Careers in Wine

5 Signs You’re a “Unicorn” Employee

  • October 10, 2016February 26, 2020

Unicorns are hard to catch. Back in the 1500s, it was believed that only fair young maidens could gain the trust of these elusive, horned creatures.

I’m no fair maiden. Still, in my time, I’ve had the luck of getting close to many magical unicorns … in the form of “unicorn” employees. Not to be confused with unicorn companies—startups valued at $1 billion or more—“unicorn” employees, for me, are staff who possess a unique set of qualities that make them extremely rare and valuable. Like actual unicorns, they’re hard to find, but once hired, offer up enormous benefits in the workplace. To name a few, they shatter expectations, raise the bar for everyone and are simply a joy to be around. Unicorn employees can literally take your business to the next level.

Whether you’re looking to build a unicorn army, or hoping to boost your own value in the workplace, here are the five key qualities of unicorn employees:

You aren’t limited by your job title. 

In the span of about 5 years, my company, Hootsuite, went from a 100-person tech startup to a 1000-person global company. Through this stage of “hyper growth,” employees who truly flourished were flexible and intellectually curious.

Earlier on in the business, this meant having the ability to wear many hats and excel at varied tasks, critical at a fast-growing startup. For example, just because somebody’s job title was “Office Administrator,” didn’t mean she would shy away from pitching in on a major marketing campaign by helping brainstorm some catchy tweets.

Later, as the company grew, unicorn employees jumped at the chance to dive deeper into specific, growing areas of business, which needed good people. Some even decided to move across several departments. I saw unicorn employees make surprising leaps—one even went from financial specialist to software engineer. I think this is so important to employee growth that we recently launched a new pilot initiative, called the “stretch program,” to help people expand their knowledge and expertise across the business … and grow their unicorn horns.

You think big and small. 

Exceptional employees are able to think strategically. This means having the ability to take a step back and see the overall company goals, or the industry as a whole, then apply it to your work. To be effective in business, you must be able to see the big picture.

On the flipside, while big-picture thinking is critical, I’ve also found that the best employees also know the devil is in the details. Running a business requires meticulous attention. A minor copyright issue, improperly executed email campaign, or even what seems like a small technical glitch can end up being catastrophic, affecting a lot of clients in a short period of time. The best employees are those who take the time to read the fine print. These are the types of people I know I can entrust with serious responsibility.

You have true grit. 

The concept of “grit” has made its way into popular culture recently, perhaps sparked by psychologist Angela Duckworth’s popular TED talk and book, on the subject. She defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” and says it’s a crucial factor to achieving success.

I couldn’t agree more. Being an entrepreneur since I was a teenager, I’ve learned that the business world is like being on a boat in the open sea. Whether it’s a patch of rough waves or an unexpected storm, unexpected obstacles are inevitable. During these turbulent times, having grit—a dogged persistence—can help you keep focused on the destination. In fact, that very outlook helped my billion-dollar company weather the storm and get to the next level. Unicorn employees have true grit, and are able stay calm and focused on the task at hand, even on choppy seas.

You’re respectful by nature.

The ability to work well with others is a skill that benefits any workplace. It seems simple enough, but you’d be surprised.

A few years ago, I put out a job posting for a high-level sales role. Many people applied, and after a series of interviews, I had some top candidates in mind. However, when I checked in with my executive assistant at the time, I was shocked to find out how many of those people who had been personable and courteous to me, had been downright rude to her.

Unicorn employees are respectful by nature, and would never treat someone—regardless of title —in this way. It’s something that absolutely sets a stellar employee apart from an average one. In fact, this is so important to the well-being of our staff, it’s been built into two of our four core company values: “Respect the individual,” and “lead with humility.”

You get it done. 

A few years back, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner sent out a short status update on his platform: “In simplest terms possible, the people I most enjoy working with dream big, get it done, and know how to have fun.”

The update blew up, striking a chord with the tens of thousands of people who commented and liked it. (Weiner followed up by writing a full post on the topic.) Like him, I too am a huge proponent of having fun at work and believe it’s crucial to success. However, I can’t stress how important it is for people on the job to be able to get shit done. After all, no matter how great a co-worker is to be around, if he can’t produce actual results, his presence is isn’t ultimately helpful and may even be damaging to others. Great teams can be shattered by a single member who can’t get shit done.

