Thoughts From The Cake Scraps

Branding.  It is a very interesting thing; it is what the people associate with a product.  This seems simple enough, but all in all, it is a very odd concept.  The legal system allows for one to sue for defamation, so one would assume that this means that somebody must own the reputation.  But can you really own a reputation?

I mean, reputation is just a collection of other people’s thoughts about you.  Can you really own that?  Then you are asserting you own other people’s opinion.  It is all very odd.  But it is all very important.

That is why today is a very special day for Lands End, my employer.  Today was the official launch day of the new brand called Lands End Canvas.  It has some very interesting clothing coming from Lands End.  I think that this is a great step for Lands’ End.  It speaks to our vision for the future and a new avenue to reach our customers.

I wish LE Canvas the best of luck.  Obviously I will not be able to give any updates on it here, but keep your ears and eyes open and you just may come across it.  I have already got my order and will be sure to share my thoughts on it with you.  But no matter how it turns out, it is an exciting next step for LE.

What do you think of the LE Canvas site?  And check out the My Canvas section when it’s live!

This is a very interesting topic that was brought to front of mind due to a recent Fortune magazine article on it.  Actually, it made the front cover.  I think that the article was very well written and, furthermore, I thought I should chime in.

I think the case for legalization of cannabis is crystal clear for very simple reasons.  And if someone can refute my points below in any reasonable manner, then I may reconsider.

First I will hit on the two most obvious points for the legalization of cannabis:

• Cannabis, in any form – smoking to brownies, is not as addictive as cigarettes and cigarettes are legal.
• Cannabis, in any form – alters your mind  to no greater extent than alcohol does and alcohol is legal.

So beyond the issue of individual rights (or the ties to racial and ethnic fears that led to the criminalization), which is a whole different topic, cannabis should be legal for no other reason than that we currently allow other drugs that are both more addictive, more mind-altering, and worse for you with the only requirement to getting them being your age.  How does this make sense?

It seems to me that if one wants cannabis to be illegal they would also have to be against both alcohol and tobacco.  How could they be for either of those drugs and against cannabis and not be a complete hypocrite?  But let us not stop there, and explore a bit more.

Then there are other arguments, such as the violence surrounding cannabis.  Somehow these people must be forgetting the prohibition era in the early 1900’s where cannabis wasn’t the problem but alcohol.  The very drug that gave LOTS of money to mobsters and gangs and was the cause of countless acts of violence.  So I must ask again, how is the prohibition of cannabis different than the one against alcohol?  Why are we trying the same thing (prohibition) and expecting different results?  I just don’t get it.

Okay, so that’s not the reason, but there must be one.  How about the fact that it is a ‘gateway drug’ to other drugs.  Interesting idea but it fails for the same reason as the other arguments, a double standard.  Just because alcohol and tobacco are not illegal does not make them any less of a drug.  So then, if cannabis is a gateway drug, what does that make tobacco and alcohol?  Anybody using harder drugs probably is using those two drugs at least as much as cannabis (but probably a lot more) and arguably at an earlier age too.

And as if we needed any additional icing on the cakes, there is the health aspect.  No, I’m not even talking about the medical uses that our government knows about (and actually dispenses cannabis to people – yes the US gov has a program that dispenses medical cannabis).  Beyond that blatant hypocrisy (as if we needed another example) one can just look at four additional facts:

1. In 1988 Judge Francis Young stated: “Marijuana…is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man” when ruling on a marijuana case.  It is basically impossible to overdose on cannabis, unlike alcohol that kills binge drinkers and alcoholics every year.
2. Many studies (according to Fortune) also say that smoking cannabis (which there are many other ways to consume than smoking) is less detrimental to health than smoking tobacco – no hard proof that it causes lung cancer exists yet.
3. Marinol, a synthetic version of the active psychoactive agent of cannabis, was approved by the FDA in 1986, further verifying that it has legitimate medical uses.
4. When marijuana was criminalized in 1937 it was done “over the objection of the American Medical Association“.

As one final point (last one I promise) the money aspect comes up.  From Fortune 9/28 p. 148:

Assuming a national consumer market for marijuana of about $13 billion annually, Harvard economist Jeffery Miron has estimated that legalization could be expected to bring in state and federal governments about $7 billion annually in additional tax revenue, while saving them $13.5 billion in prohibition related law enforcement costs.

That’s an estimated $20.5 BILLION in additional money for any number of activities, including law enforcement on the very gangs that that money would have been going to.

Knowing all of this, does anyone have any ideas why it should be illegal?   I’m just plain baffled.

