

I realize that there are a number of regulatory issues in issuing advice to investors, there are simple things that can be employed on sites today.

1. Explain if you use jargon: -- Take the first example, what do the "volatility" levels mean? Could youp place antecdotal descriptors to describe what the levels might correspond to, even if it is a septile if volatility ... at least give us something! Look at the choices in the steezy question.

2. Dump the stock photos -- If you look in the Burton site or the graphics in the screenshots above, every graphic and photo adds meaning to the message at hand. Not a pixel is wasted. Even the driver license is a Vermont driver license, as they were founded in Burlington, VT.

Look around at your site, how much stock photography are you using? Is it really communicating anything? We know this is a weak point at kasina and we are taking steps to fix that in our next site release.

3. Make the process fun -- Don't roll your eyes, Mr. or Ms. Asset Management e-Biz exec (I am talking to you, Lawrence) -- it can be done. Perhaps explaining what alpha and beta, or benchmarks and why they are important. There are some examples that came to mind. For instance, Analytic Investors did a free piece on predicting alpha of NFL teams to explain their quant approach (no link anymore) which I loved. A bit nerdy for an individual investor, but it was funny and connected with the instituional audience in an authentic, brand-positive way.

I really believe that this stuff works ... I have a new Custom board and Hail boots to prove it.

CheckSpring: From usury to banking

2006-03-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

I've been a little light on the bloggable inspiration recently until I came across Crain's today. It profiled a company called CheckSpring. It is aiming to service "unbanked" clients in the South Bronx by offering check cashing services to low income neighborhoods while trying to convert them to a bank account.

But this is a for profit ... "We're capitalists," expalins founder Charlie Wilcox. I think this is a huge opportunity where people can make money AND make the world a better place.

Now these companies have their critics and doubters, but two thoughts came to my mind ...

What happens if this market starts accumulating wealth? Who would be the asset manager who would try to serve them first? I am guessing a large scale player who could handle such small accounts or someone who would be philosophically aligned with this market segment. I will leave the names for you to fill out.

What would be the implication of combining this with a "21st Century Homestead Act," idea #7 on HBR's 20 Breakthrough Ideas for 2006 (subscription required), where each newborn could receive $6,000 as a downpayment on a productive life. What if they do this, where would most people turn who are born in low income neighborhoods ... I'd guess CheckSpring, if successful, would be up there. While I don't think that this is going to happen anytime soon, it does indicate that there is an undercurrent of support in re-establishing the middle class through public or private enterprises.

While many financial services firms feel like they are "slumming it" by looking all the way down the food chain to the mass affulent (for shame!), I think it'd behoove more people in financial services to look at further "downstream" as well. I'd argue they were looking ahead, not down.

I think we will see more CheckSprings, er, springing up soon. Banks first, but who's next?

Blogging narcissim and voyeurism

2006-03-09T11:10:00.000-05:00

I had dinner with ThatKidInTheCorner last week in his newly adopted hometown of C@L, as he calls it. Being one of my blogging mentors, I was very curious to understand why he blogs.

The next day he posted a thesis about how narcissim and voyeruism presents a cycle that feeds to the growing world of user-created content. It's funny because I don't think he really feels that himself.

For me, blogs are my "mental gym" in both reading them and writing one myself. There are a number of ideas that I have floating in mental ether and just don't become real for me until I have to construct prose, or on rare occasions, a cogent argument. But just as I don't showcase that last set of incline presses I did, I do it for me mostly. I don't expect it to get read, and judging by my StatCounter, it isn't.

So what does that mean for content and the internet, and those in the blogosphere? I think that things that deliver real value do not fall into the vortex of narcissim and voyeurism. That the purposes of creating and reading user-driven content are not aligned with each other. The points are going many to many in nature at an exponential rate.

My point? And I do have one, is that I too believe that user-driven content is going to grow, but it isn't going to get read, and that is ok. That readership (or voyeruism as ThatKid would say) is no prerequisite for content creation.

Sean Speaks ...

2006-03-09T11:02:00.000-05:00

... and his first words were "Da-da-da-da-da" last night.

Now, I can't say for sure that he was able to connect that I am Dada, or what that even was, but I can say for sure:

a) he meant to say it as he was mimicing my mouth movements
b) that he said them while looking at me with some notion of intent.

A happy day in fatherdom.

Shaun White is the whole package

2006-02-27T11:22:00.000-05:00

I am a new snowboarder, and to me the story of the Olympics was Shaun White.

