Advice to College Students

I recently attended a Business Summit at Western Washington University, a school where I have been both an instructor and an MBA graduate. One of the discussions was on how students can go out and get jobs, an important discussion, especially in a time when it’s difficult to find jobs, and it made me pause a moment and think about what I would say to students nearing graduation. Here is a draft that I hope to re-visit and edit as I learn more, and I’m still working on my advice to myself, too:

Business is about relationships and solving problems.

Because business is about relationships and solving problems, focus on clearly communicating and looking for problems to solve as a way to start your day. Every great innovation starts with solving a problem. What good does it do to solve a problem and not be able to communicate the solution? In college, the best way to develop communication and problem solving skills is through practice, and you have plenty of opportunity to practice where the stakes won’t be quite as high as they will be post-college. So go out and practice!

To better communicate, assume the person you’re talking to doesn’t live in your world. Practice empathy by walking through a situation from another person’s perspective. Then, in your communications, avoid jargon and pronouns. Too often I see people entrenched in work who forget that other people are not in their worlds. The most successful people around me can communicate very clearly the complex world within which they live without intimidating their audience but also in a way that projects useful knowledge.

At Western, particularly in the College of Business and Economics, but in other schools, too, you have a great opportunity to engage with the so-called real world. And you should do that every time you get a chance. Do projects with local organizations, do internships, join clubs, participate in activities, especially those totally unrelated to business, and make sure to have an offline presence.

 At the marketing board meeting, a great deal of attention was paid to having an online presence. Great advice. Make a polished LinkedIn profile that is both professional and unique.Write a blog (only if you have something meaningful to say).  But in the professional world, the most important things happen in person. There are loads of techie start-ups that build apps and do fun digital stuff like that, and certainly having an “online presence” is essential for getting those jobs. But the reality is that most jobs are not digital or based on 140-character statements. There is no Google or Apple without the back-up power supplies that we make at the company where I currently work. We make completely unsexy products and though we have a Facebook page and a Twitter account (essential even for a company like us!), the products we make are not sold via Facebook or even via the web. They are sold by making deep and meaningful relationships with the people with whom we work. We know their names, their children’s names, we know if they like wine with dinner, or if they look forward to seeing their dog when they come home. And we learn these things not by reading their blogs, but by spending time with them face to face, where so much more can be communicated than by email, blog, phone or fax. It also bears remembering that most companies are not Google or Apple and not all digital. There are more companies, like where I work, for example, that make the basic, totally unsexy, but absolutely essential stuff we need in order to enjoy the Facebooks and the iTunes, etc., and these sorts of companies stick around a lot longer than the “hot” companies. Unless you’re totally set on working for a techie start-up, prepare yourself for making deep and meaningful relationships with people in person.

My point being: Although you need to have an online presence, don’t forget how to relate to people in person, where it’s even more important (even if you do work for a techie company). Working with people takes a lot of practice. Very few are the people for whom interacting with others comes easy. Most of us, like myself, a true introvert, need to practice. And in my experience, even those who are good at it, need to practice and reevaluate the message they are communicating to others. As my great Branding professor Ann Stone famously says: “Everything communicates.”

Master the meeting. A meeting should be more than a catch-up on where you’re at and what you’re doing. Time for meetings can be maximized when you focus on collaborating on new ideas. Which means even more preparation on being coherent when talking about where you’re at and what you’re doing.

Integrity. Integrity. Integrity. If you’ve got it, nothing else matters. If you don’t, well nothing else matters either. The world is small. It’s amazing how things come back to you, so just remember that the world is small and every touch you have with somebody else will have an impact.

Never send an email or post a Facebook status that you wouldn’t share with your mom, your boss, or the Supreme Court. Assume an email will be read by a court. Your email is owned by your company, anyway. And let’s be real. Privacy is a very recently invented and, dare I say it, artificial phenomenon. If you’ve lived in a small town or, even when I lived in Silicon Valley, where it’s like “Cheers” and  everybody knows your name, you know what I’m talking about. If you think you have privacy, either on your email, your social media, or in your offline life, you’re completely deluded and live in fantasy world that never existed and most likely never will. Bottom Line: Don’t be a dick. Or, don’t be a dick and think you’ll get away with it.

Be like Lincoln and master the art writing a memo or an email that you never send, especially when tempers are involved (see my post on Management Lessons from Lincoln).

Once you’re out of college, your grades don’t matter. Everybody starts tabula rasa. It’s amazing to see who rises to the top and how they rise to the top when you remember they were in school. A lot of those ones who got the good grades kinda disappear, and some of the ones who hated school start ruling the world.

I don’t regret for one second the time I spent not obsessing about my grades; it’s the time I didn't spend doing activities that would have differentiated me that I regret. It’s all about character. The best recommendation letter I ever wrote was for a student who got a B in my class. There’s a huge difference between being smart and being wise. Straight-A Ivy Leaguers are a dime a dozen, but students that are wise, have integrity, and are doing useful and interesting things are the rare charm that make being an educator worth all the sacrifice.  

Be reliable. Follow through. Even if it's the littlest thing. It's amazing how much relationship capital you can gain by following through with what you say you're going to do. Find a mentor. In fact, find multiple mentors whose views counter each other. See who you respect and why you respect them by observing what they do and pick their brains. Once you’ve figured out what you need to figure out, be a mentor.

Two of the most famous CEOs of our time are famously drop outs (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), and it’s tempting to think: “Hey I didn’t learn anything in my academic career. Why don’t I drop out like they did?” This thought is terribly misguided. First of all, Jobs and Gates are meteors, titans that come along once in every 8 billion chances and they lived in a very unique milieu in which their sort of success was possible. I’ll go out on a limb here and state that there will never be CEOs quite like Jobs or Gates ever again.

I can’t repeat it enough: Do not look for direct knowledge at the university. There are some classes I took (Econ, for example) that at the time seemed entirely too theoretical. And even now, I can’t think of any direct use of Econ that I’ve done in my professional life, but having a good understanding of econ helps me to think like a more informed businessperson.  I can’t draw a quarter of the graphs I saw in econ classes, but because I’ve been exposed to them, I can understand the business fundamentals. 

Even if you’re not interested in politics, we live in a reality in which everything revolves around politics, and I’m referring not only to governmental politics but to interpersonal politics. Every company, organization, and institution has “politics” and a lot more than is detectable at first glance. The best advice I’ve heard about “office politics” comes from my current boss: When you are confronted with “politics” during difficult decision processes at the workplace, make sure you are guided by the tenet that you should always put the company first. Too often people are guided by putting themselves first, which might work out well in the short term, and certainly people make careers out of looking out for themselves first. Even if looking out for yourself first were to make you financially successful, is that how you want to be remembered? When you put the company first, you are ensuring that you are doing what the company is paying you to do.

Universities have a duty to prepare students not only for jobs, but for meaningful work and to be citizens that make valuable contributions to society. As you go through your academic career, take advantage of getting as much career advice as you can. I regret not doing this as an undergrad and felt woefully unprepared hitting the job market. But remember that universities shouldn’t teach you how to get jobs or even how to do things, but how to learn and think through decisions and then communicate these decisions. If you want to learn how to do things, go to a trade school or do an online course. There are plenty of online courses out there and they’re a lot cheaper than a four-year degree and in most cases they’re set up to more efficiently teach someone how to do a specific thing.

Too many of my students misunderstand this subtle distinction of learning how to do things versus learning how to learn. As a former language instructor, I’ll be the first to admit that there are much more efficient ways to learn how to speak a language than attend a language class. Language classes don’t teach students how to speak a language but how to learn to communicate in another language with a different group of people. A student leaving my class without knowing how to conjugate an imperfect subjunctive verb never bothered me. Students who left my class without realizing that the world is a large and complex beast and that there are many ways of thinking and communicating would make me revise my teaching activities. The same thing should go for an accounting professor. If you don’t believe me, go take a class with Steve Senge at Western, which you should be doing anyway.

