Top Chef: Season 9, Episode 6: Higher Steaks

(remember: there will be spoilers.)

This episode didn’t excite as much response from me as last week’s.

The Quickfire was a good, basic, technique-driven exercise. I couldn’t stand guest judge Dean Fearing, and his condescending style.

I was happy to see Grayson win. She’s a dark horse, and probably won’t go super far, but she’s also one of the few cheftestants that qualify for the seasonal Reality Show Participant That Seems Relatively Normal, Possibly Interesting, And You Think You Could Enjoy A Beer with them. The others who count this season would be Paul, Edward, Chris Jones, and maybe Chris C, if only for his silly commentary.

Unlike Beverly, who seems like a psychotherapist’s wet dream, a bundle of neuroses that seem to stem from the conflicts of being part of the “model minority,” a woman, and a chef (and thus displeasing her family with her career choice.) Beverly wins the Most Like Cameron From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off award, in that you figure if you stuck a lump of coal up her ass, it would come out a diamond.

Heather, who ends up winning elimination by baking Edward’s cake recipe (!), is getting, as they say on the boards, the “villain edit.” And boy, does she seem to deserve it (particularly in the “next week” teaser of her shutting down Grayson). When I see Heather, I’m reminded of the woman who runs the shoe store in the ZZ Top video Legs, the one who eats the girl’s cake.

legs_woman.png

This is how my brain works.

The less said about those on the bottom, and Whitney ultimately leaving, the better, though I’m bummed that Whitney beat out Chuy in the Last Chance Kitchen.

Top Chef, Season 9, Episode 5: Don’t Be Tardy for the Dinner Party

An experiment. I am thinking of writing about Top Chef, since it’s the show that probably brings out my biggest fan freakiness. These won’t be long, detailed reviews and recaps. Just a collection of thoughts once I get around to watching the latest episode, and have ~10-15 minutes to write a thing. There will be spoilers.

This episode has our cheftestants moving from San Antonio to Dallas. The quickfire challenge was one of those I don’t like — “Given an impossible set of circumstances, make something we’ll like!” So, whatever.

The progressive dinner at the homes of moneyed Dallas people exposed us to one of those breeds of people/households that I’m happy I have little-to-know exposure to. Pretty(-ish) trophy wives and the insecure yet well-paid men who marry them. And, being Texas, the women get bonus points for being tall and blonde.

Years ago, on a research project for a client, we interviewed a number of women about their role as the person responsible for remembering the important occasions in their family’s lives (keepers of the calendars and address books). One woman was a stay-at-home-mom in Dallas (or Plano or something), and it was the most disturbing research interview I’ve seen (I didn’t go, but watched the video). This woman was so fearful of living up to her own mother’s expectations that she pretty much drove herself crazy trying to be a perfect mom. To the degree that when she forgot some “important” occasion for her smallest child (I forget what), she felt soooo badly about it that she woke that child up from his sleep and dragged him to an ice cream parlor. In the course of this interview, she increasingly treated it as a therapy session, at one point admitting that she felt like “a monkey in cage,” and frustrated that she subsumes her entire identity and personality to support her husband and children.

On this research trip, I got into the only major car accident I’ve ever been in. I don’t have any good associations with Dallas.

I’ve been a fan of the Texas-themed challenges so far (Chili! Quincenara!), but helping people with more money than sense was not one I brought any interest to.

In terms of the chefs, Paul is clearly a stone cold maestro in the kitchen. First the ghost chile, and now he rocked a plate of freakin’ BRUSSELS SPROUTS. I very much want to eat his food when I am next in Austin.

When, at the judges table after Chuy was sent home, guest judge John “Look At My Pearly Whites” Besh, said something like, “in the end, it was the overcooked salmon that finished him.” And all I could think of was death in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life pointing an accusatory finger downward and exclaiming, “It was the salmon mousse!” But then, I’m a super nerd.

Good for Chuy to redeem himself in the Last Chance Kitchen, even if he won on literally a technicality. Bummer to see Keith go, since he was such a pleasing presence.

Also, I have to say that I’m super-digging Padma’s outfits this season. Texas fashion suits her surprisingly well.

