* Erich Brenn on The Ed Sullivan Show seems to capture what product management feels like: The Ed Sullivan Show, YouTube, last modified August 25, 2009, http://youtu.be/Zhoos1oY404.
* There’s a job role you don’t see anymore. I always thought it should come with some kind of horned Viking helmet.
* The clue’s in the name: a project manager’s scope of responsibility is the good running of a project, often within the confines of product development only and with a specific timescale and set of objectives. The project by definition is short-lived. In contrast, a product manager’s scope of responsibility is the good running of a product, on a holistic and open-ended basis, with a set of objectives that evolve with the changing needs of the target market. A single product will have many projects (and project managers) throughout its life, but its product manager will ideally be more constant.
* Possibly while bouncing around the room making a rude, raspberry-type noise. March 10, 2000, is considered the date on which the dot-com bubble burst, coinciding with NASDAQ’s peak at 5408.60, double what it had been a year previously, and a level still not matched—at the time of writing in May 2014, at least. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=^IXIC&t=my&l=off&z=l&q=l&c=.
* Purely as an aside, Grand Theft Auto V (a headline-grabbing video game) made over $1 billion in the three days following its release. With its creator’s investment of reportedly between $200 million and $250 million, it just goes to show—twelve years on from Segway—that the right product in the right market can achieve astonishingly rapid commercial success. http://www.reuters.com /article/2013/09/20/entertainment-us-taketwo-gta-idUSBRE98J0O820130920.
* It turns out that this was not an isolated event. More recently, a pigeon nearly caused the same thing to happen again by dropping a piece of baguette onto one of the supercooled magnets, raising its temperature above the point where it ceases to be a superconductor. This containment failure would have resulted in similar damage were it not for the safety valves that had been added since the last incident. A pigeon. Seriously? See: Lewis Page, “Large Hadron Collider Scuttled by Birdy Baguette-Bomber,” The Register, November 5, 2009, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/.
*If I need to pull up information from the Internet while I’m walking down a crowded street, I already can do so on my smartphone, and I don’t have to shout to myself to make it work.
* Bonus step: be ungrammatical and finish sentences with a preposition.
* Strictly speaking, the updated version of situational leadership described in the short book Leadership and the One Minute Manager. If you can get past the slightly patronizing tone, it’s well worth a read. See the Further Reading section.
* “Weird” is an understatement. Some customers thought the front grille looked like a “vagina with teeth,” according to Matt Haig’s book Brand Failures: The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time, p. 21. See the Further Reading section.
* Translation: “It’s a bit like suddenly deciding to substitute one word for another.”
* A Denon DRA-275RD, if you must know. I’ve never successfully turned the volume dial up beyond a third without bursting an eardrum.
* It is a documented medical fact (not really) that the part of the brain that permits the understanding of new technologies shuts down on the occasion of the birth of one’s first child.