What is GMO?
GMO Genetically Modified Organisms
Genetically Modified Organisms is plants or animals that have been genetically engineered with DNA from bacteria, viruses or other plant and animals. Check out the NON GMO Project to learn more. Most Americans has not even heard of GMO unless they are a regular consumer at Whole Foods Market. Maybe it is time we all are start asking them to label our foods so we can make our own choice if we want to eat it or not. http://www.nongmoproject.org/
Dreaming of owning a food truck?
How to open a successful food truck
By Christine Lagorio updated 6/1/2010 7:31:24 AM ET You're not exactly ahead of the curve if you think vending specialty food out of a van could be your big meal ticket. But that doesn't mean you can't make it big by betting on a banh mi bus or a churro cart.
Street food in New York and Los Angeles took a decidedly foodie turn in 2008, when gourmet trucks such as Rickshaw Dumpling Bar and The Dessert Truck, founded by a former Le Cirque pastry sous chef, started parking on the Manhattan streets. Formerly, lunch from a to-go cart might entail a greasy, mixed-meat kabob, a shriveled hot dog, or a stale pretzel. Today, the state of the cart is healthy, and increasingly high-end.
Call it a coast-to-coast surge of mobilized chefs, taking street eats to the next level.
The most successful are super-social-media savvy, with a loyal following that will meet them at any urban curb. Still, if you think you've got what it takes to serve meals on wheels, there are plenty of factors to consider first, the least of which should not be geography. While New York has no available vendor permits and Portland's food-truck market is already quite crowded (Multnomah County has nearly 400 food carts, according to the Portland Oregonian), other mid-sized cities look ripe for entrepreneurs.
When Scott Baitinger opened Streetza Pizza in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, last year with Steve Mai, the pair was virtually alone as street vendors – so much so that a local insurance agent had to create a policy to cover their previously unheard-of business. This year, Milwaukeeans seem to expect a snack truck to be parked outside Water Street bars late nights. Things are going so well, in fact, that Streetza is expanding via a partnership to Cleveland, where at least six new pizza trucks were slated to be in working order by Memorial Day.
Does sliding hand-tossed pizza topped with veggies grown by friends into and out of a mobile pizza oven all day sound like a dream? Well, Baitinger still has a 60-hour-a week day job, and no plans to leave it. New vendors cite considerable start-up hurdles, such as getting proper licensing, funding a kitchen and truck, mastering social networking, and staying profitable through poor weather and off seasons.
Ready to confront those obstacles and give a culinary venture a go? We've compiled stories and advice from entrepreneurs who have pioneered successful food carts.
So, you have a killer idea for a food truck. If you're thinking something fresh and hearty, something already sold on the streets of another country, or something sweet, it's likely you're on the right track.
As with almost any entrepreneurial endeavor, securing financing should be one of your first goals. Online forums and sales sites can help you determine your costs. If you want to start small, a standard, used hot dog style cart costs about $2,000 to buy, while refurbished trucks for driving and vending can run more than $40,000. That high price tag is usually due to local health department specifications, which any truck that serves food must comply with and be refurbished to meet.
Before you buy, though, assess your needs. The less you need your truck to do, and the smaller it can be, the cheaper it will be. Cody Fields, a former engineer who built wastewater treatment plants, launched his Austin empanada truck, Mmmpanadas, in early 2008. He started small by cooking his empanadas at home and selling a few dozen at a time to local bars and coffee shops. But he found serious expenses involved in expanding to a truck.
"You can spend $20,000 in buying your initial truck," he says. "I would recommend people think about going with a smaller cart — something that's not a full mobile truck, and not a full mobile kitchen.
" In New York or Los Angeles, where food carts are most popular, it might be possible to purchase a truck previously used by a vendor. Used is advisable, especially because acquiring and retrofitting a new truck can cost $75,000 to $100,000, according to a food-truck analysis by New York Magazine. Vending windows, lined walls and floors, electricity, hot running water and a retail payment system are all necessary, so even if you find, say, an appropriate-sized old DHL step van for sale for $10,000, the retrofitting will be a significant expense. Food carts generally have the same health and safety requirements as restaurants, so you can expect regular inspections for fire and health issues.
In designing the truck, you'll have to decide whether you'll be cooking most of the food on-scene, or simply using the truck as a retail and storage space. Empanadas, for instance, take considerable prep work, but can be easily stored and sold. Same goes for cupcakes or pastries. Tacos and pizza, on the other hand, need to be freshly assembled at the point of sale.
For Baitinger and Mai, fitting their truck with a functional pizza oven was the most difficult part of starting Streetza. They had purchased electric appliances for the truck, including a full-service pizza oven, before realizing that a generator to run it all wouldn't even fit in the truck. "We went through a comedy of errors, and still have an extra pizza oven we purchased sitting in my garage," Baltinger says.
A mobile restaurant doesn't have the same permitting process as a brick-and-mortar establishment. Nor does it have to pay traditional rent. But there are some other costs and logistics to consider.
Insurance This shouldn't run you much more than regular vehicle insurance, but do make clear to your underwriter any additional risks your truck might pose. For example, you might want to mention that you carry five propane tanks or have an open flame in your vehicle.
Permits Although necessary permits vary based on locality, in New York, a vendor needs a Mobile Food Vendor License and any vending vehicle needs to be equipped with a Mobile Food Vending Unit Permit. Securing a truck permit can be tough; certain cities, including New York, have a cap on the number of permits in existence at one time. It's not unlike the market for liquor licenses, experts say, with a waiting list that can run more than 10 years, according to the Street Vendor Project. While renting or buying a permit on the black market is illegal, inspectors have been known to turn a blind eye once a permit is in a vendor's hands.
