My very important posts

Your humble blogger participated in a panel discussion at a "global strategy conference" over the weekend that was run by a Management Consultancy Group That Shall Remain Nameless.  The audience consisted of a lot of CEOs, corporate officers, and at least one business coach. 

Seeing as I'd just edited a book related to this topic, you'd think I'd have known what to expect in discussions about business strategy.  However, with my limited exposure to, you know, the for-profit sector, this was quite the eye-opening experience.  Management consultants are kind of like think tanks -- they matter a great deal, but no one is precisely certain why they matter so much. 

Chatham House rules prevent me from revealing anything that was said, but after 24 hours of exposure to cutting-edge management consultant practices, I am confident that I can pass on Ten Timeless Tips for How to Excel at, and Even Enjoy, Management Consulting. 

Ready?  Here we go:

1)  Market Every Piece of Advice as a Product.  Did you noticed that this list is called "Ten Timeless Tips"?  That's mine, baby!  [NOTE:  the Ten Timeless Tips may be updated at a future point in time.]

2)  Know And Repeat Your Buzzwords. This is an absolutely crucial aspect of the job.  The more business jargon you employ, the more your clients will need you to interpret what the jargon means.  For example, at the conference I attended, there was a lot of talk about the need for a "granular" perspective. 

For extra fun, try using neologisms from The Simpsons as your buzzwords.  Example:  "You need to embiggen your strategic perspective!" 

3)  Only Speak When You Have 14-Foot Graphics-Laden Screens Behind You to Amplify Your Points.  Otherwise, just nod sagely.  Bonus tip:  if you're having difficulty finding good graphics, just use this. 

4)  In Every Coversation with a Client, Mention Your Last Trip to China. This is tricky, as you have to be casual about it, while still drivng home the point that you are intimately familiar with the world's fastest-growing market.  Here are some possible ways to get this point into casual conversation: 

• "I was talking to one of our clients in Shenzhen On Monday, and..."
• "I was sunbathing in Chengdu a week ago..."
• "When I went bass-fishing in Chongqing last month..."
• "A funny thing happened when I went to a cockfight in Harbin on Tuesday...."
• "If, like me, you ever find yourself in Tianjin biting the head off of a live chicken...."

5)  Wear Lifts/Heels, and Stand on Risers Whenever Possible.  Remember, height is positively correlated with success in the business world.  To send a non-verbal cue to your customers that you deserve their money, try to sky over them. 

6)  Use Factoids To Distract Amaze Your Audience.  To drive home a point that might encounter pushback from the audience, be sure to snap off a statistic that seems related to your point.  For example, if you're trying to convince your customers that Western Africa is a more promising market than Western Europe, you can say, "Did you know there are more live births in Nigeria than in W. Europe?" 

Some other possibilities:

• "Did you know that in Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for any distance less than 30 miles?"
• "Did you know that the most popular first name in the world is Muhammad?"
• "Did you know that the first product to have a bar code was Wrigleys gum?"
• "Did you know that Jedi is an official religion in Australia?" 

7)  Put a Modern Spin on Old Cliches.  Example:  "To paraphrase Keynes, 'In the long run, we're all liquefie-- I mean, we're all liquid.'"

8)  Get Your Clients To Work For You.  The point of being a consultant is to get your client to give you the necessary information to do their job better.  Anything that gets them to reveal more local knowledge to you is useful and labor-saving.  Example: breakout sessions!

9)  Synergize!  Mention the various ways that multimedia campaigns can augment and properly orient your business strategy.  Oh, and say Web 2.0 a lot.  Example:  I already built buzz for this post using Web 2.0 -- a series of Twitter tweets.  How awesome is that? 

10)  Leave them wanting more... in exchange for $$$$.  Example:  I have many more tips for those who truly want to know the Management Consultant Way.  Just send a check for $10,000 to the offices of Foreign Policy and you'll receive a registered letter containing the rest of them. 

Over at Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris bemoans the timidity of Hollywood's recession offerings

 Many of us are gritting our teeth and counting our dimes through this rough recession, but the studios and networks have discovered a silver lining — they don't have to try anymore. In entertainment, we have met the first casualty of the economic collapse: ambition....

