Tyson destroys the internet (well Netflix) and I keep wondering why?
Plus FIVE AMERICAN STATES I will still go to, an extended FTW on Best Practices, and some Headline Head Scratchers
As my two week Mexican sojourn winds down and the depression of returning home sets in my mood gets a little blacker. But I will try to keep the tone and topics trite and terrific.
FIRST COURSE: Tyson vs Paul. It had it all! Including enormous viewer count
But why? What am I missing?
Be like Mike is evidently a refrain heard ‘round the world but let me dwell longingly in my naivety for a little while longer. Until Friday night I thought Tyson was happily living on graft in that city of dreams, Las Vegas. I remember him most for being the namesake one of the funniest creations of Bill Simmons1 back when he wrote funny. Simmon’s proposed, based on Mike Tyson’s repeated crazy and notorious antics, that once a celebrity enters the “Tyson Zone,” people will believe any bizarre story about them without hesitation or skepticism. Bit off opponents ear. Check. Facial tattoos. Got it. Other notables in the zone included Kanye, Dennis Rodman, and Courtney Love. Friday night was another example of this Zonal experience.
If pushed hard I would have guessed that Jake Paul was another guest at the resort hotel we are staying at south of Puerto Vallarta. But that wool was quickly pulled from my eyes. He is evidently a famous You-Tuber in his own right, with a “noted” incipient boxing career. But let’s return to the recent past when I was still clueless about all of this.
Our resort’s Sports Bar had advertised a basketball game between the (Vancouver) Memphis Grizzlies and Golden State Warrior for Friday night. When we walked in something was clearly wrong. It was overflowingly full which has never happened in the two years we have been coming here, even for big NFL football games. Moreover the crowd was restive, fueled in part by plenty of beer. I instantly but incorrectly suspected MMA, as it seemed like bloodsports were on offer.
I was all for heading for the hills but my darling wife got the smaller screen TV changed to the hoops game and a table set up right in front of it, all without getting us killed. We still had no idea what the other 60 people were here to watch. I was confused as there seemed to be famous sports people being interviewed like Jerry Jones and Michael Irvin. By glancing over we saw that it was a women’s boxing match in front of 72,000 fans in AT&T Stadium in Texas. They interviewed Rosie Perez about the match like she was the second coming of Howard Cosell. Might just be me but nothing says that your acting career is in complete free fall if you are one of a dozen commentators at a boxing match.
We tried to watch an absorbing basketball game while seemingly ordinary next door people - likely realtors and investment advisors, PTA Presidents and Rotary Club treasurers - brayed (especially when the blood literally flowed) as the two women beat the living shit out of each other. I didn’t get it. Had women’s boxing exploded in popularity. My wife returned to the safety of our room at halftime but I would not be dissuaded. Then I saw the banners for the next fight: Paul vs Tyson. OK, now I get it I innocently thought. Men’s boxing and there is a guy with the same name as ex-champ Tyson. Or more likely, one of his three sons.
But no. Big no. It was 58 year old Mike Tyson against the former Youtuber turned “boxing pro with limited boxing credentials”. So a near senior citizen going against some big young inexperienced dude in his 20s. People near me were talking like it was 1990 again when Tyson was a young phenom from Brooklyn. I looked around and the bar crowd had doubled, now spilling down onto the pool level. A fantasy had descended in Mexico.
Another big no, as the fantasy was everywhere. Netflix was livestreaming it, adding to your entertainment choices beyond Emily in Paris and The Lincoln Lawyer. Evidently more than 60 million people tuned in, causing streaming problems as Netflix (the world’s largest streamer both commercially and technologically) had never had one event with so much demand. They fixed it on the fly by degrading the quality slightly of every streaming screen. Seems appropriate given the degraded quality of the event.
The next day normal people I follow on on X and Substack were talking about the fight as if it was a major event. One of the radio programmers we use on the little community radio station I’m involved with dedicated an entire episode to it. BBC took the high ground saying that the match was a “permanent stain on two-time heavyweight champion Mike Tyson's boxing legacy “. How about another permanent stain on the now quite blemished record of Britain’s famous Auntie for even covering this non-event.
Am I the only one that thinks this is crazy? Will we watch literally anything Netflix puts on? Two guys whose lifestyles clearly needed paycheques, along with surplus of celebrities, demonstrating by their attendance, the depth of their non-personalities. Evidently more people than ever will not aver their eyes from deadly car crashes as we slide by them on the highway at night.
