I met Mo Fathelbab through my Mom many years ago. I accompanied Mom on a recent trip to DC and we had coffee with Mo, the first time I'd seen him in years. He's a great person to spend time with and it's exciting to be able to offer you all a little time with him thanks to his TEDx presentation. Enjoy!
Below is an excerpt from a fantastic commencement address by David Foster Wallace. If you want more here's the full speech:
The following is an excerpt from an article titled The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved that Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970. To set the scene he's just landed in Kentucky and is speaking with an annoying Texan he's just met in a bar and convinced that he's a photographer for Playboy:
I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. “There’s going to be trouble,” I said. “My assignment is to take pictures of the riot.”
“What riot?”
I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. “At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers.” I stared at him again. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”
The grin on his face had collapsed. “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
“Well…maybe I shouldn’t be telling you…” I shrugged. “But hell, everybody else seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They’ve warned us–all the press and photographers–to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting…”
“No!” he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he whacked his fist on the bar. “Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!” He kept shaking his head. “No! Jesus! That’s almost too bad to believe!” Now he seemed to be sagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes were misty. “Why? Why here? Don’t they respect anything?“
I shrugged again. “It’s not just the Panthers. The FBI says busloads of white crazies are coming in from all over the country–to mix with the crowd and attack all at once, from every direction. They’ll be dressed like everybody else. You know–coats and ties and all that. But when the trouble starts…well, that’s why the cops are so worried.”
He sat for a moment, looking hurt and confused and not quite able to digest all this terrible news. Then he cried out: “Oh…Jesus! What in the name of God is happening in this country? Where can you get away from it?”
“Not here,” I said, picking up my bag. “Thanks for the drink…and good luck.”
You know if you replace "Black Panthers" with "Radical Islamists" and "white crazies" with "liberals" you could yank someone's chain in exactly the same way today.
How much time do you spend at work looking at information that would be classified as outside the realm of your expertise or not part of your core job description? If your answer is "very little" then you could be setting yourself up for eventual failure or at a minimum unnecessarily limiting your ability to succeed. Why? Because you need to understand not just your world, but the universe in which your world exists.
If you need an example you need look no further than what has happened to many people in the newspaper industry. 15 years ago many newspapers were riding high, boasting fat profit margins and enjoying monopolies in their markets. Then they were blindsided by what the internet represented – a distributed network of information sharing that pushed them from the center of the daily information ecosystem. Should the folks working in the newspaper industry have seen it coming? In retrospect it's easy to say yes, but at the time the vast majority of them had not an inkling of what the internet/web was about and so could not conceive how they might be able to utilize it to beat their competition, much less prevent it from decimating their entire business.
But what if some of the senior newspaper execs had spent the late '80s or early '90s looking at the larger universe of information distribution, looking at their circulation operations as one form of information distribution and figuring out how these new forms of distribution could change their business? It's quite likely that some did, and surely there are publishers out there who can point back to efforts at starting fax-based updates, email alerts, etc. But how many truly took the time to understand the underlying shift in information flow, to grasp how the new technology would be adopted by their customers and how they might shift to meet those changing consumption patterns? It's pretty plain by the state of the industry today that not many succeeded if they tried.
Over the last few years the big shift for many industries has been the rapidly expanding adoption of smartphones (over 50% of the US market now uses smartphones), but anyone who's been paying attention has seen it coming and hopefully has been adjusting to address this new reality. But what's next? What's the next big shift in how we do business going to be? It could be something related to Bitcoin, and the why is explained by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in a blog post he wrote to explain his firm's investment in a company called Coinbase:
We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power. It reminds us of SMTP, HTTP, RSS, and BitTorrent in its architecture and openness. Like what happened with those other low level protocols, entrepreneurs and developers are now building technology on top of Bitcoin to make it more useful, more accessible, and more secure.
This has the smell of something important because it could potentially change how companies exchange services for compensation. What's more fundamental to a business than that? More importantly, how much could something like that change your business? Well, how much did the wide adoption of credit cards change business 30+ years ago? But that only offers part of the answer since this feels like something that eases transactions like credit cards did, but expands the market like the web did. And who could this new development threaten? The banks are a good bet.
So who thinks that bankers truly understand what this could represent? Sure, they see it and they think about it, but how many truly understand the tectonic shift going on beneath the surface. Probably not many, because you can bet there probably aren't many bankers who have stopped counting their money long enough to try and understand this "Bitcoin World" and they could suffer the fate that many newspapers have over the last ten years.
