Giving Thanks: I fear that far too many people have no familiarity – or even empathy – with what it means to be poor.

November 27, 2013

Giving Thanks

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Tuesday morning, I got a call about a girl — now a woman — whom I had gone to grade school with. She was gravely ill. Cancer. It had spread to her brain, I was told. From where, it wasn’t clear. She was on life support. By early afternoon her childhood friend and next-door neighbor had posted on Facebook: “This isn’t good bye, it’s just see u later. God saw ur suffering n decided u should suffer no more.” Read more of this post

The Solution Revolution: How business, government and social enterprises are teaming up to solve society’s toughest problems

November 27, 2013 4:15 pm

‘The Solution Revolution’, by William Eggers and Paul Macmillan

Review by Tanjil Rashid

The Solution Revolution: How business, government and social enterprises are teaming up to solve society’s toughest problems, by William Eggers and Paul Macmillan, Harvard Business Review Press $26/£17.99

Like many revolutionary manifestos, The Solution Revolution seeks the overthrow of government as we know it. But for authors William Eggers and Paul Macmillan – both of whom work for the public sector practice at Deloitte – this is a revolution very much in the interests of business, not against it. Read more of this post

Lessons on breaking into a new market: it takes time

Michael Bleby Reporter

Lessons on breaking into a new market: it takes time

Published 27 November 2013 12:02, Updated 28 November 2013 07:56

It takes time to break into a new market. Whether that market is for large infrastructure projects or business in China, establishing relationships with local potential clients and building up a local track record is crucial, businesses say. Of course, foreigners’ access to the local market can be impeded. Italian construction company Salini says in a submission to the Productivity Commission that access to Australia’s infrastructure market is hindered by a Leighton-Lend Lease duopoly and infrastructure funder Hastings supports that view. Read more of this post

For entrepreneurs, too often the holidays are anything but happy

For entrepreneurs, too often the holidays are anything but happy

BY MICHAEL CARNEY 
ON NOVEMBER 27, 2013

For most people the holidays are about family, escaping work, overindulging on food and drink, and overall checking out. Those with jobs as teachers, bankers, and mechanics put their work lives on hold for a few hours or days. But for entrepreneurs, that’s not possible. Depending on where they are along their entrepreneurial journey, this time of year can be any combination of suffocating, exhausting, or jubilant. Read more of this post

Five reasons why now is the time to be an entrepreneur

Amanda Gome Publisher, BRW and Smart Investor

Five reasons why now is the time to be an entrepreneur

Published 27 November 2013 12:01, Updated 27 November 2013 12:58

Amanda Gome says most of us will be entrepreneurs at some stage in our working lives. 

It’s a big claim, but here it is: there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. I came to this conclusion after reflecting on more than two decades of interviewing entrepreneurs, writing about their conditions, being an entrepreneur myself and researching how companies grow as an adjunct professor at RMIT. And it’s just as well it’s easier, because most of us will be entrepreneurs at some stage in our working lives. Read more of this post

‘It’s like Star Trek’: If you think the last 30 years have been a rollercoaster, you ain’t seen nothing yet

Michael Bleby Reporter

‘It’s like Star Trek’: If you think the last 30 years have been a rollercoaster, you ain’t seen nothing yet

Published 27 November 2013 12:04, Updated 27 November 2013 13:41

You ain’t seen nothing yet. If you think the past 30 years have seen great changes in Australia’s business and economic environment, hold on while the next 30 take off. Actually, you don’t even need to go back 30. As Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes points out, it’s hard to think how much our lives have changed since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007. Read more of this post

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

11.25.13

“There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil,” Bill Gates wrote this summer. That’s quite an endorsement—and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world’s biggest challenges—the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the most data-heavy books you’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.) Read more of this post

People Who Use Nicknames Earn Bigger Paychecks

People Who Use Nicknames Earn Bigger Paychecks

ALISON GRISWOLD

NOV. 27, 2013, 2:28 PM 2,613 3

Sam or Samantha? Bill or William? Should you opt for short and friendly, or formal and serious? Experts say that not only can you use a nickname at work, you should, since doing so could boost your career. According to a study conducted earlier this year by job search site TheLadders, people who go by shorter names tend to earn more money. From an analysis of nearly 6 million names, the study found that every extra letter in a person’s name tended to correlate with a $3,600 drop in annual salary. That was true of names as similar as Sara and Sarah, Michele and Michelle, and Philip and Phillip. Over a 40-year career, the corresponding loss in earnings can amount to nearly $150,000. Read more of this post