There will always be an audience for mindless crap, but not only for mindless crap. Executives who insist that all we want is comfort food because that's all they know how to cook are missing our appetite for variety, for surprise, for something we've never seen. And in underestimating our intelligence, they overestimate their own.  

Here's a suggestion for Hollywood.  It's not even that radical a suggestion, because the source material has already been filmed.

Why not remake The Bonfire of the Vanities? 

This is a no-lose proposition.  The Tom Wolfe novel was a heady cocktail of personal hubris set in the financial, political and media world of 1980's New York.  It's the perfect lens through which one can dissect our current financial travails.  Plus, the original movie version was such a God-awful bomb that the most memorable thing about it was a book chronicling the disaster.  The remake, much like Ocean's Eleven, is bound to improve on the original. 

Hell, if even Tom Friedman is dropping references to Wolfe's novel in his columns, one would hope a movie mogul or two has figured out the zeitgeist enough to greenlight a remake.

Here, I'll give my Left Coast friends one last nudge -- some helpful casting suggestions:

• Sherman McCoy -- Aaron Eckhart
• Peter Fallow -- Hugh Laurie
• Maria Ruskin -- Scarlett Johansson
• Judy McCoy -- Calista Flockhart
• Reginald Bacon -- Jeffrey Wright
• Larry Kramer -- Jake Gyllenhaal

That's a talented, inexpensive cast right there!  C'mon, Hollywood, if you're making a movie version of Moneyball, then surely you could do the same for either Liar's Poker or Tom Wolfe's fictional equivalent.  Get on it!

I have been blogging at danieldrezner.com for 5+ years now, and it has been a wonderful ride.  When I look back on this half-decade, I think of the good times, like when I cussed out James Lileks, or when I corrected Matt Stoller, or I adapted A Few Good Men to explain pork-barrel spending, or my DC potboiler written in the jargon of IR theory, or [I think they get the point--ed.  Really, I'm almost done!]  or what Junior Soprano and the G-20 have in common.  Hell, this blog has outlasted the birth, life and death of TimesSelect.  But five years in the blogosphere is a looooooong time.  So, as of January 4th, 2009, this blog as you know it will cease to exist.  Gone.  Kaput.  Goodbye, farewell, and amen.....  ...because on January 5th, danieldrezner.com will be relocated to Foreign Policy's website at foreignpolicy.com!  That's right, I'm officially selling out!!    Now, in light of some recent developments in the blogosphere, I can imagine that longtime readers of this blog will be curious about what this means.  So, just to be clear:  I will continue to be the sole editor of my blog.  When I want to post something, it's going up -- there are no other filters here.  To put this in blunt blogspeak terms -- if either Jennifer Palmieri or David Kuo goes anywhere near this blog, I'll whack them with a f$%#ing two-by-four.  Seriously, Foreign Policy is not affiliated with any think tank or ideological foundation -- it is now owned and operated by the Washington Post Group (as is Newsweek and Slate).  And I will not be the only person joining Foreign Policy's web team.  Without spilling any secrets, I know some of the other political scientists that Foreign Policy is bringing in after the first of the year, and I've had zero problem disagreeing with them in the past.   Blogging will continue uninterrupted at this site until January 5th, after which all y'all will be re-routed to my new home at Foreign Policy.  Finally, in the only sucking up I plan on doing in public, a big thank you to Moises Naim and the rest of the Foreign Policy crowd for having enough stupidity faith to bring me on board. 

Yeah, yeah, there's another government bailout of a bank and Barack Obama is unfurling his economic team and policy proposals.  Can we get to the important stuff?  Like, the sexiest movie ever?  Entertainment Weekly, as is their wont, has come up with their list of the 50 sexiest movies of all time, and gee, the list suck eggs.  The fact that 300 is on the list at all is the first tipoff that something is wrong  [But that one is for the gays!!--ed.  Oh, for Pete's sake, then put Top Gun on the list -- that flick has way more homoeroticism than 300.]    More importantly, I refuse to live in a world in which Mr. & Mrs. Smith is declared to the the third sexiest movie of all time.  Call me old, old school, but a list like this that has no Bogart-Bacall films, no Tracy-Hepburn movies, no Bringing Up Baby, no Thomas Crown Affair (either version), only one Susan Sarandon movie, etc., then the list is pretty piss-poor.  It does get one thing right, however.  This is a pretty sexy scene: 

 

Readers are encouraged to improve upon Entertainment Weekly and discuss which sexy movies were thoughtlessly omitted from the list. 

