Category: Entrepreneurship

“Practice Makes Perfect, but It Doesn’t Make New”

(p. 12) Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.
What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.
. . .
In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,” laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. “Those who do must make a painful transition” to an adult who “ultimately remakes a domain.”
Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities by shining in their jobs without making waves. They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken medical system or lawyers who defend clients on unfair charges but do not try to transform the laws themselves.

For the full commentary, see:
Grant, Adam. “How to Raise a Creative Child.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 31, 2016): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 16, 2016, and has the title “How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off.”)

Grant’s commentary is related to his book:
Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking, 2016.

RFID Tags Can Enable Process Innovations

(p. A11) The numbers don’t look good: Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that worker productivity dropped 0.5% in the second quarter of 2016–the third quarterly decline in a row. Productivity growth, a key driver of improved living standards, has averaged only 1.3% a year over the past decade, compared with 2.9% from mid-1995 through the end of 2005.
Why the slowdown? One theory is that markets have already wrung the easy efficiencies out of current technology. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen noted in June that some economists “believe that the low-hanging fruit of innovation largely has been picked and that there is simply less scope for further gains.”
Count me in the optimistic camp. Low-cost wireless technologies are only beginning to break down the wall between the physical and digital worlds, and early-adopting companies are already achieving astounding productivity gains.
. . .
Employees can take inventory by waving an RFID reader over a shelf or a rack. A 2009 study by the University of Arkansas found scanning 10,000 items took 53 hours using bar codes, but only two hours with RFID. That efficiency allows Macy’s to inventory items every month rather than once or twice annually. Pam Sweeney, Macy’s senior vice president of logistics systems, tells me that RFID has pushed inventory accuracy in these departments to 95%.
. . .
As the cost of RFID tags falls to only cents apiece, the applications widen. Imagine checking out at the grocery store one day simply by running your cart through a scanner in a few seconds–no bar codes required. How many hours a year would that save consumers and employees both? If you want a million minuscule reasons to be bullish about productivity, look no further than tiny RFID tags.

For the full commentary, see:
MARK ROBERTI. “How Tiny Wireless Tech Makes Workers More Productive; Macy’s and Delta are using cheap RFID tags to blend the physical and digital.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 17, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 16, 2016.)

87% of Billionaires Inherited Less than Half of Wealth

(p. C6) Billionaires controlled 3.9% of the world’s total household wealth in 2015, slightly down from 4% in 2014, according to Wealth-X, a consulting group that uses public records and research staff to manually track the habits of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, or people valued at more than $30 million.
. . .
For most billionaires, however, it takes more than an inheritance to join the so-called three-comma club, according to the census; 87% of billionaires, up from 81% in 2014, made the majority of their fortunes themselves.
Todd Morgan, senior managing director at Bel Air Investment Advisors LLC in Los Angeles, says several of his billionaire clients are entrepreneurs and they are “very driven” and typically opt to keep working long after they’ve made their fortune.
“It’s not, ‘I’m worth a billion, now I’m going to sit on a beach and relax.’ It’s more of, ‘What can I create or achieve next?'” he says.

For the full story, see:
VERONICA DAGHER. “Ranks of Billionaires Grow, and They’re Getting Richer.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 8, 2016): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “The Rich Get Richer as Billionaires Increase in Number.” There are minor differences in wording between the online and print versions. The sentences quoted above, follow the online version.)

Mather and Boylston Risked Much to Fight Smallpox

I enjoyed reading the book reviewed below. From the title, and from reviews, I had the impression that it would mostly be about the smallpox epidemic and the innoculation conflict. I was surprised that of equal, or greater, importance in the book is the role of James Franklin’s newspaper in laying the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution. I learned from that part of the book too, but some might feel misled from the title about what the book was mainly about. (I think “fever” in the title is intended as a double entendre, referring both to a fever from smallpox, and a fever from the ideas of liberty.)

(p. A11) Inoculation was proposed by Cotton Mather, a figure much diminished in the 30 years since Salem. He had suffered a terrible sequence of tragedies, losing his wife and 10 of his children to accidents and epidemic disease. He had also been marginalized within the religious community by quarrels and scandals. But he had become an assiduous student of science, corresponding with the Royal Society in London and learning from its “Transactions” that inoculation against smallpox had long been practiced in Constantinople. Mr. Coss shows how Mather’s investigations led him to consult a source closer to home. His slave Onesimus, when asked whether he had ever had smallpox, replied “both Yes, and No”: He had been inoculated as a child in Africa, receiving a mild infection and subsequent immunity.

