The Shanghai Secret: How these schools in China made it to No. 1 in the world

October 22, 2013

The Shanghai Secret

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

SHANGHAI — Whenever I visit China, I am struck by the sharply divergent predictions of its future one hears. Lately, a number of global investors have been “shorting” China, betting that someday soon its powerful economic engine will sputter, as the real estate boom here turns to a bust. Frankly, if I were shorting China today, it would not be because of the real estate bubble, but because of the pollution bubble that is increasingly enveloping some of its biggest cities. Optimists take another view: that, buckle in, China is just getting started, and that what we’re now about to see is the payoff from China’s 30 years of investment in infrastructure and education. I’m not a gambler, so I’ll just watch this from the sidelines. But if you’re looking for evidence as to why the optimistic bet isn’t totally crazy, you might want to visit a Shanghai elementary school. Read more of this post

Breaking up the bamboo ceiling: Making Asian-background Australians less invisible in business

Fiona Smith Columnist

Breaking up the bamboo ceiling: Making Asian-background Australians less invisible in business

Published 23 October 2013 07:15, Updated 23 October 2013 08:39

The director of a household-name company was pleased with himself as he expanded on the promotion of business leaders with an Asian background. “We’ve got one banana and three eggs on our board,” he informed BRW. What he meant was that there is one director with Asian heritage, who has spent much of their career working for Western organisations, and three Anglo-Australians accustomed to dealing with Asian businesses and state-owned enterprises. Despite the lack of political correctness in the delivery, at least this director was conscious of the benefits of capitalising on the talents and experience of Asian-Australians. The CEO of Diversity Council Australia (DCA), Nareen Young, says employers are starting to have conversations about the “bamboo ceiling” – the Asian equivalent of the invisible glass ceiling that has kept women out of positions of power for so long.

Read more of this post

Buffett Sees Zero Chance of Gates Returning as Microsoft CEO

Buffett Sees Zero Chance of Gates Returning as Microsoft CEO

Warren Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said Bill Gates’s focus on philanthropy makes it impossible that the Microsoft Corp. co-founder will return to the company as chief executive officer. “The chances of that are zero,” Buffett told Bloomberg Television’s Betty Liu in an interview today. “He is doing exactly what he wants to do in life, and he’s doing it well and it takes his full-time energy.” Microsoft is searching for a new CEO after Steve Ballmer said he would step down from the world’s largest software maker. Gates, 57, is chairman of Microsoft and serves on the board of Berkshire. In 2006, Buffett committed a majority of his wealth to the foundation run by Gates and his wife, Melinda. Gates is “flying around the world a very significant percentage of the time, and he is engaging governments in his efforts,” said Buffett, 83. “He has got more than a full-time job at the Gates Foundation, and obviously cares about Microsoft, but he’s not going back.” Buffett appeared today alongside his son and grandson, both named Howard, to promote a new book, “40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World.” The text describes lessons the billionaire’s son learned from his years working to improve food security around the world. The elder Buffett has also given funds to foundations overseen by his three children.

To contact the reporters on this story: Noah Buhayar in New York at nbuhayar@bloomberg.net; Zachary Tracer in New York at ztracer1@bloomberg.net

Howard Buffett Finds 40 Chances to Get Philanthropy Right

Howard Buffett Finds 40 Chances to Get Philanthropy Right

Howard G. Buffett has photographed an African warlord at close range and witnessed 50 children bound in shackles in Senegal. In Barranquilla, Colombia, he sat next to the pop star Shakira in an SUV as kids banged on the windows until their idol emerged to sign autographs. Buffett, son of the second-richest person in the U.S., could have written a vanity book to chronicle his philanthropic work battling world hunger. Instead, he offers insight, self-deprecation, solutions and heart in “Forty Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World.” Warren Buffett and his late first wife, Susan, gave and pledged billions to each of their three children to fund charitable foundations. Howard, an Illinois farmer, picked global hunger as his target. In the book’s foreword, the elder Buffett describes “Forty Chances” as a “guidebook for intelligent philanthropy.” It’s more than that. Howard Buffett has figured out a way to tell 40 stories about hunger, farming, poverty and war, while delivering a readable account of a formidable challenge. Philanthropists will take much from “Forty Chances,” and the layperson will benefit, too, coming away wiser about the powerful forces that keep poverty and hunger alive — and ways to fight those forces. Read more of this post

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

BY JOSHUA DAVIS

10.15.13

José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland—the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo—“a place of punishment.” Read more of this post

How Our Brains Betray Us

How Our Brains Betray Us

In the wake of the financial crisis, parents, educators and even students have argued for more financial literacy courses in schools. Problem is, many studies show that financial education doesn’t make a difference because people don’t change their behavior – even if they know better. David Laibson, an economics professor at Harvard University, says understanding this anomaly could help us take charge of our financial lives.

