It’s Harder to be Kind than Clever: 10 Things I Learned Reading Brad Stone’s — The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

10 Things I Learned Reading Brad Stone’s — The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by SHANE PARRISH on OCTOBER 24, 2013

I really enjoyed Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Anyone who wants to better understand the dynamics of disruption or just gain a better understanding of the website we’ve come to love, must read this book. Here are ten things I found interesting. Read more of this post

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined and take risks

Dani Shapiro on the Pleasures and Perils of Writing and the Creative Life

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace,” Annie Dillard famously observed, adding the quintessential caveat, “It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you.” And yet, Zadie Smith admonished in her 10 rules of writing, it’s perilous to romanticize the “vocation of writing”: “There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.”

Still, surely there must be more to it than that – whole worlds rise and fall, entire universes blossom and die daily in that enchanted space between the writer’s sensation of writing and the word’s destiny of being written on a page. For all that’s been mulled about the writing life and its perpetual osmosis of everyday triumphs and tragedies, its existential feats and failures, at its heart remains an immutable mystery – how can a calling be at once so transcendent and so soul-crushing, and what is it that enthralls so many souls into its paradoxical grip, into feeling compelled to write “not because they can but because they have to”? That, and oh so much more, is what Dani Shapiro explores in Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (public library) – her magnificent memoir of the writing life, at once disarmingly personal and brimming with widely resonant wisdom on the most universal challenges and joys of writing. Read more of this post

Emotional Agility: How effective leaders manage their negative thoughts and feelings

Emotional Agility

by Susan David and Christina Congleton

Sixteen thousand—that’s how many words we speak, on average, each day. So imagine how many unspoken ones course through our minds. Most of them are not facts but evaluations and judgments entwined with emotions—some positive and helpful (I’ve worked hard and I can ace this presentation; This issue is worth speaking up about; The new VP seems approachable), others negative and less so (He’s purposely ignoring me; I’m going to make a fool of myself; I’m a fake).

The prevailing wisdom says that difficult thoughts and feelings have no place at the office: Executives, and particularly leaders, should be either stoic or cheerful; they must project confidence and damp down any negativity bubbling up inside them. But that goes against basic biology. All healthy human beings have an inner stream of thoughts and feelings that include criticism, doubt, and fear. That’s just our minds doing the job they were designed to do: trying to anticipate and solve problems and avoid potential pitfalls. Read more of this post

You Can’t Be a Wimp—Make the Tough Calls; To make timely, high-quality decisions, you need to develop three key traits

You Can’t Be a Wimp—Make the Tough Calls

An Interview with Ram Charan by Melinda Merino

As one of the world’s preeminent advisers to CEOs and boards, Ram Charan has spent the past 35 years on the road, watching hundreds of executives deal with their toughest challenges. He regularly shares the insights from his experiences in speeches and the classroom and is the author of several best-selling books. (His latest books are Boards That Lead, which he cowrote with Dennis Carey and Michael Useem, and Global Tilt.) He has also published many popular articles, including the HBR classic“Conquering a Culture of Indecision” (April 2001), in which he addresses the problem of organizational paralysis. In this edited interview with HBR senior editor Melinda Merino, he returns to the topic of decisions and talks about what he’s learned in three decades of helping executives make them. Read more of this post

Make the Most of a Polarizing Brand; Having a group of customers who hate your brand can be a good thing

Make the Most of a Polarizing Brand

by Xueming Luo, Michael Wiles, and Sascha Raithel

As conversation starters go, “What do you think of Miracle Whip?” probably seems unlikely—you wouldn’t think many people have strong opinions about the slightly-sweeter-than-mayonnaise sandwich spread. But when marketers at Kraft began researching shoppers’ attitudes toward the dressing, they found surprisingly deep emotions. It turns out that a substantial number of people love Miracle Whip, and many others detest it. In 2011 Kraft launched ads that sought to make a virtue of the schism. The campaign used love-’em-or-hate-’em celebrities, including Pauly D from Jersey Shore and the political pundit James Carville. Some people in the ads praised Miracle Whip’s yumminess, but one character said he’d break up with his girlfriend if he learned that she liked the dressing. Another said, “I’d rather lick your shoe” than try it. “Miracle Whip is a polarizing product,” the brand director, Sara Braun, explained at the time. “We’re trying to own up to this fact.” The strategy worked: During the campaign Miracle Whip experienced a 631% surge in social media postings and a 14% increase in sales. Read more of this post

