I’m posting my round-up today because I’m on my way to #BlogHer12.
Late last week, Fortune posted a piece of mine (referenced yesterday) called Fortune 1956: 20 minutes to a career…or not. Longtime readers of this blog know I have a thing for old consumer magazines. Periodicals of past years show what people were really thinking about at the time, and reflect how daily life was lived. What is assumed? What is not? Fortune’s editors dug around in their archives and found me an article on the 1956 college recruiting season. Various Fortune 500 companies were calling at the nation’s universities. The economy was booming. Where would the men of 1956 wind up? (Note: women were one-third of college graduates in 1956, but Fortune never mentions them, and never even suggests that any of these women might want to work for any of the Fortune 500 companies. A lot has changed in 56 years). Beyond the obviously startling perspective that only young men are interested in jobs, the most fascinating revelation is that all these Fortune 500 companies were committed to promoting from within, so whatever company you chose after graduation would be your employer for life. “The year of college graduation is the year of decision,” Fortune reported. But, of course, it wasn’t — not even for the men of 1956. Many of them couldn’t have retired in the 1990s from the big companies mentioned in this piece because they no longer exist. I found it an interesting piece to write, as I think about Schumpeter’s gale and related topics.
DailyWorth gave What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast a tout with a post this week called both “Get Up” and “How to Max Your A.M. Energy.” Lots of other interesting posts on that website that are worth a look too.
I’ve been reading “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,” the photographic book produced by UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families. The results of a multi-year anthropological study of 32 LA dual-income households are fascinating. The homes are just packed with stuff, including tons of TVs. The 32 families owned 99 televisions. It’s always interesting to see how you are like other people and how you are not. We own one television, which turns out to put us in the minority (only 2 of the studied families had just one television). 25 of 32 parental bedrooms have televisions, which we don’t either. Also, we have never really had a magnetic fridge, so we have zero objects on our fridge. The mean of the families studied was 52 objects. I also learned that while 50 percent of American families claim they almost always eat dinner together, only 17 percent of the LA families were observed eating together consistently.
It’s a great book, though as some wags have pointed out, its big contention is that we have too much stuff in our homes. Yet the book is not available in ebook form. If you want to read it… you’ll be bringing one more object into your house. Oh well.
In the UCLA study, didn’t they equate # of things on your fridge with the amount of stuff/clutter in your house? I take offense to that as a very organized person that doesn’t have a lot of room — kid organization goes on the fridge from school/camp activities, bday invites, dentist appts. It works. Is it clutter-y? Yes. But does it help us in scheduling, absolutely. I would be interested in reading the whole study.
I think their point was that they found a correlation between number of things on the fridge and number of things out and about. On some level it makes sense — some people are more finicky about clear surfaces than others (I’m not finicky, it’s just that nothing sticks to my fridge). That doesn’t mean that everyone with stuff on the fridge is disorganized. You’d be an outlier on the curve!
Gotcha! Have fun at BlogHer!