It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

When you’re talking with someone and they want to know what final conclusion you want them to draw from your conversation, they might ask you, “What’s the bottom line?” The origin of the term, “the bottom line,” is business accounting. It refers to the literal bottom line of a financial statement - a company’s profit or loss. This literal bottom line is what we typically regard as the sole point o...

When we text each other we use acronyms and abbreviations like OMG and LOL to convey meaning and emotion. And then there’s IRL – In Real Life. We use that to signal that we know the difference between the digital universe and reality. Online, you can play a first-person-shooter game with other people. In real life, you can join the US military and learn to use an M4 assault rifle. It’s the standar...

The common wisdom we’re taught when starting up a business is, “Solve a problem that needs solving.” But the truly exceptional success stories of our time have not followed this advice. When Coca Cola came along, nobody who was enjoying a long, cool glass of lemonade was clamoring for a sweet, syrupy, brown drink. When Uber came along people weren’t fantasizing about getting into a car with a tota...

What is fear? Fear is a natural response to a perception of danger. All creatures on earth have it. We use fear to spur us into action - to run or take other steps to save our lives. There are many studies listing specific fears of different societies. Believe it or not, here in the United Sates, one of our greatest fears is public speaking. In numerous studies, the fear of public speaking ranks n...

When you have a business that sells a product, you have two choices. You can try and sell it to everyone earth, like Coca Cola, or you can concentrate on a more targeted market. The Coca Cola model is called Mass Marketing. The targeted approach is called Niche Marketing. Sometimes businesses say they have a niche market as a euphemism for the fact that very few people are buying their product. Bu...

If you’ve lived in New Orleans for any length of time, you’ve experienced your share of natural disasters. We even measure time here by hurricanes. We put events in context by describing them, for example, as “Before Katrina” or “After Ida.” After each one of these disasters, affected homeowners make a claim with their insurance company. Now, I don’t like to generalize, and I don’t have any statis...

In the course of childhood, we have innumerable experiences. We spend a portion of our adult lives trying to recover from the ones that scar us. But there are also positive experiences. Joyful times and meaningful relationships stay with us. They come to define happiness. For Brittney Hawkins Dobard, one of her happy-place emotional touchstones was with her grandmother in her kitchen, baking cooki...

No matter which side of the political fence you’re on, there’s probably one thing you and your friends on the other side agree on. And that is, you can’t believe anything you see, read, or hear in the news anymore. At least, you don’t believe anything on the channels they subscribe to. And they don’t believe anything anyone says on your side. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an organization that...

Before the advent of e-commerce, the only way you could buy something was to go to a store.  Manufacturers wholesaled products to retailers, and retailers added a profit margin, which became the price consumers paid. When e-commerce came along, some manufacturers realized they could cut out the middleman - and the term “direct to consumer” was born. Because consumers are used to paying retail, man...

When you start a business that sells a product, the first thing you have to do is resolve a contradiction. On the one hand, you want to sell a product everybody needs. On the other hand, if it’s so vital that everybody needs it, they’ve probably already got it. What you have to do is convince a consumer that when they need to replace whatever-it-is, they need to try your product. Because your prod...

In New Orleans we pride ourselves on our extensive array of live entertainment. According to music media company, Off Beat , and tourist authority New Orleans & Company , on any given night we have, on average, 100 places to hear live music. If New York City had the same per capita number of live music venues, they’d have 800. In fact, they have 1,100. Ok, so we’re not beating New York, but we...

There are a number of ways of becoming a New Orleanian. You can be born here. You can marry someone from here. You can go to high school here – that’s a uniquely New Orleans badge of belonging - and then there’s a phenomenon called Magnetic Migration. That’s a term I coined to describe how certain people are inexplicably drawn here. You know these folks when you meet them. They’re so obviously New...

