I tried to translate lightning round into my 3-headed monster of languages, but "lightning" it turns out lightning is really wonky in all 3 languages and is one of the few words that don't share any real resemblance to the other languages. In Japanese it's like a "farm wife," Chinese is a "flash electricity," and I'm not advanced enough in Korean except to know it's nothing like the other two. Huh.
Anyway, the Lightning Round is a segment on Jim Cramer's podcast where viewers skip the long-winded questions and just ask him about individual stocks and his opinion on them, like Amzn (always a buy), RTN (struggling like all defense stocks but he thinks it's a buy), and any Chinese stock except BABA (all sell's according to him). It started many years ago but fitting for the times because everyone likes their information fast so they can move on to the next thing, like lightning. It's the trend of the future: quick, quick, quick, must have it NOW! (especially when you're drunk, so much so that Amazon has started cautioning customers not to online shop while drunk, where a lot of purchases are made when people have had too much to drink, as much a health risk to one's wallet as drunk driving is to one's actual health).
I was wondering why the other day the World Cup uses penalty kicks to decide the most crucial guys in the knockout stages, where they have to decide a winner but what if it's tied through regulation and then 30 minutes of overtime? It goes to penalty kicks, which seems like a difficult and rather heartbreaking way (for the losing team) of determining something they've worked so hard for. It hardly seems fair, letting what essentially is a coin flip and which has no real resemblance to the normal game of soccer determine the fate of a match. It's kind of bizarre really: it's like if basketball decided their tied games with a round of free-throw shooting, whichever team makes the most, or baseball decided their games with a home run derby. Even hockey OT in the playoffs (only in the playoffs, where games matter more) they go overtime until it's over, not penalty shots. It's using a rather small sample size that's susceptible to lucky bounces and doesn't always determine who the better team is. Better ways come to mind if soccer is worried about stretching the game out too long and somehow forcing a result, like making it 8 v. 8 or less instead of 11 v. 11, shorten the field, something.
But then I realized, penalty kicks are the perfect "lightning round" fix for the new generation! The new generation doesn't really care about fairness, or the best merit, or large sample sizes. It cares about deciding a result fast. The whole idea of a playoff system is less about fairness (the purest way as I've always said is just have an entire regular season and whoever wins the most wins) than about building excitement and marketing one game, and penalty kicks sure are exciting. Fans holding their breath for one kick, leads to great Twitter reactions and "get to your phone!" and highlights.
That, I think, is the secret to business, life, and sports in the 21st century as we go more and more to a lightning round society. People already depend on online retailers like Amazon to ship all their purchases, now it's even their food: people at my apartment building have delivery people show up all the time with food ordered online. In sports, the more "one-punch/ one strike" sports are getting more attention now than the traditional 3-hour sports: baseball seems like it's on the decline due to the length of its games, slow pace, basketball's a little too long, while fighting (UFC) at least for me is picking up pace, where the fights can be over immediately and never more than 25 minutes. I have a big problem with the fairness of UFC where one punch can derail 8 weeks of hard training camp getting ready for one fight, and that sample size of a few punches can determine a fighter's performance and ranking and status for months until his next fight (whereas baseball has thousands of pitches of sample size it can draw from to determine a player's performance. Soccer's penalty kicks are like UFC. My sport, trampoline dodgeball, has fit into that model by limiting each game to 3 minutes (great idea!)
Whoever best captures the market for quick entertainment, fast and furious lightning round action, in my opinion, will capture the market in the new century, fair or not.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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