Entrepreneurship Archives • Page 2 of 3 • Outliers Academy

Business

The #1 Reason Innovation Efforts Fail

By Guest Post February 20, 2019

by Kumar Mehta

Despite the countless books and articles written about innovation, we don’t have a good understanding about what drives innovation within organizations. Instead, we have multiple, often conflicting, theories about what makes innovation happen. We follow the one that resonates best with us or is in vogue. As a result, innovation efforts at many companies suffocate as they stumble along, thinking they are on the right path but not really knowing where they are headed.

The way to build an environment where innovation happens consistently is to make certain that the foundational building blocks that drive innovation are present. Few companies have built such an environment, what I call an innovation biome . The companies that have built this environment are the ones we admire as they are the ones that bring the most innovative offerings to the world.

In the rest of the companies, though, the most common reason that innovations fail is this: others reject an idea because they don’t have the right tools to evaluate the idea.

Overcoming disbelievers and naysayers

In most companies, when someone has an idea it has to climb up several layers of management, requiring a yes at every level for it to keep climbing.

A single no going up the management staircase can kill an idea. Since no one is ever penalized for saying no (you only get hurt for saying yes to the wrong thing), companies often develop cultures that are conservative and not conducive to innovation.

Just about every major innovation in history was rejected by the experts of the time.

Whether it was the earliest people who believed the earth is round, or Darwin’s theory of evolution, or Pasteur’s theory of germs, disbelievers and naysayers have always shown up in full force. This has never stopped. Experts thought the Personal Computer would not be successful, nor the automobile, nor the telephone (presumably the telephone was never supposed to catch on because there was no shortage of messenger boys).

This still happens every day in companies around the world.

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Apprenticeship

Execute Like a Rookie, Lead Like a Multiplier

By Guest Post February 14, 2019

by FirstRound

In 1989, Liz Wiseman took her first job out of business school at a mid-size startup called Oracle. With no previous experience, she was recruited as a technical trainer, charged with teaching programming to all of the company’s new engineering recruits. She admits she barely knew what the company did, much less how to teach engineers. A year later, she was promoted to manage the training department and make CEO Larry Ellison‘s vision for what he called ‘Oracle University’ a reality. She was 24.

“I really didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was that this was a grown-up job and I wasn’t quite grown up yet, but no one seemed to be bothered by that but me,” says Wiseman. It was scary then, but looking back, she sees clearly how being a rookie made her an ideal candidate for the blue-sky project. “My real value didn’t come from having fresh ideas. It was having no ideas at all. When you know nothing you’re forced to create something.”

Little did she know that she’d spend the next 17 years leading the University effort and Oracle’s global human resources. Since then, Wiseman has written three books about what makes people effective as employees and leaders, and has conducted extensive research on how management can maximize performance inside organizations. Now president of the Wiseman Group, training executives around the world, she recently spoke at Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner and shared her findings about the advantages of the rookie mindset, how knowing too much can be dangerous for innovation, and what leaders can do to help everyone around them achieve their potential.

The Power of Being a Rookie

Harkening back to her experience spearheading Oracle University, Wiseman breaks down why her beginner’s mind was such a strength: “When you’re forced to create something and you don’t know how to do it, you go out and you ask,” she says. “All I knew was how important product knowledge transfer was inside of the company, so I went out and talked to every single one of the product bosses. I asked them what problems they had getting people to learn. I talked to the people who needed the knowledge.”

Based on these interviews, she knew she needed to keep things simple to lower the barrier to entry, and she needed to leverage the incredible amount of knowledge existing employees already had. “Instead of hiring instructors and technical experts that we’d need to bring up to speed, we went back to the product bosses and asked them to take on the additional responsibility of teaching trainings. We knew they’d be the best at it. It was the best, most accurate, fastest solution.”

Eventually, the program got so big that management made moves to replace Wiseman with a more seasoned executive, but the experts she had recruited to teach stepped in and demanded that she stay at her post. “It turned out that by not really knowing anything myself, I was able to stay much closer to all of the important stakeholders. And, because I needed to prove myself, we operated in thin slices — what we would today probably call a lean or agile approach — to deliver quick wins. We were giving people what they needed when they needed it because I knew no other way of working.”

When you’re a rookie, you’re also a pioneer. You’re out there on the frontier without confidence, so you have to focus on the basics. You end up operating very lean.

