The European Union: A Failed Experiment - Bill Lee. How long can this go on? According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the 17-nation euro zone remains the “weakest link” in our global economy after years of economic stagnation, mired in high unemployment, plagued with stalled or contracting economies, and paralyzed by political dysfunction.
Similarly, The Economist also lambasts eerily complacent EU leaders for “sleepwalking through an economic wasteland.” The resulting human suffering is sobering — tens of millions of Europeans who want work can’t find it, and many of them are facing truly desperate situations. Here are just a few observations, which I address not to EU officials — whose performance, to my mind, justifies their removal (see below) — but rather, as a friend speaking to ordinary Europeans who are suffering under their policies and who, unfortunately, have not been accorded the power to do anything about it. In a phrase, it’s time to throw out the EU project itself. The whole thing, root and branch. (167) How to master your time - Leading a better life - Quora. Imagine you were a Jedi master called Bob (your parents, whilst skilled in the ways of the force weren’t the best at choosing names).
The love of your life - Princess Lucia – is trapped in a burning building as you hurry to save her. You might think of Lucia as the embodiment of your dreams, your aspirations – she is your most important thing. Unfortunately, before you can reach her an army of stormtroopers open fire. The incoming stream of lasers demand your attention – if you fail to dodge them, you’re dead. We all know how a hero resolves this dilemma. The secret to mastering your time is to systematically focus on importanceand suppress urgency. {*style:<ul>*}{*style:<li>*}{*style:<b>*}Schedule your priorities. Act Like a Leader Before You Are One - Amy Gallo - Best Practices. If you want to become a leader, don’t wait for the fancy title or the corner office.
You can begin to act, think, and communicate like a leader long before that promotion. Even if you’re still several levels down and someone else is calling all the shots, there are numerous ways to demonstrate your potential and carve your path to the role you want. What the Experts Say “It’s never foolish to begin preparing for a transition no matter how many years away it is or where you are in your career,” says Muriel Maignan Wilkins, coauthor of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence. Michael Watkins, the chairman of Genesis Advisers and author of The First 90 Days and Your Next Move, agrees.
Not only does the planning help you develop the necessary skills and leadership presence, it also increases your chances of getting the promotion because people will already recognize you as a leader. Principles to Remember Do: Don’t: The "Sandwich Approach" Undermines Your Feedback - Roger Schwarz. By Roger Schwarz | 10:00 AM April 19, 2013 Have you ever used the “sandwich approach” to give negative feedback to your direct reports? You sandwich the negative feedback between two pieces of positive feedback. It’s a common method, but the sandwich approach may be undermining both your feedback and your relationships with your direct reports. First, let’s look at why leaders use the sandwich approach and why it doesn’t work. They think it’s easier for people to hear and accept negative feedback when it comes with positive feedback. They assume the sandwich approach provides balanced feedback. They believe that giving positive feedback with negative feedback reduces discomfort and anxiety.
Effective leaders are transparent about the strategies they use when working with others. Imagine that you plan to use the sandwich approach with Alex and Stacey, two direct reports who just gave a presentation to your senior leadership team. Identify your strategy for the conversation. Your Optimism Might Be Stifling Your Team - Liz Wiseman. By Liz Wiseman | 2:00 PM May 1, 2013 I admit that I’m prone to an optimistic outlook, a belief that most problems can be tackled with hard work and the right mindset.
I’ve read the research that indicates that positive thinkers tend to do better in school, work and life. Perhaps I even assumed that optimism was infectious and that people wanted to work with a confident, hopeful leader. In the true spirit of optimism, how could this possibly go wrong? Then I found out from a colleague that he didn’t find my optimism nearly as reassuring as I did. We were in the middle of a high-stakes research project with a small window of opportunity to write an article for a prominent academic publication. To pull this off, we needed to complete a complex analysis, do a round of additional research, and actually write the article, all while working on several other projects and operating on a thin budget.
To me, this seemed like a feasible, interesting challenge, and I enthusiastically dove in. Raghuram Rajan | Why India slowed. Updated: Tue, Apr 30 2013. 11 47 PM IST For a country as poor as India, growth should be what the US calls a “no-brainer”. It is largely a matter of providing public goods: decent governance, security of life and property, and basic infrastructure such as roads, bridges, ports, and power plants, as well as access to education and basic healthcare. Unlike many equally poor countries, India already has a strong entrepreneurial class, a reasonably large and well-educated middle class, and a number of world-class corporations that can be enlisted in the effort to provide these public goods. Why, then, has India’s gross domestic product growth slowed so much, from nearly 10% year-on-year in 2010-11 to 5% today? Was annual growth of nearly 8% in the decade from 2002 to 2012 an aberration?
