Bill Clinton and the Meaning of "Is"

Years from now, when we look back on Bill Clinton's presidency, its defining moment may well be Clinton's rationalization to the grand jury about why he wasn't lying when he said to his top aides that with respect to Monica Lewinsky, "there's nothing going on between us." How can this be? Here's what Clinton told the grand jury (according to footnote 1,128 in Starr's report):

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

The distinction between "is" and "was" was seized on by the commentariat when Clinton told Jim Lehrer of PBS right after the Lewinsky story broke, "There is no improper relationship." Chatterbox confesses that at the time he thought all these beltway domes were hyperanalyzing, and in need of a little fresh air. But it turns out they were right: Bill Clinton really is a guy who's willing to think carefully about "what the meaning of the word 'is' is." This is way beyond slick. Perhaps we should start calling him, "Existential Willie."

Bill Clinton Quotes

It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair

"It depends on how you define alone…" –Bill Clinton, in his grand jury testimony
"There were a lot of times when we were alone, but I never really thought we were." –Bill Clinton, in his grand jury testimony

"What's a man got to do to get in the top fifty?" –Bill Clinton, reacting to a survey of journalists that ranked the Monica Lewinsky scandal as the 53rd most significant story of the century

"I don't know whether it's the finest public housing in America or the crown jewel of the American penal system." –Bill Clinton, on the White House

"When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again." –Bill Clinton

"Politics gives guys so much power that they tend to behave badly around women. And I hope I never get into that." –Bill Clinton, to a woman friend while he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford

"It was a real sort of Southern deal. I had AstroTurf in the back. You don't want to know why, but I did." –Bill Clinton, reminiscing about a pickup truck he once owned

"You know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That's a good-looking mummy" —Bill Clinton, looking at "Juanita," a newly discovered Incan mummy on display at the National Geographic museum

"Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening." –Bill Clinton

"Last year, the vice president launched a new effort to help make communities more liberal." —Bill Clinton, during his 2000 State of the Union Speech. He meant to say "more livable," and then made the same slip-up in a subsequent sentence, drawing uproarious laughter from Republicans

"I asked him to do it because he was the only person that I could trust to read all 150,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations." –Bill Clinton, on asking Vice President Al Gore to tackle federal regulatory reform

"I'm someone who had a deep emotional attachment to 'Starsky and Hutch.'" –Bill Clinton

"Sometimes I feel like the fire hydrant looking at a pack of dogs. For six years I had declined to tell those kinds of jokes, because I have been told it is not presidential. But I feel kind of outdoorsy today." –Bill Clinton, at a party honoring the 150th anniversary of the Interior Department

"Well, I don't have much job security." –Bill Clinton, in 1992, on why he still plays the saxophone

"Usually briefs." –Bill Clinton, asked during a 1994 MTV town meeting whether he wore boxer shorts or briefs

"Look, half the time when I see the evening news, I wouldn't be for me, either." –Bill Clinton, in 1995, on a pre-campaign swing through Montana and Colorado

"There are always going to be people who want to be president, and some days I'd like to give it to them." –Bill Clinton, in 1993

"The economy has produced 6.1 million jobs since I became president, and if Michael Jordan comes back to the Bulls, it will be 6,100,001 jobs." –Bill Clinton, in 1995

"It wasn't my finest hour. It wasn't even my finest hour and a half." –Bill Clinton, after giving an endless nominating speech for Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic convention

"You'd think he was running for First Lady." –Bill Clinton, on George H. W. Bush's criticism of Hillary Clinton

"If President Reagan could be an actor and become president, maybe I could become an actor. I've got a good pension. I can work for cheap." -Bill Clinton, at a Hollywood fundraiser

"I may not have been the greatest president, but I've had the most fun eight years." –Bill Clinton

[MIT] Better product design through a simple square chart

Suppose you were asked to streamline the process of real estate development. Or to better organize the offices of an international manufacturer. Or to explain how the parts of a digital printer interact. The complexities of all these tasks would likely seem daunting.

Now suppose someone said you could accomplish these assignments by drawing a simple square chart on a piece of graph paper. No need for buggy software systems, labyrinthine flow charts or bloated Venn diagrams. Sound appealing?

Welcome to the world of Design Structure Matrix (DSM) modeling, a management exercise that forms one branch of MIT’s long-running institutional fascination with the analysis of complex systems. A DSM chart is a way of simplifying complex engineering tasks — say, the design of computer hardware or engines — in order to make them more efficient.

Specifically, DSM analysis helps firms turn product design into a productive routine, rather than an ad-hoc process continually being reinvented — a point MIT management professor Steven D. Eppinger emphasizes in his new book, Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications, co-written with Tyson Browning of Texas Christian University and recently published by MIT Press. It is the first such book, outlining DSM techniques for a general audience of engineers and managers, published in three decades.

“Engineering work is procedural and repeatable,” Eppinger says. “People think of engineering as a matter of always developing something new, unlike business operations, where you do something over and over again. But we’ve learned that, no, maybe you repeat engineering work five or 20 times in your career instead of 100 times a day, but there’s a process there. And if you can write down that process, you can improve it.”

Repeat after me

DSM modeling, as Eppinger and Browning see it, applies to three main areas of business: the design process, organizations and products. The “matrix” in DSM refers to the fact that a DSM analysis is represented by a square chart with boxes inside — much like a piece of graph paper. A DSM chart, with units of a system listed along the x-axis and y-axis of the chart, simply maps the intersections of those elements, with simple observations or data about the way the units interact.

Consider a DSM chart of the entire process needed to develop a piece of commercial real estate. (Using DSM to analyze the design process, Eppinger notes, is the most popular application of DSM modeling.) In 2009, for instance, MIT graduate students Benjamin Bulloch and John Sullivan created a DSM chart for nearly 100 different activities that the real estate development firm Jones Lang LaSalle needed to complete in order to finish a project. By listing those activities along both axes of the chart, the researchers were able to see how many part of the project interacted with each other — how many specific steps directly related to the leasing process, say.

In some engineering projects, this means repeating steps in order to make sure they are performed properly. In fact the distinction between necessary repetitions in engineering and wasteful ones is, Eppinger says, one of the most important insights to emerge from DSM analysis.

“Not all iterations are bad,” he says. “You might think of rework as waste, but some iterations are fundamental and have to be built into the process, due to the cutting-edge nature of the design work and the uncertainty inherent in it. On the other hand, there are iterations that are slow and painful and frustrating and should probably be avoided. Those are the ones that derive from making mistakes or not having the right information when it’s available.”

Tracking the flow of information is one aim of applying DSM modeling to organizations. In one case, Eppinger worked with managers at the Timken Company, a global manufacturer, to assess where various parts of the business — product design, technology development, business development and oversight of its manufacturing development — should be physically located at its offices in Ohio. This DSM chart helped the firm decide where to locate the managers of its units so they would interact most effectively.

When applying DSM models to products, Eppinger notes, the aim of the analysis is to visualize the “difference between modular and integrative elements” of an object, to see which of these interact. One paradigmatic DSM chart from 2007, created in part by former MIT doctoral student Eun Suk Suh, listed 84 components of Xerox’s iGen3 digital printing system, on both the left-hand side and top of the chart; color-coding the squares in which parts interacted enabling the company to see all the connections within its product, and helped Xerox update the technology for the next generation of the product.

Tomorrow, biotech?

Soon after joining the MIT faculty in 1988, Eppinger became interested in DSM after reading an article about it in an academic journal. “I said, ‘That’s interesting, I wonder why nobody uses this?’” he recalls. Companies, he found, generally did not know about DSM — but became interested after learning about it.

Today, engineers say they appreciate the work of Eppinger and Browning. Georges Fadel, a professor of mechanical engineering at Clemson University, says they “do an excellent job” explaining DSM modeling.

The term DSM itself was coined in the 1970s by Don Steward, a professor at California State University at Sacramento. But Eppinger, Fadel says, helped “put DSM on the map. He took it and showed it’s important to see if we can understand complexities visually.”

