I Heart New York Times’ A.O. Scott

I heart A.O. Scott.

Don’t know who he is?  Well, you should.  Because this guy is FREAKING AWESOME!  He’s a movie critic for the New York Times, but what I love about him is his clear descriptions of the movies, his funny taglines and his poignant reviews.

Just today, he published “The Cinematic State of Things,” where he reduced the 2010 film themes into a top 10 list, beginning with “1. We are all figments of Leonardo DiCaprio’s imagination.”  Come on.  If that’s #1, you can’t go wrong after that.  After reading his top 10, I couldn’t help but remember all his past quips.  Thus, I had to declare my love for A.O. Scott in this post.

The first time I read one of his articles, I had been browsing through the Movie Section of the paper for quite some time.  I had glanced over a few of those reviews on Milk, Frost/Nixon, and other Academy Award contenders.  Interesting, but I didn’t feel like using my brain.  I wanted something frivolous to read while getting through my day as a Banker.  (Remember, the end of 2008 was the end of an era… for financial markets as well as Investment Banking.  In other words, I had PLENTY of time to spare during the day.)  Anyways, link after link, I found nothing interesting.  Then, out of the blue, I came upon this: “An I.R.S. Do-Gooder and Other Strangeness.”  I looked closer and realized it was a review for Seven Pounds (2008), the Will Smith movie that made no sense in the trailer.

Within minutes, I was cracking up and falling over my chair.  My cubemates rushed over to me to make sure I didn’t go crazy (because our company could disappear like Lehman Brothers at any moment).  I put up a hand to hush their concerns and pointed to my computer screen.  They looked at one another and nodded in agreement: “Yup, this one’s gone over the deep end…”

I shook my head and highlighted the passage that threw me off my rocker.  It read:

So instead of spelling out what happens in “Seven Pounds,” I’ll just pluck a few key words and phrases from my notes, and arrange them in the kind of artful disorder Mr. Muccino seems to favor (feel free to start crying any time): Eggplant parmesan. Printing press. Lung. Bone marrow. Eye transplant. Rosario Dawson. Great Dane. Banana peel. Jellyfish (but you knew that already). Car accident. Congestive heart failure.

Huh? What the … ? Hang on. What’s he doing? Why? Who does he think he is? Jesus! That last, by the way, is not an exclamation of shock but rather an answer to the preceding question, posed with reference to Mr. Smith.

My friends burst out with laughter, only to attract the nearby Associates.  Soon enough, a crowd had gathered around my tiny cube, reading the next hilarious passage:

But maybe I’m approaching this in the wrong way. Maybe “Seven Pounds” isn’t a spiritual parable about redemption or forgiveness or salvation or whatever, but rather a collection of practical lessons. Don’t drive while using a BlackBerry. Fertilize your rose bushes with banana peels — sorry, that was a spoiler. But please, whatever you do, don’t touch the jellyfish.

I’m serious. Don’t.

From then on, I couldn’t stop following Mr. A.O. Scott’s reviews on NYT.  All of his reviews had this hilarious wit.  You know… almost like talking to a friend who’s just hilarious.  Or, maybe I love him, because he reminds of another brilliant mind (myself, ha ha.  No joke.).  Either way, I couldn’t stop following him.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from this year:

• The Town (2010) — ”[T]he main attraction is the blaring music of those accents. It’s a lark, a spark, a walk in the park.”
• Tangled (2010) — “This is, all in all, a pleasant place to visit. Which is saying a lot, given how awful it could be in recent years. (Remember “Chicken Little”? “Treasure Planet”? I hope not.) “Tangled” is the 50th animated feature from Disney, and its look and spirit convey a modified, updated but nonetheless sincere and unmistakable quality of old-fashioned Disneyness.”
• “In Line at the Movies, Hoping for Good Enough” article — ”What was I doing there? Partly, it was a matter of professional due diligence, the regular duty of catching up with movies I have not reviewed. But also, and more deeply, there was the combination of curiosity, inertia and obedience that is the most common and perhaps the least understood motive for movie attendance. I was bored. The kids were bored.”
• RED (2010) — ““RED” signals that, in addition to being an action-romance-comedy, it will also be an old-timers-on-the-warpath-looking-for-payback movie. (See “The A Team” and “The Expendables.” By “see,” I mean “note for purposes of comparison,” rather than actually watch on a screen.)”

I mean, this list can go on and on and on.  However, I’ll make up your own mind about Mr. Scott.

Happy Reading!

Investment Banking & The Defense Department’s Love-Hate Relationship With “Spaghetti”

NYT Article: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

Yes, you read that correctly.  I’m talking about a love-hate relationship exhibited by both Investment Bankers (which I can attest to) and the Defenese Department (as revealed in this week’s New York Time’s article by Elisabth Bumiller.)

In my last role as an investment banker, I dealt with many requests from my VPs and Managing Directors, one of which, was to create a relationship diagram between car components makers and their distributors.  The end result?  Spaghetti.  Messy but colorful sphagetti…. much like the picture you see here. 

I remember walking shyly over to our Presentation Technology team and asking the head guy there to help me with this task.  He stared at me, mouth agape, and shook his head in disapproval.  “Look, kid.  You know that this is going to look messy, right?  You have 10+ auto-makers with different relationships with all these other distributors… It’s a waste of time for my team.”