The Mindset View of Everything

Over 6 years ago, I wrote about how Web 2.0 was better thought of as a philosophy, not a technology. (And then I wrote about it again.)

A couple years ago, I wrote about how UX is best approached as a mindset (not a process).

Internally at Adaptive Path, we’ve been talking a lot about service design, and I agree with my colleague Todd Wilkens that what’s most important in designing for service is to have a service mindset.

Pretty much everything I wrote about the Connected Age is one of mindset.

Clearly, I keep coming back to this idea. That mindset, perspective, and orientation is what is most important, most crucial, most fundamental in business. (And possibly all other parts of life.)

But it’s weird, because we’re never really taught how to think about mindsets. Even the word “mindset” (or “philosophy” or “perspective”) seems esoteric and abstract. Yet its application is what often separates success from failure.

How can we bring in to focus that which seems so ephemeral?

Read This Book: “Life, Inc”

As part of my research into the Connected Age, and why business needs to be more human, I came across Douglas Rushkoff’s “Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World And How to Take It Back.”

This is an important, eye-opening book. Rushkoff is a akin to Neo in the Matrix, seeing through our societal behavior to the corporatism that undergirds everything.

There are two main things I appreciate about this book. The first is political. In 2000, I caught a lot of grief for having supported Nader. My point at the time is that the difference between Bush and Gore was negligible. Nader’s point was that corporate influence had rendered the two main political parties nearly identical. While perhaps an unpopular opinion, I still believe that to be true — just look at how many of Bush’s policies Obama carries on. And real solutions for our social, economic, health, and environmental challenges will be neglected or heavily compromised, because of corporatism.

The other is professional. As I discussed in my post addressing bureaucracies, the prevalent belief is that this is how things have always been, and so this is how things will inevitably be. Rushkoff points out that much of what we take for granted — corporations, centralized currencies, real estate — are fabrications, created by the powerful to maintain their influence and inhibit people from engaging directly with one another.

Sometimes this book feels like medicine — reading it is good for you, but not necessarily fun. Nevertheless, it’s worth the effort.

…and there’s no way that Ticketmaster is Connected

An article in today’s NY Times talks about how the man who was instrumental for growing Ticketmaster to be the value-draining behemoth we all hate is now spearheading a competitor that aims to return ticketing to the specific venues. Ticketmaster is most definitely a hanger-on from an earlier era, and it’s inevitable that startups will aim at bringing the values of the Connected Age to ticket sales. Honestly, I’m doubtful that this guy is the one to do it, but when your customers hate you as much as Ticketmaster’s does, once there’s a viable option, people will flock.

Textbook publishers are most definitely not ready for the Connected Age

This article is about a month old, I know, but still worth pointing to: Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math. It’s an excellent example of how, when you engage in approaches that are suitable to the Connected Age, you can make serious inroads. Textbook publishers are among the most backwards businesses you can imagine, sadly clinging to an obviously outdated business model. If Craigslist can eviscerate the newspapers, can Khan Academy break us free from the stranglehold of the textbook publishers? (Even though in the article, Salman Khan says part of the magic of his efforts is that his is a non-profit, I don’t see any reason this couldn’t be a company, a la Craigslist — you don’t have to be rapacious to be successful!)

How customer service and Starbucks are killing conversation

One of the defining activities of human beings is conversation. We like to talk to one another, and do it often.

In our interactions with companies, our conversations have become increasingly, and insidiously, scripted. When we call “customer service”, we’re put in contact with someone who has been told how to talk to us, and is discouraged from veering off-script. And when we try to have a human conversation with them, we get what are clearly canned responses (especially if we’re expressing dissatisfaction with a product or service).

Actually, though, we’re now happy to get a human, even if it’s scripted, because the increasingly typical first line of response for a phone call is Interactive Voice Response, where we’re expected to talk our way through a series of menus. Such systems became famous for pissing off customers, and so they were programmed to respond to the use of profanity by getting you to a human. At the outset, this was, in a small way, joyous, because it actually felt like we were being heard. But recently I’ve realized I will swear or yell at an IVR at the outset, because I know it will trigger the system to connect me with a person. Which means I’ve been programmed by IVRs in how to behave. The IVRs have co-opted us.