And while DSM modeling has been adopted most widely in the automotive, aerospace and electronics industries, Eppinger says he is optimistic that it will spread further. “I’d certainly like to see more applications in medicine, health care devices, pharmaceuticals and biotech companies,” Eppinger says. “I’d like to see more applications in energy. There is still lots of work to be done in those areas.”

Houston Tops Our List Of America's Coolest Cities

Houston is known for many things: Oil, NASA, urban sprawl and business-friendly policies. But the Texas city deserves to be known for something else: coolness.

The Bayou City may not be the first place you associate with being hip or trendy. But Houston has something many other major cities don’t: jobs. With the local economy humming through the recession, Houston enjoyed 2.6% job growth last year and nearly 50,000 Americans flocked there in response — particularly young professionals. In fact, the median age of a Houston resident is a youthful 33.

The result? Over the past decade, the dreary corporate cityscape has been quietly transforming. Stylish housing developments have popped up downtown, restaurants have taken up residence in former factories and art galleries like the Station Museum have been inhabiting warehouses.

Combine that with a strong theater scene, world-class museums and a multicultural, zoning-free mashup of a streetscape and you have the recipe for the No. 1 spot on Forbes’ list of America’s Coolest Cities To Live.

Behind the Numbers

“Cool” is defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “very good; fashionable.”  Of course what, exactly, is good and fashionable is very much in the eye of the beholder. We sought to quantify it in terms of cities, ranking the 65 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Metropolitan Divisions (areas that include cities and their surrounding suburbs that are defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget) based on seven data points weighted evenly.

Sperling’s Best Places helped us calculate the number of entertainment options per capita in each metro area. We also ranked the cities based on other recreational opportunities, including the amount of green space, the cost and number of outdoor activities like golfing and skiing available, and the number of pro and college sports teams.

List: America’s Coolest Cities To Live

With the help of Sperling’s we tallied restaurants and bars per capita, weeding out chain establishments – Applebee’s has less sizzle than a local chef’s bistro.

We also looked at each city’s cultural composition using Sperling’s Diversity Index. It measures the likelihood of meeting another person of a different race or ethnicity. Increased diversity tends to lead to a larger assortment of interesting shops, restaurants and events.

Using the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we factored in median age, favoring places with a large young adult population.

We ranked the cities based on net migration (the number of people who relocated there in 2011) and also on unemployment rates, since a city’s offerings are only as good as the amount of people who want and can to afford to enjoy them. (No one likes to hang out in an empty bar, right?) We culled this data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Moody’s Analytics.

Houston is joined in our top 20 by four other Lone Star metro areas: Dallas ranked fourth; San Antonio, 11^th; Fort Worth, 13th; and Austin, 19^th. They all boast strong economies, large young adult populations and relatively high levels of cultural diversity.

Second on our list is Washington, D.C. With federal spending strong, the nation’s capital sailed through the recession with low unemployment and an influx of newcomers. Many of those newcomers have, like Houston, been young adults. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, residents in their 20s and early 30s make up about a third of the metro area’s population – 23% more than in 2000.

Washington also scored high thanks to its melting pot of a population, a large selection of local eateries and watering holes, and a host of activities that range from Smithsonian museums to music concerts. Washington reportedly hosts more festivals and events than any other U.S. city, according to Destination DC.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of America’s priciest cities also made the cut: Los Angeles ranked third, San Francisco came in ninth and New York took 10^th. “Established places like New York … have a built-in cool crowd,” says Bert Sperling, founder of Sperling’s Best Places. “They are like adult playgrounds and people go there for good food and interesting events.”

In general the cities on our list fall into one of two categories:  established (typically wealthier) cities (like New York, Los Angeles, even D.C.) and up-and-coming places whose low costs of living and/or strong economies have been attracting artists and young adults who can’t afford to live in the former.  Up-and-coming metro areas that made our list include D.C.’s neighbor to the north, Baltimore (No. 14), and New York’s neighbor to the southwest, Philadelphia (No. 15).

“Baltimore is in transition because it has been down and out for a long time but it’s beginning to come back because it’s affordable,” says Sperling. “[And] Philadelphia had been forgotten, but now it’s being referred to as the Sixth Borough.”

Asia Pacific Consumer Confidence Declined In Q2 2012 : Nielsen

Contacts:
Tam Nguyen , (84) 8 3997 8073
Tu Le , (84) 936 321 321
Insights:

•  Vietnam Consumer Confidence Index up one point to 95 in Q2 2012
• Perceptions of job prospects and personal finances declined while the economy and job security remain top concerns

Ho Chi Minh City, 27 July 2012 – Consumer confidence levels across Asia have continued to decline in the second quarter of 2012, however, consumers in Asia remain more optimistic than many of their global counterparts, according to the latest quarterly Consumer Confidence Index findings from Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy.
 Nielsen’s Q2 2012 Consumer Confidence Index recorded a score of 100 for Asia, down three points from Q1 2012. Confidence levels declined in many markets across Asia, with just five markets (Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Vietnam and South Korea) recording an increase in confidence levels for the quarter. Malaysia posted the strongest gain in Asia, up four points compared to Q1 2012. Japan and South Korea recorded the lowest levels of confidence in Asia with scores of 57 and 50 respectively.
 Despite weakening sentiment around the region, confidence levels in Asia continued to out-perform global averages, coming in nine points above the global consumer confidence score of 91. A number of Asia markets ranked amongst the most confident countries globally, including Indonesia (1^st) which had the world’s most confident consumers, Philippines (3^rd) and Malaysia (5^th). At the other end of the spectrum, Asia’s least confident countries, Japan and South Korea, were also amongst the lowest globally, together with Croatia, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Hungary.
 “Continuing economic uncertainty is clearly impacting on consumers’ confidence levels across the region,” said Therese Glennon, Nielsen’s Managing Director of Consumer Insights in the APMEA Region. “Consumer confidence has failed to gain any momentum this year as global events, including a worsening Euro zone crisis coupled with slowing growth rates in China and India, impacted financial markets and consumer sentiment in many parts of Asia. Consumers are reacting to renewed global market volatility by adopting a more cautious approach to discretionary spending.”
 The Nielsen Global Survey of Consumer Confidence and Spending Intentions, established in 2005, tracks consumer confidence, major concerns and spending intentions among more than 28,000 Internet consumers in 56 countries. Consumer confidence levels above and below a baseline of 100 indicate degrees of optimism and pessimism.
 Perceptions of job prospects, personal finances declined
According to Nielsen’s survey, 58 percent of Asian consumers felt their local job prospects in the next 12 months were good or excellent, down three percentage points from the previous quarter. In Vietnam, 46 percent of Vietnamese respondents say their job prospects over the next 12 months were good/excellent, decreasing 7 percentage points from the previous quarter and 11 percentage points versus a year ago. More than half (59%) of online consumers in Asia considered their personal finances over the next twelve months to be good or excellent, down four percentage points from Q1 2012 but increase two percentage points from Q2 2011. One in two Vietnamese respondents (51%) reported their state of personal finance good or excellent over the next 12 months, slightly increasing from 49 percent in Q1 2012 but still lower than a year ago (56%).
 Top 5 Concerns of Vietnamese consumers in Q2 2012

Vietnam

The economy (19%)

Job security (18%)

Increasing utility bills (12%)

Increasing food prices (7%)

Health (8%)

 Consumers adopting a cautious approach to spending
According to Nielsen’s survey, asked how they intended to utilize their spare cash after covering their essential living expense, more than one third of Asian consumers (37%) said they would put their spare cash towards a holiday or vacation, down from Q1 2012 results (44%), and spending on items such as clothing (35%), technology products (30%) and out-of-home entertainment (34%) was lower in comparison to the previous quarter. While savings (66%) remains the top choice for Vietnamese to put spare cash in after covering essential living expenses; out of home entertainment (28%) and home improvement (27%) became less attractive versus Q1 2012. Discretionary spending such as holidays/vacations (32%), new technology products (29%), new clothes (28%) saw slight increases compared to the previous quarter.
 Although discretionary spending appeared to have borne little impact from consumers’ economic concerns and weakening sentiment, Nielsen’s survey revealed that up to 86 percent of Vietnamese respondents have adjusted spending to save on household expenses compared to last year, mostly in gas and electricity (70%), out of home entertainment (63%), new clothes (63%), upgrading technology (53%) and telephone expenses (51%).
 Whilst consumers in Asia are still out there shopping and enjoying entertainment outside of their homes, they are adopting a much more conservative approach, and are more conscious of the amount they are spending on such items during these uncertain times.  More than ever, we expect consumers to seek out promotions to stretch their cash further,” notes Glennon.
 