Leaving a legacy: ‘You only die when you are forgotten’; Canadian billionaire Seymour Schulich has given away $350-million in his lifetime, partly, he acknowledges, to keep his memory alive

Leaving a legacy: ‘You only die when you are forgotten’

Garry Marr | 25/10/13 | Last Updated: 26/10/13 3:24 PM ET

 How We Die Now: “Death renders all equal,” wrote Claudian. How each one of us relates to death, however, is individual, and always changing — as we mature; as we contemplate life, and death, around us; and as society changes. In this special series in the National Post, we present stories and columns looking at the different ways we see, and prepare for, the Great Equalizer. To read the complete series, click here.

Seymour Schulich: I have two major objectives now. Number one is to be counted among the greatest Canadian philanthropists of my era and two to encourage other wealthy folks to step up He may have given away more money than anybody else in Canada, so Seymour Schulich probably has some insight into what drives the desire to have your name live on. “There are people out there who think their legacy is their company. Your company is not your legacy. Companies have a mortality rate,” says Mr. Schulich, 73, a billionaire who made his money in the gold sector. “Business is a means to an end. I don’t need to get any richer, thank you. I have two major objectives now. Number one is to be counted among the greatest Canadian philanthropists of my era and two to encourage other wealthy folks to step up.” Read more of this post

The bright side of sadness: Bad moods can have unappreciated mental upsides

The bright side of sadness: Bad moods can have unappreciated mental upsides

BY BRUCE BOWER

1:45PM, OCTOBER 18, 2013

Thomas Jefferson defended the right to pursue happiness in the Declaration of Independence. But that’s so 237 years ago. Many modern societies champion everyone’s right to be happy pretty much all the time. Good luck with that, says psychologist Joseph Forgas of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. A lack of close friends, unfulfilled financial dreams and other harsh realities leave many people feeling lonely and forlorn a lot of the time. But there’s a mental and social upside to occasional downers that often goes unappreciated. “Bad moods are seen in our happiness-focused culture as representing a problem, but we need to be aware that temporary, mild negative feelings have important benefits,” Forgas says. Read more of this post

The Decline of Wikipedia Due to Bureaucracy

The Decline of Wikipedia

By Tom Simonite on October 22, 2013

The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts. Read more of this post

Singapore’s Popular Bookshop blasted for “corrupting minors” and using gimmicks to attract customers after it used posters featuring topless models as part of a campaign to promote reading at its Nanjing bookstore

Nanjing bookstore attacked for ‘naked reading’ campaign

Staff Reporter

2013-10-26

A nude model searches for a book on a high shelf in this promotional poster for the store. (Photo/CFP) A large cardboard cut-out at the Nanjing store. (Photo/CFP)

A bookstore in Nanjing, capital of eastern China’s Jiangsu province, has been accused of poor taste after it used posters featuring topless models as part of a campaign to promote reading, reports the state-run China News Service. The posters showed topless models standing in front of bookshelves or sitting on chairs reading with their chests strategically obscured by books. The store, a branch of Singapore-based Popular Holdings, was blasted for “corrupting minors” and using gimmicks to attract customers. The store said the posters were part of a campaign that the company was holding in both Nanjing and Shanghai entitled “Reading naked brings your soul closer to books” which aims to show that reading can take different forms. People should strip off all the ornamentation of daily life in order to read. “There is no limitations to reading, it penetrates into every area of life,” the company said. Read more of this post

Je regrette: Our forward-charging culture sees regret as a sign of weakness and failure. But how else can we learn from our past?

