Breakfast of Champions

Wheaties is famous for featuring well-known and inspirational athletes on their cereal boxes. The box that I bought today, however, featured Bob Greene. Who is Bob Greene, you ask? He's Oprah's personal trainer, of course. This is not the first time I've encountered Mr. Greene. While touring the remote eastern side of the island of Maui in 2005, our tour guide pointed to a prime piece of oceanfront property and told us that Oprah's personal trainer was building a vacation home there. I love how Oprah's brand is so strong that even people who are tangentially related to her are minor celebrities. I think a good business school project would be to construct a graph showing how various products and corporations are related to Oprah and then determine how much of the US annual GDP can be directly or indirectly attributed to her business empire. My guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30%.