The innovators: Britain’s economic future relies on seeking out the new

The innovators: Britain’s economic future relies on seeking out the new

Introducing a new weekly column that will showcase innovation – and the key role it plays in business success

Birgitte Andersen

The Guardian, Monday 10 March 2014

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Sugru, the new wonder material: ‘I made a thing like wood, but it bounced’; How odd experiment led to creation of product that has been compared with Blu-Tack and Sellotape in terms of significance

Sugru, the new wonder material: ‘I made a thing like wood, but it bounced’

How odd experiment led to creation of product that has been compared with Blu-Tack and Sellotape in terms of significance

The Guardian, Sunday 16 March 2014 18.40 GMT

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Perseverance pays off for Math Magc board game inventor Jimmy Yeoh; Yeoh says he has sold over 60,000 sets of Math Magic, in 12 languages, since it was introduced at RM120 locally and £25 in the UK

Updated: Monday March 24, 2014 MYT 9:38:46 AM

Perseverance pays off for game inventor

BY LIM WING HOOI

A measure of success: Magic Gamewerks Sdn Bhd founder Jimmy Yeoh and the Math Magic board game he successfully commercialised. Children who play Math Magic enhance their mathematics skill while having fun. The philosophy behind MathMagic is to match each coloured side of the tile, which is divided into four triangles with different colours and numbers. A painting on the wall of her tomb depicting Egyptian Queen Nefertari (1295- 1255 BCE) playing Senet. Read more of this post

Big Words Are Fading, But Many People Still Love Them; Can those who enjoy sesquipedalian words, and those who find them annoying, learn to connect

Big Words Are Fading, But Many People Still Love Them

Can those who enjoy sesquipedalian words, and those who find them annoying, learn to connect

ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

March 24, 2014 6:54 p.m. ET

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CEO’s Secret to Decision-Making: Total Silence

CEO’s Secret to Decision-Making: Total Silence

How a $15,000 bet helped Khajak Keledjianof Intermix find inner peace

JEN MURPHY

March 24, 2014 5:59 p.m. ET

A friend bet Khajak Keledjian $15,000 six years ago that he wouldn’t be able to sit still for 15 minutes in complete silence. After nearly five months of trying, the 41-year-old CEO of high-fashion retailer Intermix couldn’t do it. Read more of this post

Developing leaders in a business; In his book The Will to Lead, Marvin Bower, McKinsey’s managing partner from 1950 to 1967, urges senior managers to abandon command-and-control structures and adopt a program to develop leaders

Developing leaders in a business

In his book The Will to Lead, Marvin Bower, McKinsey’s managing partner from 1950 to 1967, urges senior managers to abandon command-and-control structures and adopt a program to develop leaders, starting with themselves. In this excerpt, he explores the attributes of leadership. Read more of this post

In defence of sycophantic wage slaves; Flattery is crucial to survival in the corporate world and beyond

March 23, 2014 1:13 pm

In defence of sycophantic wage slaves

By Lucy Kellaway

Luke Johnson is wrong. Flattery is crucial to survival in the corporate world and beyond

If you are reading this, the chances are that you are a sycophant, an arse-kisser and a phoney. Read more of this post

Peter Long, Tui Travel: The head of Europe’s biggest tour operator has ridden many storms

THE MONDAY INTERVIEW

March 23, 2014 1:26 pm

Peter Long, Tui Travel

By Roger Blitz Read more of this post

Cities Move to Rein in Horse-Drawn Carriages; Efforts to Ban the Vehicles on Cruelty Grounds Are Gaining Steam

Cities Move to Rein in Horse-Drawn Carriages

Efforts to Ban the Vehicles on Cruelty Grounds Are Gaining Steam

MARA GAY

March 23, 2014 7:50 p.m. ET

Horse-drawn carriages in New York City, where a recent poll indicated nearly two-thirds of city voters don’t want to outlaw the vehicles. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

NEW YORK—Efforts to ban horse-drawn carriages from city streets on animal-cruelty grounds are spreading at a fast clip across the country, imperiling a popular way for tourists to take in the urban sights. Read more of this post

There is a lesson in Mother Teresa’s view on death rites

There is a lesson in Mother Teresa’s view on death rites

It is a lack of empathy and not “Religion getting in the way of filial piety” (March 22).

FROM HO SAN CHEOW –

MARCH 24

It is a lack of empathy and not “Religion getting in the way of filial piety” (March 22).

