Insurance Leaders: September 2011

Friday, September 30, 2011

Moods on Twitter Follow Biological Rhythms, Study Finds - NYTimes.com

September 29, 2011

Twitter Study Tracks When We Are :)By BENEDICT CAREY

However grumpy people are when they wake up, and whether they stumble to their feet in Madrid, Mexico City or Minnetonka, Minn., they tend to brighten by breakfast time and feel their moods taper gradually to a low in the late afternoon, before rallying again near bedtime, a large-scale study of posts on the social media site Twitter found.

Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.

The report, by sociologists at Cornell University and appearing in the journal Science, is the first cross-cultural study of daily mood rhythms in the average person using such text analysis. Previous studies have also mined the mountains of data pouring into social media sites, chat rooms, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, but looked at collective moods over broader periods of time, in different time zones or during holidays.

“There’s just a torrent of new digital data coming into the field, and it’s transforming the social sciences, creating new lenses to look at all sorts of behaviors,” said Peter Sheridan Dodds, a researcher at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the new research. He called the new study “very exciting, because it complements previous findings” and expands on what is known about how mood fluctuates.

He and other outside researchers also cautioned that drawing on Twitter had its hazards, like any other attempt to monitor the fleeting internal states labeled as moods. For starters, Twitter users are computer-savvy, skew young and affluent, and post for a variety of reasons.

“Tweets may tell us more about what the tweeter thinks the follower wants to hear than about what the tweeter is actually feeling,” said Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, in an e-mail. “In short, tweets are not a simple reflection of a person’s current affective state and should not be taken at face value.”

The study’s authors, Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy, acknowledge such limitations and worked to correct for them. In the study, they collected up to 400 messages from each of 2.4 million Twitter users writing in English, posted from February 2008 through January 2010.

They analyzed the text of each message, using a standard computer program that associates certain words, like “awesome” and “agree,” with positive moods and others, like “annoy” and “afraid,” with negative ones. They included so-called emoticons, the face symbols like “:)” that punctuate digital missives.

The researchers gained access to the messages through Twitter, using an interface that allows scientists as well as software developers to work with the data.

The pair found that about 7 percent of the users qualified as “night owls,” showing peaks in upbeat-sounding messages around midnight and beyond, and about 16 percent were morning people, who showed such peaks very early in the day.

After accounting for these differences, the researchers determined that for the average user in each country, positive posts crested around breakfast time, from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.; they fell off gradually until hitting a trough between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., then drifted upward, rising more sharply after dinner.

To no one’s surprise, people’s overall moods were lowest at the beginning of the workweek, and rose later, peaking on the weekend. (The pattern of peak moods on days off held for countries where Saturday and Sunday are not the weekend.)

The pattern on weekend days was shifted about two hours later — the morning peak closer to 9 a.m. and the evening one past 9 p.m., most likely because people sleep in and stay up later — but the shape of the curve was the same.

“This is a significant finding because one explanation out there for the pattern was just that people hate going to work,” Mr. Golder said. “But if that were the case, the pattern should be different on the weekends, and it’s not. That suggests that something more fundamental is driving this — that it’s due to biological or circadian factors.”

The researchers found no evidence for the winter blues, the common assumption that short winter days contribute to negative moods. Negative messages were as likely during the winter as in the summer.

But positively rated messages tracked the rate at which day length changed: that is, they trended upward around the spring equinox in late March, and downward around the fall equinox in late September. This suggests that seasonal mood changes are due more to a diminishing of positive emotions in anticipation of short days, the authors say.

Dr. Dodds, the University of Vermont researcher, has been doing text analysis of Twitter messages worldwide as well, to get a reading on collective well-being, among other things. He said the new study comported well with his own recent analysis. “We find that swearing goes up with negative mood in the very same way,” he said. “It tracks beautifully with the pattern they’re showing.”

Social scientists analyzing digital content agree that, for all its statistical appeal, the approach still needs some fine-tuning. On Twitter, people routinely savage others with pure relish and gush sarcastically — and the software is not sophisticated enough to pick up these subtleties.

“I suspect that if you counted the good and bad words people said during intercourse, you’d mistakenly conclude that they were having an awful time,” Dr. Gilbert said.

Access Source And It's Great Content: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/science/30twitter.html

Good at Chess? A Hedge Fund May Want to Hire You - NYTimes.com

September 29, 2011, 6:56 pm
Good at Chess? A Hedge Fund May Want to Hire You

For a number of hedge fund managers and traders, playing chess well has been among their better career moves.

By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

Boaz Weinstein’s opening move on Wall Street came as a result of chess.

Mr. Weinstein, now a star hedge fund manager, was trying to get a summer job at Goldman Sachs in 1991, when he was just 18. After being told there was nothing available, he stopped in a bathroom on the way out and ran into David F. Delucia, then the head of corporate bond trading.

Mr. Delucia, who is ranked as an expert by the United States Chess Federation, had played Mr. Weinstein, ranked as a master by the federation, many times. He arranged for a series of interviews until Mr. Weinstein got an internship on a Goldman trading desk.

Mr. Weinstein is not alone among Wall Streeters who have a chess connection.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal who now runs the hedge fund Clarium Capital, is also a chess master, and Douglas Hirsch, the founder of Seneca Capital, while not an expert, has become an ardent chess enthusiast.

Chess helps in trading, Mr. Weinstein said. To become a good chess player, he learned to focus on how he made decisions because he could not calculate the results of all his possible moves. Learning to deal with that uncertainty or risk has been useful. When you make an investment, “you can have an 80 percent chance of being right. And then the 20 percent comes up,” he said. “But really it is the process that you used to make the decision.”

Other games of strategy are prominent in finance. Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, is an accomplished bridge player; and David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, who bet against Lehman Brothers in 2008, finished 18th in the main event of the 2006 World Series of Poker.

But being skilled at games is no guarantee of success. James E. Cayne, the former chief executive of Bear Stearns, which collapsed in March 2008, is a world-class bridge player who has won many international bridge tournaments.

Still, the idea that gaming skills may be adaptable to investing spurred a hiring program in the early 1990s at Bankers Trust. At the time, the bank had a successful trader named Norman Weinstein (no relation to Boaz Weinstein), who had earned the title of international master from the World Chess Federation. In an effort to replicate his success, the bank hired a small group of people who had little or no trading experience, but were world-class chess and bridge players.

David Norwood, a World Chess Federation grandmaster (the highest ranking a player can obtain), was one of the recruits. “I was studying history at Oxford,” Mr. Norwood said. “Right out of the blue, I got contacted by Bankers Trust who said, ‘You would really make a good trader.’ I had no idea what trading was.”

Mr. Norwood took the job and was soon put on a trading desk, but it was too sudden. “It was like being stuffed into a world-class chess match without knowing the moves,” Mr. Norwood said. He quit after only a few months.

Despite the setback, Mr. Norwood said the experience “kind of planted a seed in me.” After a year, he found a job at Duncan Lawrie, a British private bank, and began learning trading and investing. In 2008, at the age of 40, he retired a multimillionaire.

Mr. Norwood said that he definitely believed that his skills in chess helped make him a success in business. “So many people in the investment world have bull-market mentalities. They do well when things are going well,” Mr. Norwood said. In chess, he said, you are constantly facing setbacks, and the people who become great players learn to overcome them.