While researching her book ‘Rookie Smarts,’ Wiseman studied 400 different scenarios where people were new to something or not: Taking on pieces of work, debugging a program, writing a proposal, teaching a class, etc. Her team looked at how experienced people handled tasks and compared it to people doing them for the very first time. Here’s what she found:

Experience creates a number of blind spots. “With time, we obviously gain knowledge, wisdom and more data points to inform our power of intuition. We build confidence and networks, but we’re also creating blind spots.” When your mind recognizes a pattern, it tends to stop innovating. You’re no longer looking for outlier possibilities, you miss opportunities. Generally speaking, you stop making things up. You gloss over the gaps.

Studies have shown that if misspelled words are strung together in a sentence, people can still read them with ease because all that matter is the first and last letter of a word. Our brains fill in the rest. The same thing happens when we face situations where we have experience. Our automatic response is to reach for what we already know. “We start answering questions before they’ve been asked. We stop seeing new data points or contrary points of you. We stop seeking feedback and input from others.”

We develop scar tissue. The more experience you gain, the more likely you’ll have some bad experiences that will leave scars behind, continually reminding you of your mistakes. “I have a whole set of scars that remind me not to do things that didn’t seem to work out very well the first time,” Wiseman says. “You also have to realize that you will have ideas that touch on other people’s scar tissue. They will quickly say, ‘No, no, we tried that and it didn’t work.’ This is a major way that experience can create a number of troubling blind spots.”

Ignorance can drive top performance. “If you envision a really steep learning curve, it starts in a phase of ignorance, this really gentle part of the curve. This is where, even when we’re given important and hard tasks, we can say to ourselves, ‘How hard can this be? I can do it,’” says Wiseman. “It’s only when we start to dig in and become more aware that we realize how hard something is. We start seeing the gap between what we can do and what the people around us can do. Then we move into a state of desperation. We start to panic. We look around for someone who knows what they’re doing who can help. This is where we start to reach out.”

The most powerful form of learning comes when we’re desperate. When we have no choice but to learn.

Wiseman’s research showed that in fields requiring specialized knowledge, inexperienced people tend to outperform their experienced peers by a small margin. “But where they really outperform is when the work is innovative in nature,” she says. “Rookies are a lot faster than people with experience because they are desperate and uncomfortable. When we get comfortable, that’s when we start to teach and mentor other people.” But it’s also where people slow down and stop contributing as much.

“As I looked at top performing rookies, I found this really interesting type of person: the perpetual rookie. These are people who are successful professionals, leaders, entrepreneurs with years of mastery who, despite that, maintain their rookie smarts — their ability to think and approach their work as if they were doing it for the first time.” As she investigated the attributes of perpetual rookies, Wiseman identified several traits they have in common:

They are risk mitigators, not risk takers. They learn how to operate in thin slices, test, and de-risk their progress.
They are never satisfied. “There’s an abhorrence of mediocrity that they share.”
They are curious. They always want to learn about everything, even if it’s not related to their job or immediate challenges.
They are humble. “I don’t mean in the sense of low self-esteem. I mean willing to learn from anyone and everyone no matter where they are in the hierarchy.”
They are playful. “It’s not like they try to create fun amid the work. For them, their work is just fun.”

So how can someone go about holding on to their rookie smarts? “As I looked across so many of these leaders and professionals, they all had a deliberate ritual — something that helped them go back to their rookie roots,” Wiseman says.

She cites Bob Hurley, founder of a surf company called Hurley Sports that eventually sold to Nike. “He said that at every juncture of building his business he had no idea what he was doing, and it turned out to be an advantage.”

When Hurley finds himself stuck in a rut, he thinks back to something that happened many years ago on Huntington Beach when he was an avid surfer himself. He ran into Wayne Bartholomew, the reigning world champion surfer at the time, who said he preferred surfing with beginners because they gave him energy. “So Bob told me, ‘Now when I have bad days, I go out and surf with the amateurs,'” Wiseman says. “He spends his time talking to them, hanging out with them, and he says it revitalizes his point of view.”

