O2 GLOBAL BUSINESS NETWORK

The Most Beautiful Woman in Films BEAUTY & BRAINS HEDY LAMARR

2018-02-18T03:43:00.001-08:00

GO ALL IN | STOP WORRYING & FAIL FORWARD! - One of the Best Motivational...

2018-01-27T13:17:00.001-08:00

Are U married or happy?

2018-01-25T04:39:00.001-08:00

Jack Ma's Life Advice Will Change Your Life (MUST WATCH)

2018-01-23T16:25:00.001-08:00

ANIVAR | MIDNIGHT BLUES

2018-01-23T06:26:00.001-08:00

HELLO WORLD | ANIVAR | (Special Mix feat The Runner)

2018-01-20T07:35:00.001-08:00

HELLO WORLD | ANIVAR | (Special Mix feat The Runner)

GIVE YOUR BRAIN A MENTAL VACATION!!!

If you have no break you're less efficient... tired and the next week starts slower than if you're relaxed and recharged, having replenished your inner mind.

ANI V | A STAR IS BORN

2018-01-19T17:11:00.001-08:00

Here is to life

2018-01-17T02:47:00.001-08:00

Here is to LIFE!!!

No complaints and no regrets
I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets
And I have learned that all you give, is all you get
So give it all you've got.....

How to make the PERFECT BODY and Sculpt LETHAL STRONG BUTTOCKS | Fitness...

2018-01-03T10:06:00.001-08:00

How to make the PERFECT BODY and Sculpt LETHAL STRONG BUTTOCKS | Fitness...

2018-01-01T13:21:00.001-08:00

CHANGING Paloma Faith | Amy Whinehouse New Mix | You Know that I am No Good

2017-12-31T16:36:00.001-08:00

Robbie Williams NEW MIX I FEEL | HOW TO - SURVIVING AGAINST ALL ODDS

2017-12-29T16:13:00.001-08:00

Mariatzela A DAY OUT

2017-11-26T12:35:00.001-08:00

Meeting customer expectations

2017-04-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

Meeting customer expectations

Today’s customers do not want digital versions of the same manual, bureaucratic processes they faced yesterday. They search, download, pay, and listen to music all in one go, so why should their electrical service or car insurance still make them run a gantlet of separate steps for searching, price quotation, purchasing, invoicing, delivery, payment, and activation?

Companies that want to win at digital adoption are therefore recognizing that they must reimagine and digitize entire “customer journeys.”

These are the beginning-to-end processes that customers experience in getting the product or service they need, across whichever channels they choose.

Getting the strategy right

The starting point for success is developing a clearly defined, coherent digital strategy that’s fully integrated with the overall corporate one. Without this deep alignment, any subsequent intervention is bound to fall short. Yet companies struggle to get their digital strategy right.

For more from Tanguy on how companies can build an effective digital strategy, see “What it takes to build your Digital Quotient.”)

The journey to digital maturity requires a whole-hearted commitment from a company’s leadership and a sustained investment in people, capabilities, technology, and cultural change.

How many journeys?

The total number of these “core journeys” will naturally vary by company, but a few patterns hold among major industries.

For banks, the core usually consists of between 10 and 20 journeys, with account opening and onboarding (across products); payments; mortgages; service requests (such as the ever-popular lost PIN codes); and credit-card issuance as especially prominent.

Life and retirement players look similar to banks, with 10 to 20 core journeys across account opening or enrollment, onboarding, servicing, and guidance.

The number is slightly smaller for telecommunications companies, where mobile postpaid sales, customer-care requests (such as one-off data usage adjustments), fixed-line provisioning, network repair and maintenance, and prepaid top-ups rank highly in a core of 8 to 15 journeys.

For electrical utilities, the number usually drops to fewer than 10, with sign-up, payment, meter reading, and change of address taking the lead.

STREAMLINED, SIMPLIFIED JOURNEYS SHOW IMPRESSIVE RESULTS QUICKLY—USUALLY ON SEVERAL FRONTS AT ONCE.

Faster mobile-phone sign-ups raised a telecommunications company’s customer satisfaction by 20 percent and reduced costs by 30 percent.

For a European lender, time for account opening and loan approval fell from days to minutes, customer-engagement opportunities rose from once a month to three or four times a week, and IT became far more agile, delivering new releases in a month instead of a year.

COMPANIES GET THEIR DIGITAL STRATEGY RIGHT BY ANSWERING THREE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS.

First, where will the most interesting digital opportunities and threats open up?
Second, how quickly and on what scale is the digital disruption likely to occur?
Third, what are the best responses to embrace these opportunities proactively and to reallocate resources away from the biggest threats?

The vast majority of companies will address this third question through more targeted strategic responses.

Unlocking digital value > Download this article

Raising your Digital Quotient: It’s better to focus on building an organization and culture that can realize the strategy that’s right for you.

