Zhang Yong, creator of the wildly popular Chinese hot-pot chain Hai Di Lao, may not have the global cult following Steve Jobs, but in China’s food and beverage industry, he isn’t far behind

May 24, 2013, 12:00 PM

Star Entrepreneur’s Business Advice: Don’t Listen to Me

Zhang Yong, the creator of the wildly popular Chinese hot-pot chain Hai Di Lao, may not have the global cult following of Apple founder Steve Jobs, but in China’s food and beverage industry, he isn’t far behind. In 2011, bookstores stocked the shelves with “Learn from Hai Di Lao.” Media outlets are clawing for an opportunity to interview him, a spokeswoman said.

The question for the entrepreneur—who has built a growing empire of 75 restaurants that serve sliced lamb, beef and vegetables to be boiled in spicy broth—is always, What’s next? And how did he come up with the idea to distinguish his chain with service perks like manicures, board games and noodle performances?

Mr. Zhang, who confesses that after 20 years of eating hot pot he doesn’t particularly like it, said he plans to take Hai Di Lao public, but isn’t sure in which market. The timing isn’t optimal right now, he adds, noting that other Chinese companies have listed and flopped almost instantaneously. Read more of this post

The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost; Instead of punishing them, the Byzantine general Belisarius recruited conquered peoples as allies to help defeat Germanic barbarians

May 23, 2013, 6:11 p.m. ET

The Tough Who Got Going

Instead of punishing them, the Byzantine general Belisarius recruited conquered peoples as allies to help defeat Germanic barbarians.

By MARK MOYAR

For a police chief, keeping the streets of Beverly Hills safe will probably never qualify as an act of great leadership, if only because the task itself lacks a certain degree of difficulty. The value of leadership is much clearer when circumstances are unfavorable—especially when failure seems imminent and is then somehow converted into success. For this reason, Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Savior Generals” focuses on five figures who faced an outsize challenge and rose to meet it with resolution and skill. “In some sense, winning against impossible odds—when most others cannot or would not try—is the only mark of a great general,” Mr. Hanson writes.

Mr. Hanson’s fluency with a broad range of historical epochs, which has made him one of his generation’s most notable historians, is on full display in “The Savior Generals.” Although his portraits come from the military realm—ranging from the classical period to the current day—they illustrate eternal verities that arise in all types of endeavor, and they capture attributes associated with master strategists in all walks of life, such as a disregard for conventional wisdom and an intuitive grasp of the big picture. Read more of this post

Lessons from an old master: As an art crimes investigator, former policeman Richard Ellis takes a traditional approach

May 23, 2013 3:45 pm

Lessons from an old master

By Emma Jacobs

The art of the investigation: Richard Ellis is hired by collectors and insurers to retrieve stolen works

Criminals are both nemeses and friends to Richard “Dick” Ellis. After he leaves the Wallace Collection, the gallery in central London displaying paintings by Fragonard and Canaletto, the 63-year-old is going for a drink with one. Or, as he nonchalantly puts it, “someone who was classified as a former terrorist”.

The reason? “That is how you learn to do stuff.”

Mr Ellis traces stolen paintings and artefacts on behalf of collectors and insurers. Keeping up with criminal contacts helped him do his job as an investigator at New Scotland Yard, heading the art and antiques squad, and now it helps him to retrieve stolen property for private clients. Read more of this post

Ask a Billionaire: GoPro CEO Nick Woodman; A lot of people would ask me, “Are you really doing this?” So I put a Post-it note by the side of my bed that said, “I am doing this.” Every morning when I woke up, the first thing I’d look at was that Post-it note

Ask a Billionaire: GoPro CEO Nick Woodman

By Emma Rosenblum on May 23, 2013

Nick Woodman
Chief executive officer, GoPro
Net worth: $1.73 billion

How much of your success would you chalk up to luck?
—@anne_norris

I was very lucky that I had my idea when I was young. I had very low overhead. I could go live out of my Volkswagen bus while I got my company going. But I had no idea how to bring this physical product from idea to reality and then sell it in the marketplace. A lot of people would ask me, “Are you really doing this?” So I put a Post-it note by the side of my bed that said, “I am doing this.” Every morning when I woke up, the first thing I’d look at was that Post-it note. And after three months of looking at it and getting myself pumped up to go to work, which was, you know, 5 feet across the room at my desk, I realized: I am doing this. Four months turned into four years turned into now 11 years. Dedicating myself to actually following through was my single biggest achievement.

