Disturbing

For over a month, this poster has been plastered all over the Paris metro:

Needless to say, it was pretty unsettling to see that every morning, especially when the review blurb on the right-hand poster reads "We love to hate Esther." Hey, that's my wife you're talking about!

Thankfully, they're now all but gone, only a few stragglers remain, waiting to be covered by a poster for Alvin & the Chipmunks 2.

Catching Up

The bad news is that it's been a few months since I last posted anything here. The good news is that ti's been a pretty busy period meaning that I've taken plenty of photos. Let's do this chronologically:


Thanksgiving in Michigan

Thanksgiving in Michigan 2009

Esther and I went back to Michigan for Thanksgiving and enjoyed not only ten (more or less) relaxing days but also several gustatory delights including Thanksgiving dinner (of course) as well as Lazybones Smokehouse BBQ. Hands-down, the best BBQ I've ever had. It's enough to turn a vegetarian.

Christmas in Paris

Chistmas Breakfast 2009

Normandy - December 2009

It was a quiet Christmas in Paris this year. Esther and I enjoyed a delicious brunch at our house (first album) before heading out to Normandy for a few nights. In the larger town (Deauville) near the village (Villerville), there was something of an inexplicable parade. It had to do with the 150th anniversary of Deauville, but I have no idea why there was a guy riding a giant carousel horse. It made for interesting pictures though.

Day Trip to Strasbourg

Travels - Strasbourg 2009

While I had the week between Christmas and New Year's off from work, Esther did not so I had to keep myself busy. One way of doing so was to enjoy two of my favorite things about France, the high-speed trains and the diverse regional cultures. I booked a round trip ticket to Strasbourg (on the border with Germany) leaving early in the morning and returning late in the evening. The two-hour train ride was blissfully uneventful and much quicker than the four-hour drive (and with my young person's reduction card, a wash in terms of cost). I really enjoyed the city and the photos are all fully captioned, telling the whole story.

Into 2010
The new year has started without much change though it has been the occassion to think about my mid-term plans. As those develop, certain aspects will certainly be shared here. I'll do my best to keep this updated more often and wish everyone a very Happy New Year.

Old

I got old, and I noticed the moment when it happened. It's when, all of a sudden, there is a practice which is common among the youth of the day, that you find completely incomprehensible.

Here's what happened:

Reading a NY Times article a few weeks ago about teens and Twitter (by the way, do you all know that I tweet?), they mentioned the case of Kristen Nagy, 18, to illustrate the case of a teen who sends a lot of text messages, but doesn't use Twitter. How much does she text? Let me tell you. She sends 500 text messages per day!

What???

500 texts per day? Over the 16 waking-hours of a day, that's a little more than one text every two minutes. For 16-hours straight! If it takes you 15 seconds to send one text, that's more than two hours spent sending 15-second text messages, not including the time it takes to read the messages you receive.

Trying to understand this, I compared this to my experience. Esther and I have unlimited texting included in our plans to go along with our text-friendly phones. Sometimes, when we get really crazy, we might send 15 texts per day. But 500? That's simply incomprehensible. I can't even imagine why someone would ever want to do that. It's stupid. It doesn't make sense. It makes me a little mad. I just don't understand.

And that's it, now I'm old. Kids are doing something and I, despite all my blogs, Twitter feeds, RSS subscriptions and social networks, simply can't wrap my head around it. Does not compute.

I think it's only going to get worse from here.

Ravenchase, in the NYT!

The company that I used to work for, Ravenchase Adventures, just had an article published about them in the New York Times. It focuses on the trouble that such a company would have in this economic climate, but has an overall positive tone. I have a certain, extra measure of pride in this because, before I left the company, I was put in touch with the reporter who I in turn put in touch with the company president. It's like I'm almost famous!

My shallow pride aside, it's a really great company and I hope that this brings them some more well-deserved attention!

Promoting Corporate Excellence

Via kottke, I came across a stack of slides from Netflix on developing a corporate culture, embedded below.

Some highlights:

• Slides 24-29 on building a strong team. 
• Slide 33, on the difference between efforts and results.
• Slides 41-55 on the relationship between employee freedom, business complexity and the percentage of high performance employees in a company.
• Slides 76-84 on the responsibility of managers to create a context where high performance employees can thrive.

And many others on compensation, an innovative vacation policy, etc... I encourage you to look through them all. In short, I'm impressed. It strikes me as the sort of environment where high performance individuals will thrive in a cohesive and coherent way, leading to great results.

What frustrates me, though, is the outcome of all this incredible performance. After all this work, all this effort, how is the world different? Someone in Minnesota gets a DVD one day earlier than they would have otherwise. While the global energy challenge remains unresolved, while one billion people get by on less than $1 per day, etc...

The real challenge going forward is building a system wherein this level of performance can be sustained while providing benefit where it's most needed. I understand that Grameen Bank has had some success in this respect, but I want to see more.

Of course, I have nothing against Netflix, I wish them nothing but continued success. They're providing the world with an excellent organizational model, let alone a lovely DVD rental service.

Enjoy the slides!

Culture

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