Thursday, December 22, 2011
Harvard Business Review Blog: Business Model Innovation the Red Sox Way
(blogs.hbr.org)
posted on December 22, 2011 at 06:39 AM by Lowry Seasoning Salt to business, history, products, red sox, special topics
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6 comment(s)
Read More...Major league owners are famously reluctant to release franchise-specific financial information. However, Forbes estimates that the value of the Red Sox has climbed from about $500 million in 2002 to $900 million in 2011 — an impressive 7% annual growth.
Companies seeking to revitalize seemingly stagnant businesses can take three lessons from the Red Sox success:
1. Question orthodoxy. Of course you can’t put people on top of the Green Monster. Or host a hockey game in Fenway. Or can you?
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1 2 3 >I'll also predict this thread goes over a 1000 posts.
He's more of a Yoda's robe kind of guy, I think. Now excuse me while I close my eyes and recall the glorious hours I spent with my Star Wars people...
Now that I'm older, things like Jawa and Sand People make me a little uncomfortable. There's a lot of sublimated racial politics in the Star Wars movies, isn't there?
I've found that now that I'm older, I tend to stop thinking about Star Wars altogether. That seems to ease any of this discomfort.
Jar-Jar Binks.
Not just racial though, is there any character in the whole damn thing that isn't a stereotype?
I wish I could. It still lingers, like an intense dream you had over and over... On the other hand, I have just about erased the prequels from my consciousness. I fear the Star Wars of my youth is with me forever, however.
Are all the dwarves in Lord of the Rings anti-semetic? Are they more or less anti-semetic than that greedy little blue flying guy with the huge nose and the Yiddish accent?
Never saw them haggle.
Seriously, I never read the books so I have no idea.
Hoggle from Labyrinth is kind of the gold-standard, actually.
Please excuse David from the starting lineup today, he was up late shooting wamp-rats at a Star Wars convention after-party.
Signed,
Eckstein's Wife
Now Christopher Lloyd? F$%k yeah.
And by the time we get to TNG they're samurais with really dumb accents. (Thank you Michael Dorn)
So, yeah, I know in TOS they were *supposed* to be "Oriental, hard-faced". I just don't think they pull it off very well. (IMO)
Hollywood never pulls off "oriental" well. It's always been white guys in awkward makeup from The Good Earth all the way down to Airbender (sigh).
Heh.
The politics of LOTR have been commented on for a long time. The standard (leftist) crit of it is racism (ie Southerners / Easterners, Orcs, not to mention the mixed race types), and sexism (ie the portrayal of female characters, mainly centered around Arwen; for those who haven't read the books, the movie Arwen was "improved" to deal with possible criticism on sexist grounds).
In fact, a fantasy author, Jacqueline Carey wrote a couple of books, the 2 Banewreaker books, that were meant as a "response" to LOTR, on feminist and racial grounds. (I like Carey's books, but IMO, those 2 books are by far her worst, she's way too heavy handed, and fails to appreciate the nuance in LOTR / Tolkien's stuff, see below)
I've also seen feminist defenses of Tolkien, mainly based on the character of Luthien Tinuviel (whom Tolkien said was based on his wife)
Shooty is trying:
Nowadays, women nerds are not uncommon, as the article points out.
I don't see why that was needed though, Galadriel is a big shot in the story. And with a nicely submissive husband too.
I hope it doesn't go that way. Jawas are so over the top it's hard to build up a head of steam about it. I really think Lucas doesn't even realize he's doing this stuff. I will almost guarantee he was flummoxed by the reaction to Jar Jar Binks. Then again, I still hold great fondness for Star Wars so I'm probably willing to cut it a lot more slack than someone more neutral.
hoo boy, probably not a good idea to get into the racial politics of Star Trek - it had two obvious stand-ins for Jews, one okay (Bjorans) one not-so-okay (Ferengi).
Blame the fact that 99.95% of Star Wars is based on, influenced by or outright copied several other things.
STAR WARS PLAN
TO ZAP RED NUKES
From that moment on, 99% of the non-wonkish public began to refer to SDI as simply "Star Wars." I'd much rather have a copy of that paper than a copy of that dumbassed movie.
It's beyond stupid to charge LOTR with sexism. Galadriel,.. that chick who slew the Nazgul..
I can already hear the complaints, "Why arn't any of the wizards female? Why arn't any of the Fellowship female?"...blah fukkity blah...
For all the rest, I figure it's not worth deconstructing something as bad as Star Wars. There's so many ways to take it apart that they must all be right. My overall take is that things can be revolutionary and ground-breaking without being at all good.
