Back To Basics Business Quotes

Let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. Failing that, let's go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another's backs.

All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an independent business creator. In service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe- if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.

How imperious the homicidal madness must have become if they’re willing to pardon—no, forget!—the theft of a can of meat! True, we have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honors, and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see—and history, as you know is my business—everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious foodstuffs, such as bread crusts, ham, or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categoric condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonor, and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offense is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community. A poor man’s theft is seen as a malicious attempt at individual redress . . . Where would we be? Note accordingly that in all countries the penalties for petty theft are extrememly severe, not only as a means of defending society, but also as a stern admonition to the unfortunate to know their place, stick to their caste, and behave themselves, joyfully resigned to go on dying of hunger and misery down through the centuries forever and ever . . . Until today, however, petty thieves enjoyed one advantage in the Republic, they were denied the honor of bearing patriotic arms. But that’s all over now, tomorrow I, a theif, will resume my place in the army . . . Such are the orders . . . It has been decided in high places to forgive and forget what they call my momentary madness, and this, listen carefully, in consideration of what they call the honor of my family. What solicitude! I ask you, comrade, is it my family that is going to serve as a strainer and sorting house for mixed French and German bullets? . . . It’ll just be me wont it? And when I’m dead is the honor of my family going to bring me back to life?

It used to be, as far as I can tell, that Christian parents basically tried to feed their kids, clothe them, teach them about Jesus, and keep them away from explosives. Now our kids have to sleep on their backs (no, wait, their tummies; no, never mind, their backs), while listening to Baby Mozart and surrounded by scenes of Starry, Starry Night.

More megaphones don't equal a better dialogue.

While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. Think about it: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want. When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weigh them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less—as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that. In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (“ Grains and Oilseeds,” “Livestock and Meats,” “Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our business. Today, almost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Observations are read, reflected on, and argued about by clients and policymakers around the world. I’m still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expect to continue to write them until people don’t care to read them or I die.

We have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honors, and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see—and history, as you know is my business—everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious foodstuffs, such as bread crusts, ham, or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categoric condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonor, and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offense is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community. A poor man’s theft is seen as a malicious attempt at individual redress . . . Where would we be? Note accordingly that in all countries the penalties for petty theft are extremely severe, not only as a means of defending society, but also as a stern admonition to the unfortunate to know their place, stick to their caste, and behave themselves, joyfully resigned to go on dying of hunger and misery down through the centuries forever and ever …

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

I never went to college. I don’t believe in college for writers. I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual. And the intellect is a great danger to creativity because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth--- who you are, what you are, what you wanna be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for twenty-five years now which reads, “Don’t think.” You must never think at the typewriter--- you must feel, and your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from the typewriter, but at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience. The worst thing you do when you think is lie — you can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did, and what you’re trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself — find out who you really are, and try not to lie, try to tell the truth all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional, and get it out of yourself — making things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. When it’s over, then you can think about it; then you can look, it works or it doesn’t work, something is missing here. And, if something is missing, then you go back and reemotionalize that part, so it’s all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life. It’s not supposed to be a center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around, which hold us like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a way of life. The way of living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn’t help you very much there. You should get on with the business of living. Everything of mine is intuitive. All the poetry I’ve written, I couldn’t possibly tell you how I did it. I don’t know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of these sorts of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved. I love Shakespeare, I don’t Intellectualize about him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I don’t intellectualize about him. I love Dylan Thomas, I don’t know what the hell he’s writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well. Let me give you an example on this sort of thing: I walked into my living room twenty years ago, when one of my daughters was about four years old, and a Dylan Thomas record was on the set. I thought that my wife had put the record on; come to find out my four-year-old had put on his record. I came into the room, she pointed to the record and said, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ Now, that’s great. See, that’s not intellectualizing, it’s an emotional reaction. If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” 

As soon as she releases me, Galen grabs my hand and I don’t even have time to gasp before he snatches me to the surface and pulls me toward shore, only pausing to dislodge his pair of swimming trunks from under his favorite rock, where he had just moments before taken the time to hide them. I know the routine and turn away so he can change, but it seems like no time before he hauls me onto the beach and drags me to the sand dunes in front of my house. “What are we doing?” I ask. His legs are longer than mine so for every two of his strides I have to take three, which feels a lot like running. He stops us in between the dunes. “I’m doing something that is none of anyone else’s business.” Then he jerks me up against him and crushes his mouth on mine. And I see why he didn’t want an audience for this kiss. I wouldn’t want an audience for this kiss, either, especially if the audience included my mother. This is our first kiss after he announced that he wanted me for his mate. This kiss holds promises of things to come. When he pulls away I feel drunk and excited and nervous and filled with a craving that I’m not sure can ever be satisfied. And Galen looks startled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “That makes it about fifty times harder to leave, I think.” He tucks my head under his chin and I wrap my arms around him until both our breathing returns to normal. I take the time to soak in his scent, his warmth, the hard contours of his-well, his everything. It’s really not fair that he has to leave when he’s only just gotten back. We didn’t have much time to talk on the way back home. We haven’t had much time for anything. “Emma,” he murmurs. “The water isn’t safe for you right now. Please don’t get in it. Please.” “I won’t.” I really won’t. He said please, after all. He lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. His eyes hold all the gentleness and love in the world, with a pinch of mischief. “And take good notes in calculus, or I’ll be forced to cheat off you and for some weird reason that makes me feel guilty.” I wonder what Grom the Triton king would think of that. That Galen basically just stated his intention to keep doing human things. Galen pushes his lips against my forehead, then disentangles himself from me and leads me back toward the water. My body feels ten degrees cooler when his arms fall, and it’s got nothing to do with the temperature outside. We reach the others just in time to see Rayna all but throw herself at Toraf. I can’t help but smile as they kiss. It’s like watching Beauty and the Beast. And Toraf’s not the Beast.

Everything that is wrong with the inner cities of America that policy can affect, Democrats are responsible for: every killing field; every school that year in and year out fails to teach its children the basic skills they need to get ahead; every school that fails to graduate 30 to 40 percent of its charges while those who do get degrees are often functionally illiterate; every welfare system that promotes dependency, condemning its recipients to lifetimes of destitution; every gun-control law that disarms law-abiding citizens in high-crime areas and leaves them defenseless against predators; every catch-and-release policy that puts violent criminals back on the streets; every regulation that ties the hands of police; every material and moral support provided to antipolice agitators like Black Lives Matter, who incite violence against the only protection inner-city families have; every onerous regulation and corporate tax that drives businesses and jobs out of inner-city neighborhoods; every rhetorical assault that tars Democrats’ opponents as “racists” and “race traitors,” perpetuating a one-party system that denies inner-city inhabitants the leverage and influence of a two-party system. Democrats are responsible for every one of the shackles on inner-city communities, and they have been for 50 to 100 years. What

It's an insidious twist of thought that leads one to demand women to give up their reproductive rights to force unwanted pregnancies but then, once birthed from the womb, to deny them access to basic necessities required for even a mediocre life like education, clean air, healthcare, and a fair wage. And these people have the audacity to call their position pro-life. These same people who bemoan the welfare state, yet refuse to require business to honor a fair wage, appear to want to create the very circumstances that they ceaselessly complain about. I dare say that by perpetuating this condition, by feeding the apparatus of poverty, they are satiating their narcissism. With poverty securely entrenched, these lucky few can sit back and smile with smug superiority. Because of course, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they worked harder, and they have earned what they have. It's a meritocracy, they say, if only by merit of their parent's color of flesh or social standing. So yes, let's churn out more children who will be unable to claw their way out of poverty, and if they just happen to defy the odds, let's brainwash them into believing this tripe called the American Dream so they will assist us as we throw their less fortunate fortunate siblings into the hungry machine of conservatism. Because we are really only interested in conserving the status quo.

Freydis lifted a hand and rubbed briefly at the spot on her chin where the gun’s muzzle had left a mild indentation. Then she said, to Murphy, “Are you seeing anyone?” Murphy blinked. “Mortals make the best lovers by far,” Freydis explained. “And this job means I’m basically sexually frustrated around the clock. But it’s hard to find mortals I respect.” Murphy’s cheeks turned bright pink. “Um.” Freydis frowned slightly and glanced from Murphy to me and back. “I don’t mind sharing.” “I’m . . . I’m Catholic,” Murphy said. Freydis’s eyes shone with a wicked sparkle. “I don’t mind conflicted, either.” Murphy gave me a somewhat desperate glance. Huh. I’d officially seen everything now. Murphy asking for a rescue. From monsters and madmen, she’d never cried uncle. It had taken a redhead. “Business first, maybe?” I suggested. “We could all die tonight,” Freydis said. “But as you wish.