Don’t get caught up in the idea that your education will directly teach you how to specifically do things. There is a great debate in academia about how close a relationship it should have with the professional world. This, I believe, is a healthy debate. There is a great amount that academia could pay attention to what’s going on in professional circles in order to better prepare students for their futures and great business schools are successful when they foster this relationship between university and industry. College is not all about just getting a job. It’s about learning how to be a better human being. Hopefully you’re getting good electives that are stimulating you to think deeper and think deeper not just about your potential future in industry. It’s not just direct learning (“Wow! I know what a value proposition is now. I know what cost accounting is. I can do financial projections now using the good Professor Fewings model.”) Certainly I can get this information off of Wikipedia or with a few searches on Google without spending a ton of money on a college degree. Wikipedia breaks down just about every business concept I’ve learned in class sufficiently well. What you are getting from your four-year degree, and certainly should be getting from your good profs at a school like Western, is a framework for thinking. And that’s where your real benefit comes. I get stuck every day and I go to Google or Wikipedia and I can quickly refresh my memory. Fortunately, the framework has stuck with me, even though my amnesia makes it difficult to quickly remember concepts from class.

A college education teaches you not how to do things but how to think critically, read and communicate. I use the word “read” here knowing that millions of first graders know how to read, but a university should teach someone how to read through the bullshit (not just print but things like people's gestures and different communication styles), and then communicate in a way that doesn’t get mired down with confusion.

There’s also a cliché piece of advice that you hear from professors and parents and just about all well-meaning people who say that you should follow your passion. In my more substantive conversations with successful people, none have said that they followed their passion, and I’d like to clear up the follow-your-passion piece of advice by making it known that it is a myth. Jobs don’t give you passion. You give passion to your job. And this is a subtle but important distinction. Remember: Passion is more than just what you see in the movies. Passion is blood, sweat and tears. Fear is passion, too, though it is misguided passion. You have to be able to give passion to whatever it is you do, and a lot of that passion is blood, sweat, tears and fears. Passion doesn’t magically appear from nothing. Passion comes from determination, commitment and action.

In other words, don’t do what you’re passionate about or, even worse, look for a career that you’re passionate about or where you think you’ll find passion. Be passionate about what you do. If you’re doing something that doesn’t make you give passion to it, get out of it. But don’t look for something you’ll be passionate about. Find something that you will give passion to. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.”

Lastly, a word about success. There are plenty of rich people who aren’t successful. Being successful isn’t driving a certain type of car. You should be the only one who defines what success means to you. If success means driving a fancy car, then go for it. But there are a lot of other ways to be successful. Personally, I feel most successful when I can bike every day to work. I’m successful when I have time to hike and travel and spend time with those who are important to me. I’m successful when I can leave a positive touch with everybody that I come in contact with and when I look for win-win situations for the people and organizations that I care about.  But you should define success for yourself.

This is the Holy Grail: Sunshine Daydream; 8/27/72, Veneta, Oregon

This is the Holy Grail. Not just for admirers of the Grateful Dead. But for humanity.  Sunshine Daydream, the commercially released audio and video recordings from the 8/27/72 Veneta, Oregon Springfield Creamery Benefit show, captures the Dead doing what they do best: Putting on a party with a family atmosphere. The Springfield Creamery Benefit was billed as a picnic, and when you see the footage from that day, it was in many ways a gigantic picnic--kids running around having fun, adults dancing naked in a total state of bliss, and general good-natured outdoor afternoon fun. 

The show was also a benefit, not just for a struggling creamery, but for humanity (those 15-20,000 people lucky enough to bask in the sunshine of the day at the show and those of us lucky enough to rely on the ingenious recording and re-mastering techniques of the Dead family's magicians who were able to create such a faithful document to the day that we can listen to and enjoy today). Asked about doing benefit shows, Jerry Garcia said, “When we do them, it’s usually for our friends [...]. The benefit for us is to be able to give people music, that’s a benefit, that’s the real benefit that we can provide.” What a deep benefit the Grateful Dead have left us with their 2,300+ shows, many of which are available commercially or for free through taping networks and websites. I can’t count the number of times the Dead have made me feel blissful and remind me of just how beautiful this world is, and Sunshine Daydream just might be the pinnacle of that expression. 

Jerry Garcia with his Sunburst Strat in Veneta, Oregon

In a time of government shutdowns, another Garcia quote worth remembering is from a conversation with a Yale law professor: “I’ve always thought that the Grateful Dead should be sponsored by the government or something. It should be a public service, you know, and they should set us up to play at places that need to get high.” The happiness the band left with attendees, particularly at this show, was extraordinary. And even when we struggle with the budget, one wonders just how much better the world would be with happiness brought to us by a house band--Lord knows we need it.

8/27/1972, otherwise known as the Springfield Creamery Benefit, played at the Renaissance Grounds in Veneta, Oregon, on a improvised stage put together with trees fallen by the Merry Pranksters of Ken Kesey fame, is 3 hours of happiness and rightfully one of the top 5 most requested Dead shows. But listening to this recording made me reflect on just how wonderful 1972 was for the Dead. I’ve already spent considerable digital ink reflecting on just how wonderful 1973 was, but 1972 is just as extraordinary and sets the tone for ’73. 1972 has more of the bluesy Americana sound while ’73 is more about what I’ll call the space jazz. The difference might reside in Jerry switching from his Strat to the custom-made Wolf guitar, which gave his playing and the band’s sound a more jazzy feel. 

Jerry Garcia in 1972 with the 1957 Fender Stratocaster "Alligator" that Graham Nash gave him. He's using his Sunburst Strat in the Sunshine Daydream concert

I originally fell in love with the Dead listening to the original ’72 Europe recordings. I still consider many of the songs on that album to be the definitive versions-- “Jack Straw,” “Cumberland Blues,” and “Sugar Magnolia” stick out, but we could point to many nearly perfect songs from that album. After going through other recordings from 1972, the 9/21/1972 show from the Philly Spectrum, captured on DP 31, really sticks out. As a review from the time indicated: “On a smoggy, soggy evening, in a large, darkened concert hall, the Dead managed to take every member of the capacity audience (17,500 people) to the top of a mountain on a bright sunny day. From a troubled city to wide open country.” The Spectrum has moments that might eclipse those captured on Sunshine Daydream. The 37-minute “Dark Star”--> “Morning Dew” is absolutely extraordinary and might even beat the stellar “Dark Star” from Veneta, but Veneta has many other moments worth remembering. 

Garcia in '74 with the custom-made "Wolf," with a more jazzy sound

Another indispensable recording from 1972 is Hundred Year Hall from a magical night in Frankfurt, Germany. If Beethoven died before composing the 9th, we’d still have one of the greatest composers of all time, but with the 9th he gave us something that is truly out of this world, as if it were written by a non-human entity, some deity from another galaxy. That’s how I feel about the “Other One” from Hundred Year Hall. The album is great and then we get to this 36 minutes of sounds from another universe, a peak into the Dead at a creative pinnacle. Parts of it are almost unlistenable for the uninitiated, but at 19 minutes in, we get a Space Groove Phil laying down a vamp that will propel them far. At 21 minutes out they’re a million light years from Earth. One worries that they’ve lost the song. It then becomes almost totally unlistenable, even for the initiated, but it goes further and further into other dimensions. At 32 minutes, they’re doing this insane polyrhythmic wildness beyond tribal and incorporating it back into the melody of the song which kicks back in again. No sane person would listen to this but that’s why I’m OK with not being sane. And I think most Deadheads that are fans of the Dead’s improvisatory prowess will appreciate this jewel.

The Dead understood timing. A pinnacle moment with "Dark Star" played at sunset

What sticks out from Sunshine Daydream is the visual documentary from the show. Prior to making a film of the Dead, Garcia asked why would anyone want to see a movie of us. “We just stand there.” But there’s something striking about the loose, family atmosphere that the band create on stage. My wife and I were lucky enough to catch the film of the show on the big screen at the annual Deadhead Meet-up. The visuals really capture the mantra oft-repeated: “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.” Besides images of the blissful Deadheads dancing, what sticks out from the show is Garcia’s picking on “Dark Star.” Technique-wise, Garcia had one of the best right hands that I can think of and his missing finger made his picking styles really unique. He truly was a banjo man playing an electric guitar and that made his sound so unique, so Americana. 

The loose atmosphere created on stage at Veneta, Oregon

There are clips of Garcia in the midst of some deep, profound, introspective and dazzling technical guitar licks that counterposes with a hippie hanging naked from a pole behind the stage, deep in a state of trance, totally mesmerized by the band’s playing, looking almost like Jesus hanging from the cross. This image says a lot about the band, Garcia, and the hippie movement, already in a state of decadence in 1972; yet, here on the Renaissance Fair Grounds in Oregon on this hot day, this was the time’s idealism at its most perfect state, a truly beautiful capturing of what was beautiful about the Deadheads. 

