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Omigosh, IHOP so totally doesn’t get it

An International House of Pancakes recently opened in Harvard Square.

Harvard Square is in the midst of Harvard University, and is populated mainly by college students. It was once a really hip, cool shopping area, and is now occupied almost entirely by banks and huge ATM bays. Who hangs out in Harvard Square? Teenagers, college students, and grad students.

IHOP recently opened a restaurant in Harvard Square. It’s right across the street from the Kennedy School of Government, chock full of grad students. But for some reason, IHOP business may not be too good. So their windows have huge signs advertising their specials: SENIOR SPECIAL, 50% OFF! and KIDS EAT FREE TUESDAYS.

Wow. Omigosh, wow. They’ve located their restaurant in the heart of a neighborhood whose occupants are between the ages of 18 and 25, largely unmarried, and virtually without kids. Are they really so clueless that they think a SENIORS SPECIAL and KIDS EAT FREE will increase their business? Or maybe they’re niche marketing to the six families in the area who have senior citizens or young children.

We’re taking a trendy, hip, cool shopping area and turning it into a wasteland of financial institutions and IHOP. This is progress?

What is personal integrity?

 A friend asked:  What is personal integrity? Does a person have personal
integrity when their personality is integrated, or what?

Interesting question. One meaning is that you act congruently with our values, tell the truth as you see it, etc. This is “integrity” n the sense of having societally-accepted good values like telling the truth and keeping your word.

For the structural meaning of integrity–that bridge has structural integrity–it means all parts of a system are aligned in support of  the system’s function. In a human, it would correspond to having minimal conflicts, clear values, acting in accordance with those values, and acting consistently enough over time that you actually anage to produce the results you want in your life.

That’s my interpretation, at any rate.

Questions for reflection:

  • Do you have personal integrity in the honesty sense?
  • Does your business?
  • Does your life have personal integrity in the structural sense?
  • Does your business?

Be afraid, particularly of batteries

Have you seen this story? Our Boston leadership (and I use the term loosely) is once again promoting terror, fear, and ineptitude, in one happy package. An MIT student had a “bomb hoax” on her shirt.

“Hoax” implies she was trying to pull one over on the police. No, she had a piece of wearable electronics that (a) looks NOTHING like a bomb–it looks like two batteries and a breadboard, and (b) had no intent to blow up or deceive anyone.

They’re almost proud as they discuss how, thanks to her cooperation, they didn’t shoot her dead on the spot.

So what’s the point of this story? My takeaway is that their security people are scared by a battery and a piece of wire that doesn’t even remotely resemble a bomb. That doesn’t fill me with confidence. Yet they seem to want to tell us that they somehow saved us from some would-be evildoer.

Is this the world we’ve created? Where inadequately trained security people can’t tell the difference between AA batteries and a bomb, and we’re proud of our restraint in not killing a science student in our overreactive frenzy? Absurd!

Fewer finance jocks are attending business school. GOOD!

An article in the New York Times says that fewer finance jocks are attending business school. All I can say is: Good! In fact, it’s good for everyone.

The Wall Street jockies whose only real interest is in making a buck can go make their money unimpeded by anything like the knowledge of what a company actually is, other than its financial characteristics.

And the business schools. Ah, the business schools. Currently, they churn out mainly investment bankers, private equity managers, and hedge-fund managers. Maybe at lost last, those doobies will bypass the MBA campuses and let the business schools return to teaching people who want to run companies how to do it.

I’ve long lamented that many business schools have remarkably few students who are actually interested in running businesses. Most are just interested in making a quick buck. In fact, it’s sort of a common joke that whatever career the MBAs are most pursuing today is probably headed for a big crash in the near future. My biggest fear about the hedge-fund trend is that like the junk-bond trend of the 80s/early 90s, the internet bubble of the late 90s, and the real estate bubble of the early 2000s, hedge funds just might turn out to be a bubble too. If so, when it pops, all those “geeks just wanna have funds” guys who don’t really care about much except enriching themselves will tumble right back into MBA programs, thus sucking up the time, resources, and curriculum once again from programs that would otherwise serve us by teaching people who actually care about business.

Yow! Am I cynical, yet? It’s tough being an American who actually cares about business as a driver of a safe, sane, sustainable world, rather than viewing it simply as a tool for a few white guys at the top to get obscenely wealthy.

Remembering everyone else who died on 9/11/2001

Today is September 11, 2007. There are plenty of people out today, celebrating the firefighters, rescure workers, and World Trade Center denizens who lost their life in the terrorist attack of 9/11. My friend from business school, Andy Kates, was one of those.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was a shocking event, made all the more shocking by the incredible visuals repeated over and over for days in all forms of media. The people killed in the attacks are worthy of our remembrance, as are any and all people who die.

So today, let’s remember some others who died on September 11, 2001. These folks died with little fanfare, and we didn’t start wars to avenge them, and we’re not even noticing their deaths. Yet they deserve as much of our remembrance and respect as we have to give.

Let’s remember the tens of thousands of people who died from simple old age on September 11, 2001, after being parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors to those in their lives. Or those who died from cigarette-related causes (1,205 in America) or died in automobile accidents (134). and cancer (1,500). Still others worldwide died as victims of genocide, children died from malnutrition and dehydration, families were killed in wars, and some folks died from plain old accidents.

Many, many people died on September 11th. Let’s honor all of them, and remember that we’re all in this Human Race together, and we can share our sympathies, efforts, and remembrance with everyone.