These are finally in the market but super expensive. It offers better image quality, reduced power consumption and fast response times over traditional LED TVs.

So far we have LG, Sony, Panasonic and Samsung with the latest curved & flat models in the market with LG awarded the best at the moment.

Prices range from 1500 USD and up!

Resoultions: 1080P – 4K

Let’s hope for more affordable and efficient units to be launched early 2017.

more info & prices on

http://www.techradar.com/news/television/oled-tv-what-you-need-to-know-1056228

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2016/09/05/new-panasonic-oled-tv-steals-the-show-again/#4cc0372124ff

Capri, Italy

Travel Info

Location: Southern Coast of Italy

Best Time of the year to visit: May-September

Tourist Sites: Sorrento, Positano, Capri, Pompei

Budget: Moderate

Living Expense: Moderate-High End

Min. Duration for Visit: 6 nights/7 days

How to get there: Fly to Naples & catch a Bus/Ferry/Train/Drive from Naples to the respective cities.

Flight connections: Fly to Amsterdam+ EasyJet/Transavia from Amsterdam-Naples or train from Amsterdam-Paris-Turin(Italy)-Rome-Naples (quiet long & tedious) and Curreri Bus/Circumvesuvania train from Naples-Sorrento.

Ferries:- operated within Amalfi Coast (depends on the weather entirely!) and I advice booking them once you get there. Be sure to be early at the counter to ensure tickets.

Where to stay:- plenty of options include b&b/hostels/hotels/luxurious Italian villas (traditional and stunningly superb)/ self catering apartments etc.

Cost of stay:- here’s where you’ll be spending all your money!… stay per night starts from 100 Euros and up!

Food:- This is the best part of your holiday….Cheap, yummy, fresh, mouth watering, delicious sea food, pizza, salads, pasta, spaghetti, Italian wine, fruits, cheese you name it…everything within your budget.. a total bargain !

Getting around:- Buses/Train are economical preferably local SITA buses, Circumvesuvania train, Coast-Coast tourist/site seeing buses (be sure to have the timetable in your hand and arrive 45 mins early to grab your seat plus the buses down south are not always on time!). If you’ve the budget ferry would be a good idea to save time. Local taxis are expensive unless you’re on an emergency.

Rent a Car:- Definitely cheaper from Rome/Naples. Renting a car in Sorrento/Capri can be 100 euros a day and up!

Things to do:- farm house visits, wine tasting, Italian cookery classes, hiking/trekking and most of all enjoying the beautiful beaches.

Shopping: Italian food (definitely the yummylicious fresh italian food), Hand made leather goods (sandals mainly) be sure to get them from Capri/Positano/Sorrento. However, the cheapest option will be to get them from Sorrento, Painted ceramics for your home, Lemon Chillos (traditional lemon drinks alcoholic/non alcoholic made from fresh lemon groves), 100% Linen clothes( trust me they are an absolute quality grab for the price! ranging from 100 Euros and up) and when in Italy of course the luxury Italian designers cannot be forgotten, you can find them all in Capri Island (it’s a must visit if you’re in the Amalfi Coast).

… pics are below taken from my iphone 6S plus…. enjoy… cheers

positano..

follow me on IG @sinipicha for more travelog images and videos….

We all wonder what’s the basic economics behind crude oil production. Let’s have a look at this

BBL/Barrel (unit), this basically measures the amount of barrels produced. ideally 1 barrel is 100L-1000L or in US 42Gallons/159L.

MBL: one thousand barrel

MMBBL: one million barrel

What is crude oil?

Crude oil is a mineral oil consisting of a mixture of hydrocarbons of natural origin and associated impurities, such as sulphur. It exists in liquid form under normal surface temperatures and pressure. Its physical characteristics (for example, density) are highly variable.

Where is the bulk of oil demand growth going to come from?

In the next five years, almost half of global oil demand growth will come from China, and this trend is set to continue to 2040, as oil demand from the transportation sector is growing strongly in countries such as China and India. In contrast, oil demand among OECD countries is expected to decline over the outlook period, driven mostly by government policies on fuel efficiency and the fact that rates of vehicle ownership are already high.

Below is a great website to read on Trade Economics of different countries.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com

More Statistics on

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/economy/worlds-biggest-oil-producers/index.html

As you can see USA has surpassed KSA in 2014 in oil production according to CNN Money.

