why start ups let down
Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz
You’re in your third year on your third start up and after the third day of the third month you can barely pay the rent on three desks on the third floor when you read Mark Zuckenberg paid a billion for a company with no revenue.
No one wants to fail. The vision drills deep into the heart and mind and summons images of waiting tables with a spouse and child sitting home waiting. You have to face friends and family. You have to face the mirror every morning. You have to face. . . Facebook.
After 30 years of running a PR agency and fielding inquiries from countless businesses, patterns form. Let’s call this one “unremarkable intangibility.” The pattern is visible in the presentations of certain nameless, faceless companies seeking publicity or funding. It’s clear which won’t succeed. Energy for another energy drink, anyone? Game for another game company?
Unremarkable intangibility, a corollary of information overload, is information underload. Maybe underwhelming. Some entrepreneurs don’t grasp their own idea. They don’t see the utility, advantages, need or market. Or lack of such things. They don’t listen to lovers and advisors. Frequently, they simply haven’t done their homework. Sometimes, they don’t care.
Usually, they say we’re different. There is no competition. Once built, customers will come. Once PR makes them famous, they’ll pay us. Often, these starry-eyed capitalists are deeply in love with their products or services. Love is blind. Too many are too desperate to succeed, to be rich or just too desperate. Recently, a bubble blower blurted that this all drives more people to build more businesses which brings more innovation. Indeed.
Maybe the secret surrounding silly-sounding synonymy, such as Google, Zynga, Twitter and more, is that serial scholars are signaling there will never be a Sergy & Sons, Brinn Brothers, Costolo et Cie. Seriously.
A bunch of years ago, the reasons for starting a business changed. Ambitious, hardworking people went from building great companies with great products and services that serve real needs to creating an exit strategy. Frequently, these companies are not even proprietorships. They are merely products, SKUs, features or apps that should be part of larger organizations. The best examples are iPod applications. The best app is not a co. The worst is not trade-markable and many are unremarkable. Recently, we’ve seen innovators selling designer bags for holding cameras and promotional placemats for selecting wine. More? Four companies were packing video games based on the same sci-fi film. Three others were pumping flavored energy drinks (their own Kool Aid). Two others were selling shopping sites. The last one was hopefully birthing one last mommy site.
“We are different. Ours is bigger, better, richer, pricier, cheaper, fancier, lighter, easier, nicer, robuster, distinctiver. . . . ” Errrrrr, no.
The Internet sets a low bar to entry. Opening a business 10-15 years ago meant opening stores and distributorships everywhere. Building a management team. Generating sales. Making a profit. Today, for only a billion dollars, you can buy 30 million impressions that only took one year to generate. Impressive.
Doesn’t anybody boot-strap anymore?
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inheritance for instance
Perceived and posted by Jerry Schwartz
William J. Blythe III, son of a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident, took his alcoholic, gambling and abusive stepfather’s surname at the age of 15 and the title POTUS at 46. He chose a path of politics after meeting John F. Kennedy in 1963, the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, subject of the 1996 book, “Sins of the Father.” Ironic, the tonic, if not chronic and pneumonic, Monica.
The greatest switch hitter, hall of famer and All Century teamater, was the son of a coalminer from Spavinaw, Oklahoma, and the father of four sons, agonizingly all alcoholics, also.
Speaking about going homa, Bishop T.D. Jakes, eulogizing Cissy Houston’s daughter, said, “Tomorrow’s not promised to us.” Yet, we’re always saving things for posterity, mostly not knowing what that word means. A posteriori, of course, apropos of apostles at the Apollo. Absolution, absolutely.
In the evolution of the modern world from an Industrial Revolution fought by immigrants to a digital solution wrought with tight pants and implants, we’ve wanted more for our supplants than a can’t rant. People want their children to shower before work not after. Pinstripes by day and jeans at night, rather than jeans by day and pinstripes at night.
America’s a great country. You travel overseas and observe 300-year-old ’omes, often occupied by old folks for the on-and-on. Here, most grandparents opted onboard overseas over a century ago. Not speaking American well, they became the tradesmen they were – Goldmans, Biermans, Aldermans, Ledermans. Everyman. Then, Dad took over the business after a war in the Europe gramps left years before. Then, his son, the grandson, took over after a war in Vietnam, now a popular tourist detour.
Often that son – or more recently, daughter – decided medicine or law or Wall Street was better than tiling floors or selling shoes and in one generation made more money than the previous four added together. America is a great country. Arguably, it enabled a British party family’s daughter to be the next party queen of England. Grace was in a special place. Simpson was an early symptom.
Lacking real dynasties, we create ’em. Most a mere three generations old – not centuries – they control contemporary cottage-to-castle companies in every category. They bore a bunch of books, like “The Chosen” and “The Millionaire Next Door,” and dot the dailies of docu-dramas, melodramas, psycho-dramas, epics, lyrics and satirics. As fans, we focus on fortunes and fantasies of the famous.
Though a friend fares fine in fixing family fortunes forwarded on to eons of scions, the number of notable knee-sitters, including dysfunctional and decadent descendants, is deliriously diverse, giving rise to Ancestry.com, Archives.com and, naturally, Mygreatbigfamily.com. Oh, c’mon. And a renaissance in portraiture and heirloom-quality stuff. Enough.
