Category: Business

Are You "In The Weeds"?

This piece comes from chef Shuna Fish Lydon’s blog Eggbeater, written by a working chef about the workings of a restaurant kitchen, but if you look past the jargon of the chef you’ll find the advice is relevant to any team that has to produce, on time and under pressure.

The Weeds.

It’s an expression for line cooks by line cooks, but it is also something much larger. A euphemism. It’s an in-the-moment, during service expression.

But it can also refer to your whole career.

The Weeds

can take a whole department. A station. A restaurant. A person and their career.

On The Line the weeds will usually let you out of its stranglehold after the last table is out.
But if you’re really stubborn, The Weeds might have a lesson for you that takes a week, or five years.

When I train cooks I say the same thing over and over.

There are no cowboys on islands in kitchens. If you can be smart and honest enough to see The Weeds getting near, and you can ask for support before The Weeds claim you altogether, I and we can help you push through. But if we don’t know you need help until you’re drowning, not only is it too late to help you, it’s too late to save the food from merely being banged-out. And I don’t know about you but I have more pride in my food than to allow it to be banged-out.

Go, read the rest, share it, bookmark it.

Hat tip, Ruhlman.

Quote of the Morning

Jeff Matthews nails it:

What happened to the heroic, forward-looking rhetoric great leaders are supposed to provide in times of crisis?

FDR gave us “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Churchill gave us “We shall fight on the beaches.”

George Bush cruises in with “This sucker could go down.”

Afternoon update: OUCH. Largest one-day drop on the DOW, ever.

Worst Financial Crisis Since The Great Depression

I’ve been following the chaos in the financial markets pretty closely this week.

Anyone with half a brain knows that upward cycles do not last forever, and yet somehow the banking and real estate industries managed to convince themselves that this time it would be different, aided and abetted by a business-friendly government that didn’t care what happened so long as the economy was “strong”. On every level, from the consumer buying a house they couldn’t possibly afford to the whiz kids who turned those crappy, unsustainable mortgages into a huge stinking mass of debt and derivatives, it was about greed and the desire to have more, now, even if you weren’t sure how you could pay for it, and nobody comes out looking particularly good.

I can’t blame the government for feeling the need to step in and do something, I suppose, but I’m also not happy about their selective elimination of moral hazard from the equation.

Sat. Afternoon Update: Mark Cuban asks:

Does everyone realize how much bigger a disaster last week would have been had Social Security been privatized?

That would have been very scary indeed.

Barry's Righteous Rant

Over at “The Big Picture”, Barry Ritholtz has been doing terrific work reporting on the shenanigans in the markets and the economy. Today he let rip a rant that’s worth sharing. Here’s a taste:

When this era of excess and absurdity is treated by historians in the future, the question I expect to be asked most is not why many of these people weren’t jailed for their financial felonies. Rather, I expect them to wonder why so many of these folk weren’t placed in protective custody, and heavily medicated, for the only rational explanation for their statements and behaviors is that they have gone so far beyond the bend as to be completely and totally insane.