Have a read.. and post your comments.

Originally designed by Hendo. the physics behind the design seems to be very intriguing. However, we need to look at the dangers at hand before purchasing or gifting one.

Below you can see few of the common FAQs you’ll face when you gear up to purchase one.

• http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/buying-advice/gadget/hoverboard-buying-advice-what-consider-when-buying-swegway-segway-airwheel-self-balancing-board-which-uk-us-law-amazon-3627902/#zzz

• http://www.wsj.com/articles/hoverboard-safety-concerns-create-challenge-for-retailers-regulators-1450392552

• http://bestelectrichoverboard.com/hoverboard-faq/

Have fun hover boarding this Christmas!

Top Oil Producers

The top five crude oil producers in 2011, based on the new data are

1. Russia – 9.8 million barrels a day (mbd)
2. Saudi Arabia – 9.5 mbd
3. United States – 5.7 mbd
4. China – 4.1 mbd
5. Iran – 4.1 mbd

The top five producers when substitute liquids of various kinds are included are the same countries, but in a different order. On this basis, the US also appears to be closer to catching up to the top two.

1. Saudi Arabia – 11.2 mbd
2. Russia – 10.2 mbd
3. United States – 10.1 mbd
4. China – 4.3 mbd
5. Iran – 4.2 mbd

Rankings: Top 20 Oil Producers 

please note the drop in 2011 which is reflected below

As you can see from the graph in 2011 it is 73 mbpd an increase of 0.35 % as compared to 2010’s production.

Note: Russia, USA, China are not part of OPEC. Hence OPEC prices are not applicable to these nations.

OPEC: the mission of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is to coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) which is predominately a consumer based group of nations has recently and publically been calling for OPEC and the IEA to merge.  Russia is not part of either group, neither is China or India.  For the most part, the IEA and OPEC are usually on the opposite end of the spectrum, with IEA and its consumer members calling for lower oil prices and therefore more production, while OPEC usually wants oil prices in the higher end of the range and thus cuts production.  On this basis it is unlikely that OPEC and the IEA will work together under a single framework.

So where does all this leave Russia? Could it be that Russia is in fact quietly looking at new market infrastructure when it comes to trading oil and Gas? Certainly on the gas side, Russia has been the prime mover in the creation of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), commonly referred to as the gas OPEC. Qatar and Iran are also members of the GECF. Russia, Iran and Qatar are the number one, two and three holders of gas reserves respectively in the world, with around 50%. As the world market in Gas grows, and begins to rival the influence of the oil market on economies around the world, Russia’s political and economic influence, and responsibility will also grow.

Russia is more likely to turn to Iran and importers such as China and India when it comes to energy politics, rather than the current status quo of OPEC and the IEA.

“Don’t admit that your faith is weak
Don’t say that you feel like dying
Life’s hard then it feels like diamonds
Your home’s just far too gone
Much too late to even feel like trying
Can’t understand what I’m saying
Can’t figure out what I’m implying
If you feel you don’t wanna be alive
You feel just how I am”
—Lupe Fiasco, Beautiful Lasers

Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you. Together you will build a beautiful product that delights customers and makes the world just a little bit better. It’s going to be absolutely awesome.

Then, after working night and day to make your vision reality, you wake up to find that things did not go as planned. The market isn’t quite where it was supposed to be. Your employees are losing confidence and some of them have quit. Some of the ones that quit were quite smart and have the remaining ones wondering if staying makes sense. You are running low on cash and your venture capitalist tells you that it will be difficult to raise money given the impending European catastrophe. You lose a competitive battle. You lose a loyal customer. You lose a great employee. The walls start closing in. Where did you go wrong? Why didn’t your company perform as envisioned? Are you good enough to do this? As your dreams turn into nightmares, you find yourself in The Struggle.

About The Struggle

“Life is struggle.”
—Karl Marx

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place.

The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.

The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.

The Struggle is when food loses its taste.

The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.

The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle.

The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness.

The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.

The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.

The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood.

The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak.

Most people are not strong enough.

Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle.

The Struggle is where greatness comes from.

Some stuff that may or may not help

There is no answer to The Struggle, but here are some tips that can help:

Don’t put it all on your shoulders – It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you. You won’t be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can. Get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats.