Your humble blogger is getting the hell out of Dodge for the rest of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. Blogging will be nonexistent for the next 36 hours, followed by ten days of, at best, posting whenever I damn well feel like it which won't be that often light to intermittent blogging. Since it is the end of the year and I will be out of the country, here is a short list of things I will not be missing while I am gone:

1) Paul Krugman's jihad against Barack Obama. As an outsider to progressive infighting, this was fun for a few go-arounds, but we've now hit the tedious patch when Krugman spends every column and blog post searching desperately for something to dump on Obama. This is Krugman at his most humorless and least persuasive. How bad has it gotten? If Krugman had written a column for Christmas Day, here's how I suspect it would have opened:

In the fifties, the elves at the Norh Pole were more than 40% unionized, and as we all know, it was the golden age of the elf middle class. Elf wages have since declined, and if you think that's only because of globalization and technological change, hey, here's a single magazine article from five years ago that ostensibly upends that supposition (while whiffing on the underlying causal trend). Moving, on, Barack Obama claims that, as Santa, he will help the elf middle class. He has also said, however, that he wants to be "the Santa of the naughty and the nice." He's criticized the elf union for funding alternative candidates. It's conciliatory rhetoric like that which will guarantee that Obama will not be elected by a wide margin, dooming the progressive elf movement to a curious footnote in history....

2) Any more talk about Jamie Lynn Spears... really, it's the female equivalent of the Mitchell Report. There's a lot of "what about the children?" gnashing of teeth for both issues. In the spirit of Peyton Manning's Pep Talks, here's my advice:

Wondering what to tell your children about Jamie Lynn Spears being pregnant? Tell them it means that Jamie Lynn Spears is clearly a better actress than her sister, since the character she portrays is apparently much more level-headed than Spears herself. In the end, it doesn't matter all that much, since the girl is worth gazillions and can therefore afford to hire people to assist in raising the child competently. Unless your children are as wealthy as Spears, however, assure them that if they get pregnant at that age, regardless of what they choose to do, they're going to be creating a serious wrinkle in how they thought their life was going to turn out.

3) Debates about whether Juno or Knocked Up is the better movie. It's like asking which gender you prefer -- there's no right or wrong answer to the question. I've seen both of them - I laughed harder at Knocked Up, but found more of Juno's characters (and cast) more interesting. What's more interesting is the notion that the writers of these movies -- Judd Apatow and Diablo Cody -- might be having an extended film conversation, if this Entertainment Weekly profile of Cody is at all accurate:

Cody's taste runs more toward movies like Rosemary's Baby and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (she props a Spicoli black-and-white-checked sneaker onto the booth as evidence of her devotion), or sharply funny TV like Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. ''God, I would slit my wrists to meet Judd Apatow.'' After Cody saw Superbad, she immediately went home and started writing a female response to the teen comedy, which Universal promptly snatched up. Girly Style, named after the wuss version of push-ups, tells the story of some nerdy college women.

4) Blogger endorsements. Yes, I toyed with the idea, but Ann Althouse has a valid point -- I didn't endorse during the 2004 primaries. Why start now? On the other hand, Matthew Yglesias and the Concord Monitor are onto something with the "undorsement" idea. So, my two undorsements of candidates that could ostensibly win are.... John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani. My reasons for the Giuliani undorsement have been made clear. As for Edwards -- I can't take seriously anyone who thinks that a free trade agreement with Peru -- Peru!! -- is somehow going to devastate workers and communities. Proposing to "make top prosecutors at the Department of Justice responsible for enforcing trade agreements"? I love how Edwards wants to re-engage with the world and simultaneously bully these governments into accepting American terms. Hillary Clinton's trade positions are problematic, but Edwards is Hillary on steroids.

