Kibbutz to Kardashian Turns Caesarstone, Maker of Kitchen Countertops, Into World Beater

Kibbutz to Kardashian Turns Caesarstone Into World Beater

The kibbutz that controls Caesarstone Sdot Yam Ltd. (CSTE), the maker of Kim Kardashian’s quartz kitchen countertops, is taking advantage of a 34 percent surge in profit since selling shares in New York last year to build a factory in the U.S. and start paying residents’ salaries.

Instead of the socialist ideals of its founders, the northern Israeli community has joined kibbutzim courting investors and listing on stock exchanges in Tel Aviv, London and New York (ISRA25BN). The farm collectives central to establishing the state in 1948 now make everything from drip irrigation systems to home furnishings for reality TV stars, contributing about 7 percent of industrial output in an economy growing faster than the average of advanced economies since 2003.

Caesarstone rose 44 percent in 2012, the second-best return among foreign initial public offerings in the U.S. after Guangzhou, China-based Vipshop Holdings Ltd. (VIPS) It’s up 83 percent this year and was named the exclusive provider of non-laminate countertops for the U.S. unit of Ikea Group. The combination of the 1980s financial crisis that bankrupted hundreds of kibbutzim and the country’s move to an export-led economy forced collectives to embrace free market strategies, said Gal Maharshak, the head of the non-profit organization desk at Excellence Nessuah Asset Management in Ramat Gan. Read more of this post

Mission vs Ambition: Our vision in life defines the quality and direction of your thoughts; Mother Teresa at a tender age of 12 years, took a vow to commit herself to a religious life

Mission vs Ambition

by Ashu Khanna | May 29, 2013

Our vision in life defines the quality and direction of your thoughts

“The very essence of leadership is that you have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” Hesburg

Our vision in life defines the quality and direction of your thoughts. If our vision in life is to be successful, every action will be directed from the need to be successful. Similarly, if our vision in life is being happy and peaceful, the quality of our thoughts will be governed by this need. Based on our circumstances and desires, we all have a different vision for our life. The vision for life often changes with stages of life. In the early years, we are driven by fun and learning and gradually, this changes to ambition and success.

Mother Teresa at a tender age of 12 years, took a vow to commit herself to a religious life. Having established a higher ideal for her life at such an early age, all her actions from thereon gravitated towards learning the order of the nuns and the language of the mission.  Read more of this post

How to build an “agile” culture

How to build an “agile” culture

BY BOB GOWER 
ON MAY 28, 2013

In 1987, when Paul O’Neill took over as CEO of Alcoa — a once great giant of American industry — he vowed to put all his energy behind improving one metric and one metric only: worker safety. When his tactics were questioned by a group of concerned investors, he explained, “If we bring our injury rates down, it won’t be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you sometimes hear from other CEOs. It will be because the individuals at this company have agreed to become part of something important: They’ve devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence.”

O’Neill chose safety as his metric — instead of profits, efficiency, inventory or cost of goods sold — because he recognized that safety is core to culture and that culture in turn is core to success. Transform the culture, he believed, and you’d transform the bottom line. Read more of this post

Self-made millionaire and Pimlico Plumbers founder Charlie Mullins shares how he made his first million and how he’s grown his business significantly despite the economic gloom

Charlie Mullins: How I made my first million

Self-made millionaire and Pimlico Plumbers founder Charlie Mullins shares how he made his first million.

By Emma Wall

3:45PM BST 28 May 2013

Charlie Mullins was Britain’s first “millionaire plumber”. Pimlico Plumbers was started from a basement of a London estate agent in 1979; it now employs 200 people and has an £18m turnover.

Charlie decided at the age of nine that he wanted to be a plumber, after noticing that his local plumber was well respected, had a great lifestyle and money. So, he took to ‘bunking off’ school to earn “two bob a day”’ working with the local plumber.

After leaving school at 15 with no qualifications – “a big mistake, I should have left at 14,” he said – and completing a four year apprenticeship in plumbing Charlie started out with a second hand van and a bag of tools. In 1979 he started Pimlico Plumbers from a basement of an estate agent in Pimlico. Read more of this post

Export Champions: My Carry Potty is an overseas hit; Amanda Jenner, founder of My Carry Potty, explains how she turned her “back of a cigarette packet” sketch into a business that’s exporting to 30 markets

Export Champions: My Carry Potty is an overseas hit

Amanda Jenner, founder of My Carry Potty, explains how she turned her “back of a cigarette packet” sketch into a business that’s exporting to 30 markets.

Amanda Jenner started My Carry Potty four years ago

By James Hurley

6:05PM BST 28 May 2013

A fledgling exporting strategy can go too well. Just ask Amanda Jenner. Three years ago, when she took the children’s travel potty she had designed to an overseas trade show for the first time, she was overwhelmed by interest and orders.

“We had an astronomical response – I was shocked at the strength of it. It was just me and one product next to all these established businesses but we got orders from South Korea, America, Germany and Italy.”