About the Nielsen Global Survey
The Nielsen Global Survey of Consumer Confidence and Spending Intentions was conducted May 4-21, 2012 and polled more than 28,000 online consumers in 56 countries throughout Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and North America. The sample has quotas based on age and sex for each country based on their Internet users, and is
weighted to be representative of Internet consumers and has a maximum margin of error of ±0.6%. This Nielsen survey is based on the behavior of respondents with online access only. Internet penetration rates vary by country. Nielsen uses a minimum reporting standard of 60 percent Internet penetration or 10M online population for survey inclusion. The Nielsen Global Survey was established in 2005.
About Nielsen
Nielsen Holdings N.V. (NYSE: NLSN) is a global information and measurement company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement,
online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and related properties. Nielsen has a presence in approximately 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA and Diemen, the Netherlands. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com.

Commencement speaker blasts students

By Valerie Strauss

Here’s a new one in the annals of commencement speakers: A teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts gave his address to the Class of 2012 and blasted the students, telling them over and over, “You’re not special.”

(Dennis R.J. Geppert/AP) David McCullough Jr., an English teacher at the school, delivered his rather unusual speech (see full text below) Friday, telling graduating seniors that they had been “pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped.”
It was all said in the context of telling students that there is a big wide world out there and that they should not succumb to a culture in which everyone gets a trophy. McCullough, son of the award-winning historian David McCullough Sr., advised the students to seize the future by doing what they love, rather than taking a job for money.
“Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you,” he said near the end of the speech.
But he wasn’t exactly kind in getting to his message.
“Contrary to what your soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special,” he said.
Here’s the text of the speech from The Swellesley Report:
Dr. Wong, Dr. Keough, Mrs. Novogroski, Ms. Curran, members of the board of education, family and friends of the graduates, ladies and gentlemen of the Wellesley High School class of 2012, for the privilege of speaking to you this afternoon, I am honored and grateful. Thank you.
So here we are… commencement… life’s great forward-looking ceremony. (And don’t say, “What about weddings?” Weddings are one-sided and insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can you imagine a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with envy. Left to men, weddings would be, after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent… during halftime… on the way to the refrigerator. And then there’s the frequency of failure: Statistics tell us half of you will get divorced. A winning percentage like that’ll get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do better than weddings.)
But this ceremony… commencement… a commencement works every time. From this day forward… truly… in sickness and in health, through financial fiascos, through midlife crises and passably attractive sales reps at trade shows in Cincinnati, through diminishing tolerance for annoyingness, through every difference, irreconcilable and otherwise, you will stay forever graduated from high school, you and your diploma as one, ‘til death do you part.
No, commencement is life’s great ceremonial beginning, with its own attendant and highly appropriate symbolism. Fitting, for example, for this auspicious rite of passage, is where we find ourselves this afternoon, the venue. Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma… but for your name, exactly the same.
All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.
You are not special. You are not exceptional.
Contrary to what your soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.
Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…
But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.
The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can’t ignore. Newton, Natick, Nee… I am allowed to say Needham, yes? …that has to be two thousand high school graduates right there, give or take, and that’s just the neighborhood Ns. Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. That’s 37,000 valedictorians… 37,000 class presidents… 92,000 harmonizing altos… 340,000 swaggering jocks… 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. But why limit ourselves to high school? After all, you’re leaving it. So think about this: even if you’re one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. Imagine standing somewhere over there on Washington Street on Marathon Monday and watching sixty-eight hundred yous go running by. And consider for a moment the bigger picture: your planet, I’ll remind you, is not the center of its solar system, your solar system is not the center of its galaxy, your galaxy is not the center of the universe. In fact, astrophysicists assure us the universe has no center; therefore, you cannot be it. Neither can Donald Trump… which someone should tell him… although that hair is quite a phenomenon.
“But, Dave,” you cry, “Walt Whitman tells me I’m my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!” And I don’t disagree. So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it’s “So what does this get me?”
As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It’s an epidemic — and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune… one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School… where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said “one of the best.” I said “one of the best” so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You’re it or you’re not.
If you’ve learned anything in your years here I hope it’s that education should be for, rather than material advantage, the exhilaration of learning. You’ve learned, too, I hope, as Sophocles assured us, that wisdom is the chief element of happiness. (Second is ice cream… just an fyi) I also hope you’ve learned enough to recognize how little you know… how little you know now… at the moment… for today is just the beginning. It’s where you go from here that matters.
As you commence, then, and before you scatter to the winds, I urge you to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance. Don’t bother with work you don’t believe in any more than you would a spouse you’re not crazy about, lest you too find yourself on the wrong side of a Baltimore Orioles comparison. Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction. Be worthy of your advantages. And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer; and as surely as there are commencements there are cessations, and you’ll be in no condition to enjoy the ceremony attendant to that eventuality no matter how delightful the afternoon.
The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you’re a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer. You’ll note the founding fathers took pains to secure your inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–quite an active verb, “pursuit”–which leaves, I should think, little time for lying around watching parrots rollerskate on YouTube. The first President Roosevelt, the old rough rider, advocated the strenuous life. Mr. Thoreau wanted to drive life into a corner, to live deep and suck out all the marrow. The poet Mary Oliver tells us to row, row into the swirl and roil. Locally, someone… I forget who… from time to time encourages young scholars to carpe the heck out of the diem. The point is the same: get busy, have at it. Don’t wait for inspiration or passion to find you. Get up, get out, explore, find it yourself, and grab hold with both hands. (Now, before you dash off and get your YOLO tattoo, let me point out the illogic of that trendy little expression–because you can and should live not merely once, but every day of your life. Rather than You Only Live Once, it should be You Live Only Once… but because YLOO doesn’t have the same ring, we shrug and decide it doesn’t matter.)
None of this day-seizing, though, this YLOOing, should be interpreted as license for self-indulgence. Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Go to Paris to be in Paris, not to cross it off your list and congratulate yourself for being worldly. Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special.
Because everyone is.
Congratulations. Good luck. Make for yourselves, please, for your sake and for ours, extraordinary lives.

How Much Money Do You Really Need To Be Happy?

