Investing In Employees Quotes

When you invest in your employees’ development, they’ll spend their skills in your company’s development.

When unions get higher wages for their members by restricting entry into an occupation, those higher wages are at the expense of other workers who find their opportunities reduced. When government pays its employees higher wages, those higher wages are at the expense of the taxpayer. But when workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firm competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody's expense. They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger - there's more for the worker, but there's also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer, and even the tax collector. That's the way the free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. That's the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.

One of the most important types of decision making is deciding what you are not going to do, what you need to eliminate in order to make room for strategic investments.

Businesses are at all times and in different ways accountable to employees, suppliers, customers and community.

Your assets are your employees. Invest more on those performing well. Let the non performers go.

The value of a business is a function of how well the financial capital and the intellectual capital are managed by the human capital. You'd better get the human capital part right.

I think I screamed. She certainly did. I started to walk away, she followed. We continued to scream at each other. We were in the middle of a busy square. People stopped to look at us. A lot of people. I wonder now what they thought. That Jin-Ae was my wife? My lover? Surely not an ambitious employee haranguing her boss!

When employees are unhappy with their job, they underperform and they're less productive. Smart employers invest in employee happiness.

The code-of-ethics playlist: o Treat your colleagues, family, and friends with respect, dignity, fairness, and courtesy. o Pride yourself in the diversity of your experience and know that you have a lot to offer. o Commit to creating and supporting a world that is free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. o Have balance in your life and help others to do the same. o Invest in yourself, achieve ongoing enhancement of your skills, and continually upgrade your abilities. o Be approachable, listen carefully, and look people directly in the eyes when speaking. o Be involved, know what is expected from you, and let others know what is expected from them. o Recognize and acknowledge achievement. o Celebrate, relive, and communicate your successes on an ongoing basis.

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

B-quadrant businesses get tax credits for hiring employees, for increasing their research and development, and for investing in green technology.

All husbands are unfaithful in one way or another.” Lillian and Daisy glanced at each other with raised brows. “Father isn’t,” Lillian replied smartly. Mercedes responded with a laugh that sounded like crackling leaves being crushed underfoot. “Isn’t he, dear? Perhaps he has stayed true to me physically—one can never be certain about these things. But his work has proved a more jealous and demanding mistress than a flesh-and-blood woman could ever be. All his dreams are invested in that collection of buildings and employees and legalities that absorb him to the exclusion of all else. If my competition had been a mortal woman, I could have borne it easily, knowing that passion fades and beauty lasts but an instant. But his company will never fade or sicken—it will outlast us all. If you have a year of your husband’s interest and affection, it will be more than I have ever had.

After putting economics aside, I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit:   They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving.   They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.

What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

gymnasts retire at 20, cricketers at 34, actresses at 32, actors at 75, salesmen at 50, other employees at 58 or 60 years, and doctors and lawyers when their bodies do not listen to their minds. Of course, one class beats them all — politicians retire at 90!

There is only one thing worse than investing in employees only to lose them, and that is to lose them and they stay on payroll.

Profit provides the financial foundation for businesses to invest in CSR initiatives, such as sustainable practices, employee well-being programs, and community development projects.

Where finite-minded organizations view people as a cost to be managed, infinite-minded organizations prefer to see employees as human beings whose value cannot be calculated as if they were a piece of machinery. Investing in human beings goes beyond paying them well and offering them a great place to work. It also means treating them like human beings. Understanding that they, like all people, have ambitions and fears, ideas and opinions and ultimately want to feel like they matter.

Some people will each start investing more of their salary on ‘their’ house and spending less of it on ‘their’ car or cars only when they start being able to take ‘their’ house to work, funerals, weddings, etc.

Where workers do lose their jobs due to automation, it’s not because they themselves are replaced by some piece of software. It’s often because the firms they work for fail. And the firms they work for fail because their management or shareholders are unwilling or unable to keep up with the new possibilities of technology. That failure often extends to failing to invest in the training that their employees need to implement the latest technologies.

The ideas in each—from profit-sharing with employees to new approaches to job training, from reform of the financial system to promote long-term time horizons on investment to more progressive taxes and large-scale infrastructure investment—would help create a more just economy.

Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them. For starters, their will to fight is less than yours. Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care, and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization. What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product, or another legal hassle to an already overworked legal counsel thinking more about her next stock-vesting date than your suit. Also, large companies have valuable public brands they must delicately preserve, and which can be assailed by even small companies such as yours, particularly in a tight-knit, appearances-conscious ecosystem like that of Silicon Valley. America still loves an underdog, and you’ll be surprised at how many allies come out of the woodwork when some obnoxious incumbent is challenged by a scrappy startup with a convincing story. So long as you maintain unit cohesion and a shared sense of purpose, and have the basic rudiments of living, you will outlast, outfight, and out-rage any company that sets out to destroy you. Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.

Goldman Sachs preaching about diversity so it can be at the front of the line for the next government bailout. It’s AstraZeneca waxing eloquent about climate change so it can secure multibillion-dollar government contracts for vaccine production. It’s State Street building feminist statues to detract attention from wage discrimination lawsuits from female employees, all the while marketing its exchange-traded fund with the ticker “SHE.” It’s Chamath Palihapitiya founding a social impact investment fund and criticizing Silicon Valley, even though he and his wealth are products of Silicon Valley, all to cover up for his prior tenure as an executive at Facebook who dreamed out loud about a private corporate military. Those companies and people use their market power to prop up woke causes as a way to accumulate greater political capital—only to later come back and cash in that political capital for more dollars.

