 Austin Beutner, a well-known politician and arts philanthropist, spoke to our leadership and ethics class a couple weeks ago. The talk gave me an interesting perspective on how it's possible to turn around city government organizations and be entrepreneurial in the context of public service. Beutner started his talk with his background and family information. His dad was a mechanical engineer, and Austin was taught from a young age to be serious about college and work while he was growing up. He remembers constantly washing dishes, cleaning printing presses, and driving delivery trucks for a florist. He went to college at Dartmouth and moved to Wall Street in 1982. He was part of the Blackstone Group before beginning his work in government with the State department. He remembers visiting the mayor of St. Petersburg and learning that in the Soviet system, "profiting" literally meant taking advantage of someone. This was in large contrast to his own understanding of the concept, and he realized how likely miscommunication can be with different languages and social idioms at play. This also taught him the importance of always trying to listen. After this experience, he started own firm that operated in various areas of finance. He did this until he got into a bad biking accident and decide to change careers. That's what got him to stay in the LA City public office. He felt passionate about changing the culture of how people worked in City Hall. He felt that all City employees should be public servants; the city's citizens should be their customers. (Instead, it's usually about enforcing and writing rules.) He had three major initiatives while in office. First, he wanted to "do more with less bureaucracy." One example of this was "12 to 2": reducing the number of City departments one had to interact with to get a permit from 12 to 2. His second initiative was learning from others (both for himself and for all his employees). All his employees had to do 5 cold calls per week to customers of the city (private sector employers). He personally talked to auto dealers, who are the #1 payer of sales tax and among the top 5 in aggregate payroll. They told him that they were having trouble finding entry level talent, and so he brought them together with community college leaders and started a dialogue about matching the two together. His third initiative was reducing bureaucracy. He had the idea for a business tax holiday: a temporary pause on business tax to bring businesses back to LA. He called up some business school heads and professors to write papers and went on to announce the business tax holiday with Schwarzenegger thereafter. In addition, he worked to create local preferences for using LA vendors for the City. The talk was interesting, and it was exciting to hear him tell us that he'll be running for mayor of LA. 2 Comments Notes on Brand Relevance by David Aaker 05/28/2011
 I recently heard an audio summary for Brand Relevance by David Aaker, a Haas marketing professor. The focus of the book was the distinction between brand relevance and brand preference. The key is that by differentiating from other brands and making yours the only relevant one, preference does not matter anymore (you have your own category). The four steps to achieving this according to the book are the following:
Brand Preference vs. Brand Relevance Models
Notes on Eli Broad Talk in Leadership Class 05/26/2011
 Eli Broad gave a talk in Mayor Riordan's Leadership class that I'm taking this quarter. It was a nice opportunity to hear him speak about his businesses and his philanthropic efforts. He told us he was born in NYC, and his parents moved to Detroit when he was 6 from Lithuania. He became a CPA when he was 20. Later he founded Kauffman Broad and KB Homes. He met Kauffman who was married to his wife's cousin, and their first key strategy was building homes without basements. Kauffman was the builder and carpenter, and Broad was in the office. They got along well, and he told us he made lots of mistakes. Traits of good CEO according to him: Leading by example, never asking others to do something you're not willing to do yourself. When KB went public, it had a market cap of $1 billion (in the 1970s). He was able to convince Wall Street that their business was not cyclical. Broad decided to buy insurance companies, which were the only ones to survive the Great Depression. He found insurance boring but discovered a niche in retirement savings, and converted his company to do this. This was a step on his journey that brought him to buy SunAmerica for $68 million, which he later sold for $18 billion. A quote Broad gave us was, "The reasonable man adapts himself to those around him. The unreasonable man adapts the surroundings to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man." This is a key quote for entrepreneurs to keep in mind as being unreasonable is the only way to get out of the status quo. He told us how he got a JD degree and has found himself to be able to take on many projects and do great in all of them. Right now, his main efforts include philanthropy in education reform, scientific and medical research, and the arts. Notes on Influencer by Kerry Patterson 05/24/2011
