John R. Brandt's Blog

Urban Meyer on management

"Errors are 90 percent anticipation. That's an Earle Bruce-ism. If you see something that isn't right, you go like a torpedo, blow it up and put it back together."

"Innovation sticks for about 18 months..."

Excellent interview with Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the non-profit Harlem Children's Zone, in yesterday's New York Times. A couple of his management tips:

• "Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize – and sometimes you have to cauterize – the ones who are really against change. They're the kind of person who, if you tell them it's raining outside, will fight you tooth and nail. You'll take them outside in the rain, and they'll say, “But it wasn't raining five seconds ago.” I spent a year trying to convince those people to change and give me a chance [at a school, early in his career]. Then I realized that was a wasted year.

• "Innovation sticks for about 18 months.So let's say you put a great innovative program in place. You put the right people on it, you get everything organized, and if you don't come back and do anything with it for 18 months, that program's half as good as when you started. They just start decaying."

It would have been more fun if he had named his distant cousin Jimmy to the post...

Warren Buffett today announced that his successor at Berkshire Hathaway, at least as far as its values, will be... after an exhaustive, years-long, global search... his son, Howie Buffett. Howie, in case you haven't followed his career closely, is a 56-year-old corn and soybean farmer.

Really? Really?

It would have at least been funny if he'd named distant cousin Jimmy to the position —imagine Wasted away again at Berskshire Hathaway or Why don't we get drunk, and invest? — but this is just... strange.

Can't wait to hear investor reaction at the next BH Annual meeting.

Noted Management Theorist Jim Leyland, on the importance of exemplifying confidence in the face of adversity

After the Tigers-Yankees rainout:

"This is not a big deal. Everybody does the best they can. Everybody is kind of scurrying around right now. There's no sense getting excited. I don't worry about stuff like that. I think when the manager makes a big deal about something like that, it affects the players. It is what it is. Good Lord, it rained. So what?"

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/gameflash/2011/09/30/39844_recap.html#?sct=hp_t2_a3&eref=sihp#ixzz1ZXPIKI1E

I love this quote

From R. James Woolsey, for director of the CIA and now a partnerat Lex Capital Management:

"I kind of miss the Soviets. They were at least just thugs with a cover story. They weren't fanatics and could be negotiated with. I'm not sure that's the situation with Iran." 

Google is learning that — gasp! — it's harder to compete when you don't have a monopoly

From The Daily Beast: "The smartphone wars are getting ugly: Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, wrote a blog post on the company’s official blog ripping into Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle for an 'organized, hostile campaign against Android … waged through bogus patents.'"

Um... Boo hoo?

Slimiest marketing ever

My daughter was in a minor traffic accident, for which she filed the appropriate police report. Three weeks later, a telemarketer representing a local chiropractic clinic rang our house to say: "We're calling about her recent car accident. We just want to see if she's OK."

Yeah, right.

 

L.L. Bean is advertising the "Tote That Takes 500 Pounds..."

...I've carried so much stuff to the beach that it felt like 500 pounds (books, chairs, umbrellas, kids' toys, coolers, kids themselves), but never in a single tote. Does it come with wheels?

What does your Filter Bubble look like?

Incredibly important article by Eli Pariser in The Observer — "How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles" — about how personalization of the web by Google, Facebook and others now limits the the variety of information we can find. Increasingly, search engines only feed us stuff that looks, sounds, and reads like stuff we've seen, heard or read before — reducing our chances of bumping into something new or surprising or uncomfortable, all of which are required to spur growth or change. Favorite two paragraphs:

"We are predisposed to respond to a pretty narrow set of stimuli – if a piece of news is about sex, power, gossip, violence, celebrity or humour, we are likely to read it first. This is the content that most easily makes it into the filter bubble. It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years". In a personalised world, important but complex or unpleasant issues – the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness – are less likely to come to our attention at all.

"As a consumer, it's hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. 'It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest,' technology journalist Clive Thompson told me. Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it a different way: 'Customers are always right, but people aren't.'"

What does your filter bubble keep you from learning (or caring) about?

"People run down...

... and they confuse their condition with the world's."

—John Updike