Mr. Prospect, you’ve spent 16 years and $120,000 to learn how to be a good employee. Won’t you invest $100 and two months to see if you can be as successful as your own boss?

He had no intention of giving employees better hours and benefits, either. He found it more cost-efficient to invest in employees who would last in this work environment than to make the environment more accommodating.

The irony is that companies have invested so much in training programs of all sorts and spent so much time and effort to incentivize and measure performance, but they’ve failed to actually explain to all of their employees how their business runs.

After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.

And that is a critical factor to consider if you manage others. Just because something matters to you doesn’t necessarily mean it will matter as much to the people you manage. Lay out what matters most to the organization, and then help the employees build a value system within that architecture that allows them to feel invested as well.

Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift. 2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves. 3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition. • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree. 4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“ Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.) • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it. 5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient. • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful. 6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.” • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle.

The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point—and it is no coincidence that the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English and Dutch East India companies, ones that pursued that very same combination of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the conquistadors. It is a structure designed to eliminate all moral imperatives but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue—and regularly do—that, if it were their own money, of course they would not fire lifelong employees a week before retirement, or dump carcinogenic waste next to schools. Yet they are morally bound to ignore such considerations, because they are mere employees whose only responsibility is to provide the maximum return on investment

The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had from turning an investment bank into a public corporation and leveraging its balance sheet with exotic risks, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted, from trust to blind faith. No investment bank owned by its employees would have leveraged itself 35:1, or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine CDOs.

think you might be the only woman at Hastings—out of three thousand employees, mind you—who isn’t a secretary. I can’t imagine how that could have happened. And yet you still tried to pass yourself off as a man. Is there any level to which you won’t stoop? By the way, do you know why the institute says we ladies aren’t a good investment? It’s because we’re always running off and having babies. Like you did.

Technology managers, like so many other well-meaning managers, often try to fix the person while ignoring the work environment, even though changing the environment is far more vital for long-term success. Managers who want to avert employee burnout should concentrate their attention and efforts on: Fostering a respectful, supportive work environment that emphasizes learning from failures rather than blaming Communicating a strong sense of purpose Investing in employee development Asking employees what is preventing them from achieving their objectives and then fixing those things Giving employees time, space, and resources to experiment and learn Last but not least, employees must be given the authority to make decisions that affect their work and their jobs, particularly in areas where they are responsible for the outcomes.

Design for 80 percent and build separate paths for exceptions. Eliminate or reduce the impact of low-value steps. Simplify complex steps. Combine simple steps. Work to design quality into the work, rather than inspect step outputs after the fact. Use parallel paths wherever possible. Broaden job content and empower employees. Don’t design things to the task level unless the risk of variation is unacceptable and you’re willing to invest in testing prior to implementation.

Every year, Gallup releases a wide-ranging study of the effects of “lack of engagement,” which it measures through a twelve-question survey asking employees to gauge their agreement with various statements, from “I know what is expected of me at work” to “At work, my opinions seem to count.” Within Gallup’s conception, “engagement” is a measurement of how much employees themselves are invested in the work but also of how much their managers and leaders are investing in them.

More often than not, risk takers underestimate the odds they face, and do not invest sufficient effort to find out what the odds are. Because they misread the risks, optimistic entrepreneurs often believe they are prudent, even when they are not. Their confidence in their future success sustains a positive mood that helps them obtain resources from others, raise the morale of their employees, and enhance their prospects of prevailing. When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

The more we have of something, the less happiness we derive from it. We continuously raise the bar for what we want or feel we need in order to be happy—and the hedonic treadmill spins faster with ambition. In other words, the downside to being ambitious is a constant sense of dissatisfaction with our achievements. What works well in Denmark is that enjoying a good quality of life does not have to cost a lot of money. If I lost my job and my savings, I would still be able to enjoy most of the same things I enjoy today. It is not only about how much money we make, it is also about what we do with the money we have. See experiences as an investment in happy memories and in your personal story and development. Our happiness has an impact on our health. A greater level of happiness predicts better future physical health. The biggest obstacles to happiness are feeling inferior or excluded. Some of the best decisions we make come from that inner voice that says, ‘Why not?’ You are likely to be more efficient if you have less time. Meetings are employees talking about work that they have done or work that they are going to do, and managers are people whose job it is to interrupt people. Both are killing our productivity.

You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

Many energy companies will use models to value assets with lifetimes of 20 years or longer—things like power plants, pipelines, and natural gas wells. Even if the model was sufficient when first developed, it can still fail before its lifetime is up. Assumptions made 15 years earlier are often invalidated due to regulatory changes, population shifts, and technological changes. Exacerbating this problem is the problem of employee turnover—commonly, the original developers of the models have moved to other jobs when problems develop. After a number of years, organizations need to take steps to ensure that someone still understands every model that is in production.

