I Walk the Line No, this is not a piece about Johnny Cash, though I imagine that his song by the same name talks to a similar problem we all face in one way or another. And there’s yet another song title. What exactly is a line? Is it simply a demarcation or is it a barrier not to be crossed. Is it about providing guidance and directionality or is it a warning not to…
Hospitality in the Modern World Back in 1975 I was asked to teach hospitality economics to the students at Cornell’s Hotel School, arguably the best school in the world for hotel management. It was not so challenging devising hospitality examples or cases to highlight important economics principles, though getting these abstract concepts into the heads of students fixated on “flush and gush” courses and wine-tasting was a bigger obstacle. The concept of mean reversion and…
The Illusion of Control Control is what makes the world go around. We work our whole lives to obtain it. We are unsettled if we do not feel in possession of it. At times it allows us to go faster and at other times it slows us down to an excruciating crawl. “Get control of yourself!” “You’re out of control!” “You’re a control-freak!” Does it mean to rule or just to regulate? Is it…
Resistance Insistence Resistance is a word that is stuck squarely in my mind today. I have a gray t-shirt with the word RESIST across the chest. It is a political statement and it is meant to mean a refusal to accept or comply with something. I like the sentiment in today’s political environment, only I would add an exclamation point at the end for RESIST! It says to me and anyone who encounters me and…
Compromising Compromises In almost every corner of modern life there are reasons to compromise rather than stick dogmatically to a strong and extreme position. This issue itself can be a very debatable one and some will say that compromise on the most important issues is unacceptable and morally repugnant. If only the world was always so black and white, life would be a lot less morally conflicted. I remember in high school, I attended…
Batter Up A funny thing happened on the way to the office. It turns out that this summer, the world has decided that it likes hydrogen again. That’s an understatement based on the 200-page report issues by the International Energy Agency (IEA). They say hydrogen is once again the darling it was a decade ago and a decade before that. Funny thing is that hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe, and…
Ain’t Too Proud to Beg Pride, arrogance, hubris, self-importance, pomposity is all one and the same. Pride is the top of the Seven Deadly Sins List followed by greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. As we all know that pride “goeth before the fall”, the question becomes what do we do to avoid the pitfalls of pride? Tonight, Kim and I went with Matthew and Philip to see Ain’t Too Proud to…
Expert Witness Back in 2012 I was recruited as an expert witness by a law firm trying a case about securities lending on behalf of a foreign pension fund. The suit was against a big bank that acted as the fiduciary for the pension fund. It was a fascinating case that involved a classically innocent and naive widows and orphan’s operation getting led by the hand down the primrose path of global alternative investments. …
Drowning in the Mainstream In the classic 1951 movie A Place in the Sun, Montgomery Clift rows out in a boat on Lake Tahoe (the reality versus the Adirondacks it was supposed to represent) and he has with him his knocked-up girlfriend played by Shelly Winters. He is vexed as a poor boy by the desire to make it big and snag the rich girl (Liz Taylor), to have his place in the sun,…
Stiffening The world is stiffening and becoming less flexible. One of my favorite old New Yorker Cartoons shows a Viking pushing up against a tree with the caption, “Even the Vikings had to stretch.” Obviously, what was intended was to take the ruthless and blindly ambitious Viking way of life (thought to be all about pillaging lesser and more sedate communities within their reach) and suggesting that no one can be continuously aggressive without…