You can see the naked Jesus just above Garcia's left shoulder

I’m much more interested in the Dead’s music than in the scene that developed around the band, which unfortunately unraveled in a number of hypocrisies, but when it was good, it was really good. The Deadheads brought a warm environment, based on communal sharing, and a spirit that was genuinely driven to create a better world. At its worst, Jerry suffered the same fate that Jesus did: Too many of his followers misinterpreted the message and used it for evil rather than good. And evil isn’t really the right word here, but more of a misguided close-mindedness might hit closer. Which is also part of the naive experience that the spirituality of a Dead show or a religious experience can do to people.

The Veneta show could be any show from 1972, good but not any better from the year, until we get to the “China Cat Sunflower--->I Know You Rider,” in particular the bridge between “China Cat” and “Rider.” Phil starts the first song with a really loose and huge slide down his bass that gets the selection off on the right foot, but it’s Bobby’s “rhythm guitar solo,” a lead solo played by and like a rhythm guitarist that triggers Jerry’s virtuosity on a lead guitar solo that streams so smoothly and elegantly that it takes the listener to a far-off better place in only the way that the Grateful Dead can do. As drummer Mickey Hart said, the Dead aren’t in the music business per se, but the transportation business. Their music is the perfect traveling music--nomadic, wandering, deeply western in its looseness and themes of rambling gamblers and old West shoot outs. So far West that it goes East in its spacey mysticism. It moves and it moves the listener. The music transports the listener to other times and places. This “China-Rider” is just as good as it gets. I’ve always thought the 1972 versions of the selection were the best with the 1973 space jazz transition into the funkier, almost comic book-like or cartoonish, decadent “China-Riders” of 1974 were also profoundly amazing. 1972 is the year when it’s clear that Bobby can carry his weight. Fired at one point because he was always late on the chunk of his rhythm guitar playing, Bobby has slipped into his role and he starts leading the band at points. When the Dead as a whole are really on, it’s Bobby’s  playing that adds that extra spark.

The Veneta versions of “Bird Song” and “Playing in the Band” are definitive. “Playing in the Band” has become the soundtrack of the Adventure Buddies, what I call my wife, 2 dogs, and myself, and here the song is in its most adventurous incarnation. It’s almost as if it’s a game for the band to see how far they can take the song out as far as it can go into spooky spaciness and then somehow they bring it back and slowly work the melody back in and bring it back to the head. This really is the holy grail.  

The Veneta version of “Bertha” is lively and colorful. The images of the tie-dye shown during the movie will forever be ingrained in my head when I hear “Bertha;” they’re really done so well.  

In between selections, we get water reports (“save your water, it’s hot!”) and the report of a fire truck coming to spray water on the crowd in 100+ degree heat, which gets a huge rise from the crowd. We also get reports on lost kids and kids missing their parents. What’s special about a Dead show, which is really more an experience or a jubilee, the town dance, a spectacle, is that the Dead experience is all about a family atmosphere. 

The liner notes include the petition that Deadheads signed requesting that this show be released. Though now regarded as a legendary show, what’s truly spectacular is that this was just another show during that year. That similar enthusiasm, similar energy was brought by fans coming to the Renaissance Fair Grounds. But like several other shows from 1972, the 8/27/72 show stands out as one of the best shows the band ever played. It just might be the holy grail.

Drinking Forests and Walking Through Tea: The Importance of Drinking Real Tea and the Quest to Find It

There is a moment in Les Blank’s film documentary, All in This Tea, when German filmmaker Werner Herzog sips some tea and says that the experience is not unlike walking through a forest. He imagines a lush and verdant landscape where the tea takes him, and he says approvingly, “It's all in this tea.” This experience, of walking through a forest, is precisely what I try to replicate every time I drink quality tea, and there are certain teas that have helped me attain this calm, serene state, not unlike wandering through a damp forest after a rain and kicking up pungent leaves.  

Herzog’s poetic, tea-fueled description comes as a retort to the subject of the documentary, David Lee Hoffman, who says that we don’t have the vocabulary to describe tea, which is also deeply true. 

The documentary follows Hoffman, a tea importer from California by trade, in his quest for finding “real” tea to bring back to America. More than a tea importer, Hoffman is really a tea adventurer, a happy traveler that lived a nomadic existence in Asia during the 60s and 70s, just drinking tea all day with the people he came across, people like the Dalai Lama and nomadic shepherds of the Himalayas. 

Hoffman is also a visionary, an idealist, and a man on a mission to change the way we approach tea and food. Years ahead of the goofy “local,” “organic” foodie movement, which is really just a pretentious way of saying that you eat “real” food rather than food created in a sterile laboratory with ingredients barely recognizable by the average human being or harvested at such an extraordinarily large scale that the flavor has been bred out of them, Hoffman is passionate about the importance of earthworms in agriculture. 

It’s sad that most Americans don’t know what real tea is. Tea is pleasure. Tea is ritual. Tea is for welcoming guests. Tea is for sitting around and chatting. Tea is for relaxing. Most of tea is water, which is why you need good, clean water with which to make tea.

There is nothing wrong with Lipton tea bags, and I’m the first to order some iced tea at a restaurant, but tea is so much more than that. 

My tea obsession started when I grew tired of coffee. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) coffee since I was probably 13 years old, and I like a wide range of coffee—dark roasted Colombian coffee, Turkish coffee, Vietnamese coffee, the light, delicate Kona coffee, or even mass-produced diner coffee—but there is a point when I realized that the energy coffee gives me is mainly jitters. I still like the jolt of a coffee every once in a while, but I appreciate the deeper, calmer energy of tea. I then started getting into green and oolong teas. My wife and are obsessed with a tea called Waterfall, a high mountain oolong tea that we get at Silk Road, a tea store in Victoria, BC, and the experience it approximates is not unlike coming across a hidden waterfall in a forest. I then went to China for a friend’s wedding and knew that I wanted to discover new teas. With my limited Chinese and still budding tea knowledge, I tried a tea called pu’erh, and it blew my mind. Fortunately, I had enough experience with tea that I wasn’t taken aback. Pu’erh isn’t for everybody. It is strong, complex, and isn’t easy to get a hold of at first. I bought a cake of pu’erh and brought it home, and I still had no idea how to properly prepare it, but my wife and I savored it every morning that we drank it, a special treat that was deeply important for us. 

Pu’erh is a fermented and oxidized tea that has been around since 700-900 AD or maybe even before, and comes in bricks, balls, and cakes. And pu’erh is perfect for aging. Like a cabernet, a pu’erh can be overwhelmingly strong when it is young, and then mellows with age, releasing a wonderful array of complexities, and can be great at 40-50 years old if stored properly.

Once I saw the beauty of pu’erh, I was hooked. We couldn’t find a tea store where we live that sold “real” pu’erh. Too many of the tea stores we went to sold these fruity, flavored teas, and most of the people we talked to didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked them about pu’erh. In a desperate quest to find good pu’erh, I found an herb store in Vancouver’s Chinatown and bought a pu’erh cake. I wasn’t sure of the quality. We walked around in Chinatown for the afternoon and just about made it back to our car when I spotted The Chinese Tea Shop. This is what we were looking for! 

There, Daniel Lui prepared gong fu cha pu’erh for us, and this was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Gong fu cha means good skills tea making. Not a ceremony, like the Japanese tea ceremony, gong fu cha just means using the right skills to infuse a perfect cup of tea. What is important to remember is that every infusion, every cup of tea is different, and there are many variables to making a good cups of tea. When prepared correctly, you can get 15 or more infusions from a good pu’erh tea, and it changes, releasing new flavors and essences, so you can literally spend all afternoon drinking tea, feeling Zen-like, and having profound revelations while reading or writing, each infusion giving a slightly different flavor and layer of complexity.

Daniel waiting for the gongfu cha pu'erh tea to infuse at The Chinese Tea Shop

We try to visit Daniel Lui in his Chinese Tea Shop every few months to learn more and every time I sip down new teas that take me to other places. Daniel is generous with his knowledge and his enthusiasm for tea is contagious. He had a likely and willing counterpart in myself, as I had already loved tea when I met him, but he made me realize just how much more there is to discover about tea. And what a beautiful world it is. If you want to know more about tea, you need to see his website, which is an excellent source of tea knowledge.

