AMIT PAUL EKKA: Feb 3, 2014

Monday, February 3, 2014

Top 10 business books of 2013

By Sheridan Jobbins, forumblog.org

Leading names wrestled with the leading issues of modern corporate life in this year’s crop of business books. This is my selection of the most enlightening, entertaining and useful reads of the year.

David & Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, by Malcolm Gladwell
This was the most anticipated business and economics arrival for 2013. In the five years since his sensational best seller Outliers, Gladwell has continued seeking out the unexpected in business – this time focusing on the paradox of the underdog.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg
This book was Sandberg’s compelling call to arms for women to put themselves forward in the workplace. The COO of Facebook and former senior executive at Google provides a funny, charming and personal take on the gender debate.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone
Ever wondered who owns the cloud – and what they want to do with it? This book is an exceptional insight into a singularly private individual.

The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future, by Paul Sabin
Sabin provides a genuinely original observation of a small moment in time that is continuing to change our collective future.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
If “selfie” is the new word for 2013, “Big Data” must be the new phrase. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelation about the NSA’s clandestine electronic surveillance and data mining programme, this book explains why anyone might want all that (supposedly) blind data.

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman
One step away from time travel, 3D printing brings the future into the present. Read about it with a burst of childish excitement. This is happening now, people!

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
Multitasking isn’t fruitful, say authors Keller and Papasan, since success requires long periods of laser-like concentration, not scattershot swats. If you find your “one thing”, they say, everything else will fall into place. Those of us drowning in e-mails will be able to relate to this book.

The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think, by Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed
This book is a superb analysis of best practice in successful businesses. It is not an easy read, but the authors have examined more than 25,000 companies, in hundreds of industries, over 40 years to deliver statistical examples of exceptional work practices.

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, by Mark Blyth
Mark Blyth is a faculty fellow at Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. In this book, he gives a no-nonsense summary of why he believes government austerity measures to bring about economic recovery are as plausible “as a unicorn with a bag of magic salt”. His argument presents a great excuse for why we shouldn’t be tightening our belts this holiday season.

The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig
This book provides a fresh take on the too-big-to-fail problem for executives, bankers and policy-makers searching for the naked truth.

Read more book reviews on the Forum:Blog. Titles are selected in collaboration with getAbstract.

Author: Sheridan Jobbins is a journalist and screenwriter.

Image: The Canary Wharf financial district is seen behind a woman as she walks in Greenwich Park in London. REUTERS/Toby Mel

Young Women Are Earning Almost as Much as Men for First Time Ever

By Laura Entis, www.entrepreneur.com
View Original
December 11th, 2013

Young women entering the workforce can expect to be paid almost as much as the guys around them. The playing field still isn’t entirely level, but it's flatter than it's ever been. How close are we? In 2012, women between the ages of 25 and 34 made 93 percent as much as males in their age bracket, according to a new Pew Research survey.

Between 1980 and 2012, the workplace gender gap has gradually narrowed, as wages rose for women and dropped for young men. In 1980, the median hourly wage for a woman was 64 percent as much as it was for a man, whereas by 2012, it had risen to 84 percent (this includes earnings from all women age 16 or older).

While this near parity in earnings between the genders in the millennial generation is encouraging, analysts and young women themselves are not optimistic that it will last throughout their careers. It's a trend that's played out in previous generations, where women's average earnings have fallen behind their male counterpart's as many of them start having children. "For women, marriage and motherhood are both associated with less time spent on paid work-related activities," the study states. "For men, the onset of family responsibilities has a reverse effect on their career."

When you look at the recent coverage of the issue (particularly the recentNew York Times Magazine article about the struggles previously high-earning women face re-entering the workforce), combined with the fact that, according to the survey, mothers are three times as likely as fathers to say that being a working parent has made it harder for them to advance in their career, it's easy to understand why young women have a dimmer view of their overall career trajectory than guys their same age.

Despite the fact that these young women are starting their careers earning almost as much as the men around them, they are just as inclined as older generations to believe that they are treated unequally by society and employers.

The good news? While a woman's overall outlook may be a bit gloomy when it comes to achieving career-long earning parity, just fifteen percent of millennial women say they have experienced gender discrimination on the job.