John Doerr on the great entrepreneurs of the last half-century

John Doerr on the great entrepreneurs of the last half-century

BY MICHAEL CARNEY 
ON MAY 23, 2013

In his nearly 40 years in Silicon Valley, John Doerr has worked alongside many of the greatest entrepreneurs and leaders in history. The first: Former Intel CEO Andy Grove, with whom Doerr worked closely in roles ranging from intern to a leading sales person at the microchip company. Over the next four decades Doerr invested in, mentored, sat on boards of directors with, and otherwise observed Jeff Bezos, Larry Page (and Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt), Reed Hastings, Steve Jobs and many other luminaries. Speaking to a packed house at tonight’s PandoMonthly fireside chat in San Francisco, Doerr shared his impressions of each of these men, as well as a few personal bits of wisdom.

Read more of this post

Spend time wisely: How to focus on the things that matter

Spend time wisely: How to focus on the things that matter

by Eric Barker

How can you spend time wisely?

We all wonder where the hours go. There’s a good reason for that — we’re absolutely terrible at remembering how we really spend our time.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:

Hunting through data from the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other time diary projects, I came to the inescapable conclusion that how we think we spend our time has little to do with reality. We wildly overestimate time devoted to housework. We underestimate time devoted to sleep. We write whole treatises glorifying a golden age that never was; American women, for instance, spend more time with their children now than their grandmothers did in the 1950s and 60s. Read more of this post

Fresh Water ‘More Precious Than Gold’ in Bangladesh

Fresh Water ‘More Precious Than Gold’ in Bangladesh

By Naimul Haq on 11:40 am May 23, 2013.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Fahima Begum rises each morning at dawn and walks two kilometers to a small pond, the nearest source of fresh water.

On her way she passes the rusty old hand-pumped tube well that used to supply water to her village in Bangladesh’s arid Barind region until the water table here dropped out of reach.Using a ragtag array of pots, she carries back as much as her frail body will allow, knowing that it will have to last her family all day.

Susma Sen, also a resident of the Hamidpur village, located in the Chapainawabganj district, about 330 kilometers from the capital, Dhaka, echoed her neighbor’s lamentation, adding that she rations out her family’s water use for a few days to avoid making the grueling trek again the next morning. Read more of this post

How Beetle Overcame Nazi Past to Become Americans’ Car

How Beetle Overcame Nazi Past to Become Americans’ Car

“Owning a VW is Like Being in Love,” Popular Mechanics announced after polling its readers in 1956. “These owners have actually fallen in love with a car.”

Popular Mechanics wasn’t alone in marveling at the U.S. reception of the small “made in Germany” car. The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Business Week, Road and Track and the Nation added to a buzz that was vastly disproportionate to the vehicle’s market share at the time. Of the 7.9 million new automobiles sold in the U.S. in 1955, Volkswagen AG (VOW) had accounted for just 28,907.

Nonetheless, the excitement elicited by the “Volks” in the mid-1950s foreshadowed the car’s subsequent success. Annual U.S. sales rose to 120,422 in 1959 and peaked at 563,522 in 1968. The affectionately nicknamed “Beetle” or “Bug” became a lasting fixture of the cultural landscape.

For a product that started out as an initiative of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist dictatorship, this is a surprising trajectory. Commissioned in 1934 as the Nazi “people’s car,” the vehicle owed its rounded shape and defining engineering traits — most notably its robust air-cooled rear engine — to Ferdinand Porsche, who oversaw its development. Even so, the car’s historical lineage did little to dampen its budding reputation in the U.S. during the 1950s, partly because the Nazis never mass produced it. Read more of this post

The Steve Jobs Emails That Show How To Win A Hard-Nosed Negotiation

The Steve Jobs Emails That Show How To Win A Hard-Nosed Negotiation

Zachary M. Seward, Quartz | May 22, 2013, 1:15 PM | 31,749 | 20

The U.S. government’s price-fixing lawsuit against Apple goes to trial next month in New York. Ahead of its court date, the U.S. released emails that purport to show Apple was the “ringleader” in a scheme to set artificially high e-book prices with some of the largest American publishers, which have already settled the case.

The emails have mostly been viewed in the context of the lawsuit, but they also provide an extraordinary view of high-stakes negotiations between the leaders of two powerful firms, Apple and News Corp. They start far apart, but over the course of five days, Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs successfully pulls the son of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch over to his side.

Jobs was a famously hard-nosed negotiator who won these kinds of battles all the time. Before book publishers, there was the movie industry. And before that, music record labels. But most of those negotiations were hidden from view. What follows are the emails released last week along with some context; spelling and grammar have been preserved from the originals.  Read more of this post

Wily Mutant Cockroaches Learn to Avoid Sugar to Outsmart Traps

Mutant Cockroaches Learn to Avoid Sugar to Outsmart Traps

Roaches that have been hard to exterminate may be a variety that have decided sugar doesn’t taste quite so sweet as bait anymore, researchers found.

