RWL #283

advice from the past and other interesting stuff!

Jul 10, 2022

Greetings from the LHH! It is now high summer in New Hampshire and that means we officially go to war with the chipmunks and squirrels over our blueberries. The blueberry bushes are overladen with fruit waiting to ripen. So it’s every man and rodent for himself in the scramble to get the ripe berries. Peak blueberry is a couple of weeks away, and at this point we have only been able to gather a handful of early ripe berries, but I when I see the branches of the bushes rustling and a chipmunk or squirrel drop down to the ground and scurry up another bush, I start getting competitive. I think we’re going to actually have a massive crop this year - the bushes have doubled in size since we moved into the LHH, and seem to have grown dramatically over the last couple of years. We’ll see.

This past week my middle daughter turned 25. When my daughters were babies, we bought time capsules (basically decorated popcorn tins) for each of them. We filled them with keepsakes like their first shoes, or the hat they came home from the hospital in. We also put popular magazines Time and Life, and a newspaper - just to capture some of popular culture. And then we asked all of the close relatives - grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. to write letters to each daughter to go into the time capsule and be opened when they turned 25. Those are the most precious items, especially since a good number of the letter writers have passed on.

My daughter let me read the letter I had written to her, which was interesting. I remembered a couple of things I had said - in particular I quoted from Pat Conroy's incredible novel The Prince of Tides. There is a scene where the main character is talking to his own daughter about the fallibility of parenting, “But I know we’re screwing you up a little bit every day. If we knew how we were doing it, we’d stop. We wouldn’t do it ever again because we adore you. But we’re parents and we can’t help it.”

But I did not remember that I also had a list of hopes for her, among them was, “I hope you will find work that helps you find meaning. There are so many ways to pass the time we have been given - I hope that you find work that makes you yearn for Monday rather than Friday.” That one caught me by surprise. Honestly, at that age I had not found work that gave me that sort of meaning. It was still a couple of years away for me. So I think that the Prince of Tides quote was a preemptive request for forgiveness for my failings as a father, and the second quote was as much of a hope for her as it was for myself. I was probably 28 when I wrote that. I had just started an MBA program and was really trying to figure out what I had to contribute in the world of work, because I had not been happy with what I had done so far. In the midst of that, my mother passed away during the spring semester, so I was also wrestling with guilt and sadness from losing a parent. It was a hot mess of emotions running in the background of that letter. And then of course, writing to your child 25 years in the future - who knew if I would even be there when she read it.

I definitely recommend this tradition if you have children. Even if they are more than a couple of years old, you can always push the open date back a bit farther. I was thinking maybe my wife and I should make a round 2 for them to open when they are 50. It wouldn’t be the same - writing to a 1 or 2 year-old child is not the same thing as writing to a 20-something. Toddlers are largely blank slates. By 25 we’ve made significant progress toward who we are going to be, though I’d like to think I’ve done a lot of growing since I was 25. Something to consider!

So with that, willing good for all of you, I present you with the links!

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Read

What: HBR, Blue Ocean Strategy

https://hbr.org/2004/10/blue-ocean-strategy?utm_medium=email

Why: This is a classic article (from 2004). The basic idea is the corporate strategy can be divided into two approaches - blue ocean and red ocean. Red ocean strategy involves going head-to-head against your competitors; blue ocean strategy looks to pursue new customers by meeting their needs in some new way. The core case study of the article is Cirque du Soleil, and how they changed what the circus was, and pursued a different audience by dropping many of the traditional elements of what made a “circus” and retaining only the high value elements, and then taking those high value elements to a new level. There are overlaps with Blue Ocean Strategy with other theories of strategy. I’m thinking of the Christenson’s Innovator’s Dilemma in particular. He argues that innovators move into an industry from the bottom, often dropping lower value elements and competing at the low-end of the market. I’m not sure Cirque was ever the low end, but they did drop animals, the “three ring” format, and other components and just focus on the dance and acrobatic elements.

This is definitely worth a read if you have not read their book by the same name.

Watch

What: How Airlines Quietly Became Banks (17 min)

Why: Profit centers for businesses emerge in ways that, from the outside, are not at all obvious. For example, hospitals make their big margins on pharmacy, lab, and imaging, and lose money on obstetrics and other primary care. I think most people know that gas stations make most of their money from selling you coffee and snacks and almost nothing from actually selling gas. Likewise movie theaters make most of their margin from popcorn and not selling the actual movie tickets. I had not heard that airlines were probably closest to movie theaters. Someone in the comments writes, "Airlines are credit card companies that fly planes as a side hustle". I haven’t talked to anyone who actually knows the airline business, so this could be wrong or at least not quite right, but the story is interesting and a good lesson for looking deeper into business models - sometimes the profit center is not obvious. (HT to Nephew #1 BN)

What: Zeihan on Geopolitics, The Russian Coup Question (2 min)

Why: In last week’s RWL I wrote a lengthy recommendation for Peter Zeihan’s books Disunited Nations (2020) and The End of the World is Just Beginning (2022). If you were like, yeah, maybe I’ll get to them, let me share a short (2 min) video of Zeihan talking about why a Russian coup would likely not change Russian aggression.

Listen

What: Democracy IRL, Diversity and Democracy, with Yascha Mounk (57 min)

https://democracyirl.buzzsprout.com/1935615/10921953-diversity-and-democracy-with-yascha-mounk

Why: Another podcast with one of my favorite intellectuals interviewing another intellectual I am following now. I’ve been a fan of Fukuyama for years - ever since reading his famous The End of History and the Last Man and more recently Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, both of which have been deeply influential on my own thinking about political economy at the macro level. I more recently (last two years or so) discovered Yascha Mounk and his Persuasion project. This is a great conversation about Mounk’s new book, and the challenge of multi-ethnic politics. Punch line: the classical liberal order was designed to help diverse populations get along without (literally) killing each other. But now the liberal order is under attack both internally and externally. Worth an hour of your time to listen to these two power-houses.

Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .

Flourishing in the World

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