5 Reasons Peer Advisory Groups Can Work For CEOs

via @ vistage by Leo Bottary

In my last post, 5 Reasons Peer Advisory Groups Work, I talked about the amazing benefits shared by organizations and employees when peers work together.  The thing is, peer groups aren’t just for employees; they work really well for CEOs also.  Imagine for a moment being the CEO.  It’s your responsibility to make good decisions that are best for the company as a whole.  While you may have a terrific senior management team and a highly engaged board of directors, the people giving you advice also have a personal stake in the outcome.   As a CEO, I’m not suggesting you don’t listen to your senior people or your board, who are in most cases (hopefully) sincerely offering their best input and counsel, but it begs this question:  Would a CEO also benefit from being asked tough questions and receiving counsel from fellow CEOs, who have no personal vested interest in the outcome?  As you may have guessed, Vistage member CEOs have been answering yes to this question since 1957.  Here are five benefits (among others of course), a CEO will realize by regularly engaging with a group of his/her peers:

1) Empathy – If you’ve never been a CEO, it’s nearly impossible to put yourself in a CEO’s shoes.  It’s difficult for most of us, regardless of how much we care or how objective we believe we are in offering counsel to our CEOs, to imagine what that’s really like.   Fellow CEOs aren’t looking through the lens of marketing, finance, or HR, they’re looking at the whole picture because it’s what they do every day.  The empathy that one CEO shares with another is a priceless benefit of the CEO peer advisory experience.  Its impact is not only felt professionally, but personally as well.

2) Objectivity – An employee or board member, regardless of their espoused objectivity and true sincerity, has a personal stake in the outcome.  Fellow CEOs from non-competing businesses are not burdened with that extra layer of consideration.   They can ask the hard questions without regard for sacred cows, personal relationships or other organizational/industry blinders.   It’s an eye opening experience for many CEOs when peers looks at a specific challenge through a completely impartial lens.

3) Shared Challenges – While the CEOs in the peer group may serve entirely different types of customers in widely varying industries, they share common challenges regarding employees, growth, profitability, executive development, technology, and uncertainty, just to name a few.  The more they talk, the more they realize how much they have in common and how much they can learn from on another.

4) Learning – While they have shared challenges, the myriad industries they represent set the table for rich conversations about common practices in one sector that are often quite different from practices in another sector.  Sharing ideas across industries help CEOs learn from one another.   What’s more, these CEOs will also share their personal triumphs and failures.  This display of trust creates an environment where the CEO can be truly vulnerable to learn and grow.  And unlike one-to-one executive coaching, which can be a rich complement to the peer advisory experience, there’s nothing quite like the power of the group dynamic.

5) Accountability – As CEOs share their challenges and aspirations with their peers, being CEOs as they are, they tend to be serious about holding their peers accountable to make the tough choices and to deliver on their stated courses of action.  As I’ve heard from so many Vistage Chairs and members, this atmosphere of shared accountability may be the most powerful dynamic of all when it comes to the peer advisory experience.

My personal disclaimer is that I’m not promoting Vistage per se, but more broadly, the peer advisory model.  I’ve personally experienced the benefits, both as an owner of a small firm and as a university adjunct professor.  When it comes to simultaneously working on your business and working on yourself, the peer advisory model has no peer.  I also don’t mind saying that I don’t believe Vistage is the best at this because I work here, I work here because I believe Vistage is the best at this – offering an unparallelled professionally facilitated peer advisory experience to all levels of business leaders in every size company.   Sit down and talk with any of our Chairs who lead these groups, most of whom are former CEOs, and you’ll discover what I’m talking about.   That said, I wholeheartedly encourage anyone to take a closer look at how peer advisory groups could work for your organization, regardless of whom you choose to assist you!

Is Your Business Telling You It Needs A Break?

Via @vistage by Joe Evans

We must listen to the signals our business is sending us. Organizations get tired and need rest cycles too. Not quite the same as we humans need rest, but instead, organizations cannot endlessly expend energy without replacing it along the way. Like humans, businesses need cycles of work and then rejuvenation. Constant full-speed acceleration, without maintaining the organizational pistons, will wear out the engine and momentum will slow. This means that balance is needed between the need to constantly move the organization forward and the need to recharge energy and celebrate successes along the way.

The relentless charge creates fatigue and burnout within the organization and can lead to an exhausted and ambivalent workforce that is detrimental to growth, innovation and operational excellence of our business. That does not mean that we cannot push or should coast along and slack-off in regards to advancing the betterment of our businesses. However, it does mean that we have to have a formula mixed correctly in order to fuel our business for the long-run. We need to think in terms of running a marathon and not a sprint. Given that, the formula must be calibrated our culture and it must also be attenuated to our business strategy and goals.

This may all sound a bit warm and fuzzy in our hard-driving business environments, but even in the engineering world of thermodynamics, this property is acknowledged as an important consideration. Entropy is a property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when converting energy to work. During this work, entropy accumulates in the system, which then dissipates in the form of waste heat.

