Dragonfly Louis Comfort Tiffany was not the founder of the iconic jewelry store Tiffany & Co., but was the son of its founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany. What strange family dynamic would have a father with a middle name spelled in a different manner than the given first name of his son? Louis was the first design director of Tiffany & Co., but by that time he was an accomplished artist in several mediums including painting…
Staying Calm I am watching Crimson Tide tonight, that great submarine movie about a nuclear launch crisis in the Pacific. It pits Gene Hackman, the Captain against Denzel Washington, the XO, in a face-to-face confrontation caused by a contrived partial communications situation. The set-up is whether a pre-emptive nuclear launch to gain a tactical warfare advantage is worth launching nuclear weapons in an unclear situation where there may have been an Emergency Action Message (EAM)…
On-Again, Off-Again COVID-19 is the gift that keeps on giving. We are all so very tired of the Pandemic lifestyle that we are all tending to get lax with our safety measures. After more than a year of being diligent with masking and social distancing, we may not be justified in letting down our guard, but we can probably all agree that we understand why it is happening. So far this summer, we have gone…
Riding with Polo One of my favorite branding stories involves the Ralph Lauren Polo brand. In early 2009, I was Chairman and CEO of a company called Africa Israeli, USA. It was the U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli parent of the same name, a company I liken to the General Electric of Israel because it was big and diversified. However, instead of washing machines and jet turbines, Africa Israeli had gone down a path of…
Geeks to the Rescue Kim’s ten-year-old desktop computer just died. SHe made an appointment with the Best Buy Geek Squad to come and fix it. While there are probably many different and better IT service providers, I can’t name another one that is as ubiquitous and branded as the Geek Squad. Therefore, she had the resident Geek appointment for this afternoon. Apparently Best Buy has my name on the account so the contact outreach came…
Juggling Tasks For the forty-five years of my active career, I recognized that the art of juggling tasks and prioritizing the use of one’s time was simply part of the job of working. I also knew that it was part of life in general outside of work, but rarely found that the personal tasks had the sort of urgency of triage that they had in business situations. Now I was never in the military and…
A Walk in Her Shoes Kim and I did what we always do on Thursday morning, we found an excuse to absent ourselves from our house so that the cleaning crew could do their thing without having to work around us. I think it bothers them less than it bothers us because watching others clean your personal space is less than comfortable no matter who they are. We use the time to do our errands…
Remembering How to Teach I taught at Cornell for ten years. When you start teaching you learn how to develop a course, write a syllabus, prepare lectures, prepare assigned reading, prepare cases and assignments, prepare tests and administer and present all of that. A wiley old professor of mine (now rest his soul), told me he figured he put in five hours of preparation for each hour of lecture that he gave. I found in…
Seeing Red For the last two-thirds of our trip home from Ithaca, my car was telling me with increasing urgency that I was increasingly over the time when I was due for a service check-up. I had taken the car in just before leaving and even went to the extent of having four new tires put on it for good measure. The trip was 7500 miles long, which was apparently enough to cause the service…
Everbody Is Going South and West I have a bad habit. Because I am not getting enough sleep, which I define as seven hours, I tend to fall asleep during the movie of my choice late at night. That is hardly a unique failing. It seems whomever I have staying with me at my home tends to do the same thing, probably even more than I do. Kim has the good sense to go into…