Performance appraisal based on competencies

2017-03-21T14:38:00.001-07:00

Here is a tool for individual evaluation of performance and development.

The performance review tool is a comprehensive application used to help measure how well the employee has achieved goals that were set.

Measuring performance and competences is divided into eight general and five managerial subject areas.

What has changed in Management Consulting?

2017-03-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

What has changed in Management Consulting?

According to Turner, professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, there are eight fundamental objectives that impact on a management consultancy engagement’s success.

*For more insights into strategic management visit:

OPERATING AS MANY

2015-03-01T14:45:00.001-08:00

Biohackers

2013-10-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

Biohackers: The Next Computer Revolution, or Global Catastrophe in the Making?

by Doug Hornig - Casey Research


	It's become a commonplace to bemoan the fact that technological development has been proceeding at such a rapid clip that humans, still burdened with their Neolithic brains, cannot even comprehend what's happening. Many would say we're incapable of making wise decisions about how to handle our vast new powers. So far, our dilemmas have mostly revolved around our increasingly efficient methods of taking life. Now, however, we can also make it. And the ability to do so is no longer solely invested in white-jacketed cadres of latter-day Drs. Frankenstein. It's within reach of anyone with a few bucks for the proper tools, some free time, and Internet access. Welcome to the Next Big Thing: biohacking (or "DIYbiology," as it's sometimes called). Few are aware of this new phenomenon. Yet it has the potential to transform our world, for good or ill, more than just about anything else out there. Seriously. You see, biohacking grants individuals the ability to create synthetic life forms. It's all about gene sequencing. The first complete cellular genome sequences—from bacteria—weren't worked out until 1995. That required a lot of money, an elaborate lab, and some genius-level human brain power. But in the few short years since then, the game has changed completely. Why? Because of the merging of some of the irresistible trends of our age: instant information; computerization of everything that can be digitized, including most knowledge and fine motor functions; and sharply falling prices for sophisticated electronic equipment and the software to run it. Most important, biohacking is now possible because of the price of the raw materials. This chart shows the exponential decline in the cost of producing DNA base pairs: As DNA got cheaper, people realized they could experiment with it. And before you could say "whose molecule is that?," a revolution was brewing. Like so many of the others that preceded it—the personal computer, the Internet, 3D printing—this one is being powered by a loosely organized, dedicated coalition of young technogeeks with a largely open-source view of the world and the knowledge that they can create new life forms in their garage. They are, by most measures in a world that values specialization, amateurs. But these amateurs are not unlike those who once inhabited the Berkeley Homebrew Computer club… like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In other fields of science, such a dramatic rise in enthusiast tinkerers has presaged extraordinarily positive developments. But, as with every technological innovation, DIYbio is not without a potential dark side. Which raises a rather provocative question: What happens when the world of scientific exploration—and, more specifically, genetic experimentation—opens up to anyone with a broadband connection and a few pieces of lab equipment you can buy off of eBay? Or, to put it a little more dramatically, do you get a cure for cancer, or do you get World War Z? Let There Be New Life Forms… The term "biohacking" can be used to denote any tinkering with the body that involves adding technology to enhance or improve human capabilities. But for our purposes, we'll use the narrower meaning of genetic engineering conducted in non-institutional settings. Biohackers in general are driven by the desire to openly increase our knowledge base, sharing their discoveries and inviting others freely to make modifications without regard to patents, profits, or approval by governmental watchdogs. Biohackers constructed their temple in 2009, with the establishment of Brooklyn-based Genspace, the world's first government-compliant DIY biotech lab. Genspace is the democratization of science in a nutshell, a nonprofit funded by membership dues, tuition fees, and donations from supportive nonmembers. You can attach yourself to one of the scientists already embarked on a project, or you can set up one of your own. The only credential you need to bring is your enthusiasm for the subject, with Ph.D.s onsite to help you through the rough spots. While members supply much of their own equipment, Genspace provides the specialized, costlier biotech gear such as autoclaves, incubators, and PCR machines. (PCR stands for "polymerase chain reaction"; a PCR machine is the indispensable tool used by genetics researchers to quickly generate millions of copies of a particular DNA sequence.) Genspace members pay only $100 a month for access to top-flight people and hardware and, perhaps equally important, for freedom. As cofounder Ellen Jorgensen points out, "[Y]ou can work on a project and you don't have to justify to anyone that it's going to make a lot of money, that it's going to save mankind, or even that it's feasible." Just do it. The lab may once have been unique, but the idea is spreading across the globe. In the US alone, there are now about a dozen community biolabs, or "hackerspaces," as they're known. Along with Genspace, they include Boston's BOSSLAB, BioCurious in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles' LA Biohackers Lab (the, um, LAB Lab). They cooperate among themselves and also with a loose, international confederation of biohackers called, appropriately enough, DIYBio, which lists 15 organized DIY groups in North America, 11 in Europe, two in Asia, and two in Australia/New Zealand. Down the Unmapped Yellow Brick Road The path to making synthetic life is remarkably straightforward. For example, some