The Rug Merchant A few days ago, I got a call from a guy who called himself Tobin. He asked if I remembered him from when we were in Turkey and had bought rugs from him. It seems he is here in Southern California with a truck full of rugs (actually, I have learned that it’s three containers full from which he refills his rugs). He wanted to come over and show us his wares…
A Valuation of Old Town We just had a quick visit from NYC friends Steven and Leslie. I know both from my Bankers Trust days of yore. Steven was a colleague who was a controller and then a CFO of several businesses I ran. Leslie was a central Human Resources professional. We have stayed in touch over the years and, indeed, Steven and I have worked together on other private company ventures. We go back…
To Listen Is To Be Strong My youngest granddaughter Evelyn just started Kindergarten. She did well in her science-oriented nursery school (her father is a bit of science buff), but as the younger of two sisters, we don’t tend to think of her as the brilliant sister. She has the image more of the spunky sister. But truth be told, Evelyn is actually very smart. I’m glad I said it that way since the word…
Feelin’ Prickly No, I am not in a bad mood and I am not annoyed with someone or something…at least not at the moment. It’s just that when I have stuff to do, I have such performance anxiety as a natural part of who I am that I get that prickly feeling in my backside. I imagine that the feeling itself is somewhat primordial and comes out of the cerebral cortex rather than the cerebellum.…
Hip to be Square Huey Lewis is four years older than me but, as it turns out, he did follow an early path very similar to mine. He entered Cornell as an engineering student as Hugh Anthony Cregg III, having gotten an 800 on the SAT math test. That bests my score by fifty points. The rest of his career was quite a bit different from mine, but presumably at the age of 71 now…
Networking for the Networked Network We’ve all learned about the importance of networking. Mark Zuckerberg taught us about the social network and its value by making $130+ Billion just for himself as well as spawning another seven billionaires (not including the venture capital funds that made….billions). Those others include, Eduardo Saverin ($5B), Dustin Moskovitz ($8B), Sean Parker ($3B), Jeff Rothschild ($1.5B), Sheryl Sandberg ($1B) and Chris Hughes ($1B). And lets not forget the Winklevoss Twins…
Back Up the Truck For the forty-five years of my Wall Street career the expression to “back up the truck” refers to something a guy by the name of Tom Pope said to me. Tom had grown up in the International Department of our bank in the first half of the 1970’s. That was when the domestic banking market was in its decline due to large loan losses on loans to REITs that had gone…
Quick Like a Bunny When we moved to this hilltop we noticed that when we drove up High Mountain Drive, there was one house on a curve, actually one yard on a curve, where we could always count on seeing one or more rabbits running off, chased by our headlights. We came to calling the anonymous house the Bunny House. Given that it was one of the only homes up on this hill that has…
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)…
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…