Thoughts for This Day

1. The young are impressed with a mindless vehemence. They may be right.

2. It’s a hard road, daddyo, turning lead to gold.

3. The higher the monkey goes, the more of his behind he shows.

4. A manager’s task is to make the strengths of people effective and the weaknesses irrelevant.

5. Change has to be exploited as opportunity.

6. If you don’t like the pain, move it to your competitor’s back.

7. Employees do what you inspect, not what you expect.

8. His specialty was inserting bullets in other men’s guns.

9. A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured then quietly strangled.

10. To understand is to perceive patterns.

11. New ideas are delicate. They can be killed by a sneer or a yawn, stabbed to death by a joke, or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s face.

12. Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

13. It takes two to feel inferior.

14. Publishing is a business that attracts people with a disdain for business and a yearning for culture.

15. It’s the doubled up, doggone happy that bust hard.

16. High wire walkers can’t, but do expect the ringmaster to be exclusively as interested in high wire acts as they are.

17. Too many killer ideas have been smothered by acts of deference.

18. Speaking doesn’t tell you necessarily.

19. Evolution doesn’t tolerate useless junk for long.

20. The ability to act, as in theater, is an aspect of leadership in every arena, from the playground to the boardroom.

OK, if you really want to have fun, match these up with their authors without using Google.

Choices include: Eleanor Roosevelt, Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker (3), Van Morrison, Lou Gerstner (2), Joseph Epstein (3), Shakespeare, Irving Berlin, Barnett Cocks, Charles Brower, Carl Sandburg, Robert Morgenthau, Robert Rotman, Theodore Roethke, and “unknown.”

Five Snark-trocities

1. Why is a breastfeeding mom so shocking and provocative, e.g. Time magazine’s recent cover? Or, Barack Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage on Newsweek’s “Our First Gay President”? Are they really “lightning in a bottle”? Clever, sure. Zeitgeist? Maybe. But c’mon, this is 2012, not 1960! Fact is, Esquire magazine was doing legitimately provocative, jarring covers back in the ’60s that put these to shame. Adman George Lois created covers that profoundly revealed America’s cultural peccadilloes. For example, he created the May 1963 “women’s big and little breasts” cover; the legendary Saint Sebastian cover, showing a hand-tied Muhammad Ali, arrows piercing his chest; and the famous Sonny Liston as Santa cover . . . among many, many brilliant others.

 

2. Ina Drew, the head of a trading group at J.P. Morgan, is responsible for the lack of management and oversight that led to a $3 billion-plus security loss last week. According to J.P. Morgan and The New York Times, she was unable to manage the sharks, apparently home for an extended period with Lyme disease. So they’re telling us a deer tick from upstate New York is responsible for the disaster plaguing America’s largest investment bank?

 

3. The FDA invaded the Twin Cities last week and brought their enormous investigative prowess to a tiny company in Medina. This little start-up creates one of a group of burgeoning probiotics found to be effective in treating intestinal deficiencies. The lead FDA investigator, with a trainee in tow, didn’t find any violations of code but insisted on setting up bureaucratic guidelines that could drive this little business, out of business. Is this President Obama’s way of encouraging small business to create jobs and bring America out of its economic nightmare? Congressman Erik Paulsen: Where are you when we need you? Senator Dick Durbin: Is this really the FDA overhaul you had in mind?

 

4. Cameron Douglas, son of actor Michael Douglas, is a drug addict of the highest order, imprisoned for selling methamphetamines. Douglas is a multi-multi-offender, having spent years in rehab, jail, and in and out of the courts. Now, father Douglas is using his considerable wealth to get the courts to re-examine his 33-year-old son’s situation, hoping they will let him out for yet another swing at rehabilitation. Addiction is almost entirely a function of the addict’s will, either to stop or to keep feeding the habit. No amount of money buys a cure, but it can buy time for a solution to develop. Parents all over the world agonize, hoping to find money or resources to bring their child back from the certainty of death. I know: I’m watching it happen in my own family. For the majority of those without the affluence to provide treatment, addiction remains a cruel, reality- defying experience—not promising for the millions who lack Michael Douglas for a dad.

 

5. Forbes magazine recently ran its billionaires issue. Aside from who gives a yank about how many inconceivable billions 1,296 lucky people have, the whole issue of inestimable and conspicuous wealth is becoming flammable. Take (someone please) Bernie Ecclestone’s little girls, Tamara and Petra, who are using their daddy’s Formula One billions to buy up apartments to the tune of $50–$90 million per. Barbie doll Petra recently purchased the Spelling mansion in Los Angeles as a second home for a cool $100 million, adding to her $91 million London flat. Do you suppose she had to go through the mortgage financing nightmare we all have had to endure of late? At what point does the exercise of spending money become immoral? What are the Ecclestone girls noodling as they read the newspapers about children being abused at the hands of uneducated, poverty-afflicted parents, or watch other women ravaged by cancer, or see people starving to death on the streets? Tamara showed enough compassion and concern to star in her own London reality show, Billion $$ Girl, aaaaaand start a high fashion line of women’s shoes. I’ll bet Bernie is busting his buttons with pride over his little entrepreneurs.

