13 bad habits to ditch in 2013

13 bad marketing habits to ditch in 2013

1. THE MIRE OF MARGINAL THINKING

'If you need a machine and don't buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it'

Henry Ford

Marketing is littered with cautionary tales of an entrepreneurial upstart brand revolutionising established business practices.

Take the advent of Netflix and decline of Blockbuster, for example; if it taught us anything, it is that the desire to protect or adapt an existing business model rather than embrace the digital ecosystem is quite simply brand suicide. This curse of marginal thinking is perhaps the biggest barrier to business success in the modern era.

With the benefit of 10 years' hindsight, one Blockbuster press release from 2002 now seems incredible. It declared: 'We have not seen a business model that is financially viable in the long term in this arena. Online rental services are serving a niche market.'

Even now, many brands are still dragging their heels when it comes to adapting to the proliferation of digital.

In Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital, Ajaz Ahmed writes that one of the reasons why established organisations struggle to innovate is that the existing team already has its hands full doing its current job. Big organisations are usually built for efficiency, not innovation.

'In many respects, innovation is seen as the opposite of efficiency, because it is not routine and has unpredictable outcomes,' argues Ahmed. 'This can create an environment in which there is no investment into future revenue streams because of the short-term impact on margins. As a result, the established business becomes resistant to innovation because it feels threatened by it, creating forces that actively discourage new thinking.'

In his latest book How will you Measure your Life? Clayton M Christensen, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, says that every time an executive in an established company needs to make an investment decision, there are two choices on the menu.

The first is the full cost of making something completely new. The second is to use what already exists. The marginal-cost argument almost always overwhelms the full-cost. However, he concludes: 'When there is competition, and this thinking causes established companies to continue to use what they already have in place, they pay far more than the full cost - because the company loses its competitiveness.'

Indeed, one of the big themes to have emerged in 2012 among many marketers was that of frustration. Without a high degree of autonomy, marketers cannot move fast enough to keep up with the sheer pace of change and innovation in the marketplace.

In Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, economist Tim Harford writes that many corporations today have the right level of centralisation for an era dominated by logistics and scale, but too much for an era dominated by innovation and creativity.

This is particularly true in marketing, where the advent of global network and brand deals have denied local markets the ability to engage with local suppliers to drive fast and adaptive innovation.

Compare and contrast this approach with that of Google, where engineers are allowed to spend one-fifth of their time on their own projects.

If the recession has left many marketers trapped in a mire of marginal thinking, then 2013 must be the year the industry finally embraces change; otherwise, it risks following Blockbuster down the path of irrelevance.

2. SETTLING FOR LESS

'The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it'

Steve Jobs

When the economic downturn has, in effect, become 'wallpaper' to marketers, it's time for corporations to stop using it as a catch-all excuse for lack of investment. Let 2013 be the year that marketers champion the value of their work across the business, and in the boardroom.

3. THE ENDLESS PURSUIT OF MEANINGLESS 'LIKES'

'Now is the Wild Wild West in social media' 

Chris Hirst, Grey London

Meaningless metrics have become a fact of life for marketers and it is time for the industry to recognise the futility of terms such as 'like' or 'fan'.

Many media experts have waxed lyrical over the value of a 'like' and marketers have tended glibly to follow suit. The industry must start from scratch when it comes to understanding how to measure the value of social media and stop attempting to impose dated metrics on modern channels.

It's a litany of misleading statements: connections, friends, fans and likes all mark very different sets of online behaviours.

Chris Hirst, chief executive of agency Grey London, says that not everyone wants to be a 'friend' of or 'like' a toothpaste brand, for example. 'Looking ahead, I can't believe that consumers will be willing to share as much data publicly as they do now. People don't understand that a "like" isn't an abstract event, but a mechanism for data storage,' he adds.

Stefan Olander, vice-president of digital sport for Nike, believes that brands should stop focusing on clicks or 'likes'. 'A whole industry is stuck on trying to force old metrics onto new channels. Too many businesses are thinking "I need to sell inventory", rather than 'How can I add value to a smartphone, or a new device?'" he adds.

To attempt to take the richness and complexity of human relationships and reduce them to a series of streamlined interactions is impossible. It is naive for brands to expect to do the same, package it up and stamp a media value on it.

4. EMAIL DEPENDENCY

'Sending emails has become more "the thing" than actually "doing the thing"' 

Ajaz Ahmed, AKQA

The chief executive of one of the world's biggest telecoms companies issues on-the-spot fines to agencies and employees who pointlessly 'cc' him on email exchanges, wasting valuable time. Meanwhile, Mickey Drexler, J Crew's enigmatic chief executive, 'cuts the crap' with an all-company speakerphone system.

Email is in many ways the scourge of the modern age and, for marketers, the effect is two-fold, as many brands are too reliant on email marketing to reach their consumers, as well as using it as a communication crutch to bombard colleagues with pointless missives.

David Thorp, director of research and professional development at the CIM, says there is an overload of poor email marketing. 'It's lazy marketing,' he claims. 'Its cheap to send out, so some people don't bother to target properly and the net effect is it is seriously counterproductive for many brands, as the metrics just don't measure up.'

5. HAVING IT ALL

'My ego aspires to make it happen, but my authentic self is not sure it is worth it'

Female respondent to the McKinsey 'Unlocking the Full Potential of Women at Work' report

Flexibility will be a key buzzword in 2013. Technology has revolutionised the workplace, and brands that want to keep the best talent will harness its power as a force for good.

Facebook chief executive Sheryl Sandberg declared last year that 'there is work and there is life and there is no balance'. 'Presenteeism', the mistaken belief that marketers must be present in the office at all costs, is taking its toll.

Of course, there are millions of working men and women facing much more difficult life circumstances than juggling myriad engagements of a typical marketing and advertising professional. The fact remains that, for those struggling to hold on to just one thing, the debate on 'having it all' must seem like it comes from a parallel universe. However, that doesn't mean professionals shouldn't strive to make a change in their own spheres.

We shouldn't be afraid to speak up when we hear trite statements about 'baby brains' or are exposed to the sheer lack of compassion dished out regularly to those seeking to run a career and keep up with the various demands of family life.

This is a year the marketing industry needs to face up to some uncomfortable facts, which need both to be acknowledged and changed. An industry that fails to place flexibility at the heart of its offering will never attract and retain the best talent.

6. THE DEAD END OF DISCOUNTS

'If you follow the road of price promotions, you will quickly realise it's a dead end, with no profits' 

Thierry Billot, Pernod Ricard

If the recession has taught us anything, it is that price promotion is not a sustainable marketing strategy. Brands have lined up in the past few years to sacrifice their long-term brand equity at the altar of short-term profits. This is the era of buy one get two free, where supermarkets have become all powerful.

One former editor of mine once quipped that we would know the recession was over only when Marks & Spencer ditched its 'dine in for two for £10' offer. Discounts have fast become a one-size-fits-all marketing solution.

Marketers would be wise to listen to Thierry Billot, managing director of brands at Pernod Ricard, who says that brands are diminishing their equity for promotions. 'Consumers get confused by price-cutting and it is difficult to bounce back from that,' he explains.

7. BELIEVING IN BUSINESS AS NORMAL

'Change is often seen as a threat, but to an entrepreneur, it's oxygen. It's what being alive and enthusiastic about business rests on. When the established way of doing things is in turmoil, new energy has the best chance to step in and succeed by doing things better than they've always been done before'

Sir Richard Branson, The Virgin Group

 The recession isn't going anywhere fast in 2013 and those brands that continue to hope that their business will 'bounce back' on the basis of an increasingly elusive economic recovery stand little chance of survival.

