Tag: David Foster Wallace

Disney Shareholders: Why Can’t You Be More Like Netflix?


It’s not an easy undertaking to make me laugh nowadays. Most of the time I’m just FINE (as in Frustrated [duh!], Insecure, Nervous, and Exhausted); the rest of the time I am severely distraught… And, of course, I meditate and do my best to cheer the fuck up… The vast music library helps; so does the good literature, quality entertainment… But, laughing – that’s rare, very rare… Except for the news – some news snippets make me burst out laughing! And incidentally this particular hilarious bit also had to do with Entertainment… Or rather the business of it.

You see, Disney is in trouble… I don’t need to regurgitate to you the whole stock-market mumbo-jumbo everyone else and their mothers write about, primarily focusing on the share prices, which are now below the level they were 10 years ago. Because the bottom line is fairly simple: The original Walt Disney Pictures isn’t pumping out winners annually as they used to do. All those astronomical investments into hoarding the big-name franchises like Stars Wars (Lucasfilm) and Marvel  – in spite of the high profits per hit, don’t really turn themselves into returns fast enough… And – most painfully in terms of the contemporary state of the entertainment marketing – the streaming arm Disney+ is not profitable at all.

Or, as I prefer to define it: Netflix it ain’t.

What to do? What to do? In a typical far-removed-from-reality only-in-corporate-boardrooms turn of events, the self-proclaimed “activist” investor billionaire Nelson Peltz (who started his “business-building” career – and this is very important – by inheriting his grandfather wholesale food company and then turning himself into a prominent private-equity mogul by buying and selling such fully-fledged companies as Snapple and Quaker Oats) challenged Disney’s BOD to commence the corrective actions by dismissing the company’s current CEO Bob (Why Bob, god dammit?! The man is 71! Time to grow up into your full name!) Iger (not a businessman at all – a career media executive, aka glorified mountain-top administrator with an outrageous compensation package of nearly $30 mil per year). In his haste for coup d’état, Peltz forgot to do his homework – he came into the fight empty-handed: no constructive plan, no corrective suggestions, no panoramic view of Disney’s new and improved future… Just the hope that, without Iger in the picture and with him on the board, things will get better… How? By Disney Magic? (If you didn’t hear: Peltz’s coup failed and Iger is still up there – on Disney’s very top, I mean).        

You get why this is so funny to me, don’t you?

The very idea of two people with no entrepreneurial experience in their respective portfolios fighting over who’s better fit to shake up the conglomerated mastodon (in case you forgot your primary-school lessons: mastodons were prehistoric, extinct cousins of the contemporary elephants – very large creatures) and expediently reshape it into an agile operational gazelle able to conquer the most difficult, most contemporary, most innovative trails – it seems inconceivable to me. Moreover, it’s so desperately naive to believe (assuming, of course, that anyone actually believes it) that changing one (or ten! or all!) person sitting on the head of the mastodon – very far away from its vital organs and moving limbs – would trigger the company’s rejuvenation. 

Do you think that the OG business-builders Walt and Roy Disney, if faced with a similar situation, would be concerning themselves with the BOD changes? I don’t think so. They would dig deep into the causes of the business’s slowdown, think outside of all boxes, and try to come up with absolutely new, never-explored-before solutions. Because they were the trailblazers and truly good fathers to their corporate child.  The current executive foster parents, on the other hand, are the worst: all they do is measure their child’s failures against their peers’ successes.        

You see, aspiring to someone else’s model that happens to work for them for the time being is nothing but a short-term bandaid. The key is in the entrepreneurial intuition, the managerial flexibility and the structural mobility; the integral ability to adapt, to change fast – with every single shift of the market demand and technological leap. And can we expect that from a giant who cannot be anything but rigid and slow simply because its too large for its own good? Pure fantasy, of course (who’s going to stop me, though? it’s my blog!), but the best thing for Disney’s Jenga-tower now would be to disassemble into individual blocks and let them operate as separate business units, without the burden of the astronomical executive packages. Let them compete within their own enterprising markets, against their specific peers – not against the fickle stock-market trends. I wonder what would happen then?   

And since commentators keep bringing it up as a benchmark, let me note this: Netflix Inc., God bless them – in spite of their global presence, publicly trading stock, and nineteen subsidiaries – is still a very much agile, 27-year-old (the most beautiful age) baby. With one of its shrewd co-founders still serving as an Executive Chairman of the board. 

I was a member of Blockbuster when my then pre-teen daughter first told me about Netflix DVD subscription. On my way to work I would drop the red envelopes into the mailbox and get the new ones shipped to us as soon as they were scanned into the USPS system at our local P.O. By the standards of those times: extraordinary expediency and incomparable efficiency of the entertainment-delivery operations. And that is still their main focus. Now, by means of what David Foster Wallace predicted (a few years before Netflix DVD was born, actually) would be the main form of delivering content into people’s screens – the dissemination into “teleputers” as he defined it, which we now known as streaming. In between, all of their transitions, developments, enhancements, and additions have been seamless precisely because they keep to their core, pursuing their mission.

And I hope they continue being spry, fluid, and easy to adapt. To whatever the future brings. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I owe them so much! No, for real, I have no clue how I would manage without them…   

Quote of the Week: “Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat.”


