From T+L:
To qualify, the locality must have a population of less than 2,000 (“off the map,” it obviously can’t have a tourist office), and the bistro must be the village’s sole business, or at least just one of a few (the others can be butcher’s shops or boulangeries but not bistros). Owners sign an annually renewable contract, agreeing to attend training classes and regular meetings at which experts deliver talks on olive oil, say, or how to cook wild field greens. According to the Bistrot de Pays charter, they also pledge to play ambassador by furnishing guides and brochures and being knowledgeable enough about points of interest in their area to answer tourists’ questions.
Members are asked to sell postcards, newspapers, and regional food products; hold periodic events like concerts and boules tournaments to bring villagers together; and use ingredients and serve dishes identified with the locale. If at lunch you eat a goat cheese made nearby and want to visit the producer, your waiter should know if this is possible and, if it is, how to arrange it. In the absence of a full or set menu at specific hours, a casse-croûte, or snack, of local foodstuffs like charcuterie is available throughout the day.
Ideally, the bistro should be open year-round and operate as a place where fresh bread is dropped off daily and sold. Beyond bringing the community a notch closer to self-sufficiency, the symbolism is powerful: a village that can offer its people bread controls its destiny. If the bistro has no grocery component, the deal is that residents can buy or borrow staples like flour and butter from the kitchen. This feature is particularly geared to elderly inhabitants who may be village-bound or have no way of getting to a supermarket.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Do CEOs matter
I concur with this Atlantic article that CEOs do not matter much and when they matter they destroy value more than create it. Moreover, the business press adulations of CEOs is much too short sighted. A CEO who turns around a company in 4-or-5 years has proven nothing much more than the fact that he is a turn around artist, not a leader who can guide the company through good and bad times. The tenure of a CEO matters before he is given all kinds of accolades. The yardstick to be used is a CEO who can successfully guide a company through at least 2 business cycles which means a tenure of at least 15-20 years. By this measure, neither Lee Iacoca, Jack Welch nor Lou Gerstner meet this criteria.
James March, a management professor at Stanford, goes so far as to say that in any well-run company that’s conscientious about grooming its managers, candidates for the top job are so similar in their education, skills, and psychology as to be virtually interchangeable. All that matters is that someone be in charge. “Management may be extremely difficult and important even though managers are indistinguishable,” he writes. “It is hard to tell the difference between two different light bulbs also; but if you take all the light bulbs away, it is difficult to read in the dark.”
And from Jeff Immelt, current CEO of GE:
“Not only could anyone have run GE in the 1990s, [a] dog could have run GE. A German shepherd could have run GE.”
A more nuanced view is here which tends toward the argument that CEOs do not matter much but they do matter. Thus the fact the CEOs should be rewarded based on performance is very much in conflict with the evidence.
James March, a management professor at Stanford, goes so far as to say that in any well-run company that’s conscientious about grooming its managers, candidates for the top job are so similar in their education, skills, and psychology as to be virtually interchangeable. All that matters is that someone be in charge. “Management may be extremely difficult and important even though managers are indistinguishable,” he writes. “It is hard to tell the difference between two different light bulbs also; but if you take all the light bulbs away, it is difficult to read in the dark.”
And from Jeff Immelt, current CEO of GE:
“Not only could anyone have run GE in the 1990s, [a] dog could have run GE. A German shepherd could have run GE.”
A more nuanced view is here which tends toward the argument that CEOs do not matter much but they do matter. Thus the fact the CEOs should be rewarded based on performance is very much in conflict with the evidence.
What happens in a culinary tour
Tuesday morning finds us standing at attention in our embroidered aprons at the handsome kitchen of La Mirande, a luxurious hotel in the heart of Avignon. This is a master class with the husky, mustachioed Christian Étienne, one of Avignon's top chefs. Dessert today is a labor-intensive gratin of grapes and pine nuts in a sabayon sauce, and we set to work peeling and seeding 14 pounds of grapes. Have you ever tried to peel and seed even a single grape? We are galley slaves.
