Kagan on The Latest Czar

Robert Kagan, author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams - an excellent book - on the ambitions of Mr. Putin:

... This war did not begin because of a miscalculation by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. It is a war that Moscow has been attempting to provoke for some time. The man who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" has reestablished a virtual czarist rule in Russia and is trying to restore the country to its once-dominant role in Eurasia and the world. Armed with wealth from oil and gas; holding a near-monopoly over the energy supply to Europe; with a million soldiers, thousands of nuclear warheads and the world's third-largest military budget, Vladimir Putin believes that now is the time to make his move.

Networking's Benefits

Business Week's Karen E. Klein interviews San Diego State University marketing professor William Baker on the benefits of networking.

One that might be surprising: A tendency to produce new products.

The Jaguar Look: An Endangered Species?

Donald at 2Blowhards spots the similarity between the new Jaguar and the Lexus and then takes us down Memory Lane to a time when Jaguars had a distinctive look.

What sort of Communists slipped into their design department? Do any of them think that someone is going to look at the new version and shout, "I want one of those?"

Sad.

Low Mileage and Real Cost

Consumer Reports looks at low-mileage cars and concludes that hybrid isn't always best.

Blogs You Should Visit: Eclecticity

I've been a fan of Eclecticity since first encountering it way back in the mists of my early blogdom.

Aside from featuring comments on unusual topics and sites, its fun-loving and irreverent author provides some of the best music links around (such as this one).

Check it out.

The Importance of Theme

Winston Churchill once sent back a pudding, saying that it had no theme.

The importance of theme should not be dismissed. What is the theme of your presentation? Your report? Your marketing pitch? Your meeting? What central idea do you hope to convey? What goal do you hope to achieve?

Finding a central theme and then attaching the ancillary branches to the trunk forces us to consider what we are truly about. Without a theme, we can appear to be disorganized or opportunistic.

[Old joke: If you ask mathematician "What is 2 + 2?" the response will be 4 whereas an attorney will shut the office door, lower the blinds, turn up the radio, and ask, "What do you want it to be?"]

Sometimes, we are fortunate enough to have a theme to a day, a morning or an afternoon. We are usually restricted to finding themes in a specific project. That can be both tough and fun, but it is crucial if we are to make ourselves clear.

The Battle of the Shape-Shifters

We fight a daily battle between gaining the added perspective of multiple sources of information and being distracted by those same sources from the focus needed to address our priorities.

This is the war between two or more Goods. It is a challenge because these Goods resemble creatures from science fiction or fantasy novels: shape-shifters. The Good that was indeed worthy two hours ago has now turned into a Bad; a destructive, time-destroying creature.

To counter this we have to get beyond regarding items as either/or nor can we label tasks as always Good or Bad.

We instead need to engage in frequent reassessments of their status. What is most important now? Which Good has become a Bad? Which Bad has reverted to Good status?

Some guidelines:

Any Good taken to an extreme becomes a Bad.

Some Bads never become Goods.

Good intentions do not equal a Good.

Two Countries?

Terry Teachout analyzes new twists in identity politics. An excerpt:

A week after Brooks’s latest exercise in cultural demography appeared in the Times, Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing published The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.3 In this book, an expansion of Bishop’s American-Statesman articles, the two authors offer exhaustive documentation of their original thesis that Americans “have clustered in communities of sameness . . . whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.”

The “communities of sameness” explored by Bishop and Cushing range from the very liberal neighborhoods of South Austin, Texas, to the very Republican county of Okanogan, Washington. In recent years, these communities have grown far more sharply defined in their political and cultural identities—partly because living in a homogeneous community reinforces one’s existing attitudes, partly because such communities tend to attract like-minded emigrants.

Quote of the Day

May I submit Utopian Turtletop? Do not trouble to answer unless you like it.

- Poet Marianne Moore, submitting a name for the new Ford car that became the Edsel.

Definition of a Best Seller

But although the $3 price of Gone with the Wind ($43.50 in today's dollars) was steep by Depression standards, it sold 178,000 copies in three weeks and a million by April 1938, when it ended a twenty-one-month run on the best seller list. By now nearly 30 million have been sold. About 250,000 are still purchased in America every year, and 100,000 elsewhere.

- From George F. Will's column, "The Emblematic Novel of the 1930s (No. It Is Not About the Joads.")