Does all this have anything to do with Cameron coming back?" "Basically." She didn't put any letters down. Our game had effectively stopped. "I know you might think you want to be with Cameron that way," she said, "but remember it's been such a short time that he's been back, and-" "It's not that." "Are you sure?" "I don't picture us together, like a couple. It's more like..." "Like a brother?" "Mom, could you just listen?" She clamped her lips shut. "Not like a brother," I said. "It's almost like nothing would be enough. Being a couple wouldn't be enough. Being like brother and sister wouldn't be enough. It's an endless sense of...I don't know." I could tell her it was killing her not to talk. I sighed. "Go ahead." "Unfinished business," she said, with a rush of breath. "That's what I see between you two." "Unfinished business?" "Yes. And I think it will feel that way until the day you die." I looked at her to see if she was serious. She was. "Great.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

My favourite part of my new book so far: Chapter 48: Creatures of The Night A figure stood in the stairwell beneath the Smoke's Poutinerie close to Simcoe Street and Adelaide Street West. He munched his pulled pork poutine and watched the strange object glide through the fog that engulfed the tall blue R.B.C. building. “Nice night for a stroll,” smiled The Rooster. Upon heading North, Fred had decided to take a detour and glide the exact opposite way: South. It was why he was now flying through the fog that suspended over the R.B.C. building. Through the billowing cloud he sailed and higher up into the air as he was heading towards the business district of Toronto where all the skyscrapers were. As Fred got closer, he understood why they were labeled as skyscrapers: they basically scraped the sky. But the view from up here was fantastic. It was a rainy and cold night, but Fred felt very warm in his upgraded suit. Soon, he was zooming past the green windowed T.D. building and back towards the North side of Yonge Street. However, as he sailed home, he began to worry about Allen. The Rooster had already cut up his ex-girlfriend so what would he do to Allen? Allen had been a friend to Fred when no one else had been there. Of course, he used to have many friends in preschool, elementary school, and high school but no one he clicked with. Allen McDougal was really the only family he had left and he didn't want The Rooster to kill his old friend in any way. I must radio him, thought Fred as he shot past Dundas Square. But when he pressed the button on the helmet that alerted his Butler's phone, there was no answer. Damn it. They've already got him.

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.

During his time working for the head of strategy at the bank in the early 1990s, Musk had been asked to take a look at the company’s third-world debt portfolio. This pool of money went by the depressing name of “less-developed country debt,” and Bank of Nova Scotia had billions of dollars of it. Countries throughout South America and elsewhere had defaulted in the years prior, forcing the bank to write down some of its debt value. Musk’s boss wanted him to dig into the bank’s holdings as a learning experiment and try to determine how much the debt was actually worth. While pursuing this project, Musk stumbled upon what seemed like an obvious business opportunity. The United States had tried to help reduce the debt burden of a number of developing countries through so-called Brady bonds, in which the U.S. government basically backstopped the debt of countries like Brazil and Argentina. Musk noticed an arbitrage play. “I calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the actual debt was trading at twenty-five cents,” Musk said. “This was like the biggest opportunity ever, and nobody seemed to realize it.” Musk tried to remain cool and calm as he rang Goldman Sachs, one of the main traders in this market, and probed around about what he had seen. He inquired as to how much Brazilian debt might be available at the 25-cents price. “The guy said, ‘How much do you want?’ and I came up with some ridiculous number like ten billion dollars,” Musk said. When the trader confirmed that was doable, Musk hung up the phone. “I was thinking that they had to be fucking crazy because you could double your money. Everything was backed by Uncle Sam. It was a no-brainer.” Musk had spent the summer earning about fourteen dollars an hour and getting chewed out for using the executive coffee machine, among other status infractions, and figured his moment to shine and make a big bonus had arrived. He sprinted up to his boss’s office and pitched the opportunity of a lifetime. “You can make billions of dollars for free,” he said. His boss told Musk to write up a report, which soon got passed up to the bank’s CEO, who promptly rejected the proposal, saying the bank had been burned on Brazilian and Argentinian debt before and didn’t want to mess with it again. “I tried to tell them that’s not the point,” Musk said. “The point is that it’s fucking backed by Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter what the South Americans do. You cannot lose unless you think the U.S. Treasury is going to default. But they still didn’t do it, and I was stunned. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.” In

Startups often make a fatal assumption when they attend presentations, business plan competitions, or demo days. They assume they are basically invisible until they take their place on the stage. Big mistake. The truth is, investors are observing you. We learn as much from watching your off-stage behavior as your canned presentation. Here’s a good way to go. Resolve that your formal presentation starts the moment team members leave their homes or offices and ends only when the last team member returns. At all other times, you are “on.” Assume the microphones are always on and someone has a camera phone on you at all times. Act like a disciplined team at all times. Watch what you say in the elevator or in the bathroom. You can’t believe the damaging stuff I’ve heard in bathrooms. Wait to debrief until you get back to the privacy of your office.

What about Millie?" "Millie?" he says, spinning back around to face me. "Oh yes, Millie Vagaboss. Let's definitely talk about her." His sarcasm really isn't bad for a Midwestern boy. "It's none of my business, really," I say as I realize I don't actually want to hear this, most likely. "No, no, it's your business, especially since you gave her your blessing to basically dry hump me in the van last night." "What the hell?" I think I feel my nostrils flaring, but I really hope not. "I did?" "Yeah, thanks for that," he says. "She told me you said there's nothing going on between us, and you were cool if she hooked up with me, like I'm some guy in your personal boy harem and you're giving me to her as a token of your appreciation." "It was so not like that! Are you kidding me?" "She was really drunk," he says. "But that was the gist of it, yeah." Now I'm mad. I have no idea why, since I basically did tell Millie she was free to go for it with Bean. "What's wrong?" he says. "Did you really expect to find her hiding in my closet? Were you going to fight for my honor or something?" "Stop making fun of me." "Stop giving me to your friends like I'm some kind of manslut.

78.3 Affability. Optimism and cheerfulness. Another virtue which makes social life more pleasant is affability. It may express itself in the form of a friendly greeting, a small compliment, a cordial gesture of encouragement. This virtue leads us to overcome our inclination to irritability, rash judgments and actions ... , basically, to live as though other people didn’t matter. Elizabeth’s start of joy at the Visitation emphasizes the gift that can be contained in a mere greeting, when it comes from a heart full of God. How often can the darkness of loneliness, oppressing a soul, be dispelled by the shining ray of a smile and a kind word! A good word is soon said; yet sometimes we find it difficult to utter. We are restrained by fatigue, we are distracted by worries, we are checked by a feeling of coldness or selfish indifference. Thus it happens that we may pass by persons, although we know them, without looking at their faces and without realizing how often they are suffering from that subtle, wearing sorrow which comes from feeling ignored. A cordial word, an affectionate gesture would be enough, and something would at once awaken in them: a sign of attention and courtesy can be a breath of fresh air in the stuffiness of an existence oppressed by sadness and dejection. Mary’s greeting filled with joy the heart of her elderly cousin Elizabeth (cf Luke 1:44).[496] This is how we can lighten the load of the people around us. Another aspect of affability lies in the practice of kindness, in understanding towards the defects and mistakes of other people (we don’t have to be constantly correcting others), in good manners evinced by our words and behaviour, in sympathy, cordiality and words of praise at an opportune moment ... The spirit of sweetness is truly the spirit of God ... It makes the truth understandable and acceptable. We have to be intransigent towards every form of evil; nevertheless, we have to deal kindly with our neighbour.[497] A truck-driver once pulled over at a highway rest stop for a cup of coffee. He needed a break because he had many miles ahead of him. He sat at the counter and a young boy came to wait on him. The truck-driver asked with a smile, Busy day? The young fellow looked up and smiled back. Some months later, the truck-driver returned to the same stop. Much to his surprise, the young fellow remembered him as if they were old friends. The truth is that people have a great thirst for smiles. They have an enormous longing for cheerfulness and encouragement. Every day we encounter a good number of people who await that momentary gift of our joy. Through the practice of the social virtues we can open up many doors. We cannot allow ourselves to be cut off from any of our neighbours or colleagues. The Lord wants us to do an effective apostolate of friendship and confidence. We need to introduce other people to that greatest of all gifts which is friendship with Jesus.  

Canceled checks Along with your bank statement, you will most likely receive all the checks you wrote that were cashed during that month. You should keep these in case you ever have to prove to a supplier that you paid an invoice. The bank stamp on the back of the check carries information as to when and where the check was cashed.

