This Funny World Map Shows What Every Country Leads The World In

This Funny World Map Shows What Every Country Leads The World In

MICHAEL KELLEY
JAN. 10, 2014, 7:14 AM 30,063 16

A wonderful map created by William Samari, Ray Yamartino, and Rafaan Anvari of DogHouseDiares illustrates what every country does better than every other country. They collected the information from various sources and sprinkled in some quirkier rankings since many countries led the world in multiple things.

The science of willpower: Kelly McGonigal on why it’s so dang hard to stick to a resolution

The science of willpower: Kelly McGonigal on why it’s so dang hard to stick to a resolution

Posted by: Kate Torgovnick May
January 8, 2014 at 6:07 pm EST

It’s the second week in January and, at about this time, that resolution that seemed so reasonable a week ago — go to the gym every other day, read a book a week, only drink alcohol on weekends — is starting to seem very … hard. As you are teetering on the edge of abandoning it all together, Kelly McGonigal is here to help. This Stanford University psychologist — who shared last year how you can make stress your friend — wants you to know that you’re not having a hard time sticking to a resolution because you are a terrible person. Perhaps you’ve just formulated the wrong resolution. Read more of this post

Goodnight. Sleep Clean. Why do we have to rest? Meet your brain’s janitorial staff

Goodnight. Sleep Clean.

By MARIA KONNIKOVAJAN. 11, 2014

SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time. Why would our bodies evolve to spend close to one-third of our lives completely out of it, when we could instead be doing something useful or exciting? Something that would, as an added bonus, be less likely to get us killed back when we were sleeping on the savanna? “Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.” Read more of this post

How a Hunch Led to Stunning Claim on Buddha Birth Date; Buddha’s birthplace in southern Nepal held secrets that could transform how the world understood the emergence and spread of Buddhism

How a Hunch Led to Stunning Claim on Buddha Birth Date

By Ammu Kannampilly on 4:08 pm January 5, 2014.
Kathmandu. The two archaeologists had a hunch that the Buddha’s birthplace in southern Nepal held secrets that could transform how the world understood the emergence and spread of Buddhism. Their pursuit would eventually see them excavate the sacred site of Lumbini as monks prayed nearby, leading to the stunning claim that the Buddha was born in the sixth century BC, two centuries earlier than thought.

Read more of this post

Ask a Billionaire: James Dyson on His Management Style; Letting people try out their ideas, getting them totally involved, that’s really important. Getting down there, being with people every day, and experiencing what they’re experiencing is also crucial

Ask a Billionaire: James Dyson on His Management Style

January 09, 2014

James Dyson
Founder and chief engineer, Dyson
Net worth: $4.4 billion

What kind of manager are you?

A pretty dreadful one. The trouble is, I’m just not that interested in it. I’m interested in working with a group of people to make something work. But it’s not conventional management. I just do what I do my way—most of my employees are still here, so it can’t be that wrong! If someone has an offbeat idea which sounds daft, consider it and think about it and try it out. We don’t have technicians, so engineers go and make their own prototypes and rigs. Letting people try out their ideas, getting them totally involved, that’s really important. Getting down there, being with people every day, and experiencing what they’re experiencing is also crucial.

The Little Book of IDEO: Values

The Little Book of IDEO: Values

by Tim Brown, CEO and President at IDEO on Dec 18, 2013

We wrote this to give you a sense of IDEO’s culture—the ties that bind us together as coworkers and as people.

7 Things That Can Make You Wildly Successful

7 Things That Can Make You Wildly Successful

ERIC BARKER, BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE
JAN. 9, 2014, 2:24 PM 10,610 4

What does volumes of research say you can learn from wildly successful people? To Build A Better Career, First Build A Better You

It might sound fluffy but research shows how people feel about themselves has a huge effect on success.

Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:

For most people studied, the first step toward improving their job performance had nothing to do with the job itself but instead with improving how they felt about themselves. In fact, for eight in ten people, self-image matters more in how they rate their job performance than does their actual job performance. – Gribble 2000

What frequently produces creative ideas? It’s not clever tricks — it’s being genuinely interested in your work.  Read more of this post

To Stop Procrastinating, Look to Science of Mood Repair; New Approach Focuses on Helping People Regulate Their Emotions

To Stop Procrastinating, Look to Science of Mood Repair

New Approach Focuses on Helping People Regulate Their Emotions

SUE SHELLENBARGER

Jan. 7, 2014 8:03 p.m. ET

Several new studies help explain what’s happening in the brain when people procrastinate. WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger unpacks the latest research and software engineer Sean Gilbertson shares his story. Photo: Getty Images.

Procrastinators, take note: If you’ve tried building self-discipline and you’re still putting things off, maybe you need to try something different. One new approach: Check your mood. Read more of this post

Creating a Culture of Unconditional Love

Creating a Culture of Unconditional Love

by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz  |   9:00 AM January 8, 2014

During my first decade working in the Buenos Aires office of Egon Zehnder in the late 1990s, our Argentine executive search practice soared, recording the highest per capita financial performance in the whole firm for five consecutive years. But we all know what happened in 2001. By the end of the year, Argentina’s economy had collapsed.  It was the largest sovereign debt default in world history, and GDP fell by some 30% coupled with a 300% currency devaluation. Over 12 days, five different presidents took control of the country.  One bank lost more money in a few weeks than it had accumulated over the previous century.  There were companies with losses larger than their sales, and one month the number of new cars sold in the country was lower than the number of cars stolen!  As you can imagine, that was not an easy time for me.  No one in their right mind was looking to hire a search consultant. Read more of this post

Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation

Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation Hardcover

by Adam Bryant  (Author)

More than two hundred CEOs reveal their candid insights on how to build and foster a corporate culture that encourages innovation and drives results

In Quick and Nimble, Adam Bryant draws on interviews with more than two hundred CEOs to offer business leaders the wisdom and guidance to move an organization faster, to be quick and nimble, and to rekindle the whatever-it-takes collective spark of a start-up, all with the goal of innovating and thriving in a relentlessly challenging global economy. By analyzing the lessons that these leaders have shared in his regular “Corner Office” feature in The New York Times, Bryant has identified the biggest drivers of corporate culture, bringing them to life with real-world examples that reflect this hard-earned wisdom. Read more of this post

Management Be Nimble

Management Be Nimble

By ADAM BRYANTJAN. 4, 2014

Adult Conversations Many managers go out of their way to avoid giving feedback, worried that it will turn into a battle. But the best managers have “adult conversations” right away to clear the air.

“We aspire to be the largest small company in our space.”

When Dominic Orr, the chief executive of Aruba Networks, said those words, he crystallized a goal I had heard many leaders express during the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted for the Corner Office column: they want to foster a quick and nimble culture, with the enviable qualities of many start-ups, even as their companies grow. Read more of this post

Build a ‘Quick and Nimble’ Culture

Build a ‘Quick and Nimble’ Culture

by Dan McGinn  |   11:00 AM January 7, 2014

Since 2009, Adam Bryant has interviewed hundreds of CEOs for the “Corner Office” feature in The New York Times. This month he’s publishing his second book based on the interviews: “Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation.” He talked with HBR about why a company’s culture is more important than its strategy — and some of the innovative tactics that CEOs have used to help create a high-performing culture. Excerpts: Read more of this post

An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence

An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity – a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Year’s resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. But what, exactly, makes that possible? Read more of this post

From dodo to phoenix: Conglomerates, once seen as heading for extinction, are spreading their wings

From dodo to phoenix: Conglomerates, once seen as heading for extinction, are spreading their wings

Jan 11th 2014 | From the print edition

ADAM SMITH once said that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” There is also a great deal of ruin in some kinds of business organisations. Management theorists have been predicting the death of conglomerates for decades. Stockmarkets apply a “conglomerate discount” to the price of their shares. Investors argue that it is better to bet on several focused companies than a single diversified one. Business writers routinely apply the adjectives “bloated” and “unwieldy” when mentioning conglomerates. And yet, almost everywhere, they continue to thrive. Read more of this post

