Ancient Wisdom and Modern Solutions

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Solutions

Marketers finally learn

The big grocery chains are not thinking about closing their larger stores, which have been a success. But they hope to capture new business with the smaller stores, appealing to consumers on days when they do not have time for a long shopping trip.

“The average person goes shopping for 22 minutes,” said Phil Lempert, who edits Supermarketguru.com, a Web site that tracks retail trends. “You can’t see 30,000 or 40,000 products. We are moving into an era when people want less assortment.”

Jim Hertel, managing partner at the firm Willard Bishop, which advises supermarkets, added, “If you’ve got 50 feet of ketchup and what you want is Hunt’s 64-ounce and you can’t find it, people get overwhelmed.”

-Miles of Aisles for Milk? Not Here

Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters

One of the best Google Talks- Bill Tancer is somebody to look out for.

George Washington on leadership

The Miseducation of Robert S. McNamara

He was a brilliant student at the University of California and at Harvard Business School, where he became a member of the HBS faculty. McNamara was a devotee of managerial control, an expertise he applied in his work at the Ford Motor Company and later at the Department of Defense as secretary in President John F. Kennedy's cabinet.

His mantra was measurement. As secretary of defense, McNamara developed, along with key subordinates, including Robert Anthony of the HBS control faculty, long-range procurement cycles. He even tried to get the U.S. Navy to subscribe to a common aircraft for the three branches of the military. The Navy refused to go along, since this branch was concerned about aircraft operating from carriers.

McNamara urged field commanders in Vietnam to apply measurement to enemy losses, but did not realize until it was too late that the measurements were unreliable to assess enemy losses. The most reliable assessments came from correspondents like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. McNamara published a book years after he retired to reassess the Vietnam War and his role in it as secretary of defense. His main theme was the failure to examine critically the assumptions leading to U.S. involvement in this disaster. Editorial writers took no pains to spare McNamara's feelings.

The moral I took away from his story is to avoid the perils of the fox and its reliance on a single belief, in this case measurement, and the technology of control.

-The Inner Life of Leaders

Personal Productivity Links of the Day

Five Best To-Do List Managers

Team Effectiveness MindMap Templates

Assorted

The cost of the prevailing policy framework in finance

A graphical playground

Feldstein's Heresy on Fiscal Policy?

Summers on economic dog days

Hummel on Central Banking

On time management

The crisis: a tale of two monetary policies

Measuring the value of NBA players

How To Talk to a Search Engine

The Street Porter and the Philosopher

Feldstein on Fiscal Policy

Economists predict whether the host country will rule the Beijing Olympics.

10 reasons why mind mapping software should be the foundation of your personal productivity system

Six Rules Doctors Need to Know

The former Fed chairman calls for a new way to deal with a crisis;

Mr Greenspan says a high-level panel of American financial officials should be given broad power to seize any financial institution whose failure threatens the entire economy, bail out its creditors and close it down. “We need laws that specify and limit the conditions for bail-outs” and do so transparently with taxpayers’ money, “rather than circuitously through the central bank, as was done during the blow-up of Bear Stearns,” he writes in “The Age of Turbulence”. (Penguin is to release the paperback on September 9th.)

If that means the government has to wade in, so be it. “Our country has long since abandoned the notion that we should leave crises to be resolved solely by the marketplace,” he says. “The critical need…is to formalise…the procedures improvised in the case of Bear Stearns. This should ensure that in the future, government financial assistance to lending institutions does not impact the Federal Reserve’s balance-sheet and monetary policy.”

Accounting rules for public duty and private failure

Confessions of a risk manager

A housing slump helped cause the credit crisis. But its effect on spending may have been exaggerated

An OECD study in 2004 put the marginal propensity to spend out of financial wealth at between 0.01 and 0.07 for rich countries: that is, if wealth rises by $1, spending rises by between one and seven cents. The Federal Reserve’s model puts the wealth effect in America at 0.0375.

The Fed’s model assumes the same wealth effect for housing as for financial assets. From the perspective of lifetime income, a dollar of housing wealth is the same as a dollar of stockmarket wealth. But some argue that the negative wealth effect from falling home values may be larger than for other assets. One reason is that housing wealth is spread more evenly than financial wealth, which is concentrated among rich households whose spending is less sensitive to the changing tides. Another is that housing slumps are rarer than stockmarket downturns. Consumers are likely to consider a fall in house values as a durable change in wealth and may cut spending more sharply in response.

Which CEO Characteristics and Abilities Matter?

Tribal Leadership?

Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

In a rigorous eight-year study of approximately 24,000 people in over two dozen corporations, Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright refine and define a common theme: the success of a company depends on its tribes, the strength of its tribes is determined by the tribal culture, and a thriving corporate culture can be established by an effective tribal leader. Tribal Leadership will show leaders how to employ their companies' tribes to maximize productivity and profit: the authors' research, backed up with interviews ranging from Brian France (CEO of NASCAR) to "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, shows that over three quarters of the organizations they've studied have tribal cultures that are merely adequate, no better than the third of five tribal stages.

Is this book worth reading?

Richard Thaler on Nudge

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Related;
Dustin Hoffman’s mental accounting

The Drukard's Walk

A great talk from Authors@Google;
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow

Related;
Numbers Guy Interview: Leonard Mlodinow;

WSJ: If you can pick an index-outperforming stock 51% of the time, how many picks do you need to make to have better than a 99% chance of outperforming the index? (We’ll assume your picks are uncorrelated and that the magnitude of any outperformance or underperformance is the same.)

Mr. Mlodinow: Consider a stock analyst versus an index fund in a kind of stock-picking World Series. The law of large numbers says if you play a best-of-X series you can be confident that the best team will win — if X is large enough. But for small X, say, a best-of-seven series, there is a surprisingly large chance that the lesser team will win. So in sports just because one team is superior doesn’t mean it will win the series.

The same uncertainty applies to the market. For example, suppose the stock picker has a 51/49 edge over the index fund, meaning he or she will outperform it, in the long run, in 51% of the years in which they compete. How long is the long run in this case? The mathematics shows that in order to justify 99% confidence that the stock picker will outperform the index fund more often than it underperforms it, the contest would have to go on for about 13,700 years...

WSJ: After a particular drug is on the market, it will cause a particularly serious adverse effect to happen to one of every 3,000 patients in an epidemiological, i. e., post-hoc analysis. In retrospect, how many patients must be tested in the randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, clinical trial to achieve 95% confidence that the side effect will show up?

Mr. Mlodinow: You need roughly 14,000 patients. Here is how you get that: The process is governed by the binomial distribution, which can be approximated by the normal distribution. The chance of an adverse reaction in any one patient is one in 3,000. Since you want a 95% confidence interval for one (or more) reactions, you want enough patients so that 1.00 is 1.64 standard deviations (or more) below the mean. With 14,000 patients the mean number of adverse reactions will be about 4.6 and the standard deviation is about 2.2, which gives you what you require. (I have rounded my answer to the nearest 1,000).

Correction: To achieve 95% confidence that the side effect will show up, you need 8,985 patients receiving the drug. This blog post misstated the number as 14,000. See the comments of this post for more details.

WSJ: Might we need to proceed irrationally in our lives to succeed? In other words, if we really believed that so much of success was the result of luck, wouldn’t a lot of us just give up trying?

Mr. Mlodinow: Some theorize that this is the evolutionary reason that we like to assume we are in control, even when we clearly aren’t. That may be so, but I don’t mourn the role of luck, I celebrate it. All else equal, it is a lot more fun not knowing how your book will do, or how your life will turn out, than it would be if everything could be determined by a logical calculation. Moreover, the fact that luck matters means you can help yourself by being persistent. A failure doesn’t mean you are unworthy, nor does it preclude success on the next try. As Thomas J. Watson, the highly successful IBM pioneer, said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

Wisdom from Seth Godin

Target Otaku


The new standard for meetings and conferences

If you think a great conference is one where the presenters read a script while showing the audience bullet points, you're wrong. Or if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don't provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you're wrong as well...

Here's what someone expects if they come to see you on an in-person sales call: that you'll be prepared, focused, enthusiastic and willing to engage honestly about the next steps. If you can't do that, don't have the meeting.

Here's what a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.

And here's what a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement.

how to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action--that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

Effective managers hand books to their team. Not so they can be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say to them, "are we there yet?"

Branding

Brand Names Before the Industrial Revolution;

In medieval Europe, manufacturers sold durable goods to anonymous consumers in distant markets, this essay argues, by making products with conspicuous characteristics. Examples of these unique, observable traits included cloth of distinctive colors, fabric with unmistakable weaves, and pewter that resonated at a particular pitch. These attributes identified merchandise because consumers could observe them readily, but counterfeiters could copy them only at great cost, if at all. Conspicuous characteristics fulfilled many of the functions that patents, trademarks, and brand names do today. The words that referred to products with conspicuous characteristics served as brand names in the Middle Ages. Data drawn from an array of industries corroborates this conjecture. The abundance of evidence suggests that conspicuous characteristics played a key role in the expansion of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution.

Related;

Generals also Lobby

DCI Group- Lobbyists for Myanmar in DC

DCI Group is a strategic public affairs and global issues management firm. We use a campaign-style approach to help corporations, trade associations, and nonprofit organizations address their most critical communications and public policy challenges.

