Leadership Advantage Topics

LAMP and SMACK Stacks

How to START a STARTUP

COST of Correcting Error in Software

What Happens When YOUR BRAIN Doesn't SLEEP

MicroServices Ecosystem

18 Things Mentally Strong People DO

31 Ways to be CREATIVE

 

Weight loss is NOT just WHAT you EAT, it is also WHEN you EAT

Weight loss can be tied to when, not just what, you eat

(CNN) - By Lisa Drayer, CNN , May 19, 2017 If you are trying to lose weight and otherwise improve your health, you may already be mindful about what you eat during the day.

You might skip breakfast. At lunch, you may opt for a salad with lots of veggies, no croutons and low-fat dressing -- on the side, of course.

Then, three o'clock hits.

You're incredibly hungry and craving candy, sweets or chips. You finally cave, eating a candy bar or other treat.

By 6 p.m., you're tearing the kitchen apart, snacking on anything you see

Despite your best efforts at cutting carbs at meals, you give in to a large helping of pasta or pizza. And then another. But you're still not satisfied. Dessert is calling, and you want something sweet, again. A scoop or two of ice cream satisfies you for the moment, but you continue to graze into the night until finally, you're so tired, you crash into bed.

So what is the cause of all of this diet drama that keeps occurring, almost according to schedule?

"I started noticing a common pattern where my patients were so good with restricting their calories during the day, but in the late afternoon and evening, they fell apart," said Tamara Duker Freuman, a nutritionist who has helped hundreds of people lose weight over the past decade on a meal-timing based plan she describes as the "circadian-synced diet."

"It was the ongoing grazing into the night. ... That's what kept undermining them. They often thought they were binge eaters ... but in reality, they were just really hungry.

"If they just ate a little more at breakfast and lunch, if they just added a few hundred extra calories in the morning, they would get their eating under control and lose weight," she said.

Despite your best efforts at cutting carbs at meals, you give in to a large helping of pasta or pizza. And then another. But you're still not satisfied. Dessert is calling, and you want something sweet, again. A scoop or two of ice cream satisfies you for the moment, but you continue to graze into the night until finally, you're so tired, you crash into bed.

So what is the cause of all of this diet drama that keeps occurring, almost according to schedule?

"I started noticing a common pattern where my patients were so good with restricting their calories during the day, but in the late afternoon and evening, they fell apart," said Tamara Duker Freuman, a nutritionist who has helped hundreds of people lose weight over the past decade on a meal-timing based plan she describes as the "circadian-synced diet."

"It was the ongoing grazing into the night. ... That's what kept undermining them. They often thought they were binge eaters ... but in reality, they were just really hungry.

"If they just ate a little more at breakfast and lunch, if they just added a few hundred extra calories in the morning, they would get their eating under control and lose weight," she said.

At the end of the 20-week study period, the late eaters lost less weight compared with the earlier eaters (17 vs. 22 pounds on average, respectively) and lost their weight more slowly, despite the fact that both groups ate approximately 1,400 calories per day and consumed similar amounts of fat, protein and carbohydrates.

Another study followed two groups of overweight women with metabolic syndrome on identical 1,400-calorie weight loss diets for 12 weeks. The only difference between the groups was that their calories were distributed differently throughout the day: Both groups consumed 500 calories at lunch, but one group consumed 700 calories for breakfast and a 200-calorie dinner (the "big breakfast" group), while the other group ate 200 calories at breakfast and 700 calories at dinner (the "big dinner" group).

The nutrient content of the meals was exactly the same for both groups, the only difference being that the breakfast and dinner meals were swapped. After 12 weeks, the big breakfast group lost about 2½ times more weight than big dinner group (8.7 pounds for big breakfast group vs. 3.6 pounds for big dinner group) and lost over 4 more inches around their waist.

The big breakfast group experienced a 33% drop in triglyceride levels -- a marker associated with heart disease risk -- while the group that ate the higher-calorie dinner experienced a 14.6% increase. The bigger breakfast group also experienced greater reductions in fasting glucose, insulin and insulin resistance scores, all of which indicate decreased risk for type 2 diabetes, according to the study's authors.

So front-loading calories and carbohydrates is not only favorable in terms of weight loss, it had beneficial effects on other indicators of overall health, including decreased risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

That second study "opened my eyes," Freuman said. "It wasn't just that people were less hungry and eating less at night, but it pointed to the fact that there might be some sort of underlying metabolic magic going on, where the timing of calories and carbs mattered more than the total amount of calories and carbs eaten in a day. It helped me understand what I was intuitively seeing in my patients."

Circadian rhythms: the 'metabolic magic'

More and more research is suggesting that when you eat may be just as important as what you eat. And it is very closely tied to the complex science of circadian rhythms.

According to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioral changes that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness in an organism's environment.

Circadian rhythms are driven by biological clocks inside our bodies. The brain has a master biological clock, influenced mainly by light, which tells "peripheral" clocks in the muscles and organs what time of day it is. Because of these clocks, many of the metabolic processes that take place inside us operate at different rates over the course of a 24-hour period.

Because of circadian rhythms, there are variations in certain hormone levels, enzyme levels and glucose transporters at different parts of the day, which differentially affect how calories, carbohydrates and fat are metabolized," said Freuman, who presented case studies of patients who improved their weight and health by eating in sync with circadian rhythms at the New York State Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics annual meeting in May 2016.

