Purchuasing in a physical shop

Innovation comes from young people

Younger people tend to be more innovative because they have fewer assumptions,» he said. «They don’t understand why things are the way they are. They don’t understand why they have to hail a taxi… You get more innovation because of that.

Caroline Fairchild, at LinkedIn.

Growing shoes

Awesome idea, which is already working and everyone can help to fundrise here.

Just one small thing missing from my point of view: how can we make from this a social business? The idea is there, the technology too, it has already been commercialized… but it depends on the charity of many people, or from a couple of rich ones, to keep existing. And generally, that is not sustainable.

Using the famous sentence of don’t give a man a fish, show him how to fish, the solution to get a pair of shoes to every children passes from teaching them how to make their own shoes. Maybe technology can be exported to those places in Africa where shoes are needed de most? Maybe then you can employ local people and use local material instead of fancy rubber and treated leather?

Next step is to make it profitable (or at least take it to the break even point) and self-sustainable. Charity can help to set up a business, but if it can not fly alone in a couple of years people will move their interest and their wallets to something else, and it will sadly disappear. You can use for instance recycled materials to cut down costs, or set flexible prices according to the location you sell them: cheaper in the poorer villages, medium in more resourcefull cities and overprized to tourist or first-world stores.

Then the impact in the world will be not only to thousands but millions of children.

12-point plan for job hunting

This is definitely one of the most complete processes that I have found so far to prepare yourself for job-hunting. I specially like the focus on your personal aspirations and the tricks given to identify them.

Full article by Liz Ryan at Forbes.

1. Decide what you want to do next, after you leave this job. You don’t have to look for a new job that’s just like the old one. You get to decide. Maybe it’s time for a big career shift!
2. Now, brand yourself for the job you want (not the job you’ve got)! Begin your branding exercise by writing about yourself (not for publication —  just for you). In your new job, what sort of work will you do? Write your bio as though you’re writing about yourself working at your new job, six months from now. You’ve already had experience in a lot of different subject matters, whether you’ve held the job title or not. Use the bio-creation exercise to reclaim those experiences and get them into your branding!
3. Will you update your LinkedIn profile? You’re in a stealth job search now, so you don’t want to raise alarms. You can set your Notifications to “off” so that your LinkedIn contacts don’t get notified about your profile updates, or you can live with the LinkedIn profile you’ve got throughout your job search.
4. Determine your salary requirement and your other requirements for your job search. Write about your ideal job. What is your target salary level, position title, daily commute, amount of travel per month, and so on? Write your expectations out on paper and talk about them with someone close to you. Determine your floor in each category. What is the lowest salary you would accept — and what would make that low salary worthwhile to you? Know what you want so the universe can bring it to you.
5. Write your Human-Voiced Resume to bring your new branding into clear focus for the benefit of hiring managers who don’t already know you. Remember — you don’t need permission to change careers. You need to give yourself permission!
6. Create a Target Employer List. You may already have target employers in mind, or you might decide to browse LinkedIn profiles to spot employers who are struggling with the very same kind of Business Pain you solve.
7. Learn about Pain Letters and then research and compose a Pain Letter to a particular hiring manager you’d like to start a conversation with.
8. Send your hard copy Pain Letter, attached with one staple in the upper left corner to your hard copy Human-Voiced Resume, directly to the first hiring manager on your Target Employer List, by post.
9. Activate your network. Check in with old friends and new acquaintances to begin expanding your sphere of influence.
10. Get some consulting business cards and begin passing them out to people you know (instead of the business cards your employer gave you).
11. If you are planning to use a Third Party Search channel in your job search (that is, to partner with one or more recruiters whose clients may be looking for someone like you), reach out to one or two trusted recruiters or friend-of-your-friend recruiters to talk through your resume with them. Your Human-Voiced Resume will probably not be your recruiter’s favorite, so you’ll need a traditional resume for recruiters as well as your Human-Voiced Resume to send to hiring managers directly.
12. Get a journal and begin writing in it every day or every other day. Write about your job search. Write about your ideas, dreams and feelings. You are growing new muscles. Hats off to you!

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The engineer

The engineer was not primarily a physicist, or a business man, or an inventor but someone who would acquire some of the skills and knowledge of each of these and be capable of successfully developing and applying new devices on a grand scale.

Vannevar Bush

HR in the future organizations

I have just been listening to this podcast from Jacob Morgan interviewing Pat Wadors, Senior Vice President of Global Talent Organization at LinkedIn.

While I totally recommend this one (tho it is a little bit long, is tremendously interesting), I want to highlight a couple of thoughts and ideas.