Beyond Astors, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, here are other, notable natals notching birth right in birth rite – partum me – so, for posterity, these ample examples of seeds well sown:
Finance –Abigail Johnson, Jessica Bibliowicz, and all the Quicks and Reilly
Business – Busch, Walton, Ford and all the men in Mars
Real Estate – the Rudins, Dursts, Walentas, Roses, LeFraks, Trumps, Tishmans & Speyers, plus Musses, Rechlers, Hovnanians and some Greens
Politics – Birch Bayh I and II, George and Mitt, plus the Kennedy Klan
Fashion – Gucci, Lauren, Lauder and Missoni, all very much in fashion
Literature – Styron, Buckley, Kellerman and Clark sounds like a law firm
Theater – Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein presents
Movies – starring Fonda, Douglas, Goldwyn and many more Barrymores
Music – Cole, Cash, Guthrie, Marsalis and many Marleys
Consider comedian Charlie Chaplin, who created a considerable circle of children in the course of his career. He conceived 12 who collectively carried 14, one of whom, Carmen, celebrated the silent celeb’s Oscar over champagne at the Chateau. Clearly, Carmen is connected in the cinema – acts, writes and directs (mimes don’t always rhyme). You see? No, legacy.
The trend wouldn’t tend back then, 50 years ago, as the offspring hadn’t found their well-spring doing the family thing. And 100 years ago, the Industrial Revolution’s evolution wasn’t yet an institution of pollution. Relatively few American businesses today are that old – only 23 privately owned with audited results. For some, the seeds are scarcely sown.
But, the boys that don’t buy into bourgeois businesses are a big bunch, too. Sort of like letting heirs apparently out of a balloon or a saloon. Regardless, those boomers are benefiting from the biggest bounty of bucks in history – trillions transferred from then to them.
Inherited wealth always seemed an easy way to stay in the Forbes 400 fray. No more so than the Internet lowers barriers to entry in certain sectors and lowers barriers to great wealth. A recent study showed only 9% of the 1% inherited it – down from 23% in 1989. It’s not solely that the rich are getting richer, there are more of them. And they are spread out over a wider geography. China, for example, has over a million millionaires, up 25% in a year.
Clearly, even China is considering collectable change. The Communist country currently calculates no formal gift, estate or inheritance taxes and is challenged by commerce, comments a current critique. For the country to continue without crashing, a conscious course of capitalism must be created and communicated. A World Bank report urged a free market economy, including modern estate planning. Especially for the next 5,000 years.
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lowest cost providers
Perceived and posted by Jerry Schwartz
My secretary disappeared. Where once there was one secretary per executive, suddenly there was one for two executives, then one per group, then one per floor. Now, whole businesses often have only a handful of “admins” and executive assistants.
Necessity being the mother of invention (success has a lot of fathers), in the 1980’s, computers exploded on the business scene, and proceeded to decrease correspondingly in price. Logically, word processing followed and “Delete” replaced “White Out,” “Cut and Paste” replaced “Cutting and Pasting,” voice mail replaced the receptionist and women started replacing men in key executive positions and brought new thinking to the boardroom.
How quickly we forget. Until the computer, the U.S. had been falling behind some other countries, in innovation. Magically, during this period, the balance in the American workplace shifted and generated the spark that drove the new technological revolution that produced the Internet and put the U.S. back on top, again. Incredibly, there was a time when French was a contender for the language of business (huh?), then it was Japanese, then the Internet spread English so widely that its early teaching in India helped drive that country’s economy as the leading global destination for outsourcing everything from call centers to market research to law. No one realistically envisions Spanish as the global language of business despite the massive numbers of native speakers. Nor Mandarin, though elitist parents may push their children to study it in private schools to give them cocktail party conversation on weekends. Certainly not Hebrew, despite tiny Israel’s out-sized technovation.
The loss of jobs to low cost producer countries has been bemoaned for 50 years since Kodak lost sales of Brownies to Nikons after World War II, and Nash Rambler sales declined as Volkswagen Beetle sales boomed during the same period. Made in America did not mean assembled in America.
But for all the industries that evaporated with a corresponding loss of jobs to overseas manufacturers, our national unemployment rate has not increased proportionately. Innovative businesses, different skills and new jobs popped up. In merely a decade, brand names like Facebook and Google became as well known as Coca Cola and Nabisco, though the latter took a hundred years to reach their present presence. Now, book publishing is at risk. Before, the apparel, toy and appliance industries, among many others, rose and fell. Factory graveyards in the Northeast and Midwest have been resurrected as condos, restaurants and boutiques.
Once we were an agrarian society with most jobs tied to the land, then we became manufacturers after Eli Whitney invented the system of interchangeable parts. For the last 25 years, we’ve been moving to a capitalist society based on intellectual capital. And private equity.
In the midst of the current economy, probably it’s hard to see that America’s finest hour may be dawning. It took us 200 years to realize – but not yet appreciate — a new age, finally free from high cost, manual labor intensive growth that’s better suited to more developing countries, where their psycho-social-educational point on the time line is now where ours was 50 to 100 years ago in the decades starting with the Industrial Revolution. Japan was a low cost provider in the 1950’s and 1960’s and then they, like us, moved manufacturing to places like Taiwan, Korea and Singapore. Now, Chinese manufacturing is starting to get expensive. Who will benefit next, South America, Africa, Antarctica?
Imagine a place, a country where the power of thought is the economic vehicle driving growth. Imagine a civilization so advanced that creativity and innovation are the only currencies by which GNP is measured. Maybe that’s where we are going and the current economic period is not so much a case of over leverage as it is a very difficult transition from one economic order to the other, as we move from a manufacturing base to an intellectual base. Perhaps the Great Depression was caused by the transition from an agricultural-based economy. More important, what happens when we run out of low cost providers? Do we seek other planets?
