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…
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…
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…
Popeye Work What were the earliest cartoons you remember watching? While at 67 years old, I generally find little difference between me and people of 72 or, for that matter, between me and people of 62. We were all old enough to grow up on the music of the sixties, we all experienced Vietnam one way or another and we all grew to adulthood during the greatest housing boom known to man, We are all…
Home Again, Home Again, Jiggidy-Jig Since all good things always seem better, or at least more appreciated, if they are hard-won, I suppose leaving the last day of our cross-country trip as a long and painful one is probably for the best. We had traveling companions who all wanted to get home on Sunday night because some task or travel was awaiting them Monday morning. Everyone who knows the route said to do various alternatives…
Rocky Mountain High Yesterday we were approaching Denver from the East and could see a wall of stormy-looking cloud cover over the distant mountains to the West. I have always been a big fan of big sky western panoramas with cloud formations covering the skies. There is something about that sort of view that seems to scream America the Beautiful to me. The power of the weather as shown by the clouds combined with the…
Holiday Road Who doesn’t love National Lampoon’s Vacation with Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Eugene Levy, John Candy and Christie Brinkley? That trip took the Griswold family from Chicago to Wallyworld in California in the green Family Truckster that loses parts all along the way. We are in Springfield, Ohio tonight after our first 520 miles from Ithaca today. It was an uneventful day except for our lunch stop at the…