“There’s no getting around it: For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place.
I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. I went to Utah in search of the American Dream.
Columnists don’t talk as much as they used to about the American Dream. They’re more likely to talk about things like income mobility, income inequality, the Gini coefficient — sanitary, clinical terms. These are easier to quantify than a dream, but also less satisfying. We want money, yes, but we hunger even more deeply for something else: for possibility. It matters to Americans that someone born poor can retire rich. That possibility increasingly seems slimmer and slimmer in most of the nation, but in Utah, it’s still achievable.”
Last weekend while escaping the New York Winter, i came across this amazing portrait and 'day-in-the-life' of the ever mysterious and peculiar Nick Cave. Knowing a bit about him i knew this wouldn't just be another artist documentary, and i was right. An amazing glimpse in a day, the 20,000th day, to be exact, and what a day it was. The film even without its easy to be entertained subject is an amazing piece of story telling, playing with our notions of time, while being a piece of real cinematic art in itself.
Take a peak below:
Keeping the Oscar de la Renta Name Alive
A great story in the NYtimes today about succession planning in a family business. A great inside look at a family that is managing all of the realities of loosing a founder(and father), all while respecting the grand vision, from successor to the newest collection.
We do a lot of things here at Russallo, one of the major themes from last year was around succession strategy in family businesses. Hearing stories from families in Miami to Melbourne, discussing the best way to engage the discussion, especially when the founders are still living. The most important first step was not fear the subject, and to ask simple open questions around the story. I've always believed that is the first step to build the dialogue and releases some of the existential fear that we all have when beginning to realize nothing is permanent.
*This is our first blog in the new Russallo Website, please keep a look for more to come. Below you'll find long ago thoughts. But all of which is to help show ways we here at Russallo and broader findings around the power of narrative to help achieve our goals including a broader blank canvas to share my interests and trends.
"Through Thick And Thin, Simmons Is Still Sweatin" While working as a waiter, Richard Simmons saved up a year-and-a-half worth of tips to open his first aerobics studio in Beverly Hills in 1974. Ever since then, he still teaching classes to this day.
Bureaucracy is so 19th Century. Why we all should strive for collaborative atmospheres and organizations.
Supposing Microsoft had managed to hire technology’s top players into a single unit before they made their names elsewhere—Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon—regardless of performance, under one of the iterations of stack ranking, two of them would have to be rated as below average, with one deemed disastrous.
