Sleep requirement reduced. Hypothesising that milk and eggs might have have had something to do wth it.
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Filters brewing at 100C.
Espresso brewing at 97.5C.
Oh my market...
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What's the cheapest lean beef, cooked, near Uptown Damansara? Can't be McDs?
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"Hi! We'd like to buy some shares!"
"Righto."
"Can you tell us when you'll break even?"
"No. But I can tell you three days when we may burn out."
"Ok. Will you take input from shareholders?"
"Of course. But unless you're operational, the priority to implement your good suggestions may not arise. There are formal mechanisms that allow you to force implementations, however, these have been rarely used."
"Do you have a plan for the future?"
" Nothing complicated. Increase staff quantity and quality without burning out. "Gardening." "
"Do you have a vision?"
"I can tell you a fairy tale about 100 outlets, in five years, will that do?"
"Definitely not... but it is up to you."
/
What it is to be civil, is to censor oneself in terms of others' intolerances. What it is to serve, is to pander to those intolerances.
We are the service sector. We are the civil society.
If it horrifies someone to be thought of as a machine, or merely as thoughtful meat, then these thoughts are hidden from them, except when the intention of the actor is to horrify, or when ignorance of intolerances reigns triumphant.
If it horrifies someone to be spoken about, despite being seen, then we see them without speaking of them. Such are the protocols of civility. It's real horrowshow.
I often wonder where we would be, if collective intolerances were less retrograde.
/
"Here are the reporting lines for the team we are building. If a structure isn't scalable to a hundred outlets, it won't be allowed here."
"But no one will cooperate to achieve this."
"Then we will try new people until we burn out, or achieve it."
"Why?"
"Because I have better things to do, otherwise."
"This is rude."
"I am simply stating the facts. If we are systematically obstructed from growing to a hundred outlets, I do not need this."
"What better things to do?"
"Work at McDonalds and do math in my spare time, probably."
"You are weird."
"Not news. Welcome to the firm."
"No, not the firm. Your world. I know of the firm and the firm's people, none of them are like you."
"Same difference, kids. Learn up. My world, my rules. I am customer zero. Forget that at your peril. 😂"
"Why are we having this conversation?"
"Whatever it takes to enforce discipline, will be done. I will just keep trying and hope for the best. Hope some of you will enjoy it here in the long term. Not my first preference - we did try a more relaxed approach until folks ran us out of moneh. 😂 Try, try again, FOH. FOH is the key operation. "
"So everyone who wants to quit, can quit."
" Yes. Let me affirm that. 👍 Achieve inner happiness first, or you will find it hard to make others happy."
/
Public life, as it turns out: you have friends, I only have Facebook.
/
The nature of working for any company in the services sector is not always obvious to workers. Each worker is essentially selling their time to the company, and therefore has only one customer: the company. The customers that workers serve at work are in a relationship with the company, and the company ultimately takes the blame for any misfortunes implemented by workers. Workers are agents of the legal person which is the company. The company owns their time for the duration of their role as a staff of the company. Such are commercial relationships in the service sector. Workers nevertheless may command the opportunity to reappropriate the relationship between the company's customers to themselves as individuals... thereby commandeering the customers of the company. This is the formal case. However, any such reappropriations deemed to be misappropriations are only worth prosecuting in cases where the parties involved deem the account to be more valuable than the cost of prosecution...
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Having too many simultaneous problems points back at the scalability issue. The key priority remains as the direction of talent. So attention remains on talent management.
/
Hello, are we dead yet? No? Ok. Back to tactical, soon.
/
I definitely run talent and code the same way. Write a whole lot of it really fast, and before analysing it, try to run it and be all like pleasedontcrashpleasedontcrashpleasedontcrash. But the thing is I was running talent like that before I wrote code...
/
Enforced food, sleep, then back to work :)
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We just put up an 18SG/PL poster. I have an 18SX/PL poster on the way. But we need more SX on average. Suggestions?
/
On Duval's BIG cover letter: Totally says I don't try hard enough.
/
Work. A bit of unscheduled R&D, to fill in the hours before sleep and a training shift tonight.
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On picture of man vs three velociraptors: Talent management in 2016.
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The hard problems are simple. The other problems are complex.
/
I figure we need to run through 20-30 execs and 50-100 baristas before we cultivate the talent that I require. If the funnel moves slowly, we'll never get there. If you're rich you can buy anyone. If you're not, you have to build them yourself.
/
Ok. Next nine hours, turn off empathy, and keep whipping. #workharder247 #sudobrew
/
On HBR's guide to acquiring charismatic leadership traits: The article's proposal is too easy, and not admirable - I tend to avoid doing that unless paid great sums of money to condescend. Otherwise, I generally prefer to transform myself into the person that I want to follow. Hahaha.