So how can this engineering principle be applied in business? There are several ways in fact.

Channel Focused Energy To Avoid Waste

We must focus the uses of energy. In the psychological world, ADD (attention deficit disorder) is diagnosed when an individual meets certain criteria for hyperactivity, impulsivity, or inattention.  Likewise, in the corporate world, organizations can exhibit ADD-like behavior when they mistake activity for effectiveness; when they lose focus on established objectives; and when they respond haphazardly to environmental changes.

Many well-meaning managers and leaders assume that because members of the organization are “active” that they are also “effective.”  In reality, activity does not equal effectiveness; and it’s not representative of indispensability. Rather, effectiveness is the result of “doing the right things, right”. And the right things are those activities and actions that make organizational goals a reality.

Ensure You Have The Right Type Of Energy

A 2003 MIT Sloan study identified four corporate energy zones that can either stimulate or handicap competitiveness. This in-depth study proved that organizational energy and focus is a critical component to success.

Some key points that arose from the MIT study are worth considering:

• After more than 50 years of largely ignoring soft factors, like emotions and feelings, organizations are recognizing the powerful role that emotions play in shaping corporate behavior.
• Corporate leaders are responsible for unleashing organizational energy and guiding it toward key strategic goals.
• Organizational energy is the combination of the company’s emotional, cognitive, and physical states.  While difficult to measure, organizational energy is evident in the intensity, endurance, and innovation processes of a company’s work.
• Individual energy, especially of leaders, influences organizational energy. Likewise, the energy state of the organization affects the energy of individuals.

It is the intersection of intensity and quality that determines an organization’s energy state, which usually falls into one of four categories – “The Four Energy Zones”:

• Aggression zone (responding to threat)
• Passion zone (responding to an exciting goal)
• Comfort zone (coasting dangerously on past success)
• Resignation zone (has nearly given up)

Expend It Wisely, Then Replenish Energy and Renew Excitement

Renewal of organizational energy comes from celebrating the achievement of milestones, then refocusing energy again on the next milestone. Therefore, milestones must be defined in order to be recognized when they are met and rewarded if they are accomplished according to performance acceptance criteria. Large strategic objectives can be broken down into many milestones, so there should never be a problem of advancing the business goals through milestone cycles of hard work and real celebration.

You Can't Analyze Your Way to Growth via @harvardbiz

The biggest enemy of top-line growth is analysis and its best friend is appreciation. Sure, in a small minority of companies and industries, like the smartphone business these days, there is explosive growth, and if an analysis is done of past trends, it shows lots of opportunity for top-line growth.

But in the majority of businesses, if the available data are crunched, it shows a slowly growing industry — one growing with GDP or population. That generally convinces the company in question that there aren't really opportunities for top-line growth, and that in turn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fundamental reason is that analysis of data is all about the past. Data analysis crunches the past and extrapolates it into the future. And the past does not include opportunities that exist but have not yet happened. So, analysis conspicuously excludes ways to serve customers that have not been tried or imagined or ways to turn non-customers into customers.

Thus the more we rely on data analysis, the more it will tell a dour story on top-line growth — and not give particularly useful insights. The data analysis of P&G's home care business — hard surface cleaners, dish and dishwater detergents — would have indicated that there weren't many opportunities for top-line growth circa 2000. These categories were growing at something between population growth and GDP growth, clearly candidates for harvesting or maybe sale.

If instead, the core tool is not analysis but rather appreciation —deep appreciation of the consumer's life — what makes it hard or easy; what makes her (in this category) happy or sad — there is the opportunity to imagine possibilities that do not exist.

For instance, suppose your consumers have to clean floors. It's easy enough to appreciate that mopping a floor is a fairly miserable task. Think about what it involves: getting out and filling a bucket, dragging the bucket around and repeatedly jamming the mop in and out of it, and then dumping out and cleaning the bucket. If you appreciate your floor-cleaning customers, you'll be looking to help them avoid having to go through this experience every time they have to clean a floor — because not every floor will need such a heavy-duty approach. It was out of this appreciation-triggered insight that the electrostatic Swiffer anti-mop was born and produced massive top-line growth, approaching $1 billion in sales in a decade.

A similar thing happened with Febreze.

There was a slowly growing market for air fresheners that masked odors emanating from hard-to-clean household items like furniture, drapes, and carpets. However, odor masking was hardly an optimal solution for the consumer. Appreciation of the consumer's feelings would have revealed that genuine odor elimination was the underlying desire.

Out of that appreciation came Febreze, which captures and eliminates the odor molecules in fabrics. Not surprisingly, it also produced spectacular top-line growth where the conventional analysis showed that there wasn't much to be had.

Organizationally and behaviorally, analysis and appreciation are two very different things. Analysis is distant, done in office towers far from the consumer. It requires lots of quantitative proficiency but very little experience in the business in question. It depends on data-mining: finding data sources to crunch, often from data suppliers to the industry. Appreciation is intimate, done in close proximity to the consumer. It requires qualitative proficiency and deeper experience in the business. It requires the manufacture of unique data, rather than the use of data that already exists.