When most people hear of a guy like the Flying Tomato in a sport like snowboarding, you think ... "he's gotta be some pompous, self-absorbed flyboy". Here's what I learned about him.

He is a patriot. He wanted to ride for the US in 2002 and just missed the team. Despite the controversy in snowboarding about the Olympics being too mainstream for snowboarding, he didn't care. You don't get any of the Shani Davis attitude from him.
He loves his Dude ... er, Dad. I'd love to have a relationship with my Sean that "Homer" has with Shaun White.
He's financially sensible. His parents took out multiple mortgages to finance their 13 year old son's talents. Already a multi-millionaire at age 19, he is learning to invest it. To paraphrase, "My parents are teaching me to manage my money, because, I am not going to be, like 30, trying to make another snowboarding video to pay my rent."
He is just a kid -- just as much fun to watch on the snow as off. I got a kick out of watching him hit on Sasha Cohen on (inter)national TV with Bob Costas.

I ride with my friend's 9 year old son who wears his hair long like Shaun White. It makes me happy to think that he can emulate someone who is the whole package. That it's cool to represent your country and cool to love your parents and cool to think responsibly about money.

Most importantly, as a parent, I love the fact that ... it's cool to just be a kid that loves his Dude.

Branding Lessons from "He Hate Me"

2006-02-23T08:56:00.000-05:00

For non-sports fans, Carolina Panthers RB Rod Smart gained fame as a running back by sticthing "He Hate Me" on the back of his jersey as an XFL player. A sort of FU to all the people who cut him in previous tryouts. It gained him fame and noteriety from a no name to a steady job in the NFL.

It made me realize hate is a powerful tool for brand. Hate is good, when done right.

People should hate good brands. It should arouse that a strong feeling. People hate Pepsi, Wal-Mart, and McDonalds. Yes, even the king of brands, Apple, has haters (do you know an iSnob?)

I was reminded of this in a recent meeting with a client. In short, this client's asset management firm has been known for "Factor X." Factor X is not price and performance of their funds.

They conducted a large study of advisors to survey what they wanted
They found that most advisors care about price and performance of their products and wanted "hot product." They did not care about Factor X.
Ergo, Research said, "We need to pitch performance. We aren't giving advisors what they want."
Senior Management said, "No. You need to find advisors who care about Factor X."

Refreshing, isn't it?

However, I thought of two questions. First, how many firms actually have the guts to do that? Second, why stop there? Why not make hate a strategic marketing objective?

To be frank, the only brand I can think of in the asset management industry who people really hate, I mean, He-Hate-Me-Hate ... is Vanguard. Bogle had spent years speaking about low cost and trashing advisors and two things have arisen.

1. Vanguard is now the largest mutual fund manager
2. Vanguard is now attracting advisors to their ETF line

Now I am not for creating hate and animosity for their own sake. It is a high-risk proposition, and not for everyone. For those who do it, this strategy requires two things:

1. Widely Available Market with Disperate Needs -- If you have a market of one, then you better give them what they want. However, there are over 250-500K financial advisors who are selling or advising investment management products. Most have active customers (producers) of 10% of that at maximum. Moreover, our own work in looking at behavior-based segmentation of advisors suggest there are a wide array of advisor needs. Net Net: There is room to create enemies in this channel.

2. You've Got Know You Are (or Will Be) Right -- With almost cult-like passion, your firm has to believe that you are right and not waver from your track. With Vanguard for instance, they believe that actively management investment advice is overpriced and underperforms. You can make a strong case that they are right. Margins are compresing in the advisory channel. ETFs, mostly passive indicies, are the hottest thing on the street. There is a move to fee-based advising rather than commission-based compensation ("the juice" or "smack" as some clients have called it). They have never wavered from that.

It takes guts to put a big HE HATE ME on your brand, but I think the market will reward those who do it right.

P.S. Rod Smart is now calling himself "He Love Me" ... but whatever.

Distribution is a dirty word

2006-02-12T12:14:00.000-05:00

I just came back from our company offsite where twice a year we try and think of new strategies to grow kasina and evaluate the growth of the company.

One word that was thrown around all weekend was "distribution" and I realize I am sick of the word. In plainspeak, distribution for the asset management industry means the people who are selling and marketing mutual funds, variable annuities, 401(k) plans and investments, pensions, etc.

