   
CEO Picks - The most popular editorials that have stood the test of time!
Billionaire CEO Sara Blakely Says These 7 Words Are the Best Career Advice She Ever Got
 Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound.
Sara Blakely founded Spanx in her late 20s. The company made $4 million in sales in its first year and $10 million in its second year. In 2012, Forbes named Blakely the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world.
She is clearly massively successful. Yet when asked what the best advice she ever received was, she doesn't talk about success.
Instead, she talks about how, as a child, her father would sit her down at the dining room table and ask her the same question:
"What did you fail at this week?"
He didn't want to know how many As she'd gotten. He wasn't interested in how many girl scout cookies she'd sold, how many goals she'd scored on her soccer team, or whether she'd gotten a perfect score on her math test.
No, he wanted to know what she had failed at. And when she told him, do you know what his reaction was?
He high-fived her.
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How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time
 I recently saw this tweet asking people about their career's most expensive mistake. The most common one was people staying too long at their jobs and not switching sooner.
I've seen people make this mistake over and over. Hell, I've made this mistake myself. Change can be scary. It requires you to get out of your comfort zone. But, in my experience, staying too long is one of the worst mistakes you can make in your career.
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Research: Being Nice in a Negotiation Can Backfire
 Whether you are making a large purchase, working on a joint project, or discussing your next promotion, you'll likely need to negotiate. At a very basic level, in fact, nearly every interaction we have is a negotiation - an opportunity to persuade others to agree to an outcome we want. But what is the best way to go about persuading others? Should you be warmer or tougher? Friendlier or more aloof? Our recent research may provide the answer.
Negotiation experts have long confirmed the intuition that being warm and friendly pays off at the bargaining table, leading us to gain concessions and capture a larger chunk of the value. A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled "How to Negotiate Nicely without Being a Pushover" made this point, as did legendary sports agent Ronald M. Shapiro's book The Power of Nice: How to Negotiate So Everyone Wins - Especially You!
Similarly, in our own research, we've found that people tend to believe niceness will buy them better deals. But when put to the test, this prediction turns out to be wrong.
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This incredible Google experiment lets you time travel to your hometown 200 years ago
 In the 20 years he'd lived in New York, Raimondas Kiveris had seen the city change immensely. "It was a completely different place, a different town," says Kiveris, a software engineer at Google Research. This got him wondering what his neighborhood looked like even before that - before he'd lived there, before he'd even been born. "There's really no easy way to find that information in any organized way," he says. "So I was starting to think, can we somehow enable this kind of virtual time travel?"
Three years later, his attempt at virtual time travel is taking shape as an open-source map that can show, in both a bird's-eye view and a pedestrian-level view, the changes that happen to city streetscapes over time. With a slider to control the year, the map displays a historically accurate representation of development in almost any U.S. city dating back to 1800.
He and his team created it as an open-source project so that people such as librarians and map enthusiasts can contribute their own historical sources to add detail. It can even integrate photographs of buildings, using deep learning to analyze images and augment the blocky 3D models with architectural details.
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� | � |  | How Apple Is Organized for Innovation
 Early on, Steve Jobs came to embrace the idea that managers at Apple should be experts in their area of management. In a 1984 interview he said, "We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought, Oh, we're gonna be a big company, let's hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn't work at all... They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. If you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from? And you know what's interesting? You know who the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be... because no one else is going to... do as good a job."
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The Weird Strategy Dr. Seuss Used to Create His Greatest Work
 In 1960, two men made a bet.
There was only $50 on the line, but millions of people would feel the impact of this little wager.
The first man, Bennett Cerf, was the founder of the publishing firm, Random House. The second man was named Theo Geisel, but you probably know him as Dr. Seuss. Cerf proposed the bet and challenged that Dr. Seuss would not be able to write an entertaining children's book using only 50 different words.
Dr. Seuss took the bet and won. The result was a little book called Green Eggs and Ham. Since publication, Green Eggs and Ham has sold more than 200 million copies, making it the most popular of Seuss's works and one of the best-selling children's books in history.
