Calling in those McKinsey folks to review your profit and loss numbers in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s is a little like having Dr. Kevorkian over to offer a second opinion.

“No, really, I’m feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu.”

“Not at your age. You know, if you were a new publication, you might pull through. But Harold started you back in 1925. That’s a long, long haul for a weekly. But look on the bright side: it’s been a good run.” Read more…

My heartfelt condolences to Ruth Reichl and all the other employees and freelancers who made Gourmet Magazine the most-waited for package in our mailbox every month. We have been subscribers, with occasional time off, since the 60s, when few of us would venture to actually cook any of the insanely complex recipes.

Now, I wasn’t the actual subscriber to Gourmet. The person of record was my mate. At the time, I was very serious about being serious about everything and dwelling on food seemed to me to be about as distinctive an occupation for a serious person as thinking about sex. In my mind at the time, if everyone did it, i.e. eat food or have sex, then it was a lower activity compared to making movies and discussing Important Ideas.

In other words, Gourmet was pornography. Fortunately, over the years, it has remained pornography. What changed, I guess, was my feelings about food. I have always enjoyed good food, and now I can even talk about it for a few minutes without feeling guilty.

So now that S.I. Newhouse has protected his fragile billions by shutting down the principal source of pornography in our household, I am forced to ask myself, “What have we lost?” Read more…

You’re third in line for takeoff, finally ready to depart La Guardia and get to your lunch meeting in Chicago. The pilot comes on the P.A. for a last-minute cheery message: “Thanks for your patience. We hope to make it up one we’re in the air and get you to O’Hare on time. Or at least someplace not too far from there. We’re thinking maybe Gary or Indianapolis. As the President says, we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential. So wish us luck.”

What if that were acceptable? What if we never got where we were hoping to go, and it was okay?

What are the implications when President Obama tells us that part of his philosophy is, “We shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential?” Sounds reasonable, in a way. Don’t want to be a perfectionist about everything. Wouldn’t be realistic. Never get anything done. Got to compromise, make a deal. Make progress of some kind.

I’m not so sure about throwing the perfect overboard. Read more…

I don’t idealize a great many people that I’ve known, but Richard Maddy is an exception. A violin maker, legendary string instrument rebuilder, WWII paratrooper, and son of the founder of Interlochen Center for the Arts, I met Richard when we were both serving on the alumni board of the organization his father had founded. When the board would get bogged down in the minutiae and politics of whatever problem had wound its way around us, Richard was always there to remind us what we supposed to be doing. He would ask, in some form or another, “Is it good for the kids?” Read more…

Isn’t it great that our kids are stuck with us for a fairly lengthy period of time? If we screw up and say something that perhaps wasn’t the best possible parenting expression, they’re going to be around tomorrow, too. We’re going to get another chance to do better.

This is extremely important in the realm of parenting. Most of us have absorbed the wisdom that our kids will perceive negative comments about themselves so powerfully that it will take from 10 to 20 times the number of positive remarks to create a perception of balance. That’s why we need to hesitate when we tell our kid that maybe they could have tried a little harder on that quiz. Have we already told them on 10 different occasions how great they’ve done something?

I’m feeling the same way about customer service at the moment. Take great care of me (basically just do a good job) and I’ll keep using you. But screw up, especially if it makes me look bad, and it will take a long, long time before I trust you again. Read more…

A few weeks ago I posted an open letter to GM CEO Fritz Henderson on the first day of GM’s entering into bankruptcy protection, offering my concern that Mr. Henderson’s reliance on great GM design to save the company might be a problem since GM had put so much ugly tin on America’s roads. I also noted that GM’s culture needed to change, and this was their last chance to get it right. I didn’t mention that most experts on corporate change say it requires 3 — 5 years to accomplish, if you know what you’re doing.

In an amazing display of exactly what I was talking about, Mr. Henderson tossed my article over the fence and assigned the response to Global VP for all design, Ed Welburn, who wrote a public letter back to “Gerald Sindell of the Huffington Post,” which contained an impassioned defense of GM design, and the thousands of artists and modelers at work around the clock around the world creating beautiful new GM cars. Mr. Welburn invited me to visit GM dealerships, look at and drive the new Chevys, Buicks and Cadillacs. I was also invited to visit to global design headquarters in Detroit and see for myself. Read more…

I remember many happy times in First Class. I remember when they used to print your name on matchbooks and they’d be miraculously waiting at your seat when you sat down. I remember First Class on Air Canada when they rolled a huge slab of gravlax down the aisle and sliced you off a little, accompanied by a shot of cold vodka. And I remember when the FAA was the real cop of airline safety. They didn’t let anybody get away with anything.

Everyone who cares about zero tolerance for error pays extremely close attention when an airliner goes down. Read more…

  When the financial environment goes through a sudden and radical change, every person and every enterprise will go through an urgent rethinking, since anything and everything about the future that we once had reasonable expectations about is now open to question. Since the nature of a massive degraded environmental change is so complete and the future so unknown, many of us face change with a feeling of barely controllable panic. Read more…

Frontpaged in the NY Times today in an article by William J. Broad and Cornelia Dean is a comparison of the two presidential candidates’ plans for renewing the United States as an innovation economy. Assuming that Obama will win the election, I think it is safe to say that America will return to a deep and long term investment in science education, and in direct investment in the kind of long-term research that most corporations eschew in favor of research that offers benefits in the near-term.

Shortermism is the enemy of innovation. It might even be the enemy of civilization. Read more…