Focus on the road – When they teach you how to drive a racecar, they tell you to focus on the road when you go around a turn. They tell you that because if you focus on the wall, then you will drive straight into the wall. If you focus on how you might fail, then you will fail. Even if you only have one bullet left in the gun and you have to hit the target, focus on the target. You might not hit it, but you definitely won’t hit if you focus on other things.

Everybody makes mistakes. Every CEO makes thousands of mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an “F” doesn’t help.

Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.

When you are in The Struggle, nothing is easy and nothing feels right. You have dropped into the abyss and you may never get out.

But Keep hope, faith and focus and you will sail through.

The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, or to ensure customer service, or to set standards, or to build high performance teams.
Great managers excel at turning one person’s talent into performance.
Great managers are catalysts–they speed up the reaction between each employee’s talents and the eompany’s goals.

The Definition of Leadership
Great leaders rally people to a better future
Leaders have a vivid vision of what the future could be, and rally others to strive for it.
“You are a leader if, and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress, and deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.”
The core talents underpinning all great leadership are optimism and ego
Leaders may be pessimists or even depressive (see Lincoln), but nothing, not their mood, not the reasoned arguments of others, not the bleak conditions of the present, can undermine their faith that things will get better.
“Properly defined, the opposite of a leader isn’t a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.”
“Despite their realistic assessment of the present challenges, they nonetheless believe that they have what it takes to overcome these challenges and forge ahead.”
Ego: “The key thing about leading is not only that you envision a better future, but also that you believe, in every fiber of your being, that you are the one to make this future come true….You arethe one to assume the responsibility for transforming the present into something better.”
“The difference between a leader with a powerful ego and an egomania is how the ego is channeled. The effective leader takes his self-belief, his self-assurance, his self-confidence, and presses them into the service of an enterprise bigger than himself. For the egomania, the self is the enterprise.”
To help develop a budding leader, don’t tell him to be humble; challenge him to be more inquisitive, more curious, and thereby more vivid in describing hs image of a better future, and then encourage him to channel his cravings and his claims towards making this image come true.

Great Managing
The 4 Skills of Management
1) Select good people
2) Set clear expectations
3) Recognize excellence immediately and praise it
4) Show care for your people

1) Select good people. Management is about casting–finding people whose patterns of typical behavior match up with the role you need filled.
2) Define clear expectations. Less than 50% of employees claim they know what is expected of them at work. The key is to work on defining expectations constantly, in virtually every meeting and conversation.
3) Recognize excellence immediately and praise it so that the consequences are certain, immediate, and positive. You should never worry about overpraising someone so long as the performance warrants it.
4) Show care for your people. Research shows that workers who feel cared about are less likely to miss workdays, less likely to have accidents on the job, less likely to quit, and more likely o advocate the company to friends and family. Be deliberate and explicit about forging bonds. Tell your people that you care about them. Tell them that you want them to succeed. Kep their confidences. Learn about their personal lives, and as far as you are able, be willing to accomodate the challenges of their personal lives into their work schedules. This doesn’t mean being soft; the caring manager confronts poor performance early.

Mediocre managers play checkers with their people. Great managers play chess, using each person’s unique talents.
The one thing all great manager know about great managing is this: “Discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it.”

The Three Levers:
What are the three things you need to know about a person in order to manage him or her effectively?

1) Strengths and weaknesses.
The mediocre manager believes that most things are learnable and therefore that the essence of management is to identify each person’s weaker areas and eradicate them.
A great manager believes the opposite. He believes that the most influential qualities of a person are innate and therefore that the essence of management is to deploy these innate qualities as effectively as possible and so drive performance.
Self-awareness doesn’t drive performance; self-assurance does. The overly optimistic tend to perform better than the accurately realistic.
To combat arrogance and carelessness, don’t tear down the person. Instead, build up the size of the ehallenge. Emphasize their scope, their complexity, their “no one has ever pulled this off before” quality. THE STATE OF MIND YOU SHOULD TRY TO CREATE IS A FULLY REALISTIC ASSESSMENT OF THE DIFFICULTY OF THE CHALLENGE AND AN UNREALISTICALLY OPTIMISTIIC BELIEF IN HIS ABILITY TO OVERCOME IT.
If this person succeeds praise him for his unique strengths, not his hard work. This will reinforce the self-assurance he needs to be resolute and persistent when taking on the next challenge.
If the person fails, and it is not attributable to factors beyond his control, always explain failure as a lack of effort.
The person fails repeatedly, this may actually indicate a weakness. Start by trying to enhance his skills and knowledge. Next, try to find him a complementary partner. Third, try techniques or tricks that accomplish through discipline what the employee is unable to accomplish through instinct (e.g. imagining what an authoritative third party would do). If all else fails, rearrange the employee’s workin world so that his weakness is no longer in play. And if the employee won’t even try the new role? Then it is probably time to allow him to pursue career opportunities elsewhere.