It’s a good reason to maintain the space program.
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ubiquitous, ubet!
Perceived and posted by Jerry Schwartz
Face it, facts are, Facebook’s fame and fortune flow from four “F”s:
FRANCHISE — seen almost as a fundamental right, Facebook reflects the combined interests and activities of 800 million friends worldwide.
FANTASY — it embodies the hopes and dreams of those people and proves there are no limits to those ambitions.
FUNCTION — the technology exists and is functional and cheap enough to access anywhere, useable by anyone.
FINANCING — maybe cheap to access and use, but expensive to build and operate. Fortuitously, the financing figures to fund the future.
Farfetched, no. Famously, a Fifth Dimension altering of the Age of Aquarius, a dawning when Jupiter aligns with Mars. The funneling of these four facts and a 100 years of fidgeting since the Industrial Revolution have fueled a wired and willing world weary of watching TV and wanting the web.
And it is a dawning of a new age, especially if you believe constructive change and real reason will rise from the rubble of a rotten recession. If the Internet is a utility, Facebook is the power -– the water, gas or electricity used by the widest possible number of people. Like air, earth, fire and friends. Ubiquitous. Ubet.
You doubt?
On the fourth “F,” financing, Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans are worth 1.5 trillion, up 12% from recession depths one year ago, a record 70% of which are self made. The numbers are numbing in other parts of the world. Unquestionably, when you analyze, technology creates opportunities across every industry, across every continent.
Clearly, the cash is coming. Expectations are for the biggest year for U.S. initial public offerings by Internet companies since 1999, reaching $11 billion in 2012. The biggest bygone bubble burst 13 years ago at $18.5 billion.
These items on Internet investment interest interestingly but more importantly indicate a strong income and earnings increase, not insistently identifying eyeballs. The Internet ad market hit $12.3 billion this recessionary year, up a whopping 24 percent. In the 1990’s, many web-focused companies were unprofitable. Yes, many are still struggling, but an improving economy should create a pivotal 2012 as the technology costs decrease and marketing costs increase.
The technology is there. Only several years ago, social media wasn’t social, Twitter wasn’t a glitter, Four Square wasn’t ’round, a coupon wasn’t Groupon and Zynga wasn’t game. Today, times are good in Silicon Valley, where freeways, restaurants, houses and jobs are filled. A “Golden Age,” another stage, a turned page, the next rage. Technology enables the analytics that provide the metrics that target the advertising media mix. More than merely clicks, digital addicts. Fueled an Arab spring, a Russian winter and a few other falls. It’s a generational thing. In a few years, consumers will care no more about a computer’s memory than a TV’s wattage.
I attended the Consumer Electronics Show. The ultimate in “showrooming,” where everything B2C is key to see. In a permanent decline with near record attendance, none of the big important companies are always never going anymore. Bears on Berra’s “place is so popular nobody goes there anymore.” Yet, they do, to see innovation and network socially, the old fashion way, pressing flesh instead of keys. Since 1968, a generation has almost forgotten what the letters CES mean, like IBM, BMW or WWW.
Sometimes that consumer lives in the desert. We’ve all seen the photo of a rider on a camel with a cell phone. To the second point, that guy wants more for himself and his family. The Internet turned his local rug shop into a global business and he’s enjoying the rewards. One hundred years ago, people left homelands in search of opportunity. Great waves of immigration saw and made money from the Industrial Revolution as society shifted from planting seeds to seeding plants. Arguably, that change was as great then as the current shift to a digital world. Even automobile mechanics need computer skills to fix my four-wheeled hard drive. And like Morgan, Astor and Carnegie, now Gates, Zuckerberg and Brinn are building empires and mansions. We are witnessing a second Gilded Age.
Ah, progress. Look how far we’ve come since the dotcom bubble a dozen years ago, 25 years since the commercialization of Arpanet into the Internet. Like that prime time line in Science 101. 100,000 years in the span of man on a horizontal line showing 100 million years since the birth of earth. Mostly minimal a mere moment ago, social media may be massively more manipulating in 2022.
Which brings us to the first “F,” the franchise. In the 1960’s, filosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted the worldwide web and pontificated profusely about the global village. He proposed that electronic media will move society to a collective identity with a tribal base from individualism and fragmentation. Yes, he predicted the Internet and envisioned its interactivity. Social media. Nearly a natural need, now.
A more modern mentor, Malcolm Gladwell, in his medium “The Outliers”, maintains the “10,000-hour rule”, meaning, 10,000 hours of practice made Gates Gates and the Beatles the Beatles. More than mostly talent and momentum, practice and a merger of moments make mastery massive. A month sooner or later and there’d be no place for Facebook. Look, a race, a case (not Steve) aced against MySpace or anybody else’s chase to trace and embrace the world’s database.
You like?
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non-profits for prophets
Perceived and posted by Jerry Schwartz
Interesting and incredible. The largest industry in this country is inconceivably invisible, if not inordinately influential upon initial inspection. While there are some estimates of size, any real numbers are distorted by the enormity and diversity. There are so many segments and slices that sizing the sector seems seriously surreal.
Non-profits.
I’m talking about a world EXCLUDING hospitals, schools, libraries, religious institutions and even the big branded charities that seemingly survive solely to solicit sheckles. The whole industry has turned The Wall Street Journal’s “Donor of the Day” column into one of its most popular.
