Skirting Katrina, wooing Jennifer and Mark
Dateline: four flights on Delta in a roundtrip from Indy to Cincy to JFK and back again, 30 August 2005
Amazed to make it all the way to Manhattan and back, going through Cincinnati (listed as just about the worst airport north of Katrina to be traveling through today) with really no hitches.
Sad to watch the news coverage, which always seems to wallow in the suffering of others with a weird sort of pomp and circumstance. We hear the word "chaos" a lot (Aaron Brown on CNN seems addicted to it), when scattered looting hardly seems to add up to "chaos." But the media love hyperbole, and natural disasters give the talking heads a chance to break out all the over-the-top terms with abandon, demonstrating yet again how they "hold us together" during these desperate moments.
Still, as bad as it got today along the Gulf, it's important to remember that there's really no place on earth better than America to experience a natural disaster. Frankly, you're better off being a dog in the U.S. than being a human in most of the world when a serious disaster hits. No, there's never "enough" response, but there's more here in the U.S. than you ever see anywhere else, and that demonstrated resiliency should teach us something about ourselves and our networks.
Flew today to sit down with agent Jennifer Gates and my favorite editor in the world Mark Warren, actually stepping into Esquire's offices on Broadway for a brief appearance. The purpose? To talk through this early draft of a book proposal for a joint effort by Steve DeAngelis and myself (working title, America Resilient).
With Jennifer, we discussed the route of trying to make it a more obviously business-focused book (i.e., seeking a publisher from among the biz schools universe). With Mark, we discussed the route of trying to keep it more popularly focused. Both routes offer advantages, but my gut instinct is to try and keep it something a place like Putnam could say yes to until and if it becomes obvious that the compromises and/or outcomes would be somehow significantly out of which our core goals for the work. In short, I feel like it's wrong not to target Neil Nyren until he himself says it can't work with Putnam. That's a perfectly acceptable outcome, but why not stay with the best if you can?
Here's the daily catch:
■ America's "unprecedented dependence on foreign oil" easily surpassed by New Core Asia■ Strategic connectivity versus strategic content
■ Iraq tripartite solution: It's my constitution and I'll fight (or sing) if I want to
■ America the arms pot shouldn't call any kettles black
■ The powerlessness at the bottom of the pyramid-seem familiar?