Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 4, 2012 · 10:18 am

Food Pairing And New Thinking

If I say “peanut butter,” you’ll probably respond “jelly.”  It’s one of those tried and true flavor combinations that one can’t go too far wrong in serving, even if you might be criticized for being a cheap skate (unless you’re serving 6 year olds – they love that!)  I found something that deals with that notion – flavor combinations – and it’s our Food Friday Fun topic this week.  Of course, it also provides a bit of a business lesson as well.

Peanut butter is a semi-solid and can therefor...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The thing I found is a web site called Foodpairing.com:

Foodpairing is a source of inspiration that allows chefs, bartenders, and others in the food industry to create new combinations of ingredients for dishes or drinks. Foodpairing is not based on intuition or existing recipes, but on science, providing an objective overview of possible pairings. It is based on the principle that foods can be combined when they share major flavor components.

In other words, this is a tool, based on fact, that helps creativity in the food business.  It gets us beyond our own thoughts (and prejudices) about tastes in ways that we wouldn’t necessarily think of.  As they put it, “When you are creating a new menu and you know that something is missing, but you don’t know what, Foodpairing will inspire you.”  I signed up and it’s interesting how it helps with your thinking.  Which is, of course, the business point.

You’ve probably come across people – managers, executives, even peers – who are really set in their ways and can’t break through the thinking that keeps them anchored to what may be sub-optimal places.  They can’t see new methods or new business possibilities, maybe because they’ve had bad experiences in the past when they’ve tried to break through.  The difference is that the food tool is based on scientific research – on facts.  A lot of us get good, creative , new business thoughts but base our thinking on hope, on a narrow perspective, or on other factors that can’t be the basis for moving forward.  Inspiration is one thing but it needs to be vetted (perspiration!) to turn into gold.

What gets your creative juices going?

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May 3, 2012 · 9:27 am

Overtime

I’m kind of tired this morning.  I stayed up to watch the first overtime period of a hockey game last night, which turned into a second period and then a third.  In the NHL, playoff overtime periods are the same 20 minute length as a period in a regular game, so it was the equivalent of watching almost a complete second game.  The thing that always strikes me about OT (as overtime is commonly known) is how the players deal with it.  After all, they’re told to put out 100% effort during the game, so what’s left in their tanks if they’re doing that?

into.overtime

(Photo credit: MelvinSchlubman)

It’s a good question for all of us in business.  Then again, we don’t play OT since there’s really no game clock any more.  Overtime is the quaint notion that there is work beyond normal working hours for which we get paid additional money.  Of course, with our “always on” technology, it’s not unusual to receive (and reply to) emails and documents at any hour.  In fact, I’ll bet most of you get antsy if you send a note at any time and don’t receive a reply within an hour.

There are lots of issues here.  The biggest is the same one the players face.  They’ve given everything they have to win during the allotted time and then find out that because they haven’t accomplished the goal they’ve got to continue to give more.  Can they?  These OT games often come down to conditioning and team management – who’s got the fresher legs.  That’s why as managers, we need to make sure our people are pacing themselves since there is no clock in business any more.  Sometimes our best performers will burn themselves out if we don’t make sure they’re turning off the mail and setting the phone to mute, at least on the weekend.

The notion of paying people for overtime work is a fair one yet I don’t know how anyone keeps track.  Business is not just done in the office and burnout can happen anywhere.  There is no clock in business – most of us don’t “punch in” and “punch out.”  As a result, we need to be cognizant that the game might go into OT, the little breaks in between periods of game action won’t be enough to fully recover, and we need to have the stamina to compete.

Make sense?

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May 2, 2012 · 10:12 am

Bubbles

Many of you may have seen a bunch of articles asking if we’re in another tech bubble.  There was an excellent one today in The Silicon Alley Insider (they conclude we’re not and their reasoning is pretty sound and fact-based) and it got me thinking about the nature of “bubbles” and how tech is far from the only area to experience them.  In fact, I’m going to posit that your business may fall victim to them at times.  Let me explain.

Here is the definition of a bubble from the article:

…We have to ask what a bubble is. And the important thing to get is that a bubble is a mass delusion. Technology investor and visionary Peter Thiel has a good definition which boils down to this: a bubble is a) a widespread, intense belief that’s b) wrong.  In other words, a bubble is what happens when the vast majority of people believe (and are putting their money into) things based on a fundamentally wrong-headed notion.

I like that, and I think it’s applicable to people just as much as it is to businesses.  We can start with many of the “celebrities” that populate so much of our popular culture today.  Many people seem to believe things about them (they’re role models, they’ve got talent) that are fundamentally wrong.  Add most of the “artists” we hear who are incapable of performing without electronic enhancement if, in fact, they’re the ones performing their music at all.  Most of the time, they’ve taken a riff from someone else’s work and gone from there.

Then there are some “thought leaders” out there who haven’t had an original thought in a decade.  Unfortunately, a good portion of the traditional trade press (which makes a lot of its dough from subscriptions and ads from these some folks) doesn’t point out that these emperors are naked.  There is a leadership bubble in many sectors – an intense belief in people who are just wrong.

Sorry for the snark today but am I off-base?  Are we living in a time of mass delusion?  Or am I the only delusional one?

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