Preparation facilities Even though plenty of mobile restaurants and bakeries can be started out of a home kitchen, consider the possible future need for extra facilities. When Lev Ekster launched his CupcakeStop truck last year, he hired a baker and rented a Brooklyn kitchen space only for evenings, which kept costs down. Since then, he's expanded to a full baking facility, which he's combining with an office and storefront in New Jersey.
Truck storage and security Some cities' departments of health require that vending vehicles be stored in approved commissary locations when not on duty. Expect to pay for this parking, including electricity and refrigeration costs.
Parking If you're planning on parking — anywhere, really — you'll need permission. Baitinger recommends befriending local city council representatives and establishment owners before choosing regular spots. In metropolitan areas, neighborhood associations can be helpful partners. For special events or privately owned areas, though, you might have to pay for a good location. For Ekster's second CupcakeStop vehicle, for instance, he's planning on parking daily at New York's South Street Seaport, and is paying a few thousand dollars a month for that prime tourist-heavy locale.
Buzz is a huge part of what makes a food-truck launch successful. With social media allowing vendors to distribute exclusive-feeling information about their location or daily specials, the best newly launched trucks strike a fine balance between elusiveness and consistency.
That is to say, not everyone who might want a burger is following the tweets of New York vendor Frites 'n' Meats. But if they know the truck usually serves dinner at a particular corner in TriBeCa, they can find it. When choosing a location, vendors should pay special attention to exceptions to vending rules on local park property, and be careful to stay away from competing brick-and-mortar establishments (at least until they know and love you). Milwaukee's Streetza truck, for example, had trouble gaining acceptance from local bars and restaurants due to fear it might drive business away. Now, they know the truck draws a regular social-media crowd to an area.
"In the last year, everything has taken a 180-degree turn," Baltinger says. "At first, people were trying to keep us away from their brick-and-mortar establishments, and now they want us. Still, we will never park within 500 feet of a pizza restaurant, because just ethically that doesn't seem right."
In addition to Tweeting locations and specials, Streetza crowdsources menu ideas, and held a Twitter vote on their truck design. And Baitinger is thankful for the synergy: "As much as Twitter has given to us, I try to give back to it. I give plenty of praise, and I even found my accountant on Twitter!"
Every city seems to have a distinct vibe. In L.A., there's more of a swoop-in-and-serve-em-up-quickly feel. Take the famed Kogi Korean BBQ truck, which will tweet a new location, be met by a swarm of 40 hungry fans, serve, and then take off for a new spot. In New York, vendors tend to make a schedule and stick to it. In Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin, carts and trucks gravitate to the same area, forming something of an outdoor food court, or maybe a trailer park that happens to vend cheap lunch.
If you make the decision to be a highly mobile vendor, you'll want to use Facebook and Twitter early to cultivate a loyal customer base. Baitinger says Twitter is a key to his business success, estimating that 70 percent of his sales can be directly tied to social media. "It's not always someone who's on Twitter," he says, "but it's someone who is who said something to a friend." "At a core level, we use Twitter to broadcast our location. But also, we try to push the stories about the people who eat our pizza. And photos of them. It's building a community,"
Baitinger says. Even at the most modest outset of your fledgling business, think about what you really want to create for yourself. "Creating a food truck, and a job for yourself is fairly easy to do," says Fields of Mmmpanadas. "Creating a business is much more difficult."
Ekster's CupcakeStop truck is available for events, and he does a lot of corporate store openings, such as Victoria's Secret, and bar/bat mitzvahs. He tends to book the truck on evenings, so after it is done selling to the workday crowd in Manhattan, it can head out to Long Island for a party. And that income helps make the business model sustainable. "You can make more money selling cupcakes outside than at an event, only an event is guaranteed," Ekster says. "You sign a contract and, rain or shine, you get paid."
Events are a reliable source of income for many new street vendors, and so is catering. The Streetza partners discovered this when offices started ordering their pizzas for lunch, because there weren't fresh-out-of-the-oven pizza choices readily available in downtown Milwaukee.
Online sales are another promising arena for less-perishable food products, as well as t-shirts, and other novelty products. Distribution to coffee shops, grocery stores, and other vendors is another option. That's exactly where Mmmpanadas is going. The company is already distributing empanadas, and is beginning to supply them to Whole Foods locally this month. "We're trying to create our wholesale business, but the truck only helps with that. It's a moving, 20-foot-long billboard for us, that increases visibility," Fields says. Copyright © 2012 Mansueto Ventures LLC.
By Christine Lagorio updated 6/1/2010 7:31:24 AM ET You're not exactly ahead of the curve if you think vending specialty food out of a van could be your big meal ticket. But that doesn't mean you can't make it big by betting on a banh mi bus or a churro cart.
Street food in New York and Los Angeles took a decidedly foodie turn in 2008, when gourmet trucks such as Rickshaw Dumpling Bar and The Dessert Truck, founded by a former Le Cirque pastry sous chef, started parking on the Manhattan streets. Formerly, lunch from a to-go cart might entail a greasy, mixed-meat kabob, a shriveled hot dog, or a stale pretzel. Today, the state of the cart is healthy, and increasingly high-end.
Call it a coast-to-coast surge of mobilized chefs, taking street eats to the next level.
