differentiation—from a legendary brand

Among the most differentiated vocal brands, Billie Holiday was one of the most valued and highest paid jazz artists, and by 1945 became the highest paid jazz performer on New York’s 52nd street.

Grapple Mobile: argument for VC money needs start-ups, not the other way around

Financing is a big deal. But for a start-up there can be more risk for the start-up taking VC money vs. leaving it, or vs. an established firm getting some infusion or other. The start-up isn’t proven for one thing and the founders ideally best know and define the value proposition. VC money equals less input from such founders, and at a life cycle point where it counts hard.  Secondly, the fullest benefit of on-board talent isn’t manifested at start up but over a longer term. So VC money like a lubricant removes essential early grit and operationally can short circuit a valuable valuation process while ironically aiming to affirm it.

Young entrepreneurs often value VC money on its face. But VCs can be outright liabilities, as is rarely taught. For one, pitching to a VC requires knowing their portfolio. For your start-up’s proposition can be usurped by VCs with vested interests elsewhere in business material to your start-up’s valuation. I.e., VCs can use their perch to learn how to manage their own portfolios, not invest in your team.  There’s an argument they should. The counterargument is if they can, you don’t have an idea. And the counter counterargument is if you don’t have an idea why are they listening.

In short, neither getting a hearing with VCs nor having active bidders is gold. Or need be. As described here.

Judge Rakoff blocks Citigroup settlement with S.E.C.

Off the beaten judicial path we go:

Some good looks at Judge Rakoff’s ruling denying the $285 MM mortgage settlement between the SEC and Citigroup:

NYTimes. ProPublica. FT. Daily Kos. Forbes. HuffPost.

My summary comments are:

(1) It’s why judges wear robes, don’t smile (much), and we rise when they enter: Not everybody can be bought. People talk politicians and lobbyists and greed and government brought to you by corporations. And law is corrupt. But ahead of others, judges have made decisions that made swaths of the otherwise most influential and rich stakeholders accustomed to buying privilege mad, and changed history’s course. Judges have said no to ruling classes, precedent, ethnic majorities, and to the most moneyed and powerful among us in the tobacco industry, auto firms, and yes, banks.

(2) Rakoff isn’t new to boldness. But OccupyWallStreet may be priming the atmospherics for mainstream discourse and making his boldness translate unusually beyond the hallowed Wall of US streets.

Steve Jobs: qualified praise

Women are designers. They wear paint. Make homes. Disproportionately groom and mold children and creatively care for elders. Around the world they regularly plan, fetch, improvise and present meals that sustain most humanity. Some poorest among them with only an imagination have transformed literal rags into artistic riches showcased for the world. They are creatures of detail. Aesthetics. Vision. Of how things can be.

In the U.S. they reflect a broad spectrum of detailed, daily manufactured, original personal presentation, via coifs, wardrobe, accessories, accentuations and aromatics  that steadily and functionally change, sometimes over hours in a day.  In business they have expanded ways to lead. Uncharacteristically dissented in managerial ranks.  And otherwise stretched their environs with an alternative.  Including in the highest  halls and malest of intellectual domains: Though celebrated for their discovery of the double helix, James Watson and Francis Crick themselves knew the discovery was overwhelmingly based on the unparalleled creative crystallographic photography studies and research of  molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin.

Yet women constitute 30% of the design teams of BMW and only 20% of those of GM. They are roughly 80% of the New School’s design student body, however.  They are sold more products, durable goods and appliances than their ranks in corporate American industrial design suggest they ever helped develop. Are famously scarce in A&R and production teams in American music, the stage, and major film.  Do not lead in representative governance or think tanks despite garnering most advanced degrees in the U.S.  Are scarce in management consulting. Are a minority among venture capitalists. Are still news to direct major orchestras and lead new interpretations despite playing powerfully in them. And do not feature prominently in notable design juries.

One conclusion:  A greater supply and diversity of creativity and vision exists than markets and bastions of creative vision often reflect.

Steve Jobs.

Much celebration has ensued over the contributions of the Apple founder and CEO, who died Wednesday.  My comparably muted tone here may be biased, as past an electron microscope or medical innovation I’m never too moved by gadgetry. I assume it transforms.  I expect it to do stuff I want done.

