Some background… The line was uttered in a description of David Sarnoff, who was the president of RCA/NBC. At first, Sarnoff wanted the airwaves to be free of advertising and profit primarily from the sale of radios. After the company suffered because of the Great Depression, Sarnoff was forced to put ads on the airwaves and his company grew tremendously as a result.

Anyway, the line is this: “Once you’re good at connecting consumers with advertisers, it’s hard to be good at anything else.”–Get Excited

Ricky, it’s called the Entrenched Player’s Dilemma.

Wikinomics had a fairly good description:

“The problem with mature companies is that the very commercial success of their products increases their dependency on them. Making radical changes in the product’s capabilities, underlying architecture or associated business models could cannibalize sales or lead to costly realignments of strategy and business infrastructure. It’s as though popular and widely adopted products become ossified, hardened by the inherent incentives to build on their own success. The result is that entrenched industry players are generally not motivated to develop or deploy disruptive technologies.”

I know you know Tucker but we haven’t met. The stunt you guys pulled during your SXSW panel was the only time I laughed the entire conference besides from sadness and despair.

I never came to like “Starbucked.” But I grew very fond of its writer. Most books about social and business phenomena give the reader something to think about. This book gave the author something to think about. Reading “Starbucked” produced an odd reversal of roles and left me, at least, feeling less like a student of the subject than a teacher. Not that I mean to instruct Clark. But I experienced the pleasure a teacher must feel when he watches a kid with promise outgrowing the vagaries and muddles of immaturity (and the jitters of too many coffee-fueled all-nighters) and coming into his own as a young man of learning, reason and sense.

—

P. J. O’Rourke in this weekend’s New York Times.

It might seem weird, but that is exactly what I am trying to do with this blog.

I think it’s better that way. It is much more honest. The perspective of looking back after the fact gives us all these opportunities to make excuses or embellish or omit. Instead, I’m wrestling with them out loud and trying to weave them into a narrative. This is me, as it happens.

I just got another genius book pushed on me called “A Nervous Splendor.” For about 4 months in 1888, on the same block in Vienna, unpublished Freud, the prodigal Crown Prince Rudolf, Theodor Herzl, Hugo Wolf, Anton Bruckner, and Johannes Brahmes all lived together without knowing their inevitable collective contribution to history. The book interweaves their journey’s and hints at what the future holds. It ends the day Hilter is born.

“By such a paradox Vienna attained greatness after all. It bred geniuses who foretold a modern wound. And Rudolf too became in a time a sad but significant precursor. He was the herald of an alienation common to the youth of our day. Over him loomed Franz Joesph, a storybook incarnation of The Establishment….

Nervousness is the modern sickness. It is the sickness of the century. Outside, everything is gleam and gorgeousness. One lives only on the outside, one is led astray by the dancing phosphorescence…one no longer expects anything from the inner life, from thinking or believing.”

Which echoed what Alinsky said less than 100 years later about an entirely different world–you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same:

The rest of the middle class, with few exceptions, reside in suburbia, living in illusions of partial escape. Being more literate, they are even more lost. Nothing seems to make sense. They thought that a split-level house in the suburbs, two cars, two color TVs, country club membership, a bank account children in good prep schools and then in college, and they had it made. They got it–only to discover they didn’t have it. Many have lost their children–they dropped out of sight into something called the generation gap. They have seen values they held sacred sneered at and found themselves ridiculed as squares or relics of a dead world.

But basically, Austria had peaked and inertia was the only thing keep it going. There was optimism, but mostly just fear. It blanketed the town. And in response, people stuck to what they knew best. They further embraced the Monarchy. They reveled in customs, tradition and archaic expression. But none of that shook off the fear. And the one man with some optimism, the Crown Prince and heir to the throne, so hamstrung by the system, put a bullet in his head. And was succeeded by Franz Ferdinand and the First World War.

And so the book asks this question over and over again: “Why doest thou suffer? Why doest thou live?” It doesn’t answer it of course, but it’s still a good question.