#the problem is that we conceive of famines as natural disasters

[tiarnanabhfainni]

quick reminder to everyone that the irish famine was not a genocide

#ireland #look it was definitely the fault of the british but that doesn't mean it was a genocide! #the problem is that we conceive of famines as natural disasters #but as with most natural disasters half the problem comes from how that interacts with human stuctures and society #sure the famine was ruinous because british neglect and discriminatory laws meant that the conditions for famine occurred #and they failed to provide aid because they were hung up on Malthusian economics #but y'know that goes for a lot of famines #especially in the modern era #the problem is not a lack of food #but a lack of access to food #sorry saw this a few times today and i am so tired #and ive definitely explained this in way more detail before so im gonna keep this short

[straplabs]

THE MANAGEMENT MOAT

DOES MANAGEMENT HAVE AN INHERENT ADVANTAGE?

Like most people, I always approach management issues with what is now a standard question; why are good management practices difficult to copy? Knowledge about how to run a firm have approached full dispersal, but badly managed firms still abound. Why?

The importance of good management cannot be oversold. Economists have found in a study, that management is the biggest contributor to a firm’s success - marginally bigger than factors like R&D. In another study of over 800 venture capital firms, researchers observed that “in selecting investments, VCs place the greatest importance on the management/founding team”. Over 95% of the surveyed venture capitals mentioned management as an “important” factor, while 47% think its the “most important” factor.

Management does not enjoy a coveted pride of place in most popular and even professional discourse about firms - unlike prettier cousins like strategy and culture. Part of this dissonance is because we think of it as a commodity. It does not feel like something that offers a competitive advantage or superior profitability. It can simply be purchased off-the-rack. This is clearly wrong.

Despite this management-as-a-commodity outlook, management practices still diverge across firms(and sometimes within). A World Management Survey(WMS) showed some interesting variations. One finding stands out above all. Across all countries studied in the survey, multinational firms have the best management. This persistence in the data suggests they might be better at doing a few things better than other types of firms.

At this point, you might find yourself reaching for the easily graspable explanation of financial power. That the richest global firms have the best management because they can afford the best managerial talent. But even some of the biggest, successful firms in the world also struggle to adopt some good management practices, despite their access to the knowledge and talent pool.

WHAT IS MANAGEMENT

The inner workings of firms is still essentially a “blackbox” to experts. Management is sometimes conceived as managers “gruntly” coaxing productivity out of the workforce, but even if we accept such mechanism, how exactly does it happen? In the WMS cited above, management was measured along the three dimensions “targeting, monitoring and incentives”(subsequently TMI). But how do good managers deploy TMI? How do you know if you are setting the right targets? Or when to use incentives instead of simple monitoring? The fact is that these questions often lead to complex answers.[1]

Management is a highly flexible and subjective discipline, and hence tend to resist rigid codifications. This will always present measurement problems, but it does not imply that understanding management is intractable. I believe that any good management must fulfill two core functions - (1) understanding value-chains and (2) growing the firm’s “organization capital”. Getting good at these core functions is the key to a firm’s sustained success, and it is the superpower of any good management team.

THE JOB OF MANAGEMENT

VALUE CHAINS

Every successful business must start with a good business model. Clay Christensen and Mark Johnson identified the four crucial elements of as “customer value proposition, profit formula, key resources and procedures”. Since management’s functions are mostly internal, most executives concentrate on the last two elements of the business model. But as Christensen and Johnson wrote;

“As simple as this framework may seem, its power lie in the complex interdependencies of its parts. Major changes to any of these four elements affect the others and the whole. Successful businesses devise a more or less stable system in which these elements bond to one another in consistent and complementary ways”

Management’s job begins from day one. The journey from your value proposition to your final Offering (product/service, pricing and distribution) is the value-chain. You might think your value proposition lie in the great product you are making, but you may be better served by first understanding the market. You might think the key to profitability lies in the cost structure of your profit formula, whereas it may be about working out your margins. You might think a project needs to raise more money, but you may just need to hire more talented people etc. The bottom-line is that value chains are complex, different for different offerings and it is the primal job of management to understand them and ultimately leverage them.

ORGANIZATION CAPITAL

Organization capital is a subtle, and almost elusive asset. It is slightly difficult to measure or decipher - and hence prone to misapplication. Some analysts think of it merely as a residual, i.e - what is left from all things measurable. Researchers Robert Evenson and Larry Westphal defined it as “the knowledge used to combine human skills and physical capital into systems for producing and delivering [valuable] goods”. They identified three capabilities that characterizes organization capital as “operational, investment and innovation capabilities”.