Until recently, I had no idea of the enormity of the entity enmass. Putting your arms around it is complicated by an unmeasurable boundary. Where does it start and stop? There are 1.5 million mostly tiny charities and foundations, according to the Internal Revenue Service, almost a misnomer, as 94% account for only 6% of the sector’s revenues.
Yes, this tough economy makes everyone feel like they’re working in a 501(c)(3). Amazingly, despite huge cutbacks in funding and donations, the hidden profits from non-profits are huge. Maybe that’s their raison debt. They represent a great hidden economy, much like a black market, with minimal acknowledgement, subject to wild questimates of size and impact.
Some perspective.
New York, for example, is famous for frequent fabulous fundraising functions. Dozens every night. Consider all the phacilities, phood-makers, phlorists, printers, performers, planners and publicists living off this one mostly boring, unimaginative pervasive yet persuasive marketing amusive. Dine, dance and donate. Sometimes, the money meagerly manages to cover the cost of coming. For most, however, $500 a plate times 500 people equals one big tip.
Perhaps because it is that time of year, the magnitude multiplies, the publicists publicize and the attended tend to attend and spend. Often saluting someone serious or selebrating something significant.
Top billing Bill Cunningham is cunningly the cleverest cameraman. Affable, able and accessible, he artistically archives almost all. One Sunday’s column courageously covered 12 charitables -– for HOPE’s 583 Park Avenue Dinner, the American-Italian Cancer Foundation’s Awards, the French Heritage Society’s dinner-dance and nine others, most of which you don’t know, but do good. Good!
That’s just The New York Times. These estimable enterprises are excerpted entirely from editorial entries in an expanded edition of Vanity Fair: 8 ½ Foundation, Brazil Foundation, Global ReLeaf, Oxfam, Absolute Return for Kids, Survival International, ALAS, Sure Start, Friends of Finn, Let’s Move, Three Dot Dash, Donors Choose, Battersea Home, Edible Schoolyard. A fair amount of vanity, there.
The little known Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation recently held a dinner auction raising $3.5 million from 1,000 guests. That’s $3,500 per person. $7,000 per couple! The better known Robin Hood Foundation’s annual gala raised $47 million from a record 3,600 guests this year. Life-long bachelor billionaire Ted Forstmann selflessly gave hundreds of millions to charities, heavily childrens’, often anonymously. Thirteen years before he died recently, he created the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which since raised nearly a half billion dollars for 123,000 children.
Ya gotta love the one percent.
I’ve always supported the view that the measure of a man is what he does when nobody is looking. Consider all those anonymous names in benefit programs and on hospital buildings. While some say Steve Jobs was, errr, parsimonious, others point to his anonymous support of people, programs and projects. Forbes recently cited seven selected by Eli Broad, who noted that philanthropy is thriving despite the downturn. Broad narrowed the world’s wealthy to Dell, Gates, Omidyar, Robertson, Soros, Skull and Bloomberg. Interestingly, many, including Trump, are famous anonymous altruists.
By contrast, let’s list some eponymous, non-anonymous, non-profits — Mario Batali Foundation, Ralph Lauren Center, Norman Mailer Foundation, Justin Timberlake Foundation and many sports stars, too, like the Alex Rodriquez Foundation. Takes crowd funding to a new level. A-Rod and A-listers have A-lot of friends. Baseliners and offliners probably generate more money than one liners and onliners. Haven’t seen numbers supporting this, but who else attended the Dia Art Foundation’s Fall Gala, Alicia Keys’ Annual Keep a Child Alive Black Ball, Norman Mailer’s Writers’ Colony Benefit Honoring Keith Richards? Who else created “We are the World,” “Live Aid” and “Farm Aid”? Friends, family, fun and funds of the famous. Fortunately.
In the spirit of Christmas, a record number of companies and other organizations have jumped on the sleigh bearing gifts for all manner of causes. Rolex announced its Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative in a full-page New York Times ad, though mentioning itself six times on a page with only 16 lines of copy. Ultimat Vodka paid $400,000 in ad space for Action Against Hunger. And hunting equipment company Orvis funded a foundation to save the nearly extinct black rhino, touted in its catalog opposite bone-handled knives and “braided genuine leather” bracelets. The thought counts, but so do protestors, voters, investors and customers.
Corporate funding focused on filanthropic feats isn’t new. Somewhere, somehow, some sacrilegious scholar saw a safer after life supporting idol makers with a donation from his stone carving business. More recently, 25 years ago, American Express, popularized the term “cause marketing” with convenient credit card contributions to clean and curate a corroded Statue of Liberty. In the past 10 years, progressively more proprietors have peddled pink products each October in promotion of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Strategic philanthropy is strategic fiscally. Donating time is strategic physically.
Logically, but what about G.S. Schwartz & Co?
Our foundation is solid, if not huge, for a firm our size. Yes, we do pro bono. In addition, hundreds of kids get toys yearly through our collective collecting. Hundreds of trees grow in Israel through our many donations honoring births, deaths and mitzvahs. We reimburse employees attending selected neighborhood cultural events and give extra days off for eleemosynary work. Academically, we have instituted internships for interested institutions, allied with alumni activities, and two of us have taught, too. With agency support, staff have staffed soup kitchens, built school bookcases, donated clothing and raised money for the ASPCA.
So many, so much, yet never enough.
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pain is gain
Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz
Pants pockets pulling. Jackets just joined. Collars closely clasped. Belts barely buckled.
I hate that feeling. Most of us do. Losing weight is so much cheaper than tailoring or buying clothes. Less expensive than a shrink. Less anxiety than the gym. Less is more, more or less.
