Author: Art Diamond

Most Eventually Successful Entrepreneurs Don’t Quickly Quit Their Day Jobs

(p. B4) For people who prefer an introspective read that is both inspiring and has a dash of self-help, Adam Grant’s “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” is truly original. Mr. Grant, the youngest-ever tenured full professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, dives into what it takes to be a shoot-the-moon, Steve-Jobs-like success. Many of his conclusions are counterintuitive and based on deep research.
The biggest surprise for me was that the most successful entrepreneurs didn’t quit their day jobs to pursue their ideas; instead, they stayed at work until they had worked all the kinks out of their plans and gotten them off the ground. The other head-scratcher in this book? Procrastination is a great thing. (This was a terrific revelation.)
Mr. Grant’s research shows that some of the most creative thoughts develop during periods of so-called procrastination.

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK; Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 5, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 4, 2016, and has the title “DEALBOOK; A Reading List of Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales in Finance.”)

The book praised by Sorkin in the passage quoted above, is:
Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking, 2016.

EU Regulations Frustrate Innovation

(p. A13) The EU is a supranational government run in a fundamentally undemocratic, indeed antidemocratic, way. It has four presidents, none of them elected. Power to initiate legislation rests entirely with an unelected commission. Its court can overrule our Parliament.
. . .
. . . today, Britain–the most outward-facing of the major European economies–will thrive if it leaves. . . .
This is because the EU’s obsession with harmonization (of currency and rules) frustrates innovation. Using as an excuse the precautionary principle or the need to get 28 countries to agree, the EU gets in the way of the new. “Technological progress is often hindered or almost impossible in Europe,” says Markus Beyrer, director general of BusinessEurope, a confederation of industry groups. Consequently, we’ve been left behind in digital technology: There are no digital giants in Europe to rival Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook.
The EU is also against free trade. It says it isn’t, but its actions speak louder. The EU has an external tariff that deters African farmers from exporting their produce to us, helping to perpetuate poverty there, while raising prices in Europe. The EU confiscated Britain’s right to sign trade agreements–though we were the nation that pioneered the idea of unilateral free trade in the 1840s. All the trade agreements that the EU has signed are smaller, as measured by the trading partners’ GDP, than the agreements made by Chile, Singapore or Switzerland. Those the EU has signed usually exclude services, Britain’s strongest sector, and are more about regulations to suit big companies than the dismantling of barriers.
Even worse than in Westminster or Washington, the corridors of Brussels are crawling with lobbyists for big companies, big banks and big environmental pressure groups seeking rules that work as barriers to entry for smaller firms and newer ideas. The Volkswagen emissions scandal came from a big company bullying the EU into rules that suited it and poisoned us. The anti-vaping rules in the latest Tobacco Products Directive, which will slow the decline of smoking, came from lobbying by big pharmaceutical companies trying to defend the market share of their nicotine patches and gums. The de facto ban on genetically modified organisms is at the behest of big green groups, many of which receive huge grants from Brussels.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “The Business Case for Brexit; Britain will thrive outside the EU, free from Brussels’ regulation and empowered to cut its own trade deals.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., JUNE 22, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JUNE 21, 2016.)

Iceland Project Turns 95% of Carbon Dioxide into Calcite Rock

(p. A6) For years, scientists and others concerned about climate change have been talking about the need for carbon capture and sequestration.
. . .
Among the concerns about sequestration is that carbon dioxide in gaseous or liquid form that is pumped underground might escape back to the atmosphere. So storage sites would have to be monitored, potentially for decades or centuries.
But scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and other institutions have come up with a different way to store CO2 that might eliminate that problem. Their approach involves dissolving the gas with water and pumping the resulting mixture — soda water, essentially — down into certain kinds of rocks, where the CO2 reacts with the rock to form a mineral called calcite. By turning the gas into stone, scientists can lock it away permanently.
One key to the approach is to find the right kind of rocks. Volcanic rocks called basalts are excellent for this process, because they are rich in calcium, magnesium and iron, which react with CO2.
Iceland is practically all basalt, so for several years the researchers and an Icelandic utility have been testing the technology on the island. The project, called CarbFix, uses carbon dioxide that bubbles up naturally with the hot magma that powers a geothermal electrical generating plant 15 miles east of the capital, Reykjavik.
. . .
Early signs were encouraging: . . .
. . .
The scientists found that about 95 percent of the carbon dioxide was converted into calcite. And even more important, they wrote, the conversion happened relatively quickly — in less than two years.
“It’s beyond all our expectations,” said Edda Aradottir, who manages the project for the utility, Reykjavik Energy.
. . .
. . . the researchers say that there is enough porous basaltic rock around, including in the ocean floors and along the margins of continents.

For the full story, see:
HENRY FOUNTAIN. “Project in Iceland for Storing Carbon Shows Promise.” The New York Times (Fri., June 10, 2016): A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 9, 2016, and has the title “Iceland Carbon Dioxide Storage Project Locks Away Gas, and Fast.”)