For our purposes, organization capital relates to how much a firm can leverage its value-chains. It is creating a virtuous cycle of synergy with your tangible and intangible resources and processes. Your company's competitive strategy maybe a unique ability to make superior products. Part of your organization capital will be how your branding tells the story of your innovative capabilities, and also how to keep getting better at innovation than the rest. Growing your firm’s organization capital can sometimes be confused with culture. It goes beyond that. It is about finding, nurturing and growing the true subjective edge of your value-chains.

There have been accounting measures for organization capital, but not without credible criticisms.[2] The important takeaway here is that the vital quality to growing organization capital is to recognize the points of differential and subjective advantages. Good management should always create an ecology that enables this discovery. A good manager never tries to solve problems, rather they ask critical questions that encourages employees to find interesting and efficient answers. Like Bartley Madden said, management’s main responsibility is a firm’s “knowledge-building proficiency”.

ELEMENTS OF GOOD MANAGEMENT

ADAPTABILITY-INNOVABILITY(AI)

Milton Friedman said the only social responsibility of a business is “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits”. This quote is often abused as saying businesses have no ethical responsibilities. But Friedman went further by saying that businesses must “stay within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”.

I like to refine Friedman’s words in my head in a stronger way as saying “the primary job of a valuable business is survival”. It does not matter how much social goodwill your services enjoy, or how much you give back to the community - your primary goal should be to stay in business.

Fighting the Schumpetarian force of creative destruction is hard. The challenge is even harder if you operate in a market with inadequate maturity on important levers for growth like property rights, contract law, and infrastructure. In battling survival, management’s approach has to be biological.

In the survival game, nothing beats biology. The estimated history of life on earth is almost four billion years. If we downscale history to just humans, we have been around for almost 200,000 years. We have survived natural disasters, famines, brutal wars and multiple epidemics. I am not claiming that human institutions like a business firm are like biology. But given that businesses are valuable incubators of the technological progress that has helped us thrive as a species - valuable businesses must learn from mother nature herself.

To survive require two skills - you must adapt and innovate. Every firm must have a good measure of an adaptive-innovative index. Both skills are really different sides of the same coin. Adaptation requires good ecological awareness of changing conditions. It requires always asking critical questions. “What are the demographic shifts of the market we operate?”, “how are the values of our users changing?”, “Is the company culture out of step with broader social concerns?”, “Is the new political mood part of a long trend or ahistorical?”. A firm that values survival must always study its environment and construct critical questions. You also have to constantly develop new capabilities or improve your current capabilities beyond recognition - in other words, you must innovate.

Economic history, and to a large extent social history proceeds by what economist Joshua Gans called “technological discontinuities”. An existing way of doing something will always become obsolete. A firm that wants to survive cannot be trapped in obsolescence. This is how companies, even industries get disrupted. If you do not want to be left flat-footed by the forces of social change and disruption, then you need to improve your AI-index.

LEARNABILITY

Building a learning organization is an important measure of good management practice. It boosts a firm’s adaptive-innovative capabilities. A learning organization would generate new process insights to make strategic and innovative decisions. Rich Horwath in his book “Deep Dive” labelled good strategists as “free divers” - people in the organization who can have fun with ideas in a way that generates useful insights. Having an ecology for a learning culture to thrive is the only way to court free divers. The benefits are that you never run out of innovative ideas, you will have a satisfied workforce - who value the work beyond their paychecks, and you get to retain your top talents.

ACCOUNTABILITY

Management is accountable to the firm’s stakeholders. The firm as whole is accountable to the laws of the society in which it operates. But things are usually not simple in practice. Keeping all the players in a firm’s process cycle accountable is plagued with many principal-agent problems - moral hazards, information asymmetry and other incentive problems.

Beyond external levers of control, management must cultivate accountability across the organization. Front-line managers must be accountable to their direct reports. Don’t send a memo when a one-on-one is what the situation demands. A CEO should never keep the board blindsided. The board must also be knowledgeable enough to evaluate what constitutes good practice - and not be obfuscated by innovation or an external culture that seems beyond their ken.[3]

THE PEOPLE OF IT ALL

There is no doubt that good management practice extend beyond the listed elements. What is important above all is how each firm and its management adopt and adapt good practice to its needs and purpose. One important factor I have omitted so far is culture. This is a deliberate choice because I believe culture is embedded in organization capital. The other important omission is human resource. The people who work in an organization are far too important to be treated as any other variable of the value-chain - and management is people.