2) Triggers
Each person’s strengths require precise triggering to switch them on.

The most powerful trigger is generally recognition. But the type of recognition will differ for each person. For some, it may be public praise. For another, a private conversation. For a third, a professional qualification. And for a fourth, a letter from a customer.
HSBC presents dream award each year–each year, each employee reports what non-cash prize (capped at a cost of $10,000) they would like to receive if they won. When the awards are given, HSBC shows a video explaining the award and the chosen prize.

3) Learning Style
The Three Dominant Learning Styles

1) Analyzing. Give an analyzer ample time in the classroom. Role-play. Post-mortem. Break down performance. Don’t throw her into the middle of a new situation and tell her to wing it.
2) Doing. The best way to teach a Doer is to throw her into the middle of a new situation and tell her to wing it. The most powerful learning occurs during the performance. Pick a task within her role that is simple but real, give her a brief overview of the outcomes you want, and then get out of her way. Gradually increase the level of task complexity until she has has mastered every aspect of her role.
3) Watching (imitation). Watchers learn when they get a chance to see the total performance. Get her out of the classroom, take away her manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers.

5 Questions For Asessment

For Strengths
1) What was the best day at work you’ve had in the last three months?
What were you doing?
Why did you enjoy it so much?
For weaknesses
2) What was your worst day at work in the last three months?
What were you doing?
Why did it grate on you so much?
For triggers
3) What was the best relationship with a manager you’ve ever had?
What made it work so well?
4) What was the best praise or recognition you’ve ever received?
What made it so good?
And for unique style of learning:
5) When in your career do you think you were learning the most?
Why did you learn so much?
What’s the best way for you to learn?

Great Leading
The ability to cut through individual differences and fasten upon those few emotions or needs that all of us share is at the core of great leadership. When a leader lacks extended empathy, when he loses sight of those things we all share, he loses the ability to lead.

The One Thing every great leader knows he must do is:
Discover What Is Universal and Capitalize on It.

Universals
Anthropologist Donald Brown found 327 human universals:
Joking
Tickling
Baby-talking
Sucking on cuts
Overestimating our own objectivity
Preferring sweets
Creating pithy but contradictory sayings
Every society has a word for string
Fear of snakes, but not flowers
Formal speech for special occasions
Toilet training
On average, husbands are older than wives
Every society has a word for pain
Weapons
Rape
Murder
Trade
Toys
Taking turns

For the full list of universals, see Brown’s book, “Human Universals”.

The five great universal fears and needs that are relevant to leadership

1) Fear of death (our own and our family’s) / The need for security
2) Fear of the outsider / The need for community. We are herd animals, and we organize ourselves to keep the herd strong.
3) Fear of the future / The need for clarity. In every society, we give prestige to those who claim to be able to predict the future.
4) Fear of chaos / The need for authority. Every society has devised its own creation myth in which the world was created out of chaos. The need to classify things is universal. The reason creating democracy from autocracy is hard is that we dislike chaos and thus like strong leaders.
5) Fear of insignificance / The need for respect. Every society has a word for self-image and an accompanying concept that a positive self-image is better than a negative one. Throughout history, by far the most effective way to earn the respect of others was to show yourself ready to sacrifice virtually everthing for the sake of pure prestige. He who was prepared to die in the pursuit of his ideas became the master and the easygoing became the serfs. This generated a shortage of respect, which religions filled. The popular religions are successful because they offer a way (membership in the chosen people, an afterlife, reincarnation) for even people with the least earthly prestige to get respect.

Respect is the province of the manager. Authority explains the desire for leaders, but not what they should do.

Many leaders play to security, by providing an effective police presence, justifying foreign wars by citing national secrity, and by kissing babies.

