“An entrepreneur has to tell a story that’s a prophecy that we feel will definitely come true.” How Screenwriting Guru Robert McKee Teaches Brands To Tell Better Stories; If you want everyone from customers to colleagues to believe in your mission, you need to tell them a story, not make an argument.

HOW SCREENWRITING GURU ROBERT MCKEE TEACHES BRANDS TO TELL BETTER STORIES

IF YOU WANT EVERYONE FROM CUSTOMERS TO COLLEAGUES TO BELIEVE IN YOUR MISSION, YOU NEED TO TELL THEM A STORY, NOT MAKE AN ARGUMENT.

BY: ROBERT MCKEE AS TOLD TO DRAKE BAER

It’s hard not to refer to Robert McKee as a “guru.” And why not? McKee, who has been teaching a seminar on screenwriting for 30 years and has written the field’s holy text, has become a foundational necessity to making it in movies, with alumnae including Peter Jackson, Julia Roberts, and John Cleese, and with 50-some Academy Award winners and 170 Emmy Award winners. McKee, who’s worked with brands likeMicrosoft, Nike, and HP to craft their stories, is now also teaching a Story-in-Business seminar. I had lunch with McKee and his wife, Mia, in Manhattan last week to talk about why brands need narratives. Here, we present an edited portion of our conversation.

To me, “story” is a fundamental. When people say story or whatever, they immediately begin to think of Hollywood and/or maybe the theater and novels, history, biography, autobiography. To me, they think about those big narrative forms and they call it the story, or they think in those terms. To me, the heart of it is a story, a mode of thought in direct opposition to other modes of thought that business tends to favor. Read more of this post

Prince Charles royal ruckus for fund managers saying that short-term thinking was making their brand of capitalism increasingly “unfit for purpose”

Last updated: October 18, 2013 2:03 pm

A right royal ruckus for fund managers

By Neil Collins

Prince Charles’ criticism likely to be shrugged off

The Prince of Wales may know as much about finance as the average fund manager knows about the royal family but sometimes he’s uncomfortably close to the truth. This week he told the National Association of Pension Funds that short-term thinking was making their brand of capitalism increasingly “unfit for purpose”. This irritating, overworked phrase aside, there’s a serious problem here, although short-termism is a symptom rather than the cause. The malaise in this industry can be easily summarised: too many coins are sticking to the shovels of the managers and the brokers. Since they designed the model, this is hardly surprising: they get paid whatever happens to the fund being managed. There is the nuclear threat of losing the mandate but generally only prolonged poor performance allied with no convincing case for improvement causes the bomb to be dropped. Running a fund is so lucrative that there are four pages of them in your weekday FT and little more than a single page of the underlying stocks that the funds trade. Describing this problem is easy; breaking the model is much harder. The Kay report recommended scrapping quarterly reports and greater engagement by fund managers with companies. It singled out Neil Woodford as the model manager. Unfortunately, Mr Woodford has now left the big fund he ran and the response of the average manager to the royal criticism is likely to be: why should I bother?

Start-Up Reinvents the Bicycle Wheel; “The Copenhagen Wheel” transforms a normal bicycles into a hybrid e-bike

OCTOBER 21, 2013, 8:59 PM

Start-Up Reinvents the Bicycle Wheel

By NICK BILTON

“The Copenhagen Wheel” transforms a normal bicycles into a hybrid e-bike.

It’s rare that a company comes along and reinvents the wheel, but it looks like that is about to happen. Superpedestrian, a start-up in Boston, announced on Monday that it has received $2.1 million in financing to help build a wheel that transforms some standard bicycles into hybrid e-bikes. The product, the Copenhagen Wheel, is a design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory. The original goal of the wheel was to entice more people to more bicycles in large cities in lieu of cars by giving them help from a motor. Read more of this post

Why is pivot such a dirty word?

Why is pivot such a dirty word?

BY CARMEL DEAMICIS 
ON OCTOBER 21, 2013

If I had a dollar every time someone explained to me why their company’s shift in priorities wasn’t a pivot, well, I might not be a millionaire, but I’d probably have enough to treat everyone at the bar that night. “I wouldn’t say it’s a pivot so much as…” An iteration. A new feature. A shift in priorities. No company that pivots thinks it’s pivoting. Or at least, no company that pivots wants to admit it to a member of the press. The word pivot’s use in startup land comes from the book The Lean Startup, where author Eric Ries defines it as, “Structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.” Despite his clear definition, the term has subjective meanings that color it. It’s associated with failure. Read more of this post

Mapping China’s Surnames 制图 “老百姓”

Mapping China’s Surnames 制图 “老百姓”

by ASTOKOLS27 on Oct 20, 2013 • 9:56 pmNo Comments

Using this cool new website that maps global surnames according to geographic origin, I was able to map a few of the most common Chinese surnames.  The map shows data at the sub-national level, enabling a province-level map of China’s surnames.  China presents a unique context in which to study the origin of surnames due to the continuity and prevalence of recorded Chinese characters associated with each surname, and the relatively low number of total surnames.  There are, by some estimates, 4,100 surnames in China, while in the US that number is around 6.2 million total. The geographic spread of names in China could be explained in many ways: from population and migration patterns over history, the geographic divisions between north and south, and watersheds.  Historian William Skinner’s came up with the concept of  “macro-regions”  that defined patterns of trade, commerce, language, and culture in China. With China’s massive internal migration today, one might think that the importance of geographic divisions such as the macro-regions, would fade.  As these maps show, that is clearly not the case. Here’s are maps for some of the most common surnames*: Purple indicates a high density of surnames in that province. Read more of this post

Leaders need trust more than Twitter; Running a business raises many questions to which ‘social media’ is not the answer

October 21, 2013 3:32 pm

Leaders need trust more than Twitter

By Andrew Hill

Running a business raises many questions to which ‘social media’ is not the answer

Irecently spent time sifting strategic plans for seven non-profit organisations, drawn up by teams of MBA students for an FT competition, the winner of which will be announced this week. It was a rare insight into how bright young executives are thinking and I am sure their efforts will benefit the non-profits themselves. But one thing stood out: the number of entrants that believed that, whatever the problem, social media would help solve it. Raising money? Go to Twitter. Building local, national and international support? TryFacebook. Read more of this post

The Inefficient Market Hypothesis

OCTOBER 21, 2013, 12:01 AM

The Inefficient Market Hypothesis

By NANCY FOLBRE

Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Either it was a partisan compromise, or the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science committee simply hedged its bets, bestowing its annual prize on three economists, two of whom represent divergent views. One Financial Times blogger compared it to a joint celebration of Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. John Kay, also writing in The Financial Times, put it more sharply, as “awarding the physics prize jointly to Ptolemy for his theory that the Earth is the center of the universe and to Copernicus for showing it is not.” Read more of this post

Why Transformation Needs a Second Chapter: Lean, but Not Yet Mean

Why Transformation Needs a Second Chapter: Lean, but Not Yet Mean

by Martin Reeves, Kaelin Goulet, Gideon Walter, and Michael Shanahan

OCTOBER 21, 2013

It’s a well-known mantra in business: “You can’t cut your way to greatness.” Nonetheless, painful cost cutting and other defensive measures are a familiar strategy for staying afloat. They are quick and obvious and deliver tangible results, but they are not in themselves a recipe for success. What does a CEO driving a turnaround do after these “easy” measures have been exhausted? Read more of this post