There is a tremendous variety to teas that I have only begun to explore, as the world of tea is not unlike the world of wines, another world that you could easily spend entire lifetimes walking through. Like wine, what you taste, as Herzog poetically observed, is a terroir. When you taste a good tea, you taste the 10-day lifespan of the tea leaf and all of the weather it experienced. You can taste the fragrance of orchids that grew around an oolong. You can also taste the altitude of where the tea plant was located. For example, I really like a high mountain oolong. Like the winemaker’s art, one is observing the whole experience when drinking tea, which means taking in fragrance and color of the leaves. You are literally tasting the earth where the tea or wine grapes were raised. Like great wine or food experiences, drinking tea is also about creating and re-creating memory. You are drinking an essence of a time or a place.  

Lately, my favorite tea is a shou pu’erh. Shou pu’erh is the less common black version of pu’erh tea (most are green and known as sheng pu’erh). Low in caffeine, shou gives a calm, tranquil and transcendent energy that is perfect for rainy afternoons. My penchant for shou and obsession with it is not unlike my obsession for leather goods (like my belts and boots) and mushrooms. A fine shou tastes somewhat like how a very high quality leather smells or a freshly picked boletus, morel or chanterelle mushroom tastes after delicately sauteing it in a pan with nice olive oil or a creamy sauce. This is a flavor that I attempt to replicate at any moment that I can because, like walking through the forest, it is one of the pinnacle experiences of being on this planet and truly living. 

When I drink tea, it is like I am mushroom hunting or adventuring. I’m searching for a flavor, really an experience, that is almost unattainable.When you bring a wild mushroom into your kitchen, you’re bringing in the forest and you have to respect it. I do my best to always respect the tea as well. Which makes me worry because so many of the places in China where it is grown are threatened by environmental calamities. The soils are depleted. Nevertheless, the optimist in me hopes that tea is resilient. Some of the tea I drink comes from 800-year-old trees. 

In Russia, where mushroom hunting is an age old sacred pastime, parents tie bells on their children to keep them from getting lost. They say that when you walk through the forests during the mushroom season, you hear tinkling, as if the forest is full of fairies. There is something special and unique about tea that when you drink it, a forest comes alive, and it’s full of fairies searching for the pleasurable essences of forest, be it in mushrooms, kicked up leaves, or the taste of a 700-year-old tree that has seen the test of time to give great experiences. 

I imagine things like walking through a forest, 

leaves on the ground

And it just had rained but the rain has stopped.

It’s damp and you walk

And somehow

It’s All in This Tea.

Werner Herzog (upon sipping good tea)

Notes on Innovation: Looking at Bell Labs and Stella's Farm

Lesson 1: Change is inevitable.

Lesson 2: Change requires new thinking.

Lesson 3: An idea is just the beginning. Meaning that innovation is a long process and ideas are part of a larger network that I will delineate throughout this post, which is essentially a brief history of innovation, with a particular focus on  The Idea Factory, by John Gertner, a history of Bell Labs, and some notes on approaches to innovation in current organizations as learned in How Stella Saved the Farm by Chris Trimball and Vijay Govindarajan. Bell Labs operated in a different climate than we do now, but the lessons in innovation we learn from Bell Labs are still relevant.

What is innovation? The answer for Bell Labs was “better, cheaper or both.”

We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of Bell Labs as a lesson for innovation for companies in our current environment, despite the fact that the world has changed dramatically since Bell Labs’ heyday (1940s-70s). The engineers at Bell Labs invented the future in which we now live. Just about all of the tech world (the Apples, the Googles, the Microsofts) would not be possible without the work done at Bell Labs.

The Young Turks—the gifted group of innovators at Bell Labs—achieved this innovation by bridging a gap between the best science of the academy and the important applications that a modern society needed. In essence, this is what great tech companies do now.  

Bell Labs had a very simple formula based on 4 principles: 1) Technically competent management; 2) Researchers didn’t have to raise funds; 3) Research on one topic or system could be and was supported for years (e.g., cellular telephony and underseas cables); 4) Research could be terminated without damning the researchers. Unfortunately, companies nowadays don’t have the luxury to be as foresighted as Bell Labs and think in the long term. Current research, too often, is grounded in the short term, out of necessity and lack of prolonged funding.

The question then becomes: Where do you look for innovation?

Bell Labs operated under the premise that there are plenty of good ideas; what they were looking for was good problems.

The Bell Labs Campus

So, how do you tackle problems?

Very scientifically.

There are several laws that will help us in our quest for tackling problems through innovation:

Law 1- Put learning first and profits second. Learning isn’t just about reading and investigating happenstance. Learning has to be done through disciplined experimentation. Be scientific. Start by stating a hypothesis. Predict what will happen. Measure the results. Assess the lessons learned by comparing predictions to outcomes.

Law 2- Inside a big experiment, you will find many little ones. You have to gather evidence to validate each one.

Law 3- An innovation leader’s job is to execute a disciplined experiment.

To execute a disciplined experiment, an innovation leader’s plan should start by stating a clear hypothesis. Then, clearly identify the most critical unknowns (of which there should be many; if not, start over). Plan, analyze results, decipher lessons, and then tweak a bit. Measure as many results as possible. But then focus on one metric that becomes your obsession, the one that you think most closely relates to your bottom line or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve (there’s still the element of learning first, profits second). In 3 months or so, reevaluate. Is this metric still the one most closely associated with your objective?

Everybody must understand the assumptions, lest you want to feel the pangs of being thought of as the mad scientist pissing money down the drain. One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is what has become known as the Innovator’s dilemma: It’s easier to achieve incremental improvements and meet quarterly earnings goals, while it’s much more difficult to fund research on the more interesting ideas that may destroy your business if their product becomes obsolete.

The other problem we have in tackling problems with innovation is a terrible habit of shoving new ideas into old paradigms. Take, for example, Bell Labs’ failure with the picture phone in the 1960s. We can all recognize the picture phone today in our Skype or FaceTime, but what’s crazy is that the concept and the technology for a picture phone existed in the 70s. And what’s crazier is that the PicturePhone as a business failed!

The picture phone failed because of an inability to consider Metcalfe’s Law, which states: The larger the network, the higher the value it has for its users. Marketing studies told Bell Labs that the picture phone would be wildly successful. Could you imagine being a respondent to their survey? It’s like a telephone, but you can see your loved one at the other end of the line. Yes! Of course, I’m interested!

Here's the Picture Phone. Pretty cool, huh?

Marketing studies only tell you something about the demand for products that already exist. Later, Bell Labs measured a tremendous lack of enthusiasm for mobile telephony when it was being researched in the early 1970s. People couldn’t quite imagine what mobile telephony would look like. The difference between this lack of enthusiasm for mobile telephony and an outpouring of enthusiasm for picture phones prior to the launch of the PicturePhone has to do with people not knowing what Mobile telephony would look like. The difference also resides in how Bell Labs tried to fit their ideas into the paradigm in which they existed.

You have to create a new paradigm.

2 great obstacles that many organizations face in their quest for innovation, which is in essence their quest for existence, are: 1) the great divide between sales and engineering (and I’m lumping everybody who might fit into these two big departments, marketing for the former, for example, and project managers for the latter); and 2) meetings and decisions are reactive rather than focusing on what is important. In other words, meetings become a place where everybody shares what they are doing and where they are at rather than a space in which colleagues can gather and work together on a problem.

One of my takeaways from reading about Bell Labs was the tremendous importance of serendipitous encounters with people outside a researcher’s area of expertise. The Bell Labs campus was designed for these serendipitous encounters to take place. People were forced to get out of their silos and exchange ideas, even ideas totally unrelated to the actual “business;” these non-germane ideas were many times the ideas that started off great world-changing projects. Having people totally unrelated to your Department observe your Department’s processes then becomes profoundly enlightening because these people observe the company’s interactions with customers and the company’s products in different ways. Their insights can be crucial, which explains the success behind Kaizen workshops at organizations like Toyota and cross-functional “brown bag” lunches in which employees can learn about another aspect of the company and what other people are working on.      

The other element of Bell Labs, which was without a doubt the most important element for sparking innovation, was people. Starting with Mervin Kelly, president during the glory years, Bell Labs had the ultimate “manager.” Kelly’s sense of mission and his ability to institutionalize the process of innovation so effectively define the processes of innovation at Bell Labs. Kelly believed that an “institute of creative technology” needed a critical mass of talented scientists — whom he housed in a single building, once again emphasizing the importance of serendipitous encounters for ideas— and he gave his researchers the time to pursue their own investigations “sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.”