Personally noteworthy in the celebrations, however,  is what I see as Jobs’ main but overlooked lesson, and it’s a plain one: Kids who aren’t hungry—as in need food—who have love, and whose mental hardware isn’t bogged down running sociological surveillance programs for perpetual survival—i.e., Whistling Vivaldi—have the option and mental space to dream. Not on special occasions, but by default. And to nurture it. As a centerpiece of their endeavors.

Jobs’ childhood implies little encumbrance:

• He was adopted. A much planned parenthood, that is. Attentive.

• He had peace. He wasn’t soaked in poverty’s daily theatre refereeing bickering family and wondering over the hour when a next limit would give; wasn’t wrestling with whether enough of the same colored or gendered or classed people were in the lab, on the sidewalk, or in work environments; and wasn’t trying to dampen inside himself this or that innate interest because people who looked like him or came from his town lacked critical mass in those professions–or like Rosalind Franklin’s father–didn’t approve of his gender doing it.

• He had time. Time for a hobby. And deep immersion. Mental space to think luxuriously on electronics and computers.

• He had options. He could drop out of college. Without it being ruinous.  Without sending his family into chaos for how essential it was for his whole demographic’s chance for any success.  He was a white male. He could be hold-up in a garage toying with dreams, and he could gamble. Society wouldn’t lock him out. And investors wouldn’t rule him out or refuse to ever loan him his  first $250K. And he knew it.

• In college, his 7-mile weekly pilgrimage to the beloved Hare Krishna temple was no luxury, but still unconcerned with being interrupted by law enforcement—seemingly 5 years within Dr. King’s assassination. And it’s a 7-mile trek along which every woman would have thought 112 times about being abducted; 236 times about being raped and 180 times about being dead.

Our culture holds some romanticism about a young wandering and adventuring Jobs. Entirely unintentionally, I believe, even from Jobs himself.

As a lifelong student of science I must also accept Jobs’ own word on his creative inspiration and from whence a main part came: LSD. Which he named as one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. That’s up there. Hence, even Jobs’ vision, long hailed, may have less to do with him and more with the lasting effects of a mushroom.  For Jobs reportedly said of Bill Gates that he “would be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Boldly: LSD is such a big deal to vision that Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, arguably born to an unfettered demographic,  left some success on the table because he didn’t use it.

A bunch of kids—many who even share demographical conveniences like race and gender and sexual orientation with Jobs, never mind many who don’t—simply lost the geographic lottery and got born not in Frisco but Appalachia. And quietly supporting recent celebrations—which evidence a classist Apple fervor and disappointingly at this time in American economic Occupy Wall Street history with record setting capitalistic disenfranchisement, ravaging corporate power asymmetry and poverty class  conversions—is the working assumption that Jobs, in near Jesus fashion, is simply extra extra special vs. the rest and that the specialness is endemic to him. That his phenomenal success is delinked from any facilitating context.

Elitism did attach to Apple products over Jobs’ reign:

And registered on twitter after his death:

For the record not even the newspapers published Jobs’ death as their main story the next morning as Occupy Wall Street protests commanded the cover of the New York Times, e.g., and deaths of two Civil Rights figures—Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and Professor Derrick Bell—on the same day, both of whom helped change the world, got tweeted.

Point being praise can seem genuinely swollen: Jobs was a smart, straight, creative, white male who enjoyed timely access to capital without traditionally required credentials and to supportive managerial talent, who used acid,  had doting parents, and was born to the unparalleled American creative class of San Francisco at a unique time—and let’s be clear: San Francisco is another country.  Frisco vs. Dillon, SC is the US vs. China. Controlling for all and switching 1 chromosome his twin sister likely wouldn’t have fared so well.

Missing this context means we don’t factor its absence into the lives of too many kids who are trapped in Kentucky, invisible behind gender, have inattentive overworked parents and the rest. In America there are still sieves and a bunch aren’t getting through. Steve Jobs was born on the right side, and had better odds as a white male adoptee drop-out illicit drug user in San Franciso in 1955 with an ultimate rare cancer diagnosis, than many healthy biological, law abiding, minority kids with Ivy League degrees in 2011 born to richer families in unanimously socioeconomically lagging Dixie. Yes, his company fired him and he founded or owned his companies, but my bet is on average the workplace has dished out more personal career penalty to functional healthy women having babies than it has to an absentee man getting chemo.