So many of us work long, hard hours to provide for our families and children-often long hours away from home, maybe taking on extra jobs at times or hoping to get a raise in an effort to make our lives richer financially–working harder at the expense of sleeping and taking good care of ourselves in order to have extra money. It seems so many of us just aren’t content with what we have now. But is there a point at which striving to earn or acquire extra money can be counterproductive? Or, in other words, when having extra money just doesn’t make us “happy” anymore?
In a recent column in the the Sunday Review of the New York Times, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton attempt to answer this question and by doing so create a perfect opportunity for us to reflect about the limitations of how the desire to accumulate money can ultimately affect our happiness.
There certainly is a relationship between your salary and happiness; people who earn a good living are often happier than people who live in poverty. Having extra money can certainly enhance our lives by providing extra food, objects and creature comforts in our homes.
But the irony is that earning additional income will actually not lead to extra happiness, once you have already attained a “comfortable standard” where you have what you need to function and be content. The “comfortable standard” can be quite variable based on the city, state or country you live in. Here in the US, according to Dunn and Norton, the standard falls around $75,000. Researchers at Princeton examined Gallup poll data from nearly 500,000 US households and found that higher family incomes were related to better moods on a day to day basis. However, the positive effects of money had no effect on people’s happiness and moods after a level of $ 75,000.00 was attained.
The issue then arises why we work so hard after we have reached an income level that is able to make us happy. Beyond a strong work ethic engrained by family values, or the desire to excel and compete with others, it appears that our ideas about money and happiness have gone awry. Dunn and Norton explain that based on their research with a national sample of Americans, the thought that life would be happier with double their salary (from 25K to 55K) did not translate into any measurable happiness. (Twice the money did not lead to twice the happiness). But according to Dunn and Norton’s data, people who earned 55K were only 9 percent more content than those making $25,000.00. 9 percent happier may be difficult to quantify, and better than 0 percent, but not the 100 percent you may be expecting from the extra income.
However the true take-away from all of these mental exercises with money and happiness is that what we do with our money is more important than the money we earn. The thought that making more money can allow us to have bigger houses and fancier cars to nicer digital televisions-more for ourselves- is ultimately ineffective at turning money into happiness. Research has demonstrated that if you are going to spend money on yourself, you may want to switch from buying material objects (TVs or cars) to buying experiences (trips and special events). Based on additional research by Dunn and Norton, while buying more “experiences”, you will be better off by just buying less in general and instead buy for others.
As an extension of this concept, Dunn and Norton refer to the concept of “underindulgence”- indulging a little less than you typically do- may lead you to a place where you achieve more happiness for your money. The concept is that by denying yourself the excess that you may ultimately desire may allow you to savor and appreciate the finer things in life. Dunn gives the example of indulging in chocolate sparingly -instead of in excess- may actually make you appreciate the taste and texture much more.
An extension of the underindulgence concept also relates to the ban on oversized regular soda that New York City recently proposed. In many areas of the country, the childhood obesity crisis has led to a ban on regular soda in a number of schools and campuses. According to research, restricting access to sugary sodas only at particular times of the day may actually have the ability to improve taste, while having a beneficial effect on limiting consumption. In fact, research from Arizona State University has shown that individuals enjoy the taste of soda much more when they can’t have it immediately. Food experts have previously recognized that the first sip or the first bite is often more enjoyable than the 30^th bite or sip.
A more extreme but scientifically proven means of increasing the happiness you derive from your money is a bit more radical-not spending it on yourself. It turns out that people who spend money on others rather than themselves are actually happier in the long run. They derive a greater feeling of reward and satisfaction and this helps to enrich their inner feelings of sharing and contentment.
So instead of buying that extra watch or TV the next time you have some new found money, consider the alternative: indulging less and offering others the opportunity to share in your wealth.

Mark Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake

In the last two months, Mark Zuckerberg has had a rude introduction to the capital markets. The founder of Facebook has always seemed fearful of the stock market and tried to avoid the trading hordes as long as possible, but that has turned out to be a huge mistake.
Before taking Facebook public in May, the 28-year-old Zuckerberg had led something of a charmed life. The roadblocks he faced in building the world’s biggest social-networking company were tiny, like an overdramatized civil lawsuit. Now, with Facebook’s stock in free-fall, down more than 40% from its IPO price, Zuckerberg has a big problem.
Zuckerberg did not want to deal with the pressures of being a public company. Like many entrepreneurs these days he viewed the capital markets with suspicion. The view in Silicon Valley, as recently described by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is that laws that Congress passed in response to the first Internet bubble, like Sarbanes-Oxley, make it “incredibly difficult to be public today.” So Zuckerberg made a fateful decision, he decided to keep Facebook a privately-held company for much longer than other success stories like Google or Amazon.
But Zuckerberg still needed money. He needed financing for his plans and to compete with the likes of Google or the next dorm room dreamer to come along. He also needed to attract and retain talent. Issuing stock options, or, in this case, restricted stock units, that don’t turn into cash money for years was not enough. To solve this problem, Zuckerberg turned to venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, even a Russian oligarch. But those investors also expected to cash-out and those pesky securities regulation also limited the number of shareholders Facebook could have and still remain a private company. By May 2012, Zuckerberg had no choice but to launch an IPO.
Waiting eight years to conduct an IPO, however, has turned out to be an impossible problem to manage.  The hype associated with the hottest company in Silicon Valley had created massive expectations and lots of shareholders with tons of stock looking for an exit. The bankers at Morgan Stanley applied all the lessons of the last 15 years and priced the IPO at $38, which was very aggressive, in an attempt to avoid leaving any money on the table and the embarrassment that a huge IPO pop would represent. David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer, increased the size of the offering at the last minute to try to mitigate future selling of shares from early investors and employees.
With such a big valuation at IPO time, Facebook had to show some results. But the numbers that Facebook announced on Thursday in its first quarterly earnings report were underwhelming. Zuckerberg, Ebersman and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg did not inspire much confidence about their business model in a conference call. The trading hordes drove Facebook’s stock down by 15% in Friday morning trading. “We’re disappointed about how the stock is traded but the important thing for us is to stay focused on the fact that we’re the same company now as we were before,” Ebersman said.
But that is going to be very hard to do. Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., is not a kibbutz. The employees that joined the company are like all the other creatures in Silicon Valley; they want to get rich. It’s hard to imagine morale at Facebook won’t take a hit that correlates with the loss in value of the shares belonging to the employees. And things don’t look promising for the stock short-term given that the employees, ex-employees, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists and Russian oligarchs that held pre-IPO Facebook stock will be freed from their post-IPO stock lock-ups starting in August. Make no mistake: the early institutional investors are heading for the exits.
The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.  The markets have a way of focusing the mind. Zuckerberg & Co., might have not been so late to embrace mobile or might have had more urgency to develop a monetizing strategy had Facebook faced the trading hordes earlier. As New York hedge fund manager Dan Loeb recently demonstrated with his intervention at Yahoo!, Wall Street and Silicon Valley need each other. Zuckerberg thought shielding himself from guys like Loeb would help him build a better company, but that is not what tech entrepreneurs will take away from his example.

Woman confronts PM over carbon 'lies'

Spruiking politics in public can be a risky business but Prime Minister Julia Gillard, way behind in the polls and fighting for her political life, was prepared to take the risk today.

While Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was at a forum of hand-picked supporters in Melbourne, Ms Gillard braved a Brisbane shopping centre and took pot luck as she continued to promote the carbon price scheme.
Mostly, it all went well. Michael and David were very pleased to meet her. Others thanked her for coming to Queensland. Young Conor was in the hairdressers "getting a Justin Bieber thing happening".
It couldn't last. Ms Gillard was approached by a middle-aged woman who had been told by one of the Prime Minister's minders that "no-one has asked about the carbon tax".
The woman was angry – and had a question about the carbon tax alright.
"Why did you lie to us?" she asked.
"And why are you continuing to lie and say, 'Well, I didn't really mean to lie'?"
Strong words - and Ms Gillard said she could explain, but the woman was not really interested in explanations.
"I've listened to you for months, I've watched Parliament - and you are still lying," the woman said.
Ms Gillard has never really been comfortable admitting that she was forced into the carbon tax by the Greens in return for their support for her minority government and support for a climate change program.
So she just said she "didn't foresee we'd have a hung Parliament".
Later, the Prime Minister was defended by others as a woman cried out: "You have no mandate!"
A shouting match broke out as another woman defended Ms Gillard: "She does have a mandate, she has our mandate".
The election may be more than two years away, but the campaign is already under way.

Kishore Mahbubani: Is China Losing the Diplomatic Plot?

