CE#327: Que Xote (What a RHYTHM) – Nando Lauria

CE#326: Bill Gates talks about the Khan Academy on the Gates Notes

CE#325: Twelve Ways Leaders Fail New Managers (BBW)

Bloomberg Businessweek

1. Provided lax onboarding. You had to learn on the fly when you started. Your manager didn’t have time to coddle you and it made you resourceful and resilient. So you leave your new hires to sink or swim, figuring they’ll come through just as you did—when that’s not the case.

2. Set a poor example. Your employees take their cues from you. You set the tone and serve as the role model. The question is: What are they adopting from you? Attitudes and behaviors are contagious. Your conduct sets the boundaries for what’s appropriate. Take a look at your flaws. Ask yourself if you would accept those defects from your direct or indirect reports.

3. Lacked accountability. Your managers can’t read your mind. Look at the expectations you’ve set. What are your priorities? What larger purpose do you ultimately want to achieve? What is your timeline for reaching it? What metrics should they hit? What will happen if they miss these marks? And how often do you review all this with them? Whatever gets measured gets done, or so the cliché goes.

4. Offered no support system. Management requires a steep learning curve, with so much changing on a moment’s notice. Too often, new managers feel alone in a bubble. Before you throw them to the wolves, introduce them to key leaders and reliable veterans who can provide a safety net, sage advice, and occasional support. Give them time to build relationships. And don’t worry about a mentor: They’ll find one on their own.

5. Accepted underperformance. You think they don’t take the hint. But what cues are you giving them? Are you sharing the hard facts? Or are you just tiptoeing and sugarcoating, hoping the issues self-correct over time? Fact is, self-awareness is a rare trait. And your managers deserve better than token feedback from you.

6. Didn’t listen. You hired them for who they were and what they could do. Then you plugged them in and expected them to do your bidding without question. But sometimes they push back … and for good reason. Want to know the quickest way to alienate a new manager? Ignore the knowledge, experience, and talent he brings to the table. Yeah, you probably hired him because he reminded you of yourself. But you have blind spots. So ditch the all-knowing bully shtick. Listen—even when he says what you don’t want to hear. That might be a telltale sign to change course.

7. Never solicited feedback. You think you know what’s really going on. You believe only numbers reflect performance. But it isn’t hard to conjure up success for one year. You need to ensure that it continues year after year. Without a solid foundation based on intangibles—camaraderie, buy-in, trust—everything inevitably falls apart. So quit focusing exclusively on the quantifiable. Start talking people: your managers’ direct reports, peers, and partners. Don’t be afraid of what they’ll say.

Full article here

CE#324: How To Make Your Competition Irrelevant (Open l Forum AMEX)

Q: Is the right goal to make one’s brand relevant or to make one’s competitor’s brand irrelevant?

A: Both. The goal should be to drive market dynamics by making your brand relevant and competitors irrelevant. Engage in innovation that is substantial enough, or transformational enough, to create a new category or subcategory defined by one or more offering enhancements that some customers will consider “must-haves.” These “must-haves” could involve self-expressive, social or emotional benefits as well as functional benefits.

The task then is to attract customers to the new category or subcategory and create barriers to competitors. Think of Apple’s iPod, Chrysler’s minivan, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, Westin’s Heavenly Bed and others that changed what people bought with “must-haves” and created years and sometimes decades with no real competitor.

In nearly all categories from beverages to cars to computers to financial services, the only way that a firm can gain a meaningful sales change is through this type of innovation. Expenditures on marketing and product refinements to win the “my brand is better than your brand” battle rarely changes the marketplace because of the momentum of habitual behavior.

Q: What causes brands to lose relevancy?

A: There are three risks. First, a brand can remain strong but customers start buying another category or subcategory. It does not matter how much a customer loves your minivan brand or how strong it is, if they are now buying hybrid sedans. The challenge is to make the brand relevant to the emerging new subcategory or defeat the subcategory—convince people that the minivan is a better choice than a hybrid sedan.

Second, a brand can lose energy and visibility to the point that it is not considered and, thus, not relevant. The task is to either energize the business like Apple and Nintendo have done or to find something with energy like the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and attach it to the brand.