Mother Teresa was a Catholic, yet she granted the dying people under her care the appropriate ritual for their religion. Read more of this post

Traders emulate pro athletes to improve their game, hiring coaches and metrics analysts

Traders emulate pro athletes to improve their game, hiring coaches and metrics analysts

By Jeremy Kahn, Published: March 21 | Updated: Sunday, March 23, 8:38 AM

Graham Davidson was in a slump, the worst he’d ever known.

In 15 years as a foreign-exchange trader in Sydney, New York and London, he’d always made money. Now in the winter of 2011, he seemed to have lost his touch. Read more of this post

Good education helped US First Lady get where she is

Good education helped US First Lady get where she is

BEIJING — United States First Lady Michelle Obama yesterday told Chinese professors, students and parents that she would not have risen to where she is if her parents had not pushed her to get a good education.

MARCH 24

BEIJING — United States First Lady Michelle Obama yesterday told Chinese professors, students and parents that she would not have risen to where she is if her parents had not pushed her to get a good education. Read more of this post

George Lucas on the Meaning of Life

George Lucas on the Meaning of Life

When a frustrated young woman asked the most brilliant man in the world why we’re alive, Einstein responded in five poignant lines. This question – at the heart of which is a concern with the meaning of life – has since been answered by many other great minds: For David Foster Wallace, it was about going through life fully conscious; for Carl Sagan, about our significant insignificance in the cosmos; for Annie Dillard, about learning to live with impermanence; forRichard Feynman, about finding the open channel; for Anaïs Nin, about living and relating to others “as if they might not be there tomorrow”; for Henry Miller, about the mesmerism of the unknown; and for Leo Tolstoy, about finding knowledge to guide our lives. Read more of this post

Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

March 17, 2014 by Shane Parrish

“The main problem is that we think we understand the minds of others, and even our own mind, better than we actually do.”

Despite the fact I do it countless times a day, I’m sometimes terrible at it. Our lives are guided by our inferences about what others think, believe, feel, and want. Understanding the minds of others is one of the keys to social success. With that in mind, I read Nicholas Epley’s new book Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Read more of this post

When checklists work and when they don’t

When checklists work and when they don’t

March 15, 2014 at 12:49 pm

The following is a guest post by Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Professor at Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, and Director of Ariadne Labs, in Boston. Read more of this post

The future of university education: What it takes to be educated

Updated: Saturday March 22, 2014 MYT 7:54:53 AM

The future of university education

What it takes to be educated

THE inaugural Conference on South-East Asia held in conjunction with the official launch of the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on South-East Asia (JCI) by the Deputy Prime Minister on March 18 had as its theme: Overcoming the Middle Income Trap and Keeping Balance Amid Global Turbulence. Read more of this post

Brain implants: Because you’ve always wanted to think more like Einstein

Brain implants: Because you’ve always wanted to think more like Einstein

BY DOMINIC BASULTO

March 20 at 7:52 am

As we learn more about how the human brain works, it may be possible to develop brain implants for the enhancement of learning, memory and concentration. (Oli Scarff/Getty Images) Read more of this post

Astrophysics: A telescope at the South Pole has made the biggest cosmological discovery so far this century

Astrophysics: A telescope at the South Pole has made the biggest cosmological discovery so far this century
Mar 22nd 2014 | From the print edition
ONE useful feature of a scientific theory is that it makes testable predictions. Such predictions, though, do not have to be testable straight away. Physics is replete with prophecies that could be confirmed or denied only decades later, once the technology to examine them had caught up. The Higgs boson, for example, was 50 years in the confirming. Read more of this post

“Forging meaning is about changing yourself, building identity is about changing the world”

Forge meaning, build identity: Andrew Solomon at TED2014
Posted by: Thu-Huong Ha
March 21, 2014 at 4:30 pm PDT
The extraordinary and eloquent Andrew Solomon closes TED2014 with a talk that brought the theater to its feet. Popular wisdom, begins Solomon, is that we find meaning, that it is an external truth to seek. But after a lifetime as a student of adversity, he has found that meaning, in fact, is forged. Read more of this post

Lessons From Lincoln: 5 Leadership Tips History And Science Agree On

MARCH 21, 2014 by ERIC BARKER
Lessons From Lincoln: 5 Leadership Tips History And Science Agree On
Abraham Lincoln gets a lot of credit for being a great leader. And he deserves it, but…
Frankly, most of us don’t really know why he deserves it.
What made him such an extraordinary leader? And does modern research back up his methods?
Here’s what Honest Abe did, why it works and how it can make you a better leader. Read more of this post

The Latest Fad In Education? It’s become the new buzz phrase in education: “Got grit?” Does Teaching Kids To Get ‘Gritty’ Help Them Get Ahead?