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Creativity

Dieter Rams’s 10 Principles of Design, illustrated by his ingenious products

By Guest Post February 13, 2019

by Mark Wilson

Every designer alive has heard of Dieter Rams’s 10 Principles of Design–the legendary designer’s quick-reference rules for making products, developed in his early days at Braun. But never has the list been presented with such a strong visual thesis as it is in the documentary Rams, by Gary Hustwit. The documentary was released in select theaters in 2018 (read my story on it here) but Hustwit recently shared this intriguing new clip online. It’s a fascinating, four-minute thesis about how Rams articulated his design philosophy through consumer products.

In the documentary, the 10 Principles of Design sequence feels quite different than what comes before or after. While Hustwit films Rams himself with a locked-down tripod, creating crisp, impeccably balanced frames, the list breaks out of this stoicism, embracing multi-panel animations and a bit of whimsy.

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Business

There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

By Guest Post February 13, 2019

By Bruce Schneier for Wired.com

In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin—and everything about it.

Much has been written about blockchains and how they displace, reshape, or eliminate trust. But when you analyze both blockchain and trust, you quickly realize that there is much more hype than value. Blockchain solutions are often much worse than what they replace.

First, a caveat. By blockchain, I mean something very specific: the data structures and protocols that make up a public blockchain. These have three essential elements. The first is a distributed (as in multiple copies) but centralized (as in there’s only one) ledger, which is a way of recording what happened and in what order. This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it, and immutable, meaning that no one can change what happened in the past.

The second element is the consensus algorithm, which is a way to ensure all the copies of the ledger are the same. This is generally called mining; a critical part of the system is that anyone can participate. It is also distributed, meaning that you don’t have to trust any particular node in the consensus network. It can also be extremely expensive, both in data storage and in the energy required to maintain it. Bitcoin has the most expensive consensus algorithm the world has ever seen, by far.

Finally, the third element is the currency. This is some sort of digital token that has value and is publicly traded. Currency is a necessary element of a blockchain to align the incentives of everyone involved. Transactions involving these tokens are stored on the ledger.

Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.

All three elements of a public blockchain fit together as a single network that offers new security properties. The question is: Is it actually good for anything? It’s all a matter of trust.

Trust is essential to society. As a species, humans are wired to trust one another. Society can’t function without trust, and the fact that we mostly don’t even think about it is a measure of how well trust works.

The word “trust” is loaded with many meanings. There’s personal and intimate trust. When we say we trust a friend, we mean that we trust their intentions and know that those intentions will inform their actions. There’s also the less intimate, less personal trust—we might not know someone personally, or know their motivations, but we can trust their future actions. Blockchain enables this sort of trust: We don’t know any bitcoin miners, for example, but we trust that they will follow the mining protocol and make the whole system work.

Most blockchain enthusiasts have a unnaturally narrow definition of trust. They’re fond of catchphrases like “in code we trust,” “in math we trust,” and “in crypto we trust.” This is trust as verification. But verification isn’t the same as trust.

In 2012, I wrote a book about trust and security, Liars and Outliers. In it, I listed four very general systems our species uses to incentivize trustworthy behavior. The first two are morals and reputation. The problem is that they scale only to a certain population size. Primitive systems were good enough for small communities, but larger communities required delegation, and more formalism.

The third is institutions. Institutions have rules and laws that induce people to behave according to the group norm, imposing sanctions on those who do not. In a sense, laws formalize reputation. Finally, the fourth is security systems. These are the wide varieties of security technologies we employ: door locks and tall fences, alarm systems and guards, forensics and audit systems, and so on.

These four elements work together to enable trust. Take banking, for example. Financial institutions, merchants, and individuals are all concerned with their reputations, which prevents theft and fraud. The laws and regulations surrounding every aspect of banking keep everyone in line, including backstops that limit risks in the case of fraud. And there are lots of security systems in place, from anti-counterfeiting technologies to internet-security technologies.

In his 2018 book, Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust, Kevin Werbach outlines four different “trust architectures.” The first is peer-to-peer trust. This basically corresponds to my morals and reputational systems: pairs of people who come to trust each other. His second is leviathan trust, which corresponds to institutional trust. You can see this working in our system of contracts, which allows parties that don’t trust each other to enter into an agreement because they both trust that a government system will help resolve disputes. His third is intermediary trust. A good example is the credit card system, which allows untrusting buyers and sellers to engage in commerce. His fourth trust architecture is distributed trust. This is emergent trust in the particular security system that is blockchain.

What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?