This is from A Cooking Tour In Provence by Linda Dannenberg on Carole Peck's Culinary Tour of Provence. Also,
But also more pleasant sounding:
Days pass in a mellow haze of sunshine and sated appetites. We drift down every morning for a breakfast of breads and croissants from the boulangerie, with jams, fruit salad, and fresh orange juice that sustain us until lunch. We have a cooking class with Jérôme Laurent, a fine local chef who owns Le Cilantro, one of the contemporary bistros in Arles; a wine tasting at Château Grand Callemand, a small, start-up winery rather far afield in the Luberon; and a casual cooking lesson with Carole as she prepares a succulent roast turkey leg stuffed with mustard and herbs for our brunch by the courtyard pool. One afternoon we visit La Bambouseraie, exotic bamboo gardens in Anduze, and later have a demonstration class and a marvelous meal a short drive away at the Michelin-starred Les Demeures du Ranquet, a dreamy country inn with aromatic herb gardens and lavender fields. We watch as the radiant blond chef-owner, Anne Majourel, who sports a cheeky white crew cap, prepares our basil-themed dinner: every course, including a dessert of roast figs with olive oil ice cream and strawberry-basil sauce, stars the iconic Mediterranean herb.
This is from A Cooking Tour In Provence by Linda Dannenberg on Carole Peck's Culinary Tour of Provence. Also,
We're dining at Chez Bob, a famously funky, beloved restaurant on the mosquito-infested plains. (Never go to the Camargue without slathering on mosquito repellent. The mosquitoes here are as vicious as piranhas.)
But also more pleasant sounding:
Days pass in a mellow haze of sunshine and sated appetites. We drift down every morning for a breakfast of breads and croissants from the boulangerie, with jams, fruit salad, and fresh orange juice that sustain us until lunch. We have a cooking class with Jérôme Laurent, a fine local chef who owns Le Cilantro, one of the contemporary bistros in Arles; a wine tasting at Château Grand Callemand, a small, start-up winery rather far afield in the Luberon; and a casual cooking lesson with Carole as she prepares a succulent roast turkey leg stuffed with mustard and herbs for our brunch by the courtyard pool. One afternoon we visit La Bambouseraie, exotic bamboo gardens in Anduze, and later have a demonstration class and a marvelous meal a short drive away at the Michelin-starred Les Demeures du Ranquet, a dreamy country inn with aromatic herb gardens and lavender fields. We watch as the radiant blond chef-owner, Anne Majourel, who sports a cheeky white crew cap, prepares our basil-themed dinner: every course, including a dessert of roast figs with olive oil ice cream and strawberry-basil sauce, stars the iconic Mediterranean herb.
Competition breeds trust
This is according to authors of the VoxEU article:
A simple barometer for the state of a culture that has been the focus of much of the new empirical work is the “trust” question – “Do you think that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” We investigate how answers to this question, asked for over thirty years in the US General Social Survey (GSS), vary with differences in competition across US states. Since many other things also vary across states, our strategy is to examine an episode where competition changed and track the ensuing changes in trust it caused. We examine the differential timing of financial deregulation across states between 1978 and 1993. As Black and Strahan (2002) argue, this deregulation intensified competition by making it easier for start-up firms to obtain credit. By looking at the number of start-ups and matching them to trust levels, we can see what effect increased competitive entry had on trust.
This seemed to be a strange way to establish causation yet by taking two independent measurements a causal link can be established.
Competition allows for more startups and hence more alternatives to a consumer. Consider the case of a widget maker trying to find a supplier for raw-widgets. Prior to competition he may have been beholden to maybe one or two suppliers. He may also feel that he could not trust them since they would have the power to raise prices.
With more competition he can breathe a little easier. Thus he can "trust" his supplier to be honest. Yet what kind of trust is this? Now suppliers feel that the widget maker can jerk them around by switching from one to another. For lack of any better term we can refer to this as "adversarial trust" similar to the oft-quoted "trust but verify".
Now consider again the case before competition where trust is established via a working relationship that perhaps even leads to the widget maker and suppliers opening up each others books to one another. Is this type of trust different from one derived from competition? This is the kind of trust that sounds similar to cooperation between Japanese manufacturers and their suppliers.
While the study may be able to show conclusively that "trust" can be achieved through competition it does not really get at the question that really matters:
In manufacturing, does it lead to more efficient producers?
In a country does it lead to higher productivity growth?
The kind of trust through competition may not lead to the promised land of economic growth.
A simple barometer for the state of a culture that has been the focus of much of the new empirical work is the “trust” question – “Do you think that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” We investigate how answers to this question, asked for over thirty years in the US General Social Survey (GSS), vary with differences in competition across US states. Since many other things also vary across states, our strategy is to examine an episode where competition changed and track the ensuing changes in trust it caused. We examine the differential timing of financial deregulation across states between 1978 and 1993. As Black and Strahan (2002) argue, this deregulation intensified competition by making it easier for start-up firms to obtain credit. By looking at the number of start-ups and matching them to trust levels, we can see what effect increased competitive entry had on trust.
This seemed to be a strange way to establish causation yet by taking two independent measurements a causal link can be established.
