“
Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix’s seminal cloud architect, was once asked by a senior leader in a Fortune 500 company where he got his amazing people from. Cockcroft replied, “I hired them from you!
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Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
“
Greed is a snarling monster with a set of razor-sharp teeth on both sides of its head. It devours not only those from whom it takes, but also those who eagerly receive its plunder.
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Chris Seay (The Tao of Enron: Spiritual Lessons from a Fortune 500 Fallout)
“
Your dad was in a street gang?" My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)
“
It makes no sense to compare yourself with others because there will always be better & worse people than you out there. Each person has his own path to make. You are where you are now. Could you reach for the stars & have everything you want? realistically no. You may not win Olympic Gold in London 2012 , or be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company etc but you most definitely have the capacity to make YOUR life as the Masterpiece it could really be. The choice is yours...
”
”
Pablo
“
€7,500, first-class, everything—and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff.
”
”
Slavoj Žižek
“
Women are leaders everywhere you look—from the CEO who runs a Fortune 500 company to the housewife who raises her children and heads her household. Our country was built by strong women, and we will continue to break down walls and defy stereotypes
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”
Nancy Pelosi
“
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company, great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. That’s a constant. What’s always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.
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Gary Vaynerchuk (Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy World)
“
Most people including senior sales & marketing professionals in Fortune 500 companies do not know much about the latest evidence based sales strategies
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Dharmendra Rai (The Invisible Selling Book , Behavioural Economics & More)
“
I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.
But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. It's an unnerving thought that we may be living the universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea-- really none at all-- about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to about some six hundred per week. (That's extinctions of all types-- plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure ever higher-- to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants-- while allowing that this was "almost certainly an underestimate," particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated.
The fact is, we don't know. Don't have any idea. We don't know when we started doing many of the things we've done. We don't know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: "One planet, one experiment."
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-- and by "we" i mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings-- that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities-- have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.
We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
There is so much confusion about branding even at top levels of The Fortune 500 it makes one wonder how they got successful in the first place !
Brace yourself !
Here is the shortest scientific statement on branding you ‘ll ever hear !
It appears simplistic – I assure you it is anything but . If you really understand it & internalize it – you ll be like an Avenger – a superhero in a herd of weaklings
Here it goes !
A successful brand is one that is perceived to be USEFUL & UNIQUE
”
”
Dharmendra Rai (Corporate Invisible Selling Behavioural Economics & More)
“
Raza : “ The bow and arrow was once the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine.
Today-- whoever has the latest Stark weapons rules these lands. Soon it will be my turn “
End of scene
Today picture Fortune 500 CEOs whispering to their top men “ Today – whoever has the latest sales weapons rules the world . Soon it will be our turn – thanks to Invisible Selling - Behavioural Economics & More . Get that Rai bloke to train all our guys
”
”
Dharmendra Rai (Corporate Invisible Selling Behavioural Economics & More)
“
It’s easy to like the idea of being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It’s harder to like the hours, the responsibility, and the pressure that comes with the top job. It
”
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Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
“
yield to my simple demands. It’s what keeps the wheel greased and moving efficiently. We’re not a Fortune 500 company and one of the world’s most prestigious acquisition firms
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Penny Reid (Dating the Boss: Twelve Book Boxed Set)
“
In fact, half the companies in the Fortune 500 were started during a bear market or recession. Half. The
”
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
“
It’s okay to run a church like a business, because if we don’t treat the message of Jesus like a Fortune 500 company, then nonbelievers will certainly do that with messages of their own,
”
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Chuck Tingle (Camp Damascus)
“
It doesn’t matter if you work at a fast food joint or if you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Your job title does not define your purpose. The size of your paycheck does not make you worthy. What makes you valuable is your contribution to the world and the legacy that you leave behind. Stop defining yourself by what you do, and start defining yourself by who you are!
”
”
John Geiger
“
One of the ways in which cooperatives rectify the injustices of capitalism is by instituting a relatively equal compensation-scheme for their members. While in the U.S. the average ratio of CEO compensation in the Fortune 500 companies to the ordinary worker’s has recently been reported as 344:1,49 in co-ops the pay-differential between management and the average worker rarely exceeds 4:1. In collectives, everyone is usually paid the same amount. For example, a British study from the 1980s reports that all of the dozens of small co-ops it researched had lower pay-differentials than conventional businesses, and most had little or no differential at all.50 At Arizmendi Bakery everyone currently receives about 20 dollars an hour plus a percentage of the year’s profits. The worker-owners of Mondragon Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Canada earn the same rate of pay. At Equal Exchange, a relatively large co-op, there is a 4:1 pay ratio.
”
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
“
For two goddamn years, I’d worked alongside this woman and I never thought I would see the day when she had the audacity to turn in a two weeks’ notice. She was now my highest paid employee by far and her recent benefits were so over the top and beyond the scope of what any Fortune 500 CEO offered, that George made me submit to a quarterly psychiatric exam to make sure I knew “what the hell she was being offered access to.
”
”
Whitney G. (Two Weeks Notice)
“
There was some violence a year ago. An important kid got shot during an attempted kidnapping while on spring break in Mexico. The Fortune 500 went security crazy. Now rich kids like Jack need a commando team to take a dump.
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Allen Zadoff (Boy Nobody (The Unknown Assassin, #1))
“
a study of Fortune 500 companies from research organization Catalyst found that those with the highest representation of women on their boards of directors performed significantly better than those with the lowest representation of women.
”
”
Anonymous
“
There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.
”
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Frank Bruni (Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania)
“
years ago, a Fortune 500 firm was expected to last around seventy-five years. Today this life expectancy is less than fifteen years and is constantly declining. The Fortune 500 list of 2011 featured only sixty-seven companies that appeared on the list of 1955, meaning that just 13.4 percent of the Fortune 500 firms in 1955 were still on the list fifty-six years later. Eighty-seven percent of the companies simply couldn’t keep up; they had either gone bankrupt, merged with other companies, been forced to go private, or fallen off the list completely.
”
”
Stanley McChrystal (Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World)
“
Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.
”
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Seth Godin (Crush It!)
