Jonathan Miller's Blog, page 41

The RP: Fancy Farm 2014 — A Twitter Recap

#kysen MT @KyDems: EXCLUSIVE: @GovSteveBeshear #FancyFarm #selfie. @Team_Mitch enjoying his upcoming retirement! pic.twitter.com/PvrxH9DnQ8

— Charly Norton (@CharlyNorton) August 2, 2014

#FancyFarm wrap up: press consensus – @AlisonForKY gets more impressive every day; @Team_Mitch inexplicably off his game.

— Jonathan Miller (@RecoveringPol) August 2, 2014

#FancyFarm wrap-up: state press thought @KYComer & @ConwayfotKY excelled; national press: @adamhedelen a star.

— Jonathan Miller (@RecoveringPo...

John Y’s Musings from the Middle: Failed Marketing Campaign?

Have a failed marketing campaign? Are you still, after attempting multiple promotional strategies, still struggling to break through?

Here is one of my father’s favorite explanations. Mine too.

Maybe the dogs don’t like it:

Once upon a time a pet food company created a new variety of dog food and rolled out a massive marketing campaign to introduce the product. Despite hiring a first-rate ad…vertising agency, initial sales were very disappointing. The agency was fired and a new agency and a new...

Matt Ranen: Time for CEOs to Choose Sides?

If you are the CEO of a major American or European based multinational you have a difficult question on your plate right now. Are you going to the St. Petersburg Forum in late May this year? If it were Switzerland and this were the World Economic Forum annual meeting, the decision would pretty much make itself (unless you are just bored of Davos). But this is Vladimir Putin’s show, the Russians’ answer to what they see as the ‘Western-centrism’ of the World Economic Forum.

You’ve probably gone...

John Y’s Musings from the Middle: Conversation with a friend about assumptions

Friend: Hey John. I saw you walking downtown last week but didn’t say hi because you looked busy and I didn’t want to bother you.

Me: Oh, funny.

Always say hi.

That was just my “Downtown look.”

I try to walk fast and furrow my eyebrows and look like I am concentrating on something complicated so other people won’t realize I am just trying to remember where I parked my car.

Josh Bowen: Surviving the Grocery Store

We are almost half way through the year and I would like to do a short exercise with everyone.

Ask yourself these three questions:

What have you accomplished in the last 6 months?

What are your current challenges and obstacles?

What are you going to complete in the next 90 days?

It is always a great idea to reflect on the last 3-6 months; what went right and what went wrong. Not only from a fitness perspective but also from a life perspective. This is an important exercise for us all, myself inclu...

Will Meyerhofer: Caregive. Caretake.

It seems oddly fitting that the words “caregiving” and “caretaking” mean precisely the same thing. Perhaps that linguistic oddity reflects the salient characteristic of care itself: a tension between our desire to receive it and our countervailing feeling of obligation to provide it. Human relations, generally, can be summarized as an on-going battle between those who provide care and those on the receiving end.

As a human child, you started out your life as the ultimate care-collection machin...

John Y’s Musings from the Middle: Early Intervention

Early intervention for children who may have a developmental issue is important and can be extremely helpful.

But, in my opinion, too often the teachers or counselors are too quick to pounce on a diagnosis and to “treat” something as a problem that isn’t a problem at all and will work itself out in time.

We are all on our own individual timetables and much of childhood development can’t –and shouldn’t–be forced. Vigilence is constructive as long as it doesn’t become hyper-vigilance and over-dia...

Lauren Mayer: Everything Old Is New Again

The 1960s are retro cool these days, thanks to hit shows like Mad Men and Masters of Sex (not to mention all the Austin Powers movies). And while we admire the cool fashions (skinny ties! pillbox hats!), it’s all too convenient to dismiss the less-admirable aspects of the era (segregation, no effective birth control not to mention how women were treated in general, childhood diseases like polio & measles). But many of those phenomena are returning along with the fashions – setbacks in voting...

Jason Grill: JGrill Media One of Kansas City’s Top Companies

From ThisisKC.com:

Superstar Service: JGrill Media

Whether he’s interviewing local innovators on KMBZ’s “Entrepreneur KC” radio show, writing a piece for The Huffington Post explaining why our burgeoning Midwestern tech hub is “not flyover country,” or helping a tech firm gain exposure through his PR firm JGrill Media, Jason Grill is your quintessential Kansas Citian who keeps his hometown close to his heart.

Through a unique combination of media and government relations, business consulting, an...

Brooke Masters: On-site supervisors a good start for ECB

Banking union is the flavour of the month. Faced with investors who doubt the ability of some eurozone sovereigns to make good on their debts, the 17 members of the single currency have agreed to work together to channel aid directly to troubled lenders. But the deal is conditioned on the creation of a single banking supervisor, empowered to crack down on risky banks, no matter where they are located.

Setting up an impartial expert to oversee the banks could well be a key step toward restoring...