Meanwhile, studies have shown that top performers contribute to a business 10 times more than their average counterparts. In fact, some firms, including Microsoft, claim that figure to be 100 times.

The bottom line: At the end of the day, you can be respectful, multi-talented, tenacious, detail-oriented and a big thinker. But if you don’t produce real results and move the needle, all those traits are wasted. You must be able to execute. It’s an essential unicorn quality.

For companies and business leaders, it’s probably worthwhile to put some extra time and effort into chasing unicorns. Unlike their mythical counterparts, they’re very real and they can change your company. And for unicorn employees in the making, it’s never too late to grow your strengths and make yourself more rare and valuable than ever.

CEO @ HootSuite

Image: Evonne Heyning

Careers in Wine

6 Traits- What To Hire For:

  • September 27, 2016February 26, 2020
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Celebrating 21 years in the Wine Industry

 

There’s two things you need to know, right off the bat, about these hiring criteria.

First and most obviously, the six criteria on Danny’s list are psychological traits, not technical skills.  Even though it is generally easier to hire for technical skills, whether they are knife skills in the kitchen, great customer-centric leaders like Meyer feel confident that they can teach technical know-how to almost any newly-hired employee, but on the other hand find the idea of teaching empathy, teaching work ethic and so forth to be essentially a fool’s errand, much better addressed in the selection process than in post-employment training and discipline.

The second point is this: Even though you’ll be hiring for personality traits rather than technical skills, you still need to develop highly-skilled employees before they even face the first customer. Otherwise, you’re doing your customers (and your company) a huge disservice.

 

Meyer: “I used to think that you could just hire people for their emotional skills and if they had the six essential emotional skills, that’s all it took. I learned the hard way that you can’t unleash somebody’s hospitality unless you have first completely drilled all the systems, the technical skills and know-how that are needed, to a point of excellence.”

In other words:  These wonderful, warm personality traits that you have hired your new employees for aren’t going to manifest themselves in ways that are useful to your customers until the training for skills is complete and has become second nature.

Meyer compares this to learning to drive a stick shift.

I remember when I first learned to drive a stick shift [as a teenager back in St. Louis], I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And until I had learned to be proficient at doing that, I wasn’t having any fun while I was driving. I wasn’t switching the stations on the radio dial. I wasn’t telling jokes to my friends. I wasn’t pointing out the beautiful trees on the side of the road.

At that beginner’s stage, I was “all systems all the time.” But once I learned those systems, how to shift gears, find a sticking point when I was on a hill, all those kinds to things that are really taught. Once I cleared all that out, that’s when I could get back to being myself and pick the best music for whoever was in the car, tell jokes with people, you know, enjoy the scenery.

So even though the emotional skills that lead to hospitality are not really teachable, but they are also not revealable until first you’ve learned the systems, the technical side of getting the job done.”

Meyer and his Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants hire for what Meyer calls an employee’s “hospitality quotient.”  These are the six traits he feels are required for an employee to have the potential to provide true hospitality to the guests of his restaurants.

Here’s his list of six traits to hire for, which I’m using here with his permission and hope you find useful.

1. Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full);

2. Intelligence (not just “smarts” but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning);

3. Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done);

4. Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel)

5. Self-awareness (an understanding of what makes you tick;

6.  Integrity (a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment).

Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, customer experience speaker and bestselling business author, most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service

 
 
Communication

How Not To Get Hired

  • September 16, 2016

Looking for Work? The Wrong Way to Get Your Job Application Noticed

In a hyper-competitive job market, some people looking for work will do whatever it takes to stand out. There was the student who designed a Lego set in an attempt to land an ad agency internship.

A graphic designer slapped his resume on a four-pack of home-brewed beer. And more than one desperate job seeker has donned a sandwich board in an attempt to find work.

These job hunting stunts might capture the media’s attention, but do they actually lead to job offers?