Well, what was I supposed to do?  I had to get this done, even though everyone, and I mean, EVERYONE, knew it was going to be a giant mess.  So… after some pleading, begging, “I know… but what can you do?”s and apologies, the head guy agreed.  He later returned a beautiful rendition of our Sphaghetti map.  Of course we never used it.  Our MD took one look and said, “This looks too complex to use for our client.”  That was it.  One wave of the hand and all that work went to waste.

This was only one of many complex PowerPoint maps, slides, graphs, charts, etc. we created and then subsequently scrapped.  Don’t get me wrong.  I really believe simple and concise PowerPoint presentations can be a great story-telling tool.  However, the amount of work we put into making them and then simplifying them… well, that part’s just ridiculous!  I mean, I spent 85% of my presentation-making time prettying up the doc, reformatting text boxes, changing labels, re-color-coding, etc.  A waste of precious time.

Even if our leaders acknowledge the uselessness of some of these PowerPoint slides, Banking and Military leaders alike will still continue to ask their analysts to produce them because we are all about creating “value”… even if that “value” is useless at the end.  At least they can say they tried.

Oh well… what can you do… right?

Some funny quotes from the article:

• “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander
• “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
• Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
• The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

Reflection 3/26/10: Oh, How The Corporate World Can Suck…

—EDITED 3/27/10—

After publishing this post, I watched a few movies and rested a bit.  This morning, when I went back to my blog to start on another post, I realized that I might have been very harsh about the Corporate world.  So, not to scare off potential corporateers, I wanted to add this disclaimer:

The post below is purely based on my opinion on Friday, March 26, 2010.  Opinions may differ (including that of my own on a different day)… So please read with discretion.

———————————

First of all, apologies to my avid readers who probably wondered what the hell could have happened to me since my last post… 10 days ago. Well, let me just say, I have been kept knee-deep in crap. Yes, that’s right. Crap, or in professional terms, “work”.

How could it be possible that moving from Banking, where crap gets doled out like a manure yard, to the Corporate world equaled MORE crap, you ask?

Let me reveal the deep, dark secret about this side I chose to overlook whilst in Banking…

Back in Investment Banking, I had to do a lot of modeling (no, not for magazines—a common misconception when I use that phrase—I mean, in excel). When we did any kind of merger or acquisition analysis, we had to put together an operating model of the acquisition target. Sometimes, if we didn’t get a model from our client’s finance team, we would make our own driver assumptions. However, when we did get those models, we typically looked at those corporate models and made alternate scenarios (because that’s where we could “add value”).

Now, when I received those models, they were all pasted-values and sometimes wrongly linked with random calculation errors or whatever. There were always errors. In the back of my head, I always wondered WHY and HOW. They built all those models in excel, so why not keep the linkages? And, why not build checks to make sure everything tied together?? And, why the funky rainbow colors???

Oh, how naïve I was! After months of working in the corporate world, I have realized the truth behind (almost) everything! From the awful color schemes, to the f-ed up models, to the slow turn around time, to the doling of crap…

TRUTH: Individualism, creativity and even productivity is oftentimes discouraged—of course, not openly, always stealthily. On top of that, like in other jobs, there are stringent definitions of Boss and Analyst, Superior and Inferior, crapMaker and crapTaker. Remember that little PowerPoint presentation with the crap rolling down hill and you’re at the bottom in a giant hole just taking the crap, chunks at a time? (See below.) That’s what being a Corporate analyst is like, except the processes you’ve simplified are considered “useless”.

For example, a Boss-Man asked a crapMaker and me to simplify a process where the entire excel file consisted of pasted values, wrong linkages, useless tabs, etc. As I was doing all the work, this crapMaker decided to “add value” by having me create four additional tabs that referenced the other 10+ tabs (aka, completely useless task). I tried suggesting to him that the other tabs already provided the info he wanted, but he wouldn’t listen (of course). Instead, he told me to “just do it”. I’m sure you can guess what happened next… We showed Boss-Man the new file (with crapMaker’s new tabs). Boss-Man was unhappy because he clearly stated he wanted the file “simplified” and asked (more like yelled) at crapMaker for creating additional tabs that were “useless”… and after that “discussion”, crap came raining down on me from crapMaker. What can you do though? That’s the way the Corporate world works.

You try to show some individualism, some efficiency, some innovation, some smartness, you get shut down.

What’s the goal in the Corporate world then? JOB RETENTION. Think about it, if you build an amazing automated process that any new person could do, then why should this company continue to pay you a high salary to do it? Thus, the crapMaker right above you and the Boss-Man, might say they want “efficiency” and “innovation”, but when you deliver those to them, they just ignore you and continue to use the same method they had used for the past [x] years.

So what did I learn from all this?

1. There are roles worse than being a Banking analyst.
2. Until you’re the crapMaker, you’ll always be the crapTaker. Always…
3. You have to look at everything as a “learning” experience, or else you’d burst from pent-up frustration.

Alright… that’s all I can write for today. Cheers everyone! (I know I definitely need a drink after this reflection…)