In my experience, most organizations have more of the former capabilities and behaviors than of the latter and hence most struggle with top-line growth. The biggest issue isn't the absence of top-line growth opportunities but rather the lack of belief that they exist. And that is driven by the dominance of analysis over appreciation.

ROGER MARTIN

Roger Martin (www.rogerlmartin.com) is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. He is the author, most recently, of Fixing the Game. For more information, including events with Roger, click here.

A Flying Round Trip From Kid to Not Kidding

By Tom Cuthbert, Jr. (my Dad)

This is a story about a recent incident in the life of an aviator now 83 year old whose picture was in Life magazine in August 1945. The article was "Aviation in Chattanooga Schools." I was shown as a young pilot in Tennessee and here I am, then and now. 

 The Life reporter was a good looking early-thirties blonde with her photographer out of NY City. I was only slightly impressed, having just turned 17 after soloing in March 1945.   Girls were no competition for my passion for radio and aviation. I left High School every day at noon to work the control board at Chattanooga radio stations until midnight signoff. Then every weekend I would spend most of the proceeds at Lovell field to fly - first eight hours required to solo in the yellow Piper Cub J-3 airplanes, and soon after in the more expensive aerobatic planes like the Fairchild PT-19.

After graduating from High School in 1946 I was President of the M.I.T. Flying Club in 1948, flying our Cessna 120 and 140 airplanes. I avoided being drafted into the Army in 1949 by going through Navy pilot training, getting my wings and Ensign commission in August 1950. That involved landing single-engine SNJ airplanes on a small aircraft carrier, and flying large four-engine bombers very similar to the WWII Liberator. I then volunteered to be further trained as pilot of huge Navy airships (166-foot blimps with 12-ton cars) to be around the extensive electronic equipment they carried.  

Long story short, I flew airships, fighters, bombers, and free balloons for 10 years in the Navy and 39 more years in civilian planes I either leased or owned. 

Sixteen years ago at age 67 my wife and I decided that enough was enough and sold our beautiful 6-passenger twin-engine Cessna airplane.

So, in October 2011 my son Tom III and his friend Jill, who had joined us at our Key West time share apartment, considerately saw the chance to buy a ride for me in a 1941 Piper Cub operated by stunt pilot and air-show ace Fred Cabanas. Fred gave me the controls after starting the engine, and we flew 10 miles out among islands west of Key West until returning for my landing. 

Thank goodness it was a good landing, so I didn't embarrass myself and Fred was suitably impressed as noted on his web site – http://www.keywestbiplanes.com/

As mentioned on Fred's website, I plan to return to our scheduled Key West timeshare in May 2012 and fly Fred's SNJ, like the Navy plane I last landed six times on a jeep aircraft carrier to graduate from Navy primary pilot training. The saying "There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots" - must be right - I am really old and I have tried not to be bold. I told stunt pilot Fred Cabanas, who is in his fifties, to please be careful. He plans to be around next May, and I plan to be around even longer.

Gone from sight...

“In a beautiful blue lagoon on a clear day,
a fine sailing ship spreads its brilliant
white canvas in a fresh morning breeze and
sails out to the open sea. We watch her
glide away magnificently through the deep
blue and gradually see her grow smaller and
smaller as she nears the horizon. Finally,
where the sea and sky meet, she slips silently
from sight, and someone near me says, ‘there,
she is gone!’

Gone where?  Gone from sight. That is all.
She is still as large in mast and hull and
sail, still just as able to bear her load.
And we can be sure that, just as we say,
‘there, she is gone’ another says,
‘there, she comes!’.”

Henry Van Dyke

Rest in peace mom,
I love you.

Steve Jobs: How to live before you die

Don't settle

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

RIP Steve Jobs

Why Peer Advisory Groups Will Be The Next Big Thing

By Leo Bottary

I realize it may seem odd to some that peer advisory groups, which have been around for decades and, prior to that, existed long before anyone probably ever referred to them as such, will be 

the next big thing, but I believe the time has come for this time-honored practice to take hold as never before.   The perfect storm is here.  In part it’s because the fundamentals of the peer advisory process itself are aimed squarely at problem solving, visioning, and personal and professional development,  but that’s always been the case.  The reason for the perfect storm; however, is revealed in the environmental and demographic trends that make the prospects for rapid growth nearly unlimited.  First, let’s look at the peer advisory model versus what most companies do today:

Peer advisory groups turn the traditional executive development model on its head.  The old model, which people have been using for decades now, is designed to train people to be better leaders with the implicit expectation that it will make a difference in how they lead and manage.  And that somewhere down the line, the company will actually see the fruits of this investment in its corporate culture and financial performance.  The problem is that most executive training is episodic/event-oriented.  Someone goes off to training, learns some interesting new concepts, and within a few weeks time, is back to the same old, pre-training behaviors.  What’s more, the training and the actual work of the company are often so poorly coordinated that measuring its effectiveness and value are next to impossible.