8. LATENESS: SPARE US THE 'BUSY-OFF'

'There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late' 

Og Mandino

I cannot be alone in thinking, when faced with persistent lateness, the underlying message it conveys is not 'look how busy and important I am', but 'I am incompetent, I cannot work out how long an hour is and I cannot manage my own time'.

Despite this, 2012 was the year that the 'busy-off' rivalled preoccupation with the weather's place as the nation's number-one obsession.

Dan Hagen, head of planning at agency Carat, says that lateness has become a cultural phenomenon. 'The problem is that when there is a culture of reactivism, everything becomes more important than what you are actually scheduled to do.' Let 2013 be the year the industry at least tries harder to be on time.

9. CAMPAIGNS

'Long-range planning works best in the short term' 

Doug Evelyn

Given the prevailing always-on culture, the notion that brands can rely simply on planning out their campaign schedule in advance is fundamentally flawed.

Chris Arnold, founder of agency Creative Orchestra, says that the bureaucracy that hampers big organisations has become obstructive. 'Clients need to get away from being so campaign-focused; otherwise, they are a year late with their response,' he adds.

10. ASSUMPTIONS

'It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail' 

Abraham Maslow

While marketers speak about the perils of the data deluge, the fact remains that there is still an unhealthy reliance on assumptions in the industry.

Martin Bailie, commercial strategy director at agency glue Isobar, says: 'People assuming success or hoping for success is not good enough. It is time to ditch the guessing and focus on empirical data.'

One of the biggest challenges created by the improvement in data collection and storage is the growing disparity between the amount of data collected by brands and their ability to meaningfully interpret it. Let interpretation and understanding trump assumptions this year.

11. GREENWASH: BEYOND CSR

'We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don't belong here' 

Enron's 'Visions and Values' corporate policy

Consumers increasingly judge brands by their actions, and social responsibility has rocketed to the top of the corporate agenda as a result. It has become so much bigger than just a marketing tool. This is the year brands must do more than say they are good; they must prove they are.

12. PROCUREMENT ABOVE ALL THINGS

'My favourite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time' 

Steve Jobs

Russ Lidstone, chief executive of agency Havas Worldwide London, says that one key challenge is the rise of procurement and the procurement process. He adds: 'It is natural and understandable that prospects want to know they are getting value for money - and we are keen to ensure value and transparency. However, an industry-wide challenge is the degree to which the procurement process (sometimes automated) leads to "low cost" overshadowing the strategic and creative process, the people, and the power of great creative ideas.'

13. THE MORAL VACUUM

'Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being' 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Perhaps one of the most depressing byproducts of the economic downturn is the creep of sharp practices into corporate life. From bad manners to imposing impossible working conditions on marketers, the 'uncertain economic climate' has fast become a catch-all excuse for operating in a moral vacuum.

Demanding careers, family responsibilities and acquiring and attempting to maintain the various trappings of success have a tendency to swallow up time and perspective. Marketers must recognise that in life, we don't have to operate in the margins.

In the words of Clayton M Christensen, one of the world's leading thinkers on innovation: 'It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time. The boundary - your own personal moral line - is powerful, because you don't cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there's nothing to stop you doing it again. Decide what you stand for and then stand for it all the time.'

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

Jack Garson: You're Building a Business -- But Can You Sell It?

You're Building a Business -- But Can You Sell It?

You've read the headlines. Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway to acquire Heinz in multi-billion dollar sale. Hot Topic, the teen chain store, sold to Sycamore Partners for $600 million.

Comcast recently completed its $16.7 billion acquisition of NBCUniversal. Somebody's getting rich.

But nobody would ever want to buy my company, you think. Sure, after years of struggle and plenty of doubts, your business is finally taking off. Customers are reaching out to you. Recruiting employees is easier. You've moved out of your basement/the free incubator/that cheap warehouse space and into real business space. To top it all off, you're finally paying yourself. So you have a business, a real business. Even your parents admitted it.

But despite this success, you're not building a business that someone wants to buy. You're not even trying. Why?

Because most entrepreneurs struggle through hard times working to keep their customers happy and then struggle through good times working to keep their employees happy. They deal with vendors and lenders that may or may not care about their business--depending on the day of the week -- and face constant battles from competition, regulation and plain old bad luck. No wonder most business owners just grind it out for years making a decent -- sometimes generous -- living. Then, exhausted, they retire and shut their doors.

But they're leaving money on the table. A lot.

You can build a business that people will clamor to buy. It takes know-how and discipline. Here's the info -- you supply the willpower.

First and foremost, you need to build a business that can live -- actually thrive -- without you. This may bash your ego a bit, but a buyer almost always wants to get rid of you. Sooner or later, usually sooner, most purchasers want to run your EX-company their way. After a brief transition phase (usually lasting somewhere between the mourning period for a pet fish and a few months), the buyer wants you gone. That's gone, as in "Nice knowing you, but stay away." It's the buyer's show now.

This means you need to avoid the typical "hub-and-spokes" business model that is all too dependent on the owner. The owner is the hub and performs most of the critical tasks. The employees aid the owner in performing these tasks, expanding the owner's ability to do more. Employees are mere "helpers" and the owner is a never-take-a-real-vacation Superman or Superwoman that must perform most key functions, such as sales, product design, management -- you name it. There's no meaningful delegation. Heck, if the owner goes on a long vacation without a phone and computer, everything falls apart.

Instead, hire the most talented people you can afford and put them in critical executive roles. Then let them take on larger roles as your business grows. Now a buyer can purchase your company, keep the executive team and plug in their own new leader. The purchaser will have a viable, and likely improved, business. Yes, it's nice to be wanted, even needed. And, yes, it stings a bit to think that your business can go on without you. I suggest you fantasize about your bank account. That will usually get you through the hurt.

Second, you need to make money. There's two parts. You need to be profitable each year. Then that profit must grow every year. We're talking real profit -- not page views or click-throughs or similar customer flirtations. Money, money, money. Why is it so important? Two reasons. Buyers purchase businesses to make money. Equally important, buyers never want to lose money.

The typical purchaser's formula is "buy, build, sell." Buyers start with good companies. If your business is profitable, it tells a purchaser that your company has hit upon a formula for making money. And if your profits are growing every year, it means that there's a good chance those profits will continue to grow. In fact, experienced buyers count on growing these reliable money-makers. They typically expand the business with a cash infusion, fix what's wrong and add new leaders who have taken over and grown a few other companies. Then they flip these businesses for a sizable profit.

But these buyers will scrutinize dozens of companies to find the right one -- because they really hate losing money. Almost all of them have lost their entire investment on some bad purchase in the past. It was painful. Aside from losing their own money, they lost their families' money. They lost their friends' money. They lost their investors' money. Everybody was mad. Some of those family, friends and investors still aren't talking to that idiot who lost their money. So now -- lonelier and wiser -- they won't even consider buying your business without proof that they are starting off with a good purchase. And a key threshold test is steadily increasing profits. It says your business will make a lot of money -- not lose it.

Third, you need a competitive edge. As a small company, you're flying under the radar. You're not a national sensation and you haven't attracted too much attention. That's perfectly fine for now. You win customers and make money just by being good at what you do.

But a buyer needs to grow your company to resell it for a big profit. That growth will produce a lot of visibility. Your business will come out of the "small company" closet. Vultures will be circling overhead, waiting to pounce on your ideas. These copycats will try to duplicate and even improve on your business. Think about what the iPhone did to, um (what's their name?), oh yeah, Blackberry.

So you need an edge that prevents others from copying your business. For some companies, it's software or a patent or a secret ingredient in the sauce. For others, it is incredible responsiveness or unbeatably low prices. Figure out how to make your business so special that no one else can replace it. Without this competitive edge, your ability to sell your business plunges. A buyer won't risk an investment on a company that can be wiped out by competitors.

