YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Biederman

lines on the record: 103
first: 2016-01-23
most recent: 2016-01-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Two or three things. The programming didn't occur to us until we opened Bryant Park. And the insights I've had about managing the profit and loss statement for a quasi-public entity only occurred to me over time. So I probably had some dead ends and wasted a little money early. But no one particular insight. It took a lot of reading and travel. One thing I'd certainly say is you need to travel a ton. If you do your same path to work every day, you're not going to have insights occur to you. You need to get out and see what other people are doing. I kind of knew that from the beginning a little bit, but it's become more instrumental as time's gone on.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always tell them the first job isn't that important what it is as long as your boss is a smart person and cuts you in on some of the actions. So I had an internship or two where I was put in the back room and then I had an internship. Or two, where I was included in the work of the office. So that's what we do with our interns. So get a job that's interesting to you on your career path, but it doesn't matter so much who you're working for as to the company. It does matter who your boss is. Look for a really smart boss who can teach you certain things. And then at that point, I often say to people, 24, 25, 26, time to be an entrepreneur and take risks. Get out there. My son and daughter pursuing that route. And my wife's quite an entrepreneur too in her own field of art law.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six or eight of them really have fabulous Newark stuff. In fact, he had an exhibit in Newark, the library where he first worked as a young boy. He had an exhibit there about his family and childhood.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he said, you know, this is going to be very upsetting to you, but there's a book that I just finished that is going to be a massive hit, and it kind of makes a little bit of fun of our family. And I just wanted you to understand, he explains the whole thing. And then they go away. So after his mother died, he asked his father years later, what was mom's reaction after I told her that I was going to have this huge head and be a celebrity? She said she started crying. And he said, I knew it. I knew it. I knew she'd be upset. He said, not about what you think. She started crying because she thought you were having delusions of grand. That's great. My son is crazy. He thinks he's going to be a famous life. That's funny.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely. He's got a funny story about Port Noise complaint that he tells in one of the films about him where he told his mother, he sat her down. About the”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other I've read for enjoyment I've read Philip Roth I'm within unfortunately two or three of finishing all of his novels and I just adore Orton's complaints”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's brutal. I kind of semi-mindored in English in college, and they emphasized when we did the Wasteland, there's no way this poem is regarded as one of the great triumphs of English literature without the editor, who I think was Ezrapound. And there's no way Fitzgerald was any good without Max Perkins. And Ayn Rand must not have had an editor who had the ability to say anything to her because it needed to be edited. Whereas The Fountain has a little more under control.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, like most privatization guys, I've read Ayn Rand, and it's a trial to read, but Atlas Shrugged is. Last week I had”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they didn't teach you at Harvard Business School. It's kind of good horse sense about business. And then Alan Weiss is a great one on pricing your consulting services, which ex-McKinsey friend of mine recommended.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, very good. I've read two of those. Mark McCormick's books, which nobody mentions anymore are really good. What's the name of what they didn't teach you?”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I stop reading books when we had kids, and then I said I got to start again. So I'm back reading again 40, 50 books a year. They haven't been influential. I just read them for Escape. I like Trollop and Hardy and Fitzgerald. And then management books. I've always spent half of my reading time reading management books, trying to learn stuff in business. So Collins was interesting. Good to great.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but also Brian Park's so busy it's hard even to have a petty crime. We took crime from 500 felonies a year to zero there. And it stays in the zero to one range. Every year there's something bad that happens. Fight to something stupid. Yeah, an assault. We had one weird incident with a guy who took a machete out and hacked away at a woman, which was really upsetting because there are...”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We knew it would go fine because when the first parks we'd seen with chairs, these were actually for rent. They weren't for use. Were Green Park and St. James Park in London, the Queen's entity, which is called Royal Park Enterprises, put them out. And we said, it's interesting, they're not going anywhere. I once asked somebody, why don't they disappear? Question everybody asked me about my park. And they said, well, they belong to the queen. Who would take something the queen's property?”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's going on right now? She has a lot of arts law clients who have stuck with her over the years, but she's a brilliant advisor on a lot of this stuff and negotiation and more than just a litigator of a fine arts lawyer. She's been very important.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hilarious Peter Malkin is an investor, he's 82 now, in fact today he's 82. Was the chairman of my BIDs at Grand Central and 34th Street and was very instrumental in this stuff getting going? And another mentor is my wife who's a brilliant. She's a litigator with a practice in fine art law, which is a fascinating practice. She formed the field, but she's a very good advisor on a lot of things.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really? That was a great comedy series. The language was a problem. We couldn't get the comedians to work clean. So eventually we ended up. But it was hilarious. But I thought of bringing it back.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“East Pine Hall and he was a tremendously important factor in what we did in Bryant Park. And then the people who helped me get started with these entities other than the Rockefellers, Andrew High School, who was the chairman of Time Inc. and agreed to be our chairman for many years, Michael Fuchs, who succeeded HBO. Yep, Michael's a brilliant businessman and has been our chairman at Brian Park of the kind of celebrity entity for about 20 years and learned a lot from him.