It was a tension-racked Vista Group lunch today, as a vital question was discussed. Would the prestigious group of Wellington business bloggers allow Jim Donovan to remain a member, after he announced his intention to write his final blog post on 28 March? There were conflicting accounts of the decision. One account reported that Donovan’s continuing membership was agreed only by the narrowest of majorities, just one vote. Another said that Donovan had received 100% of the votes. In reality, only one Vista Group member - Wellington mayoral candidate Jack Yan - was there to vote; the other members having pressing business elsewhere. However, Yan said that he had consulted online with the wider membership and was confident his vote had their full backing.
The Vista Group then returned to its more usual fare of business and branding matters. The scheduled topic of the month was “Wellywood! Whose bright idea was that?“ The recent proposal - that a Hollywood look-alike sign celebrating the Wellington film industry be permanently erected on a local hillside - has been almost universally panned by the media and by local citizens, not least Jack Yan. He argued out that not only would the Wellywood sign infringe Hollywood’s registered trademark, it would also be a poor me-too image for Wellington - a weak joke for a fortnight’s film festival, maybe; a permanent sign promoting the city, most definitely not. Branding is about being distinctive. However, Jack’s argument that city identities are becoming more powerful than national ones was rejected by yours truly, who came dressed head-to-toe in black, New Zealand’s national colour. It was a silent, but powerful refutation.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about 3D printers transforming manufacturing and distribution. I can add healthcare to that list. In one of its always-excellent science and technology articles, The Economist tells us that researchers are using 3D printers to produce replacement body parts:
Organovo’s 3D bio-printer works in a similar way to some rapid-prototyping machines used in industry to make parts and mechanically functioning models. These work like inkjet printers, but with a third dimension. Such printers deposit droplets of polymer which fuse together to form a structure. With each pass of the printing heads, the base on which the object is being made moves down a notch. In this way, little by little, the object takes shape. Voids in the structure and complex shapes are supported by printing a “scaffold” of water-soluble material. Once the object is complete, the scaffold is washed away.Researchers have found that something similar can be done with biological materials. When small clusters of cells are placed next to each other they flow together, fuse and organise themselves. Various techniques are being explored to condition the cells to mature into functioning body parts…
The raw material is grown in cultures from patient tissue samples, avoiding transplant rejection.
To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made… Within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.
In case you think this is fantasy, the scaffold technique is already used to grow replacement bladders. Marrying the medical technique with 3D printing was a logical next step.Although the implications for healthcare are immense, I suspect that “appearance surgery” will eagerly adopt this technology. Replacement scalps complete with hair follicles will sell well, as will wrinkle-free, age-spotless skin. The mind boggles at what could be possible in the long term. Maybe those spam ads for enlarged male appendages might finally have something to offer that works! And who knows how competitive sportspeople will use this?
Completely one-sided but good-fun spoof interview with Bill Nighy playing a banker trying to argue against a a Tobin tax (a charge on financial transactions, initially suggested for currency transactions but much wider application is being advocated in the wake of the most recent financial system crisis).
In a new twist, Wired magazine reports that driving distracts cellphone users
Routine driving impedes a person’s ability to relay information from a cellphone call accurately to a conversation partner and to remember key elements of that information, say psychologist Gary Dell of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues. Although many drivers regard talking while cruising a straightaway as no harder than walking while chewing gum, “that intuition is incorrect,” Dell says.
The road safety legislators have it all the wrong way round! Same result though; just a 180 degree different spin.
Bear with me; this will make sense soon, I hope. Nearly 2 years ago, we put our stuff into storage and, with 2 suitcases each, we set off for the first of several extended trips to Europe. Having spent the time living in 5 different rented apartments in London and Wellington, last weekend we finally moved into our new (100 year old) permanent home. You’d think that in 21 months we hadn’t time nor space to accumulate much detritus, but no; it still took several car trips to transport our peripatetic selves to the new place. At the same time, the household movers delivered our possessions from storage.