 I recently listened to a summary of Influencer by Kerry Patterson. The book was alright, and I'm not sure if it was the summary or the book, but the content didn't seem as unique as I would have hoped (a lot of the same material as in other psychology/influence books I've read). That's not to say it wasn't a good introductory/summary book for the topic. The book started with the two most basic questions people ask: Am I able? and Am I motivated? The book's goal was to demonstrate six steps to influencing people's attitudes towards those two questions. 1. Make the undesirable desirable
Michael Phelps on Philosophy 05/22/2011
 UCLA Today In the Leadership and Ethics class I'm taking with former Mayor Riordan, we had an interesting speaker a few weeks ago: Michael Phelps. It was the one on the right of the photo above, not the swimmer on the left. The one on the right, it turns out, is equally interesting (and athletic). Michael Phelps is the inventor of the technology behind the PET scan, which he later sold to Siemens. He's now a professor at UCLA. Phelps is Irish, and he began his story with an Irish saying: "When you lose something, you gain something." He taught that life is not about the plans you make but the people you meet. When his parents died, he began to live with a new family that introduced him to boxing. He was a boxer for 10 years and then went into a coma from a car accident. This made him switch away from boxing and go back to school. Another one of his sayings was, "fake it 'til you make it." He had no background in math, but he studied math and chemistry and ended up getting a Ph. D. in chemistry. He then went on to join the faculty in the medical school at Wash U and now UCLA. He started a company with two others that went on to create the PET scan. He developed PET while at Wash U, but the university claims no rights on inventions. (He said UCLA doesn't help as much and does take rights.) PET works by emitting a positron that combines with an electron to annihilate mass and emit energy (2 photons). A camera collects 40 million such events and makes an image from thousands of slices. Positrons are massless, so there is no pharmacological impact, and the scan is safe. Some other philosophical points he made:
Notes on Onward by Howard Schultz 05/20/2011
 I don't drink coffee, but I thoroughly enjoyed Onward by Howard Schultz, the story of Starbucks and its long, complex history (I like hot chocolate and tea). The audiobook I listened to was quite long,, and at times it felt more like Starbucks marketing than actual story and analysis. However, for the most part, I enjoyed hearing about the challenges the Starbucks CEO faced and how he and the right people around him helped turn around the business that we all know and love. I also grew to have a much deeper appreciation for the process around growing and roasting coffee, the training and culture behind the baristas and Italian coffee shops, and why "going out for coffee," something so commonplace now, is actually quite special and worthy of analysis. The author/CEO starts the story with his own background. He grew up in New York in the "projects" and started in the marketing department for Starbucks, a company that just sold coffee beans at the time. He went on a formative trip to Italy, where he felt the intense cultural love for espresso bars and the community created in the neighborhoods through coffee. The coffee shop has become the "third place" in one's life (with home and work being the other two). He took this idea back to the US and started his own coffee shop. In the process, he bought his former employer Starbucks and grew it to what it is today. Some key points that I found interesting in the introduction is how they treated employees and managed their team. Starbucks gives all employees (including part-time) equity options and health insurance. They also lowercase all titles and call employees "partners." The book focuses its attention on the problems in the US economy, their effect on Starbucks, and how Schultz came back to be a second-time CEO to deal with problems and turn the company around. Part 1: Love Ch. 1: A Beverage of Truth
Ch. 8: A Reservoir of Trust
Ch. 17: Whirlwind
Ch. 22: Truth in Crisis
Ch. 27: Innovate
Guys and Dogs Solve Awkwardness 05/18/2011
