by Jacob Sokol - “I’d always believed that a life of quality, enjoyment, and wisdom were my human birthright and would be automatically bestowed upon me as time passed. I never suspected that I would have to learn how to live – that there were specific disciplines and ways of seeing the world I had to master before I could awaken to a simple, happy, uncomplicated life.” ~ Dan Millman
Studies conducted by positivity psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky point to 12 things happy people do differently to increase their levels of happiness. These are things that we can start doing today to feel the effects of more happiness in our lives. (Check out her book The How of Happiness.)
I want to honor and discuss each of these 12 points, because no matter what part of life’s path we’re currently traveling on, these ‘happiness habits’ will always be applicable.
Express gratitude. – When you appreciate what you have, what you have appreciates in value. Kinda cool right? So basically, being grateful for the goodness that is already evident in your life will bring you a deeper sense of happiness. And that’s without having to go out and buy anything. It makes sense. We’re gonna have a hard time ever being happy if we aren’t thankful for what we already have. more »
by Tony Schwartz -
The way most of us work isn’t working. Study after study has shown that companies are experiencing a crisis in employee engagement. A 2007 Towers Perrin survey of nearly 90,000 employees worldwide, for instance, found that only 21% felt fully engaged at work and nearly 40% were disenchanted or disengaged. That negativity has a direct impact on the bottom line. Towers Perrin found that companies with low levels of employee engagement had a 33% annual decline in operating income and an 11% annual decline in earnings growth. Those with high engagement, on the other hand, reported a 19% increase in operating income and 28% growth in earnings per share.
Nearly a decade ago, the Energy Project, the company I head, began to address work performance and the problem of employee disengagement. We believed that burnout was one of its leading causes, and we focused almost exclusively on helping individuals avoid it by managing their energy, as opposed to their time. Time, after all, is finite. By contrast, you can expand your personal energy and also regularly renew it. more »
Success: Away from the low growth and high regulation of an America under Washington’s thumb, our northern neighbor is economically strong. As 2011 ends, Canada has announced yet another tax cut — and will soar even more.
The Obama administration and its economic czars have flailed about for years, baffled about how to get the U.S. economy growing.
In reality, the president need look no further than our neighbor, Canada, whose solid growth is the product of tax cuts, fiscal discipline, free trade, and energy development. That’s made Canada a roaring puma nation, while its supposedly more powerful southern neighbor stands on the outside looking in. more »
by J.R. Dunn -
Crony capitalism is the most serious current danger to the American community, a threat not simply to government or the economy, but to our very way of life. It is the worst such threat since the trusts and monopolies of the early 20th century, and in much the same way. Cronyism is one of the major forces behind the establishment of the corrupt pseudo-aristocracy that has been taking shape in this country over the past two decades, a synthetic privileged class made up in large part of politicians, hustlers, and hangers-on who have become expert in exploiting the rest of us.
The legacy media, for some obscure reason, tends to bury discussions about this group. While the reportage on discrete incidents is there — see the parade of stories on Solyndra, Goldman Sachs, and MF Global for examples — we find little effort to pull it all together. Academics, with the single exception of Angelo Codevilla, who sounded the alarm two years ago in The Ruling Class, appear oblivious, as if they had no idea what’s going on, which may well be the case. more »
by Tom McClintock -
The government’s continuing failure to address our nation’s gut-wrenching unemployment stems from a fundamental disagreement over how jobs are created in the first place.
We are now in the third year of policies predicated on the assumption that government spending creates jobs.
We have squandered three years and trillions of dollars of the nation’s wealth on such policies, and they have not worked because they cannot work.
Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy until it has first taken that same dollar out of the economy. more »
by Michelle Greenwald -
How exactly do we define innovation? While it’s probably the most overused term in business today, innovation is not a fad. It’s not even new. What differentiates a smart innovation—and makes it worth writing about—is that it has the capability of moving a business forward in ways that can result in more customers, more sales, more brand loyalty, more good will, or some combination of those effects. Smart innovation is capable of providing a company with competitive advantage. Innovations are smart when they are not just inventions for innovation’s sake, just to be new and different; rather they provide a strategic benefit.
Innovation has always been relevant because it aims to satisfy unmet consumer and business needs; as the new-product development time-to-market continues to shrink and product life cycles get shorter and shorter, the term will become even more relevant. What qualifies as an innovation, in my mind, is a product, service, aspect, or feature that is new, different, surprising, clever, fresh, attention-getting, challenging of conventional ways things are done, and is an obvious improvement on “what’s out there” in that particular product category and geographical area. more »
by Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. - How and why do incompetent people rise to the top?