Secondi: FIVE AMERICAN STATES I will still go to
Many Canadians are upset with the election of Donalld Trump as President. Some are promising not to visit the USA again during his reign. Here are five that I will definitely be going to over the next 4 years
MARYLAND - My son and his wife recently bought a gorgeous home there and we will naturally be visiting them
VIRGINIA: - The Ronald Reagan airport where we land to see my son is located here
FLORIDA - Can’t possibly miss a few days of the Carl Hiassen wackiness and tropical chill as a jumping off station for our trips to the Caribbean or Costa Rica. Daily Direct flights from Vancouver to Miami at a reasonable fare helps with this choice
CALIFORNIA - the home of my beloved Golden State Warriors who I will definitely be seeing this year as Steph Curry edges towards retirement and I hit my 70th birthday
SALT SPRING ISLAND - as the US ex-pat population of my island home keeps increasing (mostly from New York and California”) it is becoming a ceremonial state
This week I am featuring The Free Press. I started reading this daily (and more) independent publication about 9 months ago. I haven’t looked back. Their goal is to “report on reality”. They do a pretty good job as I disagree with some articles and wholeheartedly agree with others. Sounds about right. If you are agreeing or disagreeing consistently and completely you are in a bubble. TGIF on Fridays is hilarious and worth the price of admission. Click to give it a try.
FTW: Best practices
In this particular Tonic I’m going to a deep dive to eliminate the low hanging fruit from the playbook you are using. It will be a game-changer for sure.
Cliché is the key to bad art
Nabokov
David’s corollary : It is also the key to bad or non existent thinking
Last week I took a shot at bad cliches from the training industry This week one of the shibboleths of business that somehow still has legs in the pitter patter of sales and marketing. It is also used defensively as a virtue signal: “…but we were following best practices.”
Here is a 12 year old article that I found echoing my viewpoint. “The reality is best practices are nothing more than disparate groups of methodologies, processes, rules, concepts and theories that attained a level of success in certain areas, and because of those successes, have been deemed as universal truths able to be applied anywhere and everywhere. Just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true”
I have further problems with the phrase. Blame my mathematical education but in the complex world of business organizations that have dozens and dozens of objectives, norms and values, with many different business practices that can be done in many different ways, the word best does not compute. There are multiple possible bests, if any human endeavour can actually do BEST. I have heard people actually say that we are all following best practices. Isn’t this nonsensical, where there is no variation across a huge range of organizations. Feels like a participation badge.
But enough with the theory let’s see some action. I did two identical searches for “example of an accounts payable best practices”, one using Google and one using the French tool Quant. I used accounts payable as most people can understand it: you did some work or provided a product to a business orgaization and now they owe you money. Let’s view the results.
The first legitimate response I get after ignoring all the stuff Alphabet tries to lure me with, is Tipalti; “the preferred payables automation solution for 5,000+ of the world’s fastest-growing companies” according to their website’s ABOUT. Here are two choices from their top 15 best practices:
“Simplify the accounts payable workflow” is number one. How is this a practice? This is a homily
Jumping to number 4 on their list does us no better: “Make good use of technology”. Sounds like a parental suggestion about condoms
Let’s see what we get with Quant. Again, after discarding obvious gamed search results, we get Deloitte’s Strategies for Optimizing your Accounts Payable (another word that should be limited to mathematical usage). Here are two more best practices to consider:
Centralizing accounts payable processing reporting across the enterprise through a shared service Environment. Well at least this is a practice. But most businesses are too small to use a shared services approach. It assumes that centralizatiuon will be more efficient but
Efficiency may not be your major objective; I had more than one client that used decentralized Accounts Payable in order to be closer and more responsive to vendors
There is much research, including some studies I did as a consultant, that demonstrated the inefficiencies of centralization. .
Creating management workflows to enhance the efficiency of your accounts payable processes. Another maxim - not practice - that assumes efficiency as the one and only objective
You can see what use of the word best practice is really for: to sell services and products to business organizations. We used to have a much more appropriate expression that would show a return to honesty in business expression: standard operating procedure. But false virtues do not die quickly.
HEADLINE HEAD SCRATCHERS
I did a triple take as I thought that was what Jon Stewart was. Except with far fewer listeners.
I thought the reason people are leaving X in drives for BlueSky is because it ISN’T X
That’s a wrap for this week. Next week I will be back home so expect more tear staining than usual in the articles. If you like it consider forwarded it to a friend.