American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things

American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things Hardcover

by Bob Dotson  (Author)

Release date: March 26, 2013

For the six million people who watch the Emmy Award–winning “American Story with Bob Dotson” on NBC’s Today Show, Bob Dotson’s reports celebrate the inspirational stories of everyday Americans. Dotson has been crisscrossing the country for more than forty years—logging more than four million miles—in search of people who have quietly but profoundly changed our lives and our country for the better. Now, in American Story, he presents a road map to the unsung heroes with thoughtful solutions to problems we all face, incredible ideas that work, and blueprints to living our dreams.

*The boss who came out of retirement to start a new company for his former employees who could not find work
*The truck driver who taught microsurgery
*The man you’ve never heard of who has 465 profitable patents, second only to Thomas Edison
*The doctor who developed the vaccine to prevent whooping cough, who didn’t retire until age 104

In the tradition of Tom Brokaw’s New York Times bestseller The Time of Our Lives, American Story is a deeply moving and endlessly fascinating alternative narrative for everyone who yearns to feel good about America. Read more of this post

Richard Feynman’s Love Letter to His Wife Sixteen Months After Her Death

Richard Feynman’s Love Letter to His Wife Sixteen Months After Her Death

by SHANE PARRISH on AUGUST 13, 2013

Via: Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science

Richard and Arline were soul mates. They were not clones of each other, but symbiotic opposites – each completed the other. Arline admired Richard’s obvious scientific brilliance, and Richard clearly adored the fact that she loved and understood things he could barely appreciate at the time. But what they shared, most of all, was a love of life and a spirit of adventure.

Richard and Arline exchanged frequent letters, a lot of which appear in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. Perhaps none better than the one Richard wrote to Arline sixteen months after her death.

October 17, 1946

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich.

PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.

Who: The A Method for Hiring

Who: The A Method for Hiring Hardcover

by Geoff Smart  (Author) , Randy Street  (Author)

In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent.
The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate.
Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to
• avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods
• define the outcomes you seek
• generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople
• ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate
• attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most
In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success. Read more of this post

The Seven Deadly Sins of Storytelling

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Jennifer Aaker: The Seven Deadly Sins of Storytelling

A Stanford GSB professor of marketing explains why engaging your audience is key to success. 

Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, writes, “Right-brain dominance is the new source of competitive advantage.” Tapping the right side of the brain allows for deeper engagement by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do this? Tell a compelling story.

Before you craft your story, ask yourself: “Who is my audience and what is my goal in engaging them?” Are you persuading someone to invest in your company? Are you trying to sell an idea to your co-workers? Do you want to inspire people to help a cause or save someone’s life? Start with a deep understanding of your audience, and ensure your story has a clear and powerful meaning — to them. Then you can set to work honing it for maximum impact. Read more of this post

Why Innovation Is Still Capitalism’s Star

August 17, 2013

Why Innovation Is Still Capitalism’s Star

By ROBERT J. SHILLER

CAPITALISM is culture. To sustain it, laws and institutions are important, but the more fundamental role is played by the basic human spirit of independence and initiative.

The decisive role of the “spirit of capitalism” is an old concept, going back at least to Max Weber, but it needs refreshing today with new evidence and new thinking. Edmund S. Phelps, a professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate, has written an interesting new book on the subject. It’s called “Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change” (Princeton University Press), and it contains a complex new analysis of the importance of an entrepreneurial culture.

Professor Phelps discerns a troubling trend in many countries, however, even the United States. He is worried about corporatism, a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society, he says, people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while, he says, but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead. Read more of this post

Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success

Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success [Hardcover]

G. Richard Shell (Author)

Release date: August 15, 2013

Everyone knows that you are supposed to “follow your dream.”  But where is the road map to help you discover what that dream is?
You have just found it. In Springboard, award-winning author and teacher G. Richard Shell helps you find your future. His advice: Take an honest look inside and then answer two questions:
What, for me, is success? 
How will I achieve it? 
You will begin by assessing your current beliefs about success, including the hidden influences of family, media, and culture. These are where the pressures to live “someone else’s life” come from. Once you gain perspective on these outside forces, you will be ready to look inside at your unique combination of passions and capabilities. The goal: to focus more on what gives meaning and excitement to your life and less on what you are “supposed” to want.
Drawing on his decades of research, Shell offers personalized assessments to help you probe your past, imagine your future, and measure your strengths. He then combines these with the latest scientific insights on everything from self-confidence and happiness to relationships and careers.
Throughout, he shares inspiring examples of people who found what they were meant to do by embracing their own true measure of success.

Eric Adler: one of Shell’s former students who walked away from a conventional business career to help launch a revolutionary new concept in public education that has placed hundreds of inner-city high school students in top colleges.

Kurt Timken: a Harvard-educated son of a Fortune 500 CEO who found his true calling as a hard-charging police officer fighting drug lords in southern California.

Cynthia Stafford: an office worker who became one of her community’s leading promoters of theater and the arts.

Get ready for the journey of a lifetime—one that will help you reevaluate your future and envision success on your own terms. Students and executives say that Richard Shell’s courses have changed their lives. Let this book change yours. Read more of this post

Good Deeds Gone Bad: Why does virtue sometimes beget more virtue but other times allow for vice?