Others play to community by seeking out enemies, be they the Axis of Evil, Coca Cola, or the War on Drugs.

Both security and community will win loyalty, but loyalty should only be a means to the end of rallying people to a better future. Only by tapping into the fear of the future and the need for clarity can a leader move beyond simply preserving the status quo.

Great leaders transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future. Being passionate is insufficient; passions are volatile and temporary. Consistency is also insufficient; we are aware that things change, and we expect our leaders to open-minded enough to change with them.

The most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear; to define the future in such vivid terms, through your actions, words, images, pictures, heroes, and scores that we can all see where you, and thus we, are headed.

Adjustments along the way must be communicated with great vividness; clarity is the antidote to anxiety and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader.

The Points of Clarity
Who do we serve?
What is our core strength?
What is our core score?
What actions can we take today?

1) Who do we serve?
There is no right answer to this question, but great leaders have a clear answer.
Tesco: “We focus on serving the working man and woman, the ordinary Joe.”
Wal-Mart: “Everything we do, everything we buy is designed to serve those of us who live paycheck to paycheck.”
It may be that every organization serves many masters, but to be brilliantly clear, you must choose one.
Best Buy: “We will serve the customer who is smart but confused by the products we sell.”
Imlications? Reduce SKUs, take salespeople off commissions and tell them to focus on educating customers to make their own choices.
Best Buy then took it a step further by focusing on 5 customer types (e.g. moms, independent contractors) and then having each store focus on just one segment.

Note that a leader must not be clear on all points; he must be brilliantly clear on outcomes and focus, but give followers the lattitude to select the strategies and tactics.

2) What Is Our Core Strength?
To convert followers anxiety into confidence, you must tell us why we will win. Why will we beat our competiors? Why will we overcome the many obstacles? What advantags do we have? What is our edge? The more clearly the leader can answer these questons, the more confident we will be, and therefore the more resilient, persistent, and creative.
You don’t have to be right, you just have to be clear. Make it clear what everyone needs to do, and give them the confidence that if they can just do this one thing, you will win.
Rio Tinto Borax: Deciding to focus on safety despite a mediocre historical record.
Beginning every meeting with a 5-minute discussion on safety.
In 1999, there were 26 serious injuries; in 2003, there were 4.

3) What is Our Core Score?
It is your responsibility as a leader to sort through all the many things that can be measured and identify the one score that we, your followers, should focus on. Followers don’t care for balanced scorecards–they are too complex, which confuses us and makes us anxious. If you need a balanced scorecard, keep it to yourself and fellow executives. Give us a score that we can do something about, or that measures how well we are serving the people you have told us we should be serving, or that quantifies the strength you have assured us we possess. If you can identify the core scoree that can do some or all of these things, we will reward you with our confidence.
“A balanced scorecard is a device to help you manage, not lead. It will set expectations for one person, but won’t bring clarity to many people.”
Best Buy: Number of engaged employees.

4) What Actions Can We Take Today?
Actions are unambiguous and clear. Highlight a few carefully selected actions and your followers will happily latch on to them and use them to calm their fear of the unknown. Followers will no longer have to infer the future from theoretical pronouncements about “core values” or “mission statements.”

Types of Action: Symbolic and Systematic
Identify the few actions that can either a) grab our attention or b) alter our routines.

Symbolic action
Rudy Giuliani
Getting rid of squeegee men (by prosecuting them for jaywalking)
Getting rid of graffiti on buses and subway cars
Requiring every cabbie to wear a collared shirt

Systematic action
Force people to change their comfortable routines and engage in unambiguously new behaviors.
Giuliani
7 AM CompStat meetings Thursdays and Fridays

The Disciplines of Leadership
1. Take time to reflect
2. Select your heroes with great care
3. Practice

1) Take Time to Reflect
Take time to think and draw conclusions. It is this ability to draw conclusions that allows great leaders to project such clarity.
Think about success, which is not the opposite of failure. Understand why something succeeded, so you can repeat it.
Best Buy: After focusing stores, Brad Anderson noticed that 8 stores were doin much better than the rest. He visited them, the other stores, them again, and thought. Finally, he concluded that the difference was that the employees were not more talented, but rather better engaged. Or in other words, better managed.

