Business Insight Zone

Just a note about my own occasional idiocy: to keep my blog housekeeping nice and tidy, I regularly go through pending comments to weed out spam. Doing that just now, I accidentally deleted a comment from someone with a user name along the lines of “Tasuvius.” I may be off on the name, since I saw it only in that fleeting, dreadful moment when I realized “Oh, no — that’s an actual comment!”

We’ve been through this before, no? Yes.

Come Monday I’ll be working to upgrade the spam filter, so that I can wade through fewer spam messages and, I hope, stop deleting perfectly legitimate comments. Also, “Tasuvius” or “Tiberias” or whoever you are: please feel free to re-post so that I can approve your comment and not delete it again. And thank you for your patience with my itchy trigger finger.

Mind you, I’m not asking what you think the price of oil will do, but what you think it should do. When we talked about the sky-high price of oil last week, regular reader Darrin Dickey said this:

I don’t think this oil thing will “work itself out.” The major oil fields have peaked and are declining. It’s time for a drastic shift in how we think about transportation. For decades, we’ve puttered around sinking billions into researching alternatives (such as electric vehicles), but not very seriously. [...]

Americans are notorious for ingenuity, creativity and “finding a better way.” It’s time to kick that American spirit into overdrive and solve this problem once and for all. We can’t afford to wait for $6-$10 per gallon gas and then start contemplating what to do.

Regular reader Seth Gottlieb had this to say:

Cheap fuel is a major reason for many of our current problems: addiction to oil, disproportionate carbon emissions, big cars, lots of traffic, urban sprawl, poor public transportation, underinvestment in renewable energy . . . the list goes on.

This is in line with Read more

Who knows if he meant it this way, but Shatner offered a lovely piece of guidance in his Esquire “What I’ve Learned” interview, published in 2006:

I was always working. Maybe you weren’t aware of the movies I was making, or the television I was doing, or the shows I was creating, or the books I was writing; there have been thirty.* But I have always been solidly at work, running as fast as I can. You just haven’t been conscious of it. Suddenly I’m above the radar.

This reminds me of another quotation from a long-time actor, one noted for the prolificity of his oeuvre. I’m talking about Michael Caine, who had this to say about his nonstop career:

First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones. If they don’t come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

I like these quotes because they do two things at once: (1) display good-humored self-awareness; Shatner knows you probably haven’t read the TekWar books or seen The Devil’s Rain, and Caine knows he’s been the best thing in some bad films. (2) They emphasize the idea that you just have to keep on working. Despite their long careers, Shatner and Caine apparently don’t see their work as a chore. They keep at it.

When I read the Shatner quote to my Hoover’s colleague Russ Somers, he immediately mentioned the concept of the “overnight success” in music. (Russ used to be has for many years now been a musician.) Generally, so-called overnight successes take 15 years or more to see the light of day. It seems like they come out of nowhere, but in fact they’re able to say exactly what Shatner said:

“I was always working.”

~

UPDATE, a bit later Friday morning: After I wrote this post, I came across the New York Times obituary of the great comic actor Harvey Korman, who was one of my favorites when I was a kid. (We watched a lot of “The Carol Burnett Show” chez Walker.)

He left college for service in the U.S. Navy, resuming his studies afterward at the Goodman School of Drama at the Chicago Art Institute. After four years, he decided to try New York.

“For the next 13 years I tried to get on Broadway, on off-Broadway, under or beside Broadway,” he told a reporter in 1971.

He had no luck and had to support himself as a restaurant cashier. Finally, in desperation, he and a friend formed a nightclub comedy act.

“We were fired our first night in a club, between the first and second shows,” he recalled.

After returning to Chicago, Korman decided to try Hollywood, reasoning that “at least I’d feel warm and comfortable while I failed.”

For three years he sold cars and worked as a doorman at a movie theater. Then he landed the job with [Danny] Kaye.

So, a man whom Mel Brooks described as a “dazzling” comic talent took, by my count, more than sixteen years to get his big break. It’s a lesson in persistence.

~

* To be entirely accurate, Shatner didn’t write all those books, or at least he didn’t do all the writing on all of those books.

(Image from Wikipedia.)

Smooth landing ahead for American?

Since last week, I’ve been mulling what to say about the cuts that American Airlines and Ford Motor each announced. (More details on the restructurings here and here.) While I’m not sure how much good the changes will do for each company, I am pretty sure that both companies are at least thinking along the right track.

Here’s the deal: In the golden age of mass air travel, the airlines could afford to carry your checked bags for free and serve you meals or snacks at a moderate price in no small part because fuel was cheap. This is a fairly straightforward proposition, and regardless of how well or how poorly American has been managed in recent years, its CEO, Gerard Arpey, was right when he said “The U.S. airline industry as it is constituted today was not built for $125- or $130-per-barrel oil.” The system as it currently exists wasn’t built to withstand fuel prices this high.