biohackers wanted to make a plant that glows in the dark. Their plan: First, special software is used to design a new DNA sequence incorporating bioluminescence genes. Next, the new DNA sequences are printed out. Finally, the printed DNA is inserted into a special type of bacterium which can transfer its DNA into Arabidopsis, a small flowering member of the mustard family. The bacteria inject the new DNA into the cell nucleus of the flowers, which pass it on to their seeds, which can then be grown until they light up. Obviously, this project and others like it would not be possible without access to some very sophisticated yet affordable hard- and software. Genome Compiler, based in California and Israel, is the primary software provider. This company's stated goal is to help "design and program living things the same way that we design computer code," and it embraces "a vision of making biological design easier, cheaper, and open to people outside the research labs." You can actually download the Standard version of its compiler program from the company's website—for free. But it's San Francisco-based Cambrian Genomics that is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. This all-but-invisible startup has developed a revolutionary laser-printing system for DNA synthesis that supplies the preselected DNA 10,000 times more cheaply than conventional tech, with a dramatically reduced error rate. Its website is not very informative—perhaps because it has financial ties to DARPA—and if you go there you will find only a street address, phone number, and email. CEO Austen Heinz is, however, a bit more forthcoming. He's posted a video in which he rhapsodizes about "democratizing creation." In computer terms, he says, DIYbio is still at the punch-card level. His efforts are "designed to change behavior," Heinz says. "Every biology lab in the world will become more virtualized. They'll design code on a computer and then print out DNA. A biologist on a small budget should be able to design 50,000 different constructs at a time." He doesn't offer any further details on pricing, except to say that he already has some early paying clients. As to financing, you have to do some digging, but in addition to DARPA, the company appears to have significant backing from some high-powered Silicon Valley VC outfits. A Cambrian IPO would likely be a hot one. The Future: Prospects and Concerns Cambrian boasts among its founders Dr. George Church, a Harvard geneticist and author of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. He believes that DNA manipulation has the capacity to solve all of the world's problems. Just for starters: "We can now replace petroleum for fuels, chemicals, plastics, antibiotics and so forth. We can now start making those with biologically engineered machines." Dr. Church, however, adds a caveat: "I think we should be quite cautious. That doesn't mean that we should put moratoriums on new technologies, but it means licensing, surveillance, doing tests." That implies a certain level of government oversight. Which, in a way, puts Church at odds with labs like Genspace and the whole biohacking movement—and it foreshadows the looming, potentially epic conflict between authoritarian control and the democratization of biotechnology. But how real is the danger, and what is the DIYbio community doing about it? Everyone admits that there are risks involved in fooling around with synthetic life forms. But the biggest one is the threat of bioterrorism, and that's probably not going to come from the public DIYbio community. The horrible killer virus that unleashes World War Z is far more likely to emerge from a secret lab of some dedicated terrorist group. And you can be sure that the international intelligence agencies are on high alert for signs of any such development. As for regulation, the US government so far hasn't taken any steps to control at-home biology. One assumes that it will, at some point. But if it does—and it could, through limiting access to DIY biological materials, for example—it might succeed only in driving amateur labs underground, creating a vast new criminal enterprise in the process. In an attempt to fend off onerous regulation, biohackers themselves are being proactive. As reported in TheScientist: "In December 2011, Genspace … recruited an external advisory board of distinguished academic, government, and industry professionals to answer safety-related questions. The board also reviews the appropriateness of certain projects requiring a Biosafety Level 1 environment, ensures adherence to National Institutes of Health (NIH) recombinant DNA guidelines, and helps minimize the use of potentially hazardous reagents. For the larger DIYbio community, DIYbio.org and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars launched the 'Ask a Biosafety Expert' web portal, which allows anyone to submit biosafety- and biosecurity-related questions to a panel of biosafety professionals for a rapid response. And in the spring of 2011, the Wilson Center and DIYbio.org drafted the first-ever DIYbio code of conduct, which serves as a framework for helping achieve a vibrant, productive, and safe DIYbio community. These initiatives demonstrate that citizen scientists understand the risks associated with their work and feel a sense of responsibility to mitigate those risks." The NeoBiologic Age The Ages of Man have been many, from Paleo- to Neolithic and on through Bronze, Iron, Dark, Industrial, Atomic, Electronic, and Information. Now we are on the threshold of what might well be termed the NeoBiologic Age, and this one may involve the biggest leap forward of any. For the first time—and whether or not we have the wisdom for it—we're playing around with the creation of synthetic life. The ability to do so is not going to be confined to some elite caste which guards its secrets. It's going to be the province of anyone who can make a modest investment in the relevant soft- and hardware. No one can predict where that will lead. With so many more people conjuring up potential cancer cures, we may well get one far sooner than if the quest had remained confined to staffs of bio-pharma companies. Or we may get a new organism that kills healthy cells, not cancerous ones. That coin is in the air. Forty years ago, visionary Whole Earther Stewart Brand remarked that, "We are as gods so we might as well get good at it." Even he couldn't have known how right he was.