The lesson isn’t for kids to dream big or “think different” and be like Jobs—and frankly, such mantras ring cheap detached from real heterogeneous contexts in which people live. It’s to recognize the environments all kids need–clean and safe and creative and loving and intellectually stimulating and unencumbered—because they really can do so much of the rest.  Accomplishment isn’t just results. But results relative to a starting line and the inherent frictions or lack thereof along the charted course.  Jobs’ lesson isn’t how great the stuff he did was, or how he “changed the world”, I say. It’s that fundamental unencumberment, enables the doing of so much of the great stuff now celebrated in the first place.

I also have the impression that when Jobs left the room people often didn’t feel better about themselves. Clearly, he was an effective manager, but by this impression if correct, not an ideal one to me.

Jobs’ life was rightly his own. To design to his choosing. But I judgmentally fantasize a bolder leverage of his station and descent may have found him not giving his last energy to Apple, but using his platform to persuade corporate America on to more creative and productive courses.  Or like Randy Pausch personally laying out a path for generating his leadership as widely hailed—and impressively, Apple University may impersonally do just that.  Or like the healthy, “less broad” Bill Gates, eradicating a disease from the third world so kids got chances to live long enough to get foolish, never mind  ”stay foolish”, a mantra that in a socioeconomically aloof Applesque way assumes for practical purposes one is first middle class.

More judgmentally I suspect of Jobs’ severest mourners that if one is religious-fervor ecstatic over an Apple product today and much over the age of 6, one is overdue: For volunteering at a women’s shelter. In a literacy program. Cancer ward. Or something.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month: a survivor businesswoman remembered

This being day 1 of Domestic Violence Awareness Month (DVAM), I can’t help but think of late family friend, business woman and domestic violence survivor, Elizabeth Hill.

Elizabeth was among the most distinguished women I’ve ever known in or out of business for her MGM-grade life story of epic entrepreneurism, wealth, beauty, and at her spouse’s hand, brutality and all alongside a profound individualism. She was a natural born deal maker.

She went through a lot early, and while battered and covered in her own blood finally killed her abusive husband in self-defense on the front steps, never moving from their home where he died for the next 57 years. Her circle was small. But her self-image and objectives were big. Her business endeavors were noteworthy for anyone of her generation. Nothing about her was normal or average.  No pun is intended in correctly saying she was a business woman in keeping with this blog, literally off the beaten path.

Talking to her, I often wanted to record her given the uniqueness of her journey and innate business wisdom, saying once, “There should be a book.” Always transfixed I never did. And there was so much. In a way I’ve not exactly seen elsewhere personally, she was a woman born and evolved beyond templates who was completely comfortable not simply with business but with due personal power. She apologized for none of it and was not even slightly boastful. Her characteristic calm defied the turmoil she had known. Never didactical, she could still teach an enormity to women about life, individualism, and business by her example.   She taught me.

“Is Marriage for White People?” Stanford law professor’s new book

This new book by Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks is all off the beaten path, and concerns 1 basic unit of economic institutions and primary act of M&A–marriage.

It’s likely the first public “concession” by a prominent African American and academician that (1) “black marriage” in America is dead—for the middle class—and that (2) its resurrection shouldn’t be a goal–at least not directly.

A WSJ article on the story was reportedly the most clicked on story for WSJ readers ( a demographic hardly obsessed with the marital state of affairs of middle class black women) over a weekend that included a debt downgrade.

Professor Banks’ contention appears to be that black middle class women lack counterparts in black middle class men as potential spouses and consequently, should seek marriage with non-blacks.  He says black middle class women have been “taking one for the team” and going without the deserved fruits from the institution of marriage for too long. It’s a big economic deal too; right down to the lack of a legacy and increased demographic equity from any inheritance of rare intellectualism and socioeconomic latitudes earned by many such unmarried and childless women.  In business parlance Professor Banks’ stance appears to promote an urgent need for marital spousal competition and the break-up of a de facto dating monopoly reflexively held over black middle class women by black men at large.  He suggests—and credibly—that it would only raise the quality of some black men.  He’s already angered some with comments like this:

“It’s time for black women to stop being held hostage to the deficiencies of black men.”

I applaud his effort toward a truly new, and economically and socially relevant conversation. And of course an inconvenient one.

