^∞Fouroboros

Pocket Paul Allens

This week's Charlotte Business Journal:

The Charlotte Bobcats are broadening their sales campaign for smaller and midsized companies with a new tier of premium seating heavy on sit-down dining, waiter service and other perks.

(snip)

Team executives traveled to several new venues searching for inspiration. Silberman cites Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, home to an NHL franchise, as well as new NBA homes in Dallas, Atlanta and San Antonio as major influences.

The result: seating on the arena's suite level dedicated to ledge seats, royal boxes and terrace tables. Each offers an open area with table-top room in front of executive chairs, custom dining and access to high-end bars and entertainment areas. Among the options:

Me, I'm waiting for fractional ownership of the Cubs and Deodorant Cake sponsorship rights for the urinals.

9/15/58 : Bettendorf. Floyd Dithers, early adopter, introduces No-hangover Corn Whiskey to a skeptical State Fair audience. He is proclaimed Emperor of Iowa the next day.

Dunno if i knew this and forgot, or just heard the words and parrotted them. Yeah, it's probably the parrot thing.

melanie @ dailykos has been shepherding a great flock of threads on the state of religion and politics.

Yes, Virginia, the leg bone's connected to the neck bone. At our office, we have similar discussions, but we're primarily focused on helping get the Craft ethic back into what has become for many, a punch-in, punch-out, pressured drudgery with little meaning: Work. (Hey, build enough trust with any Artist, Executive or Plumber and pretty soon some non-sanctioned words come up. Conversations lead to "connection", "purpose", and "the meaning" behind what they do. That's the holy grail for communities and companies. Its also another post. Probably lots.)

But in the politico-religious sphere, things have gone so far through the looking glass, Americans should have packed a lunch.

The vocal left is freaked out by the mere introduction into public discourse, something they truly value in the privacy of their homes and in the management of their families: a moral sense. Laissez faire economics: Bad. Laissez faire Social policy: Good. At least that's the impression left open, absent any coherent, consistent statement of a character center. (In a country that includes the words "endowed by their Creator...certain inalienable rights" in its IPO prospectus, a lefty can hardly be surprised that 85+% believe in God and a moral compass.)

The most vocal elements of the hard-right have embraced religion so fervently and narrowly, they're rewriting scripture--or, at least its intent--to justify things like dividend tax cuts and the means testing of "compassion". (By any fair measure, a "christian" calling someone who's reticent to judge others, a "liberal scum", seems to have not read the manual fully.)

In a way, they're both AWOL. And very late. Go read.

[edited 1-26. Link fubar]

Rock against Bush, Scissors cut Paper, Paper covers Rock, or something like that.

Link courtesy Atrios


My only question is: Boxers or Briefs: What would Jesus do?

"...You know what I think of these commanders? I'll tell you what I think.They can't take a piss without a Power Point presentation."

Yowza!

Welcome to The March of the Porcelain Soldiers , quite a piece of blowback written by Col. David Hackworth for GQ, but pulled because of 9-11. After seeing what he calls "poor performance" of conventional troops on the ground in Afghanistan, he posted this at his site. If you don't know him by name, go to his site for the picture, and everything else--you've seen him on the tube. The snappy Powerpoint quote isn't Hackworth's, it's from a Drill Sergeant, one of many he interviewed on a visit to Fort Snoopy. Yeah, Fort Snoopy. It's actually Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the largest Basic Combat Training command for garden-variety boy and girl grunts. But the way he puts it, there's not too much grunting going on any more unless you count co-ed, ahem, anatomy drill.

But the part that really snared me was his spittle over "today's values based Army." It turns out Powerpoint and buzzword performance prattle wears camo, too. He hears a square-jaw Ranger Batallion Commander use the word "nurture" and about has an embolism. Too funny. I've always thought "Army of One" went against any tenet of unit cohesion I ever understood: break em down individually, build em up together. Essentially antithetical, self-centered, Brand Me crapola, rife for misinterpretation--especially considering the creative produced for it. Sure, you could try to say, "No, No. It means a Big One, Like E Pluribus Unum: Out of many one." But I've never heard anyone really give that a game go. It still sounds like maybe the Army of Unum brochures aren't back from the printers yet.

Hungry?

You know you are.

Why JFK jr. couldn't keep George aloft?

We cringe at the current "What can a [frog, blender, toilet plunger, whoopee cushion, etc.] teach us about Financial Services" campaign from Wachovia. But however tone-deaf, it does remind us that stories and narrative are the best ways to make a message stick. Why, gee, we used some today:

It's not primarily about values. That's means to an end. Necessary, vital, but a means. The point is competitive advantage. One you can sustain. Much management it seems takes the negative view of human behaviour, and it resorts to a push model; coercion, rather than co-option or the pull of ambition. For the short term, this approach satisfies us for two reasons:

A. We feel like we've done "something" about a problem-- we've intiated action.

B. Much like the cattle prod gets immediate results, the push, or coercive, model spikes improvement (or at least attention) in the desired area.

In stressed companies, these are the reflexive patterns we regress into as managers. And on the face of it, why not? After all, how many times have you felt comfortable giving up control in times of pressure? Oddly, the seemingly intuitive and instinctive thing to do is counterproductive to the desired outcome.

In this, management is not unique: when a plane stalls in flight and starts to dive and lose control, pilots must be trained to fight their instinct to pull back on the stick--an action that can further reduce speed an induce a much more deadly event: a flat spin.

Of course, metaphorical thinkers will observe that directing a company and flying a plane are, at heart, management. Each requires the understanding of dynamics that are in turns obvious and counterintuitive. Each requres us to manage and interpret dynamical, rythmic systems. For airplanes: engines, conrol surfaces, inertia, gravity. For business, the equvalents: resources, people, ideas and markets.