Other companies have followed the Bankers Trust example. The Web site of the hedge fund manager D. E. Shaw Group lists among its employees a life master at bridge, a past “Jeopardy!” champion and Anna Hahn, the 2003 United States women’s chess champion.

Ms. Hahn, who joined the company shortly after winning the championship, is a senior trader, focusing mostly on commodities. Her chess background “definitely got our attention,” said Michelle Toth, who oversees human resources. “We prize analytical rigor here,” she said. “Someone who achieves this level definitely stands out.”

Boaz Weinstein rebounded from a trading loss of more than $1 billion at Deutsche Bank during the financial crisis to found the $4 billion hedge fund Saba Capital Management, whose flagship fund is up more than 7 percent for the year. He said he often considered chess players when hiring.

At Deutsche Bank, which he left in early 2009, Mr. Weinstein said he helped recruit Elina Groberman, who was the 2000 United States women’s co-champion. He also hired Anatoly Nakum, a master. Mr. Nakum eventually left to head credit trading at Barclays Capital before moving on to UBS, where he was co-head of North American credit trading operations. He left in June and said that he was currently pursuing opportunities in investment management.

In 2005, Mr. Thiel hired Patrick Wolff, a two-time United States champion, as an analyst. Mr. Wolff rose to become one of the managing directors at Clarium. This year, he set up his own fund, and, in a reference to his chess background, named it Grandmaster Capital. He said the fund had about $50 million under management, much of the money from Mr. Thiel.

Mr. Hirsch, the founder of Seneca Capital, became interested in chess when his children started studying it. Eighteen months ago, he began taking lessons. As his understanding has grown, he has noticed analogies between chess and investing.

For example, he said, memory, pattern recognition and the order in which you play moves are important in chess, and the same is true in investing.

Mr. Hirsch said that when he first started playing chess, he just wanted to enjoy the game. He has improved rapidly, he said, and now his goal is to become a master by raising his official numerical rating through participation in tournaments.

But his new obsession has not come without a cost, at least to one of his other passions. When he is playing golf, Mr. Hirsch said, he often thinks about chess positions. Strangely, he said, the reverse is not true.

At Talpion, the hedge fund started earlier this year by the billionaire investor Henry Swieca, one of the fund’s senior traders, Matthew Herman, is also a senior chess master, a rank above an ordinary master.

“I don’t think chess is usually going to get someone a job in finance,” said Mr. Herman, who worked at Goldman Sachs for six years before joining Talpion. But the ability to play chess at a high level “is perhaps reflective of your approach to everything.”

Access Source And It's Great Content: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/good-at-chess-a-hedge-fund-may-want-to-hire-you/

Thursday, September 29, 2011

10 Clues to Opportunity - Booze & Company - Strategy+Business

Published: August 23, 2011

/ Autumn 2011 / Issue 64

Market anomalies and incongruities may point the way to your next breakthrough strategy.

by Donald Sull

During their heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, transatlantic cruise lines such as the Hamburg America Line and the White Star Line transported tens of millions of passengers between Europe and the United States. By the 1960s, however, their business was being threatened by the rise of a disruptive new enterprise, namely, nonstop transatlantic flights. As it happened, the cruise ship lines had one potential strategy with which to save their business: vacation cruises. Starting in the 1930s, some of these lines had sailed to the Caribbean during the winter, thus using their boats when rough seas made the Atlantic impassable. And in 1964, when a new port was opened in Miami, Fla., the pleasure cruise business began to boom.

But the great cruise lines missed this breakthrough opportunity. They saw their profitability fall while dozens of startups, including Royal Caribbean and Carnival, retrofitted existing ships to offer pleasure cruises and built an entirely new travel and leisure category that continues to grow today.

Managers and entrepreneurs walk past lucrative opportunities all the time, and later kick themselves when someone else exploits the strategy they overlooked. Why does this happen? It’s often because of the natural human tendency known to psychologists as confirmation bias: People tend to notice data that confirms their existing attitudes and beliefs, and ignore or discredit information that challenges them.

Although it is difficult to overcome confirmation bias, it is not impossible. Managers can increase their skill at spotting hidden opportunities by learning to pay attention to the subtle clues all around them. These are often contradictions, incongruities, and anomalies that don’t jibe with most of the prevailing assumptions about what should happen. Here is my own “top 10” field guide to clues for hidden breakthrough opportunities, observed in a wide variety of industries, countries, and markets. If you find yourself noticing one or more of them, a major opportunity for growth could be lurking behind it.

1. This product should already exist (but it doesn’t). As the accessories editor for Mademoiselle magazine in the early 1990s, Kate Brosnahan spotted a gap in the handbag market between functional bags that lacked style and extremely expensive but impractical designer bags from Hermès or Gucci. Brosnahan quit her job, and with her partner Andy Spade, founded Kate Spade LLC, which produced fabric handbags combining functionality and fashion. These attracted the attention of celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts. Many well-known product innovations — including the airplane, the mobile phone, and the tablet computer — began similarly, as products that people felt should already exist.

2. This customer experience doesn’t have to be time-consuming, arduous, expensive, or annoying (but it is). Consumer irritation is a reliable indicator of a potential opportunity, because people will typically pay to make it go away. Reed Hastings, for example, founded Netflix Inc. after receiving a US$40 late fee for a rented videocassette of Apollo 13 that he had misplaced. Charles Schwab created the largest low-cost brokerage house because he was fed up with paying the commissions of conventional stockbrokers. Scott Cook got the idea for Quicken after watching his wife grow frustrated tracking their finances by hand.

3. This resource could be worth something (but it is still priced low). Sometimes an asset is underpriced because only a few people recognize its potential. When a low-cost airline such as easyJet or Ryanair announces its intention to fly to a new airport, real estate investors often leap to buy vacation property nearby. They rightfully expect a jump in real estate values. Similarly, the founders of Infosys Technologies Ltd., India’s pioneering provider of outsourced information technology services, were among the first to recognize that Indian engineers, working for very low salaries, could provide great value to multinational clients. The company earned high profits on the spread between what they charged clients and what they paid local engineers.

4. This discovery must be good for something (but it’s not clear what that is). Researchers sometimes recognize that they have stumbled on a promising resource or technology without knowing the best uses for it right away. The resulting search for a problem to solve can lead to great profitability. One example was the founding of the ArthroCare Corporation, a $355 million producer of medical devices based on a process called coblation, which uses radio frequency energy to dissolve damaged tissue with minimal effect on surrounding parts of the body. Medical scientist Hira Thapliyal, who codiscovered this process, founded a company to offer it for cardiac surgery, but that market turned out to be too small and competitive to support a new venture. Undeterred, he looked for other potential uses, and found one in orthopedics, where there are more than 2 million arthroscopic surgeries per year.

5. This product or service should be everywhere (but it isn’t). Sometimes people chance upon an attractive business model that has failed to gain the widespread adoption it deserves. Two archetypal retail food stories illustrate this. In 1954, restaurant equipment salesman Ray Kroc visited the McDonald brothers’ hamburger stand in southern California, and convinced them to franchise their assembly-line approach to flipping burgers. In 1982, coffee machine manufacturing executive Howard Schultz visited a coffee bean producer called Starbucks in Seattle. He recognized the potential of a chain restaurant based on European coffee bars, and he joined Starbucks, hoping to convince the company’s leadership to convert their retail store to this format. When they didn’t, he started his own coffeehouse chain, later buying the Starbucks retail unit as the core of his new business.