Circadian rhythms can help explain why eating late at night increases the likelihood of weight gain and decreases the rate at which we lose weight, compared with eating earlier in the day.

For example, research suggests that the calories we burn from digesting, absorbing and metabolizing the nutrients in the food we eat -- known as diet-induced thermogenesis -- is influenced by our circadian system and is lower at 8 p.m. than 8 a.m., according to Frank A.J.L. Scheer, director of the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Other metabolic processes involving insulin sensitivity and fat storage also operate according to circadian rhythms and can greatly influence the likelihood of weight gain or weight loss at different times of the day.

"These different metabolic processes ebb and flow at different times of the day, and they play a role in how your body metabolizes food energy, which ultimately affects your weight, cholesterol levels and blood sugar control -- and so it has tremendous implications for what is considered optimal times for eating," Freuman said.

Breakfast-skippers beware

Circadian rhythms may help explain why breakfast skipping is associated with increased risk of weight gain, even among those who consume comparable amounts of calories in a day.

"The link between breakfast skipping and obesity had once been thought to be due to overcompensation of calories at subsequent meals due to excess hunger ... but the research does not consistently show differences in total energy intake among breakfast-skippers," Freuman said.

"Something else about skipping breakfast -- aside from potentially eating more calories later in the day -- must explain the greater risk of weight gain among breakfast skippers," she said. A more likely answer: Eating more calories in the later part of the day is out of sync with metabolic circadian rhythms.

"We get less metabolically robust as we age," she explained. "So even if you've gotten away with skipping breakfast and eating out of sync in your 20s or 30s, it may eventually catch up with you."

Night shift workers can also benefit from eating in sync with their circadian rhythms. They may modify meal timing to sync up with metabolic circadian rhythms by eating breakfast at the end of their workday, at 7 or 8 a.m., and then eating their heaviest meal when they wake up, about 3 or 4 p.m.

Freuman discourages her night shift patients from eating during the night. "We don't want them eating many calories, so we'll have them sip on tea or have a Thermos of miso soup or, if need be, something small like an apple in order to minimize overnight calories.

"Your metabolism is working in a certain way, whether you are awake or asleep -- so even if you are awake during most of the night, you still want to be eating most of your calories during daylight. Sleep has little to do with it," Freuman said.

Tips for eating in sync with circadian rhythms

So how do we eat in sync with our circadian rhythms? They key is to front-load your calories and carbs. Freuman suggests the following, which she advises to her patients:

1. Don't skip breakfast

Ideally, breakfast should be satiating enough to preclude the need for a midmorning snack, and it should have a minimum of 300 calories, according to Freuman. It should always include high-fiber carbohydrates, which are more slowly digested than refined carbs, and it should include protein, which helps keep hunger in check.

Good breakfasts include a cup of cooked oatmeal with low-fat milk and a small handful of nuts, two slices of Ezekiel or whole-grain bread with mashed avocado and sliced tomato, or a two-egg omelet with veggies, fruit and a slice of whole-wheat toast.

If you are not hungry when you wake up, you can defer breakfast for a few hours -- but it should not be skipped, according to Freuman.

2. Have the "blue plate special" for lunch

"Lunch should be like that blue plate special ... the main meal of the day," Freuman said.

For a simple lunch strategy, Freuman suggests filling half of your plate with non-starchy vegetables and then dividing the second half into protein (like grilled fish or chicken) and slowly digested high-fiber carbohydrates (like beans or quinoa). "A salad with grilled chicken is fine, but try adding a baked sweet potato, a heaping scoop of chickpeas or even a thick, hearty lentil soup," she said.

If you prefer a sandwich for lunch, pair it with fiber-rich vegetables. "A turkey sandwich is part of a good lunch, but it's not a whole lunch." Try adding butternut squash soup or carrots with hummus.

Other good lunches that Freuman recommends include baked salmon with lentils and cooked green veggies or a Mexican quinoa bowl with quinoa, black beans, chicken, avocado and salsa, along with a pile of greens.

The easiest way to plan for lunch may be to use last night's leftovers. "I cook dinner at home and bring in my leftovers for lunch the next day. When I get home from work, I'm not tearing the house apart."

3. Pack a snack

An afternoon snack may be necessary if lunch and dinner are more than five hours apart. However, it should be no more than 200 calories, and it should be high in protein and fiber. "This will prevent you from arriving at dinner feeling 'starving,' " Freuman said.

Snacks that will satisfy include an apple with a tablespoon of peanut butter, grape tomatoes with string cheese, a hard-boiled egg or plain Greek yogurt with fruit.

4. Go low-carb for dinner

Dinner should be light and low in carbohydrates. "The more you can go low-carb for dinner, the more it will mitigate the effects of distorted calories at night," Freuman said.

Dinners might include fish and a cooked vegetable, lettuce-wrapped tacos or a turkey burger (minus the bun) and a salad with light dressing.

"I'll make turkey meatballs for my kids, and I'll give them pasta too, but I'll have mine on a bed of spinach -- and the next day, I'll bring the pasta for lunch."

And when dining out, Freuman suggests ordering two appetizers, like a salad and a shrimp cocktail or grilled calamari.

