All posts by Steve Stern

Watching the Golden Globes, thinking about the ads

Film

Globes Winners 2014Watching the Golden Globes last night, with all the glittering stars, what I most remember is the Bing Ad. For some reason, I have decided that am a Google guy and Microsoft, in general, sort of bugs me. Maybe it is because, when they ruled the world, Microsoft quit innovating. Maybe it is because they were never an innovator to start with, just a company built around making money off of other people’s ideas.

There were so many good movies this year that I wasn’t particularly rooting for anybody. I had my favorites, but it is impossible to argue that the winner weren’t terrific. I haven’t seen The Wolf of Wall Street and have no idea if Leonardo DiCaprio should have won for best actor, but both 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle both winning for best picture, was great. Woody Allen got an award he deserved and didn’t ruin it by showing up, and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were funny for the second year in a row. But all that is a blur the next morning and I still remember the Bing Ad and the Apple Ad. They are both well worth watching.

Team owners, bosses, setting the tone, and Chris Christie

Uncategorized

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During the last couple of days, I have found it hard not to keep bumping into Chris Christie. During that time, he has gone from ridiculing the very idea that shutting down the lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge was done on purpose, to admitting it – as the evidence grew – but denying he knew anything about the shutdown. It seems to me that the question of whether Christie knew or not isn’t relevant.

During the 1960’s and 70’s, I was a close-to-fanatic Oakland Raider fan. At the time, the Raider’s primary owner was Wayne Valley, the owner of the – then – very successful Besco home building company. Valley brought on Al Davis as Managing General Partner and Davis, as Managing Partner, turned the Raiders into one of the premier football teams of the era. At the same time, the 49ers were owned by the widows of the previous owners,  Josephine Morabito Fox and Jane Morabito. After a disastrous 2-14 season, the widows sold the team to  Edward DeBartolo Jr. who hired head coach Bill Walsh and the rest is history (at least in San Francisco).

When you read the history of the two teams during that era, the instrumental people most mentioned are Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, John Madden and Ken Stabler, along with various other players. Not much is said about the owners, but – I contend – the owners are the most important members of the team. The 49ers turned around because of Eddie DeBartolo. Under the Morabito widows, the 49ers had some great quarterbacks, like John Brodie and Y. A. Tittle, they had some great receivers and defensive backs, but they were never a great team.

When the Enron bubble burst, CEO Jeffrey Skilling and Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow got most of the credit but Ken Lay, the founder of Enron who claimed he knew nothing about the various frauds, was also charged and convicted as he should have been. As an aside, after he was convicted but before he was sentenced, Ken Lay died. He was vacationing in Snowmass, I guess when you steal as much as he did, you don’t go directly to jail. End aside. When Apple was run by John Sculley, it made some great computers but it didn’t become the Apple worth more than Microsoft, until Steve Jobs came back to turn the company around.

Steve Jobs didn’t do everything himself, but he set the tone. He created the culture, just like Ken Lay. Just like Al Davis and Eddie DeBartolo. And just like Chris Christie in New Jersey. Christie said that he fired his Deputy Chief of Staff, Bridget Kelly, because she lied to me. He didn’t fire her because of the traffic problems she caused or the because she acted in a petty and vindictive way; he fired her because she lied to him. Christie may be a governor that doesn’t like being lied to, but he has created a climate in which doing things that hurt the people of New Jersey is accepted, in which acting in a petty and vindictive way is accepted.

Strong Tea parties and weak tea

Politics

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A day or so ago, I got an email requesting that I sign an online petition. Like most people, I suspect, I get these alot . It seems so much like petitioning  the choir that I often just delete them and move on. But, I read an interesting article in The Economist that started me thinking about that petition and other ones like it. The article shows the results of Tea Party rallies over April 15th, 2010.

new research suggests that the people whom left-wing pundits once dismissed as “teabaggers” made a big difference in the mid-term elections of 2010, when Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives….When it rained, attendance at rallies halved….Dry rallies created momentum…and the rallies a year later were twice as large. Such enthusiasm translated into a 7% rise in the Republican vote in 2010, compared with wet areas. If the Tea Party merely expressed voters’ frustrations rather than inflaming them, one would expect no difference between wet and dry districts. The authors conclude that protests can indeed shape policy.

In a way, this is what I expect, it is why I walked precincts for Obama and turned out for Occupy protests. But, often, when I am doing that, my mind tells me that what I am doing is not going to change anybody’s mind and I didn’t walk as many precincts as I had time for, I didn’t go to most of the Occupy and Move-On protests I was invited to, and I haven’t signed most of the petitions I believe in.

