DDO Roundup - Calvin Klein, Chess, Paul Graham, RSS, NYC Bonuses, Google Maps
* Calvin Klein plans to introduce a new fragrance, "in2u." Here's a quick writeup:
Last year, Calvin Klein went so far as to trademark "technosexual," anticipating it could become a buzzword for marketing to millennials, the roughly 80 million Americans born from 1982 to 1995.
A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: "She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It's intense. For right now."
There are two potential conclusions for me to draw here, either: one, that blogging really is a hot phenomenon (in a new sense of the word); or, two, that Calvin Klein has completely had it as a brand. Although the idea that blogging can turn a woman on is appealing, I can tell you from experience, that if it ranks anywhere, it would be last in line amongst hundreds of alternatives. Calvin Klein, far from the hot brand it once was, is now a reliable cash cow for Philips-Van Heusen (PVH), whose stock has been performing phenomenally over the past year.
* "It often happens that a player carries out a deep and complicated calculation, but fails to spot something elementary right at the first move." - Alexander Kotov
* Longtime readers know I respect Paul Graham as one of the finest writers on business and technology out there. This latest piece, his introduction to the book, "Learning from Founders" has many of his great ideas in a short piece. I'm a real believer in the ideas from these paragraphs on productive work places, although I haven't yet put them into practice in my life:
The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive. Suits, for example. Suits do not help people to think better. I bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That's when you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work. [...]
Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what passes for productivity in big companies. And yet conventional ideas of "professionalism" have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. [...]
In the car world, there are at least some people who know that a high performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan with giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk. Why not in business? Probably because startups are so small. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.
For some more great work from Paul Graham, check out his archives. I'd also recommend a personal favorite of mine, "What Business Can Learn from Open Source". Classic quote: "Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale."
* Barron's adds RSS feeds; Ed realizes he is a nerd. Barron's just started offering RSS feeds of their content, along with content from the WSJ. I'm speechless, as Barron's was the last major financial publication to not offer feeds. Check it out here. These feeds need work, but they're better than nothing, and they're better than what the WSJ used to offer.
* City Journal is one of the more insightful publications on politics with a pragmatic perspective, even if the material is often uneven in quality and insight. Nonetheless, their perception of NYC's dependency on the uber-elite finance community is an important voice, and Nicole Gelinas' latest piece, "Bonus Boom, But..." is a great example of themes the magazine has published for quite a while:
While [NYC] bonuses are up 23 percent since the boom year of 2000, jobs are actually down 10 percent. Six years ago, Wall Street employed 200,000 New Yorkers. Today, it employs fewer than 180,000, the same number that it employed in 1997.
True, since 9/11, employment in the securities industry has grown robustly—indeed, at triple the employment growth rate in other sectors of the city’s economy. But New York can’t rely on Wall Street to generate a broad base of good middle-class jobs. Each Wall Street position may “create” two additional city jobs and another one regionally, but the employment tends to be in not particularly well-paying restaurants and retail (all those traders and bankers going out to eat and buying stuff). And the high taxes that New York is accustomed to levying on its Wall Streeters deter new investment in other job-creating industries in the city and the state. [...]
The words of one once-and-future mayoral candidate shouldn’t give New Yorkers much confidence that the next mayor will understand how perilously dependent New York is on Wall Street. At a December conference on the city’s taxes, Brooklyn congressman Anthony Weiner, told that 1 percent of city taxpayers pay a full third of income taxes, cracked: “They can afford to pay more.”
* You always knew Google's global map products could be a problem, you just never heard any examples of it. I wonder if Google feels that they adhere to the "don't be evil" mantra when they continue to offer detailed satellite maps of a war zone with US lives at risk. Perhaps Google's "don't be evil" concept is meant in the same sense as it did while I was in university, as in, "don't support the evil American imperialists." I can hardly imagine a company recruiting heavily from top American universities would interpret evil any other way. All this commentary is, of course, inspired by the now very old news that terrorists have used Google maps to hit UK troops.
* I used to be a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, but critical reviews of his recent work have caused me to reconsider. Check out this Richard Posner review of the book "Blink" from January 2005. Here's an excerpt:
There is irony in the book's blizzard of anecdotal details. One of Gladwell's themes is that clear thinking can be overwhelmed by irrelevant information, but he revels in the irrelevant. An anecdote about food tasters begins: "One bright summer day, I had lunch with two women who run a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum." The weather, the season, and the state are all irrelevant. And likewise that hospital chairman Brendan Reilly "is a tall man with a runner's slender build."
* And, in a perfect example of the dangers of web surfing to the best attempts at time management, check out some fascinating reading on the 2002 Millennium War Games, put on by the Pentagon to demonstrate the superiority of electronic, information-driven war systems. These systems were put to shame by General Paul Van Riper, who outwitted the systems with a variety of low-tech solutions. Van Riper's success pointed to the devastating danger of low-tech determination against high-tech weapons, ending in controversy. Nova has an interesting interview with Van Riper.
As a taxpayer, you should be very concerned that the $300 billion dollars we spend on military equipment each year is probably close to wasted. For example: for all the hubbub about the joint strike fighter, 50% of US casualties in Iraq were the product of the RPG-7, a shoulder-fired grenade launcher developed by the Soviets in 1961. Effective responses to this now primitive weapon: zilch.
For the most compulsively readable interpretation of this exercise, check out the War Nerd. Here's an excerpt from the War Nerd's interpretation:
What van Ripen did to the US fleet...that's something very different. He was given nothing but small planes and ships-fishing boats, patrol boats, that kind of thing. He kept them circling around the edges of the Persian Gulf aimlessly, driving the Navy crazy trying to keep track of them. When the Admirals finally lost patience and ordered all planes and ships to leave, van Ripen had them all attack at once. And they sank two-thirds of the US fleet.
That should scare the hell out of everybody who cares about how well the US is prepared to fight its next war. It means that a bunch of Cessnas, fishing boats and assorted private craft, crewed by good soldiers and armed with anti-ship missiles, can destroy a US aircraft carrier. That means that the hundreds of trillions (yeah, trillions) of dollars we've invested in shipbuilding is wasted, worthless.