1. HR is changing from hiring/firing people + negotiating benefits to a wider and more flexible concept. HR now is about treating employees BEAUTIFULLY. Not just «good» or «fair»: beautifully. This is  influencing leaders and help people to achieve their aspiration. It is also about guaranteeing the alignment of the company’s values and making things happen in the daily culture.
2. The vision of HR is to inspire people to change the world: your team, the employees working for the company (and candidates too), the customers, etc.
3. The mission of HR is to enable high performance healthy company scale. The health status is reached by creating a fun atmosphere of inclusion, where the employee feels recognized and wants to be engaged.
4. We are in a talented world. Every company wants the top people working for them, so they have to first attract them and then retain them. The only way to do it is to come honest to the candidates/employees: to offer the right things for their career and to be able to keep those promises in the future. However HR can not always control every single detail, so the company needs to be prepared and have a plan for unexpected situations where the employee might eventually leave.
5. The key tools to retain people are empowerment and accountability.
6. Everyone deserves a great leader, and HR has the perspective and tools to get closer to that ideal situation.

The unsurprising truth about female leaders

By Caroline Fairchild, at LinkedIn.

On Monday, I moderated a panel of female business leaders at the 10th Annual Duke MBA Women’s Leadership Conference. I started the discussion by posing a question to the audience of roughly 100 female MBA students and professors.

“Fortune recently released its list of The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and less than a third were women. Does that surprise anyone?”

Not a single woman rose her hand.

While it may not be surprising that women represent the minority of great leaders in business or beyond, I was shocked that this future cohort of business execs appeared unfazed by the stat. A majority of the women in the audience would be rejoining the workforce in a matter of months. Yet the lack of female role models ahead of them appears to be nothing but old news.

Rather than dwell on the reality of the present, I turned to my panel — leaders at CitiGroup, Procter & Gamble, SAP and Aetna — to weigh in on the future. How can women make that very unsurprising stat, surprising in the future? Here is what they said.

Brag about yourself because no one else will.

Women are much less likely than men to share their accomplishments at work with their managers, said Marissa Moss, a director in CitiGroup’s High Yield Research Group. While men are willing to brag about their big wins, women think that if they just do a good job, their work will eventually be noticed. Moss said that’s not the case, particularly in male-dominated fields like finance, and encouraged the MBA students to speak up at work when they succeed.

Get used to taking risks because it never gets any easier.

While women may be more risk-averse than men, risk-taking doesn’t suddenly become easier as you go through your career, said Jill Higman, an executive director at Aetna. In fact, as women progress in their career, it’s more likely that risk-taking becomes more challenging as they get married and begin families. Yet the reality is taking risks is necessary to having a successful career. Higman, who admitted that she is not a natural risk-taker, shared that she taught herself to become more tolerant. The key is taking opportunities and pushing for the right job when it makes sense for you in your career, she said.

Marry a man who wants to stay home.

Sharon Ruddock, global vice president and chief learning officer at SAP, didn’t succeed in finding a partner who was willing to stay home, but she still encouraged the audience to seek out a stay-at-home dad. The support at home can make taking big opportunities in your career all that much easier, she said. Ruddock also encouraged the audience to be overconfident in their abilities as she views a lack of confidence as the main reason why we see fewer female leaders in business.

Pull out bias from the hiring process.

For Charlene Patten, the global brand franchise leader of Gillette Venus and female shave care at Procter & Gamble, the numbers won’t change until the unconscious bias of the hiring process does. We all have read the studies that say a guy named Howard is more likely to get the job than a woman named Heidi with the identical resume. At Procter & Gamble, the company takes a candidate’s name and gender off of his or her resume to ensure bias doesn’t creep in.

Leave Early

Next time you go to a party. Maybe even it’s a political party. Or a charity event. Or a dinner. Or a conference call. Or a sales meeting.

Do this:

Find the most valuable, fun, creative thing you can learn as quickly as you can. The one thing that will add value to your life. Hone in on it FAST. Learn something.

Then leave.

Even in a sales meeting: if you learn from the customer, the customer will buy from you.

Even on a first date. Get the kiss. Leave early. It gets better later if you leave early today.

Someone said to the great pianist, Artur Rubinsteain, «I love the way you play the notes!»

Artur Rubinstein said, «Ahh, the secret is how I play the silences between the notes.»

The real you is the silences between the notes.

Not the you in the meetings. The talking you. The worrying you. The you trying to please the date or the boss or the trolls. The you that HAS to respond!

I try (sometimes not so successfully. Sometimes horribly) to play the silences in between the notes.

How many things can you leave early today? Be honest about it. This is the only gift we were given when we were born. The ability to leave things early.

Without the silence, we would never know how to distinguish a beautiful sound.

By James Altucher, influencer in LinkedIn.

Leadership

When you look at other sectors of society, you see leaders who are geniuses at this. You can spot the collaborative leader because he’s rejected the heroic, solitary model of leadership. He doesn’t try to dominate his organization as its all-seeing visionary, leading idea generator and controlling intelligence.

Instead, he sees himself as a stage setter, as a person who makes it possible for the creativity in his organization to play itself out. The collaborative leader lessens the power distance between himself and everybody else. He believes that problems are too complex for one brain, but if he can create the right context and nudge a group process along, the team will come up with solutions.

THIS is the leading style I like.