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By encouraging employees to both seek and provide help, rewarding givers, and screening out takers, companies can reap significant and lasting benefits. A McKinsey Quarterly article.
After the tragic events of 9/11, a team of Harvard psychologists quietly “invaded” the US intelligence system. The team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective. By surveying, interviewing, and observing hundreds of analysts across 64 different intelligence groups, the researchers ranked those units from best to worst.
[They discovered], after parsing the data, that the most important factor wasn’t on their list.
The single strongest predictor of group effectiveness was the amount of help that analysts gave to each other.
Evidence from studies led by Indiana University’s Philip Podsakoff demonstrates that the frequency with which employees help one another predicts - sales revenues in pharmaceutical units and retail stores;
- profits, costs, and customer service in banks;
- creativity in consulting and engineering firms;
- productivity in paper mills;
- and revenues, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and performance quality in restaurants.
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With collaborative consumption — the growing new economy based on access instead of ownership —you don’t have to buy a bike, car, prom dress, DVD, or chainsaw. You rent it or swap for it.
...collaborative consumption is a way to live light, waste less, to protect the environment, to create and associate with a community of like-minded people. But it’s not just a phenomenon of the hip. For everyone, it’s a way to de-clutter and save money.
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Photo credit: by edwardhblake NOTE: The Flickr Creative Commons is terrific photo sharing to help illustrate this ScoopIt.
At a time when other retailers are struggling to get people into stores, Costco is enjoying a moment in the sun.
For its part, Costco, or at least many of its officials, would like to see the company's practice of paying employees well put into law. The company’s CEO, Craig Jelinek, said earlier this year that he supports President Barack Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage, even arguing that lawmakers should boost it to $10 per hour.
For these Awards, the Foundation does not seek or accept nominations. The Award is not only recognition for past leadership and success but also an investment in the future.
Award winners include:
StoryCorps – Brooklyn, New York ($1 million) captures, shares, and archives stories of a diverse range of Americans for future generations
Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University – Chicago, Illinois ($750,000) protects the rights and well-being of young people in the juvenile justice system and advocates for fairer laws and policies
Sin Fronteras – Mexico City, Mexico ($500,000) protects the human rights of migrants in Mexico
Organizations will use this support to build cash reserves and endowments, develop strategic plans, and upgrade technology and physical infrastructure.
To qualify, organizations must demonstrate exceptional creativity and effectiveness; have reached a critical or strategic point in their development; show strong leadership and stable financial management; have previously received MacArthur support; and engage in work central to one of MacArthur’s core programs.
Google and Apple - what makes for innovation and what are the lessons learned? ...Google could have made the decision to stay solely focused on search, but they had the foresight to move beyond the certainty of what is to pursue new opportunity by focusing on what if.
Apple on the other hand, while once the leading innovator in their space, has ceded that position to other more aggressive players like Samsung, HTC , and yes, Google.
Where Apple went wrong is they began to confuse version releases and feature improvements with innovation.
Via Susan Bainbridge
"What Nassim Taleb misses about technology and innovation is that its purpose is not to entertain the delicate tastes of the chattering classes, but to improve the lives of us all. ...What’s more, most of technology’s black swans are positive ones."
Excerpts: The Usefulness Of Useless Things
What Mr. Taleb fails to understand is that technologists are supremely aware that most of their efforts will come to nothing
_________________________
What, I wonder, would Mr. Taleb make of Edison’s 9,999th try? _________________________
...They are, in fact, searching out black swans (to use Mr. Taleb’s own parlance), in full knowledge that they will spend most of their time rushing up blind alleys.
What, I wonder, would Mr. Taleb make of Edison’s 9,999th try? The truth is that useless things often end up very useful indeed. Modern information technology did not originate with engineers, but has its roots in an obscure academic crisis, whose major figures, such as Cantor, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel and others never dreamed that their work would have important practical consequences.
...What Mr. Taleb seems to miss is that these are ...people dedicated to following their dreams and willing to put their own skin in the game to do so.
What’s more, most of technology’s black swans are positive ones. As [Greg Satell] recently wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “Innovation is a particularly sticky problem because it so often remains undefined.” You can’t simply focus on the technologies that are sure bets, but must take into account the entire matrix (pictured in the article, four quadrants.) ... the logical consequence of his argument) is that we should remain in the upper right quadrant, where both the problem and the domain are well defined and he would presumably assign the lowest value on basic research and disruptive innovation, which have no clear applicability.
