The New York Times had a feature story today on Stanford QB Andrew Luck. It says exactly what you’d expect: he’s smart (on and off the field), he’s got first-round potential and he hugely admires Coach Harbaugh. As a side note, I have been an Andrew Luck fan before he even arrived on The Farm.
ESPN also had its PAC-10 preview, which was also was about exactly as you’d expect: it’ll be a tight race to the finish, Jake Locker and Andrew Luck will be battling for the Top QB herald and Oregon might still be a threat despite their team’s inability to stay out of police custody.
Both items also had their own surprises. In the New York Times article, Andrew Luck’s dad, Oliver, made a very good point about Harbaugh:
Jim has taken Stanford kids — and they all come from pretty good families; I’m sitting in the parents’ section with doctors and lawyers — and he’s convinced them they are a group of lunch-pail, blue-collar, smack-you-in-the-face, union kind of guys. I just love the irony of that. It’s the last school you would anticipate where you could create that.
He’s totally right.
In the ESPN clip, the commentators claim that USC and Oregon are the schools to watch — Lane Kiffin will have his struggles, and the arrests across just about every position at Oregon will have their effect. But the surprise is at the end: Stanford is the (dark-horse) pick to represent the PAC-10 at the-bowl-which-must-not-be-named.
He is also totally right.
In a year where you really can make an argument for any one of 7 or 8 teams to win the PAC-10 title, it’ll be a great football season.
And Andrew Luck will be a huge part of all the story lines.
Tags: andrew luck, espn, jim harbaugh, lane kiffin, oregon, pac-10, usc
This is an awesome, awesome piece in Wired about the production of Toy Story 3.
It’s as much about creating a movie as it is about a team which knows each other and works well together.
A choice bit is when producer Darla Anderson is quoted as saying:
“Walking to the bathroom or getting a cup of coffee is often the most productive part of my day. You bump into somebody by accident and then have a conversation that leads to a fix.”
It reminds me a lot of Google culture, and why the unofficial “rule” is that Googlers should never be more than 150 feet away from a microkitchen.
It’s not only about delicious snacks (which it partially is). As this article proves, it’s not just some cliche team-building thing…it is what helps the Pixar team collaborate, and the effect at Google is no different.
Tags: collaboration, Google, pixar, productivity, toy story 3
I’ve been recently thinking a lot about ideals: the ideal job, the ideal girlfriend, the ideal New York City apartment*. Before I get too emo or abstract, I should state that I’m a bit skeptical of Platonic conceptions, of the Gatsby variety (discussed on Various Provocations blog, excerpted on Google Books). I’ll explain in the same manner as I often like to do; I’ll try to weave together a number of otherwise disparate anecdotes. However, the overarching idea here is: it’s hard to cling to a Platonic ideal, and when you do, it can be dangerous to your end goal.
My first example came from the Mother’s Day dinner my dad and I jointly prepared. I should rephrase that to accurately reflect that I only contributed for the dessert portion of this, but I’d like to think my efforts were respectable. We had a delicious miso Chilean sea bass (fresh fish from here) as well as two desserts: a strawberry shortcake and an orange bundt cake. (This parenthetical is a big tangent, but a worthwhile one: for those of you who are in NYC, I could not more strongly recommend the monthly cake special from Benoit, Alain Ducasse’s midtown bistro. It’s either $20 or $25, with something different each month and each one has been spectacular. We’ve had every month’s since it started in late ’09 and not only are they a steal, but they’re beautiful, and delicious — we’ve seen pumpkin pies, bouches de Noëls, coconut-chocolate ganaches, etc. This month’s was a strawberry shortcake with a very delicate pistachio filling and a thin layer of meringue on top. Fabulous. As for the bundt cake, I actually made that from scratch, see pics here and here, and that was my total contribution to the dinner preparation. It should be noted, however, that my dessert was just as popular as the Benoit cake.).
Anyhow, we had these two desserts. And when the inevitable question of comparison came up, the issue was phrased as a comparison not of each implementation — this strawberry shortcake versus this pound cake — but of their respective Platonic conceptions. Which do you prefer, the world’s best strawberry shortcake or the world’s best orange bundt cake? Earlier in the meal, we ran across a similar problem (this is a family that likes food). When discussing the Peking duck at previous night’s dinner at Chinatown Brasserie, we asked which was preferable when eating 北京烤鸭: the Platonic thin, pancake/tortilla-like wrapper or the Platonic conception of the white, fluffy bao?

Images via Flick
Fair questions, both. Except my uncle pointed out: seeing the world via a binary (or even ternary) lens was inherently limiting: perhaps there is a cake out there which combines the wonders of strawberry flavor, layered whipped cream, with the satisfying weightiness of the pound cake. (Actually, that sounds pretty good.). What about a wrapper, a vehicle for the Peking duck which allowed for the best of the thin wrapping and the flavor-absorbing bao? By pigeonholing yourself, or either of these food dilemmas, into an “either…or” version of the ideal, you miss out entirely on the possibility of a delicious hybrid!
