Israel : Start-Up Powerhouse | ASIA TODAY News & Events

With a population of just eight million, Israel boasts 64 companies on Nasdaq. How has tiny Israel become one of the world's leading havens of innovation? What can Taiwan learn from Israel? And how are the two nations joining forces?

Jerusalem's Old City is a place of contradictions.

This is sacred ground for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. One can walk the entire route from the Wailing Wall to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to the Dome of the Rock in ten minutes. Yet there are seldom disturbances in the Old City; devotees of the various religions have learned to coexist peacefully, at least here.

Unfortunately, the same is not true in the world that lies beyond.

Israel declared itself an independent nation in 1948, with United Nations backing. Several subsequent wars with neighboring Arab nations in the 65 years since have cost the lives of tens of thousands of people and earned Israel a credible reputation as the arsenal of the Middle East.

Without getting into the right and wrong of things, Israel, with just 60 percent of Taiwan's land area and roughly one-third her population, has not only been able to survive, but has even earned grudging admiration as a "nation of start-ups."

The impetus behind the innovation, simply put, is survival. For decades now, Unit 8200 of the Israeli Intelligence Corps has put advanced technology to use gathering signals intelligence on hostile nations and has been instrumental in the creation of the Israeli information and communications technology industries.

In November of last year, Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial capital on the Mediterranean coast, came under Hamas-led rocket attack from Gaza, the Palestinian territory controlled by the extremist organization.

Responding to the situation, Israeli military commanders activated the nation's newly-developed "Iron Dome" air defense system, which successfully intercepted more than 80 percent of the incoming rockets.

Some days it rains, and some days there's a rocket attack – so it goes in Israel.

At the height of the attacks in a 24-hour Tel Aviv bar, young people still gathered to share their dreams. Don't for a moment, however, believe this to be an Israeli version of a Taiwanese nightspot. At 2 a.m. the young folks still hanging on here are still on the job. They're looking not for a good time but for business partners.

Per capita venture capital investment in Israel is 2.5 times that in the U.S. and 30 times that of Europe. The country averages one new business for roughly every 1,900 people.

Faced with the daily threat of enemy rocket attacks, people in many other countries might be hastily arranging dual citizenship or an immigration destination.

Why do the Israelis refuse to abandon their country, and how is it they are able to attract international investment capital to allow for the possibility of further development for future generations?

Chutzpah

Surrounded by hostile Arab nations, Israel was founded in strife and is brimming with dauntless start-up spirit.

Tal Ben-Shahar, an Israeli national and former professor at Harvard University who was in Taiwan this past month for a speaking engagement at the invitation of CommonWealth Magazine, says some of his earliest memories are of his father's role in the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Egypt and Syria.

As his father donned his battle fatigues and said good-bye, the three year-old Ben-Shahar bawled inconsolably. He carried on until a next-door neighbor told him: "If you cry, you cannot be a soldier like your father." For years thereafter, Ben-Shahar says, he was unable to shed a single tear.

Fortunately, his father returned safely from the war. Ben-Shahar went on to become one of the most popular professors at Harvard University, specializing in positive psychology and leadership psychology and authoring a series of books instructing people "how to be happier."

Israelis have a knack for squeezing the most out of life amidst perilous living conditions.

As Daniel Shechtman, the Israeli winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, puts it, Israelis have a natural predisposition to chutzpah – fearless audacity – which imparts a strongly adventurous national spirit.

Israelis' natural ease at facing failure stands in marked contrast to the predilections of East Asian cultures, where people regard failure as a form of disgrace.

One must experience failure before one can be an experienced entrepreneur, Shechtman says.

Substantive Official Support

At the close of the 1980s, Israel had but one venture capital firm. In 1993, the Israeli government introduced policy incentives promising matching contributions from the Israeli government for every dollar that venture capital firms invested in the country. In effect, the government assumed half the risk.

Within 10 years, venture capital funds in Israel had multiplied 60-fold, from US$58 million to US$3.3 billion. The number of companies financed by venture capital grew from 100 to 800.

Israel has also encouraged the establishment of multinational venture capital funds. Often Israeli companies specialize in R&D while working with American partners that handle marketing and distribution, owing to their huge market.

Every major city in Israel now boasts its own "startup hub." Staffed by retired businesspeople offering their services free of charge, these centers offer local solutions to any difficulties aspiring entrepreneurs might face.

Israeli president Shimon Peres has also launched a number of projects to provide direction to youthful entrepreneurs.

For example, to spur nanotechnology research, Peres had nanotechnology research institutes established at six Israeli universities to serve as the foundation of the nation's nanotechnology industry. The operations of the research institutes are maintained through a "triangular support model," with government, universities and private institutions each providing one third of the budget.

This approach of casting a wide net allows the Israeli government to squeeze three times the impact out of its limited resources. The generous environment attracts top-flight talent. The resultant research then draws marked industry interest.

And thus the innovative momentum continues to snowball.

Figures from the Israel National Nanotechnology Initiative show that between 2007 and 2012, 88 nanotechnology experts from around the world immigrated to Israel to take positions at the nation's universities. During those years there were 625 academia-industry collaborative efforts resulting in 170 start-ups or approved patents, with an additional 704 patent filings pending, according to the Initiative website.

Focus on Hi-Tech & Exports

In response to the near total boycott by neighboring Arab nations, Israel has no choice but to focus on overseas exports, and its products tend to have characteristics reflecting that: compact, easy to transport over long distances and culturally adaptable.

Right from the start Israeli entrepreneurs were aware that Israel's market of eight million was just too small. They thus cast their eyes abroad. You can have innovative products, but if you can't get them to the rest of humanity, it's a dead end.

In an interview with CommonWealth Magazine, Giza Venture Capital founder and chairman Zeev Holtzman asserted that technological innovation is the cheapest because it costs nothing to put your brain to work.