“
Of the twenty-eight women who have served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six were married, one was divorced, and only one had never married.10 Many of these CEOs said they “could not have succeeded without the support of their husbands, helping with the children, the household chores, and showing a willingness to move.”11
”
”
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
“
Trumpeting feature benefits that may or may not be of value to your customer will not get you closer to the sale. Mentioning your place on the Fortune 500 will not get you any closer to the sale. In fact, every time you talk about yourself, you risk triggering those change-resistant, emotionally fraught thoughts and feelings in your customers.
”
”
Keenan (Gap Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes: How Problem-Centric Selling Increases Sales by Changing Everything You Know About Relationships, Overcoming Objections, Closing and Price)
“
the combined revenues of companies in Fortune’s Global 500 are already at 44 percent of world GDP.
”
”
Mustafa Suleyman (The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future)
“
I’d graduated top of my class from Oxford and Cambridge, lettered in tennis and polo, and spoke seven languages fluently. I’d founded a charity for funding the arts in underserved areas when I was eighteen, and I was on the fast track to becoming one of the world’s youngest Fortune 500 CEOs. In my thirty-two years on earth, no one had ever told me I was lacking something.
”
”
Ana Huang (King of Pride (Kings of Sin, #2))
“
There are men—I have known a good many—who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company. They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place. Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them. They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do. And, failing that, just trying to look busy.
”
”
Gene Wolfe (The Best of Gene Wolfe)
“
Edward Niedermeyer, who had written a critical book on Tesla titled Ludicrous, unleashed a thread of tweets. “Improvements to common driver assistance systems is moving the industry toward more radar, and even more novel modalities like LiDAR and thermal imaging,” he wrote. “Tesla, in a marked contrast, is moving backwards.” And Dan O’Dowd, a software security entrepreneur, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling Tesla’s self-driving system “the worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
“
For the US to be like Russia today,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of members of Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshall Service, Border Patrol, state and local police officers, the Federal Reserve Bank, Supreme Court justices, US district court judges, support of the varied organized crime families, the leadership of the Fortune 500 companies, at least half of the banks in the US, and the New York Stock Exchange.
”
”
Oliver Bullough (Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World)
“
Our understanding of the world of business is all mixed up with storytelling and mythology. Which is funny because we’re missing the real story by focusing on individuals. In fact, half the companies in the Fortune 500 were started during a bear market or recession. Half. The point is that most people start from disadvantage (often with no idea they are doing so) and do just fine. It’s not unfair, it’s universal. Those who survive it, survive because they took things day by day—that’s the real secret. Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
“
What is America to do about the rising tide of horror? Visitors from Europe or Japan shake their heads in wonder at the squalor and barbarity of America’s cities. They could be forgiven for thinking that the country had viciously and deliberately neglected its poor and its blacks. Of course, it has not. Since the 1960s, the United States has poured a staggering amount of money into education, housing, welfare, Medicaid, and uplift programs of every kind. Government now spends $240 billion a year to fight poverty,1278 and despite the widespread notion that spending was curtailed during Republican administrations, it has actually gone up steadily, at a rate that would have astonished the architects of the Great Society. Federal spending on the poor, in real 1989 dollars, quadrupled from 1965 to 1975, and has nearly doubled since then.1279 As the economist Walter Williams has pointed out, with all the money spent on poverty since the 1960s, the government could have bought every company on the Fortune 500 list and nearly all the farmland in America.1280 What do we have to show for three decades and $2.5 trillion worth of war on poverty? The truth is that these programs have not worked. The truth that America refuses to see is that these programs have made things worse.
”
”
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
“
One way to get a life and keep it is to put energy into being an S&M (success and money) queen. I first heard this term in Karen Salmansohn’s fabulous book The 30-Day Plan to Whip Your Career Into Submission. Here’s how to do it: be a star at work. I don’t care if you flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a Fortune 500 company. Do everything with totality and excellence. Show up on time, all the time. Do what you say you will do. Contribute ideas. Take care of the people around you. Solve problems. Be an agent for change. Invest in being the best in your industry or the best in the world!
If you’ve been thinking about changing professions, that’s even more reason to be a star at your current job. Operating with excellence now will get you back up to speed mentally and energetically so you can hit the ground running in your new position. It will also create good karma. When and if you finally do leave, your current employers will be happy to support you with a great reference and often leave an open door for additional work in the future.
If you’re an entrepreneur, look at ways to enhance your business. Is there a new product or service you’ve wanted to offer? How can you create raving fans by making your customer service sparkle? How can you reach more people with your product or service? Can you impact thousands or even millions more?
Let’s not forget the M in S&M. Getting a life and keeping it includes having strong financial health as well. This area is crucial because many women delay taking charge of their financial lives as they believe (or have been culturally conditioned to believe) that a man will come along and take care of it for them. This is a setup for disaster. You are an intelligent and capable woman. If you want to fully unleash your irresistibility, invest in your financial health now and don’t stop once you get involved in a relationship.
If money management is a challenge for you, I highly recommend my favorite financial coach: David Bach. He is the bestselling author of many books, including The Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Smart Couples Finish Rich. His advice is clear-cut and straightforward, and, most important, it works.
”
”
Marie Forleo (Make Every Man Want You: How to Be So Irresistible You'll Barely Keep from Dating Yourself!)
“
But those constant interruptions strain the brain further and make a hash of our time. For every interruption, Jonathan Spira writes, it takes ten to twenty times the amount of the interruption time to return to the previous task: It can take five minutes after a mere thirty-second interruption to get back on track. Fully one-third of every worker’s day, he reports, is taken up by these endless cycles of unnecessary interruptions. Even Fortune 500 CEOs, with the ultimate power to predict and control their own time, are not immune. One study found they averaged only twenty-eight uninterrupted, productive minutes a day.24 “This overwhelm is not any one thing,” Huda Akil told me. “It’s not just technology. It’s not just two-career couples. It’s a thousand little stabs. You put that together and it’s like being constantly slightly jet-lagged.
”
”
Brigid Schulte (Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time)
“
You began receiving the texts in late September, after the first date. You wore the
translucent dress with the high collar and open-shoulder sleeves that made you feel like you were a fashion writer for a New York magazine, or a high-powered exec of a Fortune 500 company: a shimmering butterfly, someone who mattered, not a
barely-eighteen college freshman who spent most evenings in her dorm room slurping Top Ramen.