/
This F&B project is a very strange one. I find it remains amusing. I wonder how long it will last. Barely caught up on sleep, and off to get some more.
/
On Bloomberg's coverage of Fab's demise:
0. Fail fast, fail often, only works if you fail cheaply enough.
1. If you want to market weird, you have to iterate very quickly (or be so weird, that no one wants your space, due to low margins).
2. If you want to market class, you have to keep a very cool head.
3. If you want to grow a team, you need to trust other people's decisions (not in terms of what you actually believe, but in terms of what you let them get away with).
No particular message from me. Just reflections on the article, and my current project.
/
I'm not sure if I (or the staff) understand the following:
1. Real wages for unskilled roles will continue to drop, for decades (1a), in economies which experience no real growth (1b). The less skilled the role, the likelier its wages are to drop if you consider the total wages of the industry as a whole.
1a. Technology tends to do that, at the expense of increasing wage inequality - within a fixed universe: Uber for X makes a few people richer, and many people poorer, despite making the sum of a people richer.
1b. This is true across economies, if trade technologies straddle economies. So when Uber for X is introduced to the world, the world's economies which experience growth are the ones that reap the benefits which Uber for X brings to the world in general. The world's stagnant economies experience no net benefit, even though privileged individuals within stagnant economies may experience net benefits as a result of rising inequality within such stagnant economies, resulting from the effects of an Uber for X technology. (Uber for Xs are just market making technologies: "brokerages.") Any benefit brought to a stagnant economy as a whole is possibly described as having been sucked out of the economy, and into other growing economies if brokerage effects ("trade") are efficient between economies. (Cue: references to the Internet and global outsourcing services as an industry.)
1c. And then you have the rising (buzzword: skyrocketing) supply of non-human substitutes for any service over time. (An elementary subject in economic discussions.)
2. Real growth exists at the value-added end of the services supply spectrum.
2a. The more one is able to pay for services, the less likely one is going to have to pay a naive individual human to do it (1c)- one will tend to afford professional individual humans (and yet (1), in the case of professional service firms, wage drops at the bottom of the pyramid will supplement the wages of its higher tiers).
3. Our competitive advantage as a firm consists of the rate at which we convert less-value-adding labour into more-value-adding labour. ("We either manufacture baristas, cooks, and analysts, faster than anyone else, or we have no competitive advantage.")
Old thoughts, reviewed.
/
Sleep: somewhat less than ideal.
Probability of project success: 0.51
Probability of me being met today by something I didn't expect of the industry: 0.01
Probability of me getting back to work so that I can focus on contract delivery as MP: let's make it a 1.0.
Deploy, deploy, deploy!
I probably need to focus on the second row a bit more. The second and third rows are mostly what's on my mind, daily.
/
I just noticed an unusual pattern in how I evaluate staff. I tend to evaluate the desirability of their performances against the test of whether I would admire or be disgusted by such performances in someone I was reporting to. God damn it, I'm such a sub...
/
I only make time to work on [cafe]'s wall art every quarter or so, so these are special and important moments for me. Back to other issues for the rest of the day haha.
/
I made a tactical error on Saturday morning. There will be reparations later.
/
What, to eat, that is of value? Little that the eye can see.
/
3pm
Up.
4pm
Admin issues via phone. Breakfast is purchased.
5pm
Customers arrive early; service begins. Electrical failure - resolved; work order placed with corporate services.
6pm
Official hours begin. Entertainment of people that one can read, whom one may never care for, proceeds in earnest.
8.5pm
A lull in activity. Breakfast is eaten.
9pm
Bar service; while discussing accounting, IT, project management, and marketing with colleagues, over Slack; entertainment of people one has never met before, whom one may never meet again, continues, with care.
12am
Instawhoring.
1am
Missing cash. Cleaning begins. Multiple Slack conversations in limbo. A piece of cake - freely given, and consumed.
Training of staff proceeds, as it is a quiet day.
Looking forward to:
2.5am
GTFO. Drive staff home. Find lunch. Get more sleep. Procrastinate on administrative issues.
:)
Such is the game.
PS. Made it to bed before 5am. "Achievement unlocked," as the gamers say.
/
Enforced bed time.
/
Reflections on working with foam board. This medium is expensive and crummy. Days like this, I wish we could afford an interior design production team. And a brand management team. And a QA team... and...
/
Breakfast time!
/
I like nasty women, but they don't like me.
/
As much as I would like to do about various items, at work, and outside the office... it appears that the responsible thing to do at this time is the set of chores, then enforced feed and sleep, before an 11pm shift. Reminding myself that it's a good day to die.