Why are there so many incompetent leaders? Is your boss less than competent? How about that department head in accounting or HR that doesn’t know his/her job? How in the world do incompetent people rise to the top in many organizations? Here are the reasons:
We Don’t Do a Good Job of Selecting Leaders. We simply don’t invest the time or resources needed to select the best people for jobs. Time and time again, we take hiring shortcuts. We interview in a haphazard way, and select the person who appears best in the interview. The problem is that often the best performer in the interview is one of the least competent workers (they’re so good in the interview because they get so much practice, because they are often fired!). more »
by Alyson Shontell -
There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa.
Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.
Milne has no finance background yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year.
Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000. more »
by Thomas Lockwood -
Have you noticed how similar some products are becoming? A Tesla and a Lotus, that’s an easy one. But I’m talking about the similarities between seemingly disparate objects, like an Audi car and Oakley sunglasses, a 3M stapler and an Alessi teapot, or a Starbucks café and your bank lobby. Consumers love cool design, and, in case you haven’t heard, companies are catching on. Investing in the design process can be a sustainable business advantage, because it tends to lead to five things: creative collaboration, innovation, differentiation, simplification, and customer experience.
For starters, designers tend to collaborate with each other, other disciplines, and users to generate new ideas, explore alternatives, and create new stuff (products, websites, brands, stores, etc.). The process of design thinking, co-creation, and design as creative collaboration can help companies move beyond their norms and create new markets. more »
by Marla Tabaka - The purpose-driven company is led by someone who has a reliable inner compass guiding them. John Baldoni asks: What’s your direction?
Can you describe the purpose of your business in a single sentence? Do you—and does every single person who is connected with your organization—have a reason to believe in that mission? Internationally recognized leadership educator John Baldoni believes that when an organization succeeds, it is because everyone involved knows precisely what they do—and why they do it. Even in start-up mode, an entrepreneur needs to constantly consider his or her mission and purpose to ensure growth and success. I recently spoke with Baldoni, the author of Lead with Purpose: Giving Your Organization a Reason to Believe in Itself, about the the defining qualities and responsibilities of one who leads with purpose. more »
If there’s a common denominator in tax reform and economic growth packages, it’s this: the corporate rate is too high, and needs to come down for the sake of keeping our employers competitive internationally. Even most on the Left have accepted this.
The most common tax-rate target is 25%. Because of how the world has been moving in the direction of low corporate tax rates, however, this is no longer good enough — and might even result in a worse outcome than the status quo.
First, a little background. A generation or two ago, the entire developed world had high corporate income-tax rates. In 1981, the developed nation average was 47%. Canada had a 51% rate. The United Kingdom levied a rate of 52%. more »
It seems that no one is immune to the tendency to procrastinate. When someone asked Ernest Hemingway how to write a novel, his response was “First you defrost the refrigerator.” But putting off tasks takes a big hit on our productivity, and psyche. Procrastination is not inevitable. Figuring out why you postpone work and then taking concrete steps to prevent it will help you get more done and feel good about yourself.
What the Experts Say
According to Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist and the author of 12 books, including Driven to Distraction, delaying work is often a symptom of how busy you are. “We procrastinate because we all have too much to do,” he says. And of course, we want to dodge things we don’t like. “Many people procrastinate because they fear the drudgery or the difficulty of the task they are avoiding,” says Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and coauthor of The Progress Principle. But, as you have likely learned, it doesn’t pay to dawdle. “Putting it off doesn’t make it go away. Getting it done does,” says Hallowell. Here are five principles to follow next time you find yourself deferring important work. more »
PovertyCure is an international network of organizations and individuals seeking to ground our common battle against global poverty in a proper understanding of the human person and society, and to encourage solutions that foster opportunity and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that already fills the developing world.
In my latest book, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL, I wrote about the negative impact of executive stock-based compensation on corporate short-termism. Eliminating stock-based compensation would help reduce the incentive for executive leadership to focus on the short term. But there is a residual problem which has long frustrated me. The answer finally popped into my brain (funny how that works). As usual, the solution won’t be easy to pull off (but that has never stopped me).
The residual problem I’m talking about is corporate short-termism. Many companies face quarterly or even more immediate pressure from their shareholders (increasingly made up of hedge funds, program traders, and day traders) to deliver short-term performance. Worried that short-term-oriented arbitrageurs will put their company in play and short-term-oriented shareholders will gain majority or effective control of the company, ending their ability to steer the long-term trajectory of the company, they focus on making short-term decisions to protect their positions. The paradoxical result is that they never get around to taking those long-term-oriented decisions. more »
by Ben Schiller - Post-financial meltdown, business schools are trying to make their graduates more responsible. But does taking one class on ethics work, or does a new ethical model need to permeate the curriculum?
