Tag Archives: business thinking

January 29, 2013 · 12:37 pm

The Art Of Weaving

As I was on the treadmill this morning I listened to a great live show from the Rolling Stones. It was recorded in October of 1994 on their Voodoo Lounge tour and it reminded me about why The Stones are one of the greatest bands ever. It also reminded me of a few business points.

A big part of the band’s signature sound is the interplay between the two main guitar players.

The Rolling Stones live at BC Place in Vancouv...

Photo: Ryan W. Woodland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most bands have one player who is designated as the rhythm guitarist; the other one plays lead.  When you listen to The Dead or other bands with multiple guitar players you can usually name the lead guitarist.  While Bob Weir played the occasional solo, it’s pretty clear that Garcia was the lead.

Think about the Stones – who is the lead?  I don’t think there is one, because of what Keith Richards called “the fine art of weaving.”  That’s what he calls the blending of the two guitar parts into a seamless sound.  It’s hard to tell which is playing the lead part and which is carrying the rhythm, and the correct answer to that will often change throughout the song.  Which of course leads to the business points.

First, anyone who has ever heard the Stones’ sound can identify it immediately.  Isn’t that sort of solid identification something all brands seek?

Second – while each of the guitar players in the band – Ron Wood and Keith Richards – can handle lead guitar well enough to front a band (which each has done – Wood with The Faces, Richards with numerous other projects), they sublimate their skill into “lesser” roles to create something bigger.  How many co-workers, peers, and managers are willing to do be that selfless when the need is here?

Finally,  they’re LIVE!  No overdubs, no pre-recorded tracks.  The band plays every note we hear and they deliver.  This was 37 shows into a tour that would go on for almost another year yet they personified the old Joe DiMaggio quote.  When asked why he played so hard, he replied: “Because there is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first time. I owe him my best.”    How many of us can say the same each day?

The fine art of weaving and the work around it is becoming more rare these days.  What are you doing to preserve it?

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January 25, 2013 · 11:37 am

Garlic And Customers

Friday means time for our Foodie Fun screed.  Today, I want to talk about garlic.

An Ikea garlic press, with pressed garlic.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You’ve probably cooked with it and I’m dead certain you’ve eaten it.  One thing you’ve probably noticed as you’ve done either is that raw garlic can have an unpleasant, sharp, hotness about it.  If you turn up the heat and try to cook that out and aren’t careful you can burn it, which makes it incredibly bitter.  Even when you cook it carefully, if you do your prep work on the garlic too early and it sits, the flavor can be off.  Who thought something so small could be so difficult!

The root of the problem is something called allicin, which is a compound that forms when you cut into the cells and continues to build as it sits.  The way to handle the build-up is either not to let this happen in the first place, giving it immediate attention by cooking it or to put the chopped garlic into something acidic such as lemon juice to convert the allicin into a few more mellow compounds with long, hard to spell names that also form when the garlic is cooked (they’re sulfides for you chemists out there).  You’d do that for a salad dressing, for example, where you’re using raw garlic.

I realize this is a business blog so you’re probably wondering what the heck garlic has to do with your business.  What came to my mind was how we deal with other people – customers, clients, co-workers, and bosses.  Once something injures them – as when we cut garlic – the defense mechanisms spring into action – just as garlic forms allicin.  The longer we delay dealing with the situation, the more of what we don’t want builds up – allicin or anger, in the case of the humans.  We need to handle problems quickly, either by resolving them or by putting them into a context that allows us the time we need to formulate the solution.  Reacting with intense heat – burning the garlic – usually doesn’t work too well.  In the case of the aforementioned groups, letting them know you hear and understand their situation and that you are working to resolve it is the equivalent of the gentle heat needed to turn raw garlic into something fragrant and delicious.

I don’t advise mixing my metaphors here –  dealing with a teed-off person face to face after eating garlic isn’t going to help matters.  However, the lesson we can learn from the plant just might!

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January 15, 2013 · 9:48 am

Want To Learn Something? Teach It!

As we’ve discussed before here on the screed, I went to school way back in the last century to become a teacher.

English: A teacher and young pupils at The Bri...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To do so where I went to school you had to major in both your field of choice (English in my case) as well as in Education. You studied the information you were going to teach as well as the teaching process itself.

There was a flaw of sorts in that education. English majors do not spend a lot of time on grammar or spelling (even if we do get beaten up about it by our professors). We teachers-in-training had to take a course in philology which other English majors didn’t, but in general our subject matter learning wasn’t much different from our peers who weren’t getting teaching licenses. I hasten to add we DID have to take a lot of courses about how to teach but they were for anyone becoming a teacher no matter the subject area.  What I didn’t quite understand at the time was something that I’ve since learned:

If you want to learn something, teach it.

A fairly sizable part of what we do in business is teach. It may be that we need to develop staff or it may be that we’re trying to educate a potential customer about our product. Either way, we’re teaching. The funny thing is that you discover immediately that it’s impossible to educate someone about the subject if you don’t fully understand it yourself.  You find the holes in your knowledge base.  Many of us have had teachers who we thought were one chapter ahead of the class in terms of their knowledge.  It’s the same in business – I’m sure you’ve had the experience of a salesperson who knew less that you did about a product or who couldn’t answer a question without running for an information sheet.

So today’s business point is this:  if you want to understand a topic or a product fully, prepare a lesson plan about it as if you were going to teach a class on it.  You’ll learn a great deal about it as you flesh out the various outlines.  This works for almost anything – it’s almost impossible to explain something if you don’t understand it.  Then let me know what you think!

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