About 20 years ago, I found a formula, protocol, regimen or lifestyle that has kept my weight and wasteline roughly the same between ages 40 and now 60 as they were between 20 and 40.
Inside every thin person, formerly overweight, hides a fat person who sneaks out once in a while. You can feel chubby cheeks on your chair’s seat. Bending moves memories slightly over your belt’s top. Mirrors reflect folds that are hard to face.
In a world where weight weighs heavily on those weary from worrying about the way they look, we watch and wink wondering what if, instead of what was or why not, we could wear whatever we want. Wow!
Stripes instead of plaids. A-lines better than tubes. Straight collars over spreads. Solids rather than patterns. Natty not nubby. Dips not dollops.
Public relations is often as much about personal presence as it is about publicity. Perception is reality. Reality is not image. Image is important. There’s no second impression if you don’t pass the first. Should judges judge jerseys before juries? Should Docs don dark duds? Silver sailor suits should be suitable, upon reflection, but what would happen to navy blue? Dark blue jerseys are slimming.
I was fat once, 20 pounds heavier and two inches shorter than now. That was in my young teens. Baby fat, they called it. Years putting it on, at that age and stage, losing it was fast and easy. Forty to 50 years later, dropping pounds is harder. Blame changing metabolism and gravity. Same weight, unevenly and unfairly distributed. Poor eating habits and minimal exercise don’t help, either. Some things you can control, others you can’t. Fear of being fat again is a powerful dietetic. The little fat boy inside is always whispering in my ear, jiggling as my jacket’s joiner jams. Jeeze!
Years of reading, experimenting with diets and exercise have created a system that works. Works for me, anyway. Endless studies show dieters who exercise lose more weight than those who don’t. Who pays for such stuff? Other studies say dieters who avoid high-fat and high calorie foods lose more weight. Duh!
Sounds like the key is not consuming more water or fiber, eating fewer candy bars or drinking less alcohol. Nor is it walking a mile or two every day, doing crunches or golf minus the 19th hole. Mulligan’s are high-calorie whisky-based linaments.
The answer to less flab is more self control and less food. Some activity and not some dessert. Veer from the volumes of vacuous verbiage. Don’t buy diet books!
Okay, at 62 with a 22-year-old’s waist and want, how do I do it? Here are my rules for life’s roles by eliminating rolls. The goal, here, is NOT to be NBC’s Biggest Loser. This is for increasing self-satisfaction and self-esteem over long periods of time. So, for the fridge door –
• No rolls or any other bread. Never met a thin baker and, besides, these are empty calories — pain is gain
• No desserts. Nothing. The problem with fruit is that it raises your anticipation. You always want more
• Wine, even good wine, red or white, only one glass per day. Period. While one is high-calorie, the second is a game changer. Drink bad stuff so you want less. Then, you’ll savor the good stuff slowly
• No sauces, gravies, emulsions, oils, dips, au jus, glaces, dressings
• Soups and cheeses are forms of fat, one liquid, one solid, both fattening. Not good
• Eat all the lean animals, fishes or birds you want -– the new zoo menu. But, no panko on or in
• No sodas, ciders, juices, sports drinks, energy drinks or green bulls, let alone red. More bull is more bull and more calories, all empty
• Eat all the veggies you want, but not fried or sauced, preferably boiled or s teamed. Raw is good. Potatoes are not. Learn to like hot, spicy Asian. The Cold War is long over.
• Try all veggies for one full day every week. Good for the heart and soul. Better and easier than one day of nothing as some suggest
• The healthiest meal of the day is usually the worst, breakfast. Do not eat eggs, bacon, muffins or toast. Do not drink orange juice or even look at home fries, especially out-of-home. Most non-sugared cereals and skim milks with fruit are good. A slice or two of toasted multi-grain should satisfy your carb cares. No butter. Period
• Find new foods. Sometimes, novelty can replace calories. Snack on edamame, jicame, pomegranate, kiwi and star fruit. Technology gives us sweet things year ’round from everywhere. IPods have no seeds.
Some people eat to run. I run to eat. Any exercise accomplishes four things
- Aids weight loss
- Flexes joints and muscles
- Increases tolerance for pain from non-exercise activity (like getting up in the morning)
- Provides cocktail party conversation, as in, “I ran two miles today and feel great.”
Even a little exercise works, but you do it regularly, daily. Walk when you can ride, trot when you can walk, move when you don’t have to. Hide that TV remote along with your driver’s mocs. Get that coffee yourself. Tie your shoes without bending your knees. Photocopy your own papers. It figures or figure it out. It’s your figure. Buy a pedometer, if you must.
Worst of all is kidding yourself. One more bite, one small piece. A nibble. A taste. Starting next week, next month. More tonight, less tomorrow. Two small pieces are less fattening than one bigger one. Eating someone else’s food is less fattening. Early in the day’s better than late at night.
Smart advice is don’t eat dumb (raw or half-baked). Find a balanced diet. Offset a big breakfast with a lighter lunch, an expense account meal with a fruit salad deal. One day on, another day off. Adding weight takes time, losing it takes more. Give in less. Eat smaller portions, too.
And, wait.
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cross-platform interstitial
Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz
Expressions. I hate ’em.
Old saws. Metaphors. Similies, homilies — what are these? They are trite, banal sayings. Hackneyed terms. Even some expressions of late, but not too soon. What keeps them alive? The phrases are better dead than read.
Better safe than sorry, but why apologize if you look before you leap, a leap of faith with hope and charity, beginning at home, where the heart is, of course.
