Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Culture

  • Responsibility Culture

    I’ve blogged about this before, but I find myself revisiting it, to remind myself of the values that matter. Netflix got well known for their vacation policy (or lack thereof), but it’s just a small part of their responsibility culture. The whole presentation is here. It’s 128 slides but it’s a quick read.

    If you are in a hurry, read the 9 key values at the start. But by then you’ll probably keep going. My favorite phrase of the whole deck:

    Great Workplace is Stunning Colleagues

    I love the word “stunning”.

    Another great slide is:

    Why are we so insistent on high performance?

    In procedural work, the best are 2x better than the average.

    In creative/inventive work, the best are 10x better than the average, so huge premium on creating effective teams of the best

    Seriously, just read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

     

  • Daily Napkins

    There’s an article in Mashable today about a mom who illustrates her kids napkins for lunch every single day. She has two sons, now 6 and 10.

    Her sons go to my daughter’s school, are the same ages and are in my daughter’s classes. Tori and Ansel are good friends. I’ve seen these napkins for years. As a daily project they are frankly quite impressive.

    The Mashable article led me to her blog, Daily Napkins, where she displays them. That blog led me to a NY Times article from a year ago on the same topic. So she’s been somewhat famous for this for a while.

    A napkin for lunch every day since 2006. Crazy? Artistic? Amazing? Persistent? Choice D, all of the above.

  • Happy Birthday Ella

    Google has a nice doodle for what would have been Ella Fitzgerald’s 96th birthday. No matter what your musical tastes, if you do not own any music by Ella, you are missing out. My 10 year old can tell you that she is my favorite singer ever and always will be.

    I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that her Christmas Album is the best Christmas album ever. Any of her stuff with Louis Armstrong is great. Twelve Nights in Hollywood is a brilliant two CD set of live performances (she’s especially good live). Oh seriously, you can’t go wrong with any of her stuff.

    Just listen and enjoy…

  • Robert Ebert on Twitter

    A good post from a great writer with some good advice:

    My rules for Twittering are few: I tweet in basic English. I avoid abbreviations and ChatSpell. I go for complete sentences. I try to make my links worth a click. I am not above snark, no matter what I may have written in the past. I tweet my interests, including science and politics, as well as the movies. I try to keep links to stuff on my own site down to around 5 or 10%. I try to think twice before posting.

    Think twice, what a radical concept…

  • What Teachers Make

    My daughter is learning Slam Poetry, so she showed me this. No comment other than watch it.

  • Culture Does, Policy Says

    Pretty obvious stuff from 37 Signals, but if it were that obvious why would we have Dilbert?…

  • Stairway to Heaven

    At the Kennedy Center Honors celebrating Led Zeppelin, Heart performed Stairway to Heaven with a full choir and orchestra. You see the reaction from the members of Led Zeppelin in attendance.

    You may need to be old to appreciate this, but wow:

    If you want to see Led Zeppelin performing this live almost 40 years ago:

  • Elvis Lives

    As a jazz fan with daughters 10 and 6 years old, my playlist is not typically the popular one. The sole exception is around Christmas. I have the best Christmas music.

    I would argue that simply having the Ella Fitzgerald Swinging Christmas Album dramatically improves your holiday playlist. Add some Diana Krall, Nat King Cole and some classics by Eartha Kitt (Santa Baby), The Pointer Sisters (Santa Clause is Coming to Town), Springsteen (Merry Christmas Baby), Mellencamp (I saw Mommy Kissing Santa) and a few others, and you have some serious Christmas music.

    So that playlist has been going like crazy the past week.

    In 4th Grade, Danielle is reading more non-fiction, particularly biographies. She just finished one on Elvis. So I said, “wait, I have a Christmas song by him” (Here comes Santa Claus). She likes it but says, “I thought he was more rock and roll”.

    Well, it’s not in the Christmas playlist, but I do have the album they released with all Elvis’s #1 hits. So I crank out Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock.

    Picture me and my two daughters dancing crazily on a Tuesday night to Elvis Presley music released before I was born. It really doesn’t get any better…

  • More Famous People Among Us

    Well, perhaps kind of famous is more accurate. A while back I mentioned that the co-creator of The Daily Show lived in our building and I had no idea who she was.

    Today I discovered that our neighbor two doors down is a twice Grammy nominated musician. I knew she was a musician, but I mainly thought of her as the nice woman with two black labs.

    Truthfully, I don’t know her music, but this was apparently her biggest hit:

  • Losing

    I’m currently reading How Children Succeed. I’m not quite half-way through so I can’t do a review yet. But one section resonated.

    The author is talking about a low income Brooklyn school that somehow excels nationwide at chess. The teacher often will focus a class on what the students blew in the tournament the weekend before. Which can be a challenge.

    It’s uncomfortable to focus so intensely on what you’re bad at.

    The teacher takes them down a difficult path. To take responsibility for mistakes and learn from them without obsessing over them.

    Very rarely do kids have an experience in life of losing when it was entirely in their control. But when they lose a chess game, they know that they have no one to blame but themselves.

    So the teacher teaches, without making excuses. But tries very hard to make one key point:

    I try to teach my students that losing is something you do, not something you are.

    That might be one of the key lessons in life.