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Doug Hornig

An editor at Casey Research, Doug Hornig’s work can be read in "BIG GOLD" a monthly newsletter which focuses on mid- to large-cap gold stocks; "What We Now Know" – a free bi-weekly e-letter covering trends in investments, geopolitics, the economy, health and technology; and "The Daily Resource" an economy and investment column on kitcocasey.com. A former Edgar Award nominee, finalist for the Virginia Prize in both fiction and poetry, and a past winner of the Virginia Governor's Screenwriting competition, Doug lives on 30 mountainous acres in a county that just got its first stop light. He is an admitted political junkie, but hates all political parties. Doug has authored ten books and has written articles for Business Week, Playboy and more.

Is this the end of globalization?

2013-05-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

Evidence of the end of globalization is building up. According to Satyajit Das, growth in trade and cross border investment, which has underpinned prosperity and development, is being reversed in a major historical shift.

The European Central Bank cut its main interest rate to a new low of 0.50% in an attempt to drag the euro zone out of the longest recession in its history.

For many nations, following the global financial crisis, the advantages of greater economic and monetary integration are now less obvious.

By closing their economies and focusing domestically, some nations believe that they can capture a greater share of available growth and deliver greater prosperity for their citizens.

The financial crisis revealed that integration reduces the effectiveness of a nation’s economic policies, unless other nations take coordinated action.

Governments reacted to the global financial crisis by initiating large spending programs to support the economy. In many cases, there was significant financial leakage, with spending boosting imports rather than promoting domestic demand, employment, income and investment.

Various breakdowns — restrictions on trade, currency manipulation, capital controls and predatory regulations — now signal the retrenchment of globalization and return to autarky.

The motivation is protection of national industries, iconic businesses, employment, incomes and competitive advantage.

Direct intervention, artificially low interest rates and quantitative easing are deliberate policies to manipulate currencies. Devaluation makes exports more competitive assisting individual countries to capture a greater share of global trade, boosting growth. Devaluation is also used to reduce real debt levels by reducing the purchasing power of foreign investors holding a nation’s debt.

Free movement of capital has become increasingly restricted. Since 2008, the growth in cross border capital flows has slowed, with global financial assets increasing by just 1.9% annually — well below the 7.9% average growth from 1990 to 2007.

In addition, nations with high levels of government debt that face financing difficulties seek to limit capital outflows.

Low interest rates and weak currencies in developed economies have led capital to flow into emerging nations, with higher rates and stronger growth prospects. Brazil, South Korea and Switzerland have implemented controls on capital inflows.

Closed economies is a natural way to deal with these pressures, reasserting sovereign control. As one nation adopts such policies, it compels other countries to pursue similar strategies — with far-reaching consequences.

Satyajit Das is a former banker and author of Extreme Money and Traders Guns & Money

Wall Street Criminality and Pathological Greed

2013-04-29T06:31:00.001-07:00

Jeffrey Sachs Calls Out Wall Street Criminality and Pathological Greed

One of the things that Matt Stoller has stressed that the possibility of reform is remote until breaks within the elites take place.
Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, is a controversial figure for his neoliberal stance on macroeconomics and his role in promoting the use of “shock therapy” in emerging economies. But it is also important to recognize that criticism from a connected, respected insider has more significance than that of someone like Bill Black, who has made a career of taking on bank fraud but has never reached a top policy-making level.
This talk is blistering at several points. It was recorded at a conference “Fixing the Banking System for Good” on April 17 (hat tip Jesse). If you have trouble with the embedded version, try YouTube.
[NC's anonymous transcriber made a complete transcript of Sachs' statement, so I'm going to replace the partial transcript previously posted with what follows. --lambert]

