Mexicali Flyer (new venue)

Mexicali Flyer, originally uploaded by catdirtrecords.

Also, I hear "le Castle Vania" will be in the house, if that means anything to you.

We're Back, Motherfucker...

Che Cafe Flyer, originally uploaded by catdirtrecords.

With the power. Beauty Bar, Che Cafe, Mexicali. Did I mention Le Castle Vania is an "add" for Mexicali? Mermaid? All girl/all ages, first Che Cafe show. So So Glos- for real man, for real. New York City's finest and they've been tearing it up nationwide.

UCSD- this is your chance. Don't sleep. And... uh... I think there may be something different about Fifty on Their Heels. Something new. Something fresh. It may surprise you.

It all starts on 12/6, then 12/7 & then 12/8.

Also tomorrow night at the Che? Scarlet Symphony, The Muslims, The Prayers- I'll be there TALKING BUSINESS. Won't say what that is all about. Curious? No?

Could 91x Get Any Worse? Yes! (Adam Carolla Watch 2008)

UPDATE 12/17/07: In response to the moderate traffic this post is generating as a result of Carolla's recent issues showing up for his show- there is no FUCKING WAY 91x would hire him in the way people are talking about it on the various carolla related bulletein boards- this post is about 91x ADDING him as a syndicated show. This post is from a month ago. In no way am I suggesting Carolla would forsake his syndicated show to a morning show dj at 91x in San Diego. That is preposterous.


I wanted to mention this week's Blurt column for this item:

According to one insider, the next local morning DJ to be replaced by a syndicated show is Chris Cantore, who has anchored the 91X morning show for 11 years. On November 14, his on-air partner Jennifer White announced that she was leaving 91X after 2 years. She is set to get her own morning show on Sophie 103.7.

It is rumored that Cantore in the Morning will be replaced by the L.A.-based Adam Carolla Show in January. Carolla's all-talk show replaced the syndicated Howard Stern Show in many cities when Stern switched to Sirius almost two years ago. Locally, the Carolla show was carried on Free FM, the now-defunct all-talk station at 103.7 FM. Weak ratings prompted 103.7 to switch to the female-friendly "Sophie" music format.


Now, I never thought I would speak up for Cantore in the Morning, but... Adam Carolla? Man- they already tried that here. It didn't work. Nobody likes Adam Carolla. And as for Cantore- well- he's a local guy, he has local people working on his staff and he actually lives in San Diego. I can't imagine that Carolla will be a ratings boost, so it must be a cost saving measure. Either way it's sad and it makes me loath 91x ever more.

Me? I got Sirius radio in my new Jetta and seriously- I haven't listened to terrestial radio since I got the new wheels. Sirius even has a show called "blog radio" which I think is dj'ed by Aqauarium Drunkard (Official Indie Blogger Nation Rep. from Los Angeles) and uh... yeah... I think I'm going to stick with the Sirius.

Book Reviews: Alfred D. Chandler & the History of American Business

Books Discussed in this Essay

Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. BUY IT!

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
BUY IT!

Ignore the history of American business at your peril. The growth of American corporations since the end of the civil war has been nothing short of amazing, yet the attention paid to these entities tends to be either focused on the "great men" of American business (the robber barons & entrepreneurs) or else focused on the "corporations are evil" idea so popular among students & academics at our institutions of higher learning. That's unfortunate, because while both perspectives have some element of truth, they both obscure the central lessons of American business history.

Those lessons are laid bare in these two volumes, both written by business historian Alfred Dupont Chandler Jr. Chandler ignores the morality of corporations and largely ignores the entrepreneurs responsible for founding American corporations in favor of a focus on the administrators and organization builders that took the large corporations from their energetic but disorganized roots into the modern area as decentralized, "multi-functional"(and multi national) entities that we recognize today.

Chandler's narrative is straight forward: After the Civil War, the growth of American Railroads created a huge domestic market. Some companies took advantage of this change to vastly increase their capacity and sales, others started or consolidated existing businesses to create new corporations that dominated their respective industries. Periodic depressions in the business cycle forced these new, large corporations to deal with the problem of "excess capacity" and difficulty in obtaining raw materials. These new problems led these businesses to expand into new, related lines of business or to "vertically integrate" either backward (buying sources of the raw materials they used to make products) or forward (creating marketing organizations to sell their finished products directly to consumers).

The companies that moved the fasted in this regard were the first to come up against the problems face by a modern multi-functional diversified corporation. That problem: how best to make the various disparate parts of the business contribute most effectively to the generation of profit on behalf of the corporation. In "Strategy and Structure" Chandler explains the second half of that equation, in the "Visible Hand" he describes the first half. Taken together the books represent a coherent explanation for how we got from here (pre-civil war landscape of small, individually owned businesses) to there (modern landscape of large, multi-functional, multi-national corporations).

Basically, younger executives in the business, with less of a background in operations, understood that the most effective way to run a multi-function business was to create a "general" office that did not have a background in any one function of the business. Today you know those people as "CEO's" "CFO" and "Divisional Vice Presidents", but this was a development that didn't happen for almost every large business in the US until the 1920s or even later.