How To Decide Whether A Company Is Valuable Or Vulnerable; Gandhi once said you can measure the civilization of a people by how they treat their animals. Translated into corporate terms: you can measure how ideas are given arms and legs so they can move forward

How To Decide Whether A Company Is Valuable Or Vulnerable

MICHELLE KERRIGAN, WORKPLACE CONFIDENCE 41 MINUTES AGO 0

Gandhi once said you can measure the civilization of a people by how they treat their animals. Translated into corporate terms: you can measure the success of leaders by how they value teamwork and day-to-day operations. Recently, a law firm partner who specializes in joint ventures and venture capital transactions asked me what I look for in workplace success. It was an operational due diligence exercise to help investors determine “am I on a winner?” I gave her a list of questions to consider when assessing quality, whether you’re an investor or a CEO wondering about your own operation. Here are four to get you started:

The management: are they leaders?

The team: are they organized and primed to execute?

What happens when people ask questions?

Is there an overall sense of unity and positive energy?

Most people might just focus on the first question. Totally understandable. But, if you’re investing in a company with a growing or changing operation, you may want to take a closer look at the day-to-day workplace. That’s where the magic happens. Where the vision you’re investing in comes to life, in the form of people, process, and teamwork. It’s where ideas are given arms and legs so they can move forward. The value in any company depends on it, and so does the value of leadership. Answers to the bottom 3 questions will tell you a lot about the #1. Read more of this post

Ogilvy & Mather Has Launched A Behavioral Science School

Ad Agency Launched A Behavioral Science School

JESSICA DAVIES, THE DRUM AUG. 15, 2013, 9:30 AM 185

Ogilvy & Mather’s behavioural sciences practice #ogilvychange has launched its first summer school, giving students the chance to work on live marketing briefs. The school has chosen six university students from 70 applicants, all of whom have proven they are well-read in behavioural sciences literature and can apply their knowledge beyond the theory and outside their own laboratories. The course, which kicked off this week, will begin with a crash-course in applying behavioural science, before moving on to work on live behaviour-change marketing briefs with specialist teams from across the Ogilvy Group businesses. The will work alongside leading advocates of behavioural economics, including Ogilvy’s vice chairman Rory Sutherland and Dr Nichola Raihani from UCL. Ogilvy & Mather UK’s vice chairman Rory Sutherland said the advertising and marketing industry would benefit from having more psychologists and behavioural economists. “The new media world, and the new behavioural tasks we are being required to solve, make this an imperative. “But there is another reason, too. I would like them to explain why in God’s name the marketing function has for 50 years assumed it has absolutely nothing to learn from academic psychology,” he said. The positions were publicised at “top-tier” universities that offer psychology and behavioural sciences degrees, across social media sites and the IPA student careers website. Ogilvy & Mather launched #ogilvychange earlier this year.

Apples losing their crunch to global warming: study

Apples losing their crunch to global warming: study

POSTED: 15 Aug 2013 10:41 PM
Global warming is causing apples to become less crunchy, but sweeter. PARIS, France: Global warming is causing apples to lose some of their crunch but is also making them sweeter, a study said Thursday. Analysing data gathered from 1970 to 2010 at two orchards in Japan, a research team said there was clear evidence that climate change was having an effect on apple taste and texture. “All such changes may have resulted from earlier blooming and higher temperatures” during the growth season, they wrote in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. About 60 million tonnes of apples are produced every year, making it the world’s third most popular fruit. Previous studies had shown that global warming was causing apple trees to flower earlier, and that harvests were also affected by changes in rainfall and air temperature. The orchards used in the study produce the Fuji and Tsugaru apples, the two most popular kinds in the world. The farms are located in Japan’s Nagano and Aomori prefectures, which had seen a mean air temperature rise of 0.31 and 0.34 degrees Celsius (0.5 and 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit), respectively, per decade. The orchards were chosen because there had been no changes in cultivars or management practices for extended periods, thus ruling out non-climate factors like technological improvements in the apple change. The data collected over the years included measures of acid and sugar concentration, fruit firmness and watercore — a disease that causes water-soaked areas in the flesh of an apple. The analysis showed a decrease in acidity, firmness and watercore, but a rise in sugar concentration over time. “We think that a sweeter apple is a positive thing and a loss of firmness is a negative thing,” study co-author Toshihiko Sugiura of the National Institute of Fruit Tree Science in Fujimoto told AFP. “We think most people like sweet and firm apple fruits, although everyone has his own taste. A soft apple is called ‘Boke’ in Japanese which means a dull or senile fruit.” The study said that the results “suggest that the taste and textural attributes of apples in the market are undergoing change from a long-term perspective, even though consumers might not perceive these subtle change.” The research claims to be the first to measure changes in the taste and texture of food as a result of climate change.

