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Sometimes failure is no success at all

December 16, 2013 5:49 pm

Sometimes failure is no success at all

By Andrew Hill

Mending a dud product is no substitute for getting it right first time

What struck me most forcefully in the profile of Jack Ma, Financial Times person of the year, was not the Alibaba founder’s youth, his love of martial arts, or his against-the-odds subjugation of eBay, once the dominant force in Chinese internet auctions. It was this: what a failure he was. Mr Ma was bad at maths, twice failed his university entrance exam and flopped when he tried to launch an online Yellow Pages. Read more of this post

Management communication is not about command or pulling rank, but rather influence to ‘make things happen’

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 10, 2013

From objective to outcome, via dialogue

Management communication is not about command or pulling rank, but rather influence to ‘make things happen’

NARENDRA AGGARWAL

Think about it: Difficult conversations often involve bad news, but leaders need to take time to think about how this is presented. – FILE PHOTO

AS managing a company becomes more complex with its growth in size and business diversity, mastering the art of management communication becomes critical to the success of the business. Rather than communicating to sell or negotiate contracts, management communication focuses on dialogue between colleagues in an organisational setting. Read more of this post

3 Leadership Hacks Every Business Owner Should Know

3 Leadership Hacks Every Business Owner Should Know

JENNA GOUDREAU

DEC. 18, 2013, 4:32 PM 2,393 1

As the world becomes increasingly complex and business owners face more pressures than ever before, leadership advice hasn’t really changed. That’s why Mike Myatt, a leadership advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs and author of new book “Hacking Leadership,” set out to provide shortcuts that would simplify the complexities of building a successful business.  Read more of this post

The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture

The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture

by Michael C. Mankins  |   8:00 AM December 19, 2013

A company’s culture can have a powerful impact on its performance. Culture is the glue that binds an organization together and it’s the hardest thing for competitors to copy. As a result, it can be a lasting source of competitive advantage. Take these examples:  Read more of this post

Four Keys to Thinking About the Future: (1) Enhance Your Power of Observation. (2) Appreciate the Value of Being (a Little) Asocial. (3) Study History. (4) Learn to Deal with Ambiguity

Four Keys to Thinking About the Future

by Jeffrey Gedmin  |   2:00 PM December 17, 2013

A publishing company has discovered that one of its well-known authors has plagiarized. The publisher has pulled the title. But does the publisher’s responsibility end there? Does one disclose the transgression to the public? Or to the author’s university employer? Or insist that the author do so him/herself? Read more of this post

The Fine Art of Tough Love

The Fine Art of Tough Love

by Joanne Lipman  |   8:00 AM December 17, 2013

What does it take to achieve excellence? I’ve spent much of my career chronicling top executives as a business journalist. But I’ve spent much of the last year on a very different pursuit, coauthoring a book about education, focusing on a tough but ultimately revered public-school music teacher. And here’s what I learned: When it comes to creating a culture of excellence, the CEO has an awful lot to learn from the schoolteacher. Read more of this post

Great Entrepreneurs Pick Great Markets: (1) Moats, (2) Mega Trends, (3) Concentration, (4) Market Creation

Great Entrepreneurs Pick Great Markets

by Rob Go  |   12:00 PM December 16, 2013

It’s hard to underestimate the power of an attractive or unattractive market in driving outcomes for companies, including start-ups. As Andy Rachleff, one of the founders of the venture capital firm Benchmark has said “When a great team meets a lousy market, markets win.” For entrepreneurs, then, the challenge is to find an opportunity in an attractive market. Read more of this post

In Praise of Failure

DECEMBER 15, 2013, 5:00 PM

In Praise of Failure

By COSTICA BRADATAN

If there was ever a time to think seriously about failure, it is now.

We are firmly in an era of accelerated progress. We are witness to advancements in science, the arts, technology, medicine and nearly all forms of human achievement at a rate never seen before. We know more about the workings of the human brain and of distant galaxies than our ancestors could imagine. The design of a superior kind of human being – healthier, stronger, smarter, more handsome, more enduring – seems to be in the works. Even immortality may now appear feasible, a possible outcome of better and better biological engineering. Read more of this post

Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams on life beyond the cubicle

December 18, 2013 4:27 pm

Dilbert’s creator on life beyond the cubicle

By Andrew Hill

Quick on the draw: since 1989 the cartoonist Scott Adams has produced more than 9,000 comic strips and still produces one a day

There are three frames to the typical Dilbert comic strip. Scott Adams, the creator of the mordant office satire, talks as though his own career has only just reached the third frame and, once completed, will have a punchline better than any he has written so far. The twist: the simply drawn everyman-engineer Dilbert will not be in it. Read more of this post

Lang Lang on the Keys to Success; The Chinese pianist is focusing on the next phase of his career: mentoring young musicians

Lang Lang on the Keys to Success

The Chinese pianist is focusing on the next phase of his career: mentoring young musicians.