Yes. Galadriel was explicitly stronger, wiser and better looking than her husband in Tolkien's writing. Although I guess for the movies, they really wanted an action girl, and shoehorning Galadriel into that role would've done a lot more violence to the story than doing it to Arwen.
The dwarves were pretty clearly written as cave Jews, but there were also plenty of parallels to dwarves/elves/gnomes in Norse mythology as well.
I'm really scratching my head over the Bajoran one.
As for the Ferengi...they were SUPPOSED to be TNG's new Klingons/Romulans, but that didn't work out. It's not til DS9 that we get the capitalism/greed based society. So yeah, I guess. But...what? Now no one is allowed to ever make a greed based society without being accused of being anti-semitic?
It's like in comics, now all females are supposed to be off-limits from anything bad happening to them or it's MISOGYNY!!! MISOGYNY!! REVISE THE WOMAN IN FRIDGE LIST!! Someone call Gail Simone!!
Quick. Who was the first 'Woman in a fridge'? Steve Trevor? Larry Lance? I-Ching?
Commentary
It's a fine line. Greedy and capitalist is well and good, but make them short and crude and ... well, you're treading on some uncomfortable associations
Big shot, but she's a distant big shot who doesn't do much of anything. Even in the books, she is very offstage.
And in the context of the entire cycle, ie all the Middle Earth books, not just LOTR, Galadriel still doesn't really do much, compared to various other female characters.
That is actually why the simpler sexism crits tends to miss the mark. Tolkien has strong very prominent female characters, just not so much in LOTR.
"It's beyond stupid to charge LOTR with sexism. Galadriel,.. that chick who slew the Nazgul.."
The criticism is that Galadriel does nothing, and Eowing is just one (accessory) character. The deeper feminist criticism, is that Arwen exists simply to marry Aragorn, have his kids, continue / replenish the line. Which was why the movies had to "improve" her.
The character design looks like it was copied from a 1930s German propaganda poster.
But did someone deliberatly think "Hey! Jews in Space!!"...maybe..maybe. GOD KNOWS TNG/DS9/VOY treatment of American Indian stereotypes is beyonnnnnnd crazy.**
*By the end, it's Quark who is the last vestige of what Ferengi were as his entire society evolves past him.
**I mean the writers are *on record* as saying "Hey! I'm gonna do an Indian story! How's that Indian story coming along?" Seriously? And the constant spiritualism and dialogue "Picard! What do you plan to do about your Indians!" really??
....sorry....(please God don't let this turn into a Chief Wahoo thread)
#31 is a parody. A bit too obvious.
And if you think this thread is a parody, I've seen long long discussions / debates / essays on the racial / class / gender / religious politics of Tolkien.
http://www.leiasmetalbikini.com/members/fansincostume.html
Sure, fiction is fiction. But some fiction at least, tries, or pretends to try, to comment on society. Given that, it is fair game. In fact, much of the best speculative fiction pretends to try at the very least to comment on society and humanity, using science fiction, or fantasy, as the props, or the explorative tools. They are also fun at the same time.
In the words of Yoda;
"Do or do not, there is no try."
Alternately, in the words of Bart Simpson;
"I can't promise I'll try, but I'll try to try."
But they looked like that *before* anything having to do with money or anything took place. They were supposed to be the antagonists of the Federation.
And maybe they look like this because Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, Max Grodénchik and Wallace Shawn...are jewish.
As to the Ferengi, it never really crossed my mind that they "were" Jewish. The series didn't play on anti-Semitic stereotypes that I ever saw. They were first introduced in a TNG episode as "Yankee Traders" or something like that, perhaps to distance them from anti-Semitism. I just thought they were pretty obnoxious and dramatically useless.
But there are explicitly political things in some fantasy: in Tolkien (the "scouring of the Shire" is the most direct), in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, throughout. It would be unjust to their authors not to take them seriously as politics.
all I know is a few weeks ago I was talking to a guy I had just met about Star Trek, and when I mentioned the Ferengi he cut in and said "you mean the space Jews?"
*What a source of shame and embarrassment that the worst actor ever is an MOT. At least, the world's ugliest porn star is a gentile ... oh, wait a minute. Damn you Ron "the Hedgehog" Jeremy!
phun phact - Nimoy adapted the "live long and prosper" sign from hand signals he saw his rabbi make during prayer
EDIT: This explains it:
I guess it upsets me (and since I'm a liberal arts academic, I see a lot of amateur literary criticism . . .) when people see racism everywhere. It is some places, of course, and where seen, should be so labeled. It also was unquestionably the basis for certain character archetypes, but those archetypes have moved beyond that, and are now frequently used innocently. Archetypes make certain kinds of literature--like fantasy and science fiction--richer and more fun, and getting all tied in knots about them is like drinking a gallon of prune juice.
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