One thing that Mueller insisted on was that Musk put two years’ worth of compensation into escrow. He was not an internet millionaire, and he did not want to take the chance of being unpaid if the venture failed. Musk agreed. It did, however, cause him to consider Mueller an employee rather than a cofounder of SpaceX. It was a fight he had regarding PayPal and would have again involving Tesla. If you’re unwilling to invest in a company, he felt, you shouldn’t qualify as a founder. “You cannot ask for two years of salary in escrow and consider yourself a cofounder,” he says. “There’s got to be some combination of inspiration, perspiration, and risk to be a cofounder.

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

All this depends, however, on the rich using their profits to open new factories and hire new employees, rather than wasting them on non-productive activities. Smith therefore repeated like a mantra the maxim that ‘When profits increase, the landlord or weaver will employ more assistants’ and not ‘When profits increase, Scrooge will hoard his money in a chest and take it out only to count his coins.’ A crucial part of the modern capitalist economy was the emergence of a new ethic, according to which profits ought to be reinvested in production. This brings about more profits, which are again reinvested in production, which brings more profits, et cetera ad infinitum. Investments can be made in many ways: enlarging the factory, conducting scientific research, developing new products. Yet all these investments must somehow increase production and translate into larger profits.

The fragmentation of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her résumé, a biographer of her rationales, and an entrepreneur of her possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator. She is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. She is all at once the business, the raw material, the product, the clientele, and the customer of her own life. She is a jumble of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but equally an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced, shorted, hedged against, and minimized. She is both headline star and enraptured audience of her own performance.

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

After many years and hundreds of interviews with workers in every conceivable profession, she has found that employees have one of three “work orientations,” or mindsets about our work. We view our work as a Job, a Career, or a Calling.14 People with a “job” see work as a chore and their paycheck as the reward. They work because they have to and constantly look forward to the time they can spend away from their job. By contrast, people who view their work as a career work not only out of necessity, but also to advance and succeed. They are invested in their work and want to do well. Finally, people with a calling view work as an end in itself; their work is fulfilling not because of external rewards but because they feel it contributes to the greater good, draws on their personal strengths, and gives them meaning and purpose. Unsurprisingly, people with a calling orientation not only find their work more rewarding, but work harder and longer because of it. And as a result, these are the people who are generally more likely to get ahead. For

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.

What’s an IPO, exactly? A company decides it wants to “float” part of its equity on the public markets, allowing employees and founders to sell private shares to pay them off for years of service, as well as sell shares out of the corporate treasury to have some money in the bank. Large investment banks (such as my former employer Goldman Sachs) form what’s called a “syndicate” (“mafia” might be a better term) wherein they offer to effectively buy those shares from Facebook, and then sell them into the capital markets, usually by pushing it via their sales force onto wealthy clients or institutional investors. That syndicate either guarantees a price (“firm commitment”) or promises to get the best price it can (“best effort”). In the former case, the bank is taking real execution risk, and stands to lose money if it doesn’t engineer a “pop” in the stock on opening day. To mitigate the risk, the bank convinces the offering company to expect a lower price, while simultaneously jacking up what real price the market will bear with a zealous sales pitch to the market’s deepest pockets. Thus, it is absolutely jejune to think that a stock’s rise on opening day is due to clamoring and unexpected interest. Similar to Captain Renault in Casablanca, Wall Street bankers are shocked—shocked!—that there should be such a large and positive price dislocation in the market they just rigged.

Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman

William Blum, the former State Department employee who became one of its most severe and encyclopedic critics, drew up a disturbing balance sheet of American interventions since the end of the Second World War, and there are numerous cases of overturning democratically elected governments. He also emphasized Washington’s meddling in elections, as it has not hesitated to invest considerable sums and to use very dubious tactics—from misinformation campaigns and economic destabilization efforts to clandestine cia operations—to swing so-called democratic elections in a direction favorable to its own interests. In one of his most recent books, entitled quite simply America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, he reaches the conclusion that the American administration, for which the question of democracy remains utterly secondary, aims above all at world domination. For the United States has shown itself to be hostile to any popular movement likely to contest its hegemony. It is in this vein that it has • endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected; • grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries; • attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; • dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries; • attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. Needless to say, such a performance inevitably calls into question the history of the spectacular blossoming of democracy. Numerous other specialists have corroborated Blum’s conclusions, often with detailed investigations bearing on individual cases of what Chomsky judiciously named “deterring democracy.

As I write this, I know there are countless mysteries about the future of business that we’ve yet to unravel. That’s a process that will never end. When it comes to customer success, however, I have achieved absolute clarity on four points. First, technology will never stop evolving. In the years to come, machine learning and artificial intelligence will probably make or break your business. Success will involve using these tools to understand your customers like never before so that you can deliver more intelligent, personalized experiences. The second point is this: We’ve never had a better set of tools to help meet every possible standard of success, whether it’s finding a better way to match investment opportunities with interested clients, or making customers feel thrilled about the experience of renovating their home. The third point is that customer success depends on every stakeholder. By that I mean employees who feel engaged and responsible and are growing their careers in an environment that allows them to do their best work—and this applies to all employees, from the interns to the CEO. The same goes for partners working to design and implement customer solutions, as well as our communities, which provide the schools, hospitals, parks, and other facilities to support us all. The fourth and most important point is this: The gap between what customers really want from businesses and what’s actually possible is vanishing rapidly. And that’s going to change everything. The future isn’t about learning to be better at doing what we already do, it’s about how far we can stretch the boundaries of our imagination. The ability to produce success stories that weren’t possible a few years ago, to help customers thrive in dramatic new ways—that is going to become a driver of growth for any successful company. I believe we’re entering a new age in which customers will increasingly expect miracles from you. If you don’t value putting the customer at the center of everything you do, then you are going to fall behind. Whether you make cars, solar panels, television programs, or anything else, untold opportunities exist. Every company should invest in helping its customers find new destinations, and in blazing new trails to reach them. To do so, we have to resist the urge to make quick, marginal improvements and spend more time listening deeply to what customers really want, even if they’re not fully aware of it yet. In the end, it’s a matter of accepting that your success is inextricably linked to theirs.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