In exacting detail, the suit portrayed O’Reilly as a hypersexualized misogynist with a romance novelist’s imagination. In one infamous exchange, O’Reilly described taking Mackris on a Caribbean sexcapade. “You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I’d join you and you would have your back to me and I would take that little loofa thing and kinda’ soap up your back … rub it all over you, get you to relax.… So anyway I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda’ kissing your neck from behind … and then I would take the other hand with the falafel [sic] thing and I’d put it on your pussy but you’d have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business …

right through those pretentious horn-rims of his. He never even got to reach for the door. It was over in a matter of seconds—the two most satisfying shots Denny had ever taken. Except, of course, not Denny. Not anymore. That was a pretty good feeling, too. To leave this all far behind. No time for celebrations, though. The car had barely gone quiet before he was out on the sidewalk and back to doing what he’d always done best. He kept moving. Chapter 100 THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS following the hits at the Harman were a full-court press like I’d rarely seen in Washington. Our Command Information Center had traffic checks going on all night; Major Case Squad put both units on the street; and NSID was told to drop all nonessential business, and that was just inside the MPD. Details were operating out of Capitol Police, ATF, and even the Secret Service. By morning, the hunt for Steven Hennessey had gone from regional to national to international. The Bureau was fully activated and looking for him everywhere it was possible for the Bureau to look. The CIA was involved, too. The significance of these murders had really started to sink in. Justices Summers and Ponti had been the unofficial left wing of the Supreme Court, beloved by half the country and foxes in the henhouse, basically, to the other half. At MPD, our late-afternoon briefing was like a march of the zombies. Nobody had gotten much sleep overnight, and there was a palpable kind of tension in the air. Chief Perkins presided. There were no introductory remarks. “What are we looking at?” he asked straight-out. Most of the department’s command staff were there, too. Every

Successful people make life happen. Successful people make money work for them. Successful people are committed to growing their wealth. Successful people think outside of the box. Successful people turn what life hands to their advantage. Successful people fear no failure. Successful people draw lessons from mistakes. Successful people focus on opportunities. Successful people understand basic functions of money. Successful people look at the big picture. Successful people associate with people with similar status. Successful people do not back away from obstacles. Successful people use all tools available to grow their business. Successful people are problem-solvers, problems do not scare them. Successful people are active listeners and action takers. Successful people act on opportunities to get ahead. Successful people earn based on performance. Successful people think broad and consider all good ideas. Successful people get their strength from their net worth. Successful people make money work for them, no other way around. Successful people commit to lifetime learning. Successful people don’t let fear take control. Successful people get up and shake off the dust after the hardest fall.

Agile is a process wherein a project is subdivided into iterations. The output of each iteration is measured and used to continuously evaluate the schedule. Features are implemented in the order of business value so that the most valuable things are implemented first. Quality is kept as high as possible. The schedule is primarily managed by manipulating scope.

The decision to disrupt a business model that is working for you requires no small amount of courage. It means intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope that a long-term risk will pay off. Routines and priorities get disrupted. Traditional ways of doing business get slowly marginalized and eroded—and start to lose money—as a new model takes over. That’s a big ask, in terms of a company’s culture and mindset. When you do it, you’re saying to people who for their entire careers have been compensated based on the success of their traditional business: “Don’t worry about that too much anymore. Worry about this instead.” But this isn’t profitable yet, and won’t be for a while. Deal with this kind of uncertainty by going back to basics: Lay out your strategic priorities clearly. Remain optimistic in the face of the unknown. And be accessible and fair-minded to people whose work lives are being thrown into disarray.

Editor’s introduction: Welcome our guide on guest blogging in seo. That’s right, send it a spot on profcontent from our friend alex. Alex breaks down everything beginners need to know to start blogging on the web. Take that, Alex. What is good blogging? Guest blogging- also referred to as blogging – is the need to contribute to another person’s blog to build relevant exposure, leads and links. Link are a primary ranking factor in goggle, and seo offer a strong chance of getting a link back from another website, among other marketing considerations in guest blogging. Guest blogging build a relationship with the blogger hosting your post, connects with the blogger hosting your post, connects with their audience for additional exposure, and helps you build authority among that audience. The premise is simple: you write a blog article tailored to the needs of a particular blogger and get a backlink in return, What Is Guest Blogging in SEO? A Guide for usually below the article in what’s called an author box. Blogger are inserted in publishing high- quality content on their blogs that they can use to attract new readers as well as share with their exiting audience. This makes guest blogging a win-win solution for both website owners who want to rank higher in search engines (and need link to do so) and bloggers who want to drive more readers to their blog. Interested in attracting more readers their blog. Is guest blogging good for bloggers? The short answer is yes again. As extensive as the blogger is shrewdness and eager to spend time sifting through and excision posts from outside bases, guest blogging can be a great source of valuable content for the blogger’s audience. An important portion of removal any external role is reviewing the links inside the content Take a look at this (or another) post a bout guest blogging and inbound marketing written by Neil Patel. Almost every paragraph has an external link. You get, Neil knows that links add price to a post by if more material and additional incomes. Be like Neil. To be on the benign side, examine guest posts for superiority and make sure you only link to superiority websites that add price to the mesh. To type sure the websites you’re involving to are immobile available, aren’t recurring 404s, or readdressing to dissimilar content. 1.find list of top blogs. The first step of prospects is pretty obvious: type a phrase like “ top [ industry specific] blogs list” into goggle and review the results. Opinion all the blogs registered one by one on each sheet in the search fallouts. Most likely you find great blogs this way, but only a few of them can accept guest articles from contributors. 2. Advanced search with search strings: Google has many hunt strings to help you find exact happy on the web, which you can syndicate into search If you are novel to this, you can learn extra here or here. If you search for [“keyword” and “write for us”], your results will look like the image under. 3. Shadow people or businesses who actively visitor blog. One of the best ways to find great guest blogging opportunities is to find other people who consistently contribute quality guest posts to industry- related websites. Most people and companies share their posts through social media profiles. Once I ran across a twitter profile that was basically sharing their guest posts, so I pretty much grew my list in no time. Stab this search thread to find sites anywhere a precise person or business published a guest post: “individual name “or” corporation name” “guest column”.

What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

With this in mind, here are the basic steps to organizational design: 1. Figure out what needs to be communicated. Start by listing the most important knowledge and who needs to have it. For example, knowledge of the product architecture must be understood by engineering, QA, product management, marketing, and sales. 2. Figure out what needs to be decided. Consider the types of decisions that must get made on a frequent basis: feature selection, architectural decisions, how to resolve support issues. How can you design the organization to put the maximum number of decisions under the domain of a designated manager? 3. Prioritize the most important communication and decision paths. Is it more important for product managers to understand the product architecture or the market? Is it more important for engineers to understand the customer or the architecture? Keep in mind that these priorities will be based on today’s situation. If the situation changes, then you can reorganize. 4. Decide who’s going to run each group. Notice that this is the fourth step, not the first. You want to optimize the organization for the people—for the people doing the work—not for the managers. Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization. Making this step four will upset your managers, but they will get over it. 5. Identify the paths that you did not optimize. As important as picking the communication paths that you will optimize is identifying the ones that you will not. Just because you deprioritized them doesn’t mean they are unimportant. If you ignore them entirely, they will surely come back to bite you. 6. Build a plan for mitigating the issues identified in step five. Once you’ve identified the likely issues, you will know the processes you will need to build to patch the impending cross-organizational challenges.

So a lot more protocols, more reporting, more steps to basically everything, which meant even more work. I had to run every little thing by our CEO. He was busy and didn’t get back to me quickly, and then things wouldn’t get done, and I’d be blamed for it. I started to feel like I wasn’t even doing the job I was hired for, and I began questioning my ability and my purpose for even being there.

Where does scientific knowledge come from? You know the process. A good scientist pushes to the edge of knowledge and then reaches beyond, forming a conjecture—a hypothesis—about how things work in that unknown territory. If the scientist avoids the edge, working with what is already well known and established, life will be comfortable, but there will be neither fame nor honor. In the same way, a good business strategy deals with the edge between the known and the unknown. Again, it is competition with others that pushes us to edges of knowledge. Only there are found the opportunities to keep ahead of rivals. There is no avoiding it. That uneasy sense of ambiguity you feel is real. It is the scent of opportunity. In science, you first test a new conjecture against known laws and experience. Is the new hypothesis contradicted by basic principles or by the results of past experiments? If the hypothesis survives that test, the scientist has to devise a real-world test—an experiment—to see how well the hypothesis stands up. Similarly, we test a new strategic insight against well-established principles and against our accumulated knowledge about the business. If it passes those hurdles, we are faced with trying it out and seeing what happens. Given that we are working on the edge, asking for a strategy that is guaranteed to work is like asking a scientist for a hypothesis that is guaranteed to be true—it is a dumb request. The problem of coming up with a good strategy has the same logical structure as the problem of coming up with a good scientific hypothesis. The key differences are that most scientific knowledge is broadly shared, whereas you are working with accumulated wisdom about your business and your industry that is unlike anyone else’s. A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work. Not a wild theory, but an educated judgment. And there isn’t anyone more educated about your businesses than the group in this room. This concept breaks the impasse. After some discussion, the group begins to work with the notion that a strategy is a hypothesis—an educated guess—about what will work. After a while, Barry starts to articulate his own judgments, saying “I think in my business we can …” When engineers use a nice clean deductive system to solve a problem, they call it winding the crank. By this they mean that it may be hard work, but that the nature and quality of the output depends on the machine (the chosen system of deduction), not on the skill of the crank winder. Later, looking back, I realize the group had expected strategy to be an exercise in crank winding. They had expected that I would give them a “logical machine” that they could use to deduce business plans—a system for generating forecasts and actions.