6. Customers have adapted our product or service to new uses (but not with our support). Chinese appliance maker Haier Group discovered that customers in one rural province used its clothes washing machines to clean vegetables. Hearing this, a product manager spotted an opportunity. She had company engineers install wider drain pipes and coarser filters that wouldn’t clog with vegetable peels, and then added pictures of local produce and instructions on how to wash vegetables safely. This innovation, along with others including a washing machine designed to make goat’s-milk cheese, helped Haier win share in China’s rural provinces, while avoiding the cutthroat price wars that plagued the country’s appliance industry.

7. Customers shouldn’t want this product (but they do). When Honda Motor Company entered the U.S. motorcycle market in the late 1950s, it expected to sell large motorcycles to leather-clad bikers. Despite a concerted effort, the company managed to sell fewer than 60 of its large bikes each month, far short of its monthly sales goal of 1,000 units. Then a mechanical failure forced the company to recall these models. In desperation, it promoted its smaller 50cc motorbike, the Cub, which Honda executives had assumed would not interest the U.S. market. When the smaller bikes sold well, Honda realized it had discovered an untapped segment looking for two-wheel motorized transportation. (The campaign is still remembered for its catchphrase, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”)

8. Customers have discovered a product (but not the one we offered). Joint Juice, a roughly $2 million company that produces an easy-to-digest glucosamine liquid, was founded by Kevin Stone, a prominent San Francisco orthopedic surgeon. He learned about the nutrient from some of his patients, who took it for joint pain instead of the ibuprofen he had prescribed. Many doctors might have ignored this or even scolded their patients for falling prey to fads, but Stone recognized he might be missing something. He looked up the clinical research on glucosamine in Europe, where it was the leading nutritional supplement. (Veterinarians, he discovered, swore by it, and their patients fell for neither fads nor placebos.) Then he built a business around it.

9. This product or service is thriving elsewhere (but no one offers it here). In the early 1990s, a Swedish business student named Carl August Svensen-Ameln tried to store some of his belongings in Sweden while at school in Seattle, but found that all the local self-storage facilities were full. He studied the storage industry, already prevalent in the United States, and discovered a business model characterized by high rents, low turnover, and negligible operating costs. Yet self-storage, at the time, was virtually nonexistent in continental Europe. Svensen-Ameln and a friend from business school set up a partnership with an established U.S. company, Shurgard Storage Centers Inc. The resulting company, European Mini-Storage S.A., was the first of several such companies that Svensen-Ameln started in Europe, to great success.

10. That new product or service shouldn’t make much money (but it does). Established competitors are often surprised when upstart rivals do well. In his 2008 book, The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (Penguin Press), Charles D. Ellis noted that for decades, Goldman Sachs partners had avoided investment management, which they believed generated lower fees than trading and investment banking. When Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. published its financial performance as part of a 1970 stock offering, Goldman partners were startled to learn that fees and brokerage commissions on frequent trades added up to a highly profitable business. Shortly thereafter, Goldman expanded into managing corporate pension funds, and aggressively built its business.

Incongruities like these can offer a critical clue about where your assumptions no longer match reality. From there, you are more likely to uncover the kinds of opportunities that you might otherwise have missed — and that your competitors still don’t recognize. Start by asking yourself, What are the most unexpected things happening in our business right now? Which competitors are doing better than expected? Which customers are behaving in ways we hadn’t anticipated? Take yourself through the list of top 10 clues. Leaders who consistently notice and explore anomalies increase the odds of spotting emerging opportunities before their rivals.

Reprint No. 11304

Author Profile:

Donald Sull is a professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School, where he is also the faculty director for executive education. His books include The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World (Harper Business, 2009).

Access Source And Its Great Content: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11304?gko=ce28d&cid=20110927enews

Learn How to Think Different(ly) - Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen - Harvard Business Review

10:24 AM Tuesday September 27, 2011
by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen Comments ( 63)

In the Economist review of our book, The Innovator's DNA, the reviewer wondered whether genius-level innovators such as Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs challenge the idea that working adults can really learn how to think differently and become innovators.

We don't think so. Remember, it was Steve Jobs who jump-started the now-famous "Think Different" advertising campaign as a way to inspire consumers and recharge Apple's innovation efforts. It worked. Reflecting back on the campaign, Jobs said "The whole purpose of the 'Think Different' campaign was that people had forgotten what Apple stood for, including the employees." And the best way to tell people what Apple stood for was to tell them who the company's heroes were. The campaign reminded everyone — consumers and employees alike — that the "crazy ones...see things differently."

Reams of relevant research (including our own) proves Jobs right. Innovators excel at connecting the unconnected. They engage in associational thinking. At Apple (or at any innovative company), they take a little bit of this, sprinkle in a little bit of that and that and that to churn out market-busting ideas such as iTunes, and the iPod, iPhone, and iPad (along with a few market disasters like the G4 Cube computer).

But neither Steve Jobs nor Apple nor any other high-profile innovator or company has a corner on the think-different market. In fact, our study of over 5,000 entrepreneurs and executives shows the opposite: almost anyone who consistently makes the effort to think different can think different.

Take Gavin Symanowitz, whom we recently met in South Africa. His original business, GetAGreatBoss.com, lets great managers showcase their skills to attract talent and boost their own careers by conducting a 360 review of the manager by his or her staff, and if the results are favorable, he links the results to job ads that the boss is trying to fill, making these job ads far more appealing. By connecting the unconnected — 360 leadership assessments and help wanted ads — Symanowitz forged an online business that sprouted in Africa and now grows globally.

Innovators (of new businesses, products, and processes) spend almost 50% more time trying to think different compared to non-innovators. In other words, non-innovators do occasionally think different (answering "at least a little bit" to questions like "I creatively solve challenging problems by drawing on diverse ideas or knowledge" to hit the 48th percentile in our global database). Yet compared to innovators, they just don't do it as often. Generating new business ideas that make a positive financial impact takes time. Innovators who spend more time thinking different (scoring in the 70-80th percentile) consistently engage in associational thinking by "agreeing"or "strongly agreeing" with questions like the one above and they deliver innovative results more frequently than those who don't. It's that simple.

If thinking different can make such a positive difference, why don't more people spend more time doing it? Researchers at Harvard Medical School opened our eyes to one compelling answer. Sixty to eighty percent of adults find the task of thinking different uncomfortable and some even find it exhausting. When adults must connect the unconnected through associational thinking, it wears them out. Why? Because most adults have lost the skills they once had (just watch almost every four-year old who relishes the chance to think different. And all of us were once four-year olds). We don't lose this skill because genetic coding automatically shuts it down on our twenty-first birthday. Instead, most of us grew up in a world where thinking different was punished instead of praised (at home or school). So while roughly one-third of anyone's innovation capacity comes from their genetic endowment, two-thirds of it is still driven by the environment. So here are a few simple suggestions to ratchet up your associating skills, the essence of thinking different.

Just do It. Nike's slogan is not a bad starting place when it comes to creative thinking. Do it by frequently forcing associations or connections across different ideas when they don't naturally emerge. John Hunt, Global Creative Director at TBWA Worldwide, told us how his company uses role-playing to help their clients think different. Clients assume the persona of an innovator from another company such as Apple or Virgin, a form of role-playing that encourages clients to look at a challenge from a different point-of-view.