Competition allows for more startups and hence more alternatives to a consumer. Consider the case of a widget maker trying to find a supplier for raw-widgets. Prior to competition he may have been beholden to maybe one or two suppliers. He may also feel that he could not trust them since they would have the power to raise prices.
With more competition he can breathe a little easier. Thus he can "trust" his supplier to be honest. Yet what kind of trust is this? Now suppliers feel that the widget maker can jerk them around by switching from one to another. For lack of any better term we can refer to this as "adversarial trust" similar to the oft-quoted "trust but verify".
Now consider again the case before competition where trust is established via a working relationship that perhaps even leads to the widget maker and suppliers opening up each others books to one another. Is this type of trust different from one derived from competition? This is the kind of trust that sounds similar to cooperation between Japanese manufacturers and their suppliers.
While the study may be able to show conclusively that "trust" can be achieved through competition it does not really get at the question that really matters:
In manufacturing, does it lead to more efficient producers?
In a country does it lead to higher productivity growth?
The kind of trust through competition may not lead to the promised land of economic growth.
Mali
A fascinating article on music in Mali in CN Traveler.
To an out-sider, the social details appear fantastically arcane, and I tried to keep a running tally in my notes: "Blacksmiths (including ironworkers) can marry only potters, but have close relations with Fulani, who are cattle herders"; "weavers always married to dyers"; "leather makers entitled to repair calabashes"; "all Bozo are fishermen"; "griots were once hunters, though both hunters and griots now deny it." I kept this going for a week, then surrendered to befuddlement. ...
Though the country is officially Muslim, there is no prohibition against following other religions or practices. I had also begun to notice a vagueness bordering on the elusive whenever I asked Malians simple biographical questions about age or birthplace or their children's names. In a people so unfailingly polite and hospitable, it was a glaring anomaly. Little by little, I began to grasp that animism is less nostalgic folklore than a fully operational belief system that ascribes supernatural meaning to every aspect of daily life. Magical stories of river gods, supernatural visitations, and miraculous medicinal cures conjure a world of benevolent spirit allies. But in the shadows, and seemingly more potent, lurks the persistent threat of misfortune in the form of curses, spells, and sorcerer's vendettas. Sharing even minor personal details can give an enemy the necessary opening to put a curse on you. ...
To an out-sider, the social details appear fantastically arcane, and I tried to keep a running tally in my notes: "Blacksmiths (including ironworkers) can marry only potters, but have close relations with Fulani, who are cattle herders"; "weavers always married to dyers"; "leather makers entitled to repair calabashes"; "all Bozo are fishermen"; "griots were once hunters, though both hunters and griots now deny it." I kept this going for a week, then surrendered to befuddlement. ...
Though the country is officially Muslim, there is no prohibition against following other religions or practices. I had also begun to notice a vagueness bordering on the elusive whenever I asked Malians simple biographical questions about age or birthplace or their children's names. In a people so unfailingly polite and hospitable, it was a glaring anomaly. Little by little, I began to grasp that animism is less nostalgic folklore than a fully operational belief system that ascribes supernatural meaning to every aspect of daily life. Magical stories of river gods, supernatural visitations, and miraculous medicinal cures conjure a world of benevolent spirit allies. But in the shadows, and seemingly more potent, lurks the persistent threat of misfortune in the form of curses, spells, and sorcerer's vendettas. Sharing even minor personal details can give an enemy the necessary opening to put a curse on you. ...
On the way up, we'd been listening to his cassettes of Malian music, so I wanted to know how he reconciled his distaste for griots with a liking for their music. He picked out a handful of the cassettes and slammed them down on the armrest, one by one. "Pas griot!" "Pas griot!" "Pas griot!" He wasn't wrong. Not all of Mali's musicians were born to the griot caste. Both Salif Keïta and Ali Farka Touré came from higher classes and initially met with outrage when they became musicians. ... But griots are more than an alien underclass. They preside at weddings and child-naming ceremonies, have wealthy patrons whose praises they are enlisted to sing, are the keepers of cultural history, and even hold government positions. Somewhere between sorcerers and artists, liars and truth tellers, they're a social adhesive that seems designed not to stick. ...
One does not arrive in Timbuktu with great ceremony. The town's port is silted up and impassable, so we disembarked downriver and drove in on sand-strewn streets that declare the circling, encroaching presence of the Sahara. Now a World Heritage Site, modern Timbuktu is part museum, part atmospheric end-of-the-world euphoria. The restored mosques and madrassas recall Timbuktu's provenance as a sixteenth-century hub of Islamic scholarship. But Main Street hummed with glamorous young women dressed in brightly patterned boubous and Tuareg nomads swaddled in cerulean blue. And everywhere were intrepid-looking Europeans, besuited in safari jackets and explorer hats, loading up Land Rovers and SUVs with tents, mattresses, water coolers, and food supplies for the ride out to Essakane, where the Festival au Désert would shortly take place. ...