JASON CHOW AND WEI GU

Dec. 19, 2013 6:11 a.m. ET

At the age of 31, Chinese pianist Lang Lang says he has already entered the second phase of his career. He’s firmly at the top of the classical music world’s A-list, with repeated gigs accompanied by top orchestras and high-profile performances such as the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee last year. Read more of this post

After founding and nurturing several companies, Romesh Wadhwani is bringing the same principles and passion to philanthropy

Romesh Wadhwani: The Renaissance Man

by Seema Singh | Dec 10, 2013

After founding and nurturing several companies, Romesh Wadhwani is bringing the same principles and passion to philanthropy

Award: Distinguished Non-Resident Philanthropist
Romesh Wadhwani
Age: 66
Why He Won: For creating institutional frameworks for entrepreneurship in India. The Wadhwani Foundation has created a resource network for young entrepreneurs to dip into and is working to get policy bottlenecks removed.
His Trigger: He wanted to focus on key issues like job creation.
His Mission: His Foundation aims to help create 15,000 to 20,000 startups, and half-a-million new jobs by 2022 and skill 5 million people.
His Action Plan: His model is based on leveraging financial resources from stakeholders —institutes, government, corporates—in the 10:90 ratio (Foundation:stakeholders).
His Next Move: To strengthen existing initiatives; work with government agencies to ease the process of setting up startups; improve the innovation grant environment and convince governments to include startups in their procurement policy. Read more of this post

Rohini and Nandan Nilekani contribute to causes that others may find risky. In doing so, they are nudging the society to look at these issues afresh

Rohini & Nandan Nilekani: The Conscious Givers

by Seema Singh | Dec 9, 2013

Rohini and Nandan Nilekani contribute to causes that others may find risky. In doing so, they are nudging the society to look at these issues afresh

Award: Outstanding Philanthropist
Rohini and Nandan Nilekani
Age: Rohini-54, Nandan-58
Why They Won: For having given nearly Rs 350 crore, especially to ideas which CSR doesn’t fund. Rohini has committed to giving Rs 20 crore every year; Nandan has spent five years at UIDAI as part of the ‘giving back to society’ process.
Their Trigger: The belief that self-created wealth should be given away for social good. They believe that the wealthy should leave only so much to their children that they do something but not leave so much that they do nothing.
Their Mission: While Rohini funds ideas and people that create a more empowered society, Nandan invests in institutions that pay off over years.
Their Action Plan: A commitment to keep doing more of what they have done. Approachability is their biggest asset.
Their Next Move: For Nandan, giving years to public causes is more expensive than writing cheques for ‘a few hundred crores’. After having started UIDAI, it is clear he wants to remain in public life to help bring ‘consequential social change’. Read more of this post

Young Woman Dies After Tweeting That She Worked 30 Hours Straight

Young Woman Dies After Tweeting That She Worked 30 Hours Straight

VIVIAN GIANG

DEC. 18, 2013, 11:26 AM 33,096 25

Mita Duran, a 24-year-old woman who worked as a copywriter in Indonesia, slipped into a coma on Sunday after tweeting that she had worked for 30 hours straight. She died not long after. Duran often kept herself awake by drinking Kratingdaeng, better known as Thai Red Bull, writes Lee Moran at the New York Daily News, while working late into the night at Young & Rubicam, an ad agency owned by multinational advertising and public relations company WPP. Duran’s Twitter feed shows that she often tweeted about her heavy workload: “Haven’t slept since Saturday and I have 30 more copy lines to go and a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon,” she said on July 8. “Sweetest sleep I’ve had in a long time. It’s a shame I’m supposed to wake up uh, ONE HOUR earlier. Slept through 3 phone calls and 3 alarms!” she said on Nov. 14. This is Duran’s last tweet before collapsing on Sunday: Duran’s father, Yani Syahrial, is reported to have posted on social media website Path that his daughter was in a coma for “working over the limit,” Zachary Stieber writes at the Epoch Times. Young & Rubicam tells us the statement below is the company’s official statement on Duran’s death:  Duran’s friends and families urge others to consider this a cautionary tale for young professionals “to know [your] limit.”