This has been a Thought From the Cake Scraps.

I was working on my laptop today and was playing around with my newly installed Office 2007.  I really need to get to know it more, but work still uses 2003 and I have become quite good at using the 2003 version.  Some co-workers are even generous enough to put me into the category of Excel Expert.

I’m not sure about all of that, though I have done some posts on cool Excel tricks, but I do know one thing.  I don’t have nearly as good of handle on 2007 as I do on 2003.  The I remembered something that @Fantastical7 told me that had changed my life on my desktop computer.  The Office 2007 Search Ribbon.

This is the best download for Office that you have never heard of.  If you are having trouble figuring out where that old command went in the new ribbon structure, this add-in is perfect for you.  No more scouring the internet for answers to simple questions.  Just simple answers that are quick and, best of all, are exactly what you are looking for.

At the time of this post, only 64, 169 had downloaded this add-in.  I have to say that that is a bad indicator.  I just wonder how much time people have wasted looking for the buttons when this add-in makes it super simple.

So, what do you think of Office 2007?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine the other day on which programs to apply to for an MBA.  If you have read my prior post you know that I am a fan of just going and getting the best GMAT score that you can; don’t worry about it too much.  Do your best and you’ll be fine.

So, why do I think that just doing your best on the GMAT will lead you toward the right program?  The reason is quite simple actually.  You don’t take Calculus 3 when you have never had Calculus 1.

While each individual has there own reasons to get an MBA, a common theme is to improve oneself – however you want to define that.  My thought is that your GMAT score will give you a good idea of where you will get in.  Don’t beat yourself up over getting into a top 10 school.  And, going back the the Calculus example, here’s why.

If you apply yourself on the GMAT, and have no special conditions, you will have a score that – more or less – is an indication of your ability (yes, there are many exceptions).  That means that if you have a 500 level score, Harvard is probably not looking good.  But take a moment to think about it like a Calculus class.

A student should not try and get in the most advanced class that they can get into with no regard to the level of their knowledge in the subject matter.   This we can all agree on but then some people hold a different standard to an MBA program.  The reality is that an individual new to calculus will get the same incremental value to themselves in a Calc 1 class as a more advanced person will get from a Calc 3 class.  If the goal is to improve yourself by X%, then both the Calc 1 student and the Calc 3 student will achieve their goals.  Either student going in the other’s class will make them fall short of their goal.

Therefore, be realistic about what schools you can get into.  Don’t view a non-top 10 school as a failure or a shortcoming.  The goal of an MBA isn’t to get a top 10 school on your resume (or at least shouldn’t be the main goal).  The goal is to improve yourself.  There are many levels of ability which means that there are many levels of programs that will all give the same incremental benefit to the individual at all of the different levels.

It is like the marathon I ran.  Just finishing was the goal.  I was happy with my time, but I’m sure an Olympic marathoner would not have been happy with that time.  The point is the same.  different goals for different people.  A lower ranked school may be a better overall fit, and deliver more incremental value to the individual, than a top 10 school might.

If you have found yourself discouraged about your GMAT score and the schools you might get into, maybe this gives you a fresh perspective.

What do you think about a MBA program’s incremental value?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

I have recently completed the General Management Admissions Test, or the GMAT, and I have a few thoughts on it.  I want to share some of those thoughts over a series of posts and so I am going to do just that.  I had the idea for this series after I had a particularly good day.  You may be able to guess that that was the day that I took the test.

For starters I want to be clear that this series of posts are going to be my opinion.  I am not doing lots and lots of research to validate each and every detail.  I am merely sharing my experiences.  If you want textbook detail there are plenty of guides out there that already do just that.  No need to recreate the wheel here.  This is a blog about my experiences and I hope you find value in them.

With that in mind, I present my first critical point: expectations going in.

After talking to many people coming from differing points in their career or education I realized one common theme: get into a top 10 school or the like.  I think that this view is making a critical mistake.  Don’t fall into this trap.

Goals are an excellent thing to have.  Setting goals is something that everybody should do for all sorts of reasons.  But, make sure they are the right goals.  If you go into the test thinking that you need a specific score so that you can get into a specific school you are setting your sights far too narrow and this will only do harm for most people.  Don’t confuse this with not setting goals, just make them more realistic.  Goals have to be S.M.A.R.T. to work.