Ford, similarly, grew to great size in an era when fuel wasn’t a big concern because it was abundant and inexpensive. In fact, Ford was the biggest car maker in the world during the early 20th century, when the United States was also the world’s top producer of crude oil. When cheap fuel is as ubiquitous as clean tap water is for Americans, you tend not to think about it. When the stuff is repriced at two . . . three . . . four times what it was just a couple of years ago, something has to give.

Thus, higher ticket prices. Thus, less pickups and more small cars. Welcome to the new order of things.

Read more

It’s the easiest thing in the world to take the long way around, isn’t it?

Have one more cup of coffee before you pick up the phone to make the call you think could be unpleasant.

Wait one more day to start your new workout routine.

Have a long meeting where everyone talks around the issue instead of a short one where people take direct responsibility.

Write a long, jargony sentence instead of a short, simple one.

Come up with a long, fluffy list of to-do’s instead of a short, hard list of top priorities.

Circumlocute endlessly instead of saying what you mean.

Proliferate paperwork instead of saying “I think this paperwork is hurting our business.”

Take something simple and make it complicated.

Multitask ad infinitum instead of doing one important thing.

Sound familiar? If so, you tell me:

What’s the straight line from here to there?
If you aren’t following it, what’s preventing you?

~

Related posts:

• Clarity: simple, hard, revolutionary.
• The power of naive questions.
• Could you survive an audit of your own work?

~

(Picture by monkeyleader.)

Two annoying things I’ve discovered:

1. Some bit of eldritch technology is rendering perfectly harmless apostrophes as “’” . . . which makes me want to sigh. So far I’ve been able to suppress my natural copy-editor’s tendencies to hunt out EVERY . . . SINGLE . . . INSTANCE of this and correct it by hand. I’ll check with our ninja-like tech folks to see if there’s some simple umbrella solution. All that to say this: if seeing “’” plopped down in the middle of a word makes you twitch, you’re not alone.
2. I use the spiffing Firefox browser for the lion’s share of my browsing needs, therefore I don’t often see the weird bits of rendering sometimes barfed up by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. So it wasn’t until earlier this week that I figured out the heading font I’ve been using for some of my “What do YOU think?” questions comes out
   

   unspeakably large

   in Internet Explorer. As I have time and remember to do it, I’ll go back and tweak these fonts down a notch.

Anything else? Consider this your opportunity to let your inner copy-editor come out and roar.

Actual photo of the tech guy responsible,
who will remain anonymous for the safety of all concerned.
He usually wears a shirt in the office.

Because the tech folks at Hoover’s are composed entirely of Awesome, the images on this blog have been restored to their full pixellatory glory. Which, when you think about it, will make that post on the price of oil in Euros much easier to understand, what with being able to see the graph and all.

This victory came despite the staunch efforts of the bloggistic technology to hold a good man down. And while it might not have been pretty, it was both swift and righteous.

So, to recap:

• Hoover’s tech people: awesome.
• Normal blogging service: fully restored.
• What you should expect: rampant business bloggery.

~

(Image via CompleteMartialArts.com.)

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”

Let that anonymous quotation set the tone. Now here’s a simple set of questions for you as I try desperately vainly manfully to get back into the flow of things after a delightful holiday weekend with my family:

• What if you stopped multitasking altogether?
• What if your company “outlawed” multitasking — for example by forbidding BlackBerries in meetings?
• What if you turned off your e-mail throughout the day?
• What if you radically reduced the number of things you worked on in a day, but increased the time and intensity you gave to each task?

What gets me thinking of this? This post from Jon Lebkowsky, this one from Josh Waitzkin (via Tim Ferriss), and, while we’re at it, this golden oldie from yours truly.

And while we’re at it, you’d also be well served to consider Kathy Sierra’s “Multitasking Makes Us Stupid?” and Joel Spolsky’s “Human Task Switches Considered Harmful.” Mind you that Sierra’s piece comes from 2006 and Spolsky’s comes from 2001. It’s not like these findings are new — but they’re more of a problem than ever, at least from the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen.

What say you?

~

Related posts:

• Multitasking = cognitive hell.
• Productivity tip: Batch Processing.
• Book review: Organized for Success, by Stephanie Winston
• Once again: Do Not Multitask.

~

Photo (of hares, not rabbits) by Jim Champion, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

More or less, anyway. The images that should accompany most of the posts here seem to have lost their way in the migration from the old server to the new server. Images: such pretty little things, but just try to get them to stick with the program. It’s like herding cats, I tell you.

We will attempt to corral them and put them on display for you once again. Posting may be intermittent until we get that ironed out. Meanwhile, why not wander over the the “Worth Reading” section of the sidebar and treat yourself to some delectable bonbons from my del.icio.us feed? No calories!

Over the holiday weekend, we are shifting this blog over to a new server. Therefore you may see some of those little technical hiccups that the server-shifting-over process can create.

We think that everything (including indexing in search engines, etc.) should be back to normal by the time we all return from the holiday. We think. (Fingers crossed.)

Please holler if you have questions. And for those of you here in the States, enjoy the Memorial Day weekend!