The most successful are super-social-media savvy, with a loyal following that will meet them at any urban curb. Still, if you think you've got what it takes to serve meals on wheels, there are plenty of factors to consider first, the least of which should not be geography. While New York has no available vendor permits and Portland's food-truck market is already quite crowded (Multnomah County has nearly 400 food carts, according to the Portland Oregonian), other mid-sized cities look ripe for entrepreneurs.
When Scott Baitinger opened Streetza Pizza in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, last year with Steve Mai, the pair was virtually alone as street vendors – so much so that a local insurance agent had to create a policy to cover their previously unheard-of business. This year, Milwaukeeans seem to expect a snack truck to be parked outside Water Street bars late nights. Things are going so well, in fact, that Streetza is expanding via a partnership to Cleveland, where at least six new pizza trucks were slated to be in working order by Memorial Day.
Does sliding hand-tossed pizza topped with veggies grown by friends into and out of a mobile pizza oven all day sound like a dream? Well, Baitinger still has a 60-hour-a week day job, and no plans to leave it. New vendors cite considerable start-up hurdles, such as getting proper licensing, funding a kitchen and truck, mastering social networking, and staying profitable through poor weather and off seasons.
Ready to confront those obstacles and give a culinary venture a go? We've compiled stories and advice from entrepreneurs who have pioneered successful food carts.
So, you have a killer idea for a food truck. If you're thinking something fresh and hearty, something already sold on the streets of another country, or something sweet, it's likely you're on the right track.
As with almost any entrepreneurial endeavor, securing financing should be one of your first goals. Online forums and sales sites can help you determine your costs. If you want to start small, a standard, used hot dog style cart costs about $2,000 to buy, while refurbished trucks for driving and vending can run more than $40,000. That high price tag is usually due to local health department specifications, which any truck that serves food must comply with and be refurbished to meet.
Before you buy, though, assess your needs. The less you need your truck to do, and the smaller it can be, the cheaper it will be. Cody Fields, a former engineer who built wastewater treatment plants, launched his Austin empanada truck, Mmmpanadas, in early 2008. He started small by cooking his empanadas at home and selling a few dozen at a time to local bars and coffee shops. But he found serious expenses involved in expanding to a truck.
"You can spend $20,000 in buying your initial truck," he says. "I would recommend people think about going with a smaller cart — something that's not a full mobile truck, and not a full mobile kitchen.
" In New York or Los Angeles, where food carts are most popular, it might be possible to purchase a truck previously used by a vendor. Used is advisable, especially because acquiring and retrofitting a new truck can cost $75,000 to $100,000, according to a food-truck analysis by New York Magazine. Vending windows, lined walls and floors, electricity, hot running water and a retail payment system are all necessary, so even if you find, say, an appropriate-sized old DHL step van for sale for $10,000, the retrofitting will be a significant expense. Food carts generally have the same health and safety requirements as restaurants, so you can expect regular inspections for fire and health issues.
In designing the truck, you'll have to decide whether you'll be cooking most of the food on-scene, or simply using the truck as a retail and storage space. Empanadas, for instance, take considerable prep work, but can be easily stored and sold. Same goes for cupcakes or pastries. Tacos and pizza, on the other hand, need to be freshly assembled at the point of sale.
For Baitinger and Mai, fitting their truck with a functional pizza oven was the most difficult part of starting Streetza. They had purchased electric appliances for the truck, including a full-service pizza oven, before realizing that a generator to run it all wouldn't even fit in the truck. "We went through a comedy of errors, and still have an extra pizza oven we purchased sitting in my garage," Baltinger says.
A mobile restaurant doesn't have the same permitting process as a brick-and-mortar establishment. Nor does it have to pay traditional rent. But there are some other costs and logistics to consider.
Insurance This shouldn't run you much more than regular vehicle insurance, but do make clear to your underwriter any additional risks your truck might pose. For example, you might want to mention that you carry five propane tanks or have an open flame in your vehicle.
Permits Although necessary permits vary based on locality, in New York, a vendor needs a Mobile Food Vendor License and any vending vehicle needs to be equipped with a Mobile Food Vending Unit Permit. Securing a truck permit can be tough; certain cities, including New York, have a cap on the number of permits in existence at one time. It's not unlike the market for liquor licenses, experts say, with a waiting list that can run more than 10 years, according to the Street Vendor Project. While renting or buying a permit on the black market is illegal, inspectors have been known to turn a blind eye once a permit is in a vendor's hands.
Preparation facilities Even though plenty of mobile restaurants and bakeries can be started out of a home kitchen, consider the possible future need for extra facilities. When Lev Ekster launched his CupcakeStop truck last year, he hired a baker and rented a Brooklyn kitchen space only for evenings, which kept costs down. Since then, he's expanded to a full baking facility, which he's combining with an office and storefront in New Jersey.
Truck storage and security Some cities' departments of health require that vending vehicles be stored in approved commissary locations when not on duty. Expect to pay for this parking, including electricity and refrigeration costs.
Parking If you're planning on parking — anywhere, really — you'll need permission. Baitinger recommends befriending local city council representatives and establishment owners before choosing regular spots. In metropolitan areas, neighborhood associations can be helpful partners. For special events or privately owned areas, though, you might have to pay for a good location. For Ekster's second CupcakeStop vehicle, for instance, he's planning on parking daily at New York's South Street Seaport, and is paying a few thousand dollars a month for that prime tourist-heavy locale.
