Organizational Behavior, Knowledge and Decision-Making
Tags: project management
While Canada Post is holding my mail, HBR found a way to make sure I receive what I paid for.
Dear Benoit Hardy-Vallee,
We are emailing you today to inform you that there could possibly be a delay in receiving your Harvard Business Review July/August 2011 issue due to the strike affecting Canada Post.
As a valued subscriber to Harvard Business Review, we want to give you the opportunity to read the magazine right now while you wait for the issue to be delivered. To mitigate any service interruptions, we are making the July/August issue available to you electronically, please click on this link, (REMOVED) to read the digital version of this issue. As soon as the strike is resolved and mail operations return to normal, the July/August issues will be delivered as quickly as possible.
Please contact our customer service department directly with any questions. They can be reached by phone at 1-800-274-3214 or by email at subsvcs@HBR.customersvc.com
Thank you,
I was just coming back from our HQ in Omaha, so it was a good timing to read about Berkshire Hathaway in the newspaper.
Built using the last BH Annual report data, found in Buffet’s letter to shareholders:
Compounded Annual Gain (1965-2010) is 20.2% for BH, 9.4% for the S&P, while overall Gain (1964-2010) is 490,409% for BH, 6,262% for the S&P.
Notes: Data are for calendar years with these exceptions: 1965 and 1966, year ended 9/30; 1967, 15 months ended 12/31. Starting in 1979, accounting rules required insurance companies to value the equity securities they hold at market rather than at the lower of cost or market, which was previously the requirement. In this table, Berkshire’s results through 1978 have been restated to conform to the changed rules. In all other respects, the results are calculated using the numbers originally reported.
The S&P 500 numbers are pre-tax whereas the Berkshire numbers are after-tax. If a corporation such as Berkshire were simply to have owned the S&P 500 and accrued the appropriate taxes, its results would have lagged the S&P 500 in years when that index showed a positive return, but would have exceeded the S&P 500 in years when the index showed a negative return. Over the years, the tax costs would have caused the aggregate lag to be substantial.
Tags: Buffet, investment
PMI is launching an Agile Certification. (from threon.com)
The United States currently spends about $160 billion—twice what it did a decade ago—and that amount could double again by 2018.”
via Chart Focus: The real cost of obesity.
Why: lack of sleep and calories. According to this study:
Our findings suggest that chronic sleep deprivation during childhood and adolescence is a significant explanatory variable of the halt in the secular trend observed in Japan since the late 1980s; another explanatory variable identified using prefecture-level data is caloric restraint.
Rich and slim, but relatively short Explaining the halt in the secular trend in Japan
As a consultant, I am not the most entrepreneurial person. As Victor Cheng puts it in is online video on how to get into consulting, this job is not made for the Steve Jobs or Richard Branson of this world. Consultants develop hypotheses and find solutions based on solid facts, data and research—they check the water before jumping in. Entrepreneurs have ideas, dreams, goals, and vision—they jump in the water and figure it out as it goes.
I do, however, appreciate the courage and determination of people who take risks and venture into unchartered territory. Thus I find watching Dragons Den (in my case the Canadian version, on CBC) quite enjoyable. After watching many episodes (and seeing people failing to secure an investment for so many obvious reasons), it seemed to me that there is a list of rules that must be followed to have a reasonable chance (and I guess they apply to any start-up or entrepreneurs trying to secure funding).
I just plotted some numbers from StatsCan to have a sense of the industry; Looks like the modern Homo Consumericus spends a lot on food and cars!
“Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.”
–Peter Drucker
As mentionned in a previous post (What is a strength?), Gallup research repeatedly showed that managers should focus on developing their employees’ strengths rather than fixing their weaknesses. As a result, most of the performance appraisal schemes aim at “identifying opportunities (aka weaknesses” and developing an action plan to mitigate them. The underlying theory behind that, a “folk performance management theory” can be summarized in 4 tenets. And all of them are false.
For more details, read the classic “First Break All the Rules“
…according to a study published in European Journal of Social Psychology. So there is a lot of variability between individuals.
(via Geary Behavioural Economics Blog: How habits are formed: modelling habit formation in the real world.)
 |
| Profile |