"The human capital in Israel, not the natural resources, are the main resources," Holtzman says proudly, calculating that five to six dollars in export value has been created for every dollar he has invested in innovation.

Taiwan-Israel Alliance

Seeing the vibrant energy Israel has poured into research and its abundant venture capital experience, Taiwan has reached out to Israel.

Between 2004 and 2008, the Executive Yuan's National Development Fund committed to NT$1.3 billion in investments with Giza Venture Capital to promote technology transfer, strategic alliances and Israeli investment in Taiwan.

Aside from technology transfer agreements or strategic alliances with Israeli companies that have involved such Taiwanese companies as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Alitech, CyberTAN and ASUS, Giza Venture Capital has acquired a five percent stake in Taiwanese solar wafer and solar ingot maker Danen Technology Corp.

But beneath the vitality there are private anxieties. Factors beneficial to start-ups, such as matching government investment funds for foreign investors, were at their apex at the close of the 1990s. These conditions no longer exist.

The biggest commercial challenge Israel now faces is identifying, aside from high-tech, that next wave of energy driving newly rising industries. Taiwan cannot afford to wait either.

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Kennedy

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中国��が�化で各国の��を影�する指数ランキング : アジアで�くマレ�シア人

http://blog.livedoor.jp/cathaycher/archives/30003716.html

中国経済が悪化で各国の経済を影響する指数ランキング

2013年07月27日

野村がまとめた、中国の経済の低迷によって影響を受けやすい各国のランキング。香港、シンガポール、台湾、マレーシア、韓国、オーストラリア、チリ、ロシア、インドネシア、南アフリカという順番になるが、日本は後ろから数えて5番目というのがかなり意外。



 

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THE SELF-MASTERY SECRETS OF CEOS

"The hardest victory is the victory over self."
- Aristotle

CEOs are different people than most, according to a recent survey of about 1,000 top leaders in the U.S. by John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, and Manju Puri of Duke University. While 64% of the general population can be described as "risk-averse," only 9.8% of CEOs fall into that category. Moreover, 80% of CEOs are optimistic and proactive--a number also well above the normal percentage.

Those findings make complete sense. Effective leaders can't be afraid to make tough choices--and must be able to envision successful outcomes. And one more key trait they need to have in place is self-mastery.

We can only control what we control. Overall economic conditions and political movements are beyond our individual control. Laws and taxes are also unchangeable. Nor can we expect to fully control other people's opinions of us--or whether they choose to treat us fairly or unfairly.

What we can control, however, is ourselves--and that doesn't mean just how we react to all of the above. No, what we really should work on controlling is the pace of our own growth and development, as well as our approach to each day of our lives. Instead of accepting where we are in life, we can put self-mastery into action--and be as proactive as possible to create the kind of success we want to experience in our lives.

The business greats--people like Jack Welch and Richard Branson--all display self-mastery on a daily basis. They have focus, motivation, and the passion to constantly seek to move themselves and their enterprises forward. Their success and fame can't be chalked up to luck or coincidence--because their ongoing fortune is a consistent effect of their self-mastery.

The late, great Stephen Covey perhaps summed up self-mastery best in his mammoth best-seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People : "The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person."

In other words, when we exchange what we want to do now for what we want to achieve later, we display the most powerful aspects of self-mastery. We demonstrate the discipline that prepares us for success. We can't change our future and our outcomes until we change ourselves.

Here are a few important ways in which you can harness your own individual power--and work toward being, as the old Seinfeld classic episode had it, "master of your domain."

Create Concrete Goals

If you don't know where you're going, how can you steer yourself in the right direction? When you are able to brainstorm challenging but realistic objectives that you're excited about achieving, you're motivated to do what it takes to attain them. Without these kinds of goals in place, self-mastery often seems senseless. When we do have a desired destination in mind, we're more able to channel our passion and energy to reach it.

Mold Your Emotions and Attitudes

We can't completely change who we are; we all have certain traits, talents, and dispositions that we're born with. However, we can reprogram and transform our basic "circuitry" so we can be as proactive and productive as possible. Studies show that up to half of our happiness potential is directly under our control--so make the most of what you have and greet each day with a positive attitude and a strong plan.

Find Your Focus

You can have a wonderful goal and an amazing attitude--and still wander through your days not getting any closer to what you want out of life. That's why focus is important. When you drill down on what you need to actually do to create a successful outcome, you actually advance yourself and your business ambitions.

Increase Your Willpower

Willpower is an essential element of leadership. If a leader shows strength in avoiding impulsive and destructive behavior, he or she inspires followers to do likewise. Temptation, of course, is always the arch-enemy of willpower--but the more we fight temptation and show self-restraint, the more we make self-mastery an ingrained part of our DNA, and the closer we get to our goals.

The very traits that cause CEOs to be successful--being unafraid to take a risk and being overly positive about the future--can also lead to self-indulgence and disaster. Self-mastery prevents that from happening. We should always keep a firm hand on the wheel of our own personal behavior, especially when our success takes us into the fast lane. That's how we make sure we win the race.

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Casinos, Corporate Sponsorship, and Tuition Hikes: How Madrid Is Trying to Beat the Recession - Feargus O'Sullivan

Casinos, Corporate Sponsorship, and Tuition Hikes: How Madrid Is Trying to Beat the Recession

Reuters

While there are signs that Spain's economy is slowly rallying, Madrid is still a city swimming through a toxic cocktail of debt and unemployment. As the capital of a country where over a quarter of the workforce is jobless, Madrid has failed even to cash in on a sharp rise in tourist trips to Spain despite remaining one of Europe's most delightful cities to visit.

That doesn't mean the city's government isn't making an effort to change things. In fact, it's trying a host of measures, ranging from the supposed tough love of brutal austerity measures to hawking its metro system out to commercial sponsors. In an unlikely mix of state pruning and raw commercialism, the city is rooting around for numerous ways out of its current impasse. These are some of the key ways Madrid's right wing government is trying to make the city work.