I believe that it was not, and that two important factors have come into play in the last two years. In short, strong growth tests economic institutions’ capacity to cope, and India’s were found lacking. Maliki's Iraq: Rape, Executions and Torture - Human Rights. Baghdad - Heba al-Shamary (name changed for security reasons) was released last week from an Iraqi prison where she spent the last four years.
"I was tortured and raped repeatedly by the Iraqi security forces," she told Al Jazeera. "I want to tell the world what I and other Iraqi women in prison have had to go through these last years. It has been a hell. " Heba was charged with terrorism, a fate faced by many Iraqis who are detained by security forces. "I now want to explain to people what is occurring in the prisons that [Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki and his gangs are running," Heba added. Heba's story, horrific as it is, unfortunately is but one example of what a recent report from Amnesty International refers to as "a grim cycle of human rights abuses" in Iraq today.
One Iraqi woman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said her nephew was first detained when he was just 18. While her nephew was free, he informed his aunt of how he and other detainees were tortured. Protests. To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology - Rafe Sagarin. By Rafe Sagarin | 12:30 PM March 5, 2013 Remember when Apple’s stock traded at $7 a share? I do, because that’s when I sold my shares. Tech experts’ sage predictions had convinced me that the Mac would never make a dent in the PC market.
As it turned out, the Mac didn’t need to make a dent, because Apple mutated its cute computer DNA into cute music players and phones that fit massive unfilled niches. Yet even the genius architect of this turnaround made faulty predictions sometimes. Remember the invention Steve Jobs said was going to be “bigger than the PC”? You may have seen a mall cop riding one recently. Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future. Fortunately, there’s a rich source of lessons on how to thrive in an unpredictable world, and it has been cranking out success stories for 3.5 billion years. All of Earth’s successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one.
Decentralization. Redundancy. Symbiotic relationships. Schumpeter: Pope, CEO. Infrastructure in India: RIPPP. The IRS Just Sent Me $160,000. Can I Keep It? - Adi Ignatius - Our Editors. By Adi Ignatius | 2:18 PM February 7, 2013 We’ve probably all had the experience where a store cashier accidentally hands over too much in change, and we kindly point out the error and decline the windfall. We’re basically forgoing “free” money, but we feel good about doing the right thing and perhaps saving the cashier from later being personally penalized for the error. But what if it were the faceless and evil-ish U.S. Internal Revenue Service that made the mistake? What would our instincts tell us to do then? I recently received a letter from the IRS alerting me that it had made changes to my 2011 tax calculation.
In this case, however, the change was in my favor. Now what? I’m almost certain the IRS made a mistake. I’m an editor, with an editor’s salary. Still, friends have offered conflicting advice on what I should do. Others say that would be unethical. Then there’s a third consideration. What would you do? The moral aspect is clear. Life is full of ethical dilemmas. The paradox in Chidambaram’s budget. Updated: Wed, May 15 2013. 04 50 PM IST Here is a paradox worth paying attention to. Finance minister P. Chidambaram was able to keep the fiscal deficit for 2012-13 within the target he had set himself because total spending by the government was around Rs.60,000 crore less than budgeted. One would have expected him to build on this austerity, even though it was led by curbs on capital spending rather than subsidy cuts. There are no prizes for guessing why we have seen a strategic switch from austerity to profligacy: there is a national election due in 2014.
The good news is that Chidambaram has promised a sharp increase in development spending while bringing down the subsidy bill as a percentage of the gross national product, by around 0.6 percentage points. It seems that the arithmetic depends on two factors: the ability of the government to control subsidies and the success of the proposed disinvestments. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha is executive editor, Mint. India’s public finances: A walk on the wild side. Semiconductor Industry to Recover this Year. Increased sales of electronics and new forms of computing devices will drive the worldwide semiconductor market to growth this year after a slowdown in 2012, the nonprofit organization World Semiconductor Trade Statistics said on Monday. Semiconductor revenue this year will grow by 4.5 percent compared to 2012, in which yearly revenue was US$290 billion.