Leadership

Leadership is NOT about you, It's about making other people better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact it lasts in your absence and making sure systems and culture is are place to set other people to succeed even when you are not in the room.

- Anne Morriss, managing director of the Concire Leadership Institute.

AWS : The Software Division of Amazon

Cool lyrics by Pharell Williams

Happy - Lyrics by Pharell Williams

It might seem crazy what I'm about to say
Sunshine she's here, you can take a break
I'm a hot air balloon, I could go to space
With the air, like I don't care baby by the way

Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like that's what you wanna do

Here come bad news talking this and that
Yeah, give me all you got, don't hold back
Yeah, well I should probably warn you I'll be just fine
Yeah, no offense to you don't waste your time
Here's why

Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I'm happy

Stats on the place we LIVE !!!

About 71% of the Earths surface is covered by water;29% of it is land. The oceans hold about 96.5% of all Earths water. Earth water is a total volume of 1.332 billion cubic kilometers (351 quintillion US gallons)

There are 196 countries in the world today. Taiwan is not considered an official country by many, which would bring the count down to 195 countries. Although Taiwan operates as an independent country, many countries (including the U.S.) do not officially recognize it as one

7 Continents
Asia
Africa
North America
South America
Antartica
Europe
Australia

5 Oceans:
Artic
Atlantic
Indian
Pacific
Southern

Great Architecture Links

Great Architecture Links

Key Principles of Software Architecture

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658124.aspx

Architectural Patterns and Styles
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658117.aspx
Crosscutting Concerns
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658105.aspx

A Technique for Architecture and Design
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658084.aspx

10 Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services - By Werner Vogels

Excellent experience of Werner Vogels from Amazon

The epoch of AWS is the launch of Amazon S3 on March 14, 2006, now almost 10 years ago. Looking back over the past 10 years, there are hundreds of lessons that we’ve learned about building and operating services that need to be secure, reliable, scalable, with predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Given that AWS is a pioneer in building and operating these services world-wide, these lessons have been of crucial importance to our business. As we’ve said many times before, “There is no compression algorithm for experience.” With over a million active customers per month, who in turn may serve hundreds of millions of their own customers, there is no lack of opportunities to gain more experience and perhaps no better environment for continuous improvement in the way we serve our customers.

I have picked a few of these lessons to share with you in the hope that they may be of use for you as well.

1. Build evolvable systems

Almost from day one, we knew that the software we were building would not be the software that would be running a year later. The expectation was that with each order or two of magnitude, we would need to revisit and revise the architecture to make sure we could address the issues of scale.

But we couldn’t adopt the old style approach of upgrading systems through a maintenance outage, as many businesses around the world are relying on our platform for 24/7 availability. We needed to build such an architecture that we could introduce new software components without taking the service down. Marvin Theimer, Amazon Distinguished Engineer, once jokingly said that the evolution of Amazon S3 could best be described as starting off as a single engine Cessna plane, but over time the plane was upgraded to a 737, then a group of 747s, all the way to the large fleet of Airbus 380s that it is now. All the while, we were refueling in midair and moving customers from plane to plane without them even realizing it.

2. Expect the unexpected

Failures are a given and everything will eventually fail over time: from routers to hard disks, from operating systems to memory units corrupting TCP packets, from transient errors to permanent failures. This is a given, whether you are using the highest quality hardware or lowest cost components.

This becomes an even more important lesson at scale: for example, as S3 processes trillions and trillions of storage transactions, anything that has even the slightest probability of error will become realistic. Many of those failure scenarios can be anticipated beforehand, but many more are unknown at design and build time.

We needed to build systems that embrace failure as a natural occurrence even if we did not know what the failure might be. Systems need to keep running even if the “house is on fire.” It is important to be able to manage pieces that are impacted without the need to take the overall system down. We’ve developed the fundamental skill of managing the “blast radius” of a failure occurrence such that the overall health of the system can be maintained.

3. Primitives not frameworks

Pretty quickly, we started to realize that the way customers would like to use our services was a work in progress. When customers left the constraining, old world of IT hardware and datacenters behind, they started to develop systems with new and interesting usage patterns that no one had ever seen before. As such, we needed to be ultra-agile to make sure we were catering to our customers’ needs.

One of the most important mechanisms we provided was to offer customers a collection of primitives and tools, where they could pick and choose their preferred way to engage with the AWS cloud, instead of only providing one framework that they are forced to use, which includes everything and the kitchen sink. This approach has enabled our customers to become so successful, that even later generations of AWS services make use of exactly the same primitive services our customers have become accustomed to.

It is also important to realize that it is hard to predict what certain priorities are for your customers until they have the service in their hands and actually start building with it. This is why we deliver new services often with a minimal feature set and allow our customers to help drive the roadmap for extending the service with new features.

4. Automation is key

Developing software services that need to be operated is radically different from building software that needs to be shipped to customers. Managing systems at scale requires a very different mindset to ensure that we meet the reliability, performance, and scalability expectations of our customers.

A key mechanism to achieve this is to automate the management as much as possible, removing error prone, manual operations. To do this, we needed to build management APIs that control the key functionality of our operations. AWS helps its customers do this too. By decomposing your applications into essential building blocks, each with a management API, you can apply automation rules to maintain reliable and predictable performance at scale. A good litmus test has been that if you need to SSH into a server or an instance, you still have more to automate.