When I hear it it's like nails on a chalkboard ... "Distribution" is a dirty word.

A core theme of kasina's work has been around advocating for a smarter sales and marketing force -- one that takes customer needs and can deliver value through products and advice that fits those needs, customized to each client's demands at any particular time.

How do you "distribute" that?

When I think of distribution, I think of distributing power or pizzas. Not high value advice or service that is meant just for me ... delivered in such a way that no one else could have thought about it in the same way.

This is something that I think is wrong with our industry. The word distribution is an artifact of a "push mentality" of product development. That is to say, build a good product with good performance and people will just eat it up -- like thin crusted sausage pie or my electricity. Jam it down their throats and we can continue to have industry wide net margins of ~14%.

If all we are is "distributors" ... pizza delivery people in italian suits, then I think this isn't sustainable. There already is margin compression going on. If this keeps up, bet there is more to come.

Without a rigorous historical/anthropological study of the industry, I bet it is mostly due to the fact that the top investment professionals rose first to top management -- so sales and marketing took a back seat. It is an anachronism ... where fund managers have to disclose that "past investment performance is no guarantee of future results for the shareholder" they do believe that "past investment investment performance *is a guarantee* of future sales results (for me.)"

This is not true anymore, great products are on the shelf, and there are average (or even subpar) products are doing quite well thank you. I am not saying that performance does not affect flows and sales (it does), I am just saying the use of the term distribution implies that there is nothing else to the game. I think that is not true.

I think words matter in a change effort. We aren't in the distribution game, I suppose we need to think of something else to call it.

Service Selling? Smarter Service? Customer focus? We are still trying to work on it, but I feel pretty confident that distribution is not the way to go.

Furthermore, we aren't the only industry to face this. Autos, computers moving to service models and it is no longer just about the car or the box. I don't think anyone needs to hear the parable of IBM again (consulting good, laptops bad), but think along those lines.

I am open to comments/suggestions/flames from the blogosphere.

Have your SRI cake and eat it too

2006-01-25T21:12:00.000-05:00

I was refreshed, encouraged, inspired, and just plain happy to read that socially responsible is finally coming into its own. It is not a fad. Do not ignore it. Here are some highlights from a recent study by the Social Investment Forum's recent study (PDF) on the socially reponsible investment (SRI) market:

It's already big - 1 in 10 dollars is already involved with SRI somehow through investment screening, advocacy, etc.
It's getting bigger-- SRI fund assets grew to $179 billion in 2005 (+18.5%) increase over the $151 billion tracked in 2003.
It's growing faster than the overall fund market -- The last decade has shown a 12x growth in SRI (1995-$12B AUM)

I strongly encourage any industry folk to give this study a once over.

After reading it, I began to levy some common criticisms against SRI -- below average performance and high expenses. Ironically, on the front page of Morningstar today is a piece on identifying some solid SRI large cap funds with good performance and with fees as low as 25bps. Also, a deeper dive is available at SIF's site in a broader range of investment styles. I am not a product person, but looks like there are good options in a lot of investment categories.

I originally came from a nonprofit background. When I entered business, I always thought it would be a small waystation to returning to the nonprofit world at some point in time. Frankly, that is still a hope, but the timetable has moved out.

I've been vexed by having to choose one or the other, and reading things like the recent WSJ panel on corporate responsibility reinforces that opinion that basically you are choosing profit (be it individual or corporate) or social responsbility. Or the way I thought of the tone of the piece was you could be either social or responsible. Pick one.

The longer I am in business, I am a believer that there is a third alternative -- social AND responsible. We try to live it at kasina in our work with the kasina Youth foundation, because we believe it makes us a more valuable company, and damnnit, it feels like the right thing to do.

It's nice to see the numbers indicate that others inside the asset management industry are starting to feel the same way.

NYC Idiotarod

2006-01-24T22:13:00.000-05:00

There are events that people associate with New York ... Macy's T-day parade, Dick Clark and the ball in Times Square, 4th of July fireworks on the East River.

This one takes the cake for locals and makes me happy to be a New Yorker -- the Idiotarod.

If anyone is interested in assembling a team, let me know.