And, perhaps complicating the matter, women who have taken time off work to care for a family member (this includes children) say they have few regrets and, if faced with the same choice, would do it again.

Stop Spending Time With Toxic People

By Dan Kennedy, www.entrepreneur.com
View Original
December 27th, 2013

Image credit: Shutterstock

In his book No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, business coach and consultant Dan Kennedy reveals the steps behind making the most of your frantic, time-pressured days so you can turn time into money. In this edited excerpt, the author explains the people you spend time with affect your productivity and why you should carefully choose who to associate with.

One of the most significant things you can control is association -- your choices of who you permit into your world, who you give time to or invest time with, and who you look to for ideas, information and education. The people around you rarely have a neutral effect. They either facilitate your accomplishment, they undermine it, or they sabotage it outright.

The first useful association tactic is the elimination of toxic people and saboteurs. It's not an easy thing to face facts about a friend, family member, long-time employee or long-time vendor when they are, in some way, interfering with or disapproving of your accomplishment. It's important to face these facts and to act on them because the more time you spend with people who are unhelpful, unsupportive, disrespectful, envious, resentful, dysfunctional or outright damaging to you, the less value all your time has.

These people don’t just harm the minutes you and they are in the same place. Few people can so perfectly compartmentalize that they can lock every thought, assertion and act of a toxic person in a little mind box and without leakage into other mind boxes. Paraphrasing a Chinese proverb (I found in a fortune cookie), if you lie down with mongrel dogs, even for a short nap, you wake up with fleas -- and they ride with you wherever you go.

Ideas, beliefs, opinions and habits work just like that. Even if you're associating only occasionally or briefly with someone who is intellectually or emotionally toxic or someone who is feckless and inept, it’s enough time for the fleas to leap from them to you, burrow in and be carried away by you to subtly affect your performance and productivity. If your creativity or constructive thinking or work performance is thus diminished, so is the value of your time.

People who are detrimental for you to associate with are not necessarily of evil intent. They may all be “good people,” but that doesn’t mean they’re good for you. Good chocolate cake is not good for a diabetic. In fact, it’s poison. Associating with somebody who is always pushing it to you, saying “Just have a tiny piece” is just as suicidal as baking it for yourself.

There are lots of ways a person can be toxic and poisonous to you. I’ve had clients describe how recurring disputes with a particular employee were mentally exhausting but couldn’t be helped because otherwise, that person was a great asset. The “otherwise” is a big problem. Many small businesses wind up with a ruthlessly defensive key person who goes into murder mode anytime an attempt is made to add a second person but is “otherwise” terrific.

There's the “we tried that before” guy. If it were up to him, we’d light the place with candles because Edison would have been limited to one try. There’s the “constructive critic,” always making you feel inadequate or undeserving, in the guise of being a cautionary ally worrying over you stubbing a toe.

On the other hand, constructive association with creative, inspiring, encouraging people can do a great deal to bolster your performance, thus making your time more valuable. Each minute of your time is made more or less valuable by the condition of your mind, and it is constantly being conditioned by association.

The entrepreneur is particularly susceptible to gaining or losing power by association because he has so many diverse responsibilities and is often operating under pressure, duress and urgency. Playing this game in a compromised mental state, weakened or wounded by poor ideas and attitudes seeded into the mind by association, is extremely difficult. Playing it strengthened and empowered by rich ideas and attitudes seeded into the mind by association can make the difficult easy.

Simply put, you want to deliberately reduce and restrict the amount of your time left vulnerable to random thought or association, and deliberately, sharply reduce the amount of time given to association with people who won’t make any productive contribution and may do harm. Does that mean you can only spend time with people you are in complete philosophical agreement with? No. In fact, such isolationism can be dangerous. But it does mean you should avoid association with people who believe and promulgate beliefs diametrically opposed to “success orientation.”

You want to deliberately increase the amount of your time directed at chosen thinking and input, and constructive, productive association. You want to associate with strivers and achievers, with winners and champions. This is an uplifting force that translates into peak performance, which makes all your time more valuable.

Warren Buffett's owner's manual

In his letters especially from the earlier years, Buffett had followed the practice of putting out a list of key points that a company needs to satisfy if it wished to get acquired by his investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway.