SINGAPORE - In 2016, China's share of the global economy will be larger than America's in purchasing-price-parity terms. This is an earth-shaking development; in 1980, when the United States accounted for 25% of world output, China's share of the global economy was only 2.2%. And yet, after 30 years of geopolitical competence, the Chinese seem to be on the verge of losing it just when they need it most.
China's leaders would be naive and foolish to bank on their country's peaceful and quiet rise to global preeminence. At some point, America will awaken from its geopolitical slumber; there are already signs that it has opened one eye.
But China has begun to make serious mistakes. After Japan acceded to Chinese pressure and released a captured Chinese trawler in September 2010, China went overboard and demanded an apology from Japan, rattling the Japanese establishment.
Similarly, after North Korean shells killed innocent South Korean civilians in November 2010, China remained essentially silent. In a carefully calibrated response, South Korea sent its ambassador to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for the imprisoned Chinese human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo in December 2010.
China has also ruffled many Indian feathers by arbitrarily denying visas to senior officials. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao subsequently calmed the waters in meetings with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but such unnecessary provocations left a residue of mistrust in India.
But all of these mistakes pale in comparison with what China did to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in July. For the first time in 45 years, the Asean Ministerial Meeting (AMM) failed to agree to a joint communique, ostensibly because Asean's current chair, Cambodia, did not want the communique to refer to bilateral disputes in the South China Sea. But the whole world, including most Asean countries, perceived Cambodia's stance as the result of enormous Chinese pressure.
China's victory proved to be Pyrrhic. It won the battle of the comminique, but it may have lost 20 years of painstakingly accumulated goodwill, the result of efforts such as the Asean-China free-trade agreement, signed in November 2002. More importantly, China's previous leaders had calculated that a strong and unified Asean provided a valuable buffer against any possible US containment strategy. Now, by dividing Asean, China has provided America with its best possible geopolitical opportunity in the region. If Deng Xiaoping were alive, he would be deeply concerned.
It may be unfair to blame China's leaders for the Asean debacle. More likely than not, over-zealous junior officials pushed a hard line on the South China Sea, whereas no Chinese leader, if given the choice, would have opted to wreck the AMM Communique. But the fact that it happened reveals the scope of China's recent poor decision-making.
The 'nine-dotted line' that China has drawn over the South China Sea may prove to be nothing but a big geopolitical millstone around China's neck. It was unwise to attach the map in a note verbale responding to a joint submission by Vietnam and Malaysia to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in May 2009. This was the first time that China had included the map in an official communication to the UN, and it caused great concern among some Asean members.
The geopolitical opportunity implied by inclusion of the map has not been lost on America, which is why the US, somewhat unusually, has made another effort to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention. Having tabled the nine-dotted line at the UN, China walked into a no-win situation, owing to the difficulty of defending the map under international law. Indeed, as the eminent historian Wang Gungwu has pointed out, the first maps to claim the South China Sea were Japanese, and were inherited by Nationalist China.
Domestically, too, the nine-dotted line may cause problems for the government by presenting critics with a useful weapon. Any hint of compromise will expose officials politically. In other words, a few rocks in the South China Sea have put China between a rock and a hard place.
There is no doubt that China will have to find a way to compromise over the nine-dotted line. In private, it has begun to do so. Even though the line covers the waters northeast of the Indonesian-owned Natuna Islands, the Chinese government has given Indonesia categorical assurances that China does not claim the Natuna Islands or their Exclusive Economic Zone.
These private assurances calmed relations with Indonesia. So why not make similar overtures to other Asean states?
The legacies of Deng and his predecessor, Mao Zedong, are very different. But the People's Republic's two most important leaders did agree in one area: both bent over backwards to make territorial concessions to resolve border disputes. This explains why China was so generous to Russia, for example, in its border settlements.
Mao and Deng could do this because both provided China with strong leadership. The challenge for the world now is that China has become politically pluralistic: no leader is strong enough to make wise unilateral concessions.
Nothing will happen in China until the leadership transition is completed in November. The new administration of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang will need some time to settle in. But America is waking up. So, too, will the rest of the world in 2016. The big question then will be: Is China as geopolitically competent as number one as it was when it was number two?
Kishore Mahbubani is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and author of the forthcoming book The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World.

Vietnam uncovers new evidence that islands do not belong to China

A Han-Chinese map of China published by Shanghai Publishing House in 1904 reveals that China stretched as far south as Hainan Island, and that Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) Islands did not belong to China.
After holding it for 30 years, Dr. Mai Hong, former head of the Library of the Institute for the Study of Chinese and Demotic Scripts and Cultures, has decided to release the historical evidence.
Hong recently sat down with Tuoi Tre for an interview about the map:
How did you get this map?
I got this map when I administered a library of Chinese and Demotic Script books (now Institute for the Study of Chinese and Demotic Scripts and Cultures) in 1977. At that time, collecting maps was not our administrative function. However, to my surprise, an elderly man who often sold books to us showed up at our office one day and recommended I buy this map. I spent one month's salary to purchase it without my family's knowledge.
Is it a valuable map made a long time ago?
Yes, it is. It's a color-coded paper map that has a carton-paper cover and can be opened like a book. Inside the map, there are more than 35 pieces - each measured at 20cm wide, 30cm long - stuck on canvas. Because I can read Han-Chinese, I've translated about 600 Han-Chinese words into Vietnamese that adequately represents the origin and date of the map.
According to the translation, the map was created across nearly two decades (1708 - 1904), from the Kangxi Emperor who ruled China from 1661 - 1722 to the Guangxu Emperor from 1875 to 1908. The emperors asked many clergymen and gifted astronomers and mathematicians to make this map.
More specifically, in 1708, King Kangxi recruited some western clergymen to draw the map of the Great Wall. In 1711, the King continued to ask the clergymen to survey lands in 13 provinces nationwide. After that, Chinese intellectuals and western clergymen worked together for nearly 200 years to finish this map. Among famous western clergymen helping King Kangxi with the map were Matteo Bicci from Italy, Joannes Adam Schall Von Bell from Germany, and Ferdinandus Verbiest from Belgium.
In 1904, Shanghai Publishing House printed this map and distributed it to all provinces of the Qing Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China ruling from 1644 to 1912. The introduction of the map was written by the director of a Chinese observatory.
What is some helpful historical data from this map?
In this map, the director of a Chinese observatory greatly appreciated achievements by western clergymen, who were at the time ahead of China in the field of astronomy and mathematics. As the map indicates, there are no photos, drawings or surveys of Truong Sa or Hoang Sa islands on the map. The Chinese themselves also admitted that Hainan Island was the end of their land to the south.
Why did you decide to release this map?
In my opinion, this map will provide some helpful evidence that helps Vietnam get more active in resolving disputes with China over the ownership of the two islands in the East Sea. This is also helpful data for local scholars or researchers who are studying the seas and the islands' sovereignty.
Official map
According to Pham Hoang Quan, a local researcher on Han-Chinese and Demotic Scripts, the map, measuring 115cm long and 140cm wide, was printed on separate sheets and belonged to a group of large-scale maps.
Quan added that during the Ming and Qing dynasties, there were only 60 maps of this kind.
The map's accuracy in terms of longitude and latitude is nearly on par with modern maps. This map was made by experts at the Observatory of the Qing Dynasty, so it can be considered official, he said.
The information in this article was contributed by Tuoi Tre News. For more information, visit the website http://www.tuoitrenews.vn/

