“Football’s a good enough sport, but can you die playing it?” More than a decade ago, while flipping channels, I was first exposed to Northern Exposure. Maggie asked Joel to have dinner with her football-loving father under the pretense Joel was her extreme sports-loving boyfriend. (Not sure I got the above quote right, and google …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Worst We Can Do is Go Bankrupt in the Morning.
I’ve mentioned this before in Job Security is the Ability to Get a Job, there’s a line in the Princess Bride that I think accurately describes the modern day employer-employee relationship: “Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” – Dread Pirate Roberts Today, Seth Godin said the …
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The Attention Pyramid
Fix the Employee Cafeteria and You’ll Fix the Customer Relationship
Rob over at Business Pundit posts on How Broken Windows Can Kill a Business. As always, insightful. I’m a big fan of fixing the small things. Not only does it make a change easier to implement, all big things are made of small things, so the big things start to take care of themselves. The …
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Podcasting Rewards Good Conversation, Not Celebrity
Greg Lindsay over at Business 2.0 linked to the Working Pathways’ economics of podcasting post in his Podcasting’s Nonstar System article. “An unknown number of those Apple-made microstars will convince themselves that they hold a first-mover advantage in an untapped medium…Eventually they’ll fail, and they’ll fail faster than ever before…For the first time in the …
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What I Read in the Sunday Paper
Jen and I have subscribed to a Sunday paper as long as I can remember. In Chicago, it was the Chicago Tribune, here in Minnesota on the west side of Highway 280, it’s the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Leisurely reading the paper over doughnuts and coffee is a tradition I’m quite fond of. In an effort …
First Crack 54. On the Set of A Prairie Home Companion Filming
This summer, student filmmaker and long-time friend, Jon Steinhorst worked on the set of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion movie in St. Paul. I sat down with him the day filming ended to talk about how he got the job, what he did, and what he learned about filmmaking, directing, and fans. You may …
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The Power of Podcasting 2: Feeling Bad for the Dead Guy
Dan Klass shares some fantastic stories on his podcast the Bitterest Pill. My all time favorite is #41 So, You Don’t Even Live Around Here. If you’ve listened to #39 CSI:Naked Man Body or #38 CSI:Private School or checked out the little cartoon image of him. You know he’s not as svelt as he once …
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The New Phonebooks are Here, Please Recycle
Growing up, I always looked forward to the new phonebooks. Visiting my grandparents, I spent hours exploring the big city via their encyclopedic yellow pages. Steve Martin’s classic Jerk only amplified my enthusiasm and provided a chorus. “The new phonebooks are here! The new phonebooks are here!” Today, unexpected as always, a new phone book …
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A Case for Attention.xml
A couple months back, I was shopping for a new car, Jen and I spent hours combing automakers websites looking at their models, the model’s specs, comparing it against the car we wanted to buy. Ford knows I went to their site. Honda knows I went to their site. Both know which models I looked …