The first guy was forty-five. His wife was the
same old song on the radio. He took you out for lobster and fried oysters. Afterwards, he grabbed your neck like you owed him something, and you closed your eyes and imagined pretty things: white-gold
ribbons of sunlight skimming the belly of oceans, the sequins falling from your prom dress the first time you slept with a guy, movies where everyone sings soprano and defies the laws of flight.
”
”
Rona Wang (Cranesong)
“
Stay unfit for leadership While we may not have a science of leadership, we have developed a finely honed science of non-leadership. It is embodied in the training of women we have seen so far. Train girls to feel unsafe, live in fear, stay at home, shrink, judge themselves and their bodies, make girls feel wrong, inferior, immoral and dirty; don’t let girls speak, reason, question, have an opinion, argue, debate; teach them modesty, to wait and follow; make girls suppress their emotions, seek only approval, always please others perfectly, especially men, never say no, avoid conflict, never negotiate, and never initiate action, and then bundle all this behaviour and spray it with morality. This training would make anyone unfit for leadership. No wonder only 5 per cent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women. Studies show that confidence matters more than competence in influencing and selling ideas to others. And women are less likely to ask for a big job or assignment; it is risky and immodest to shine or want to shine.
”
”
Deepa Narayan (Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women)
“
Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.
”
”
Randolph M. Nesse (Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry)
“
Like spacecraft that pick up speed as they rise into the Earth’s stratosphere, growth stocks often seem to defy gravity. Let’s look at the trajectories of three of the hottest growth stocks of the 1990s: General Electric, Home Depot, and Sun Microsystems. (See Figure 7-1.) In every year from 1995 through 1999, each grew bigger and more profitable. Revenues doubled at Sun and more than doubled at Home Depot. According to Value Line, GE’s revenues grew 29%; its earnings rose 65%. At Home Depot and Sun, earnings per share roughly tripled. But something else was happening—and it wouldn’t have surprised Graham one bit. The faster these companies grew, the more expensive their stocks became. And when stocks grow faster than companies, investors always end up sorry. As Figure 7-2 shows: A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock. The more a stock has gone up, the more it seems likely to keep going up. But that instinctive belief is flatly contradicted by a fundamental law of financial physics: The bigger they get, the slower they grow. A $1-billion company can double its sales fairly easily; but where can a $50-billion company turn to find another $50 billion in business? Growth stocks are worth buying when their prices are reasonable, but when their price/earnings ratios go much above 25 or 30 the odds get ugly: Journalist Carol Loomis found that, from 1960 through 1999, only eight of the largest 150 companies on the Fortune 500 list managed to raise their earnings by an annual average of at least 15% for two decades.
”
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
Ascent To The Sierras
poet Robinson Jeffers #140 on top 500 poets Poet's PagePoemsCommentsStatsE-BooksBiographyQuotationsShare on FacebookShare on Twitter
Poems by Robinson Jeffers : 8 / 140 « prev. poem next poem »
Ascent To The Sierras
Beyond the great valley an odd instinctive rising
Begins to possess the ground, the flatness gathers
to little humps and
barrows, low aimless ridges,
A sudden violence of rock crowns them. The crowded
orchards end, they
have come to a stone knife;
The farms are finished; the sudden foot of the
slerra. Hill over hill,
snow-ridge beyond mountain gather
The blue air of their height about them.
Here at the foot of the pass
The fierce clans of the mountain you'd think for
thousands of years,
Men with harsh mouths and eyes like the eagles' hunger,
Have gathered among these rocks at the dead hour
Of the morning star and the stars waning
To raid the plain and at moonrise returning driven
Their scared booty to the highlands, the tossing horns
And glazed eyes in the light of torches. The men have
looked back
Standing above these rock-heads to bark laughter
At the burning granaries and the farms and the town
That sow the dark flat land with terrible rubies...
lighting the dead...
It is not true: from this land
The curse was lifted; the highlands have kept peace
with the valleys; no
blood in the sod; there is no old sword
Keeping grim rust, no primal sorrow. The people are
all one people, their
homes never knew harrying;
The tribes before them were acorn-eaters, harmless
as deer. Oh, fortunate
earth; you must find someone
To make you bitter music; how else will you take bonds
of the future,
against the wolf in men's hearts?
”
”
Robinson Jeffers
“
History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.
”
”
Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
“
Putting it all together, fluctuations in attitudes and behavior combine to make the stock market the ultimate pendulum. In my 47 full calendar years in the investment business, starting with 1970, the annual returns on the S&P 500 have swung from plus 37% to minus 37%. Averaging out good years and bad years, the long-run return is usually stated as 10% or so. Everyone’s been happy with that typical performance and would love more of the same. But remember, a swinging pendulum may be at its midpoint “on average,” but it actually spends very little time there. The same is true of financial market performance. Here’s a fun question (and a good illustration): for how many of the 47 years from 1970 through 2016 was the annual return on the S&P 500 within 2% of “normal”—that is, between 8% and 12%? I expected the answer to be “not that often,” but I was surprised to learn that it had happened only three times! It also surprised me to learn that the return had been more than 20 percentage points away from “normal”—either up more than 30% or down more than 10%—more than one-quarter of the time: 13 out of the last 47 years. So one thing that can be said with total conviction about stock market performance is that the average certainly isn’t the norm. Market fluctuations of this magnitude aren’t nearly fully explained by the changing fortunes of companies, industries or economies. They’re largely attributable to the mood swings of investors. Lastly, the times when return is at the extremes aren’t randomly distributed over the years. Rather they’re clustered, due to the fact that investors’ psychological swings tend to persist for a while—to paraphrase Herb Stein, they tend to continue until they stop. Most of those 13 extreme up or down years were within a year or two of another year of similarly extreme performance in the same direction.