Worst, yet, some are true. Worse, still, is when they are used by friends and family -– familiarity breeds contempt. Contemplating, I thought these phrases might be schadenfreude, related to the Buddhist concept of Mudita. Nope, not that simple. Using them seems to have less to do with loving another’s misery than suffering the misery among company. Is there one word for rubbing one’s nose in it? Do we hear homonyms, like synonyms, oppose antonyms, but confuse heteronyms?
Hey, a bird in the hand is worth $1.69 a pound. People who live in metal houses shouldn’t throw can openers. On the horns of a dilemma? Didja ever see a dilemma without horns? Or is this ontological monism, dualism or pluralism really epiphenomenalism? My view is that it’s nomological. Maybe scatological.
Anyway, it’s time to cross this bridge; we’ve gotten to it. We’re on the brink, so to speak. Close but no cigar, so, where there’s smoke, remember, once burned, twice shy.
Primarily offenders and propagators are the old and young. Age-old expressions, as in, youth is wasted on the young, older but wiser, age before beauty. Got it? The young waste words out of ignorance, happenstance or dalliance and it shows in boring high school and college essays. The elderly abuse words in obstinance or arrogance. They keep repeating the same mistakes hoping, if they live long enough, they’ll finally get ’em right. Or people won’t notice. Brilliance.
Other sources of expressions are balladers, baseball, the Bible, Broadway and Bartlett’s. Maybe presidents and other precidents, though sometimes incidents and accidents. Maybe the best writers and speakers were poor readers, forcing them to come to terms with their own terms. Self-expressions!
Buzzwords are the new buzzwords. A hunt for lasting fame by coining words or phases or popularizing participles, perchance possessing the penchant. Marketing execs and motivational speakers love ’em, though creating something viral is always a strain. Lets them write books, conduct surveys, give talks. To wit:
Mobile-optimized site, cross-platform interstitial, asymmetrical advantage, silozation. Remember simply USP and ROI? How about eyeballs? More eyeballs, less creative! Fancier words, fancier fees.
Followed by geeks, gear heads, tech types and consummate consultants using qwerty, as in:
Technocrats, cloud computing, blogosphere, metrix, even artificial intelligence nee natural language processing. Fully integrated, interoperability. Robust, scalable, real-time and embedded. B2B, B2C P2P — gee! More likely, social, local and mobile. Or, is it the reverse?
Speaking of mobile, SMS or text messaging, that is, we’re forced to use graphemes, morphemes and phonemes — the least number of characters. Less phemes, more phones? Unquestionably, the explosion of phones produces a lot of characters using textese, chatspeak, SMSish and txto to reach out and touch someone. Txtng: the gr8 db8. OMG. LOL. LMAO, even. The message, however, is as old as hieroglyphics, which explains why uniform short-form cuneiform conforms and informs.
Superseding politicos, super delegates, tea partiers, Dixiecrats, the occasional northeast liberal democrats and the disenfranchised in the red and blue states north of the Mason-Dixon, but east of the Mississippi, appealing to wonks and cronks. Whatever was a CHAD, hanging or otherwise, a paper tiger? We now know. . . a rip-off.
Oh, but we still dial phones, carbon copy, shift gears, bear palls and occasionally slay dragons, prime the pump or fire up the old engine, run it up the flag pole and salute it. Speaking of bearing palls, people still kick the bucket, pass away or simply pass, but rarely just die, anymore. I suppose sometimes they exit left or right or go to the better place or netherworld. No, not never. Just eternity, from here, justly so.
Certainly, trips the light fantastic, an expression unexpectedly from 1630’s not the 1960’s. It means to dance, but not to the same old song. It’s music to my ears, nonetheless. And speaking of balladers, I recently attended a Paul Simon concert and heard that you don’t need to be coy, Roy. Just make a new plan, Stan, and slip out the back, Jack. In the end, remember to get yourself free.
Simon just turned 70! Not trite at all.
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an untimely dearth
Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz
Out tweeting Twitter apparently is the new twist among TV tweakers racing to bring news to the masses as quickly as 140 characters and a key stroke.
Seems like the salient solution for the recent Hurricane Irene was 24/7 broadcasting. Non-stop almost guaranteed out-scooping anything digital. And it was local, too, the way Internet inventors intuit interactivity some day. Only rich and powerful ad-supported TV networks have the beat reporters to beat everyone racing into harm’s way. Roseanne Rosannadana reporting live precariously perched on a precipice overlooking an over-estimated ocean. My time-honored Times arrived on time Sunday mid-morning. Neither snow nor rain, it came. . . miraculously. Less need to fire up the search engine.
Whether the weather was ever over-estimated, if over-reacted, it was not overlooked as an opportunity to catch eyeballs. Proof? Many millions in commercials were preempted for the constant coverage lest you switch to some beaming streaming site somewhere. Like the VIX, Wall Street’s fix on volatility, TV’s response to covering events increases with each event. Clearly, continuity is the counter to Twitter’s rapid rise as a real-time news service. Even old media now follow it.
Certainly takes a heck of a publicist to turn a tropical storm into a hurricane or the other way around, depending on where you live. If a tree falls in a storm and nobody hears it, do we see it on the evening news?
Are we hearing a little boy crying wolf? Damn those slow days when so-called soft stories saturate the headlines. Desperate Do-gooder Defends Delay, Defiantly Denies Dishonesty. Another kickback? Another affair? Another juicy tidbit, or not?
News spelled backwards is swen, as in, ’swen it’s fit to print. Often not.
