Red Rooster Harlem

I’ve just tasted the best fried chicken ever. I kid you not: the batter was crisp and crunchy, making you want to bite and bite; the chicken was moist and tender, almost melting in your mouth; you just wanted to add more of the spicy seasoning from the shaker.

Last night, my brother and I dropped into Marcus Samuelsson’s latest creation, Red Rooster Harlem, a restaurant serving classic American dishes with a twist. Not to be confused with the Australian fast-food franchise, Red Rooster Harlem is the newest restaurant in the area, and is hopefully leading a local renaissance of good restaurants.

The service was friendly and attentive. The ambience was relaxed, with cool tunes playing in the background and lots of animated chatter in the foreground. The cocktail list was interesting, a mix of old and new, making the most of a good range of infused liquor.

A Harlem local, Marcus Samuelsson was guest chef for Barack Obama’s first state dinner. Born in Ethiopia, he grew up in Sweden, studying in Gothenburg before moving to New York where he served as executive chef of Aquavit, winning a stack of awards. More recently he won television’s Top Chef Masters Season 2.

Marcus Samuelsson pays homage to the best in Southern cuisine with dishes such as a cheddar pastry apple cake, yet salutes his Nordic roots with the tempting gravalax and purple mustard. Both the smoked and salt cured salmon was fantastic. That said, the chicken was my favourite, so if you’d like to try the best fried chicken ever, head up to Red Rooster Harlem, and order the fried yard bird.

Why People Fail

Success. It’s what so many people strive for. It’s been the subject of much study in recent years. Think of all of those personal development courses, CDs, tape sets, and books. Recall the sports psychologists during the recent Olympics. What about the business coaches walking in and out of office buildings every day.

But what about studying why people fail?

My good friend, Siimon Reynolds, has just released a new book that deals with this very notion. Why People Fail outlines sixteen common obstacles of success and how you can overcome them. Whether it’s stress, mistaking IQ for EQ, low energy levels, or a lack of persistence, Siimon explores why people fail and provides ideas on overcoming them. I particularly liked his chapter on daily rituals. Whether it’s clearing your desk, prayer, learning a new language, or planning for tomorrow, by incorporating these tasks into daily rituals, you can make a significant impact on your life over a period of time.

So if you’d like to get some great tips on avoiding failure, get a copy and read it.

Who owns this content?

I’ve just finished listening to a recent story on the ABC’s Background Briefing about who owns the news and it makes for interesting listening. At the World Media Summit, of over 400 media publishers and editors, in China yesterday, News Corporation chief, Rupert Murdoch, repeated his call for news organisations to charge for content on the Internet. He warned that news organisations and content creators must change otherwise search engines and other aggregators would eat all their lunch. He said that many Internet users believed that once they’d paid their ISP for access, they had purchased access to a content buffet. This message was echoed by the boss of the Associated Press, Tom Curley.

The Background Briefing piece interested me by pointing out that newspapers have been under threat since the 1930s with the advent of broadcast radio. Radio presenters were able to read breaking stories from the newspapers over the air before the public could purchase the papers, and this upset the publishers. Journalists, of the newspaper variety, cast aspersions on radio journalists, saying they weren’t in the same league as them. Naturally, the same occurred with the advent of television and television journalists. Over the years, the Associated Press (AP) has stood up for the commercial interests of publishers. In 1918 they won a case against the International News Service, who was found to have ‘copied’ AP’s work, claiming it as their own, and they’re likely to cite this precedent sometime soon. Today, AP is trialling a new strategy to prevent sites from copying and reusing its material. When it distributes content, it will be wrapped in a container that includes a tracking beacon that will allow central monitoring of users who view that piece of content. It’ll be fascinating to watch its progress.

If you’ve got a spare 40 minutes, I can highly recommend the episode.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Tattoo

It’s amazing to see what love does. Last month, I celebrated with some friends who got engaged after seeing each other for only two weeks. While they had met over five years ago, they hadn’t stayed in touch, and upon re-connecting, they felt they were made for each other. After spending a lot of time together during the two weeks, they decided to get engaged quickly.

Earlier today, another friend showed me an expression of love. He’s now seen his girlfriend for two months and has been visibly (and emotionally) impacted: he talks about her; he thinks about her; all the time. As an expression of his love, he got her name tattooed onto his chest this weekend. While I’m not too keen about getting a tattoo emblazoned on my chest, I understand his sentiments.

When you think of charismatic American leaders, who comes to mind? Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, and even William Jefferson Clinton. All of them used repetition in their speeches to get their point across. Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech used phrases and images that King had finessed over years of public speaking. John F Kennedy Even today’s American President has made use of the “yes, we can” refrain over, and over, and over. (Stop it!) Australian politicians have also found a fondness for repetition. You knew Paul Keating was making a point when he repeated the last sentence.

Successful business leaders, too, have made use of repetition to get their point across. Jack Welch had a saying of being simple, being consistent, and hammering your message home. That’s why he produced a wallet-sized card containing all of GE’s values. Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, repeated his company’s values again and again.

Repetition doesn’t need to happen in the same sentence. It doesn’t need to happen in the same talk or speech. But, if you’re wanting to get your point across, repetition (and consistency) over time will help ensure people get what you mean.