”
”
Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)
“
The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it? At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He travelled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely – some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
One of our greatest epidemics today is obesity. It is estimated that more than 500 million people suffer from obesity worldwide today, and that it kills more than three million people each year. In comparison, about 55,000 people are killed in war each year, which of course in no way suggests that we are overestimating the horror and seriousness of war – how could we? – but the little attention we give to obesity in comparison does suggest, however, that we are not taking the “war” we should be waging against obesity seriously. It seems that we overlook what a merciless killer and cause of pain that obesity and the overeating that leads to it really is: it increases the risk of heart disease (the most common cause of death worldwide), many kinds of cancer, type 2 diabetes, degenerative joint disease and mental problems such as depression and low self-esteem.[27] Fortunately, a lot seems to imply that we have a powerful and peaceful weapon at our hands that can help us overcome obesity: a vegan diet.
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Magnus Vinding (Why We Should Go Vegan)
“
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.
Many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, Fortune 500 companies and celebrities are using WordPress.
WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine.
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
You can download and install a software script called WordPress from wordpress.org. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a servicecalled WordPress.com.
WordPress users may install and switch between different themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website and they can be installed without altering the content or health of the site. Every WordPress website requires at least one theme to be present and every theme should be designed using WordPress standards with structured PHP, valid HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Themes:
WordPress is definitely the world’s most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it’s been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like.
WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install.
It’s good choice for beginners.
Plugins:
WordPress’s plugin architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. WordPress has over 40,501 plugins available.
Each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs.
WordPress menu management has extended functionalities that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc.
If you like this post then please share and like this post.
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”
ellen crichton
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Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.
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John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
“
In 2009, the twenty most valuable companies in America had 1,790 employees per $ 1 billion in market cap; today they have 656.57 Perhaps the starkest example of this trend in recent memory: When the social media firm WhatsApp was sold to Facebook in 2014, it had a market cap of $ 19 billion—more than any number of Fortune 500 firms—and only thirty-five employees. 58
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Rana Foroohar (Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us)
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biggest companies and government agencies were designed in another century, for purposes of safety and stability. Built to last, as the saying goes. They were not built to withstand rapid, radical change. This is why, according to Yale’s Richard Foster, 40 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be gone in ten years, replaced, for the most part, by upstarts we’ve not yet heard of. Institutions are similarly suffering.
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
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Karma’s a bunch of bullshit. If it were true, how come most Fortune 500 companies are run by sociopaths?
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Melanie Summers (The Royal Wedding (Crown Jewels Romance, #2))
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One would have difficulty finding an elite institution today that does not pressure its managers to hire and promote as many blacks and Hispanics as possible. Nearly 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have some sort of diversity infrastructure, according to corporate diversity trainer Howard Ross.
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Heather Mac Donald (The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture)
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A black senior vice president at a Fortune 500 firm might be able to significantly increase diversity by hiring and promoting qualified African Americans. But those qualified job applicants are going to come from the ranks of the Mainstream, not the Abandoned.
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Eugene Robinson (Disintegration)
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With a typical Fortune 500 company using thousands of individual software programs, the list of vulnerabilities could hover in the tens of thousands at any given moment. It was an impossible game of catch-up against an adversary that only needed one hole to remain open among literally millions that an organization had to continually fix.
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Matthew Mather (CyberStorm (Cyberstorm, #1))
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The lack of much outside investment allowed Gates and Allen to hold the vast majority of their company’s stock through the mideighties. Jobs, while his net worth had climbed into a significant fortune with Apple’s rise, didn’t own enough to control his destiny and was fired. It was a cruel irony: For all his counterculture spirit and brilliance, he suffered the mercenary’s fate, left with money but no kingdom. Gates, however, remained reluctant to go public even ten years after Microsoft’s founding. Eventually, due to the number of Microsoft employees who owned shares, and U.S. securities laws obligating any company with more than 500 shareholders to be registered, which Microsoft expected to soon pass, Gates agreed to list his shares. But as a final symbol of resistance, he did try to fly coach during the IPO roadshow—one last ode to parsimony—until his underwriters insisted otherwise.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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Platforms, then, have economic advantages that enable them to grow faster than similar pipeline businesses. This phenomenon alone would lead to significant disruption of traditional industries, as platform businesses displace pipeline businesses at the top of the Fortune 500 rankings. But the era of platforms-eat-pipelines is disrupting businesses in many other ways as well. In particular, the rise of the world of platforms is reconfiguring the familiar business processes of value creation, value consumption, and quality control.8
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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Antispanking laws would solve a nagging problem for Child Protective Service agencies nationwide: to wit, the criticism that current child abuse and neglect laws discriminate against the poor-that, in fact, definitions of neglect and abuse are often synonomous with definitions of poverty. A prohibition on spanking would be nondiscriminatory; it would "tie the hands," so to speak, of haves and have-nots alike. After all, the typical Fortune 500 CEO has probably never beaten his children in ways that produced bruises on their bodies; nevertheless, he has probably spanked them. Antispanking laws would mean that he would be no less vulnerable to the forced "interventions" of Child Protective Services workers than an unemployed single mother of three living hand-to-mouth in a slum tenement.
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John Rosemond (To Spank Or Not To Spank (John Rosemond Book 5))
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A litany of scandals came to public attention in the wake of the political fallout from Watergate, uncovering slush funds for domestic and foreign bribery. The SEC offered an amnesty for companies admitting to questionable or illegal payments; over 450 US companies admitted making such payments worth over $300m to government officials, politicians and political parties. Over 117 of the self-reporting entities were Fortune 500 companies.
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Andrew Feinstein (The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade)
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Entre 1995 y 2005, por ejemplo, los inmigrantes fundaron el 52 por ciento de todas las nuevas compañías de Silicon Valley.[41] Y fundaron, a su vez, más del 40 por ciento de las empresas incluidas en 2017 en el listado Fortune 500 de Estados Unidos.[42]
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Joseph E. Stiglitz (Capitalismo progresista: La respuesta a la era del malestar (Spanish Edition))
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Only 11 percent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1955 are on the list today The average age of a company on the S&P 500 Index has fallen from sixty years in the 1950s to less than twenty years currently
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Gary Hamel (Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them)
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A sense of pride washes over me when they all yield to my simple demands. It’s what keeps the wheel greased and moving efficiently. We’re not a Fortune 500 company and one of the world’s most prestigious acquisition firms for nothing. It takes an iron fist to keep everyone in perfect submission. All because they obey my one golden rule.
