I visited Zuccotti park on Sunday (Oct 16, 2011) and it brought back memories of marching against the Vietnam war in the 60’s – and yes, despite the fact that I remember the 60’s I really was there. In once sense the message was the same – Power to The People. A group feeling cheated and wronged were trying to change the course of those in power. But there were differences as well. Here are some random thoughts about those differences.
I hear a lot of complaints that OWS (Occupy Wall Street) is unfocused and needs a more succinct list of demands. I disagree. I think the lack of simple demands engenders a lot of conversation. And conversation was one thing that impressed me on at Zuccotti park. People were talking to each other. For the most part, the protesters were engaging others – media, tourists and just curious folks in conversations about what they believed. And the lack of a consistent message kept those conversations going because everyone I heard talk was there for a slightly different reason.
This contrasts sharply with my recollections of the “peace” marches in which I participated in the 1960’s. We were marching for peace against the war, but our rhetoric and behavior was anything but peaceful. We chanted slogans at people rather than talk with them.
The people in Zuccotti park showed a lot of concern for others. The place was cluttered but clean, their own sanitation department was organized to keep it that way. Even flower beds were fenced off and people were respectful of that. This contrasts markedly with my recollections of anti-war protestors looting stores and vandalizing property back in “the day”. I saw a man with tattoos all over his face reach down with a rag in his (bare) hand to wipe up dog urine while keeping others from stepping in it.
On what appears to be the “official” OWS site, they are talking about first aid just 1 minute into the 7 minute video.
Amenities – a strange word to use in a situation like this, but I can think of none better – ranged from a food line where anyone who wanted to could get a meal to a people’s library. There were probably a dozen buckets holding over a hundred books and even chairs set nearby so folks could read. Someone was even handing out blank calendar booklets
There were cops. Lots of them. But mostly I saw them just standing around. The only people I heard them admonish were the tourists. They had put up barriers to distinguish the park from the sidewalk and if you were on the sidewalk side, you had to keep moving. If you wanted to stop, you had to move inside so as not to block the walk way.
I’ve seen the videos and read reports of beatings and arrests. So I know terrible things happened. But none of the occupiers (or cops for that matter) seemed to hold a grudge the day I was there.
I saw none. I know there had been some by authorities against the protesters. But there’s much less violence from either side than I remember from the 60′s. I’m aware of the front-page picture of the man tackling a cop. but I’m also aware that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. When I marched in Washington DC against the war, protestors openly looted from local stores and trashed the place, and it was almost expected we’d get tear gassed – and we did. The tone was far from peaceful when I marched but it was on Sunday.
I hope it’s a renaissance – a re-ignition of the idea that our society functions best for those at the top as well as the bottom when the top and bottom are not so far apart. Even the IMF seems to think so. Hell, Eric Cantor is even pandering up to the idea. I doubt he’s sincere but one of the things that happens when people stake out a claim like OWS is it moves the conversation in that direction.
We all know about working smarter not harder. But Seth Godin has an interesting insight that we often confuse working longer with working harder (or smarter).
Here are a couple of choice quotes (but you should really read the whole thing – especially on Labor Day).
None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.
Entrepreneurs, especially need to hear that working long is attractive because it helps you avoid the hard stuff while feeling like you’re doing what you should. And the hard stuff that really pays off doesn’t have to take long.
Takeaways:
UPDATE: I have a client who loves to work 17 hour days (except for weekends when she only works eight). She also wants to grow her company and sell it for 20 million dollars. She doesn’t realize why her long hours will make it harder for her company to be worth that much. Here’s why.
Anyone in a position to pay $20MM for her company, won’t be in a position to step into her job and work those hours. If they have to figure out how many people it will take to replace her, how those people will fit into the organization and how it will affect the bottom line, then the company will be a lot less valuable to them than if she’s already A) figured it out and B) implemented it for enough time to work out the kinks.
Let’s say her company is worth $5 Million today. She can wait till it’s worth 15 before she does those things, OR she can do them now. The sooner she does them, the more pervasive the systems and culture of scalability will be within the company when it is time to sell. That will make it worth more sooner.
The most value she can add is to replace herself so completely that when she does sell, neither the customers, the staff, or the suppliers notice any hiccup at all.
[tags] entrepreneur, hard work, productivity, small business, CEO Skills [/tags]
The trip was wonderful. We went to London for history and Paris for food. London was fantastic and Paris more so. Partly because my wife’s cousin and her boyfriend are both architects in Paris (he’s a native) and they showed us around places that were (to use Matt’s words) really Frenchy. Places we would have never seen otherwise.
