Category: personal AnGoL

For over 30 years, Seven-Eleven Japan was the most profitable retailer in Japan. It achieved that stature by relying on each store’s salesclerks to decide what items to stock on that store’s shelves. Many of the salesclerks were part-time, but they were each responsible for maximizing turnover for one part of the store’s inventory, and they received detailed reports so they could monitor their own performance.
The language of hypothesis formulation was part of their process. Each week, Seven-Eleven Japan counselors visited the stores and asked salesclerks three questions:

• What did you hypothesize this week? (That is, what did you order?)
• How did you do? (That is, did you sell what you ordered?)
• How will you do better next week? (That is, how will you incorporate the learning?)

Source: Why Hypotheses Beat Goals

In one study from 2006, psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.

Source: Masters of Love – The Atlantic – Pocket

Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.

The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.
People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”

Source: Masters of Love – The Atlantic – Pocket

To pay for Continental, Schaeffler Group borrowed about 11 billion euros from a consortium of banks. At the time, Schaeffler’s lenders, including Royal Bank of Scotland, were desperate, too, having suffered enormous losses on home mortgages. They wanted to avoid any more write-downs that might result if the company defaulted on the loans. So in 2009 and 2010, Schaeffler’s lenders restructured the debt in a devilishly complex series of transactions.

By 2012, these maneuvers had caught the eye of the Global High Wealth group. Paul Doerr, an experienced revenue agent, would head the audit. Eventually, the IRS discerned what it came to believe was the transaction’s essence: The banks had effectively forgiven nearly half of Schaeffler’s debt.

To the IRS, that had significant tax implications. In the wealth team’s view, Georg Schaeffler had received billions of dollars of income — on which he owed taxes.

The auditors’ view reflects a core aspect of the U.S. tax system. Under American law, companies and individuals are liable for taxes on the forgiven portion of any loan.

Source: The Top 0.5% Underpay $50 Billion a Year In Taxes and Crushed the IRS Plan to Stop Them — ProPublica

Many economists argue that larger cities are more productive than smaller cities, and become ever more productive as they grow due to something called “agglomeration benefits”.
There are many other factors that contribute to productivity, but this simple law seems to hold well in economies like the USA, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. For example, Lyon, the second largest city in France, is more productive than Marseille, the third largest city, which is in turn more productive than Lille.
Almost uniquely among large developed countries, this pattern does not hold in the UK. The UK’s large cities see no significant benefit to productivity from size, especially when we exclude the capital.
The result is that our biggest non-capital cities, Manchester and Birmingham, are significantly less productive than almost all similar-sized cities in Europe, and less productive than much smaller cities such as Edinburgh, Oxford, and Bristol.

Source: “Birmingham isn’t a big city at peak times”: How poor public transport explains the UK’s productivity puzzle | CityMetric

Not long ago, it became fashionable to embrace failure as a sign of a company’s willingness to take risks. This trend lost favor as executives recognized that what they wanted was learning, not necessarily failure. Every failure can be attributed to a raft of missteps, and many failures do not automatically contribute to future success.
Certainly, if companies want to aggressively pursue learning, they must accept that failures will happen. But the practice of simply setting goals and then being nonchalant if they fail is inadequate.
Instead, companies should focus organizational energy on hypothesis generation and testing. Hypotheses force individuals to articulate in advance why they believe a given course of action will succeed. A failure then exposes an incorrect hypothesis — which can more reliably convert into organizational learning.

Source: Why Hypotheses Beat Goals

The “side hustle” is one of a growing roster of trendy corporatized idioms, like ordinary household appliances that are now “smart” or plain vanilla businessmen and women remade into the more exotic “entrepreneurs.” Our jobs are now “flexible,” although we are the ones contorting ourselves to work at all hours, or we are professionally “nimble” because we are trying to survive on freelance gigs.

Ultimately, like so much of this lexicon, the “side hustle” describes the overworked outsiders to privilege, who are forced into informal vocations by the absence of a legitimate economy. They are then told that suffering is valiant and also groovy. In a recent viral BuzzFeed piece describing millennials as the “burnout generation,” side hustles are listed as one of the main culprits.

Source: Opinion | The Con of the Side Hustle – The New York Times

What is Candida auris? Candida auris is a fungus that, when it gets into the bloodstream, can cause dangerous infections that can be life-threatening. Scientists first identified it in 2009 in a patient in Japan. In recent years, it has emerged around the world, largely in hospitals and nursing homes. There have been 587 C. auris cases reported in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of them in New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

Source: What You Need to Know About Candida Auris – The New York Times

Those who keep more active tend to be happier overall

The scientists found that, while those who exercised regularly tended to feel bad for around 35 days a year, non-active participants felt bad for 18 days more on average.

In addition, the researchers found that physically active people feel just as good as those who don’t do sports, but who earn around $25,000 more a year.

Essentially, you’d have to earn quite a lot more for your earnings to give you the same happiness-boosting effect sport has.

Source: Exercise makes you happier than money, says Yale and Oxford study – Business Insider

FIGURE OUT THE TECH, AND CLEARLY EXPLAIN THE RULES

Third, she thinks managers should make sure that their technological infrastructure can adequately support a distributed team. Additionally, she says managers should be upfront and transparent about where team members can work from. If workers can only work remotely from certain offices or locations, managers need to be explicit about the rules so that it doesn’t seem like certain workers are enjoying certain privileges over others.

It’s also worth noting that at Google, each employee has their own set of objectives and key results both for the quarter or year—a framework that may help its remote workers stay productive. “I think that sort of organization and structure in place certainly helps people to get work done,” says Gilrane, “because then they’ll have a clear understanding of what is prioritized.”

Source: Google’s remote work employee survey