Does Teaching Kids To Get ‘Gritty’ Help Them Get Ahead?
by TOVIA SMITH
March 17, 2014 5:00 AM
It’s become the new buzz phrase in education: “Got grit?”
Around the nation, schools are beginning to see grit as key to students’ success — and just as important to teach as reading and math. Read more of this post

One more time: Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains

One more time: Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains
by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis 2,700 words
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis is director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas, a trained concert pianist, and the author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2013). Read more of this post

The Dismal Art: Economic forecasting has become much more sophisticated in the decades since its invention. So why are we still so bad at it?

The Dismal Art: Economic forecasting has become much more sophisticated in the decades since its invention. So why are we still so bad at it?
James Surowiecki
Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters By Walter A. Friedman • Princeton University Press • 2013 • 268 pages • $29.95
We live in an age that’s drowning in economic forecasts. Banks, investment firms, government agencies: On a near-daily basis, these institutions are making public predictions about everything from the unemployment rate to GDP growth to where stock prices are headed this year. Big companies, meanwhile, employ sizable planning departments that are supposed to help them peer into the future. And the advent of what’s often called Big Data is only adding to the forecast boom, with the field of “predictive analytics” promising that it can reveal what we’ll click on and what we’ll buy. Read more of this post

The man who destroyed America’s ego: How a rebel psychologist challenged one of the 20th century’s biggest-and most dangerous-ideas

The man who destroyed America’s ego
How a rebel psychologist challenged one of the 20th century’s biggest—and most dangerous—ideas
Will Storr in Matter
FOR MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY, our beliefs have been based on the assumption that people are fundamentally bad. Strip away a person’s smile and you’ll find a grotesque, writhing animal-thing. Human instincts have to be controlled, and religions have often been guides for containing the demons. Sigmund Freud held a similar view: Psychotherapy was his method of making the unconscious conscious, helping people restrain their bestial desires and accord with the moral laws of civilization.
In the middle of the 20th century, an alternative school of thought appeared. It was popularized by Carl Rogers, an influential psychotherapist at the University of Chicago, and it reversed the presumption of original sin. Rogers argued that people are innately decent. Children, he believed, should be raised in an environment of “unconditional positive regard”. They should be liberated from the inhibitions and restraints that prevented them from attaining their full potential. Read more of this post

World’s Best CEOs: Members of our exclusive club share a high regard for innovation, growth, and shareholder return. Who’s in and who’s out on our 10th annual list

SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 2014
World’s Best CEOs
By ANDREW BARY | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR
Members of our exclusive club share a high regard for innovation, growth, and shareholder return. Who’s in and who’s out on our 10th annual list. Read more of this post

TED turns 30 with new chapter of ‘ideas worth spreading’

TED turns 30 with new chapter of ‘ideas worth spreading’
Saturday, 22 March, 2014, 4:25pm
Agence France-Presse in Vancouver
TED turns 30 years old with a mind-sizzling mix of intrigue, wonder and passion in the renowned gathering’s new home in Canada.
A conference born in California in 1984 that grew into a global forum for heady “ideas worth spreading” ended Friday after gazing thoughtfully at the past and looking optimistically ahead. Read more of this post

Breaking the third-generation curse in the family businesses; professionalisation can be easily executed but it can dilute family capital

Breaking the third-generation curse in the family businesses
The Nation
March 22, 2014 1:00 am
Wanchalerm: In the third generation, professionalisation can be easily executed but it can dilute family capital. Family businesses must place emphasis on managing family capital to ensure that the business becomes self-sustaining across generations. Read more of this post

The co-innovation sweet spot; Companies pursuing a strategy of co-innovation can mess up in two ways: changing too little or changing too much

The co-innovation sweet spot
Howard Yu and Jean-Louis Barsoux, The Jakarta Post | Business | Sat, March 22 2014, 12:58 PM
Companies pursuing a strategy of co-innovation can mess up in two ways: changing too little or changing too much
Shifting industry boundaries mean that change is happening faster and coming at us from all directions. It is becoming harder to keep up by innovating alone. Read more of this post

Looking for Ways to Keep Money From Dividing a Family

Looking for Ways to Keep Money From Dividing a Family
MARCH 21, 2014
Business leaders talk after a symposium called “Successful Multigenerational Families” in New York. The event drew dozens of wealthy people focused on handling their money in a way that would not divide their families. Read more of this post

Don’t Worry, Get Botox; If you can’t frown, it may be harder to be depressed

Don’t Worry, Get Botox
MARCH 21, 2014

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