In some cases, yes. Brennan Gleason, the man behind the “résum-ale,” as he dubbed it, quickly landed a job as a creative director for a digital marketing agency with the help of his one-of-a-kind C.V. But quirky job hunting approaches don’t always yield quick results.

It took Dan Conway, aka the Extreme Job Hunter, a year to find work, despite engaging in stunts like auctioning himself off on eBay and sending pizza to potential employers.

Outlandish job search techniques are more common, and may be more effective, when the applicant is in a creative field like marketing and design, perhaps because they’re a way for people to show off their skills to potential employers. Leah Bowman, the student behind the Lego resume, told Careertopia that, “For most companies, this type of application might even cross the line to inappropriate.

For advertising agencies, however, I felt that showing my creativity and personality would be an asset.” But even designers and marketing pros should proceed with caution; one quarter of executives in this field surveyed by The Creative Group said gimmicky resumes were unprofessional.

Still, job hunters in all fields are under pressure to get noticed by hiring managers, who are often inundated with resumes for every job posted. The competition can inspire some desperate moves. While the instinct to make yourself stand out isn’t a bad one, some applicants take it too far, engaging in bizarre behavior than can torpedo their chances of getting the job.

“Candidates are realizing that an extraordinary cover letter and resume with strong references aren’t enough, that if you really want the gig, you have to stand out from the competition,” Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer for CareerBuilder, said. “Unfortunately, what many aren’t realizing is that the catch is making sure you do that in a professional, respectful way.”

Overzealous job seekers don’t always realize there’s a fine line between the charmingly creative job application strategy and the wildly inappropriate. Hiring managers surveyed by CareerBuilder shared stories of candidates who took an out-of-the-box approach to getting noticed, including:

What is it about looking for work that inspires people to act in a way that seems designed to turn off hiring managers? Alison Green, an HR expert, blames the “charlatans of the job search advice world, telling people they need to ‘stand out’ and be ‘memorable.’”

The creative job application gone wrong. How to rise above….
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Candidates who want to rise above the pack might decide it’s a good idea to mail a cake and a framed picture of themselves to a hiring manager (as one candidate did to a reader of Green’s Ask a Manager blog), but such brazen moves can backfire. “I was so incredibly creeped out by this gesture … I was afraid to eat the cake and couldn’t look at him and didn’t even call him for an interview,” the receiver of this unique “gift” recounted.

Those looking for work would do better to focus on substance rather than sizzle when trying to impress a would-be employer, say most career experts.

A strong resume that outlines past accomplishments and clearly shows how your past experience relates to the position you want is a must, according to CareerBuilder. (And remember, only Elle Woods can get away with a scented resume on pink paper.)

A robust social media presence that shows you’re an expert in your field can be an advantage when an employers searches for you after receiving your resume.

During the face-to-face portion of the hiring process, steer clear of common interview mistakes and take the time to ask a few questions of your own, since this shows you’re interested in the job.

Finally, don’t forget to send a thank you note. Many applicants overlook this basic gesture, even though 59% of hiring managers say a thank you note or email after an interview can boost a person’s chances of being receiving a job offer.

And if you’re tempted to send a potential employer a shoe to “get your foot in the door,” remember this: Though gimmicky tactics might get a hiring manager’s attention, it’s ultimately your skills and experience that will land you the job.

Careers in Wine

Drowning in Guilt-How to hire millennials—and weed out the…

  • September 4, 2016

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Yes, I hear you complain about them every day: Those millennials, they ask about vacation time in the first interview! They get a bad cold and disappear for days!

They want my job after a week in their job!

“Who do these upstarts think they are,” you moan to me over every business lunch.

I feel your pain—but question your premise. Sure, there are tons of indolent slackers lounging in their parents’ rec rooms and some of them should stay there because they make terrible employees. But don’t dismiss the generation; just take some hiring and management precautions. Here are six steps to weeding out the duds and finding the eager hard-chargers who’ll stick around, build your business and make you look good.

 1. Be brutally honest in the interview.

I used to mince words with prospective employees. In my lexicon, senior people with monstrous egos that needed to be not only tolerated but massaged were referred to as “challenging” or “difficult.”