Peer advisory groups work in exactly the opposite fashion. By having a professional facilitator bring peers together, whether they are colleagues from different areas of a large company or CEOs from different businesses, they can work together as equals with the primary goal of meeting difficult challenges or setting a course for the future.   The diversity of the group, coupled with real dialogue, works to create an environment of trust to address larger issues that tend to transcend personal agendas.  By setting specific objectives, it’s easy to measure the ROI.  Peer groups will ask the hard questions and arrive at their own solutions rather than have to comply with recommendations of trainers or outside consultants.  Over time, during this repeated collaborative process of actual problem solving, the participants become better listeners and better leaders.  Great results lead to improved leadership behaviors and the cycle continues.  It rarely happens the other way around.

So sure, the peer advisory model makes perfect sense, but why will it be the next big thing?

1. Large companies are forced to do more with less and are challenged to create alignment within their newly re-organized organizations.  To do so in a manner that’s effective and measurable, they will no longer be able to rely on the old “executive development” model of training executives to be better leaders and managers, in the hopes that what they learn in training actually finds its way into meeting the day-to-day needs of the organization.   And the continued inability to link training expenditures to producing more competent leaders and better bottom-line results, will result in companies seeking out a more practical way to accomplish both.
2. Leaders of smaller companies are finding that the world in which they operate is becoming increasingly complex, especially on the international and technology fronts.  The good news is that these challenges are common across industry sectors.  As a practical matter (also challenged to do more with less), CEOs and business leaders will likely turn to their peers for guidance  instead of paying high-priced consultants or investing in leadership training programs.  (And like their larger company colleagues, they’d be wise to do so).
3. Today’s younger CEOs are digital natives versus digital immigrants.  They grew up with social media and are natural networkers who are much more inclined than their predecessors to engage their peers for advice and counsel.
4. There’s been a fundamental shift in management education aimed at leveraging the experience of the increasing number of adult learners in the classroom, in both traditional and online education environments.  The practice of andragogy, or learning centered environments geared to adults, is becoming increasingly more popular, replacing pedagogy (a teaching centered/lecture-oriented approach) that relies more on the knowledge of the instructor than in the inherent experience and collective insights of the group.  It’s only a matter of time before it finds its way more prominently into private enterprise.
5. As I pointed out in my last post, there are many similarities between learning teams and peer advisory groups.  Adult learners who’ve grown accustomed to working in peer groups in school, will seek to continue the practice in the workplace in greater numbers.  Peer groups at work will replace the learning teams they left behind.

Professionally facilitated peer groups simply make too much sense in today’s world not to catch fire – and soon!  Now I understand if you’re skeptical about a Vistage employee making the case for why professionally facilitated peer advisory groups is the next big thing.  Since it is what we do, I might be wary as well.  So I ask you to consider the argument on its merits, offer your comments (positive or negative), and understand that no self respecting advocate of peer advisory groups would ever presume to write such a post without consulting his peers.   This is not my opinion alone.  Thanks to my colleagues at Vistage and Seton Hall University for your contributions to this piece!

The Heresy of Netflix via @forbes

Robert Passikoff, Contributor

Convention has it that the one thing you must not discuss with the father of the girl you’re dating is politics; with the mother, religion, but even convention has its moments.

We dance around religion and politics because you will not find more passionate, easily ignitable people on earth than those who hold a belief deeply. Netflix co-founder and chief executive Reed Hastings is finding this out, to his grief and financial loss, as his actions cause brand believers to lose the faith.

Video: Netflix CEO Issues Mea Culpa, Changes Mail Service Name

Video: Netflix Plunges on Subscriber Update

After springing some spectacular pricing “options” on customers, this past Sunday Hastings made the widely panned decision to split Netflix in two, leaving Netflix proper to handle the Internet-streaming service and assigning the new company, Qwikster, the DVD-by-mail business.

Sure, it’s a questionable business decision to begin with, but the true heresy lies not in dividing the company, but in breaking down the lines of communication between the Netflix brand and the brand’s many faithful disciples.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 17,000 former Netflix believers fired back in the Netflix blog’s comments section, faith obviously shaken to the foundation at this unexpected and largely unexplained change. Netflix users are feeling unheard and uncared for, their thoughts and opinions bounding back on them like so many unanswered prayers. This has also showed up in Brand Keys Loyalty numbers. At the beginning of the year, Netflix had a comparable brand strength – an ability to delight – of 99%. Not bad, huh? After the change in pricing policies that moved down to 93%. As of today? 87%.

Any beloved brand has a differentiating feature, a hook that gives brand fanatics something to hang their hats on, and Netflix’s was customer care and responsiveness. This breach of faith is potentially damning to Netflix. Because the world is full of things for consumers to believe in, and in the battle for consumer devotion, no brand is sacred.