If all of this sounds hard, it is. But with these ideas and the determination to implement them, people will compete to buy your business. Sure, the sale of your company may never make the headlines or billions of dollars. But it can make you rich.

 

 

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

China's economic growth to rebound 

China's economic growth will rebound slightly over the next quarter driven by recovering global demand and accommodative policies, but concerns over rising inflation may result in tightening measures, experts said.

The economy was forecast to expand 8.2 per cent in the second quarter, up from an estimated 8 per cent in the first three months, according to a quarterly report published by the Bank of China yesterday.

The prediction was backed by the rising profits of large industrial enterprises, which rose 17.2 per cent year-on-year to 709.2 billion yuan (US$114.1 billion) in the first two months, mainly driven by the power, oil refining and steel sectors, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics.

"The economic rebound lacked momentum in the first quarter due to slowing consumption and investment, but the stabilisation of these two will boost growth in the second quarter," the bank's report said.

In addition, exports grew "unexpectedly", and there was a significant increase in the trade surplus in the first two months, which was $44.4 billion compared to a $4.9 billion deficit last year.

However, such a growth trend lacks sustainable momentum amid an unstable global economic recovery, the report said.

The report also predicted that the Consumer Price Index, a key gauge of inflation, would pick up by 0.5 percentage points to an average of 3.2 per cent in the second quarter from the previous quarter, as a result of escalating food prices and resource price reform.

The pressure also comes from imported inflation as a result of the quantitative easing widely adopted by governments globally, which generated excessive global liquidity and pushed up commodity prices.

"Given these factors, we forecast a neutral macroeconomic policy to seek a balance between stabilising growth and guarding against inflation," said Wen Bin, a senior researcher with Bank of China's Institute of International Finance.

"Interest rates will remain unchanged throughout the whole year, and there will be no room for further reductions in the bank reserve requirement ratio in the first half of this year," he said.

But David Leung, general manager of wealth management and priority and international banking, consumer banking at Standard Chartered Bank (China) Ltd, said that the monetary authorities would probably increase interest rates by 25 basis points in the fourth quarter, then hike rates again by 50 points in the first quarter of next year, increasing inflationary pressure.

Leung said China could maintain GDP growth of 8.3 per cent throughout the entire year, with inflation controlled below 4 per cent.

The Asian economy would be driven by China's economic recovery, before strengthening against the backdrop of improvements in the US economy, he said.

Continuous monetary loosening worldwide would inject further liquidity and support the global market, especially capital markets, he said.

"Therefore, more hikes in interest rates would be considered as signals of an even stronger rebound, which would boost corporate credit ratings and further shore up the stock market."

But some analysts are not so optimistic.

Yao Wei, a Chinese economist at Societe Generale CIB, said: "Loan growth in the banking system will be damaged by the tightening of the property sector, and non-bank credit growth will cool as a result of stricter regulation of shadow banking activities."

This will lead to tighter liquidity conditions and slower economic growth later in the year, she said.

The Bank of China report also estimated that the renminbi exchange rate would rise further, mainly due to strong demand for the currency amid an inflow of hot money.

"The renminbi exchange rate will climb steadily and become more elastic. It is expected to appreciate by about 3 per cent against the US dollar to 6.1 by the end of 2013, and to 6.18 by the end of second quarter," Wen said.

He added that there is room for more widening of the renminbi's daily trading band against the US dollar set by the central bank, which is currently 1 per cent.

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

Why Your Skyrocketing Rent Is Bad for the Economy | Emily Badger

Why Your Skyrocketing Rent Is Bad for the Economy

Shutterstock

Michael Lind is in the midst of a three-part series over at Salon on the rise of rentier capitalism in America, with some pretty unambiguous headlines (yesterday: "Private sector parasites"; today: "How rich 'moochers' hurt America"). His premise is that the true "takers" in America are not the impoverished families on food stamps or the retired workers using medicare. They are, among other people, the landlords who've been sitting comfortably on the other end of the astronomical uptick in rent prices we've been wringing our hands over here, here, here and here.

Last spring, The New York Times reported that rents in Manhattan had reached an all-time high. By September, our own Richard Florida noted that it had become cheaper to own a home than to rent one in every one of the country's 100 largest metros. Earlier this year, it appeared as if the average rent for an apartment in San Francisco had finally leveled off... at $2,741 a month.

We've thought a lot about what all of these numbers mean for families and young professionals who would like to move into (or stay within) increasingly unaffordable major metros. But Lind's writing puts a whole different perspective on the problem: What about all of the landlords who are now depositing this windfall, and without lifting a finger or remodeling a bathroom to get it?

While productive capitalists — "industrialists," to use the old-fashioned term — need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, "rentiers" (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.

Landlords aren't the only "rentiers" in our economy. Lind uses the acronym FIRE to reference the broader sector of rent "takers" in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors. The fact that all of these people are doing so well right now means that massive flows of wealth in our economy are changing hands without the production of new tools or services or products, or really without the creation of any new value. Wealthy rentiers are growing wealthier without producing anything. Meanwhile, while you sit in your $3,000-a-month Manhattan studio, you're not funneling that money into sectors of the economy we would ostensibly like to spur, like technology (buy a new computer) or local business (try a new restaurant).

Lind again:

All of this suggests that, if we want a technology-driven, highly productive economy, we should encourage profit-making productive enterprises while cracking down on rent-extracting monopolies, whether they are natural products of geography and geology (real estate and energy and energy and mineral deposits) or artificial (chartered banks, professional licensing associations, labor unions, patents and copyrights). This is a valid distinction between "makers" and "takers."

In the United States, he laments, we tend to view all money-making enterprises "as if they were equally productive and socially useful" simply because they make somebody money somewhere. And we seldom distinguish between wealth accumulated through passive means like rent collection or active (and riskier) efforts at doing... anything productive.

The fact that your rent is rising is hardly the fault of greedy landlords. They're extracting what the market will pay, and the market has gotten a lot tougher as more job-seekers have moved into certain cities, and as many people have been scared off of homeownership. But it's worth noting that as you dash off your next rent check, you're not the only one hurting. This isn't good for the economy, either.

Top image: Henryk Sadura/Shutterstock

Emily Badger is a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities. Her work has previously appeared in Pacific Standard, GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

Kuala Lumpur: Capital Without a Past

Its name means "Estuary of Mud," and it started life as a tin-mining frontier town in the 1850s. Perhaps that is why Kuala Lumpur has always been reinventing itself. Since independence in 1957, the capital of Malaysia has been striving to rise, like a lotus flower, above its murky, terrene origins. And it has succeeded. Today, one of the most spectacular sights in the city—or anywhere in the world—is the 88-story Petronas Twin Towers. Lit up at night, they glitter like a pair of diamond-encrusted ears of corn. But whenever I see them, I think also of Bok House, a mansion 10 minutes' walk from the Twin Towers.

As Kuala Lumpur has modernized, parts of its history have been forsaken. (Vin's Image via Getty)

Chua Cheng Bok built the mansion in 1929. He started out poor, but became one of the richest men in the country and constructed his home in the Renaissance style, incorporating Chinese and Anglo-Indian elements into its design. In 1958 it was leased to a restaurant called Le Coq d'Or. In the early 1980s, when I was 10 or 11, my parents used to take my sister and me for dinner there once a month. Le Coq d'Or's menu was Western: fish and chips, chicken chop, steak, but Malaysianized (the chicken chop came soaked in a mushroom gravy; the vegetables were steamed but still crunchy). The staff was Hainanese, of the kind much sought after as cooks by the English during colonial times.