Step by Step… Can you write out your ideal business step by step Here is a business I am setting up for a client. She wants to shipping start her own shipping company… One she will need a US partner to collect and transfer packages to her in Jamaica. She will also need one in China. I have two contacts. One has a warehouse in Florida The other has two in China. Chinese connect makes goods available within 3 weeks, she has to tell her customers four. The US connect makes it within 3-5 days. She has to tell them within a week… Next she will need a website where her customers can login and track their packages. This will come with individual dashboards. She will need an interface and warehouse management software and logistics APIs. She will also need an automated email set up (journey) to send emails to her customers without her or her agents needing to do that. Without this Saas she would have to hire someone to reply to messages and emails about , someone to call and track, use usps and FedEx tracking numbers to track and reply back to customers. She also needs a beta ApI to allow her warehouse guy to update the CRM with information about her customers packages… Key nodes such as - Intransit to destinations Held at customs Clearance In transit to store Pick up available etc… These will come in as email notifications Fully automated. Everything will be connected using Webhooks… entire system. Saas she might need to use a combination of GOhighlevel, Workiz and To run this as a System as as Service. Each platform can work together using webhooks. Gohighlevel as a Saas is $500 a month Workiz is $200 dollars She can use Odoo which is open source alternative as a CRM And Clickup as Management. This is how a conversational business plan looks. You can see it. You can research it. You can confirm that it’s plausible. It doesn’t sound like pipedreams. It sounds workable to credit companies /banks and investors. It sounds doable to a BDO Client. I also sound as if I know what I am doing. Not a lot of technical language. A confused prospective business investor or banker don’t want to use a dictionary to figure out everything… They want to see the vision as clear as day. You basically need to do to them what I did to you when you joined my programme. It must sound plausible. All businesses is a game of wit. Every deal that is signed benefits both party. Whether initially or in the long term. Those are the sub-tenets of business. Every board meeting or meeting with regulatory boards, banks, credit facilities, municipalities is a game of convincing people to see your thing through… Everyone does Algorithm is simple. People want you to solve their problems with speed and efficiency. Speed is very important and automation. Progress, business and production are tied to ego… that’s why people love seh oh dem start a business or dem have dem online business and nah sell one rass thing. Cause a lot of people think being successful and looking successful are one and the same thing until they meet someone like me or people who done the work… Don’t rush it… you are young and you have time. There are infact certain little nuances Weh yuh only ago learn through experience. Experience and reflection. One of the drawbacks of wanting to run your business by yourself with you and your family members is that you guys will have to be reliant on yourself for feedback which is not alw

I told David, “Go look at every store and its entire inventory, who we would sell it to and what we would get for it, in case the deal goes south.” It was a basic fire-sale analysis—what we’d get in the worst-case scenario if we had to liquidate the company. David came back and said, “We’d get 80 percent of our purchase price back.” So I knew that what we had to lose was 20 percent.

While doing the research for this book, I interviewed many people—seminar leaders, conversation facilitators, psychologists and focus group moderators, biographers and journalists—whose job it is to ask other people about their lives. I asked these experts how often somebody looks back at them and says, “None of your damn business.” Every expert I consulted had basically the same answer: “Almost never.” People are longing to be asked questions about who they are. “The human need to self-present is powerful,” notes the psychologist Ethan Kross. A 2012 study by Harvard neuroscientists found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money. The Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé found that people feel especially compelled to talk about negative experiences. The more negative the experience was, the more they want to talk about it.

I asked these experts how often somebody looks back at them and says, “None of your damn business.” Every expert I consulted had basically the same answer: “Almost never.” People are longing to be asked questions about who they are. “The human need to self-present is powerful,” notes the psychologist Ethan Kross.

businesses from the Northeast, with promises of corporate tax breaks, lax environmental standards, and a compliant, union-free workforce. The county finally won the privilege of hosting a Proctor Silex plant by floating a $5.5 million bond to finance water and sewer services for the facility—even though many residents in the region were themselves living without running water or basic services. Predictably, in 1990 the company moved to Mexico, which was offering more competitive terms. Moore County was left with toxic waste, eight hundred unemployed workers, and tremendous public debt for having subsidized the company’s plant.

For several months during 2010, the policy makers inside GIPSA drafted a new rule that would carry out the changes required by the farm bill and take them much further. For example, the rule would ban any tournament system for chicken farmers that didn’t guarantee the farmers a predictable base payment. Tyson could only offer incentives for good performance, in other words, rather than docking a farmer’s income by adjusting the base pay rate through the tournament. The rule also made one legal change that aimed to make the PSA more powerful than ever. The rule said that if a farmer or rancher wanted to sue a company like Tyson under the Packers and Stockyards Act, the farmer had only to prove that Tyson harmed the farmer himself, not the industry as a whole. This single provision rolled back a series of federal court decisions that had basically rendered the Packers and Stockyards Act toothless. The courts had ruled that to win a case under the act, a farmer had to prove that a company’s actions amounted to an industrywide antitrust violation.

When eBay entered the Chinese market in 2002, they did so by buying the leading Chinese online auction site—not Alibaba but an eBay impersonator called EachNet. The marriage created the ultimate power couple: the top global e-commerce site and China’s number one knockoff. eBay proceeded to strip away the Chinese company’s user interface, rebuilding the site in eBay’s global product image. Company leadership brought in international managers for the new China operations, who directed all traffic through eBay’s servers back in the United States. But the new user interface didn’t match Chinese web-surfing habits, the new leadership didn’t understand Chinese domestic markets, and the trans-Pacific routing of traffic slowed page-loading times. At one point an earthquake under the Pacific Ocean severed key cables and knocked the site offline for a few days. Meanwhile, Alibaba founder Jack Ma was busy copying eBay’s core functions and adapting the business model to Chinese realities. He began by creating an auction-style platform, Taobao, to directly compete with eBay’s core business. From there, Ma’s team continually tweaked Taobao’s functions and tacked on features to meet unique Chinese needs. His strongest localization plays were in payment and revenue models. To overcome a deficit of user trust in online purchases, Ma created Alipay, a payment tool that would hold money from purchases in escrow until the buyer confirmed the receipt of goods. Taobao also added instant messaging functions to allow buyers and sellers to communicate on the platform in real time. These business innovations helped Taobao claw away market share from eBay, whose global product mentality and deep centralization of decision-making power in Silicon Valley made it slow to react and add features. But Ma’s greatest weapon was his deployment of a “freemium” revenue model, the practice of keeping basic functions free while charging for premium services. At the time, eBay charged sellers a fee just to list their products, another fee when the products were sold, and a final fee if eBay-owned PayPal was used for payment. Conventional wisdom held that auction sites or e-commerce marketplace sites needed to do this in order to guarantee steady revenue streams.

In 2011, price discovery was happening in a different way. It involves producers like Wirtz sitting behind desks with a phone cradled between their ear and their shoulder, trying to find someone to buy their hogs. Instead of a raucous market with hundreds of buyers to compete on price, Wirtz basically gets to choose between four. Those buyers are Hormel, Cargill, JBS Swift, and Tyson. But really, not all four of them are in the market at the same time. Most of them have hogs locked up through forward contracts, and they enter the cash market only haltingly to buy last batches of pigs they need to keep their slaughterhouses running at full capacity. On some days, farmers like Wirtz might try to stoke up competition between three or even two buyers. This wasn’t the case even as recently as 1995. Back then, the top four meat companies controlled only about 46 percent of the total hog market. By 2006, the top four companies controlled 66 percent.

All this research, says Buffett, really points you back to one central issue: “My first question, and the last question, would be, ‘Do I understand the business?’ And by understand it, I mean have a reasonably good idea of what it will look like in five or ten years from an economic standpoint.” If you aren’t comfortable answering that basic question, you shouldn’t buy the stock.