Many conversational spaces have been shaped in this way. The one that probably irks me most is the Starbucks ordering process, which was broken down by the folks at Dubberly Design. That article lauds this approach as one that works for “beginners” as well as “aficionados” of Starbucks. I find it diabolical, because Starbucks essentially dehumanizes the conversation between the customer and barista, turning it into a programmatic code. For a company that claims it’s all about the customers’ experiences, it’s disheartening how they make the primary interaction between humans one that could take place between robots.

Designers are taught to shape environments and tools to support their users’ behaviors and desires, but oftentimes this leads to over-specifying in an attempt to “optimize” an experience. This leads to static, stagey, and ultimately unfulfilling engagement, where we realize we are expected to play a role, and cannot just be ourselves. The challenge for experience designers is to specify just enough to support a good interaction between customer and company, but also allow for the emergent and irreplaceable spark that can occur between people.

Book Review: The Most Human Human (in short: read it!)

After seeing the an interview with author on The Daily Show, and reading a glowing notice in The New Yorker, I made a priority of finishing The Most Human Human before I ended family leave.

It’s a delightful and discursive book, wending its way through cognitive science, philosophy, poetry, artificial intelligence, embodied experience, and more. The author, Brian Christian, writes with a deft touch, in an episodic and occasionally meandering style that feels like you’re taking part in a good conversation.

Which makes sense, considering the book’s supposed raison d’etre is the author’s preparation for being a confederate (a human participant) for the Loebner Prize, in which judges of a Turing test have conversations with computers and humans, to determine both The Most Human Computer and The Most Human Human.

As part of this training, Brian, who has B.A.s in philosophy and computer science (from Brown, natch), and an MFA in poetry, endeavors to better understand just what makes humans human. In doing so, he runs across what he calls “The Sentence,” which every discipline that studies humans (anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.) has some version of, and goes something like, “The human being is the only animal that ____________”. Except that the items that have filled in that blank (“uses tools”, “has language,” “feels remorse”, “thinks”, etc. etc.) have been taken down one by one. Perhaps the best fill-in is, “obsesses about its own uniqueness,” because, really, what does it matter if humans aren’t wholly unique (except, perhaps, in our agglomeration of traits), and yet why do we seem to get so worked up about being distinct from all other creatures? But I digress.

This book came at a particularly opportune time, given the theme of my recent writing on business in the Connected Age — that it needs to embrace our humanity. In the context of computation and automation, Brian addresses the world of work, how many activities that were once done by people are now done by machines, computers, and robots. He astutely points out that replacing people with machines isn’t the problem, but what happens before then, when people’s work tasks become so rote and repetitive, that you’ve essentially turned people into machines. You can’t have IVR (interactive voice response) until you’ve already turned customer service representatives into automatons by requiring them to closely follow a pre-defined script.

The book also digs into our collective left-brain bias, with a quote from Oliver Sacks: “The entire history of neurology and neuropsychology can be seen as a history of the investigation of the left hemisphere.” It’s becoming clear, though, that we favor the left-brain over the right at our own peril — those with strokes affecting right-brain function can find it impossible to make decisions, because it turns out decisions are rooted in emotion, not rational analysis. There’s even a mention of user experience, and how it’s ascent demonstrates a shift away from a left-brained “rational” desire for more features and functions, toward a whole-brained understanding of how people behave, to support, as my colleague Jesse calls it, “human engagement.”

Anyway, I could go on, but I simply don’t have the time. In short, get the book, read it, engage with it, talk to it, take notes as you think about it, and enjoy it.

The “Connected” Meme Flourishes

At the beginning of March, I gave a talk where I posit that we are in a “Connected Age” and that business must alter its practices accordingly. Shortly after, I find out that Dave Gray had recently written a blog post about the Connected Company, which then turned into its own blog, and Google Group.

And now I hear about Tiffany Shlain’s new film, “Connected”, a documentary that is tag-lined “an autobiography about love, death, and technology,” and which seems to hit on many of the themes I’ve been mulling around the Connected Age.

(And in finding out about the film, I found out about the book Living Networks, “leading your company, customers, and partners in the hyper-connected economy.”