On every visit I would wander around the poorly lit mansion. The lobby was tiled in squares of black and white. Italian marble statues covered in a skin of dust posed on heavy traditional Chinese blackwood furniture. A grand staircase with art nouveau cast-iron railings rose from the center of the lobby into the darkness of the closed-off second floor. The dining room smelled of starched tablecloths and stale frying butter. Oil paintings, murky with age, hung on the walls. Part of the thrill of exploring the house was my suspicion that it was haunted. Going to the washroom on one of my first visits, I turned down the wrong corridor and came to a room furnished with only an immense Chinese blackwood opium divan. The mother-of-pearl decorations on its headboard were elaborate and eerie, giving the divan a malevolent air.

Our regular dinners at Le Coq d'Or tapered off when I started secondary school. I went there a few times after I graduated from college. The Twin Towers were rising behind Bok House, and soon after, I was told that Le Coq d'Or had closed for good and that the mansion would be demolished. Conservation organizations fought to preserve Bok House as a heritage building, and for a while I thought it would be saved—the house had fended off worse threats to its existence before, including Japanese bombs during the Second World War. But one morning in December 2006, workmen showed up at Bok House. By sunset the 77-year-old house was gone.

I remembered how, whenever we dined at Le Coq d'Or on special occasions, my father would order Bombe Alaska. That was where I first saw the flambéed dessert being prepared: the ancient waiter wheeling the cart to our table, dousing the mound of ice cream with rum and then setting fire to it with a match. The shadowy dining room was the perfect stage for this performance. I would watch the flames play over the ice cream, so blue I felt they ought to be ice-cold and not burning hot.

Today, Kuala Lumpur has five-star restaurants offering cuisines from around the world. Air-conditioned elevated walkways connect one massive shopping mall to another, malls filled with all the luxury brands you desire. Once a year the city explodes into a frenzy when the F1 drivers compete at the Sepang racetrack an hour and a half's drive from the city. In its rush to modernize, to rise above the silt, Kuala Lumpur has erased nearly every reminder of its past. With its merging of Eastern and Western designs, its antique opium divan, its history and hoard of memories, Bok House was one of those reminders.

Sometimes, walking to the Twin Towers, I would pass the property where Bok House used to stand. I would stop and, for a minute or two, look at the place where, many years ago, set among Kuala Lumpur's numerous Malay, Chinese, and Indian eating places, there was once a restaurant called Le Coq d'Or. In its dining room you could order a Bombe Alaska and watch it being set alight at your table, and for a few seconds the flames would illuminate the faces of the people around you, before fading away.

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

BILLION OF DOLLARS WORTH OF GOLD IS HIDING IN OUR GARBAGE

The rally cry of the gold bug has never been louder thanks to the aggressive monetary policies of the central banks around the world.

To meet demand, traditional miners crush tons of rock for specks of gold.

Meanwhile, most of us just throw away gold without knowing it.

Here's an interesting infographic shows how much gold is in our garbage.

Why Isn't Better Education Giving Women More Power? | Garance Franke-Ruta

Why Isn't Better Education Giving Women More Power?

Walter Newton

In her new book, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, recounts a warning she delivered to Harvard Business School students in 2011. "About one-third of the women in this audience will be working full-time" in 15 years, she told them. "And almost all of you will be working for the guy you are sitting next to."

Surveying the stubborn gender inequalities of the early-21st-century workplace, Sandberg has written what might best be described as a cross between a feminist treatise and an airport business book, in which she advocates for structural changes to make corporate America more hospitable to women—particularly mothers. She also issues a bracing call for women to propel themselves ever higher, take more risks, speak up, negotiate, and pull a seat up to the table. But for all the persuasive parts of her argument, a vexing contradiction remains mostly unaddressed. In one important arena, women have already, to borrow Sandberg's phrase, been aggressively leaning in: school. Women surpassed men as a percentage of college students in the late 1980s, and by 2009 had become the majority of master's-degree students and doctoral candidates. The majority of Americans older than 25 with college degrees are, today, women. Yet just 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. So why hasn't women's success in the academy led them to more leadership positions in the work world?

Forty years ago, Title IX mandated equality for women. But it did so only in schools. In the decades since Congress passed this law, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, women have flocked to the ivory tower. There, enforced equal standing is coupled with criteria for success that are transparent, and that reward industriousness. Many parts of the work world, by comparison, are still plagued by sexism, or reward a particular sort of self-promotion that many women shy away from. Studies have repeatedly shown that women get more criticism and less praise in the workplace than men do. They are offered lower starting salaries, and are judged more negatively by prospective employers than are men with identical backgrounds. And unlike in school, the burden of fighting discrimination rests almost entirely on an individual, who must initiate grievance procedures against her boss.

Just as important, the behaviors that school rewards—studying, careful preparation, patient climbing from one level to the next—seem to give women an advantage academically, judging from the fact that they get higher grades in college than men do. Yet these behaviors aren't necessarily so helpful in the workplace. Out in the work world, people hire and promote based on personality as much as on formal qualifications, and very often networking can trump grinding away. As Whitney Johnson and Tara Mohr put it in an article on the Harvard Business Review's Web site earlier this year, "The very skills that propel women to the top of the class in school are earning us middle-of the-pack marks in the workplace."

It can take young women years to realize that the professional world is less of a meritocracy than the school world, and that the strategies that lead to success in one realm may not be enough to master the other. In the meantime, many suffer from what Carol Frohlinger and Deborah Kolb, the founders of Negotiating Women Inc., a firm that coaches women in leadership skills, call "tiara syndrome"—the belief that if they "keep doing their job well, someone will notice them and place a tiara on their head." This tends not to happen.

Women begin to fall behind the moment they leave school. Even controlling for their college major and professional field, they wind up being paid 7 percent less than men, on average, one year after graduating, according to a 2012 study by the American Association of University Women. One reason is that they take fewer risks right out of the gate: they are much less likely to negotiate their first salary—57 percent of men do this, versus 7 percent of women. Compared with their male peers, women also set less ambitious goals. A McKinsey study published last April found that 36 percent of male employees at major companies hope to be top executives, compared with just 18 percent of female employees. I've heard countless stories that reflect this same divide. Stephanie Mencimer, now a reporter at Mother Jones, told me that when she was a hiring editor at The Washington Monthly, she marveled at how, among comparably credentialed applicants just out of school, women were more likely to apply to be interns, while men would apply to be editors at the magazine.

The university system aside, I suspect there is another, deeply ingrained set of behaviors that also undermine women: the habits they pick up—or don't pick up—in the dating world. Men learn early that to woo women, they must risk rejection and be persistent. Straight women, for their part, learn from their earliest years that they must wait to be courted. The professional world does not reward the second approach. No one is going to ask someone out professionally if she just makes herself attractive enough. I suspect this is why people who put together discussion panels and solicit op‑eds always tell me the same thing: it's harder to get women to say yes than men. Well, duh. To be female in our culture is to be trained from puberty in the art of rebuffing—rebuffing gazes, comments, touches, propositions, and proposals.

Sensing that they are not prepared for the world they have entered, many professional women seek still more academic credentials. I've come to think of this as intellectual primping—the frequently futile hope that one more degree will finally win notice, and with it, that perfect job or raise. Eight years ago, Anna Fels, a New York City psychiatrist in her 60s, published a book called Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives. She told me she has since noticed that, in the wake of gains unimaginable when she was young, women today may have a harder time seeing the barriers before them than did the women of her generation. "Women may think the more degrees they get, the more chances they have of being hired," she says, "but they are swimming upstream."

In the 20th century, women often needed to be better-credentialed than men to get to the same place—for example, female Pulitzer Prize winners tended to be better-educated than men who won the same award. But in the 21st century, education is clearly no panacea.

