Baap Rey !!: Most Popular Editorials: Billionaire CEO Sara Blakely Says These 7 Words Are the Best Career Advice She Ever Got

Billionaire CEO Sara Blakely Says These 7 Words Are the Best Career Advice She Ever Got

Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound.

Sara Blakely founded Spanx in her late 20s. The company made $4 million in sales in its first year and $10 million in its second year. In 2012, Forbes named Blakely the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world.

She is clearly massively successful. Yet when asked what the best advice she ever received was, she doesn't talk about success.

Instead, she talks about how, as a child, her father would sit her down at the dining room table and ask her the same question:

"What did you fail at this week?"

He didn't want to know how many As she'd gotten. He wasn't interested in how many girl scout cookies she'd sold, how many goals she'd scored on her soccer team, or whether she'd gotten a perfect score on her math test.

No, he wanted to know what she had failed at. And when she told him, do you know what his reaction was?

He high-fived her.

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Research: Being Nice in a Negotiation Can Backfire

Whether you are making a large purchase, working on a joint project, or discussing your next promotion, you'll likely need to negotiate. At a very basic level, in fact, nearly every interaction we have is a negotiation - an opportunity to persuade others to agree to an outcome we want. But what is the best way to go about persuading others? Should you be warmer or tougher? Friendlier or more aloof? Our recent research may provide the answer. Negotiation experts have long confirmed the intuition that being warm and friendly pays off at the bargaining table, leading us to gain concessions and capture a larger chunk of the value. A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled "How to Negotiate Nicely without Being a Pushover" made this point, as did legendary sports agent Ronald M. Shapiro's book The Power of Nice: How to Negotiate So Everyone Wins - Especially You! Similarly, in our own research, we've found that people tend to believe niceness will buy them better deals. But when put to the test, this prediction turns out to be wrong.

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If Strategy Is So Important, Why Don't We Make Time for It?

Almost every leader wants to make more time for strategic thinking. In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the leadership behavior most important to their organization's success. And yet in another study, a full 96% of the leaders surveyed said they lacked the time for strategic thinking. It's important to remember that strategic thinking doesn't necessarily require large amounts of time; it's not about taking endless sabbaticals or going on leadership retreats. As productivity expert David Allen says, "You don't need time to have a good idea, you need space... It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don't have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they're suboptimal."

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The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can't hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can't even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old - or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt - and it's stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn't fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you'd expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

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This study of 1.6 million chess moves found the age we hit our cognitive peak

More than 24,000 chess games played in professional tournaments over 125 years have been analyzed by scientists to measure how age affects cognitive ability. They conclude that humans reach their cognitive peak around the age of 35 and begin to decline after the age of 45. And our cognitive abilities today exceed those of our ancestors. "Performance reveals a hump-shaped pattern over the life cycle," report the authors in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Individual performance increases sharply until the early 20s and then reaches a plateau, with a peak around 35 years and a sustained decline at higher ages."

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A radical new technique lets AI learn with practically no data

"Less than one"-shot learning can teach a model to identify more objects than the number of examples it is trained on.Machine learning typically requires tons of examples. To get an AI model to recognize a horse, you need to show it thousands of images of horses. This is what makes the technology computationally expensive - and very different from human learning. A child often needs to see just a few examples of an object, or even only one, before being able to recognize it for life. In fact, children sometimes don't need any examples to identify something. Shown photos of a horse and a rhino, and told a unicorn is something in between, they can recognize the mythical creature in a picture book the first time they see it. Now a new paper from the University of Waterloo in Ontario suggests that AI models should also be able to do this - a process the researchers call "less than one"-shot, or LO-shot, learning. In other words, an AI model should be able to accurately recognize more objects than the number of examples it was trained on. That could be a big deal for a field that has grown increasingly expensive and inaccessible as the data sets used become ever larger.

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Brain Scans Reveal Why "Night Owls" Have It Rough in a 9-to-5 Society

The 9-to-5 workday originated with American labor unions in the 1800s, and today, the eight-hour workday is the norm. But however normalized the schedule, it is directly opposed to something more powerful: biology. In a new study, scientists report that people whose internal body clocks tell them to go to bed late, but are then forced to wake up early, have a lower resting brain connectivity in the regions of the brain linked to consciousness. Scientists shared their findings Friday in the journal SLEEP, with the article, "Circadian phenotype impacts the brain's resting state functional connectivity, attentional performance and sleepiness."

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Restoring craft to work -- A replacement to corporate purpose

The innate desire to do a job well has greater motivational force than any corporate purpose. You've probably heard these stories before. There's the proud janitor at NASA who tells President Kennedy that he isn't just sweeping up; he is helping put a man on the moon. And the gung-ho stonemason who tells architect Christopher Wren that he isn't just hammering rock; he is building a cathedral to God's glory. The stories are popular, even though they probably never happened. And they get told and retold to support the power of purpose. It's the subtext that bothers me. Invariably, the moral of these stories is that employers (a label that literally defines the rest of us as something to be used) need to provide employees with a purpose. This suggests that many jobs are, in and of themselves, meaningless. It also implies that people don't care about the work they do - that they are wastrels.

