Business Insight Zone

Happy New Year! Here are some short items I’ve been thinking about as I ease back into the saddle of regular posting.

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Climate alarmism.

In the interests of fair (I don’t say “balanced) coverage, I offer this John Tierney column from the New York Times as a counterpoint to my own comments in two recent posts (here and here).

In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

If Tierney is a little backhanded with his treatment of climate alarmists in the media, they themselves are a little underhanded with their opportunistic reporting, which Tierney rightly derides.

Better than overwrought alarmism, or overwrought rejectionism, about climate change would be a more sober assessment of the whole issue. If the climate is, indeed, changing as a whole and over the long-term, then seemingly contrary data points (Antarctic cooling, the fact that it’s snowing outside my window, whatever) don’t change that. And if it is changing over time, the fact that you or I do or don’t “like” Al Gore doesn’t change anything, either.

The media critic in me isn’t too optimistic that we’ll see this balance anytime soon — and especially not in a presidential election year.

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Will Smith strikes again.

Last month we talked about Will Smith’s “sickening” work ethic — which is tied to serious insight into how the movie business works. After seeing the so-so I, Robot on cable over the holidays, I was newly impressed by Smith’s ability to carry a showy but insubstantial picture.

Like each of Smith’s last four pictures, his current release I Am Legend has grossed more than $300 million worldwide, this despite some pretty harsh pans. (My favorite comes from David Denby, whose snippet review opens like this: “In 1973, when ‘Day of the Dolphin’ opened, Pauline Kael wrote that it was ‘the most expensive Rin Tin Tin picture ever made.’ Alas, this is no longer true.”)

Smith has earned his fair share of good reviews over the years, especially for his work in Ali, but in general it seems he won’t go down as a great dramatic (or comedic) actor. But he surely will go down in movie history as a huge box-office success.

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Clutter isn’t a storage problem; it’s a thinking problem.

That’s the lesson — which ties in with what I said the other day about information overload — of this NYT piece:

A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves

. . . But experts say the problem with all this [shopping for new organizing bins, shelving, etc.] is that many people are going about it in the wrong way. Too often they approach clutter and disorganization as a space problem that can be solved by acquiring bins and organizers.

Measures like these “are based on the concept that this is a house problem,” said David F. Tolin, director of the anxiety disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Yale.

“It isn’t a house problem,” he went on. “It’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.”

I’ve heard people say that the big problem with their e-mail overload is that they need more disk space — not that they need to recalibrate how they think about their stuff altogether. And there are plenty of businesses that look for technological solutions to problems that are really problems in their organizational culture or psychology.

The more I look, the more convinced I become that individual and institutional psychoses are often the same problems — not just similar, but exactly the same, merely expressed at different scales.

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The Hawaii Warriors get seats at the grown-ups’ table — where they are promptly served their own heads.

This follows up our earlier bowl-season commentary: I have friends in Hawaii who have rooted all year for the University of Hawaii football team to go undefeated. The Warriors carried that off until they ran aground of the University of Georgia in the Sugar Bowl last night. For “ran aground of,” you could substitute something like “got run over by” or “got beat up by.” The Bulldogs shut down the Warriors totally, winning 41-10.

Give credit to star Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan, who admitted flat-out that Georgia “was the fastest team I’ve probably ever seen.”

Football fans can hope that someday there will be a true national playoff that will allow all the Hawaiis of the country to see how they stack up against the big programs of the SEC, the Big Ten, the Big XII, and the Pac-10 — whether that means beatings like these or the shocking upset victory that Hawaii’s conference-mate Boise State pulled off last year against Oklahoma.

But — since this is a business blog — I’ll advise you not to hold your breath for that. Because the powers-that-be who run, and profit from, the various bowls don’t want to upset the apple cart that now brings them so much money every year, even if doing so would satisfy fans across the country.

Category: Entertainment, Green & Clean, The business of sports, The working life