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Dambisa Moyo, “Let’s talk about agility”

“Time Magazine” has named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. But it’s not just as a macroeconomist that Dambisa Moyo is blazing a trail. She’s a passionate marathon runner, too.       Q. Dambisa, you travel the world giving talks and attending symposia, you write books, you sit on various boards: how do you fit it all in? A. I feel I’m very lucky in that I have found my vocation. I had long dreamed of having a career like this. I went to school and then was fortunate enough to work for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. After my first book, “Dead Aid”, came out in 2009, my car eer took a different path. I’ve now had the privilege of visiting almost 80 countries. Q. During your travels, I understand you met with Chinese President, Xi Jinping: What does one talk about with such a powerful head of state? I was part of a small group invited to meet with the Chinese premier. To be honest, I mainly just listened. Xi Jinping’s way of thinking and his visions are truly impressive. I think a lot can be learned from listening more often.…
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David Orban, “We’ll Live Forever and We’ll Become Cyborgs”

Super-smart droids will work instead of us. Whereas we will be data sets with the ability to reincarnate at will. The future according to Singularity University’s David Orban.         “We shall be living side by side with robots and droids who will be more intelligent than people. While they work in our place, the new human race will spend its time exploring the unknown potential of the mind. People will become cyborgs, with capabilities enhanced by technology. We’ll be able to live forever by transferring our brains (including the sentient self) into other bodies and to explore outer space by transmitting our grey matter at the speed of light as if it were bits travelling through the ether.” This is the future awaiting us in the next 50 years according to David Orban, the founder of countless successful hi-tech companies, but above all a visionary and professor at Singularity University, a “factory” of geniuses and start-ups funded by Google, founded in 2008 by scientist Ray Kurzweil and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. Orban is not a sci-fi author, but a world-famous business manager and futurologist, who spends a third of his time in…
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Who Owns This Mess? financial crisis by Hernando de Soto

Here we are, three years into the global financial crisis, and we’re still flying blind. We don’t even know what we don’t know. What we do know is that we’re stuck in a huge contraction of private credit; no one is making enough loans and investments to expand or start businesses and get the economy growing. The remedies applied by U.S. and European governments tried to treat the symptoms — bad debts, shaky banks, floundering businesses, people losing their homes, rising unemployment, currency wars — and not the disease. Had those symptoms been the real cause of the crisis, “vulture capitalists” should have swept in by now. They should have spotted the signals that send knowledge of who is in trouble and — following the laws of supply and demand — picked up on the cheap the potentially lucrative remains of the nonperforming assets and transactions, correcting the deficiencies that led to them. They would have bought a block of old houses and revamped it into a 20-story high-rise with two restaurants and ample parking. They would have taken over an airline unable to fill its first-class section and rearranged it into a discount, no-frills option with twice the number…
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Think Simple: How Smart Leaders Defeat Complexity. Ken Segall’s new book

Think Simple. Simplicity is arguably the most potent weapon in business—attracting customers, motivating employees, helping outthink competitors, and creating new efficiencies. Yet rarely is it as simple as it looks.       Ken Segall’s first book, Insanely Simple, was based on observations gained from twelve years working as Steve Jobs’s advertising agency creative director, first with NeXT and then with Apple. He saw firsthand that Jobs looked at everything through the lens of simplicity. His obsession with simplicity was not just visible in Apple’s products. You could see it in the way the company organized, innovated, advertised, sold at retail, and provided customer service. In practice, simplicity was Jobs’s most powerful business weapon. It helped Apple distinguish its products and create entirely new product categories, and it put distance between Apple and its competitors. But, while Apple is a terrific example of a company that has been propelled by the power of simplicity, it is hardly alone. Inspired by the ways Apple has benefited from the power of simplicity, Ken Segall set out to find other companies that were traveling this path. He wanted to learn more about the thinking of their leaders. He felt that if he could…
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Irene Villa: “There Is No Peace Without Forgiveness”

Irene Villa lost her legs in a terror attack. A psychologist, writer and competitive athlete, she advocates faith, facing it and forgiveness   Irene Villa has a magnetic personality. She survived a terrorist attack by the ETA group in Madrid in which she lost both legs, but she won the “affection and love” of many people who follow her, who read her writings and who are encouraged by her testimony. In an interview with Aleteia, Irene tells why she forgives, and how she advocates for a more humane world.     You are a psychologist, a writer and a journalist. Do you think people empathize with you? It is important to have passed through certain things in order for other people who are in the same struggle to believe you, hear you and say, “Well it’s true; if she can do it, why can’t I?” For me, the people who came to see me when I had my amputations were essential. It’s true that at times the only way to help certain people is to have passed through it yourself, and to have overcome it. Many people said to me, “Don’t worry; someday you will learn to walk again,” and…
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ROCKvolución: Rock ’n’ Roll B-School

