antinomian.com

[Elvis] suddenly spotted a mystical face in the clouds. Unfortunately, it was Joseph Stalin. “That’s Joseph Stalin’s face up there…” Elvis whispered to his spiritual advisor Larry Geller. “What’s he doing up there?” Geller himself remembers that the clouds did look like Joseph Stalin — and then that the miracle had happened.

Elvis violently screeched the bus to a halt, crying “It’s God! It’s God…! The face of Stalin turned right into the face of Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it.”

Elvis later decided that he wanted to become a monk, and according to Careless Love, “the guys all fumed at this latest evidence of the boss’s weirdness and almost perverse dedication to the bizarre.”

And that night in the Mojave desert, their motor home caught on fire.

via Elvis Presley’s Strangest Christmases – 10 Zen Monkeys.

From News You Can Lose: Financial Page: The New Yorker.

In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

But there’s so much invested (financially and otherwise)  in those products! It just has to work, right!? And besides… who needs customers anyway?