Many industry watchers saw business schools as contributing factors in the financial crisis, arguing that, by failing to challenge orthodoxies, and overlooking “socially useless” activities, they helped create conditions for collapse. That nearly every relevant banker, regulator, and politician was an MBA graduate helped make the case.
But what about now? Have b-schools changed?
Yes, and no, according to a survey of how schools are teaching social, environmental, and ethical topics. more »
by Chris Banescu -
As the world mourns the passing away of Steven P. Jobs, the visionary entrepreneur and creative genius behind Apple, it’s important to remember some timeless insights and essential lessons for life that he talked about. I was reminded of the maturity and wisdom of his message while watching a video of an inspiring and thoughtful Commencement address he delivered to the Stanford University graduating class on June 12, 2005. There are several notable comments and sage advice I highlight below. They have helped and reassured me, I hope they will help you also.
Steve Jobs on the importance of dealing with hardships, finding work that you are passionate about, loving what you do, and following your vocation:
“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
by Chris Banescu -
Warren Buffett and President Obama claim that the rich do not pay enough taxes. They both blame the American tax code of being unfair and coddling the rich. Both have been pushing the same class-warfare narrative for many years, using current US capital gains and dividends taxation rates as evidence for their big government progressive agenda. Both are spreading misinformation about all the taxes corporations and individuals actually pay.
As far back in 2007, Mr. Buffet, the third-richest man in the world, began criticizing the US tax code for its low tax rates on dividends and capital gains from long-term investments. One of his most infamous statements, one often repeated by the Left to support its punish the rich schemes, was made in a speech at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser for Senator Hillary Clinton in New York:
“The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
by Eric Markowitz – One of the world’s oldest publishing companies brought in a ringer to revolutionize the way the company does business. The result? The first fully-interactive textbook.
Nature Publishing Group, which publishes several highly regarded scientific journals and textbooks, was founded in England in 1869, eight years before electric lights illuminated the streets of London. Now, 140 years later, with the help of Harvard Classics scholar Vikram Savkar, the company is beginning to disrupt the traditional textbook model that it helped to create.
This month at California State University, the company released Principles of Biology, an interactive, constantly updating biology textbook that retails for less than $50. Like most digital textbooks, the software is accessible on laptops and tablets, but unlike most digital textbooks, it’s not just a scan of a .pdf. The company calls it a “digital reinvention of the textbook,” meaning that students can interact with the material; they can literally match amino acids and corresponding DNA with their fingers. Inc.com’s Eric Markowitz spoke with Vikram Savkar about what it takes to create a culture of innovation in an old-school company. more »
Everyone complains about his or her boss from time to time. In fact, some consider it a national workplace pastime. But there’s a difference between everyday griping and stressful frustration, just as there is a clear distinction between a manager with a few flaws and one who is incompetent. Dealing with the latter can be anguishing and taxing. But with the right mindset and a few practical tools, you can not only survive but flourish.
In the global phone handset market Motorola went from the market leader to market laggard in just six years. Its earnings fell from US$4bn to $0.6bn and its share price from $180 to $46 over this time. Theirs is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you fail to recognize the changes occurring in the wider market and how quickly customer expectations can change.
How could the company that first invented the mobile phone 35 years ago and then hold the No. 1 market position for most of the next three decades make such a bad error in judgment?
Motorola’s demise actually stemmed from its greatest success – the RAZR handset. Launched in 2003 the ultra-thin handset with the clam shell appearance sold a staggering 110 million units over the next four years. Its impact was so extraordinary that the industry magazine PC World rated it #12 in The Greatest Gadgets of the last 50 years. Buoyed by this success the company introduced nine separate versions of the RAZR in quick succession. more »
by Gary Jason -
The failure of the American K-12 public school system has been obvious for decades. Some of us fossils can recall the public uproar that accompanied the release of the report “A Nation at Risk” back in 1987, documenting the mediocre at best, disastrously bad at worst performance of the nation’s public schools.
The public school special interest groups (the PSSIGs) — that is, public school administrators, education department professors, “labor studies” professors, textbook publishers, and most notoriously teachers unions and their members — managed to turn the outrage into support for jacking up spending.