Yet it is there that we break truly new ground.
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Mayer defended her decision by first acknowledging that "people are more productive when they're alone," and then stressed "but they're more collaborative and innovative when they're together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together."
The shift in policy affects roughly 200 of Yahoo's 12,000 employees.
As an example of that collaboration, Mayer touted the newly-launched Yahoo Weather app for iOS, which uses built-in geolocation technology in Flickr photo albums to help users get a more accurate image of local weather -- an idea, she explained, originated by two software engineers who work in the same office.
By using the image of a purple elephant in her presentation, Mayer poked fun at her own management gaffe, which, as Fortune's Pattie Sellers argued, wasn't the policy itself but how it was unveiled to the public.
"Nassim Taleb's third book argues that we can benefit from chaos, uncertainty, resistance and stress. In an antifragile system, randomness is your best friend."
The Lebanese-American thinker Nassim Taleb argues in his new book Antifragile that there also exist things that are the exact opposite of fragile.
Things that are not merely robust [or resilient], but beyond robustness, such that accidents and chance events tend to make them better and stronger – much like a glass that becomes harder to break every time you drop it on the floor.
You see the same phenomenon in industries where the level of competition and entrepreneurship is high. The nightlife in your city gets better for every restaurant that goes bankrupt. The bankruptcy itself is a sad event, and negative for those concerned, but the overall result of bankruptcies is to improve the quality of those that survive.
Nassim Taleb’s new word for this opposite of fragility is antifragility....
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Via Philippe Vallat
"How Jenny Griffiths inspired winning innovation in her futurefacing clothesbuying company Snap Fashion."
Griffiths's "BIG" Moment
In April 2012, Cisco announced the inaugural British Innovation Gateway, or “BIG” Awards, an annual contest offering $135,000 in prize money, an additional $75,000 in marketing, public relations, and legal support, plus a 12-month mentorship with Cisco’s own in-house business coaches for a company working in an undiscovered, tech-savvy niche.
In September, Griffiths won it all with a pretty basic message. As her 60-second spot put it: See something you love, want, need? Get your phone out…
That’s led to some of the more widespread attention she’s been seeking. The U.K. Apple app store made Snap Fashion a featured download, which helped boost user traffic: The app has since had more than 10,000 downloads and the site attracts tens of thousands of users.
Mega-retailers that seemed unreachable before (think: Net-A-Porter) now cold call her to get more involved with the service.
Griffiths plans to use the CISCO contest windfall and mentorship to expand. This year, she is releasing an Android app, building better platform compatibility with likes of iPads and iPad Minis, recruiting local designers to the site, and unveiling a men’s section.
...Cisco hasn’t offered to buy the company--at least, not yet. They seem to be betting that the example of a homegrown startup making it on its own in London will be more powerful encouragement to the legions of startups now sprouting in East London.
"People don't buy what you do, but buy why you believe it."
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers ...
Belief...
The law of diffusion of innovation: TIVO, the single highest quality product on the market, great market conditions. Yet a commercial failure.
For Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech, there where no invitations. The focus was on belief. 250,000 people showed up to hear him speak. They showed up for themselves for what they believed for America. 25% of the audience was white.
“[Martin Luther King, Jr.] gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.”
"A rare CEO personal phone call: After making a customer complaint, I received a phone call from the CEO of Jiffy mix, the top producer of baking mixes in America."
While Jiffy competes by selling quality products at the lowest price (40 to 60 cents for corn muffins, for example), most American companies now try to sell their products by making people feel inadequate.
Many of our best and brightest minds shuffle paper and money ...to earn big salaries, while the real creators of wealth — bakers, builders, farmers, inventors, teachers, designers, and doctors are loaded down by debt.
Jiffy mix is a welcome trend-breaker.
According to CEO Holmes, "Our staff puts more emphasis on internal and external relationships than we do on completing tasks. This is very different from most companies ... Our dedication to strong family business values, combined with real world professionalism has us uniquely situated for the 21st Century."
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"You can’t tell the story of the women’s movement through one person," Gloria Steinhem.