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If Strategy Is So Important, Why Don't We Make Time for It?
 Almost every leader wants to make more time for strategic thinking. In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the leadership behavior most important to their organization's success. And yet in another study, a full 96% of the leaders surveyed said they lacked the time for strategic thinking.
It's important to remember that strategic thinking doesn't necessarily require large amounts of time; it's not about taking endless sabbaticals or going on leadership retreats. As productivity expert David Allen says, "You don't need time to have a good idea, you need space... It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don't have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they're suboptimal."
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To Control Your Life, Control What You Pay Attention To
 One of the best insights on what true productivity means in the 21st century dates back to 1890. In his book The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, William James wrote a simple statement that's packed with meaning: "My experience is what I agree to attend to."
Your attention determines the experiences you have, and the experiences you have determine the life you live. Or said another way: you must control your attention to control your life. Today, in a world where so many experiences are blended together - where we can work from home (or a train or a plane or a beach), watch our kids on a nanny-cam from work, and distraction is always just a thumb-swipe away - has that ever been more true?
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How to Get Rich By Losing Lots of Money: The WeWork story
 Adam Neumann is out of his WeWork job, but entrepreneurs will surely imitate him.
HBO's Silicon Valley aired its final episode last year, the tech world's realities having gotten too dystopian to be fictionalized, in good conscience, for laughs. When a reporter asked what material the show had left on the table, the showrunners, Mike Judge and Alec Berg, admitted, "We missed the WeWork guy." That guy - WeWork's telegenic co-founder and former CEO, Adam Neumann - had once been known for turning an upscale co-working business into America's most valuable private start-up, peddling vague kumbayas like This decade is the decade of "We." But then WeWork filed paperwork to go public, revealing that the company had lost billions of dollars while enriching Neumann.
Among other extraordinary disclosures, it turned out that he had bought we-related trademarks, then charged WeWork $5.9 million to buy them. The press soon uncovered other details to fill out the portrait of a terrible little richling: Neumann's practice of hotboxing chartered jets, whether his co-passengers liked it or not; his musings about becoming president of the world; his company-wide ban on meat that left executives puzzling over how to implement it.
When life transcends art, tell it straight.
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The C.E.O. Who Promised There Would Be No Layoffs
 In 10 years running Mastercard, Ajay Banga has favored a forward-looking approach.
When the pandemic hit, Mastercard's chief executive, Ajay Banga, made a promise to the company's 19,000 employees: There would be no layoffs as a result of the economic destruction wrought by the virus.
It was a decision he could afford to make. During his 10 years as chief executive, Mr. Banga vastly expanded the company's reach. Revenues roughly tripled, and profits quadrupled.
Mr. Banga says he didn't achieve these results simply by managing for the short term. When he took over in 2010, he told investors that he would not be giving quarterly earnings guidance. Instead, he offered investors a rolling forecast of where Mastercard would be in three years, and set to work striking new partnerships around the globe.
The strategy worked. Mastercard stock has soared by more than 1,000 percent during his tenure, outperforming competitors Visa and American Express.
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Get 1% Better Every Day: The Kaizen Way to Self-Improvement
 It's happened to all of us.
You have a "come to Jesus" moment and decide you need to make changes in your life. Maybe you need to drop a few pounds (or more), want to pay off some debt, or desperately long to quit wasting time on the internet.
So you start planning and scheming.
You take to your journal and write out a bold strategy on how you're going to tackle your quest for self-improvement. You set big, hairy SMART goals with firm deadlines. You download the apps and buy the gear that will help you reach your objectives.
You feel that telltale rush that comes with believing you're turning over a new leaf, and indeed, the first few days go great. "This time," you tell yourself, "this time is different."
But then ...
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Short Circuit Panic With This Simple Breathing Exercise
 Let's be honest, the world is a mess right now. In addition to fighting to save your business during a pandemic-induced recession, we're dealing with riots, social isolation, murder hornets, cannibal rats, etc. With headlines like these, you could be forgiven for just completely freaking out every once in awhile.