The reproduction of those key points will act as a perfect conclusion to our report as it also summarises the key points covered in this report.

However, it should be borne in mind that investing is not a perfect science and hence, mistakes cannot be completely eliminated. A few of them might creep in every now and then.

In fact, even Buffett has acknowledged that he has made quite a few mistakes in his investment career. In a section titled 'Mistakes of the First Twenty-five Years' from the 1989 letter to shareholders, Buffett has reviewed some of the major investment related mistakes that he has made in the twenty-five years preceding 1989. These are the conclusions that he has drawn from them.

Laid out below are the key points that Buffett has mentioned in most of his earlier letters to shareholders. He looks to invest in companies, which have -

1. Demonstrated consistent earning power (future projections are of little interest to him, nor are 'turnaround' situations),

2. Businesses earning good returns on equity while employing little or no debt,

3. Management in place (Buffett says that he can't supply it),

4. Simple businesses (if there is lots of technology, Buffett will not understand it),

5. An offering price (Buffett will not like to waste his time or that of the seller by talking, even preliminarily, about a transaction when price is unknown).

Since all the above points are self-explanatory, we do not intend to add anything more except for a small quote from Buffett, which you should go through so many times that it remains forever etched in your memory.

Mr. Buffett once famously said: "Only follow two rules in investing: Rule#1: Do not lose money, and Rule#2: Do not forget Rule no. 1"

If one devotes his investment lifetime to strictly following what we have outlined in this note and also Buffett's rule, he is likely to emerge a much wealthier person than most of his peers.

This article has been authored by Equitymaster, which is known for its well-researched, unbiased and honest opinions on the Indian stock markets.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by Equitymaster are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of The Hindu Business Line or any employee thereof. The Hindu Business Line is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the article.

Keywords: Warren Buffett, Buffett investing principles, Equitymaster,equity investment

The Relationship Between Anxiety and Performance

By Scott Stossel, Scott Stossel | 11:00 Am January 6, 2014, blogs.hbr.org
View Original
January 6th, 2014

I choked.

It was just a middle-school tennis match against a manifestly worse player, but I became overwhelmed with anxiety. Before we’d started, the most important thing was to win. But during the match, I just wanted to get off the court fast. Burping uncontrollably, afraid of throwing up, I hit balls out. I hit them into the net. I double-faulted. And I lost 6-1, 6-0. After shaking hands and running off the court, I felt immediate relief. My distended stomach settled. My anxiety relented. And then self-loathing took over. This was a challenge match for a lower-ladder JV position. The stakes were low, but to me they felt existentially high. I’d lost to the overweight and oleaginous Paul (not his real name), and the result was there on the score sheet, and on the ladder hanging on the locker room wall, for all to see.

This sort of thing—purposely losing matches to escape intolerable anxiety—happened dozens of times throughout my school sports career. My coaches were baffled. How could I look so skillful in practice, they wondered, and yet so rarely win a significant match?

Choking when you’re expected to perform—whether you’re squaring off in tennis or vying for resources or key accounts or a desirable role at work—is actually surprisingly common. It happens with some regularity to probably around one-fifth of the population. Since this response is at least partly hardwired (more on that later), it’s not something you tend to outgrow as you mature and gain perspective. Thirty years after that match with Paul, I still struggle with it. A lot.

Who chokes, and why?

People who choke can be peak performers in some settings, trembling mice in others. The list of elite athletes who have choked spectacularly is extensive. Greg Norman, the Australian golfer, became completelyunglued at the 1996 Masters, nervously frittering away a seemingly insurmountable lead over the final few holes. Jana Novotná, the Czech tennis star, was five points away from winning Wimbledon in 1993 when she disintegrated under pressure and blew a huge lead over Steffi Graf. And then there’s Roberto Duran, who famously lost his world welterweight championship to Sugar Ray Leonard. With sixteen seconds left in the eighth round—and millions of dollars on the line—Duran turned to the referee, raised his hands in surrender, and pleaded, “No más, no más [No more, no more].” Until that moment, Duran appeared to be invincible. Since then, he’s been widely considered one of the greatest quitters and cowards in sports history.