Blockchain enthusiasts point to more traditional forms of trust—bank processing fees, for example—as expensive. But blockchain trust is also costly; the cost is just hidden. For bitcoin, that’s the cost of the additional bitcoin mined, the transaction fees, and the enormous environmental waste.

Blockchain doesn’t eliminate the need to trust human institutions. There will always be a big gap that can’t be addressed by technology alone. People still need to be in charge, and there is always a need for governance outside the system. This is obvious in the ongoing debate about changing the bitcoin block size, or in fixing the DAO attack against Ethereum. There’s always a need to override the rules, and there’s always a need for the ability to make permanent rules changes. As long as hard forks are a possibility—that’s when the people in charge of a blockchain step outside the system to change it—people will need to be in charge.

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Accounting

Why Marx Loved Central Banks

By Guest Post February 12, 2019

by Thorsten Polleit for Mises.org

In his “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), published together with Frederick Engels, Karl Marx calls for “measures” — by which he means “despotic inroads on the rights of property” –, which would be “unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production,” that is, bringing about socialism-communism. Marx’s measure number five reads: “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.” This is a rather perspicacious postulation, especially as at the time when Marx formulated it, precious metals — gold and silver in particular — served as money.

As is well known, the quantity of gold and silver cannot be increased at will. As a result, the quantity of credit (in terms of lending and borrowing money balances) cannot easily be expanded according to political expediency. However, Marx might have fantasized already, what would be possible once the state is put in a position where it can create money through credit expansion; where it has usurped and monopolized the production of money. Long before Marx, the English churchman and historian Thomas Fuller had elaborately expressed the power of money: “Money is the sinew of love as well as war.”

The Origins of Modern Central Banking

The idea of central banking has a long history. For instance, the Swedish central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, was founded in 1668, and the English central bank, the Bank of England, was formed in 1694. The fraudulent operations of such institutions came to light soon, at the latest with the writing of the British economist David Ricardo. In his 1809 essay “The High Price of Bullion” he pointed out that it was the increase in the quantity of money — in the form of banknotes not backed by gold — that caused a general rise in prices, an effect we know as (price) inflation.

Unfortunately, however, the political-economic insight that central banks holding the money production monopoly would misuse their power time and again, engage in cronyism, and cause an anti-social debasement of the currency has not — to this very day — sufficed to discredit the monstrous idea of central banking. It seems that as far as monetary affairs are concerned, Marx’s concept of Dialectical Materialism has made quite an impression: What is appears to form peoples’ consciousness (not vice versa). This has certainly helped in creating central bank Marxism on a world-wide scale.

Cutting the Last Ties with Commodity Money

On 15 August 1971 Marx’s vision became true: The US administration single-handedly terminated the redeemability of the US dollar into physical gold – and so gold, the currency of the civilized world, was officially demonetized. Through this coup de main, in the United States of America, as well as all other countries in this world, an unbacked paper money — or fiat money system was established. Since then, all currencies around the globe represent fiat currencies: representing money creation by circulation credit expansion, not backed by real savings or deposits, monopolized by central banks.

The fiat money system, the creation of money through circulation credit expansion, has brought about a new kind of debt slavery on a grand scale. Consumers, corporations and, of course, governments, too, have become highly dependent on central banks continuously churning out ever greater amounts of credit and money, provided at ever lower interest rates. In numerous countries, central banks have de facto become the real centers of power: Their monetary policy decisions effectively determine the weal and woe of economies and whole societies.

By issuing fiat currencies, created out of thin air, a rather small clique of central bankers, together with their staffers, causes — to borrow from Friedrich Nietzsche — a “revaluation of values.” Chronic monetary inflation, for instance, discourages savings; running into ever greater amounts of debt gets cultivated; by central banks’ downward manipulation of the interest rate, the future needs get debased compared to present needs; the favoring of a sort of monetary “Deep State” comes at the expense of demolishing civil and entrepreneurial liberties.

A Supranational Central Bank

In Europe, central bank Marxism has accomplished a rather astounding feat: 19 nation states with a total of around 337 million people have given up their right to self-determination in monetary affairs, submitting to the monetary policy dictate of a supra-national central bank entirely beyond effective Parliamentary control that issues a single fiat currency, the euro. While central bank Marxism has been reasonably successful in Europe, however, its true spearhead has always been the US central bank: The Federal Reserve (Fed).

