Simran Sethi is hosting The Green on the Sundance Channel. The weekly show will launch next month (April ‘07).

Simran is a friend and former classmate. I love to brag about her. She’s amazing. I hope you’ll watch her show.

Congratulations to the team at the Sundance Channel. They’ve assembled a great cast and an impressive advisory panel. Should be good tv.

[tags]Simran Sethi, Sundance Channel, The Green[/tags]

A couple weeks ago I was visiting friends in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon and we decided to check out the Bonny Doon Vineyard tasting room.

Bonny Doon is a renegade brand. They’ve successfully disrupted the market with their innovative packaging (Stelvin screw top bottles), memorable brand names (Big House Red, Cardinal Zin, Bouteille Call), and eccentric, irreverent artwork.

They’re comic, iconoclastic, culturally informed wine marketers. They reportedly hate wine marketers. Of course they do.

This post provides a brief summary of Bonny Doon’s efforts to create a sense of terroir, to localize their supply chain, and to promote premium markets as opposed to commodity markets. Read the rest of this entry »

Julia Moskin has conducted a brilliant and much needed study about the merits of cooking with cheap versus expensive wines (NYT). It’s a funny article and very well written:

“Next I braised duck legs in a nonvintage $5.99 tawny port that reminded me of long-abandoned Halloween candy, with hints of Skittles and off-brand caramels.”

Moskin is correct with her conclusions. It’s not necessary to cook with expensive drinking wines. Cheap table wines are fine for cooking.

We cooked with boxed Franzia wines at one of the fine kitchens where I spent my chef’s apprenticeship. These cheap wines were great for stocks, merinades, sauces, and deglazing. Often the taste of the wine is only sensible as a subtle acidic balance in flavor. With something so subtle, it turns out you can easily substitute a $6.00 bottle for a $36.00 bottle, and no one will notice the difference.

One other trick: leave the Franzia box in the walk-in and refill high class show bottles for use on the line. They’re easier to handle. Plus you never know when a customer will visit the back of the house.
[tags]Julia Moskin, cooking with wine[/tags]

This picture is from the great Detroitblog.

Today the Financial Times reports that head executives of Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota (North America), and General Motors have pledged to “cooperate with an ambitious legislative plan to tackle global warming.”

I’ll take the lead in California and personally thank each and every resident of the community of Detroit for making this congressional deal possible. I’ve always felt that Huffington was wrong about you. I knew you’d come through. Thanks.

What you say, who’s Huffington?

In 2003 things were looking rather bleak for the automotive industry. For a short time it was even fashionable to bash the residents of Detroit - you may recall (just kidding) Arianna Huffington’s “Detroit Project”. Well, I recall it.

I recall calling the Detroit Project’s LA based publicist to inquire exactly how many times Huffington had actually been in Detroit before she decided to pick a fight with the whole city.

Once, the publicist said, Ms. Huffington had been there once.

Ms. Detroit Project Huffington had been to Detroit once. We should cut her some slack then I guess.

Eventually she stopped blaming the Iraq war on the people of Detroit, and her Detroit Project website quit posting in May 2003. Wonder how long they’ll squat that URL? It’s a nice one, someone cool could use of it.

For those who think we should thank Huffington too, why not? You should take a collection for a three week spa and retreat package at the Bali-Hi Motel on East Jefferson, (313)822-3500. Detroit spring air might do her some good.

For other innovative automotive news visit the Wired blog “Autopia” for a conversation with Larry Burns, GM’s Vice President of R&D.

[tags]thank you Detroit, thank you Huffington, thank you Bali-Hi[/tags]

Few days ago the SF Chronicle had a Sunday cover story about “neo-nomads” and shared workspaces. The “coworking” wiki and google group have been unusually active too.

What’s this mean for Plan Resonate? Right now, not much. The space on Alabama street isn’t open to the public. Sharing the space was a good experiment. There may be more of it in the future, possibly in a new location. Interim, I’ve decided to deflate the jumpy castle that we had set up in the courtyard.

Pretty interesting to see the Chron using nomadic language. Several years ago it seemed like there was a viable management strategy in the nomadic model. Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation has several attractive elements to it. It’s possible to adapt their rhizome model too, and I’ve seriously studied and experimented with how that might work for Plan Resonate. The results have been inconclusive.

Maybe nomadic thought works better as a fashion statement than as an intellectual framework? I’m not sure, and I’m sure not the first to suggest it. You can now amaze your anthro buddies by ordering this utterly conclusive D&G t-shirt at cafe press.

Selection from D&G’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980):

“Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as “monadic” but are instead nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invariant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.”

Some of it might be applicable - it’s very much open to your interpretation. At least it’s an interesting example of the intersection of pop culture and academia. Whether or not you think it’s trash, D&G still have a powerful brand. How many of their contemporaries have created as much of a cultural impact?
[tags]shared workspace, nomads, jumpy castle[/tags]

See this post at SFist for a rundown of the latest hacks. Cool if you like using bus schedules.

Had a great meeting today with undergrad SCNO students from my alma mater, Michigan State University. SCNO stands for Students Consulting for Nonprofit Organizations. SCNO has invited Plan Resonate and other management consulting firms to play a mentoring and advisory role on student led projects. I’m honored and excited to be involved.

The other mentor firms are:

• IBM Global Services
• Accenture
• Hitachi Consulting
• Mckinsey & Company
• Spartan Internet Consulting

It feels great to have this connection with the students in East Lansing and it’ll be fun to support their work on meaningful projects. A group of us are engaged in some food system development work on behalf of the Greater Lansing Food Bank’s Community Garden Project.[tags]Michigan State University, Greater Lansing Food Bank[/tags]

MyTCorp Food Services will continue our role of providing innovative solutions with the successful implementation of a banana intelligence initiative. We’ll have all necessary hardware in place by the end of Q1 and kickoff a mandatory training workshop series soon thereafter. Remember to check the ProduceDashboard for RealTimeData and kindly refer all questions and comments to:

http://239486123.us.mytcorp.com/blogs/bananasinbrief/

[tags]banana hoarding, management consulting, problem solving[/tags]

Selection from “Writing Reports for Management Decisions” by David M. Robinson, Charles E. Merrill Publishing, 1969:

“How true is the oft-heard charge that too many business report writers simply do not know how to write effective reports? Casual observation of the poor quality of written reports in many organizations suggests that the charge may be totally supportable. Observation of reports in other organizations, however, may suggest that the charge is without a firm foundation. In all likelihood, enough observation may lead the observer to this conclusion: The difference between effective and ineffective reports usually can be traced to the differences between the effective and ineffective people who write the reports. The plain truth is that very often the people who do not know how to write reports have not been trained in the subject.”

Some people have complained in the recent past about the shortage of quality editing in new online media. Yet poorly edited content isn’t a new thing. Wherever you find people communicating in writing you’re going to find that some of them are better, and some worse. You’ll also find that good communication skills are as useful today as they’ve ever been. It still holds that training is helpful. Practice can be helpful too.

I know less than I should about formal grammatical structures and editing techniques. The results are occasionally charmless godawful wooden posts that read like outtakes from a corporate quality manual. Clunky language with no soul. Part of the permanent record. Shame.

And so I wonder, do managers need to understand the rules for relative pronoun use in restrictive vs. nonrestrictive clauses?

[tags]David M. Robinson, Writing Reports for Management Decisions[/tags]