Busy-office-workerSynopsis of James O. Incandenza's short (16 min) film Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat, Latrodectus Mactans Productions, Year of the Whopper:

"A bureaucrat in some kind of sterile fluorescent-lit office complex is a fantastically efficient worker when awake , but he has this terrible problem waking up in the A.M., and is consistently late to work, which in a bureaucracy is idiosyncratic and disorderly and wholly unacceptable, and we see this bureaucrat getting called in to his supervisor’s pebbled-glass cubicle, and the supervisor, who wears a severely dated leisure suit with his shirt-collar flaring out on either side of its rust-colored lapels, tells the bureaucrat that he’s a good worker and a fine man, but that this chronic tardiness in the A.M. is simply not going to fly, and if it happens one more time the bureaucrat is going to have to find another fluorescent-lit office complex to work in . It’s no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called ‘termination,’ as in ontological erasure, and the bureaucrat leaves his supervisor’s cubicle duly shaken. That night he and his wife go through their Bauhaus condominium collecting every alarm clock they own, each one of which is electric and digital and extremely precise, and they festoon their bedroom with them, so there are like a dozen timepieces with their digital alarms all set for 0615h. But that night there’s a power failure, and all the clocks lose an hour or just sit there blinking 0000h. over and over, and the bureaucrat still oversleeps the next A.M. He wakes late, lies there for a moment staring at a blinking 0000. He shrieks, clutches his head, throws on wrinkled clothes, ties his shoes in the elevator, shaves in the car, blasting through red lights on the way to the commuter rail. The 0816 train to the City pulls in to the station’s lower level just as the crazed bureaucrat’s car screeches into the station’s parking lot, and the bureaucrat can see the top of the train sitting there idling from across the open lot. This is the very last temporally feasible train: if the bureaucrat misses this train he’ll be late again, and terminated. He hauls into a Handicapped spot and leaves the car there at a crazy angle, vaults the turnstile, and takes the stairs down to the platform seven at a time, sweaty and bug-eyed. People scream and dive out of his way. As he careers down the long stairway he keeps his crazed eyes on the open doors of the 0816 train, willing them to stay open just a little longer. Finally, filmed in a glacial slo-mo, the bureaucrat leaps from the seventh-to-the-bottom step and lunges toward the train’s open doors, and right in mid-lunge smashes headlong into an earnest-faced little kid with thick glasses and a bow-tie and those nerdy little schoolboy-shorts who’s tottering along the platform under a tall armful of carefully wrapped packages. Kerwham, they collide. Bureaucrat and kid both stagger back from the impact. The kid’s packages go flying all over the place. The kid recovers his balance and stands there stunned, glasses and bow-tie askew. The bureaucrat looks frantically from the kid to the litter of packages to the kid to the train’s doors, which are still open. The train thrums. Its interior is fluorescent-lit and filled with employed, ontologically secure bureaucrats. You can hear the station’s PA announcer saying something tinny and garbled about departure. The stream of platform foot-traffic opens around the bureaucrat and the stunned boy and the litter of packages… The film’s bureaucrat’s buggy eyes keep going back and forth between the train’s open doors and the little kid, who’s looking steadily up at him, almost studious, his eyes big and liquid behind the lenses… The bureaucrat’s leaning away, inclined way over toward the train doors, as if his very cells were being pulled that way. But he keeps looking at the kid, the gifts, struggling with himself… The bureaucrat’s eyes suddenly recede back into their normal places in his sockets. He turns from the fluorescent doors and bends to the kid and asks if he’s OK and says it’ll all be OK. He cleans the kid’s spectacles with his pocket handkerchief, picks the kid’s packages up. About halfway through the packages the PA issues something final and the train’s doors close with a pressurized hiss. The bureaucrat gently loads the kid back up with packages, neatens them. The train pulls out. The bureaucrat watches the train pull out, expressionless. It’s anybody’s guess what he’s thinking. He straightens the kid’s bow-tie , kneeling down the way adults do when they’re ministering to a child, and tells him he’s sorry about the impact and that it’s OK. He turns to go. The platform’s mostly empty now. Now the strange moment. The kid cranes his neck around the packages and looks up at the guy as he starts to walk away: ‘Mister?’ the kid says. ‘Are you Jesus?’ ‘Don’t I wish,’ the ex-bureaucrat says over his shoulder, walking away, as the kid shifts the packages and frees one little hand to wave Bye at the guy’s topcoat’s back as the camera, revealed now as mounted on the 0816’ s rear, recedes from the platform and picks up speed."

              David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest, pp. 687-689, Little, Brown and Company

(For those who are wandering whether I'm reading Infinite Jest right now: Yes, I'm reading Infinite Jest right now.)

Quote of the Week: More on American Males’ Favorite Topic of Small Talk


Cbb2bf41b190754fbc87003525e2e6d7"A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism, football…  The exaggerated breadth of the shoulders, the masked eradication of facial personality, the emphasis on contact-vs.-avoidance-of-contact.  The gains in terms of penetration and resistance.  The tight pants that accentuate the gluteals and hamstrings and what look for all the world like codpieces.  The gradual slow shift of venue to 'artificial surface,' 'artificial turf…'  And have a look at these men whacking each other's asses after a play…  Football is pure homophobically repressed nancy-ism…"

                                                                                            David Foster Wallace

                                                                                                   Infinite Jest                                                     

Quote of the Week: Self-Help Advice from David Foster Wallace


David foster wallace"Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you."

David Foster Wallace