August 16, 2013

Good Deeds Gone Bad

By MATTHEW HUTSON

ON your way to work today you may have paused to let another car merge into your lane. Or you stopped to give a dollar to a subway artist. A minute later, another chance to do the same may have appeared. Did your first act make the second more tempting? Or did you decide you had done your good deed for the day? Strangely, researchers have demonstrated both reactions — moral consistency and moral compensation — repeatedly in laboratories, leading them to ask why virtue sometimes begets more virtue and sometimes allows for vice. In doing so, they have shed an interesting light on how the conscience works. We often look to past behavior for clues about who we are and what we want, and then behave accordingly. Of course, we seek consistency not only with desirable behaviors, but also with less noble acts: in one study, subjects assigned to wear sunglasses they knew were counterfeit were more likely to cheat during the experiment. But other research shows that good behavior often makes people feel license to be bad. In one study, after shopping for environmentally friendly products, compared with conventional ones, subjects stole more money. Again, this works both ways: another study found that contemplating a taboo act increased one’s willingness to volunteer with an organ donation campaign. Read more of this post

Struggling Immigrant Artist Tied to $80 Million New York Fraud

August 16, 2013

Struggling Immigrant Artist Tied to $80 Million New York Fraud

By SARAH MASLIN NIR, PATRICIA COHEN and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Pei-Shen Qian’s neighbors on 95th Street in Woodhaven, Queens, knew he scratched out a living as an artist: he often dried his paintings in the sun, propping them up on the weathered white siding of his modest house. They were less clear on why he kept his windows covered, or why every so often a man in an expensive car would come to the house carrying paintings to, not from, a painter. “He would bring a painting in and show it to him, for him to work on or fix up something,” Edwin Gardiner, 68, who lives across the street, said before pausing and adding, “I don’t know what he did with it.” Parts of the mystery became clearer on Friday as neighbors learned that Mr. Qian, a quiet 73-year-old immigrant from China in a paint-flecked smock, is suspected of having fooled the art world by creating dozens of works that were modeled after America’s Modernist masters and were later sold as their handiwork for more than $80 million. Read more of this post

In praise of “laziness/busyness”: Businesspeople would be better off if they did less and thought more

In praise of laziness: Businesspeople would be better off if they did less and thought more

Aug 17th 2013 |From the print edition

THERE is a never-ending supply of business gurus telling us how we can, and must, do more. Sheryl Sandberg urges women to “Lean In” if they want to get ahead. John Bernard offers breathless advice on conducting “Business at the Speed of Now”. Michael Port tells salesmen how to “Book Yourself Solid”. And in case you thought you might be able to grab a few moments to yourself, Keith Ferrazzi warns that you must “Never Eat Alone”. Yet the biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.

Which of these banes of modern business life is worse remains open to debate. But what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster. All this “leaning in” is producing an epidemic of overwork, particularly in the United States. Americans now toil for eight-and-a-half hours a week more than they did in 1979. A survey last year by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that almost a third of working adults get six hours or less of sleep a night. Another survey last year by Good Technology, a provider of secure mobile systems for businesses, found that more than 80% of respondents continue to work after leaving the office, 69% cannot go to bed without checking their inbox and 38% routinely check their work e-mails at the dinner table.

This activity is making it harder to focus on real work as opposed to make-work. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, who has been conducting a huge study of work and creativity, reports that workers are generally more creative on low-pressure days than on high-pressure days when they are confronted with a flurry of unpredictable demands. In 2012 Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, and two colleagues deprived 13 people in the IT business of e-mail for five days and studied them intensively. They found that people without it concentrated on tasks for longer and experienced less stress.

It is high time that we tried a different strategy—not “leaning in” but “leaning back”. There is a distinguished history of leadership thinking in the lean-back tradition. Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, extolled the virtues of “masterful inactivity”. Herbert Asquith embraced a policy of “wait and see” when he had the job. Ronald Reagan also believed in not overdoing things: “It’s true hard work never killed anybody,” he said, “but I figure, why take the chance?”. This tradition has been buried in a morass of meetings and messages. We need to revive it before we schedule ourselves to death. Read more of this post

Weak entrepreneurship education could provoke backlash; much of entrepreneurship education is subpar, relying on what he describes as inspirational anecdotes rather than demanding courses that teach discrete behaviors and processes

Weak entrepreneurship education could provoke backlash

1:31pm EDT

By Sarah McBride

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When Bill Aulet tries to hire faculty to bolster entrepreneurship courses at MIT, where he is a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, he often runs up against a familiar challenge. “We bring in people and interview them all the time,” he said at a breakfast in San Francisco last week to mark the publication of his new book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship.” “They’re not MIT rigor. And we get to see the best of the best.” The paucity of teaching talent underscores what he sees as the biggest drawback in entrepreneurship education: much of it is subpar, relying on what he describes as inspirational anecdotes rather than demanding courses that teach discrete behaviors and processes. The situation could cause a backlash against entrepreneurship, he said. Such a backlash, Aulet said, could lead to undesirable outcomes including lack of policy geared toward entrepreneurship – such as tax breaks, or visas for foreign entrepreneurs – or fewer people starting companies. “Entrepreneurs won’t receive the support they need,” he said in an interview with Reuters. Read more of this post

Lessons From Monks About Designing The Technologies Of The Future

Lessons From Monks About Designing The Technologies Of The Future

KLINT FINLEY

posted yesterday

“The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body,” William S. Burroughs once said in a Nike commercial, of all places. But things haven’t worked out that way, at least not for most of us. Our technologies are designed to maximize shareholder profit, and if that means distracting, confusing or aggregating the end-user, then so be it. But another path is possible, argues Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in his new book The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul. Read more of this post