Rich Mintz  

I’ve often been surprised at the degree of honest self-awareness I see in the voices of the interview subjects at Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” in the Sunday NYT. Almost every week, there’s at least one nugget of quotability that helps me see something more clearly in my own life path. And so, this week, this nugget from Sheila Lirio Marcelo, founder and CEO of Care.com:

“The first thing [the executive coach] gave me advice on, and I give it to everybody, is to journal. Write things down. When you come out of a meeting, or you come out of an interview, or you just finished running a session, what’s on your mind? How did it make you feel? How did you make people feel? What’s going on? Again, it was raising my self-awareness around my management style.”

Amen! During every American business boom cycle (and I’m old enough that I can say “every,” thank you very much), there are always entrepreneurs who are lionized in the press for just charging forward, trying not to stop to think, just indulging their animal business instincts or riding the wave or making the wave or what have you. This (let’s call him the “Nose for Success” Guy, or “Nose Guy” for short, and 95% of the time it is a guy) is just one of the American business types that we all recognize and are taught to admire. (One of these guys shows up as a character in Allegra Goodman’s new book The Cookbook Collector, which I just finished.)

The problem with this is that “be more like Nose Guy” is a difficult business strategy to put into practice, if by “strategy” you mean “principles or approach which, if you adopt it, will lead you to your goals.” The Nose Guy story is tautological. If you have the nose for success (and, really, we can argue about whether such a thing even exists, but grant for the moment that it does), and you find yourself in a lucky position, then, boy, will you do well. But if you don’t have it, saying “be more like that guy” — like the tedious urgings of George Costanza’s parents about Lloyd Braun (video), and indeed of anxious parents throughout history to emulate boring, conformist siblings and cousins — gives you nothing actionable to work with. To be more like, say, Warren Buffett or Mike Bloomberg — for you, [Your Name Here], to make your actual successes more resemble those of these people, what exactly are you supposed to do today?

Well, one of the very few levers you have, as an ordinary person with an ordinary nose, is self-awareness. If you’re lucky enough to be Nose Guy, you can just charge forward after the scent — you don’t have to be able to explain how you know which way to go, just go. But if you’re like the rest of us, you need to be more deliberate. And in the realm of normally successful business people, most of us get there — if we ever do — by being exceptionally deliberate. And (again, in the absence of The Nose) the way to successful deliberateness is awareness of the world, and of yourself, and how the two interact — knowing which of your instincts to trust, and which to second-guess, being able to predict how you will affect people, being able to motivate them to work with you rather than against you, and so forth. And this awareness, in turn, can be developed only by study of oneself and the world and the points at which they interact. And this study, in turn, is vastly aided by a self-reflective attitude.

It goes without saying that nowadays we all move too fast. But writing — especially coherent, thoughtful, synthetic writing — cannot be rushed. Writing up one’s impressions of a meeting or encounter — or, really, anything — is a superb opportunity to take stock of what went well, what didn’t, how you feel about it, and what to do next. Taking time to think and write about a failure is the right way to learn from it and turn the next opportunity into a success. And, more broadly, stopping periodically to take stock, to collect your thoughts, and to set them down is the best way to make sure that your life path, taken broadly, is leading to a place you will be happy to find yourself in a year’s or five years’ or ten years’ time.

This blog, rambling and random as it sometimes may seem to you, has been immensely useful to me in understanding who I am, what I’m good at, and what direction I should point myself in, in both the short and long terms. And, within the context of my job, the things I take time to reflect on are the things I handle best, and the areas in which I produce the best value for our clients, for my employer, and for myself. Marcelo’s advice rings true.

Brilliant, just brilliant! FreshDirect, the Queens-based gourmet-ish grocery delivery operation, packages a “Fruit Ripening Bag” with its fresh fruit. Otherwise known as a “bag,” it is printed with instructions for using it to ripen your fruit. (Said instructions more or less reduce to: “Place fruit in bag. When ripe, remove.”)

And thus FreshDirect turns something that costs them 2.4 cents apiece into a valuable customer-retention amenity!

OK, I’ve done it: I’ve subscribed to Sirius XM satellite radio. This despite owning hundreds of CDs and gigabytes of ripped and downloaded music, having streaming music available at my command bundled with Time Warner and Roku products and services I’ve already paid for, having a Pandora account that I basically like, and, you know, having access to the Internet, which contains for free (for those willing to dig) every single musical note ever played in the history of man, multiplied a zillion times over.

So here’s the deal. In the course of my one-week free trial, I discovered that despite all that music I already had access to, I actually listen to a lot more music via this Sirius XM/iPhone/docking station three-way marriage than I’ve listened to since I gave up my XM subscription. A lot more, like five times as much. And that music involves a broader variety of genres, and a broader variety of songs, including both songs that awaken my nostalgia and songs I’ve never heard of before. And about half of the background music I’m adding to my media diet is directly crowding out background episodes of reality TV. Good stuff, right?

One of the business facts I’m reminded by all this is that people don’t just pay a premium for innovation in product, they pay a premium for innovation in delivery experience, too, and in packaging of that experience, and especially in the consistency and reliability thereof. It’s worth money just not to have to think — to be able to take for granted that something will just work. Netflix figured that out with DVDs-by-mail, and then figured it out again with streaming, and Apple of course figured it out ages ago and has put it into practice half a dozen times, in a range of sectors that are gradually converging. FedEx figured it out, by taking something (overnight delivery via USPS) that was perceived, rightfully or not, as a dicey proposition and making it 100% trustworthy.

So now, wherever I plop myself down, I dock my phone, I hit the Sirius XM button, I fiddle with the display for just a moment, and within 10 seconds I’m listening to an interesting stream of music. I don’t even think; I just do it. Now that’s the kind of reliability I’d happily pay $12 a month for.