There are three key assets in retail: real estate, inventory, and people.

When a manager chooses to speak with team members regarding their professional development, this tells the team member that no matter how many course-correction discussions they have had, the manager still wants to invest time in developing them.

Our research and extensive interviews with executives and senior practitioners in the digital transformation process revealed that digital leaders think differently about high performance. In successful digital organizations, pushing the performance envelope, rewarding high performance, and learning how to invest in “optimal” mindsets are all critical parts needed to drive and sustain digital changes. “Overall, starting with a feeling of optimism promotes hope and overrides any other sentiments in your work. What would happen if all your employees felt different about coming to work? There would be a different buzz about the building. There would be a different outlook that would help people look forward to what’s next and what’s coming up. This optimism and hope creates an environment that inspires people to seek out their best and find levels of performance that maybe before they never thought were attainable. Starting with this whole new and different chemistry, any workplace is far better suited to achieve its goals and be its best, even in times of difficulty or adversity.” —Pete Carroll, head coach, the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks

This book is for anyone who wants to understand the techniques that allow a business to grow from zero to a multibillion-dollar market leader in a handful of years. These techniques should be of interest to entrepreneurs who want to build massive companies, venture capitalists who want to invest in them, employees who want to work for them, and governments and communities who wish to encourage the growth of these companies in their own regions. And even if you don’t want to build, invest in, or work for any of these companies, you’ll still need to navigate the world that they’re building. If you are a manager or a leader who is trying to rapidly scale a project or a business unit within a larger company, blitzscaling can help you too. And while we draw these lessons primarily from the world of high tech, many of the principles and frameworks the book lays out (especially regarding people management) are applicable to high-growth companies in most industries worldwide, from European fast-fashion retailers to Texan oil shale companies.

You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What's the return on investment of college? What's the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What's at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

Between 2017 and 2020, the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone plans to put at least 3 billion RMB (around $450 million) into AI development. That money will go toward a dizzying array of AI subsidies and perks, including investments of up to 15 million RMB in local companies, grants of 1 million RMB per company to attract talent, rebates on research expenses of up to 5 million RMB, creation of an AI training institute, government contracts for facial recognition and autonomous robot technology, simplified procedures for registering a company, seed funding and office space for military veterans, free company shuttles, coveted spots at local schools for the children of company executives, and special apartments for employees of AI startups.

So we’re left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Put bluntly, which of the following situations would you rather be in? We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice when it’s put that way, especially once you realize there’s probably enough money in your budget to get these exceptional people—it’s just being spent in the wrong places. Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring, according to the Corporate Executive Board.74 Per employee Training spend: $606.36 Hiring spend: $456.44 % of total HR expense Training spend: 18.3% Hiring spend: 13.6% % of revenue Training spend: 0.18% Hiring spend: 0.15% Companies spent more on training current employees than on hiring new employees. Data from 2012.

We’re influenced by how issues are framed. Many 401(k) plans no longer ask employees whether they want to contribute. Instead, they ask employees if they want to opt out of participating. If we were rational, it wouldn’t matter how the question was framed. But in this case, it produces a radically different outcome. By asking employees if they want to opt out, 401(k) plans tap into our tendency toward inertia and make participation appear to be the norm. Result: Many more employees put away money for retirement. Similarly, we can be influenced by how investment gains and losses are framed. We might be told that, “over the past 50 years, stocks have made money in 75 percent of all calendar years.” Alternatively, we might be told that “over the past 50 years, stocks have lost money in 25 percent of all calendar years.” The two sentences tell us the same thing—yet the first description makes stocks seem more appealing.

The right way to think about domain knowledge is as a corporate capital asset, as dollars of investment in the head of each knowledge worker, put there by organizational investment in that employee. When that person leaves, the asset is gone. If you did a rigorous accounting of this human capital, you would be obliged to declare an extraordinary loss each time one of your people quit.