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Great Leaders Use Honesty to Help Their Successors - Bloomberg

Great Leaders Use Honesty to Help Their Successors

Jack Ma, the founder and long-time CEO of Chinese web company, Alibaba, recently announced that he is stepping down as CEO, and now we have learned that Jonathan Lu Zhaoxi will become chief executive of the company in May. Alibaba is an incredible success story. The company began in 1999 and last year had estimated revenues of $40 billion. By comparison, after its first 13 years, Apple had revenues of $8.9 billion.

I admire Ma and believe that he is an amazing leader. Those who have worked with him are lucky — but the man or woman that follows him faces a challenge ahead. How do you succeed someone so revered?

CEO transition has become a routinized activity — companies bring in a well-known consulting firm and follow a checklist to identify and onboard a new leader. And, overall, I'd say that most transitions done this way — with good people and due diligence — deserve a "B" grade. But what's much more complicated, and harder to get right, is a transition when the CEO has grown to be larger-than-life. Like Ma. In these cases, it is up to the departing leader to help, in a way that only he (or she) can.

Ma knows this very well, and predicted his own quandary. He has written in an email to his employees: "Succeeding a founder CEO is a difficult job, especially taking over from a CEO with such a distinct personality...." Some might interpret this as the arrogance of a very successful man. Others might read it as the disarming honesty of a great leader (since the statement is, factually, 100% true). I've observed Ma and from what I know of him, I suspect the latter assessment is accurate: frank and open honesty, not chest pounding arrogance. And that brings us to a very important point.

We want the truth from our leaders. But we have become cynics, accustomed to twisted messages from politicians and company marketing communications so wordsmithed that they lack meaning. These things do not inspire us, or pull us toward someone in a leadership position, with an attitude of wanting to help. They do the opposite. Great leaders have the ability to surprise and reassure people with their direct and honest communication. This is an essential part of what makes them great. And it is especially important in times of big change and uncertainty — such as CEO transitions — where it can smooth the way for the incoming leader.

Will this be the case with Alibaba? I hope so. Ma has put reality on the table, stating clearly what the challenges are and what he wants, with the real authority that comes from his venerated position.

With Ma's endorsement, I expect Alibaba employees will rally around Lu Zhaoxi. They'll be less likely to sit back and wait for the new guy to prove himself, or to gossip continually about their new CEO as inferior. They will be more inclined to actively help, with some sense of urgency, around a huge challenge for the firm. And if they do — Alibaba competitors had better look out for them.

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http://goayjl.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/joelie-beauty-and-cosmetics-loreal-eats-into-pgs-china-lead-with-mushroom-lotions/

JOELIE BEAUTY AND COSMETICS | L'Oreal Eats Into P&G's China Lead With Mushroom Lotions | Goayjl's Blog

L'OREAL PARIS

L'Oreal Eats Into P&G's China Lead With Mushroom Lotions

At L'Oreal SA (OR)'s Shanghai research center, more than 260 scientists working with skin cells and test tubes tailor products from lipsticks to shampoos for Chinese shoppers.

This year's offerings: a cosmetic balm for Chinese men looking to mask face blemishes, and skin serums made from white fungus, ginseng, and cordyceps — a type of parasitic mushroom widely used as a herbal remedy.

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Contestants for the Miss Universe China Pageant train for the event in Beijing, China. Photographer: Keith Bedford/Bloomberg

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A Yue-Sai counter is seen at the New World Department Store in Shanghai. Source: L'Oreal via Bloomberg

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An employee works on a lipstick at L'Oreal SA's Shanghai research center. Source: L'Oreal via Bloomberg

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Employees walk outside of L'Oreal SA's Shanghai research center. Source: L'Oreal via Bloomberg

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A promotional image shows Yue-Sai's Vital Essential Serum made with Ganoderma Fungi, or lingzhi. Source: L'Oreal via Bloomberg

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Yue-Sai plans to introduce a customized skin serum this year. Specially trained "beauty advisers" will chat with Chinese customers at store counters about their lifestyles and analyze skin types to mix up a moisturizer with ginseng, cordyceps and white fungus to meet an individual's requirements. Source: L'Oreal via Bloomberg

The world's largest cosmetics maker is launching the new products to whittle away at Procter & Gamble Co (PG).'s lead in China's market for beauty and personal care products, estimated to reach $34 billion this year by Euromonitor. To gain an edge over its Cincinatti competitor, L'Oreal is counting on lotions using traditional medical ingredients and offerings targeted at Chinese men, among the fastest growing sections of the market.

The strategy will help the Paris-based firm boost China sales more than 10 percent in 2013 from 12.05 billion yuan ($1.9 billion) last year, China Chief Executive Officer Alexis Perakis-Valat, predicted in an interview. The new products will be unveiled later this year.

"L'Oreal has become a formidable competitor for Procter & Gamble (PG) in skin care," Oru Mohiuddin, a senior analyst in London at researcher Euromonitor International, said in an e-mail. "Not just has L'Oreal approached China from various angles, including pricing and retail coverage, it also strived to make the brands more customized and effective."

Fighting Acne

The maker of labels from Lancome to Biotherm has been narrowing the gap with P&G in China's beauty and personal-care industry. L'Oreal's share of the market rose to 11 percent in 2011 from 9 percent in 2008, according to the most recent data available from Euromonitor.

P&G, which banks on home staples such as Olay and Gillette, lost 1.6 percentage points to 15.8 percent in 2011. L'Oreal is already ahead in skin-care, with a 15 percent share in 2012 compared with less than 10 percent for P&G.

The companies are fighting for shoppers like 24-year-old Shanghai advertising executive Corina Su, who has an extensive daily beauty regimen. As part of a determined battle against acne, she spent $169 on a Clarisonic electric face brush made by L'Oreal. Her morning routine includes a herbal gel cleanser, cucumber toner and avocado eye cream.

"Chinese people place a huge emphasis on beauty and skin care as they are especially afraid of aging," Su said.

Stock Surge

L'Oreal's stock has jumped 35 percent over the past year, compared with a gain of about 14 percent for P&G and a loss of 8 percent for Japan's Shiseido Co. The Garnier maker trades at about 24 times this year's estimated earnings compared with P&G's 19 times.

China is the second-largest market for P&G, with sales of $7 billion including daily goods such as Bounty paper towels in addition to personal care brands.

The overall China business expanded about 50 percent in the past three years and the company continues to grow through new categories and innovation in existing ones, it said in an e- mailed statement. P&G chose China to launch its Oceana skin-care brand in January.

L'Oreal, headed by chief executive officer Jean Paul Agon, reported a 12 percent gain in last year's earnings and said it is "well prepared" to outstrip the growth of the beauty market this year. It is likely to extend market share gains in China skin-care, Euromonitor's Mohiuddin said.

China, which provides about 6 percent of L'Oreal's annual revenue of 22.5 billion euros ($29 billion), offers a window into how the French company is tapping new markets to boost growth as spending in Europe slows.

Playing Catch-Up

The company's business benefited in China from the 2009 introduction of the Kiehl's skincare brand that drew consumers looking for mid-priced skin-care products, according to Paul French, a Shanghai-based analyst at Mintel Group.

"In China, for a long time you just had your high and low end," said French. "Kiehl's, along with Korea's Face group and L'Occitane, really opened up the mid-market range."

Market share declines for P&G's Olay brand in China also open opportunities for L'Oreal's Garnier brand, which is in a similar, more affordable price range, Mohiuddin said.

"In China, P&G had been very successful, but then got complacent in terms of innovation and tried to consistently raise prices, leveraging its strong share position only," said Ali Dibadj, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. via e- mail. "Eventually, competitors like L'Oreal and others caught up."

While building global brands such as Kiehl's and Garnier in China, L'Oreal has added local lines. In 2004, it bought the Yue-Sai brand, which uses traditional Chinese herbs in its creams. Sales of that line rose more than 20 percent last year as buyers snapped up items such as a 50-milliliter jars of Youth Preserving Moisturizer for 210 yuan made with Ganoderma Fungi, or lingzhi.