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MBTI is easier to explain if you group the Xe and Xi pairs together. #software #models
/
Kitchen ops: shroom protocol updated.
/
I don't think I've been on this many dates in any one year before this one. Given that love is typically a low priority against work, I'm not sure if it's because work has been excruciatingly boring all year, or because I'm just missing people who aren't here right now.
/
One more errand before the end of the day.
/
So while waiting for 0230hours duty, I banter with the intern CEO: we are trying to become 7Eleven for specialty coffee; we are not trying to be the Apple genius bar; talent management priorities must serve this effectively. I pull out one of our prospecti from a year ago. So it is written. So it must be done... given an absence of new information.
What else. Pretty ladies encouraged to stay longer without ordering? On the contrary, staff have an incentive to strike up profitable lines of questioning. Upon reflection, I tend to make time to get into small talk with the following two types of customer: the pretty, friendly ones who stay late, as there are no other customers to attend to; and the ones who are just plain loud, as that is an easy temperament to play to (I am often just plain loud, myself).
/
NT and NF yuppies talk about love.
We are different. I suppose the difference is that in the long run, I tend to deprioritise affections, and to prioritise learnings.
So as much as I love many people, at the end of the day, work is the top priority. What counts as work may vary from day to day.
Also, afterthought: you should learn how to get into relationships without falling. :p
/
Mental health status currently a bit weak. My usual practice for mental conditioning, is to contemplate difficult scenarios, build a map of these, and study its navigation. [For example, of late, the scenarios which have come to mind are loss of organs, and limbs and near-total disability. I consider the process of tissue damage, and the pain in 0-1 second, 1-10 seconds, 11-60 second periods, and beyond. I study how the MNS has to be manipulated to engage tactically with these scenarios.] And while usually stimulating, these calisthenics have left me of late, a little drained. I believe it is due to unhealed brain tissue stresses resulting from prolonged work-related efforts, incomplete nutrition, and reduced sleep. I just hope that there are no long-term deficiencies from this study. Hopefully recovery will be eventually possible. In other words, I am less concerned about current experiences, and more concerned about the unknown long-term opportunity cost of all this.
/
Not healing fast enough :p
/
Explaining to a talent manager that for overperforming underpaid staff... you don't expect them to stay. So these are NOT stable hires. LOL.
/
Training the horse traders
/
Breakfast: Bigger, Longer, Uncut
/
When we appoint a project manager, their job title will be Cron.
/
Not sure if it's the phenylalanine, or just elevated complexity of fires at the office versus shoddy sleep and nutrition. But I am tired. I have to work next on visual art for the cafe. While it pains me to be spending valuable time on trivia, the reality of business is that art is not trivial, but near the core of brand communications to pleb audiences. All in all, commerce is trivia. And our species too. It's just the only thing there is left to do, if one is alive and killing time.
/
I'm not ready for work. But the objective case for going out right now: this body appears to require feeding, and if work doesn't get done I'll have less interesting story to tell about how I spent the day in bed.
/
Enforced bed rest during conscious hours. No rushing out just yet.
/
When the sole focus of work is the construction of trust, then it is easy to deploy the technology of such conversations. Undistracted, it is easy to pamper the social and emotional needs of an individual female, complete with all the necessary protrusions. But when the focus of work is the construction of a strong balance sheet, then my empathy is fleeting, and I must become an inferior lover. So when I am subject to a low cognitive load, I have more tools at my disposal for the disposal of loneliness, but when my cognitive faculties are under duress from current economics, then there is simply less to be spent on women. Which takes us back to the economics of marriage - many folks don't want an active portfolio of lovers - it is not deemed to be worth their time.
/
Apple has turned into a car company - most growth is incremental hardware, not new formats, not software oriented. Tesla turned into a tech company. Apple, hurry up and buy Tesla already. Too long...
/
Snapchat: Short. Short. Short. They missed the boat by a hair.
/
Hari ini dalam sejarah [brand]: another snowflake bites the dust...
/
One day, this body will stop responding to this brain, and it'll be the end of my public life, and the beginning of a truly caged existence.
/
1:30pm
"Boss, why you so happy today?"
"I have work at 3pm. Though probably, it's just a slightly more balanced portfolio of food, sleep, and exercise."
5:20am
I wonder if I still look happy. :p
/
Haven't even left my bedroom and I'm already following up on requests that we move faster. Sigh
/
Awake. Much work to be done. Seems like I can't go off B-complex supplements and get decent sleep. Not sure if it's an addiction, or the placebo effect.
/
A fitting movie: Dr Strange. Then the lights come on during the hospital fight scene, and they are evacuating the building. Lovely.