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K. Webster (Stroke of Midnight (Cinderella, #1))
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From 1980 to 1993, the Fortune 500 industrial firms shed nearly 4.4 million jobs, more than one out of four that they previously provided. During that same period, their sales increased by 1.4 times and assets by 2.3 times. The average annual CEO compensation at the largest corporations increased by 6.1 times to $3.8 million.
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David C. Korten (When Corporations Rule the World)
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Going public is a sign a company has found enough competitive advantages to scale into a large corporation. But almost 40% of all public companies lost all their value from 1980-2014. A list of top ten fortune 500 companies that went bankrupts includes: General Motors, Crysler, Kodak and Sears. General Electric, Time Warner, AIG and Motorola. Countries follow similar fates. At various points in the past, the world scientific and economic progress has been dominate by Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Whenever a once-powerful thing loses an advantage, it's tempting to ridicule the mistakes of it's leaders but it's easy to overlook how many forces pull you away from a competitive advantage simply BECAUSE you have one. Success has it's own gravity. The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the easier to see it's ass.
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Morgan Housel (SAME AS EVER: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life (From the author of The Psychology Of Money))
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On the one hand, the most elite, highest-paying jobs in the economy belong among the most male-dominated. Only about 14 percent of the top executives (and just about 8 percent of the highest earners) in Fortune 500 companies are women, and more than a quarter of these companies have no women in top management; Wall Street remains overwhelmingly male-dominated; women make up only 18 percent of equity partners at American law firms; and the gender pay gap among doctors has widened in recent years.
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Daniel Markovits (The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite)
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Results of a recent survey of 74 chief executive officers indicate that there may be a link between childhood pet ownership and future career success. Fully 94% of the CEOs, all of them employed within Fortune 500 companies, had possessed a dog, a cat, or both, as youngsters.
The respondents asserted that pet ownership had helped them to develop many of the positive character traits that make them good managers today, including responsibility, empathy, respect for other living beings, generosity, and good communication skills. For all we know, more than 94% of children raised in the backgrounds from which chief executives come had pets, in which case the direction of dependency would be negative. Maybe executive success is really related to tooth brushing during childhood. Probably all chief executives brushed their teeth, at least occasionally, and we might imagine the self-discipline thus acquired led to their business success. That seems more reasonable than the speculation that “communication skills” gained through interacting with a childhood pet promote better relationships with other executives and employees.
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Reid Hastie (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making)
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Stewart Brand abandoned his communard dreams for a new calling: corporate consultant. He had gotten a taste of the power of a social network at the WELL. If a company could sponsor an online community and if it could convince its customers that they were engaging in social rather than economic activity, then they could increase customer allegiance and their own profits. From this insight flowed the Global Business Network. Forget going back to the land—there was gold in preaching that Whole Earth message in the suites of the Fortune 500. The corporate conquest of the Web had started.
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Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy)
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But as he approached fifty, Kenny yearned to do something different. Someone told him that More Than Money—the same inheritors group Jeff Weissglass got involved with—was hiring an executive director. He landed the position and, in short order, discovered that his pregnant teens had at least one thing in common with these young heirs and heiresses: Society defined and stereotyped both groups by how much money they did or didn’t have. The foundations that funded adolescent pregnancy care assumed the girls were getting knocked up because they were poor, “which was not necessarily true,” Kenny says, whereas the inheritors were pegged as “entitled and spoiled and lazy—and there’s no basis for that.” The anti-inheritor bias proved so toxic that some of Kenny’s former colleagues shunned him after he took the new job. “They’re like, ‘What a sellout! What a cop-out! Why would you do that?’ ” he recalls. “What does it say about our culture that everyone wants to win the lottery in some way, shape, or form, and there’s a whole segment of our culture that hates people who win the big payout.” This is indeed a paradox. Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins gave away his $500,000 inheritance in 1986, when he was a young man. (Invested in the S&P 500, it would be worth about $14 million today.) He has since dedicated himself, through the Institute for Policy Studies, to educating the American public about inequality. His memoir, Born on Third Base, includes the following scene: Speaking to a crowd of about 350 people, he asks who among them feels rage toward the wealthiest 1 percent. Almost everyone raises a hand. He then asks, “How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1 percent?” They laugh, but again, almost everyone. “People are envious,” Kenny says. “And what you end up doing with envy is demeaning whoever it is that you envy, because they have what we think we deserve.” During his time at More Than Money, Kenny grew friendly with Paul Schervish, then the director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and when Schervish offered him the associate director job, Kenny jumped. He’d seen how inheritors grappled with their unearned fortunes. Now he wanted to better understand their parents. Havens was the numbers guy “and I was in charge of: ‘I’d like to know what these people are thinking, and nobody ever asks them.’
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Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
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Capture the Quantitative Impact of Your Accomplishments
Examine everything you’ve done, but don’t merely report what you’ve done. Report the quantitative impact, that is, the numbers that resulted from your achievement. That’s what hiring managers care about most. For example:
When I was in school, I worked in the University’s Personnel department. During my time there, the Director asked if I could explain a monthly report she received from Accounts Payable.
The report identified everything charged to Personnel. Unfortunately, neither the Director nor her team could understand what it was saying. After some analysis and research, I was able to translate the confusing report into something the Director could understand.
What I did not do was ask the Director and her team for the financial impact of now being able to understand the report.
While what I did was a valuable story to share at my next interview, it would have meant a lot more if I’d identified the dollars saved or some other quantified impact.
As noted earlier, a few years later, I worked for a high-tech company that sold equipment to Fortune 500 firms. The company wasn’t winning the large deals like they had in the past, so I was asked to investigate.
I identified the process breakdown causing the problem. I also created a short-term solution, so that the company could start winning bids again while the long-term solution was being developed.
What I did not do — and almost have to kick myself now for not doing — was to ask for the value of the deals we were now winning. Those $$$ would have clearly explained the positive impact of my work. It would have been a wonderful talking point in my resume.
After my job was eliminated for the second time in 13 years, I started doing a better job of quantifying the impact of my accomplishments.
