What Goes Around In November 1985, I was sitting in my corner office on the third floor of 280 Park Avenue. I used to call that the “cafe” office because it was close enough to the street to feel a part of the hub-bub out on Park Avenue and yet it was above it all. To be clear, I was thirty-one years old at the time, which is almost hard for me to imagine in…
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…
Anti-Social Media Yesterday, after a turbulent weekend of social media “interaction” on Next Door, I opted to disconnect. I have not formally taken myself off of the system since I may want to still know if there is a rattlesnake on the loose or a lost kitty wandering about. But I have signed-off of the text exchange that got far too bitter and entrenched for my delicate sensibilities. I know what you’re all thinking, but…
What Are We Fighting For In August, 1969 I was fifteen and living in Rome, Italy getting ready to enter my junior year at Notre Dame International Prep. As we all know, junior year is the critical transcript year for a kid wanting to go to college. For a kid living overseas and wanting to finally go back to the states to do what he had always expected to do, it was not lost on…
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…
The Mystery of San Pasqual This morning I got sucked into a debate that I would rationally generally avoid. I have joined Next Door, which is an app for local communities allowing people in the same neighborhood who might not know each other to share important information and, presumably, operate more like a real community. I mostly ignore or only lightly notice the neighborhood postings on Next Door since they are mostly about lost dogs…
Getting Educated Allow me to begin by declaring that I am as imperfectly formed as any other human being on the face of the earth. I like to think of myself as enlightened and evolved, but let’s face it, we are all riddled with flaws including the flaw of self-professing our “not worthy” outlooks exactly like this very sentence. How’s that for calling it in on my own position? But one of the things we…
The Rapture and Rupture of Pompeo Mike Pompeo has been an enigma to me for a long time. I doubt I’m the only person who think his name immediately invokes the tragedy of Pompeii and the pillars of salt that resulted from the population after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. I first heard about him when he was announced for appointed by Trump to be the head of the CIA in late 2016. He was…
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…
A Fortnight of Sunlight Twenty years ago, Peter Mayle and his wife spent a year “retiring” from their overcast British lifestyle (he had been a British Mad Man) by buying and renovating a house in Provence. He was already a writer, but his best-selling book A Year in Provence established him at a late stage in life (his 60’s) as a prominent and popular writer. I both loved the book and loved the whole romantic…