Leaders are formed in the fire of experience
– Carlos Ghosn, CEO, Nissan Motor Company
Bob Dylan Turned evil 66(6) last week ... I have to admit to something I do not know whether I can actually say here: Coflict is a bit like cooking at least in terms of temperature range. If the temperature is too hot (shouting like Ian Faulks or showing deep depressed aggression like Bob Lorraway) everyone gets burned; too cold and you have to stoke the fire or nothing gets cooked. I am always willing to dive into the conflict and transform it. Like the sun and the tide, conflict is a powerful force that only fools like Ian and Bob pretend to have mastered ;-) I love to drop a pebble into a pond and then follow the ripples out and see where they take me. There are people on either side of the pond who have absolutely no relationship to each other, except they’re joined by this ripple. Most people are happy just to show the pebble hitting the water I prefer to follow and swim the cold river of strange inhumanity … As George Santayana in the publication Life of Reason (1905) said Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
As the Seattle PI puts, Debbie Macomber isn't known well, just read well, and she may be the least-known best-selling writer in the Northwest. They say she has 70 million copies of her books in print. One driver of her success: Macomber has a mailing list of 75,000 readers. These are not lists I have bought; every one of those readers has been in touch with me personally. Every city I am going to, I send out postcards to everyone on my list in that city and neighboring ZIP codes. I have a staff of three who help me with that. So I'm bringing a lot of people into the bookstores where I appear. Port Orchard's Macomber isn't known well, just read well
Reviving Literary Revolutions: Truth and common sense CAN prevail Why Not a Bestseller? Game of nods and winks
Denver Post writer Douglas Brown's proposal for JUST DO IT, about his adventures having sex with his wife at least once a day for 100 consecutive days, has become quite the blog bait.
The enduring line comes from NY Mag's Vulture: "what a great stunt-based book concept, like A.J. Jacobs, but with sex." While enjoying the attention, agent Daniel Lazar at Writers House notes that the blogs have focused on "the two salacious paragraphs of a 60 page proposal that the editors already know is really about marriage and falling madly in love with your spouse again, even after years together." (We've deleted all references to a word that would make our mail get blocked by your servers.)
• Messy Life and odd links ;-) Proposed Vulture; ["We are making an exponentially greater impact on the market. Just imagine seven hundred new titles a year hitting the shelves with one logo rather than twenty-one different logos. If nothing else, we are affecting the perception of the retailers who stock the shelves Eliminating Imprints Helps ; FEW things strike fear into the human heart like a receding hairline, but a path-breaking study released overnight points for the first time to a genetically-based remedy for hair loss. Resources For Entrepreneurs ]
• · Chicago Tribune article discusses ethical aspects of lawyer blogs Bringing clarity to the regulation of lawyer blogs in Kentucky by launching this blog as a "test case" early last year. How Kentucky's Attorney Advertising Commission is now treating blogs by Kentucky lawyers. The article was apparently prompted by the proposed changes in New York's rules on attorney advertising, which appear to place significant restrictions on lawyer-authored blogs. The Federal Trade Commission has criticized the proposed regulations. The Tribune article reports that, "there were so many public comments to the proposals that the state extended the deadline by two months, to Nov. 15." Blogs and Liars; The origins of the spectacularly successful Macquarie Bank model started, paradoxically, in a dud investment in the privatised Loy Yang power station in Victoria. The investment was housed in a fund known as Infrastructure Trust Australia, established in December 1996, that underperformed the market. But in a hallmark sign of Macquarie Bank persistence, the fund was renamed Macquarie Infrastructure Group in 2000 and became a prominent investor in a series of toll road operations. If your place is anything like mine …
• · Vicki Jayne, Management (New Zealand), March 2007, pp.54-59. As a profession it’s still in junior league. At a performance level - project management still depends too heavily on its natural ‘heroes’. How best to build consistent performance management success? People process & performance - how to get the recipe right?, ; Globalisation is a bit like Australia's film or Australia's water crisis - we can see it is going to accelerate but we don't know what to do about it. The antipodean egos have landed;-)
• · · When The Prince of All That Is Evil Matthew Saville knows a thing or two about sticking to his guns; I hold journalists who spend half an hour asking me about my work and then devote all their article to my girlfriend in complete contempt Brendan joins the big time
• · · · You need to carry in these books and put them on these tables.' Our inventory is a reflection of the community Title Wave Books; It's completely surpassed anything I expected We'll only sell out if someone offers us enough money. Things have been looking up for Australian film. Two years ago, Wolf Creek, Little Fish and Look Both Ways all carved a niche at the box office. Cine of the times
• · · · · Last year, it was Kenny, Jindabyne and Ten Canoes. Then, at Christmas, came the phenomenon known as Happy Feet. Made in Sydney with Hollywood backing, director George Miller's penguin musical was an international hit and won an Oscar for best animated feature. Film; Art
• · · · · · Phillip Adams wasn't always my favorite columnist. His views on celebrities are not mine, and I was reminded of that one Saturday. Why celebrity portraits are just fake art ; ON September 7, 1943, Rudolf Vrba saw something that astonished him. Given who he was and where he was at the time, his capacity to be astonished should have been long exhausted. Vrba, a Slovakian Jew, was a prisoner at Birkenau, by far the largest of the component camps that made up Auschwitz. It was at Birkenau, housing as it did crematoriums II-V and their accompanying gas chambers, that more Jews died at the hands of the Nazis than any other place. By then it was already on its way to becoming the largest cemetery on earth. Window on the ghetto