Then we have Claude Shannon, who is the visionary. In many ways, Shannon’s visions were more important and have greater effect on our lives than those of Steve Jobs, the visionary we most celebrate nowadays. Shannon was the informationist, the theorist behind binary code, and the one to envision an information network that would wrap the world like “the biological systems of a man’s brain and nervous system.” He was also behind the digital computer and digital circuit design. Clearly, there would be no Google without Shannon.

Somewhere between Shannon (the genius) and Kelly (the manager) we have John R. Pierce, the Instigator, whose job was to wrest excellence out of places where it might fall short. He identified promising lines of research by making connections between staff members. Having a Pierce, an Instigator, is precisely what can help solve the 2 obstacles to organizations trying to achieve innovation that I identified above. A Pierce can break down silos, though breaking down institutions is difficult for a single person, and a Pierce can make meetings meaningful by knowing how to make combinations of people to make great projects.

Bell Labs Corridor

An innovative company like W.L. Gore, makers of Gore-Tex and probably the most famously “flat” organization, exemplifies taking an Instigator’s role even further by creating a lattice with self-managed teams. Bill Gore conceived of the company as a lattice connecting every individual in the organization to each other, an informal network of relationships that sparks cross-functional collaboration and allows information to flow freely. Because not only do we need to have serendipitous encounters to spark creativity, information should flow freely. Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, notes just how important coffee houses, where ideas are exchanged, are to innovation in this video. And in his description, we learn that an idea isn’t just a single Eureka moment but a network, once again emphasizing that an idea doesn’t stand alone, but only becomes meaningful when it solves a problem and is inserted into a new paradigm in which it fits.

When a company decides to be innovative, it typically assigns one division under one leader to just make innovation “happen,” which is a course for disaster. It’s important that a dedicated team work on activities that are outside the specialized capabilities of the current organization and that this team is built up as if it were an entirely different company and measured by different standards. The leader of this team—because he or she is leading an experiment that is bound to create conflicts with the existing organization—should be measured not necessarily on profits (because learning should be more important with this innovative new team) but on how well he or she executes a disciplined experiment.

At the end of the day, innovation is like a box of Legos. Lego means something like “play well” in Danish, while in Latin it means “I study” or “I put together.” Serendipitous encounters, instigators, free-flowing information, and scientific and disciplined experimentation are what it takes to innovate. In essence, playing well and putting together. Innovation is about making things cheaper and better. It also requires creativity. When I was a kid, I used to think that creatives are the types that when they speak rainbows and unicorns came out of their mouths. Creativity is really about asking the tiny little questions that can change a process just enough to make it better or cheaper. Sometimes with big results. Creativity also requires structure to which everybody can relate. A story structure is one of the most universal concepts that exists. A good marketer is a good storyteller. And a good storyteller works using a structure.With a good structure, a story line develops. When a story line develops, people can see themselves in it. Great companies make a story in which we can see ourselves and want to participate.

Management Lessons from Abraham Lincoln: A Review of Team of Rivals

General Grant, upon receiving the telegram announcing Lincoln’s assassination and deciding on how to break the news to his wife, said, “First prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received.” And I cannot think of worse news for America in its history. Lincoln’s assassination was a pivotal moment, and 150 years later we still deeply feel the scars from his loss, which paved the way for a less than ideal reconciliation between North and South after our most trying time as a nation. It’s difficult to speculate just how much smoother Reconstruction would have gone with Lincoln but undeniable that Lincoln was the person best equipped to lead the country through the Reconstruction process, because of his extraordinary empathy which gave him his ability to understand how people think. And empathy is the first quality that we learn in management lessons from Abraham Lincoln in Doris Goodwin Kearn’s Team of Rivals.

Lincoln’s ability to assuage differences between his rivals with his empathy would have made the herculean task of Reconstruction that much more possible. 3 years later, during his VP Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, we get a sense of just how fractured the country was and how difficult Lincoln’s task was during the Civil War. But those closest to him, like Grant, instantly recognized that Lincoln’s death was “an irreparable loss to the South, which [needed] so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.” Elizabeth Blair, southerner with family in the Cabinet, remarked, “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again.” When we think of leaders, we commonly do not think of words like tenderness, friend, empathy or clemency. But those characteristics are what made Lincoln more than a common leader. 

At 7:22 AM on April 15^th, 1865, time of death for Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton gave the most concise and perfect tribute to Lincoln: “Now he belongs to the ages.” His cabinet members, who Lincoln carefully picked to have views different from his own, were, like Grant, the first to realize just how damaging the loss was, because they knew how he brought together their differing views, representing the different opinions of the country, to form his own views and carefully craft his decisions, which were famous for their timing, because no man had a better barometer of what was going on in his country than Lincoln. When most “great leaders” are known for their ability to speak, Lincoln’s empathy and ability to listen made him superhuman. 

In all organizations there are warring factions—sales versus engineers at a tech company, administration versus faculty at a university. What a great leader can do is tap into all of the points of view to form a more whole view of a situation and tap into strengths and dampen weaknesses to make the whole much better than the sum of parts.

Team of Rivals carefully crafts the story of the 4 Republican candidates for president in the 1860 election—Seward, Bates, Chase and Lincoln—and how the little known rail-splitting lawyer from Sangamon County, whose most famous act was losing a Senate race, not only beat out the 3 other much better known candidates but then brought them together in his Cabinet, almost undeniably the most qualified Cabinet in our country’s history. Indeed, Lincoln's strategy of being everybody's second choice worked out, as he never disparaged the other candidates, but worked with them. 

The contentiousness of his Cabinet members (Chase coveted the presidency in the 1864 election so badly that he campaigned against Lincoln in his re-election efforts, even while Lincoln wouldn’t let him leave the Cabinet, knowing that Chase was the most qualified Treasury Secretary, because he funded the war and filled the nation’s coffers at a time when it should have gone bankrupt). One of Lincoln’s great coups takes place when he refuses to accept the resignations of his two most brilliant Cabinet members, Chase and Seward. In the “public interest,” he required both men to remain in office, despite their mutual despise of each other. By retaining them, Lincoln was able to maintain a balance in the Cabinet. Mary Lincoln believed that all of the Cabinet members were stabbing Lincoln in the back, but Lincoln understood just how important it was to keep a broad view of what was happening in the country. By balancing his team of rivals, he had consolidated his leadership. “If I had yielded to that storm & dismissed Seward the thing would have all have slumped over one way & we should have been left with a scanty handful of supporters. When Chase gave in his resignation I saw that the game was in my own hands & I put it through.” Lincoln’s careful chess moves are brilliant, though nobody suspected him of using his Cabinet members in such ways. 

Lincoln uses what I call the “Colombo Method,” named after the hard-boiled detective of 1970s TV fame. Colombo (Peter Falk in his most iconic role) was so good at “playing dumb” when speaking with his murder suspects that he let the criminals put themselves in jail. Colombo made the suspects think he was a bumbling idiot, so they start talking. Just as he would walk away, Colombo would say something like, “There’s just one more thing...” This is where Colombo would nail the murderers. 

In many ways, being an unknown rail-splitter from Illinois helped Lincoln, because people assumed he didn’t know what he was talking about. Early on in Lincoln’s presidency, just about all of the nation assumed that it was Seward who was running the show, though Seward was the first to understand Lincoln’s genius and to later realize just how much Lincoln was in charge in his quieter, more unassuming way. Seward himself thought he was calling the shots with Fort Sumter, the first debacle of Lincoln’s presidency and the beginning of the Civil War. While Seward wanted Lincoln to surrender Sumter, under the guise that southerners would be appeased by its abandonment, Lincoln knew better. Looking back, this theory looks more like Seward’s folly than the purchase of Alaska, but Lincoln had already taken Seward’s good advice of holding, occupying and possessing property belonging to the government; Lincoln just wasn’t going to cede Sumter per Seward’s prescription. 

Following Seward’s harsh criticism that Lincoln didn’t cede Sumter, Lincoln wrote a memo that he never sent. Here is another pointed lesson that good leaders follow: writing emails that they never send. Lincoln realized that, though he was the most gifted of our presidential writers, it was best to approach Seward in person and quietly defuse the situation, rather than write a memo he would later regret. 

Perhaps Lincoln’s first great feat was branding the war as an effort to keep the Union together rather than a war to free the slaves, much to the chagrin of radical Republicans and abolitionists who, had they gotten their way, would have imperiled the cause by losing important border states like Kentucky. While radical Republicans wished that he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation earlier, Lincoln wisely understood that the north would not fight to end slavery but to preserve the Union.  