Today’s world depends on the fiat US dollar issued by the Fed more than ever. Effectively all other major currencies are built upon the Greenback, and it is the Fed that determines the credit and liquidity conditions in international financial markets. It effectively presides over a world central bank cartel which, if it is allowed to continue unimpededly, will eventually steer and control the world economy through its unassailable money production monopoly, effectively removing one of the most critical roadblocks against unrestricted state tyranny.

Ideas Have Consequences

So those favoring a free society can only hope that something will get in the way of central bank Marxism. This is by no means impossible. Socialism-communism is not the inevitable destiny of social life and historical evolution, as Marxists would like to make us believe. What truly matters are ideas or theories, if you will, as ideas — whatever their specific content, wherever they come from, whether they are right or wrong — underlie and drive human action.1Ludwig von Mises was acutely aware of this indisputable insight:

Human society is an issue of the mind. Social co-operation must first be conceived, then willed, then realized in action. It is ideas that make history, not the “material productive forces”, those nebulous and mystical schemata of the materialist conception of history. If we could overcome the idea of Socialism, if humanity could be brought to recognize the social necessity of private ownership of the means of production, then Socialism would have to leave the stage. That is the only thing that counts.2

Against the backdrop of Mises’s words one may add: Once people understand that Marxism (and all its particular forms of socialism) does not guarantee a higher living standard and that it does make a better or more just and reasonable world, it would usher in the end of central banking and fiat money. In other words: whether or not central bank Marxism and fiat money will prevail or be thrown out of the window (or flushed down the drain) will be determined by the outcome of the “battle of ideas.” So there remains reason for hope!

1. For a detailed explanation see Mises, L. v. (1957), Theory and History, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, US Alabama, Part Two, esp. Chapter 7, pp. 102 – 158.
2. Mises, L. v. (1981), Socialism. An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, p. 461.

Check out the Amazing Mises Institute

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Apprenticeship

Mentorships and Kids

By Guest Post February 11, 2019

by Joanne Foster, EdD

Synopsis

Here’s an overview of why mentorships are increasingly popular, including benefits, structuring guidelines, and lots of helpful information for parents, teachers, and kids.

“The term ‘mentor’ comes from Greek mythology: Odysseus’ son Telemachus was entrusted to the care of Mentor, a wise advisor. History and literature from classical times to the present abound with examples of mentorships in politics, business, science, the arts, and education. Aristotle benefited from his mentorship under Plato, as Mickey Mouse benefitted from his in Fantasia’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’”

~ Excerpt from p. 160 of Being Smart about Gifted Education

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS A MENTORSHIP?

A mentorship is a supportive relationship established between a learner and someone who is more experienced in a particular domain. (For example, sciences, business, creative arts, technology, and so on.) The mentor offers guidance, knowledge, and understanding. Mentoring requires an investment of time and patience, and a willingness to support and encourage the learner. Typically, the “mentee” is deemed to be the learner, but in truth all strong mentorships are mutually rewarding experiences wherein both parties interact meaningfully and respectfully with one another, learn, and derive benefits.

WHAT KINDS OF BENEFITS?

Here’s a list of ways mentorships can strengthen a child’s or teen’s learning:

Enriched perspectives relating to an area of interest, including useful information, skill sets, creative and critical thinking opportunities, and practical applications
Transmission of values and attitudes
Enjoyment
Enhanced and authentic connections to important domains of competence, and to others within the “real world” (This includes exposure to fields of interest—leading to greater career path awareness, preparation for taking on roles, and appreciation of accomplishment in the chosen area.)Emotional support
Discovery of resources beyond the classroom
Intellectual challenge and increased competence, including perhaps the creation of a possible portfolio of acquired learning achievements
Encouragement and guidance for self-directed learning
Expansion of understandings of diversity and possibility (For example, non-traditional minority professionals can challenge gender and cultural stereotypes, and mentorships can be particularly beneficial for students from culturally diverse or economically disadvantaged backgrounds.)
Respect for expertise
Relationship-building experiences
Positive role models, including helping kids better understand pathways to high achievement
Potential for academic credit

Here’s a list of benefits for mentors:

Ongoing learning
Rejuvenation of spirit
Sense of fulfillment
Sense of respect and of being valued
Fresh perspectives—seeing things anew from the point of view of mentees
Involvement and enjoyment
Contribution to the skills and expertise of young people interested in possibly entering the field of interest
Vicarious satisfaction through accomplishment of the protégé
Connections to the educational system
Inter-generational friendship
Community engagement

HOW TO STRUCTURE A MENTORSHIP?