Buzz is a huge part of what makes a food-truck launch successful. With social media allowing vendors to distribute exclusive-feeling information about their location or daily specials, the best newly launched trucks strike a fine balance between elusiveness and consistency.
That is to say, not everyone who might want a burger is following the tweets of New York vendor Frites 'n' Meats. But if they know the truck usually serves dinner at a particular corner in TriBeCa, they can find it. When choosing a location, vendors should pay special attention to exceptions to vending rules on local park property, and be careful to stay away from competing brick-and-mortar establishments (at least until they know and love you). Milwaukee's Streetza truck, for example, had trouble gaining acceptance from local bars and restaurants due to fear it might drive business away. Now, they know the truck draws a regular social-media crowd to an area.
"In the last year, everything has taken a 180-degree turn," Baltinger says. "At first, people were trying to keep us away from their brick-and-mortar establishments, and now they want us. Still, we will never park within 500 feet of a pizza restaurant, because just ethically that doesn't seem right."
In addition to Tweeting locations and specials, Streetza crowdsources menu ideas, and held a Twitter vote on their truck design. And Baitinger is thankful for the synergy: "As much as Twitter has given to us, I try to give back to it. I give plenty of praise, and I even found my accountant on Twitter!"
Every city seems to have a distinct vibe. In L.A., there's more of a swoop-in-and-serve-em-up-quickly feel. Take the famed Kogi Korean BBQ truck, which will tweet a new location, be met by a swarm of 40 hungry fans, serve, and then take off for a new spot. In New York, vendors tend to make a schedule and stick to it. In Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin, carts and trucks gravitate to the same area, forming something of an outdoor food court, or maybe a trailer park that happens to vend cheap lunch.
If you make the decision to be a highly mobile vendor, you'll want to use Facebook and Twitter early to cultivate a loyal customer base. Baitinger says Twitter is a key to his business success, estimating that 70 percent of his sales can be directly tied to social media. "It's not always someone who's on Twitter," he says, "but it's someone who is who said something to a friend." "At a core level, we use Twitter to broadcast our location. But also, we try to push the stories about the people who eat our pizza. And photos of them. It's building a community,"
Baitinger says. Even at the most modest outset of your fledgling business, think about what you really want to create for yourself. "Creating a food truck, and a job for yourself is fairly easy to do," says Fields of Mmmpanadas. "Creating a business is much more difficult."
Ekster's CupcakeStop truck is available for events, and he does a lot of corporate store openings, such as Victoria's Secret, and bar/bat mitzvahs. He tends to book the truck on evenings, so after it is done selling to the workday crowd in Manhattan, it can head out to Long Island for a party. And that income helps make the business model sustainable. "You can make more money selling cupcakes outside than at an event, only an event is guaranteed," Ekster says. "You sign a contract and, rain or shine, you get paid."
Events are a reliable source of income for many new street vendors, and so is catering. The Streetza partners discovered this when offices started ordering their pizzas for lunch, because there weren't fresh-out-of-the-oven pizza choices readily available in downtown Milwaukee.
Online sales are another promising arena for less-perishable food products, as well as t-shirts, and other novelty products. Distribution to coffee shops, grocery stores, and other vendors is another option. That's exactly where Mmmpanadas is going. The company is already distributing empanadas, and is beginning to supply them to Whole Foods locally this month. "We're trying to create our wholesale business, but the truck only helps with that. It's a moving, 20-foot-long billboard for us, that increases visibility," Fields says. Copyright © 2012 Mansueto Ventures LLC.
Would pay $11,111 for a coffee maker?
By Dan Seifert on October 1, 2012 02:00 pm @dcseifert Verge
Blossom isn’t looking to steal sales from the likes of Keurig, not yet at least. Instead, the company is gunning straight for the high-end, extreme coffee enthusiast market with its Blossom One Limited brewer. The $11,111 machine is hand-made with exotic materials like mahogany and teak, and Blossom is even hand-delivering it to customers that are willing to plunk down that kind of money for a coffee maker. But while the One Limited has some exotic materials, it’s the integration of new technology with the traditional methods of making coffee that has our interest piqued.