"Most people are not smelling their wine enough!" No, seriously...

How Do You How-To With Gary Vaynerchuk: Taste Wine on Howcast

Windows 8 "Upgrades" the Blue Screen of Death via @mashable

Six years ago, I tossed my Dell Laptop out the window, went to the Apple store and bought my first MacBook Pro.  Now, another MacBook, an iMac, two iPads and four iPhones later... I can barely remember what the Blue Screen of Death looks like.  It strikes me as funny that Microsoft chose to "upgrade" it!  

 

by Ben Parr

If you are or ever were a Windows user, you’re likely familiar with the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). The bug check screen, with its lines of error codes, has been part of Windows since version 1.0. It has represented the crashing of computers — and the frustration of users — for decades.

The BSoD was never intended to be user friendly, though. It was made for engineers who wanted to figure out why a PC crashed. For the rest of the world, it signifies the downside of owning a Windows device.

The iconic Stop Error screen is getting a facelift with Windows 8. The redesigned OS also includes speed and stability improvements, a Metro interface optimized for touchscreens and an app store.

The new BSoD doesn’t include all of the bug checks or lines of code that have defined the error screen for years. Instead, the Windows 8 BSoD includes a giant sad emoticon and a simple message that “your PC ran into a problem” and that it has to restart.

We’re fans of the new error screen — it’s much clearer and more user-friendly — though we hope there’ll be fewer chances to see it. But we want to hear your thoughts. Do you like the new Blue Screen of Death? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Mobility Digest

Privacy Advocates Criticize Icon Program, Call For New Regs via @mediapost

by Wendy Davis

A coalition of advocacy groups in the U.S. and Europe are calling on government officials to reject the ad industry's self-regulatory privacy program.

"Consumers in both the US and EU are offered limited options, based on principles crafted by the digital marketing industry and 'enforced' by groups that do not represent consumers or governments and that are completely lacking in any independence from the industry they are intended to monitor," the groups say in a letter sent Thursday to Federal Trade Commission consumer protection head David Vladeck, European privacy official Jacob Kohnstamm and other regulators.

U.S. groups signing the letter include Consumers Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.

The self-regulatory program requires that ad companies engaged in behavioral targeting notify consumers about the technique via an icon and to allow them to opt out of receiving targeted ads. The rules allow ad companies to continue to collect information about users who opt out.

The Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Review Council is enforcing the program, created by the umbrella group Digital Advertising Alliance.

The privacy advocates argue that the icon program falls short because "industry research" shows that "very few users ever click on it, let alone decide to opt-out." The advocates also say the icon doesn't sufficiently inform people about the "wide range of data collection that they routinely face."

The privacy coalition, dubbed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue, is urging officials in the U.S. and EU to undertake a number of new steps, including enacting regulations to "address new threats to consumer privacy from the growth of real-time tracking and sales of information about individuals' online activities on ad exchanges and other similar platforms."

Stuart Ingis, counsel to the DAA, disputes the groups' criticisms. He says that the Better Business Bureau has "100% independence" from industry. "The Better Business Bureau has done effective self-regulation independent of the industry for years," Ingis says. 

"A Lifespan is a Billion Heartbeats"...

... and Nine Other Things Everyone Should Know About Time 

A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.”

Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time.

1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”

3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.

4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.)

6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participantMalcolm MacIver.)

7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.)

8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)

9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”

(Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)

Four Ways to Kill a Good Idea

Someone is out to shoot down your best ideas. Do you know how to defend yourself?

In their new book, Buy-IN: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down, HBS professor emeritus John P. Kotter and University of British Columbia professor Lorne A. Whitehead teach how to get past the "confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets." This excerpt looks at attack strategies used by naysayers: fear mongering, delay, confusion, ridicule.

Book excerpt from Buy-IN: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down

By John P. Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead

Fear mongering

This kind of attack strategy is aimed at raising anxieties so that a thoughtful examination of a proposal is very difficult if not impossible. People begin to worry that implementing a genuinely good plan, pursuing a great idea, or making a needed vision a reality might be filled with frightening risks—even though that is not really the case.

There are all sorts of ways to create fear. You have seen a half dozen in the library story. The trick is to start with an undeniable fact and then to spin a tale that ends with consequences that are genuinely frightening or that just push the anxiety buttons we all have. The logic that goes from the fact to the dreadful consequence will be wrong, maybe even silly. A story that reminds us of scary events in the past may not be a fair analog, but it can be effective in bringing up unpleasant memories. Pushing anxiety buttons is manipulative in the worse sense of the word. But it can be an effective tactic.

Once aroused, anxieties do not necessarily disappear when a person is confronted with an analytically sound rebuttal. If humans were only logical creatures, this would not be a problem. But we are not. Far from it….

