Baking does not fuck around.
(Looks at sad pan of not-nearly-good-enough brownies.)
This mistake led to me putting yogurt up my nose in an attempt to soothe the pain.
Heh.
So I was just watching the NFL channel's Top Ten Gutsiest Calls in NFL history and I'm struck by how much the underlying narrative in football is so different than in baseball. Not in the game itself (though those are also different) but in how fans and analysts perceive the game.
Because in the NFL five of the top ten gutsiest plays were incredibly stupid. Yet they are celebrated. Going from the gut, taking wild chances, disregarding the odds - these are the things that make America great! Ta da!
And even some of the gutsy plays that worked were still kind of stupid, notably Sean Payton's decision to open the second half of the Super Bowl with an onside kick. It worked. But it was pretty fucking reckless. If that was a surgeon making an equivalent decision in the OR, I'd consider it malpractice.
Whereas in baseball there's still lots of old school narrative where basically The Game Reveals Character. Clutchiness is the classic old narrative in baseball. Also, Doing the Little Things, and Gritty Gamers. But the stats revolution in baseball has created a counter narrative about making the right decisions based on process. So nobody gets lauded for lucking into a good result from a bad, poorly considered process.
Which brings me back to the odd tyranny of narratives which often drive business and workplaces. The fetishization of Excellence (when competence is really more likely and frankly all you need from say, a file clerk), the Workplace as Family (Teppy suffers from this job); My Way or the Highway (manager as military commander with lives at stake). All those business books which are selling a storyline that you can hang your business practices on.
But I've worked at so many places which did not even understand the basics of the business decisions they made. I vividly remember sitting in on endless hiring committee meetings from partners at our law firm deciding which of the summer clerks were going to get offers. And...they don't know shit.
They were experts at their narrow practice of law, but their decision-making process was so ungrounded, and kind of bullshitty. They were all smart attorneys and successful, but they really didn't have a great sense of how to make a good hire. The stuff they said in the meetings was roughly equivalent to people calling into sports radio talk shows, blathering on with theories they pulled out of their ass.
My old HR director boss at my first law firm job did have a brutally cold way of looking at a resume. I remember her looking through our summer applicants and saying bluntly, "If they haven't distinguished themselves by the time they've finished college then they don't have enough drive to make it here as a partner. Look at this person who interned at The Hague in the International Court when they were a junior, and captained a champion Rugby team, and edited the school paper. That's what you're looking for."
I'm not saying her standard was the only valuable one, but it was thought out, considered and tested against a fair amount of experience. And that firm stuck with its strategy, the bios for their Partners were vastly tilted towards Ivy or Ivy Equivalent (Stanford, U of Chicago, OxBridge) and top tier law schools. They recruited very heavily at Harvard, and barely looked at something decent and local like San Jose State.