A woman walks up the stairs at Vodafone-Sol metro station in Madrid. (Juan Medina/Reuters)

They're letting a phone company rename their subway network

Arrive by Metro at Puerta Del Sol, Madrid's central square, and you'll find the station has been renamed Vodafone Sol in honor of the British telecommunications company. In a step almost unknown in Europe, Vodafone have purchased the right to rebrand an entire line of the Metro system for €3 million. Starting in September, Line 2 will be known as Line 2 Vodafone for at least three years. Metro bosses must be relieved to see their finances partly plugged, but it remains to be seen how much of a boost the sponsorship deal gives Vodafone. There's been resentment of the move locally, perhaps understandable in a country that still has living memories of streets and squares being renamed without consultation after General Franco and his flunkies.

They're keeping a billion more of the money they used to send to Barcelona.

The subject of where tax money goes is even more fraught in Spain than in most countries. Autonomous and with some secessionist ambitions, the substantially Catalan-speaking region of Catalonia has long been one of the country's economic powerhouses. Catalans often feel they've been having their fiscal blood sucked by a host of other regions packed with feckless, work-shy siesta lovers. Outside the region, however, many feel that Catalonia got an unfairly good deal from the former socialist government, as a way of dampening any pro-independence grumblings.

Now with a downturn nationwide, Spain's central government is staunching the flow of cash, redistributing a billion euros less this year than in 2012 to Catalonia's regional government in Barcelona. It's likely Madrid will get a good chunk of this – Spain's finance minister said recently that when it came to national funding, Madrid got the worst deal of any Spanish region. Certainly, pressure in Barcelona is slightly less intense, as its tourism sector continues to expand and thrive while Madrid's struggles.

Demonstrators protest against Las Vegas Sands' planned gambling complex in central Madrid. (Andrea Comas/Reuters)

They're building Europe's largest ever casino

If all goes to plan, American gambling corporation Las Vegas Sands will soon be pumping almost €10 billion into a massive casino and conference center in the Madrid suburbs. Promising a potential 10,000 new jobs, it looks to be a huge, splashy project that will resemble two mammoth glass fingers stuck in the air when it's complete.

Already dubbed Eurovegas, its development has currently stalled while developers try to strong-arm the Spanish government into exempting the complex from the country's smoking ban. In some ways, Eurovegas's blueprints resemble the many eye-catching urban projects Spain sank cash into in the past few decades in an attempt to replicate Bilbao's success with the Guggenheim Museum. This time, however, the project's moneymaking potential doesn't begin and end in a ticket office and gift shop. The casino's proposed site, in a nondescript suburb on Castile's dusty southern plateau, isn't the most likely tourist hot spot.

They're still building large-scale urban projects, but now the money is private

While out-of-control construction and a property speculation boom were key motors behind Spain's current economic struggles, Madrid still hasn't seen a total let-up in major building projects. Central Madrid's Plaza de Canalejas is the proposed site of a huge development that will gut a belle époque building and its courtyard and use its shell to provide a nest for a luxury hotel and shopping mall. Eighteen major Spanish architects have signed a letter condemning the project's destruction of a historic monument as cultural vandalism, but with a Spanish bank funding the project, many in the city are just glad to see that something is being built.

Craig Reedie, vice president of the International Olympic Committee commission, speaks during a news conference in Madrid. (Juan Medina/Reuters)

They're trying to host the 2020 Olympics.

University students take part in a demonstration against cuts in education due to government austerity measures in central Madrid. (Juan Medina/Reuters)

They're handing hospitals over to private companies and more than doubling tuition fees.

In a country like the United States that has always had private healthcare, the turning over of hospitals to private management might seem like a second rank headline. Not so in Madrid, however, where thousands of healthcare professionals demonstrated on Sunday against the proposed private management (not the actual privatization) of six city hospitals. In Europe such changes are always super-heated political issues, monetizing healthcare widely seen as a way to squeeze profit from misfortune, shifting Europe closer to the prospect of the sort of "death panels" that once made Sarah Palin shudder so.

Following public pressure, Spain's high court has actually ordered Madrid to put its part-privatization plans on hold. Going full speed ahead, meanwhile, are plans to push up student tuition fees. Madrid's public universities will see 20 percent fee hikes in the next year, going up to a 65 percent rise in two years. These are likely to be fiercely contested, as it's hard to underestimate the psychological effect such measures have on young people already seeing their prospects shrink. For fans of the European social model, if you don't get good state-funded healthcare and full education, there's not much point being European.

Top image: Health workers take part in a protest against the local government's plan to cut public healthcare spending in Madrid. (Juan Medina/Reuters)

Feargus O'Sullivan is a London-born writer and journalist. He lives in London and Berlin. All posts »

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2013/07/20 05:00 - Rakuten Again Cuts Price On E-Book Reader

Rakuten Again Cuts Price On E-Book Reader

TOKYO (Nikkei)--Rakuten Inc. (4755) slashed the price on the main model of its kobo e-book device series Friday, the latest sign of an intensifying battle against industry leader Amazon.com Inc.

The kobo Touch now sells for 5,480 yen, down more than 20% from the previous 6,980 yen. The decrease marks the second price cut in just one year since the product's debut last July. Its original price of 7,980 yen was lowered last November.

The price on the kobo mini featuring a 5-inch screen was slashed from 6,980 yen to 5,980 yen on July 8. Rakuten has launched a campaign offering a 1,000 yen voucher redeemable for e-books to kobo buyers.

Rakuten began offering an application letting customers read books from smartphones and tablets as well at the end of last year. But this ended up keeping kobo sales from growing much.