In any mentorship arrangement, it’s important to clarify expectations. These should be agreed upon by both the mentor and the mentee, with parents and teachers overseeing the process, and with their approval. It’s a good idea to draw up a written agreement outlining intents and responsibilities. This includes the right of withdrawal from an arrangement if it does not seem to be working out well. Periodic review of this “contract” will help to ensure that everyone’s expectations are being met.

A mentorship can be a one-on-one program between two people, or it may take the form of more a complex arrangement with others involved. Either way, it should be part of an individual student’s overall educational plan, and it should also be valued as an integral component of it.

Heads up—any program involving kids requires careful supervision and consistent monitoring by adults. With that caveat uppermost, here are a few possible “models” for mentorships.

Co-creation of an individualized program by the mentor and the student, always under the guidance of parents or teachers

School visits by vetted community experts who can help to increase the depth of programming that classroom teachers are able to provide

Job-shadowing programs, whereby students prepare for the mentorship phase in school, and then spend time in the pre-approved career setting of their mentor

Online or virtual mentorship programs—especially good for children and teens who want to investigate a field or learn about something that is not otherwise readily accessible to them (Note: Online options demand attentive supervision.)

Creative approaches, whereby a mix of the above might be contemplated, or an innovative mentorship format is designed for specific purposes. For example, mentorships are a frequently recommended practice in gifted education. Unique or differentiated learning experiences can provide gifted learners with targeted and enriching educational opportunities and challenges in areas of heightened advancement. (Click here for an article with additional information about fostering giftedness.)

WHERE TO FIND A MENTOR?

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Accounting

Netflix paid NO federal or state taxes in 2018 despite record profits

By Guest Post February 9, 2019

by Lauren Fruen

Netflix paid NOTHING in federal or state taxes in 2018 despite posting record profits of $845million – and even got a $22million rebate

Netflix didn’t pay a cent in state or federal income taxes last year, despite posting its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018 of $845million, according to a new report.

In addition, the streaming giant reported a $22 million federal tax rebate, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

Senior fellow at ITEP Matthew Gardner said corporations like Netflix, which has its headquarters in Los Gatos, California, are still ‘exploiting loopholes’ and called the figures ‘troubling’.

Netflix says they paid $131 million in taxes in 2018 and this is declared in financial documents. But Gardner says this figure relates to taxes paid abroad, according to a separate part of their statements.

He told DailyMail.com: ‘It is pretty clearly true that Netflix’s cash payment of worldwide income taxes in 2018 was $131 million. But that is a worldwide number—the amount Netflix actually paid to national, state and local governments worldwide in 2018. This tells us precisely nothing about the amount Netflix paid to any specific government, including the U.S.’

Gardner added: ‘Fortunately, however, there is another, more complete geographic disclosure of income tax payments.

‘The notes to the financial statements have a detailed section on income taxes. And what this tells us is that all of the income taxes Netflix paid in 2018 were foreign taxes. Zero federal income taxes, zero state income taxes in the US.’

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Accounting

Hamilton on Steroids

By Guest Post February 9, 2019

By John Devanny

“The revenue of the state is the state.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution

Washington D. C. finds itself in the midst of an entertaining, nay consuming, Kabuki theatre. The federal government has “shut down” its non-essential functions, re-opened the same, and promised to do it all over again in a few weeks, raising the question as to why it has non-essential functions at all. Mr. Mueller’s fishing expedition continues sailing along through Mr. Trump’s tweetstorms, as Democrats await the landing of the big tuna complete with waterside fish fry and impeachment. Meanwhile, the Trumpites patiently fantasize about their man turning the tables on the evil deep state by purging the temples and draining good ol’ foggy bottom. T’is all sound and fury underscoring Henry Kissinger’s view that the smaller the stakes, the more vicious the politics.