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was closely linked, unbeknownstly. We can say it now that he passed away about 15 years ago. The Rockefellers supported his work. They thought it was so important. Gave him an office and a secretary and consulting deals. There was one point he took me down to Princeton and he said, little known to the public, the Rockefellers don't give money to this school unless I say the physical improvement is a good one. So I want to show you something outside of...”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working There was a guy who's not well known in the business community, William H. White, Jr., who came up with a lot of the theories about movable chairs and the like that we've implemented in Bryant Park, brilliant guy. He was a journalist. He's known more for the books he wrote, including the organization man.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State Street, they did a nice job. Of all the mayors I've met, you know the most. And that was generally known. And after I asked this chief of staff, where do you learn all that? Because most mayors don't know these details of visual stuff. And he said, his father, of course. And I said, how did that happen? He said, he took him out in a car on the weekends. He said, Richie, look at that building. That looks horrible. And I just told my guy, you needed to paint that side of it and take that iron casing away. He said he really, his father, surprisingly, the old Mayor Daley, Richard Day Daley, I guess it was. Had a very good eye, but was known as a ward healer and a tough mean guy. He had another skill which was not highly publicized outside of Chicago.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was funny. Mayor Daly, I'm very fond of him. The second Mayor Daly, he was in Brian Park taking notes one day. And he's chief of staff called me and he said, he has a question. And I said, I'm coming right down. I want to meet him. He said, no, please don't do that. He's on his way to investment bankers in 10 minutes. But he is curious. I said, okay, Drew, I'm going to give you these answers, but only if I can visit him in Chicago. So went out there, had an incredible meeting with him. Mayor Daly was a great park mayor. And you're right, the park's really have been well done. He did it through a park district, not through BIDs, not through privatization. He didn't really believe in privatization because he's all.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the people who are not smart, it's that they don't have the frame of reference to think bigger. And that's a big problem for my firm.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once in a while, that's a challenge. Other ones are we have there, there's a park I won't name in Boston. We have two projects in Boston, South Station and Fannel Hall. There's a park I'd like to do there. But this is not the fault of this mayor or the previous mayor. It's the fault of the abutters who are thinking too small about it. It could be one of the great public spaces in the country, surrounded as it is by iconic structures. But another big problem is just this small thinking, I call it. It's just let's collect a little bit of money and turn on the fountains and have a concert once in a while. Doesn't”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within a reasonable distance, we're going to go there, even if you produce something that's so spectacular that people should want to see it as a curiosity.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning no impact. Did you not have? Well, it's a suburb where no particular reason, there's no density and there's no reason people...”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turning a park around. Once in a great while we come upon something where I say to the staff, you know, this is pushing on a string, to use that.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So those are our starting points. And from then, it's a budget. And the only last do we go to the architects and say, okay, now draw this up for us. We save the clients a lot of money by not having them spend a lot of money on fancy plans, especially in blue states where construction costs are so high. Dallas can afford to do a little bit of that. The park really cost about $23 million, but could have been a bit less. But the same effort in New York above the surface of the park would have been three times as much.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massive, but some clients think they're going to get 10 or 20%. So, first thing we do is disabuse them of that. Say, Brian Park's been plugging away doing this for 25 years. You're not going to get higher than 4%. And then we say, okay, what's going to drag these people in? Is it knitting seminars like we do in Bryant Park? Is it juggling clinics? Is it concerts? Is it the reading sessions we have? Is it Patank? Is it ping pong? We have a putting green, all those things. We put together a bunch of things on a map and show the client how we're going to drag people into their space at hours they might not have expected to be there, including seasons where in the past Brian Park was empty in the winter for eight months. It's jammed now between.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what are we going to have to do to get them there? Because our market share at Bryant Park sounds small, but it's 4%, basically, of all the people in the surrounding area are in Bryant Park at lunchtime. And you say, what happened the other 96? And the answer is they're on vacation, they're on a business trip, they're in a conference.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Visitor market share calculation. We go out depending on the walking distance of each city. Dallas has a terribly small walking distance. Nobody walks there. New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, everybody walks. So we go out 1,200 feet in those cities and 200 or 300 in Dallas. And then we look at the adjacent hotels, office buildings, residences, retail shops, museums, and we say, how many people plausibly could be in this public space?”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's that like? The first thing we do is a kind of intriguing market share calculation. This comes from a conversation with Eli Brode, who's done wonderful things for downtown LA, but Eli was too optimistic in my view about how many people would visit the public spaces on Grand Avenue after the Disney concert hall was built. So I kept warning him, Eli, not as many people are going to visit just to see the building as you think. And then I said, I need to have a systematized way of making that case to clients like Eli. Who's a smart guy and didn't really believe me? So we created something called a.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They run a representative restaurant, but the volume isn't what it was because it was cut down. Warner had turned it into a mega megalith. I think he had $35 million in revenue annually. A lot of it from catering. And now smaller.