Category: Personal

  • Keywords: Hedgehogs and Foxes (and AI, oh my!)

    What kind of thinker are you? Knowing the difference between when you’re a hedgehog & when you’re a fox can be empowering. The following piece is part of a “Keywords” series that I’ve slowly built over the history of The Dispatch. Before we start, though, I want to share that Claude was helpful developing my argument in a…

  • Is AI Slop Good for Brick and Mortar?

    Will untrustworthy AI products and advertising breathe new life into retail because that’s where trustable humans are?  It was spring. I walked the streets of New Delhi reckoning with an urgent Number Two and no place to deposit it. Public toilets, at least in that hood, seemed not a high municipal priority. Then, through gastrointestinal-distress-blurred…

  • My Neuroses’ Playlist & Another Modest Proposal

    My Neuroses’ Playlist In previous articles, I’ve mentioned how earworms plague me. There are four flavors of earworm: For example, I watched the end of the movie Kingsman, which features Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love; it stayed in my head for days. In fact, just writing that last sentence brought it back. For example, the other morning I…

  • No Experience is Wasted…

    …if you can think analogically: a mini-memoir. Last week, a young colleague and I visited La Profesora’s Digital Skills class at Portland State University. We were there to talk about career readiness and what my friend Rishad Tobaccowala, in his terrific book Restoring the Soul of Business, calls “the turd on the table.”** In this case, the…

  • Wonder Moments

    When something makes you notice and appreciate the technological marvels that we all take for granted, pay attention. Last Wednesday, my first meeting was a Zoom with one person in Warsaw (6,000 miles away) and another in Palo Alto (a mere 350 miles away). I’m in Los Angeles visiting family. I have global meetings like…

  • Thought Flavors

    Different tools can unleash different kinds of thinking, including fountain pens (a recent interest). Lately, I’ve gotten into fountain pens. A couple years back, my friend Rob gave me a nice Pilot. Then, after they went to Paris on a long-delayed mother/daughter trip, Kathi and Helena brought back a Waterman for me. I had an…

  • Will Teach for Food: a Mini Memoir

    Today’s job market for recent college grads eerily resembles the academic job market in the 1990s: what are the lessons? The great graduate job drought, a dejecting article by Anjli Raval from the Financial Times ($) arrested my attention this week. Recent college graduates face long and difficult job searches. In the U.K., there are 140 applicants…

  • Am I Becoming an iPhone Recluse?

    I started experiencing profound relief every night when I powered down my smartphone. Why is that? Overture: What follows is an atypical piece from me. It’s a lightly-edited journal entry that explores territory adjacent to “My Quest to be Whelmed” from a month ago.  Soundtrack: I’ve never suggested music to have playing when reading one…

  • My Quest to be Whelmed

    It’s hard to watch the news and harder to talk about it with people who might disagree. I’m overwhelmed. Are you? I’m a lucky guy. I have a happy marriage. I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. We live in a lovely suburb just remote enough that there’s not much crime, and we can still get…

  • A Marketing Win

    Since so much of the news is dyspeptic and terrifying, here’s a story about how 1-800-FLOWERS creates happiness and profit at the same time. My last piece was grim, so I wanted to explore something smart that 1-800-FLOWERS does that drives business and profit while also making its customers happy. 1-800-FLOWERS.com owns Harry & David as…