Diversity, Equal Opportunity, and Success are Core Principals Driving the Mission of the Green Card Organization of the United States of America The Green Card Organization is a reputable institution that provides a service for individuals who have a desire to immigrate by implementing a wide variety of services from basic to the most complex. The Green Card Organization can ensure error-free applications by assisting any individual who requires additional aid to simplify the process and guarantee a complete and accurate submission. Plenty of legal procedures are made easier, and by working with the Green Card Organization, their specialized services can fit the need of any client. The Green Card Organization provides expertise on the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery program. This program can be difficult to complete without error, as over 40% of applicants that are self-handled are disqualified due to inaccurate information. This lottery allows only one submission per year, and the Green Card Organization believes their assistance will guarantee qualification and the possibility of obtaining a Green card. “For everyone the process of receiving a Green card is different, however when that amazing moment comes that you will receive confirmation, we will be here to help. Time is of the essence when it comes to the process of a successful Green card applicant, it is important to go through the immigration process according to the timeline and correctly. Delays in the process can result in termination. Here at our organization, we will make sure that everything happens quickly and correctly for you. Our team of immigration experts will keep everything on track and assist you with all the necessary procedures. We provide personalized services and will make sure that no opportunity is missed to help each and every one of our clients achieve their goal. Your success is our success!” The Green Card Organization website provides important immigration information, such as different ways to obtain a Green card. The Green Card Organization explains that one of the most common ways to receive a Green card is through the sponsorship of a family member. The family member must be a U.S. citizen, or a Green card holder themselves. Additional details describe instances on who is permitted to apply for a Green card so the client is able to make certain they are eligible. Another way the Green Card Organization explains how to obtain a Green card is through a job, meaning their professional background and/or business dealings. An employer can petition for an employee to get a Green card, but they first must obtain a labor certification and file Form I-140, known as the Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker. Other individuals who deal in American Investments may apply for the Green card if they have sizeable assets in the United States. Any individual can self-petition and apply for a Green card without a labor certification as long as they are able to prove that they considerably contribute to the American workforce. The Green Card Organization provides a list of special jobs regarding professionals who are permitted to apply for a Green card with Form I-360, known as the Petition of Amerasian, Widow(er), or Special Immigrant.

Looking back, a big reason we hit our goal early was that we decided to invest our time, money, and resources into three key areas: customer service (which would build our brand and drive word of mouth), culture (which would lead to the formation of our core values), and employee training and development (which would eventually lead to the creation of our Pipeline Team).

simply introducing two employees who don’t know each other is probably the easiest and fastest way to invest in social dividends.

There are many potential explanations for the less-than-robust performance, but IBM’s current strategy suggests that one component at least is a challenge to the traditional shrink-wrapped software business. As much as any software provider in the industry, IBM’s software business was optimized and built for a traditional enterprise procurement model. This typically involves lengthy evaluations of software, commonly referred to as “bake-offs,” followed by the delivery of a software asset, which is then installed and integrated by some combination of buyer employees, IBM services staff, or third-party consultants. This model, as discussed previously, has increasingly come under assault from open source software, software offered as a pure service or hosted and managed on public cloud infrastructure, or some combination of the two. Following the multi-billion dollar purchase of Softlayer, acquired to beef up IBM’s cloud portfolio, IBM continued to invest heavily in two major cloud-related software projects: OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. The latter, which is what is commonly referred to as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, may give us both an idea of how IBM’s software group is responding to disruption within the traditional software sales cycle and their level of commitment to it. Specifically, IBM’s implementation of Cloud Foundry, a product called Bluemix, makes a growing portion of IBM’s software portfolio available as a consumable service. Rather than negotiate and purchase software on a standalone basis, then, IBM customers are increasingly able to consume the products in a hosted fashion.

The five most highly correlated factors are: Organizational culture. Strong feelings of burnout are found in organizations with a pathological, power-oriented culture. Managers are ultimately responsible for fostering a supportive and respectful work environment, and they can do so by creating a blame-free environment, striving to learn from failures, and communicating a shared sense of purpose. Managers should also watch for other contributing factors and remember that human error is never the root cause of failure in systems. Deployment pain. Complex, painful deployments that must be performed outside of business hours contribute to high stress and feelings of lack of control.4 With the right practices in place, deployments don’t have to be painful events. Managers and leaders should ask their teams how painful their deployments are and fix the things that hurt the most. Effectiveness of leaders. Responsibilities of a team leader include limiting work in process and eliminating roadblocks for the team so they can get their work done. It’s not surprising that respondents with effective team leaders reported lower levels of burnout. Organizational investments in DevOps. Organizations that invest in developing the skills and capabilities of their teams get better outcomes. Investing in training and providing people with the necessary support and resources (including time) to acquire new skills are critical to the successful adoption of DevOps. Organizational performance. Our data shows that Lean management and continuous delivery practices help improve software delivery performance, which in turn improves organizational performance. At the heart of Lean management is giving employees the necessary time and resources to improve their own work. This means creating a work environment that supports experimentation, failure, and learning, and allows employees to make decisions that affect their jobs. This also means creating space for employees to do new, creative, value-add work during the work week—and not just expecting them to devote extra time after hours. A good example of this is Google’s 20% time policy, where the company allows employees 20% of their week to work on new projects, or IBM’s “THINK Friday” program, where Friday afternoons are designated for time without meetings and employees are encouraged to work on new and exciting projects they normally don’t have time for.

Another problem is the number of options available for investment allocation in pension plans. Even grocery shoppers can get overwhelmed by the number of choices available. For example, a store display of 6 flavors of jam results in more purchases than a display of 24 flavors of jam. Employees can also get overwhelmed when they have hundreds of investment choices in their pension plan. An overwhelmed employee delays making decisions so long that he or she never ends up participating in the plan. One study shows that the probability of participation by an employee falls by 1.5–2 percent for every ten mutual funds added to the menu. Having fewer funds to choose from leads to higher participation.16

Employees who work for a company whose stock price increase ranked among the top 20 percent of all firms in the past five years allocated 31 percent of their contributions to the company stock. This compares to an allocation of only 13 percent to company stock in firms whose performance was in the worst 20 percent. The actual 401(k) asset allocation behavior of employees suggests that they use the past price trend (the representativeness bias) as a determinant for investing in the company stock (the familiarity bias).

