How to survive in business

The following are my rules for surviving in business. (Note that I did not say “succeeding,” which is an entirely different matter.) These rules may work more broadly, but by “business” I mean primarily large business, which is a particular species of employment, to which I’ve been subjected for 27 of the last 33 years.

I stole at least two of these from someplace long forgotten, and there isn’t much originality in the others either. This is certainly not a comprehensive list – just some things I’m fairly certain are true. I realize it’s kind of a pathetically short list after so many years in the workplace. Maybe you all have some suggestions for additions.

• If you wait to act until you are sure there is a problem, it is probably too late to do anything about it.


• High margin businesses are great, but they will hide a plethora of problems, give cover to a lot of specious expenses, and make mediocre managers look good.


• Most people’s biggest liability is their greatest strength taken too far.


• All things worth doing are not worth doing well. It’s better to act than to study. It is better to try five things quickly, even if it means making four mistakes, than to do one thing carefully. Three singles are better than one home run.


• Communication is everything. It is the mortar that holds the organization together.


• The hardest skill position to fill in any business is a good salesman.


• Enthusiasm is the most valuable quality to bring to the workplace.


• People work for many reasons. Money is only one of them, and it is rarely the number one reason.


• You manage things. You lead people.


• No one can do it alone. Success requires that everyone be a contributor. The most important thing you can do is hire the right people.


• Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Executing well is the key to success. (Inspiration without execution is hallucination.)


• Find something you do well, and then do more of it; e.g., if you are a good writer, find work where good writing is valued.


• It’s easier to apologize than to ask permission.


• Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience.


• Don't be irreplaceable - if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.


• In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rental car.


• Never trust the bosses; this does not mean they are all evil – but that’s the way to bet.

Three things I like

I recommend “Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival,” by Norman Ollestad. It was a father’s day gift from my son, which coincidentally turned out to be a fascinating look at four generations of fathers and sons from one family, although the book is primarily about the author and his father, also named Norman.

Norman the elder was an extreme sports guy before the term existed. For Norman the younger’s first birthday in 1969, big Norm strapped the kid onto his back and took him out surfing off the Malibu beach where they lived.

The focal point of the story was a February 1979 airplane ride over the San Gabriel Mountains that went badly. The pilot, Big Norm, and his girlfriend were killed. Little Norm, then aged 11, had to hike down from over 8000 feet, in the dead of winter, to survive. It is an amazing tale, very well told, although I agree with the Times review, which found the cross-cutting format a bit annoying. Never-the-less, the cross-cutting to some of father and son’s adventures before the crash, especially their trip to Mexico, were almost as thrilling as the crash. This is a terrific, and very fast, read.

As popular as the blues are, it is difficult to hear new blues music. You won’t see the latest blues stars hosting SNL, or playing on the Plaza for the Today Show. So I was really happy to discover Murphy’s Saloon, a podcast available both online and via i-Tunes.

The host is Murphy. I don’t know much about him except that he is Chicago-based, and kind of a goofily, earnest, blues-nerd, who gets all the releases from labels like Alligator and Blind Pig early, and pulls together great cuts for the show. He intersperses them with artist info, a lame-joke-of-the-week, and shout-outs to fans around the globe. Any more talking would be too much, but Murphy grows on you and there is nothing at all wrong with his taste in music.

Finally, I really like David Brooks. He is smart, funny, well-informed, and opinionated without being partisan. These are all the things I wanted to be when I was writing about politics, but reading Brooks twice a week guaranteed me two days of feeling inadequate out of every seven.
Read what he had to say today about leaving health care reform to the Senate. I guarantee you that you will feel smarter after reading it, which is how I almost always feel after reading anything by him.

The earth is bipolar

I stole the headline from a Steven Wright performance we saw last weekend. He must have done 250 one-liners in 90 minutes. Another good one: “I blame the ending of the cold war for global warming.”

It is a polar world: black/white, ying/yang, Beatles/Stones, Warren/Niles, Pepsi/Coke. Choices have to be made, and I’m finding that this is also true with writing. For the past 18 months the Daily Blank has focused primarily on politics. That was easy during the elections because we had the horse race and the personalities, on top of policy and performance, to discuss.

But now that we’re deep into fixing the world, I find that my heart really isn’t in it so much anymore. I still read the papers every day, but writing about it is depressing. Pretty much everyone is either a crook, an influence peddler, a political pimp, or a thief. And they are all liars. Every story is, at its heart, the story of how people with money and power use it to accumulate more money and power, at the expense of the weak and stupid. Writing about it just brings out my inner grumpy old man – and frankly, I don’t need any encouragement in that department.

