Anita Mui: Remembering a Cantopop Star; “Anita also had to work very hard in order to earn a living when she was very young. Both of us didn’t have a childhood or adolescence at all, which meant we had to be perfect at our jobs.”

December 27, 2013, 8:03 AM

Anita Mui: Remembering a Cantopop Star

By Joyu Wang

When Cantopop star Anita Mui Yim-fong died from cancer a decade ago, her obituary dominated headlines in Hong Kong. Now, a series of events are commemorating the singer, who sold millions of records and performed tirelessly until her death at the age of 40. Embodying her home city’s philosophy of working hard to build a career from scratch, Ms. Mui first shot to fame in 1982 after winning a singing award for new talent in Hong Kong. She went on to make more than 30 albums and give a total of 292 live concerts in her career – still a record for a Chinese female singer. Read more of this post

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Selling Anything: Be the sun and you will become abundance. The sun shines no matter what. It doesn’t care which flower blossoms. The sun is always there providing value every second of the day

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Selling Anything

Posted Dec 21, 2013 by James Altucher, Contributor

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. His latest book is “Choose Yourself!” (foreword by Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter). Follow James on Twitter @jaltucher.

I’ve never read a book on sales. They seemed corny. Like many people, I always looked down on the concept of “selling.” It seemed like something lower than me. To some extent, selling appears manipulative. You have a product where you give the perception it has more value than it has in reality. So you need to manipulate people to buy it. This seems sad, as in “Death of a Salesman” sort of sad. Read more of this post

How Thoughts of Money Lead Us Astray: Experiments show that cash on the brain suppresses reflection

How Thoughts of Money Lead Us Astray

Experiments show that cash on the brain suppresses reflection

Dec. 27, 2013 7:48 p.m. ET

The New Year makes many of us think about time passing, and research shows that such thoughts often spur us to act more ethically. If we were to brood instead about the cash we’re likely to blow on Dec. 31, our actions might be less upright. Read more of this post

The Secret to Delighting Customers: Give people purpose, not rules

The Secret to Delighting Customers

by Dilip Bhattacharjee, Bruce Jones and Francisco C. Ortega  |   10:00 AM December 27, 2013

What motivates employees to go above and beyond the call of duty to provide a great customer experience? Disney tells a story about a little girl visiting a theme park who dropped her favorite doll over a fence. When staff retrieved the doll, she was covered in mud, so they made her a new outfit, gave her a bath and a hairdo, and even took photos of her with other Disney dolls before reuniting her with her owner that evening. The girl’s mother described the doll’s return as “pure magic.” Read more of this post

The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Scrabble; For 30 years, one couple has stayed together by using their words

The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Scrabble

For 30 years, one couple has stayed together by using their words.

SHIRA DICKER and ARI L. GOLDMAN

Dec. 27, 2013 7:44 p.m. ET

When we get invited to an engagement party—something happening more now that we have children in their late 20s—we always give a Scrabble set. Invariably, we wrap it up, attach a bow and include a note with a promise: “Here is one of the secrets of a happy marriage.” Read more of this post

A Fund That Invests Like Buffett

A Fund That Invests Like Buffett

“Put all of your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket,” Warren Buffett says. In other words, if you want to beat the market, focus your efforts on a concentrated portfolio of stocks whose businesses have been analyzed as thoroughly as possible to screen out any chance of a blowup. Read more of this post

The fall guy: Bad emperors get all the credit for crumbling dynasties. What of the incompetent functionaries who do all the work?

The fall guy: Bad emperors get all the credit for crumbling dynasties. What of the incompetent functionaries who do all the work?

Dec 21st 2013 | From the print edition

IT WAS the summer of 1880. In China’s rugged north-west, Russian soldiers were skirmishing with Chinese forces. In the seas to the east, the tsar’s navy was approaching Chinese waters. Thousands of Chinese troops were dispatched to Tianjin, near the capital, Beijing, where an army was mobilising for a war the Qing empire did not wish to fight. Considering that China and Russia had just negotiated a treaty, things were not going terribly well.

Read more of this post

Pulpit Bullies: Why Dominating Leaders Kill Teams

Pulpit Bullies: Why Dominating Leaders Kill Teams

by Michael Blanding | Dec 27, 2013

Power interrupts, and absolute power interrupts absolutely. Francesca Gino and colleagues discover that a high-powered boss can lead a team into poor performance

When Harvard Business School Associate Professor Francesca Gino invites high-powered business leaders to address her class, she often observes an interesting phenomenon. The guest speakers announce that they are just as interested in learning from the students as teaching them, and encourage them to ask questions and make comments. In reality, however, the speakers often do the opposite—dominating the time and not allowing for much discussion at all. Read more of this post

