On the Hinge

During last week, I took the family to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  While the Museum has a lot of interesting work on display, I was particularly interested in one piece which I had read about in a book by Lewis Hyde, entitled Trickster Makes This World.  It is a work by Marcel Duchamp entitled [...]

Stay Hungry

Thanksgiving Sunday is hardly the day to talk about keeping hungry.  If you’re like me, you’ve had three days of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and pies, plus all the weird side dishes that your mother served and that you hated growing up but now can’t do without.  You’re probably sitting in front of a TV, watching [...]

Surface Area

I’m on a green tea kick and this weekend I was researching tea pots, specifically one called a Yixing tea pot.  The Yixing is a clay pot and, according to the description, because it is clay, it is porous, which means that the surface area is many times larger than a traditional teapot.  This provides, [...]

Pepsis not Pepsi

There is a great TED talk given by Malcolm Gladwell (link here) in which Gladwell talks about the findings of Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist who has made a career out of consumer preferences.
In the early 1970’s, Pepsi asked Dr. Moskowitz to determine which percentage of Aspartame it should put into Diet Pepsi to give it [...]

A Stick of Gum

I was on a flight yesterday from San Antonio to Charlotte.  A woman sat next to me and ahead of us were, it seemed, her parents. As we were taking off, the woman pulled out a pack of gum, offered a stick to each of her parents and turned and offered me one.
It was, as [...]

Time to face your Nightmare

OK, so you’ve ridden out the worst of the this economic storm.  You’re still alive, but your car’s sputtering and running out of gas.  And it’s dark and you’re not sure where exactly you are or going.  It there was a soundtrack to your life, now would be the time when the music raises the [...]

The Permanent Now

Last week a friend of mine was diagnosed with a condition that requires a visit to the specialist. Her doctor gave her two names.  She called one and the number routed her to an individual who took down all her particulars.  When she tried to schedule an appointment, the person on the other end said [...]

Find Your MacGuffin

This weekend, I my son and his friend introduced me to the world of guerrilla drive-ins and macguffins.
The guerrilla drive-in is a movie shown in secret outdoor locations.  The one in our area shows movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Back to the Future”, etc from the seat of a 1977 BMW motorcycle sidecar, typically shown on sheets [...]

Five Easy Steps to Grow Your Company

In a recent post at techcrunch.com, Sarah Lacy mused on whether execution is more important than vision.  The vast majority of comments testified to the fact that execution (getting things done) is more important than vision (having the idea).  In fact, the business world is littered with failed companies that had great ideas and successful [...]

Groucho Marx, CEO

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”  Groucho Marx.
I’ve loved the Marx Brothers since I was in seventh grade.  That was the year I switched from Catholic school to public school.  It was a year I felt I could breathe again, met [...]