What is currently at stake is the survival of the last vestiges, really the tatters and shreds, of the old republic, and no one, neither leftists identity politics ideologues or MAGA hat wearing Trumpites are lifting even a whimper of protest, minus a few notable exceptions such as journalist Greg Hunter. What matters is 21 trillion dollars of unaccounted for spending. The story takes us back to the eve of the 9/11 attacks. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, disclosed a particularly embarrassing piece of news that the Defense Department spent 2.3 trillion dollars and could not account for it. Conveniently for Rumsfeld and the DoD, some folks decided to pilot passenger jetliners into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, so the issue of the “missing money” fell to the wayside. Until, Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing during Daddy Bush’s reign, claimed that around 6 trillion dollars of spending could not be accounted for in the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. One Dr. Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics and the holder of the Morris Chair of State and Local Government Finance and Policy at Michigan State University, was sure Fitts and her researchers were incorrect. So he and a team of graduate students combed through the publicly available financial records and found that Fitts was correct. So, just for kicks, they took a look at the spending records of the DoD and found another 15 trillion of unaccounted spending. As Skidmore and his intrepid team dug deeper into the bowels of federal agencies with information requests, the Office of the Inspector General pulled the plug on all the internet links to the key documents that showed the unaccounted for spending. Eventually, the links came back up, and with a promise of an audit of spending by the DoD. Clearly, Dr. Skidmore had hit a nerve.

Various and sundry debunkers have gone into overdrive to assure us that all is well. The leading court newspaper, the Washington Post, is quite certain that this is a case of double counting or perhaps lost receipts. Other sober-minded folks have compared this to someone forgetting about the twenty-five bucks you paid an enterprising teenager to mow your lawn, or perhaps it’s like when you forget to report a meal on your expense account, or you double booked the latte at Starbucks. A few lawns, some lattes, some double booked F-35s, some uncounted $300.00 toilet seats and pretty soon we have 21 trillion dollars of unaccounted spending. The Post never produced any evidence of plugging or double booking of accounts, bless their hearts, they just took the federal government at its word.

But we really can’t take the federal government at its word. Consider Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) Statement 56. According to Michele Ferri and Jonathan Luire, Statement 56 is fraught with perils for the republic.

In the absolute most simple terms, Standard 56 allows federal entities to shift amounts from line item to line item and sometimes even omit spending altogether when reporting their financials in order to avoid the potential of revealing classified information.1 However, as with all laws, nearly every word in that sentence is a complicated concept to unpack. Who counts as a federal reporting entity? When and how can these entities conceal or remove financial information from their reports? What information can be removed? When does something count as confidential, and who makes that determination? . . .

The simplest place to start with understanding Standard 56 is its scope. It applies to federal entities that issue unclassified general purpose federal financial reports (GPFFR), including where one entity is consolidated with another. This means it only applies to otherwise unclassified financial reports where there is a risk of revealing classified information; classified financial reports are their own can of worms. (see generally FASAB Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56, available at http://files.fasab.gov/pdffiles/handbook_sffas_56.pdf) Standard 56 also doesn’t remove the actual requirement to report, it just allows these entities to change their reports in ways that don’t reflect their actual spending.

Simply put, a broad interpretation of Statement 56 (When has the federal government not chosen the broad interpretation?), books can be cooked if an entity, public or private, is spending money or fiscally involved in operations that are related to national security. This renders the balance sheets and accounts of both the federal government and the corporations that do business with the government, deeply suspect at best, completely untrustworthy at worst. Most ominous, it effectively removes public spending from any meaningful oversight by the people or the representatives of the people and the states in the Congress. What is in place now is the legal architecture to support legitimize financial fraud.

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Entrepreneurship

Reasons Working Too Hard at Your Business is a Waste of Time

By Guest Post February 8, 2019

by Victor G. Snyder

As the leader of a small business, you’re bent on driving growth. You are willing to put in the work that’s needed to achieve that, but paradoxically, working too hard could create unexpected obstacles to your business growth.

If you’re working hard and putting in long hours but your business has hit a plateau, it’s possible that your hard work is the problem.

Here are some of the ways that working too hard could be holding your business back from realizing its growth potential.

Working Too Hard Stops You from Delegating Effectively

When you work too hard, you end up micromanaging your own employees. This undermines their dedication to the business and sends a silent message that you don’t trust them to meet your expectations. That can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, generating resentment and an unhealthy work atmosphere.