The Culture, Causes, and Costs of Anxiety

The Culture, Causes, and Costs of Anxiety

“Anxiety … makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you,” Anaïs Nin wrote. “Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy,” Kierkegaard observed. “There is no question that the problem of anxiety is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence,” Freud proclaimed in his classic introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. And yet the riddle of anxiety is far from solved – rather, it has swelled into a social malady pulling countless numbers of us underwater daily. Among those most mercilessly fettered by anxiety’s grip is Scott Stossel, familiar to most as the editor of The Atlantic. In his superb mental health memoir, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind (public library), Stossel follows in the tradition of Montaigne to use the lens of his own experience as a prism for illuminating insight on the quintessence of our shared struggles with anxiety. From his personal memoir he weaves a cultural one, painting a portrait of anxiety though history, philosophy, religion, popular culture, literature, and a wealth of groundbreaking research in psychology and neuroscience. Read more of this post

Wisdom is quite strongly related to gratitude. Wiser individuals are more grateful than others, and they are grateful for different things than others”

Is it wise to be grateful?

Fri, Jan 10 2014

By C.E. Huggins

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – At all ages, wisdom and a sense of gratitude appear to go hand in hand, especially for women, according to a recent study. Among the participants, people who were considered wise by others also spontaneously expressed feelings of gratitude more frequently than others, Austrian researchers report. Read more of this post

Introspection Can Improve Your Investing

Introspection Can Improve Your Investing

by CFA Institute ContributorsJanuary 8, 2014

Introspection Can Improve Your Investing by A. Michael Lipper, CFA

The holiday season and the turn of the calendar year can create an opportunity for introspection as to how you invest. While one should be just as introspective about wins, it is too difficult for most to separate brilliance and a bull market. Hopefully on the downside it is a bit easier to identify systemic elements that led to losses. To see what impulses are really working, we must shed the standard alibis – “someone lied,” an external negatively interpreted event surprised us, or the weather plus Christmas or Easter came early. While each of these excuses may have happened, your own particular losses are what you were thinking about before, during and after the market prayed upon our conscience. Read more of this post

Turning Around the Successful Company

Turning Around the Successful Company

by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Kaelin Goulet

DECEMBER 20, 2013

Today’s business environment is characterized by rapid, extensive change and unpredictability. The combined effects of digitization, connectivity, globalization, demographic shifts, and social feedback are shaking the foundations of almost all businesses, making sustained growth more valuable and elusive than ever before. In addition, we see that companies—at a time when adaptiveness is so crucial—are often hampered by internal complexity that makes change difficult. Read more of this post

Why It’s Hard to Be Entrepreneurial

Why It’s Hard to Be Entrepreneurial

by Matt Reilly  |   9:00 AM January 7, 2014

For many years, I have talked with business executives about the need to reorient their attitudes toward failure. If they want their organizations to generate more good ideas, monetize the best of them, and in general innovate faster, they need to not only tolerate but celebrate the fruitless pilots and instructive flops that are an inevitable part of the process. Read more of this post

It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best

It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best Hardcover – June 3, 2014

by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz (Author)

Are you surrounding yourself with the right people?
Yes, your success in business and in life depends on your own performance. But have you thought about how those around you affect that performance? Do they strengthen or weaken it? Help or hinder your progress?
In It’s Not the How or the What but the Who (a phrase adapted from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), renowned global talent management expert Claudio Fernández-Aráoz explains why people decisions—the choices you make about friends, your spouse, employees, project partners, mentors, and even elected officials—are more important than any other. To thrive, you need to get the best people in your corner and on your team, and then help them grow. Yet few people know how to do that well.
In a series of short, lively essays, Fernández-Aráoz addresses the challenges and explains how to overcome them. Based on research and stories from his nearly thirty-year career in global executive search and leadership development, each offers wisdom and practical advice about how to “get people right” in a more systematic way—from identifying your biases and accurately assessing the skills and potential of others to selecting, developing, motivating, compensating, and diversifying teams.
Engaging and often counterintuitive, the book is packed with important lessons on how to surround yourself with the best.