No…” I shook my head with tears running down my cheeks. “I saw the ad, the listing. I applied for this job. Raina…” I paused, thinking about how Raina just so happened to be driving exactly where I was. “Raina dropped that paper off to your motel room in hopes that’d make the process easier for you. Raina was paid to follow you and pick you up. Raina is basically the Ivory’s adoptive daughter, and her husband Jax once worked here.” “How’d they escape? How did they manage to not tell anyone about what’s happening here?” “Demi, you just don’t get it.” Bradley rubbed his forehead as if it were aching. “It’s not white-therapy; it’s white-torture. We all went through it. You’re the first they haven’t done it to in years. For two years, we all lived in those sound-proof rooms, eating nothing but plain white food. No sounds, no color, no stimulation. It stripped us of emotion. It made us completely submissive and devoted to this family.” “But you don’t seem submissive. You seem like you’re just pretending so you could be here for Daisy?” “I can’t imagine leaving this place. I’m messed up, Demi. I wanted to help Daisy escape, but thought I’d probably stay here and work for the family. Because if they caught me, they’d put me back into a cage. No one speaks to you, you hear no noise, no sounds, you see no color or anything. They shave your head and put you in all-white. You stare at four white walls all day and eat white food so your senses are depleted.” Fear churned inside of me as my legs trembled and I forced myself to sit down. “Why do they do this?” “Because they need staff. Loyal staff who will help them with their business. They sell these women as mail-order brides essentially, and their wait list is filled with the world’s richest men. Each woman is guaranteed to be completely obedient, subservient, and designed to be exactly what that man wants. Each woman sells for one to three million dollars.

So you’re stubborn, then? Have a bit of a temper?” I saw Maxon covering his mouth with his hands, laughing. “Sometimes.” “If you have a temper, would you happen to be the one who yelled at our prince?” I sighed. “Yes, it was me. And right now, my mother is having a heart attack.” Maxon called out to Gavril, “Get her to tell the whole story!” Gavril whipped his head back and forth quickly. “Oh! What’s the whole story?” I tried to glare at Maxon, but the whole situation was so silly, it didn’t quite work. “I got a little . . . claustrophobic the first night, and I was desperate to get outside. The guards wouldn’t let me through the doors. I was actually about to faint in this one guard’s arms, but Prince Maxon was walking by and made them open the doors for me.” “Aw,” Gavril said, tilting his head to one side. “Yes, and then he followed to make sure I was all right.... But I was stressed out, so when he spoke to me, I basically ended up accusing him of being stuck-up and shallow.” Gavril chuckled deeply at this. I looked past him to Maxon, who was shaking with laughter. But the more embarrassing thing was that the king and queen were laughing along with him. I didn’t turn to look at the girls, but I heard some of them giggling, too. Well, good. Maybe now they would finally stop seeing me as any sort of threat. I was just someone Maxon found entertaining. “And he forgave you?” Gavril asked in a slightly more sober tone. “Oddly enough.” I shrugged. “Well, since the two of you are on good terms again, what sort of activities have you been doing together?” Gavril was back to business. “We usually just go for walks around the garden. He knows I like it outside. And we talk.” It sounded pathetic after what some of the other girls had said. Trips to the theater, going hunting, horseback riding—those were impressive next to my story. But I suddenly understood why he had been speed dating over the last week. The girls needed something to tell Gavril, so he had to provide it. It still seemed weird that he hadn’t mentioned any of it to me, but at least I knew why he had been away. “That sounds very relaxing. Would you say the garden is your favorite thing about the palace?” I smiled. “Maybe. But the food is exquisite, so. . .” Gavril laughed again.

You need to understand the politics of our enemies, the strategies of defending our outposts from constant attack, and have a thorough knowledge of both recent and current battles. If you cannot grasp these basic topics, then you have no business on the back of a dragon.

Back then, Ron Howell’s job might have seemed easy enough: he sold the gasoline and other fuels that Koch Industries produced at its refineries. As the senior vice president of supply and trading at Koch, Howell made sure that Koch’s fuel went straight from the refineries to the highest-paying customer. Gasoline was the kind of product that seemed to sell itself—there was always demand for fuel. People at Koch referred to Howell’s job as the “dispossession of molecules,” meaning that he simply had to find a home for the various fuels that Koch produced. This seemed straightforward. But Howell’s job was the kind of job that produced insomnia and ulcers. It forced him to retire when he was in his thirties before the job killed him. When he talked about oil trading, even decades later, Howell often used words like whippin’ and savage. The savagery of Howell’s average workday began when he walked into the office in Houston every morning and picked up the phone to sell the first barrel of gasoline or diesel fuel. The stomach acids started to boil the instant Howell tried to establish what might seem like a basic, simple fact: the price of oil that day. Determining the price of oil at any given minute was an arcane art practiced by a network of traders around the world. They spent their days on the phone with one another, arguing, cajoling, bluffing, and bullying. The fact is that nobody really knew the price of a barrel of oil, or gasoline, or diesel fuel. Everybody had to guess, and the person who could guess with the most precision walked away with profits that were almost limitless. The person who guessed wrong faced instant, brutal downsides in the market. There was a common misperception that the price of oil floats up and down on a global market. Every day, business commentators and journalists talked about the “price of oil” as if it were like the price of General Electric stock—a price that was determined by millions of buyers and sellers who traded on large, open exchanges. In fact, there was no global market for oil. Oil was bought and sold inside a constellation of thousands of tiny nodes where transactions and prices were totally hidden to outsiders.

There’s a charge to being around Duncan, like one of those light bulbs you touch in the science museum that make your hair stand up, and we hadn’t stopped talking—urgently—since I arrived. We bounced from topic to topic, frantically, like fast friends excited to find someone else who also wanted to talk about religion, mysticism, sex, ghosts, and drugs. We sat down next to the incense like two kids in a dorm room trying to mask illegal aromas, and Duncan hit Record. I told him I wasn’t used to things getting so deep and so interesting so quickly. “That’s what happens when you’re with cool people,” Duncan said. “You end up getting in great conversations.” I wondered in this moment if Duncan knew how unique he was. I wondered if he knew how bored and dismissive people can be when you try to talk about dreams, or out-of-body experiences, or the afterlife, or if you suggest that the physical world is only just a small piece of what’s really going on here. “The plague of the world is that so many people allow themselves to be surrounded by vampires,” Duncan said, using the classiest monster as a word to describe all the what-you-see-is-what-you-get people, the ones who are busy cockblocking the curious weirdos from tripping out on their basic wonder. “Their whole life is one shit conversation to the next to the next to the next until they’re on their deathbed, and that’s the one real conversation they have. They finally say, ‘I love you so much!’ And then they die.” This is Duncan, the opposite of a vampire. He doesn’t drain life from people, he infuses them, resuscitating their awe and bringing color back to their cheeks. The vampires, he warned, “will keep you stuck in the harbor of sorrows. They’ll try to keep your fucking anchor down.” I cackled with laughter. Duncan is one of those rare people who remind you that we’re all here, stuck in our human bodies, confused and curious since we all emerged from the interdimensional space portal commonly known as a vagina. He wants to get into it; he wants to touch, taste, scream, laugh, and sing his way toward enlightenment, and as I sat with him that day, he made me think he just might bring me along with him.

Just let her move back in with me and I’ll take care of her.” “No.” He frowned at me sternly. “Absolutely not. Didn’t I say she would get no more of your blood?” “What do you care if she takes my blood after Roderick leaves?” I demanded. “I told you it will not happen again. Taylor will not drink from you again. Nor will any other vampire.” I put a hand on my hip. “You’re getting awfully possessive for somebody who’s basically just a business partner.” “I am your master—at least for now.” His eyes blazed silver. “And I have put out the word in Tampa that no other vampire is to touch or taste you in any way. To do so means death and I will not hesitate to enforce that penalty.” “So you put out the word to every vamp on the street that you own me? Thanks a lot, you big asshole,” I stormed. “What do you think that’s going to do to my professional reputation?” “I don’t care what it does to your reputation as long as it keeps you safe,” he replied.

A helpful way of reflecting upon this involves thinking about how we interact with other people’s flesh. We can think of three basic ways that we can look at another. The first can be described as lust and involves reducing somebody to their purely physical appearance. The second could be called indifference and refers to times in which we see a person’s flesh and yet pay no attention to it – for instance, walking down a busy street can involve seeing hundreds of people while paying no real attention to any of them. The third way can be described in terms of love. In love we value the flesh of our beloved, but we do not reduce them to their flesh. In particular, the face of our beloved is important, for in his or her facial expressions we are able to perceive the existence of various emotions and feelings that are otherwise unavailable to us. Not only this, but when we look at the face of our beloved we are aware that we are looking at one who looks back at us.