5. APIs are forever

This was a lesson we had already learned from our experiences with Amazon retail, but it became even more important for AWS’s API-centric business. Once customers started building their applications and systems using our APIs, changing those APIs becomes impossible, as we would be impacting our customer’s business operations if we would do so. We knew that designing APIs was a very important task as we’d only have one chance to get it right.

6. Know your resource usage

When building a financial model for a service to identify the appropriate charging model, be sure to have good data about the cost of the service and its operations, especially for running a high volume – low margin business. AWS needed to be very conscious as a service provider about our costs so that we could afford to offer our services to customers and identify areas where we could drive operational efficiencies to cut costs further, and then offer those savings back to our customers in the form of lower prices.

An example in the early days where we did not know the resources required to serve certain usage patterns was with S3: We had assumed that the storage and bandwidth were the resources we should charge for; after running for a while, we realized that the number of requests was an equally important resource. If customers have many tiny files, then storage and bandwidth don’t amount to much even if they are making millions of requests. We had to adjust our model to account for the all the dimensions of resource usage so that AWS could be a sustainable business.

7. Build security in from the ground up

Protecting your customers should always be your number one priority, and it certainly has been for AWS… from both an operational perspective as well as tools and mechanisms; it will forever be our number one investment area.

One approach that we learned quickly is that to build secure services, it is necessary to integrate security at the very beginning of service design. The security team is not a group that does validation after something has been built. They must be partners on day one to make sure that security is fundamentally rock solid from the ground up. There is no compromise when it comes to security.

8. Encryption is a first-class citizen

Encryption is a key mechanism for customers to ensure that they are in full control over who has access to their data. Ten years ago, tools and services for encryption were hard to use and it wasn’t until a few years into our operations that we learned how to best integrate encryption into our services.

It started by providing server-side encryption in S3 for compliance use cases. If you would inspect any disks in our datacenters, none of the data would be accessible. But with the launch of Amazon CloudHSM (for hardware security models) and later Amazon Key Management Service, customers could use their own keys for encryption, which removed the need for AWS to manage their keys.

For some time now, support for encryption has been integrated at the design phase of each new service. For example, in Amazon Redshift, each of the data blocks is encrypted by default with a random key and the collection of these random keys is again encrypted with a master key. The master key can be provided by customers, ensuring that they are the only ones who can decrypt and have access to their critical business data or personal identifiable information.

Encryption continues to be a high priority for our business. We will continue to make it even easier for our customers to make use of encryption so they can better protect themselves and their customers.

9. The importance of the network

AWS has come to support many different workloads; from high-volume transaction processing to video transcoding at scale, from high-performance parallel computing to massive web site traffic. Each of those workloads have unique requirements when it comes to the network.

AWS has developed a unique skill to innovate datacenter layout and operations, such that we can have flexible network infrastructure that can be adapted to meet the needs of our customers’ workloads, whatever they may be. We have learned over time that we should not be afraid to develop our own hardware solutions to ensure our customers can achieve their goals. This enables us to meet our very specific requirements, such as the ability to isolate AWS customers from each other on the network to achieve the highest levels of security.

Another successful example of how AWS-designed networking hardware and software enabled us to further improve performance for our customers was in addressing the virtualization tax on network access from virtual machines. Because network access is a shared resource, customers previously could experience significant jitter on the network at times. Developing a NIC that supported single root IO virtualization allowed us to give each VM its own hardware virtualized NIC. This lowered latency more than 2x and delivered more than 10x improvement in latency variability on the network.

10. No gatekeepers

The AWS team has delivered many services and features over time to create a very broad and deep platform for our customers. But AWS is so much more than the services that we built in-house: a very rich ecosystem exists of services delivered by our partners that extends the platform into many new directions.

For example, we have partners like Stripe offering payment services to Twilio making telephony programmable on AWS. Many of our customers are also building platforms themselves on top of AWS to serve specific vertical needs: Philips is building their Healthsuite Digital Platform for managing healthcare data, Ohpen has built a platform for retail banking on AWS, Eagle Genomics has built a genomics processing platform, and many more. What’s essential is that there are no gatekeepers on the AWS platform that tell our partners what they can and cannot do. “No gatekeepers” liberates the innovative processes and opens the door for many unexpected inventions, which are sure to follow.

I am looking forward to seeing what we learn – and AWS customers accomplish – over the next 10 years. And remember, it is still Day One ...

Charlie Chaplin on Life

Strength

Quotes by Khalil Gibran

Quotes by Khalil Gibran 

"May there be such a Oneness between us that when one weeps the other tastes salt."

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your Thoughts.

"A truth can walk naked...but a lie always needs to be dressed..."

"Be yourself. Not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be".

Microservices Ecosystem

Deming's 14-Point Philosophy

A Recipe for Total Quality

Quality matters everywhere in an organization.

The concept of quality is at the core of many of our ideas about effective management and leadership, and programs like Total Quality Management and Six Sigma have been at the heart of many companies' success.

We know now that quality needs to be built into every level of a company, and become part of everything the organization does. From answering the phone to assembling products and serving the end customer, quality is key to organizational success.
This idea is very much a part of modern management philosophy. But where did this idea originate? Before things like globalization and technological advances became so important, competitive pressures were typically much lower, and companies were usually satisfied with focusing their quality efforts on the production process alone. Now, quality is often thought to start and end with the customer, and all points leading to and from the customer must aim for high-quality service and interaction.