White Fungus

The company will expand Yue-Sai on the mainland this year by selling more through online Chinese retailers such as T-Mall. The brand also plans a customized skin serum this year.

Specially trained "beauty advisers" will chat with Chinese customers at store counters about their lifestyles and analyze skin types to mix up a moisturizer with ginseng, cordyceps and white fungus to meet an individual's requirements.

"As needs are getting more and more sophisticated, and beauty is less and less one size fits all, you have to have an answer for very different needs," Perakis-Valat said.

His company faces rising competition even as its China ambitions grow. Other global rivals such as Japan's Shiseido (4911), Anglo-Dutch personal care company Unilever Plc (ULVR) and direct distributor Amway Corp. are diving deeper into the world's most populous nation.

Formidable Foe

It still faces a formidable competitor in P&G, the world's largest consumer products company, which had 2012 sales of $83 billion. After lowering its profit projection three times last year, P&G in January raised its 2013 forecast amid a push to reduce expenses and cut jobs.

Part of the French company's success will depend on its ability to sell to men in China, where the male grooming industry will expand 13.4 percent this year, outstripping overall beauty and personal care by Euromonitor's estimates.

The cosmetics seller plans to introduce L'Oreal Paris men's blemish balms after the success of so-called BB creams among Asia women.

"The exciting thing about China is that people don't really know what they want yet," said Mary Bergstrom, founder of the Bergstrom Group consultancy. "Consumers are so keen on finding the next big thing. Trends that you might not immediately think of working have the potential of working well in this market."

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

Why Startups Should Take a Big-Brand Approach to Marketing

The following is the first of a bi-monthly series in which marketing expert Jim Joseph will show entrepreneurs on a small-business budget how to apply marketing strategies used by big brands.

Whether or not you realized it before, if you're a small business owner, you're also a marketer. Maybe you were never trained, but you are in fact marketing your business. While lots of people have different perceptions about what marketing should be, for me, good marketing is all about creating a powerful and compelling brand experience for customers.

It takes a special kind of person to run a small business. You wear many hats. Entrepreneurs don't often have a clearly defined role within a well-oiled machine, nor can they generally count on multiple resources to complete projects. There's no marketing team to do the heavy lifting.

We also expect marketing to be a never-ending job. The minute we have our plan in place, something changes -- a competitor enters the market, legislation changes the rules or a technological advance requires a rethink.

This is true of big businesses and it's certainly true of small ones. Many entrepreneurs look longingly at the big brands, wishing they could replicate their activities and generate their impact. I believe that in small business, you can get the same kind of results as the big brands, just on a different scale.

Related: The Secrets of What Makes a Product Go Viral

The methodology needed to create an amazing brand experience remains the same whether you're Nike, a local restaurant, BMW or a consultant. It's the same process regardless of the size of the business. Sure, the budgets may be different, but how you get there is essentially the same.

To start, small businesses can learn a lot from how big brands create experiences that connect with customers, creating sharing and loyalty.

It's a matter of knowing what you want to accomplish and following proven best practices that work on any size business. It's a matter of turning your business into a brand by creating an experience tailored to your specific customer. Small businesses can often do that even better than big ones.

Brands should be inspiring. That should be your ultimate goal. As an entrepreneur, you may not think you can be inspirational, but you couldn't be more wrong. It comes with the entrepreneurial territory. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and way of life. You can add more value to people's lives than most large corporations. Innovation and creativity doesn't necessarily come from the towers of big business. It comes from the breakthrough, on-the-ground thinking of small businesses.

Every two weeks I will explore a different aspect of small business marketing, using principles I've seen from the big brands. We'll investigate how to act like a brand, identify your target customer, position your business and map out touch points -- all with the goal of helping you create a comprehensive marketing plan that builds toward a compelling brand experience.

Related:Branding's Cardinal Sins: 3 Common Mistakes to Avoid 

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Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

What Google Glass And the Android Smartwatch Are Really All About | Cult of Android

http://www.cultofandroid.com/24839/what-google-glass-and-the-android-smartwatch-are-really-all-about/

What Google Glass And the Android Smartwatch Are Really All About

Google is getting closer to releasing Google Glass into the market. And we learned this week that Google's Android team is working on a smartwatch. 

Both these products are examples of Android-based wearable computing devices.

A fresh new religious war has broken out on the social networks about whether the watch is better than the glasses, or whether smartphones are better than both the glasses and the watch. "Why would I wear an Android smartwatch when I have an Android phone in my pocket that's much better?"

These arguments demonstrate that most people don't get this technology at all.

Wearable computing as human augmentation

You can divide the world of products into two types. The first type are products that we use. For example, if we buy a toaster, we use that product to make toast.

The second type of product is something that becomes part of us. We don't so much use it as we are changed and augmented and improved by it. For example, if you lose a tooth, a dentist can install a lifelike, fully functional artificial tooth in your mouth. When you eat, you don't so much "use" the artificial tooth. It's an upgrade to your personal self.

Other products that fall into this category include eyeglasses, pharmaceutical drugs, prosthetic limbs, tattoos, stents, pacemakers and many others.

Wearable computing devices fall squarely into this category. They feel like and function like augmentations to our physical brains, giving us superhuman powers of photographic memory, total recall and the ability to communicate across vast distances. They let us outsource our knowledge to the Internet. Instead of memorizing facts and carrying them around in our brains, we can simply conjure them up from the cloud when we need them.

So for example let's say you're wearing Google Glass. You ask Google Now a question, and remote servers crunch the data find the information deliver back an answer to you.

The way I look at this transaction is that you the Google Glass-augmented user, is using the phone, the Internet and the remote servers.

Google Glass is on the user side of the fence, not the computer side.

And the same goes for smartwatch or any sort of computing device built in your shoes or a chip embedded under your skin.

If you wear contact lenses and read a book while wearing them, you're not using two products. You're an enhanced human that's using one product.

So when people say: "Why would I use Google Glass when I have a perfectly good smartphone?," they're clearly missing the point.

That's like saying "Why would I use contact lenses when I have a perfectly good book?" No, the purpose of the lenses is to enhance your ability to use the book. You don't choose between them.

Speaking of contact lenses, one of the creators of Google Glass, whose name is Babak Parviz, has worked on — and is probably still working on — a contact lens that works a little bit like Google Glass, displaying information directly on the lens.

The next step after contact lenses is the surgical installation of something into the eye itself that feeds you wireless data to that eye without the need to "wear" anything.

Google Glass isn't comparable to a smartphone. The choice between using or not using Google Glass is a choice between becoming augmented in that way or choosing not to be.

The either-or question

I'm also seeing people say they won't use a smartwatch because they'd rather use Google Glass, or vise versa. Again, this reveals a mis-understanding about what the wearable computing movement is all about.

Within a few years wearable computing devices will interoperate with each other in powerful ways, multiplying the effect.

For example, your Google smartwatch may notify you of an incoming video, and you might use a voice command through Google Now to play the video on Google Glass.

Google Glass may notify you that the guy your meeting with for lunch is running late, and you might respond with the voice command to buzz your smartwatch when he's two minutes away.

Fitness devices will lead the way, enabling you to monitor your heart rate, pulse and other vital signs, and have that data crunched and made useful by, say, an app running on your wristwatch and displayed on the Google Glass electronics built into your prescription sunglasses.

The ultimate application for wearable computing is to augment yourself in multiple ways simultaneously and have all these devices form a little mesh network all over your body combining sensors, Internet connectivity and various ways to interface not so that you're "using" a bunch of little mobile computers, but instead to transform you, personally, into an augmented human with powerful abilities.