How LeapFrog’s CEO Built the Educational Toy Company; Mike Wood Left the Legal Profession to Focus on Plastic Toy Letters; Glitches Early On Delayed Production

Updated August 14, 2013, 8:59 p.m. ET

How LeapFrog’s CEO Built the Educational Toy Company

Mike Wood Left the Legal Profession to Focus on Plastic Toy Letters; Glitches Early On Delayed Production

ADAM JANOFSKY

Mike Wood, creator of educational toy company LeapFrog, at his office in San Rafael, Calif., on Tuesday.

Mike Wood had been practicing law for about 11 years when he encountered a challenge that would change his life: teaching his 3-year-old son to read. His son Mat had memorized the letters of the alphabet, but struggled to learn the sounds that the letters represented. Over the next five years, Mr. Wood researched marketing and phonics, a teaching method that focuses on the correlation between letter groupings and sounds, while holding down his partnership at a technology law firm. He decided to take sound chips—like the ones used in singing greeting cards—and put them in plastic toy letters. When a child pushed down on a letter, it would make the sound that the letter represented. Mr. Wood designed a prototype, left his job and set up focus groups with mothers. He then found a buyer at Toys “R” Us Inc. and a manufacturer in China. In 1995, he started LeapFrog Enterprises Inc., LF +0.57% an educational toy company. By 2002, LeapFrog had $520 million in annual revenue, and its best-selling product, a hand-held learning device called LeapPad, was in nine million homes. The Emeryville, Calif., company’s stock soared almost 99% after it went public that July, making it the top-performing IPO of the year. Read more of this post

The Entire History Of The World In One Chart

The Entire History Of The World In One Chart

SLATE AUG. 14, 2013, 1:37 PM 10,499 9

The Vault is Slate’s history blog. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @slatevault, and find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here.

This “Histomap,” created by John B. Sparks, was first printed by Rand McNally in 1931. The David Rumsey Map Collection hosts a fully zoomable version here. This giant, ambitious chart fit neatly with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the “outline,” in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! all of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman. The 5-foot-long Histomap was sold for $1 and folded into a green cover, which featured endorsements from historians and reviewers. The chart was advertised as “clear, vivid, and shorn of elaboration,” while at the same time capable of “holding you enthralled” by presenting: the actual picture of the march of civilization, from the mud huts of the ancients thru the monarchistic glamour of the middle ages to the living panorama of life in present day America. The chart emphasizes domination, using color to show how the power of various “peoples” (a quasi-racial understanding of the nature of human groups, quite popular at the time) evolved throughout history. It’s unclear what the width of the colored streams is meant to indicate. In other words, if the Y axis of the chart clearly represents time, what does the X axis represent? Did Sparks see history as a zero-sum game, in which peoples and nations would vie for shares of finite resources? Given the timing of his enterprise—he made this chart between two world wars and at the beginning of a major depression—this might well have been his thinking. Sparks followed up on the success of this Histomap by publishing at least two more: the Histomap of religion (which I’ve been unable to find online) and the Histomap of evolution.

Harnessing the Power of Surprise for Business Breakthroughs

Harnessing the Power of Surprise for Business Breakthroughs

Aug 14, 2013

we’re wired to appreciate positive surprises. our brains are set up to appreciate the way they challenge assumptions while adding value to things we care about

Think about the first time you picked up an iPod, iPhone or iPad and experienced the touch screen as an extension of your fingertips. Reflect back on the first time you played the Nintendo Wii, drove a Toyota Prius, used Purell hand sanitizer, discovered the trendy design of Method soap, visited Starbucks, or saw Cirque du Soleil. The list of the usual suspects of breakthroughs could go on and on. Though these things are all quite different from one another, they tend to produce similar feelings of positive surprise—with a hint of delight, wonder, and intrigue—when we first encounter them. Read more of this post

The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer

The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer

by Daniel Burrus  |  11:00 AM August 14, 2013

We all know that if you put a frog in water and slowly heat it to the boiling point, the frog will stay put and die. But if you throw the frog into already boiling water, it will quickly jump out. Today’s IT leaders have known about the exponential growth of processing power, storage, and bandwidth, but like the frog, they didn’t notice the boiling point approaching because the change has happened over so many decades. These three change accelerators are what lie behind today’s avalanche of business transformation, and they are directly affecting the roles of CIO and CTO.  Read more of this post

A Formula for Fixing the Hardest Problems

A Formula for Fixing the Hardest Problems

by Frank Weil  |  10:00 AM August 14, 2013

For many years I have been asking friends and colleagues, “What frustrates you the most in modern society?” I’ve received many, varied answers but at their core, so often, was a common root — another question: “How can citizens and government accomplish what modern life requires of them to improve the world in which they coexist?” As the three basic sectors of U.S. society — government, business, and nonprofit,each of which have their own culture, language, and mentality — attempt to solve our most-pressing challenges, we seem to be sinking into a bottomless black hole. Even simple problems elude solutions, and the ones that do exist — regulation in government, competition in business, and the work of nonprofits to fill gaps — frequently fall short. How can we find some way out of this mess? Read more of this post