Shake it up. When associations don't come naturally, try forcing them to surface unnaturally — by shaking things up randomly. For example, try the Idea Generator app, which randomly combines three words together when you shake your smart phone. Shake it again and three more random words show up. You can get even more creative combinations by adding your own words to the mix (including foreign ones) and seeing what you get. For example, we just shook up the app while writing this blog and got three words — perforated, bite-sized, and humane — which might help generate a new idea. Perhaps putting bite-sized perforations into a new product could make a difference. That's exactly what David Mullany did in 1953 by transforming a solid plastic ball into the Wiffle ball, a completely new product with bite-sized perforations in it.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found that if adults practice associational thinking long enough, the task no longer exhausts but energizes them. Like most skill-based activities, if we slog away at it and practice over and over again, the task becomes not life taking but life giving. And that's when the most creative ideas pop out.

As a leader, how often do you think different? How often do you brainstorm? How often do you hunt for solutions in new environments? Thinking different is easier said than done. We don't claim that folks can jump from the low end of the bell curve of creativity performance to the high end just with practice. But when it's done frequently enough by just about anyone, it can transform good ideas (and not so good ones) into great ones that might even disrupt the world. We have found that most people can actually do this reasonably well if they choose to put in the time and effort that's required to think different. That's what disruptive innovators do, day after day. Do you? Can you? Will you?

Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen

Jeff Dyer is the Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy at the Marriott School, Brigham Young University; Hal Gregersen is a professor of leadership at INSEAD; They are the authors of the The Innovator’s DNA.

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Monday, September 26, 2011

Time Of Your Life - Leadership Wired - John Maxwell

Leadership Wired - September 2011, Issue 2

John Maxwell

The Time Of Your Life

Which significant event or season would you describe as “the time of your life”? Perhaps your wedding day and honeymoon, an adventurous vacation, or the birth of a child. These memorable moments stick in our minds and remembering them brings back feelings of joy. Yet while our lives may be marked by notable occasions, they’re not defined as much by any single event as by the unremarkable days which shape our character and values. The hours, minutes, and seconds in a day literally are the time of our lives. How we use them shapes who we are. To make the most of the precious resource of time, consider the following three steps.

1) Gain Clarity

Clarity is the most important concept in personal productivity. Leaders cannot make the best use of time until they have a clear-cut notion of their purpose in life. Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University, after more than fifty years of research, concluded that “long-term perspective” is the most accurate single predictor of upward social and economic mobility in America. Long-term perspective turns out to be more important than family background, education, race, intelligence, connections, or virtually any other single factor in determining your success in life and at work.

Successful people have a clear future orientation. They think five, ten, and twenty years out into the future. Take a moment to ponder your purpose. What do you hope to accomplish in life? Where would you like to be in 10 years?

More concretely, ask yourself, “Why am I on the payroll?” Pose this question to yourself over and over again throughout your career. In truth, most people are not sure exactly why they are on the payroll. Yet, if you are not crystal clear about the results you have been hired to accomplish, it is very hard to perform at your best, raise your value as an employee, and earn promotions.

2) Generate Priorities

Leaders look ahead to where they hope to be in the future, and they set priorities in the present to make sure they end up at their desired destination. Their future intent influences their present action. Prioritization means giving focus and energy to those things that give the highest return.

The 80/20 Rule is a helpful concept to hone in on your high-return tasks. This principle says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, and 20 percent of your products or services will account for 80 percent of your profits. This means that if you have a list of ten items you do, two of those items will turn out to be worth five or ten times or more than the other eight items put together. Which priorities on your to-do list are most likely to account for the bulk of your productivity?

3) Get on a Schedule

Scheduling is telling your time where to go instead of wondering where it went. Sticking to a predetermined schedule guards your time and puts you in control of your agenda. Alternatively, unscheduled time flows to trivial tasks, falls under the sway of the assertive personalities around us, and surrenders to every emergency that arises.

Thoughts on scheduling:

1. Schedule in advance

Work a couple of months ahead. Put top priorities on the calendar first,
making sure keep your family at the top of the list.

2. Resist the urge to overschedule

You’re not Superman or Superwoman, so don’t try to cram 14 hours of work into
an 8-hour day. Also, build in ample time for rest and exercise. In
addition, give yourself margin. Leave some free time to deal with
unexpected events or to fit in an unforeseen appointment. Finally, just say no. Filter out meetings or involvements that eat away time and offer little in
return.

3. Create large chunks of time

Most of the truly important work you do requires large
chunks of unbroken time to complete. Your ability to carve out and use these
blocks of peak-value, highly productive time is central to your ability to make
a significant contribution to your work and to your life. Study your natural
rhythm and carve out space on your calendar to perform your most important work
during the time of day when you function best.

Quotes

"Time is what we want most, but what we use worst."
~ William Penn

"The time to relax is when you don't have time for it."
~ Sydney J. Harris

"The key is in not spending time, but in investing it."
~ Stephen R. Covey

"To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing."
~ Eva Young

"You cannot kill time without injuring eternity."
~ Henry David Thoreau
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This article is used by permission from Leadership Wired, John Maxwell's premiere leadership newsletter, available for free subscription at www.johnmaxwell.com/newsletters.

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Saturday, September 24, 2011

Increase Your Passion for Work Without Becoming Obsessed - Scott Barry Kaufman - Harvard Business Review

HBR Blog Network

Scott Barry Kaufman

11:48 AM Wednesday September 21, 2011
by Scott Barry Kaufman Comments ( 9)

Work brings some people intrinsic joy. These people feel in control of their work, feel good about themselves while working, find their work to be in harmony with their other activities. Pscyhologists describe these folks as having harmonious passion. But there's another kind of passion: obsessive passion. Those who are obsessively passionate feel an uncontrollable urge to engage in their work, feel more conflict between their passion and other areas in their life, and their work forms a large part of their often unstable and negative self-concept.

In my last post, I summarized Robert J. Vallerand's distinction between obsessive passion and harmonious passion. In the comment thread that followed, I noticed a couple of questions emerge: Is obsessive passion ever helpful? What should you do if you recognize that your passion for work is not harmonious, but obsessive? I'll address both of those in this post.

Some commentators argued that obsessive passion could be useful in the beginning stages of a new endeavor, such as when starting a new company. I disagree. Obsessive passion is rarely beneficial. It's not just that those with high levels of obsessive passion are committed, focused, and dedicated. Those who are obsessively passionate about their work are inflexibly, excessively and compulsively committed, finding it difficult to disengage. As such, they are setting up bad habits from the start, and risking burnout in the longer run. Note that harmonious passion is correlated with flow — the mental state of being completely present and fully immersed in a task. Research shows that it's flow that is conducive to creativity, not obsessive passion. The positive emotions and intrinsic joy that is associated with harmonious passion is what propels one to greatness, not the negative emotions, compulsions, and unstable ego that is associated with obsessive passion.

All of us have at least a little bit of obsessive and harmonious passion for our work. The key for work productivity and for buffering against work burnout is to increase your harmonious passion while reducing your obsessive passion.
How can we turn down the dial on obsessive passion and turn up the dial on harmonious passion? Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of scientific research on the practical side of Do you have enough energy? Do you engage in your work with positive enthusiasm? Do you feel enjoyment doing what you do?