The Overlooked Secret to Great Performance; Few companies or leaders systematically focus on, and invest in, how their employees feel, even though doing so would serve their bottom line

NOVEMBER 27, 2013, 10:33 AM

The Overlooked Secret to Great Performance

By TONY SCHWARTZ

Think of a time when you were performing at your best and another occasion when you were performing at your worst. Now, take a few moments to visualize the two occasions in your mind. The vast difference between these two experiences has nothing to do with your inborn talent or your skills. How much of your capacity you bring to work on any given day depends, to a large degree, on how much energy you’ve got in your tank. Read more of this post

Leading in the 21st century: An interview with HCA CEO Richard Bracken; The chairman and chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest operators of health-care facilities discusses leadership in a time of significant industry change

Leading in the 21st century: An interview with HCA CEO Richard Bracken

The chairman and chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest operators of health-care facilities discusses leadership in a time of significant industry change.

November 2013

With 165 hospitals, 113 freestanding surgery centers, and more than 200,000 employees in the United Kingdom and the United States, Nashville-based Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) is one of the world’s largest operators of health-care facilities. Chairman and CEO Richard M. Bracken is steering his publicly traded company through the significant changes now transforming the health-care industry—and doing so amid considerable uncertainty. For Bracken, the leadership challenge comes down to getting the balance right between performing in the short term and taking the necessary steps to position his company to cope successfully under multiple possible scenarios in the future. Read more of this post

Kids who like vinyl would love newspapers; Never write off any technology, even when it seems to have been buried

November 27, 2013 4:19 pm

Kids who like vinyl would love newspapers

By Michael Skapinker

Never write off any technology, even when it seems to have been buried

The biggest surprise about the rise in vinyl record sales is the age of the buyers. A poll by the BPI, the UK music industry body, found that more than a third of the record enthusiasts were under 35 years old. How do they even know what vinyl is? Surely their parents had converted to cassette tapes, if not CDs, by the time they came along? Read more of this post

Japan Wants To Turn The Moon Into A Giant Power Plant

Japan Wants To Turn The Moon Into A Giant Power Plant

DYLAN LOVE

NOV. 27, 2013, 10:52 AM 24,522 56

Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese architecture and engineering firm, has a plan to effectively turn the moon into a giant solar power plant, reports Inhabitat. It proposes building a massive collection of solar panels (a “Luna Ring”) 6,800 miles long by 12 miles wide on the moon’s surface. That’s certainly a heavy-duty construction job for human beings, so Shimizu plans to get the work done with robots, only involving humans in supervisory roles. Read more of this post

How to Buy Diamonds

November 27, 2013, 1:46 P.M. ET

How to Buy Diamonds

By Robert Milburn

Simply must buy yourself or your spouse a diamond? If you’re not up on gemology lingo, stumbling down New York City’s Diamond District on 47^th Street can be an intimidating business. That’s why Penta caught up with the diamond experts at Leviev, famous for breaking through the De Beers stranglehold on the diamond industry, to get the low-down on selecting the proper diamond. Read more of this post

Freeports: Über-warehouses for the ultra-rich; Ever more wealth is being parked in fancy storage facilities. For some customers, they are an attractive new breed of tax haven

Freeports: Über-warehouses for the ultra-rich; Ever more wealth is being parked in fancy storage facilities. For some customers, they are an attractive new breed of tax haven

Nov 23rd 2013 | GENEVA, LUXEMBOURG AND NEW YORK | From the print edition

PASSENGERS at Findel airport in Luxembourg may have noticed a cluster of cranes a few hundred yards from the runway. The structure being erected looks fairly unremarkable (though it will eventually be topped with striking hexagonal skylights). Along its side is a line of loading bays, suggesting it could be intended as a spillover site for the brimming cargo terminal nearby. This new addition to one of Europe’s busiest air-freight hubs will not hold any old goods, however. It will soon be home to billions of dollars’ worth of fine art and other treasures, much of which will have been whisked straight from collectors’ private jets along a dedicated road linking the runway to the warehouse. Read more of this post

“How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang”

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

“How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang”

From Alexandre Afonso:

In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics. [1] The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor  of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated 3.30 dollars as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why they still live with their moms). [2] Read more of this post

5 Ways to Rescue An Unproductive Day

5 WAYS TO RESCUE AN UNPRODUCTIVE DAY

IT’S NOT LIKE YOU DON’T HAVE THINGS TO DO–SOME DAYS JUST NEVER GET OFF THE GROUND.

