Leaders must watch and wait more often

August 26, 2013 5:29 pm

Leaders must watch and wait more often

By Tom Peters

Wow or bust! Market yourself or perish! Sign up for the action faction! Don’t get sidetracked by analysis paralysis!

Those phrases urging business people to stop thinking and take action! Now! – always with an exclamation mark! – are associated with my work on what makes a successful management team. I’m not about to to recant. But I will acknowledge that two books have set me back on my heels: Quiet by Susan Cain , and Wait by Frank Partnoy. I despise terms such as “transformational”, but the ideas in these two books may actually merit them. As I put it, when speaking (loudly) about Quiet to one avowedly aggressive senior management team recently: “I’ll bet a pretty penny that you have been ignoring the half of the population who might have saved you from, or at least ameliorated, the horrendous mess of the past six or seven years.” The subtitle of Quiet is “the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking” and one of her arguments is that the more measured and thoughtful introverts might have helped to avoid the early 2000s feeding frenzy. But we failed to ask them aboard. Why? She unearthed voluminous research that says we find talkative people “smarter, better looking, more interesting, and more desirable as peers”. And we like fast talkers too. There is a lot to say for action- takers and risk-seekers: I have been celebrating them for 30 years. But Cain’s book gave me pause concerning the imbalance I’ve been party to, and cheerleader for. Read more of this post

Taking an Invention From Idea to the Store Shelf: Building a better mousetrap may be the easy part. After that comes patent, production and marketing, and missteps along the way can be costly

August 23, 2013

Taking an Invention From Idea to the Store Shelf

By ALINA TUGEND

EVERY once in a while, my family will toss around ideas for potential inventions. Like my son’s ultimate alarm clock, which wakes you up, tells you the weather and makes tea and toast. None of us have ever gotten past the talking phase. But a lot of other people have. Last year, the United States Patent and Trademark Office reported that 1.5 million patent applications were pending, compared with around 269,000 in 1992. And the office issued around 270,000 patents in 2012, about 160,000 more than two decades before. It’s very easy to believe that a multimillion-dollar invention is just a twist of a screwdriver away. Listen to the seductive radio and television ads that promise to help your invention fly off the shelves. Watch reality television shows like “Shark Tank,” where contestants vie to get businesses to invest in their idea. Read more of this post

Perils of holding on to corporate pet projects

August 26, 2013 1:48 pm

Perils of holding on to corporate pet projects

By Jonathan Moules, Enterprise Correspondent

Children seldom expect the downside of pet ownership when dreaming about receiving a puppy for Christmas. But at least there is usually a parent on hand with enough wisdom to put them straight. Unfortunately, ambitious business owners often do not hear the sobering warnings when it comes to their corporate pet projects. And when these puppies get out of control, the damage can be considerable. Read more of this post

College Costs Surge 500% in U.S. Since 1985: Chart of the Day

College Costs Surge 500% in U.S. Since 1985: Chart of the Day

The cost of higher education has surged more than 500 percent since 1985, illustrating why there have been renewed calls for change from both political parties. The CHART OF THE DAY shows that tuition expenses have increased 538 percent in the 28-year period, compared with a 286 percent jump in medical costs and a 121 percent gain in the consumer price index. The ballooning charges have generated swelling demand for educational loans while threatening to make college unaffordable for domestic and international students.

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A Different Formula for Happiness: In Time Perspective Therapy, people stop focusing on the past so much and look to the present and future

August 26, 2013, 7:22 p.m. ET

A Different Therapy to Find Greater Happiness

Instead of dredging up unhappy memories, focus on present, future

ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

Say the words “therapy session” and many people will picture an hour spent on a couch dredging up unhappy childhood memories. A different approach suggests that redirecting the focus onto the present and future can make people happier, healthier and lead to better relationships. The method, called Time Perspective Therapy, involves figuring out which of six different outlooks a person has: past-positive (you love the past); past-negative (you have regrets and bad things happened in your past—or things that you now exaggerate as bad); present hedonism (you enjoy the present and like to reward yourself); present fatalism (you feel that events are beyond your control, so why bother?); goal-oriented future (you plan ahead and weigh the costs and benefits of any decision); transcendental future (you live a good life because you believe the reward is a heaven after death). Read more of this post