Most cockroach baits cover poison in a layer of glucose, a sugar. Some mutant German roaches, the most common species of pest found in houses, apartments, restaurants and hotels, now taste glucose as bitter, researchers said in a study released in the journal Science. This change in palate enables them to avoid traps.

The scientists collected 19 roach populations, mostly from the U.S. and Puerto Rico, to look at how common the glucose-spurning had become. They found seven populations that had the taste trait, said Coby Schal, a study author and a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He expects the numbers would have been higher had his group asked exterminators to send sample roaches from infestations that had been difficult to control by ordinary means. Read more of this post

Prime Numbers Are The Secret To The Cicada’s Success

Prime Numbers Are The Secret To The Cicada’s Success

John Matson, Scientific American | May 23, 2013, 5:24 PM | 1,746 | 

“Periodical cicadas have the longest life cycles known for insects. They are called ‘periodical’ because in any one population all but a trivially small fraction are exactly the same age. The nymphs suck juices from the roots of forest trees and finally emerge from the ground, become adults, mate, lay their eggs, and die, all within the same few weeks of every 17^th (or in the South, every 13^th) year. Not one species does this, but three, and they always do it together.” —Monte Lloyd and Henry S. Dybas, 1966

There is safety in numbers or, at least, there is survival in numbers. That is the maxim that periodical cicadas live by.

Periodical cicadas — insects of the genus Magicicada — are remarkable creatures. They develop extremely slowly, underground, before surfacing en masse at either 13- or 17-year intervals, when the ground temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit. As described in the epigraph above, they quickly mate, lay eggs and die, disappearing from view until their offspring crawl out of the ground more than a dozen years later. Read more of this post

Three Stories About Steve Jobs, Einstein, And Ben Franklin Prove That Creative Beats Smart

Three Stories About Steve Jobs, Einstein, And Ben Franklin Prove That Creative Beats Smart

Max Nisen | May 23, 2013, 1:55 PM | 2,948 | 6

There are few commencement speeches that last beyond the day they’re given. One is Steve Jobs’ 2005 address to Stanford’s graduating class, where he famously used three stories to memorably define his life.  Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson used the same format in his Sunday commencement speech at Pomona College. He spoke about Jobs and his other most recent biography subjects, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, to drive home an incredibly important lesson. “You are officially credentialed as smart,” Isaacson told graduates. “That’s the good news. The bad news, as you’ll learn, is that smart people are a dime a dozen, and they usually don’t amount to much.” Using one of the phrases most associated with Jobs, Isaacson argued that it’s something other than smarts that defines the most successful people.

“What really matters is those who are creative, those who are imaginative, those like Steve Jobs, who can think different,” he said. Read more of this post

The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success; Down-to-earth advice for getting out of a rut

May 22, 2013 4:18 pm

Down-to-earth advice for getting out of a rut

By Trisha Andres

The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success

Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson

Dutton Books, $27.95

You could call it being stuck in a rut. Or, as the authors of this new book put it, you could say that effort follows the law of diminishing returns, eventually causing both people and companies to reach a point of stagnation where marginal returns disappear.

In The Plateau Effect , Bob Sullivan, an NBC News columnist, and Hugh Thompson, a maths professor and IT security expert, argue they have found a cure for this condition. They call it “constant recalibration”, or always rethinking your approach to problems. Read more of this post

The terrifying rise of the political entrepreneur who “do play the political game, and do not necessarily build a successful business.”

The terrifying rise of the political entrepreneur

By Francisco Dao, Updated: May 23, 2013

In 1999, I decided to leave the headaches of entrepreneurship behind and get a regular Silicon Valley job in an attempt to ride the dot-com wave. My timing was terrible, and by 2001 I had started another company. In that time, however, I learned that the corporate world is comprised of two groups. In one group, there are the entrepreneurs, individuals judged by actual results and forced to live by Yoda’s famous line, “Do or do not, there is no try.” Then there are the corporate stooges, for lack of a better term, who are usually judged by their ability to play corporate politics, making nice to their various bosses.

How a corporate stooge actually performed, or whether or not they produced value, was of little importance. They only had to be good at crafting an appealing image. This is what made entrepreneurs a different breed from the people who made their bones climbing the corporate ladder. Entrepreneurs were judged strictly by their bottom line results. Read more of this post