I made the deal with Mr. Zuckerman on my own,” Crispin said. “I could make others.” “I won’t comment on the Zoom deal,” Win said. “But I will tell you this. You are a bright young man. A bright man knows not only his strengths but equally important, he knows his weaknesses. I do not, for example, know how to negotiate an endorsement contract. I may know the basics, but it is not my business. I’m not a plumber. If a pipe in my house broke, I would not be able to fix it. You are a golfer. You are one of the greatest talents I have ever seen. You should concentrate on that.” Tad

Renowned psychologist David McClelland of Harvard wrote about three basic motivators in people’s work: need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need for power. Most successful business professionals’ scores on these three motivations form something of a checkmark. They tend to be moderately highly motivated by a need for achievement, not much motivated by need for affiliation, and highly motivated by a need for power. The meritocrat, by contrast, is very highly oriented toward achievement, moderately highly motivated by need for affiliation, and almost negatively motivated by need for power. That

Our culture of achievement has grown to emphasize visions of success that are, for the most part, fairly predictable. Cole skipped a couple of steps. The basic plan is to go to Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or the like, then maybe to a top-ranked business school, then back to banking, consulting, private equity, hedge funds, or a name-brand tech company. Or maybe go from law school to top firm to partner or in house at an investment firm, and live in New York, San Francisco, Boston, or Washington, DC.* Again, these institutions and roles are necessary, and they’re natural developments in our economy. We need them. But we need people doing other things too. We need people willing to take risks and, yes, to occasionally fail. Like real-world consequences fail. We need people committed over extended periods of time to creating value, no matter how hard that is. We need people who care deeply about the work they’re doing. Imagine someone who you think could stand to take on some risk—someone well educated who would always have something to fall back on, whose family might have some resources so he would be unlikely to starve. And this person would probably be young and free of major life obligations. Someone sort of like . . .  Cole. What’s interesting is that many of the people I meet who are young, highly educated, and from good families are among the most risk-averse. They feel like they need to be making progress along a ladder with each passing month or year. Their parents have often set high expectations for them. They measure themselves each period against their peers, who are generally following various well-defined paths.

When Jayne Juvan, a partner at the law firm Roetzel & Andress in Cleveland, Ohio, started using social media, very, very few lawyers used these tools. Because her profession is so conservative, many of the attorneys she interacted with didn't see the opportunity. After only a few months of blogging, Crain's Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media by lawyers. In her first year of practice, she landed a client via social media. That was a game changer, because her colleagues began to see her as an owner, not just an employee. When she started to land wins, it became harder to navigate her profession because the legal industry was quite competitive. But, as she shares, "I didn't back off, because I now knew how powerful social media was." Good thing. When she was a third- and fourth-year associate, in 2007 to 2008, the economy collapsed. Her class experienced deep layoffs across the industry, which she sidestepped, in part because of her social media efforts. Most of the accolades she has received can be traced to social media. When she was considered for promotion to partner, the fact that she was being followed by prominent professionals on Twitter bolstered her case in a major way, as the CEO saw the potential of these relationships. According to Catalyst, only 20 percent of partners in law firms are women, and only 16 percent of them have $500,000 worth of business or more.6 Jayne Juvan made partner at age thirty-two, and at thirty-four, her billing reports placed her in the small percentage of women with $500,000-plus of business. Once Juvan had acquired the basic competencies involved in practicing law, social media became her distinctive strength, propelling her into the partnership ranks at her law firm.

A great story about a big company’s ability to do this comes from one of the world’s biggest businesses, General Electric. I learned about Doug Dietz a few years ago when I saw him speak to a group of executives. Doug leads the design and development of award-winning medical imaging systems at GE Healthcare. He was at a hospital one day when he witnessed a little girl crying and shaking from fear as she was preparing to have an MRI — in a big, noisy, hot machine that Dietz had designed. Deeply shaken, he started asking the nurses if her reaction was common. He learned that 80 percent of pediatric patients had to be sedated during MRIs because they were too scared to lie still. He immediately decided he needed to change how the machines were designed. He flew to California for a weeklong design course at Stanford’s d.school. There he learned about a human-centric approach to design, collaborated with other designers, talked to healthcare professionals, and finally observed and talked to children in hospitals. The results were stunning. His humandriven redesigns wrapped MRI machines in fanciful themes like pirate ships and space adventures and included technicians who role-play. When Dietz’s redesigns hit children’s hospitals, patient satisfaction scores soared and the number of kids who needed sedation plummeted. Doug was teary-eyed as he told the story, and so were many of the senior executives in the audience. Products should be designed for people. Businesses should be run in a responsive, human-centric way. It is time to return to those basics. Let TRM be your roadmap and turn back to putting people first. It worked for our grandparents. It can work for you.

Sit Quietly This is the most important Zen practice.   It is the classroom for living a wise and kind life.   Sit anywhere and be quiet: on a couch, a bed, a bench, inside, outside, leaning against a tree, by a lake, at the ocean, in a garden, on an airplane, in your office chair, on the floor, in your car. Meditation cushions are okay too.   Sit at any time: morning, night, one minute, three years.   Wear what you've got on. Loosen your waist so that your belly can move with your breath.   Sit as relaxed as possible. Relax your muscles when starting and during sitting.   Sit with your back straight but not stiff. Keep your head upright with your ears level.   Respect all medical conditions. Only take a posture you can. All postures are okay.   Do what you can do.   Keep your eyes slightly opened and out of focus. Closing them will make you sleepy and sometimes busy. Opening them wide will keep you busy.   Breathe naturally through your nose. Enjoy breathing. Feel your breath. Watch your breath. Become your breath.   Be like a cat purring. Follow your breath like ocean waves coming in and out.   When you get distracted, come back to the simplest and most basic experience of being alive, your breathing.   That's it. No belief. No program. No dogma.   You do not have to be Buddhist. You can be of any faith, religion, race, nationality, gender, relationship status, or capacity.   Just sit quietly, connect with your breath, and pay attention to what happens. You will learn things.   Do it when you want. You decide how much is enough for you. If you do it daily, it will get into your bones.   Please enjoy sitting quietly!   The only way to learn sitting quietly is to do it.

8 Ways to Work Smarter and Improve Productivity We as a whole have a similar measure of time in a day, and there is no real way to get a greater amount of it. It doesn't make a difference how effective or well off one is - we are altogether topped at 24 hours for every day. We need to subtract some to sleep, eating, driving and simply living everyday lives - the time left for entrepreneurial undertakings is once in a while enough. However, there is an approach to expand that time, and it includes working more brilliant - not harder. Utilize the eight hints beneath and you will accomplish more in a shorter timeframe. 1. Ensure you cherish what you do 100 percent. This is entirely basic. When you completely adore what you do, it doesn't feel like work. It sounds so buzzword, yet it's flawless. I adore what I do, and I get up each morning energized for what is coming down the road. A late night or long travel day doesn't make a difference - I hop up out of bed each morning without a wake up timer. When you are really enthusiastic about what you are doing you remain laser centered, which normally brings about high profitability. In the event that you are hopeless and abhor what you are doing, paying little mind to how much cash you are making, you won't be energized and your profitability will go directly down the deplete. 2. Grasp innovation. In the event that you decline to grasp innovation you will put yourself at a noteworthy weakness. There are program augmentations, applications and robotization programming to help practically every part of your business and everyday duties. Quite a while back, it wound up noticeably conceivable to maintain your whole business in a hurry from your portable workstation. Today, the same is conceivable from your cell phone. We have mind boggling apparatuses accessible to us that give us finish area opportunity. Thump out errands while driving, doing cardio at the exercise center or sitting tight for a flight - having your whole business readily available can radically build your profitability. 3. Use your systems administration connections. Think about the time and exertion you burn through systems administration - being dynamic via web-based networking media, going to meetings and conversing with everybody. Set aside the opportunity to truly make a strong system and really use the quality of others to help your business. You need to give before you can hope to get, so make it a point to help however many individuals as could be expected under the circumstances. The connections you assemble while doing this can prove to be useful down the line, and when you have a system of experts to help you in specific zones, you gain from the best, as well as don't need to do all the truly difficult work alone. 4. Measure accomplishment in assignments finished, not hours worked. Many people are hung up on the quantity of hours works. Disregard saying "I worked 12 hours today" and rather concentrate on the quantity of assignments you finished. When you are a business person, hours worked amount to nothing - you aren't checking in. Assignments finished, not number of hours, manage achievement. As you figure out how to thump out errands speedier, you accomplish more. Most business people are normally aggressive, so make an individual rivalry and attempt to up your execution as far as every day assignments finished. Do this and watch your profitability shoot through the rooftop. 5. Delegate your shortcomings. I was always wore out until the point when I figured out how to appoint. Now and then, we think we are superhuman and can do everything, except that is basically not the situation.

I passionately believe home cooking has vast benefit to individuals, families, community, environment and animal welfare, but in today’s busy society it is often the first thing we outsource. While some may argue this makes economic sense, the cost and benefit of doing so cannot be measured in dollars alone.

After months of calling for inflation of housing prices, Krugman in 2002 came right out and said the Fed needed to create a housing bubble. Since 2007, Krugman has repeatedly and angrily denied that was what he was saying, so let me run his comments in their full context: A few months ago the vast majority of business economists mocked concerns about a “double dip,” a second leg to the downturn. But there were a few dogged iconoclasts out there, most notably Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley. As I’ve repeatedly said in this column, the arguments of the double-dippers made a lot of sense. And their story now looks more plausible than ever. The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.6 Well, Krugman got exactly what he wanted.