2) Select Your Heroes with Great Care
Heroes are employees whose performance you choose to celebrate. To predict future behavior, look at the people and events the organization chooses to revere.
Britain
Charge of the Light Brigade, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain
The Brits celebrate perseverance and effort, not winning
USA
The most competitive of nations, where winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing
For example, British sports broadcasts do a horrible job of picking players of the game

3) Practice
Great leaders practice the words, images, and stories they will use to help us perceive the future more clearly.
MLK: The “I have a dream” speech wasn’t the planned speech. He had written a new one, but when it started to bomb, reverted to the speech he had practicee so many times before.
Do not worry about being repetitive–just when you are bored by the sound of our own voice may be when you finally reach your audience.

“Efective leaders don’t have to passionate. They don’t have to charming. They don’t have to be brilliant. They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget the tryth that of all the human universals–our need for security, for community, for clarity, for authority, and for respect–our need for clarity, when met, is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience, and creativity.

Show us clearly whom we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions must be taken today, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.”

Sustained Individual Success

The Twenty Percenters
Only 20% of people report that they are in a role where they have a chance to do what they do best every day.
Buckingham reports that he has three 20 percenters in his life.

Dave Koepp, screenwriter
Despite the many travails of being a screenwriter in Hollywood, he has still found a way to sustain passion, spirit, and superior performance despite life’s imperfections.

Myrtle Potter, President of Genentech
Turned Prilosec, a Merck/Astra JV that was floundering, into the top selling drug in the world ($4B/yr). Talked to the doctors and discovered that they were only prescribing Prilosec when Pepcid, Zantac, and Tagamet failed. She made sure doctors were informed of two facts: 1) Prilosec was the only drug that went beyond alleviating symptoms to curing the underlying condition. 2) Certain patients would never respond to the other drugs, and thus would always end up on Prilosec.

Tim Tassopoulos, Chick-fil-A
Wondered if he would be happier in politics, which he was passionate about. Did his MBA at Georgetown, where he was George Stephanopoulos’ roommate, and discovered that he found actual politics boring–it didn’t have immediate feedback and direct impact on people.
“How could I possibly find a better situation than the one I am in now? In Chick-fil-A I have a company that believes in me, that challenges me to give of my best every single day, and that puts me in direct contact with wonderful people who expect me to help them and guide them and coach them every day. In so many ways, I am blessed.”

The difference between the twenty percenters and the rest of us can be found less in what they choose to do and more in what they choose not to do. Twenty percenters are rigorously discriminating about how they choose to invest their time. No matter how tempting the ofer, they refuse to get sueked into activities that, on some visceral level, they know they will not enjoy
David rejected the offer to write buddy movies. Myrtle rejected promotions. Tim turned away from politics.

The One thing we all need to know to sustain our success:
Discover What You Don’t Like Doing and Stop Doing It.

Know what opportunities engage your strengths and which do not and have the self-discipline to reject the latter.

“Sustained success is caused not by what you add on, but by what you have the discipline to cut away.”

Virtually all personality traits can be boiled down to the Big Five:
1) Openness to experience
2) Extroversion
3) Neuroticism
4) Agreeableness
5) Conscientiousness

Personality traits do not explain sustained success.

To have a great impact over a long period of time requires 2 things.
1) First, you must take your natural talents and enthusiasm and apply yourself to learning enough role-specific skills and knowledge to be deemed good at something where you possess some kind of comparative advantage over everyone else.
2) You must stay good and more likely, get better. You must be resilient, flexible, open to learning, innovative, confident, optimistic, and pace yourself for the long term.

The 3 Main Contenders (runners up)
1) Find the right tactics and employ them.
2) Find your flaws and fix them.
3) Discover your strengths and cultivate them.

1. Find the right tactics and employ them.
“The Power of Full Engagement (Tony Schwartz, Jim Loehr)
The best tennis players were more effective between points–they could slow their breathing and heart rate to recover energy and focus for the subsequent point.
The best way to succeed is through a disciplined process of stress and recovery.
Impose on your life a series of routines that allow you to stress yourself, then recover, stress, then recover, and you will find that, over time, your capacity, your resilience, and your energy will all expand.
Since the human body is designed to work in 90-minute increments, you should discipline yourself to get up after an hour and a half’s work and take a break.
“The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers” (James Citrin, Richard Smith)
Build your personal brand
Go blue-chip early
Avoid the “permission paradox”
Seek out special projects and one-off assignments because they will allow you to claim that you have skills and experiences not supplied by your current job
“Career Warfare” (David D’Alesandro)
Proactively manage you boss by providing the three things she really wants:
1) Loyalty
2) God advice
3) A subordinate who will never make himself look good at her expense
Make friends in high places; you may need them it you have to circumvent a self-serving boss
“It is always showtime.” However trivial or boring a transaction might be, you are still making an impression.