Customers who read books on smartphones and tablets purchase manga comics relatively often -- in contrast to e-reader users, who are avid readers of novels, says Rakuten. For this reason, the Japanese firm decided to reduce kobo prices further in a bid to spark demand among e-book customers who are different from those using smartphones for reading.

Rakuten is also offering deeper discounts on e-books, giving 30% off the retail prices for three days starting Thursday. In response, Amazon on Friday launched a campaign returning 30% of e-book purchases to customers as member points.

(The Nikkei, July 20 morning edition)

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20m adults concerned about debt - Telegraph

20m adults concerned about debt

The number of debt-ridden adults who worry about their finances has risen by 8pc since February, according to a survey by insolvency trade body R3.

One fifth of UK adults say they are "very" or "extremely" concerned about their current debts.

Worryingly, 42pc of adults said they struggled to make it to pay day, with most saying the high cost of living was to blame.

Liz Bingham, president of R3, said: "Although the economy is starting to pick up, many families are finding themselves left behind, weighed down by the cost of the day-to-day.

"There is a sizeable chunk of the population in a very precarious position. They are renting, they have no savings, and they are only able to pay off the interest on their debts without making any headway into the principal. These people have no financial buffer to cope with any increase in the cost of living."

More than 12 million Britons said they had no savings.

The number of 'zombie debtors' – those who can only repay the interest accrued on the debt rather than the orginal sum - has increased since February.

Ten per cent of UK adults admitted to only paying the interest on their credit card bills, up from 7pc in February. Another 7pc of UK adults said they were only paying the interest on their overdraft, rather than tackling the principal. This was up from 4pc in February.

Britons most worried about forms of debt were credit cards (42pc), mortgage repayments (22pc) and overdrafts (20pc).

Liz Bingham said: "Credit cards and mortgages may still be the biggest debt concerns, but their dominance has decreased over time. The credit market is becoming increasingly fragmented as traditional sources of credit become harder to access.

"Other types of debt, such as payday loans, have become established as a concern for those with money worries over the past few years as their popularity has risen."

Ten per cent of those surveyed said they worried about debt from payday loans.

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OracleVoice: Dear CIO: Are You Tackling the Top 10 Strategic Issues for 2013? - Forbes

Dear CIO: Are You Tackling the Top 10 Strategic Issues for 2013?

(Photo Credit: iStockPhoto)

Business-technology teams today face a daunting set of inside/outside challenges: just as CEOs are demanding more business value from IT, customers are demanding more-intelligent engagements and flexible experiences from the businesses they buy from.

In that context, CIOs need to find a way to not just manage both simultaneously, but to conceive and execute bold new approaches for both simultaneously.

As a result, strategic CIOs are radically reworking everything from enterprise architecture to social-media policies and from cloud-computing deployments to customer-experience projects in an effort to simplify IT and thereby fund innovation, growth, and latency-free processes.

In my debut column in this space 10 months ago, I offered a list of The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 that touched on the following business-technology challenges and opportunities that are still facing businesses today:

1) Transforming IT spending habits by leveraging cloud computing to unlock and liberate huge chunks of IT budgets.

2) Embracing social business in a wide range of ways to enhance internal collaboration and external engagements.

3) Exploiting Big Data and analytics to unlock new growth opportunities.

4) Creating customer-centric systems and culture across the organization.

5) Future-proofing your IT architecture to meet the profoundly more-demanding requirements of businesses in a world increasingly driven by mobile, social, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.

6) Cloud computing as business-transformation agent: rapidly shifting the cloud discussion from one that's centered on technology to one focused on strategic business outcomes.

7) Big Data goes strategic: Big Insights, Big Opportunities, and Big Growth become the new themes.

8) Move at the speed of your customers: finding elegant and scalable ways to marry systems of record (ERP) with systems of engagement (Social).

9) CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer: CIOs need to help CEOs accelerate everything from product development to analytics to financial closings to responding to customer inquiries. Latency is the enemy!

10) More Innovation, Less Integration: old IT approaches simply can't scale with today's demands, so CIOs must find powerful new approaches to meet the new customer-driven requirements of today and tomorrow.

Now, I realize that's quite a wide-ranging list and that the completion of even half of those suggestions would be monumental achievement. The problem, though, is that the outside world is growing increasingly demanding, increasingly mobile, increasingly intelligent, and increasingly impatient.

And because the future is arriving more quickly than ever before, and therefore the only viable alternative for CIOs is to ensure that their companies can move as fast as this crazy world we live in today!

That's why I think the list we published 10 months ago of The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 still holds up very well today at the mid-point of the year. And while I don't mean to suggest that this list will be a perfect fit for every company, I do believe that based on conversations about this list with lots of customers, it provides a thought-provoking way for CIOs to engage with their CEOs and other business leaders on today's most-pressing business challenges.

I hope these 10 discussion points, and the overall analysis, provide some fresh thinking for you and your company, and I welcome your feedback via Twitter to @bobevansIT.  (The following content was originally published as a standalone column on Forbes.com in September 2012.)

Perhaps no C-level position has undergone as many changes in expectations, approaches, and philosophies during the past few decades as that of the Chief Information Officer.

And the turbulent forces shaping businesses in today's always-on global marketplace promise to accelerate that ongoing evolution. In that context, I've put together a list of what I believe will be the top priorities for strategic CIOs in the coming year.

As you'll see, each of these 10 is rooted in change, and calls for the CIO to be a leader instead of a follower; a disrupter instead of a go-alonger; and a business-driven executive instead of a tech-focused manager.

Several themes reverberate throughout: analytics, breaking down silos, social, the cloud, and particularly customers, opportunities, growth, and innovation. I hope these prove helpful, and please share your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter at @bobevansIT.