Veteran documentary producer Dyllan McGee has worked on more than a dozen films for PBS and HBO, but MAKERS is unlike anything she’s ever created.
First of its kind...the entire idea was born out rejection.
What came out of that first roadblock flipped the script ...
MAKERS evolved into a “digital first” online platform for archiving dozens of interviews with feminist trailblazers, an approach that the Washington Post called a “sweeping documentary covering 50 years of feminism, pro and con, from the days when highly educated women were expected to live happily ever after as wives and mothers.”
Interview subjects include well-known women leaders like Condoleezza Rice, Sheryl Sandberg, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg alongside lesser-known women with powerful stories like Brenda Berkman, the first NYC firefighter, and Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston marathon.
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A Senate report on the London Whale trading losses shows that J.P. Morgan needs to make major shifts at the top to move past this mess. (RT @FortuneMagazine: J.P.
This is a sad chapter for the storied firm. And the episode taints not only Dimon but former Exxon Mobil (XOM) CEO Raymond's legacy, along with the other board members as well.
The SEC also shares the blame. Why did the regulator not step up quickly to address the clear disclosure issues?
...This is a cultural issue at J.P. Morgan that must be fixed at the top. ...Shareholders need to vote to split the roles of CEO and chair and to remove Dimon from the board. Congress and the regulators also need to address what is broken -- in the law and its enforcement.
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"Organizations create mythologies that become part of the culture.They are stories with great impact. But they are still just stories. Blind acceptance of mythologies costs money, morale, and motivation."
How do these mythologies impact yourorganization?
Organizational Mythology #1 - Working with people requires "Soft Skills“.
Organizational Mythology #2 - Leaders are made, not born.
Organizational Mythology #3 - Training changes organizations.
Organizational Mythology #4 - All projects are created equal.
Organizational Mythology #5 - Power is bad.
Organizational Mythology #6 - The greatest organizational mythof all: Bad leaders can change.
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Entrepreneur Richard Lorenzen dug deeper and found that the Affordable Care Act is not the small-business disaster colleagues and opponents have suggested.
The Mandate to Provide Coverage
Perhaps the most contested stipulation of the Affordable Care Act is the requirement for certain businesses to provide healthcare coverage to their full-time employees. Rest assured, small businesses in the U.S.: this provision will not break your bank.
The two chief executive officers who engineered the joint venture between Teva Pharmaceuticals and Procter & Gamble are now gone, only slightly more than two years after the deal was announced.
The joint venture, called PGT Healthcare, seems to be working well enough for each company to focus on other challenges, but leadership changes can mean once-heralded plans and practices fall out of favor.
Yahoo’s move aims to make up for years of missing out on the growth of social networks and mobile devices.
Excerpts:
The deal would be the largest acquisition of a social networking company in years, surpassing Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram last year.
Tumblr has over 108 million blogs, with many highly active users. For Yahoo and its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, buying Tumblr would be a bold move as she tries to breathe new life into the company. The deal, the seventh since Ms. Mayer defected from Google last summer to take over the company, would be her biggest yet.
It is meant to give her company more appeal to young people, and to make up for years of missing out on the revolutions in social networking and mobile devices.
News from Deb:
30 Incredible Ways Technology Will Change Education By 2028
Take a look at 2018
Technology to promote early literacy habits is seeded by venture capitalists. This is the start of new government programs that start farming out literacy and educational programs to start-ups, entrepreneurs, app developers, and other private sector innovators.
Digital literacy begins to outpace academic literacy in some fringe classrooms.
...Open Source learning models will grow faster than those closed, serving as a hotbed for innovation in learning.
Via miracletrain 夢想驛站, Devrim Ozdemir, Ph. D.
The Obama Administration’s proposal to change an outdated food aid restriction would allow the United States to feed millions more people at the same cost. ________________________
...By strengthening and not undercutting local farmers, cash aid also helps countries to avoid hunger later. ________________________
Excerpts:
In many places, people go hungry because there is no food. But in a lot of places, food is available and the market is working — people are just too poor to buy it. In those places, giving individuals or charitable groups cash to buy food can make food aid cheaper, faster and fairer. By strengthening and not undercutting local farmers, cash aid also helps countries to avoid hunger later.