To do Agile right, you had to work in pairs, write tests first, refactor, and commit to simple designs. You had to work in short cycles, producing executable output in each. You had to communicate with business on a regular and continuous basis.

here are the basic steps to organizational design: 1. Figure out what needs to be communicated. Start by listing the most important knowledge and who needs to have it. For example, knowledge of the product architecture must be understood by engineering, QA, product management, marketing, and sales. 2. Figure out what needs to be decided. Consider the types of decisions that must get made on a frequent basis: feature selection, architectural decisions, how to resolve support issues. How can you design the organization to put the maximum number of decisions under the domain of a designated manager? 3. Prioritize the most important communication and decision paths. Is it more important for product managers to understand the product architecture or the market? Is it more important for engineers to understand the customer or the architecture? Keep in mind that these priorities will be based on today’s situation. If the situation changes, then you can reorganize. 4. Decide who’s going to run each group. Notice that this is the fourth step, not the first. You want to optimize the organization for the people—for the people doing the work—not for the managers. Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization. Making this step four will upset your managers, but they will get over it. 5. Identify the paths that you did not optimize. As important as picking the communication paths that you will optimize is identifying the ones that you will not. Just because you deprioritized them doesn’t mean they are unimportant. If you ignore them entirely, they will surely come back to bite you. 6. Build a plan for mitigating the issues identified in step five. Once you’ve identified the likely issues, you will know the processes you will need to build to patch the impending cross-organizational challenges.

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds. Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions. Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like. Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds.
 Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions.
 Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like.
 Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

I just wrote as much as I could for several pages. Every night I wrote her novels and every morning I mailed them to her. That was all well and good until I found out I’d addressed all of the envelopes incorrectly! I’d left out one digit of the zip code on every single letter I’d written. I was devastated. Even though I had put a return address on them, I was sure they were stuck in post office limbo. I had this realization the same day I got my first letter from Jamie. I ripped it open and read it through gripped fingers. She told me all about her first few days in basic training, and at the bottom she added the most heartbreaking line, “I wish you’d write me. I know you’re busy and I know you don’t like to write, but I wish you would.” I couldn’t believe it. She thought I hadn’t written at all. I called a buddy of mine who is now Command Sergeant Major Phil Blaisdell, a battalion sergeant major at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. “Phil, I’m in trouble. Man, I’ve been sending her letters and I was putting the wrong zip code on them and I got a letter from her and she thinks I’m not sending her letters and I know she needs that.” “All right, let me call you back.” A little while later my phone rang. “I’m Command Sergeant Major Duncan. I am the battalion sergeant major of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. First of all, I’d like to tell you that I know who you are and I appreciate your service and what you’ve done. I’ve seen your Men’s Health issue and you are an inspiration. I understand you know a Specialist Boyd,” she said. “Yes, Sergeant Major, I do.” “Well, I’ve got her standing in front of me right now. Would you like to talk to her?” “Yes, Sergeant Major, I would.” So she handed the phone to Jamie. Jamie was a little stressed out because she had been called to the sergeant major’s office and thought, What have I done? The conversation was rushed and she was speaking in a hushed tone. “Hey, I miss you, I love you.” “Hey, me too, baby. Let me tell you real quick, I’ve been sending you letters—” “I got them all today. Thank you.” “I miss you, and I hope that you can tell.” “Look, I want to keep talking but they’re watching me.” “Okay, we’re good. Just wanted to make sure you got the letters. I love you and we’ll talk later.

So after I got Jamie’s address, I wrote to her every day. Every night after I put the kids to bed, I would write. I would tell her about everything that had happened--what I did, what the kids did, something funny one of them said. I just wrote as much as I could for several pages. Every night I wrote her novels and every morning I mailed them to her. That was all well and good until I found out I’d addressed all of the envelopes incorrectly! I’d left out one digit of the zip code on every single letter I’d written. I was devastated. Even though I had put a return address on them, I was sure they were stuck in post office limbo. I had this realization the same day I got my first letter from Jamie. I ripped it open and read it through gripped fingers. She told me all about her first few days in basic training, and at the bottom she added the most heartbreaking line, “I wish you’d write me. I know you’re busy and I know you don’t like to write, but I wish you would.” I couldn’t believe it. She thought I hadn’t written at all. I called a buddy of mine who is now Command Sergeant Major Phil Blaisdell, a battalion sergeant major at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. “Phil, I’m in trouble. Man, I’ve been sending her letters and I was putting the wrong zip code on them and I got a letter from her and she thinks I’m not sending her letters and I know she needs that.” “All right, let me call you back.” A little while later my phone rang. “I’m Command Sergeant Major Duncan. I am the battalion sergeant major of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. First of all, I’d like to tell you that I know who you are and I appreciate your service and what you’ve done. I’ve seen your Men’s Health issue and you are an inspiration. I understand you know a Specialist Boyd,” she said. “Yes, Sergeant Major, I do.” “Well, I’ve got her standing in front of me right now. Would you like to talk to her?” “Yes, Sergeant Major, I would.” So she handed the phone to Jamie. Jamie was a little stressed out because she had been called to the sergeant major’s office and thought, What have I done? The conversation was rushed and she was speaking in a hushed tone. “Hey, I miss you, I love you.” “Hey, me, too, baby. Let me tell you real quick, I’ve been sending you letters--” “I got them all today. Thank you.” “I miss you, and I hope that you can tell.” “Look, I want to keep talking but they’re watching me.” “Okay, we’re good. Just wanted to make sure you got the letters. I love you and we’ll talk later.

In any case, Locke argued that we all have a natural set of property rights and can happily go about our business trading with each other and creating all sorts of prosperity. Only much later do we get together and form governments in order to eliminate certain “inconveniences” associated with the state of nature. This sets up the basic contrasts: economy = natural; government = artificial. The impact of this type of thinking can be truly disastrous. No one knows this better than economic planners in Eastern Europe, who were unlucky enough to ask a bunch of American economists for advice on how to make the transition from communism to capitalism. Naturally, the Americans had no experience in these matters, but they did have an overarching ideology that stipulated that markets are nothing more than the expression of our natural “propensity to truck and barter.” So their advice to the East Europeans was quite simple— don’t do anything. Just destroy all your existing public institutions and markets will magically pop up and take their place. Nothing could be easier. Any country foolish enough to take this advice quickly found that when it scaled back the government’s role, what it wound up with was rampant criminality, not orderly markets.

Look, Dad. I’m okay. I like this girl. Everything’s normal. “Only my father,” I say to Tina, “would imagine that anyone could find paperwork arousing.” “What?” Her smile is a touch too wide, a little too faked. “Don’t tell me your media training didn’t cover this, either.” I set the stack of papers on the flat surface of my desk and gesture Tina to sit in the leather-bound executive chair. “What am I supposed to say, then? Come on, baby. It’s a nondisclosure agreement. You’ll like it. I promise.” She gives me an unimpressed look. “God,” she says. “And I thought you were supposed to be a good liar. That’s not how you do it.” She bites her lip and then she leans toward me. Her eyelashes sweep down, and when she talks, she lowers her voice toward sultry. “I don’t know, Blake.” She bites her lip and reaches gingerly for the papers, stroking her thumb along the edge. “It’s so…big. I’m not sure it will fit.” I almost choke. She looks up with a touch of a smile. Fuck. I started this. “We’ll go nice and slow.” I pull a chair beside her and sit down, and very slowly take a pen from the holder. “Tell me if it hurts and I can stop anytime. I promise.” “Be gentle.” I know we’re just joking. I know this doesn’t mean anything. Still, my body doesn’t know this is a show when I lean toward her. I don’t feel like I’m lying when I inhale the sent of her hair. It goes straight to my groin, a stab of lust. “Trust me,” I murmur. She’s sitting in my chair. She’s smaller than me and all that dark leather surrounds her, blending in with her hair. But when she looks up, tilting her head toward me, she doesn’t seem tiny. She pulls the first paper-clipped section of pages to her, glances at the first paragraph, and wrinkles her nose. “Ouch,” she says in a much less sensual tone of voice. “It hurts already.” “It basically says that if you tell anyone anything about Cyclone business, we get one of your kidneys,” I translate helpfully. “How sweet.” She hasn’t looked up from the document. “Do your lawyers know you summarize their forms like that?” “Disclose two things,” I say, “and we get two kidneys.” “Mmm. Playing rough. What happens if I disclose three? You shut down my dialysis machine?” “You get a commemorative Cyclone pen,” I say mock-seriously. “Come on. We’re not monsters.” She cracks a smile at that. She’s not one of those girls who always smiles, and that means that when she does smile, it means something. Her whole face lights up and my breath catches at the sight. I lean in, as if I could breathe in her amusement. But then she drops her head and goes back to reading. When she finishes, she signs with a flourish. “What’s next?” she says. “Bring it on.” I hand over the next few pages. She holds it up and looks at me. “Don’t lie to me, baby. I bet you make all the girls you bring in here sign this.” You know what? I have never before found SEC regulations this sexy. I lean close to her. “No way,” I murmur. “This is just for you.” “Really?” She manages that look of hurt skepticism so well. I reach out, almost touching her cheek—until I remember that this isn’t real. “No,” I whisper back. “Not really. Everyone does sign it; it’s company policy.” “Oh, too bad.” She’s still reading the page. “I was hoping you had a selective disclosure just for me.” Selective, I realize, is a sexy word when drawn out the way she does it, her tongue touching her lips on the l sound. So is disclosure. “I can disclose,” I hear myself saying. “Selectively.” “Maybe you can give it to me in a material and nonpublic place.” I lean toward her. “You know me. I put the inside in insider trading.” She’s still holding the pen poised above the paper. I touch my finger to the cap and then slowly slide it down the barrel until my hand meets hers. A shock of electricity hits me, followed by a jolt of lust.