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How Perfectionists Can Get Out of Their Own Way

Like any extreme trait, perfectionism can be a double-edged sword. Having high standards and being hardworking can help someone stand out in a crowded field, and their tenacity can help them improve their skills over time. And, to an extent, being very conscientious can help avoid errors. The benefits I've mentioned, and a fear that any flaw will result in catastrophe, can keep people hooked on their perfectionist mindset. However, there are also significant downsides to attempting mistake-free performance. If you're struggling to let go of some of your perfectionistic tendencies, or managing someone who is, it can be helpful to remember the ways perfectionists can self-sabotage in the workplace. I'll discuss five below. You'll notice a general theme of the person losing sight of the big picture.

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This cargo ship cuts emissions 90% using an old-fashioned trick: Sails

Using sails to transport goods? An idea so old it's new again. The tens of thousands of cargo ships that travel the world's oceans - carrying everything from jeans and smartphones to cars and bananas - collectively emit more CO2 than most countries. A new ship called the Oceanbird, in development now, is designed to help: With huge, wing-like sails, it runs on wind power, but will be able to cross the Atlantic in less than two weeks, only a few days longer than a ship running on fossil fuels. For the shipping industry, which is racing to figure out how to cut emissions in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the design has advantages compared to other potential solutions. Unlike cars, ships can't easily shift to electric power, since the massive size of a cargo ship means that it would need to be filled with batteries to run, leaving little room for cargo. Ships can run on liquified natural gas, but that would only partially reduce emissions. Ammonia fuel doesn't pollute as it burns but is polluting to produce. Wind energy can avoid all those challenges.

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The Great Covid-Driven Teamwork Divide

For most teams, the pandemic either brought colleagues closer or drove them increasingly apart. There are three key reasons why.What makes a team more than the sum of its parts? Its cohesion or connectedness, which allows for pooling of individual members' strengths and compensates for their weaknesses. Accordingly, Google's landmark Project Aristotle study found that the single most important driver of team performance was not the skills, intelligence or personality of a team's members, but rather the quality of the team's interactions and whether members felt psychologically safe. The Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps the greatest threat to team connectedness we have ever seen. Colleagues who were mostly co-located - often literally within arm's reach of one another - have been forced to disperse across cities, even countries. As we saw this occurring, we fretted for the future of these teams. Would close working relationships built up over months if not years simply be scattered to the four winds? To capture the effects in real time, we launched a survey back in June about how teams were being impacted by Covid. More than 500 professionals around the world responded. The findings surprised us.

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Ikea seeks to disrupt itself before it is disrupted

World's largest furniture retailer rolls out a series of experiments that could uproot its business model Just off Oslo's main shopping street lies an experiment at the heart of Ikea's attempts to disrupt itself before it is disrupted. Until recently the only way to experience Ikea was to travel to the outskirts of big cities, visit an enormous warehouse and transport the furniture home yourself to then spend hours assembling it. All that is changing, and the Oslo planning studio is just one in a bewildering number of experiments encompassing everything from renting out furniture to students to selling second-hand sofas. While at an early stage, the moves will provide a case study of a large company trying to rediscover the entrepreneurial spirit that brought it success. If scaled up, the experiments would potentially uproot a business model that Ikea has followed faithfully for seven decades.

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What's the Best Way to Create Long-Term Value?

It's a well-known paradox. Most executives are committed to the idea of maximizing long-term shareholder value, but when they want to track and improve performance, they focus on a dizzying variety of short-term measures (and acronyms). ROA. ROC. TSR. EBIT. EBITDA. CAR. EPS. We could go on. Why this focus on short-term measures? In large part, because they're easy to obtain, easy to use, and have been widely used in the past. The problem, as studies have long made clear, is that optimizing short-term accounting measures and ratios often doesn't maximize long-term value. To think clearly and effectively about long-term value, companies need a better measure - and, as we write in a recently published article in the Strategic Management Journal, we've devised one that we call LIVA, short for Long-term Investor Value Appropriation. The idea behind LIVA is simple: Add up the net present value of all the investments a firm has engaged in over a long period of time. The key insight from our analysis is that this can be done by using publicly available stock-market data. LIVA uses historical share-price data to calculate the value a company has either created or destroyed for its entire investor base over a long time period.

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What's Keeping CEOs Up At Night About Working Remotely?

The Wall Street Journal asked 19 CEOs for their perspective on remote work and whether it was working for them. We asked 500. With the help of our parent company, Chief Executive Group, we questioned 500 CEOs on their biggest challenges in managing the sudden, Covid-enforced transition to remote work. We were so bowled over by the volume, breadth and depth of responses that we launched an entire website www.remotework360.com to help navigate the uncertainties of remote, and also distilled the responses into an insightful whitepaper: "Remote Work; The CEO Perspective." You can download a free copy here, and read on for a key summary:

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How to Hold Remote Workers Accountable Without Micromanaging

Good managers don't actually care what folks do with their time. They care if the job gets done.In March, a viral leaked email from a Wall Street Journal manager instructed newly remote workers to keep managers informed if they're "taking a break, conducting an interview, in a meeting, or will otherwise be unavailable for a while." This is how you ruin remote work. Managers might as well ask to be informed every time an employee takes a bio break, eats a Snickers bar, ties their shoes, sneezes, scratches their elbow, or tidies their desk. I understand where the impulse comes from. Millions of people are working remotely for the first time, and managers are trying to adjust. Most are used to seeing their direct reports in person throughout the day, and think this gives them an idea of what exactly folks are doing with their time. But here's the thing. Good managers don't actually care what folks do with their time. They care if they get their job done or not.

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Sunday, August 22, 2021

Most Popular Editorials: Billionaire CEO Sara Blakely Says These 7 Words Are the Best Career Advice She Ever Got

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