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Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
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Thus, although orthodox Buddhists do believe that the religious value of Buddhism surpasses that of other religions, they do not discriminate against other religions or deny their value. If believers of other religions create the conditions for a fortunate rebirth and act constructively, aren’t these people better qualified to be the friends of Buddhism than those scoundrels who destroy human happiness?
Although Buddhists encourage believers of other religions to convert to Buddhism, Buddhists have never ostracized or persecuted other religions. This is clear from the last 2,500-plus years of world history.
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聖嚴法師 (Orthodox Chinese Buddhism: A Contemporary Chan Master's Answers to Common Questions)
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David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL and the only member of the U.S. Armed Forces ever to complete SEAL training, U.S. Army Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training. Goggins has competed in more than sixty ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. A former Guinness World Record holder for completing 4,030 pull-ups in seventeen hours, he’s a much-sought-after public speaker who’s shared his story with the staffs of Fortune 500 companies, professional sports teams, and hundreds of thousands of students across the country.
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David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
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To be clear, the overwhelming percentage of those who work in the federal branch are civil servants. A president gets to appoint on the order of four thousand people to senior positions. Whether someone is a political appointee or a civil servant, there are limits to how we can compensate those in government; there is no way this compensation can compete with Wall Street or Fortune 500 companies. What we can do is offer these people our respect.
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Richard N. Haass (The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens)
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A survey of 348 male managers at twenty Fortune 500 companies found that fathers from dual-career families put in an average of two fewer hours per week – or about 4 percent less – than men whose wives were at home. That was the only difference between the two groups of men. But the fathers with working wives, who presumably had a few more domestic responsibilities, earned almost 20 percent less.
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Ann Crittenden (The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued)
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Deloitte’s Shift Index shows, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years today.
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Jez Humble (Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean (O'Reilly)))
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In 1992, a US Fortune 500 CEO had a 36 percent chance of retaining his or her job for the next five years; in 1998, that chance was down to 25 percent. By 2005, the average tenure of an American CEO had dwindled to six years. And the trend is global. In 2011, 14.4 percent of CEOs of the world’s 2,500 biggest listed companies left their jobs. Even in Japan, famous for its relative corporate stasis, forced succession among the heads of large corporations quadrupled in 2008.
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Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
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Only 71 companies from the original 1955 Fortune 500 list remain today.
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Ivaylo Ivanov (The Next Apple: How To Own The Best Performing Stocks In Any Given Year)
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Consider this: on average, new companies that reach Fortune 500 scale today are doing so more than two times faster than just two decades ago, and the fastest—the world record holders for scaling—are exceeding prior records by a wide margin.
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Chris Zook (The Founder's Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth)
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But now, for millions of Americans, the magic of the dream is tarnished. Something is not right and an alien sense of discomfort grips the dreamer. Despite the excitement and promise that heralded globalization, American business seems frenzied and fickle. Many Fortune 500 companies, once considered havens of lifetime employment, have transformed themselves into profit-driven workaholic cults. The scramble for “the dream” demands a lengthened workday, diminished sleep, continuous learning, unusual energy, and a high tolerance for financial insecurity. To be “successful” is to be a multitasking dynamo. We rise early and burn the lights late. We exercise to CNN at breakfast and telephone while driving, for there’s not a moment to lose. At dinner we graze on snacks and fast food, but with a laptop computer as the preferred companion. In the culture of global commerce, which is etched most visibly on the face of America but increasingly apparent in Europe and other industrialized nations, the quest for economic prosperity has become a competitive high-speed game. For some the pursuit is seductive—as when I rise at dawn in Los Angeles to dine at dusk in New York—and it offers a mask of accomplishment and purpose. But for those snarled in traffic jams and crowded airport lounges, and for the lonely children who do not understand, America’s accelerated lifestyle is increasingly a source of anxiety and frustration. Thus
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Peter C. Whybrow (American Mania: When More is Not Enough)
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In late 2008, one of my business partners, Clayton Christensen offered his opinion that the recession would have an “unmitigated positive impact on innovation” because “when the tension is greatest and resources are most limited, people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.” This theory is supported by the Kaufmann Foundation statistic that “51 percent of the Fortune 500 companies began during a recession or bear market or both.” Whether launching a business or pursuing a dream, there are many high-profile instances in which a lack of resources ultimately proved to be a boon, rather than a bane. If we dig a bit, each of us can uncover examples among friends and family, and ourselves. Would most children have as many opportunities as they do in sports, music, or other extracurricular activities without parents, mothers in particular, who are accomplished at bartering as a way to stretch limited family budgets? Would kids have as many chances to explore their interests if their parents weren’t so adept at arranging for carpooling, chaperoning, and borrowing, thus enabling their kids to participate? Without the constraints of time, money, and health, would the online retailer Shabby Apple exist? (For a reminder of how that business came to be, see chapter 5.) If my parents could have paid for college, would I have caught an early glimpse of corporate life during the Silicon Valley heyday? Would I have ever set foot on Wall Street had I not needed to work to put my husband through school? All of us have had the opportunity to bootstrap if we look hard enough. Men seem to know how to do this in the business world: 88 percent of the founders of Entrepreneur magazine’s Hot 500 were men. But I wonder if women aren’t better at bootstrapping than we think we are. Chronically under resourced (whether due to the gender pay gap or ceding our resources to conform to societal expectations), women continually feel the tension of having too little budget and too little time. Because of this tension, we are expert at rethinking how to get things done. Many of us know how to turn scarcity into opportunity.
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Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
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With the blessing of NASA and the White House, the publishers had made the deal to pay the Original Seven an astounding total of 500,000 dollars, to be split equally and spread over several years, a fortune in those days. When the Next Nine came aboard, the pie was cut into thinner pieces, but was still a chunk of money. And when we joined the team, the funding was again reapportioned in equal shares and each of us received 16,250 dollars each year. On top of being astronauts, now we were rich!
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Eugene Cernan (The Last Man on the Moon: One Man's Part in Mankind's Greatest Adventure)
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The campaign drew heavily from the American anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, which led to the dismantling of racial segregation programs in South Africa by targeting the one thing which—unlike protests or letters or phone calls—no government can ignore: money ... SHAC set out to make Huntington the South Africa of the corporate world. They identified banks, suppliers, customers and employees—anyone with any financial ties to the lab, from Fortune 500 companies to toilet paper suppliers. They focused on businesses with no vested interest in animal experimentation, either philosophically or economically; Huntington needed them, but they did not need Huntington.