These Guys Are Trying To Build A Dog Collar That Translates Barks Into English

These Guys Are Trying To Build A Dog Collar That Translates Barks Into English

RYAN BUSHEY

A new campaign has launched on Indiegogo to raise money for a device called “No More Woof”. The project’s goal is to translate dog barks into English so owners can understand how to help their pet. Read more of this post

How to Become Henry Kissinger

HOW TO BECOME HENRY KISSINGER

By David Brooks
Excerpted from The Weekly Standard
December 4, 1995

In this country, any boy or girl can grow up, get on the speaking circuit, and deliver after-dinner speeches to conventions filled with shoe salesmen for $50,000 a pop. All it takes is hard work, dedication, and a reputation for global omniscience. Read more of this post

Teen Marijuana Use Steady as Kids See Less Risk in Pot

Teen Marijuana Use Steady as Kids See Less Risk in Pot

About 6.5 percent of high school seniors smoked marijuana daily in 2013, compared with 6 percent in 2003, as attitudes toward the drug’s danger relax, according to a U.S. government report. About 40 percent of 12th-graders view regular marijuana use as harmful, a decrease from 44.1 percent last year, according to a Monitoring the Future report from the National Institutes of Health. As more states ease marijuana laws, the change in attitudes may increase future use, the authors said. Read more of this post

Patience is key to life’s endless negotiation

December 17, 2013 3:54 pm

Patience is key to life’s endless negotiation

By Luke Johnson

Executives who rush the process are likely to have a long time to dwell on their mistake

Negotiation plays a central role in life from an early age. Haggles over homework, discussions about sharing an apartment, buying a car or agreeing terms for a job – we must all negotiate all the time. Read more of this post

Five non-business books that will inspire managers

December 18, 2013 4:25 pm

Five non-business books that will inspire managers

By Michael Skapinker

Works on astronomy, politics and plain English that surpass faddish specialist titles

Year-end is the time for a clear-out of the business books I haven’t read and those I never finished. We get sent dozens of business books to review, but I have got through very few over the years. Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma has stayed with me. Confronting Mistakes: Lessons from the Aviation Industry when Dealing with Errorby Jan Hagen, which I am reading at the moment, may do so too. Read more of this post

PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s nonprofit foundation encourages learning by doing

Why a Nonprofit Backs Dropping Out of School

PayPal Founder’s Foundation Encourages Learning by Doing

LORA KOLODNY

Dec. 18, 2013 10:17 p.m. ET

PayPal Inc. founder Peter Thiel jumped to the investor side after he sold his payment-technology firm to eBay Inc. EBAY +1.05% for $1.5 billion in 2002. He put part of his $55 million windfall into startups—including LinkedIn Corp. LNKD -3.65%, Yelp Inc., YELP -1.51% SpaceX and Yammer—that had been formed by PayPal co-founders and employees. He also became Facebook Inc. FB -2.68% ‘s first outside investor, selling $640 million of his shares in the social network’s initial public offering last year. Read more of this post

B-Schools Vie for Startup Crown; M.B.A. Programs Tout On-Campus Incubators, Successes Like Warby Parker—Which School Is Best?

B-Schools Vie for Startup Crown

M.B.A. Programs Tout On-Campus Incubators, Successes Like Warby Parker—Which School Is Best?

MELISSA KORN

Dec. 4, 2013 7:08 p.m. ET

Every elite business school claims it is the ideal place to start a business. But how can students really know which is best? Melissa Korn reports on the News Hub. Photo: Stanford School of Business. So, you want to start a company. Which business school is best? Read more of this post

Robert Downey: A futurist knows; The actor and producer talks to Fortune about the big ideas that have impacted his view on technology and entertainment

Robert Downey: A futurist knows

By Stephanie N. Mehta, Deputy Managing Editor December 19, 2013: 5:00 AM ET

The actor and producer talks to Fortune about the big ideas that have impacted his view on technology and entertainment.

FORTUNE — Robert Downey Jr. has become one of the most powerful players in Hollywood. But the 48-year-old actor admits he’s not much of a networker. “I think about people, and I have a conversation with them in my head,” he says. “But I tend to not reach out.” In an interview about his career and the future of the movie industry, the Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes actor tellsFortune about the real-life discussions (Elon Musk!) that have influenced his thinking about technology, business, and entertainment. Edited portions of the interview will appear in the January 13 issue of Fortune; a lengthier excerpt of the Q&A follows. Read more of this post

To U.C. Berkeley’s long-standing strategy thinker David Teece, companies gain an edge only when they evolve in ways no one else can match

Published: November 11, 2013

The Dynamic Capabilities of David Teece

To U.C. Berkeley’s long-standing strategy thinker, companies gain an edge only when they evolve in ways no one else can match.

by Art Kleiner

Every great company is involved in building great capabilities: gaining competitive advantage from the things it does exceptionally well. In the last few years, the growing recognition of capabilities’ importance in management strategy and business innovation has made David Teece’s work particularly relevant. A professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, Teece originated the theory of “dynamic capabilities” to explain how companies fulfill two seemingly contradictory imperatives. They must be both stable enough to continue to deliver value in their own distinctive way and resilient and adaptive enough to shift on a dime when circumstances demand it. Read more of this post