Starting this morning, my wife and I will be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary in grand style -- going on vacation for five days and four nights to a small Caribbean isle that will remain anonymous. The children will not be accompanying us, as their grandmothers will be here to take care of them. None of you will be coming either. So,until my return, here's a few links that should be worthy of comment... in descending order of seriousness:

1) In the next issue of Foreign Affairs, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have articles articulating their foreign policy visions. Go check them out. I'll be particularly curious to see just how much overlap there is between them. 2) Megan McArdle reads the Social Security Trustee Reports so you don't have to -- and in the process addresses the liberal meme of "every day, in every way, Social Security is getting better and better." 3) James Pethokoukis has a nice survey of expert opinions on the extent to which the Chinese and American economies are intertwined, and what a hard landing in Beijing would mean to the United States. 4) ABC had a hard-hitting story on.... appropriate cleavage in the workplace. Best. Topic. Ever. Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who informs us, "Women know what their breasts look like in their clothes. It doesn't just happen. "Breast power" is real. We can pretend we don't know, but we do." I knew I'd been manipulated all these decades.

That is all.

So I stumbled across MyHeritage.com today -- which claims to have a face recognition program that lets you upload a photo and tells you which celebrities you look like. Of course, I couldn't resist. After uploading the picture on the front of the web site, here's the list of celebs I was told I resemble:

Matt LeBlanc Dustin Hoffman Antonio Banderas Usama bin Laden George Clooney Pierce Brosnan Jason Biggs Roberto Rossellini Hugh Grant Tom Stoppard

If you've managed to contain yourself to this point, well, you have better self restraint than I. Needless to say, their technology appears to be heavily dependent upon the angle of the face in the photo, hair length, facial hair, the presence of eyeglasses, etc. In other words, it's pretty much rubbish. When I uploaded a Salma Hayek photo, the program declared her to be only a 74% match with... Salma Hayek. So this was a waste of time..... until I realized that I could upload pictures of other bloggers and see who they resembled. The resulting lists of names are pretty friggin' funny.

Via Matt Welch, I found Anne-Marie O'Connor's story in the Los Angeles Times about Senator Barbara Boxer's new novel, A Time to Run (co-authored with Mary-Rose Hayes). There's some fascinating information in O'Connor's piece about the motivations behind the troika of protagonists:

In "A Time to Run," the main characters from the reigning "blue states" ? Josh from California and Ellen from equally reassuring New York ? are liberal, altruistic, sane. Their affluent families are caring and sharing. Their red state-born buddy, Greg, is the son of an emotionally abusive Ohio hardware seller former Marine who lost his favorite son in Vietnam. The red states that Greg heads to after graduation are interchangeably dull Siberias where Greg hangs out with the menfolk, bonding over beer, football and hunting. Josh and Ellen become Left Coast do-gooders. Greg becomes a sociopathic neoconservative journalist, the go-to guy for character assassinations conjured by a right-wing California senator. Boxer said that although she didn't intend for the characters to represent the American political equation, "I hope people will understand the issues I raise about why people are blue or red or purple." Her literary intrigues are not all political: There's also some bodice-ripping, with a love triangle between Greg, Ellen and Josh, and physical congress, tastefully suggested by euphemisms in which bodies "mesh." There's a whiff of scandal, too, when a youthful indiscretion comes back to haunt Josh.... Boxer said the novel explores "why people become liberals and conservatives. We explore the battle between liberals and conservatives at so many levels." And it's not pretty. If you're looking for an inspirational story about someone who rose above a difficult background to champion the downtrodden, forget it. In "A Time to Run," underprivileged Greg emerges as an opportunistic user ? an object lesson that does not seem particularly populist. ("We wanted to give Greg a very solid blue-collar background, and Ohio just seemed to be a good place for somebody like Greg to be from," said co-writer Hayes, who is the London-born author of such books as "The Winter Women." "I do believe that that is a fact, that generally speaking, large coastal cities have a more liberal bent.") "It's so clear the relationship with (Greg's) dad and what happened to his brother in Vietnam, made a big impact on his life," Boxer said. "The fact that [Josh and Ellen] had loving families made a very big difference." Greg, Boxer said, "didn't have that inner applause you get from your family. "It's terrible when someone with all his talent uses it to hurt people."

Insert your own joke about the Kennedys here. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go consult a therapist to determine which parent emotionally abused me so much as to drive to the right of the political spectrum. [Wow, emotional abuse and early gender confusion. You're a psychological mess. No wonder you didn't get tenure!--ed. Hmmm... maybe I should take a closer look at the Americans With Disabilities Act!!]