YouSaid · the spoken record

Duff McDonald

lines on the record: 99
first: 2017-07-07
most recent: 2017-07-07
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

“A good Yeah, or, you know, just don't, it's not take the job seriously. It's like not get. All wound up in what you're doing, just do what you're doing and be easy about it.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More natural and storytelling tell stories the way you tell stories. And don't, you know, change it because you're, you know, in putting it in written form. And, you know, part of that has to do with the legacy of who you're writing for, like various publications won't let you write in certain ways. But the main point was just relax, man. And say it the way you. Want to say it because you're effective that way.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the lesson there was I've been trying too hard not that I've been trying too hard to like sound smart or write in a specific way. I just, it wasn't coming out as easily and fluidly as.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an easy one. And I could claim that I learned it, but my brother actually just said it to me. Like two years ago, I was getting ready to write the Harvard book and I was spewing out, you know, some endless rant about Elton Mayo, who was a father of human resources, also a fraud. And I finished telling him the story. And he said, all right. Don't take what I'm about to tell you the wrong way, please. And he goes, You should write Less like you currently write and more like you speak.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hopefully the New York Times and whoever will be around for a while, but the price paid per dollar spent, or sorry, the price paid per word. Is in free fall. And the only thing that is going to retain its value is a great scoops and B, great writing and C great storytelling. So you got to refine to do great storytelling about any particular thing, you got to know enough about it to be able to do that So, you know, you got to figure out what your thing is and hone it. Although, I don't think I should be in a position to be telling aspiring journalists what to do because I never was one. So I don't really know how they think because I don't know how they thought back then.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have a passion and a facility for writing, I think it's my advice would probably be targeted. You know, you got to figure out your thing.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that happens again. And it's not because I can do something. I just think the structure of the industry has changed. Everything's changed. So different.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good one. If you have, you know, you're not going to accidentally end up in the situation I have been lucky to end up in anymore because it was.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. And what did I learn that I better grow up and I treated her, I did not treat her well at the end of our marriage. And it was just a colossal personal failure on so many fronts about responsibility and doing the right thing and not. Blaming other people for the things that bother you. Luckily, my ex-wife is a forgiving person. And so things are okay, but it was like, I just learned that how to not be a horrible person.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this one doesn't require much recall. I don't really have too many career failures. I failed in a marriage. And I failed, like I drank. Alcoholically At the same time”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Snow crash. Right. But the Baroque cycle, the three of them, that is like it is. He could have just set the pen down and retired. It is a piece of greatness. Wow”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I might have started again, but there was so much in it. He is a hilarious writer. It's all about money and the history of money. What is”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, my favorite, I think multi-book reading experience in the last 20 years or so was Neil Stevenson's Baroque trilogy. What each of those books with a thousand pages long. And I was reading one of them when I moved at some point. And the book ended up in a box in the attic. And I forgot about it and found it a decade later and then finished the trilogy.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of thing. Parallel lives more like parallel thought And parallel changes in the way they helped the rest of us change the way we think through the way they did what they did. And I told people afterwards, I was like. I never would have read a biography of Darwin or of Lincoln, and I certainly wouldn't have read a joint one except it was Gopnik. And it is. One of the greatest books”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consciousness explained one of my favorite books, Daniel Dennet. Best book I've ever read in the last decade was an Adam Gopnick book called, I don't know if this is the name of it, but if Lincoln and Darwin or Darwin and Lincoln? Okay. And it is like a... Dual biography”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, sorry. I was out there for a couple days. A month. And as soon as I finished, I was like, oh my God, what have I done? I can't do this. I can't write anything close to this.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally decades. You know what? It was on my shelf too. And then when I sold the Jamie Diamond book, I was like, I should read a biography. And I took that out to a friend's house in Amiganset by myself for a weekend and read it. At the end of it, I was read that.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not considering that I've read a biography. I'm not a huge reader of biographies. I thought the power broker. Was one of the greatest.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, I've now read everything. I used to do that with fiction writers, and then I realized that I didn't want to do it anymore because it's like you use it all up and you want to savor some of it for later. Right.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read, I took under the dome on a trip a couple years ago. It's like his latest fat one. Like the size of the stand and stuff, he's still got it.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Borges' book Labyrinths, Short Stories. It's fantastic, Italo Calvino's book, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Invisible cities. Nabakov, everything. David Foster Wallace, I was a fan of. I thought the sort of verbal pyrotechnics there were great. In recent years, I rediscovered Stephen King from when”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Before I was a journalist, I would say the balance of my reading was probably 90% fiction, 10% nonfiction. And even these days, if you don't include the reading I do for work. It's probably seventy, thirty fiction.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Like, that's real storytelling. So Grayden, but then if there is one name who I read not with an eye to trying to write like him, because it will never happen, but who I read just because it brings me Euphoric something is Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker. He is the greatest, in my opinion, he's the greatest writer”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and if you read that stuff and put it up side by side with fortune, like the people at Fortune, where I've been a contributor, they should be embarrassed of themselves. So you're not going to.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did like a decade's worth of work with them. Graden gave me, you know, was awesome enough to give me a lot of work for a while when I was freelance. That's how you do a good business story. Those guys do it better than anybody.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean Yeah, you know, Michael Lewis is there. Bethany McLean is there. William Cohan is there. Brian Burrow is there. Who else do you need me, Grayden? I'm available. So the way that they do business stories at Vanity Fair, I wrote for them.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great, like, you know, it's like any publication, it has its ebbs and flows, but he is a great, he's one of the great editors, and he hires. Great writers”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Byron would be number one. I'm not sure I have, you know, the guys who Grayden Carter has had at Vanity Fair doing business writing.