In America we have a motivation problem : money. I’m not a communist. I love capitalism (I even love money), but here’s a simple fact we’ve known since 1962: using money as a motivator makes us less capable at problem-solving. It actually makes us dumber.
A number of years ago I watched a CEO make a long series of really bad decisions. He gutted his company of most of its long-term potential. It bothered me for years because I couldn’t understand why. This CEO is an intelligent, affable person. Let’s call his company “Company X”. I had several conversations with him over a five year period. He seemed like a good man for the job. His actions in the boardroom didn’t jibe with the person I thought I had talked with.
For confidentiality reasons I cannot provide details about Company X. I’ve talked personally with people who worked for this company and I believe what they’ve told me. Think of the following as a modern day parable. For the sake of litigious prudence, let me state that details of the story have been sufficiently altered as to claim, “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”
There was a lot of talk in the company cafeteria about the CEO’s incentivization package. If the company stock price were to hit a specified target and maintain it for a specified number of weeks, the CEO stood to gain serious remuneration. Sounded like a fine idea to me. He had to hit a target of perceived value and make it stick for a while. I’m sure the people who thought it up patted themselves on the back for it.
Life on the ground began to deteriorate. A friend of mine was working in a part of the company that interfaced with customers. He was working with a great bunch of people, but the pressure somehow kept ratcheting up. He couldn’t point to anything specific, but everybody started saying things like “We’ve just got to hit these deadlines and then we can relax a little.” They hit those deadlines. Somehow, the crisis wasn’t over. It actually got worse. By the time one crisis would end, the next was already in full swing. Then came the first wave of layoffs…
Once the layoffs started, nobody complained about the new normal — crisis time all the time. People started saying “We’ve got to hit these deadlines…” full stop. No one talked about relaxing in the future anymore. Eventually it became apparent that this new normal emanated from a high level personnel change intended to “improve the numbers,” as I was told. Improve them it did. Their numbers were better than ever. Their lives were hell.
Read all HERE.
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Smithsonian Institution “The world’s largest museum and research complex, with 19 museums, 9 research centers and more than 140 affiliate museums around the world.”
Women in the U.S. labor force currently earn just over 77 cents for every one dollar men earn. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Gallery of Awesome People together, like Eastwood and Pitt above, HERE.
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2012 Shattering US Heat Records
The first three months of 2012 have been unseasonably warm ones in the US. Temperatures in the lower 48 states have so far been 6° F (3.3° C) higher than average and were 8.6° F (4.8° C) above normal for March. In March alone, more high temperature records were broken in the US than in any other single month on record. Meteorologists attribute the recent warm-up to a rare confluence of several weather patterns, including La Niña, but the fact that these unusually high temperatures have persisted for months has some concerned about global warming. More …
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Most Northerners who fought in the War of the Rebellion declared that they did so to preserve the Union. But many citizen soldiers enlisted for other reasons — some quite personal, discussed privately if at all, and certainly not in polite society.
If anyone had asked John William Fenton why he joined the army, the tall, hazel-eyed 23-year-old from the Finger Lakes region of New York would most likely have expressed the same patriotic motives as a majority of his comrades in blue. But he had another motive: to redeem his family from scandal.
His early years were not ideal. His father was convicted of bank fraud after a very public trial that dragged the family name through the newspapers, then trekked to California, where he died in San Francisco during the waning days of the Gold Rush. A fragmentary paper trail suggests that Fenton, a younger sister and brother and his widowed mother weathered a storm of troubles. They lived for a time in Buffalo, then New York City. One source suggests that Fenton ran with a wild crowd. During the second spring of the war, he was living in the Kansas town of Shawnee, though how he came to settle there is unclear. He worked as a banker, just as his father had.
Go HERE.
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Need some art to fill your day? The above painting is by: Benczúr Gyula – Cleopatra (1911)
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America’s schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower.
Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies — nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don’t emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students — with spontaneity, authority, and wit.
MORE.
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People take part in a pillow fight flashmob at the Brandenburg Gate that was organized over Facebook in Berlin.
Thomas Peter / Reuters
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Back in 1998, Roy Baumeister conducted an experiment that was downright evil.
Together with his former Case Western Reserve University colleagues Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice, he examined the effect of a tempting food challenge designed to deplete participants’ willpower through the awful power of an unfulfilled promise of chocolate!
In the first part of the trial, Baumeister kept the 67 study participants in a room that smelled of freshly baked chocolate cookies and then teased them further by showing them the actual treats alongside other chocolate-flavored confections. While some did get to indulge their sweet tooth, the subjects in the experimental condition, whose resolves were being tested, were asked to eat radishes instead. They weren’t happy about it. As the scientists noted in their eventual Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper (PDF), many of the radish-eaters “exhibit[ed] clear interest in the chocolates, to the point of looking longingly at the chocolate display and in a few cases even picking up the cookies to sniff at them.”
MORE.
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If economists ran the tax system, there would be virtually no exemptions or loopholes. But economists don’t run the tax system! Instead, businesses, rich people, Congressmen and attorneys spend a shockingly large amount of time lobbying for tax breaks or exploiting the ones that exist. When the modern income tax was created in 1913, the code was 27 pages long. Last year, it was 5,296 pages. What in the world does it say? After surveying 20 accountants, tax lawyers and policy wonks, we’ve boiled down their arcane knowledge to this short list of things you might want to know.
What’s the Easiest Way to Cheat on Your Taxes?
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It’s a Friday night in West Philadelphia and a 27-year-old nursing student is explaining the finer points of moving black market Oxycontin.
Let’s call her Laura.
We’re sitting in her car, a late-model Mazda, in the parking lot of a TGI Friday’s. It’s raining. There’s a police car nearby, but the officer is presumably more concerned with potential drunk drivers than opiate trafficking.
Laura hands me a small bag. It’s packed with 30-mg tablets of Roxicodone. She paid her supplier $17 per pill; back home, about 50 miles outside the city, she’ll sell them for $25 to $30.
Oxycodone-based painkillers—Oxycontin, Percocet, Roxicodone—have been popular for years in Philadelphia’s blue-collar suburbs, and Laura is happy to sell them.
But in recent months, demand has shifted. Addicts with pill habits they can’t afford are asking Laura for heroin.
MORE.
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In 1986, a young nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in Los Angeles. Police pinned down no suspects, and the case gradually went cold. It took 23 years—and revolutionary breakthroughs in forensic science—before LAPD detectives could finally assemble the pieces of the puzzle. When they did, they found themselves facing one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.
By Matthew McGough
Image Credit: Mark Yankus
It was a burglary gone awry. That’s how it looked, at least, to the Los Angeles police detectives who arrived at a gated condo complex in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles on the evening of February 24, 1986.
The body of a 29-year-old nurse and three-month newlywed, Sherri Rasmussen, had been discovered by her husband, John Ruetten. When Ruetten, an engineer, had come home from work at 5:55 p.m., he’d known instantly that something was wrong. The garage door was open and the silver two-door BMW he’d bought Rasmussen as an engagement gift was gone. It seemed strange that she would not be home; he knew she had called in sick to work that morning.
When Ruetten rushed inside, he found his wife’s body in the ransacked living room. Shards from a broken porcelain vase littered the floor. A TV wall unit was partially collapsed. A credenza drawer had been yanked out and its contents, mostly documents, dumped on the floor.
MORE.
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Scientists rewrite rules of human reproduction.
Molecule find raises hope for arthritis sufferers .
iBrain headband analyses brain waves and could one day read your mind .
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How the Mariana Trench Became Earth’s Deepest Point.
Imported plants bring U.S. forest threats .
Foods to lower your cholesterol.
Dental x-rays linked to common brain tumor .
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