But it was more complicated than that. Once Seward realized that it was Lincoln who was in charge, he also became an ally to the President in balancing the warring factions. Radicals thought Seward a conservative influence on the president, but both he and the president were engaged in the same task of finding a middle ground between the two extremes of radical Republicans and conservative Democrats. 

Where Lincoln shines above most leaders is his ability to recognize his errors. Fred Seward wrote, “Presidents and Kings are not apt to see flaws in their own arguments, but fortunately for the Union, it had a President, at this critical juncture who combined a logical intellect with an unselfish heart.” And errors Lincoln did commit, making him more human and credible and therefore more beloved by his countrymen. 

Though Lincoln was not experienced in war nor did he like it at all—his opposition to the 1848 war with Mexico probably lost him previous political positions—he was, in his own way, a fantastic war strategist. His perfectly timed visits to troops—he was totally unafraid of being on the front in dangerous situations—rallied them. He was also wise to understand his popularity with the troops, going to great lengths to give them time off to vote (they favored Lincoln in extraordinary numbers in his re-election campaign over the braggadocio General McClellan). One soldier wrote that he had to lower his cap “to cover a smile that had overmastered him” at the “ludicrous sight” of Lincoln riding along on the front, with his lanky, tall frame, almost bigger than the horse. But, the soldier wrote, the troops loved Lincoln. “His benignant smile as he passed on was a real reflection of his honest, kindly heart; but deeper, under the surface of that marked and not all uncomely face, were the unmistakable signs of care and anxiety...In fact his popularity in the army is and has been universal.” 

Goodwin Kearns notes the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’s leadership, which appeared in the extreme secessionist paper, the Charleston Mercury. “He has called around him in counsel, the Mercury marveled, “the ablest and most earnest men of his country. Where he has lacked in individual ability, learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought it, and found it... Force, energy, brains, earnestness, he has collected around him in every department."

Leaders set direction and achieve outcomes not only because they are able to get

other people to do things but because they themselves make a powerful message when

they do things. Leaders have a magnetic quality; people gravitate towards leaders and

espouse their ideas. Leaders communicate effectively, though not necessarily in a verbal sense. Through their actions and their body language, people inherently know who a leader is. The first person I think of when I think of a leader is Abraham Lincoln, who gave his “last full measure of devotion” to this country in its most difficult time. Acting as both a rudder and a motor through a massive sea change that would divide this country, even while he attempted to hold it together, Abraham Lincoln is the epitome of transformational leadership.

But the most concise definition of a leader comes in General Sherman’s evaluation of Lincoln: “greatness, combined with goodness.”

I found this Escuela Abraham Lincoln in Havana, Cuba, where there are many memorials to Lincoln because Castro, despite his dislike of most things American, could appreciate the magnanimity of Lincoln. The popularity and recognition of Lincoln’s unparalleled leadership qualities are nearly universal, even in places not know for appreciation of the United States. Tolstoy commented that "Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together. We are still too near to his greatness, but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.” It is Lincoln’s character that makes him powerful: “He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.” 

On Shakespeare and Baseball: A Review of Ken Burn’s Baseball

22 hours of viewing that we slowly pecked away at all summer, an hour here and an hour there, and we finally finished all 10 innings of Ken Burns’s Baseball. I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t have a particular attraction to the sport of baseball. For about a 3-year period in my early adolescence (an appropriate age), I was entranced by the sport, keeping track of box scores, memorizing stats, and I became an avid collector of the stories surrounding the game, but I hadn’t returned to those stories for most of the rest of my life.

After all of those hours watching Ken Burns’s documentary, I do not have any more love for the game than I did before. But I do have a tremendous deal more respect for who we are as Americans. Despite many of the commentators in the documentary repeating that “Baseball is the greatest game in the world,” I can still not come even close to concurring. With baseball only played in a handful of countries in Latin America, Korea, Japan and hardly noticed in Canada, I can hardly think of baseball as a universal game. For those in the Caribbean, the game is a ticket to the United States. Soccer wins most universal and most loved in the world. At a more subjective level, I find football to be the more cerebral, complex game and basketball to be more exciting than baseball. 

It turns out that Ken Burns doesn’t have that great of a penchant for the sport either (what we learned in an interview in the “making of” adding to our 22-hour total). As in all of his documentaries, Ken Burns isn’t telling us a story about baseball but a story about what it means to be American through the lens of baseball. 

Indeed, baseball is who we are as a people, for better or worse, and its history has told our story as a people. It is no exaggeration that the 20th century can be broken into pre- and post-Jackie Robinson. Certainly, Jackie Robinson’s entry into the game in 1947 was one of the emotional climaxes of the documentary and it was fascinating hearing all of the backstories of this momentous event from those involved, like Robinson’s wife. What still stings is how long it took just one of the enlightened owners, Branch Rickey, to end the gentlemen’s agreement and finally realize that black men should be able to play in the majors. The great ghost surrounding the event is that we will never know if Josh Gibson was better than Babe Ruth. Gibson is the symbol of all the wonderful players that most of America could never experience because they were relegated to the Negro Leagues.

Another highlight of the documentary is any moment when Buck O’Neal is speaking. A more charming and gracious speaker you will never find, as O’Neal told wonderful stories of his time in the Negro Leagues but with also deep appreciation and no sense of the deep bitterness of what was happening in the Majors. 

The great lesson of the documentary, though, and my big takeaway, came in the bottom of the 10th when describing the steroid problem. Like all of the momentous changes that came in baseball’s history, such as the idea that black people could be treated as human beings when Americans saw that they could play the game like Jackie Robinson, the steroid problem in baseball describes a deep character flaw that we have as a people. The insatiable desire to be the best, at all costs, is not relegated to baseball. Indeed, all major sports have the steroid problem. All major activities (business and politics are clear examples) do as well. Baseball just became the poster boy for the problem. Indeed, any normal human being, if offered the chance, would take a pill to make themselves better at their job and increase their salary by a million-fold. So it wasn’t surprising that young twenty-year olds were experimenting with all sorts of chemicals to make themselves better. It happens in just about every industry. 

Yet the big moment of the documentary came when describing Barry Bonds, who could be the most hated figure in sports history. During this section, one of the commentators explains how John Keats describes why William Shakespeare was the greatest writer that ever lived because he had what Keats called “Negative Capability.” Negative Capability might just be a convoluted way to say that Shakespeare could both see and describe the good and bad in every situation, making us aware of the complexities of the human situation, and the idea that “ the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration,” and so one has to see the beauty in baseball and even Bonds, because there is just such an enormous character to see in him. Barry Bonds is the classic case of having so much good and bad to describe. 

Long before Bonds started “allegedly” taking PEDs, he was on track to be as good as Willie Mays, his godfather and arguably the greatest all-around player in baseball history. With 400 home runs, 400 stolen bases, an outstanding outfielder with a gun of an arm, and one of the smartest hitters ever, the skinny pre-PED Bonds was an absolutely devastating athlete. His desire to get even better, spurred by the PED-enhanced Mark McGwire breaking Roger Maris’s single season home run record, is totally understandable, even by the fans who constantly berated him with the asterisk placards and nasty comments. Yet Maris was the original asterisk (even Yankee fans treacherously said he would never be as good as Ruth after he broke Ruth’s record because Maris did it in the 162-game season). McGwire, of course, has a gigantic asterisk by his name, but nobody talked about his asterisk at the time because it wasn’t en vogue to talk about PEDs in the season when McGwire broke the record. 

The only player to crush Ruth’s lifetime record without an asterisk (that we know of) was Hank Aaron, who comes off as the most gracious, humble, kind-hearted human being in the documentary. When Bonds broke Aaron’s record, Aaron said that there should be no asterisk. Because Aaron, like Bonds, also received the death threats, and he knew the perseverance, dedication, smarts, it takes to hit more than 714 home runs over the course of a career in the big leagues. One also has to bear in mind that Bonds did what he did against pitching that was 100 times more sophisticated than what Ruth faced and 10 times more sophisticated than what Aaron faced. The pitchers in Bonds's era were also juicing, making them superhumans too. The great irony. Having been able to see Bonds play in person, I remember how whenever he came to the plate at PacBell Park, fans would come streaming down from the hot dog stands, everybody would stand at nervous attention, while during the rest of the game they would casually chat. Bonds had that great power that you did not want to miss a single second of one of his at-bats because he could do anything. 

