Monthly Archives: August 2019

08/30/19

Threesomes With Siri

If you own an Apple phone and use Siri — face it, who doesn’t — you may not realize that when you found yourself in an “intimate” moment, you may really have been enjoying a threesome with Siri.

Apple had a program wherein they captured “inadvertent” conversations including you doing the wild thing [or discussing that rash, or doing a drug deal, or plotting a watermelon theft] with your beloved and allowed contractors to evaluate them to see how this problem happened.

“Babe, who is that?” asks the beloved just as you unleash your secret, death defying, all satisfying power move.

“Oh, that’s Tim Cook’s pal, Siri.”

“Babe, that’s creepy.”

“Shh, now where were we, beloved? Oh, yes, my power move. Come here, dumpling.”

Of course, they forgot to tell you that you and the dumpling were providing “content” for the contractors.

Yes, this really happened.

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08/24/19

CEO Shoptalk — Teaching Yourself

I am fond of saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” It has been a cornerstone of my “Wisdom of the Campfire” CEO coaching consultancy with — wait for it — CEOs.

I get calls from a great number of CEOs who are looking for guidance for a specific situation and I have longstanding arrangements with others, some for several years.

The common denominator is they are “ready.”

An adjunct to that is that sometimes CEOs are both the teacher and the student. You may be teaching yourself. It is neither odd nor unusual and many times it is complementary to a steady arrangement with a CEO coach.

On the left, how the CEO sees him/herself. On the right, how the CEO may really be. The transformation is the teaching. Sometimes, you are teaching yourself.

Allow me to give you an example from my personal experience.

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08/23/19

Trump’s Folly — Greenland

Don’t let the title fool you, I am in favor of the United States buying Greenland and its 844,000 square miles of ice. I don’t really care that it was President Trump’s idea meaning I could like something even when it is disqualified by being an idea from “that” guy. [Tongue, meet cheek.]

Of course, it is not President Trump’s idea.

That distinction belongs to Senator Owen Brewster of Maine who spun the idea up in 1945. That idea was first proposed to the Danes by President Truman’s Secretary of State in 1946 and the US’s opening bid was $100,000,000. Classified archives burst open in 1991 revealing this nugget.

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08/22/19

CEO Criticism — Responding To Criticism

As a CEO, you will be the beneficiary of a wonderful phenomenon — the whole world will tell you about your shortcomings, what they would do differently, and the fact that you’re, well, a bum. They may question your intellect and opine that your mother dresses you funny.

It comes with the job.

Run a public company and deal with thousands of shareholders and the criticism is broader, deeper, and more pointed. Shareholders will even make fun of your dog. What kind of person makes fun of a man’s dog?

You will be tempted to respond, which will generate more criticism another response until the cycle becomes entrenched and begins to sap your energy.

This guy, who had a few critics in his day, is reputed to have said:

“You will never reach your destination if you stop

and throw stones at every dog that barks.”

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08/21/19

Tumblr Tumbled

It is obligatory to write something about Tumblr in the blogosphere or “they” will hack your site, and crash it. The Big Red Car doesn’t want that to happen, so here goes.

Related image

It is a curious case, this Tumblr story. With apologies to Charlie Dickens.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of greed, it was the age of Yahoo Marissa, it was the epoch of liquidity, it was the epoch of overpriced deals, it was the season of Porn, it was the season of VC virtue, it was the spring of the micro blogosphere, it was the winter of Tumblr, the Internet had everything before it, the Internet was its own worst enemy, every startup was going to be come a Unicorn, every startup was going bust — in short, it was like today when we suffer delusion and cannot believe that things like Tumblr ever happened.”

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking company founded by David Karp, a natural coder, in 2007.

NEW YORK, NY – DECEMBER 10: Founder and CEO of Tumblr David Karp attends Tumblr’s 2014 Year In Review Party at Brooklyn Night Bazaar on December 10, 2014 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Photo by Steve Mack/FilmMagic)

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08/20/19

Failing v Quitting

Yesterday, somebody sent me a link to the formal ritual whereby the freshmen/women (called “Rats”) of the Virginia Military Institute are pried loose from their parents’ loving arms and deposited with a third class corporal to be whipped into hard men and women during four demanding years at the nation’s oldest state military school.

At a school founded in 1839 which has provided warriors to fight our wars since then, ritual is an important element in the process — the unique process that turns an unshapen lump of clay into a hardened vessel in four years.

Sixty-one percent of the Rats will study math, science, or engineering and they are from 34 states and 4 foreign countries. They have an average GPA of 3.7.

It is a touching ritual. If you are bored today, watch it. Do you know of any other school that takes its students in in such a fashion?

The man speaking, the Superintendent of VMI, General JH Binford Peay III, VMI ’62, was the commander of the 101st Abn Div in the First Gulf War which conducted the longest airmobile movement in combat of any division in the history of warfare, setting up shop behind the Iraqi invaders of Kuwait. He was also the Centcom Commander as a 4-star General. [He has whipped VMI into the best shape it has ever been in since 1839. Personal view. He is also an inspiring leader and a good guy.]

One of the speakers, the Commandant, a warrior with almost three decades of military service made the distinction between failing and quitting. It is an important distinction.

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08/20/19

Woke American Capitalism

Yesterday marks the day when American capitalism took a crack at being “woke” when the Business Roundtable redefined the role of the American corporation in the “new” America we live in today.

In the past (1997), the Business Roundtable thought “…the paramount duty of management and boards is to the corporation’s shareholders…”

Makes sense, no? The shareholders own the company, right? Not so fast, amigo. Not so damn fast.

If you are a student of such things, you will enjoy reading the view of the world from 1997. It is here:

Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Governance

It is worth noting that the “shareholders” are not a social club; they own the companies of which these CEOs are the leaders and managers.

The food chain looks like this:

 1. Shareholders — the owners — of companies elect the Board of Directors.

 2. The Board of Directors engages the management of the company — the Chief Executive Officer being the primary hire of the Board.

 3. The Chief Executive Officer assembles the balance of the management of the company subject to the concurrence of the Board.

 4. The CEO and the management run the company subject to Board oversight.

This is a legal construct as well as a practical structure.

In this instance, the Business Roundtable is populated by CEOs. The CEOs of the Business Roundtable did not ask permission of their boards or their owners to rediscover the purpose of corporations. They acted on their own.

The initiative was introduced by Jamie Dimon, Chairman of the Business Roundtable and Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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08/19/19

White Privilege = Original Sin

Going philosophical on you. Original Sin and White Privilege.

If you are a Christian, you likely know about the concept of Original Sin.

When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden — hey, have you ever imagined a world in which Adam and Eve had chocolate chip cookies with ice cold milk and didn’t bite into that apple (honeycrisp, likely)? — mankind was tagged with an ancestral sin that was fairly shared amongst all of us as collective guilt.

Here’s Michelangelo catching Adan & Eve in the act in the Garden of Eden.

[Note: The Snake, the perpetrator, seems to have womanly characteristics. No? Is that terribly unwoke to mention? If so, I apologize. Also, please take notice of the fact that everyone in the painting is white. This will turn out to be important.]

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