A New Business Philosophy

We owe this transformative thinking to Dr. W. Edwards Deming. A statistician who went to Japan to help with the census after World War II, Deming also taught statistical process control to leaders of prominent Japanese businesses. His message was this: By improving quality, companies will decrease expenses as well as increase productivity and market share.
After applying Deming's techniques, Japanese businesses like Toyota, Fuji, and Sony saw great success. Their quality was far superior to that of their global competitors, and their costs were lower. The demand for Japanese products soared – and by the 1970s, many of these companies dominated the global market. American and European companies realized that they could no longer ignore the quality revolution.
So the business world developed a new appreciation for the effect of quality on production and price. Although Deming didn't create the name Total Quality Management, he's credited with starting the movement. He didn't receive much recognition for his work until 1982, when he wrote the book now titled "Out of the Crisis." This book summarized his famous 14-point management philosophy.
There's much to learn from these 14 points. Study after study of highly successful companies shows that following the philosophy leads to significant improvements. That's why these 14 points have become a standard reference for quality transformation.

Note:

Deming's points apply to any type and size of business. Service companies need to control quality just as much as manufacturing companies. And the philosophy applies equally to large multinational corporations, different divisions or departments within a company, and one-man operations.

The 14 Points

1. Create a constant purpose toward improvement.
   • Plan for quality in the long term.
   • Resist reacting with short-term solutions.
   • Don't just do the same things better – find better things to do.
   • Predict and prepare for future challenges, and always have the goal of getting better.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
   • Embrace quality throughout the organization.
   • Put your customers' needs first, rather than react to competitive pressure – and design products and services to meet those needs.
   • Be prepared for a major change in the way business is done. It's about leading, not simply managing.
   • Create your quality vision, and implement it.
3. Stop depending on inspections.
   • Inspections are costly and unreliable – and they don't improve quality, they merely find a lack of quality.
   • Build quality into the process from start to finish.
   • Don't just find what you did wrong – eliminate the "wrongs" altogether.
   • Use statistical control methods – not physical inspections alone – to prove that the process is working.
4. Use a single supplier for any one item.
   • Quality relies on consistency – the less variation you have in the input, the less variation you'll have in the output.
   • Look at suppliers as your partners in quality. Encourage them to spend time improving their own quality – they shouldn't compete for your business based on price alone.
   • Analyze the total cost to you, not just the initial cost of the product.
   • Use quality statistics to ensure that suppliers meet your quality standards.
5. Improve constantly and forever.
   • Continuously improve your systems and processes. Deming promoted the Plan-Do-Check-Act approach to process analysis and improvement.
   • Emphasize training and education so everyone can do their jobs better.
   • Use kaizen as a model to reduce waste and to improve productivity, effectiveness, and safety.
6. Use training on the job.
   • Train for consistency to help reduce variation.
   • Build a foundation of common knowledge.
   • Allow workers to understand their roles in the "big picture."
   • Encourage staff to learn from one another, and provide a culture and environment for effective teamwork.
7. Implement leadership.
   • Expect your supervisors and managers to understand their workers and the processes they use.
   • Don't simply supervise – provide support and resources so that each staff member can do his or her best. Be a coach instead of a policeman.
   • Figure out what each person actually needs to do his or her best.
   • Emphasize the importance of participative management and transformational leadership.
   • Find ways to reach full potential, and don't just focus on meeting targets and quotas.
8. Eliminate fear.
   • Allow people to perform at their best by ensuring that they're not afraid to express ideas or concerns.
   • Let everyone know that the goal is to achieve high quality by doing more things right – and that you're not interested in blaming people when mistakes happen.
   • Make workers feel valued, and encourage them to look for better ways to do things.
   • Ensure that your leaders are approachable and that they work with teams to act in the company's best interests.
   • Use open and honest communication to remove fear from the organization.
9. Break down barriers between departments.
   • Build the "internal customer" concept – recognize that each department or function serves other departments that use their output.
   • Build a shared vision.
   • Use cross-functional teamwork to build understanding and reduce adversarial relationships.
   • Focus on collaboration and consensus instead of compromise.
10. Get rid of unclear slogans.
    • Let people know exactly what you want – don't make them guess. "Excellence in service" is short and memorable, but what does it mean? How is it achieved? The message is clearer in a slogan like "You can do better if you try."
    • Don't let words and nice-sounding phrases replace effective leadership. Outline your expectations, and then praise people face-to-face for doing good work.
11. Eliminate management by objectives.
    • Look at how the process is carried out, not just numerical targets. Deming said that production targets encourage high output and low quality.
    • Provide support and resources so that production levels and quality are high and achievable.
    • Measure the process rather than the people behind the process.

Tip:  There are situations in which approaches like Management By Objectives are appropriate, for example, in motivating sales-people. As Deming points out, however, there are many situations where a focus on objectives can lead people to cut corners with quality. You'll need to decide for yourself whether or not to use these approaches. If you do, make sure that you think through the behaviors that your objectives will motivate.