Negative Capability applies to Pete Rose, a sad story because we cannot recognize Rose’s outstanding accomplishments, even when he was one of the most exciting players to play the game. We are all human and have enormous faults and expecting a ball player to be perfect not only makes the ball player into a fantasy ideal, but it makes him tremendously boring and, dare I say it, not worth watching. Frank Deford has an outstanding story about why Pete Rose should be allowed into the Hall of Fame, and I can’t say if allowing Rose into the Hall is the right thing, but clemency is more powerful than vengeance and punishment of people, even if what they did is totally wrong (of which there is no doubt in my mind for Rose). 

This negative capability, to see the beauty without all the consideration, was easily the most profound moment of the 22 hours of baseball, but there were so many other moments that even non-baseball fans could appreciate. I never realized just how Joe DiMaggio was this great American superhero and what a great guy he really was or seemed to be at least. Of course, the Babe is bigger than life, like a cartoon character and it was great to see old footage of this most American of characters. You could not find a more comic book character in a comic book. 

Another one of the more touching moments was Mickey Mantle describing how he was about to quit in the minors and he called his father, who came out to get him and told him to pack his stuff. Expecting some sympathy and an inspiring speech, Mickey was surprised and his father said, “I thought I raised a man, but I must have raised a coward.” Clearly, Mantle was no coward and he just needed his dad.

The saddest story of them all was Curtis Flood, also an incredibly well-spoken, thoughtful, elegant human being. His stories about living marginalized as a negro player whose owners didn’t even know that the black players, even the stars, had to stay in separate hotels, were moving. Another sad story was the Dodgers’ move West that parallels the making of American suburbia, leaving behind the demolished Ebbetts Field (one of the sadder moments for baseball). This sad story captures the essence of what isn’t necessarily good or bad about baseball and America but what just is.

Whether you like baseball or not, Ken Burns’s Baseball is a monumental picture of who we are as Americans. And should be required viewing for all those who want to understand America better. 

Winterland 1973. The Complete Recordings: A Review

Normal bands release a live concert from a single date or release a single or double disc of “best ofs” from a tour. Not the Dead. Because of their fans, the Dead don’t just release the entire concert, zits and all, the Dead (and their business people) release 3-night runs (on 9 discs) capturing a particular moment in time. Or in the case of “Winterland 1973. The Complete Recordings” 3 nights in a row. November 9-11, 1973, a Friday night through Sunday night run of shows in San Francisco that captures the band doing what they do best: playing live improvisational music.  

What’s curious about this box set released in 2009 is that in 1973 the Dead played only 3 nights in their home base of San Francisco. In a year in which they played over 150 shows. Yes, they kicked off 1973 at Maples Pavilion (in Stanford). But these 3 are the only concerts they played in the place they put on the map in their own musical way. Yet here we have the historical documentation of how they sounded in late 1973. Which is a really good but difficult and somewhat dark time for the Dead (Pigpen’s recent passing). 

Every Deadhead has their favorite era. Many point to the Cornell May 8th, 1977 show, which is in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. But I’m not entirely convinced that Cornell was the best show of the spectacular Spring ’77 tour. Then there are Deadheads who believe that the only true Dead is the Pigpen era (1965-maybe late ’71, because Pigpen really stopped having an impact on the Dead once he got sick and eventually passed in ’73), punctuated by the extremely intense playing from ’68 to ’70. Personally, I’m very fond of ’72 and the post-Pigpen ’73-74, although I do find myself coming back frequently to the intensity of ’69-’71 (2/13/1970 is such a spookily intense show!). As much as I appreciate the blues songs that Pigpen sang perfectly with so much soul and the tremendous energy that Pigpen brought to the band, it took Pigpen passing for the Dead to make the natural progression from country psychedelic rock band with a blues background to one with credible Jazz chops. 

In ’73, Jerry was learning jazz scales from his friend, pianist Merl Saunders, and these scales were giving incredible depth to his improvisation. Jerry’s soloing is really peaking at this time. It is still quite unfathomable for me to imagine that not only did the Dead play some 150+ shows, each in front of thousands of people, in 1973, but that Jerry would get incredibly bored when not on tour and would play clubs in San Francisco and Palo Alto with the Merl Saunders or Jerry Garcia Band (which had a more gospel and funky sound than the Dead) and would play an incomparable banjo with Old and In the Way (though he wasn’t quite old in ’73). It is entirely conceivable that Jerry played live on some 320 nights or more in ’73. By some accounts, his favorite pastime was buying Fender chord books and practicing chords. Literally, Jerry’s life at the time must have been Play-Travel-Sleep. Play-Travel-Sleep. Do it over again. And Play-Travel-Sleep.   

What strikes me about the box set “Winterland 1973. The Complete Recordings” is how perfectly it is suited for us Dead historians. Beautiful liner notes written by Dennis McNally capture the essence of the Dead in ’73 and how they came to be where they were on those nights in early November 1973. Luscious murals of the band and colorful characters of the time. A mailing list for fans wanting info on the upcoming tour from an era so pre-band website it is not even funny. And a great pin, which is now on one of my hats, and reads: “Good Ole Grateful Dead.”

Then there’s the sound. And for the audiophiles out there, this recording really is a treasure in its own special way. The shows were recorded on 2-track tapes on a Nagra IV as part of the band’s normal documenting procedures of the time, which employed a mic split permitting a different mix to tape than that to the PA system, with minimal processing allowing the clearest possible signal path to tape. These are far from your average 2-track recordings! An incredible restoration process took place to transfer the tapes to digital format using the highest possible digital resolution (192KHz/24bit). A standard CD is 44.1 KHz/16bit for reference. Processing and mastering procedures are described in great detail in the liner notes. The result: stunning sound quality. Each of the instruments are captured in their glory. The booms of Phil’s bass are deep and frightening. The high notes and intricate arpeggios of Jerry’s Wolf guitar are faithfully captured. Bobby’s presence is ever more important for the band at this time and his rhythm guitar pushes the band along. If there’s a weak point, it’s the vocals which do fade away slightly at points but not in a distracting way at all.  

The energy of the shows transfers nicely to the recordings. The Dead were notoriously inept at making albums in the studio (true Deadheads will argue that point, but let’s face it: with the exception of American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, it’s perfectly okay to skip the studio albums and head straight to their live recordings in order to appreciate the band's contribution to music). Because the Dead made their music on stage and not in a studio, there are volumes of the most essential Dead tunes that were never recorded in the studio (“Jack Straw,” “Brown-Eyed Woman,” “Ramble On Rose,” and many more). Jerry captured the essence of the Dead, which had to be appreciated live, when he said: “Working in the studio is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live is like having a rowboat out on the ocean...You can't manufacture intensity [in a studio].” The Dead loved to be flung out deep to sea, where the intensity happened organically in the conversation between audience, venue and band. You can hear the energy streaming through the building on these recordings, like you can on all great Dead recordings. Steady waves of intensity cycle between all those involved. You can feel the telepathy between the band members and then the telepathy between the band and the audience (“Jerry smiled at me and I knew what he was going to play”). This energy is felt even to listeners like me 40 years later who were not even born yet in 1973. 

One of my favorite recordings that faithfully captures this energy is an audience recording of 6-22-1973. The sound quality is poor by modern studio album standards, but if you listen carefully to the “Bird Song” from that show, what you hear is a perfect experience of communion between band members and audience and an energy that is absolutely sizzling.  

But back to the 1973 Complete Winterland Recordings. Friday night’s show is worth 3 out of 5 stars. Good, not great. As my wife, a budding Dead appreciator noted, “There was no moment that sent me to Jupiter.” When the Dead were really on, they can send you to Jupiter, and there is no deep space wildness in Friday’s show. Highlights include a tight first set with a unique “They Love Each Other” and a 21-minute “Playing in the Band,” which almost got me to Jupiter but not quite. 

Saturday night’s show features a “Playing in the Band>Uncle John’s Band>Morning Dew>Uncle John’s Band>Playing in the Band” which occupies just about an entire disc. Deep space travel is required and it is quite excellent. The first set is also smoking. And there's a good "Truckin'" leading into a stellar "Wharf Rat" with a Nobody's jam in the middle. Amazing show, not quite magical. 4 out of 5 stars. Sunday night’s show takes the cake for me. A very long, tight energetic first set, punctuated by a monstrous “China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider,” one of the best versions that I can think of. The second set is anchored by a 35-minute subtle, exploratory “Dark Star” which blends nicely into a “Eyes of the World>China Doll.” The "Dark Star" from this night is not the crowd pleaser that the legendary 2/13/1970 version is, but man is it extraordinary. Very deep space travel with some very strange and wonderful Phil bass bombs dropped in the middle, and just when you think the band is going to lose it, they bring it back so beautifully for a truly transcendental, maybe even mature-sounding "Dark Star" that is deeply satisfying, especially on repeated listens. I enjoyed it the first time I listened to it, but did not really love until I was driving through some deep pea-soup fog, completely driving on memory and not sight, and getting lost. I made it back alive to my house just as the "Dark Star" was getting out of the deep space and into the transcendent "coming home" section with Bobby laying down that line that indicates they were near the end. I had to sit in the driveway and listen to the transition to the wonderful "Eyes of the World" and felt quite blissful. This is the deepest "Dark Star" I can think of. Let's give Sunday night's show a 5. 