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Will Potter (Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege)
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Candidate: Because digital advertising is the only segment that’s growing, we need to understand more about what’s going on with customers, so I’m going to switch gears and analyze customers next. Interviewer: That sounds like a reasonable plan. Why don’t you go ahead and do that. Candidate: I’d like to know who these customers are. What are the key customer segments? What’s the growth rate of each segment? Interviewer: Well, the customers are Fortune 500 brand managers such as Procter & Gamble, midmarket-size clients, and small-business clients.
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Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
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Questions on the following topics can help you identify helpful information about the company that you can then use to refine your hypothesis—and ultimately structure a more customized issue tree: Capabilities and expertise Distribution channels Cost structure (mainly fixed versus variable; is it better to have higher fixed costs with lower variable, which is a barrier to entry, or vice versa?) Investment costs (optional: only if the case involves an investment decision) Intangibles (e.g., brands, brand loyalty) Financial situation Organizational structure (optional: if, for example, team organization is in conflict with how customers want to do business, as in the case with the Fortune 500 CIO who wanted to do business with just one person)
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Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
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organizational structure can be useful to analyze in cases that involve an execution aspect. Most cases deal with a big strategic decision—not the execution of a previously made decision—so you likely won’t need to consider this topic during the case interview. As a working consultant, however, you would be wise to analyze the company’s organizational structure to identify any conflicts between the structure and the strategy. We can refer again to the Fortune 500 CIO for this topic: If the CIO will deal with only one point of contact, he will not want to work with a company organized into five divisions, each with its own sales force.
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Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
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When a consultant interviews you, she is wondering, Can I drop you off with a division of a Fortune 500 company by yourself, with little to no supervision? Can you handle the client, solve its problems, and in the process make the firm look good? That’s what that consultant is really thinking, but most candidates don’t appreciate this perspective.
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Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
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The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.” 98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed. 99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period. 100 The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines. 101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $ 3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $ 2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s. 102
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Stephen M. Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
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In my own market research for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, I have found that the best ways to communicate authenticity I to trigger personalization. Do audience members see themselves in the slogan… and therefore in the product? Unfortunately, achieving personalization is by no means easy.
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Frank Luntz (Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear)
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In 2000, the National Gallery in London put on a millennial exhibition entitled “Seeing Salvation.” That was a case in point—especially remembering that European countries tend to be far more “secularized” than the United States. It consisted mostly of artists’ depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion. Many critics sneered. All those old paintings about someone being tortured to death! Why did we need to look at rooms full of such stuff? Fortunately, the general public ignored the critics and turned up in droves to see works of art, which, like the crucifixion itself, seem to carry a power beyond theory and beyond suspicion. The Gallery’s director, Neil McGregor, moved from that role to become director of the British Museum, a job he did with great distinction and effect for the next decade. The final piece he acquired in the latter capacity, before moving to a similar position in Berlin, was a simple but haunting cross made from fragments of a small boat. The boat, which been carrying refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, was wrecked off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, on October 3, 2013. Of the 500 people on board, 349 drowned. A local craftsman, Francesco Tuccio, was deeply distressed that nothing more could have been done to save people, and he made several crosses out of fragments of the wrecked vessel. One was carried by Pope Francis at the memorial service for the survivors. The British Museum contacted Mr. Tuccio, and he made a cross especially for the museum, thanking the authorities there for drawing attention to the suffering that this small wooden object would symbolize. Why the cross rather than anything else?
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N.T. Wright (The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion)
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the immigrant population in the United States is a terrific example of how the combination of embracing constraints and being surrounded by a new culture can lead to an explosion of creativity. Immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans, and 52 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups include an immigrant. Forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by first-generation immigrants or their children.7 Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, makes this powerful statement about the importance of avoiding cultural entitlement: "Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n. But, when we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. Unless companies invest in the difficult task of creating new things, they will fail in the future no matter how big their profits are." If you want to keep innovation alive, look for ways to combine something old with something new.
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Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
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One study of America’s Fortune 500 companies found that the one quarter with the most female executives had a return on equity 35 percent higher than the quarter with the fewest female executives. On the Japanese stock exchange, the companies with the highest proportion of female employees performed nearly 50 percent better than those with the lowest. In each case, the most likely reason isn’t that female executives are geniuses. Rather, it is that companies that are innovative enough to promote women are also ahead of the curve in reacting to business opportunities. That is the essence of a sustainable economic model. Moving women into more productive roles helps curb population growth and nurtures a sustainable society.
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Nicholas D. Kristof (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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Singleton’s fierce independence of mind remained a prominent trait until the end of his life. In 1997, two years before his death from brain cancer at age eighty-two, he sat down with Leon Cooperman, a longtime Teledyne investor. At the time, a number of Fortune 500 companies had recently announced large share repurchases. When Cooperman asked him about them, Singleton responded presciently, “If everyone’s doing them, there must be something wrong with them.
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William N. Thorndike Jr. (The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success)
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We live in a world where there are twenty cities with populations over ten million people. The entire population of the American colonies was 2,500,000. Philadelphia, the largest American city, had all of thirty thousand people, a small town by our standards. The same week the Continental Congress voted for independence, the British landed 32,000 troops on Staten Island. In other words, they landed a military force larger than the entire population of our largest city. When the delegates signed their names to that Declaration, pledging "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," those weren't just words. Each was signing his own death warrant. They were declaring themselves traitors.
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David McCullough (The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For)
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the U.S. is on the precipice of a permanent shift that threatens to transform the country from a thriving, diverse community of religious believers who share a marketplace and a public square into a collection of separate mini-theocracies, where we are more concerned about the religion of the person sitting next to us than the fact that he or she is a fellow American, where an employee needs to know the religion of a Fortune 500 company's owners to know what the health coverage will be, and where goods are tagged with religious identity.
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Marci A. Hamilton (God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty)
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Women start companies at twice the rate of men and employ more people than the Fortune 500 combined.