Transcript
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University

Jeffrey Sachs: […] I think, you know, your point, Larry, is a very powerful one. And at a not a literal level of single-purpose banking, but of, you know, a more general level, Glass-Steagall successfully did that for quite a long time, and its removal was a very, very cynical play by Rubin, Summers, Clinton, Gramm and others who all had very strong interests, personal interests, in the outcomes of that deregulation, and exploited the gaps that they created, and then to the chagrin of some of us at least were invited right back into the White House in early 2009, after they had made this calamitous mess, to be the ones supposedly to fix it. And I know that Summers, for example, continued to really institute moral hazard policies right and left by fighting against any limits on compensation of these people who had entered into the breach.
So, this is a case where institutional reform of separating fractional reserve banking and basically the provision of liquidity from gambling should be done, but I would add this other point, which is that a lot of what’s happened actually and what’s been revealed is in my view prima facie criminal behavior. It’s financial fraud on a very large extent. There’s also a tremendous amount of insider trading, and you can even watch it when you’re living in New York, how that works.
So it’s not so mysterious, but we don’t even act – take John Paulson, for example. Paulson worked together with Goldman Sachs to defraud massively many European banks which bought the toxic mortgages that Paulson had put together. When this Abacus deal was taken up by the SEC, Goldman ended up paying a small fine. The chair of Goldman, of course, continued in his position and continued at White House state dinners, and Paulson wasn’t even mentioned once in any of the proceedings, and he took home a $1 billion dollar paycheck the next year, even as Goldman was paying a roughly $700-million-dollar fine, if I remember correctly, for the abuse that Paulson was part of. I can’t believe, no matter what the financial regulations, we can’t do better than that. That’s really pathetic.
Audience: As a former congressional staff attorney and retired tax lawyer, looking at the possibilities of small steps which might be taken, how affirmative would you think reenactment of Glass-Steagall would be?
Jeffrey Sachs: I think that it is quite important to re-create a mechanism where liquidity is separated from large-scale financial gambling. It’s really, in my opinion as a macroeconomist, it’s the collapse of liquidity that is the real macro danger. The rest is the collapse of confidence, lawlessness, decency and so on, but what made Lehman so damaging, of course, was how it infected the money markets, the interbank loans, and the complete drying up of commercial paper. This was the devastating effect. It was basically March 1933 replayed.
So liquidity is what is the real value here from a macroeconomic point of view. Loss of wealth, I could care less whether they make more or less money. I don’t even care whether they make big money particularly except I think a lot of them are crooks and that it’s based on a lot of nefarious behavior, but the macroeconomic significance is a kind of diamond in the banking crisis which we know to be part of a fractional reserve banking system.
And it seems to me analytically we have two – we have basically two levels of decision making. One is separating liquidity in the banking sector from other kinds of speculative financial activity. This I would do for sure, and I would never have put Goldman Sachs back under the Fed’s protection as a banking unit so that it could receive direct loans from the Fed. That’s ridiculous, and sad, actually.
But the second point then is Larry’s point, and this is whether fractional reserve banking itself has value enough to keep it in its current form. I’m not convinced, I have to say, one way or another. I kind of, you know, grew up in a fractional reserve banking system. I do believe that it provides liquidity in normal times if regulation is good. I tend to believe that there is value in reserve banking, but it’s also highly volatile, as theorists have recognized at least for 150 years, and as Milt Friedman agreed, as Diamond said, as Larry has pointed out, and I think we have the choice, could we really have liquidity without fractional reserve banking? If we could, we might be able to address, you know, another, another degree of this problem.
The final point, of course, is separating the politicians from the crooks, but maybe that’s so close together that they can’t actually be separated. Maybe it’s just the same community.
Audience: Yeah, hi. This is Mike Imhoff. [inaudible] My question was, your international experience, you’re talking, you were starting off by saying you’re talking to a lot of international decision-makers. What is the sense there about the readiness to try different monetary and financial approaches to what we have today? Do they feel that they can start to do that on their own in their own countries, or do they feel that they depend on the central countries like the United States and the Europeans to do something first?
Jeffrey Sachs: I think in general for most small countries or most developing countries – I’ll put aside the very largest ones – there is a sense of almost complete dependency on the international system – their payments, their lines of credit, interbank markets, the need for swap facilities with the Fed or the ECB, the pervasiveness of tax havens, the extent of flight capital from their countries, the legal structures where basically very clever U.S. lawyers helped to free all of these countries from their tax revenues. They feel very much dependent on a system that they feel is dysfunctional, but they are also, they’ve been well schooled that for the last 25 years their goal is to be part of the international system. They just woke up to a system that they find very destabilizing, and they don’t see any clarity of the way forward, and most of the advice that they get is to be part of this system and be quiet, basically. This is how the system is; you join it, you stay on good terms with the Fed, with the IMF, with others, and there is very little sense of autonomous potential among these countries. Really I can only emphasize the palpable anger and vulnerability that’s felt right now is very, very high.
Audience: My name is Dennis Peacock, and I represent the faith-based side of macroeconomics, and I just want to congratulate you that you pulled us back to the reality that in spite of all the complexities and theories and mechanics that we deal with in economics, that economics is really about values and the values and ethics of people. Thank you very much.
Jeffrey Sachs: Well, thank you very much for saying it and practicing it. I do believe – by the way, I’m just going to end here because I’ve been told I have to run to the U.N. in fact right now – I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structures need reform. But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.
If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I’m afraid to say, and no party is – I mean there’s – if not both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption is, as far as I can see, everywhere. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now, and it’s very, very unhealthy.
I have waited for four years, five years now, to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language, and I’ve not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won’t, I’ve waited for a judge, for our president, for somebody, and it hasn’t happened. And by the way it’s not going to happen anytime soon it seems.