I want to keep writing, but I want to write about other things. The question is, “what?” They always say, “write about what you know about” but who’d want to read about putting together a sales presentation and pricing model. I think I’d bore myself to death before I proof-read it. I was considering writing a post called “Eight great places to get a martini in Manhattan,” and I still may write that one. I think the drinks would be tax-deductible.

My stated reason for starting this blog in the first place was that, “I have more opinions than opportunities to express them,” and the nice thing about politics is you can state your opinions and, especially in an election year, receive plenty of feedback. But a steady flow of personal opinions on movies, books, or anything else, begins to sound like a lot of self-indulgent horse hockey pretty quickly to me, and my own wouldn’t be any exception to that rule.

I need to think about this for a while, so this will be my last post until I come up with a new plan. Feel free to respond with suggestions, as I value your opinions. This is the 220th post on the Daily Blank. Thanks to all of you for showing up and contributing to the conversation.

Hasta luego amigos.

RIP Koko Taylor

Tell automatic Slim

To tell razor toting Jim

To tell butcher knife toting Annie

To tell fast-talking Fanny

We're gonna pitch a ball

Down to the union hall

We're gonna romp and stomp till midnight

We're gonna fuss and fight till daylight

We're gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long

All night long

All night long

All night long

All night long

We're gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long

Hear a little here.

Fear & Loathing in Mississippi (part 6)

Sunday

My first terrifying thought is that it is Sunday morning in Mississippi, and we have failed to plan appropriately. There is one more day of blues, the Crown is gone and the liquor stores are closed. Beer is plentiful, but at this point in the journey it might as well be hops-flavored Kool-Aid.

Technically the festival is over, but we’ll still have a full day of music. We start with the blues brunch at Ground Zero, Morgan Freeman’s club (above). It’s the nicest joint in town. They have several comfortable, well-used, mismatched couches on the broad front porch, facing the train station, where we sit in the morning sun waiting for the doors to open.

We’re among the first to be seated as the Reverend KM Williams, a Texas hills country bluesman sets up. The Reverend is dressed in a very sharp black suit, white shirt, black tie, black hat with a white band, and black and white wing tips. He tunes his mirror-finish, stainless steel guitar and wears a harmonica rack around his neck. An amplified porch board rests at his feet for rhythm. His drummer is a white man named Washboard Jackson. “Wash” wears a sleeveless white dress shirt, a skinny black tie, and cut off dress pants. He has little metal pieces taped to his fingers with which he plays his drum kit and cymbals – he does not use sticks or brushes. They are one of the best acts we hear all weekend. Turns out the Rev spent 17 years working at the Twinsburg Chrysler plant outside Cleveland before taking a package and returning to the south to play his music and preach.

We take McRik to the Greyhound Station after the show. He has to return to Hong Kong – something about his collateralize rice futures swaps being upside down. I don’t understand, but we convinced him last night to ride the dog back to the Memphis airport so we could keep the Imperial for the remainder of our trip. He tells us that if he can unload his rice swaps on the Saudis we can keep the car for good. Sweet.

Buzzard and I slide over to Cathead Records for the afternoon mini blues fest. Cathead is a very funky retailer of blues music, memorabilia, Mississippi folk art, and is a general cultural clearing house for Clarksdale and environs. It was started by an ad guy from St. Louis and his wife who visited Clarksdale ten years ago and decided to move there. The wife is gone but Cathead endures.

There’s a couple hundred people hanging around under the marquee that extends from the storefront into the street. At this point in the weekend we recognize half the crowd. The other half move away as we move in. Big Red has his double smoker out front firing ribs. We ask Red, and everyone else we talk to, if they know where we can get some corn liquor, but we have no luck. There are several interesting looking women walking around taking pictures and shooting video.

It’s another great show. Bilbo Walker, a Chuck Berry look-alike, duck walks through his set. Honeyboy Edwards plays. I have no idea how old he is but he learned to play guitar from Robert Johnson, and his skin looks like black parchment.

The best set is Big George Brock. Red hat and a suit of vertical, shiny and matt-finish, red stripes, finished off with red shoes and red silk stocking. He blows the horn with the energy of a man half his age, and his voice has the soul of someone older than God himself. His sideman on guitar is Lightnin’ Malcolm, and Big George’s much younger wife contributes some powerful vocals. Add the bass and drums and this is the biggest band we’ve heard since Jack Johnson Friday night, and they rocked.

All these people and yet no one could tell us where to find some corn.

It was a full afternoon of blues and we are hungry, so we fuel up at the no name Mexican restaurant where our waiter, fresh from Jalisco, tells us how much he loves the blues – especially Los Lonely Boys.