Inoculation was commonplace across swaths of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Mr. Coss explains, but this inclined the doctors of Enlightenment-era Europe to regard it as a primitive superstition. Such was the view of William Douglass, the only man in Boston with the letters “M.D.” after his name, who was convinced that “infusing such malignant filth” in a healthy subject was lethal folly. The only person Mather could persuade to perform the operation was a surgeon, Zabdiel Boylston, whose frontier upbringing made him sympathetic to native medicine and who was already pockmarked from a near-fatal case of the disease.
“Given that attempting inoculation constituted an almost complete leap of faith for Boylston,” Mr. Coss writes, “he spent surprisingly little time agonizing over it.” He knew personally just how savage the toll could be. On June 26, 1721, just as the epidemic began to rage in earnest, Boyston filled a quill with the fluid from an infected blister and scratched it into the skin of two family slaves and his own young son.
News of the experiment was greeted with public fury and terror that it would spread the contagion. A town-hall meeting was convened, at Dr. Douglass’s instigation, at which inoculation was condemned and banned. Mather’s house was firebombed with an incendiary device to which a note was attached: “I will inoculate you with this.”

For the full review, see:
MIKE JAY. “‘BOOKSHELF; An Ounce of Prevention; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 3, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 2, 2016, and has the title “‘BOOKSHELF; When Ben Franklin Was Against Vaccines; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.”)

The book under review, is:
Coss, Stephen. The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

GE Replaces Annual Performance Review with Frequent Feedback

(p. B8) General Electric Co. is getting rid of ratings.
The industrial giant’s salaried employees will no longer be given one of five labels–ranging from “role model” to “unsatisfactory”–as part of their annual performance review. The changes, to be announced to employees Tuesday, breaks with a system GE has used in some form or another for the last 40 years.
Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt is undertaking a bid to refocus on the company’s core industrial business. To spur these efforts, GE has spent the past few years reimagining the way its 310,000 employees work, placing new emphasis on experimentation and risk-taking. A new performance-management system asks employees and managers to exchange frequent feedback via a mobile app called PD@GE, in person or by phone. The messages are compiled into a performance summary at the end of the year.

For the full story, see:
RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN. “GE Scraps Staff Ratings to Spur Feedback.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 27, 2016): B8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 26, 2016, and has the title “GE Does Away With Employee Ratings.”)

Fragmented Health Care Causes Polypharmacy Harms

(p. D5) Dr. Caleb Alexander knows how easily older people can fall into so-called polypharmacy. Perhaps a patient, like most seniors, sees several specialists who write or renew prescriptions.
“A cardiologist puts someone on good, evidence-based medications for his heart,” said Dr. Alexander, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness. “An endocrinologist does the same for his bones.”
. . .
“Pretty soon, you have an 82-year-old man who’s on 14 medications,” Dr. Alexander said, barely exaggerating.
Geriatricians and researchers have warned for years about the potential hazards of polypharmacy, usually defined as taking five or more drugs concurrently. Yet it continues to rise in all age groups, reaching disturbingly high levels among older adults.
. . .
Ultimately, the best way to reduce polypharmacy is to overhaul our fragmented approach to health care. “The system is not geared to look at a person as a whole, to see how the patterns fit together,” Dr. Steinman said.

For the full commentary, see:
Span, Paula. “THE NEW OLD AGE; An Ever-Mounting Pile of Pills.” The New York Times (Tues., APRIL 26, 2016): D5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 22, 2016, and has the title “THE NEW OLD AGE; The Dangers of ‘Polypharmacy,’ the Ever-Mounting Pile of Pills.”)

“You Call It Procrastination, I Call It Thinking”

(p. 7) A few years ago, . . . , one of my most creative students, Jihae Shin, questioned my expeditious habits. She told me her most original ideas came to her after she procrastinated. I challenged her to prove it. She got access to a couple of companies, surveyed people on how often they procrastinated, and asked their supervisors to rate their creativity. Procrastinators earned significantly higher creativity scores than pre-crastinators like me.
I wasn’t convinced. So Jihae, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin, designed some experiments. She asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some were randomly assigned to start right away. Others were given five minutes to first play Minesweeper or Solitaire. Everyone submitted their ideas, and independent raters rated how original they were. The procrastinators’ ideas were 28 percent more creative.
Minesweeper is awesome, but it wasn’t the driver of the effect. When people played games before being told about the task, there was no increase in creativity. It was only when they first learned about the task and then put it off that they considered more novel ideas. It turned out that procrastination encouraged divergent thinking.
Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional. My senior thesis in college ended up replicating a bunch of existing ideas instead of introducing new ones. When you procrastinate, you’re more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away. But when it’s in limbo, it stays active in our minds.
Begrudgingly, I acknowledged that procrastination might help with everyday creativity. But monumental achievements are a different story, right?
Wrong. Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his collaborators have told me. Bill Clinton has been described as a “chronic procrastinator” who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches. Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, to the point that his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. It became Fallingwater, his masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind “Steve Jobs” and “The West Wing,” is known to put off writing until the last minute. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.”