Not Related;
MCC Signs Largest Compact to Date ($698m) with Tanzania

What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries

In Weak Rivets, a Possible Key to Titanic’s Doom;

Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday.

The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic....

Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.

Each of the great ships under construction required three million rivets that acted like glue to hold everything together. In a new book, the scientists say the shortages peaked during the Titanic’s construction.

“The board was in crisis mode,” one of the authors, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, who studied the archives, said in an interview. “It was constant stress. Every meeting it was, ‘There’s problems with the rivets and we need to hire more people.’ ”

Apart from the archives, the team gleaned clues from 48 rivets recovered from the hulk of the Titanic, modern tests and computer simulations. They also compared metal from the Titanic with other metals from the same era, and looked at documentation about what engineers and shipbuilders of that era considered state of the art.

The scientists say the troubles began when its ambitious building plans forced Harland and Wolff to reach beyond its usual suppliers of rivet iron and include smaller forges, as disclosed in company and British government papers. Small forges tended to have less skill and experience.

Adding to the problem, in buying iron for the Titanic’s rivets, the company ordered No. 3 bar, known as “best” — not No. 4, known as “best-best,” the scientists found. Shipbuilders of the day typically used No. 4 iron for anchors, chains and rivets, they discovered.

So the liner, whose name was meant to be synonymous with opulence, in at least one instance relied on cheaper materials.

Many of the rivets studied by the scientists — recovered from the Titanic’s resting place two miles down in the North Atlantic by divers over two decades — were found to be riddled with high concentrations of slag. A glassy residue of smelting, slag can make rivets brittle and prone to fracture.

“Some material the company bought was not rivet quality,” said the other author of the book, Timothy Foecke of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency in Gaithersburg, Md.

The company also faced shortages of skilled riveters, the archives showed. Dr. McCarty said that for a half year, from late 1911 to April 1912, when the Titanic set sail, the company’s board discussed the problem at every meeting. For instance, on Oct. 28, 1911, Lord William Pirrie, the company’s chairman, expressed concern over the lack of riveters and called for new hiring efforts.

In their research, the scientists, who are metallurgists, found that good riveting took great skill. The iron had to be heated to a precise cherry red color and beaten by the right combination of hammer blows. Mediocre work could hide problems.

“Hand riveting was tricky,” said Dr. McCarty, whose doctoral thesis at Johns Hopkins University analyzed the Titanic’s rivets.

Wine Library

tv.winelibrary.com

Related;
Bottoms Up | Wine Guru Gary Vaynerchuk

Thomas Friedman- 'Call Your Mother'

The best column of Thomas Friedman;

My mom left two indelible marks on me. The first was to never settle for the cards you’re dealt. My dad died suddenly when I was 19. My mom worked for a couple of years. But in 1975, I got a scholarship to go to graduate school in Britain and my mom surprised us all one day by announcing that she was going, too. I called it the “Jewish Mother Junior Year Abroad Program.”

Most of her friends were shocked that she wasn’t just going to play widow. Instead, she sold our house in little St. Louis Park, Minn., and moved to London. But what was most amazing to watch was how she used her world-class bridge skills to build new friendships, including with one couple who flew her to Paris for a bridge game. Yes, our little Margie off to Paris to play bridge. She even came to see me in Beirut once, during the civil war — at age 62.

The picture of her in Beirut makes me think back in amazement at what my mom might have done had she had the money to finish college and pursue her dreams — the way she encouraged me to pursue mine, even when they meant I’d be far away in some crazy place and our only communications would be through my byline. It’s so easy to overlook — your mom had dreams, too.

My mom’s other big influence on me you can read between the lines of virtually every column — and that is a sense of optimism. She was the most uncynical person in the world. I don’t recall her ever uttering a word of cynicism. She was not naïve. She had taken her knocks. But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes were made by optimists.

Six years ago, I was in Israel at a dinner with the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, which publishes my column in Hebrew. I asked the editor why the newspaper ran my column, and he joked: “Tom, you’re the only optimist we have.” An Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, was seated next to me and as we walked to the table, he said: “Tom, I know why you’re an optimist. It’s because you’re short and you can only see that part of the glass that’s half full.”

Well, the truth is, I am not that short. But my mom was. And she, indeed, could only see that part of the glass that was half full. Read me, read my mom.

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

Related;
My mom by Donald J. Boudreaux

Social Intelligence?

When Emotional Intelligence Does Not Matter More Than IQ

Welcome to Your Brain

Josh Waitzkin "The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence."


Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life


Brain Rules

The Global Power Elite

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf

Related Book- The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

Advice from Down Under

via Harry Clarke