Unpacking and putting everything in a sensible (at least for now) place is a chore, lightened by good and bad surprises - “I’d forgotten we had that,” and ” Why on earth did we bother to pack this?” However, one thing was no surprise. As we unpacked our clothes from the storage boxes and hung them with our clothes we had kept or acquired since, the pile of unneeded cheap wire and plastic clothes-hangers grew and grew.
Now I know we had a purge of such things before we put everything into storage, so how come we’d acquired so many since, and in such a short time? The answer is of course that virtually every garment you buy comes on a hanger, and every time you send something to the dry-cleaners or laundry, it comes back on a hanger. It’s a wonder we ever need to buy hangers at all. Inevitably you end up with far more hangers than you can possibly need. So where do all the surplus hangers go?
There’s much comment about unnecessary plastic and paper packaging, but at least there’s a recycling industry which can use it again. So what about all these metal and plastic hangers. Opportunity for some smart thinking, perhaps?
I apologise to regular readers for my lack of blog activity this week. I have indulged in a sustained attack on my waistline and liver, lunching four days out of five and early evening drinks every day. Isn’t the run-up to Christmas fun? Blogging will not get any better any time soon; I’m off to the beach tomorrow and won’t be back until early January. I am not alone in being very glad to see the back of 2009. Let’s make 2010 a much better year. Merry Christmas, everyone.
“We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking… The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials”…
“Piracy-related business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area and as locals we depend on their output,” said Mohamed Adam, the town’s deputy security officer. “The district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our hospital and our public schools”…
Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. “I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,” she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. “I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the ‘company’.”
I wonder how long it will take for investors in guaranteed-rental investment properties, high-yield finance companies and other such exciting opportunities to jump in.
Economics writer Tim Harford (aka. The Undercover Economist) gets asked many unusual questions, and now seems to have morphed into The Financial Times‘ agony agony columnist:
Dear Economist: Should I stay single in Italy – or come home?
I’m a 32-year-old American woman; I moved to Italy about five years ago and later applied for a master’s programme at an Italian university. Average earnings for my BA in political science are low, so I wasn’t missing out on much.
My problems are two-fold: first, dating. Italy has the second-oldest population in the world. Seeing a single thirtysomething is like finding a unicorn. Eliminate men who live with their mothers, are chain-smokers, or are shorter than me, and I’m in a convent. Second, my Italian university has decided to reverse its previous decision to accept my American degree. I am being forced to re-earn an Italian BA, which could take a further year.
I’d hate to turn down another degree, but can I handle another year’s worth of pasta and enforced singledom? My current plan includes going to San Francisco upon my return, though I do have the choice of a semi-permanent job with Nike in the middle of nowhere. Or I could stay in Italy; but if I spend another year single, according to my mother, I will die alone.
Crying in my cappuccino
Dear Crying,
You appear to be committed to staying in a country whose food, bureaucracy and dating scene do not suit you. Your judgment has been clouded by the sunk-cost fallacy: you hoped to get a master’s degree, great food and an Italian paramour. Things didn’t work out and you have wasted five years. You’re only human if you want to waste another year or two, but you’re making a mistake. Go home.
As for your career, forget cash: the happiness literature suggests that a happy relationship and secure job are far more important. San Francisco is not famed for its excess of single straight men, but the demographics of the middle of nowhere are excellent, with many eligible bachelors. Your new life awaits.
I normally give this kind of advice only after the 2nd bottle of red!
I claim no credit for this, having shamelessly lifted it from interest.co.nz, who got it from, etc., etc….
It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea.
It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.
Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to choose one.
The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower. The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel. The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town’s prostitute that in these hard times, gave her “services” on credit.
The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there. The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.
At that moment, the tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.
No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism…. .
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States is doing business today.