While the occasional emotional meltdown is entirely understandable, it's also unpleasant and unwelcome. How do you deal with these moments of panic? According to Brown University psychiatrist Judson Brewer all you need is one hand and your breath.
In a TED Ideas post full of medical terminology, Brewer explains in detail how anxiety clogs up our short-term memory (which is analogous to a computer's RAM) with repetitive worries, killing our ability to think productively. The key to getting your brain working again is dumping all that anxiety. Mindfulness is the way to do this.
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� | � | | The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry
 Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can't hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can't even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old - or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt - and it's stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn't fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you'd expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)
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This study of 1.6 million chess moves found the age we hit our cognitive peak
 More than 24,000 chess games played in professional tournaments over 125 years have been analyzed by scientists to measure how age affects cognitive ability.
They conclude that humans reach their cognitive peak around the age of 35 and begin to decline after the age of 45. And our cognitive abilities today exceed those of our ancestors.
"Performance reveals a hump-shaped pattern over the life cycle," report the authors in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Individual performance increases sharply until the early 20s and then reaches a plateau, with a peak around 35 years and a sustained decline at higher ages."
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The Best Investing Books for Every Kind of Investor
 What kind of investor are you?
Do you like to pick stocks or would you rather own index funds?
Are you drawn to technical work or do you prefer a great story?
Does history excite you or are you obsessed with what is happening right now?
Depending on how you answer these questions will affect what kind of investing books you might find most appealing. Unfortunately most articles on the "best investing books" don't provide any such differentiation.
For this reason, I have compiled a list of the best investing books based on where you are on your investment journey. The list is a starting point for further exploration and should include a little something for everyone to enjoy.
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Brain Scans Reveal Why "Night Owls" Have It Rough in a 9-to-5 Society
 The 9-to-5 workday originated with American labor unions in the 1800s, and today, the eight-hour workday is the norm. But however normalized the schedule, it is directly opposed to something more powerful: biology.
In a new study, scientists report that people whose internal body clocks tell them to go to bed late, but are then forced to wake up early, have a lower resting brain connectivity in the regions of the brain linked to consciousness.
Scientists shared their findings Friday in the journal SLEEP, with the article, "Circadian phenotype impacts the brain's resting state functional connectivity, attentional performance and sleepiness."
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� | � | | A radical new technique lets AI learn with practically no data
 "Less than one"-shot learning can teach a model to identify more objects than the number of examples it is trained on.
Machine learning typically requires tons of examples. To get an AI model to recognize a horse, you need to show it thousands of images of horses. This is what makes the technology computationally expensive - and very different from human learning. A child often needs to see just a few examples of an object, or even only one, before being able to recognize it for life.
In fact, children sometimes don't need any examples to identify something. Shown photos of a horse and a rhino, and told a unicorn is something in between, they can recognize the mythical creature in a picture book the first time they see it.
Now a new paper from the University of Waterloo in Ontario suggests that AI models should also be able to do this - a process the researchers call "less than one"-shot, or LO-shot, learning. In other words, an AI model should be able to accurately recognize more objects than the number of examples it was trained on. That could be a big deal for a field that has grown increasingly expensive and inaccessible as the data sets used become ever larger.
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Restoring craft to work -- A replacement to corporate purpose
 The innate desire to do a job well has greater motivational force than any corporate purpose.
You've probably heard these stories before. There's the proud janitor at NASA who tells President Kennedy that he isn't just sweeping up; he is helping put a man on the moon. And the gung-ho stonemason who tells architect Christopher Wren that he isn't just hammering rock; he is building a cathedral to God's glory. The stories are popular, even though they probably never happened. And they get told and retold to support the power of purpose. It's the subtext that bothers me.
Invariably, the moral of these stories is that employers (a label that literally defines the rest of us as something to be used) need to provide employees with a purpose. This suggests that many jobs are, in and of themselves, meaningless. It also implies that people don't care about the work they do - that they are wastrels.