The Highest-Paid Olympic Athletes

More than 10,000 athletes from 204 nations will participate in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Most Olympians scrape by through a combination of small sponsorships, minimal stipends from the national governing bodies for their sports and part-time jobs. That is the reality for the vast majority of Olympic athletes, who ply their trade in sports the general public only pays attention to every four years when the Games roll around.
And then there are these guys. They travel by private jet and are the rock stars of global sports, with billions of dollars at stake. The 20 highest-paid Olympians earned $448 million collectively over the past 12 months. They are almost entirely made up of basketball stars with eight-figure salaries and tennis pros armed with fistfuls of multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals.
Roger Federer is the highest-paid Olympian with earnings of $54.3 million between July 2011 and July 2012. Federer is once again at the top of his sport after his seventh Wimbledon crown this month and 17th Grand Slam overall. The win elevated him to the No. 1 ranking in the world, and he broke the record for most weeks ranked No. 1 in a career, which was previously held by Pete Sampras at 286.
Federer rarely plays doubles on the ATP Tour, but he won a gold medal in doubles at the 2008 Beijing Games. Everything Federer touches seems to turn to gold. He earned $9.3 million in prize money over the past 12 months and an estimated $45 million from appearances and sponsors. Federer has the most impressive endorsement portfolio of any athlete on the planet. His blue-chip roster of sponsors includes Nike, Rolex, Wilson, Credit Suisse, Gillette, Mercedes-Benz and more. Federer also commands more than $1 million per exhibition and is heading to South America at the end of the year for a series of these very lucrative events.
Federer is one of seven tennis players among the 20 highest-paid Olympians. Maria Sharapova ranks No. 4 at $27.1 million and Novak Djokovic ranks No. 8 at $19.8 million. Spain’s Rafael Nadal earned $32.4 million over the past 12 months, but dropped out of the Olympics last week due to knee problems.
Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade caused a stir three months ago when he asserted that NBA players should get paid for appearing in the Olympics. “It’s something you want to do. But it’s taxing on your body. You’re not playing for the dollar. But it would be nice if you would get compensated,” Wade told reporters after a Heat practice in April.
Wade led the 2008 U.S. Olympic gold medal team in scoring, but will miss London after knee surgery. His fellow basketball player are not getting paid directly for their participation in the Games, but Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola and others ink lucrative endorsement deals with elite NBA players knowing these athletes will get global exposure in the Olympics and NBA playoffs. The more exposure they get, the more valuable they become for the brands.
Nike pays LeBron James and Kobe Bryant upward of $15 million a year including royalties and sends both stars overseas for store openings and basketball clinics. Olympic basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski is on the Nike payroll along with every member of the team except for one player: Kevin Love, who has a deal with Chinese brand 361 Degrees. But he still wears Nikes on the court.
James leads a group of 12 NBA stars among the 20 highest-paid Olympians with earnings of $53 million, which ranks second overall. In addition to Nike, James has endorsement deals with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, State Farm, Dunkin’ Donuts, Audemars Piguet and Upper Deck. Eight members of the U.S. Olympic basketball team made the cut, as did four NBA players representing other countries, including Spanish brothers Pau and Marc Gasol, who earned $17.2 million and $10.9 million, respectively, over the past year.
The one athlete outside of tennis and basketball among the highest-paid Olympians is track star Usain Bolt, who ranks No. 7 with estimated earnings of $20.3 million. Bolt announced himself to the world with a triple-gold 2008 Olympic performance that saw him set world records in the 100 and 200 meter sprint events. Bolt earns the bulk of his income through endorsements and sponsor bonuses for record race times. Partners include Gatorade, Hublot, Nissan Motor and Visa, but his biggest sponsorship deal is with Puma, which pays $9 million annually.
The only athlete bigger than Bolt at the 2008 Games was swimmer Michael Phelps, who won a record eight gold medals in Beijing. Phelps will be back in London looking to add to his 16 overall Olympic medals. Phelps does not crack the top 20 highest-paid Olympians, but earned an estimated $7 million over the past 12 months from 11 sponsors that include Speedo, Visa, Omega, Subway and Under Armour. He inked a deal last year with Procter & Gamble to be the global face of Head & Shoulders. P&G is running a marketing campaign this year featuring Phelps in more than 200 countries.
Phelps’ biggest competition in the pool is Ryan Lochte, who made roughly $2 million this past year from sponsors like Gillette, Nissan Motor and AT&T. Lochte also has medal bonuses with partners Speedo and Gatorade that could push his income close to $3 million with a strong performance in London.
Athletes will be chasing gold medals in London the next two weeks across 26 sports, but these 20 have already won the gold.
The List:
1. Roger Federer ($54.3 million)
2. LeBron James ($53 million)
3. Kobe Bryant ($52.3 million)
4. Maria Sharapova ($27.1 million)
5. Kevin Durant ($25.5 million)
6. Carmelo Anthony ($22.9 million)
7. Usain Bolt ($20.3 million)
8. Novak Djokovic ($19.8 million)
9. Chris Paul ($19.2 million)
10. Li Na ($18.4 million)

Fifty Shades Of Business

While the eyes of the world are beginning to focus on London for the 2012 Olympic Games, my attention is diverted north toward the Lake District of England. This is where you’ll find the Damson Dene Hotel, a 40-bedroom retreat that has made the bold decision to replace the Gideon Bible in each room with the smash hit “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E. L. James.
On his blog Innkeeper Jonathan Denby explained the decision noting the world is a more secular place, no one reads the bible (some even dislike that it’s in their room), and that “Fifty Shades of Grey” is something everyone seems to want to read at the moment.
Cultural phenomena come at us all the time and businesses of all stripes and colors regularly find a way to attach themselves to them. For example, you can go to any number of delicatessens and order a Philadelphia-themed Rocky Balboa hoagie. The question is knowing when this is a right move for your business and in what fashion.
Since my website, Hitched, focuses on married life, it’s been impossible to avoid discussions of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” I personally think the Damson Dene Hotel made a clever move…I know my website’s readers would want to visit that hotel now.
In fact, our sex expert, Dr. Trina Read, was getting so many questions regarding “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the subject matter within it, that we dedicated an entire podcast episode to it a few weeks back. This cultural phenomenon aligns very well with my audience and I’m sure there are many other examples that will align well with your business too. Here’s are five things to consider when thinking of running in step with culture:
What are you trying to get out of it? You should have an understanding for why you want to align yourself with a cultural sensation.
Does this align with your business? While some things might seem too big to pass up, you need to make sure that the association isn’t damaging to your business and brand, or turn off your customers and clientele.
What does this say about your business? By ditching the bible and replacing it with a  book that is being devoured by adult women everywhere, it definitely says something about the clientele the Damson Dene Hotel is going after (or already has).
Are you prepared for a backlash? When something becomes a cultural phenomenon it’s because a large group of people carry deep passions for it. If your business takes the wrong step, you need to be prepared to hear about it and react.
Are you prepared for success? On his blog, Denby mentions how he spent much of the day speaking with the press. Of course most businesses would kill to have the “problem” of a media exposure onslaught. Still, businesses should prepare for the time, money and manpower that may go along with success.
Embracing the public’s interest in “Fifty Shades of Grey” may not be for your business. And while the Damson Dene Hotel looks to fill their rooms by switching out one book for another, finding the right cultural touchstone for your business could drive attention and fill your coffers. To that I say, “Amen!”

The Real Reason for Microsoft's Woes

It’s been a busy and lazy summer, so I’ve had little surplus time and energy to keep up with my Forbes blogging, so I’ve been sort of taking a sabbatical. But I figured I couldn’t let Kurt Eichenwald’s recent Vanity Fair story on Microsoft’s decline pass by without a reaction.
The article has been highly anticipated for some time. Like everybody else in technology, I was eagerly waiting to read it.
But I was sorely disappointed. The article, despite the research and extensive interviewing that clearly went into it, entirely misses the forest for the trees. It is deeply superficial. It confuses effect for cause, spins the entire tale around caricatured larger-than-life personalities, and uncritically takes insider accounts of the politicized culture at face value. It only just stops short of being pure TMZ-style celebrity sensationalism. Unfortunately he is never able to rise above his attraction to the human drama, and the temptation to inflate its importance and make it the main plot (he would do well on Aaron Sorkin’s staff). His biggest failing is in what he leaves out: discussion of broader industry structure trends, which in my opinion are the real, if duller, story.
So ultimately, this amounts to little more than an eloquent hatchet job on Ballmer. The sort of thing that adds momentum to a lynching discourse but is ultimately an unimportant subplot. Ballmer is a minor part of the problem, and if replacing him becomes necessary, it will be a minor part of the solution.
So why is this dramatic human story ultimately a distraction (and even a danger), and what is the real story here? Because I do agree with Eichenwald on one thing: Microsoft is in trouble and has been for a while.