12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship.
    • Allow everyone to take pride in their work without being rated or compared.
    • Treat workers the same, and don't make them compete with other workers for monetary or other rewards. Over time, the quality system will naturally raise the level of everyone's work to an equally high level.
13. Implement education and self-improvement.
    • Improve the current skills of workers.
    • Encourage people to learn new skills to prepare for future changes and challenges.
    • Build skills to make your workforce more adaptable to change, and better able to find and achieve improvements.
14. Make "transformation" everyone's job.
    • Improve your overall organization by having each person take a step toward quality.
    • Analyze each small step, and understand how it fits into the larger picture.
    • Use effective change management principles to introduce the new philosophy and ideas in Deming's 14 points.

Executive

An executive is anyone who is responsible for actions and decisions that contribute to the performance capacity of his/her  organization - Peter.F.Drucker

20 biases from BI

20 Biases from Business Insider

Great Lyrics

Lyrics from Ameriprise Financial Commercial  - Amazing

I've been a poor man and I've been a king
I've had my life and the world on a string
I've traveled many roads, but I'm so far from done
Good to know there's so much to live for
Oh-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Oh oh what a day to feel alive

Top 10 Behaviors

The Top 10 Behaviors That Could Launch Your Career

This question originally appeared on Quora: What is the single greatest piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

Answer by Nelson Wang, CEO of Collide, on Quora
Over the past 9 years, I’ve worked at large companies like Cisco and VMware and have joined smaller start ups like Box (now a public company) and Optimizely as well.  I’ve also worked at MTV, a small boutique law firm, and UCLA.
No matter where I’ve worked, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern of what creates success at work and have worked on a list.
The more I’ve followed these, the more success I’ve found.  I hope it helps you too.
Here’s the list of the top 10 behaviors that could launch your career.

1.  Be authentic.
Bring your whole self to work! You’d be surprised at how many people appreciate real, meaningful connections at work. You don’t need to be a corporate robot.  Sheryl Sandberg has a great quote about this:
“Motivation comes from working on things we care about, but it also comes from working with people we care about, and in order to care about someone you have to know them. You have to know what they love and hate, what they feel–not just what they think. If you want to win hearts and minds, you have to lead with your heart as well as your mind. I don’t believe we have a professional self from Mondays through Fridays and a real self the rest of the time. That kind of division probably never worked, but in today’s world it makes even less sense … It is all professional and it is all personal, all at the very same time.”

2.  Be passionate. 
You care. You want to make a difference. People can hear that in your voice, the way you move. And guess what? Passion is contagious. It can inspire your staff. It can make your customers your champions.  It can carry you through the journey. If you treat work like a grind, it will feel like a grind. If you’re passionate about what you do and how you can make a difference, work will no longer feel like work. It’ll feel like a mission. And that changes everything.

3.  Be focused.
At some point, you’re going to have a list of things at work that you can’t get to. Instead of feeling overwhelmed and giving up, focus on what’s really truly important to accomplish that day. Each day, I try to create a list of three really critical things I need to work on that can have a huge impact at work. Focus drives results.

4.  Look forward.
It’s easy to caught up in your mistakes. You look back, dwell on the issues, and suddenly you can’t focus on the task at hand. This can have a huge impact on your present performance. Here’s what I’d suggest – it’s called the “10 years test.”Ask yourself – is this a big issue in 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 months? What about 10 years? Will this issue matter in 10 years? 99% of the time, the answer is no. So stop dwelling on it, lift your head up high, and look forward.

5.  Own it
You’re going to be successful at some things and you’ll fail at others. One of the best things you can do through it all is to own it. People will respect you for that. Why? Because you’re willing to show them that you’ll own it through both the good and the bad. Most people are only willing to own it when things are good.

6.  Be an artist
“Are you an artist or just following instructions?” – Seth Godin
Following instructions is safe. It’s easy. It’s also usually less likely to add a huge amount of value to the company. You create value by challenging the status quo. By pushing the limits of what can be done. And often times, this involves a huge amount of creativity and out of the box thinking. Don’t be afraid of being an artist at work.

7.  Stay Persistent
Most people cannot handle rejection or adversity well. No one said solving tough and important problems was easy! The ones who remain persistent are the ones that persevere. Stay the course. AirBnB did (it took over 1000 days) and look where it got them!

8.  Embrace your fears. 
Afraid you might not be good at a potential job that you’re looking at? Afraid of speaking up at work for the promotion you know that you deserve? Afraid of trying out a new business idea? Here’s a question you should ask. If you never try, how will you ever know? You know what you should really fear? The fear of having a huge amount of regret many years from now, because you never really tried.
Hustle is the antidote to fear. Go and make it happen.

9.  Don’t make excuses.
Just go and make it happen. I’d talk more about this – but the Holstee Manifesto sums it up perfectly.

10.  Enjoy the moment. 
Life is short. Make the best of it. Smile. Inspire someone. Laugh until your stomach hurts. Do a fist pump. Yell out “WOOO!” when you close a big deal. Tell your coworkers how awesome they are.

Go out there and have fun. Because you know what, awesomeness is contagious.

Why Mindful Individuals Make
Better Decisions

Natalia Karelaia, INSEAD Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences | July 23, 2014

Mindfulness is practiced in board rooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. But just how

much does it improve the quality of your decision-making?

