dre in the morning

My favorite TV show, back when I used to watch TV (now I just watch Hulu, but “watching computer” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “watching TV”), was Connections, a show on TLC (back when that stood for the The Learning Channel, and they used to have actual educational shows).

Connections was a British export from Channel 4 hosted by James Burke, who also wrote the book Connections. The premise of the show was simple: everything that’s ever been thought or said or invented, especially ideas (which are called memes these days), are connected to one another. Mr. Burke would start out with ice cube trays and end up with the Saturn IV rocket. At least that’s how I remember it.

I was reminded of Connections by this fascinating article on Fiji Water in Mother Jones. You know, the stuff that comes in square bottles. Here’s an excerpt:

I sat down and sent out a few emails—filling friends in on my visit to the Fiji Water bottling plant, forwarding a story about foreign journalists being kicked off the island. Then my connection died. “It will just be a few minutes,” one of the clerks said.

Moments later, a pair of police officers walked in. They headed for a woman at another terminal; I turned to my screen to compose a note about how cops were even showing up in the Internet cafés. Then I saw them coming toward me. “We’re going to take you in for questioning about the emails you’ve been writing,” they said.

Pretty harrowing for the opening of a story on bottled water. Go ahead and read the whole thing. It’ll make you never want to drink Fiji water ever again.

Anyway, the piece quotes businesswoman Lynda Resnick, who owns Fiji. Resnick is quite the character, profiled here in The New Yorker. She’s not only a bottled water magnate, but she’s also single-handedly responsible for the explosion in popularity of the pomegranate. Yeah, you read that right.

And, to top it off, she not only started her own ad agency at 19, but she was the person who loaned Daniel Ellsberg her Xerox machine so he could run off a few copies of some important government papers.

The one Resnick quote from The New Yorker that stuck in my head was this:

She insists that being a great marketer is synonymous with being a great friend. “You don’t have to be a genius. You have to read the pop culture…You have to listen to conversations. You have to pay attention.”

The article prefaces this quote with the statement, “She collects people as avidly as she collects objets d’art, and she believes that her wide social network played a crucial role in (her) success.”

Frankly, after reading about Fiji, pomegranates, and The Franklin Mint (yeah, she owned that too), I was feeling a little depressed. Luckily, the web (like James Burke) is all about connections, and seeing a plug for a David Sedaris essay on The New Yorkers page, I clicked through for some patented Sedaris humor.

Mistake. Sedaris describes a trip to Australia, and a business woman there who relates this bit of corporate balloon juice:

Pat was driving, and as we passed the turnoff for a shopping center she invited us to picture a four-burner stove.

“Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter.

This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.

Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allowing her to retire at fifty-five. She owns three houses, and two cars, but, even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.

I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that, she switched off her health. “How about you?”

This kind of philosophy probably fits right in with Resnick’s world view. And the really depressing part is it’s probably all too true. At least that’s been my experience with Corporate America.

So which two burners would you switch off? And why?

I’d like to think that guys like James Burke keep ‘em all on high, all the time. But I know that’s probably not true.

BRB, gotta go to Burger King.

IMPORTANT LINKS
I found the Fiji article on Metafilter, one of my all time favorite sites. The New Yorker piece was referenced in the comments on the original post.