Sunday night and the only game in town is Red’s, where it is open mike night. The joint is mobbed. I can’t deal with the congestion but Buzzard plows in while I join the scene out front, which is plenty active and offers lots of amusing drunks even at this early hour, including our friend Ho-Fo-Sho.

I strike up a conversation with Jackie and her pals, a group of locals who are content to party in the warm spring evening out on Sunflower Avenue. Jackie tells me how she hopes to join her daughter in Atlanta soon, as there is just no work in Clarksdale. She’s drinking something from a clear plastic Coke bottle that is clearly not Atlanta’s home town brew. I inquire, and am delighted to discover, it is the longed for corn liquor. Jackie offers me a pull, but warns me that she has “sweetened” it. “With what?” I ask. “Gin” she replies. Wow. Well, nothing ventured…so I take a pull and am pleasantly surprised at how smooth it is.

Turns out she got it from Dale, the 300 pound drummer from Jack Johnson’s band, for whom I had bought a beer on Friday night. Amazingly, he remembers, and promptly fetches me my own 12 ounce “Coke” from the back of his Ram van, which he has driven down from his home in Scranton, PA. He comes to Clarksdale about once a month to gig with Jack, and always brings some his finest, which he distills in his basement.

Unfortunately his gift comes unsweetened and goes down like turpentine laced with ground glass. It does, however, do the job. The key is to take a pull from your beer both before and after the corn.

I meet a man who offers to wash my car for $5. He tells me how he can’t work since his wife stabbed him in the back with a fillet knife. He lifts his shirt to show me a 15 inch scar, which runs mysteriously from his left nipple horizontally down to, and beneath, his beltline. I tell him I don’t have a car but give him the five.

Buzzard returns, drags me inside, and plops me onto a barstool he has saved for my lazy carcass. The music is good, but I’d have preferred the pros. Harmonica Bean MCs and does yeoman’s work managing all the wannabees, and keep the band, more-or-less, on some kind of track, all the while performing crowd control, as the human mass is constantly spilling onto the stage – which is an imaginary line to begin with.

Bean turns away head-butt boy, who wants to play his harp tonight, but inevitably the music deteriorates anyway as the night progresses. It’s OK – we need to be eased down a little somehow if we are ever to return to polite society. We decide to try Anniebelle’s but we are too late. And just like that, it is over.

Buzzard and I head over to the train station, find a comfortable bench, and light cigars. He a Rocky Patel maduro, and me a Montechristo white label. We replay the weekend and make plans for the rest of the trip. There is more of Mississippi to see – Holly Springs, Oxford, Natchez, Biloxi – and then on to New Orleans. But that is another story.

For now we are content. We have been purified in corn and Crown. We have accepted the sacrament of pork. We have transversed the Crossroads from four directions and kept our souls. We have harvested our ids from the Delta loam and African rhythms. We are blues infused.

Fear & Loathing in Mississippi (part 5)

Late Saturday night

On to Tricia’s Italian Restaurant, the name being more of a goal than a reality. At the moment it’s a gutted storefront with bright overhead lighting, a few card tables, and some folding chairs. Tricia is selling home made pies up front and hoping to get the full restaurant open soon.

Somehow it’s the perfect venue to hear L.C. Ulmer, who is nearly 80, and gets more sound out of a guitar than most trios. He is fast and wild. We can’t tell if the music is from the earliest days of the Delta, or avant guard and innovative -- we’re lost in an acoustic tornado. I love it. We share a piece of “jess pie” on the way out. McRik says his first wife made jess pie. Buzzard said his second wife made hash brownies until the sheriff raided his apartment in Pittsburgh.

The momentum of the Crown-soaked evening and the Devil’s music inevitably drives us back across the Sunflower River to the black side of town. We are in no mood to be around the suburbanites at this point, and most of them stay on the white side of the river, especially at night. We hit Messenger’s Pool Hall and catch a little of Big T. and the Family, then RL Boyce at the Club 2000, where I am transfixed by a dancing woman I think is about 30, but could be 50. Her 90 pound body and complete lack of teeth make it hard to tell, but she is a perpetual motion machine. She wears out one partner after another. I am tempted, but I think she might be a friend of the Devil, and I am too afraid of her to get that close.

It’s getting late. There’s just one place left to go -- back to Annie Bell’s, where Junebug Jefferson plays a unique style of blues suited perfectly for this crowd; kind of Muddy Waters meets James Brown. I cant explain it, but I can dance to it. Some of our new friends from last night are there. Again, we are the only whities in the joint. It’s fun, festive, and friendly; like a good wedding reception between two families that don’t really know each other, but aren’t going to let that get in the way of a good time.