Why Weird People Are Often More Creative

WHY WEIRD PEOPLE ARE OFTEN MORE CREATIVE

THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION THAT’S GETTING INTO YOUR MIND DETERMINES HOW CREATIVE–OR CRAZY–YOU MIGHT BE.

BY DRAKE BAER

When Albert Einstein came across a cigarette butt, he would often pick it up–fuel for the ol’ tobacco pipe. When Charles Dickens walked around London, he would often be wielding his umbrella–the best defense to imaginary street urchins. When Björk goes to an awards show, she might dress like a swan–what could be more genius? Or beautiful? Or weird? Read more of this post

In Life and Business, Learning to Be Ethical

In Life and Business, Learning to Be Ethical

JAN. 10, 2014

By ALINA TUGEND

Lots of New Year’s resolutions are being made — and no doubt ignored — at this time of year. But there’s one that’s probably not even on many lists and should be: Act more ethically. Read more of this post

Review: ‘Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival’, by David Pilling

January 10, 2014 6:49 pm

Review: ‘Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival’, by David Pilling

Review by Chris Patten

Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival, by David Pilling, Allen Lane £20 / $29.95, 432 pages

Knightsbridge and Bond Street are not Britain, and clearly Nihonbashi and Ginza are not Japan. But a shopping trip to the Mitsukoshi or Matsuya department stores in Tokyo, or a sight of the stylishly dressed kids in the Shibuya district of the city, are nonetheless hard to reconcile with the picture that over the past 20 years has often been painted of Japan – a country said to be down on its uppers with a population reduced to hunting squirrels for the pot. David Pilling quotes a visiting MP from northern England, dazzled by Tokyo’s lights and awed by its bustling prosperity: “If this is a recession, I want one.” Read more of this post

Caring as a business tool: humanising companies with empathy

Caring as a business tool: humanising companies with empathy

As Comedy Central and Coca-Cola discovered, connecting more closely with people can make businesses stronger than ever

Christophe Fauconnier and Benoit Beaufils

theguardian.com, Friday 10 January 2014 21.40 GMT

Care, the conventional wisdom goes, belongs in the bassinet, not the boardroom. We disagree. We believe that care is the most essential ingredient of business, brands and marketing, today and in the years ahead. It makes us work as people, for other people. It helps us create brands and products that are meaningful for them, not simply transactions for immaterial targets. It will give us, our brands and our businesses longevity, the staying power that only comes from adding value to the lives of the people we serve. Read more of this post

Character at heart of global leadership

Character at heart of global leadership

Stewart Black and Allen Morrison | Business | Sat, January 11 2014, 3:46 PM

Most people think that the higher you go, the more authority and control you have. But our research finds that in today’s complex, global environment, the higher you go, the more you get things done because of the goodwill and trust you develop, not because of your formal authority.  Read more of this post

The canvas of life, painted with love: Even in times of trial, there are opportunities to reach out and make a difference to the people whose paths we cross

Updated: Sunday January 5, 2014 MYT 7:49:00 AM

The canvas of life, painted with love

BY SOO EWE JIN

Even in times of trial, there are opportunities to reach out and make a difference to the people whose paths we cross.

HAVE you ever watched an artist at work? Most artists paint in private but there are also those who do not mind letting people watch them work. On a recent trip to Penang, I came across a group of artists along Beach Street – which is part of the heritage zone – and I wondered how they could paint with so many curious onlookers hovering around them. Read more of this post

A VC’s 10 startup secrets he wishes he had known as an entrepreneur

A VC’s 10 startup secrets he wishes he had known as an entrepreneur

BY MICHAEL SKOK 
ON JANUARY 10, 2014

Entrepreneurs are in a position to make a significant impact on the world, but they’re also faced with intense challenges that aren’t typically encountered in any other situation. Over the course of my career, I have confronted and seen many roadblocks that can arise on an entrepreneur’s path. Read more of this post