Do you define yourself by criteria other than work? If your self is a pie, how big of a bite does your work take out of it?

a two-part process: first it's important to recognize that you are demonstrating obsessive passion, and then it's a matter of boosting your harmonious passion.

warning signs that you are obsessively passionate about your work

Do you have a positive self-image? Obsessive passion is correlated with a negative image of the self, including automatic subconscious associations between the self and the concept "unpleasant."
When you work, is your interior monologue positive — filled with words like "want to," "get to," and "can't wait to"? Or are words like "must," "need," and "have to" rummaging around?
Are you able to stop working when you want to? Recent research found that online gamers who were very harmoniously passionate about gaming felt positive emotions while playing, while gamers with obsessive passion felt more negative emotions both when playing and when prevented from playing. Do you feel a compulsion to work all the time, even when you really don't want to?
Do you get into a state of flow? Do you feel as though time has receded into the background, or do you feel the weight of pressure on your back? Flow is an enjoyable experience, whereas obsessive engagement feels more urgent.

If you're reading down that list and thinking, "no, no, no," these are signs that you may have obsessive, not harmonious, passion. If you do think your level of obsessive passion might be too high, there are some things you can do about it:

Schedule real breaks. If you recognize you are obsessively passionate about your work, force yourself to get out of that headspace by scheduling other activities during the course of the day (like lunch with a friend, or a break to hit the gym). Block out time after work or on weekends for family, friends, and activities you enjoy. Having a schedule will keep you honest.
Don't bring work home. If you can afford to, make it completely impossible to access your work once you leave work. Don't bring home your laptop. Leave those files on your desk. Keep separate email accounts for home and work, and don't check work email when you're at home (put up an out-of-office message if you have to). Obsessive passion is really just a bad habit, and habits can be broken gently.
Change your thought patterns when you work. Fake the mindset of the harmoniously passionate person until you make it. For instance, convert thoughts of "must" and "need" to "want" and "desire." At first, this may feel awkward, but eventually the obsessively passionate mindset will dissipate, and so will the behaviors associated with it. A recent study suggests that changing your explicit thought patterns may increase self-esteem and harmonious passion.
Commit to a new hobby. Often, investing too much self in one project is an indication of a negative core self. The more additional things outside of work contribute to a positive sense of self, the less space your work performance will take up in your ego, and the smaller your chances of burnout.

If all of this sounds incompatible with success, consider a case study: A young, very talented musician is trying to decide whether to launch his promising solo career, or to put it off a little while to learn more about the world around him. On the one hand, timing is very important in the music industry. There are many talented artists, and they could get a head start if he decided to postpone his career. On the other hand, talent isn't everything in music. Audiences not only respond to talent, but also to many subtle influences like sensitivity, expression, and wisdom, fed by experiences outside the musical realm.

The musician's name? Yo-Yo Ma. In the end, he chose to defer his career to expand his sense of self. Ma compares those years to an "emotional bank account in which you must draw the rest of your life." To be sure, that path wasn't all clear sailing for Ma; he earned a D+ in his music history course at Harvard. But if those years of undisciplined learning were detrimental to his career, I am hard-pressed to detect it. Yo-Yo Ma is one of the greatest cellists of all time, noted not just for his incredible talent and dedication, but also the breadth of his accomplishments, his compassion, thoughtfulness, knowledge, and positive enthusiasm. In other words, his harmonious passion.

Passion is one of our most important vehicles for performance, creativity, imagination, and ingenuity. By no means do I want to discourage passion. But we rarely realize how other important areas of life feed into our main passion. When one's life isn't in balance, passion can become obsessive and counterproductive. When a person feels good about their self and the work they are doing, and is capable of disengaging, passion becomes a wellspring of long-term success.

Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive scientist and personality psychologist. He's an an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University.
Follow him on twitter @sbkaufman.

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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Bosses Don’t Listen, Study Finds - ABC News

By Christina Ng
Sep 19, 2011

12:00pm

Bosses Don’t Listen, Study Finds

A new study seems to confirm what some disgruntled employees have long-suspected: bosses don’t listen.

The study, in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, claims that the more power an individual has in the workplace, the less likely they are to take advice from others. And on top of not listening, these inflated decision makers are often wrong in their decisions.

“There’s a tendency for power to make you confident, which is a good thing because we want our leaders to be confident, but there’s a dark side to that confidence,” said Elizabeth Morrison, one of the study’s authors and a professor of management and organizations at New York University. ”You can be over-confident and less open to input from others.”

The researchers collected data from over 200 managers as well as their coworkers. In addition to the real-life bosses, experiments were conducted where students were assigned different levels of power and asked to make various decisions.
Those in higher positions of power had the tendency to make decisions on their own without seeking or taking input from others.
Morrison said that the researchers were surprised to find that people in higher positions of power felt an overall confidence that lead them to make decisions on their own both in areas where they were experts and in areas that were not part of their expertise, simply because they were powerful.
The researchers noted that the decision-maker and his or her underlings see things differently. Often times, the employees in positions of greater power had “internalized role expectations” that powerful people are supposed to be confident in their decisions and that taking advice from others is a sign of weakness.
However, employees working under these decision-makers believed that bosses who take advice and input are better leaders.
The managers who made the decisions on their own were found to be the least accurate. Their over-confidence and inflated sense of their own judgment often led them to the wrong decisions.
The experiments also found that women were more likely to take advice than men.
Morrison believes that the study has real-life implications for the workplace. “If you feel you have the answer, recognize that there may be a tendency to be off in that judgment and force yourself to listen to other people,” she said.
The study was titled “The Detrimental Effects of Power on Confidence, Advice Taking, and Accuracy” and conducted by Morrison, Kelly See, Naomi Rothman of Lehigh University and Jack Soll of Duke University. It will be published in November.
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The Cure for Horrible Bosses - Harvard Business Review

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

In the recent film comedy Horrible Bosses, three truly dreadful managers make their employees’ lives miserable. The first is a cruel executive who dangles a promotion in front of a subordinate as bait, only to snatch it away once his stupid demands have been met. The second is a mean cokehead who inherits the family business from his kindly deceased father. The third is an orthodontist who sexually harasses her assistant, threatening to tell his fiancée that it’s his fault.
The victims in the movie can’t quit. They need the jobs. Instead, they compose elaborate, farcical plots to eliminate the bosses.

In real life, horrible bosses are the stuff of tragedy, not comedy. Workplace discontent is no joke. Some surveys show that as many as half of American workers feel low levels of work engagement, stemming in part from poor management.

It’s not insults that cause the greatest harm, but rather callousness about people’s time. Horrible bosses want control. They expect subordinates to be on call 24/7 and to hit unrealistic deadlines with limited resources. When the work product is delivered, horrible bosses may ignore it for long intervals, making it clear that the deadline was artificial and the stress unnecessary.

To minimize the impact of horrible bosses, companies can ensure that performance reviews are based on objective measures, not subjective ones. They can examine tasks and workloads for relevance and fairness. They can offer training to teach respectful behavior. They can police sexual harassment and make flexibility a right. But formal processes go only so far. Employees sometimes find themselves worse off when they use official complaint mechanisms.

The best cure for horrible bosses is alternative relationships and collaboration. Organizations that foster strong, multidimensional relationships among colleagues weaken the control of a single autocratic boss. They make it more likely that the sins of horrible bosses will be exposed to others who can stop them.

Groups caught in a horror show can end the misery by banding together to focus on goals and show compassion for one another. Jane Dutton of the University of Michigan, a leader in the positive psychology movement, has shown that simple gestures of caring can humanize the workplace and raise levels of performance.

