The Pain of the Number Last summer, when I knew I would be moving out to San Diego, I reached out to several schools in the area that had graduate business programs to see if there was any interest in my credentials as a ten-year-member of the faculty at Cornell’s business school and a forty-five year Wall Street business manager. The folks at the University of San Diego showed interest and I went at the…
Cactus Flowers Many years ago (almost thirty) I was a banker with an office on Park Avenue. In fact, I had a corner office facing in the preferred Southeastern direction so that I had a lovely view down towards the Beaux-Arts Helmsley Building (what used to called the New York Central Building) that frames the visual end of midtown as Park Avenue traffic goes through regal archways in the building’s base to circumnavigate the old…
In Search of Content We have heard for twenty years, ever since the internet took serious root with the advent of widespread broadband, that content would be king. Like with many business imperatives, timing is everything and the world was not ready yet for content to be king twenty years ago. I would argue that to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the platform is the message and over the past twenty years there has been a great…
Gigging I alternate in thinking that I am on overload one minute and on pause the next. As soon as I find myself thinking that my situation is unique and a direct outgrowth of my own choices and circumstances, I read something or see something on cable news that makes me see people talking about exactly the same syndrome. Let’s think for a moment about that all-important baseline. My baseline is that I am 66…
The 600 Year Blink I read two enlightening articles this morning, one from The New Yorker and one from The Atlantic. It has occurred to me lately that in the age of digitized content, several magazines have seemed to be in ascendancy rather than decline like so many other magazines. In the pattern unfolding of the Coronavirus era, I sense that magazines will not be excluded from the tendency to accelerate the prevailing trends. The…
Deposing Views Today I was involved with an all-day deposition in a case where I am acting as an expert witness. I spent about 10-12 hours reading all the materials I had written on the case (1 46-page Report, 2 20-24-page Rebuttal Replies), the two rebuttals (each 25-30-pages) and various summary motions, articles, etc. I had worked on the case from late November through mid-January, when I wrote the first report. I spent 56 hours…
Ultimate Democratization The year was 2000 and we had just come through the Y2K scare relatively unscathed. It was not for lack of scrambling and effort as you may recall, so who knows whether we averted a crisis by getting out ahead of it by sounding the alarms, or if the concern was over-hyped and was never really a big risk. Either way, it was nice to see that Y2K did little to slow the…
Needless Mark-up I hear that Neiman Marcus is likely to declare bankruptcy soon as the latest signal that the retail business sector is the next in what promises to be an ongoing array of zombie business segments in the new normal. This morning I heard a retail analyst talking about it. He was actually quite balanced about it all. Clearly Neiman Marcus is an iconic brand that has been around for 113 years. It originated…
High Plains Drifter I look nothing like Clint Eastwood. I think nothing like Clint Eastwood. I’ve heard about his politics, so I want nothing to do with Clint Eastwood. But damn, does that guy know how to make movies that appeal to us all. I am my own version of a high plains drifter. I’ve spent my life parachuting into new places and figuring out how to prevail. Now comes the ultimate test of that…
Donut Holes I can tell that this quarantine has gone on too long or at least long enough. It’s been seven weeks by my count and any way you slice it, that’s a long time to be at home. The problem is, I can’t reasonably expect any sympathy for that since the entire world considers staying at home the least troubling of the three choices. The first choice is to be sick with COVID-19 and…