Millions of students are finding major changes in the curriculum and battles over how teachers are evaluated, as the biggest revamps of U.S. public education in a decade work their way into classrooms

Updated August 26, 2013, 8:39 p.m. ET

Biggest Changes in a Decade Greet Students

Some Teachers, Parents Push Back on New Standards

STEPHANIE BANCHERO and ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES

Millions of students heading back to school are finding significant changes in the curriculum and battles over how teachers are evaluated, as the biggest revamps of U.S. public education in a decade work their way into classrooms. Most states are implementing tougher math and reading standards known as Common Core, while teacher evaluations increasingly are linked to student test scores or other measures of achievement. Meantime, traditional public schools face unprecedented competition from charter and private schools. Read more of this post

Researchers Study Self-Knowledge (Literally): The Body Sends Cues to the Brain; Understanding Them Can Improve Your Health

August 26, 2013, 6:59 p.m. ET

Researchers Study Self-Knowledge (Literally)

The Body Sends Cues to the Brain; Understanding Them Can Improve Your Health

SHIRLEY S. WANG

How well do people know their bodies and how does that help them function day to day? The attempt to understand how humans make sense of all the complex feedback they receive from the eyes and ears down has taken off and reached a new level of understanding in the last decade. One prong of the research being conducted in the United Kingdom, Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere is focused on understanding how well brains detect and react to cues from inside the body. Read more of this post

If predictive power is not in the cards for economics, what is it good for?

AUGUST 24, 2013, 3:09 PM

What Is Economics Good For?

By ALEX ROSENBERG and TYLER CURTAIN

Recent debates over who is most qualified to serve as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve have focused on more than just the candidates’ theory-driven economic expertise. They have touched on matters of personality and character as well. This is as it should be. Given the nature of economies, and our ability to understand them, the task of the Fed’s next leader will be more a matter of craft and wisdom than of science. Read more of this post

Kaizen and the art of human wa maintenance

Kaizen and the art of human wa maintenance

An ex-resident and frequent visitor finds convenience and joy in the little things that Japan does so damn well

BY GLENN NEWMAN

AUG 26, 2013

Little things matter. This truth is hard-wired into the Japanese psyche. Kaizen — the Japanese practice of continuous improvement through small, incremental changes — is well-known and influential worldwide. At least in the West, kaizen is primarily thought of as a method for improving manufacturing, engineering and other business processes. But kaizen goes much deeper in Japan. Kaizen here is organic, ubiquitous and attuned to the physical and psychological needs of human beings. At its best, this “human-scale kaizen” (HSK) eliminates or eases many of the mundane uncertainties, annoyances and embarrassments of daily life. Here are but a few of the innumerable examples of HSK in Japan: Read more of this post

Adults salivate at Lego’s robot kits; Mindstorms sets more complex, powerful

Mindstorms sets more complex, powerful

Adults salivate at Lego’s robot kits

AP AUG 25, 2013

Robot world: Will Gorman plays with a Mindstorms cobralike robot in

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA – Few are more excited about Lego’s new Mindstorms sets rolling out next month than Silicon Valley engineers. Many of them were drawn to the tech sector by the flagship kits that came on the market in 1998, introducing computerized movement to the traditional snap-together toy blocks and allowing the young innovators to build their first robots. Now, 15 years later, those robot geeks are entrepreneurs and designers, and the colorful plastic bricks have an significant influence in their lives. Read more of this post

Is Coke’s 127-year-old recipe the same? Not quite

Is Coke’s 127-year-old recipe the same? Not quite

CANDICE CHOI 11 hours ago

ATLANTA (AP) — Coca-Cola keeps the recipe for its 127-year-old soda inside an imposing steel vault that’s bathed in red security lights. Several cameras monitor the area to make sure the fizzy formula stays a secret. But in one of the many signs that the surveillance is as much about theater as reality, the images that pop up on video screens are of smiling tourists waving at themselves. “It’s a little bit for show,” concedes a guard at the World of Coca-Cola museum in downtown Atlanta, where the vault is revealed at the end of an exhibit in a puff of smoke. The ability to push a quaint narrative about a product’s origins and fuel a sense of nostalgia can help drive billions of dollars in sales. That’s invaluable at a time when food makers face greater competition from smaller players and cheaper supermarket store brands that appeal to cash-strapped Americans. Read more of this post