The research mentioned above was detailed in an academic paper in Science:
Matter, Juerg M., Martin Stute, Sandra Ó Snæbjörnsdottir, Eric H. Oelkers, Sigurdur R. Gislason, Edda S. Aradottir, Bergur Sigfusson, Ingvi Gunnarsson, Holmfridur Sigurdardottir, Einar Gunnlaugsson, Gudni Axelsson, Helgi A. Alfredsson, Domenik Wolff-Boenisch, Kiflom Mesfin, Diana Fernandez de la Reguera Taya, Jennifer Hall, Knud Dideriksen, and Wallace S. Broecker. “Rapid Carbon Mineralization for Permanent Disposal of Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Emissions.” Science 352, no. 6291 (June 10, 2016): 1312-14.

Tech Support Causes Rage By Taking Away Sense of Control

(p. B4) Especially frustrating when talking to tech support is not being understood because you are trying to communicate with machines or people who have been trained to talk like machines, either for perceived quality control or because they don’t speak English well enough to go off-script.
“It’s utterly maddening because the thing about conversations is that when I say something to you, I believe I’m having influence on the conversation,” said Art Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-host of the podcast “Two Guys on Your Head.” “And when you say something back to me that makes no sense, now I see that all these words I spoke have had no effect whatsoever on what’s happening here.”
When things don’t make sense and feel out of control, mental health experts say, humans instinctively feel threatened. Though you would like to think you can employ reason in this situation, you’re really just a mass of neural impulses and primal reactions. Think fight or flight, but you can’t do either because you are stuck on the phone, which provokes rage.
Of course, companies rated best for tech support often charge more for their products or they may charge a subscription fee for enhanced customer care so the cost of helping you is baked in, as with Apple’s customer support service, AppleCare, and the Amazon Prime subscription service.
You can also find excellent tech support in competitive markets like domain name providers, where operators such as Hover and GoDaddy receive high marks. Also a good bet are hungry upstarts trying to break into markets traditionally dominated by large national companies. Take regional internet and phone service providers like Logix and WOW, which rank near the top in customer support surveys.

For the full story, see:
KATE MURPHY. “Why Help on Tech Is Unbearable.” The New York Times (Mon., July 4, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 3, 2016, and has the title “Why Tech Support Is (Purposely) Unbearable.”)

The Lucky Success of the Half-Blind “Becomes the Inevitable Coup of the Assured Visionary”

(p. B1) The most fun business book I have read this year? “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” by a former Facebook executive, Antonio García Martinez. I was sent a galley copy several months ago and picked it up with no intention of reading more than the first couple of pages. I don’t think I looked up until about three hours later.
This is a tell-all of Mr. Martinez’s experience in venture capital and later at Facebook, filled with insights about Silicon Valley — what he calls “the tech whorehouse” — mixed with score-settling anecdotes that will occasionally make you laugh out loud. Clearly there will be people who hate this book — which is probably one of the things that makes it such a great read.
The dedication page includes this gem: “To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.” Mr. Martinez is particularly incisive when it comes to illustrating how failed ideas that happen to work are often spun into great successes: “What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary,” he writes. “The world crowns you a genius, and you start acting like one.”

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK; Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 5, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 4, 2016, and has the title “DEALBOOK; A Reading List of Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales in Finance.”)

The book praised by Sorkin in the passage quoted above, is:
Martinez, Antonio Garcia. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. New York: Harper, 2016.

Good Niche Movies Can Be More Profitable than Blockbusters

(p. 5D) “Counterprogramming is the framework to get the most
bang for the buck for movies that aren’t necessarily going to be blockbusters. ”
Counterprogramming has become a crazy expensive game of chicken, Dergarabedian says.
Scheduling a rom-com next to a superhero franchise or a horror movie on Valentine’s Day is a classic ploy, he says, but there’s no formula that’s guaranteed. “You still have to be able to deliver the movie,” Dergarabedian says. “People are looking for different and good. You can’t just rely on being the other option.”
. . .
“A lot of these are David and Goliath matchups,” Dergarabedian says. “But it’s about who wins the profitability derby. That can ultimately be more important than where you rank on the chart.”
To determine success, look at how well the audience is served rather than money, says Erik Davis, managing editor for Movies.com and Fandango.com. The greater the disparity in the genres, the better the position to succeed, he says.
Though Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 performed modestly against BvS, Davis considers that scheduling a a win. “They (both) have potential to mine their specific audience,” he says.

For the full story, see:
Heady, Chris. “Studios Think Outside the Box (Office).” USA Today (Thurs., July 7, 2016): 5D.

“Students Love It When We Share What We’re Passionate About”

(p. F5) NEW LONDON, Conn. — Between forkfuls of pad Thai, chicken and tofu, 20 Connecticut College faculty members listened as Michael Reder talked about teaching.
“The research shows that students love it when we share what we’re passionate about,” said the animated Mr. Reder, whose enthusiasm for teaching is infectious. “Students often say they want to be a name and known to the faculty. But what’s interesting is how much they also want to know about you. They want to hear about what you do and why you do it.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN HANC. “Professors as Teachers.” The New York Times (Thurs., JUNE 23, 2016): F5.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 22, 2016, and has the title “Teaching Professors to Become Better Teachers.”)