I’m not polite any more.

I tell the prospective employee that the wine industry marketing environments, for an example can be hard to work in. I also tell them I don’t allow screaming, yelling, throwing things ain the organizations they may work in.…but those “difficult” people will still find ways to torture you. (I don’t, of course tell them that back in the day,  at X Winery, one of the Sr. Marketing VP threw a box of yellow Kleenex at a friend of mine saying, “Don’t come back until these are white!”) I also tell them that the WIne Marketing business is a somewhat stagnant business right now. Several tiers of the job ladder have been eliminated and now there are only assistants and senior brand managers. Where I used to have five mid-level jobs to promote assistants into, I now only have one. I tell them it can take four years instead of two to advance. If they are still sitting in the chair across from me when I’m finished with this non-seduction, I figure they must really want the job.

2. Don’t hire them if you sense even a whiff of entitlement. I tell every prospective employee that they will be gofers for the first two years (that means chores like packing wine and POS for various events) even if they won’t be. When one young man who wanted to be a brand manager said, “But my university led me to believe…,” I said, “Stop right there. No one cares what your college led you to believe. They only care if you can use a copy machine and answer phones. That is how we all started.” No surprise: Our discussions ended there.

3. Do a hunger check. For a big part of my career, my assistant’s chair was held by a revolving door of fill in the blank recent top 10 University Grad . I wasn’t looking for a University Grad; it’s not as if I graduated from any of these schools or wanted to do something for my alma mater. It just so happened that at the time, these smart, heads-down kinds of people worked perfectly in the male dominated wine industry. Later on I tried out grads from other Ivies, but after going several rounds with Harvard kids who embarrassed me with their sloppy, “I’m above all this” office work, I put a moratorium on Harvard diplomas. (See, you don’t have to be a millennial to feel entitled.) I feel the same way today: The  hardest-working, most attentive, most intelligent starters still come from schools with un-fancy names. They’re millennials, for sure, but not slackers. I have come to believe that America’s top-tier schools are doing their graduates a disservice by boosting their expectations about starter jobs. Entry level is the great flattener of the working world.

4. Remember, everyone announces themselves in the interview.

I learned this the hard way when I ignored my gut response and hired a young woman who made me feel uncomfortable in the interview. She startled me during our first discussion when she suddenly asked intimate questions about my children. Turns out that in preparing for the interview she had done something smart: She’d gone back and read all of my editor’s letters, in which I’d written often about my kids. But she didn’t explain that in the interview, leaving me to feel she’d snooped in a creepy way, which made me squirm a bit. But I hired her. Our entire time together (less than a year) was marred because she constantly tried to front run my desires and fumbled them; she couldn’t wait for direction.

5. Shake ‘em up a bit. Ok, so I’ve worked with some of the scariest people in wine—and made it through. While some people are just mean and awful because they can be, I’ve carved out a spot as a pretty nice person who is tough but fair. But every now and then, especially when working with the overly pampered (millennial or otherwise), I find it’s a good idea to borrow a trick from the monster-boss playbook and send a tiny chill down their spine. I am a little sterner than I would normally be; I play the tough parent who won’t put up with the crap they just handed me. I let them know I set a high bar and plan for them to jump high enough to clear it.

6. When you find the good ones, help them move up—even if that means losing them. Yes, I said that. When you find those great millennials, be generous. Part the waters for them, give them perks, jump into their court and use your influence to move them along to the next tier when it’s time—even if the better job is not in your winery and it kills you to lose them. That’s how you win their loyalty. Forever. And you just may be nurturing an employee who’ll come back to you years later.

Communication

In the Hot Seat: Handling Tough Questions Honestly

  • July 5, 2016

R1607J_BROSMIND-850x478Information exchange is integral to creating win-win deals, but it must be carefully managed. Disclose too much and your counterpart might take advantage of you; disclose too little and you miss opportunities to discover mutually beneficial trades. So what should you do when you’re asked a question that, if answered truthfully, would put you at a bargaining disadvantage?