We see this problem all the time when people are trying to help an organization deal with a changing environment or to exploit a new and significant opportunity. In one typical case, a sizable change was needed inside a firm. With effort, some people did develop an innovative vision of what changes would be needed and a smart strategy of how to make those changes. Then, in trying to explain this to others and achieve sufficient buy-in, the initiators ran into someone who noted (correctly) that the last time they tried a big change (in their case, the "customer centric" initiative), they were unsuccessful, and some of the consequences (impossible workloads for a while, a few good people's careers derailed) were very unpleasant. Anxiety began to grow as others used the wordscustomer centric again and again. No one made a perfectly logical case for how the historical and current situations were comparable. But that didn't matter. An undercurrent of fear became a riptide, and the new change vision and strategies never gained sufficient buy-in to make the change effort successful.

Even if most people see an anxiety-creating attack for what it is, if those who don't see the fallacy of the logic constitute more than a small percentage of a group, you might still have a serious problem that must be handled with care. Even a single smart or credible person, if made fearful, can be tipped not only toward opposing a proposal, but also toward using attack tactics that tip still more people. Anxiety then builds like an infection.…

People use fear-mongering strategies with voices that are beastly or, more often, ones that are oh-so-innocently calm. People can know very clearly what they are doing and why, or they can be completely oblivious to the way they're acting. One doesn't have to be an unethical or a self-serving person to use a strategy that raises anxieties and kills off a good idea. And that fact has huge implications regarding what you must do to deal effectively with fear mongering and all the other attack strategies (more on that soon).

Delay

There are questions and concerns that can kill a good proposal simply by creating a deadly delay. They so slow the communication and discussion of a plan that sufficient buy-in cannot be achieved before a critical cut-off time or date. They make what may seem like a logical suggestion but which, if accepted, will make the project miss its window of opportunity. Death-by-delay tactics can force so many meetings or so many straw polls that momentum is lost, or another idea, not nearly as good, gains a foothold….

Death by delay can be a very powerful strategy because it's so easy to deploy. A case is made that sounds so reasonable, where we should wait (just a bit) until some other project is done, or we should send this back into committee (just to straighten up a few points), or (just) put off the activity until the next budget cycle. With a delay strategy, attention can be diverted to some legitimate, pressing issue, the sort of which always exists. There is the sudden budget shortfall, the unexpected competitor announcement, the dangerous new bill put before the legislature, the growing problem here, the escalating conflict there. These can require immediate attention, but rarely 100 percent of people's attention.

With death by delay, the point is to focus people 100 percent on the crisis so that a good idea is forgotten or crucial communication is lost. Growing momentum toward buy-in then slows to the point that it can never be regained. We recently saw a version of this, which you might call the "we have too much on our plate right now" argument. It is possible to have too many projects, where clearly any recommended action should be cutting back, not adding more. But in this case, the proposal was for a very innovative automotive parts product, and no one could have logically defended the superior worth of all the other projects in the works. But those who were running some of the current programs, and receiving considerable resources for doing so, correctly saw the new proposal as a threat, which they successfully killed with a too-much-on-our-plate-right-now bullet.

Because it is so easy to use, death by delay is a weapon available to nearly anyone, which makes it particularly dangerous. Yet, as with the other three attack strategies, the many little bombs it creates can all be defused.

Confusion

Some idea-killing questions and concerns muddle the conversation with irrelevant facts, convoluted logic, or so many alternatives that it is impossible to have the clear and intelligent dialog that builds buy-in.

Heidi Agenda hit Hank with "what about, what about, what about?" With that attack, it's easy for a conversation to slide into endless side discussions about this and that, and that and this, and don't forget about . . . Eventually, people conclude that the idea has not been well thought out. Or they feel stupid because they cannot follow the conversation (which tends to create anger, which can flow back toward the proposal or the proposer). Or they get that head-about-to-burst feeling, which they relieve by setting aside the proposal or plan.

Some individuals can be astonishingly clever at drawing you into a discussion that is so complex that a reasonable person simply gives up and walks away.… A confused person might still vote yes, but only to stop the conversation and with no commitment toward making the idea become a reality.

A complex topic is not needed for a confusion strategy to work. Even the simplest of plans can be pulled into a forest of complexity where nearly anyone can become lost. Statistics can be powerful weapons, used not to clarify but to bewilder. "You are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Just look at this [twenty-two-page] spreadsheet. I think if we study it closely . . ." Complex stories, about which most people do not know the details, can be lethal. "What about the Teledix project [which no one has ever heard of] and the competitive strategy we have for the TX line of products [a strategy that half the people in the room know nothing of]? I worry that the interaction of Teledix, TX, and this proposal will hurt third-quarter income, at least in Asia, which would be very bad. Don't you think so?"…

We recently watched a presentation communicated in PowerPoint slides, all sixty-eight of them, and many in impossible-to-read small print.… The slide deck "demonstrated" why a proposal to allocate many more resources to building a firm's business in Europe went too far. The document is incomprehensible (we have yet to find anyone in that firm who can explain it clearly), but it has successfully undermined support for a plan that is probably a very good one.