The bottom line, and the thing to understand, is that wearable computing devices like Google Glass and the coming Android smartwatch are not examples of another type of mobile computer — they're not smaller, wearable smartphones.

The way to look at them is examples of a a brand-new category of products that becomes part of and enhances the human body.

In short, we are evolving into cyborgs. Google Glass and the Android smartwatch are just the next step in that evolution.

If that sounds sinister or too science-fictiony to accept, realize that this process has been going on for a long time. We've been enhancing the human body and human ability with man-made upgrades for centuries.

Even wearable computing has been widely distributed in many professions, from the military to medicine and many others.

What Google Glass and the Android smartwatch represent is the first major implementation of wearable computing for everybody.

So like it or not, wearable computing is coming. Ultimately, resistance is futile. You WILL be augmented.

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E-commerce in China: The Alibaba phenomenon | The Economist

The Alibaba phenomenon

E-commerce in China

China's e-commerce giant could generate enormous wealth—provided the country's rulers leave it alone

Mar 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

ON ITS way to becoming the world's biggest economy, China is passing another landmark. Its e-commerce market is overtaking America's. And one giant firm dominates the market: Alibaba, by some measures already the world's largest e-commerce company. Last year two of Alibaba's portals together handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales, more than eBay and Amazon combined. Alibaba is on track to become the world's first e-commerce firm to handle $1 trillion a year in transactions (see article). Yet despite such extraordinary success, many people outside China have barely noticed the rise of this privately held behemoth.

That is about to change. The firm's founder, a former English teacher called Jack Ma, has just announced that he will hand over the chief-executive job to a trusted insider, Jonathan Lu, in May. Soon afterwards, the firm is expected to announce details of its initial public offering (IPO), sure to be the most trumpeted since Facebook's listing last year—and possibly even bigger, too. Facebook's IPO valued the company at $104 billion (its market capitalisation has since slipped back to $63 billion). Estimates of the likely valuation of Alibaba range from $55 billion to more than $120 billion.

The IPO will turn global attention to Alibaba's remarkable rise. And there are other reasons to watch the company closely. One is its future growth potential: if it avoids a Facebook-like fumble, in a few years' time it could be among the world's most valuable companies (the current global leader, Apple, now worth around $420 billion, was only valued at $90 billion in 2009). Another is that, as Alibaba expands and moves into new markets, it has the capacity to change China.

The crocodile of the Yangzi…

Alibaba's story so far has been one of canny innovation and a clear focus on how to win competitive advantage in China. "EBay may be a shark in the ocean," Mr Ma once said, "but I am a crocodile in the Yangzi river. If we fight in the ocean, we lose; but if we fight in the river, we win." The crocodile of the Yangzi, as he became known, started the company in 1999 with Alibaba.com, a business-to-business portal connecting small Chinese manufacturers with buyers overseas. Its next invention, Taobao, a consumer-to-consumer portal not unlike eBay, features nearly a billion products and is one of the 20 most-visited websites globally. Tmall, a newish business-to-consumer portal that is a bit like Amazon, helps global brands such as Disney and Levi's reach China's middle classes.

Alibaba could grow even faster. By 2020 China's e-commerce market is forecast to be bigger than the existing markets in America, Britain, Japan, Germany and France combined. And although it is not about to challenge Amazon in America, Alibaba is expanding globally by capturing the spending of Chinese overseas and by moving into emerging economies. In this the firm is helped by Alipay, its novel online-payments system that relies on escrow (releasing money to sellers only once their buyers are happy with the goods received). This builds trust in societies where the rule of law is weak.

Perhaps Alibaba's greatest untapped resource is its customer data. Its sites account for over 60% of the parcels delivered in China. It knows more than anyone about the spending habits and creditworthiness of the Chinese middle class, plus millions of Chinese merchants. Alifinance is already a big microlender to small firms; it now plans to expand lending to ordinary consumers. In effect, it is helping liberalise Chinese finance. China's big state banks, which channel cheap capital to state-owned enterprises, have long neglected everyone else. The firm is using its online platforms to deliver insurance products too, and more such innovations are on the way.

Alibaba thus sits at the heart of "bamboo capitalism"—the sprawling tangle of private-sector firms that are more efficient than China's state-owned enterprises. Some 6m vendors are listed with its sites. The firm's efforts are boosting productivity in China's woefully inefficient retail and logistics sectors. And, more than any other company, it is speeding up the country's much-needed shift away from an investment-heavy model of growth towards one that is driven by consumption.

… is now in dangerous waters

All very promising but like the Yangzi alligator, which is now endangered, there is nothing inevitable about Alibaba's future fortunes. Three things could yet throw the firm off-course.

The most obvious is that it could overreach—and stumble. Coping with the stepping aside of a formidable founder is rarely easy. By China's low standards, Alibaba generally gets good marks for governance, with one caveat: observers have doubts about the murky way in which Mr Ma spun out Alipay from the parent company a few years ago. It will not be able to get away with that as a public company. The same transparency is needed with its products. By Chinese standards it has done a lot to fight fakes, so much so that the American government recently gave Taobao its official blessing. Yet it is still too easy to find knock-offs on that site.

Tidying up these things is not just good management. It ties into the second risk—that foreign governments will clamp down on Alibaba. China's companies are viewed with suspicion abroad: its resource-hungry state enterprises have suffered a backlash in Africa (see article); its firms listed on North American stock exchanges have been punished in the wake of accounting scandals; and Huawei, a telecoms giant, has been branded an enemy of the state by American congressmen. It would be sad if Alibaba, which seems to have far fewer ties to the Chinese state, was tarred with the same brush.

But the greatest threat to the company's future will be at home. Like Amazon or eBay, Alibaba needs to be monitored by antitrust regulators. But the politics of China pose a particular risk. Big banks are already lobbying against its financial arm. The Communist Party is bound to be jealous of an outfit that has so much data on Chinese citizens. For the government to clip Alibaba's wings without a good cause would be wrong. Alibaba has the potential to become the world's most valuable company, and in the process help create a better China.

From the print edition: Leaders

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Bill George: Resilience Through Mindful Leadership

Resilience Through Mindful Leadership

The movement to develop mindful leaders in business is at a tipping point, as interest from corporations, educational institutions and the media continues to grow. As Arianna Huffington recently pointed out on CNBC's Squawk Box: "The tipping point was very evident at the World Economic Forum in Davos this past January, with many oversold sessions on the topic and meditation being taught by leading practitioners like Matthieu Ricard, PhD (a Buddhist monk who is the Dalai Lama's scientific advisor)." I witnessed this personally by leading a sold-out Davos dinner on the topic and participating in two other sessions on "Mindful Leadership."

What's causing this dramatic shift in our consciousness about what it takes today to be an effective leader? It starts with the changes taking place in the world. We live in an era of globalization and rapid technological change that is creating volatility, uncertainty, chaos and ambiguity. (VUCA is the acronym created by the U.S. Military Academy to describe the world of the 21st century.) Its impact is compounded by the rapidly changing job market and the new 24x7 communications world.

This creates stress for executives and the institutions they lead. For institutions, the velocity of the business cycle and risks of the multi-polar global environment create instability. For individuals, the volatility creates more emotional ups and downs and can cause us to lose confidence. Amid such volatility, a reserve of mental and physical energy is required to be resilient.

As I wrote in my 2009 book, Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis, resilience is the combination of heartiness, toughness and buoyancy of spirit. These qualities are necessary for leaders to persevere through struggling moments, bounce back from adversity and adapt to external stress.

Resilience in Action

Many leading corporations -- Google, General Mills, Aetna, Genentech, Target, and Cargill, for example -- have created mindful leadership programs to build resilience in their employees. Google's and General Mills' programs are widespread through their employee base. Aetna's research on meditation and yoga has established their benefits for health and well-being.