That may sound harsh, but just about the worst epithet one can sling at an athlete—worse, in some ways, than ”cheater”—is “choker.” To choke is to wilt under pressure, to fail to perform at the moment of greatest importance. A technical definition, as laid out by Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago cognitive psychologist who specializes in the topic, is “worse performance than expected given what a performer is capable of doing and what this performer has done in the past.”

In any performance arena, from sports to the military to the workplace, choking is produced by anxiety and, ipso facto, viewed as an absence of fortitude, a sign of weakness.

Of course, it’s not that simple.

Research shows a strong correlation between your genetically conferred physiology and how likely you are to crack under stress. For instance, a person’s allotment of neuropeptide Y (NPY), a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates stress responses, among other things, is relatively fixed from birth, more a function of heredity than of learning. People high in NPY tend to be unusually psychologically resilient and resistant to breaking down in high-pressure situations.

But that said, there’s also an element of “nurture” at work here. Psychological resilience is a trait that can be taught; the Pentagon is spending millions trying to figure out how to do that better. It’s possible that those who thrive under pressure have learned to be resilient—that their high levels of NPY are the product of their training or their upbringing.

According to the explicit monitoring theory of choking, derived from recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, performance falters when you concentrate too much attention on it. This runs counter to all the standard bromides about how the quality of your performance is tied to the intensity of your focus. But what seems to matter is the type of focus you have. As Beilock puts it, actively worrying about screwing up makes you more likely to screw up.

To achieve optimal performance—what some psychologists call flow—parts of your brain should be on automatic pilot, not actively thinking about (or “explicitly monitoring”) what you are doing. Beilock has found that she can dramatically improve athletes’ performance, at least in experiments, by getting them to focus on something other than the mechanics of their stroke or swing. Having them recite a poem or sing a song in their heads, distracting their conscious attention from the physical task, can rapidly improve performance. Chronic chokers—especially those who are clinically anxious—are too distracted from the task at hand by a relentless interior monologue of self-doubt: Am I doing this right? Do I look stupid? What if I make a fool of myself? Can people see me trembling? Can they hear my voice quavering? Am I going to lose my job?

When you look at brain scans of athletes pre- or midchoke, says sports psychologist Bradley Hatfield, you see a neural “traffic jam” of worry and self-monitoring. Brain scans of nonchokers, however—the Tom Bradys and Peyton Mannings of the world, who exude grace under pressure—reveal neural activity that is “efficient and streamlined,” using only those parts of the brain relevant to strong performance.

Does that mean those of us whose bodies are set to quiver in response to the mildest perturbances are doomed to choke any time the pressure is on? Not necessarily. Because when you begin to untangle the relationship between anxiety and performance, it turns out to be very complex. It’s possible to be simultaneously anxious and effective.

Take, for example, Bill Russell, a Hall of Fame basketball player who won eleven championships with the Boston Celtics (the most by anyone in any major American sport, ever). He was selected to the NBA All-Star team twelve times and was voted the league’s most valuable player five times. He is generally acknowledged to be the greatest defender and all-around winner of his era, if not of all time. No one would question Russell’s toughness or his championship qualities or his courage. And yet, according to one tabulation, he vomited from anxiety before 1,128 of his games between 1956 and 1969. His teammate John Havlicek told the writer George Plimpton in 1968, “It’s a welcome sound, too, because it means he’s keyed up for the game and around the locker room we grin and say, ‘Man, we’re going to be all right tonight.’”

Like someone with an anxiety disorder, Russell had to contend with nerves that wreaked havoc with his stomach. But a crucial difference between Russell and the typical anxiety patient (aside, of course, from Russell’s preternatural athleticism) was the positive correlation between his anxiety and his performance. When Russell stopped throwing up for a stretch at the end of the 1963 season, he suffered through one of the worst slumps of his career. For him, a nervous stomach correlated with effective, even enhanced, performance.

How much anxiety is too much?

At some level, it’s normal—adaptive even—to be anxious in our postindustrial era of pervasive uncertainty, where social and economic structures are undergoing continuous disruption and professional roles are constantly changing. According to Charles Darwin (who himself suffered from crippling agoraphobia), species that “fear rightly” increase their chances of survival. We anxious people are less likely to remove ourselves from the gene pool by, say, becoming fighter pilots.