This focus on human drama is a common pathology that rears its head when mainstream media (though I suppose, with my Forbes hat on, I am nominally part of it) tackles technology. Industry structure trends and analysis are boring. People-centric stories, especially “glorious leader” heroic narratives, are so much more fun to read and write.
But ultimately, they suggest a dangerous sort of path-dependent “it could have been different if only such and such key person had been different” narrative that gets its emotional power from more hopeful, but ultimately specious counterfactuals. Technological evolution is more robust than that.
Single individuals, sadly for those fond of human dramas, are never that important. Even really big personalities like Ballmer, Gates and Jobs are products rather than makers of history.
So what is the real reason for Microsoft’s woes? The answer lies in that boring old MBA subject of industry structure dynamics. There is less entertaining human drama in that story, but you get both a more robust narrative that is not so sensitive to the speculative impact of individual personalities, and (to the technologist) more interesting conclusions.
Eichenwald’s version of the story is a sort of “personality determinism.” All flavors of determinism are partial truths at best, but personality determinism is particularly weak and small-minded (and peculiarly American). Environmental determinism, which I favor, has its flaws, but is not quite as brittle (and you do need to pick some sort of ism poison to tell a coherent story).
How do the two versions of the Microsoft story differ?
Personality-Determinism versus Environmental Determinism
Eichenwald’s version of the story, as I said, is basically a Steve Ballmer hatchet job. And to be fair to him and other Ballmer-bashers, the guy makes for an attractive target, with his charging bull personality that endears itself to nobody. And he’s a sales guy to boot, and as such, easy in our culture to hate on. He may swing big deals in backrooms but cuts a sorry figure on the marketing stage (a good part of Eichenwald’s story is devoted to an unflattering and unnecessarily extended account of Ballmer’s gauche last performance at the CES stage, with Apple-standards for stagecraft providing the subtext).
Bill Gates, who has retired to a living sainthood, does not get a free ticket out of jail either though. He gets blamed for being an accessory before the fact via a quote from that currently unimpeachable witness, and candidate for postmortem technology sainthood (too soon?), Steve Jobs:

“They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.”