Most Americans know they should save for retirement and pay off their debts. Yet they often don’t do those things. Why?

Our brains are responsible for good intentions not being translated into action. There’s a little tug-of-war going on in our minds. One region of the brain tells us that the right thing to do is to execute. Another brain region says to go for instant gratification. The presence of the dopamine reward system make us biased to do things we can do now. To make things that are not pleasant happen, we have to learn how to exert self-control. Read more of this post

Starbucks vs Starbung in Bangkok

Starbucks vs Starbung

Tuesday, October 22, 2013 – 09:20

The New Paper

BANGKOK – On one side is a billion-dollar global coffee chain. On the other is a Bangkok street vendor, selling coffee from his cart. Starbucks, which had an annual net profit of US$1.38 billion (S$1.7 billion) last year, is suing Mr Damrong Maslae for 300,000 baht (S$12,000) for copying its famous green logo on his Starbung cart, the Bangkok Post reported. Mr Damrong sells coffee for 20-30 baht each in the Thai capital. Starbucks is also demanding a monthly payment of 30,000 baht plus legal fees, according to its Trademark Act violation complaint. Read more of this post

“An entrepreneur has to tell a story that’s a prophecy that we feel will definitely come true.” How Screenwriting Guru Robert McKee Teaches Brands To Tell Better Stories; If you want everyone from customers to colleagues to believe in your mission, you need to tell them a story, not make an argument.

HOW SCREENWRITING GURU ROBERT MCKEE TEACHES BRANDS TO TELL BETTER STORIES

IF YOU WANT EVERYONE FROM CUSTOMERS TO COLLEAGUES TO BELIEVE IN YOUR MISSION, YOU NEED TO TELL THEM A STORY, NOT MAKE AN ARGUMENT.

BY: ROBERT MCKEE AS TOLD TO DRAKE BAER

It’s hard not to refer to Robert McKee as a “guru.” And why not? McKee, who has been teaching a seminar on screenwriting for 30 years and has written the field’s holy text, has become a foundational necessity to making it in movies, with alumnae including Peter Jackson, Julia Roberts, and John Cleese, and with 50-some Academy Award winners and 170 Emmy Award winners. McKee, who’s worked with brands likeMicrosoft, Nike, and HP to craft their stories, is now also teaching a Story-in-Business seminar. I had lunch with McKee and his wife, Mia, in Manhattan last week to talk about why brands need narratives. Here, we present an edited portion of our conversation.

To me, “story” is a fundamental. When people say story or whatever, they immediately begin to think of Hollywood and/or maybe the theater and novels, history, biography, autobiography. To me, they think about those big narrative forms and they call it the story, or they think in those terms. To me, the heart of it is a story, a mode of thought in direct opposition to other modes of thought that business tends to favor. Read more of this post

Prince Charles royal ruckus for fund managers saying that short-term thinking was making their brand of capitalism increasingly “unfit for purpose”

Last updated: October 18, 2013 2:03 pm

A right royal ruckus for fund managers

By Neil Collins

Prince Charles’ criticism likely to be shrugged off

The Prince of Wales may know as much about finance as the average fund manager knows about the royal family but sometimes he’s uncomfortably close to the truth. This week he told the National Association of Pension Funds that short-term thinking was making their brand of capitalism increasingly “unfit for purpose”. This irritating, overworked phrase aside, there’s a serious problem here, although short-termism is a symptom rather than the cause. The malaise in this industry can be easily summarised: too many coins are sticking to the shovels of the managers and the brokers. Since they designed the model, this is hardly surprising: they get paid whatever happens to the fund being managed. There is the nuclear threat of losing the mandate but generally only prolonged poor performance allied with no convincing case for improvement causes the bomb to be dropped. Running a fund is so lucrative that there are four pages of them in your weekday FT and little more than a single page of the underlying stocks that the funds trade. Describing this problem is easy; breaking the model is much harder. The Kay report recommended scrapping quarterly reports and greater engagement by fund managers with companies. It singled out Neil Woodford as the model manager. Unfortunately, Mr Woodford has now left the big fund he ran and the response of the average manager to the royal criticism is likely to be: why should I bother?