WHAT NOT TO DO

Lie. You will be tempted to lie. Don’t. Setting aside ethical, moral, and legal arguments, if you get caught, it can damage your reputation and your relationship with your counterpart and potentially put the entire deal in peril. Research shows that many positive interactions are required to restore trust after a single breach, and breaches entailing deception are among the most difficult to recover from.

Palter. Another common but misguided approach is what Todd Rogers and colleagues call “paltering,” or using truthful statements to convey an inaccurate impression. The researchers give the example of former U.S. president Bill Clinton’s answer to a question about whether he’d had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky: “There is not a sexual relationship—that is accurate.” Technically that statement was not a lie, because his involvement with Lewinsky was in the past. But research shows that people view such legalistic skirting of the truth as unfavorably as they view outright lying.

Abstain. A third common workaround is to abstain from answering the question. However, Kate Barasz, Michael Norton, and I have shown that this tactic leaves a worse impression than disclosing even extremely unsavory information. For example, in one study, participants viewed people who had confessed to frequently stealing items worth more than $100 as more trustworthy than those who had simply refused to answer the question.

WHAT TO DO

Redirect. In the short term, the strategies deployed by politicians, who routinely face tough, direct questions, can be instructive—particularly for one-shot negotiations (when you are unlikely to meet your counterpart again). A familiar tactic is to dodge the question by changing the subject to something seemingly related. As noted earlier, people are generally not very good at detecting dodges, so you have an opportunity to selectively disclose information of your choosing. A second strategy is to turn the tables and question the questioner. Responding in this way can deflect attention and enable you to take control of the topic.

Share carefully. If you’re playing a longer game, disclosure can work in your favor; it can foster trust and facilitate better outcomes through collaboration and joint problem solving. To avoid being exploited, however, negotiators should start small: Share a substantive but not critical piece of information. Only if your counterpart reciprocates should you continue the tit for tat; disclosure without reciprocation leaves you vulnerable to your counterpart’s value-claiming tactics.

 

Leslie K. John is an associate professor at Harvard Business School. Twitter: @lesliekjohn.

Careers in Wine

How Millennials are Changing the Wine Industry

  • August 5, 2015

Article from Wine Industry Advisor

While the precise dates governing the birth years for the biggest generation in history known as millennials vary, (somewhere between 1976 and 2004), there is no dispute that they love their wine. The first segment of this group hit legal drinking age in the early 2000s, as U.S. wine consumption surged. It has increased at a steady rate ever since. Millennials are responsible for nearly 27 percent of the total U.S. wine consumption, second only to baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) who account for nearly 42 percent.

Approximately 70 million millennials are currently age 21 and account for 30 percent of weekly wine drinkers. As the number of aging, wine-drinking boomers decreases, the millennial generation is stepping in to fill the wine buying slack — and marketers and industry experts can’t help but notice. This generation’s whole approach to wine is vastly different from those who have come before them.

Millennials are the first digital generation, and their technological fluency shapes their buying decisions. They
have grown up with instant, on-demand access to information, price comparisons and peer reviews. They don’t wait for a special occasion to drink wine, nor do they stash wine in a cellar for a decade like their boomer parents. Wine is used to relax, to socialize with friends or family, with or without meals, while cooking, while hiking, during wine tasting parties, and on vacations. A 2011 study of 467 millennials by the Wine Business Institute at Sonoma State University showed that this generation drinks wine as part of their informal, everyday life, and therefore in larger quantities than previous generations. The study suggested that “ by linking into these motivations of socialization, relaxation, and fun regarding wine, marketers will be able to relate better to Millennial desires.”

Millennials are not fans of slick advertising or pretentiousness, and want authenticity and transparency from winemakers. They want to know the unique story behind their wine, how it is grown, blended, and by whom. Critics’ scores and gold medals hold little weight for them; instead they’ll value what their friends are saying about the wine on social media.

These wine lovers are experimental and they crave adventure. Traditional wine and food pairing rules don’t concern them. The per bottle maximum they pay for a celebratory quaff hovers around $20, but the daily drinking comfort zone is closer to $10. Millennials are active and they want their wine to be just as mobile and portable. This marketing shift is a challenge that the wine industry appears to be excited to tackle.