Third, a brand can create a negative, a reason not to buy the brand. It could be based on a perceived lack of social conscious or a quality problem that undercuts credibility. Avoiding a negative is not always an exciting initiative, but it can have strategic implications.

Full article

CE#323: Is Sugar Toxic? (NYT)

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”

It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. “It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.”

If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

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CE#320: Eric Whitacre – Sleep (Virtual Choir 2011)

CE#319: The World’s 10 Most Innovative Companies, And How They Do It (Forbes)

Barry Jaruzelski and Cesare R. Mainardi (Forbes),
Spending the most on innovation is not how they do it.

You can spend all you want on innovation, but you can’t guarantee success. In fact, the most innovative companies are not necessarily the biggest spenders, according to Booz & Company’s recent global innovation study. What matters instead? The ability to build the right innovation capabilities to connect with the overall business strategy and other critical capabilities.

In conducting our latest Global Innovation 1000 study, we surveyed more than 450 innovation executives (senior managers and R&D professionals) at more than 400 different companies around the globe. We asked them to identify the companies they thought were the most innovative.

The results were striking: Seven of the top 10 innovators were not among the top 10 spenders on innovation. Many of those identified by their peers as top innovators actually spent well below their industry averages on R&D, as a percentage of sales. And, most important, the top 10 innovators turned in better financial performances than the top 10 spenders.

Full article here

CE#318: Genesis – Rome – Turn It On Again (Italia1 Broadcast)

CE#317: Why cloud storage is the future of music (CNN)

(CNN) — Amazon this week became the first big internet company to offer something called “cloud music.” To the unfamiliar, that term may seem off-putting, like a new soft-rock genre that leans heavily on harp solos. But it’s possible many of us will be using cloud music systems in the not-far-off future.

So what does that look like?

In marketing-speak, the cloud is just a fancy term for all the computers — other than your own — that are connected to the internet.

Companies like Amazon and Google maintain huge networks of computers that are stored, row after row, in secret warehouses all over the world. These machines hold data that computer users don’t want to store on their own hard drives.

Think about all the photos you have on Facebook; any documents you’ve stored with a service like Dropbox or Mozy; or all of your Web-based e-mail. Those files are stored somewhere out in the cloud instead of on a personal laptop.

The cloud-storage concept is catching on in lots of ways, but music, as buzz about Amazon’s new service shows, seems to be the next frontier in this cloud expansion.

Still, this transition is fraught with legal and technical challenges. It’s also been a long time coming, which gives ammo to skeptics who say cloud music has been the “next big thing” for years now.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the topic. Think of it as Cloud Music 101.

What’s better about cloud music?

It’s convenient.

Read full article here

 

CE#316: Everything You Know About Weight Loss is Wrong

Over the weekend, I watched “Fathead”, a documentary produced in reaction to Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me”. This documentary completely challenged everything I knew about weight loss and heart disease, and was also incredibly informative and entertaining.

Tom Naughton, a stand-up comedian and computer programmer, set out to prove Morgan Spurlock wrong. Fast food can be part of a healthy diet. Tom decided that he’d eat fast food three times a day for a month, just like Spurlock…but he’d LOSE weight, not gain it.

According to the “Fathead” official site, the creators describe the film as a “delicious parody of Super Size Me…Naughton serves up plenty of no-bologna facts that will stun most viewers, such as: The obesity “epidemic” has been wildly exaggerated by the CDC. People the government classifies as “overweight” have longer lifespans than people classified as “normal weight.” Having low cholesterol is unhealthy. Lowfat diets can lead to depression and type II diabetes. Saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease — but sugars, starches and processed vegetable oils do.”

Naughton’s plan was simple: maintain a caloric intake of 2000 calories per day while eating only fast food (and a couple of “Carb Options” snack bars.) But you can’t just cut calories to lose weight. You need to be eating the correct types of food, and in the correct ratio. And you also need to take into account your hormones, particularly insulin. When insulin levels are up, you are more likely to store calories from food as fat, rather than burning them. And what increases insulin levels? The consumption of sugars and carbohydrates. So Naughton decided that he’d limit both calories and carbs, ingesting 100 grams of carbohydrates per day.

Full article