LINKEDIN Top Content, Tailored For You

2013-03-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

10 immutable laws of mistakes

2013-03-20T02:15:00.000-07:00

By Alan Norton

Mistakes are inevitable.
But as Allan Norton explains, certain laws govern how we deal with them, learn from them, conceal them, and even profit from them.

For something so certain, so common, and so potentially destructive, mistakes remain a mystery. Why do we make them?
Why do we repeat them?

These 10 laws will give you a better understanding of what mistakes are and how to best deal with them.

Law #1: Everyone makes mistakes

“Everyone makes mistakes. That’s why there is an eraser on every pencil.” — Japanese proverb
This amusing yet clever Japanese proverb reminds us that there is something innately human about the mistakes we make. It also wisely implies that we have the power to correct our mistakes.
Corollary: Nobody can change law number one.

Law #2: Not all mistakes are bad mistakes

“The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.” — Theodore Roosevelt
Mistakes are going to happen, but that is not always a bad thing. The person who makes no mistakes isn’t taking any risks or living life to its fullest. By playing it safe, you may miss out on some of life’s greatest rewards. Wise men and women seek perfection but allow themselves the luxury of making mistakes.
If you still believe that all mistakes are bad, consider this question: How can a mistake be considered bad if more is gained than lost? There are many examples of serendipitous mistakes that have led to great discoveries. Penicillin, for example, was discovered by Alexander Fleming when he accidentally left a petri dish open. And how about those mistakes that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? My favorite, the Inverted Jenny stamp, was sold in November of 2007 for $977,500!

Law #3: Mistakes not seen by others are not mistakes

“When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound?” — Charles Riborg Mann and George Ransom Twiss
If a mistake is made and no one knows about it, is it a mistake? Okay, to you it is a mistake. But if no one else is aware of your mistake, it isn’t a mistake — assuming, of course, that you correct your error before someone else does see it. It’s not necessary to proclaim every mistake you make, especially the stupid ones. Why unnecessarily damage your image and possibly your career? But you can pass on the lessons you have learned from your mistakes and still be a hero for a day.

Law #4: Ignorance does not excuse your mistakes

“Ignorance of the law excuses no man…” — John Selden
Likewise, not knowing a system feature or behavior that leads to a mistake cannot be used as an excuse. I learned VB transaction processing to speed up the loading of data into a remote database. Unfortunately, I was unaware of the consequences of processing large numbers of transactions before committing the records. The network crashed and I owned up to my mistake. It may have been an unintentional mistake, but pleading ignorance wouldn’t have changed the fact that I was responsible for crashing the network.

Law #5: Mistakes occur at the very worst time

“If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.” – Corollary to Murphy’s Law
I have always appreciated Murphy’s Law and its corollaries, including Murphy’s computer laws. Perhaps that is because there is a certain amount of truth in them. It is no coincidence that frequently, the worst mistakes occur at the worst time. End-of-project mistakes happen due to stress, time pressures, and fatigue. A deadline often leads to mistakes in the scramble to complete a task. Less time to recognize and fix mistakes is often the genesis of what can and will go wrong.

Law #6: Mistakes beget mistakes

“Desperate people do desperate things.“ — Anonymous
Your heart is racing, beads of sweat are forming on your brow, and your stomach feels like it has both butterflies and moths. You have just made the kind of mistake that can be career-ending. How will you proceed? You decide to quickly fix your mistake before someone else sees it. But this is no time to make another mistake. First, take a few deep breaths and ask yourself several questions:

Will I take unnecessary and dangerous risks to correct my mistake?
Am I in over my head and need help?
Can I fix this problem without making it worse?

You are more prone to make bad decisions when under a large amount of stress. The last thing you want in a career-defining moment is a comedy of errors. Stay calm, remain levelheaded, and take the time you need to avoid additional mistakes.

Law #7: Mistakes made with computers propagate faster and cause more damage

“Computers have enabled people to make more mistakes faster than almost any invention in history, with the possible exception of tequila and hand guns.” — Mitch Ratcliffe
Oh, the power you wield as an IT professional! You have the power to damage so much with the smallest of mistakes. Use an OR instead of an AND or put a decimal point in the wrong place, and all kinds of bad things can happen. The work you do is “supercharged” once it is run on a computer. The pressures to produce perfection are enormous. Since we all make mistakes, the only reasonable course is to take great care in the proofreading and testing of your work before turning it on to the world.

