OFF the CUFF

  • Are You a Man? One Author Feels Your Changes

    By CNBC | Off the Cuff – Wed, Mar 27, 2013 6:25 AM EDT

    There’s a seismic shift on the Earth’s surface. All around us, imperceptible to the human eye, creatures are evolving.

    It’s men. They’re changing.

    That’s according to Bruce Feiler, the best-selling author and New York Times columnist. “I think the evolution of men is actually one of the under-discussed conversation topics in the world today,” he told “Off the Cuff.” “There are so many conversations about women and work-life balance. Men are facing these issues in a very real way. “

    Feiler’s grandfather made 28 cassette tapes before he died, on which he narrated his life story. “He didn’t mention his wife by name,” he said. “He didn’t mention his wedding. He didn’t mention his children more than once or twice. He talked about his life, his job, and what he thought about things. I see in my father, particularly as he gets older, an evolution to be much more open about feelings. Men now in their 20s and 30s, they don't want to just get on a corporate ladder and climb to some height. They want to have more meaning in their lives.”

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  • The last family argument left oatmeal on the ceiling.

    Your tween wants a tattoo.

    Your son bought $600-worth of virtual pirate coins on an online app.

    You’ve tried bribing, cajoling, begging, crying, screaming, pleading—and that’s just with the in-laws.

    Don’t give up. Call in the cavalry. That's exactly what best-selling author and New York Times columnist Bruce Feiler did.

    “I was incredibly frustrated as a parent," Feiler told “Off the Cuff”. “Our lives were very chaotic. We were out of control. And I felt like we were always playing defense and we were never playing offense with our children. I was very frustrated that parents are in this straitjacket, that the only ideas we can implement must come from the family improvement industry, shrinks and self-help gurus,” he continued. “Yet, in all these other areas of contemporary life, from Silicon Valley to corporate America, championship sports teams, even the military, there are all these ideas of how to make groups and teams run effectively. I wanted to find out what those people were doing in their homes and then test their ideas out with my own wife and kids.”

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  • “Are you going to throw a plate at me? I'm ready! I can take it,” laughed Marcus Samuelsson, the award-winning chef. Samuelsson is the creative mind and palate behind eight restaurants in the U.S. and Sweden, and the author of five books. He’s been blunt about coming up in a business where, to succeed, you have to be as tough as petrified jerky. He says he still has the scars from flying crockery, lobbed by irate head chefs and restaurant owners.

    “Having to cook for the owner's dog was one of my most humble moments,” he told “Off The Cuff.” “It wasn’t like ‘no’ was an option. ‘Cause if I would have said no, the door was right there. So, sometimes you just got to push through it, do it with great smile and pride, and do better than the guy next to you, regardless if you're cooking for the royal family or the dog.”

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  • "I always kid that in ten years I won't be smart enough to apply for this job,” said Billy Beane, the much-praised general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. “The amount of intellectual capital that's coming into the game… has changed significantly in the last decade.” Beane, a former professional baseball player, went on after his playing career to work as a scout for the A’s, and then moved on to the club’s front office in 1993. His approach to selecting players became the focus of the Michael Lewis best-seller, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”

    Traditionally, a baseball player’s relative worth was gauged according to his recent successes, his number of stolen bases and his batting average. But Beane, faced with a limited budget, had to find a new way to field a competitive roster. In the late ‘90’s, he embraced Sabermetrics – the analysis the game through specialized statistics that look at individual players’ on-field performance. Beane’s own use of Sabermetrics relies much more heavily on stats such as runs scored and on-base percentage than it does on the older, more traditional metrics. It’s used as a predictor of a player or a team’s future success, and has become a factor in trades, rosters and contracts. Beane used Sabermetrics to build a team of players for a fraction of the cost that major-market teams were paying at the time – and he’s still doing the same thing.

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