Update: Someone forwarded me this fine Time interview of Professor Banks.

entrepreneur Peter Thiel aims to start up libertarian country

As reported in the Lookout article ”Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands”, entrepreneur Peter Thiel, of PayPal and other fame, a libertarian, is investing in building libertarian societies in the ocean:

“Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

Asserted then is that libertarian society, not proven viable, is so—if first funded via wealth generated under regimes whose GDP is 30% government; and generated, organized and seed-populated by those harboring literacy, NIH-funded vaccination-induced disease immunity, and enjoying peace, among the public health, educational and security benefits flowing to societies with substantial command institutions.

Diddy’s Ciroc Vodka and the disproportionate marketing influence of African Americans

“My brand is rocket fuel. It would take this brand 10 years to get to where I can take it in one year.” –Sean “Diddy” Combs

Diddy signed a 2007 deal with Diageo PLC entitling him to a 50% stake in Ciroc Vodka.  Here’s how business has done since he signed, and for simple comparison, how the Air Jordan sneaker business did for the same period after Michael Jordan signed his famously successful shoe contract with Nike.  It’s a succinct graph but in both categories sales were either flat or growing unremarkably up to the contract:

It’s one of many new deals between the alcoholic beverage industry and proven influential lifestyle brands in industry moguls and icons.

In the March 2011 Forbes column “Why Diddy Will Be Hip-Hop’s First Billionaire” , Forbes staff noted:

“…Executives at Diageo could never have expected just how much Diddy’s presence would boost sales. In 2007 sleepy Ciroc was moving cases at a rate of 60,000 per six months, or 120,000 per year. In 2009 Diddy’s second year with the brand, Ciroc moved 400,000 cases. This year Ciroc is on pace to sell more than 1 million cases. The boom was fueled in large part by Diddy’s diligent shilling—on billboards, in lyrics, on Twitter and even through a self-proclaimed nickname, “Ciroc Obama.”

Diageo management framed Ciroc’s success after the Combs partnership:

“Only twice in my career have I seen an immediate response in our brand tracking”…“We saw it really take off in the African-American community, and it has started to broaden its appeal. Throughout the entire economic recession, it was one of the few brands that never slowed down.”… “As a community, African-Americans are leaders in terms of style, fashion and image,”…“They can take brands and make them very big themselves.”–Jim Mosely, Diageo Senior Vice-president for consumer planning 

Other examples of non-textbook breakthrough African American marketing influence can be found in industries of fashion and accessories, food and non-alcoholic beverages, fragrances, electronics, automobiles, and even travel.

the optics of leadership

In my quarters there was a chromosomatic split: Those who thought a now resigned congressman’s career was salvageable after explicit photos of him rounded the public sphere, and that only any illegal conduct by him ultimately mattered, were mostly men. Those who immediately declared him finished mostly had 2 X chromosomes. And some of them—like me—said it’s all about the pictures and they matter really really hard.

When the story broke, Arianna Huffington called it (the end of the congressman’s House career) with one tweet, in that dark, succinct and characteristic 2 X style in which our finest aunts have ominously murmured when somebody went too far at the church supper.  And unquestionably, it was time to go.

The end of this congressman’s authority and House career was so foregone a conclusion for me, that some male acquaintances’ early protestations to the contrary—primarily because of some “ranking” they envisioned of the congressman’s infraction relative to that of other still-sitting legislators (none of whose foibles, however, had been photographically captured, never mind infinitely digitally disseminated)—made me want to lay it out nicely and prove it. Like a math theorem. Not to “make” one agree, but allow one to hear Aunt Julia—whose voice clearly had not gone off in their heads.  It was mostly with such fellows in mind that I originally wrote in calm consideration of what struck me as more than axiomatic—my earnest explanation that fire is indeed hot:

Leadership is part optics.

In a recently resigned congressman’s story people have talked law, lies, and other still-sitting politicians’ foibles. Unmentioned is how the New York congressman failed the optics test endemic to political leadership:

• that Obama passed by not being photographed smoking on the campaign;
• that Bush 1 failed by glancing at his watch during a debate;
• that a paralyzed FDR passed by “walking” before a troubled country;
• that frontrunner Nixon failed under television lights in the 1960 debate with Kennedy;
• that Reagan passed by understanding cameras as an actor and staffing accordingly;
• and that Gary Hart failed when pictured with a companion.

Knowing (for example that some other politician consummated an extramarital affair) and seeing (for example pictures as in the present case, in absence of such consummation) don’t drive the same optics or outcomes in politics. In court. In sales. In management. Or in courtship. What we see (and don’t see) regularly trumps what we know. Or becomes it. And leaders of duration generally know that.