Law #8: Mistakes of inaction are mistakes nonetheless

“I never worry about action, but only about inaction.” - Winston Churchill
As you get older, you begin to realize the mistakes you have made by not asking out your high school sweetheart, not fighting for what is right, or any number of other what-if situations. Similarly, you may second-guess not getting that certification, not taking that project lead position, or other decisions of inaction you have made on the job. The tragedy is that these decisions are often life-altering. Equally tragic, whether they were mistakes or not may become obvious only in the clarity of hindsight. Other mistakes of inaction are clearer to identify as true mistakes:

Failing to communicate
Failing to research in detail
Failing to analyze thoroughly
Failing to test all possible outcomes
Failing to perform root cause analysis

Law #9: Failing to own up to your mistakes is a mistake

“You may make mistakes, but you are not a failure until you start blaming someone else.” — Mary Pickford
If you can’t quickly fix your mistake, hiding it is almost always a bad idea. Finding the humility to admit your error ASAP will allow others to come to your aid. More knowledgeable members of your team can help determine the full scope and impact of your mistake and help in the remediation process. You compound your mistake further if you blame someone else or a peer is implicated for what you have done — and no one with a conscience wants to live with that.

Law #10: Failing to learn from your mistakes is a mistake

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” — John Powell
It has been said that life is a journey, not a destination. Mistakes are part of that journey, and it is an opportunity lost if we do not learn and grow from those errors we encounter along the way. But learning is not enough. We must also put into practice what we have learned or we have learned nothing at all.

The bottom line

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” — Rita Mae Brown
If it is true that you learn more from your mistakes than your triumphs, I must be a genius. And yet I am no genius. More than once while walking along the path of life, I have failed in the learning process. I’ve caught myself making the same mistake over and over and not fully understanding why. The flowchart in Figure A helps to explain where the learning process can fail.

Figure A

The “learning from mistakes” process

When you make a mistake for the first time, you either recognize it or you don’t. If you recognize it, you fix it if you can. It’s a fairly simple process. The second time you are presented with a similar situation, you must first recognize the situation, remember the mistake you made, and then change your behavior. Fail at any of those three decision points and you will repeat the mistake. That is a more complex process and the reason why we repeat our mistakes.
My favorite mistake is the intentional one. Navajo rug makers include a small imperfection called a “spirit string” to allow the “spirit” that they have put into the work to escape and because only God is perfect. Lest we forget, this is perhaps the greatest “mistake” quote of all: “To err is human, to forgive divine.” — Alexander Pope. And the world could use a little less human and a little more divine right now.

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About Alan Norton

Alan has worked at companies like Hughes Aircraft and CSC, where he developed client/server-based applications. Alan is currently semi-retired and starting a new career as a writer for TechRepublic.

See all of Alan's content

4G: What does it mean for business?

2013-03-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

By Nick Heath

As mobile operators worldwide roll out 4G networks that promise speeds several times faster than 3G TechRepublic looks at the potential benefits of 4G for business and what firms should know before getting on board.

As the PC is joined in the workplace by the smartphone and tablet, workers will increasingly expect a mobile network that makes it easier to work on the move.
Enter 4G, a collective term for next generation of wireless technologies offering download and upload speeds several times faster than 3G.
The most commonly used 4G technologies are LTE - Long-Term Evolution - and WiMax - although LTE dominates in the UK and increasingly in the US too.
Speeds of LTE services vary but are generally sold as being five to 10 times faster than 3G services. TechRepublic sister site CNET benchmarked speeds of between 23 and 40Mbps using the 4G EE LTE network recently launched in the UK - although obviously real world performance will vary.
But why should businesses care about 4G, and what are the potential pitfalls when buying 4G-compatible hardware?

Business benefits

As you would expect the amount of benefit a business gets from 4G really depends on how much its workforce or infrastructure rely on mobile comms.
The faster speed and reliability of LTE, over 3G, makes it a good fit for those workers whose job takes them out of the office on a regular basis - the so-called road warriors who will be able to send and receive information at speeds that rival the office broadband without having to find a wi-fi hotspot.
And 4G is not just about speed: it should also provide a more reliable mobile connection than 3G. While busy 3G connections can slow to a crawl, the higher throughput of LTE should provide a network that is less prone to becoming unusable when bogged down said Rosalind Craven, senior search analyst for mobile with IDC.
But businesses should also consider the needs of the future workforce. With enterprise hardware typically being refreshed every two to three years, most firms investing in a new phone or tablet for staff today should at least consider future-proofing by purchasing an LTE-compatible phone. If a firm is upping its use of mobile or cloud-based apps, then giving staff the ability to shunt large amounts of data on the move could help workers get the most from these tools.
4G could also be a boon to the likes of logistics or utility firms, who rely on using machine-to-machine comms to collect data from equipment - although obviously an upgrade from 2G or 3G is only worth it if capacity is an issue.
New services such as unified comms and mobile video calling could also benefit after businesses switch to LTE.