1) Simplify IT and Transform Your Spending: Kick the 80/20 Budget Habit. While surely not as sexy as Social and Business Analytics and Cloud, this bold decision to take an entirely new approach to IT infrastructure is the one and only way CIOs can unlock the funding necessary to pursue those snazzier and unquestionably vital new initiatives. Far too many companies today find that they need to devote 70% or even 80% of their IT budget just to run and maintain what they've already got, leaving as little as 20% for innovation. And if you wonder sometimes why you've got precious little IT budget available to fund growth-oriented innovation, the answer becomes pretty clear by looking at the list of usual suspects that have brought us to this point: server sprawl, massively underutilized storage resources, unproductive data centers, labor-intensive integration requirements, and a near-endless list of "strategic" vendors. The IT policies of the past that resulted in the 80/20 trap are simply no longer able to meet the needs of today's intensely demanding and always-on business world, and are indeed becoming liabilities not just because they're inadequate but also because they suck up vast percentages of the IT budget and make it almost impossible for CIOs to fund essential new efforts in analytics or cloud or mobile or social. CIOs need to determine which vendors are only exacerbating this problem, and which ones offer modern alternatives that are cheaper, faster, and smarter. My POV: CEOs should tie most or all of the variable compensation for their CIOs to changing that deadly 80/20 budget ratio by 5 percentage points per year. The CIOs willing to tackle this huge issue will not only earn some nice bonus dollars but will unlock huge value for their companies as well as for their own careers. 

2) Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-Enabled Enterprise. When social media began to invade the corporate world some years back, the traditional border-collie behavior of many CIOs triggered immediate and unconditional opposition to social tools on the grounds of security challenges, lack of familiarity, and unproven value. As social's ability to forge new and more-immediate relationships with customers became more clear, some CIOs grudgingly agreed to let down the drawbridge (but they drew the line at removing the alligators from the moat!). Today's business-technology leaders must go well beyond that passive acceptance and become passionate and unconditional zealots for the social-driven revolution and its ability to help their companies grow by providing real-time customer insights, engagements, and processes. Beyond customers, the social revolution is also becoming indispensable internally for motivating existing employees and recruiting great new talent, and in forging deeper and more-valuable relationships with partners. My POV: CIOs who fight this trend will be pushed aside by CMOs and LOB heads who understand social's potential and know they can't compete unless that potential is harnessed by the company for competitive advantage. And what does "pushed aside" mean? At best, temporary embarrassment, and at worst, demotion or even unemployment.

Next up: time to create the Opportunity Chain?

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China's Economy Depends on Its Politics

The news that China's gross domestic product grew 7.5 percent from April to June -- down from 7.7 percent in the first quarter -- has provoked fewer gasps of horror than one might have expected. Chinese officials have been talking down the importance of the number for days. The mainland economy might ultimately grow 7 percent this year instead of at its usual double-digit rate, they've hinted. Nothing to worry about.

These officials, from Prime Minister Li Keqiang on down, are speaking to two audiences: the global financial elite, and the tens of thousands of junior officials who administer Communist rule in China. Top leaders like Li understand that the Chinese economy needs to slow down. Too much money is flowing into unproductive investments -- ghost apartment blocks empty of residents, mills churning out steel that no one wants -- and local officials, striving to meet high GDP growth targets, are often to blame. By implying that such targets are no longer sacrosanct, Li means to encourage a focus on the quality rather than the quantity of growth.

He's hoping to engineer a "soft landing'' for China's jumbo-jet economy, a gliding slowdown in which consumption, not misdirected investment and white-elephant projects, becomes the primary driver of growth. The effort is laudable and long overdue. Unless Beijing pushes ahead with political as well as market reforms, however, it is doomed to failure.

Mixed Messages

All those officials out in the provinces are receiving mixed messages. For years they've been judged on their ability to meet the official growth targets; not surprisingly, most of them did so. While some falsified figures outright, many others funneled cheap credit to state-owned companies and crony developers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, credit has ballooned to an estimated 173 percent of GDP from 115 percent. This, party leaders have declared, must stop.

Yet local officials continue to be judged by something else -- their ability to maintain stability. On any given day there are 500 "mass incidents" in China (an official term, elastically defined). Authorities often try to buy peace with payoffs, or by sanctioning make-work projects to keep protesters employed and quiescent.

Li acknowledges that his reforms will cause pain when projects are canceled and inefficient enterprises shuttered. Yet the government has provided no new means for ordinary Chinese to vent their grievances -- quite the contrary. Thousands of online censors are policing social networks like Sina Weibo more intensely than ever. Efforts to promote greater democracy at the village and county level have stalled. Legal reforms that allowed people some hope of pursuing their claims in court have been slowed and in some cases reversed.

Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to believe that the party can recapture the affection of the masses by intensifying its ideological commitment. Xi has launched a Maoist-style "mass line'' campaign to eliminate "formalism, bureaucratism and hedonism and extravagance.'' If that fails, local officials can always rely on batons. China spends more on internal security than it does on external defense.

Top leaders show signs of realizing that this can't go on. Li recently encouraged Politburo members to read Alexis de Tocqueville on the French Revolution, notes Minxin Pei, a China scholar at Claremont McKenna College. Faced with mobs at the gates, local officials are only too likely to turn the credit back on, adding to the nearly $2 trillion in debt that local governments are estimated to have accumulated.

Democratic Discipline

Xi and Li must rebalance their efforts at reform. They have talked about imposing market discipline on lending decisions, by allowing interest rates to rise, for instance. The recent tightening of credit conditions, now partly reversed, was presumably a clumsy attempt to do just that. Broader social reforms are needed as well. Relaxing household-registration restrictions (hukou) would normalize the position of China's 250 million migrant workers and encourage them to spend more of their savings; former World Bank China director Yukon Huang believes that alone could boost consumption as a share of GDP by 2 to 3 percentage points. A stronger social safety net would also lessen the need to save.

Just as critically, leaders in Beijing need to bolster the discipline of democratic accountability. A freer press would challenge the vested interests that are sure to resist Beijing's newly decreed sobriety. Only empowered and legitimate courts will convince Chinese that their grievances will get a fair hearing.