Loyal Subscribers Keep Hobby Magazines Afloat

December 27, 2013

Loyal Subscribers Keep Hobby Magazines Afloat

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Lance Prucnal’s family, like others in the digital age, has canceled most of its newspaper and magazine subscriptions. Mr. Prucnal’s wife dumped Family Circle, Taste of Home and Better Homes & Gardens because she no longer found enough interesting recipes. His daughter said goodbye to Glamour. And he didn’t renew Newsweek and The Dallas Morning News because the family was getting their general-interest news from television. Read more of this post

The Indie Innovator of Champagne Country: Anselme Selosse, the reclusive French vintner who helped uncork a bubbling movement

The Indie Innovator of Champagne Country

Jay McInerney tracks down Anselme Selosse, the reclusive French vintner who helped uncork a bubbling movement

JAY MCINERNEY

Updated Dec. 27, 2013 5:31 p.m. ET

GROWER SPIRIT | Anselme Selosse, who runs Jacques Selosse, at his winery Michel Joly for The Wall Street Journal

CHAMPAGNE LOVERS should be grateful to Anselme Selosse, who has inspired a new generation of grape growers to produce their own bubbly rather than sell their grapes to the big, brand-name houses. The proliferation of small grower-made Champagnes, especially from Côte des Blancs, the area of France best suited to Chardonnay grapes, has been the most exciting recent development in Champagne. Grower Champagnes are the indie bands of the world’s most famous sparkling-wine region—not necessarily better, but quirkier and more distinctive than the products of the big houses. Read more of this post

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was stricken with polio at 39, it was reasonable to assume that his only future was retirement as an invalid. Alonzo Hamby reviews James Tobin’s “The Man He Became.”

Book Review: ‘The Man He Became’ by James Tobin

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was stricken with polio at 39, it was reasonable to assume that his only future was retirement as an invalid.

Alonzo L. Hamby

Dec. 27, 2013 4:38 p.m. ET

Visitors to the District of Columbia’s greatest theme park, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, are greeted at the entrance by a life-size statue of FDR in a wheelchair. Not in the original plan, it was added in 2001 after sustained advocacy by groups representing the handicapped. Roosevelt, despite his own championing of polio victims, would surely have preferred to see himself depicted without a wheelchair. He avoided such images during his lifetime, carefully constructing instead the persona of a leader who had grappled with the dread disease and prevailed over it. In “The Man He Became,” James Tobin describes, with a crisp narrative sweep, the difficult physical battle that culminated in FDR’s election to the presidency in 1932. Read more of this post

What Children Really Think About Magic; research shows little kids’ surprisingly sophisticated concepts of fantasy and reality

What Children Really Think About Magic

Dec. 27, 2013 7:29 p.m. ET

This week we will counter the cold and dark with the warmth and light of fantasy, fiction and magic—from Santa to Scrooge, from Old Father Time and Baby New Year to the Three Kings of Epiphany. Children will listen to tales of dwarves and elves and magic rings in front of an old-fashioned fire or watch them on a new-fashioned screen. Read more of this post

The Words That Popped in 2013: As a Busy Year Rushed By, a Spray of Newly Coined Terms Burst Forth Around Us

The Words That Popped in 2013

As a Busy Year Rushed By, a Spray of Newly Coined Terms Burst Forth Around Us

BEN ZIMMER

Dec. 27, 2013 7:26 p.m. ET

Casting an eye back on 2013 through the lens of language can feel like looking at a series of bubbles: words that momentarily caught our fancy, often tied to passing trends or breaking-news stories. But those bubbles in the language almost always go “pop!” before too long, as new ones rise to take their place. Read more of this post

Trip Tips: Perception versus reality on the reconstructed Silk Road

Trip Tips: Perception versus reality on the reconstructed Silk Road

Thu, Dec 26 2013

By Peter Ward

SAMARKAND (Reuters) – I had a smile on my face as I strode across the tarmac of Samarkand airport, for I had arrived at last in the city I had toiled for four years to recreate as a novelist. Read more of this post

Thatcher, Mandela, Chavez Are Among Notable Deaths in 2013

Thatcher, Mandela, Chavez Are Among Notable Deaths in 2013

The first female prime minister of the U.K., the first black president of South Africa and the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange were among the notable deaths of 2013. Margaret Thatcher, 87, died in April; Nelson Mandela, 95, died this month; and Muriel Siebert, 84, died in August. The year also included the deaths of politicians Edward Koch, 88, in February and Hugo Chavez, 58, in March; musicians Marian McPartland, 95, in August and Lou Reed, 71, in October; and athletes Stan Musial, 92, in January, and Ken Norton, 70, in September. The world of business, finance and investing lost Fred Turner, 80, the former McDonald’s Corp. chief executive officer who introduced Chicken McNuggets, Egg McMuffins and Happy Meals, in January; Martin Zweig, 70, who predicted the 1987 stock-market crash, in February; and Alfred Feld, 98, whose 80 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. made him the firm’s longest-serving employee, in November. Here are the year’s notable deaths, with each name linked to a previously published obituary. A cause of death is provided when known. Read more of this post