Never mind that Jobs, rest his soul, had his own philosophies to defend and axes to grind. Never mind that his implicit suggestion that product-focus ought to be some sort of sacrosanct value for technologists needs more than just pious assertion as justification (after all, as people appear to have forgotten, in the eighties and early nineties, Microsoft’s business pragmatism allowed it to roar ahead of Apple’s product romanticism). Never mind that in a story that is bigger than just this last decade, there were periods that Jobs spent in the doghouse. And never mind that pious and self-serving paean to the “humanities and liberal arts,” guaranteed to tug at the heart-strings of non-technologists.
The real problem with this whole approach to analyzing a major large corporation is that it vastly overstates the importance of the CEO’s control over a company’s destiny, and indeed, the company’s own ability to dominate its larger economic environment. The real drama is far grander than the story of any individual within it.
When you start this way, you end up where Eichenwald does. For him, Microsoft’s well-known (and once admired, if hated) fast-follower strategy becomes yet another “leadership” problem that prioritizes feature copying (which, it is uncritically implied, is somehow a vaguely dishonorable business strategy). Management fads like stack ranking end up being presented as the cause of politicized internal cultures that are uncritically presented as “toxic” simply because a few interviewees decide to whine about it.
And of course, we have the ultimate kind of hanging evidence used in CEO inquisitions: the idea that Microsoft let certain great innovations like e-readers and touch-screen devices slip through its fingers.
That last flawed argument has been made since Xerox’s  misadventures with PARC, which have been gleefully misrepresented in the popular imagination for decades (I fervently hope Aaron Sorkin never gets his hands on a copy of Fumbling the Future or Dealers of Lightning, the best known versions of the PARC story).
Unfortunately, none of this is particularly compelling as an explanation for Microsoft’s woes.  There is plenty of less sensationalist business thinking that demonstrates the flaws. For example, fast-follower strategies are actually more successful in general than innovation-pioneering strategies (as demonstrated in Copycats by Oded Shenkar). Highly politicized cultures based on aggressive internal competition can work wonderfully well in some business environments. There are successful companies that swear by stack ranking (which is not a defense or argument in favor of the mechanism, just an observation that the contextual appropriateness and tastefulness of the application of a management tactic matter more than the tactic itself).
The “innovation leak” myth of missed opportunities is perhaps the most pervasive. Even today, 30 years after the fact, when management thinkers and researchers who study innovation have largely agreed that the story of PARC and Xerox was more about prevailing industry structure dynamics than personalities, in the popular imagination, the drama of individual conflicts among larger-than-life personalities looms large.
It is easy to see why this happens. Going back to the PARC example, the story of Robert Taylor (the big-personality impressario who made PARC happen) and his dramatic confrontations with other strong personalities such as the founder of SDS, Max Palevsky, is an attention-grabber. It is hard not to read the story as a sort of Greek tragedy where early acts of hubris on Taylor’s part result in his fall later, engineered by the envious and unreasonable minor gods in senior Xerox management.
Truth be told, the DNA differences between personal computing technology and the kind of business thinking and competence required to make and sell copiers was so big that the outcome would likely have been the same no matter who had been on the two sides of that story. Elephant and pot-bellied pig DNA just don’t mix.
The story of “culture” is simply the story of “personalities” on a somewhat larger scale. Effective cultures conform to the demands of the specific  technology and market.  It is tempting to believe that culture can be chosen as an independent management variable and even replace strategy altogether, but the argument does not hold water. Both business strategy and culture follow the logic of the specific product and market in a particular time and place.
In fact, the whole story is simply a gigantic case of mistaking correlation for causation. Microsoft is in trouble. Ballmer is perhaps a not-very-likable personality, let’s blame one for the other.
If Microsoft had succeeded rather than failed, and Apple and Google had failed to make their leaps ahead, similar (and equally contrived) stories could be written in reverse. If Gates had stayed, the story would likely have been the same. If Gates had chosen a technologist instead of a sales maven as his successor, ditto. Momentum and cultural inertia are facts of life, not matters of CEO choice.
So what’s really been going on with Microsoft? Let’s do the environmental determinism version of the story.
Horizontal to Vertical, Enterprise to Consumer
Microsoft and Apple were both born in a decade of deregulation that favored horizontal integration attacks on IBM’s monopoly over computing. You cannot understand what is happening today without going back to the eighties, because the DNA of a company at birth is generally its DNA for life. If it survives at all, its early successes define its later personality.
Microsoft happened to be in the right place at the right time. Intel was positioned to carve out a horizontal processor slice from the computing pie. Microsoft was positioned to carve out a horizontal operating system slice. The software universe was ready for some large-scale bottom up innovation on a relatively open platform (remember Linux didn’t exist back then, so DOS was as open as it got) that did not require midnight visits to mainframe caverns with stacks of punch cards.
There was basically a four-layer cake waiting to be baked. The physical “box” made of commodity parts, minus the processor, was the base layer. It was not really worth monopolizing, and that layer saw the emergence of a large disorganized assembly industry and two majors (Dell and Compaq) in America, and an Asian tsunami of electronics manufacturing.
The processor layer saw Intel emerge as near-monopolist, with players like AMD gradually emerging as competition via antitrust legislation.
The OS layer went to Microsoft.
And perhaps most important, the then-nonexistent application software layer was opened up to the masses. Like most of you technologists over 30, I learned programming on a PC running MS DOS.
It was the PC, not the Mac, that created the modern personal computing software industry. Only a horizontal industry structure could have enabled this. Without it, both the Mac OS and Windows would be walled gardens of limited accessibility and utility. It is fascinating to me that Eichenwald manages to discuss Microsoft without discussing its developer ecosystem, something that was crucial in its early days and remains crucial today.
Apple was not the right answer then for the economy at large.
Jobs followed his personal philosophy of vertical integration and manic focus on usability when the high-leverage move was to sacrifice both in favor of architectural openness, hardware commoditization, and catalysis of a (then non-existent) personal computer software industry. It is something of a miracle that he survived long enough to get a second chance.
It is easy now to underestimate the magnitude of what Microsoft got right back then, starting with the original Gates-Allen BASIC.
For the sake of completeness, I should note that the much-lauded PARC personal computer (which finally saw the light of day very late as the Xerox Star system) was also not the right answer. It was too integrated and custom-built, and too reliant on networked architectures that had no hope of sprouting up overnight. PARC nostalgia often clouds our ability to recognize the genuine differences that both Microsoft and Apple introduced along the way to beating the PARC model.
But the big story then was that IBM was vulnerable to a horizontal integration, openness and hardware commoditization trifecta attack. Again, the story as told seems much more path-dependent than it really was (for example, the famous anecdote about how Gary Kildall of Digital lost what would become the MS-DOS market to Microsoft through a sitcom-ish series of tragicomic events that made IBM turn away from the CP/M operating system). The Ballmer story told by Eichenwald today is strikingly similar to the Gary Kildall story told back then.
Again, even if the story had not played out in this specific way, the broad point of industry structure being friendlier to horizontal organization in that period holds. If not Gates and Microsoft, some other horizontally integrated attacker, not Apple, would have won the day. Because only horizontal integration allowed for the emergence of a powerful enough paradigm to challenge mainframes, and some player would have been in the Goldilocks zone.
Industry structure scholar Charles Fine of MIT has studied these sorts of effects in detail (see for instance, his old classic Clockspeed). Among his broader ideas is that most industries cycle slowly through horizontal and vertical integration phases (loosely speaking). Each has its advantages and disadvantages.
Another such industry structure trend that Microsoft was poised to take advantage of back then was the slow migration of IT from the deep bowels of corporations, to the surface. Then, unlike now, the “personal” in PC was a misleading adjective. The computers were used by individuals, but not really in their personal capacity. Industry was the initially important adopter of personal computing technology because of the advantages it offered over mainframe-based computing (“personal” computing in the home market did not become dominant until the nineties). The PC was really a BC (“business computer”) until the mid 90s.
Again, Eichenwald misses the significance of this subplot. Because enterprise IT is generally a “boring” story in human terms. Apple, iPads and iPhones are sexy. Drones hammering out dull enterprise glue code in Java, on Windows machines, through the late nineties, are not.
This trend too would eventually reverse. By 2004, technology was generally flowing from the consumer sector to the enterprise, reversing the historic flow direction (this is the much-talked-about “consumerization of IT” effect, which is a story that is bigger than Apple and Microsoft).
So what happened? Why did Microsoft lose its lead?
Simply put, the technological winds shifted, starting around 1997, to favor vertical integration.
As the Internet emerged, creating a sort of supercritical soup of technological mixing and matching (not to mention viruses from a newly anarchic Russian sphere — the world is a big place), the relatively open PC platform became increasingly unstable and confusing. It was too open, too vulnerable to the natural chaos that hides in openness. At the same time, as consumer markets and graphical capabilities became increasingly important, and vertical integration began to offer serious advantages.
At a marketing level, the commodity hardware effort had succeeded beyond everybody’s wildest expectations (benefiting Apple as much as Microsoft), leading to the now familiar flood of beige, boxy computers on desks everywhere. Things had gotten cheap enough that there was now a competitive advantage available along the aesthetics vector. People could pay an aesthetics premium without bankrupting themselves.
And Jobs, fresh off yet another radical-but-failed vertical-integration project (NeXT), finally received his cue to step on stage. Candy-colored iMacs burst on the boring beige scene. Jeff Goldblum began telling us superciliously on TV that beige was boring.
Shifting Winds and Stopped Clocks
I’ll offer a bit of an extreme caricature that understates the talents of both Jobs and Gates, but in a way, they were both like a stopped clock that happens to tell the time correctly twice a day. Both had fixed personalities and relatively unchanging philosophies that were more or less effective as winds shifted around them. For example, Eichenwald uses Gates shooting down of the e-reader for not being enough like Windows as a symptom of failed vision. But insisting on a Windows-ish feel to all Microsoft products makes perfect sense for a company whose fundamental DNA is horizontal integration. It is like Intel’s Intel Inside marketing posture. What may make less sense at a product level may make more sense at an industry structure level. Sometimes you have to cede product categories that go against the grain for you.
Jobs’ philosophies looked equally inappropriate when Microsoft was beating Apple. The point is that individual and corporate personalities are relatively static, and it makes far more sense to recognize the fact and develop a certain resilience to unfavorable winds rather than attempting to “change culture” with every swing of the business cycle and industry environment. Better to be a stopped clock that is right twice a day than a late clock that is never right.
Notice something about this telling of the story? There is far less focus on individual names and personalities, internal management fads and dissection of politicized cultures and management fads like Stack Ranking.
Ultimately, these things are a matter of detail. The reason serious study of management focuses on broader environmental macro issues is that ultimately these prevail.
The direction of the wind matters a lot more than the captain of the ship when big technological forces are opening up new oceans of opportunity. There are enough ships waiting and positioned for every possible direction of the shifting wind.
To extend the metaphor further, culture, management and personalities are naturally selected by the wind direction. If the environment selects an aggressively competitive and politicized culture, led by a charging bull, and working off a “fast follower” strategy, that’s what will happen. If the winds shift, those same variables become correlated with “failure.”
There is always somebody in the right place, at the right time, with the right personality, within a company with the appropriate culture to sustain the successful strategy. That does not mean they fundamentally “cause” the success (or failure).
The New Environment
Ironically, the wind is shifting again in favor of Microsoft’s culture, after a decade of favoring Apple’s culture. Things are about to go horizontal again. If Eichenwald’s not-so-subtle call for a Ballmer lynching is successful, Microsoft might end up striving mightily to “change” and become more like Apple and Google just when the environment actually favors a return to its roots.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has very weak table stakes in the new battlegrounds (mobile and cloud, the two ends of the emerging computing world). On the mobile end, it has turned into a contest between Google and Apple, and Google is winning (the Nexus 7 is the most serious shot across Apple’s bows yet).
Ironically, Google is winning using Microsoft’s original winning horizontal strategy: a relatively open OS layer of the stack, commodity hardware based on increasingly open architectures, a new kid on the processing block (ARM) and an exploding market of software innovation much like the eighties world of desktop software.
Apple, to its credit, has managed to adapt its vertical DNA to this increasingly horizontally structured environment in the world of apps, taking advantage of the tighter usability constraints of mobile devices (compared to desktop computers) to sustain a walled garden app model, but ultimately, the economics are not in Apple’s favor. If it does not gradually open up, lower cost and more open Android models will win the day.
Microsoft has no credible offering at this end of the game. Google is out-Microsofting Microsoft.
On the other end, Microsoft’s traditional captive market, the enterprise, is under increasing threat from cloud-and-SaaS everything. Here, its Azure-based offerings are slightly more credible than its mobile offerings. But here too, it faces very tough competition from players ranging from Amazon to Salesforce and Google itself.
Can Microsoft navigate these rough new seas?
Only if it goes back to its roots. Losing your way is one thing. Losing your faith is quite another.
Saving Microsoft
It is crucially important for the world that Microsoft survive as a technology company, and not just because the idea of living in a brushed aluminum Apple world wired to an increasingly hollow-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” Web sounds like a terrible idea to me.
Microsoft is an important force in the marketplace because it represents pragmatism, fast following, commoditization and a concern for the needs of businesses and practicality. If Microsoft does not survive, I hope another company steps into its shoes. These dimensions of corporate diversity matter. We do not want shifting winds to find no ships to propel to greatness in some direction because an Apple-Google monoculture (bi-culture?) spreads through the economy.
So to survive, Microsoft must not doubt or second guess its own strengths. It must not try to become a second-rate Apple or Google. It must strive to become once more, a first-rate Microsoft.
A strong sales culture is not an evil weakness.
A preference for horizontal integration is not a weakness.
Business pragmatism is not ideologically inferior to product romanticism.
These things were valuable once. They will be valuable again. They may have turned temporarily toxic in an unfriendly decade, but they can be restored to health.
Certainly there are problems with Microsoft that go beyond unfavorable winds. The minimum threshold for usability has risen much higher than it used to be. Fast followership requires good radars and disciplined selection of trends to follow and startups to buy, a discipline that seems to have been lost. Strategic fast-following appears to have been replaced by envy-based fast following, which is indistinguishable from thrashing around. The thinking at the top appears to have become intellectually lazy.
All this can be fixed.
But the idea that there is nothing of value in the company that created the modern world of personal computing and fulfilled the vision of a computer on every desk (and then some) is dangerous and toxic. More dangerous and toxic than any amount of internal politicking and stack-ranking. Second guessing your strengths based on transient ill winds is the worst thing you can do.
And even Ballmer deserves a redemptive telling of his tale. It would be a tragedy if his contributions were forgotten, or if the strengths he brought to Microsoft culture were abandoned in a scapegoating-and-purge move. The technology world is bigger than cardboard heroes and villains.
Microsoft may or may not survive. But the grand narrative of technology deserves to be more than a series of Monster of the Week slayings of out-of-favor leaders.