Long Weekend Stuff

Happy New Year! One of the non-profits I work with has a fiscal year beginning September 1. For certain purposes this can be a little awkward, but in terms of the natural rhythm of the year, it feels just right. The nights are cooler, the apples are almost ready to be picked, the school buses are rolling and Saturday football is here. It just feels like the time of year with the most potential energy, and the right time to set New Year’s resolutions and kick-off new projects.

Why Is It Always Bugs? The other night we saw District 9, a sci fi made in South Africa with a very clever (bug-like) alien-apartheid premise. It’s about a half-hour too long, and best when it’s more like Cloverfield and less like Transformers. Maybe our 14-year-old had the most appropriate movie review: “Now I’m really a vegetarian.”

Trash Suddenly Rocks. E.L. Doctorow has a new book, Homer & Langley, about the Collyer brothers who died in Harlem in 1947, prisoners of their own voracious hoarding. (Langley was actually killed by one of his own booby traps.) “Pack rats” doesn’t begin to describe what was going on in their mansion, and “rich” doesn’t begin to describe what Doctorow will remain from this fictionalized story about the two men. Meanwhile, Andy Warhol's voracious hoarding resulted in a New Jersey warehouse full of boxes containing the effluence of his life, now being opened one-by-one. In six years or less, 610 boxes and filing cabinets will be fully indexed. So far, one box has contained $17,000 and another a signed, naked picture of Jackie O.

It reminds me of how excited the archaeologists in Boston became when--preceding the Big Dig--they were lucky enough to uncover colonial privies. It also reminds us, I suppose, that we are ultimately our trash.

Bob Edwards’ Weekend podcast. Edwards always has terrific guests and a nice way of asking questions and then getting out of the way. One recent podcast in particular worth downloading was a conversation with Dr. William Meller (Evolution Rx). Meller marries medicine and evolution and comes to a series of conclusions that turn recent medical wisdom on its head. We don’t get enough sun, for example, and that includes more than 50% of babies. We no longer get enough dirt or toxins in our early years and hence end up with a bunch of allergies we don’t really need to get. (Our livers are big and our kidneys efficient because they’ve been dealing in toxins for millions of years.) Morning sickness was designed to protect the fetus by encouraging the mother to eat a bland diet; ADD was designed to protect the tribe by keeping a few folks from getting too engrossed in the campfire stories and missing the sound of the sabertooth. In principal, if something we consider “bad” today prevails in the population at large, there’s generally a good reason for it. Getting fat, for example, was our reaction to the abundance of spring and the threat of winter; getting fat on carbos is because, as Stone Agers, we only had access to "fruits and nuts" for a few weeks each year and never developed a "shut-off valve."

Of course, while the current data is genuine, the theories themselves are, well, theoretical and undoubtedly subject to some withering expose I haven’t bothered to find on line. But—like the Greeks and their warped columns—it causes you to wonder if we have a clue what we’re doing.

More bugs: Crazy Ants. I’m not happy about their movement northward from Texas and Florida, but figure there’s plenty of time for us to move to Alaska before they get here. As a New Englander, it just makes me glad that things (like killer bees) tend to move south-to-north and not vice versa--otherwise we’d have grizzly bears approaching Maine by now.

iPhone Stuff. I finally figured out how to make ringtones and added Louis Armstrong’s opening solo from West End Blues to my iPhone. It sounds so good that sometimes I just listen and forget to answer the phone. Our addictive game of the month is DoodleJump, courtesy of our vegetarian 14-year-old. Our app of the month is RunKeeper, which keeps your running (biking, walking) time, distance and pace via a gently nagging voice that interrupts iTunes to announce how slowly you are going (as often as every five minutes). It’s further proof of my premise that we eventually ruin all of our hobbies with information and technology. [See Numbers in the Garden (of Good and Evil).]

Finally, Henry Mintzberg at McGill has a new book, Managing, coming out this month. In it, he’s studied 29 managers by spending a day with each, observing their activities. His findings include:

Management is less like a conductor waving his baton at an orchestra to make beautiful music and more like an “orchestra conductor during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.”

Mintzberg combined various lists of what makes an effective manager and came up with 50 or so items. “Put kryptonite on the list, and even Superman wouldn’t succeed as a manager,” Mintzberg says. Instead, he observes, we’re all flawed in some ways. As long as those flaws are not fatal, “maybe the best managers are simply ordinary, healthy people who aren’t too screwed up.”

Management is “largely about interruption.” [An interesting idea, and one they don’t teach you in business school. Of course, they don’t teach you how to hire, fire, motivate, review or break up the fistfight in the warehouse, either. But you will be able to price exotic options.]

Managers lead on three planes—by doing, by managing through people, and by managing through information. Mintzberg says there’s far too much of the latter. “My granddaughter could do that: she’s four. It doesn’t take genius to say: 'Increase sales or out you go.' That’s the worst of managing through information.”

So, Happy New Year! Enjoy the apple-picking. Given a choice between District 9 and Julie and Julia, don't force your family to go to District 9. And if anyone can get his or her DoodleJumper past the UFO, please let me know.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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