Showing posts with label Productivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Productivity. Show all posts
Thursday, May 7, 2015
How To Flare the Break Lines and Wiring Properly
Monday, May 4, 2015
LS Engine Swap Chuck Garage Step By Step
Monday, January 19, 2015
Secret Revealed: How To Change a Habit
When I talk to people about their happiness challenges, they often point to hurdles related to a habit they want to make or break. My book describes the multiple strategies we can exploit to change our habits. First up: Self-knowledge. Key! Crucial! Essential! When we're trying to shape a habit, it's key that we understand ourselves.
We have to shape that habit in the way that suits us, or else it's not likely to stick. For instance, if you're a night person, and you try to get up at 6:00 a.m. to go for a walk, you're likely to fail. But if you go for a walk after work, you might have much better success.
So the secret to changing your habits is to know yourself. One aspect of Self-Knowledge is knowing where you fit in the framework of the Four Tendencies. That's a whole separate topic, it's so huge -- and here's a quiz you can take, to identify your Tendency. There are many other distinctions to consider, as well:
But there are many important distinctions that can help us know ourselves better. To read more about the ones I mention…are you a:
They say there are two types of people: those who love dividing the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. I love dividing the world into categories. I could keep going. Abstainers and moderators. Radiators and drains. Leopards and alchemists. Under-buyers and over-buyers. Eeyores and Tiggers.
Do you find that thinking about these distinctions helps you understand yourself better? Of course, this exercise is meant to broaden self-understanding, not trap us into a single rigid identity.
As I mention above, my current writing project is a book about habit formation. Such a fascinating subject. I identify the multiple strategies that we can use to make or break our habits. Some are quite familiar, such as Monitoring, Scheduling, andConvenience. Some took me a lot of effort to identify, such as Thinking, Abstaining, Identity. Some are more complicated than you might assume, such as Rewards andOther People. The most fun strategy? Treats. My favorite chapter? The hilarious strategy of Loophole-Spotting -- I love keeping lists of the loopholes I spot. To pre-order the book, go here.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Today Post The Number One Demotivator at Work
Apathy in organizations is often a result of a disconnection between what matters to the person and what they’re asked to do. Yet apathy isn’t always easy to gauge at work. A team member’s performance may not be up to snuff for any number of reasons: personal stress, burnout, office strife, etc.
Sometimes the best way to gauge if someone isn’t engaged is to simply ask: Do you enjoy what you’re doing?
Monday, April 28, 2014
Where To Live In China? All Over The PRO World of INFLUENCERS
The Urban China Initiative (a think tank focused on urbanization challenges in China and supported by McKinsey & Company) just published its most recent ranking of Chinese cities based on its own proprietary sustainability index. Take a look to find where your city ranks on the list.
What are the key messages?
Overall, China’s cities are becoming more, not less, sustainable.
Richer cities tend to perform better on the index and so most of them tend to be in the east or on the coast of China.
Greater sustainability correlates with size up to a point, that point being around 4.5 million people. After this, size doesn’t matter.
Greater sustainability correlates with increased population density up to a point, that point being around 8,000 people per square kilometer. After that, higher density doesn't lead to higher sustainability.
Five Chinese cities have already crossed these thresholds and 11 more are likely to do so soon, representing more than 20% of China’s population.
Improving sustainability in these cities requires new forms of action, which have proven successful in peer cities globally. These include many actions that are not hard to describe, but are hard to implement consistently, whether it is in energy savings and emissions reduction, tighter supervision of polluters, pricing resources to create rational usage, smart planning of and incentives to use public transport. Implementation, not conception, makes all the difference in China.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Food And Beverages Business
Over the last few days, media has been abuzz with the news of Sun Pharma’s $4-billion acquisition of Ranbaxy.
Given the fact that it is the second largest acquisition in the Indian pharmaceutical sector till date, it is not surprising that everybody is fixated on the sheer size of the deal.
But if you look beyond the fancy valuation, this courageous move by Sun Pharma founder Diliip Shanghvi to buy out the beleaguered Ranbaxy from Daiichi Sankyo has some important lessons for everybody.
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It is a version of our famous cinnamon roll made for that environment – definitely not intended to be the same as our hand rolled classic Cinnabon Cinnamon rolls you get in our bakeries in malls. They are different – it takes a lot of labor and square footage to make the classic rolls we are famous for, but we do have versions of baked goods (like the MiniBon Roll at Burger King or the Delights at Taco Bell that are inspired by our famous products in our hand-rolling bakeries, but different as they are made for a fast-food environment).