When Drew Brees was The Saints’ quarterback he was regularly out and about in New Orleans. If you ran into him, you couldn’t help noticing that for a guy who had such a dominating presence on a football field, there didn’t seem to be anything physically exceptional about him. But when he played the game, Drew had an ability to size up what was happening, and he could see opportunities that other p...

When you walk into just about any interior space in the US – from the biggest office building to the smallest apartment – you’re almost certain to find art hanging on the walls. And not just one piece. From your doctor’s waiting room to your sister’s bedroom, you’ll typically find multiple works of art. Sure, they’re not all paintings, some of them are posters or prints, but at some point, each on...

When somebody suggests going out for a beer, you know what that means. Or, rather, you know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean meeting up for a single beer. And after you’ve had a few beers at whichever place you decided to meet, at some point somebody will suggest moving on and going to get another beer – or two – at someplace else. The problem with this plan is, nobody should be driving a car...

One of the conundrums about being human is, we strive for happiness, but when something makes us happy we grow accustomed to it and, usually sooner than later, we’re looking for something else to make us happy. Whether it’s your income, your appearance, your career, or anything else in your life that can be improved, we’re trapped on what social scientists call The Hedonic Treadmill .  It’s why we...

There’s a term in theater called “meta.” It’s used to describe a scenario where actors call attention to the fact they’re performing. For example, the play within a play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Except for the name of the company that used to be Facebook, we don’t have a similar term to “meta” in business. But we do have a similar concept . We have businesses that make other businesses do better b...

If you’re a theater kid in high school and decide that’s what you want to do with the rest of your life, you’re familiar with the moment you tell your family you’re taking out college loans to major in theater. Even your most supportive parent can’t hide a fleeting grimace as they think, “You may see yourself becoming a great writer or actor but the only role you’re writing for yourself is a perso...

Dr Nicolas Bazan is a world-renowned neuroscientist with a research lab in Stockholm Sweden and another here in New Orleans. When Dr Bazan was a guest on Out to Lunch , he pointed out that, compared to other fields of medicine, treatment for conditions of the human brain are at a primitive stage. For example, the current standard of care for Traumatic Brain Injury is “rest.” Part of the reason the...

The city of New Orleans is in Orleans Parish. For reasons that are mainly economic and infrastructure-related, Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish are inter-dependent.  The two parishes are very different. The rivalry between them isn’t on the scale of the Saints and the Flacons, but it’s definitely real. If you live in Jefferson Parish, the basic perception is, “Sure, New Orleans has great r...

In the world of American coffee culture, 1971 changed everything. That was the year Starbucks was born. For much of the country, Starbucks was the first coffee shop in their town. In New Orleans, our first coffee shop opened in The French Market - in the late 1700’s. For a city not known for being on the cutting edge of business, we were 200 years ahead of the coffee game. Today, we’re the country...

There are sayings in the English language that employ literal terms but have no literal meaning. For example, when we describe something as “black and white” we mean it’s obvious, not that there’s literally a black object and a white object.  When we say something’s “open and shut” we’re suggesting it’s inarguable, not that anything is literally open and shut – which, when you think about it, is p...

When people talk about their business, there are a number of sentences that raise the red flag of skepticism. “Let me explain this as simply as I can” usually means you walk away scratching your head saying “Wait, what?” “Nobody’s ever done anything like this” is typically the precursor to a business pitch you’ve already heard twice this month. And then there’s this one – “I’m not in it for the mo...

I’m sure you’re aware of the many lists that New Orleans finds itself at the top or bottom of. For many years we’ve heard we’re near the top of the list for violent crime. At the same time we’re near the top of the list for best places to start a business. We’re near the bottom of the list of per capita income. And near the top of the list of dollars gambled on professional sports. Some of these l...

If you could sell a product every person on earth wants, you’d have a winning business. Right? So - other than a phone upgrade - what does nearly every single person on earth want? Love. And happiness. That’s the product platforms like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and other online dating services are selling. According to the latest numbers out there, 5% of people on Hinge find a partner. It’s about 13%...