What to watch, listen to and read this month
— -- Business events to watch this month:
Sept. 8:President Obama outlines his program for creating jobs to a joint session of Congress. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks in Minneapolis on the U.S. economic outlook.
Sept. 14-16: The Interbike International Bicycle Expo, a bicycle industry convention, is held in Las Vegas. Last year's expo drew 24,000 attendees.
Sept. 15: Labor Department releases Consumer Price Index for August.
Sept. 20-21: The Federal Reserve's policy-making committee meets.
Sept. 21: A Senate Judiciary subcommittee holds a hearing examining Google and consumer and competition issues.
Sept. 29:Commerce Department releases its final estimate of U.S. gross domestic product for the second quarter.
On TV
2 Broke Girls
CBS; Sept. 19; 9:30 p.m.
A sassy waitress and a classy waitress try to make ends meet at a diner full of colorful characters … wait, is this Alice?
Not quite. For one thing, it's not the 1970s. And instead of waitresses Alice, Flo and Vera, we have financially strapped Max (the infinitely watchable Kat Dennings from Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), who also moonlights as a nanny, and Caroline (Beth Behrs), a fallen heiress who hatches a plan to raise $250,000 to launch a business based on Max's homemade cupcakes.
As a show, 2 Broke Girls has pedigreed parents in co-creators Michael Patrick King (Sex and the City) and comedian Whitney Cummings, a peerless director in James Burrows, whose sitcom career stretches back to the Alice era, and a promising pilot episode.
Long Distance Warrior
Public television; Sept. 13; 8 p.m. ET/PT (check local listings)
This inspirational, hour-long biography of MCI leader Bill McGowan pays posthumous homage to the driven competitor whose small Midwestern communications company successfully challenged the monopoly that was AT&T. Through interviews with colleagues and historians, we learn that McGowan was a chain-smoking workaholic whose management style was ahead of its time. He favored fewer layers, disliked bureaucracy, gave stock options to all employees and abandoned interoffice memos as soon as MCI Mail electronic messaging became available.
Colleagues laud McGowan as the quintessential American entrepreneur who disabused the country of the notion that long-distance calling was a luxury and sped up advances in cellphones and fiber-optic lines. "I would argue that Bill McGowan had a greater impact on telecommunications, not only in this country but worldwide, than Henry Ford did on the automobile industry," Dan Akerson, former MCI CFO and now CEO of General Motors, says in the documentary.
Books
Off Balance:
Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction
By Matthew Kelly (Hudson Street Press; $21.95; Sept. 15)
The reason work-life balance remains so elusive, says speaker/consultant Matthew Kelly, has a lot to do with verbiage.
"The term itself is fatally flawed," Kelly said in an interview. "You're essentially telling people that 'your work isn't part of your life,' and yet they spend most of their life working."
In Off Balance, Kelly puts the onus on individuals — not corporations, though they play a role — to achieve overall satisfaction in their lives, and provides steps to help them get there.
"If people say, 'I need work-life balance,' I find they're basically saying, 'I'm not living the life I want to live,'" Kelly says.
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