Ridicule (or character assassination)

Some verbal bullets don't shoot directly at the idea but at the people behind the idea. The proposers may be made to look silly. Questions may be raised about competence. Slyly or directly, questions can be raised about character. Strong buy-in is rarely achieved if an audience feels uneasy with those presenting a proposal.…

Without even saying the words, a question is raised about whether you are smart enough to have done careful homework on a problem, or visionary enough to see better alternatives….

Questions and concerns based on a strategy of ridicule and character assassination can be served with a dramatic flourish of indignation, but more often are presented with a light hand. There is a sense that the attacker feels awkward even bringing up a subject, but he nevertheless feels it is his duty to ask whether George's dinners with his admin assistant might . . . No, no, that wasn't fair. Forget I said that.

The ridicule strategy is used less than the others, probably because it can snap back at the attacker. But when this strategy works, there can be collateral damage. Not only is a good idea wounded, and a person's reputation unfairly tarnished, but all the additional sensible ideas from the proposer might have less credibility, at least until the memory of the attack fades. 

The Growth of Social Media

via

LinkedIn Takes A Deep Data Dive On Startup Founder Profiles

Groupon's MySpace Moment?

via @forbes

MySpace Moment, sooner or later, is going to enter the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary alongside crowdsourcing, bromance and cougars. It is a fact that once seemingly invincible brands can inexplicably decline in popularity so let’s give this depressing phenomena a name so we can say, oh, I don’t know, Groupon may be nearing a MySpace Moment.

Which it may be.

Something is amiss: The Securities and Exchange Commission frowned upon – and legions of accountants mocked – its Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income metric in its first filing. It inflated the company’s worth by ignoring marketing costs. Groupon subsequently amended its filling.

It posted a net loss in the second quarter (although much of that was related to the hiring of more than 1,000 employees).

Now Experian Hitwise is reporting a significant drop-off in Groupon traffic this summer, nearly 50% since its peak in the second week of June 2011 compared to last week.

During the same time, Living Social has achieved 27% growth in visits to its site.

These are just two data points, of course, and they ignore the formidable assets that Groupon does have – namely its email mailing list, which CEO Andrew Mason pointed out in a recent internal memo to employees (the only way the company has to defend itself now that it is in a quiet period) and head start in this market and name recognition.

It has also been pushing into real time mobile offerings with Groupon Now.

And it’s not that other sites don’t dip in traffic every now and then – or even fail to turn lagging initiatives around. Remember Google’s social media efforts pre-Google+?

Or eBay’s diversification away from the auction model

Are Daily Deals Sustainable?

In fact eBay is a good company to point to right now. Ten-fifteen years ago, it was auction-everything thanks to eBay’s wild popularity at the time. To be sure, there is still a market for that business style but as eBay itself has shown with its emphasis on fixed-pricing, it is better to diversity into other categories as well.

So may it be with the daily deal model. Doubts are growing whether its current form is sustainable – by that I mean, will there be enough consumers to fuel the 400 plus daily deal offerings in the long run? Or merchants, for that matter?

One point made by Experian Hitwise that does not bode well for Groupon or the model is that overall visits to a custom category of Daily Deal & Aggregator sites were down 25% for the same time period.

Also, it noted PriceGrabber released results from its Local Deals Survey in June, stating that 44% of respondents said they use or search daily deal Websites. “However, 52% expressed feeling overwhelmed by the number of bargain-boasting emails they receive on a daily basis.”

NBA's Problem Is Not Player Salaries

via @BISportsPage

The NBA claims that 22 teams lost money last season, with a total loss of $370 million. And to fix the problem, the league wants to rein in player salaries. But a closer look at the numbers suggest the problem does not lie with the players' paychecks.

On the surface, this should be obvious. Since the NBA and the players ratified the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement prior to the 2005-06 season, player salaries have been fixed at 57 percent of league revenue.

And if we adjust player salaries for inflation (via Nate Silver), salaries are only up 5.4 percent since the beginning of the previous CBA that the NBA owners happily agreed to. In that same time period, revenue was up 5.3 percent.

However, league income in the last five years is down 31.1 percent. Why? Because spending by the owners on everything else besides player salaries is up 12.7 percent, outpacing league revenue growth.

Still, in the end, according to the data from Forbes.com, the league is still making money. It is making less money, and certainly the owners want to make more. But the idea that the league is losing money may not be accurate. And even if they are losing money, they only have their own spending habits to blame.

Adopt a Duck. Win a Car. Save a Life.

Join  our  team!   Manu Ginobili and I have teamed up to rasie money for Haven for Hope here in San Antonio.  Adopt a Duck for $5!

Thanks!

Manu and Tom 

How to Taste Wine

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How to Taste Wine

Edited byKathy Howe and 37 others

Whenever you come across fertile wine country, wine tasting is often one of the most rewarding excursions available. If you long to walk through the vineyards and admire the grapevines and picturesque backdrop, wine glass in hand, you must first learn to appreciate the subtle beauty of wine.