Another good way to neutralize horrible bosses is to focus on the mission and help others around you succeed. A manager I’ll call Pierre was sent by his company to lead a turnaround, as COO, of a low-performing subsidiary in a developing country. The country CEO was imperialistic and antagonistic. He gave Pierre a basement office with no staff and proceeded to ignore him. Pierre’s corporate bosses told him to work it out. After a few days of feeling depressed, Pierre decided to move into the tiny office next to the CEO and find his own assistant from outside the company, someone with no history with or allegiance to the CEO.

Then he forged ahead with relationship-building. He identified the best performers in the unit who he thought would be the most independent of the CEO’s power. He met with them in small groups and provided abundant performance data and ideas for growing the business. Soon they were leading their peers in making changes. The horrible boss couldn’t control Pierre and couldn’t stop the momentum. The boss became impotent in his irrelevance—and later was fired for corruption.

In the movie, the three friends help one another, and the horrible bosses fall on their own swords. Real life is not as dramatic or entertaining. Still, an underlying truth holds: The best cure for horrible bosses is wonderful colleagues.

Access Contet Source And Its Great Stuff: http://hbr.org/2011/10/the-cure-for-horrible-bosses/ar/1

1 in 3 Employees Would Work an Extra Week Annually for Incentive Program

WorldatWork Newsline

Sept. 7, 2011 — Incentive programs that reward employees for meeting performance-based milestones can help bolster performance and morale, according to survey results from Staples Advantage, the B2B division of Staples Inc. Results show that one-third of office workers would even be willing to put in an extra workweek each year if it meant their company would implement one.

Meanwhile, for employees that already participate in company-driven incentive programs, the benefits are clear. These participants say the programs have made them:

Feel more valued (85%)
Happier and more motivated at work (70%)
More loyal to their company (65%)
More productive and able to get better results (about 60%).

Based on the results of the survey, Staples Advantage also reports that incentive programs can serve as recruitment tools, as more than 70% of employees at companies without incentive programs said they'd love to work for a company that has one. In addition to working an extra week each year, these employees would be willing to make other sacrifices if it meant their company would implement an incentive program. For example:

30% said they would take on extra responsibilities
More than 40% would be in favor of forgoing the annual holiday party.

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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Inside Influence Report: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

September 14, 2011

By Steve Martin, CMCT

In a 1981 single that went on to feature in VH1’s Top 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs, UK punk rock band The Clash asked “Should I stay or should I go?” The question posed in their song is likely to be asked as often today as it was upon its release thirty years ago - and not just pertaining to matters of the heart; but to matters of business too.

Every day millions of customers and consumers ask themselves if ‘they should stay or go’ when finding themselves waiting in line for a service and not knowing how long their wait is likely to be. Shoppers may switch lines in checkouts hoping to pick a faster moving one. Web users might refresh their browser in the hope a chosen download will run faster. Customers contacting a telephone helpline may abandon a current call and call back later in the hope that the wait time will be shorter.

But what are the factors that people use to decide whether they should stay or go and what are the potential implications for business when it comes to ethically influencing and persuading customers?

We might be living in the fastest-moving, most stimulated-saturated environment ever but we still spend a considerable amount of our time waiting in line (or online). Some sources estimate that the average American citizen can spend upwards of 2 years of their life waiting in queues. In a new paper about to be published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Narayan Janakiraman from the University of Arizona, together with two Wharton School colleagues Robert Meyer and Stephen Hoch, look at what influences people to stay waiting when in a line or to abandon their wait for another time.

The core of their work is that the simple intuition “a queue worth joining is a queue worth persisting in” is advice that is frequently violated. Janakiraman, Meyer and Hoch cite examples where significant numbers of callers (34% in one study) who contact call-centers hang- up and dial again primarily as a result of impatience. Tellingly few people in these groups ever benefit from these abandoned waits primarily because they invariably call back some time in the future and their total cumulative wait time becomes much longer.

Viewed through the lens of Dr. Cialdini’s six universal principles of persuasion a decision to continue waiting or to abandon a place in line appears to pit two principles against each other.

On one hand the longer a person waits in a queue the more likely they are to focus their attention on alternative activities they could have accomplished while waiting. Not attending to these alternative activities could be viewed as ‘sunk costs’ or ‘losses’ and the principle of scarcity clearly demonstrates that our attention and subsequent actions are drawn to avoiding losses of any kind. As a result it is possible that a person focussing on other activities they could be attending to while waiting in line might be motivated to abandon the wait by virtue of this loss aversion.

However things are rarely as straightforward as they seem. It could also be argued that a person who begins waiting in line or in a queue has made an active commitment to that queue and therefore the principle of consistency might be activated, compelling them to remain. As each minute of waiting time passes it is possible that a person experiences an increased motivation to completing the goal of getting through and becomes even more committed the closer they get. Much akin to a frequent flyer taking more flights the closer they get to the next reward stage of a loyalty program.

So in view of the tension between the powerful forces of scarcity and consistency what do people typically do? Janakiraman and his colleagues find that normally, peoples’ decisions to abandon a wait are most likely to occur somewhere in the middle of that wait. No doubt that this decision to abandon a place in line will also likely be accompanied by feelings of annoyance at the potential losses incurred not to mention general frustration and displeasure. Hardly a desirable situation if it is your company that customers and potential consumers are waiting to do business with.

Which prompts the question, what can be done to mitigate these feelings and to reduce the number of potential customers who will hang up before speaking with your organization?

Clearly the obvious answer is to reduce call wait times and wherever possible this should be done. But what if this is not always possible? Across three studies Janakiraman and his colleagues test and propose some suggestions:

Provide a contrast by informing people in line of the current duration of alternative queues they could have joined. The authors found evidence that if customers see that wait times would have been just as long (or longer) in other queues it diminishes the appeal of abandoning one line to join an alternate one.
Publish the slower rates of progress in alternative queues. In line with the adage “a watched pot never boils” the studies found that if consumers were simultaneously provided with information about slower progress in alternative queues then this was also likely to reduce abandonment. Of course such an approach should only be used if such comparisons are true and it is ethically wise to do so.
Provide active distractions while people wait. Providing simple activities for people to engage in while waiting also led to a reduced likelihood to leave a queue in the studies. One wonders if this might also provide a business with the chance to turn waiting, a largely frustrating experience in most people’s eyes, into an opportunity to influence consumers and perhaps create future obligations? For example a business might employ the principle of reciprocity by providing valuable information or recommendations to customers while they wait. This information may not necessarily just be about products and services supplied by that company - in fact it may be better if they are not. Doing so may demonstrate that company’s desire to do its best for its customers and at the same time at least turn a less than pleasurable experience into a tolerable one.

One wonders what strategies and ideas Inside Influence Report readers recommend for productively filling that time while customers wait in line or if you are the customer what might work for you?

As always your comments are gratefully received......if you would just like to form an orderly queue please.

Source:
Janakiraman, N., Meyer, Robert J., and Hoch, Stephen J. (2011) "The Psychology of Abandoning Waits for Service," Journal of Marketing Research (in press).

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Study Finds Supervisors Pay Lip Service to Work-Life Balance

WorldatWork Newsline

Sept. 12, 2011 — From receiving unfavorable job assignments to hearing negative comments from supervisors, there is a growing imbalance between what employers say about work-life balance and what they actually do, according to a global survey released by WorldatWork.