When I ran my marathon the goal was simple: finish.  There was no time pressure there wasn’t a “finish without walking” or anything else.  It was just finish.  Getting into a B-school is the same thing.  Just get in.  You should be looking at an MBA because you want to enhance your career and learn more.  The harsh reality is that while a top 10 or 20 school will give you a great education, there are plenty of others that will give you nearly as good of education but perhaps a little less powerful alumni network.  This means that no matter what score you get, there will probably be a place you can get into, so just enjoy the journey of the test and stop worrying about the end result so much.  After all, 700+ GMAT score doesn’t secure you entry; the score is just part of a larger application.

That is my first advice to you when looking to take the GMAT.  Know that you are taking the GMAT to get into an MBA program and to enhance your skills, meet people, and learn.  These things can be done many places.  Take the pressure off yourself to perform and just do it.  Needless worrying will only bring you down.

If you have to set a target score, only do so after you have done many practice tests.  Know where you stand.  Know what you can do.  Then put a little reach into it.  You’ll be fine.  Not going to Harvard is not the end of the world.  Lots of colleges can help you out.

Now that you are in the right mindset to attack the test, the next step is to begin the journey to your score by a self evaluation.  Look for that in my future posts in the series, GMAT Journey.

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

Every now and then you just have a day that is a good day. Today was that day for me. I think I might do a few posts on GMAT stuff just for the heck of it. Make sure to check back and see if I actually do that.

Also, I found out that pinball is quite a bit of fun. I have to admit that I would still never spend money on it, but it is fun. Okay, I may spend like $0.25 but not whatever it is those places are charging these days.

Which brings me to my final point, as much fun as they are, are arcade games on their last legs? Let me know what you think.

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

Well folks, it looks like we have yet another ‘entertainment shopping’  site on our hands.  SevenSnap has thrown its somewhat different hat into the 3rd ring at this 3 ring circus we have.  We’ve previously covered Pennycave and Swoopo on this blog (found here and here) so what better place to cover SevenSnap.

SevenSnap, at its core, is more like a XXX phone line or live show than anything else.  Rather than paying for bids and the risking getting nothing on the bids, SevenSnap charges you just to look at the item.  Yes, that’s right.  You have to pay just to get the chance to buy it.

Here’s how it works.  A new item gets put up every 60 min.  You have to create an account and buy minutes to get into the ‘Snap Room’.  Yes, they actually call it that in their guide.  Once in the room, the price of the item drops by as much as $100 a min, based on the number of people in the room.

Hold on; that sounds good for a second, but think about that.  They are capping the rate that it can drop to $100 a min, no matter how many people in the room.  If there is only 5 people it drops $5 a min, but if there are 1,000 people (or 5,000 for that matter) it only drops $100 a min.

After you have paid to gain entry to the oh so wonderful Snap Room, you can ‘Snap’ the product at any time.  As you can tell, they spent a lot of time on the names of things.

Once anybody in the room Snaps a product the price goes back up to the original amount and begins the price dropping anew.  So while you may try and get a good deal, the likely thing that will happen is that someone will ’snap’ it before you, leaving you with nothing.  And remember, the price only drops every min – unsure how they deal with people joining at different times – so it is not constantly dropping, just in big chunks.  As with most of these sites, most people will lose out.

The worst part here is that there isn’t even risk to SevenSnap.  If you buy it right away they get their asking price and then sell another one.  If you don’t buy right away, the price is only dropping if people are paying.  So they are still fine.  They determine their minimum margin from the start and then anybody that is in the room over 100 (since the price decline caps a $100 a min) is gravy.

I would stay away from this, just as I would every other ‘entertainment shopping’ site.  Go buy a lotto ticket, your odds of coming out ahead are probably better.  At least SevenSnap is limited to the iPhone and iPod Touch.  This way a few extra people will save their money.

So do you think this and other ‘entertainment shopping’ sites are a scam?  Let me know your thoughts below.

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.  (Hat tip to TechCrunch for their post)

Every now and then a person stumbles across a small tip that makes life easy. Well, maybe just easier. Today I share one of those tips with you, the shift key.

We all use the shift key, but few people know about the additional power that it can provide. Gone are the days where it is used just for making a letter upper case or YELLING on the internet.

On a Windows OS,  holding the shift key while right clicking an item in a folder allows you to open the document read-only.  Very helpful if you don’t want to lock people of of the document, but still want it open.

The second and more helpful trick that I learned is in Excel.  Have you ever wanted to have a single page summary, but just couldn’t get it to work because the column widths for the stuff above doesn’t match with the stuff you want below?  Shift can help.

Copy the area that you want and then hold shift and go up to Edit > Paste Picture Link.  You now have a picture that is easily moved around, no matter the above column structure.  Better yet, if you change anything in the original range, it changes along with it!