I was at a breakfast function this morning to witness the induction into the NZ Hi-Tech Industry Hall of Fame (aka. The Flying Kiwis) of two of this country’s leading technology entrepreneurs - Rod Drury (whom I first knew 20 years ago as a junior consultant who could build clever spreadsheets) and Selwyn Pellett, (whom I first met 12 years ago when he sold us some components). Both thoroughly deserve their admission to the Hall of Fame. There’ll no doubt be plenty elsewhere on their careers, but it was interesting to hear them talk about dark moments. Rod was fortunate in not having any serious business disasters, but acknowledged the terrible loneliness of being away from home for long periods, staying in yet another hotel. Anyone who thinks business travel is glamorous clearly doesn’t do it much! Selwyn talked about launching his company on the London AIM share-market when there was an unexpected last-minute problem; the gap between what the new investors would pay and what the existing shareholders would accept had suddenly widened to what seemed like an unbridgeable gulf. It looked like the listing would be cancelled and with it all the plans which depended on the new capital. Fortunately a deal was done and the listing went ahead, albeit a day late.
I remember a particularly dark moment at Deltec. The global market for cellular network antennas had virtually dried up very suddenly. I’m talking about a 90% drop in the space of a month. Fortunately we’d built up a cash reserve and rode it out for a while, but after the 3rd straight month of no orders, we held a secret board meeting off-site in a private room at the Wellington Club. We’d asked the receivership partners at PwC to come in later and advise us on the actions we were taking as directors, since we didn’t want to be personally sued for trading while insolvent. After an hour of doom, gloom and tough decision-making, one of the independent directors suddenly said “**** this! It’s my 60th birthday today and we’re going to celebrate!“ He ordered champagne for us, served just as the the PwC receivership guys walked in. The look on their faces was priceless; a brilliantly funny moment in an otherwise awful day. On the positive side, PwC told us we were doing all the right things, and we survived the downturn, which was (inevitably) followed by a boom.
You rarely hear about the dark moments, but for most entrepreneurs and business owners, dark moments come along more often than most other people realise.
Postscript: My graphic seems to have caught people’s attention. In technology businesses, I often joke that the best way to get the sales team’s focus onto a product is to not release it for ages, and then immediately withdraw it!
Stockbrokers never seem to get any positive press. They make more money the faster they can persuade you to churn your portfolio, and they rapidly tap-dance around the issue when you question the performance of stocks you’ve bought on their recommendation. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a Wellington stockbroker has applied these abilities to become the world’s fastest tap-dancer. Slow-motion video showed that he achieved 1056 taps in 60 seconds. Think about that - it means he had to lift a heel or toe off the ground 18 times every second. Who needs automated stock-trading systems when a human broker can move that fast in real-time?
The Economist’s Big Mac Index is somewhat accepted as a rough and ready medium-term indicator of underlying currency value. Now I see that Swiss global banking giant UBS has adopted it too. In its annual review of wages and prices around the world, one of the quirkier charts plots the relative time a worker needs to earn enough money to buy a Big Mac hamburger. In the same report, UBS also publishes an iPod index. Given the commonality of iPod and Big Mac purchasers in the IT industry, this is highly relevant information for cross-border salary comparisons!
I’m off to Europe on 2 September for 5 weeks. It’s a busy schedule, a mixture of business and leisure (London, Provence, Tuscany, Bristol, Giggleswick, London), but if anyone wants to catch up in London, let me know. At 41p to the NZ$, I might let the moths out of my wallet.
I hate procrastination. The name of this weblog is taken from my hero Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s personal motto “En Avant“. For him and me, it means “Get going!“ Despite that, I chuckled when I heard comedian Michele A’Court chatting on the radio yesterday, suggesting that when people procrastinate, doing anything other than the task they are avoiding, sometimes good things happen, new ideas invented, and so on. Even if I disagreed with her tongue-in-cheek theme, I liked her closing quip:
“Procrastination. Put it on your To-do List. Just not right now”.
No, I’m not writing about interpersonal bad manners. Pew Research has published the results of a US survey which looked at what proportion of income earners were taking naps during the day (amongst other questions):
Income < US$30k 42%
Income US$30k-50k 35%
Income US$50k-75k 31%
Income US$75k-100k 21%
Income > US$100k 33%
So apparently low-earning Americans nap more, but nap less and less as they move up the ladder, until they reach the top where they start napping again. Unsurprisingly, this news has encouraged someone to write a guide to power-napping.