Enough said.

Had to be in the office unconscionably early this morning, but, as I’ve noted previously, blueberries make everything better. This morning’s haul, from the fruit seller at Fulton and Broadway, are Naturipe Farms blueberries from Georgia; they’re firm and sweet, and I got them at the peak-summer NYC street price of $2 a box.

NYC fruit stand prices seem like the punch line of an old “make it up in volume” joke. Given that supermarkets sell the very same thing for $3.49 — and this is not second-quality merchandise — how does this guy manage at $2? Obviously his overhead equation is different, but still, his inventory begins to rot (especially on a day like today — we’re approaching 80 degrees at 8 in the morning) the moment he sets it out. Margins for a fruit seller on New York streets must be exceedingly thin.

Contrary to my earlier anecdotal musings, the answer via Ezra Klein seems to be “no” — or at least “not to a statistically meaningful degree.

From the Harvard Business Review blog, the claim that being able to sleep on airplanes is one of the keys to business success at the high end. (Hat tip: Mari Kuraishi.)

Probably true, though “sleeping on airplanes” is really just a proxy for “being able to subordinate your biological, emotional, and social needs to the needs of the company.” Which is one reason why people who rise into the corporate stratosphere seem so different from you and me — they’re cut off by necessity from a lot of the day-to-day experiences (dinner at home, kid’s soccer game, sleeping past 5:15am, etc.) that make up the fabric of the rest of our lives. Even those of us who, you know, are still working in business, but at an altitude a bit less rarefied than the chairman of ExxonMobil.

And on the subject of height (courtesy xkcd):

Robert Reich (via Max Chafkin on the Inc. blog, via Greg Palmer) pours cold water on the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurism — namely, that recessions have their silver lining, in that they give incipient entrepreneurs a kick in the pants to go out and do that thing they’ve always wanted to do.

Obviously there are those who’d rather be doing something other than working for themselves, either because it doesn’t suit them temperamentally or because they crave more stability. But the conventional wisdom conforms with common sense.

There are thousands of small business owners in America, probably tens of thousands, whose entrepreneurial spirit was activated by adverse economic circumstance and who are out there right now making lemons out of lemonade. (I’ve been there myself. I didn’t make a fortune, but boy, did I get business experience that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.) And there are tens or hundreds of thousands of employed people in this country who are happily working at companies that were founded, or found their professional niche, or grew and flourished during and even as a result of economic downturn. I’d have to count myself as one of them: there’s no business more countercyclical than the business of helping nonprofit organizations fundraise more effectively in a downturn, which is one of the businesses my employer is in and one of the things I do for a living.

Based on my experience dealing with nonprofits (especially cultural nonprofits) over the past two years, I want to acknowledge the positive impact of financial strain on small organizations, specifically the way it enforces strict prioritization. If there isn’t enough money to waste on fruitless initiatives and vanity projects, two things you end up having less of are fruitless initiatives and vanity projects, and that is in its way a good thing.

This is also the appropriate time to plug Rework, the new business book by the people behind the 37signals family of Web applications and the “Signal vs. Noise” blog.

I read Rework today on the subway (yes, it’s that kind of read, more a collection of business vignettes than a book) and I think it’s worthwhile reading for anyone who’s thinking about starting something but afraid to jump in and do it, or who’s having trouble staying focused while developing a project, or who’s fighting off interference by friends or investors or colleagues obsessed with the wrong things. The gospel of these people is “simplify, simplify” — aspire to do less but know exactly what it is and do it well, be honest about who you are and what you stand for, break dizzying challenges into bite-size chunks, move the ball forward a little bit every day. One of the ideas I took away was the idea that an institutional culture isn’t something you create, it evolves out of consistent practice, which I think is true but which I’ve never heard stated quite that simply. I’ll post some more gems when I think of them — but in the meantime, buy or borrow a copy; it amounts to a crash course in institutional common sense that applies to any organization of any size, especially small ones that can’t afford to waste time or attention.

“Friedrich Nietzsche may be the most exciting philosopher — ever!”

– First line of the Teaching Company ad running on the back page of today’s New York Times Book Review

Marketing consultant and woodworker Greg Payette wants to bring back American manufacturing — and given that I know he’s a New England boy, I’m sure his first concern is states like Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had a 150-year run as manufacturing centers but are finding it hard to compete nowadays. Or take New Jersey, which spent over a century making everything under the sun (remember “Trenton Makes, the World Takes”?). From Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, I think I learned more about the history of the glove industry in Newark than I know about industries like printing and advertising, which I actually work on the fringes of.

Making things with the hands provides a different kind of pride than you get from making things with the brain (or from managing other people, from afar, who are making things with their hands). Handcrafting — even in the context of a factory assembly line — gives you an indisputable sense of accomplishment. You can argue about whether your novel is finished or whether your painting is good enough, but once your factory has produced a pallet of Johnson rods, they’re done, no question — and you did it. The analogy from my own professional life is direct mail (as compared to online fundraising and other channels that don’t produce anything tangible). Mail is physical, it has a look and a feel and a smell, and the responses pile up in a heap where they can be visually assessed and counted and held in the hand. I miss that sometimes.

I don’t want to handwave about the ease of “bringing manufacturing back,” or even about whether it’s feasible to an old-timey degree, in a globalized economy driven by the pursuit of tiny incremental efficiencies. But wherever it is feasible (due to some accident of geographic protectionism, or a tiny quality advantage that the market is willing to support, or just a bullheaded determination to buy local), it should be encouraged — because in leaving behind the old-fashioned ways of making physical things, we’ve left behind something psychological, too.