Ultimately, the vote alone can create a truly effective safety valve for citizens' mounting frustrations. For years Beijing has bought stability with economic progress. Now that the country faces years of painful de-leveraging, its people cannot be expected to meekly accept that the party has their best interests at heart. Even the Study Times, a newspaper run by the Central Party School, warned last week that Xi's mass-line campaign was "not an effective substitute that can realize the function of democracy.''

Western investment analysts have been reassuring their clients that China isn't about to crash, that its leaders retain enough control to oversee much-needed reforms. The truth is, if Xi and Li are to succeed, they will have to surrender some of that control to their people.

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First Ranking Of Top 30 CEOs On Social Media | LinkedIn

First Ranking Of Top 30 CEOs On Social Media

This is the first global ranking of CEOs on social media. These CEOs are the pioneers and early adopters. Their impact is prompting other CEOs to rethink whether they should be involved in social media.

How Did We Create The CEO Social Media Ranking?

A few bloggers have created their own "who to follow lists" but these are not based on any ranking methodology. At the moment Klout offers the most well recognized of the metric-based measures, looking at followers and engagement across multiple social networks, but its single "score" out of 100 is mainly quantitatively based and therefore a bit raw.

Our goal was to combine the best of both approaches, taking into account both quantitative and qualitative measures to determine the top 30 CEOs on social media.

We have monitored Twitter, LinkedIn and the blogging activities of all CEOs from the Fortune 500 Global to Silicon Valley. We took into account their Klout score and looked at a range of qualitative measures around who creates true "value-added content", as determined by users.

Value added was measured in terms of originality and positive impact on the corporate world, their industry, and application to their own company. We favored CEOs who had actively contributed to the leadership agenda. We reduced their score if it was seen as too obviously self-promoting or if we believe they have no direct involvement in social media content. We favored CEOs who had consistently contributed over time.

So Here Are The Top 30 CEOs:

* Click On Their Pictures For A Full CEO Dossier, News, Written Profile, Social Links & To See How You're Connected To Them & Their Companies Via LinkedIn *

Source: WorldOfCEOs.com, a Xinfu Group company (of which I am a director)

Is Your CEO On The List?

If they're not and you think that they should be, please get in touch in the comments section below or email feedback@worldofceos.com – we would be happy to consider your CEO for a future ranking. We've currently restricted the ranking to 30 people but may consider expanding it as more CEOs make a meaningful impact. We are particularly interested to hear about how your CEO is offering industry and leadership insights, is engaging employees, customers and broader stakeholders and is innovating across the various social networks.

We are also interested in any other factors that you think mark out a successful social CEO. We don't promise it is an exact science but we think our methodology is significantly more robust than other listings.

Do You Struggle Because Your CEO Doesn't "Get" Social Media?

The majority of CEOs are still wary or don't really get social media. In many companies, CEOs still hide behind a fake "ROI shield", citing lack of time or unproven return-on-investment as an excuse to delay embracing social media. If that sounds like the situation in your company, then please consider an earlier piece that I wrote here on LinkedIn, which should help to open up your CEO to the possibilities:

Social Media: 10 Big Questions for Skeptical CEOs http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130629012609-13518874-big-ceos-want-linkedin-and-twitter-switched-off?trk=mp-details-rr-rmpost

It will be interesting to see how this picture changes over the next year. While Richard Branson is currently the undisputed CEO social champion nothing lasts forever on social media. He has a loyal following but even he sees wildly varying engagement levels depending on the quality of what he posts.

My sense is we are at the early stages and hope to see some new emerging social media CEO stars and expect many more established CEOs to pick up on social media this year.

We welcome genuine feedback and suggestions on how we develop this. Also do follow me here on LinkedIn to get weekly updates on how to become a better leader.

-----

By Steve Tappin

Chief Executive, Xinfu, Host BBC CEO Guru & Founder, World Of CEOs

www.twitter.com/SteveTappin

www.worldofceos.com

www.xinfu.com

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www.bbc.co.uk/ceoguru

Steve is a personal confidant to many of the world's top CEOs. He is the host of BBC 'CEO Guru', which features in-depth, on-the-record interviews with the CEOs of General Electric, Lenovo, WPP, China Vanke, Wholefoods and Unilever.

Founder Of WorldOfCEOs.com, Steve is the author of 'The Secrets Of CEOs', which interviews 200 CEOs on business life and leadership. His latest book, 'Dream to Last', was published in Mandarin in December 2012, by Beijing University Press, and will be released in English later this year.

To receive Steve's weekly 'CEO Insider' email, sign up at:

http://archive.aweber.com/woceosinsider/FowCY/h/CEO_Insider_Your_Weekly.htm

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2013/07/16 12:50 - ADB Lowers Asian Growth Rate Forecast

ADB Lowers Asian Growth Rate Forecast

MANILA (NQN)--The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said Tuesday it cut its forecast growth rate for gross domestic product in developing Asia to 6.3%, down 0.3 point, due to a slowdown in China that is affecting the economies of Southeast Asia.

For major industrial economies worldwide, the outlook was raised by 0.1 point, due in part to the effects of Japan's economic stimulus program.

Developing Asia refers to the 45 developing-country members of the bank. In its previous outlook in April, the ADB predicted strong consumer spending would underpin overall growth in the region. But the outlook was dimmed by an accelerating downtrend, largely because China's growth rate in the April-June quarter slowed to 7.5%.

In China, companies have been slow to increase output and exports have slumped due to slower growth in overseas demand. The ADB warned investment could fall further in China due to problems with the country's shadow banking system.

Southeast Asia, meanwhile, is seeing solid domestic demand. But the ADB said these economies are likely to be hurt by the slowdown in China, which is a major trading partner. Changyong Rhee, the bank's chief economist, said the knock-on effects from China's economic slowdown has become a concern for the region.

