Today we are enjoying what I would consider be a very different kind of day. Because of our train ride on the California Zephyr, we ended up in Emeryville, which is just across the Bay bridge from San Francisco nestled between Berkeley and Richmond. I’ve spent very little time in the East Bay, so I took the path of least resistance, which was to book a hotel near the train station. And because our objective…
We have all spent a lot of time over the past year watching the Ellison Dynasty exert its influence over global media. I managed to keep my thoughts to myself during the Warner Brothers / Discovery wars between Paramount and Netflix, not knowing who would inflict more change/harm on the things I cared about in the movie and media universe. But then Pete Hegseth had to step to the podium this weekend doing what all…
I have always believed that living somewhere with broad, expansive views makes a huge difference. Don’t get me wrong, intimate and beautiful courtyards and gardens can be lovely and very inspiring without the benefit of panoramic distances, but nothing beats the long view, whether of some water scene overlooking an ocean or lake or some distant mountains majesty. When shopping for a home to which to ultimately retire in 2011, Kim and I (joined by…
Today was the day of reunion. Back in 1996 I asked my friend Frank O’Connell, who sat on the Cornell business school advisory council with me if you would like to go with me on a motorcycle ride through southern Utah. Frank had been a long time motorcycle enthusiast, and at the time he was in between CEO gigs so he said he would like to do that. We tried the same thing the year…
I listened to a video that a friend made based on a letter of advice he had sent to his granddaughter on the occasion of her going off to college. He was giving her advice about how to make friends and specifically how to selectively establish relationships that will help you create the world you want to inhabit as you go forward. It was all perfectly good advice, but one thing struck me about his…
I seem to be in a virtuous cycle of watching movies with single word titles. Instinct (1999) is the latest. It’s a psychological thriller starring Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding Jr. Anthony Hopkins plays Dr. Ethan Powell, a renowned anthropologist who disappeared into the African wilderness to study mountain gorillas. Two years later, he’s found and arrested after killing two park rangers and injuring others. That makes it a blend of Gorillas in the Mist…
All life ebbs and flows. There are special times and mundane times. Things get exciting and then they get boring. There are moments of great hope and then come the depths of depression. Such is life. Even if we are people that enjoy the roller coaster ride with all its ups and downs, it would be hard for anyone to admit that it isn’t a bummer when you come off a high and have to…
I was watching a movie last night about the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm during World War II. It was called The Exception and it starred Christopher Plummer as the Kaiser. At the time, he was in exile in Holland while Adolph Hitler was ravaging Europe. He had just invaded Holland in 1940 and the story tells the tale of the military and service people surrounding the Kaiser as Hitler tried to manipulate him to root out…
Today I am wearing a t-shirt given to me by my daughter Carolyn. It is a light blue shirt that simply says, Easy Breezy. I suppose that it might be a statement about the weather here on the hilltop. Today, a day in early February, it’s scheduled to be in the high 70s, which usually means it will end up being in the low 80s. Right now at 8am its sunny and 65. From the…
The Tyrol (or Tirol) is a historic region in the Alps that straddles the Austrian-Italian border. There’s the Austrian Tyrol, which forms the Austrian state of Tyrol (Bundesland Tirol) with its capital of Innsbruck and South Tyrol (Südtirol/Alto Adige), the southern part that became Italian territory after World War I. That is now an autonomous province of Italy with its capital being Bolzano/Bozen (the place of my state’s heritage). There’s area is still largely German-speaking…