If this is how you see your role and if this is what you are doing when you spend time with your people —setting unique expectations, highlighting and perfecting individual styles, and running interference —you cannot help but be drawn toward your most talented employees. Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.

Here’s how “save more tomorrow” works. When new employees join a company, in addition to the regular decisions they are asked to make about what percentage of their paycheck to invest in their company’s retirement plan, they are also asked what percentage of their future salary raises they would be willing to invest in the retirement plan. It is difficult to sacrifice consumption today for saving in the distant future, but it is psychologically easier to sacrifice consumption in the future, and even easier to give up a percentage of a salary increase that one does not yet have.

For years, we have all been educated in the public school system and taught how to be an employee where we trade hours for dollars. It’s time to learn a new way of making money for yourself and your family. You

better idea would be to keep the same number of staff you have now and invest in high upside-leverage “performance enhancement” training, which would result in those same employees becoming as much as 50 to 100 percent more effective.

The modern Berkshire Hathaway that he had created churned out new beads for the rosary almost like a clockwork. Buffett’s hunt for things to buy had become more ambitious, free of the cigar butts and lawsuits of the decades before. The great engine of compounding worked as a servant on his behalf, at exponential speed and under the gathering approval of a public gaze. The method was the same: estimate an investment’s intrinsic value, handicap its risk, buy using margin of safety, concentrate, stay in the circle of competence, let it roll as compounding did the work. Anyone could understand these simple ideas, but few could execute them. Even though Buffett made the process look effortless, the technique and discipline underlying it actually did involve an enormous amount of work for him and his employees. As

Around $300,000 of the total $600,000 that was raised by Augur's funding team comes from a man named Joe Costello. Costello is a successful tech entrepreneur, known to be one of Steve Jobs' top picks for the new CEO position of Apple itself. Following the smart money isn’t always a dumb idea. Gambling or casino are terms never used by Joey Krug, a young Pomona college dropout, but also Augur's lead developer. He and the small team of just five employees use the term “prediction market.” Due

Media City, Dubai, UAE – Kazema Portable Toilets, one of the leading suppliers of plastic portable toilets, GRP portable toilets and sinks, and other portable sanitation equipment today, this week excitedly announced they have been named a finalist for their entry into the “RSA Customer Focus of the Year Award’ at the Gulf Capital SME Awards 2017. With all portable products being made from high quality, durable materials that can withstand the demands of sanitation, Kazema Portable Toilets carries a wide variety of ancillary products and accessories designed to assist business owners in earning more. Now in its 6th year as a regarded small to mid-sized business recognition awards ceremony, the SME Awards proudly identify startups, innovative SMES with exemplary products and services, SMEs which invest in their employees’ environment and customer strategy, and also the visionary entrepreneurs at the helm. “We’ve created a portable solution that is compatible with any business looking to add depth, expansion, and productivity to their operation,” said Raj, Founder and Owner of Kazema Portable Toilets. “We provide our clients with professional support worldwide that enables them to supply clients locally with our product, as well as harness it for widespread exportation.” Recognized for their high-stock, ready-to-use durable product today, Kazema Portable Toilets is one of the front-runners for their SME awards category. Kazema beat out hundreds in the category to be regarded as a finalist for their entrepreneurial solution to a problem every person encounters daily. “We are passionate about our work here at Kazema Portable Toilets, and we are honored to be named a finalist in such a reputable competition,” said Raj. “We want to thank SME for the recognition, and look forward to winning our category.

Egg franchise sector is projected to grow at 10% in coming five years The growth of egg franchise sector in India will be increased due to urbanization, changing lifestyle and consumption pattern. Moreover, people demand more luxurious outlets to enjoy with friends and families while eating delicious egg dishes. A plethora of new egg franchise establishments have contributed towards massive development of egg industry. As per experts, the sector is estimated to grow at 10% in forthcoming years may become leading sector to attract more investors. There are numerous evolving trends in egg industry that are contributing to generating futuristic opportunities. Indore based start-up egg franchise brand, Andeywala has produced amazing business model to provide better infrastructure facilities at low investment. Now it becomes easy to start new business with Andeywala. Besides this, sector is expected to provide employment to millions of people, an increased number of egg restaurants will require employees. Tier 1 and tier 2 cities are crowded with food franchises but none of them exclusively egg dishes.

Working right through lunch is a false economy. The value of that extra time at your desk or in saved expenses pales in comparison to the cost of a lost opportunity to learn or grow or to invest in an employee. If you skip lunch or eat lunch alone, you are wasting opportunities.