The reason this contender isn’t the One Thing is because it doesn’t tell you how to avoid becoming a commodity.

2. Find your flaws and fix them.
Despite its seemingly logical appeal, few successful individuals subject themselves to it. Few successful managers subject their people to it. And few successful teachers subject their students to it.
You learn less when focusing on areas of weakness (biologically)
You will feel less energized and challenged when fixing your flaws (emotionally)
Self-efficacy is not the same as self-esteem; self-esteem relates to your general feeling of worthiness, while self-efficacy is tied to a specific activity.
An APS study shows that high self-esteem does not predict anything, no resilience, not persistence, not goal-setting, and not achievement.
In contrast, the level of self-efficacy for an activity does an excellent job of predictint subsequent performance.
Bandura’s research shows that how well you face new challenges is determined by your ability to transfer your self-efficacy from one activity to another.
The best way to transfer self-efficacy is to look deliberately for similarities between the new challenge and previous challenges where you have succeeded in the past.

3) Discover your strengths and cultivate them.
This is important, but it is rare that a person can find a single career track that plays to her strengths. What usually happens is career-creep, where success results in promotions and responsibilities until one day you realize that the majority of your job bores you, leaves you unfulfilled, frustrates you, drains you, or all of the above.
In Buckingham’s own career, a major engagement with a large entertainment company resulted in the majority of his job consisting of activities that weren’t a fit with his strengths (though he was still calling upon his strengths daily). “My problem wass’t that I was so far off my strengths’ path that I couldn’t find any success. My problem was that, having found success, I didn’t have the discipline to stay focused when faced with the increased complexity and opportunity that success brings.

To keep track of your success at following the One Thing, every three months, write down your answer to this question: What percentage of your day do you experience a feeling of self-efficacy, that optimistic, positive, challenged-yet-confident, authentic feeling? What percentage of your day do you spend doing those things you really like to do?
At Best Buy, their 10 most successful managers answered 70-95% of the time.

Discover what you don’t like doing
Most dislikes are caused by one of four distinct emotions

1) You’re bored
When the content of your job becomes deeply uninteresting to you, you must change your job

2) You’re unfulfilled
If your values are disengaged from or actively compromised by your work, you must do the same. To stay in it for the money or security is, in the long run, a bad bargain. It will rob you of the best of you

3) You’re frustrated
Find a tiny stream in which your strengths can flow, and carve it into the Mississippi

4) You’re drained
Find someone else to do what you hate to do (e.g. Jefferson and Madison)
Jobs and Wozniak; Case and Kimsey; Clark and Andreessen; Elison and Miner; Gates and Ballmer
Gates is a serial partner-finder. It began with his friend Kent Evans, who was tragically killed in rock-climbing accident in 1972. Only then did he partner with Paul Allen. And of course, he brought in Steve Ballmer.
Find an aspect of the activity that brings you strength and always keep this aspect at the top of your mind.

The four tactics are: Quit the role; tweak the role, seek out the right partners, or find an aspect of the role that brings you strength.

Conclusion
To excel as a manager, you must never forget that each of your direct reports is unique and that your chief responsibility is not to eradicate this uniqueness, but rather to arrange roles, responsibilities, and expectations so that you can capitalize upon it. The more you perfect this skill, the more effectively you will turn talents into performance.

To excel as a leader requires the opposite skill. You must become adept at calling upon those needs we all share. Our common needs include the need for security, for community, for authority, and for respect, but for you, the leader, the most powerful universal need is our need for clarity. To transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future, you must discipline yourself to describe our joint future vividly and precisely. As your skill in this grows, so will our confidence in you.

And last, you must remember that your sustained success depends on your ability to cut out of your working life those activities or people that pull you off your strengths’ path. Your leader can show you clearly your better future. Your manager can draft you onto the team and cast you into the right role on the team. However, it will always be your responsibility to make the small but significant course corrections that allow you to sustain your highest and best contribution to this team, and to the better future it is charged with creating. The more skilled you are at this, the more valued, and fulfilled, and successful you will become.