Jetting abroad

Jet lag describes the condition where your circadian rhythms are interrupted when travelling in an aircraft across time zones. Symptoms of jet lag include difficulty sleeping at a normal time, waking up in the middle of the night, and extreme drowsiness. In my years of travel, I’ve been very lucky in avoiding the severe effects of jet lag by following three simple rules.

Rule one: always adjust your watch to the destination time zone. As soon as I get on the plane, I adjust my watch to the time zone of my destination city. This means if I’m going from Sydney to Los Angeles for instance, I’ll turn my watch back seventeen hours. Likewise if I’m going to London where I’ll turn it back nine hours. By adjusting my watch to the destination time zone I start acting as if I’m the destination time zone.

Rule two: don’t eat and drink too much. When you’re onboard the plane and the attractive hostess keeps offering you food, I know it’s difficult resist the extra chocolate ice cream and cheese platter. Equally, when that glass of wine seems to have a never ending bottom, and you’ve left the cares of the world 35,000 feet below, saying “no” to the cognac or some other digestif requires real willpower. Believe me; on the occasions where I’ve over indulged, I’ve regretted it; on the occasions where I’ve been disciplined, I’ve sufferred little jet lag.

Rule three: sleep according to the destination time zone. I know this is a follow-on to my first rule and it works. If you can sleep as close as possible to normal nighttime according to the destination time zone, you’ll land fresh and full of energy. For those who find it difficult to sleep, I’ve always found some Baileys with a mild antihistamine works a treat.

So there you have it: my three simple rules for overcoming the jet lag curse. Try them next time you fly to visit friends and family and let me know if they work for you too!

A recent article in The Economist reports investors have a voracious appetite to throw money into venture capital (VC) funds focussed on promising start-ups. Marc Andreessen, one of the founders of Netscape Communications, announced in early July 2009 that he and his business partner had raised over $300m to invest in start-ups and it was oversubscribed. What’s interesting is that a month earlier, the Kauffman Foundation released a study concluding the US venture capital industry must shrink for it to be viable in the long-term. It found the industry has been stagnating, producing declining returns, and has grown far too big.

Although firms such as Google, Home Depot, Microsoft, and Starbucks were venture-backed, less than 20% of the fastest-growing comanies in the US had venture investors. In fact, only 16% of around 900 companies in the sample had venture capital backing. Further, the returns from the venture industry is 10% below a leading listed small-cap index on a ten year timeframe.

So there you have it, too much money trying to find the next big idea. Once investors wake up to the fact that the industry has not been producing spectacular returns, and has been charging a small fortune as a management fee, it’s inevitable they will reallocate their investments to other asset classes. The question is how long will it take?

Kyotofu's award-winning cupcake

Although many people use the phrase “going out for coffee” as an expression to catch-up (or meet-up) with an old (or new) friend, couldn’t “going out for dessert” be an equally valid social occasion?

A little over a month ago, I did just that with my brother and a bunch of his friends in New York. The venue was Kyotofu a Japanese dessert bar in Midtown. Containing two sections, the front of the restaurant had bar stools and a couple of tables while past the kitchen, while down the back, was a larger dining room housing more chairs and tables. On offer was a full menu of sweets that could be ordered individually as well as a prix fare menu. Being a closet sweet tooth, I couldn’t help but indulge in the sampling menu that included cheesecake, black sesame sweet tofu, and the miso chocolate cake.

The cheesecake, accompanied with a sponge base, was delicate yet had a full flavour. The black sesame sweet tofu came with a roasted green tea sauce and goji berries. The slight bitterness of the berries worked well with the sweetness of the tofu whose texture was smooth but firm. The miso chocolate cake was a surprise. I’ve always thought of miso as being extremely salty but in this instance it was juxtaposed against lightly-flavoured green tea ice-cream.

With good service and the right sort of lighting (dim if you ask), I reckon it’s a pretty good date venue.

If I wasn’t concerned about my carbohydrate intake, I’d be back more often.

Anyone who has travelled abroad with global roaming will recognise there’s a large cost for convenience. If you’re an Australian who is travelling in say, Singapore, and one of your mates in Australia calls your mobile, and you answer, your mate will be charged for the Australian portion of the call while you’ll be charged for the international (Australia to Singapore) portion of the call. This means taking calls overseas can be an expensive past time, especially if it’s your mate who talks and talks and talks, before you can even tell her you’re overseas!

It’s a slightly different story for text messages (SMS). In most countries, it’s free to receive a text message on a foreign phone so texting has been the communication method of choice for travellers. The catch, of course, is the cost of texting on your Aussie phone while on foreign soil. The last time I checked with my Australian carrier, it cost 75 cents to send a text message while overseas, which is a good three times the cost of a text message in Australia.

After a day of sending about fifteen text messages to a friend while I was on foreign soil, I realised I blew through more than ten dollars very quickly. I then remembered I could email! While the cost of data while roaming overseas is much more than when back home, it’s much cheaper than texting. If memory serves me correctly, I pay around 1 cent per kilobyte and given the 160 characters you can type into a text is much less than 1kb, the data rate can go a long way. (Obviously there’s a communications overhead and you could get in trouble if you decide to download that 2 megabyte attachment from the office.)

So there’s my tip. If you’ve got a BlackBerry or email-enabled phone, it can be much cheaper sending emails overseas than texting. (Oh, and if you’ve got a GPS-enabled phone, the A-GPS feature that uses the data network helps you find your way around really quickly!)