My second example is from the first line of this piece. I have been apartment hunting, and while I knew who my roommates would be (Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum) we didn’t have an apartment squared away until recently. It was tough, New York real estate is a tricky business, and dealing with brokers can be no fun. There are plenty of
fun neighborhoods we liked, but we also wanted to be sure we had a space we liked that was commutable for the three of us. Anyhow, I think we each had in our heads the “perfect apartment.” The apartment in my head was more than just an aspirational, it was a really nice place: plenty of light, too much space, 2.0 bathrooms, marble countertops, super convenient location…I may be a bit hyperbolic here but I had a Platonic conception of the ideal apartment. So did my roommates. And in a real estate world where inventory flies off the shelves faster than Ben & Jerry’s in a heatwave, we acted quickly on an apartment which I’m sure fits in none of our combined Platonic conceptions of a place. The location can’t be beat, and it has a large living room space to entertain. It’ll be home. And we’ll make it a great home. It took us, all of us, to realize how to temper our expectations and put aside whatever ideals we had in our heads.
Now, I don’t have an MBA. And I don’t (currently) run a start-up. So I’m uniquely unqualified to tackle the issue of whether an MBA is a plus or a minus in the start-up world. But I’m going to try and answer, and propose what I think is the best solution. (Hint: it relates to the Platonic form I’ve been writing about so far.).
On the one hand, you have Guy Kawasaki, who proclaimed on Twitter that the MBA was not only of no utility to him as an entrepreneur, but in fact it was a negative. (I’m not sure if I’d even entertain that
thought…I can understand an MBA being of no positive value, but it’s a different thing entirely to say that it has actively hurt him as a Silicon Valley fixture). On the other hand, you have Vivek Wadwa defending the MBA as “the best investment I’ve ever made.”
Wadwa, who has various appointments at Cal, Duke and Harvard, summarizes Guy’s thoughts as follows:
Kawasaki explained that his issue with MBAs is that they are “taught that the hard part is the analysis and coming up with the insightful solution.” In other words: implementation is easy and analysis is hard. “But this is the opposite of what happens in startups. Implementation is everything in a startup.” Kawasaki believes that MBAs aren’t a good fit for startups, and engineering graduates are.
Wadwa agrees that the average (tech) entrepreneur does not need to know much about pricing assets or about accounting cost flow assumptions, perhaps staples of the MBA program in the U.S. And he’s right. But, Wadwa argues, there is enormous value in learning how to present business ideas, how to integrate teams and how to manage. So why not re-envision the MBA entirely? Why is this piece a back-and-forth between two guys, spitting out jabs 140 characters at a time? Plenty of top schools are looking at reworking their entire programs, given the changing business environment (and perhaps the realization that their model wasn’t best preparing people for business). Maybe, then, there is a time and a place for the Platonic conception. There is a time and a place for the ideal, the imagined.
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* Of the three examples I threw out at the top of this piece, I’ve discussed only the apartment in detail. I’m pretty happy on the other two.
Tags: alain ducasse, apartment, bao, benoit, bundt, cakes, dessert, entrepreneurship, erika, fitzgerald, gatsby, Google, guy kawasaki, mba, mother's day, peking duck, plato, platonic conception, sea bass, startups, techcrunch, union square, vivek wadwa

I’m sorry but it’s honestly the first thing I thought!
Tags: bunnies, Easter, whole foods
A while back, a friend’s mom told me about a game she used to play with her friends and colleagues (she has a background in law and interactive media).
The premise of the game is that all advertising is rooted in one of two things: sex and fear. More on sex in a minute, her point about fear was that even if advertisements did not play on your explicit fear of, say, security, they would touch upon your fear of being an outsider when you didn’t know about the latest and greatest products.
The point of the game, however, centered around sex. She
pointed out that you could use just about any jingle or slogan to promote Viagra, even phrases from otherwise unrelated products. My favorites were the adaptation of Men’s Warehouse: “You’re going to like the way you look, I guarantee it.” Or the use of Chevy’s ads, “Like a rock.”
It’s a fun game, but it drives home a point: advertising appeals to our base instincts, desires and thoughts.
Which is why I found this article on “neural advertising” in Time such a good read.
Researcher Martin Lindstrom monitors consumers when they are exposed to advertising; he checks brain activity, pupil dilation, sweat responses and flickers in facial muscles — all markers of emotion.
To figure out what most appeals to our ear, Lindstrom wired up his volunteers, then played them recordings of dozens of familiar sounds, from McDonald’s ubiquitous “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle to birds chirping and cigarettes being lit. The sound that blew the doors off all the rest–both in terms of interest and positive feelings–was a baby giggling. The other high-ranking sounds were less primal but still powerful. The hum of a vibrating cell phone was Lindstrom’s second-place finisher. Others that followed were an ATM dispensing cash, a steak sizzling on a grill and a soda being popped and poured.
Imagine, then, if companies go ahead with the talks Lindstrom is already having: European supermarkets piping the sound of percolating coffee or fizzing soda into the beverage department or that of a baby cooing into the baby-food aisle.
This would be a combination of the explicit physiological Maslow needs coupled with the love/belonging and esteem higher up the pyramid.
What would this mean for Web marketers? How could you drive home affinity to the same set of interests and needs online? Can you use the same hook (namely, sound) to draw in your audience without making the user feel as though s/he is being bombarded?
Tags: babies, chevy, hillary clinton, jingle, marketing, maslow, maslow's hierarchy, mcdonald's, men's warehouse, neural advertising, ricky bobby, sex, slogan, viagra