Richard Branson Taught Me That ‘Successful People Start Before They’re Ready’

Richard Branson Taught Me That ‘Successful People Start Before They’re Ready’

JAMES CLEAR, JAMESCLEAR.COM AUG. 23, 2013, 3:06 PM 2,709

In 1966, a dyslexic sixteen–year–old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church. Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first record store the next year. After two years of selling records, he decided to open his own record label and recording studio. Read more of this post

Jeff Bezos’ Hiring Strategy in Amazon’s Early Days: The ‘Anti-Pitch’; Rather than tell prospects how happy and amazing Amazon is, Jeff Bezos would tell them that “it’s not easy to work here.” It had a powerful, intended effect — there was no disillusionment over what Amazon was when the prospect eventually joined. Those who chose Amazon in spite of the anti-pitch knew what they were getting into, and had in fact self-selected for the challenge. Amazon became known as a company whose engineers were intense and elite.

Jeff Bezos’ Hiring Strategy: The ‘Anti-Pitch’

WALTER CHEN, IDONETHIS BLOG AUG. 23, 2013, 3:36 PM 2,580 1

Today, the competition for top tech talent is as fierce as it’s ever been, and without a high-performing team, it’s tough to survive. It makes sense that such intense competitive pressure drives startup founders to pitch their company to prospective hires in ever more grandiose terms, exaggerate how well their company is “crushing it,” and make their culture sound like the happiest place on earth. How else can you stand out to a top candidate who’s considering offers from all of the hottest companies? It’s counterintuitive, but Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to hiring: he gives prospects a hiring anti-pitch. Rather than tell prospects how happy and amazing Amazon is, Jeff Bezos would tell them that “it’s not easy to work here.” Even in 1997, during the dot-com boom, Bezos’s anti-pitch was stark and to the point: “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Read more of this post

An Alternative Reason Good Investment Managers Struggle To Persist; after the lifestyle moves up, the fear sets in. Now it’s less about the glory of the home run and more about the fear of a strikeout

An Alternative Reason Good Investment Managers Struggle To Persist

Posted by Michael Kitces on Wednesday, August 21st, 2013

Earning an income is a fundamental incentive to work. It starts with just earning enough for the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter. From there, it grows to a desire for a greater lifestyle, the “nicer things” of life, and perhaps even the opportunity to accumulate enough to not need to work in the future (i.e., to retire), which in turn incentivizes trying to further grow income and advance a career. Read more of this post

Star Stock Pickers Harder Than Ever To Find

Star Stock Pickers Harder Than Ever To Find

By Cinthia Murphy

August 22, 2013

Peter Lynch, George Soros and Bill Miller are some of the best active equity fund managers the market has seen, and to a certain degree, they also seem to be a disappearing breed. Active equity managers who become household names on the heels of stellar year-after-year outperformance are harder and harder to find these days. Lynch is famous as the stock investor who took the Fidelity Magellan Fund from its small beginnings in 1977 to $14 billion in assets by 1990, all the while beating the S&P 500 Index in 11 of those 13 years. Soros, meanwhile, is known in part for running the Quantum Fund for nearly 20 years, which generated an average annual return of more than 30 percent under his watch. Read more of this post

Why most brainstorming sessions fail; Trying to “think outside the box” won’t work if you don’t recognize the box you’re already in. Here’s how to brainstorm better

Why most brainstorming sessions fail

By Anne Fisher, contributor August 23, 2013: 10:41 AM ET

Trying to “think outside the box” won’t work if you don’t recognize the box you’re already in. Here’s how to brainstorm better.

Laughing Stock/Corbis

FORTUNE — Dear Annie: I’m a member of a 14-person brand-management team for a product whose sales were skyrocketing for a while but have now leveled off. My boss told me that senior management is “concerned” about this plateau where we seem to be stuck, and he wants me to organize some brainstorming sessions to try to come up with “outside the box” ideas for increasing sales. Not only have I never done this before, but it’s stressing me out for two other reasons. First, previous brainstorming efforts have led nowhere, so people here are pretty jaded about the whole idea. And second, my boss gave me the impression that this assignment is kind of an audition for a promotion, so I don’t want to screw it up. Do you or your readers have any suggestions? —Pittsburgh Pat Read more of this post

Paris pickpockets target tourists from China; Paris may be irrepressibly beautiful and intoxicatingly romantic, but it is still not heaven on earth

August 23, 2013 3:55 pm

Paris pickpockets target tourists from China

By Adam Thomson in Paris

For years, Paris has traded on its reputation as the City of Light and even as the city ofl’amour. But for a growing number of Chinese tourists, it is becoming the city of crime. Chinese visitors are descending on Paris in record numbers and their lavish spending on luxury brands has made them an irresistible target for thieves. Petty crime between January and the end of June in one of the world’s most-visited cities jumped 7.8 per cent compared with the same period in 2012 – but it was up by more than 24 per cent when it came to Chinese tourists. Jean-Francois Zhou, a tour operator based on the Champs-Elyseés, says that thieves see the hordes of Chinese as prime targets because they carry far more cash than visitors from other countries – in large part because of the significant fees involved in using their plastic cards abroad. Read more of this post

Otom (Others’ Time and Others’ Money) causing a ruckus among investors

Updated: Saturday August 24, 2013 MYT 7:53:44 AM

Otoms causing a ruckus among investors

GOVERNANCE MATTERS: BY SHIREEN MUHIUDEEN

THE acronym Otom looks harmless enough, but actually describes a devious charlatan who uses Others’ Time and Others’ Money (hence Otom) for their own gains. Most individuals will invest in a particular company only if they believe in the people who run it. It is all about trust and should that trust be broken, the investment will not be forthcoming. With so many investment opportunities these days, many investors are looking to diversify their portfolios by putting their money in various asset classes, which include properties, equities and, very often, unlisted equities. Read more of this post