A boost to rural businesses

One of the most significant ways that LTE could benefit business is as a replacement for slow fixed-line broadband.
There are still areas that are broadband notspots; regions where there are generally too few people to make a high speed service commercially viable, and even more locations where broadband speeds top out at a middling 1-2Mbps.
Even if LTE only offers speeds in the region of 20Mbps it will still be far faster than that available in many rural regions in the UK.
“When more rural areas are covered this could be a real lifeline for many businesses - an opportunity to have access to broadband that otherwise they wouldn’t have,” said Matthew Howett, lead regulatory telecoms analyst at Ovum.
WiMax is also already replacing fixed-line broadband in markets in Russia and Africa.

Devices

While there have been relatively few mobile handsets that support LTE until recently, there are an increasing number of compatible Windows 8 and Android handsets on the market - with Samsung, HTC and Huawei among the major manufacturers to offer support. The Apple iPad 3 supports works with LTE services in the US, and the iPhone 5 is also rumoured to support 4G. For laptops and PCs there are also a variety of dongles that work with LTE services.
But it’s still early days for LTE-compatible devices, and IDC’s Craven said before buying it may be worth waiting six months, when there will be more devices available at a wider range of prices.

Growing coverage

There are about 40 commercially available LTE networks worldwide. Availability of 4G services varies from country to country, from fairly wide-ranging coverage in the US to being (currently) almost non-existent in the UK.
In the US, the major telecoms operators claim to offer LTE services in most major cities, for example Verizon says that its service is available in 371 cities, covering nearly 75 per cent of the U.S. population.
Despite lack of 4G in the UK, national coverage is being rolled out. EE, the mobile operator previously known as Everything Everywhere, is promising its 4G LTE service will be available in 16 UK cities before Christmas 2012.
The operator is aiming for the 4G to be available to 70 percent of the British population by 2013 and 98 percent by 2014.
Devices that include 4G will also be able to fall back to use 3G or 2G connections where coverage is unavailable.

Falling prices

Whereas operators of LTE services have so far generally charged significantly more for contracts than for 3G services, prices are expected to fall in an attempt to stimulate LTE uptake.
It will be important that the price of LTE services appeals to businesses and consumers if operators want to capture market share as the number of people with LTE-compatible handsets grow, said IDC’s Craven.
“Pricing is changing very rapidly, initially there were quite big premiums but these have really shrunk,” she said.

International incompatibility

Before picking up a 4G device businesses need to look carefully at which regions it is able to access 4G services in.
International travellers may struggle to use 4G services abroad due to incompatibilities between 4G services offered in different countries.
Much of this incompatibility arises from mobile network operators offering 4G LTE services that rely upon different sets of radio frequencies.
For instance, the LTE services rolled out in the UK will be based on the 800MHz, 900MHz, 1,800MHz and 2.6GHz frequency bands, while most US operators use 700MHz. A recent report by the GSMA’s Wireless Intelligence Service predicts at least 38 different radio frequency combinations may be used in LTE deployments internationally in the next few years.
Devices can theoretically work with LTE services in different countries by supporting multiple bands, but this multi-band support is still limited. For example the iPad 3 supports both the 700MHz and 2.1GHz bands, but is still incompatible with LTE services in the UK.
The problem isn’t only international, in the US it seems that some handsets and tablets aren’t able to swap between the LTE services of different operators, thanks to operators decision to use different bands, or portions of bands, for their LTE service.
As such, businesses should check whether a device supports the bands used for 4G services in regions they operate in.
The lack of 4G compatibility internationally is offset by the fact that 4G devices will be able to switch to using 3G or 2G services.
A further complication when it comes to international 4G services is the US rolling out a different high-speed wireless technology called WiMax, which is incompatible with LTE. However LTE is becoming more common in the states and is likely to become standard 4G service there according to IDC’s Craven.

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About Nick Heath

Nick Heath is chief reporter for TechRepublic UK.

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10 immutable laws of mistakes

Law #1: Everyone makes mistakes

Law #2: Not all mistakes are bad mistakes

Law #3: Mistakes not seen by others are not mistakes

Law #4: Ignorance does not excuse your mistakes

Law #5: Mistakes occur at the very worst time

Law #6: Mistakes beget mistakes

Law #7: Mistakes made with computers propagate faster and cause more damage

Law #8: Mistakes of inaction are mistakes nonetheless

Law #9: Failing to own up to your mistakes is a mistake

Law #10: Failing to learn from your mistakes is a mistake

The bottom line

Figure A

The “learning from mistakes” process

About Alan Norton

4G: What does it mean for business?

Business benefits

A boost to rural businesses

Devices

Growing coverage

Falling prices

International incompatibility

About Nick Heath

O2 GLOBAL BUSINESS NETWORK HUB > Dr GOLD MONEY MAKING KNOW-HOW to CHANGE your LIFE | O2 |: How To MAKE MONEY | How To CHANGE my LIFE | O2 | >...

O2 GLOBAL BUSINESS NETWORK HUB > Dr GOLD MONEY MAKING KNOW-HOW to CHANGE your LIFE | O2 |: O2 LIFE MATTERS | > Money and the Meaning of Life...