Podcaster and author James Altucher recently stopped by Business Insider to talk about his provocative blog post about whether or not owning a home is a smart investment.
Altucher is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, angel investor and former hedge fund manager. His podcast and blog teach the lessons he’s learned about money, health and happiness after having it all, losing it, and getting it back again.
Typically, entertainers travel by limo to the red carpet at awards shows. Granger Smith is not normal. He insisted on traveling to the recent Country Music Awards red carpet in a Chevy Silverado. It’s authentically who he is: Smith has always owned a Silverado and it’s what his “customers” expect from him.
It reminded me of a similar incident 20 years earlier at the ACM awards. Alan Jackson walked the red carpet in jeans and a T-shirt. The show producers told Jackson to “play along” with a pre-recorded track. Jackson disagreed, so he had his drummer play along without drumsticks as a weird way of clueing in his audience. He walked away with the male vocalist of the year award and I would argue his authenticity is precisely why fans love him.
The more we drive with GPS—or walk down the sidewalk staring at directions on a smartphone—the less we’re able to navigate on our own. Relying on navigational tech might even make the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles memory, shrink a little.
A set of maps from designer Archie Archambault might help us rebuild the mental maps of cities that we’re starting to lose. Instead of a literal grid of streets, he maps out neighborhoods and the basic parts of a city the way someone who lives there might think of it, or at least the way they probably did before Google Maps existed.
When my younger brother and I went trick-or-treating as kids at Halloween, he was scared of kids dressed as ghosts. When he was very young, he had eye surgery a couple of times. All of the OR people wore white. He associated their white dress and the white sheets of “the ghosts” with pain.
Like him, we can associate the ghosts of business pain past with present opportunities. We often fear stepping up into them because of our past failures.
Here are 3 Positive Strategies to Transform Business Fear so you Work Positive this week:
I admit it. I was under a rock. I hadn’t heard about Peeple until I watched John Oliver’s hysterical send up of it on Last Week Tonight. Touted as Yelp for people, the application would have allowed you to create a profile for someone you wanted to rate (without their consent) and then rate them using 1 to 5 stars along with comments. If you posted something negative, the subject had 48 hours to talk you out of posting it. If negotiations didn’t work, the posting went up and you could engage in rebuttal on the site. And all of those comments would stay up forever because you couldn’t delete your account.
What could possibly go wrong in this scenario?
The Washington Post saw the possibilities for abuse and slammed the site as it was coming out in its beta launch to a limited number of opted-in users. Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough pitched Peeple as a ‘positivity app’ designed to ‘lift up people’. To be fair, they also limited profanity, sexism and discussion of private health conditions. But the fundamental premise, that others have the right to rate you on a public platform without your permission and that you are reduced to a star rating was what the Post found most disturbing.
If you plan to leave your current employer to start a rival company, you better bring a strong team with you, new research suggests.
The success of a “spin-out” company — a business created by employees who leave one company to form another in the same industry — depends on the founder’s ability to attract a large and experienced team of colleagues, according to a study scheduled for publication in the upcoming edition of the Academy of Management Journal.
With attention shifting from Facebook and Twitter to social darling Snapchat, some agencies are hoping to turn their ephemeral posts into recruitment and new business opportunities.
Havas Chicago this week kicks off the second iteration of its Snapchat recruitment program for interns, calling on job seekers to create social media campaigns from among seven causes, from fighting hunger to ending gun violence. The winner will get a 10-week internship and the chance to lead an agencywide initiative supporting the cause they pitched.
Are you my friend, my rival, or both? Maurice Schweitzer and Adam Galinsky, a pair of social psychologists who study behavioral decision-making, posit that in every relationship we are at once cooperating and competing with one another. Schweitzer and Galinsky penned a book on the subject, entitled “Friend or Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both,” which explores real-world case studies to illustrate the dynamics between rivalry and coordination. Their conclusions about power relations and social comparisons offer valuable insights for entrepreneurs and business professionals. So, Business News Daily caught up with Schweitzer, a professor at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, to find out what the implications of his research are for the business world.
After a seven-year review process that gave rise to a grassroots climate activist movement, the Obama administration rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline on Friday, a decision that handed a major victory to environmentalists. Obama announced his determination at a morning news conference in the Roosevelt Room, alongside Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Biden.
“The State Dept has decided the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interests of the U.S.,” Obama said. “I agree with that decision.”
The move comes only weeks ahead of a crucial climate summit in Paris, where diplomats will work to forge a new global warming agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions for all countries starting in 2020. The administration has committed to reducing U.S. carbon emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025, and is pushing for an ambitious climate agreement to be forged.
During his statement on Keystone, Obama confirmed for the first time that he will be going to Paris to join other world leaders in addressing the summit.
In the wake of several high profile drone accidents and a spike in reported sightings over the past year tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration, the government is cracking down on the unmanned flying objects. By the end of the month new drone registration requirements are expected. The AS-MC01-P multicopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), developed by Aerosense Inc., a joint venture between Sony Mobile Communications Inc. and ZMP Inc. (Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg)
The FAA and the Department of Transportation want drone registration and have called on a handful of interested parties—ranging from drone manufacturers to Amazon and other companies with drone delivery systems in their sights—for recommendations. Thursday marks the final day of a three-day meeting of the new “drone task force,” which has been issued a November 20 deadline to hand in its formal suggestions for policing drones.