Steps 

1 

Look at the wine, especially around the edges. Tilting the glass a bit can make it easier to see the way the color changes from the center to the edges. Holding the glass in front of a white background, such as a napkin, tablecloth, or sheet of paper, is another good way to make out the wine's true color. Look for the color of the wine and the clarity. Intensity, depth or saturation of color are not necessarily linear with quality. White wines become darker as they age while time causes red wines to lose their color turning more brownish, often with a small amount of harmless, dark red sediment in the bottom of the bottle or glass. This is also a good time to catch a preliminary sniff of the wine so you can compare its fragrance after swirling.  

This will also allow you to check for any off odors that might indicate spoiled (corked) wine.

2

Swirl the wine in your glass. This is to increase the surface area of the wine by spreading it over the inside of the glass allowing them to escape from solution and reach your nose. It also allows some oxygen into the wine, which will help its aromas open up.

3

Note the wine's viscosity - how slowly it runs back down the side of the glass - while you're swirling. More viscous wines are said to have "legs," and are likely to be more alcoholic. Outside of looking pretty, this has no relation to a wine's quality but may indicate a more full bodied wine.

4

Sniff the wine. Initially you should hold the glass a few inches from your nose. Then let your nose go into the glass. What do you smell?

5

Take a sip of wine, but do not swallow yet. Roll the wine around in your mouth exposing it to all of your taste buds. You will only be able to detect sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (think: meaty or savory). Pay attention to the texture and other tactile sensations such as an apparent sense of weight or body.

6

Aspirate through the wine: With your lips pursed as if you were to whistle, draw some air into your mouth and exhale through your nose. This liberates the aromas for the wine and allows them to reach your nose where they can be detected. The nose is the only place where you can detect a wine's aromas. However, the enzymes and other compounds in your mouth and saliva alter some of a wine's aromatic compounds. By aspirating through the wine, you are looking for any new aromas liberated by the wine's interaction with the environment of your mouth.

7

Take another sip of the wine, but this time (especially if you are drinking a red wine) introduce air with it. In other words, slurp the wine (without making a loud slurping noise, of course). Note the subtle differences in flavor and texture.

8

Note the aftertaste when you swallow. How long does the finish last? Do you like the taste?

9

Write down what you experienced. You can use whatever terminology you feel comfortable with. The most important thing to write down is your impression of the wine and how much you liked it. Many wineries provide booklets and pens so that you can take your own tasting notes. This will force you to pay attention to the subtleties of the wine. Also, you will have a record of what the wine tastes like so that you can pair it with meals or with yourmood.

Wines have four basic components: taste, tannins, alcohol and acidity. Some wines also have sweetness - but the latter is only appropriate in dessert wines. A good wine will have a good balance of all four characteristics. Aging will soften tannins (see Tips for a more detailed description). Acidity will soften throughout the life of a wine as it undergoes chemical changes which include the break down of acids. Fruit will rise and then fall throughout the life of a wine. Alcohol will stay the same. All of these factors contribute to knowing when to drink/decant a wine.

Here are some commonly found tastes for each of the most common varieties (bear in mind that growing region, harvesting decisions and other production decisions have a great impact on a wine's flavor character):

Cabernet - black currant, cherry other, black fruits, green spices

Merlot - plum, red and black fruits, green spices, floral

Zinfandel - black fruits (often jammy), black spices - often called "briary"

Syrah (aka Shiraz, depending on vineyard location) - black fruits, black spices - especially white and black pepper

Pinot Noir - red fruits, floral, herbs

Chardonnay - cool climate: tropical fruit, citrus fruit in slightly warmer climes and melon in warm regions. With increasing proportion of malolactic fermentation, Chardonnay loses green apple and takes on creamy notes, Apple, pear, peach,apricot

Sauvignon Blanc - Grapefruit, white gooseberry, lime, melon

Malolactic fermentation (the natural or artificial introduction of a specific bacteria) will cause white wines to taste creamy or buttery

Aging in oak will cause wines to take on a vanilla or nutty flavor.

Other common taste descriptors are minerality, earthiness and asparagus.

10

Match the glassware to the wine. Stemware/drinkware comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The more experienced wine drinkers and connoisseurs often enjoy wines out of stemware or bulbs that are tailor-made for a specific varietal. When starting out, there is a basic rule of thumb; larger glasses for reds, and smaller glasses for whites. Austrian glassware company Riedel is the gold standard of drinkware when it comes to wine, but for the beginner, less expensive stemware will do.

11

Try pairing wines with unusual ingredients and note the how it enhances or diminishes the flavors of the wine. With red wines try different cheeses, good quality chocolate and berries. With white wines you can try apples, pears and citrus fruits. Pairing wine with food is more complicated than "red with beef and white with fish." Feel free to drink whichever wine you want with whatever food you want, but remember a perfect pairing is a highly enjoyable experience.

12

Ultimately, a wine should complement the food and cleanse the palate. So big, jammy, sweet wines will not do as well as ones with a more composed bouquet or aromas and high acidity.