Chrysler and market efficiency

Chrysler was saved (again) with government money, by government workers who lacked auto industry expertise and mostly drove foreign cars.

high salaried law professor tells law graduates coveting big-money jobs to “get over it”

In a commencement address, the ABA Journal reports that Emory University law professor Sara Stadler told law graduates coveting big-money jobs to “Get over it.”

That this professor or Emory University Law School itself would correspondingly “get over” any decline in the legal market for law graduates and not sunnily market as usual programs lacking real placement statistics to support repaying exorbitant tuition indebtedness born by so many graduates, is less clear. That law career services would “get over” using big-law jobs and salaries as prime bait in their advertised placement metrics for prospective applicants isn’t clear either.

Deserving focus is the role the ABA and these very programs had in producing such supply excesses that leave many newly minted J.D.s in the job and competitive compensation lurch.  Stadler herself stated, “I’m sure Emory has failed you in some way”, saying how she wished she could change this. Presumably she and the university partly could. Via loan forgiveness. Graduates seem ill advised to plan on such change, however.

Here are some excellent comments to the article:

Doctors abandoning evidence-based medicine. Again.

The New York Times reported today that a little medical device company, Biotronik, with 5% market share in pacemakers and defibrillators, is Big Daddy in one certain medical center (some of whose doctors it hired) with 95% market share.  And it got there in 3 years from 0% market share. Technically, that’s a growth rate of infinity. Many a firm is emboldened by 10%. This is a quick change of heart—devices. Plus clinical trial (all expenses paid).

Casualities in this story—at least 3:

• evidence-based medicine
• competition
• ethics

SKILLSHARE: Learn anything from anyone + Starting a Learning Revolution

Let’s Start a Learning Revolution from Skillshare on Vimeo.

STEM to STEAM: new ways to problem solve

Weeks ago the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) hosted a provocative workshop called “Bridging STEM to STEAM: Developing New Frameworks for Art-Science-Design Pedagogy“.

“…The goal of this gathering of minds was to develop strategies to enhance STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] education by integrating art and design – transforming STEM into STEAM and promoting the intellectual and creative potentials in the process.

“The workshop brought together 60 leaders from the fields of science, creative IT, engineering, art and design, mathematics and education research to strategize about innovative ways to fuse these fields and teach new approaches to creative problem solving.”

I like this.

It means breaking through an “artificial bifurcation between art and science” that I’ve felt for some time. On a college campus, the buildings where science and art are taught can reside in different zip codes. Disparate whole subcultures of professors and students go in and out. There’s economy in this and I get it. But some learning approaches in the sciences haven’t ever much changed. We’re creating some great scientists on the one hand, but on the other we have a shortage, and many new students aren’t raring to go because they disidentify with a zip code.

Disciplines are siloed off behind inert traditions. Yet academies themselves know silos are false. Many in the end spend energy stitching much of it back together through Dual Degree Engineering and cross disciplinary joint degree programs.

Folks in science can be ashamed to be closeted poets or guitarists–like it means lack of focus. Venus and Serena Williams—who appear continuously in school or learning a foreign language or designing a clothing line—are high profilers who have publicly nurtured creativity while “scientifically” mastering a conformist, precision oriented day job. It was their rejection of convention—in training, strategy, and scheduling—that correlated with their original success and worked as a template for others. They have weathered the lack of focus critique; but as career “delineations” that for them were congruent, creativity arguably enhanced their game.

A workshop participant remarked how the world comes to us whole and we dysfunctionally break it down into artificial pieces expecting to understand it.

I’m glad for this group of envelope pushers.

Chrysler and Alamo—some human experiences

I tweeted this about a recent rental car experience–the car, not the rental company (Alamo) though both were more than satisfactory:

The car manufacturer quickly condensed and retweeted my tweet, suggesting a human vs. computer retweeter:

I then tweeted how impressed I was with the humaness and speed of their retweet:

Later I also tweeted how impressed I was with Alamo, the car rental company. They score an efficiency point in their contract differentiation with other rental firms.  Alamo actually blocks off less (0) than the local gas station on a normal pit stop. How human. And fair.

Egypt

This is a communicative rap video , even in Arabic.  This picture from the video speaks volumes:

So does this one.

Well documented in U.S.  enterprise and life is how lack of choice and input into the surrounding world are the biggest killers of morale, productivity, creativity and general progress.  Lose-lose.