That's where the title of this post comes into play. It is vitally important for all of us to be information omnivores, because you must understand the larger context in which you're working and living. While you don't need to understand all the technology that underlies what we do, just like you don't have to know how an internal combustion engine works to understand the affect of cars, you do need to understand how their application and adoption will affect your business or your life. How do you do this? Simply by being curious. Watch TED talks, read articles in trade magazines from industries that aren't your own, read the blogs of experts in other fields, take a class at a local community college or take a free class from one of the online programs like Coursera. The possibilities are almost endless and even if you never apply the information you glean to your day job you'll know something you wouldn't have otherwise. Worst case scenario you'll probably get better at Trivial Pursuit and you'll be able to wow people at dinner parties with your amazing grasp of (seemingly) worthless knowledge. More likely you'll find that your newfound knowledge will come in handy in ways you never anticipated.
Who knew that there are "dyslexia friendly" fonts? From Freakonomics:
As a lunch-table discussion here in England revealed, the University insists on certain typefaces that are dyslexia-friendly, particularly Arial, Trebuchet, and Verdana. It costs me or any other faculty member nothing to use one of these on exams; non-dyslexic students are not harmed by them, and dyslexic students are better off.
Is a lack of demand for skilled labor contributing to America's stubbornly high unemployment rate?
What explains the current low rate of employment in the U.S.? While there has substantial debate over this question in recent years, we believe that considerable added insight can be derived by focusing on changes in the labour market at the turn of the century. In particular, we argue that in about the year 2000, the demand for skill (or, more specifically, for cognitive tasks often associated with high educational skill) underwent a reversal. Many researchers have documented a strong, ongoing increase in the demand for skills in the decades leading up to 2000. In this paper, we document a decline in that demand in the years since 2000, even as the supply of high education workers continues to grow. We go on to show that, in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together. In order to understand these patterns, we offer a simple extension to the standard skill biased technical change model that views cognitive tasks as a stock rather than a flow. We show how such a model can explain the trends in the data that we present, and offers a novel interpretation of the current employment situation in the U.S.
I might be one of a handful of people who will think this is exciting, but so what? Freakonomics coauthor Stephen Dubner is going to be playing a gig with his old band in Winston-Salem this week. From the Freakonomics blog:
A long time ago, I played in a rock band, called The Right Profile. It was a great deal of fun. We wound up getting a record deal with Arista…
But I quit the band about a year later. We were in the middle of making our first record. I decided I didn’t want to try to be a rock star after all, as much fun as it was. Writing suits me better.
I pretty much went cold turkey and have performed almost no music since then. But all these many years later, The Right Profile is set to ride again, if only for a few songs. We were asked to participate in a concert by the Vagabond Saints’ Society at a centennial celebration for the city of Winston-Salem, N.C., on Fri., May 7, from 7-10 pm.
I can’t wait. Winston-Salem has produced some amazing music over the years (the dB’s, Ben Folds, Let’s Active, the Alisons, Dillon Fence, and many more), and it will be great fun to hear these guys again and crawl backwards into the time capsule. Also I can’t wait to play again with my bandmates Tim Fleming, Jeffrey Dean Foster, and Jon Wurster.
The date is actually May 10 and according to the centennial celebration website the Vagabond Saints' Society show will be at 6th and Cherry. Should be a blast.
A story from Mt. Airy, NC highlights why you have to be very careful when you have a raffle or other fundraising contest at one of your events:
Vickie Riekehof was called out as the winner of the raffle for a 2013 limited edition Fiat Abarth, or that is what she thought. After arriving to claim the car, she said David Chaloupka, owner of Amadour Winery and Vineyards who oversaw the contest, told her that she had to toss a Frisbee into the car’s open window from a point estimated to be about 90 feet away.
She claims there was no such rule for the contest when she purchased the $100 raffle ticket.
Bob Meinecke, organizer of the festival and member of the Mount Airy Rotary Club, said it was his understanding the instructions would be printed on the ticket and on the literature about the event.
“There was a misunderstanding. We refunded her money and apologized,” said Meinecke. “It was a he said she said thing. My understanding was that verbal instructions were given to each person who purchased a ticket from the salesperson.” He said that person was Chaloupka.
Word of advice: whenever you're trying to separate people from their money, even for a good cause, never allow it to be organized in such a way that it come down to a "he said, she said thing."
One of the best parts of my job is being able to work with on community service project with our member companies. Each year we do a project related to housing and this year we worked with Housing Greensboro to help repair two homes for families that are facing some fairly serious difficulties due to illness. One of our members, THS National, sent along a videographer and the result is the video below.
Befuddled 