Category Archives: General

Happiness takes a little magic

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 In his words:

“The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls aged 8 to 12, finds that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.”

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it’s evil, but because it’s too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%.

I am fascinated by this study because everything I have been doing in the last year professionally and personally has been to reduce the overage of technology and noise in my life and it has increased my happiness by many fold.

By Brian Lam

The Gates Notes : What is the world’s richest man learning?

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Bill Gates is a great guy. You may not like Microsoft (I am personally a apple fanboi) but; you have to admire his business skills and now his foundation work. The most remarkable by any rich human being.

He is now spending a lot of time learning through the basics of subjects through online courses which he explains in this blog post on his new blog – The Gates Notes.

What a world we live in!

A lot of people ask me what I’m reading and how I learn about new topics that interest me. I am fortunate to have time to read a lot and I also like to view courses online from MIT’s OpenCourseware, Academic Earth, and others. These courses have ignited a passion of mine, which is to think about how to harness this approach so students who otherwise wouldn’t have access can experience these great courses and learn from these great teachers.

One of my favorite sources for great lectures is The Teaching Company. Most of their courses are available as audio downloads and on DVD. I had a chance to meet with The Teaching Company team and the way they find the very best professors and best courseware is impressive and it shows in the overall quality of the teaching.

via The Gates Notes.

Why not be great? The plan for the next decade

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My inspiration for the coming decade….

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

via Seth’s Blog: Only two years left.

How Do Innovators Think? – HBR Editors Blog – Harvard Business Review

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Fryer: Which of these skills do you think is the most important?

Dyer: Weve found that questioning turbo-charges observing, experimenting, and networking, but questioning on its own doesnt have a direct effect without the others. Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas arent created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they havent been connected before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating — so they are a means of getting to a creative end.

Gregersen: You might summarize all of the skills weve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. Its the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children.

via How Do Innovators Think? – HBR Editors Blog – Harvard Business Review.

Via Rajesh Jain

Global Warming Is Manageable — if we are Smart

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Why is it that what you are saying about global warming is so contradictory to everything else that most people read, see and hear in the media?

Well, there are several reasons. It is partly because they dont read the U.N. reports, which on many of these issues confirm what I am saying very clearly. And since the sensational always goes over better than the merely sensible, stories in the media play into the stereotype of global warming. There is much more sizzle in saying the world is going to come to an end than there is to saying, it is a bit of a problem and we need to fix it smartly, but that is it. The scary stories also appeal to the visceral hatred of materialism harbored by many, even when they are materialist in their own habits.

It is much easier to find a real person who died in the heat wave in 2003 in Paris, and tell that story. It is much harder to tell a compelling story about a person who didnt die from cold in Paris in the winter of 2003. So it is often much easier to show all the problems from global warming, and very much harder to show all the distributed benefits from pursuing more sensible policies.

Finally, politicians obviously garner a lot of support by saying we want to save the planet much more than they garner support if they talk about making smart, simple policies that might also be politically difficult to get through. Essentially, they get to promise they are going to cut emissions in 2020 or 2050 — when they are not going to be politicians any longer.

Al Gore talks about global warming as our generational mission. He asks how we want to be remembered by our kids and grandkids. Well, why would anyone want to be remembered for having spent $180 billion to do virtually no good a hundred years from now, when less than half that sum could fix virtually all major problems today? With better information, most of us would have no difficulty choosing how we want to be remembered.

via Global Warming Is Manageable — if Were Smart – Barrons.com.

Do we need to change behaviour at all?

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I have been writing about how Kevin Rudd’s plan to introduce carbon trading included payments to millions of households on the increase in expenses. I suggested that was the wrong thing to do and that we need to change behaviour of consumers to solve this.

What about the other side? What if the emissions reductions are possible through large systemic changes in electricity production, energy efficiency at the business level etc and leave the consumers out of it directly. Consumers will still pay for the increased business costs through increases in product costs however, that is dependent on the market (which is somewhat free in Australia).

In a way the business guys are better at doing this than each individual consumer. Let them sit back and have fun and pay a bit more in product expenses.

What say?

100 Best Blogs for Socially-Minded MBAs

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Just found out this good list of blogs which includes the widely read and popular blog WorldisGreen.com!

Some of the recent news stories have given those in the business world a bad rap, insinuating that ethics and business don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. You, as a socially-minded MBA student, know those allegations are not true. So do these bloggers and their readership. The following blogs provide insight and thought-provoking posts on environmental and social justice topics that are relevant to all future business people.

via 100 Best Blogs for Socially-Minded MBAs | Online Classes.org: Find the Right Online Class Match.

The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery

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“Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That's what we're doing in health care,” Dr. Shetty says. “What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation.”

At his flagship, 1,000-bed Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, surgeons operate at a capacity virtually unheard of in the U.S., where the average hospital has 160 beds, according to the American Hospital Association.

Narayana's 42 cardiac surgeons performed 3,174 cardiac bypass surgeries in 2008, more than double the 1,367 the Cleveland Clinic, a U.S. leader, did in the same year. His surgeons operated on 2,777 pediatric patients, more than double the 1,026 surgeries performed at Children's Hospital Boston.

Next door to Narayana, Dr. Shetty built a 1,400-bed cancer hospital and a 300-bed eye hospital, which share the same laboratories and blood bank as the heart institute. His family-owned business group, Narayana Hrudayalaya Private Ltd., reports a 7.7% profit after taxes, or slightly above the 6.9% average for a U.S. hospital, according to American Hospital Association data.

via The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery – WSJ.com.