The success or failure of management depends on how the people at the organization responds to decisions and choices it makes. Cultural psychologist Michelle Gelfand thinks social class primes people for their work life.[4] Her research indicates that people from working class background tend towards conformism, while upper class folks are more likely to be “rule breakers”. Should management be concerned with such structural factors when dealing with people? It depends.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman stresses the importance of treating people “differently” in their excellent book.[5] There will always be room for “rule breakers” and “rule makers” in every organization. Management must learn what makes each individual tick, what conditions nurtures their strength and what strengthens their weaknesses.

Paul Romer emphasizes that what we call “human capital” resides first and foremost inside people’s brains. This is what creates “learnable outputs” that we call knowledge. An organization that retains and nurture its best talents - brains - people will always thrive. Maybe what makes good management difficult to emulate, is that people are just different.

Endnotes

[1]The economic sub-discipline on principal-agent theory is dedicate to exploring these questions.

[2]Treating organization capital as a purely accounting measure neglects the entrepreneurial elements of it.

[3]The debacle at Theranos and Afren illustrates this point.

[4]Her book “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers” is a good survey of how structural factors shape social norms.

[5]See their book “First Break All the Rules.

Chart source: Bloom et al.

#management #business #organization

[worldupdatereviews2017-blog]

Kat Von D Beauty Is Giving freely Loose Totes For Earth Day

New Post has been published on https://worldupdatereviews.com/kat-von-d-beauty-is-giving-freely-loose-totes-for-earth-day/

Kat Von D Beauty Is Giving freely Loose Totes For Earth Day

In case you’re doing a little shopping this Earth Day, one brand has were given you included. Kat Von D Splendor is Giving away Unfastened tote baggage for Earth Day, and the layout is awfully state-of-the-art. Similar to the holiday, this deal won’t be around for long, however, it’s a first-rate excuse to save some of your preferred KVD Splendor merchandise and get the maximum bang in your greenback.

With regards to cosmetics organizations, KVD Splendor ranks among a number of the great On the subject of attention. Kat Von D goes out of her way to make sure by-product her emblem sells are vegan and cruelty Loose. As though that wasn’t sufficient to convince you to keep, she’s also getting inside the excursion spirit with a Free tote promo. The bag says “kiss my studded lips” with a photograph of a brilliant red Studded Kiss Lipstick on one side and the KVD Splendor logo on the alternative side.

All you need to do to get the Loose tote is spend $25 or more on the Kat Von D Beauty site. You simplest have until Apr. 23 at 2: fifty-nine p.M. ET to get in on the Free bag amusing. The sooner you store the higher, because, according to the KVD internet site, when they sell out, they are long gone for correct. Of route, a laugh as purchasing an Earth Day promo might be, not anything beats donating to companies which are operating in the direction of protecting the surroundings, so make that a concern all yr lengthy.

Earth Day Records And Some Activities Which could Make A Difference

What’s Earth Day?

Earth Day became installation via U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson on Apr, twenty-two 1970. He became fearful about the growing environmental disaster and attempted to make it a regarded and mentioned difficulty. Beginning as an environmental teach-in in Philadelphia on April sixteen lasting till April twenty-two, without an official governing frame, it grew on the grassroots degree to an international day of environmental consciousness.

At the primary Earth Day in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia site visitors included; Senator Edmund Muskie ( creator of the Smooth Air Act, 1970 ), Ralph Nader, Ian McHarg Panorama dressmaker, George Wald a Nobel prize-prevailing Harvard Biochemist, Senate Minority Chief Hugh Scott and poet Allen Ginsberg. Since then, normal folks such as you and me, stars and politicians have thrown themselves into expressing the troubles of environmentally aware movements which includes recycling, electricity efficiency and reducing and/or reusing disposable gadgets. Progressing into a worldwide effort to shop our world, Earth Day become a global agency with a ruling body to gather Sports and thoughts.

At the same time as many human beings help Earth Day, there are remarks. Some people say that Earth Day has come to designate the marginalization of environmental protection, and the celebration of itself has outlasted its usefulness, writer Alex Steffen. In a Can also 5th Washington Times editorial Arbor Day became compared with Earth Day as Arbor Day being a happy, non-political birthday party of trees, Even as Earth Day changed into a pessimistic, political ideology that portrayed humans in a terrible mild. Peter Foster from Junk Science announces that Earth Day became conceived in counter-lifestyle hysteria and has evolved as a focal point for ideological competition to an industrialized society and cites the volcanic eruption in Iceland as evidence Mom Nature does what she pleases and that consists of polluting.