Moderating a panel

2006-01-23T13:38:00.000-05:00

Guy Kawaski wrote a blog today on how to kick butt on a panel. In the comments section, someone wanted some tips on how to moderate a panel for success. I've moderated a few, and generally speaking, I find them a lot of fun. Here are a couple of things that I thought worked well:

Work together on a deck/Create a fake company -- In one panel that I moderated last year, myself and 3 other panelists from different companies created a fake mutual fund company in order to show salient ways that the Web can help improve relationships with advisors. We had different roles as marketing, technology, CRM, and strategy and no where in the panel presentation did we advertise or even say our own companies name (outside introductions). It enabled us to display our expertise without having to pitch why our companies were so great. We were really able to focus on the content of the session. In turn, we got more exposure, and frankly, had a lot more fun.

Never ask a yes/no question -- There's nothing worse than getting -- "No. (silence)" Panel buzzkill. Instead of "Do you do x?" you can easily change most questions by adding the words, "In what way ... " or "What's your experience with ..."

Have more questions prepared than you will use -- Sometimes panels leave time for Q and A from the audience, but depending on your position in the agenda (post-lunch or pre-golf, pre-drinks sessions are notoriously bad) you might not have any response at all ... leaving you the moderator with dead time. Try to circulate and rehearse responses between you and your panelists. In my experience, there should be no surprises from the moderator's perspective. Furthermore, make sure that you have more than you need. In general, I try to prepare at least 20 panel questions/hour of panel time.

Put the discussion points/objectives on a slide -- Panels are great to see brilliant minds in motion, but often it becomes hard to distill who is talking about what. I have had some success in cluing the audience about what the substance of the material is going to be. It has to be better than "Intro, Presentation, Audience Q and A." Think of it this way, what are the three things you want the audeince to leave with? Just put it on the slide and leave it there for the audience to refer to.

Have dinner the night before -- even though you may have done several conference calls or circulated email prep a number of times, there is nothing like sitting face to face and seeing how the group interacts. You will get some idea of who can take the lead and how the personalities gel when sitting together. Make note of that and it can help you during the panel to moderate tempo or direct an audience question to the right person. **On this dinner point, a colleague of mine ... "re: the dinner the night before....which I think is essential, for just the reasons you state. It makes me crazy when the moderator or panelists then CONSTANTLY REFERS to (during the presentation)...."like we were discussing last night at dinner/this morning at breakfast......" It makes me nuts. I THINK it makes the audience feel like1) left out that they weren't invited and2) that they are getting some "remnant" of the "good stuff" that was "discussed last night at dinner."

Any other comments/suggestions?

What's So Five Minutes From Now?

2006-01-23T10:14:00.000-05:00

I will spare everyone the sob "When I came back from vacation, I had a jillion emails story" ... I have the same problem that everyone has -- I just get too much email.

Last week, Business Week ran a "E-Mail Is So Five Miniutes Ago" basically stating that online chat, and wikis are replacing some of the function of email in the workplace. While I think that this is true, I think it is more important to focus on what is the core element of these technologies that are making them so attactive.

Basically, I believe that they require permission. Anyone can send you email. Thus, it takes a lot of work to make communication channels like email permission based. They are expensive or ineffective (ever lose something important in your spam filter?). Basically, with wikkis, blogs or chat, if I want to tune you out, I can, and it is easy to do.

When thinking about marketing, I try not to spend all my time "keeping up with the Joneses" and now exclusively hopping on the wikki bandwagon -- but rather focus on the principle of permission and keep your mind open to other permission based systems that are so five minutes from now.

What does that inlcude? Well, things that are "out there." I believe that most senior executives I meet are skeptical of things like Word of Mouth Marketing and Buzz Marketing, but watch out, the concept of permission (and its cousins authenticity and relevance) is significantly affecting our inboxes, and I bet it will significanly affect our pocketbook sooner than you think.

If it hasn't done so already.

The following business observation takes place between 10:10 PM and 10:15 PM

2006-01-16T22:15:00.000-05:00

My wife marvels at my ability to advance through commercials at a full speed on our DVR. So, I didn't watch one commercial over the last 4 hours of 24 (well, 2.6 hours since I skipped the commericials).

So, I didn't see one ad, or so I thought. Here is what I noticed:

Terrorist and CTU networking by AVAYA (why else would a terrorist hold a phone like that ... logo time)
Cell service brought to you by Sprint (grey Treo 650 v. silver Treo 650)
Ex-CTU agents who can't get jobs at the oil wells drive shiny new Toyota trucks
Terrorists love Toshiba laptops

The following technology nits take place between 10:00 PM and 10:10PM

2006-01-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

Being a closet geek and a 24 Junkie ... I got a kick out of the fact that two pieces of technology that I use/used to use are in the show.