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was the observer? He was at the observer. I had the good fortune to follow in his footsteps writing a similar column in the observer. I hired him at Red Herring to write for us because I thought he was so great. And he was the one who... Showed me how to write with attitude when without fear and taking aim at the right targets. You know, I spent most of my early career doing positive stories. Here's something you should do. It's a great idea. And Red Herring, here's some great technologies. Here's a great trend. These are all fascinating and awesome things. And it turns out it's just as fun to call people to account for.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writer or editor? Writer slash editor. But he was sort of the central financial writer for years. Fascinating guy, and his method of writing could... Could bore you to tears given its repetitive aspects? But it was very effective, so he was the one who taught me sort of the simplicity and clarity were key. The next one was Jason Ponton, who was the editor of Red Herring magazine. He's at MIT Tech Review now. And he brought a flare to red herring that was eye-opening for me coming out of a service magazine like money. And he sort of prayed at the altar of the economist. He made me realize when I just wasn't even sure of it, that writing could be like a joyous experience as opposed to a mind-numbing one. And then the next one was someone who just died, actually, Christopher Byron.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, internet 1.0, and they hired me as their New York Bureau chief and public markets editor because they were all VC and private equity.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. He pulled me into his office. He said, You told me you weren't going to leave. And I said, I told you I wasn't going back to Wall Street. I didn't tell you I wasn't going to go to a better publication. So I then was at money for five years and realized it was time to quit when I had written the exact same story twice. Because Service Magazines, if you're actually good at what you do at a Service Magazine, you should write the same story price.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he said, How do I know you're not going to go back to Wall Street? And I said, I'm not going back to Wall Street. Six months later, I left for Money magazine.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is way back. Yeah, and the guy there said to me, what are you doing? All of the people who work here want to work on Wall Street. You're the first person who's ever come from Wall Street to work here.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what's funny is on that point, I say that one of my points in the Harvard book is that they have spent so much time telling themselves that they have a moral righteousness to as an aspect of their leadership. It's like you telling the story of something that happened so many times that suddenly like on your 50th telling a thing that you weren't that sure about the first time you told it, it's a fact now because you've been speaking to me.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my point is just we might not have actually gone through such a significant change with fake news. We may have been in this state before but didn't really realize it”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, back to the journalism thing and the fake news thing, one thing that has occurred to me, though, is like the internet has allowed us to be aware of more people's opinions than the media's opinions. Historically, whoever was on TV and stuff.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should be able to agree at what day of the week it is Or what the temperature is outside. And the fact that we've ended up, you know, in a situation where nobody believes anybody who's, they have decided is not trustworthy, it's horrible.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, just sort of the essence of what is truth. Like, yes, we can all have different opinions, right? But not different.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they have a sort of a boilerplate approach to problem solving and thinking that works very well in process situations. And if you want someone to come in who is outside of your organization, so who doesn't come with baggage and can do stuff without. Personal bias”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like it depends who you are. Right? If you are the CEO, yes. If you're the shareholder, maybe. If your society, probably not unless you rate efficiency as the highest value of all.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“McKinsey book. Yeah, there were people who said he asked the question Are they worth it or not? And he doesn't give a satisfactory answer. And my response.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, although I was amazed there were people who were confused about what my true opinion of McKinsey was. It's like, do you?”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're in the wrong job. Now it's like once I'm on to a subject I like, just all you're doing is reading and talking to people who are introducing you to other people who are introducing to other people. It's great. Like all you're doing is spending your time learning stuff. And if you're interested in it, what a way to make a living. The writing stuff, I've gotten more confident with each successive book. This last one is a little.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I love, you know, the reporting part of it, there was a point in my career, I think it was at Money Magazine. When you're writing personal finance, it's hard to get that motivated for it. I remember. When I would be calling people, I would actually be hoping they didn't answer their phone.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so financially, it's been worked for me. As far as what do I like about it from the actual process itself, if there is a criticism of the latter two books that I just don't care about, it's that they focus a little too much on the history. I love the history. You have to.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uh, It's great for me at least as a freelancer, this is a practical answer. Freelancing got really. I sort of had a nice three or four year run of freelance magazine writing before the crisis, and it was really fun. When money got tight, freelance got a lot more difficult. And writing books is easier from a cash management perspective. Really?”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he talks about the fact that there's two oppositional stances in American business. One is business versus government and one is management versus worker. Right, and neither of those has to be. And in other variants of capitalism, like Germany, neither of them is nearly as polarized as it is here. And the management values the input of their employees, I think, a little more than they do in the States, especially if they've gone through the fame machine of a place like HBS where you're convinced that you are the reason for all success and you blame government or unions for your failures. Japan as well as Germany. They're a little calmer about what constitutes success and what its origins are, and they're not so obsessed with trying to take credit for it. So they're better at sharing it”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, once you're united, right, right. You deserve it all. I think it's because, as some historians, business historians point out, one of the ones who I found particularly insightful is a guy named Robert Locke, who's been living in Germany for some time.”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“HBS, I lay some blame at their doorstep for helping build the CEO fame machine, right? So the case method is. Teaches from the perspective of the CEO, what would you do? How would you save this company? You, you, you. And then Fortin Magazine”
2017-07-07 · Masters in Business · Duff McDonald: How To Fix the Broken Elite Institutions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source