Tag: Maytag

Time to read

There is a time to listen and a time to read.

That time is now. At lunch or in line.

The WSJ runs a a picture of an “early adopter” (old lady wrapped herself in a good book, digital that is).

For her, what a lifetime that was: out of the house to go to work (with sandwich bread), maybe as a telephone dispatcher, then came home to TV dinners with a Chevy in the driveway. Meanwhile, the Maytag man took care of her laundry and her husband the lawn.

Now she has retired, reading a book which is resided in the cloud, while keeping in touch with relatives on Facebook.

(I should mention the Pill).

Reading time has always been hard to come by. It’s at the top of the pyramid of chores (shopping, cooking, cleaning etc…). Now, reading is readily available as the headline news you see everywhere (when I was hooked on “the girl with a dragon tatoo”, I wished I had a comparable service so I could access my bookmark anywhere).

It’s interesting to see if readership increases as a result of better access.

Or it’s more profitable just to sell picks and pans for another Gold Rush.

One thing is for sure. Those so-called Independent Book Stores will join the fate of Independent Telephone companies of last century i.e. giving ways to an oligarchy of heavy weights. Too bad Google ebooks couldn’t be renamed with an “A”, as in Apple, Amazon and ATT.

But by its colorful logo, we already got the idea that the company is into creativity, colorful-ness and cloud-orientation. At least, it got an A as in Algorithm which suggests your next book, even before the title becomes available. It’s an age of “cognitive surplus”.

Everything is just the tip of the iceberg. 1 per cent visible, 99 percent invisible.

Time for reflection. A time to die, a time to live.

 

Time to heal

Of the 5 stages of grief, the first one goes away the quickest (denial). The last stage, acceptance, takes the longest (not without some relapses). I wass at my parent’s graves this past Thanksgiving. A bit of acceptance there.

Trophies, college degrees and even old business cards showed our accomplishments. But they are not indicators of present success (there was PBS piece about an Ivy League graduate working as a clerk inputting license plate numbers of violators into the system – a job that could easily be automated).

We rushed from agricultural society to the information age, thinking that these flat screens will show larger bank balances. No they don’t. In fact, it shows less.

People who stay on the farm, hard as it is, hire more help right on site, not thousand of miles away. I remember a title “Acres of diamond”. Something about the value resides in each of us.

In the East, we have a similar story. It was about a mandarin who told his pulpit to keep dipping into the ink and copying down tons of books (no Google book-scan back then).

When the pulpit came back from earning his degrees (= lifetime job appointment), he asked his master where the diamond was (purported to be at the bottom of the ink vase). The diamond, as it turned out, had already been attached to the cap he was then wearing.

In fairy tales, input=output, Bond got the girl at the end.

We are living in a time when input might not equal output.

Put a coin in the vending machine, the coke comes out.

Ring the bell, shoppers will stop.

Many of us believed this mechanistic universe will never fail us (except for a few incidents such as the Challenger, Three Mile Island etc..whose cause were all “human”).

Put your money on “securitization”, then sit back . GE thought so as well, and joined the Maytag man to take a nap.

Hope 1.0, hope 2.0 etc….

The dream lives on with governor Moon Beam in California, but not else where. It’s all austerity in Greece and Spain.

Here in the US, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.  W have the Saints quarterback to lift us our of our Katrina dilemma.

Some wounds won’t heal completely. Most will take time. In a mechanistic universe,

when a production run is on and time is exactly what we cannot afford to lose. As of this edit, the market is bullish again.

Don’t dream, it’s over

The Maytag man finally wakes up from a long nap!

Pent-up demand pushes consumers to go out and spend on big-ticket items such as refrigerators, washers and dryers.

Walmart got a law suit for paying men more than women for the same job.

Our calendar is very consumer-friendly i.e. plenty of  shopping events, from Mothers Day to Memorial Day…

Past President(s) signed into law certain holiday, to fall on Mondays hence long shopping weekends by design.

We saw the testimonies of “what is synthetic CDO?” etc…

But by the time the witnesses were sworn in, it’s already yesterday’s news.

People have moved on. Can’t live on Main Street in the ghosting shadow of Wall Street.

Kids need shoes.

Jeans need washer and dryer.

Maytag man, wake up.

As the refrain by Crowded House, ” Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over”.

I am glad it’s only just begun, this time, living in real-time and in reality.

Call it what you’d like, but it ain’t that version of the American Dream we used to know i.e. A Chevy in the drive way,

and a chicken in the pot (with apple pie for deserts).  The America today has apple pie and McNuggets, with ketchup upon request only. For Here or To Go (we prefer you take it “to go”).

Don’t dream, it’s over.

 

Load balancing

A few years back, we got headlines like “women made strides with Nobel prizes“.

And I remember hearing our shared winner of Economics said she studied ways which societies managed to share work load,

from fisheries to farming. I assumed she was trying to crack the “non-zero sum” code, or something similar to

Network Theory (how we are most affected by “weaker ties”, a few degrees of separation away from us).

The speed of microprocessors has ushered in nothing short of an information/knowledge revolution.

Essentially, each of us serves as a “node” in our social connectedness.

Back in my sales days, we treated these “nodes” as “sales leads” or “warm calls”.

Whether their influence is positive or negative, they influence nevertheless.

( I remembered for instance one real estate guy who did not like watermelon with seeds, or my former boss who enjoys yoga and sushi).

Our social memory, only to be referred to or occasionally resurfaced as our own, idiocy or idiosyncrasy, constantly gets its supply from myriads of stimuli (new book title, another  headline, latest franchise movie like Fast and Furious or Friday the 13th).

Back to our headline. When I grew up, I admired names like Marie Curie and Marilyn Monroe (I did know that one was French, and the other American, and how far apart they were, spectrum wise: science vs the arts).

Now, I remember Avon and Ebay former CEO’s  (now HP’s).

And I remember my mom, the greatest multi-tasker I have ever known: teacher, mother, wife, cook and great relative to a very large extended family. She managed it all, earning her French teaching credential during that colonial era, to eventually pass away gracefully in a West Virginian nursing home. Her secret: putting herself last. Servant leadership.

Teaching load, laundry load, and household-budget. Women are better at multi-tasking than men (Maria Shriver, one of the Kennedys, was caught on tape yapping away on a cell phone, against CA law). Microprocessing speed and fat pipe will only accelerate the process (of helping women make greater strides, in all spheres).

I would add telecommuting as a great enhancer of load balancing. And a quiet Maytag also helps.

Next studies on collaboration should incorporate machines into the mix. Imagine how fast it could have been had those first Honeywell computers (actually appliances) been sold well. It still doesn’t lessen the burden of a traveling executive, male or female. But then, that’s where out social networking comes in to complete the transformation of the Third Wave, which has swept away both Marie Curie and Marilyn Monroe, leaving only Madame Secretary in its wake (as of this edit, it’s now J. Kerry).