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Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your SmallBusiness)
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The Dictator Supervisor When I held a high-visibility position at a Fortune 500 company, I was adamant about the quality of the correspondence that went out of my department. Although I had a superstar staff, I edited all staff memos in order to make them “better.” One day, because time was of the essence, I quickly reviewed a memo in the presence of the writer and concluded that it conveyed the message and required no changes. I would have worded it a little differently, yet I simply stated that it was okay to send it. The woman who had written the memo was ecstatic. She said, “No changes? I can’t believe it!” She was beaming. From that day forward, I made adjustments to staff memos only when it was absolutely necessary. The impact on morale was amazing. I learned something that I had not learned in business school: people need to feel that they exercise some control or authority in their environment.
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Deborah Smith Pegues (Confronting Without Offending: Positive and Practical Steps to Resolving Conflict)
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This practice often produces a receivables asset that is one of the largest tangible assets on a company's balance sheet. A review of the 2004 Fortune 500 certainly reveals this truth. Receivables ranked among the top three tangible assets for 75% of the top 100 companies. Surprisingly, management of this multi-million (or multi-bil- lion) dollar asset rarely receives much senior management attention, except when a serious problem develops. The custodians of the receivables asset are similar to umpires of a baseball game; they are not noticed unless they do
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John G. Salek (Accounts Receivable Management Best Practices)
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just seventy-one companies from the original Fortune 500 compiled in 1955 remain on the list today.
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Bernadette Jiwa (The Fortune Cookie Principle: The 20 Keys to a Great Brand Story and Why Your Business Needs One)
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their father left for the gym and never came back. She’d been wined and dined with some incredible offers from Fortune 500 companies, but LightPulse was her home, the house she’d helped build, and she had no intention of leaving. Even if
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Ernie Lindsey (Sara's Game (Sara Winthrop, #1))
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History records that there was only one Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo — and that he was too small for his job. The fact is there were two Napoleons at Waterloo, and the second one was big enough for his job, with some to spare. The second Napoleon was Nathan Rothschild — the emperor of finance. During the trying months that came before the crash Nathan Rothschild had plunged on England until his own fortunes, no less than those of the warring nations, were staked on the issue. He had lent money direct. He had discounted Wellington's paper. He had risked millions by sending chests of gold through war-swept territory where the slightest failure of plans might have caused its capture. He was extended to the limit when the fateful hour struck, and the future seemed none too certain. The English, in characteristic fashion, believed that all had been lost before anything was lost -— before the first gun bellowed out its challenge over the Belgian plains. The London stock market was in a panic. Consols were falling, slipping, sliding, tumbling. If the telegraph had been invented, the suspense would have been less, even if the wires had told that all was lost. But there was no telegraph. There were only rumors and fears. As the armies drew toward Waterloo Nathan Rothschild was like a man aflame. All of his instincts were crying out for news — good news, bad news, any kind of news, but news — something to end his suspense. News could be had immediately only by going to the front. He did not want to go to the front. A biographer of the family, Mr. Ignatius Balla, 1 declares that Nathan had " always shrunk from the sight of blood." From this it may be presumed that, to put it delicately, he was not a martial figure. But, as events came to a focus, his mingled hopes and fears overcame his inborn instincts. He must know the best or the worst and that at once. So he posted off for Belgium. He drew near to the gathering armies. From a safe post on a hill he saw the puffs of smoke from the opening guns. He saw Napoleon hurl his human missiles at Wellington's advancing walls of red. He did not see the final crash of the French, because he saw enough to convince him that it was coming, and therefore did not wait to witness the actual event. He had no time to wait. He hungered and thirsted for London as a few days before he had hungered and thirsted for the sight of Waterloo. Wellington having saved the day for him as well as for England, Nathan Rothschild saw an opportunity to reap colossal gains by beating the news of Napoleon's 1 The Romance of the Rothschilds, p. 88. 126 OUR DISHONEST CONSTITUTION defeat to London and buying the depressed securities of his adopted country before the news of victory should send them skyward with the hats of those whose brains were still whirling with fear. So he left the field of Waterloo while the guns were still booming out the requiem of all of Napoleon's great hopes of empire. He raced to Brussels upon the back of a horse whose sides were dripping with spur-drawn blood. At Brussels he paid an exorbitant price to be whirled in a carriage to Ostend. At Ostend he found the sea in the grip of a storm that shook the shores even as Wellington was still shaking the luck-worn hope of France. " He was certainly no hero," says Balla, " but at the present moment he feared nothing." Who would take him in a boat and row him to England? Not a boatman spoke. No one likes to speak when Death calls his name, and Rothschild's words were like words from Death. But Rothschild continued to speak. He must have a boatman and a boat. He must beat the news of Waterloo to England. Who would make the trip for 500 francs? Who would go for 800, 1,000? Who would go for 2,000? A courageous sailor would go. His name should be here if it had not been lost to the world. His name should be here and wherever this story is printed, because he said he would go if Rothschild would pay the 2,000 francs to the sailor's wife before
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Anonymous
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He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune 500 company, and you’d be happy. He had done all that and he was miserable. He’d gotten out of his father’s house only to find another kind of servitude. He decided to start over and do things his own way. He would become an entrepreneur.
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George Packer (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America)
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The Fate Gene A latent Ch05En gene destines someone for greatness. Maybe you'll be a rock star, or CEO of a Fortune 500. You might save somebody's life, or give birth to the greatest supporting actress of all time. Maybe you'll be a superhero. Those
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William Dickstein (Ch05En: Episode 1 (A Tale of Gems))
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Srsde
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Do you ever run into the grocery store for two or three things, and walk out with twenty? Somewhere between the milk and bananas, you discover a cartful of things you didn’t realize you “needed!” Supermarkets are designed to promote impulse buying. High-margin, brightly packaged items are cleverly displayed to catch your eye and empty your wallet. Avoid the temptation by making a shopping list at home, and sticking to it when you get to the store. Instead
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Francine Jay (Frugillionaire: 500 Fabulous Ways to Live Richly and Save a Fortune)
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It is clear looking at statistics of inventions, discoveries and fortune 500 companies, that it is not the believers that are managing the affairs of the earth. What a tragedy!!!
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Sunday Adelaja