Start-Up Reinvents the Bicycle Wheel; “The Copenhagen Wheel” transforms a normal bicycles into a hybrid e-bike

OCTOBER 21, 2013, 8:59 PM

Start-Up Reinvents the Bicycle Wheel

By NICK BILTON

“The Copenhagen Wheel” transforms a normal bicycles into a hybrid e-bike.

It’s rare that a company comes along and reinvents the wheel, but it looks like that is about to happen. Superpedestrian, a start-up in Boston, announced on Monday that it has received $2.1 million in financing to help build a wheel that transforms some standard bicycles into hybrid e-bikes. The product, the Copenhagen Wheel, is a design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory. The original goal of the wheel was to entice more people to more bicycles in large cities in lieu of cars by giving them help from a motor. Read more of this post

Why is pivot such a dirty word?

Why is pivot such a dirty word?

BY CARMEL DEAMICIS 
ON OCTOBER 21, 2013

If I had a dollar every time someone explained to me why their company’s shift in priorities wasn’t a pivot, well, I might not be a millionaire, but I’d probably have enough to treat everyone at the bar that night. “I wouldn’t say it’s a pivot so much as…” An iteration. A new feature. A shift in priorities. No company that pivots thinks it’s pivoting. Or at least, no company that pivots wants to admit it to a member of the press. The word pivot’s use in startup land comes from the book The Lean Startup, where author Eric Ries defines it as, “Structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.” Despite his clear definition, the term has subjective meanings that color it. It’s associated with failure. Read more of this post

Mapping China’s Surnames 制图 “老百姓”

Mapping China’s Surnames 制图 “老百姓”

by ASTOKOLS27 on Oct 20, 2013 • 9:56 pmNo Comments

Using this cool new website that maps global surnames according to geographic origin, I was able to map a few of the most common Chinese surnames.  The map shows data at the sub-national level, enabling a province-level map of China’s surnames.  China presents a unique context in which to study the origin of surnames due to the continuity and prevalence of recorded Chinese characters associated with each surname, and the relatively low number of total surnames.  There are, by some estimates, 4,100 surnames in China, while in the US that number is around 6.2 million total. The geographic spread of names in China could be explained in many ways: from population and migration patterns over history, the geographic divisions between north and south, and watersheds.  Historian William Skinner’s came up with the concept of  “macro-regions”  that defined patterns of trade, commerce, language, and culture in China. With China’s massive internal migration today, one might think that the importance of geographic divisions such as the macro-regions, would fade.  As these maps show, that is clearly not the case. Here’s are maps for some of the most common surnames*: Purple indicates a high density of surnames in that province. Read more of this post

Leaders need trust more than Twitter; Running a business raises many questions to which ‘social media’ is not the answer

October 21, 2013 3:32 pm

Leaders need trust more than Twitter

By Andrew Hill

Running a business raises many questions to which ‘social media’ is not the answer

Irecently spent time sifting strategic plans for seven non-profit organisations, drawn up by teams of MBA students for an FT competition, the winner of which will be announced this week. It was a rare insight into how bright young executives are thinking and I am sure their efforts will benefit the non-profits themselves. But one thing stood out: the number of entrants that believed that, whatever the problem, social media would help solve it. Raising money? Go to Twitter. Building local, national and international support? TryFacebook. Read more of this post

The Inefficient Market Hypothesis

OCTOBER 21, 2013, 12:01 AM

The Inefficient Market Hypothesis

By NANCY FOLBRE

Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Either it was a partisan compromise, or the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science committee simply hedged its bets, bestowing its annual prize on three economists, two of whom represent divergent views. One Financial Times blogger compared it to a joint celebration of Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. John Kay, also writing in The Financial Times, put it more sharply, as “awarding the physics prize jointly to Ptolemy for his theory that the Earth is the center of the universe and to Copernicus for showing it is not.” Read more of this post

Why Transformation Needs a Second Chapter: Lean, but Not Yet Mean

Why Transformation Needs a Second Chapter: Lean, but Not Yet Mean

by Martin Reeves, Kaelin Goulet, Gideon Walter, and Michael Shanahan

OCTOBER 21, 2013

It’s a well-known mantra in business: “You can’t cut your way to greatness.” Nonetheless, painful cost cutting and other defensive measures are a familiar strategy for staying afloat. They are quick and obvious and deliver tangible results, but they are not in themselves a recipe for success. What does a CEO driving a turnaround do after these “easy” measures have been exhausted? Read more of this post