“Hugely exciting”, the Bournemouth-based entrepreneur recalls, yet she admits she was “naive” to take on “everyone who said yes”. “People will order 1,000 units but don’t want to build the brand. Now we’ve realised exporting is not all about volume.” Read more of this post

JCPenney Forced To Deny Tea Kettle Looks Like Hitler

JCPenney Forced To Deny Tea Kettle Looks Like Hitler

Jim Edwards | May 28, 2013, 2:56 PM | 16,439 | 17

JCPenney has officially denied that a tea kettle being advertised on a billboard on the 405 Interstate near Culver City, Calif., is intended to represent Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator during World War II. The notion that the kettle looked a bit like the architect of the Holocaust caught on after someone posted a photo on Imgur, the photo sharing site, showing what the image of the kettle looks like if you squint at it. Sure enough, a black sweep of hair, a moustache and a saluting “arm” appear, sort of. The Telegraph wrote a story about it, and JCP responded in a tweet that said, “Certainly unintended. If we’d designed the kettle to look like something, we would’ve gone w/a snowman.” (It’s a rare day when a major retailer can get away with tweeting a Hitler joke — but JCP has pulled this off.) Here’s the Imgur photo:

25 Psychological Traps That Lead ‘Good’ People To Commit Fraud

25 Psychological Traps That Lead ‘Good’ People To Commit Fraud

Max Nisen and Aimee Groth | May 28, 2013, 1:27 PM | 18,389 | 3

Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling (R) was convicted for conspiracy and securities fraud

Many white collar crimes aren’t committed by hardened criminals. It’s often normally moral people under financial strain, those under severe pressure from their bosses or shareholders, or people who get away with something minor then try to to test their limits.

So what exactly leads otherwise normal and hardworking people to cross the line? That’s the subject of a paper by Dr. Muel Kaptein of the Rotterdam School Of Management.

We’ve collected some of the key insights and cognitive biases as a guide of what to look out for in a workplace.  Read more of this post

To disrupt an industry, it’s best to know it well

To disrupt an industry, it’s best to know it well

BY ERIN GRIFFITH 
ON MAY 27, 2013

The word “disruption” gets tossed around so often in the tech blogosphere that it’s become practically meaningless. But there’s plenty of room in the world for legit disruption, i.e., starting a company that eats away at, and maybe even topples, a dominant industry.

The problem is that too many people set out to disrupt industries that they don’t understand.Often VCs worship the idea of a naive 20-year-old engineer who is unfamiliar how an old industry is set in its ways. It takes that kind of naiveté to shake up the old dominant players who aren’t incentivized to innovate, the thinking goes. Execs in the hospitality industry can list thousands of reasons why something like Airbnb would never work. It took a crazy, determined and somewhat desperate group of recent college grads to build something like Airbnb; now those same hotel execs are wondering if their businesses are under threat from the site and its many copycats. Read more of this post

Museums, long reluctant to post good-quality images of their artworks online, are rethinking that strategy as innovators like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam make a range of copying and clipping services available

May 28, 2013

Masterworks for One and All

By NINA SIEGAL

AMSTERDAM — Many museums post their collections online, but the Rijksmuseum here has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost, encouraging the public to copy and transform its artworks into stationery, T-shirts, tattoos, plates or even toilet paper.

The museum, whose collection includes masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Mondrian and van Gogh, has already made images of 125,000 of its works available through Rijksstudio, an interactive section of its Web site. The staff’s goal is to add 40,000 images a year until the entire collection of one million artworks spanning eight centuries is available, said Taco Dibbits, the director of collections at the Rijksmuseum. Read more of this post

Talent Management: Boards Give Their Companies an “F”

Talent Management: Boards Give Their Companies an “F”

by Boris Groysberg and Deborah Bell  |  12:00 PM May 28, 2013

What is top of mind for corporate boards worldwide? In one of the most comprehensive global surveys of corporate directors to date, we found that they were very worried about developing and enacting strategic plans that will enable their organizations to succeed. And what did they say was their biggest concern? Not competitive threats. Not rising costs. Not innovation, risk management, technology, debt, or the regulatory environment. Corporate directors identified talent management as their single greatest strategic challenge.

In our survey, conducted in partnership with WomenCorporateDirectors and Heidrick & Struggles, we asked over 1,000 board members across the globe to rate their companies’ performance in each of nine dimensions of talent management: attracting top talent; hiring top talent; assessing talent; developing talent; rewarding talent; retaining talent; firing; aligning talent strategy with business strategy; and leveraging diversity in company’s workforce. Read more of this post

NYC Commuters Ride to Work as Public Bikeshare Begins

NYC Commuters Ride to Work as Public Bikeshare Begins

New York City’s newest public-transit option, which allows commuters to rent bicycles to get to work, got its first real road test today as businesses reopened after the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

Tim McGlinn, a 44-year-old equities analyst at U.S. Steel & Carnegie Pension Fund, stuck his blue plastic key in the docking station outside Pennsylvania Station this morning to release one of 25 gleaming new two-wheelers for the first time. He takes the train from Maplewood, New Jersey, each day and had longed for the opportunity to swap his subway trip for a bike ride on the two-mile trek uptown to his office. Read more of this post

Bayern Ousts Manchester United From Soccer Brand-Value Throne

Bayern Ousts Manchester United From Soccer Brand-Value Throne

Bayern Munich, which won the Champions League title four days ago, has ousted Manchester United from first place in brand value, according to a survey of the world’s top soccer teams.