They just don't work like I know them to work.

I have been a Treo 650 user for a bit. While performing recon on the terrorists, Jack has to use a telescope to see the terrorists, but uses his 1 megapixel cameraphone (no zoom) to send a hi-res photo to CTU for scanning. Whatever.

And the terrorists, a bit further behind the technology curve due to funding problems I suppose, are using my old laptop -- a Toshiba Portege 3500. The terrorists are watching wireless TV to monitor their progress. Having spent a few transcontinental trips watching movies ... I can tell you first hand that video processing on that computer was so bad that all videos played like What's Up, Tiger Lilly?

(and yes, my laptop had the max memory on board ... 1GB)

(and yes, it was the 3500 series, and not the M200 ... don't ask me why I know this)

(OK, I am going to stop dorking out now. )

(I mean, geeking out.)

Drinking on the job: Not just for Roy McAvoy

2006-01-12T11:26:00.001-05:00

A classic scene in the movie Tin Cup, has Kevin Costner's Roy McAvoy downing a bottle of tequila before the opening round of the US Open at the advice of his caddy, Romeo (Cheech Marin) ...

"You play better when you are wasted."

While hilarious in a movie (a Kevin Costner film at that) .... I don't get what is the deal with people who heavily drink on/before the job in real life. A study estimates that about 1 in 10 of us has worked with a hangover (9.2%).

I wonder if Bode Miller, the champion skiier, took the survey ... As he recently admitted (and apologized for):

"Talk about a hard challenge right there. ... If you ever tried to ski when you're wasted, it's not easy," Miller said. "Try and ski a slalom when ... you hit a gate less than every one a second, so it's risky, you know. You're putting your life at risk there. It's like driving drunk only there's no rules about it in ski racing."

Breaking Vacation Rules

2006-01-11T20:12:00.000-05:00

I spent the last two weeks at my Vermont house on vacation. Life moves a bit slower there than in New York, and I certainly wasn't working. I had narrowband access, spent most of my time, skiing/riding, cooking, eating, etc.

My vacation was nothing like real life, but I certainly didn't get the vacation blues.

I think the old traditional advice is not to think about work on vacation. I disagree. I was thinking about work the last few days of my vacation and I used it to consider how happy I was doing what I was doing. For me, I got two things out thinking about work on vacation:

I was able to hit the ground running and felt energized about coming back
I actually look back on my vacation in a more favorable light, which makes my vacation while I am working ... hard to explain but hopefully you get what I mean.

Margaret Heffernan at Fast Company cites a fact that American employees give up about $1.2B in vacation each year. I think that it is actually the company that is losing out by not forcing people to take vacations.

I think that we could all think a little about work on vacation and I think it would have macroeconomic and personal benefits as well. So go ahead, open your email once at the end of vacation ... but just between your first and second daiquiris.

Google MinusWords

2006-01-11T10:24:00.000-05:00

Jeff Matthews recently posted his thoughts about a press release from FTD (the flower people). Basically the gist is ... Google advertising is downard trending to breakeven ... and they conjecture negative ROI should they continue.

Some of this is anticipated. To me, its no suprise that companies are slashing away at their traditional marketing budgets, but geez, online advertising? Google ... already?

Print marketing has had a 60 year run.
TV marketing had a good 30 year run.
Online ... about 10-15 years? Is that it?

A couple thoughts come to mind ...

First, I thought that there may be a difference between commodity marketing (like flowers) and differentiated/specialized services marketing (like what we do at kasina) but to be honest, we see the same results. We have launched a very small Google AdWords campaign, and not a single click through despite quite a few impressions. I would have thought if someone actually typed an impressionable query there would be some conversion ... at least around ~.05% ... but none.

Granted, we are a focus group of one, but look at the comments on the Matthews board and some other business owners share the same sentiment.

This led me to the second and more important conclusion: repetitive marketing will make you irrelevant. Marketing has to evolve. Yesterday, print was dead and online was crowned king. Now we see onilne advertising is perhaps dying and word of mouth, buzz marketing is on a metoric rise.

Don't think that it will last. Soon people will be overbuzzed, over word of mouth-ed, etc. What will be next?

I am not telling you to short GOOG right now, but I think the lesson learned is that consumers will grow immune over time to any sort of marketing, and the horizons for change are becoming even shorter.

Don't get too comfortable.