Flossin' In L'Austin

Family and MBA adventures in Austin. Very little actual flossin'.

[fastcompany]

These horrifying photos show a destroyed American landscape that agriculture giants don’t want you to see.

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Amazing how much these look like open, infected sores.

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Acadian sunset

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Louisiana Notes

I'm now in New Orleans, a city I've never been to. I've been wanting to recently, especially after running across this Tennessee Williams quote:

“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.  Everywhere else is Cleveland.”

I don't think that's really right anymore but I get the point and I've wanted to finish the Tennessee Williams trilogy of cities. 

I left Waxahatchie this morning, stopped in Austin to drop our car off, and picked up a rental. I also go to see my friend Jess, who, as luck would have it, is from New Orleans. I got a lot of great advice from her, so it's with a great deal of embarrasment that I reveal where I had dinner -- Popeye's. Which is kind of like going to Italy and eating at Pizza Hut. But it was raining and I was lost and hungry and tired near Baton Rouge and I had to far to go to wait till New Orleans. I will atone for my sins tomorrow at a recommended restaurant.

For now, I am stuck with a stomach full of Popeye's which is making my face feel hot and my neck feel tight. It feels like my brain is demanding more oxygen than my blood is able to provide. 

But enough about that. I have something else to reveal -- southern Louisiana is absolutely gorgeous. I have often pictured it and pictured it looking pretty much like the Katy Freeway outside of Houston. It looks nothing like that. It's green and lush and then sky is perfect. And 'swamp' is such an ugly word for such a beautiful thing. The causeway I went over after Lafayette was remarkable -- a whole type of ecosystem that I haven't really seen before.

The area around Lafayette actually reminded me a lot of Jamaica -- hot and wet and verdant and fecund, with humans not really winning the war against nature but just barely managing to hold it back.

Jess mentioned something in her email about The Awakening, which I somehow managed to get this far in life without reading. So I downloaded the audiobook while I was in Austin and listened to 3/4 of it along the way. That really set the mood, as did Clifton Chenier and Lucinda Williams. I'll have to wait till tomorrow to find out if Mme. Pontellier gets it on with Robert (or kills herself or runs away to Mexico).

I'm now in New Orleans, in a clubby neighborhood (there are partyers outside my hotel window), but I haven't really seen anything and I am going to bed. 

Tomorrow though I intend to take a little running tour of the French Quarter, then grab a beignet on the way out of town. I am 1000 miles from home on this crazy weekend roadtrip. It's fun but I wish Nikki and the kids were with me.

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The federal and state governments have a cartoon version of the economy, focusing on atomistic firms and workers and silver-bullet tax and regulatory solutions. Cities and metros, by contrast, blend the ecosystem and the enterprise. They focus not just on a singular transaction, firm, or solution but rather on building effective structures, institutions, intermediaries, and platforms to give dozens of entrepreneurs and firms what they need: skilled talent, strategic capital, stable governance, reliable rules, functioning infrastructure, collective branding, and marketing.

[stanfordgsb]

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stanfordbusiness: “My definition of balance is that there really isn’t balance because I like to be 100 percent driving toward what I find most fulfilling,” shared Specialized Bicycles women’s product manager Erin Sprague (MBA ’12). Learn more about how Sprague’s passion for fitness inspires her forward-looking life philosophy: http://stnfd.biz/m3zOq Wow, what a bad definition of balance. There is a lot of good discussion happening now of how men and women can achieve balance in their personal and professional lives and this contributes nothing to it.

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Finally got this to work. Apparently I live at Costco.

[fastcompany]

Foursquare’s new Time Machine feature lets you visualize your check-in history in infographic form. 

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It was neat to watch my history animation, but I'm having trouble getting this to produce a shareable stats graphic.

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I'm catching up on old magazines and I ran across this. I really like this approach:

Compared with mandates, green default rules have the important advantage of maintaining freedom of choice, and they have the potential to protect the environment, save money, increase energy independence, and reduce waste.

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"Lunch Provided" -- my favorite phrase

And here's what I love about business school: I'm taking a 4-day quantitative bootcamp before orientation starts and even it has catered lunches and a networking happy hour. Undergrad life was not like that.

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Spider vs. Wasp

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The Pike Powers Laboratory and Center for Commercialization is set to open its doors Tuesday as Pecan Street Inc.

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Why I want an MBA

So I took the kids to our favorite local froyo-and-toppings-by-weight place today.* I have always been impressed by this place because they have a paper recycling bin and a plastic recycling bin and that's it.

Today there was an owner-looking guy (i.e. not a teenager in a t-shirt) and so I finally went up and asked him about it to satisfy my curiosity.

He told me that they set it up that way because they wanted everything to be recycled or reused but that the waste management company just sends everything to the landfill. 

It was kind of heartbreaking. This guy has every desire to be basically zero-waste. He's taken every step he needs to do so -- the only thing to even throw away are paper ice cream cups, paper napkins, plastic spoons, and plastic water bottles. And when I pointed out that the paper stuff could be composted his eyes kind of lit up like, "wow that would be even better."

The problem is that he's outside of the city limits and has limited options for waste management. So he pays a company to come offer a service that isn't want he wants but is the only one available. Let me repeat that: he's paying someone to haul his waste to the landfill, when what he really wants is to be zero-waste.

So this is why I want an MBA. So much of finding sustainable solutions to human problems is just connecting the dots. The first step seems to me to be letting people be as green as they want to be -- removing stupid barriers like the one before this guy. The second is making people who never had a zero-waste thought cross their mind realize that a) it's a great idea for everybody involved (and everybody's involved) and b) it can be as cheap or cheaper than the older, unsustainable way of doing things. 

So I think an MBA can do both of these things. And I don't know that I will end up in waste management (though I'd love to -- call me WM), but I definitely want to do something with the same goal -- finding business solutions to environmental and social problems, solutions that make everybody better off in every sense.

*note: this is still in Winchester; we don't move for 4 more weeks.

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Ah, this kiddie splash park looks like a nice place to stop and smoke.

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I never had an operational commander in the military that I felt was competent to handle any kind of serious legal matter, but maybe that's just my experience. Gotta love the women senators changing the status quo though.

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Fledgling robin that has decided to make our back patio its home.

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My commute. 85 miles each way. But I only have to make it 23.5 more times.

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