Brand Finance Plc gave Bayern a brand valuation of 668 million euros ($860 million), up 8 percent from last year, the company said in an e-mailed statement, citing its annual report. Manchester United, which won a record 20 English league titles, fell to second place with a brand estimated at 650 million euros.

“Bayern Munich is still very much a story of domestic dominance, however its continued presence in the Champions league has provided the club with access to a global audience,” Dave Chattaway, London-based Brand Finance’s Head of Sports Valuation, said in the statement. “The challenge now for all Bundesliga clubs and the league itself, is to see if they can export their domestic brand strength into global opportunities.” Read more of this post

What is the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims?

What is the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims?

May 28th 2013, 23:50 by S.B.

CLASHES between Islam’s two big sects, the Sunni and the Shia, take place across the Muslim world. In the Middle East a potent mix of religion and politics hassharpened the divide between Iran’s Shia government and the Gulf states, which have Sunni governments. Last year a report by the Pew Research Centre, a think tank, found 40% of Sunnis do not consider Shia to be proper Muslims. So what exactly divides Sunni and Shia Islam and how deep does the rift go?

The argument dates back to the death in 632 of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad. Tribal Arabs who followed him were split over who should inherit what was both a political and a religious office. The majority, who would go on to become known as the Sunnis, and today make up 80% of Muslims, backed Abu Bakr, a friend of the Prophet and father of his wife Aisha. Others thought Muhammad’s kin the rightful successors. They claimed the Prophet had anointed Ali, his cousin and son-in-law—they became known as the Shia, a contraction of “shiaat Ali”, the partisans of Ali. Abu Bakr’s backers won out, though Ali did briefly rule as the fourth caliph, the title given to Muhammad’s successors. Islam’s split was cemented when Ali’s son Hussein was killed in 680 in Karbala (modern Iraq) by the ruling Sunni caliph’s troops. Sunni rulers continued to monopolise political power, while the Shia lived in the shadow of the state, looking instead to their imams, the first twelve of whom were descended directly from Ali, for guidance. As time went on the religious beliefs of the two groups started to diverge. Read more of this post

Fed’s 100-Year Roots Grew From Virginia Congressman

Fed’s 100-Year Roots Grew From Virginia Congressman

As Carter Glass began to sketch out plans for a central bank in 1913, all the U.S. representative from Virginia had to do was read his mail to know he had nationwide support.

“As soon as money is needed in business in larger amounts than usual, the banks and business men begin to wonder if it is going to be possible to get the funds necessary to see us through,” Chas. K. Gleason of Edwin P. Gleason & Son, “Converters of Cotton Goods,” wrote from Philadelphia on March 26, 1913. “Currency Legislation is of utmost importance to business men and all the people connected with them.”

Gleason was just one of thousands of American bankers, coffee roasters, shoemakers, bed manufacturers, coal jobbers and hardware-store owners who were fed up with the way the financial system was strangling an otherwise booming economy at the turn of the 20th century.

The correspondence — in an archive of Glass’s papers at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library — leaves little doubt about why the Federal Reserve Act became a law 100 years ago. The public demanded it. Read more of this post

Bill Gates Fattens Wealth Gap Over Slim as Family Office Cascade’s Investments in Ecolab Surges

Bill Gates Fattens Wealth Gap Over Slim as Cascade Surges

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates extended his lead yesterday over Mexico’s Carlos Slim as the world’s richest person to $5.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Almost all of Gates’s investments, including a 4.8 percent stake in Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, have soared this year while Slim’s main holding, a 44 percent stake in America Movil SAB, the largest mobile-phone operator in the Americas, has fallen 14 percent.

One of the biggest gainers in Gates’s portfolio, which he controls through his Kirkland, Washington-based investment vehicle Cascade Investment LLC, is Ecolab Inc. (ECL) The St. Paul, Minnesota-based provider of sanitation and health services is up 22 percent this year, a performance that has added $423 million to the billionaire’s fortune.

“Ninety percent of what they produce gets flushed down the drain and you have to rebuy it,” Shlomo Rosenbaum, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co.’s Baltimore office, said in a telephone interview. “They have repositioned their portfolio of assets to be much more exposed to the energy market. That’s something that I think will help their top-line growth for years to come.” Read more of this post