________________________
...giving individuals or groups cash to buy food can make food aid cheaper, faster and fairer....the United States, the largest donor, is still tied to sending [food]... ________________________
With the exception of one country, every major supplier of humanitarian food aid enjoys the flexibility to use whatever form of aid works best — they can send food, buy food in the affected region, or just provide cash or vouchers. But the United States, the largest donor, is still tied to sending sacks of grain and legumes from America. Only 15 percent of American humanitarian food aid can be untied — bought outside the United States.
Now the Obama administration proposes giving America more flexibility. In the 2014 budget it just submitted to Congress, it is upping the untied amount from 15 percent to 45 percent.
The proposal also modernizes food aid by ending a second great inefficiency: a process known as monetization. And it is planning to ask American companies to provide not just commodities but also super-nutritious foods for the severely malnourished — in general modernizing food aid.
Read the full article here, including the problem in Haiti - why our food donations are disrupting their ability to recover.
Photo: By Feed My Starving Children (FMSC), Flickr
Against tall odds, Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans chairman, is putting down money to revive a two-square-mile area that was once Detroit’s core.
...His plans, according to academics like Brent D. Ryan, author of “Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities,” amount to one of the most ambitious privately financed urban reclamation projects in American history.
Opportunity Detroit, as Mr. Gilbert has branded it, is both a rescue mission and a business venture.... When he started buying in 2011, the city was having what he has described as a “skyscraper sale.”
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When a female CEO outlaws telework, a firestorm ensues. A male CEO does so — and goes unnoticed.
Joly, the new chief executive officer of Best Buy, announced recently that he was ending the innovative, flexible work style the company pioneered — Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE.
The circle of those who saw video of a coach’s abusive acts as soon as December was wider than had been understood.
On Friday morning, two days after Mr. Rice was fired, Athletic Director Tim Pernetti resigned, and implied that he was being made a scapegoat.
- He said his initial inclination when he saw the videos last fall was to fire Mr. Rice, but “Rutgers decided to follow a process involving university lawyers, human resources professionals, and outside counsel.”
Robert L. Barchi, the president of Rutgers, placed the blame on Mr. Pernetti and other senior officials who he said recommended that Mr. Rice be suspended rather than fired. The contradictory accounts signaled a deepening discord in the fallout over a decision that has outraged state lawmakers, faculty and students.
The Motley Fool - Costco is one of the 25 Best Companies in America.
The case for Costco
Costco has been lionized as "the Anti-Walmart" for its long policy of paying all employees a living wage and good benefits, including health coverage. In 2005, The New York Times claimed the average pay for Costco employees was 42% higher than Wal-mart's Sam's Club warehouse.
In 2008, Slate reported that after five years, a cashier makes about $40,000, and that workers pay only about 12% of health care costs out of pocket.
Any kind of job at Costco can also turn into a career thanks to the company's policy of hiring from within.
Wall Street, predictably, hates this. According to them, employees should be paid the least possible so that returns can accrue to shareholders.
In 2004, Deustche Bank analyst Bill Dreher famously complained that at Costco, it's better to be an employee than a shareholder.
Well, if Bill Dreher was a shareholder in 2004, I hope he didn't sell. Between January of 2004 and 2013, Costco shares more than quadrupled market returns, returning 180% to the S&P 500's 40%.
...The Foolish bottom line
Over 30 years, ...Costco has defied Wall Street "wisdom" through generosity to employees and devotion to customers, making investors rich along the way.
Pierson is a veteran agent and agency’s chief of staff.
She does not need Senate confirmation for the post, which White House officials said would be announced Tuesday afternoon.
Obama’s selection of Pierson comes after an extraordinarily difficult year at the service, and amid calls that the next director make internal changes at the agency whose masculine culture was exposed during an overseas trip last year.
China's change at the top ran smoothly - this time
...In the Western democracies of France and the United States voters endorsed both change and continuity respectively.
Voters in Mexico demonstrated the vitality of their democracy, while the will of the voters in Russia is unclear.
The people of Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, Japan and South Korea voted, mainly endorsing unchanged government.
But another great change of leadership happened in 2012 without the unpredictability which arises from consulting the people. The leadership transition in China was predictable.
For only the second time in its history the CCP had managed a transition of leadership, establishing an unambiguous, yet unwritten, set of guidelines for change.
Leadership change in any one-party state is difficult.
Read more: http://ow.ly/jkTbL ;
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