The father of G-Shock, Kikuo Ibe, revolutionised the world of digital watches

Shock value

Monday, Oct 21, 2013

Dylan Tan

The Business Times

KIKUO Ibe, inventor of the iconic Casio range of G-Shock timpieces, looks amused when told his biggest fan in Singapore has about 600 different models and variations of the digital watch in his collection. He has every reason to because there’s really no need to own more than one. The groundbreaking watch he created 30 years ago is virtually indestructible – it’s water-resistant; can resist drops, vibrations and G-forces; and depending on use, has been known to run for as long as 10 years without a battery change. The “G” in its name refers to “gravity” which Mr Ibe wanted to counter when he was creating the break-proof watch. Its design consists of several layers of bumpers which protect the timepiece from damage even when used in the most extreme of conditions. Read more of this post

NASA Says Ban on Chinese Nationals Was a Mistake

Oct 21, 2013

NASA Says Ban on Chinese Nationals Was a Mistake

JACOB GERSHMAN

NASA says it mistakenly banned Chinese scientists from attending a science conference next month, blaming the mix-up on a “misinterpretation of the agency’s policy.” It was reported earlier this month that NASA had decided to exclude Chinese nationals from the Kepler Science Conference taking place at the Ames research center in California next month. The ban provoked outrage from U.S. scientists and an angry letter from a U.S. congressman who said Congress had never authorized such a policy. Read more of this post

More Botox for Baby Boomer Men; In a Tough Job Market, Guys Seek a Little Facial Work

More Botox for Baby Boomer Men

In a Tough Job Market, Guys Seek a Little Facial Work

ELIZABETH O’BRIEN

Oct. 16, 2013 6:19 p.m. ET

However stealthily, men are having a little work done in increasing numbers these days. Elizabeth O’Brien and dermatologist Dr. David McDaniel explain on Lunch Break. Photo: Shutterstock. David McDaniel, a dermatologist in Virginia Beach, Va., recalls an awkward scene in which a husband bumped into his wife at Dr. McDaniel’s office. Both were there for Botox, but the husband hadn’t told his wife he was getting treated. The man quickly threw his arm around Dr. McDaniel, pretending the doctor was an old buddy he had stopped by to visit. Read more of this post

Lawrence Klein, Nobel Winner for Econometric Models, Dies at 93; Economist Applied Forecasting Models to the Real World

Nobel-Winning Economist Applied Forecasting Models to the Real World

BRENDA CRONIN

Updated Oct. 21, 2013 8:13 p.m. ET

Lawrence R. Klein was the father of modern economic forecasting, which melds economics with statistics in an attempt to predict the future. Mr. Klein, who died Sunday at age 93, was the recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering work on econometric models. He ushered forecasting from academia into the realm of business, said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of IHS Global Insight, the firm that ultimately evolved from the groundbreaking forecasting operation founded by Mr. Klein. Read more of this post

Stress of Childhood Poverty May Have Long Effect on Brain

Stress of Childhood Poverty May Have Long Effect on Brain

Children raised in poverty or in orphanages experience chronic stress early in life that can have long-lasting effects on the brain, setting them up for future mental and physical ailments as adults, two studies found. The stress of poverty may affect regions in a child’s brain that control emotion, according to research published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A second study found that children who had lived in an orphanage were more anxious than those who hadn’t. Read more of this post

Infecting an Audience: Why Great Stories Spread

INFECTING AN AUDIENCE: WHY GREAT STORIES SPREAD

BY: JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL

In the second of a two-part series, Jonathan Gottschall discusses the unique power stories have to change minds, and the key to their effectiveness.

In his 1897 book What is Art? the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy defined art as “an infection.” Good art, Tolstoy wrote, infects the audience with the storyteller’s emotion and ideas. The better the art, the stronger the infection–the more stealthily it works around whatever immunities we possess and plants the virus. Tolstoy reached this conclusion through artistic intuition, not science, but more than a century after Tolstoy’s death this is exactly what psychologists are finding in the lab. When we enter into a story, we enter into an altered mental state–a state of high suggestibility. Read more of this post