 

Hate to get all biblical on you, but Proverbs 29:7 works here.

From Raging Waters

I hadn’t taken a shower or put on clean clothes for several days, but I was alive. Fifteen inches of rain had fallen on the Black Hills of South Dakota in less than six hours. Four inches fell in 30 minutes. Imagine.

The first week of June 1972: I had just taken a job as a handyman, laughable for someone who not only didn’t know how to fix anything but had just turned 23. My first job out of college—on a dude ranch, the Ox Yoke outside of Nemo, operated by the former sheriff of Custer, his wife, their two sons, a ranch foreman with a cast, ankle-to-thigh, and his long-in-the-tooth pregnant wife. There were no guests at the “ranch.” There were, however, 10-plus WWII rehabilitated veterans, likely supported by a considerable government subsidy. Most sported lobotomy marks and outsized personalities. They worked cleaning out cesspools, digging drainage ditches, and running up to the garbage dump every day. I hung with them and the owner’s sons—let’s call them Spin and Marty, whose signature look consisted of toothpicks jammed into their cowboy hat bands. The youngest, usually shirtless, had a hankering for beer, tough talk, and mirrors. For all I know, he could have ended up in some western Dakota bar swinging from a pole in mesh stockings and falsies.

There was a big red barn up near the gravel entrance, trailing down to the valley this little ranch snuggled into. A meandering creek ran right past my motel room at the bottom of the canyon. The barn was where the crazies gathered to listen to the family C&W combo, a band I joined once they heard I could play a little keyboard. The big house below was where they lined up the vets every morning to distribute pills before breakfast, pills specifically designed to keep shell-shock victims focused on the prize: acquiescence. It was a scene out of Cuckoo’s Nest.

The rain started the afternoon of June 9. Before long the little trout pond by the big house had overflowed and the little creek behind my room had turned into white water, and the owners were out of town. Once the rains came, the WWIIs wisely migrated to the barn. By nightfall we lost electricity and water. The flood went raging batshit. We made a decision to get all hands on deck, requiring transporting the guys back from the barn. Spin and Marty fired up the truck and four-wheeled it up the hill. We couldn’t get the truck near the big house so we rigged a rope, strung from the truck to the house, stretching across waist-deep, fast-moving water.

The vets were hysterical. I recall one poor fellow squeezing his wiener like a four-year-old who can’t hold back the pee any longer. We got them inside and did a head count, only to discover one missing, an Italian pianist who previously had shared his musical charts with me, wondering: Who might play his music? I recommended Frank Zappa. He wandered off that night into the rain. One of the guys told me he had gone fishing. After the heavy rain stopped, armed with flashlights we went out looking in the mud. The fast-moving water had turned a flat meadow into mounds of uneven sod. Every bump sent a shiver of fear that we’d found our missing pianist.

Two days later the National Guard made it in with fresh water and typhoid and malaria vaccines. The sheriff sent me to a motel in Rapid to help a crony clean out mud-soaked carpets. I left in a Guard truck, pockets empty, jeans and a T-shirt, a gnarly little dog, and a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit. An American Indian family with whom I slung mud each day shared the second floor of the motel. Talk about living a Woody Guthrie song. After a few days, I pay-phoned the parents of a college friend who invited me over to shower, eat fried chicken, and get a good night’s sleep. I picked some Army fatigues out of a free bin at the local Armory and was soon rescued by three friends who made it down from Bald Mountain. They whisked me away to their house above the water, and 238 dead.

After a scream-dream night, I revisited the ranch, lobbied for the $66 they owed me, and left for a pre-nuptial dinner and my wedding in Sioux Falls. Eight hundred people—Greeks, the in-laws’ patrician pals, observers from my side, and a couple handfuls of friends, mostly freaks from college. Thankfully, even my lovely bride showed up, an explosion of splendiferous white satin and flight response.

The contrasts were mind-numbing. Forty years ago this June.