A business professor in Spain wants to rock you. In a recent session for MBA alumni, Salvador López, marketing lecturer at ESADE Business School and author of the Spanish-language book ROCKvolución empresarial (Urano, June 2012), turned jam sessions into business lessons. He had students view film of live concerts and interviews with musicians (some of which he conducted for his radio show) to analyze, among other things, their use of technology, ability to form alliances with clients, whom they call fans, and outside- the-box thinking. With students, he discusses the history of Genesis and the finer points of the Beatles, U2, and Coldplay.   Now working on his first solo album, López wants aspiring executives to learn management techniques from rock ’n’ rollers, ROCKvolución. He’ll do anything to convey his passion for music and the lessons it teaches, even lead a crowd in Queen’s We Will Rock You. In fact, he is designing an entire executive education program on management and music. Recently, López waxed philosophical about the power music has to move people and shared some of the takeaways rock legends have offered on the world of business. Here are excerpts from the conversation:   What makes, ROCKvolución, rock ’n’…
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Deepak Chopra, The spiritual leader of the pack

The spiritual leader of the pack: While everybody is given potential in life, the issue of how to best maximize that potential and reach new levels of achievement is a problem that most people grapple with, and which few of us solve. Furthermore, having an innovative mindset is paramount to surviving and thriving in an ever-changing economic landscape, no less so for Chinese elites.   Luckily this summer, in an event organized by the California Personal Evolution Center (CPEC), the Institute of Psychology at Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai American Chamber of Commerce, Dr Deepak Chopra, the spiritual leader, named one of Time Magazine′s "100 Most Influential People of the Year" in 1999, will hold his first leadership forum in China. He will be the first speaker in the series of events called, "The World is Within You," and will be in Shanghai and Beijing, on August 11 and 14, respectively. Fusing spiritual wisdom, spiritual leader, management consulting expertise, and lessons from his best-selling book The Soul of Leadership, Dr Chopra will bring audiences a whole new perspective on leadership and success. Published in 2010, The Soul of Leadership has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal as one…
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Tim Berners-Lee believes web access is a human right

Tim Berners-Lee, the man attributed to the creation of the internet, gave a speech at an MIT symposium and shared his two decades worth of internet knowledge with the crowd. He spoke about a wide variety of issues, from net neutrality, which he is supportive of, to mobile web access.   Berners-Lee’s words concerning web access raised a couple of eyebrows, and definitely raised the interest of this writer. “Access to the Web is now a human right” he continues, “It’s possible to live without the Web. It’s not possible to live without water. But if you’ve got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.”     Berners-Lee’s quote certainly adds an interesting thought to how we perceive the world wide web. Has the web manifested to such a point that we believe it to be a need in our society? This led me to think of my life, and where I would be without access to the internet. It was a pretty scary exercise. His quote also brings to mind the net neutrality debate. It strikes to…
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Martin Lindstrom, How to build an unforgettable logo

No, you don′t have to tell me, because I know what you′re about to say: your new product is brilliant. It′s a game-changer. Problem is, you need a killer logo, an unforgettable logo. Well, today, designers, inventors, and investors are facing a dilemma similar to the one that writers and artists have struggled with for decades: there′s nothing left. Or here′s another problem: if you do manage to create a jaw-droppingly clever or memorable image, rather than engendering widespread consumer recall of your brand, your Easter-blue palette risks looking uneasily similar to the Tiffany box, and your little black bull is a transparent rip-off of the one that dangles from the neck of Sangre de Toro red wine.   As far as the logo is concerned, to paraphrase Bill Maher, it′s time for New Rules. Today, what counts far more than a puma, a monkey, or a snarling aardvark is the cross-sensory experience your brand offers. I′m talking not only the emotion, beliefs, and desires your brand evokes, but its feel, touch, sound, smell and personality, of which the logo is just one small part. Whether it′s a soda can, a car, a doll, a fragrance, a smartphone, or laptop,…
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Baroness Susan Greenfield, ″Perception of science still needs a lot of work″

New Delhi: Baroness Susan Greenfield, a member of Great Britain’s House of Lords and a neuroscientist at Oxford University, is about as controversial as scientists can get. As head of the UK’s Royal Institution, the world’s oldest independent research body, she did much to boost science communication as well as slap sexism charges on the institution when it ousted her. She spoke in an interview about her controversial opinion on the potentially deleterious effects of social networking sites on teenagers’ brains, sexism in science, as well as her forthcoming dystopian novel, 2121 .   You’re known for your controversial views on how prolonged exposure to Facebook and computer games could be changing teenagers’ brains? Is this good or bad for science? Well, if you’re a neuroscientist you take it as a given that the brain will change because we know that the brain is really sensitive to the environment and that is why we are so successful as a species. We don’t run fast, don’t see particularly well, and are not as strong compared to others, but what we do fantastically is adapt to our environment. The big question is how we will adapt and whether that will be good…