Every October since 2003, WorldatWork's Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP) has led a national awareness campaign promoting work-life effectiveness as a key contributor to productivity and success in the modern workplace. This year, the campaign is calling attention to a troubling gap between leaders' beliefs and behaviors at many organizations.

The original intent of the study was to look at men and work-life integration, but one of the unexpected findings was that employees suffer a variety of job repercussions for participating in work-life programs, according to Kathie Lingle, executive director of WorldatWork's Alliance for Work-Life Progress.

"This conundrum can be so oppressive that some employees go underground, resorting to 'stealth maneuvers' for managing their personal responsibilities," Lingle said. "The good news is that 80% of employers around the globe avow support for family-friendly workplaces. The bad news is they are simultaneously penalizing those who actively strive to integrate work with their lives."

Employee respondents reported repercussions that included:

Being overtly or subtly discouraged from using flexible work and other work-life programs
Receiving unfavorable job assignments
Receiving negative performance reviews
Receiving negative comments from a supervisor
Being denied a promotion.

The study found the following prevailing leadership attitudes in developed countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany):

More than half of the surveyed managers think the ideal employee is one who is available to meet business needs regardless of business hours.
40% believe the most productive employees are those without a lot of personal commitments.
Nearly 1 in 3 think that employees who use flexible work arrangements will not advance very far in the organization.

The same leadership attitudes prevailed in emerging countries (Brazil, China, India), but on a larger scale.

"While the HR department designs and administers work-life programs, it's the managers who have to implement it," said Rose Stanley, work-life practice leader for WorldatWork. "Our studies find that a culture of flexibility correlates with lower employee turnover. Specifically, those with training and experience managing employees on flexible work arrangements are much more supportive of work-life than those without that training and experience. Closing the gap between what managers believe and how they behave will make every workplace a better place to work."

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Saturday, September 17, 2011

What Is Spiritual? - September 15, 2011 Happiness Newsletter

By Lionel Ketchian

We have all heard of a "spiritual life," and "spiritual principles." What exactly is the spiritual? My thought about that question is that the spiritual is a direction to live your life. Let's see what the dictionary says. Webster defines spiritual as pertaining to the spirit, not the material. It also describes it as, intellectual, divine, and pure. I also looked up spirit and found it defined with, the breath of life, and the soul. Other meanings included mood; essence; real meaning; intent, and courage.

I think there are basic beliefs that make up the spiritual person. Actually rather than beliefs I would like to refer to them as opinions. They may be opinions that an after life exists, opinions that we are all interconnected, have an intelligent universal order, knowledge that there are laws governing the principles of existence, and understanding that an inward journey is an important aspect of life.

Spirituality is the way you treat yourself and others and the way you treat every object. Every single thought you have and what you do with it and how you live every moment of your life is the spiritual. All this is what makes up the spiritual. Spirituality is a way of experiencing the world. Whereas philosophy is a way of understanding the world, admittedly philosophy is important to a spiritual person, but it is treated as a step to go higher, not the object of a goal.

Their is so much knowledge in the world. We have created so much knowledge that it seems to be in excess. We need to develop a direct knowledge, which is wisdom. Wisdom is the power you possess through direct experience. Wisdom is a direct experience of understanding. Understanding is a much more useful quality than knowledge. You can read many books to gain knowledge, and we think of knowledge as something new. A good book is not written to give you knowledge, it is written to give you the experience of knowing the wisdom that is within you.

We seem to think that knowledge alone will make up for not trusting ourselves. Society encourages us not to trust ourselves. We have such great support systems that many don't believe they can rely on themselves. The more we can trust ourselves the more we can trust the world. The more we accept ourselves the more we accept the world. When we have self acceptance and trust we learn to work with ourselves instead of just our problems. That is the only way to deal with our problems effectively.

When truth is experienced from your own projection mechanism of feeling, than feelings can control us. When we use wisdom and insight than our thinking can work for us. You ultimately choose one or the other. The only problem is that by allowing feelings to lead, you have no choice. You will react to situations, people and problems. At least by thinking, you enable yourself to choose what is best for you. Thinking allows you to see where certain actions will take you. As a human being you think as well as feel. Thinking first rather than just feeling is the spiritual way. Think for yourself and be responsible for your own actions and your own happiness in life.

As Thaddeus Golas stated in his book, The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, "It is quite natural, in pursuing enlightenment or just in trying to be happier, to look to your everyday experiences for signs of results. Indeed, your daily life is nothing else but an expression of your spiritual condition. Your life will change as you become more loving, but not in ways that you can exactly predict. What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens."

Choice allows you to think about what you want and it allows you to run your own mind. When you don't make your own choices you don't put your best choices to work. Your mind runs you, and that's very different from letting thinking work for you. You're not subject to the winds of fate because you're not allowing indiscriminate thoughts to run your mind. It gives you the chance to know that you can cope with whatever comes along.

Choice is the road we walk on and thought is our legs. Thought is what moves us forward and choice is our direction. Choice is the most important power we have. Making choices is the only real freedom there is. Most important things are as simple as making a choice. Life's answers are uncomplicated. Although choices may be simple it does not always follow that it's easy. The choice for happiness creates the right mind frame. As we learn to make the choice for happiness, we learn to discipline our mind and allow it to work for us. Being unhappy is just an incomplete way of telling yourself that you don't like the problem you think you have. Being happy allows you to make good choices to eliminate the problem.

It has been said that the biggest lessons in life come from making mistakes, and from our suffering. We learn more in this way than any other.

The greatest way to learn is from other people's mistakes and suffering. Then we can gain the wisdom while avoiding the pain. I think the spiritual life allows us to do that very thing. Spirituality and religion coexist together but people make them different. Actually, spirituality is present in every religion. The spiritual principles in each religion are incredibly the same. Most differences are a result of interpretation of beliefs. There are common spiritual principles like forgiveness, non-judgment, unconditional love and peace of mind. The spiritual expresses the concept of responsibility in one's own life. Ultimate spirituality is freedom, "Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free."

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

Conning: Specialty Premium Growth Outpaces Other Lines | PropertyCasualty360

September 13, 2011 By Phil Gusman, PropertyCasualty360.com

NU Online News Service, Sept. 13, 1:04 p.m. EDT

Specialty insurers increased premium at an average 4 percent annual-growth rate over the past five years, beating the industry average, which remained close to flat over that time, a Conning Research & Consulting report says.

Conning says almost 75 percent of insurers in the top underwriting performance quadrant for the industry are specialty insurers. The report also says that insurers are moving toward increasing their specialty capabilities, illustrated by recent merger and acquisition trends. Conning cites 2011 examples of Hanover acquiring Lloyd’s insurer Chaucer for $510 million and Selective acquiring the renewal rights for Alterra’s $77 million commercial excess and surplus book of business.

This expansion, Conning says, could improve insurers’ risk diversification, underwriting results and premium-growth opportunities. But the firm notes that expansion without development or acquisition of expertise “misses the critical success factor associated with specialization.”

Additionally, Conning says newly minted specialty insurers may not have access to smaller specialty markets through their regular retail distribution channels and may not receive adequate support from wholesalers and managing general agents.

“The third concern is that naive capital could disrupt these markets,” Conning says.

Conning acknowledges that “specialty insurance” is an “imprecise and inconsistently defined term and marketplace.” The report says, “Insurance professionals and industry analysts use this and similar terms to describe classes of insurers, classes of customer markets, and distribution processes. These include, at times, excess and surplus insurance, high-risk insurance, customer niches, and also insurance provided by single-product providers. These markets often overlap, a factor in the imprecise definition.”