Merely covering an event 24/7 creates its own sense of importance, as if the amount of time or space or both is more important than the inherent news value. Length and breadth are the digital economy’s equivalent of above-the-fold, upper-right-hand corner. Migosh, I am a serious Steve Jobs and Apple lover, but he hasn’t died, yet, and is still chairman of the board, with no deadline for any reporter’s byline, online or off. A long, untimely dearth.
Out-scooping the competition can be hysterically historic — Wilkie did not win and Truman triumphed long before computers and TV. Headline writers, byliners, reporters, editors and broadcasters all err all the time. Was a security guard the bomber? Was the mother the killer? Was he or she guilty of anything more than attracting attention? Who, the head of the IMF, Ethan Hunt? Ah, the crush to rush.
We do love sin. True or false. Exaggerated or not. Reality or un. Hyped, piped or otherwise sniped, our hunger for headlines, bold-faced names and unfaced facts is huge. So is the army of media and publicists who feed the beast daily, all in a huff to post. And paying a price for it, too, now sleaze sells exclusive stories to the highest bidder. Yes, tabloids have attracted readers for hundreds of years, millennia if you like hieroglyphics. What were those people saying on cave walls? Positively pornographic, if not purely prurient.
And the phenomenon is not slowing down. In fact, it’s increasing. Never has there been so many devoted to so much. Once we read Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell. Then, we watched “Entertainment Tonight” and “Extra.” Now, we solve our Internet addiction online all the time. Our indulgence in insignificant information is insatiable and often indiscriminant, but not interloping, just inspecting.
Hype is a four-letter word worth wonting not wasting. Unemployment doesn’t dazzlingly “drop” from 9.2 to 9.1. Stocks don’t really “rocket” from 11,000 to 11,200. The Earth doesn’t quite “quake” at 5.8, nor does sonic “boom” sound at 767. Actually, the noise comes at 768 but where’s the news, what’s the story? Use action words. Create drama. Highlight human interest. Uncover hidden truths.
There is a story out there about a publisher who tried starting a newspaper filled with only good news, but he went out of business. Newspapers are not going out of business, any more than radio did when TV arrived. In this social-local-mobile era, we want gossip, hearsay, rumor and tattle everywhere on any platform. Some call it content, others call it buzz. Not what it was, but will be or should be. May be. Or, not.
Hidden truth is, old-fashion offline publicity drives more people online.
Yup.
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the numbers are numbers
Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz
Impervious. That’s what we’re becoming.
In this modern, digital, global era, we are changing into insensitive, ineffectual inhumans impervious to life’s scrapnel. The numbers are numbers.
We can’t allow this to happen. We can’t be so thick-skinned that we wear data like armour, shedding it only when we need to shed tears.
Unquestionably, in a high intelligence nuclear society, we are capable of acts so terrible that the sheer horror of their frequency anesthetizes our emotions. Compounding this is our ability to passively watch man’s inhumanity to man and nature’s preternatural destructiveness tsk-tsk-ing on the evening news. Even sooner with Twitter and YouTube. Once upon a time there was no atomic bomb to level cities. Only recently, perhaps since 9/11, did media publish personal profiles of civilians mass killed, lest we reduce them to listless lists.
Centuries of statistics pile up in our books and heads, reducing previous records to footnotes. Just as it once seemed impossible to hit $14-trilllion in debt, break the 3-minute mile and score the 3,000th hit, now science and technology allow ever bigger buildings to be built and destroyed, larger armies to fall, civilizations to crumble. We used to talk about watching sons die on the evening news as it covered the Vietnam War’s 58,000 sacrificing ultimately. Now, we watch daughters, too, in places we can’t pronounce.
The Civil War claimed 625,000 lives. World War I, originally called the Great War, took 116,500. The aptly named second, which renamed the first, resulted in 405,400 dead. Afghanistan, our longest battle, recently reached 1,600. Oddly, we enjoy movies about the mighty and merely “300,” who died in Thermopylae in 480 BC.
Yes, Nazis exterminated an unfathomable 6 million. Television, let alone the Internet, did not exist to uncover it. Some newsreels did. Would history have otherwise changed? Arguably, yes. Much as the Middle East is changing today. But, technology giveth and taketh. Bomb building basics exist online. Really right wingers spread hate deeper and wider on the worldwide web. Kopycats killers kopy kwickly. Goebbels would have loved this powerful propaganda tool.
Forensic science using sophisticated DNA testing, unused a mere decade ago, convicts, acquits and requits. Justice becomes injustice becomes justice. The technology spares two more -– an ex-mom in Orlando and an ex-girlfriend in Italy. So accurate at creating innocents, the practice is so new, it lacks a name. An innocent project ? It also convincingly convicts suspects turning them into convicts.
If the Internet has done one thing, it has taught the world to mourn the way it never did. Globally, in unison. For a little girl, a princess, 90 Norwegians, 16,447 Japanese, 3,000 office workers, 20,000 in Bhopal. Another rock star overdosing prematurely at 27. 30 U.S. soldiers crash in Afghanistan.
If we love our iPads, how much can the word love mean? Do hash marks or dashes change the concept of obscenity? And how does a “wardrobe malfunction” misfunction? The verbal abuse dilutes the impact. Our emotions become desensitized. Our expectations are managed, euphemistically, of course.
Lenny Bruce went to jail for words George Carlin was only censored, for Larry David to use enthusiastically. It’s a matter of time. The 1950’s weren’t the 1980’s, weren’t the 2000’s. No different, perversely public affairs of prominent politicians are becoming pervasively private. Each week each new news is less shocking. Another unfaithful, so what? We now yawn at books revealing prurience of presidents past.
