Priorities in hiring

"I love having talented people around me to help me... I'm not scared of talent. I'm scared of bitches, but I'm not scared of talent."

Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz had an Interview Magazine-style conversation with Dr. Sanjay Gupta in the March issue of Harper's Bazaar. I especially liked this part, where Elbaz talks about who he surrounds himself with at work.

I've blogged about Elbaz before -- the clothes he designs are pretty, and he always says interesting things.

A perfect conduit



“...he is the
perfect conduit: just sophisticated enough to talk to sophisticates, just hayseed enough to seem astounded by what they tell him.”

--Nora Ephron in a January 1967 profile of Johnny Carson published in the New York Post

Vanity Fair published a really good story on Johnny Carson's rise in this month's issue. I've always heard about the massive impact Carson had on American culture, but never quite got it myself until now. 

The article included part of the snappy Nora Ephron quote excerpted above, starting at "just sophisticated enough..." -- I found the beginning of it thanks to a search on Google Books. It explains the Iowa-born, Nebraska-bred Carson's appeal perfectly.

Here is another interesting stat, from another VF article published this month: At its peak, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show had an audience of more than 15 million viewers per night. At the moment, Leno's Tonight Show has around 3.7 million viewers.


"It's very difficult to know where to be."

We find ourselves having that conversation about getting older and how much London has changed and how much New York City has changed. 

"But the world's changed," says Blanchett. "It's very difficult to know where to be. I used to live with people about whom I thought, Why have you completely pulled up stakes and gone to the coast? Couldn't you have just moved to the suburbs? Or quit your job? 

It's like going dry, I imagine. Because sometimes life is so fast and so absolute that the only way you can change things is by actually shifting your life utterly and totally to a different hemisphere. You can't partially change. There's no semi-revolution."

-- From a candid and refreshingly well-written interview (less focus on clothes, more on personality, culture, and atmosphere) with Cate Blanchett in the January 2014 issue of Vogue magazine.

"No one likes to admit they're being helped."



"No one
likes to pay out money. No one likes to admit that they're being helped. Very few people like to admit that other people have made a contribution to their success."

-- This entire 60 Minutes segment from 1975 on the late Hollywood agent Sue Mengers is fascinating (I've been reading up on her after this LA Times article about the Broadway play based on her career.) I especially liked what she said in the excerpt above, about why agents and marketers and their ilk get a bad rap.

At its core, business is where people hustle to get paid for the value they add to the world. If you're someone who is comfortably on salary in some established industry, it can be easy to forget that.

Back in her day, Mengers clearly hustled to get her 10%, and blazed the trail for a lot of modern consultants in the process. That woman knew how to give good phone. (And her manicure was on point.)

Also, the whole pace and tone of 60 Minutes in the 1970s was good stuff. Straightforward interviews, some of them over a glass of wine, edited together to run under 10 minutes. No fancy graphics or artsy camerawork. Simple and effective.