BY LAURA VANDERKAM

Some days you’re on fire. And some days, you’re not. Every time you try to crank out a report, you wind up on Facebook. You haven’t heard back from anyone whose input is necessary for a project. You have a million things to do but you aren’t doing any of them. Should you just write the day off? If you want to take a break, go for it. Breaks are productive! But if you’re determined to get things done, snatching your day from the jaws of non-productivity is possible. The key insight is that progress–of any sort–is surprisingly motivational. Generate some progress, and you want to make more progress. Here’s how to get the snowball started: Read more of this post

New Clues May Change Buddha’s Date of Birth

November 25, 2013

New Clues May Change Buddha’s Date of Birth

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

In traditional narratives, Queen Maya Devi, the mother of Buddha, gave birth to him while holding on to a branch of a tree in a garden at Lumbini, in what is now Nepal. Accounts vary as to when this occurred, leaving uncertain the founding century of one of the world’s major religions. Until now, archaeological evidence favored a date no earlier than the third century B.C., when the Emperor Asoka promoted the spread of Buddhism through South Asia, leaving a scattering of shrines and inscriptions to the man who became “the enlightened one.” A white temple on a gently sloping plateau at Lumbini, 20 miles from the border with India, draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year to read a sandstone pillar documenting Asoka’s homage at the Buddha’s birthplace. Read more of this post

Brazilian Soccer Is Too Big To Fail

Brazilian Soccer Is Too Big To Fail

To understand Brazil’s economic woes, one should consider how politics has ruined the country’s most venerated sport. It’s no secret that the economics of the Brazilian soccer world are dysfunctional. For the most part, teams are poorly run, member-controlled organizations with histories of financial mismanagement, run by overpaid managers with little accountability. For years, soccer clubs stopped paying taxes and evaded social security obligations. And the government often rescued them from financial failure — as it may be about to do again. Read more of this post

A Message for Entrepreneurs: ‘Don’t Hesitate to Start’; Roni Einav, one of Israel’s most successful software entrepreneurs, believes in balancing instincts and education. You must not be afraid of making mistakes

A Message for Entrepreneurs: ‘Don’t Hesitate to Start’

Nov 21, 2013

Roni Einav is one of Israel’s most successful software entrepreneurs. In 1983, he founded Fourth Dimension Software, later renamed New Dimension Software. He served as its CEO and chairman until the firm was sold in 1999 to Texas-based BMC Software for $675 million. Currently, he heads Einav High Tech Assets, which invests in high-tech start-ups. Einav is also co-author with Miriam Yahil-Wax of the memoir, Nordau to NASDAQ — The Evolution of an Israeli High-Tech Start-Up, which describes his entrepreneurial journey. Einav believes that entrepreneurs need to balance their instincts and education, and to not be afraid of making mistakes. In a conversation with Knowledge@Wharton, he says: “I tell people that if they are looking for the perfect idea, for the perfect gap in technology, they will never get there.” An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Read more of this post

All Singapore has to fear is the fear of failure

All S’pore has to fear is the fear of failure

I have been lucky enough to have failed throughout my career. Mentors and supportive bosses let failure teach me things that I cannot imagine learning from any school or manual.

BY JULIAN PERSAUD –

5 HOURS 23 MIN AGO

I have been lucky enough to have failed throughout my career. Mentors and supportive bosses let failure teach me things that I cannot imagine learning from any school or manual. It is an established rule of Silicon Valley that you have to embrace failure to innovate. So it is no wonder that “failure” emerged as a big theme of Google’s Big Tent conference here on Oct 29, in which we invited representatives from non-government organisations (NGOs), the Government and the private sector to discuss Singapore’s approaches to innovation. Read more of this post

Foreign Entrepreneurs Learn Art of the American Pitch; Coaches teach foreign entrepreneurs how to loosen up and deliver presentations that will wow an American audience of investors, clients or colleagues