A FANCY WAY TO MEASURE COFFEE TEMPERATURE WHILE IT BREWS For starters, Blossom says that the One Limited features an all-new heating system that gives very granular control over the temperature of the water used. Temperature, along with pressure and the ratio of coffee to water, is one of the key factors in brewing coffee. Cheap coffee makers, like the ones you find on the department store shelf, generally don’t get water hot enough for a proper "extraction" (what coffee nerds call brewing), and therefore produce an inferior cup of joe. The One Limited has a "proportional integral derivative feedback control loop," (monitored by an Arduino, naturally) which controls the temperature of the water throughout the brewing process. Blossom president Jeremy Kuempel explains this technology as "a fancy way of saying we measure the temperature of the coffee while it brews and we use heating elements to correct that temperature to whatever [the user] has set it to be." Additionally, the feedback control lets the user control temperature values and curves throughout the brewing process. Blossom has also incorporated a simple control dial and monochrome LCD on the front of the coffee maker to select the desired temperature and time for steeping. Kuempel gave us a demonstration of the technology on what the company calls the "Dev 2 Prototype," an early version of what will eventually become the One Limited this coming spring. He was sure to stress that while this machine uses similar processes to the One Limited to brew the coffee, the final product will look significantly different from the prototype. Regardless, the Dev 2 was able to produce an eight ounce cup of coffee in about 70 seconds from start to finish, including heating the water to the desired temperature. Though that may sound like a long time to those used to automatic brewers and pod-based machines, it is actually pretty quick for a full manual coffee brewer. The ubiquitous automatic coffee maker has been a staple of the modern kitchen for decades with little innovation across the handful of designs in use. But a recent resurgence in the interest of specialty coffee has spawned a number of new innovators in the space on both the high-end and the low-end of the market. Blossom Coffee is a young company that hopes to use mechanical engineering experience and new web-connected technology to improve upon the age-old coffee maker, and it’s using the five-figured One Limited as its launching platform. Like the thermostat market, the world of coffee makers is largely dominated by a few well known, entrenched brands that have been pumping out the same designs for decades. Entrenched companies don’t like their bread and butter messed with, and the legal action from Honeywell against Nest is a prime example of that. Things in the coffee maker market have been shook up a little with the surge in popularity of automatic pod-based single cup brewers (think Keurig), but those do not cater to real coffee aficionados. While the pod-based brewers are simple, quick, and automatic, they give the user very little control and are generally derided in the high-end coffee world. While Blossom has used the engineering chops of its designers to improve the heating performance of the One Limited, it has also added 21st-century things like always on 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity and a digital camera. A camera on a coffee maker, you say? Why, yes indeed. Blossom has made the One Limited programmable through QR codes, so owners can use the camera to scan a code provided from a coffee roaster to automatically set their coffee maker to the right temperature and brew time. Additionally, Blossom plans to deploy a webapp accessible from a smartphone or tablet that lets owners push custom settings to their One Limiteds over the internet. Blossom hopes that this level of customizable control will interest boutique coffee shops, which can run different One Limited machines for each type of brew that they choose to offer, as opposed to current machines which can take a long time to adjust their temperature for various types of coffee brews. The One Limited, with its five-figure price tag and extremely limited run is just the beginning for Blossom. At over eleven grand, the One Limited is clearly targeted to someone whose perception of money is on the level with their perception of minute differences in the pH balance of tap water. The company admits that this particular model will only appeal to the exceptionally wealthy coffee connoisseur, but it has plans to release more mainstream versions of its coffee maker in the future, provided this one is a success. "It’s my vision to make amazing coffee available to everyone," noted Kuempel. Given the relatively low profile of the One Limited, the existing producers of high-end coffee makers (think Bunn, not Mr. Coffee) haven’t really paid too much notice to Blossom. But, as we saw with Nest and the legal issues that crept up once it started encroaching on Honeywell’s thermostat turf, Blossom may ignite the ire of some of the larger companies if it gains enough traction. At the end of the day, it's hard to see this particular device or other variations of it making a dent in the world of big coffee. While the engineering behind the One Limited is interesting, it essentially takes a pretty simple process and unnecessarily complicates it with enough control parameters to make even the most hardened coffee nerd's eyes water. Don't get us wrong, the coffee it produces is good (really good, in fact). But so is the coffee made with a $26 plastic AeroPress. The creators behind the Blossom One Limited have done an excellent job of marrying their love of engineering with their love of coffee. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are far simpler (and cheaper) methods of getting our daily caffeine fix that don't seem to be going anywhere any time soon.
A FANCY WAY TO MEASURE COFFEE TEMPERATURE WHILE IT BREWS For starters, Blossom says that the One Limited features an all-new heating system that gives very granular control over the temperature of the water used. Temperature, along with pressure and the ratio of coffee to water, is one of the key factors in brewing coffee. Cheap coffee makers, like the ones you find on the department store shelf, generally don’t get water hot enough for a proper "extraction" (what coffee nerds call brewing), and therefore produce an inferior cup of joe. The One Limited has a "proportional integral derivative feedback control loop," (monitored by an Arduino, naturally) which controls the temperature of the water throughout the brewing process. Blossom president Jeremy Kuempel explains this technology as "a fancy way of saying we measure the temperature of the coffee while it brews and we use heating elements to correct that temperature to whatever [the user] has set it to be." Additionally, the feedback control lets the user control temperature values and curves throughout the brewing process. Blossom has also incorporated a simple control dial and monochrome LCD on the front of the coffee maker to select the desired temperature and time for steeping. Kuempel gave us a demonstration of the technology on what the company calls the "Dev 2 Prototype," an early version of what will eventually become the One Limited this coming spring. He was sure to stress that while this machine uses similar processes to the One Limited to brew the coffee, the final product will look significantly different from the prototype. Regardless, the Dev 2 was able to produce an eight ounce cup of coffee in about 70 seconds from start to finish, including heating the water to the desired temperature. Though that may sound like a long time to those used to automatic brewers and pod-based machines, it is actually pretty quick for a full manual coffee brewer. The ubiquitous automatic coffee maker has been a staple of the modern kitchen for decades with little innovation