I know that my male readers look to me for sartorial advice (well, maybe not). Those preferring a conservative look will feel vindicated that the white shirt is back. The BBC reports that City of London shirtmaker Charles Tyrwhitt has sold 50% more white shirts this year. Tyrwhitt founder Nick Wheeler has an explanation. “A white shirt looks great but it is safe,” he says. “Bolder shirts don’t always fit in with the mood of the moment.”
Charles Tyrwhitt offers ten things you really should know about white shirts:
A sobering but thought-provoking fact
Proving its resilience and classic trustworthiness, the white shirt is once again at the front of city boys’ wardrobes in these credit crunching times. Gordon Gekko-style ostentatiousness, loud colours and eye-catching ties are out and a new sober seriousness in - and nothing says ‘lets get down to business’ like the rolled-up sleeves of a white shirt. “No one wants to look like a wide boy,” an Ernst & Young consultant was recently quoted saying.
A kinda spooky but true fact
The oldest white shirt in history - dating back to 3000BC - was discovered in a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb at Tarken by archaeologist and general brainy bod Flinders Petrie. Apparently it was quite a fancy linen number with pleated sleeves and a fringed neck. God knows what state it was in. Hope they kept the receipt.
A gory but kinda cool fact
There are more blood-stained white shirts soaking up screen time in the 1992 Tarantino classic Reservoir Dogs than any other Hollywood movie. Sit down in front of the DVD with a stopwatch if you don’t believe us. What would Quentin, Scorsese, Lumet et al have done without a nice clean white shirt to suddenly, shockingly turn crimson, eh?
A slightly naggy but need-to-know fact
You must take care of your shirt like it were a newborn babe. White shirts should always be just that. White. Pristine white. Ideally white shirts should be dry cleaned for you to pick up freshly laundered, pressed and ready to go. But if you must wash in the machine never mix with grey socks and always use whitener, naturally. And collars should never be dog-eared or wilting. If a white shirt looks tired and washed out it’s ready for the local Oxfam.
An obvious but needs-to-be-repeated fact
We’ve said it before, but it must be said again, there’s no more iconic white shirt-wearer in the world today than US president Barack Obama. He rocks a pristine crisp white shirt like nobody else on the planet right now.
A socially relevant but nonetheless interesting fact
The whole social concept of ‘white collar’ - as in ‘white collar jobs’ and ‘white collar crime’ - was coined by Pulitzer Prize winner and lifelong socialist Upton Sinclair in America in the 1930s. It comes from the days when all management and administrative staff would wear white shirts while manual workers would wear blue and foremen brown. It kind of stuck.
A perennially fashionable but practical fact
You just can’t go wrong with investing in some decent, high quality white shirts. For any occasion, it’s the perfect neutral base garment that can be dressed up or down and worked to maximum effect in stark contrast to dark ties and jackets. (Only the most fashion forward and daring should consider wearing it with a white tie.) And it always looks cool on its own too.
A punky but always classy fact
Despite its associations with the corporate world, the white shirt is so versatile that it’s just at home hanging down the trendiest east London rock dive as it is on the top floor of a multinational bank. Punk goddess Patti Smith iconised the white shirt as a statement of androgynous individualism on her classic Horses album sleeve - shot by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe - in the 70s and to this day, worn with the right amount of youthful insolence, it’s still the epitome of cool.
A seemingly random but historically significant fact
There’s only one White Shirt Day in the world - and that’s in Flint, Michigan USA every 11th February. Why? It commemorates the day in 1937 General Motors manual workers won their sit down strike. Now every year on that day workers all wear white shirts as a reminder of their equal rights with management.
An unlikely but pleasingly jangling guitar fact
The only song to ever pay exact titular homage to the enduring fashion classic is White Shirt on 90s indie darlings The Charlatans’ debut album. “When my white shirt lets me down, like one we race against the wind.” Apparently.
Stockbrokers never seem to get any positive press. They make more money the faster they can persuade you to churn your portfolio, and they rapidly tap-dance around the issue when you question the performance of stocks you’ve bought on their recommendation. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a Wellington stockbroker has applied these abilities to become the 