But hardship is part of the festival's legend. Now in its eighth year, it began as a cultural solution to the long-simmering feud between the Tuaregs, the Saharan nomads who have occupied the desert for two millennia, and the Malian government. A brewing civil war made the area a no-go throughout the early nineties, and despite a peace accord in 1996, travel advisories continue to discourage tourism. The festival has been vital in bringing foreigners back, with its irresistible invitation to three days of Saharan magic, world music, and cross-cultural community—the only place in the world where Robert Plant can share a bill with West African griots and Tuareg bluesmen. Last year's festival entered legend as the coronation of the Tuareg band Tinariwen, Mali's latest superstar export, whose impeccable rebel credentials start with their formation in a militia training camp in Libya. I'd seen them play in New York a few weeks earlier, and they didn't disappoint. Performing in a sepulchral half-light and dressed in Berber costume, they came across as a revolutionary combination of Ali Farka Touré and Jimi Hendrix. ...
I crawled out of my tent at dawn to behold a bizarre sight. A dozen of my campmates were up on the dunes, performing tai chi and sun salutations; the peddlers were at their side, trying to talk them into buying jeweled daggers and tribal headdresses.
Physical therapy
In an earlier post about my dislocated shoulder I had wondered about the efficacy of electrical stimulus therapy. Shifting to physical therapy, my thoughts are that the 15 minutes of time that was allotted was well worth it, if nothing else, it served as a enforcement device for making sure the patient completes their exercises.
PT also seemed like a pretty satisfying occupation - directly helps those in treatment, but at the same time seemed like a rigorous job which required standing and helping with patients for an extended period of time depending on how busy they were. Where I was they were extremely busy. A general description from the Occupational Outlook Handbook are here with earnings information as follows:
Median annual earnings of physical therapists were $66,200 in May 2006. The middle 50 percent earned between $55,030 and $78,080. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $46,510, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $94,810.
Median annual earnings in the industries employing the largest numbers of physical therapists in May 2006 were:
Home health care services $70,920
Nursing care facilities 68,650
General medical and surgical hospitals 66,630
Offices of physicians 65,900
Offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists, and audiologists 65,150
Some other stats from the Occupational Outlook Handbook puzzled me:
Metropolitan areas with the highest concentration of workers in this occupation are:
1. Sherman-Denison, TX
2. Missoula, MT
3. Waterbury, CT
4. Jackson, TN
5. Cumberland, MD-WV
Are there sports teams in these areas or more rehab clinics?
And what about these stats on earnings? Supply or demand?
Top paying metropolitan areas for this occupation:
PT also seemed like a pretty satisfying occupation - directly helps those in treatment, but at the same time seemed like a rigorous job which required standing and helping with patients for an extended period of time depending on how busy they were. Where I was they were extremely busy. A general description from the Occupational Outlook Handbook are here with earnings information as follows:
Median annual earnings of physical therapists were $66,200 in May 2006. The middle 50 percent earned between $55,030 and $78,080. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $46,510, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $94,810.
Median annual earnings in the industries employing the largest numbers of physical therapists in May 2006 were:
Home health care services $70,920
Nursing care facilities 68,650
General medical and surgical hospitals 66,630
Offices of physicians 65,900
Offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists, and audiologists 65,150
Some other stats from the Occupational Outlook Handbook puzzled me:
Metropolitan areas with the highest concentration of workers in this occupation are:
1. Sherman-Denison, TX
2. Missoula, MT
3. Waterbury, CT
4. Jackson, TN
5. Cumberland, MD-WV
Are there sports teams in these areas or more rehab clinics?
And what about these stats on earnings? Supply or demand?
Top paying metropolitan areas for this occupation:
MSA | Employment | Hourly mean wage | Annual mean wage | Percent of MSA employment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
70 | $51.67 | $107,480 | 0.079% | |
240 | $46.23 | $96,160 | 0.194% | |
Santa | 1,350 | $44.77 | $93,110 | 0.088% |
San | 790 | $44.41 | $92,370 | 0.078% |
390 | $44.36 | $92,260 | 0.178% |
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
School's in
And traffic seems to be 3x worse than usual. Any serious attempts to address traffic congestion really needs to take schools into account. Too may private schools? Not enough school buses? Not enough children taking school buses? Cancel schools?
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