Over the last quarter-century, we have nearly doubled our national per capita spending — we now outspend per capita for K-12 education every other nation on Earth but one. But our national student scores have remained flat, while internationally, we have dropped in ranking among developed nations from 14th during the 1970s down to 24th place today. more »
It is often in times of crisis and life-threatening emergencies that the real character of an individual is made manifest. The contrasts between the leadership of an American airline captain and that of our current president offer us an opportunity for personal and societal reflection. The differences could not be more striking.
On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport with 155 passengers and crew on board. In the cockpit of the Airbus A-320 twin-engine aircraft were Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles. With First Officer Skiles at the controls, the airplane climbed away from the airport. As flight 1549 approached an altitude of 3,000 feet, the plane struck a flock of geese and instantly lost thrust in both engines. At once Captain Sullenberger realized that both engines were failing and imminent danger awaited the passengers and crew. He quickly put his hand on the side stick, called out “my airplane” (at 3:53 in the video), and took over control of the aircraft from First Officer Skiles. There was no panic, no fuss, no paralysis, no moment of indecision — just calm, competent leadership and confident action. more »
There is incredible power in writing down one’s goals. This sage advice comes from an entry written by Michael Hyatt on his blog Intentional Leadership. The five (5) useful tips he mentions can help us focus our efforts, clarify our desires, motivate us into action, and give us an opportunity for self-reflection and self-improvement; key elements in finding purpose and meaning in our lives. I encourage everyone to visit Michael’s site often, he posts a lot of other great stuff there also!
Most people don’t bother to write down their goals. Instead, they drift through life aimlessly, wondering why their life lacks purpose and significance. I am not saying that committing your goals to writing is the end-game. It’s not. But it is the beginning.
Here are five reasons you should commit your goals to writing:
1. Because it will force you to clarify what you want. Imagine setting out on a trip with no particular destination in mind. How do you pack? What roads do you take? How do you know when you have arrived? Instead, you start by picking a destination. The same is true with the milestones in your life. Writing down your goals forces you to select something specific and decide what you want. more »
by Nick Nanton & JW Dicks -
As I tell my clients over and over, your personal branding campaign should be primarily centered on the goal of branding yourself as a celebrity within your market. The key phrase here is “within your market.” You don’t need to become the next Hollywood superstar, you just need to become the go-to guy in your field, within your market. And as you know if you’ve been paying attention, that involves branding yourself both as an expert and as an interesting individual. Why interesting? Because it’s not good enough simply to be considered good at what you do; you also need to be memorable. You need to stick in the minds of potential clients, so that when they need your services, you are the first person they think of. For some clients I’ve spoken to, this seems to present a problem. “There’s simply nothing memorable about me,” they say. If you identify with that notion, pay attention, because today I’m going to show you that anyone can brand themselves as an expert and a celebrity if they are willing to commit 100% to that goal. more »
by Josh Linkner - Hyper-growth companies often credit a culture of innovation as their primary driver of success. They deploy creative thinking to attack problems big and small. Here’s how you can too.
We live in a business world accelerating at a dizzying speed and teeming with ruthless competition. As most of the tangible advantages of the past have become commoditized, creativity has become the currency of success. A 2010 study of 1,500 CEOs indicated that leaders rank creativity as No. 1 leadership attribute needed for prosperity. It’s the one thing that can’t be outsourced; the one thing that’s the lifeblood of sustainable competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, most companies fail to unleash their most valuable resources: human creativity, imagination, and original thinking. They lack a systematic approach to building a culture of innovation, and then wonder why they keep getting beaten to the punch. more »
by Jacob Sokol -
by Tony Schwartz -
by IBD Editorials -
by J.R. Dunn -
by Tom McClintock -
by Michelle Greenwald -
by Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. -
by Alyson Shontell -
by Thomas Lockwood -
by Marla Tabaka -
by Ryan Ellis -
by Amy Gallo -
, I wrote about the negative impact of executive stock-based compensation on corporate short-termism. Eliminating stock-based compensation would help reduce the incentive for executive leadership to focus on the short term. But there is a residual problem which has long frustrated me. The answer finally popped into my brain (funny how that works). As usual, the solution won’t be easy to pull off (but that has never stopped me).
by Ben Schiller -
by Chris Banescu -
by Eric Markowitz –
by Amy Gallo -
by Gary Jason -
It is often in times of crisis and life-threatening emergencies that the real character of an individual is made manifest. The contrasts between the leadership of an American airline captain and that of our current president offer us an opportunity for personal and societal reflection. The differences could not be more striking.
by Nick Nanton & JW Dicks -
by Josh Linkner -