Month: October 2014

OLD MASTERS

After 80, some people don’t retire. They reign. 

A few weeks ago, I (Camille) got a call from The New York Times Magazine to interview people in the 80’s and 90’s who are still doing what they do and doing it well. Despite the time constraints, it was a dream job to talk to over a dozen “Old Masters” to find out where they are in their professional and personal lives, what they’ve learned, how they maintain their level of excellence.

I’ll be sharing some of the themes of our discussions in the coming weeks, but for now, I wanted everyone to get a chance to see the gorgeous results of photographer/filmmaker Erik Madigan Heck‘s portraits, Lewis Lapham‘s insightful essay and my interviews with fifteen amazing Old Masters including architect Frank Gehry, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Actress Betty White and many others.

 

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We all know that Columbus sailed the “ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two,” but beyond the facts that he didn’t actually discover the Americas and that he dealt deplorably with the indigenous people he encountered in the New World, most of us don’t know much about Columbus’s history-making startup that he called, “Enterprise of the Indies.”

His entrepreneurial journey offers lessons for anyone trying to innovate today.

Go Where the Action Is  Continue reading “Christopher Columbus, Startup Entrepreneur”

How does a family start-up with a throwback idea and not a lot of capital break into an industry dominated by corporate giants? 

Five years ago, Mary Beth Minton and her son Matt McCarty started their company Zylie & Friends around a single product, a teddy bear that Minton had sewn herself.

Now their award-winning bear, Zylie, and a growing pack of stylishly dressed toy bears, each with a passport, map, and a travel diary, hailing from foreign countries, are in over 600 stores nationwide.

Zylie has appeared on national television, on a recent TEDx stage during Minton’s talk “Unplug to Play,” and has fans around the world–from the YouTube celebrity family the Bratayleys (with half a million followers) to the thousands of ordinary kids who follow Zylie on Instagram.

Not bad for a little bear created as an antidote to too much screen-time.

So what can the rest of us learn from Minton and McCarty’s experience? Continue reading “How a Small Company That Lets Kids be Kids Struck a Chord with Families”