An influential study conducted a hundred years ago by two Harvard psychologists, Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, demonstrated that moderate levels of anxiety improve performance in humans and animals: too much anxiety, obviously, impairs performance, but so does too little. Their findings have been experimentally demonstrated in both animals and humans many times since then.

“Without anxiety, little would be accomplished,” David Barlow, founder of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, has written. “The performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.”

So how do you find the right balance? How do you get yourself into the performance zone where anxiety is beneficial? That’s a really tough question. For me, years of medication and intensive therapy have (sometimes, somewhat) taken the physical edge off my nerves so I could focus on trying to do well, not on removing myself from the center of attention as quickly as possible. For those who choke during presentations to board members or pitches to clients, for example, but probably aren’t what you’d call clinically anxious, the best approach may be one akin to what Beilock has athletes do in her experiments: redirecting your mind, in the moment, to something other than how you’re comporting yourself, so you can allow the skills and knowhow you’ve worked so hard to acquire to automatically kick into gear and carry you through. Your focus should not be on worrying about outcomes or consequences or on how you’re being perceived but simply on the task at hand. Prepare thoroughly (but not too obsessively) in advance; then stay in the moment. If you’re feeling anxious, breathe from your diaphragm in order to keep your sympathetic nervous system from revving up too much. And remember that it can be good to be keyed up: the right amount of nervousness will enhance your performance.

This post is adapted from the author’s book My Age of Anxiety.

Top 10 Inspirational Quotes Worthy of Your Refrigerator

Sometimes, all you need is the right inspirational quote to give you a little pick-me-up when you're feeling down. Here are a few of our favorites that we've shared over the years.P

10. "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."P

You may think luck is a superstition, but there actually is a difference between people who consider themselves lucky and those who consider themselves unlucky. But when it comes right down to it: sometimes luck is just hard work in disguise.P

9. "Nothing is less productive than doing what should not be done at all."P

Not everything needs to get done—and even fewer things need to get done now. True productivity relies in separating the urgent from the important, and the unimportant from everything else.P

8. "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."P

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal once said Inspiration is like food poisoning: it sprays out uncontrollably when you need it the least. But you'll never get food poisoning if you don't eat, and you'll never get inspired if you don't work toward something.P

7. "A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit."P

It doesn't matter if you're in a position of "leadership" or not—a lot of the world's best leadership advice goes for your personal life, too. Don't be afraid to give up your credit when it matters, but don't get greedy when it doesn't matter.P

6. "You can't rest on your laurels. Your own body of work is yet to come."P

Sometimes you have to work really hard to achieve your goals, but other times they come easily. No matter what, though, you can't get complacent: instead of taking a break when things go right, use it to build momentum. Your best work is always ahead of you.P

5. "Try not to become a person of success. Rather, become a person of value."P

Success is great, but applying value to that success will actually make you happy. Being a good person will actually make you happy.P

4. "A man's gotta make at least one bet a day, else he could be walking around lucky and never know it."P

This quote may be from Jim Jones, but that doesn't mean your bet has to be suicide for a cult leader. It just means sometimes, even evil people have good advice, and we could all benefit from breaking out of our comfort zone and taking a few risks.P

3. "Here is something false: You only live once."P

Despite the cries of YOLO across the internet, you don't only get one chance in life to do what you want. Conventional wisdom, according to webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, says it takes about 7 years to master something—which means you've got 11 chances to do whatever you want. So don't be afraid to spend a few years teaching yourself a valuable skill, orpursuing that dream career. If it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted your onlylife—just one of them.P

2. "A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor."P

Whether you're trying to learn something new or survive a ton of criticism, sometimes life just hands you lemons. Whatever it is, though, you'll be better off in the end. A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.P

1. "Those who do not give a fuck change the world. The rest do not."P

It may not have been said by a famous philosopher or former president, but some of the best advice we've ever heard is that no matter what you do, people will judge you. You'll never be able to escape it. Luckily, you don't need everyone to like you—the only people that matter are your people. So let yourself do the embarrassing. Embrace the awkwardness. If you do, you'll go a lot higher than those who care what everyone else thinks.P

Images by Ensuper (Shutterstock), Dchauy (Shutterstock), and Alex Jackson (Shutterstock).P