Companies are increasingly allocating more of their marketing dollars to social media advertising, and interactive online marketing strategies. Wineries have created digital marketing divisions and director of social media positions. They maintain active and engaged roles on Facebook, throw Twitter parties, curate wine blogs, and produce tasting videos to keep the wine chat flowing 24/7. Wine apps allow users to shoot a photo of a wine label and immediately access descriptions and ratings, adding their own tasting notes to the database. The Wall Street Journal noted that when it comes to wine apps, “Sometimes it seems as if there are almost as many wine apps as there are wines.”

Millennials value the connectivity and networking benefits of in-person social settings — wine bars and festivals are thriving, and tasting groups are forming. Producers such as Gallo, owner of Barefoot Wines, sponsor face-to-face events, like the World Series of Beach Volleyball. Stephanie Gallo, VP of Marketing, draws her inspiration from Starbucks, “which brought a premium product — gourmet coffee — into the mass market.”

The yearning for authenticity and the desire to know where and how the products they eat and drink are sourced has spilled into wine packaging. Millennials value eco-conscious products, and alternative packaging is evolving to comply. The proliferation of premium-boxed wines that use recyclable materials is illustrative of just that.

The wine company Bota uses soy-based inks printed on recycled, unbleached Kraft paper, bound with cornstarch instead of glue. Many box wine producers use organic grapes from sustainable, fair practice farms in California, Washington and Italy. To quench the millennial thirst for information, producers are including more product information on packaging as well.

Several companies now offer single-serving wine pouches. All this experimentation pays off for wineries because approximately 85 percent of millennials are willing to purchase an unfamiliar brand, according to the Wine Market Council. Just as long as that brand offers them sufficient information, authenticity, convenience, and eco-friendly, portable adventure.

Careers in Wine

When Not Everyone Agrees With You

  • August 26, 2014

News From Napa…
As I am sure you have all heard and seen the images from Sundays 6.0 quake.  Thank you so much for all the calls and texts, and emails.  We were very lucky – the Benchmark family is safe and intact. We had a few few minor breakages, but overall we are grateful and our hearts and prayers go out to our neighbors and friends who did not fare as well.  

We wish a speedy recovery to our industry friends and families.
………………………………………………………………………………

When Not Everyone Agrees With You
The more invested we are in an idea, the more likely we are going to present an idea persuasively. And even if we do present it well, there will likely be some resistance to some or all aspects of it. How we react to resistance is a determining factor in both the growth of our ideas and ourselves.

What is there to do when not everyone agrees with you? You could rejoice at the evident diversity of perspectives, but realistically, you must remember that this is not a personal evaluation. Keep discussions objective and tightly anchored to the original idea.

Perhaps you feel very strongly about something. As situations become more qualitative than measurable, the ultimate redress may be impossible to define. As you may have previously noted, others will have their ideas and beliefs at least as strong from another perspective.  

Perhaps you have taken great pains in presenting an idea. Opening ideas up to questioning allows you to use the knowledge gained from experience and research to further elaborate on the merits of the issue. As you rationally express your points, you will learn more deeply about the subject, as well as increase your general ability to maintain a positive and productive attitude.

Careers in Wine

Robert Mondavi

  • June 18, 2013

Like a lot of us in the wine industry Mr. Mondavi was more than just another employer or vintner ..he was a true inspiration. He valued  the connection between people, food and wine and family. It is a great honor for us at Benchmark Consulting to honor Mr. Mondavi and hope to continue on in his shadow of undying commitment to the best.