Still, Conning notes that many industry professionals and analysts consider specialty insurance to be more profitable than other lines, “despite its amorphous market definitions.”

Conning says the sum of specialty sub-segments it analyzed for the report represented more than 40 percent of property and casualty insurance premiums in 2010, with the high-risk market accounting for about $70 billion, including $32 billion in E&S premium.

Addressing distribution dynamics in the specialty market, Conning says it seen “an expansion in the channels, including one high-risk market insurer that expanded into direct online distribution. Some insurers are also offering specialty products and programs to retail distributors, bypassing wholesalers and MGAs. “The condition is exacerbated by a proliferation of online portals funneling business to a number of destinations and bypassing the multi-tiered specialty-distribution system,” Conning says.

The firm adds that the increase in specialty products and insurers is “rapidly adding to the complexity of specialty distribution,” although this is somewhat offset by regulatory modernization for the non-admitted market, the rise of larger wholesalers with a global reach and better technology.

“We see compelling reasons to drive the growth of electronically supported exchanges for specialty insurance,” Conning says. “The future could have more-transparent products and pricing and have faster and more cost-efficient processing.”

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Turnover among large-company CFOs is outpacing the rate of CEO churn in 2011 - CFOs By the Numbers - CFO Magazine

Job Hunting September 13, 2011 CFO.com

After 17 years, CEOs are finally catching up to CFOs in the rate of turnover; and other newly minted facts about the job market for finance chiefs.
David McCann

Turnover among large-company CFOs is outpacing the rate of CEO churn in 2011, for the 17^th consecutive year, according to the annual "Volatility Report" by executive recruiting firm CristKolder.
However, the gap in the two turnover figures has narrowed to less than a percentage point. Extrapolating the result so far this year to a full year's worth of data, CFO positions will open up at 14.1% of the 669 companies that are in either the Fortune 500 or S&P 500, compared with 13.3% for CEOs. Back in 2007 and 2008, when numerous CFOs were walking the plank as companies scrambled to find credit and stock prices plummeted, the gap swelled to as much as seven percentage points.
Other tidbits from the report include the following:

The average CFO is 51 years old, earns a base salary of $550,000, has 5.1 years of tenure in his or her current job, and sits on 0.3 boards.
While few CEOs (8%) were CFOs in their immediately prior jobs, 37% have had some experience as a financial executive, continuing a long-term trend. In 2000 only 19% of chief executives had finance in their DNA.
The energy sector has the most CEOs with CFO experience, at 25%. Technology companies have the fewest (6%).
The percentage of new CFOs hired away from other companies has climbed from 29% in 2010 to 35% this year – getting back near the historical average of 39% – while the same statistic for CEOs dipped from 27% to 25%.
The financial-services industry accounted for 25% of CFO volatility through July. Next on the list was the technology sector at 16%. The most stable were the services, health-care, and energy industries, all at 7.3%.
Twenty-four percent of CFOs were controllers in their previous roles.
The number of companies with a chief operating officer declined for a fourth consecutive year, reaching 38%. That's down from 48% in 2000.

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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Are You Training Yourself to Fail? - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review

More About "Rituals"

1:37 PM Tuesday September 13, 2011 Comments ( 9)

"Did you get done what you wanted to get done today?" Eleanor, my wife, asked me.
"Not really," I said.

She laughed. "Didn't you write the book on getting done what you want to get done?"

Some people are naturally pre-disposed to being highly productive. They start their days with a clear and reasonable intention of what they plan to do, and then they work diligently throughout the day, sticking to their plans, focused on accomplishing their most important priorities, until the day ends and they've achieved precisely what they had expected. Each day moves them one day closer to what they intend to accomplish over the year.
I am, unfortunately, not one of those people. Left to my own devices, I rarely end my day with the satisfaction of a plan well executed. My natural inclination is to start my morning with a long and overly ambitious list of what I hope to accomplish and push myself with sheer will to accomplish it. I'm prone to be so busy — answering emails, multitasking, taking phone calls, taking care of errands — that, without intervention, I would get very little of importance done.
And then, exhausted by my busyness, but unsatisfied by how little of importance I'd accomplished, I would distract myself further by doing things that made me feel better in the moment, if not accomplished — like browsing the internet or eating something sweet.
I've created a quiz that you can access here to test how well you manage complexity. The quiz is based, in large part, on my own failures. In other words, left to my own devices, I would not score well.

Here's the thing: the odds are against us getting our most important priorities accomplished. Our instincts most often drive us toward instant gratification. And the world around us conspires to lure us off task. Given total freedom, most of us would spend far too much time browsing websites and eating sweets. And being totally responsive to our environments would just have us running around like crazy catering to other people's agendas.

For me, the allure of accomplishing lots of little details would often override my focus on the big things I value. Each morning I would try to change my natural tendency by exerting self-control. I would talk to myself about how, starting this morning, I would be more focused, psych myself up to have a productive day, and commit to myself that I wouldn't do any errands until the important work was done.

It almost never worked. Certainly not reliably.

And so, without understanding it at the time, I was teaching myself to fail. People talk about failure — I talk about failure — as critical to learning. But what if we don't learn? What if we do the same things, repeatedly, hoping for different results but not changing our behavior?

Then we are training ourselves to fail repeatedly.

Because the more we continue to make the same mistakes, the more we ingrain the ineffective behaviors into our lives. Our failures become our rituals, our rituals become our habits, and our habits become our identity. We no longer experience an unproductive day; we become unproductive people.

You can't get out of this pattern by telling yourself you're a productive person. You're smarter than that; you won't believe yourself and the data won't support the illusion.

You have to climb out the same way you climbed in: with new rituals.

For me, the best way to discover the most effective rituals to help me achieve my most important priorities was though trial and error. Every evening I looked at what worked and repeated it the next. I looked at what didn't and stopped it.

What I found is that rather than trying to develop super-human discipline and focus, I needed to rely on a process to make it more likely that I would be focused and productive and less likely that I would be scattered and ineffective.

Rituals like these: [1] Spending five minutes in the morning to place my most important work onto my calendar, [2] stopping every hour to ask myself whether I'm sticking to my plan, [3] and spending five minutes in the evening to learn from my successes and failures. [4] Answering my emails in chunks at predetermined times during the day instead of whenever they come in. [5] And never letting anything stay on my to do list for more than three days (after which I either do it immediately, schedule it in my calendar, or delete it).

It doesn't take long for these rituals to become habits and for the habits to become your identity. And then, you become a productive person.

The trick then is to stay productive. Once your identity changes, you are at risk of letting go of your rituals. You don't need them anymore, you think to yourself, because you are now a productive person. You no longer suffer from the problem the rituals saved you from.

But that's a mistake. Rituals don't change us. They simply modify our behavior as long as we practice them. Once we stop, we lose their benefit. In other words, being productive — forever more — requires that you maintain the rituals that keep you productive — forever more.

I would love to say that I am now one of those people who is naturally pre-disposed to being highly productive. But I'm not. There's nothing natural about productivity for me.

But when Eleanor joked about my writing the book on getting our most important priorities accomplished, she reminded me that, while it may not be natural to me, I could be highly productive.

And the next day, following a few simple rituals, I was.

Peter Bregman

Peter Bregman is a strategic advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams. His latest book is 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. To receive an email when he posts, click here.

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