New Technology Reveals Huge Helium Supplies

(p. A8) Helium’s role in superconductivity and other applications has grown so much that there have been occasional shortages. The gas forms in nature through radioactive decay of uranium and thorium, but exceedingly slowly; in practical terms, all the helium we will ever have already exists. And because it does not react with anything and is light, it can easily escape to the atmosphere.
. . .
But now scientists have figured out a way to explore specifically for helium. Using their techniques, they say, they have found a significant reserve of the gas in Tanzania that could help ease concerns about supplies.
. . .
Working with scientists from the University of Oxford and a small Norwegian start-up company called Helium One, the researchers prospected in a part of Tanzania where studies from the 1960s suggested helium might be seeping from the ground. The area is within the East African Rift, a region where one of Earth’s tectonic plates is splitting. The rifting has created many volcanoes.
Dr. Gluyas said the gas discovered in Tanzania may be as much as 10 percent helium, a huge proportion compared with most other sources. The researchers say the reservoir might contain as much as 54 billion cubic feet of the gas, or more than twice the amount currently in the Federal Helium Reserve, near Amarillo, Tex., which supplies about 40 percent of the helium used in the United States and is being drawn down.
The next step would be for Helium One or one of the major helium suppliers around the world to exploit the find.

For the full story, see:
HENRY FOUNTAIN. “A New Way to Search Out Elusive Helium.” The New York Times (Weds., JUNE 29, 2016): A8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 28, 2016, and has the title “Scientists Devise New Way to Find an Elusive Element: Helium.”)

“Entrepreneurs Can Appear in the Most Unpromising Environments”

(p. A11) Adam Fifield’s entertaining biography of the little-recognized Grant shows that entrepreneurs can appear in the most unpromising environments–such as within the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the United Nations.
. . .
While top-down planning is usually misguided in aid (and most everywhere else), it turned out to be suitable for the particular challenge of vaccinations. Unfortunately, the aid establishment learned the wrong lessons from Grant’s career. Instead of seeing him as an entrepreneur who saw a very specific unrealized opportunity to spread vaccination and oral rehydration salts, they viewed his success as vindicating top-down planning in general.
. . .
Those who came after Grant . . . seem to have developed even more of the paternalistic savior complex than he had–his counterparts today are the likes of Bono, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates. But the condescending image of a powerful white male as the savior of helpless nonwhite children is thankfully a lot less acceptable today than it was in Grant’s time. Since 2000 we have witnessed the mainly homegrown economic growth of low- and middle-income countries surpassing that of rich countries–plus many other positive long-term trends from democratization to the explosion of cellphones. Aid alone cannot explain these large triumphs in poor countries. There is still room for humanitarian entrepreneurs like Grant to find new breakthroughs, but we can appreciate much more today that the poor are their own best saviors.​

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM EASTERLY. “BOOKSHELF; The Father of Millions; The Unicef breakthrough on vaccinations and oral rehydration salts is still cited today as one of the few successes in foreign aid.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Oct. 16, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 15, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Fifield, Adam. A Mighty Purpose: How Jim Grant Sold the World on Saving Its Children. New York: Other Press, 2015.

Majerus Did Not Need a Randomized Trial to Know that Aspirin Prevents Heart Attacks

(p. A21) Philip W. Majerus, a biochemist who was credited as being the first to theorize that taking small doses of aspirin regularly can prevent heart attacks and strokes in vulnerable patients, died last Wednesday [June 8, 2016] at his home in St. Louis. . . .
. . .
Even before his findings were confirmed in a study by other researchers a decade later, Dr. Majerus was taking aspirin daily.
“I was already convinced that aspirin prevented heart attacks,” he recalled in the journal Advances in Biological Regulation in 2014. “I was unwilling to be randomized into a trial where I might end up with the placebo. I refused to participate.”
Dr. Majerus recommended that “all adults should take an aspirin daily unless they are among the few percent of the population that cannot tolerate the drug.” The cardiovascular benefit of aspirin was fully achieved by 50 to 75 milligrams daily, he said, and “there is no evidence that branded aspirin, which is much more expensive, is in any way superior to the generic version.”
Later studies found that for people in their 50s who are vulnerable to heart disease, taking daily doses of aspirin reduces the risk of heart disease.
. . .
Investigating how aspirin inhibited clotting, Dr. Majerus concluded that the medicine modified an enzyme that leads to the formation of a platelet-made molecule that constricts blood vessels and aggregates platelets. The pills’ effect lasts for the platelets’ life span, typically about two weeks.
“Phil Majerus, more than any other individual, has produced the most original body of work on biochemistry of platelets as it relates to thrombosis,” Prof. Joseph L. Goldstein, a Nobel laureate at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said when the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award was announced.

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Dr. Philip Majerus, Who Recognized Heart Benefits of Aspirin, Is Dead at 79.” The New York Times (Weds., JUNE 15, 2016): A23.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JUNE 14, 2016, and has the title “Dr. Philip Majerus, Who Discerned Aspirin’s Heart Benefits, Dies at 79.”)