When employees trust the leadership, they become brand ambassadors and in turn cause progressive change in their families, society, and environment. The return on investment to business is automatic, with greater productivity, business growth, and inspired customers.” Contrast

Does the flat tax work?...The flat tax works in a country that is a former Communist state, with no investment capital, and low wage rates, which needs to build a capitalist economy from a base of approximately zero. The flat tax works if people are willing to pay a 20% sales tax on everything they buy to make up for lower revenue. The flat tax works if employers are willing to pay 34%, or more, in Social Security taxes for every employee they hire. The flat tax works in a country where almost everyone has the same amount of wealth so there's no need for the distributive effect of graduated rates. And if all these conditions are met, the flat-rate tax will probably work as long as the economy is on a path of steady growth.

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

God’s angels are indifferent and apathetic. They have no feelings. They know nothing of passion, of love, of beauty, or even of justice. They understand nothing. They are the indoctrinated employees in God’s investment bank. They do nothing but praise themselves and each other and their boss and their company. Opportunistic cheaters and thieves of love and justice and beauty they are. Their CEO though, isn’t God but Satan. Though without a doubt on the surface it seems as if angels work for the Lord, and they love our God and praise Him, but secretly and really, they answer to the major shareholder, Lucifer. They bow to him unconditionally and without thought. They themselves, like the weak-willed who ought to have fallen, the sheep and the scorpions, lacked the courage and bravery to stand up to God when he founded the bank of existence. They agreed to the company policy but work secretly to overthrow it in disdain at their creator’s vision. The boldest and courageous of the angels is in fact Satan himself.

I wrote this book for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs who want to offer good jobs but don’t think they can because controlling costs is so important to their business. You will see that offering good jobs can in fact reduce costs and increase profits as long as it is combined with operational excellence. If you want to offer good jobs and low prices at the same time, operational excellence is not optional, it is mandatory.

Like financial investments, company harassment of employees generally has a long term payback as their victims organize and tell their horror stories to the world.

Harrah’s had committed to finishing the new Octavius hotel tower at Caesars Palace and spent $1.1 billion in capital investments in 2008. By 2010, capital investments had dropped to just $160 million. One bellman at The Paris described the years after the Apollo/TPG takeover: “It felt ugly after the buyout. Before you could service the guest, it was a great place to work before those private equity guys took over.” Attrition and hiring freezes meant that employees were often forced to do the work of two people. Customers were suddenly facing longer lines to check in and have their luggage delivered, which proved stressful both for guests and the remaining staff. Holes in the wall weren’t fixed because maintenance crews were let go, and there was no money for repairs anyway. Duct-taped carpet was evident everywhere. The system for delivering and bussing room service orders broke down, leaving carts of food scraps next to elevators and guest rooms, leading customers to complain and forcing the union to intervene.

To fill this gap in the capital market, Davis and Rock set themselves up as a limited partnership, the same legal structure that had been used by a short-lived rival called Draper, Gaither & Anderson.[18] Rather than identifying startups and then seeking out corporate investors, they began by raising a fund that would render corporate investors unnecessary. As the two active, or “general,” partners, Davis and Rock each seeded the fund with $100,000 of their own capital. Then, ignoring the easy loans to be had from the fashionable SBIC structure, they raised just under $3.2 million from some thirty “limited” partners—rich individuals who served as passive investors.[19] The beauty of this size and structure was that the Davis & Rock partnership now had a war chest seven and a half times larger than an SBIC, and with it the ammunition to supply companies with enough capital to grow aggressively. At the same time, by keeping the number of passive investors under the legal threshold of one hundred, the partnership flew under the regulatory radar, avoiding the restrictions that ensnared the SBICs and Doriot’s ARD.[20] Sidestepping yet another weakness to be found in their competitors, Davis and Rock promised at the outset to liquidate their fund after seven years. The general partners had their own money in the fund, and thus a healthy incentive to invest with caution. At the same time, they could deploy the outside partners’ capital for a limited time only. Their caution would be balanced with deliberate aggression. Indeed, everything about the fund’s design was calculated to support an intelligent but forceful growth mentality. Unlike the SBICs, Davis & Rock raised money purely in the form of equity, not debt. The equity providers—that is, the outside limited partners—knew not to expect dividends, so Davis and Rock were free to invest in ambitious startups that used every dollar of capital to expand their business.[21] As general partners, Davis and Rock were personally incentivized to prioritize expansion: they took their compensation in the form of a 20 percent share of the fund’s capital appreciation. Meanwhile, Rock was at pains to extend this equity mentality to the employees of his portfolio companies. Having witnessed the effect of employee share ownership on the early culture of Fairchild, he believed in awarding managers, scientists, and salesmen with stock and stock options. In sum, everybody in the Davis & Rock orbit—the limited partners, the general partners, the entrepreneurs, their key employees—was compensated in the form of equity.

Leverage Integrations as a Service In a start-up, you always need to be on the lookout for shortcuts to save you time and money. Don’t corners that will have a negative effect—just look for ways to triple your productivity. No matter how fast I could build integrations, I could never build them all. But in 2012, a new company called Zapier was building a platform to integrate web services together. This was perfect for WebMerge, as I could essentially build an integration to every one of their connected apps, with one single integration. WebMerge was one of the first 100 apps on Zapier, and it instantly allowed WebMerge customers to integrate their documents with each of those 100 apps. Over the years, Zapier blew up and now has thousands of apps available. Zapier was by far our largest integration partner with over 50 percent of our revenue coming from customers using Zapier. Investing in this early platform was crucial and sped up our integration releases by many years. What’s your Zapier story? Is there a partner out there that can open your business to a whole new market—or just help you get your product in front of new customers years ahead of schedule?