Update: As commenter Ryan, of RyanMalesevich.com fame, points out, this is for Excel 2003.  For 2007, no shift is needed.  Just click the down arrow below “Paste” > “As Picture” > “Paste Picture Link”

Do you have any tips to share?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

I have been out of college for around two years now and, amazingly, I am having the same issues with community sustainability in my new location as I did back in college.  This is both frustrating and a bit sad.  Here’s the basic problem, there are only certain times of the year where ‘fun’ businesses make money and so they just don’t make the cut long term.

This is a huge problem at UW-Whitewater.  The city literally loses half its population every summer to the departing masses of students.  Now this is hedged a bit by the fact that 1/2 the students go home on the weekends anyway (with weekend being Thursday to Sunday).  So really even though you have these masses of consumers, it is very hard to make any money because 50% of the time you are way under capacity and 50% of the time you are way over.  And, to make matters worse, often times the demands that college students have are so far out of alignment with the demands of the local population that there is little to no crossover in activity interests.  This makes an already tough situation that much tougher.

A similar thing appears to happen in Dodgeville (and surrounding community).  There are huge amounts of hotel capacity and stores that depend on tourist traffic.  The problem?  Who is coming to WI for a vacation in the winter?  And how can cute, fun, but out of the way places draw traffic if there isn’t a constant stream of people?

There are great businesses that just can’t make it.  Great restaurant, like the Walker House in Mineral Point, WI- to whom this post is dedicated to, don’t get the traffic they need to make it.  I have great memories of the Walker House in the short time I have been here.  I ate my post-marathon meal there.  I tried to bring in new customers as often as I could.  They even started to know my name, and most definitely knew exactly what I was going to order (Patty Melt w/ the best homemade fries you have ever had).  Heck, they even remembered that I was always bringing someone new.  It had atmosphere.  It had class.  It didn’t have traffic.

The Walker House is now closed and looking for a partner.  I think that they have many of the right components, but just fall short on a marketing and business plan.  It would be interesting to do some discovery and see what it would take to open up again or what sorts of sales they had when they were open.  Just a thought.

This just leaves me with that buring question, how is it that some small out of the way restaurants can make it and by word of mouth they get more traffic than they can handle while other places with equally good food and atmosphere can’t generate the same thing.  The only conclusion I can think of is a concept that I read about in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.  Basically you need somebody to love the place that knows people and will spread the word.  You need a reliable and passionate brand advocate.  I guess Walker House just didn’t have enough of them.

Do you know any great restaurants that are out of the way?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.

If you’re like me, you see a bed full of pillows and wonder what the purpose of all of them could possibly be.  After all, if one were to use the bed, all of the pillows would have to be removed and the put back on after the cat nap.  It is very easy to think that the extra pillows have no purpose.  But, I have found that there is a very subtle error in this way of thinking.

Many things are not designed with practicality in mind.  Yes, the widget has to accomplish the job it was made for, but it also has to look good doing it.  Here again you may argue that as long as it gets the job done, it doesn’t matter; again I have to say that there is an error in that logic.

The common error between the throw pillows and the widget examples is that it ignores that instant judgment that people make upon viewing the object.  The reality is that many, if not all, people judge a book by its cover.  Knowing that, it is easy to see how this ties into business.

The experience that people have with your product matters, the story it tells matters.  What is often overlooked is that this extends beyond the product to the company itself.  This includes everything form retail locations to corporate headquarters.  Money has to be spent to preserve the experience and the brand image.

I have a great example.  Out at Lands’ End headquarters in Wisconsin we have both offices and a distribution center.  Out in the back there is an area where semi trailers are parked that are not being used.  I have not idea how much space, but it can hold a few.  What I noticed on a run the other day is that there is a big grass mound/hill between the offices and this parking area.  It has been there for a long time, but how much did it cost to build it?  I have no idea, but it also makes me wonder, how many people decided to work for Lands’ End, or how many vendors gave a better deal, or how much business has been done because of a great experience on the campus.  An experience that was great, in part, because they saw a beautiful grassy hillside with trees instead of parked semi trailers.

That is why as much as I wonder why a business would pay for an office in downtown NYC or why people spend what they do on nice suits, or why a company does what might be considered ‘fat cat’ spending on things such as landscaping, art, architecture, and the like…as much as I wonder about all of that and as much as people love to criticize it I think at the end of the day it matters.

People will argue until they are blue in the face that they would like to just have something that gets the job done and that all that spending is wasteful.  Mostly this is because we want to believe that we are completely rational and don’t make ’shallow’ decisions.  But as much as we would like to believe this, it is simply not true.

What do you think about throw pillows?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.