across the handful of designs in use. But a recent resurgence in the interest of specialty coffee has spawned a number of new innovators in the space on both the high-end and the low-end of the market. Blossom Coffee is a young company that hopes to use mechanical engineering experience and new web-connected technology to improve upon the age-old coffee maker, and it’s using the five-figured One Limited as its launching platform. Like the thermostat market, the world of coffee makers is largely dominated by a few well known, entrenched brands that have been pumping out the same designs for decades. Entrenched companies don’t like their bread and butter messed with, and the legal action from Honeywell against Nest is a prime example of that. Things in the coffee maker market have been shook up a little with the surge in popularity of automatic pod-based single cup brewers (think Keurig), but those do not cater to real coffee aficionados. While the pod-based brewers are simple, quick, and automatic, they give the user very little control and are generally derided in the high-end coffee world. While Blossom has used the engineering chops of its designers to improve the heating performance of the One Limited, it has also added 21st-century things like always on 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity and a digital camera. A camera on a coffee maker, you say? Why, yes indeed. Blossom has made the One Limited programmable through QR codes, so owners can use the camera to scan a code provided from a coffee roaster to automatically set their coffee maker to the right temperature and brew time. Additionally, Blossom plans to deploy a webapp accessible from a smartphone or tablet that lets owners push custom settings to their One Limiteds over the internet. Blossom hopes that this level of customizable control will interest boutique coffee shops, which can run different One Limited machines for each type of brew that they choose to offer, as opposed to current machines which can take a long time to adjust their temperature for various types of coffee brews. The One Limited, with its five-figure price tag and extremely limited run is just the beginning for Blossom. At over eleven grand, the One Limited is clearly targeted to someone whose perception of money is on the level with their perception of minute differences in the pH balance of tap water. The company admits that this particular model will only appeal to the exceptionally wealthy coffee connoisseur, but it has plans to release more mainstream versions of its coffee maker in the future, provided this one is a success. "It’s my vision to make amazing coffee available to everyone," noted Kuempel. Given the relatively low profile of the One Limited, the existing producers of high-end coffee makers (think Bunn, not Mr. Coffee) haven’t really paid too much notice to Blossom. But, as we saw with Nest and the legal issues that crept up once it started encroaching on Honeywell’s thermostat turf, Blossom may ignite the ire of some of the larger companies if it gains enough traction. At the end of the day, it's hard to see this particular device or other variations of it making a dent in the world of big coffee. While the engineering behind the One Limited is interesting, it essentially takes a pretty simple process and unnecessarily complicates it with enough control parameters to make even the most hardened coffee nerd's eyes water. Don't get us wrong, the coffee it produces is good (really good, in fact). But so is the coffee made with a $26 plastic AeroPress. The creators behind the Blossom One Limited have done an excellent job of marrying their love of engineering with their love of coffee. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are far simpler (and cheaper) methods of getting our daily caffeine fix that don't seem to be going anywhere any time soon.
Pizza oven for your home kitchen
I saw this today and I thought it was the coolest thing, not sure if I need another appliance, but if you like pizza like I do it maybe worth checking out.
By Marc Lifsher September 14, 2012, 4:16 p.m.
SACRAMENTO -- Whole Foods Market, the upscale seller of organic products and other "natural" foods, has endorsed a California initiative that would require the labeling of genetically engineered food ingredients. The Austin, Texas, company said it's backing Proposition 37 on the November ballot "because it has long believed its customers have the right to know how their food is produced." That "right to know" is the main argument for the measure, which has strong support from farmers, processors and sellers of organic foods and opposition from biotech companies, grocery manufacturers and the soft drink industry. The grocery industry contends that genetically engineered foods are healthful and no different nutritionally than organic fruit, vegetables and grains. Opponents so far have raised about $25 million to fight Proposition 37, while supporters reported $3.5 million as of Sept. 1, according to Maplight.org, a nonpartisan voter information service. Whole Foods' endorsement of Proposition 37 came with a couple of strings attached. In a Sept. 11 press release, the market complained that a 0.5% thresh hold was too low for exempting a product with a small amount of genetically engineered content from the labeling requirement. The company also objected to a provision that would allow private attorneys to sue on behalf of the state, alleging a violation of the labeling mandate, should it become law. Stacy Malkan, the spokeswoman for the Proposition 37 campaign, welcomed the Whole Foods endorsement. "It shows support from a very important retailer," she said. "They make an effort to keep GMOs [genetically modified organisms] out of their stores." But Malkan noted that the parts of Proposition 37 that Whole Foods doesn't like can't be removed from the initiative before the election. Nor can they be changed, if it should be approved, unless the effort gets the approval of two-thirds of the state Legislature and is deemed to be "in furtherance" of the law's intent. Whole Foods' concerns with the initiative are legitimate, but its call for modifying Proposition 37 is misguided, said Kathy Fairbanks, a spokeswoman for the No campaign. "None of these provisions can be changed easily," she said. "The only way to get a change is through another ballot measure."
Monsanto scientist shows an ear of biotech corn. (P.J. Huffstutter/LA Times / September 30, 2011)
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-wholefoods-endorses-labeling-20120914,0,720913.story
Looking to brew some Beer, how about beer from the White House?
If you were ever interested in brewing beer, why not start with beer that is made at the White House. The President seems to approve.
Gypsy Picnic
My earned ACF Medals
The first few times winning ACF medals was a amazing experience, I encourage everyone who is in the culinary world to compete. I have learned so much from competitions and try to improve each time I compete. It is nice to win a gold medal but I have to say winning gold isn't everything. It is what you get out of it that's important. If you don't learn from your wins or mistakes then whats the point of competing? I have entered in over 20 events. Didn't win all gold, mostly silvers. But I did have fun and when I did win a gold I was pretty excited. I will be out there again trying my best and if I don't win no big lose, I am just happy to be there and experience the excitement. Hope to see you there and good luck if you decide to compete in a culinary event.
Fajitas at El Paso Cafe
If your the are in the need of good Mexican food and margaritas, please try El Paso Cafe. You will not go wrong. I found El Paso Cafe by accident while getting lost around Arlington, Virginia. I felt like I walked across the border into Mexico. I love it it there and I know once you visit you will too, check out for yourself and let me know what you think.