Famous Math Professor Says Zuckerberg’s $3 Million Math Prize Is NOT A Good Idea

Famous Math Professor Says Zuckerberg’s $3 Million Math Prize Is NOT A Good Idea

JULIE BORT

DEC. 16, 2013, 8:32 PM 19,115 24

On Friday, billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner announced a new $3 million prize for mathematics known as the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. This is the third such prize that the Valley’s elite have created. Read more of this post

Amazon Turned a Flaw into Gold with Advanced Problem-Solving

Amazon Turned a Flaw into Gold with Advanced Problem-Solving

by Michael Skok  |   1:00 PM December 5, 2013

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

– Albert Einstein

Several years ago, Amazon was struggling with scaling its e-commerce infrastructure and realizing that many of its internal software projects took too long to implement, a major pain point from a competitive standpoint. Read more of this post

Ad Exec With Cancer, Given ‘Two Weeks To Live,’ Posts Self-Written Obit On The Day Of His Death

Ad Exec With Cancer, Given ‘Two Weeks To Live,’ Posts Self-Written Obit On The Day Of His Death

LAURA STAMPLER AND JIM EDWARDS DEC. 16, 2013, 7:17 PM 108,614 8

Mike Hughes, the former president of The Martin Agency, died today after a long and public battle with cancer. He was 65. Initially diagnosed with lung cancer in the 1990s, Hughes was given “two weeks to live” by his doctors last January. Hughes declined to go quietly. Instead, he began a blog called “Unfinished Thinking” to chronicle his battle. Today, his last post was published. It begins: Read more of this post

10 Things The Greatest Leaders All Have In Common

10 Things The Greatest Leaders All Have In Common

ERIC BARKER, BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE
DEC. 16, 2013, 6:11 AM 27,346 6

I’ve posted a lot about effective leaders. Looking back, what patterns do we see?

Know The Power Of Feelings

Leaders who just focus on results don’t do nearly as well as those that also pay attention to relationships.

Via Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect:

Zenger fund that if employees rated a manager as very high on “focus on results” (that is, one’s ability to get things done effectively), there was only a small (14 percent) chance that the manager would be rated among the top 10 percent of leaders overall. However, if in addition to “focus on results,” employees also rated the manager’s ability to build relationships” very highly, then the likelihood of that person’s being rated as a great leader overall skyrocketed to 72 percent.

Paying attention to employee feelings matters.

What’s the difference between exemplary and good employees? They care.

Via Responsibility at Work: How Leading Professionals Act (or Don’t Act) Responsibly:

What strategies really improve organizations? Research involving 400 people across 130 companies came up with a simple answer:

You must change individual behavior by addressing employee feelings. Read more of this post

Six Investment Errors You Are Making Right Now

Six Investment Errors You Are Making Right Now

By Barry Ritholtz – Dec 13, 2013

(Correct Tudor Jones’s first name in 10th paragraph.)

It is an annual event that comes with the regularity of Thanksgiving and holiday shopping. I am referring to the Black Friday survey conducted every year in a misguided attempt to forecast holiday sales. Read more of this post

How To Use The Media To Sell A Company; Recent stories about a potential sale of Time Warner Cable offer a master class in the subtle semiotics of deal-making. A reader’s guide

How To Use The Media To Sell A Company

Recent stories about a potential sale of Time Warner Cable offer a master class in the subtle semiotics of deal-making. A reader’s guide

posted on December 7, 2013 at 9:15pm EST

Peter LauriaBuzzFeed Staff

“Time Warner Cable’s Next CEO Ready to Sell If Price Is Right,” blares the headlineof a Bloomberg story published Friday morning. The headline isn’t as informative as it sounds, however: A basic operating principle of mergers and acquisitions reporting is that companies aren’t for sale until they are — and they usually are when the price is right. Read more of this post

50 Unfortunate Truths About Investing

50 Unfortunate Truths About Investing

MORGAN HOUSEL, THE MOTLEY FOOL
NOV. 27, 2013, 10:04 AM 51,297 36

Sorry, but …

1. Saying “I’ll be greedy when others are fearful” is much easier than actually doing it.

2. The gulf between a great company and a great investment can be extraordinary.

3. Markets go through at least one big pullback every year, and one massive one every decade. Get used to it. It’s just what they do. Read more of this post

Inequality and Good Intentions; A new book says good intentions are a barrier to equality and to progress among the world’s poor

DECEMBER 18, 2013, 12:01 AM

Inequality and Good Intentions

By CASEY B. MULLIGAN

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

A new book says good intentions are a barrier to equality and to progress among the world’s poor. Read more of this post