As a bonus, I'll give the sound for the 3 shows a 6 out of 5. 

The benefit of having 3 nights in one box set is that we get to compare each of the shows very scientifically. The only songs the band played on all 3 nights were Bobby’s brand new “Weather Report Suite” (WRS) and “Big River.” WRS smokes on all 3 nights, and a reason to purchase this set is just to compare the WRSs. In fact, the band and Jerry especially is playing it so intensely on Saturday night that while Bobby and Phil lead the song to its conclusion, Jerry is still urging to burn up for way longer on his guitar. And while the band concludes the song, Jerry continues to solo in an almost space mariachi John Coltrane sound. You can hear the influence of Villa-Lobos, Albéniz and Miles Davis. Jerry does not want to stop playing and it’s quite wonderful to hear this magic enthusiasm. 

McNally correctly identifies that the band’s playing of Johnny Cash’s “Big River” could have earned them a place in the Grand Ole Opry on all 3 nights. A really tight country feel that would have you confused if you didn’t know. Are these boys from the hills of Tennessee or are they beatniks from the Peninsula and San Francisco? What’s great about the Dead is not just that they can do the Grand Ole Opry as well as any country musicians, but they can turn on a dime and then do a modal jazz 20+ minute “Eyes of the World.” And that’s really why I love the Dead in late 1973.

What you hear are live show veterans. You hear a band that has been playing 150+ shows a year, on the road for the vast majority of their "adult" lives. They purposefully went to places outside of the comfort home environs of San Francisco to test themselves in 1973. The “polished” (this is a difficult adjective to apply to the Dead, because when they are not just good but great, there’s an important element of unpolished looseness that is essential) sound of the band in 1973 bothers some fans. And it’s true, on these recordings there aren’t the magically intense spontaneous concerts that you would hear from the younger, much more unpolished but extremely energetic band in a 2/11/1969 or a 5/8/1970 show, for example. But what you have are moments. Really wonderful, technically proficient moments. And what are they? A rock band? A psychedelic band? (Though certainly part of the “psychedelic” culture of the late ‘60s, I would strongly argue that the Dead’s sound isn’t really “psychedelic” at all.) A country band? A Jazz combo? One can even hear the influence of Bach’s counterpoint in the dueling solos one hears between Phil and Jerry with Bobby comping like McCoy Tyner on a “Dark Star.” What makes the Dead special is the blend of styles that gives the band their own unique sound. And what a special sound it is. 

I do not recommend 1973 Winterland Complete Recordings for neophytes. (I highly recommend the 12-19-1973 show for those newbies wanting to get a taste of the Dead in late 1973 and to hear Jerry's improvisational talents and the Dead's space jazz chops really peaking). But for the historians, this is a great compilation not just for the wonderful artifacts collected in the box, but the great sound quality of the recordings, and the energy of the music. Complete. Warts and all.

Sonic Exploration, The Science of Music and Contributions Made by The Grateful Dead

Whether you love them or hate them, the Grateful Dead were sound tech pioneers.

One of the greatest tributes to the band is this headline, which came from Pro Sound News, a trade journal for sound tech enthusiasts, after Jerry died: "The Ultimate Experimental Lab Closes." 


The Grateful Dead spent most of their 30-year history exploring sound and taking music to new sonic frontiers. What makes their music so rich, even to listeners in 2013, is that each year, each tour, and even each concert could be so different and could evoke so many genres and styles that the music came to have its own style. A 35-minute experimental and hallucinatory “Dark Star” could suddenly melt into a cover of “El Paso,” a cowboy ballad originally sung by Marty Robbins in 1959. What also evolved significantly during the Dead’s 30-year tenure was the equipment that the group used to explore sound. 

A significant aspect of the Dead’s history revolves around pioneering sound equipment that would eventually be adopted by other groups, and the principles they developed mark an important contribution to the field of music. Some of the Dead organization’s inventions and ideas, like the “Wall of Sound” were so extravagant and far-fetched that no other group has attempted to replicate them. Yet, still the Dead’s contribution to the science of sound and music cannot be ignored. 

Because the Dead were probably in the jazziest of their many eras in '74, precision in sound was crucial.The Wall of Sound created this perfect sound laboratory and allowed them to take explore new territory in an effort to create the clearest, most perfect sound for the greatest number of concert attendees.

Every instrument of the band had a column of speakers on the wall. Phil, had a different speaker for every string on his bass guitar! Separation and clarity of sound for Dead concertgoers was unparalleled at the time and the Dead were light years ahead of other amplified bands of the time.

The Wall of Sound was just a massive PA that used 92 tube amplifiers to push 26,400 watts through 604 speakers capable of projecting cosmic jams and thundering quadraphonic bass sounds up to a half-mile from the stage without distortion. The system weighed over 70 tons and stood over three stories high and 100 feet wide. Put together by gearheads, audiophiles and psychonauts who were escapees from the computer and engineering outfits of the Bay Area's budding computing business scene.
To this day, the Wall remains a touchstone for sound systems of all shapes and sizes, including the PAs deployed at the ever more popular mega summer festivals. But what was special about it was that it created a "macro-acoustic event." The band could play cleanly and loud enough for those in the back without frying the ears of those up front. 

There are several officially released concert videos of the Dead and one is The Grateful Dead Movie, which was made during their 5-show run in October '74 in SF right before the band's hiatus to take a break from touring. A hiatus caused by the burdens of touring with the Wall, which presenteed the need for a slew of touring engineers and roadies and several semis.  It's great to see the visual aspect of these shows but in general I find these videos a tad disappointing. I find the sound recordings better capture the energy and I like to picture myself there. But one of my little highlights of the Grateful Dead Movie is this brief clip in which Phil is just geeking out talking about the sound system for his bass. It's a little glimpse into the technical wizardry of the Dead's crack equipment crew and you can tell Phil is the ultimate tech music nerd. 

Alembic, a custom guitar and pickup design outfit formed in 1968, essentially became the Dead’s Research and Development wing and took off from where the Dead’s original patron, Owsley Stanley aka “Bear,” started, and worked with “Bear” to ultimately take the Dead’s exploration of sound to new heights.

One of my favorite contributions that Alembic made to the Dead sound was Phil Lesh’s bass and how it fit into the Dead’s incredibly ambitious search for The Sound. For the sound nerds, check out the technical specs for Phil’s bass and speaker set-up here.  Phil’s bass was the first quadraphonic bass ever made. Each string had a separate signal. On each of the bass and treble pickups there were five controls, which enabled him to select 1) the bandwidth of the filter, 2) the center frequency of the filter, 3) the kind of filter he used, 4) how much of the filtered sound reached the speakers, and 5) the mix of the unequalized and unfiltered direct sound. Not only was there an amazing pallet of sounds available to Phil, he was also able to amplify each string separately through four different speaker towers that could be set up at equidistant locations, effectively enabling him to throw his sound around an entire stadium or venue. 

When the Dead played Winterland, an old ice skating rink in San Francisco, Phil would drop “Phil bombs,” bass tones at certain frequencies that would knock the plaster off the ceilings that would highlight wild explorations of sound like “The Other One,” an energetic and percussive piece about rambling on the bus with the Cowboy Neal Cassady made famous by Jack Kerouac. 

In 1973, a New York Times article pointed out that the Dead “were and are experts in the art and science of showing people another world, or a temporary altering (raising) of world consciousness.” Showing people other worlds was made possible by the power of the technology behind the Dead’s music. Even if the Dead’s music is not your cup of tea, you cannot fault the group for its thoroughly ambitious (it often left them completely broke) Search for the Sound and their contribution to the Science of Music. 

You can read more about how the Dead recruited NASAand Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab  scientists  to improve their sound in this informative Wired article "Call them hippies, but the Grateful Dead were Tech Pioneers."