Berry Austin
Another day in Austin and I am in need of more Ice Cream! Today I went to Berry Austin, They have self serve ice cream and sorbet. Just pour it yourself and add the topping of your choice and have the cashier weight it and your on your way to a delious and cool dessert. Just thinking about it makes me want to go back right now to get more. It was a fun place to visit. Check out when you get here in Texas! Located on 5523 Balcones Drive, Austin, TX, 78731
NYT
Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
By ADAM BRYANT
Mountain View, Calif.
IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.
Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.
They wanted to build better bosses.
So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Now, brace yourself. Because the directives might seem so forehead-slappingly obvious — so, well, duh — it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out:
“Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”
“Help your employees with career development.”
“Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”
The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.”
“My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Google speak for human resources.
But then, Mr. Bock and his team began ranking those eight directives by importance. And this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting.
For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.
But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”
Project Oxygen doesn’t fit neatly into the usual Google story line of hits (like its search engine) and misses (like the start last year of Buzz, its stab at social networking). Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager. Most of them seem to make perfect sense.
Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf, the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery and frustration for those who struggle to get better.
That caveat aside, Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field.
H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions.
“Google is really at the leading edge of that,” says Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, who has a good perch to see what H.R. executives at more than 1,000 big companies are up to.
Project Oxygen is also unusual, Mr. Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.
Many companies, he explained, adopt generic management models that tell people the roughly 20 things they should do as managers, without ranking those traits by importance. Those models often suffer “a lot of organ rejection” in companies, he added, because they are not presented with any evidence that they will make a difference, nor do they prioritize what matters.
“Most companies are better at exhorting you to be a great manager, rather than telling you how to be a great manager,” Mr. Safferstone says.
PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions.
People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses.
Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.
“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”
In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.
Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.
The process of reading and coding all the information was time-consuming. This was one area where computers couldn’t help, says Michelle Donovan, a manager of people analytics who was involved in the study.
“People say there’s software that can help you do that,” she says. “It’s been our experience that you just have to get in there and read it.”
GIVEN the familiar feel of the list of eight qualities, the project might have seemed like an exercise in reinventing the wheel. But Google generally prefers, for better or worse, to build its own wheels.
“We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation.
Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.
“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says.
He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.
“He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls.
Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.
“And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.”
Mark Klenk, an engineering manager whom Google made available for an interview, said the Project Oxygen findings, and the subsequent training, helped him understand the importance of giving clear and direct feedback to the people he supervises.
“There are cases with some personalities where they are not necessarily realizing they need a course correction,” Mr. Klenk says. “So it’s just about being really clear about saying, ‘O.K., I understand what you are doing here, but let’s talk about the results, and this is the goal.’ ”
“I’m doing that a lot more,” he says, adding that the people he manages seem to like it. “I’ve gotten direct feedback where they’ve thanked me for being clear.”
GOOGLE executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.
The traps can show up in areas like hiring. Managers often want to hire people who seem just like them. So Google compiles elaborate dossiers on candidates from the interview process, and hiring decisions are made by a group. “We do everything to minimize the authority and power of the manager in making a hiring decision,” Mr. Bock explains.
A person with an opening on her team, for instance, may have short-term needs that aren’t aligned with the company’s long-term interests. “The metaphor is, if you need an administrative assistant, you’re going to be really picky the first week, and at six months, you’re going to take anyone you can get,” Mr. Bock says.
Google also tries to point out predictable traps in performance reviews, which are often done with input from a group. The company has compiled a list of “cognitive biases” for employees to keep handy during these discussions. For example, somebody may have just had a bad experience with the person being reviewed, and that one experience inevitably trumps recollections of all the good work that person has done in recent months. There’s also the “halo/horns” effect, in which a single personality trait skews someone’s perception of a colleague’s performance.
Google even points out these kinds of biases in its cafeteria line. The company stacks smaller plates next to bigger ones at the front of the line, and it tells people that research shows that diners generally eat everything on their plate, even if they are full halfway through the meal. By using the smaller plate, Google says, they could drop 10 to 15 pounds in a year.
“The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information,” says Ms. Donovan, who was involved in the management effectiveness study and the effort to encourage healthier eating. “They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’ ”
The true test of Google’s new management model, of course, is whether it will help its business performance of the long haul. Just a few hours after Mr. Bock was interviewed for this article in mid-January, Google surprised the world by announcing that Larry Page, one of its co-founders, was taking over as C.E.O. from Eric E. Schmidt.
Though Mr. Schmidt explained the move on Twitter by writing, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed,” the company made clear that the point was to speed up decision-making and to simplify management.
Google clearly hopes to recapture some of the nimbleness and innovative spirit of its early years. But will Project Oxygen help a grown-up Google get its start-up mojo back?
D. Scott DeRue, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, applauds Google for its data-driven method for management. That said, he noted that while Google’s approach might be unusual, its findings nevertheless echoed what other research had shown to be effective at other companies. And that, in itself, is a useful exercise.
“Although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership,” he said, “Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader.” Whether Google’s eight rules will still apply as the company evolves is anyone’s guess. They certainly aren’t chiseled in stone. Mr. Bock’s group is continuing to test them for effectiveness, watching for results from all the training the company is doing to reinforce the behaviors.
For now, Mr. Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn’t require a personality transplant for a manager.
“You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”
By ADAM BRYANT
Mountain View, Calif.
IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.
Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.
They wanted to build better bosses.