Last year's revenue dropped by 3.2 percent compared to 2011, primarily due to a challenging global economy and a slowdown in the Chinese market. Semiconductors provide the base for computing and are used in a range of products including PCs, smartphones, tablets, cars and medical devices. Semiconductor demand over the past few years has been closely tied to the supply and demand of products, with more product purchases helping semiconductor sales grow. The Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents semiconductor companies in the U.S., also said the semiconductor market is poised to rebound next year.
Why india is so GREAT^^^ AMAZING F@Cts in india. What defines the Indian Right? Reporting January’s general election results, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper classified parties into four blocks: Arab parties, Centre-Left, Ultra-Orthodox and Right. Two of these, the first and the third, are religious categories, the other two are ideological. If we were to classify Indian political parties how would we? Let’s explore this because there has come to be in India recently a class of public intellectuals who refer to themselves as being of the “Right”. Writer Swapan Dasgupta says: “The Right is an endangered community in India’s English-language media. I happen to be one of the few to have retained a precarious toehold in the mainstream media.” Right is not an Indian term. To be of the Right in Europe and the US is to be conservative.
The modern American conservative movement is defined by the Catholic writer William Buckley. In American politics, Right means supporting the following: 1) Low taxes 2) A strong military posture 4) Free market capitalism 5) The death penalty. Political donation with every spoon of sugar:Something Fresh:Nidhi Nath Srinivas. Are you an Akhilesh Yadav supporter? Do you believe in Bhupinder Singh Hooda's politics? Are you willing to invest in the success of the BJP in Karnataka and the Badals in Punjab?
No matter what your answer is, it is irrelevant. Every Indian is being used today to bolster the power of these regional satraps. Each time we buy a bag of sugar, we make a political donation. The game being played using us is so ludicrously simple that success is guaranteed. So Yadav encourages UP mills to clamour for trade barriers so that supply is curtailed, prices rise and consumers pay more. In neighbouring Haryana, Hooda realises that this is a great formula for political gain bankrolled by the aam aadmi. Like all good strategies, it travels well across crops and regions.
How did he achieve this success? Luckily, this strategy can be easily foiled if the Centre plucks up courage. No one resents farmers earning better. Www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/publications/13/Carr-Salzman.pdf. Management Is (Still) Not Leadership - John Kotter. Manmohan Singh’s Second Wind by Shashi Tharoor. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW DELHI – In September, India’s mild-mannered prime minister, Manmohan Singh, turned 80. He also turned a page: After months of being pilloried by every pundit with a soapbox for indecision and weakness, and for presiding over “policy paralysis” while corrupt colleagues allegedly made off with the country’s silver, Singh has boldly seized the initiative.
A series of reform announcements, and some frank talk to the public, have underscored his new message: “I am in charge.” The initial steps that he has announced are impressive. Likewise, the government has reduced subsidies on diesel and cooking gas in the face of vociferous opposition, including a one-day strike that shut down the country. The rebirth of Singh the reformer came after a long wait. But Singh’s most recent chapters have been less positive. Within Singh’s Congress Party, the pressure will mount to match economic-reform initiatives with “pro-poor” programs. The rich world's economy: The gift that goes on giving. The Best-Performing CEOs in the World. It’s no accident that chief executives so often focus on short-term financial results at the expense of longer-term performance. They have every incentive to do so.
If they don’t make their quarterly or annual numbers, their compensation drops and their jobs are in jeopardy. Stock analysts, shareholders, and often their own boards judge them harshly if they miss near-term goals. And without equally strong pressure to manage for a future that stretches beyond 90 or 180 days, CEOs’ behavior is unlikely to change. Five years ago we launched a global project to address that challenge. Three years ago, in the January–February 2010 issue of HBR, we introduced such a scorecard.
Judging CEO Performance For the most part, we used the same methodology that we did three years ago. Assess the long-term performance of each CEO, from the first day on the job to the last. (Or for CEOs still in office, until August 31, 2012, our last day of data collection.) Reflect the global nature of business. Daily chart: A historic year. Semiconductor Stock Outlook - Jan 2013 - Industry Outlook. The Industry Handbook: The Semiconductor Industry. A new boss at Tata: From pupil to master. Structural problems can’t be fixed with cyclical tools. When Jim Crow Drank Coke. Next rate cut? The ball is in Chidambaram’s court. The economy: Looking better.