Whilst you examine it, Earth Day has Some vehement adherents and vehement detractors. Either way, hey each have a factor. We’re stewards of this planet and we are able to make A few kind of big messes, however the planet can make Some large messes of its own that we haven’t any power to govern. Feeling responsible approximately how you live your lifestyles isn’t any manner to stay; that includes the way you address the surroundings. We shouldn’t sense guilty or be coerced into trying new principles to maintain our planet Clean. We have to want to do what little we are able to to attempt to depart a higher vicinity for generations to return factoring in what we haven’t any manipulate of. Figuring out the reserves of Earth Day is a non-public name.

At least bringing to the forefront notion of the toxic chemical compounds used in masses of our regular merchandise is a pleasant thing. This has created a big commercial vacuum that corporations are spending to fill. Taking the green approach to packaging and making their merchandise, businesses have jumped on the bandwagon of environmentally pleasant products. Retaining poisonous components out of our cleaning and regular merchandise will move an extended way to help the surroundings and our own family’s health.

One manner to help the planet is by way of shopping earth friendly cleaning products. One employer has been around making and selling non-harmful and biodegradable cleaners and fitness merchandise In view that earlier than Earth Day and environmental problems were based. Dr. Shaklee founded the Shaklee co. And delivered the first biodegradable utility purifier and official Earth Day by-product over 50 years back known as Primary-H.

As in line with the tempo and fashion Shaklee has evolved a cleaning machine any valet of the environment would like to have. It’s far called Get Clean and comes in a starter package that has everything you need to replace all of the noxious cleaners most families now use and out-plays eleven national brands. This kit facilitates to take away 108 pounds of waste from landfills, 248 pounds of CO2 emissions and is the equal of planting ten bushes. Oldsters using those merchandise have lately stored sufficient plastic from going into landfills to circle the globe over 19 Times.

Whether or not you believe the politics behind Earth Day, leaving our international higher than we observed it ought to be counted for something. we can be capable of determine to shop for concentrated merchandise that we add water to, to reduce the quantities of waste or reuse or recycle our trash. We’re able to use non-adverse cleaners that hold chemical compounds out of our water. Our global is changing as it has via Records, what we determine to do or not to do, will impact our destiny.

Grass Root Efforts Promote Earth Day What is Earth Day?

While you’ve got possibly heard the phrases “Earth Day”, did you realize there are observations of Earth Day? The United International locations celebrates at the equinox; loads of nations celebrate Earth Day annually on April 22nd. each activities have been birthed in 1969, with grassroots efforts, a focal point of environmental focus, and party of Earth.

activities to Main to Earth Day

Prior to 1970, conservatism become an concept held via a minority of humans. The notion that herbal resources might emerge as devastated to the point of extinction did now not enter our collective thought. Pollutants, from our homes, cars, and conduct, became a normal industry ed81d2c1d705861968d8963ac974ba36. The concept of being the arena’s steward was lumped in a mindset of ‘a hippie component’ and now not understood through mainstream The us. two previous events tilted our environmental attention: a e-book and a photograph.

In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. The book mentioned the commonly used, toxic insecticides utilized in agriculture and day by day existence. The name cited the consequences of the devastating insecticides: a international without birds. Highly, Silent Spring have become a success. People cared, and that they wanted the records.

In 1968, the sector saw the entire Earth for the primary time. Apollo astronauts photographed the planet on their flight home from the moon. The Earth seemed beautiful with its swirls of blues and whites. The photo supplied a startling awareness: people noticed Earth as susceptible and wanting human care.

Earth Day is Born

In 1969, John McConnell promoted Earth Day as a global party of Earth’s gifts. The equinox seemed becoming time, as it turned into the mid-point of spring and autumn across the hemispheres. A peace activist, McConnell first offered his Earth Day concept to an audience on the UNESCO Convention on the surroundings. He wanted Earth Day to be a global holiday, in which the sector celebrates Earth’s wonders and gifts.

On March 21, 1970, cities across the globe celebrated Earth Day. McConnell created an Earth Day proclamation that known as upon people to do so against crises of the arena, consisting of famine, battle, and poverty. The proclamation also said that members might rejoice and worldwide Earth Day to create a single community and embody Earth’s gifts. The proclamation changed into encouraged by using 9aaf3f374c58e8c9dcdd1ebf10256fa5 people and leaders round the arena: astronaut Buzz Aldrin, anthropologist Margaret Mead, inventor-scientist Buckminister Fuller, Japanese environmental scientist, Y. Fukushima, American senators, U.N. President S.O. Adebo, and UN Secretary-Trendy Thant.