This is a business blog, not a travel blog, but in the next few posts I’ll share some of my impressions of both here.
The Starbucks incident. Dee drinks a lot of tea and the best in the US is at Starbucks. Why? they make the water hot enough – how hard is that? Surprisingly she found better tea in Paris (and many more high end tea houses) than in London. Mariage Freres has the most amazing selection of teas I’ve ever seen. Literally hundreds. I knew of black tea, green tea and even white tea. They also had red teas and blue teas. For a tea-totaler (get it?) like me they offered tea ice cream – 3 scoops, each one a different tea flavored ice cream. You don’t see that a Baskin Robbins.
Mariage Freres is obviously not Starbucks. Ignoring the milkshakes being marketed as coffee (which I won’t get into) Starbucks is the McDonalds of tea. I mean that only in a good way – you can find it almost everywhere and the product is consistent. So we stopped into a few when she wanted a dependable, cheap (what costs $1.50 in the US cost $3 – $4 in Paris but it was cheaper than the others) drink of tea.
In one Starbucks we ran into a trio of Americans. The first commented as we walked in, “That woman” referring to Dee, “is American but I don’t know why I know that”. Her friend replied, “It’s her bag”. Thus giving Dee a chance to discuss her theory that Amercians abroad can be indentified by their Vera Bradley hand bags. Apparently no one has snapped up the international Vera Bradley franchise. But the man in the trio asked “Aren’t you thrilled to find a Starbucks?”
Thrilled by a Starbucks? In Paris? What’s wrong with this picture? I was thrilled to eat sausage and cheese on a baguette so crusty it cut the roof of my mouth. Thrilled to drink wine in a place with casks lining the wall where you could bring an empty wine bottle and have them fill it for you, and where even the waitress smoked in the no smoking section. I was thrilled even to pay 25 euros ($32 -yipes!) for scallops that were sautéed and seasoned to a perfection I’d only imagined. Thrilled to see an open air market with chickens in a butcher case with their heads and feet still attached right next to animal organs I could barely identify – hearts, kidneys (or was that liver?) and would never buy. I was even more thrilled to see that the rotisserie next to that case contained a small pig on a spit (take that Boston Market!) some of which I did buy. It was superb. If I could be thrilled by finding a Starbucks in Paris, I would have stayed home.
Isn’t the point of travel to broaden yourself? To see things you don’t see at the mall? And I don’t mean in the sense of going abroad to “see the freaks”, and comment on how unusual these foreign places are. What if instead, you traveled to see how freaky we can be? To understand why someone would think it strange to buy a chicken without a head and feet attached? To try to figure out how people who create and appreciate the most exquisite perfumes in the world would reject an air conditioned restaurant and prefer to eat outdoors at café tables just inches away from smelly traffic on a sidewalk that smells like piss?
Takeaways:
Owning your own business is one of the most amazing ways to get what you want. As long as you understand how the game is played, you get to choose things like where you live and work, what kind of work you do, who you work with, when you work. And oh yes, you get paid for it if you do it well.
Over the years I’ve cataloged 22 different kinds of things things people want from running their companies. Only four are primarily focused on money. Seven focus on emotions or values, five on lifestye, three on community or people, and two are mostly related to the future.
Have you ever described in detail what you want from your company? If you do there’s a better chance you’ll build your company in a way that helps you get it. Yes, there are times when the choices are mutually exclusive. But knowing what you want makes it easier to choose.
Sharp readers will notice one the numbers don’t add up to 22. The missing one is “company growth” and it’s really a stand-in for all the other things you want.
Takeaways:
I couldn’t believe it! Here is an article about how to improve your penmanship. If only Mrs. Ziefert had read this when I was in her 5th grade class. Excuse my little detour into the personal here but it’s always bugged me that I write so fast that even I can’t read it half the time. Well I guess if that’s a major regret of my life, I’m doing pretty good.
Takeaways:
On a Sunday while the last of 24 inches of snow was still falling on the northeast, I got in an SUV and drove to Best Buy. Yes it was open. And I bought a router so I could get more than one computer in my house on the internet. It was on sale for $40.
Now this could be a post about how frustratingly complex even the simplest of computer networks is, or why they choose to break down (when I did not upgrade anything) after years of decent service.
But instead, I thought about how absurd it is that it was even possible for me to do what I did in those circumstances. Quite a tribute to the success of our species that so many people: the bored Best Buy sales people who outnumbered shoppers by far to the snow plowers to those who keep electricity and cable running at times like this, all have the luxury to go about some modicum of normalcy in the face of a huge weater event, rather than having to hunker down and wait till it blows over just to survive.
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