“As a CEO and Entrepreneur, your success will directly correlate to how well you can assemble the best team and then bring out the best in those people,” notes Mark Moses, the CEO of CEO Coaching International. “Micromanagers should never be CEOs of large or growing companies. This is because they are simply too complex to micromanage. Being involved at every level and not delegating to your team creates a bottleneck that essentially strangles an organization.”

Indeed, in order for your business to really scale, you need talented employees who are experts in their areas of specialty. If you’re working too hard, you are probably carrying out tasks which don’t draw on your real strengths. When you hire experts, they can carry out the work in less time, thanks to their training and experience, and you can free yourself up to focus on those strategic tasks which no one else can do.

Working Too Hard Stops You From Building Scalable Business Systems

No matter how hard you work, there is a limit to what a single person can achieve. For a business to scale successfully, it needs to be based on smart systems that can expand beyond your own capabilities. When you focus on completing task after task at all costs, instead of building a scalable business process that will do it for you, you’re stunting your business growth.

“Yes, your talents and skills were the reason that it was able to get up and running, but they will not be the tools that allow it to reach future success,” says Ken Marshall, founder of Doorbell Digital Marketing. “Now don’t get me wrong, working hard and getting things done is not an inherently bad thing. In fact, when your company is in its infancy, you’re going to be doing most of the work. But at some point, you’re going to have to figure out ways to remove yourself from all of the repetitive or non-essential tasks, take a step back, and look at where the ship is headed.”

Working too hard can create an overdependence on you. If your employees are constantly interrupting you to ask for decisions that they should be capable of reaching on their own, it prevents you from focusing on your more important core responsibilities and holds them back from potential growth in their own roles.

Working Too Hard Prevents You from Thinking Creatively

For your business to scale, you need to feel passionate about it. But when you work too hard, your drive and passion get drowned out by petty tasks that should be delegated to someone else.

You could end up focusing too narrowly on the minutiae of the business, making it difficult to see the big picture and create an effective business strategy. At the same time, rushing so fast from one task to the next prevents you from focusing fully on any one aspect of the business, which will also prevent you from maintaining perspective with a holistic growth plan.

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

Communication

Don’t bother inviting me to catch up over coffee — I’m done networking and I’m starting to think you should be, too

By Guest Post January 31, 2019

by Shana Lebowitz

Will networking help you build a successful career? I’ve never been sure.
Mostly, traditional networking seems to me like it takes a lot of time and effort.
Some experts say building connections is a practical strategy, in case you ever lose your job.
Other experts say you’re better off working and developing concrete skills than schmoozing.

A few weeks ago, one of my coworkers at Business Insider created a Slack channel called #lunch-buddy. Anyone who joined the channel would be randomly paired with another BI employee; the two would then meet for lunch, or coffee, or maybe just a walk, and get to know each other.

This initiative seemed to me a brilliant idea. Generally speaking, my coworkers are lovely people, but I know only a sliver personally. And when it comes to employees in other departments — say, product or finance — I’m curious to know what they do all day because, as it stands, I have no clue. (I imagine the feeling is mutual.)

I typed “#lunch-buddy” into the Slack search bar. And then I closed out of it. It was a Monday morning and, already, I was behind on work. I imagined that, by the time my buddy and I arranged to meet up, I’d be even farther behind. Inevitably, I’d wind up nibbling nervously on a sandwich while sneaking glances at my phone to make sure no one was Slacking me. This buddy business was not going to work out, at least not for me.

I should mention that, when the email about the lunch-buddy program went out, I was in the middle of reporting a story about networking. My specific goal was to figure out whether networking was good for your career, as so many influencers would have it, or bad. Good because you meet interesting new people who can introduce you to interesting new job opportunities, clients, and projects. Bad because you spend so much time schmoozing that you forget to, you know, work.

I wasn’t sure where I stood on the subject. As the lunch-buddy incident had made clear, I theoretically supported networking, but wasn’t very adept at practicing it. On LinkedIn, I posed the question to my connections. Unsurprisingly for a networking website, several people who commented said their relationships had always benefited them in their career.

And maybe they’d benefited mine, too. A few years ago, I was looking for a new job and mentioned as much to an old coworker (who’d become a friend) when we got together for drinks. Days later, she emailed me a Business Insider job posting that I’d missed in my search and, well, the rest is history.

Does that count as networking? I’m not sure. I like to think it’s better defined as being a human being with human friends who are willing to help you out.

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!