Fearing Obsolescence, a Company Charts Its Reinvention; When a Web marketing and communications company discovered its hardware system was out-of-date, it set out on the giant — and ultimately successful — task of remaking the company

August 14, 2013

Fearing Obsolescence, a Company Charts Its Reinvention

By STACY PERMAN

It may be the most terrifying moment a business owner can face: the realization that what you have been doing successfully, possibly for years, no longer works. For Clint Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Emma, a Web-based marketing and communications company, that moment came three years ago when his team attended the annual South by Southwest Music and Media conference in Austin, Tex. Started in 2002 and based in Nashville, Emma had grown quickly. By 2010, it had 90 full-time employees and 30,000 clients. It had recently passed $10 million in sales, but an awareness had begun to set in that its hardware system — built before the cloud even existed — was showing signs of strain. Capacity was running low and programmers had to navigate several layers of the system to update existing features or introduce new ones. These concerns crystallized at the conference when the Emma executives listened to Google employees discuss their plans for Gmail. Read more of this post

Troubled Teens Make More Successful Entrepreneurs

August 14, 2013, 2:19 PM

Troubled Teens Make More Successful Entrepreneurs

By Khadeeja Safdar

Smart, rule-abiding teenagers are less likely to become successful entrepreneurs than equally intelligent teens who engage in illicit activities, according to new research. In a working paper published by theNational Bureau of Economic Research, economists Ross Levineand Yona Rubinstein examine what it takes to become an entrepreneur and whether entrepreneurship pays off in terms of wages. Using data from the March Supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau‘s Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, they look at the cognitive, noncognitive and family traits of self-employed individuals who have incorporated businesses and compare it to the characteristics of salaried workers and the self-employed who don’t have incorporated businesses. Read more of this post

How One Employee And One Consulting Firm May Be Singlehandedly Responsible For The Stunning Pay Gap Between CEOs And Workers

How One Employee And One Consulting Firm May Be Singlehandedly Responsible For The Stunning Pay Gap Between CEOs And Workers

MAX NISEN AUG. 14, 2013, 4:35 PM 8,319 13

McKinsey is the world’s largest and most profitable management consulting firm, as well one of the most difficult places to get hired. Over its 87-year existence it’s had a massive impact on the U.S. economy according to “The Firm,” a forthcoming book by Duff McDonald. In a New York Observer column, pointed out by Mike Dang at The Billfold, McDonald argues that the massive modern-day gap between executive and worker pay has its origin with the consulting firm. Read more of this post

Study Shows BMW Drivers Are The Rudest On The Road

Study Shows BMW Drivers Are The Rudest On The Road

RICHARD READ, THE CAR CONNECTION AUG. 14, 2013, 5:51 PM 2,075 14

Rude drivers come in all shapes and sizes, and they drive a wide variety of cars. We’ve been cut off by soccer moms in minivans, sound-blasted by bass-powered hoopties, and nearly t-boned by more muscle cars than we can count.  But for some reason, the rudest drivers on the road often seem to be those in luxury cars. Maybe that’s just us projecting: we see a nice car, and we feel a tinge of jealousy, which creates an instant dislike for the driver. Or perhaps it’s something we’ve picked up from movies: we see a Mercedes-Benz AMG zooming down the road and think, “Here comes another hedge-fund manager.” Or perhaps it’s because the wealthy people who drive those cars really are jerks. For folks who buy that last argument, there’s now a bit of proof to back it up. According to the New York Times, a paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the rich really do drive differently than the rest of us. The paper — entitled “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior” — was written by Paul K. Piffa, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltnera. The researchers carried out a total of seven separate studies, each of which looked at the linkage between affluence and altruism. Read more of this post

Dragonfly: Nature’s Drone, Pretty and Deadly; African lions roar and strut and act the apex carnivore, but they’re lucky to catch 25 percent of the prey they pursue

April 1, 2013

Nature’s Drone, Pretty and Deadly

By NATALIE ANGIER

African lions roar and strut and act the apex carnivore, but they’re lucky to catch 25 percent of the prey they pursue. Great white sharks have 300 slashing teeth and that ominous soundtrack, and still nearly half their hunts fail. Dragonflies, by contrast, look dainty, glittery and fun, like a bubble bath or costume jewelry, and they’re often grouped with butterflies and ladybugs on the very short list of Insects People Like. Yet they are also voracious aerial predators, and new research suggests they may well be the most brutally effective hunters in the animal kingdom. Read more of this post