For the full commentary, see:
Grant, Adam. “Step 1: Procrastinate.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 17, 2016): 1 & 6-7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 16, 2016, and has the title “Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate.”)

Grant’s commentary is related to his book:
Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking, 2016.

VCRs Let “You Create Your Own Prime Time”

(p. B1) Many new technologies are born with a bang: Virtual reality headsets! Renewable rockets! And old ones often die with a whimper. So it is for the videocassette recorder, or VCR.
The last-known company still manufacturing the technology, the Funai Corporation of Japan, said in a statement Thursday [July 21, 2016] that it would stop making VCRs at the end of this month, mainly because of “difficulty acquiring parts.”
. . .
In 1956, Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company introduced what its website calls “the first practical videotape recorder.” Fred Pfost, an Ampex engineer, described demonstrating the technology to CBS executives for the first time. Unbeknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice president at the network.
“After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the 20 video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high-quality, instantaneous replay of any event.”
At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr. Pfost.
. . .
A consumer guide published in The Times in 1981 — when the machines ranged in price from $600 to $1,200 — explained the appeal:
“In effect, a VCR makes you independent of television schedules. It lets you create your own prime time. You set the timer and let the machine automatically record the programs you want to watch but can’t. Later, you can play the tape at your convenience. Or you can tape one show while watching another, thus missing neither.”

For the full story, see:
JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH. “Once $50,000. Now VCR, Collects Dust.” The New York Times (Mon., JULY 21, 2016): B1 & B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JUNE 19, 2016, and has the title “The Long, Final Goodbye of the VCR.”)

“Doctors Often Do Not ‘Know’ What They Are Doing”

(p. A11) Into the “swift currents and roiling waters of modern medicine” plunges Dr. Steven Hatch, whose informative “Snowball in a Blizzard” adds an important perspective. Dr. Hatch believes that our health-care system can “champion patient autonomy” and facilitate “more humane treatment, less anxiety, and better care” by revealing to patients the “great unspoken secret of medicine.” What’s the secret? Simply stated, “doctors often do not ‘know’ what they are doing.” In Dr. Hatch’s view, despite spectacular advances in biomedical science, modern “doctors simply cannot provide the kind of confident predictions that are often expected of them.”
. . .
He begins where Donald Rumsfeld ended: There will always be “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns” in medicine. Dr. Hatch illustrates this spectrum of uncertainty with engaging exposés of popular screening tests like mammograms (attempting to detect breast cancer is like “finding a snowball in a blizzard”); common drug treatments, like those used to lower serum cholesterol or blood-pressure levels (about which expert national guidelines seem to change almost yearly); and health-care coverage in the lay media (whose “breaking news” too often ignores the uncertainty of the news being broken). Throughout his book, Dr. Hatch’s message is “caveat emptor,” warning his readers to beware not only the pseudoscientists, flim-flammers, anti-vacciners and celebrity doctors but also the all-too-certain pronouncements of the medical establishment.

For the full review, see:
BRENDAN REILLY. “BOOKSHELF; Give It To Me Straight, Doc; Doctors can’t really be certain if any treatment will help a particular person. But patients are looking for prescriptions, not probabilities.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., March 15, 2016): A11.
(Note: the ellipsis between paragraphs, and the first two in the final quoted paragraph, are added; the third ellipsis in the final paragraph is in the original.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Hatch, Steven. Snowball in a Blizzard: A Physician’s Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Creativity Is Correlated with “Openness to Experience”

(p. D3) “Insightful problem solving can’t be boiled down to any single way of thinking,” the authors say. Creative people have messy processes, and often messy minds, full of contradictions.
Contrary to the well-worn notion that creativity resides in the right side of the brain, research shows that creativity is a product of the whole brain, relying especially on what the authors call the “imagination network” — circuits devoted to tasks like making personal meaning, creating mental simulations and taking perspective.
While creative people run the gamut of personalities, Dr. Kaufman’s research has shown that openness to experience is more highly correlated to creative output than I.Q., divergent thinking or any other personality trait. This openness often yields a drive for exploration, which “may be the single most important personal factor predicting creative achievement,” the authors write.
These are people energized and motivated by the possibility of discovering new information: “It’s the thrill of the knowledge chase that most excites them.”
Once the idea is found, alas, the creative process begins to resemble something more like grinding execution. It’s still creative, but it requires more focus and less daydreaming — one reason highly creative people tend to exhibit mindfulness and mental wandering.
“Creativity is a process that reflects our fundamentally chaotic and multifaceted nature,” the authors write. “It is both deliberate and uncontrollable, mindful and mindless, work and play.”

For the full review, see:
CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN. “Books; The Blessed Mess of Creativity.” The New York Times (Tues., FEB. 9, 2016): D3.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 8, 2016, and has the title “Books; Review: ‘Wired to Create’ Shows the Science of a Messy Process.”)

The book under review, is:
Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. New York: TarcherPerigee, 2015.