As we’ve seen in each of these roles, the critical skill is not balance, but its inverse, intentional imbalance. The great manager bets that he will prevail by magnifying, emphasizing, and then capitalizing on each employee’s uniqueness. The great leader comes to a conclusion about his core customer, his organization’s strength, its core score, and the actions he will commit to right now, and then, in the service of clarity, banishes from his thought and conversation almost everything else. The sustainably effective individual, by rigorously removing the irritants from his working life, engages with the world in an equally imbalanced fashion.

Despite a slowing world economy, India’s exports are booming. After growing 38% in 2010-11 , they are growing even faster this year – by 46.4% in June, 81 % in July and 44% in August. This beats even China hollow . Cynics say this is too good to be true. Earlier, crooked businessmen took black money abroad by under-invoicing exports. Could they be bringing back their black money as over-invoiced exports? Does this explain the export boom?

Very possibly, according to a new report from three researchers at Kotak Securities. They looked at export data from company reports of the BSE 500 (the top 500 companies of the Bombay Stock Exchange) and compared these with official data for 2010-11 . For engineering exports, official data showed a huge increase of $30 billion, but engineering companies of the BSE 500 showed an export increase of only $1.38 billion . Who accounted for the balance of over $28 billion? Minor companies? Ghost companies ? Large private companies owned by big businessmen but not listed on the stock exchanges?
The researchers found that exports of metals and metal products increased from $13 billion to $29 billion, according to official data. But the companies in the BSE 500 increased such exports by less than a billion dollars. Official data say exports of copper articles more than quadrupled to Rs 36,700 crore. The big new buyer was China, not normally a buyer of brassware handicrafts . Opposition parties are suddenly interested in the matter since one of the bestknown exporters of brassware is Robert Vadra. Possibly copper articles other than brassware are now being exported by large companies. We require a detailed export breakdown. The Kotak Securities researchers also found anomalies in inflows from foreign institutional investors. Official inflows last year were $22 billion, but the data of EPFR Global, an international authority on global flows, show inflows of only $4.5 billion, leaving a gap of $17.5 billion compared with official data.

The researchers are cautious in interpreting their findings. They do not make any categorical accusations, but mention the possibility of illicit inflows and roundtripping by Indian crooks. Part of the data gap they have uncovered may be explained by differences in methodology and data sources. In any event, we need a thorough examination by the Indian authorities.
Many people have jumped to the conclusion that the export boom represents overinvoiced exports to bring back black money. They argue that economic conditions are bleak in the US and Europe, and Indian economic prospects look better. Besides, Indians with black money abroad may feel threatened by US pressure on tax havens like Switzerland to end bank secrecy, and such Indians may be bringing back their money.

However, this theory has major weaknesses . When crooks under-invoiced exports in the past, the concealed sum was invisible to and untaxed by the government. But if crooks want to bring back this black money, it makes no sense to do so through over-invoiced exports–the inflated export value would be fully taxable.

In the old days, export profits were partly or wholly tax-free . In those days, over-invoiced exports could indeed be used as a way of bring money back to India tax-free . But not today. One simple way of bringing back black money is through the hawala market. But while hawala operators can handle large sums, they might not be able to handle thousands of crores.
The most popular way of bringing back black money has been to route it through financial institutions based in tax havens like Mauritius. This launders the black money lily-white , and remains tax-free . It has none of the hassles and risks of over-invoicing . Black money can also be brought back safely as NRI bank deposits. This again will be white money, hassle-free and tax-free . Thirty million Indians abroad send home $55 billion a year as cash remittances and tens of billions more as NRI bank deposits. Black money returnees should easily escape notice as a small part of this huge flood.

Finally, the worsening global economic situation has led foreign investors to pull billions of dollars out of India. This is not the climate in which black money operators would suddenly bring home enormous sums. Nor do we have imminent big elections requiring massive black money.

So, the export boom remains a puzzle. We need an urgent, detailed investigation of Kotak Securities’ research findings by the tax authorities, RBI and the commerce ministry . Even if they come up with a perfectly innocent explanation – which sounds a stretch – we need the details to improve our understanding of what’s driving exports.