Five years ago when I introduced mindfulness to my MBA decision-making class it was

perceived as something completely esoteric; there were maybe two or three students who could

relate to the concept. Today, not only have most of them heard about it, many are practicing it.

More and more corporations are offering mindfulness training to their employees. It’s being

incorporated into negotiation techniques and leadership manuals, in fact every area of business

where strong decisions are required.

While it’s generally accepted that mindfulness helps decision-makers to reach conclusions,

there’s growing evidence the positive influence goes much further, impacting the way decisions

are identified, made, implemented and assessed.

Close analysis of the latest mindfulness research, with Jochen Reb, Associate Professor of

Organisational Behaviour at Singapore Management University, for a chapter in the upcoming

book Mindfulness in Organisations, suggests that mindfulness techniques can have a positive

effect on all our widely-recognised stages of the decision-making process.

1. Framing the decision

Mindfulness can assist in being proactive and identifying when a decision should be made:

clarifying the objectives, generating options, avoiding irrational escalation of commitment to a

previous bad decision (the sunk cost bias) as well as recognising the ethical dimension of the

choice to be made. Research shows that people who are more mindful are also more aware of

their ethical principles and make decisions aligned to those values. This links mindfulness with

authenticity.

Before making any decision, mindful individuals take time to pause and reflect and listen to their

inner selves assessing their own values and objectives. Decision-makers who fail to link

decisions with their major goals may find their choice takes them somewhere they don’t

necessarily want to be.

Natalia Karelaia, INSEAD Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences | July 23, 2014

Mindfulness is practiced in board rooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. But just how

much does it improve the quality of your decision-making?

Five years ago when I introduced mindfulness to my MBA decision-making class it was

perceived as something completely esoteric; there were maybe two or three students who could

relate to the concept. Today, not only have most of them heard about it, many are practicing it.

More and more corporations are offering mindfulness training to their employees. It’s being

incorporated into negotiation techniques and leadership manuals, in fact every area of business

where strong decisions are required.

While it’s generally accepted that mindfulness helps decision-makers to reach conclusions,

there’s growing evidence the positive influence goes much further, impacting the way decisions

are identified, made, implemented and assessed.

Close analysis of the latest mindfulness research, with Jochen Reb, Associate Professor of

Organisational Behaviour at Singapore Management University, for a chapter in the upcoming

book Mindfulness in Organisations, suggests that mindfulness techniques can have a positive

effect on all our widely-recognised stages of the decision-making process.

1. Framing the decision

Mindfulness can assist in being proactive and identifying when a decision should be made:

clarifying the objectives, generating options, avoiding irrational escalation of commitment to a

previous bad decision (the sunk cost bias) as well as recognising the ethical dimension of the

choice to be made. Research shows that people who are more mindful are also more aware of

their ethical principles and make decisions aligned to those values. This links mindfulness with

authenticity.

Before making any decision, mindful individuals take time to pause and reflect and listen to their

inner selves assessing their own values and objectives. Decision-makers who fail to link

decisions with their major goals may find their choice takes them somewhere they don’t

necessarily want to be.

http://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-management/why-mindful-individuals-make-better-decisions-3479

Finding Meaning in Your Career

Finding Meaning in Your Career
Pan Pan, Founder and Managing Partner, Pantèra Ventures (INSEAD MBA ’03J) | July 24, 2014
Working backwards from where you want to be can give you purpose.
Most people are not working in a job they are passionate about all of the time. In fact, according
to a recent Financial Times column by Lucy Kellaway, having passion for one’s job can be
dangerous. One should at best care about and enjoy one’s job. But even the best jobs can get
mundane and routine and it is up to the individual to make his/her career continuously challenging,
interesting and fulfilling.
In today’s world, stable career paths are disappearing; there is the added challenge of how to
manage one’s career to keep one’s self relevant and competitive in the job market – while trying
to find meaning on that often chaotic, bumpy path.
Keeping your goals in mind
One way to approach this is to work backwards. In fact, two of my favourite professors[1]
recommend this approach. You look towards the end of your career and life and think about the
“end game”. Where do you personally want to be and what do you want to have? What would
you like to have accomplished? What kind of impact would you like to have made? What legacy,
however small, would you like to leave behind?
Instead of thinking only about your current job and the next moves, focus on the big picture and
think about your values and what is important to you – especially in terms of contribution you
would like to make – and to whom and why