Clearly, the stock market reflects this.
With each successive crisis, the market responds predictably less violently, despite increased volatility. We now expect prices to bounce back. A buying opportunity. Compared to a world war, a depression, another world war, a presidential assassination and a terrorist attack on two Manhattan towers, a global financial crisis seems, well, not so bad. Financial debacles are simply less tangible, almost invisible. Can’t hold it, can’t see it, but we feel it. Does $14 trillion in debt really seem that much greater than $13.5 trillion. What about $2 trillion lost in the stock market a few weeks ago? Paraphrasing, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, ya gotta lotta money. Well, now we do. The most recent recession lasted 18 months, a record ’till the next.
So, too, a recession is when a neighbor loses a job and a depression is when you lose yours. The unemployment rate drops from 9.2 to 9.1 percent. Drops? It’s a matter of perspective.
For a while, there, even shuttle launches barely made the evening news. ’Cept for a catastrophe now and then. Perhaps the program’s end is really NASA’s fault for marginalizing the moments, allowing the Times to print them on page 37, lower left corner, below a fold invisible online. Incredibly, there were 17 Apollo and hundreds of rocket launches. Another rocket or rocker, so what?
Back on earth, we live in a world of 3 billion weighing 7.0 sextillion. Actually, I lied, it’s only 6.6 sextillion tons. Yesterday, the temperature in Antarctica was -85°F. They say it feels like. . . -85°F.
Please.
the write stuff
Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz
Staggering. The number of comments I receive to my blogs is staggering. Hundreds and hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds to each. Clearly, my words get widely forwarded. Yes, there are disagreements with my opinions here and there. But rarely criticism of the writing. Quite the opposite.
“I love your style.” “How do you find the words?” “There’s a stream of consciousness, a viewpoint, a certain tempo.” “Sprightly.” “Creative.” “Great reading, fun.” “Ugh, the puns” and “an annoying alternating alliteration.”
Blowing my own horn’s not the point, here. Of course, I love the attention, good and bad. Feels great. Unexpected. More important, what can I do with it? Over 30 years, I’ve made a nice living by writing. I’m in public relations and write for other people, for other purposes. Like others in my field, we’re ghosts. . . ghostwriters, that is. This blog is all about writing for myself! It’s a form of practice, a way to stay in shape, like working out at the gym. It’s also expressive, a way to air my views, say things I can’t when writing for others. Harumph. Guffaw.
Seriously. There has got to be some good to all my free form words and unformed ideas. Back pats and attaboys are appreciated. But, there’s no money in my blog. If nothing else, writing my blog shows I/we/the agency can write successfully for clients. And we do. Blogging helps our search engine optimization, too. And it distinguishes us. Positions us.
My goal, in this particular post, is to help others to write well. Or, better. Good writing generates thought, influences movements, create ideologies, perpetuates concepts, raises money. Express yourself and win. Communicate. Accentuate. Propagate. Satiate. Create. But, wait, mate.
Content is important and I am not content. I don’t want to be a good writer as much as a fun writer. Uninhibited, my stuff may be fun to read. Maybe the entertainment lies in its iconoclasm. As a ’60s child, I like following my own wavy path. It’s always served me well. All this free–spiritedness leads me to a key point.
Find your talent within. Express yourself on paper (and on screen) with the same eloquence you use when you speak. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you speak better than you write, even though you think you’re a pretty good writer. Most people think they’re pretty good writers. Often, they’re not. Period. Most politicians I know think they’re good writers. A non-secquitor. Most job applicants say the same. A non-sense.
10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell in his book, “the Outliers,” said success and greatness comes from practice at that level. One of his examples is 10,000 hours of playing in European clubs before the Beatles became famous. Another is all those attempts to build a business, like Apple or Microsoft, by garage-based entrepreneurs. Through my agency and angel venture activities, I’ve learned serial entrepreneurs are a myth. Most try and fail many times before hitting it big (10,000 hours). Often, they only hit it once. This leads me to an important lesson, REWRITE.
Rewrite, edit and otherwise redo and rethink repeatedly. Yes, often. I’ll change a single word a dozen times, a sentence three or four, a paragraph unconsciously too much. Writing is hard. Good writing is harder. Great writing is impossible, demanding double discipline, the drive and ambition to fix and change your simplest one-liner and your complex-est essay as often as necessary. Five times, ten times, more? It’s the difference between a monologue and a soliloquy. Most people think twice is enough, three times is too much and four times is unthinkable. This whole blog was rewritten four or five times with some words, sentences or phrases done many times more. Ya think it’s easy? Work is hard. That’s why ya gotta love it. I love it. I love the smile on your face as you read this.
All this takes me to the other side of the page, to the reader. Focus on your audience. Of course, you want to keep them interested and awake. More important, give them a reason to read your stuff. In some cases, you –- and they – have no choice, as with employee benefits manuals, corporate annual reports and the Bible. No elder wrote the Bible thinking to entertain generations of readers with wry and wit. That said, when you do have a choice, choose wisely. And write clearly, with order and purpose.
Several years ago, in a move to dramatically improve the quality of our work, we at G.S. Schwartz & Co. chose to implement a writing test for all new applicants. Our view is, yes, hire great thinkers. Search out creativity. Identify hard workers. Seek specialists in our clients’ businesses. Get the best. But we want more. We want people who can communicate all this. In writing. Right?
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