Je regrette: Our forward-charging culture sees regret as a sign of weakness and failure. But how else can we learn from our past?

by Carina Chocano 2,700 words

Carina Chocano is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Wired, among others. She is the author of Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid? (2003).

I regret everything. Decades-old decisions, things I said, things I didn’t say, opportunities I missed, opportunities I took, recent purchases, non-purchases, returns. I turn all of these things over in my mind and examine them for clues — to what, I’m not sure. All I know is that very little of what I do or fail to do escapes the constant churn of revision. It’s just the way I process experience: sceptically, and in retrospect. It’s like being a time-traveller, only instead of going back to Ancient Rome or the French Revolution, I return again and again to the traumatic sites of my own fateful (or not so fateful) forks in the road. Some people see this as self‑flagellation; I tend to think of it as a lifelong effort to reconcile the possible with the actual — a getting to know the real me. After all, as they say, we’re defined by our choices. Read more of this post

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region

Updated: Saturday October 26, 2013 MYT 8:41:49 AM

Study on what drives Asian business

BY THEAN LEE CHENG

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region
Author: Joe Studwell
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd

JOE Studwell, author of How Asia Works: Success and Failures in the World’s Most Dynamic Region, does not mince his words. He analyses the Malaysian auto sector and draws comparison with South Korea’s international success in the car manufacturing sector. Studwell says although Perodua was set up subsequently after Malaysia’s first car project, Proton, which took off in the 1980s, Perodua was tasked with producing cars with smaller engine capacity. This means that Proton, which was producing cars with higher engine capacity, had no competition as both had their respective markets. Read more of this post

Abbott Lab chairman and CEO Miles White: The Reinvention Imperative

The Reinvention Imperative

by Miles D. White

“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.” Those are the words of John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, who won 10 NCAA national championships in just 12 seasons because of his ability to constantly adapt—to new players, new rivals, and new styles of play. In business, too, leaders are continually faced with complex changes: an aging population, the growth of the middle class in emerging economies, constant technological advancement. In a shifting environment, consistent business performance is not enough to perpetuate itself. To keep their organizations relevant, CEOs and other leaders must heed the reinvention imperative. Read more of this post

Dismantling the Sales Machine

Dismantling the Sales Machine

by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman

Sales leaders have long fixated on process discipline. They have created opportunity scorecards, qualification criteria, and activity metrics—all part of a formal sales process designed to help their team members replicate the approaches of star performers. This is the world of the sales machine, built to outsell less focused, less disciplined competitors through brute efficiency and world-class tools and training. Read more of this post

Eugene Fama, King of Predictable Markets

October 26, 2013

Eugene Fama, King of Predictable Markets

By JEFF SOMMER

Eugene F. Fama, 74, is one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, along with Lars Peter Hansen, a fellow professor at the University of Chicago, and Robert J. Shiller, a professor at Yale. Often known as the father of the efficient-markets theory, Professor Fama, a former student of Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago Nobel laureate, is a careful empiricist and a genial, open conversationalist. But some of his opinions have set off controversies. He has come under criticism from Professor Shiller, for example, for minimizing the role of investor psychology and emotion in financial markets. And while Professor Fama doesn’t involve himself directly in politics, saying his “extreme libertarian” views are of no general interest, he isn’t reticent when asked about them. I interviewed Professor Shiller, a frequent contributor to Sunday Business, for an article last week. And on Tuesday, I talked by phone with Professor Fama for more than an hour. Here is an edited, condensed version of that conversation.  Read more of this post

How to raise a criminal successfully

How to raise a criminal successfully

BUSINESS MATTERS (Beyond the bottom line) By Francis J. Kong (The Philippine Star) | Updated October 27, 2013 – 12:00am

I give parenting seminars all over the country. I’ve been invited to give parenting seminars in other countries as well. I address faculty members, parents and students without charging fees or requiring an honorarium; it’s my ministry. Whenever I have them as my audience, I get inspired and fulfilled. And when I’m inspired, I do corporate trainings better. Thus, it’s an “all-win” situation. Read more of this post