The net of it is, we can't count on any cooperation out of Sergei Yakut. He basically told me to shove it, and that was before I called him a sick fuck in need of a muzzle and choke collar." "Jesus, Niko," Gideon sighed, probably, on the other end of the line, scrubbing his hand through his spiky blond hair in frustration. "You really said that to him—to a Gen One? You're damn lucky he didn't tear your tongue out before he sent you on your way." Probably true, Nikolai acknowledged to himself. And he'd have lost more than just his tongue if Yakut knew the kind of lust he had been feeling for Renata. "You know I'm allergic to ass-kissing, even if the ass in question happens to be Gen One. If this was a total public relations mission, you picked the wrong guy." "No shit." Gideon chuckled around another low curse. "You coming back in to Boston, then?" "I see no reason to linger. Unless you figure Lucan will look the other way if I decide to go back and put a torch to Yakut's house of horrors. Put him out of business, at least for a while." He was kidding . . . mostly.

Business people complained to us that the technologists they worked with cared more about getting the "latest and greatest" software or device than about actually doing their jobs. Geeks responded that the business people had no respect for the technology and what it could do. Suits griped that technologists spoke gobbledygook and could not make themselves clear to mere mortals. Techies shot back that the business people couldn't be bothered to learn even the most basic elements of the systems their companies depended on, and that explaining these concepts to someone determined not to learn them was impossible.

When Alice was eighteen and I was seventeen and a half we ‘came out.’ Alice’s family took a furnished house in Cadogan Gardens from which Mrs. Norton and Alice were to operate. Our campaign was conducted from Hill Street. Looking back on it, the whole business was an incredible performance. The basic idea was rational enough. When a girl reached marriageable age, she was introduced by her parents into adult society, where it was hoped she would meet her future husband.

Stewart Brand: It had great continuity and those people stayed in touch online for decades and all that. But it ossified… Fabrice Florin: And a lot of the intellectuals that were sharing ideas on The Well went on to branch out into different areas. But you can really trace back a lot of the origins of this new movement to The Well. A lot of the folks were there. Howard Rheingold: I remember I got a friend request on Facebook early from Steve Case and I said, “I know who you are. But why do you want to friend me?” And he said, “Oh, I lurked on The Well from the beginning.” So I think, yes, it did influence things. Larry Brilliant: Steve Jobs was on it—Steve had a fake name and he lurked. Howard Rheingold: Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Craig Newmark: They would all say that they were informed by their experiences on The Well. Fabrice Florin: The Well was the birthplace of the online community. Larry Brilliant: All that goes back to Steve giving me the computer, letting me use it in Nepal, the experience I had with his software to access the satellite, and then coming back and Steve seeing what Seva-Talk could be. We showed it to hundreds of people and nobody saw anything in it. Steve got it immediately. Fabrice Florin: And Stewart basically gave the technology a set of values and ethics that all the developers could share. They already had their own hacker ethic, but he helped to amplify it and bring people together. And then it became big business, and it was hard for intellectuals to be the primary driving force anymore. It became the businesspeople who started driving it. Which is understandable given the scale and scope of what happened. It just became too large for intellectuals to hold.

Seven years later Lisa’s number is still in my phone under her daughter’s name. And Lisa is still my first phone call. No matter what. Sprained ankles, lice, a new writing project, family drama, or that new chick flick. I call Lisa. Now, sure, there have been many, many other attempts with other women who’ve been too busy or too overwhelmed or whatever other “too” might be taking up space in their lives that left no real room to connect. And that’s okay. Because it only takes one. It only takes one friend to fill us up and pull us out of our phobias about being “new.” One friend will kryptonite-proof you against that paranoia that you don’t belong. One friend will insulate you with the delicious sense of familiarity in a completely unfamiliar group. Lisa was my one over and over and over again for those seven years, and it was hard thinking about doing it again without her. But because I remembered how it started, I had a head start on knowing how to start over. Back to basics. The shortest distance between strangers is often a shared honest story.

Even the most basic CEO building blocks will feel unnatural at first. If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say, “Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the buildup and then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it, and present it to me again tomorrow.” Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do. If she doesn’t, the more complex motions such as writing reviews, taking away territory, handling politics, setting compensation, and firing people will be either impossible or handled rather poorly.

Blast at close range. Ugh! Autumn flipped and turned through the air as she was pushed away by the powerful force. “OH! I think this fight is over, folks! No one can withstand such a powerful attack at close range!” yelled Rex. The gladiator landed in the dirt and rolled for several more blocks before coming to a stop. Rex ran over to Autumn’s body and started counting down. “10… 9… 8…” Jasmine stood far away as she watched her rival’s motionless body. “7… 6… 5…” Finally, Autumn lifted her head. She looked up at Rex, who was counting loudly in her ear. “4… 3…” The gladiator got up to her hands and knees. “2… 1…” She got up to a one knee kneeling position, but it wasn’t enough. “0!” yelled Rex. “That’s it, folks! This fight is over! And what a fight it was!” “I told you it was over…” said the fierce monk. Autumn fell back and sat on the dirt. “Jasmine has won the match! Wowee! That was intense!” announced Rex. The audience cheered and clapped for the both of them. “Whoa… that match was insane,” I said to Bob. “Yeah, I know… but it’s kind of weird to watch them fight so hard just for the glory of it,” Bob said. I nodded. “They’re both really competitive, I guess.” With that said, we both continued watching as Rex ran over to Jasmine and asked, “So, how does it feel to be the winner?” “Great…” she replied simply. “And Autumn, how do you feel?” Rex asked. “Ugh… how do you think I feel?” the gladiator replied. “Okay, then!” Rex continued making announcements about the fight. Meanwhile, Jasmine looked over at Autumn and said, “Hey… good fight.” “Yeah… good fight...” Then Jasmine walked over to the sitting gladiator, and they both bumped fists. Rex returned to Jasmine, grabbed her hand and raised it up in the air. “The winner of today’s last match! Let’s give it up for Jasmine the monk!” “Autumn! Are you okay?!” yelled Arthur as everyone around him cheered and clapped. “Also, please give it up for Autumn for putting up an amazing fight!” yelled Rex. The audience cheered just as loudly as before. Bob and I clapped as we watched medical personnel rush in to take care of the two combatants. “Man, I’m not sure that was worth it,” I said. “For some, it might be,” said Bob. “Yeah, I guess there are people who love glory more than their own wellbeing.” Bob nodded. “Come on, let’s go in and check up on the two of them.” “Are we allowed in there?” “Well, we’re basically in the fighting area already.” “Yeah, we got some front row seats, huh?” I nodded, and then we went in toward the center. “How are you feeling, Autumn?” I asked as I rolled up to the medics working on the gladiator. “I’m alright… but I can’t believe I lost…” Autumn said softly. “It’s okay, it was quite a fight,” I said, trying to comfort her. “I’m sorry that I let you down, Steve…” “Huh? What? You didn’t let me down.” “By losing, I let down gladiators everywhere.” I shook my head. “Nah, don’t be too hard on yourself, Autumn.” She just looked down at the ground. “Plus, I’m sure you’ve won if you had taken that Blood Lust potion earlier, instead of saving it for later.” “You think so?” Autumn said as she looked up. “Yeah, you took quite a beating in the beginning. If you were Blood Lusted from the get-go, you could’ve avoided most of that damage,” I explained. “Ah, yeah, huh?” “Speaking of the potion, how did you get one, anyway?” “I put in a special order at Paul’s Potions Shop. It took like a month to get made.” Bob nodded. “Yeah, they’re super busy over there.” “Ah, so Cindy brewed it for you, huh?” I said. “I guess she’s the only one who would know the recipe. Anyway, you really surprised me with that Blood Lust potion.” “Heh… my secret weapon…” Autumn said. “And I thought that I wouldn’t even need it.” “Who knew monks were such fierce fighters,” Bob said.

Day Two/5:00 AM: Addicts are often hyper-vigilant about others talking behind their backs or slandering them. Our sponsors tell us that what “they” think of us is none of our business. It can still be hard to take. It matters not if someone speaks badly of me; I live so no one believes it.