“I went throughout the world to find out what my competition was. And then I stopped at nothing to improve what we are doing, to excel. But you have to have faith in yourself; you have to be willing to work hard. You’ll have many naysayers who say ‘No-no.’ Plow ahead! If you have it in your heart, you can achieve it. And that goes for any business. Put your heart and soul into what you do. Work hard. You have to gamble, but gamble intelligently. That takes dedication. But that’s all, it’s very simple!” –Robert Mondavi

This June 18th marks what would have been Robert Mondavi’s 100th birthday; he passed away in 2008 at the age of 94. It’s been almost six yearsand we are still commemorating the man who is best known as the Father of American Wine. His life story reads better than an epic novel rife with risk-taking, vision and of course family drama. Born in Virginia, Minnesota to Italian immigrant parents, Cesare and Rosa, wine was always part of life for Mondavi. The family moved to California where Robert later attended high school in Lodi and eventually Stanford University. In 1943, his parents, after much urging from Robert, purchased Charles Krug Winery in Napa and Robert joined the enterprise along with his brother Peter.  The drama began in 1965 when Mondavi was ‘fired’ from the winery over major disagreements about winemaking direction and vision. Shortly after his dismissal, Robert purchased his own winery in Oakville with the specific goal of making world-class wines that could compete with anything in Europe.

It all sounds so obvious to us now, but in the 1960’s Napa was just farmland. According to the late Mondavi’s wife, Margrit Mondavi, ” In 1960 the Valley was still kind of like a little country town, I think there were 17,000 acres of grapes, today there are 40,000. There wasn’t a paved road. Much of the Valley was for sale; it was still sort of recuperating from the war and the Depression and all of that. Many people didn’t believe in it. But he went forward, built a new winery, the first new winery since Prohibition.

Today the winery is in corporate hands, but the legacy of Mondavi’s belief and passion lives on though the countless small producers who populate the Napa Valley, and the United States as a whole. His philanthropy is also a legacy with his $10 million dollar gift to the University of California at Davis for the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and $25 million for the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. He not only championed premium wine, he elevated the very idea of American wine and food as something to be celebrated, shared and savored.

The winery will be hosting several events to honor this anniversary, including a concert with Martina McBride. Festivities begin on June 29th, for additional information and to purchase tickets, Click Here or visit eventbrite.com or call 1-888-769-5299. All additional inquiries can be sent to concerts@robertmondaviwinery.com.

Robert Mondavi: “I went throughout the world to find out what my competition was. And then I stopped at nothing to improve what we are doing, to excel. But you have to have faith in yourself; you have to be willing to work hard. You’ll have many naysayers who say ‘No-no.’ Plow ahead! If you have it in your heart, you can achieve it. And that goes for any business. Put your heart and soul into what you do. Work hard. You have to gamble, but gamble intelligently. That takes dedication. But that’s all, it’s very simple!”

Margrit Mondavi, wife of Robert Mondavi: “He gave everybody advice. Bob’s ecumenical spirit: ‘the more good wine that comes out of Napa Valley the better it is for me.’ So he shared, he was generous, he was philanthropic and I believe that was his biggest contribution to Napa Valley. ”

Glenn Workman (Robert Mondavi Wines Vice President & General Manager): “I used to give him a bad time once in a while about not having a rearview mirror in his car because he was so focused on the future and what was in front of him, that, yeah even though we had accomplished something, there is a lot more that lay ahead. He was in his 50s and still had an incredible drive. He was setting the tone not only for Robert Mondavi Winery but for Napa Valley wines as well as the wine industry in the United States, in my opinion, and it was a passion that was exciting.”

Peter Mondavi (Robert Mondavi’s younger brother): “We can be very thankful for what he did for the wine business. I’m talking overall, especially Napa Valley. He was the real ambassador of it. Of all the people I’ve known in the wine business, and I’ve known quite a few of them, there’s no one that could compete with him as far as I’m concerned. And I don’t think there will ever be another one who can do what my brother did. He did wonders for the Napa Valley.”

Genevieve Janssens (Winemaker, Robert Mondavi Winery): “I was very young when I moved to Napa Valley and I was under the absolutely incredibly vision of Mr. Mondavi who was quite a detail-oriented, passionate man. I think it’s a great way to live and make wine.”

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Katie Kelly Bell

Forbes Contributor

Hiring

College Graduates Fare Well in Jobs Market, Even Through…

  • May 4, 2013

A recent jobs fair in New York. The jobless rate for college graduates in April was 3.9 percent.