Five to Get Hot About

1. The Metro section of the Star Tribune reported that Cottrell Foster, the two-year-old “son” of Shacara Foster, died of a bacterial infection. He was found to have broken bones, a shattered skull, and internal organ injuries. He was taken to the hospital only after he had stopped breathing. Cottrell lived in a duplex with his sister, his mother’s boyfriend, and 11 other family members (not a typo). Mom Foster will be sent to prison if found guilty of homicide. While there, she will be fed three square meals per day. She will sleep in a cell with a toilet and warm blankets. She will watch TV, read books, work out, and chat it up (or whatever they do) with other inmates, all through the generosity of your tax dollars. Does anyone else find it ironic that Twin Citians complain and commiserate more about funding a football stadium than funding Ms. Foster’s care and feeding for the rest of her life? Worse, why is no one calling for effective legislation to better manage those who statistically are a certainty to be a drag on society or even a threat to our collective stability? Folks keep fiddling around with the ups and downs of the football stadium while Rome is burning.

2. The more businesses I’m involved in, the more I believe that working in smaller, entrepreneurial environments is what fosters innovation, productivity, and purpose. There is something about a nimble and driven work force that is not easily replicated inside a large company. If I could recommend anything to a 20-something, I would encourage him/her to enter the work force through a small company. Problem is, the economy has stolen that opportunity from most kids.

3. There are evangelists everywhere, including me at times, holding up Steve Jobs as the poster child for thinking differently and working outside the box. I just heard British advertising legend Sir John Hegarty preach the same gospel, that is, “convention sucks.” On the one hand we need to be reminded that thinking creatively and avoiding “the book” are muscles we need to flex. However, as an ad agency president reminded me, creative execution and innovation are frosting on the cake, not the cake itself. There’s much to be said for staying on track, doing the sensible thing, and making messaging easy to understand and products even easier to buy.

4. LinkedIn posts articles and links daily on its home page. A recent post was billed as “Top 50 Posts.” I fell for the tease and clicked. Turns out it was the top 50 posts from an evangelical site. Nothing against evangelicals, but this was really a misleading headline. Shame on LinkedIn.

5. Watching American Idol, The X Factor, The Voice, etc., reminds me why the mainstream music industry sucks so bad. It’s less about creativity and artistry, and really all about what sells. If I were a young artist, Jimmy Iovine is the last guy on the planet I’d be looking to for creative direction, much less J. Lo, Simon Cowell, or Randy Jackson. Steven Tyler may be the only person on any of those panels who actually grew up as an artist. And had Tyler, as a young man, been on Idol, he would have told Iovine to go pound sand.

Your Worst Anomie

Claes Oldenburg, one of the premier artists in the nation, was commissioned 25 years ago to design a sculpture for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center. He was mandated to create something that would be a singular and iconic symbol for both the Garden and the city of Minneapolis. Oldenburg created the ubiquitous and beloved “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” a work of art that nary a civilized person living in the Twin Cities hasn’t seen and enjoyed a hundred times over.

I would imagine that at least half of the civilized beings in this town have wondered when, not if, someone would deface the sculpture. Fortunately, it took two decades before a local spray painter wrote the name of a despicable monster, an African general named Kony, on the face of the spoon for all to see and enjoy.

For some it might sound elitist to show so much concern over a graffiti-stained work of art. Graffiti shows up everywhere, so why the lament on this particular venue? Perhaps because this isn’t an underpass on North Fifth Street, but a revered work of art. It isn’t the Vatican’s Pietà, but it’s our pietà, and there’s no acceptable rationale for its destruction, even if it’s in the name of urban expression.

Graffiti ranks right up there with consumer-generated content—at its best, a mediocrity. Unlike most graffiti and other attempts at expression, the jerks who vandalized this work of art could give a damn what you or I think, or the cops for that matter. So much of what they do is for the FU. They wouldn’t know the feeling of being connected if it walked up and hugged them breathless.

But their single act is emblematic of so much more.

America’s societal fabric has been ripping for years. We all know it. We’ve been watching our discourse degrade, our culture become more coarse and crude, and we’ve been stunned by the seemingly endless stream of unimaginable and heinous acts people commit on one another. Without intervention, trends suggest that soon there will be more “unconnecteds” than “connecteds.” Then the real fun begins.

For those in our society who aren’t taught early that respecting other people is a fundamental part of being alive or that playing along makes the world a better place, it’s easy to see why they beat people up and take their money, or cold cock unsuspecting kids on the street while friends record it on cell phones, or knife complete strangers in downtown parking ramps, or beat up their girlfriend’s crying three-year-old, or shoot errant bullets from the back seat of a car into a neighborhood home, or sexually abuse kids on a hockey team or the children they say Mass for, or relentlessly bully a classmate, or have blood alcohol levels sufficient to drive away after mowing down a motorist changing a tire.

I could go on and on and you know it.

The fix begins with respect for others and feeling connected to them—which starts at home. Helping, supporting, even legislating behavior for families whose intellectual, cultural, moral, or financial struggles preclude them from teaching even the most fundamental values to their children, is the first line of defense against a society increasingly rife with insensitivity, hopelessness, and violence.

If you think turning your back on these folks is a blow against enablement, well brother, you can start that revolution without me.