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If you focus on how your brands are performing at the retail level and work with your distributor and import partners in your launch months, it will help you build your brand more effectively. The market feedback that you will gather will help you educate your own team and prepare you for your next distributor call when you can show them “why your brand works”.
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Traditional grocery stores were built for their parents’ (or grandparents’) generation, when almost all meals were prepared at home and people needed to buy a lot more ingredients. My mom used to love going to the grocery store and walking the store aisles. She went every day at 4pm. Part of that may have been that she had to have enough food to feed five kids, but part of it was that it was her hour to be out of the house and socialize. Nida was her favorite checkout woman and would ask how the soccer game went the night before or if my mom liked the recipe she gave her. Going to the grocery store was a fun part of the day.
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But teff is also similar to quinoa in another, more problematic respect, which has complicated the grain’s growth. Quinoa was once as unknown to the North American diet as teff is today. Positioning it as a miracle food—packed with protein but not gluten, full of nutrients but not calories—helped international sales soar. That has been a mixed blessing for the leading exporters of quinoa. In Bolivia, quinoa prices skyrocketed by 900% between 2000 and 2013, making it hard for Bolivians to enjoy the crop themselves.
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Environmental Working Group, the nonprofit that released the report, is trying to persuade food manufacturers to stop using azodicarbonamide, or ADA, which acts as a kind of baking powder in the making of rubber, plastics, and ceramics, making them lighter and more elastic. Food producers took to using the same chemical to soften the texture of baked goods.
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Blue Print Of GVO and PURELEVERAGE Business
Monday, April 21, 2014
10 Things You NEED to Do if You Were Hired Today
The woman right next to me was alive one second, then a taxi came up on the sidewalk of 42 Street between 6 and 7 Avenue, hit her and veered off and now the woman was lying in the street, blood everywhere. This happened on the first or second day of my work when I started at HBO. I tried to call 911 in the payphone (there were still payphones in August, 1994) and then I had to go. The woman was dead.
I loved HBO like I would love a parent. I wanted them to approve of me. And kiss me as I went to sleep at night.
Before I got the job offer to work there I would watch HBO all day long. My friend Peter and I would watch HBO or MTV for 10 hours straight. I’d go over his house around 1pm in the afternoon and by 10pm we would look at each other and say, “what the hell did we just do”. Everything from the “the Larry Sanders Show” on HBO to “Beavis & Butthead” on MTV. We couldn’t stop. I loved the product. I wanted to work there.
Rule #1: Love the product.
You have to love the current output of the company. If you work at HBO, love the shows. Watch every single show. No excuses.
If you work at WD-40, know every use of WD-40. Make up a few more that nobody ever thought of. If you work at Otis Elevators, understand all the algorithms for how it decides which floors to stop on when.
If you work at Goldman Sachs, read every book on the history, study every deal they’ve done, know Lloyd Blankfein’s favorite hobbies and how he rose through the ranks. You have to love the product the way Derek Jeter loves playing baseball.
Rule #2: Know the History.
When the business I started, Reset, was acquired by a company called Xceed, I learned the history of the mini-conglomerate that Xceed was created out of. There was a travel agency for corporations. I visited them in California. There was a burn gel company. I visited them and met all the executives and learned the technical details how the gel was invented. There was a corporate incentives company. I met with them to see if any of their clients could become my clients.
At HBO, I learned how Michael Fuchs (the head of HBO Sports at the time. Later CEO of HBO) in 1975 aired the first boxing match that went out on satellite. And how Jerry Levin (the CEO of HBO, later CEO of Time Warner) used satellites to send the signal out to the cable providers. The first time that had ever happened. Ted Turner had been so inspired by that he turned his local TV affiliate, TBS, into a national TV station, and the rest became history
Rule #3: Know the history of the executives.
At HBO I studied the org chart religiously. My title was “programmer analyst, IT department” and yet I was always asking around: how did John Billock become head of Marketing (he trudged around house to house selling HBO subscriptions in Louisiana when Showtime started up, for instance, decades earlier).
Where did my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss work before arriving at HBO (Pepsi). Where did the head of Original Programming get his start? (he was a standup comedian, later CEO of HBO, before being forced to quit when choking his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot). It was like reading about the origins of all the superheroes. I was a fanboy and my heroes were the other executives. I wanted to be one of them. Or better.
Same thing: know all of your colleagues and what their dreams and ambitions are. Get to work 2 hours before they get to work. If they need favors, do them. You have a whole two hours extra a day. You can do anything.
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