Foreign Entrepreneurs Learn Art of the American Pitch

Coaches Teach How to Wow Investors, Clients and Colleagues

CECILIE ROHWEDDER

Nov. 26, 2013 9:40 p.m. ET

When a group of Austrian executives landed in New York recently, they were eager to tell U.S. bankers, consultants and asset managers about their country’s strong economy. But they worried no one knew where they were coming from—literally. “When Americans hear the word Austria, they think of the emperor—depending on whom you ask, also of Nazis—of good pastries and the waltz,” says Claus Raidl, president of the Austrian National Bank. “That’s a distorted image of Austria.” Read more of this post

Tips from a prolific public speaker; Keep to the point, make it memorable – and shorter than the audience is expecting

November 26, 2013 3:55 pm

Tips from a prolific public speaker

By Luke Johnson

Keep to the point, make it memorable – and shorter than the audience is expecting

Asure sign the economy is recovering: more invitations for paid speaking engagements. During tough times the frequency of such gigs slumps because everyone wants a speech for free. But recent experience suggests that budgets have been boosted, and diaries are busier. I usually only undertake gratuitous speaking assignments if they fall into one of two categories: either the sponsor is a charity where I have some connection; or the occasion is directly relevant to my work. Read more of this post

Solved: the riddle of the rotating Egyptian statue

Solved: the riddle of the rotating Egyptian statue

Wed, Nov 20 2013

LONDON (Reuters) – For months, curators at a British museum had been wondering how an ancient Egyptian statue in a sealed display cabinet had been able to rotate on its glass shelf, seemingly of its own free will. Rumors abounded that it was cursed by an Egyptian god, or that the spirit of its owner had entered the figurine, causing it to shudder. Others put forward more prosaic explanations, suggesting a magnetic field was behind the statue’s movements. Read more of this post

Why You Should Embrace The Tao Of The Jedi

Why You Should Embrace The Tao Of The Jedi

JAMES ALTUCHER, THE ALTUCHER CONFIDENTIAL NOV. 25, 2013, 4:42 PM 2,220 1

In 2005 I was going to go out of business (again). My biggest investor had lost all his money. He had a nervous twitch and whenever I ran into him he was constantly twitching. “I need my money back,” he told me. But I didn’t have it. I had invested it. It would be a year before I could legally give it to him. So I didn’t know what to do. He once threw a chair at me he was so angry. So I did what any normal 37-year-old man in the hedge funds business would do: I bought the book, “The Tao of Star Wars.” Because I knew deep down if I just surrendered to The Force then my business would be ok.  Read more of this post

The Warren Buffett Wannabe Index

November 25, 2013, 5:04 P.M. ET

The Warren Buffett Wannabe Index

By Robert Milburn

Want to invest like Warren Buffett? That’s the premise of a recently launched new app, callediBillionaire, which allows you to dig through the holdings of the nation’s top financial gurus and create your own portfolio based on where the smart money has parked cash. These guys (no females on the list yet) include Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, and David Einhorn, investors famous for beating the broader market. So you can understand the logic of this investment gimmick, but when we tested the app, we found it had a few bugs still to work out. Read more of this post

How to become a morning person

How to become a morning person

November 26, 2013

Even night owls can learn to be an early bird. Small business owner Jill Chivers has never been a morning person. But that all changed three months ago after a visit to her GP. Chivers was told she would have to exercise regularly or go on medication to lower her cholesterol levels. It was an easy decision. “It was a wake-up call,” she said. “I didn’t want to go on medication, so I now have a morning routine.” Chivers was a night owl who used to watch TV and read until midnight or 1am before rising at 8am. She now gets up at 6am every day to exercise – rain, hail or shine. Read more of this post

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire taps the zeitgeist with its them-and-us society and the feeling that when money is in the hands of so few, the odds are never in our favour.

Review: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

11-26 13:54 Caijing

The second film in the franchise raises the already-high bar set by The Hunger Games

What are the odds? Like Katniss Everdeen ducking a poison-tip arrow, the keepers of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy of fantasy novels have dodged the perils of the sloppy second franchise film. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is leaner, gutsier and smarter. In hand-to-hand combat, it would have the first film on the floor, trapped in a headlock, whimpering for mercy. Over two-and-a-half heart-pounding hours, it doesn’t drag for a second. Read more of this post