How Did Spaghetti Sauce Revolutionize Product Marketing? Another Fascinating Story From Malcolm Gladwell

I will read any book, listen to any interview or watch any video that Malcom Gladwell puts out. The guy is brilliant, funny and a great writer. He’s so good, in-fact, that he can take a presentation that is essentially on horizontal product segmentation and turn it into one of the most fascinating and entertaining videos that I’ve watched in the last year. I can’t tell you more without spoiling Gladwell’s delivery. Watch. It will be well worth it, even if you’re not a marketer.

Did you gain any insights from this video? Let me know your thoughts!

How Neel Kashkari’s Blackberry Cost You $700 Billion And Possibly Helped To Save Western Civilization

In 2006, Neel Kashkari was a 33-year-old tech banker at Goldman Sacs in San Francisco with no government experience. Only two years later, through bizarre circumstances and in the shadow of what looked like the cataclysmic economic meltdown of the financial system, he would find himself appointed by Hank Paulson as the federal bailout chief in charge of TARP and $700 billion.

Laura Blumenfeld of  The Washington Post writes a riveting article that reveals shocking insights into the gravity of the financial meltdown and the degree to which no one knew what to do about it. Blumenfeld writes “Thoughts tended toward the apocalyptic. During midnight negotiations with congressional leaders, Paulson doubled over with dry heaves. A government economist broke into Kashkari’s office sobbing, ‘Oh my God! The system’s collapsing!’” In-spite of this, Kashkari says “We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

I was shocked to learn just how uncertain they were. Blumenfeld goes on to write “In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: ‘We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number.’”

Regardless if your political views lean right or left, its hard not to feel empathy for Kashkari who was skewered by the media and became a congressional punching bag. Kashkari received the appointment in large measure because of a 1o page plan called “Break the Glass: Bank Recapitalization Plan” that he had drafted with a colleague while still Paulson’s aide. The plan was drafted for the unlikely event of an economic meltdown. When the meltdown actually occurred later that year, and the Treasury needed to do something fast, they turned to Kashkari’s plan as the blueprint for TARP.

Blumenfeld paints a picture of a politically naïve Kashkari as being woefully unprepared for the position that he was thrown into… and of a man who was chewed up and spit out of the Washington machine, resigning 6 months into the Obama administration to re-gain his bearing by building a shed in the woods of Northern California with his own hands.

My take on  this article, TARP, the financial meltdown and haters

Those interested in Business and Economics should find this article fascinating. I certainly did.

While I take issue with many if not most of the policies of the Bush administration, the bashing of TARP, Paulson and Kashkari by seemingly most of my fellow Democrats (including this Huffington Post piece by Jason Linkins ) is  perplexing and troubling to me. It’s true that they didn’t know what they were doing. It’s true that they were unprepared for the impending collapse of the financial system. And it’s true that they made lots of mistakes – they admit all of this. They didn’t know what to do, and rather than debating and pondering, they took decisive action with TARP. I find the loaning of money to the irresponsible financial institutions whose greed, arrogance and complacency were responsible for most of this mess to be repugnant… but what were they to do – nothing? If they had, surely those same haters would be deriding them for inaction. The fact is that it increasingly looks like the world narrowly escaped what may very well have turned into another Great Depression. The actions of Paulson and Kashkari and the government at large may or may not have helped to avert disaster, but I’d much rather be debating the merit of their actions from the perspective of a strengthening economy than debating their absence of action from a soup kitchen.

This article has me really looking forward to reading Hank Paulson’s book  ’On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System’ which delves much deeper into what really went on behind the scenes in this remarkable and frightening crisis. Another relevant book that promises to deliver fresh insights about the crisis is Andrew Ross Sorkin’s ‘Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves’.

Incidentally, Laura Blumenfeld, is the author of her own very well received novel: Revenge: A Story Of Hope.

Read the full Washington Post article, The $700 Billion Man here.

Do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? This is a very controversial topic and I’d love to hear your thoughts…