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How Perfectionists Can Get Out of Their Own Way
 Like any extreme trait, perfectionism can be a double-edged sword. Having high standards and being hardworking can help someone stand out in a crowded field, and their tenacity can help them improve their skills over time. And, to an extent, being very conscientious can help avoid errors.
The benefits I've mentioned, and a fear that any flaw will result in catastrophe, can keep people hooked on their perfectionist mindset. However, there are also significant downsides to attempting mistake-free performance.
If you're struggling to let go of some of your perfectionistic tendencies, or managing someone who is, it can be helpful to remember the ways perfectionists can self-sabotage in the workplace. I'll discuss five below. You'll notice a general theme of the person losing sight of the big picture.
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This cargo ship cuts emissions 90% using an old-fashioned trick: Sails
 Using sails to transport goods? An idea so old it's new again.
The tens of thousands of cargo ships that travel the world's oceans - carrying everything from jeans and smartphones to cars and bananas - collectively emit more CO2 than most countries. A new ship called the Oceanbird, in development now, is designed to help: With huge, wing-like sails, it runs on wind power, but will be able to cross the Atlantic in less than two weeks, only a few days longer than a ship running on fossil fuels.
For the shipping industry, which is racing to figure out how to cut emissions in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the design has advantages compared to other potential solutions. Unlike cars, ships can't easily shift to electric power, since the massive size of a cargo ship means that it would need to be filled with batteries to run, leaving little room for cargo. Ships can run on liquified natural gas, but that would only partially reduce emissions. Ammonia fuel doesn't pollute as it burns but is polluting to produce. Wind energy can avoid all those challenges.
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� | � | | An Economist's Guide to the World in 2050
 Largely driven by the rise of China and India, the emerging-market share of global GDP is also soaring. In 2000, emerging markets accounted for about a fifth of global output. In 2042, they're set to overtake advanced economies as the biggest contributors to global GDP - and by 2050, they will contribute almost 60% of the total.
More viscerally felt will be the shift in relative power between countries. In 2033, according to our projections, India will overtake an age-hobbled Japan to become the world's third biggest economy. In 2035, China will outstrip the U.S. to become the biggest. By 2050, Indonesia may have moved into the big league. Three of the world's biggest economies will be Asian emerging markets.
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A Study of 2.7 Million Startups Found the Ideal Age to Start a Business (and It's Much Older Than You Think)
If you're in your 30s or 40s (or even 50s) and you believe conventional wisdom, you might think the entrepreneurial train has passed you by and it's too late to start your own business.
Wrong: A recent study conducted by the Census Bureau and two MIT professors found the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged--even in the tech sector. The researchers compiled a list of 2.7 million company founders who hired at least one employee between 2007 and 2014. The average startup founder was 45 years old when he or she founded the most successful tech companies.
And in general terms, a 50-year-old entrepreneur is almost twice as likely to start an extremely successful company as a 30-year-old. (Or, for that matter, a successful side hustle.)
Still not convinced? Check out these stats:
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How to build a data-driven company
 Creating a data culture is one of the keys to building a data-driven organization. The right technology, data literacy, and disrupting the status quo are ways to start.
While transformations can be difficult, the value of embracing data is clear - which is why Cindi Howson, the chief data strategy officer at analytics platform provider ThoughtSpot, urges more companies to think about what's stopping them from becoming data-driven.
Speaking in August at the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium, Howson said data-driven companies enjoy increased revenue, improved customer service, best-in-class operating efficiencies, and improved profitability. "It sounds like what we all want and why we collect data at all," she said. But according to a study from the Harvard Business Review, only 20% of companies are actually empowering frontline workers with data, Howson said. "That is an unacceptable situation for the state of the industry after 25 years. So, what does it take?"
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The Great Covid-Driven Teamwork Divide
 For most teams, the pandemic either brought colleagues closer or drove them increasingly apart. There are three key reasons why.
