Does Your Company Think Like a Fraternity?
My son’s fraternity had a huge problem. The University of Colorado had banned alcohol during rush parties. Fraternities use rush parties to get pledges. Alcohol makes freshman boys happy. Happy freshmen are easier to convert into pledges. More quality pledges mean a stronger, more popular house. Popular houses get the best girls. You get the […]
Is There a Picasso in Your Basement?
Over the summer, a museum in Evanston, Indiana discovered a multi-million dollar piece of glass artwork by Picasso that had been gathering dust in their basement. It had been in storage for nearly 50 years. It makes one wonder how a museum, with curators who are experts in art, could not have known that a […]
Are You a Poser?
My son left for college last month and just before he left he received a text from a fraternity brother excited to see him. “I hate that guy”, my son declared, “What a poser!” A ‘poser’, for those of you without teenagers, is someone who pretends to be someone they are not. No one respects […]
Solving the World’s Problems: One Electronic Cigarette at a Time
I just read that Thompson Reuters expects S&P 500 second-quarter 2012 revenue growth to be only 2% compared with an average of 7% every quarter since 1998. Seconds later, I read how revenues for the electronic cigarette industry have now reached $300M, up 400% in the last four years. Huh???? For the uninitiated, including me, […]
The Hot New Apple…Coffee Cup
As I walked past the way too crowded Apple store in Santa Monica a few months ago, I was struck yet again by the amazing popularity of Apple products and had a crazy thought. Actually, a relatively ridiculous thought. Imagine if Apple announced that they were releasing in a week the most technologically advanced coffee […]