And to make a good wedding reception, the food has to be right. Tacked on to the side of Annie Bell’s is a small room big enough for a grill, a counter and maybe three customers. A hand-painted sign out front identifies it as “WOP’s” – home of the WOP burger. (above on left end)Open from 5 pm to 5 am. daily. We get three and take them across the highway. We stand next to the Imperial, using the hood for a table. The WOP most closely mimics a Big Mac, but the meat is broiled, the bread is fresher, and WOP’s secret super soul sauce is unique.

This may be the most delicious thing I ever ate. We are tired, drunk, excited, hungry. The night is perfect, warm, breezy, clear, fragrant. The setting is lean, stripped of all hype, a parking lot, a highway, a car, some pals. We eat in silence for a while, savoring the best meal of the trip. And then we see her. She isn’t exactly dancing, but it is more than a walk. Her gaunt body and toothless, sunken mouth are unmistakable from a 100 yards. It is the Devil’s mistress from Club 2000 -- and she is headed our way.

She dips and sways in time to some unheard rhythm. Is it emotional expressionism, or just corn liquor messing with her nervous system? We stand and stare. I can’t resume chewing until she passes us by, 10 feet away without so much as looking up, down State Street toward the crossroads. Relief rolls over me. Are we lucky, or do you have to engage the Devil and suggest a wager before he speaks to you?

Fear & Loathing in Mississippi (part 4)

Saturday night

Saturday night requires more planning, and the first priority is upgrading the liquor. “I can’t drink anymore of this shit,” Buzzard declares as I pass the Kentucky Tavern. If McRik’s feelings are hurt he hides it well.

A mess of ribs are cooking in the Uptown parking lot. Buzzard tosses half of the last bottle of KT into the fire, which nearly immolates a Chicago biker dude who’s staying next to us in the motel. (The Uptown doesn’t really attract the Dockers crowd.) Biker dude laughs and says, “dump the rest in the sauce, man.” Buzzard complies. Instant Ribs Sunoco.

We replace the KT with a quart of Crown Royal. It’s Saturday night after all. You need the right beverage and you gotta dress sharp. I go with my magic shirt -- a gift from Buzzard that he picked up at the Super Soul Shop last year. It’s royal blue with gold sparkly appliqués representing a Crown Royal logo, some brass knuckles, a Cadillac logo, a Hummer grill and a few other lifestyle-appropriate images, and my new lid. I look superfly.

Buzz and McRik elect to dress like two guys hanging out at the sports book at Caesars Palace, but hey – I don’t judge.

We also need an itinerary. During the day it’s easy to just wander around outside from act to act, but tonight there are indoor venues – mostly juke joints – where the headliners will perform at set times, and we had people we definitely wanted to see. Fortunately Buzzard has been to the fest a couple times before and knows his way around.

We make a plan and set off for Hopson’s Plantation where Muddy Waters drove a tractor until he split for Chicago. They have three music rooms and we head in to hear Terry “Harmonica” Bean. He plays a great set in which he gives little 30 second blues history lessons between songs, and plays the same harmonica riffs the way James Cotton, Little Walter and then Sonny Boy Williamson would have done. Terry has mucho charisma.

Next comes Cedric Burnsides, grandson of R.L., playing drums, with Lightnin’ Malcolm on guitar. Cedric looks like Dwight Howard, only blacker. He’s wearing a white wife-beater and punishing the toms with a furry. Malcolm, a big white, farm boy is more Hendricks than Hooker. This is the younger generation of bluesmen and they are whipping the crowd into a frenzy. It’s Malcolm’s little sister’s birthday. She jumps up on stage and dances like no one is watching. Nobody is having more fun than her.

We go back into town to My Brother’s Sport’s Bar to hear 84-year-old T. Model Ford (above). T. did time at Parchman for murder as a younger man, and was a big player in the resurgence of blues the past ten years. He can still bring it, although he let’s his partner “Stud” control most of the set.

We keep moving. The Crown goes down easier than the KT would have if we’d mixed it with Bosco. We are vibrating to the beat, in synch with the crowd. It’s a happening. We’re like lemmings at a party, but with no cliff in sight. I contemplate why I love this music so. I read once that the foundation of the blues are rhythms that come from a specific West African tribe with no tradition of signing; they instead used drumming to express emotions. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure makes sense. You can’t listen to the blues and not move it.

The blues also make you feel good because no matter how bad things are for you, you probably have it better than whoever is signing. He ether just shot his old lady, got shot by his old lady, had his boss cheat him out of his money, caught his old lady cheating on him with his best friend, is running from the police, hiding from his landlady, drinking too much to ease his pain, or gambling to win money to feed his babies.

On the other hand, he is almost certainly getting laid more than you, so there is a chance you might learn something useful. In the end, it’s just as John Lee Hooker said: “I got it in me and I gots to get it out!” But it's only midnight.