[Leaders] frame their life stories in ways that allow them to see themselves not as passive observers of their lives but rather as individuals who can develop self-awareness from their experiences. Authentic leaders act on that awareness by practicing their values and principles, sometimes at substantial risk to themselves.
-Bill George
Finals are next week, along with a series of papers and the >play conference. It through it all, I still seem to find some time to browse the Internets.
The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.
The Bookseller, an industry magazine, Waterstone’s offered a mere 50 per cent discount – £9.49 instead of £18.99. Tesco asked £7 and Asda £5. Asda’s book buyer celebrated “fantastic” sales, despite the fact that the store is thought to be losing £4 a copy. The old joke is made real: losing money on every sale, but making it up on volume. The Book Depository, an online retailer, grabbed headlines with a price of £4.99 – whereupon Amazon quickly cut prices to match. These prices have prompted many people in the industry to feats of rhetorical self-flagellation. Industry insiders complained to The Bookseller about “ridiculously aggressive discounting” and asked “how can the book trade take itself seriously?”Tim then proceeds to outline the economic thinking behind perfect competition and price wars:
Every retailer has to charge a mark-up to cover overheads, and faces a tension between the immediate pressures of competition and the need to stay in business. Every item sold, even at the tiniest mark-up, is better than no sale at all. Yet if the mark-ups are too thin, bankruptcy will not be far away.In other words, perfect competition will drive down the price down to almost the marginal cost of the item.
It's been a great couple days here at Berkeley. I'm constantly inundated with new ideas. I've been truly amazed at the ad hoc conversations that occur within the interstitial time between meetings and classes.
One topic that has gotten me really excited is the concept of design thinking. As once an aspiring graphic designer, I have always been fascinated with design. It is the last mile between us and utility.
One core component of design thinking centers around tying cultural analysis and ethnographic observation to create big "I" insights. The following is a great short video on how design thinking was used to design the future of sustainable fishing:
Design Ethnography from Central
HT: Youngandbrilliant
Lesson #4: When someone responds, "That's a good question." That means that they don't have the answer at hand.
Paul Krugman, let's it rip in the NY Times piece:
Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.Read the entire article here.
Lesson #3. It's all about constant and long-term vigilance. It's easy to say yes now, but can one follow through?