On the other hand, the ADB raised its growth forecast for major industrialized countries to 1.1% on the back of the faster growth likely to flow from Japan's monetary easing. The economic growth forecast for Japan rose 0.6 point to 1.8%, up from the previous outlook for 1.2% growth.

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4 Bogus Claims About Why Walmart Can't Pay A Living Wage | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

4 Bogus Claims About Why Walmart Can't Pay A Living Wage

On July 9, Walmart bared its teeth against the living wage. Alex Barron, a Washington D.C. regional general manager took to the Washington Post, stating that Walmart would not pursue three planned D.C. stores if the city council's living wage legislation--which would require major retailers to pay workers at least $12.50 per hour, instead of the current $8.25--passed. The Post then reported that a team of Walmart representatives and lobbyists presented the ultimatum to the council itself. The law passed anyway, though it's unclear if the mayor will sign it.

"We have gone to great lengths to have thoughtful conversations with council members about why the LRAA would result in fewer jobs, higher prices and fewer total retail options," Barron wrote.

At the center of Walmart's case are arguments that have been made pretty much any time any city tries to raise the wage standard for its workers: that higher wages are anti-business and negatively impact consumers. But really, much of Walmart's historical fight against fair pay has been debunked. Below are four arguments against the living wage that just don't make sense.

Higher wages mean fewer jobs

"Economic research has totally invalidated this," says Jack Temple, policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. He points to how raising the minimum wage has impacted businesses in San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Washington D.C. In 2011, the Center for Economic Policy Research put out a finding that in contrast to claims that higher wages would mean fewer jobs, a higher minimum wage in these cities actually had next to no effect on employment at all--and possibly even a slightly positive one.

Image: Double Take, Craig Dugas via Flickr

Part of the reason why higher wages don't mean fewer jobs is because higher wages offset high turnover, Temple says. Low-wage big box retailers like Walmart have high rates of turnover, which means they often have to go through the expensive time-wasting process of hiring new people. But when you pay people more, they tend to stick around, and that gets rid of costs in new hires and absenteeism. "Costco, for example, has strong financial performance--[higher wages are] part of their business model because of that turnover. Trader Joe's is another example," Temple says.

Higher wages mean higher prices for consumers

In 2011, a Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education study posed a hypothetical scenario: If Walmart were to raise its minimum wages to $12 an hour across the board, how would that affect workers and consumers? They found that, on average, the cost would be incredibly small--$0.46 per shopping trip, or $12.49 a year for the average shopper who spends more than a $1,000 there annually. Meanwhile, poor and low-income workers would make an additional $1,670 to $6,500 per employee in the family. "We found that price increases would be very small and spread out over large numbers of people," Ken Jacobs, one of the lead authors on the study and chair of the Center tells Co.Exist.

On the other side of the equation, a recent report prepared by Democratic legislators on the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce showed that Walmart's low wages actually cost taxpayers in terms of public benefit programs. As an example, legislators cited a Walmart supercenter in Wisconsin that cost taxpayers least $904,542 a year in Medicaid for employees who couldn't afford health care.

So do higher wages mean higher prices for consumers? Yes, but a negligible amount, and that's not taking into the externalized cost of low wages on the wider population.

Higher wages would raise prices and hurt low-income families and communities

"The notion that a higher wage is worse for business is absolutely untrue," says Amisha Patel, executive director of Chicago's Grassroots Collaborative. In 2006, when the city tried passing a living wage for its major retailers, the Collaborative, a coalition of 11 community organizations, rallied for the cause in low-income neighborhoods across the city. "[Walmart] is playing on people's fears in a climate where they're really terrified and want to believe that any job is better than no job," she said.

The notion that a higher wage is worse for business is absolutely untrue.

Authors in the Berkeley study mentioned above also found that Walmart entering urban spaces without any kind of fair labor guarantees would be a "mixed blessing." "There is strong evidence that jobs created by Walmart in metropolitan areas pay less and are less likely to offer benefits than those they replace," the authors noted. The Berkeley researchers also found that Walmart workers were more likely to be poor than its shoppers, and that increasing wages would have a net positive impact.

If Washington, D.C. raises its living wage, Walmart will be forced to compete somewhere else

"Walmart and people who make a similar argument say business will leave and prefer to go to Maryland or Virginia, where wage requirements wouldn't be as high," Temple says. "[But] when you have service-based jobs like this, you can't move across state lines because you'd be giving up your consumer base. It's not a question of competitiveness with fellow cities--Walmart was interested in moving to D.C. in the first place because it wanted contact with that base."

Jacobs, one of the authors of the Berkeley study, also notes out that Walmart's decision to keep its wages low carries another kind of opportunity cost by effectively keeping its business out of cities. He also doesn't think Walmart's threat to lock itself out of D.C. is truly about just D.C., but instead echoes the company's fear of living wage initiatives across the country. "I think from Walmart's perspective they're not thinking about this as a D.C. issue. Could they compete in D.C. with higher wages? Absolutely. They're looking at if Chicago tries again, if New York tries, and all these other areas. I think from a business standpoint, Walmart would be better off if it came to some kind of agreement with these cities," he said.

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What Flight Attendants Are Trained to Do When Things Go Wrong: A Take on Asiana Flight #214 | Patricia Sund

What Flight Attendants Are Trained to Do When Things Go Wrong: A Take on Asiana Flight #214

Many people have asked me to write about the crash of Asiana Flight #214 in San Francisco. My 26 years of experience in the industry has prompted many questions about the crash from a flight attendant's point of view.