So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Now, brace yourself. Because the directives might seem so forehead-slappingly obvious — so, well, duh — it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out:
“Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”
“Help your employees with career development.”
“Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”
The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.”
“My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Google speak for human resources.
But then, Mr. Bock and his team began ranking those eight directives by importance. And this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting.
For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.
But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”
Project Oxygen doesn’t fit neatly into the usual Google story line of hits (like its search engine) and misses (like the start last year of Buzz, its stab at social networking). Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager. Most of them seem to make perfect sense.
Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf, the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery and frustration for those who struggle to get better.
That caveat aside, Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field.
H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions.
“Google is really at the leading edge of that,” says Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, who has a good perch to see what H.R. executives at more than 1,000 big companies are up to.
Project Oxygen is also unusual, Mr. Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.
Many companies, he explained, adopt generic management models that tell people the roughly 20 things they should do as managers, without ranking those traits by importance. Those models often suffer “a lot of organ rejection” in companies, he added, because they are not presented with any evidence that they will make a difference, nor do they prioritize what matters.
“Most companies are better at exhorting you to be a great manager, rather than telling you how to be a great manager,” Mr. Safferstone says.
PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions.
People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses.
Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.
“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”
In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.
Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.
The process of reading and coding all the information was time-consuming. This was one area where computers couldn’t help, says Michelle Donovan, a manager of people analytics who was involved in the study.
“People say there’s software that can help you do that,” she says. “It’s been our experience that you just have to get in there and read it.”
GIVEN the familiar feel of the list of eight qualities, the project might have seemed like an exercise in reinventing the wheel. But Google generally prefers, for better or worse, to build its own wheels.
“We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation.
Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.
“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says.
He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.
“He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls.
Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.
“And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.”
Mark Klenk, an engineering manager whom Google made available for an interview, said the Project Oxygen findings, and the subsequent training, helped him understand the importance of giving clear and direct feedback to the people he supervises.
“There are cases with some personalities where they are not necessarily realizing they need a course correction,” Mr. Klenk says. “So it’s just about being really clear about saying, ‘O.K., I understand what you are doing here, but let’s talk about the results, and this is the goal.’ ”
“I’m doing that a lot more,” he says, adding that the people he manages seem to like it. “I’ve gotten direct feedback where they’ve thanked me for being clear.”
GOOGLE executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.
The traps can show up in areas like hiring. Managers often want to hire people who seem just like them. So Google compiles elaborate dossiers on candidates from the interview process, and hiring decisions are made by a group. “We do everything to minimize the authority and power of the manager in making a hiring decision,” Mr. Bock explains.
A person with an opening on her team, for instance, may have short-term needs that aren’t aligned with the company’s long-term interests. “The metaphor is, if you need an administrative assistant, you’re going to be really picky the first week, and at six months, you’re going to take anyone you can get,” Mr. Bock says.
Google also tries to point out predictable traps in performance reviews, which are often done with input from a group. The company has compiled a list of “cognitive biases” for employees to keep handy during these discussions. For example, somebody may have just had a bad experience with the person being reviewed, and that one experience inevitably trumps recollections of all the good work that person has done in recent months. There’s also the “halo/horns” effect, in which a single personality trait skews someone’s perception of a colleague’s performance.
Google even points out these kinds of biases in its cafeteria line. The company stacks smaller plates next to bigger ones at the front of the line, and it tells people that research shows that diners generally eat everything on their plate, even if they are full halfway through the meal. By using the smaller plate, Google says, they could drop 10 to 15 pounds in a year.
“The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information,” says Ms. Donovan, who was involved in the management effectiveness study and the effort to encourage healthier eating. “They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’ ”
The true test of Google’s new management model, of course, is whether it will help its business performance of the long haul. Just a few hours after Mr. Bock was interviewed for this article in mid-January, Google surprised the world by announcing that Larry Page, one of its co-founders, was taking over as C.E.O. from Eric E. Schmidt.
Though Mr. Schmidt explained the move on Twitter by writing, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed,” the company made clear that the point was to speed up decision-making and to simplify management.
Google clearly hopes to recapture some of the nimbleness and innovative spirit of its early years. But will Project Oxygen help a grown-up Google get its start-up mojo back?
D. Scott DeRue, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, applauds Google for its data-driven method for management. That said, he noted that while Google’s approach might be unusual, its findings nevertheless echoed what other research had shown to be effective at other companies. And that, in itself, is a useful exercise.
“Although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership,” he said, “Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader.” Whether Google’s eight rules will still apply as the company evolves is anyone’s guess. They certainly aren’t chiseled in stone. Mr. Bock’s group is continuing to test them for effectiveness, watching for results from all the training the company is doing to reinforce the behaviors.
For now, Mr. Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn’t require a personality transplant for a manager.
“You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”
Amy's Ice Cream
This week I Flew back to back in Austin, Texas because I just can't stay away. One of the places I often visit is Amy's Ice Cream and because of the beautiful weather here I need something to cool me down a bit. Today the weather is sunny and super warm, not a cloud in the ski makes for a perfect day to eat ice cream from Amy's. I ordered the killer queen. It has chocolate ice cream with chocolate pebble puffs and peanut butter chunks. It sure hit the spot!
Here is the link if you like to check it out http://www.amysicecreams.com/2.0/#/home/
Here is the link if you like to check it out http://www.amysicecreams.com/2.0/#/home/
Student Skills
Our team got a gold in the student skills category. Here is our gold medal four course meal
My 6 platted desserts
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