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason there weren't so many bids on the new tavern deal was that the city imposed the Hotel Trades Council on the deal. But to be fair to the city, I think Warner LaRoy had welcomed the men when he owned Tavern on the grain previously. So that's a dicey operation. I think they only got two or three bids for what really should have been a great opportunity because there were a lot of catering possibilities”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a challenge. It's going to be a challenge. The restaurants in Central Park with. Obviously, involvement of the city because they own the real estate are going to have a challenge because the Hotel Trades Council dominates their workforces now. And I don't know if those two will survive. They're a great place.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's going to hurt their ability to do things like pick up paper in parks that they privately manage. And they know that, but the mayor's behind it and they have to be behind it.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we now have in some of the cities in those states minimum wages of $15, specified amount of sick leave in New York City, specified amount of maternity leave. A lot of these things I did voluntarily, but to legislate across every business in your environment and say all of you must do the following things, really, in my mind, goes too far. And for little efforts, we try to do a lot with little. If you're a little company, whether you're a for-profit or not for profit, it's really difficult to do this. $15. So Seattle.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the difference. The terms of employment, a real threat to our field. And it's not just me, it's the little organizations that are doing the same thing in parks and neighborhoods is this specifying of the terms of employment by government, which is happening in states like New York, New Jersey, and Washington and California. When you say specified.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About in those free states so much. So that is one difference. And the second is there really is a difference in terms of the belief in capitalist system. I don't have to, I started a speech once in Dallas about this is the reason our parks work. And part of my pitch was that the free enterprise system is a good thing. And one of the guys on the board waved his arms head dan, you don't have to make that speech here. We're in Texas. We got it. Right.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's two things unions, I think New York State is 35% union workforce. Astonishing number. New Jersey, California. Really unions are in very good control of legislative processes.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the United States, I come back to New York sometime depressed that I'm back in a tough environment for my field. It's easier.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and they were very grateful John Scholz is the now new head of the downtown Seattle Association. Why do I know that name? He came up through the ranks, but John said this has been a huge success, and we're really grateful. I'm sure they're spreading the word that there's a great approach.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's going on here? Seattle, that's hugely successful. In that case, we're not running it. We very often at that distance tell them what to do and then back off. And there was a very good group, downtown Seattle Association that took our recommendations whole and running with it. It's usually successful. It's called Occidental Park. It's a couple of blocks from the stadium there in the neighborhood known as Pioneer Square. This was a truly violent space. It was drugs, a lot like Brian Park at the beginning, drugs and really bad guys hanging out and victimizing people. Tons of tech companies a couple of blocks away. None of them were using it. The employees weren't there. So we told them how to program and how to spend a little bit of money without government on various things. The Seattle Parks Foundation and downtown Seattle Association ran with it and it's a real turnaround. I keep track of it long distance. We're done.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Greeley Park to the south and Herald Square to the north. And all the way west past that to the edge of Hudson Yards, past Penn Station, the post office. That's all an area run by a business improvement district. Not everything, but most of what you see there as a member of the public. The litter collection, the capital plant, security officers, parks is run by RBI”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the debt service on that's been $50 million total over the run. And that's how Grand Central on 34th Street got built with that. Technique rather than asking government for capital funds, which is always a”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we're talking to the Tempe people about a possible use of the techniques we use to build our capital plant, which is borrowing money, using the governments in New York City triple tax exempt capacity issue.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, obviously, they aren't the varieties of programming that would allow you to exclude government money. I'm trying to think of an example where we're going to have to take government money.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's usually government agency, but sometimes a private player. And then the other kind of client that's a challenge is they are more interested in how much they pay than in how much success they have. They only look at the expense side of the ledger with you. So we've had a few of those, but I would say 80 to 90 percent of the client experiences have been great, and I speak highly of all of them, and I hope they speak well of me.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've Once in a while, a company, but more often a government, wants you to answer the questions they ask you as a consultant a certain way, and I have to give my little speech, which I was taught when I was at my first job after business school, American management systems, really good, smart gut bunch of guys no longer exist. They were sold. They said, as a consultant, you need to tell the client do you want me to tell you what you want to hear or you want me to tell you what you need to hear? The right answer. Once in a while we get a client who wants us to give them the answer they wanted to hear when they brought us in, which is very often the wrong answer. Right.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, these are cities we're in, starting from the west, Honolulu, San Francisco, Oakland actually now, LA, Tempe, Arizona, Euston, Dallas, Green Bay, Detroit, Buffalo, Toronto, Atlanta, Newark, Greensboro, North Carolina, Boston.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. How many employees are 13 employees, nine full-time, four part-time? It's very small. And there's plenty of work. As my wife predicted a long time ago, your only problem is going to be staffing the work. They're going to be lined up around the block when you open this. Took a while for that to happen, but now it's busy.”
2016-01-23 · Masters in Business · Interview With Dan Biederman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source