One of the questions had to do with our training. What exactly are we trained to do? It's a pretty long list, actually. And the list of what we are trained for and what we can be asked to respond to can be found in the Flight Manual pictured above. Here is what is inside that manual cover:

That's a lot of ground. Some of the things we are trained to handle are medical emergencies, Ditching (evacuating in water), volatile fuel threats and fires, evacuations, blocked exit procedures, decompressions, life raft procedures, and malfunctions.

We have to know how to deal with armed passengers, armed officers escorting prisoners, deportees, and hostile passengers.

We are well trained in the use of emergency equipment such as halon fire extinguishers, solid state oxygen units, cold weather survival equipment, automatic external defibrillators, the first aid kit, the pocket mask for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, life rafts, and the emergency locater transmitter. Not only that, but we also have to know where every piece of this equipment is on every airplane we're qualified on. I'm currently qualified on five types of aircraft, but each type has different models and configurations, so we have to know the quirks of where they put the equipment on each configuration of each aircraft.

We have to know a myriad of security procedures, sabotage procedures, how to put out a high energy battery fire if someone's laptop ignites, unauthorized evacuation procedures, (if a passenger pops a slide on the ground) how to handle an Arctic landing, and inadvertent oxygen mask drops. This is just the tip of the iceberg of stuff we have to know. Look at the size of the manual. We have to know this stuff. And we get updates, revisions and bulletins every few weeks when stuff changes. So in actuality, we're retraining all of the time.

Sometimes this knowledge and equipment helps us out tremendously in an emergency. There are those times, however, when all bets are off and you have to make it up as you go along. Usually, these are cases when there is no procedure in place when something occurs. The FAA and the Airlines can't think of every possible scenario. Usually in these cases, the flight attendants end up creating a policy or procedure that eventually is put in place by the airlines or by the FAA.

There's only so much training you can get before you run into something that has never happened before. So trust me when I tell you that there's a lot more to this career than slinging orange juice and telling people to turn off their cell phone. A lot more. The thing is, you just don't see it. As I said to someone on Facebook, if you saw what was covered in my manual, you'd freak.

For instance, on Flight #214, two of the slides deployed inside the aircraft, which is really not where you want them to be, obviously. They malfunctioned and pinned two of the flight attendants underneath. I can tell you this. There is no procedure for this, at least at my company. So the other flight attendants used axes to deflate the slides and get those pinned flight attendants out from under the inflated slides. And it probably wasn't easy. Those slides are big and really heavy. Let me put it this way: I don't think a salad fork would do the trick.

It was a bad accident and I'm happy, yet amazed that only two people lost their lives. The tail being sheared off by hitting the sea wall most likely severed a lot of wiring. Between that and the fuel onboard, you had the perfect mix for a nice campfire right there in coach. From what I'm able to ascertain from the video I saw of the crash, the pilot was coming in too low and too slow and apparently attempted to abort the landing and he pulled up on the controls to raise the nose. This cocked the angle of the plane down in the back and the wall sheared off the tail.

I've been in airplanes that have aborted both takeoffs and landings. They aren't fun. I've seen a lot of things happen on flights that you wouldn't believe. But until you experience it, you really never see flight attendants in action. And you probably never want to see what we are trained to do. What bothered me the most about the reporting was that former DOT Inspector General, Mary Schiavo credited the pilots for opening the exits. She said, and I quote: "You have to push a button in the cockpit. You have to actually activate the emergency exit. And in many cases, that never comes, and it's passengers who get up and say, I'm going to get myself out of here, and I'm going to save several people.

I think this is a crock of complete crap. And it was a real "douche canoe" statement to make. The pilots do not activate the doors or the slides. The flight attendants do that after visually assessing what's happening outside the aircraft in that area of the aircraft and ensuring there's no fire. The pilots don't have rearview mirrors and have no idea what's actually going on behind them. There are no "buttons" in the cockpit to activate the slides or open the doors. I really would expect that Ms. Schiavo would know this. Every day I see people who can't open a damned bathroom door. They try to open the lav door using the ashtray mounted on the wall. So can passengers actually open the doors? Yes, they can. But flight attendants are seated next to the doors and usually take care of that.

And I'm getting real tired of the media and the press being a day late and a dollar short with crediting flight attendants for what they do. This flight crew did an absolutely amazing job with this accident and they are indeed heroes. And finally, in the last day or so, they are beginning to get credit for for actions. I do see some good coming out of this. People are going to begin to pay attention to the safety video and read the safety card in the seat back pocket. They're going to be a tad more respectful. They're going to say "Please" and "Thank you." For about two weeks. 9/11 got them paying attention for about a month and a half. People actually thanked us for coming to work when we got flights back in the air five days later. Forgive my cynicism, but that's the nature of the beast. People want to forget. They simply don't want to think about these things. And I don't blame them. But I have to. And I do it every day.

So you see, we are indeed "bridesmaids" and never the bride. Why? Because nobody, and I mean nobody ever wants to see what pilots and flight attendants are actually paid to do and to know. Do you really want to be there and see how damned fast I can evacuate a 757-2R exit? Do you really want to see me help deliver a baby at 35,000 feet? (And yes, I did.) Do you want to see me on the floor applying shock pads of the automatic external defibrillators to a guy dying of a heart attack? (Yup. Been there too.) Do you want to see pilots bring in a DC10 with absolutely no flight controls? Well, they did. They did it here:

And if you think landing in water is unlikely, it usually is. Yet it is indeed survivable. "Sully" did it here. And the flight attendants evacuated the plane right in the middle of the Hudson River:

185 survived that horrific crash in Sioux City. Considering the circumstances, that's pretty damned good. And every passenger survived the "Miracle on the Hudson" flight.
My hope for the future of air travel is that people get their crap together and start flying responsibly. Wear long pants, a long sleeved shirt and closed-toe shoes. Count the seat backs to your nearest exit. Pay attention to the safety video. Read the damned safety card so you have an idea what you're doing. And for God's sake, listen to us.

This post was originally published on http://parrotnation.com/.

 

 

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