Walking Squares: Dusk

The painters are working on self’s room, so she’s been hiding out in the library. She dozed off in a deep, plush armchair. She’s never dozed off in an armchair before! She must have been deeply asleep, because she had a dream.

Then she decided to watch the first episode of the new season of The Crown. Elizabeth Debecki is a dead ringer for Diana. And holy hell, did Prince Charles ever get a glow-up: this season, he’s played by Dominic West. Dominic West. The two little boys who play William and Harry are very cute (and look just like young William and Harry).

And now to Walking Squares!

She set off for the lake (her favorite destination). It was getting dark, there was nothing to steady her hand, so her pictures came out somewhat blurry.

On the walk back, she decided to take pictures of the studios and the Main House. She leaned on a gate, which made her efforts sharper.

Sentence of the Day: NO RULES RULES, p. 136

Wow, TV is just killing self, right now. She’s on CNN (standard stuff) and Twitter (Trump’s Diet Coke ordering button! That’s almost — sweet! It is better that the red button ordered Diet Coke, it could have been ordering a nuclear strike!)

In the meantime, she is still reading No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention.

p. 136: Our big threat in the long run is not making a mistake, it’s lack of innovation.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

No Rules Rules, pp. 124-125

Self is enjoying this book much more than she thought she would. To be honest, she found the early going pretty dull. She lives IN Silicon Valley and meets people like this on a regular basis, there is nothing fascinating about people who work in high-tech. (So why did she choose to read this book? Uh. Could it be because she subscribes to Netflix?)

But, somewhere around p. 50, she found that some of the bullet points of do’s and dont’s could be applied to her own life. Amazingly, there was relevance!

Now she’s reading about how open-ness and admitting one’s mistakes is a good thing, it can heighten your employees’ loyalty. (Hey, boss is human!)

But not in all cases. If you are perceived by employees as a strong and capable leader, admitting your mistakes will only enhance your image.

If, however, you are regarded as weak, admitting your mistakes will only make you appear more weak.

Lesson: You’ll want to build trust in your competence before admitting your mistakes.

In other words, try not to make too many mistakes in the beginning?

LOL

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Sentence of the Day, 3rd Thursday of 2021

Self is alive! (Confetti! Fireworks!)

Her favorite musical guests from last night’s Inauguration Concert: the original cast of Rent; The Foo Fighters; John Legend; Demi Lovato; Tim McGraw; Jon Bon Jovi.

The sentence of the day is as follows:

If you are promoting a culture of candor on your team, you have to get rid of the jerks.

— No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, p. 34

Corollary, or Sentence # 2: Jerks are likely to rip your organization apart from the inside.

Good advice, that.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Introduction: NO RULES RULES

In her 2018 book, The Fearless Organization, she explains that if you want to encourage innovation, you should develop an environment where people feel safe to dream, speak up, and take risks. The safer the atmosphere, the more innovation you will have.

Introduction, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

NO RULES RULES: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, by Reed Hastings with Erin Meyer

Self will be up-front: She only got two chapters into To Start a War. She knew the book would be critical of Dubya, but what she didn’t anticipate was how little the criticism would mean to self, now that she’s experienced the utter failure of Trump.

She turned to her next book: No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, written by Netflix founder Reed Hastings and business writer Erin Meyer.

From the Introduction:

• It was not obvious at the time, even to me, but we had one thing that Blockbuster did not: a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls.

Oh, no. Did author Erin Meyer just write that one of the keys to the success of Netflix was “very few controls”? She’s been so spooked by Trump and the fact that the GOP took the guardrails off for 4 years that a phrase like “very few controls” is forever linked, in self’s mind, to Trump. And look at how well that turned out. We escaped his Presidency by the skin of our teeth. People were counting down the time remaining in terms of hours.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Next

Just picked these up from the library.

The Economist: Books of the Year 2020

A list from a list (highly idiosyncratic — in which self decides which kind of writing she’s going to spend most of 2021 doing)

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

• A Promised Land, by Barack Obama – “A reminder that the 44th president is one of the best writers ever to serve in that office”
• Stranger in the Shogun’s City, by Amy Stanley – “The everyday struggles of an obscure woman in Tokyo in the first half of the 19th century”
• Kiss Myself Goodbye, by Ferdinand Mount – “The hilarious tale of a . . . pathologically inventive aunt in raffish, upper-class Britain either side of the second world war”

HISTORY

• A House in the Mountains, by Caroline Moorhead – “Weaving deep research into a compelling narrative . . . about four women fighting with the partisans in northern Italy in 1943”
• Alaric the Goth, by Douglas Bain – “Colorful portrait of the city and empire in the fifth century”

FICTION

• The Slaughterman’s Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits – “Late 19th century picaresque about a Jewish mother in the Pale of Settlement who sets out to retrieve her wayward brother-in-law in Minsk”
• Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart – “Coming of age in Glasgow in the 1980s”
• Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar – “Part autobiographical tale about growing up as a Pakistani-American through the age of 9/11 and then Donald Trump”
• Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi – Opens with “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.”

CULTURE AND IDEAS

• Leo Tolstoy, by Andrei Zorin – “Weaves together his times, his writing, his faith and his political activism”

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

• Apollo’s Arrow, by Nicholas Christakis – “the history of plagues”

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

• No Rules Rules, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer – “The boss of Netflix and his co-author explain how he arrived”

IMMIGRATION NATION Premieres on Netflix

Quoting from Vanity Fair’s Don’t Look Away from Immigration Nation, HWD Daily, 3 August 2020:

• Few docuseries are as urgent and infuriating as Immigration Nation, which premieres on Netflix today. Filmmakers Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau gained rare access to ICE agents and detention facilities, following officers, bureaucrats, and asylum-seekers through our broken system. “Most of the time,” Sonia Saraiya writes, “what emerges is a system increasingly designed to maximize the immigrants’ suffering.” Particularly under the current administration, “it seems that the immigration process has been changed primarily to make immigration as difficult and painful as possible. Donald Trump cannot, on his own, outlaw immigration. But he can cruelly disappoint those who dare to hope that the U.S. could be their home. It’s striking that these apparent undesirables are mostly guilty only of believing they could belong in America; they’re being punished for believing in a dream.”

Watch, and stay safe.

 

 

2018 SAG Awards Nominees: Personal Favorites

Some are very predictable to regular readers of this blog. Also, 2017 was really wonky since she didn’t get to see that many movies.

Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture: Baby Driver

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role: Holly Hunter, The Big Sick

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries: Jeff Daniels, Godless

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series: Game of Thrones

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.