What makes a team more than the sum of its parts? Its cohesion or connectedness, which allows for pooling of individual members' strengths and compensates for their weaknesses. Accordingly, Google's landmark Project Aristotle study found that the single most important driver of team performance was not the skills, intelligence or personality of a team's members, but rather the quality of the team's interactions and whether members felt psychologically safe.
The Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps the greatest threat to team connectedness we have ever seen. Colleagues who were mostly co-located - often literally within arm's reach of one another - have been forced to disperse across cities, even countries. As we saw this occurring, we fretted for the future of these teams. Would close working relationships built up over months if not years simply be scattered to the four winds? To capture the effects in real time, we launched a survey back in June about how teams were being impacted by Covid. More than 500 professionals around the world responded.
The findings surprised us.
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� | � | | Ikea seeks to disrupt itself before it is disrupted
 World's largest furniture retailer rolls out a series of experiments that could uproot its business model
Just off Oslo's main shopping street lies an experiment at the heart of Ikea's attempts to disrupt itself before it is disrupted. Until recently the only way to experience Ikea was to travel to the outskirts of big cities, visit an enormous warehouse and transport the furniture home yourself to then spend hours assembling it.
All that is changing, and the Oslo planning studio is just one in a bewildering number of experiments encompassing everything from renting out furniture to students to selling second-hand sofas.
While at an early stage, the moves will provide a case study of a large company trying to rediscover the entrepreneurial spirit that brought it success. If scaled up, the experiments would potentially uproot a business model that Ikea has followed faithfully for seven decades.
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What's the Best Way to Create Long-Term Value?
 It's a well-known paradox. Most executives are committed to the idea of maximizing long-term shareholder value, but when they want to track and improve performance, they focus on a dizzying variety of short-term measures (and acronyms). ROA. ROC. TSR. EBIT. EBITDA. CAR. EPS. We could go on.
Why this focus on short-term measures? In large part, because they're easy to obtain, easy to use, and have been widely used in the past. The problem, as studies have long made clear, is that optimizing short-term accounting measures and ratios often doesn't maximize long-term value. To think clearly and effectively about long-term value, companies need a better measure - and, as we write in a recently published article in the Strategic Management Journal, we've devised one that we call LIVA, short for Long-term Investor Value Appropriation.
The idea behind LIVA is simple: Add up the net present value of all the investments a firm has engaged in over a long period of time. The key insight from our analysis is that this can be done by using publicly available stock-market data. LIVA uses historical share-price data to calculate the value a company has either created or destroyed for its entire investor base over a long time period.
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What's Keeping CEOs Up At Night About Working Remotely?
 The Wall Street Journal asked 19 CEOs for their perspective on remote work and whether it was working for them. We asked 500.
With the help of our parent company, Chief Executive Group, we questioned 500 CEOs on their biggest challenges in managing the sudden, Covid-enforced transition to remote work. We were so bowled over by the volume, breadth and depth of responses that we launched an entire website www.remotework360.com to help navigate the uncertainties of remote, and also distilled the responses into an insightful whitepaper: "Remote Work; The CEO Perspective." You can download a free copy here, and read on for a key summary:
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How to Hold Remote Workers Accountable Without Micromanaging
 Good managers don't actually care what folks do with their time. They care if the job gets done.
In March, a viral leaked email from a Wall Street Journal manager instructed newly remote workers to keep managers informed if they're "taking a break, conducting an interview, in a meeting, or will otherwise be unavailable for a while."
This is how you ruin remote work.
Managers might as well ask to be informed every time an employee takes a bio break, eats a Snickers bar, ties their shoes, sneezes, scratches their elbow, or tidies their desk.
I understand where the impulse comes from. Millions of people are working remotely for the first time, and managers are trying to adjust. Most are used to seeing their direct reports in person throughout the day, and think this gives them an idea of what exactly folks are doing with their time. But here's the thing. Good managers don't actually care what folks do with their time. They care if they get their job done or not.
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