To develop the new military leaders needed for a VUCA world, West Point has also created multiple training programs on resilience. These include spiritual fitness as well as master resilience training programs to bolster mental toughness, cultivate strong relationships and build on one's strengths -- all qualities of mindful leaders. Martin E.P. Seligman's Harvard Business Review article, "Building Resilience," summarizes these initiatives.

Alan Mulally's turnaround at the Ford Motor Company illustrates the value of resilience. He became CEO of Ford in 2006 and faced week after week of challenging news about the business. As the financial crisis peaked, Ford's very existence was at risk. As documented in Bryce Hoffman's American Icon, Mulally maintained an upbeat, positive spirit and can-do attitude that transformed Ford. He applauded those who offered bad news and encouraged the organization to view setbacks as learning opportunities en route to success.

The Mindful Leader

The best way to become more resilient is to develop oneself into a calm, compassionate and adaptable Mindful Leader. How does one become mindful? In 2011, I presented my ideas on authentic leadership to the Dalai Lama and asked him that question. He stressed the importance of creating daily mindful practices.

Two practices have increased my resilience and shaped my leadership. The first is meditation, which I began in 1975, twenty minutes twice a day. This has been the single best thing to improve my effectiveness and sense of well-being. Meditation enables me to forget less important events and focus with clarity on significant issues. My most creative ideas come out of meditation. In addition, meditation increases my energy level and enables me to be more compassionate toward others.

Meditation certainly isn't the only way to become mindful. Other regular practices include prayer, journaling, intimate discussions and solitary exercises like jogging, hiking and swimming. The important thing is to have some form of introspective practice that enables you to slow down your mind and reflect on what is important.

Second, I have been meeting weekly since 1975 with a group of men to discuss our beliefs and life experiences. We serve as mirrors for each other, allowing us to maintain equilibrium under pressure and understand how we are perceived by others. In addition, my wife and I formed a couples group of eight people in 1983 that meets monthly for personal discussions. The format of these groups is similar to the Young President Organization's Forum and the small, intimate groups described in my book, True North Groups.

Being Mindful Makes You a Better Leader

In my experience, mindful people make much better leaders than frenetic, aggressive ones. They understand their reactions to stress and crises, and understand their impact on others. They are far better at inspiring people to take on greater responsibilities and at aligning them around common missions and values. They are better at focusing and are more effective at delegating work with closed-loop follow-up. As a result, people follow their mindful approach, and their organizations outperform others over the long-run.

There is no cost to becoming mindful, and it makes far better use of your time. That's why it's catching on so rapidly. The tipping point is indeed here.

Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and author of True North and Authentic Leadership. He is the former chair and CEO of Medtronic. Read more at www.BillGeorge.org, or follow him on Twitter @Bill_George.

 

 

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

For Real Influence, Listen Past Your Blind Spots - Mark Goulston and John Ullmen

For Real Influence, Listen Past Your Blind Spots

More than ever before, people see through the self-serving tactics and techniques that others use to persuade them. They don't like being pushed, played or nudged to comply, and they resist and resent agenda-driven influencers.

The alternative is to use real influence to inspire buy-in and commitment. To learn how the best-of-the-best do it, we conducted over 100 extensive interviews with highly respected influencers from all walks of life for our recent book.

We found that great influencers follow a pattern of four steps that we can use too. An earlier post covered Step 1: Go for great outcomes. Later we'll cover Step 3: Engage them in "their there;" and Step 4: When you've done enough... do more.

Here we cover Step 2: Listen past your blind spots.

To invite genuine buy-in and engagement, we need to listen with a strong personal motive to learn and understand. But we have a "blind spot" in our brains that gets in the way. What we hear is easily distorted with our own needs, biases, experiences and agenda, even when our intentions are good. We often hear what others say without understanding what they mean. We hear what it means to us, not what it means to them.

We outline four different levels of listening, and the first three fall short of what's needed for achieve real influence.

Level One: Avoidance Listening = Listening Over
Listeners who listen over others are the people who say, "Uh huh," while clearly showing no interest in what the other person is saying. They look preoccupied, and they usually are. Sometimes they don't even stop checking their e-mail or texting on their phones while they're "listening." Level one listening can annoy, exasperate, or even infuriate the person who's talking.

Level Two: Defensive Listening = Listening At
This is listening with your defenses up, preparing your counterpoints while the person is talking. It's being quick to react and slow to consider. They're often seen as high maintenance, and over time, people avoid them because they're exhausting. This is the kind of listening that prompted Mark Twain to say, "Most conversations are monologues in the presence of witnesses."

Level Three: Problem-Solving Listening = Listening To
This is listening in order to accomplish things. Problem-solving listeners listen in order to move things forward. If people want your solutions, this is the right approach. But people will feel frustrated, misunderstood and even resentful if you presume to offer "fixes" they don't want or need.

Level Four: Connective Listening = Listening Into
This is listening of the highest order, and it's the human listening that all of us crave. It's listening into other people to discover what's going on inside them. It's listening on their terms, not yours. It's understanding where people are coming from to establish genuine rapport.

To master the art of Level Four Listening, resist the urge to defend yourself, explain yourself, or offer quick fixes. You can help more effectively later, when the time is right, if you don't pre-judge what another person needs (which might be very different than you think). Instead, remember that you are listening to learn. Ask questions like these:

What does that mean for you? How do you feel about . . . ? What do you think about . . . ? What's your take on . . . ? What's your perspective on . . . ? What was your first reaction when you heard? What's the best thing about that? What else comes to mind?

To put Level 4 Listening into practice, consider these questions:

• Who has modeled Level Four Listening for you in your life?
• When do you find yourself most challenged to use Level 4 Listening?
• With whom is it most important that you raise your level of listening?

Using Level Four Listening isn't always easy, but it leads to real insight and real influence.

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics

IBM's Newest Invention Mimics the Human Brain on an Atomic Level - Adam Clark Estes

IBM's Newest Invention Mimics the Human Brain on an Atomic Level

Here's a headline you've probably seen before: "IBM creates brain-like computer chip." Here's a more exciting one: "New IBM circuit works in three dimensions, flips switches with atoms." Heck, both are exciting. The latter's just, for lack of a more appropriate cliché, a bit more mind-boggling. 

IBM scientists described a new kind of circuit in a paper published in Science on Thursday. There is no chip involve, per se. It's being described accurately as a "post-silicon transistor" and potentially paves the way for the most powerful and efficient computers the world has ever seen. This is possible largely because it mimics the behavior of another hyper-efficient computational marvel: the human brain.

The new so-called nanofluidic circuit works a little bit like a network of streams. A charged fluid moves over the surface of the circuit changing its properties (e.g. flipping a switch "on" or "off") with the positively and negatively charged atoms in the fluid. Like the synapses of the brain, the ions operate in three dimensions, a game changer in terms of efficiency and uncharted territory in terms of computing. "We could form or disrupt connections just in the same way a synaptic connection in the brain could be remade, or the strength of that connection could be adjusted," Stuart Parkin, a physicist and IBM Fellow, told The New York Times. It's a little bit easier to visualize. Below, the green represents the ionic fluid and the orange is the surface. 

 

While there have been other efforts that attempt to build a brain-like computer — many of them from IBM — this nanofluidic circuit is a game changer. It pulls us out of the current evolutionary cycle of computers that commonly follows Moore's Law. (That's the one about computers becoming twice as powerful and half as big every two years or so.) "This is an alternative to a slowdown in Moore's Law," Parkin added. "Our inspiration is the brain and how it operates. It is full of liquids and ionic currents. We could build more brain-like devices."

More brain-like devices? Sounds intriguing. We can't wait until scientists start dropping installing them behind the eyes of automatons.

Goay Joe Lie

Director of Joe Lie Beauty And Cosmetics