 The Good, Bad, and Ugly Here's the scenario. You're at dinner with both your family and your significant other's family. The awkwardness that results needs no explanation. How does the awkwardness go away? From my experience, there are often two main solutions: guys and dogs. By "guys," I mean the most common link between the two families. (This example can be extended to include two social groups that share some common members but do not often mix.) There is this pressure that guys (if they're the most "common" member of the two social circles) feel to help break the ice. Often times, girls play this role much more naturally. Everyone often looks to whoever it is organizing the event or joint outing for social cues as to what to do with the awkwardness. And the best way to dispel it is through humor. That's where dogs come in. Having a dog around immediately (for better or worse) shifts the focus of attention away from the social interaction and onto the cuteness or hilarity of the animal. Everyone likes to pet it, ask questions about it, tell stories about its escapades, and that dispels awkwardness and also creates bonding (as the two social circles learn more about each other through their common experiences around dogs). Maybe cats and all pets help serve this function too. But humor and cuteness need not be solely from dogs. Often funny hats and weird clothes can serve the same function. I wonder if other guys (or pet owners) out there have felt the same way and what techniques others use to help their guests feel at home. When it's my job, I know that I feel responsible to do this as the guy, and my dog always comes to the rescue to help. Steve Soboroff's Success Acrostic 05/16/2011
 LA Times Steve Soboroff recently spoke at my leadership and ethics class led by Mayor Riordan, and it was a fun, very personal discussion. Steve is a successful real estate developer and has worked as a land broker for many large shopping center deals. He was also pivotal to bringing Staples Center to LA. His talk centered on an acrostic about the characteristics of leaders and effective people:
 One of the most fun and comprehensive books I've read recently is Guy Kawasaki's classic The Art of the Start. It was a really fun read and covered all the basics of entrepreneurship I had learned about before but gave them a very succinct, clear structure. It also went through pretty much all the important questions an entrepreneur needs to consider, and I can see how it can serve as a helpful guidebook for preparing business plans, pitches, and actually starting a company. The book starts with a general introduction speaking about economic cycles. It does this through two metaphors: telescopes and microscopes. When things are going great, everyone looks very far into the future (with an all-seeing telescope) and has high hopes. When things aren't going so great, everyone looks very closely at every minute detail and cost (with a microscope). Entrepreneurs need to be able to do both in appropriate measure. Ch. 1: Starting
Ch. 2: Positioning
What is Nostalgia 05/12/2011
 "True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories." --Florence King "Nostalgia is a seductive liar." --George Wildman Ball "Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was." --Will Rogers "I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine." --Lou Reed "Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had." --Mignon McLaughlin "A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow I recently went back to Stanford for the west coast business school Challenge 4 Charity Weekend. It was my first time back on campus for more than a couple of hours, and the nostalgia hit me really hard. It was incredible how many things I felt at once. It got me thinking about what nostalgia really means, why it exists, and whether others experience it the same way. Here's just a sample of the many thoughts that ran through my mind that weekend: Wow, I remember that corner! And my bike! And getting lunch here! That was so pleasant. Wow, I feel old. I feel out of place. Why am I here? I want to be here. I like it here. Can I stay? Can I go back (in time, in space)? Where do I belong? Where are my friends? Where is everyone who was here when I was? What if I could bring them all back now? Would I? This place is the same, but I'm different. That's good. I see it in a new way now. This place has changed. Have I? Did it change me? All these new amazing buildings and cafes. But I'm still me. How much have I missed? It was so nice to reconnect with a place I spent four years getting to know. It was so nice seeing some old friends and catching up. It was so nice seeing that the dorm room I decorated and undecorated four times in a row is still there, with little change. Except for its occupant. Who's room is it, anyways? What do you think? Have you had experiences like this? What are we supposed to do about nostalgia (if anything)? What is the right way to acknowledge and honor it? | About Max Mednik
Max is an avid entrepreneur and student of life. He is a graduate of Stanford and founder of Ridacto and AMA Capital. He is a member of the business school class of 2012 at UCLA Anderson. He lives in Los Angeles with his family and spends his free time enjoying his many hobbies and interests.  ArchivesJanuary 2012 CategoriesAll SubscribeConnectFollow Me on Twitter  Connect on Facebook   Shazam Tags |
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