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: If You Want To Be Successful, Stop Going To The Bathroom

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: If You Want To Be Successful, Stop Going To The Bathroom

JULIA LA ROCHE AUG. 23, 2013, 11:26 AM 18,286 41

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire founder of media giant Bloomberg LP, said on his radio show that people who want to be successful shouldn’t go the bathroom a lot. From Politicker: [via Daily Intelligencer] “Everybody’s got different opportunities in front of ‘em, different skill sets they bring and luck plays a part of it. But my experience is that you make your own luck. The harder you work, the luckier you get.” “I always tried to be the first one in in the morning and the last one to leave at night, take the fewest vacations and the least time away from the desk to go to the bathroom or have lunch. You gotta be there. I mean, everybody says, ‘Oh, that’s crazy!’ But if you want to succeed, … you can’t control how lucky you are, you can’t control how smart you are, but you can control how hard you work, so that’s the first thing.” Cross your legs, folks.

Beware the Sirens of Management Pseudo-Science

Beware the Sirens of Management Pseudo-Science

by Freek Vermeulen  |   9:00 AM August 23, 2013

Management is not an exact science, they say. And I guess most things that involve the study of human behavior cannot be. But I sometimes wonder if that is the reason — or the excuse — that the business sections at airport bookshops are so full of nonsense. Quite often these books are written with panache. And the authors — aspiring “management thinkers” and “gurus” (never scientists) — have an excellent sense of the pulse of the business public. They are neither crooks nor charlatans; they write what they believe. But that doesn’t make their beliefs right. People can believe vigorously in voodooism, homeopathy, and creationism. Read more of this post

Bankers turned novelists found starting a new chapter tough but rewarding; “The world I used to occupy was all about dirty money”; “If you thought you worked hard as a banker you will be begging for mercy by the time you reach the end of a novel”

August 22, 2013 5:57 pm

They plotted to escape the City

By Emma Jacobs

Elmore Leonard, the American crime writer who died this week, was once asked if he could write about the wrongdoers on Wall Stin the aftermath of the financial crisis. “No – where’s the action?” he said. “My people don’t have stock. It’s the most boring thing in the world to make your money that way – using money to make money.” Nonetheless, a number of former executives, bankers and traders have attempted to do just that by leaving the constraints of the corporate world to become novelists – with some of them drawing on experiences from their previous careers. Read more of this post

Bank of America reviews long-hours culture after intern’s death; “Looking back, the money was just an anaesthetic. Ultimately, the money and perks could never make up for the exhaustion or the lack of control we all had over our lives.”

Bank of America reviews long-hours culture after intern’s death

Moritz Erhardt, who was ‘tipped for greatness’ was found dead in shower after working solidly for 72 hours at Merrill Lynch

Shiv Malik

theguardian.com, Friday 23 August 2013 13.36 BST

Bank of America Merrill Lynch will review its working practices and culture of long hours following the death of a German intern last week, who colleagues said had pulled three all-nighters in a row before being discovered by emergency services. One of the world’s largest banks issued a statement on Friday afternoon expressing shock at the death of 21-year-old Moritz Erhardt, who was working in Merrill Lynch’s investment banking division, and announced a review of working practices with a special focus on junior members of staff. Erhardt, from south-west Germany, was found dead in a shower cubicle at his temporary accommodation in east London last Thursday evening. Read more of this post

Any society with a lot of “threshold earners” is likely to experience growing income inequality. A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold

From the January/February 2011 issue

The Inequality That Matters

Tyler Cowen

Does growing wealth and income inequality in the United States presage the downfall of the American republic? Will we evolve into a new Gilded Age plutocracy, irrevocably split between the competing interests of rich and poor? Or is growing inequality a mere bump in the road, a statistical blip along the path to greater wealth for virtually every American? Or is income inequality partially desirable, reflecting the greater productivity of society’s stars? Read more of this post

A Brief History of Maps: A look at maps through time and what they did, and didn’t, show us.

August 23, 2013, 9:40 p.m. ET

What Lurks Beyond the Boundaries

AMANDA FOREMAN

For adults vacationing with children, the greatest test of endurance used to be putting up with the refrain “Are we there yet?” The invention of Google Maps along with similar Internet tools has mercifully spread peace and good times where guesswork and frayed nerves reigned before. Still, it is important to remember that the desire to know “where and when” is one of the noblest questions of humankind. The earliest efforts to ascribe boundaries to space and time were directed up instead of down. The ancients began with the lights in the night sky. The oldest star chart in existence depicts the Orion constellation, carved onto the tusk of a woolly mammoth during the Stone Age. Read more of this post

The Cadbury legacy

Updated: Saturday August 24, 2013 MYT 9:54:30 AM

The Cadbury legacy

OPTIMISTICALLY CAUTIOUS: BY ERROL OH

WHAT should you do if you’re hoping that a prestigious institution will one day honour your work by setting up an archive to preserve and organise your records? Here’s a suggestion: Get appointed the head of a committee that produces an influential and timely report on a hot-button topic, and from then on, become a widely recognised authority on that subject. That worked for Sir Adrian Cadbury, not that there’s any evidence that he had indeed nursed such an ambition. On Wednesday, Cambridge University’s Judge Business School issued a press release saying Cadbury had recently donated to the school copies of all his speeches on corporate governance. These go to the Cadbury Archive housed at the school. The rest of the archive’s papers are those accumulated by Cadbury when he was chairman of Britain’s Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance. The committee was formed in May 1991 by the Financial Reporting Council, the London Stock Exchange and the accountancy profession. Read more of this post