By 
Is college worth it? Given the growing price tag and the frequent anecdotes about jobless graduates stuck in their parents’ basements, many have started to question the value of a college degree. But the evidence suggests college graduates have suffered through the recession and lackluster recovery with remarkable resilience.
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The unemployment rate for college graduates in April was a mere 3.9 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for the work force as a whole, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. Even when the jobless rate for college graduates was at its very worst in this business cycle, in November 2010, it was still just 5.1 percent. That is close to the jobless rate the rest of the work force experiences when the economy is good.

Among all segments of workers sorted by educational attainment, college graduates are the only group that has more people employed today than when the recession started.

The number of college-educated workers with jobs has risen by 9.1 percent since the beginning of the recession. Those with a high school diploma and no further education are practically a mirror image, with employment down 9 percent on net. For workers without even a high school diploma, employment levels have fallen 14.1 percent.

But just because college graduates have jobs does not mean they all have “good” jobs.

There is ample evidence that employers are hiring college-educated workers for jobs that do not actually require college-level skills — positions like receptionists, file clerks, waitresses, car rental agents and so on.

“High-skilled people can take the jobs of middle-skilled people, and middle-skilled people can take jobs of low-skilled people,” said Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. “And low-skilled people are out of luck.”

In some cases, employers are specifically requiring four-year degrees for jobs that previously did not need them, since companies realize that in a relatively poor job market college graduates will be willing to take whatever they can find.

That has left those who have spent some time in college but have not received a bachelor’s degree to scramble for what is left. Employment for them fell during the recession and is now back to exactly where it began. There were 34,992,000 workers with some college employed in December 2007, and there are 34,992,000 today.

In other words, workers with four-year degrees have gobbled up all of the net job gains. In fact, there are more employed college graduates today than employed high school graduates and high school dropouts put together.

It is worth noting, too, that even young college graduates are finding jobs, based on the most recent data on this subgroup. In 2011, the unemployment rate for people in their 20s with at least a bachelor’s degree was 5.7 percent. For those with only a high school diploma or a G.E.D., it was nearly three times as high, at 16.2 percent.

Americans have gotten the message that college pays off in the job market. College degrees are much more common today than they were in the past. In April, about 32 percent of the civilian, noninstitutional population over 25 — that is, the group of people who are not inmates of penal and mental facilities or residents of homes for the disabled or aged and who are not on active military duty — had a college degree.

Twenty years ago, the share was 22 percent. Given the changing norms for what degree of educational training is expected of working Americans, employers might assume those who do not have a four-year degree are less ambitious or less capable, regardless of their actual ability.

These forces might help explain why there is so much growth in employment among college graduates despite the fact that the bulk of the jobs created in the last few years have been low-wage and low-skilled, according to a report last August from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group. Today nearly one in 13 jobs is in food services, for example, a record share.

Clearly, positions in retail and food services are not the best use of the hard-earned skills of college-educated workers, who have gone to great expense to obtain their sheepskins.Student loan borrowers graduate with an average debt of $27,000, a total that is likely to grow in the future.

But nearly all of those graduates are at least finding work and income of some kind, unlike a much larger share of their less educated peers. And as the economy improves, college graduates will be better situated to find promotions to jobs that do use their more advanced skills and that pay better wages, economists say.

The median weekly earnings of college-educated, full-time workers — like those for their counterparts with less education — have dipped in recent years. In 2012, the weekly median was $1,141, compared with $1,163 in 2007, after adjusting for inflation. The premium they earn for having that college degree is still high, though.

In 2012, the typical full-time worker with a bachelor’s degree earned 79 percent more than a similar full-time worker with no more than a high school diploma. For comparison, 20 years earlier the premium was 73 percent, and 30 years earlier it was 48 percent.

And since a higher percentage of college graduates than high school graduates are employed in full-time work, these figures actually understate the increase in the total earnings premium from college completion, said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an independent research organization.

So, despite the painful upfront cost, the return on investment on a college degree remains high. An analysis from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington estimated that the benefits of a four-year college degree were equivalent to an investment that returns 15.2 percent a year, even after factoring in the earnings students forgo while in school.

“This is more than double the average return to stock market investments since 1950,” the report said, “and more than five times the returns to corporate bonds, gold, long-term government bonds, or homeownership.”

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