This week, I have the pleasure of reviewing a book that I’ve been looking forward to reading for quite some time: Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gary’s work, he is the raging ball of charisma that hosts Wine Library TV, an online video blog about his consuming passion – wine. Gary built his parents’ local discount liquor store into a multi-million dollar/year business by harnessing his incredible passion and enthusiasm and channeling it through a medium that suited it: one of the first video blogs.

Through his efforts, Gary has built upon this passion to create a career that involves television appearances, keynote speaking invitations, business consulting, and a myriad of other outlets and opportunities.

The best part (and the premise of Crush It!) is that he managed to accomplish all of this while doing exactly what he loves (and his argument is that it is exclusively because he was doing what he loved that it was possible in the first place). More »

From 5ft below sea level to the Mile High City of Denver.

courtesy of joesephfotos.com

I’m just getting back to the heat of August in New Orleans, a reminder that the summer of Louisiana and Colorado are VERY different.

My most recent festival work took me to Denver, CO for the Mile High Music Festival.  Mile High is in its 3rd year as a festival and takes place on the Colorado Rapids 917 acre soccer complex, where the festival grounds cover 14 of the soccer fields.  Festival attendance is generally around 35,000 – 40,000 people, although last year’s attendance was lower than expected causing AEG to bring in well known festival favorites such as Dave Matthews and Jack Johnson.

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Sorry for our absence, here at RabbitHole we have been making some big changes.  We have some exciting news that we will be announcing over the next few weeks, so stay tuned….

While reading Trust Agents on my way to Denver I began thinking about customer interactions with large corporations.  So many of these corporations spend their money on high profile executives to come in and make strong and drastic changes to either increase profit, market share, public perception, etc….what too often these companies lack is individuals such as John.

John is what Seth Godin calls a “linchpin.” He is invaluable to the company.  John is a flight attendant for Frontier Airlines.  During the course of my 2 hour and 20 min flight to Denver from New Orleans, John managed to personally connect to just about every person on the 120 person plane.  John created a tasteful and personal relationship for Frontier airlines to their customers.

Not only did John remember just about every passenger name in the first 5 rows but 1 hour into the flight grandparents were telling John to go say hi to their grandchildren at the back of the plane.

As I waited to get the video footage, each passenger shook John’s hand and often gave him compliments such as “great to have you,”  “thank you SO much,” as well as, “you are the single BEST airline attendant I have ever seen.”

John does for Frontier Airlines what no manager, no corporate program, no incentive, no advertisement could do. He establishes, connects, and fosters relationships with every passenger in such a sincere manner, that every person who was on that plane couldn’t help but think “maybe I should keep flying Frontier.”

As always, we look forward to your thoughts, comments, and questions. Stay tuned for updates from Mile High Music Fest!

Cheers,

- David

david@rabbitholeconsulting.com

Our friend Greg Rhoades recently wrote a post for neworleans.com detailing a disturbing recent push by the New Orleans Police Department to enforce an outdated curfew law that effectively prohibits the fundamentally New Orleanian tradition of street performance. Below is an excerpt from the post:

This week I’ll be doing a double feature covering epsisodes 8 and 9 of Treme, while focusing primarily upon the former.

Episode 8 takes us into Mardi Gras day, the venerable holiday of head-splitting hangovers imbued with an overall sense of shame at the debauchery of the past week all while maintaining the sense of being a last hurrah before the Lenten period of repentance. Relatively little happens plot-wise in this episode although the writers take the opportunity to pack it full of traditional Mardi Gras references that at their best are relevant and informative and at worst sound a little tired. More »

I’m just arriving back from Bonnaroo, which wrapped up its ninth annual weekend festival.  The roughly 80,000-person music festival is held in June every year in Manchester, TN, conveniently located an hour from my house in Nashville.

Aerial from 2006

This year’s Bonnaroo is certainly one to go down in the books, seeing as the festival started with heavy rains and thunderstorms, turned to blistering heat,
and ended with perfect weather for Dave Matthew’s closing set.

With the initial rains, golf carts, cars, trucks, and even tours buses were stuck in mud on entering the festival site, but luckily due to the extreme heat More »

David and I have both been traveling for the past couple of weeks so time for writing has been scarce. We do, however, have some cool things in the works to look forward to:

Firstly, the next Thursday Book will be Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, something I’ve really been looking forward to getting the time to read. You can check out a description here.

Secondly we will have a Bonnaroo recap ready when David gets back from the festival.

And finally, we will fully catch up on our Treme Reviews/Locals Guides in the next week or so.

Until then, I recommend checking out Nine Lives and letting us know what you think.

-Patrick R (patrick@rabbitholeconsulting.com)

“Down here in the city of misrule, we are always our own worst enemy.” – Creighton Bernette

This week’s episode touches on some of the darkest and coincidentally most controversial subject matter to date in the series including the debate over issues of public housing, schooling, and the upcoming Mayoral election.

I began formulating ideas for this post feeling somewhat critical of the series due to the fact that at this point I had expected to be more drawn in and engaged by the characters and their respective situations (a la Wire) than I have been, but by the end of the episode I had been swayed by the importance of the bigger picture being portrayed as well as the imminently important social commentary taking place and had my faith in Treme restored.

Simon, Overmyer, et al have done an exceedingly good job of engaging viewers in the real debates and conversations that were taking place throughout the city in Katrina’s aftermath without forcing a partisan political agenda down our throats. From shifting spheres of political influence due to demographic shifts in the repopulated city to the struggle to establish reliable and affordable public housing for the city’s currently displaced/previously marginalized working poor, no punches have been pulled.

I look forward to the possibility of  solutions to the problems being laid out in this season shaping up in the seasons to come.

This week’s locals guide: More »

This week’s review is of a highly detailed book that reaches into the enigmatic history of today’s music industry.  Most people today have come to the understanding that the modern record industry is run by an oligopoly consisting of the “4 majors,” Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Group, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group.  Another label pegged to the music industry is its history of flagrant corruption. In Hit Men, Author Fredric Dannen, covers a variety of these corrupt affairs that have plagued (and built) the music industry to what it is today, most notably – the “payola” scandal of 1978.

Billboard aptly describes Dannen’s portrayal as “a sobering, blunt, and unusually well-observed depiction of the sometimes sordid inner workings of the music business.”

Historically, there were two methods of gaining notoriety in the More »

This week we will be covering Good to Great by Jim Collins. While, primarily corporate-oriented on the surface, Good to Great provides an extremely valuable look at what fundamental characteristics and practices constitute great leadership.

For Good to Great, Jim Collins and his team spent years developing as empirical a set of data-driven criteria as possible for determining what companies, over the span of twenty years, provided the highest value of return to their shareholders, and what ultimately contributed to these returns.

Their findings revealed that in almost every case, regardless of industry, circumstance, or economic climate, the companies that prevailed were those that were headed by great leaders. Collins goes on to determine the criteria possessed across the board by all of the leaders that steered their companies to greatness.

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