Financially literate employees are more productive and engaged than those people who are financially stressed all the time.

The relationship between employer and employee is permeated by the same spirit of indifference. The word “employer” contains the whole story: the owner of capital employs another human being as he “employs” a machine. They both use each other for the pursuit of their economic interests; their relationship is one in which both are means to an end, both are instrumental to each other. It is not a relationship of two human beings who have any interest in the other outside of this mutual usefulness. The same instrumentality is the rule in the relationship between the businessman and his customer. The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy. The attitude toward work has the quality of instrumentality; in contrast to a medieval artisan the modern manufacturer is not primarily interested in what he produces; he produces essentially in order to make a profit from his capital investment, and what he produces depends essentially on the market which promises that the investment of capital in a certain branch will prove to be profitable.

We invest our time in an extensive selection process, including an in-depth background check. Once hired, our security guards undergo rigorous training in first aid, fire prevention, customer service, and more. They provide Guards Services Los Angeles, CA to maintain a safe environment and reassure both employees and the public. Guardian Eagle Security Inc's security personnel can make a huge difference when dealing with incidents with minimal operational disruption. Contact information 11500 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA, 90064 (888) 990-0002 Info@ges.net

As a people leader, your job is simple: You are the link between organizational mission-critical objectives and the effort your employees invest in achieving those objectives. And you just have to keep those two pieces working together smoothly.

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)

When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer. In 1982, Simons changed Monemetrics’ name to Renaissance Technologies Corporation, reflecting his developing interest in these upstart companies. Simons came to see himself as a venture capitalist as much as a trader. He spent much of the week working in an office in New York City, where he interacted with his hedge fund’s investors while also dealing with his tech companies. Simons also took time to care for his children, one of whom needed extra attention. Paul, Simons’s second child with Barbara, had been born with a rare hereditary condition called ectodermal dysplasia. Paul’s skin, hair, and sweat glands didn’t develop properly, he was short for his age, and his teeth were few and misshapen. To cope with the resulting insecurities, Paul asked his parents to buy him stylish and popular clothing in the hopes of fitting in with his grade-school peers. Paul’s challenges weighed on Simons, who sometimes drove Paul to Trenton, New Jersey, where a pediatric dentist made cosmetic improvements to Paul’s teeth. Later, a New York dentist fitted Paul with a complete set of implants, improving his self-esteem. Baum was fine with Simons working from the New York office, dealing with his outside investments, and tending to family matters. Baum didn’t need much help. He was making so much money trading various currencies using intuition and instinct that pursuing a systematic, “quantitative” style of trading seemed a waste of

Rich Lesser, the CEO of The Boston Consulting Group, calls this building an “opt-in” culture. “The reality of being an employer is not that you make people feel an obligation to stay,” Lesser told us. “You hire the best people you can possibly find. Then it’s up to you to create an environment where great people decide to stay and invest their time. Since we made this an emphasis, our employee satisfaction scores have been better than ever, and our retention of top talent is substantially higher than a decade ago.

As with her previous tours, the process of defining the tour was a collaboration between Gultekin and her manager. “Dan always asks, ‘What do you want to do in five years?’ and we work backwards from there,” Gultekin told us. “I want to be a general manager, so we decided that I needed to add sales to my toolkit. I had never done sales in my life but he knew that my fresh perspective could be useful.” Notice how the mission had to serve the needs of both the employee and the business; Gultekin and LinkedIn have a strong alliance because they have the mutual trust to commit to a mutual investment (shifting to sales) that will provide mutual benefit (a more well-rounded skill set for Gultekin, and a fresh perspective for LinkedIn).

If we can’t go back to the age of lifetime employment, and the status quo is untenable, it’s time to rebuild the employer-employee relationship. The business world needs a new employment framework that facilitates mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. An ideal framework encourages employees to develop their personal networks and act entrepreneurially without becoming mercenary job-hoppers. It allows companies to be dynamic and demanding but discourages them from treating employees like disposable assets.

In an alliance, employer and employee develop a relationship based on how they can add value to each other. Employers need to tell their employees, “Help make our company more valuable, and we’ll make you more valuable.” As Russ Hagey, Bain & Company’s chief talent officer, tells recruits and consultants, “We are going to make you more marketable [in the labor market in general].” Employees need to tell their bosses, “Help me grow and flourish, and I’ll help the company grow and flourish.” Employees invest in the company’s success; the company invests in the employees’ market value. By building a mutually beneficial alliance rather than simply exchanging money for time, employer and employee can invest in the relationship and take the risks necessary to pursue bigger payoffs.

Gamson said he builds trust through honesty: “I know my employees are likely to leave the company at some point. Recognizing that fact doesn’t temper my interest in investing in them. On the contrary, it fuels it. Assuring them that it’s more than OK to talk together about their career, even if it doesn’t include LinkedIn, helps establish an atmosphere of open honesty, and helps them understand that we are aligned in our interest in making them better.

So don’t treat tweeting on the job like an infraction—encourage it! Ask your employees to expense lunches with interesting people. By helping employees invest in their individual networks, you build an environment of trust and reciprocity. And when you ask employees to tap their own networks on behalf of the company, they’ll be more likely to respond favorably.