Book Review

I’ve written about Amro music in the past, so when Pat Averwater, CEO, told me that his brother Chip wrote a book titled, Retail Truths, The unconventional wisdom of retailing, I was intrigued. I’m not familiar with any other music instrument retail owners writing business books about retailing. If you’re out there, please let me know. It's important to keep in mind that music instrument retailing, when done right, is a business which follows many of the same principles as any other successful retail business. However, for me, it’s fun reading these principles knowing that an MI dealer wrote it. We all know folks who have opened up a music retail store, just to get into NAMM, or get a discount on their favorite pedal. What Chip discusses are real-life retailing principles of success learned over 4 generations of music retailing. No doubt if I learned the principles in Chip’s book when I…

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. Albert Einstein I have always been intrigued by the relationship between music and math. It's well known that Albert Einstein loved playing his violin.  Musical structures are mathematical in nature. Music theory is numeric in nature and its vocabulary can be directly translated to the language of math. Many musical concepts have mathematical counterparts. 1 & 3 1- Music notation is strictly ordered- The major scale is arranged with 5  full tones and 2 semitone intervals. 2- Rhythm requires a logic to count bars and longer phrases. 3- Strings vibrate at certain frequencies. 4-Sound waves can be described by mathematical equations. 5- Stringed music instruments require a certain shape in order to resonate with the strings in a mathematical fashion…

I just finished reading, How to Give Financial Advice to Women and plan on reading How to Give Financial Advice to Couples by Kathleen Burns Kingsbury. I thoroughly enjoyed the read. The book was written for financial advisors who want to better understand female and couple psychology to connect and communicate more effectively with their clients. But non-professionals, both men and women, can also benefit from the read and glean important insights on ways the financial services industry is evolving...

When Doris Duke was born, the newspapers called her “the richest little girl in the world.” Miss Duke was the only daughter of James Duke, the founder of the American Tobacco Company and Duke University. I met Miss Duke in the late 1980s during a consulting assignment. Over the course of several years, we developed a close relationship. We kept in touch till 1992, when all communication was abruptly terminated by her butler, Bernard Lafferty. Shortly after, I learned that Doris had died. Though Doris was the heiress of the Reynolds tobacco industry and was the wealthiest woman in the world, she died alone. At the end of her life, her circle had shrunk to a few servants and a group of doctors and lawyers she had known only a short time. As she signed her last will with a shaky hand and turned her fortune over to her butler, not a…