Olivia Judson at the Opinionator Blog: Unorthodox -- Hairier, Edgier Sex Life of Ciliates.
Joshua Green in The Atlantic: Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.
MSNBC.com: Leader of largest U.S. university takes on tenure -- The President of The Ohio State University calls "the emphasis on research, publishing in job-for-life protection ... outdated."
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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Filed under: Biology, Fun stuff, HigherEd, Management
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4 Comments:
thanks! for link #2. reposting... :-)
An entire freaking article about the Dead, without naming a single member except drummer Mickey Hart? What happened to the journalistic idea of going to the primary source -- or has the band clammed up, and if so, why not say so? They quote some biz school guy called Barnes as saying tape-sharing "reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets." Why didn't the writer check with Lesh, or Weir, or one of the other surviving members? Perhaps Barnes is right. Or perhaps it wasn't a conscious decision -- it was just that the band realised taping wasn't hurting them. Perhaps there were even differences among band members. (The Jerry Garcia Band did not allow taping, I believe. And after Garcia's death, remaining members differed about internet distribution.)
The Olivia Judson article is one of the nicest pieces of science writing I've read in a long time.
Agree with Gautam - the ciliate article is very interesting (perhaps you should briefly summarise your links!)
The Dead article still annoys me though -- because, I think, they were a genuinely interesting band and there is so much worthwhile stuff that one can say about them, and indeed so much that they have themselves said in their own words; and instead one gets this tertiary-source drivel. For example, it says they were "anything but naive about their business"--but they were regularly in financial trouble until the 1980s. Early on, they got defrauded by their manager who was their own drummer's father. Then they started their own record label in the 1970s and it flopped.
Where they succeeded is in building a community that was willing to follow them to concerts around the country. And it was that which eventually became the moneyspinner for them: they played 100-200 concerts a year and could count on large audiences for almost all of those concerts. The article hardly talks about the financial importance of concerts. And it's not the Dead alone: old-timers like Dylan, the Stones, McCartney, Springsteen, even Leonard Cohen, are some of the biggest concert draws in recent times. It is an interesting cultural/sociological question why that should be so. But I don't think there are business lessons to be learned, except the trivial one that consumers favour long-established brands.
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