It is nice to see that rallies have effects, and scary because it means that not doing anything has an effect, even if it is negative. Liberals seem to concentrate on Presidential elections and Conservatives on local and down ticket elections. I think the conservatives are right. Having a school Board that is in agreement with  their basic beliefs is more germane to their daily lives than having a President that is. We Liberals scream like scalded cats when the School Board wants to buy books that say Intelligent Design is a real theory but the best way to stop that is to get people on the School Board that don’t believe in that nonsense in the first place.

The article ended with Watery tea may be weak, but the strong stuff makes lawmakers sit up and take notice, which reminded me that Courtney Gonzales brought over some green tea on Christmas Eve and showed us how to make it weak. I – we – think of tea as a way to administer caffeine but  for hundreds if not thousands of years, it has been a way to make water safe to drink.

To stretch my ramblings on The Economist’s article a little further, I would say that the same is true in politics. The strong tea of presidential politics gets the headlines but it is the weak tea of down ticket politics that, eventually, makes the water safe to drink. It is state and local policies that determine if family planning clinics stay open and determine the boundaries of electoral districts. It is easy for me to fall back on the belief that politics is a way to shock the system into change every four years, but I am starting to believe that politics is the almost daily work of signing protests, the daily work of trying to be heard.

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Michael Schumacher

Uncategorized

Schumacher skiing

 

When Howard Dunaier emailed me about Michael Schumacher – the most successful Formula One driver of all time – getting hurt in a skiing accident, the day before New Year’s Eve, I think he was more upset than I was. At the time, I really didn’t have much of an emotional reaction and I still don’t. I am not sure why. There is no doubt that Schumacher is one of the world’s best athletes – even if you don’t believe that driving a car is an athletic endeavor, it is hard not to be impressed by his making a Billion dollars by doing it – but, for me, he has always been easier to admire than love.

As an aside. I said for me because I don’t know Schumacher – of course I have never met him, I haven’t even seen him drive in person – and all my reactions to him are my reactions, my projections. I don’t want to say for me in every paragraph below but please be aware that it is there. End aside.

Stirling Moss, probably the greatest race driver never to win a championship, said, To achieve anything, you must be prepared to dabble on the boundary of disaster. Schumacher, who won seven Formula One World Championships, almost never seemed to be dabbling on that edge. Sure, he  had great desire, speed, racecraft, and is relentlessly  fit, but his work ethic and ability to build a team around him are what set him apart. He was too invulnerable to be a warm and fuzzy, a lovable, kind of guy. He seemed unemotional, but nobody can drive as well as he did in his prime without being emotional and Schumacher, in the moment, over the years, he has done some very emotional, very dangerous, and very stupid things.

By all accounts, the way he skied on the day of the accident was not one of them. But, I am sure that Michael Schumacher does not ski like a normal 44-year-old man. Either way, he fell nine days ago and nobody is yet willing to say he is going to live. That, in itself, is pretty unusual. They have placed him in an artificial comma and have – somehow – reduced his temperature to below normal. I think that is also unusual for this period of time, so it does not look  very good.

In the strange way that life works, that has made Michael seem very vulnerable, for the first time.

 

 

 

Well, I guess it is Governmental Transparency

Politics

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Close to a couple of weeks ago, the National Reconnaissance Office – that’s NRO to the cognoscenti –  launched a new spy satellite.  The NRO was founded in 1961 – but the government didn’t get around to telling anybody until 1992 – and, according to its website,  is in charge of designing, building, launching, and maintaining… America’s spy satellites. The logo for the latest spy satellite is a malevolent octopus humping the earth. For the dense among us, they provided the tag line Nothing is beyond our reach.

At first look, it seemed sort of off-putting – Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst for the ACLU, tweeted, You may want to downplay the massive dragnet spying thing right now. This logo isn’t helping. and that is a mean looking octopus – but I think he is wrong and the logo is brilliant. In its own way, the Defense department – I think the NRO must work for Defense, they wouldn’t be under State would they?  – is doing the same thing as Edward Snowden. The logo is designed to stop terrorists more than to catch them.

The thing that stops me from driving faster than traffic on The 280 coming back from San Francisco at 11:30 Saturday night is that I don’t want to get a ticket and, going into San Francisco at 5:30, I saw several black and white Highway Patrol cars that, I am worried, are still around. Edward Snowden is like the guy flashing his lights at me, saying Slow down, there is a cop ahead. The logo is like painting the Highway Patrol cars black and white so I will know they are at work. The presence of the Highway Patrol stops me from speeding and the presence of NRO satellites keeps terrorists from using emails. Sure, not all the terrorist, but most.