Perhaps it is important to you that you can tell your grandchildren you have run or started
companies and those companies have made a difference in their respective industries and
impacted people’s lives. Or perhaps all you want to do is retire on a farm in New Zealand with
your partner and fix vintage cars in your garage. The jobs you have are merely stepping-stones
to that ultimate dream.
Of course this method requires asking some core questions, especially about one’s self. And that
is part of what life is about - to search for the answers to these questions as we continue on the
journey of life.
Your goals might change
For some of us at least, it may take a long time to find the answer to your life’s purpose and I
suspect for the majority of us, the answers will change and evolve over time. I thought my
"purpose" in life was to be a pianist since I was five until I changed careers.
Nevertheless, it is important that as we progress in our career, we think about the big picture and
ask ourselves why we are doing what we are doing. Not only would this give us a stronger sense
of direction and purpose, but also more motivation and resilience in the face of short-term
setbacks. I think too many people are so busy doing what they are doing without questioning the
purpose or real meaning behind it that even when they eventually reach their goals, they feel
unsatisfied with a sense of anti-climax and immediately pursue another goal.
This is reflected in Tolstoy’s search for meaning of life when he turned 50, after he’d written his
greatest works. Despite his celebrity, having a large estate and family, good health for his age and
promise of eternal literary fame, Tolstoy succumbed to a spiritual crisis and needed to find
meaning beyond being a great writer. This avalanched his search, which he felt was “the simplest
of questions, lying in the soul of every man”, yet at the same time paralysingly profound.
Prioritise
Once you have some ideas as to what is important to you, including but not limited to the
contributions and impact you would like to make ultimately, then you can come up with a
strategy, not a specific plan, to fill the gap between where you are now and where you want to
end up. There will be multiple ways and paths of getting there but at least you will know which
general direction you prefer to pursue even if the path will need to be revised at times.
As we search for meaning in our careers and lives, a good guide to use is to face and accept
reality, use Occam’s razor and simplify. Einstein told us to make things as simple as possible, but
not simpler. We cannot change who we are and what we are given nor can we change the past.
But we can always act and live in the present to shape our future.

Pan Pan is Founder and Managing Partner of Pantèra Ventures. She has an MBA from INSEAD (’03)

Motivational Quotes

1. Life isn’t about getting and having, it’s about giving and being. –Kevin Kruse

2. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. –Napoleon Hill

3. Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. –Albert Einstein

4. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.  –Robert Frost

5. I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale

6. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. –Wayne Gretzky

7. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. –Michael Jordan

8. The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. –Amelia Earhart

9. Every strike brings me closer to the next home run. –Babe Ruth

10. Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. –W. Clement Stone

11. We must balance conspicuous consumption with conscious capitalism. –Kevin Kruse

12. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. –John Lennon

13. We become what we think about. –Earl Nightingale

14.Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore, Dream, Discover. –Mark Twain

15.Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. –Charles Swindoll

16. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. –Alice Walker

17. The mind is everything. What you think you become.  –Buddha

18. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. –Chinese Proverb

19. An unexamined life is not worth living. –Socrates

20. Eighty percent of success is showing up. –Woody Allen

21. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. –Steve Jobs

22. Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. –Vince Lombardi

23. I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. –Stephen Covey

24. Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso

25. You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. –Christopher Columbus

26. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. –Maya Angelou

27. Either you run the day, or the day runs you. –Jim Rohn

28. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. –Henry Ford

29. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain

30. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
31. The best revenge is massive success. –Frank Sinatra

32. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing.  That’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar
33. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. –Anais Nin

34. If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. –Vincent Van Gogh
35. There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. –Aristotle

36. Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. –Jesus

37. The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

38. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you have imagined. –Henry David Thoreau

39. When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me. –Erma Bombeck

40. Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.  –Booker T. Washington

41. Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart. – Ancient Indian Proverb
42. Believe you can and you’re halfway there. –Theodore Roosevelt

43. Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. –George Addair

44. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato

45. Teach thy tongue to say, “I do not know,” and thous shalt progress. –Maimonides

46. Start where you are. Use what you have.  Do what you can. –Arthur Ashe

47. When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’.  They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. –John Lennon

48. Fall seven times and stand up eight. –Japanese Proverb

49. When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. –Helen Keller

50. Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see. –Confucius

51. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank

52. When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. –Lao Tzu


53. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. –Maya Angelou

54. Happiness is not something readymade.  It comes from your own actions. –Dalai Lama

55. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on. –Sheryl Sandberg

56. First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. –Aristotle

57. If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. –Latin Proverb

58. You can’t fall if you don’t climb.  But there’s no joy in living your whole life on the ground. –Unknown

59. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. –Marie Curie

60. Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown

61. Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine

62. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. –Booker T. Washington

63. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. –Leonardo da Vinci

64. Limitations live only in our minds.  But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless. –Jamie Paolinetti

65. You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing, no one to blame. –Erica Jong

66. What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan

67. I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong. –Benjamin Franklin

68. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. –Bill Cosby

69. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

70. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb

71. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. –Roger Staubach

72. It is never too late to be what you might have been. –George Eliot

73. You become what you believe. –Oprah Winfrey

74. I would rather die of passion than of boredom. –Vincent van Gogh

75. A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. –Unknown

76. It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings.  –Ann Landers

77. If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money. –Abigail Van Buren

78. Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. –Farrah Gray

79. The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at. –Jesse Owens

80. Education costs money.  But then so does ignorance. –Sir Claus Moser

81. I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. –Rosa Parks

82. It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. –Confucius

83. If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough. –Oprah Winfrey

84. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. –Dalai Lama

85. You can’t use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have. –Maya Angelou

86. Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan

87. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. –Martin Luther King Jr.

88. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. –Teddy Roosevelt

89. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. –Tony Robbins

90. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. –Gloria Steinem

91. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison

92. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try. –Beverly Sills

93. Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –Eleanor Roosevelt

94. Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. –Grandma Moses

95. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. –Ayn Rand

96. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. –Henry Ford

97. It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln

98. Change your thoughts and you change your world. –Norman Vincent Peale

99. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. –Benjamin Franklin

100. Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn

101. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. –Steve Jobs

102. If you can dream it, you can achieve it. –Zig Ziglar

~Courtesy : Forbes - Kevin Kruse.