The following information is used for educational purposes only.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Tribute to Steve Jobs Think Different
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Remembering Nora Ephron-26-06-2012-Last scene of "When Harry met Sally"
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Sunday, June 24, 2012
INTAFF-Europe's Optional Catastrophe
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
July/August 2012
COMMENT
Europe's Optional Catastrophe
The Fate of the Monetary Union Lies in Germany’s Hands
Sebastian Mallaby
SEBASTIAN MALLABY is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.
Two decades ago, when the European currency system was last on the brink of collapse, the ultimate question was how much Germany, the continent's economic powerhouse, would do to save it. The peripheral economies were hurting, weighed down by a monetary policy that was appropriate for Germany but too austere for weaker European countries. Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, had to make a choice. It could continue to set high interest rates, thus upholding its commitment to stable prices. Or it could cut rates and accept modest inflation -- and so save the rest of Europe from a prolonged recession.
We know which option Germany chose then. The Bundesbank brushed off suggestions that it should risk inflation for the sake of European solidarity; speculators correctly concluded that this made a common monetary policy intolerable for the weaker economies of Europe; and in September 1992, the continent's Exchange Rate Mechanism, a precursor of today's euro, shattered under the pressure of attacks from hedge funds. Almost 20 years later, the world is waiting for a new answer to the same question. How far will Germany go to keep Europe together?
The economist Rudiger Dornbusch observed that in economics, crises take longer to come to a head than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. By the time you read this, the eurozone may have splintered. But whether or not that has happened, or soon will, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of the crisis, Germany has had the power to save the monetary union if it wanted to. The union's disintegration would be an optional catastrophe.
SUPERMAN CENTRAL BANKERS
To see why the euro's failure could be averted, one must first grasp the awesome power of today's central banks. Until World War I, the advanced economies were tethered to the gold standard, meaning that central banks could not print money in unlimited quantities. Likewise, for almost all the years since World War II, the power of the printing press has been checked, first by a diluted version of the gold standard and then by the fear of inflation. But the combination of fiat currencies and economies that are in a slump changes the game. Money, no longer tied to gold or any other firm anchor, can be created instantly, in infinite quantities, on the technocrats' say so. And so long as factories have spare capacity and unemployment keeps wages in check, there is unlikely to be any significant penalty from inflation.
Of course, central banks had this same power in the 1930s, when the world was in a depression and the gold standard had been abandoned. But they hesitated to use it, a decision documented and lamented by monetary historians from Milton Friedman to Ben Bernanke (the current chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve). Since 2008, by contrast, central bankers have been determined to prove that they understand history's lessons. Appearing on Capitol Hill shortly after the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in 2008, Bernanke himself informed Barney Frank, then chair of the House Financial Services Committee, that the Federal Reserve would stabilize the insurer AIG at a cost of more than $80 billion. "Do you have $80 billion?" Frank asked. "We have $800 billion," Bernanke responded. In fact, by December 2008, the Fed had extended fully $1.5 trillion in emergency financing to markets, dwarfing the $700 billion bailout fund authorized by Congress through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Central banks on the other side of the Atlantic have acted with equal resolve.
For much of 2011, Europe's political leadership bickered about the details of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), a TARP-like bailout fund with an intended firepower of 440 billion euros. Then, one day last December, the European Central Bank provided 489 billion euros to the continent's ailing banks, and in February 2012, it repeated this stunt, effectively conjuring the equivalent of two EFSFs out of thin air through the magic of the printing press. Since the start of 2007, the ECB has purchased financial assets totaling 1.7 trillion euros, expanding its portfolio from 13 percent to over 30 percent of the eurozone's GDP. That means that the ECB has printed enough money to increase its paper wealth by an amount exceeding the value of eight years of Greek output.
This superman act has, at least as of this writing, saved the euro system from breaking up. Without the central bank's extraordinary support, private banks across the eurozone would have struggled to raise money and would have collapsed. Private firms, unable to take out bank loans, would also have gone under. The debtor countries would not have been able to rely on banks to purchase their government bonds and thus would have defaulted, in turn devastating the private banks that already held their bonds. The ECB's printing of money duly improved sentiment in the market. The interest rate on Italy's ten-year bonds, for example, tumbled, from around seven percent to about 5.5 percent, although it has since risen.
The ECB will eventually use up its room for maneuver. Some observers fear that the sheer volume of freshly minted euros is bound to lead to serious inflation, either when money begins to circulate faster or when the mere prospect of that event creates self-fulfilling inflationary expectations. But the best bet is that, with growth flat and unemployment over ten percent, the threat of inflation spiking across the continent is remote: with plenty of spare capacity on hand, any rise in demand will be met with increases in supply rather than with higher prices. For the foreseeable future, therefore, the ECB can keep on printing money to prop up banks. It can expand its modest direct purchases of government securities to ensure that finance ministries can raise money at less than punitive interest rates. It could even extend its support to nonfinancial firms, for example, by announcing that it stands ready to hold loans to small businesses on its own balance sheet. Most obviously, the ECB can help manage the crisis by keeping short-term interest rates low.
Increasing the money supply is sometimes dismissed as a mere palliative. But in addition to propping up banks, businesses, and governments, easy money can facilitate structural adjustment. If the ECB prints enough money to hit its target of two percent inflation across the continent, this is likely to mean zero inflation in the crisis countries, where unemployment is high, and three to four percent inflation in Europe's strong economies, where workers are confident enough to demand wage increases. By delivering on its inflation target, in other words, the ECB can help Italy and Spain compete against Germany and the Netherlands, gradually eroding the gap in labor costs that lies at the heart of Europe's troubles. At the same time, a determined and sustained period of monetary easing would probably weaken the euro. That would boost the competitiveness of the crisis economies against the rest of the
world, further increasing the odds of an export-led recovery.
In short, the ECB has real power. It can avert a market meltdown and at the same time gradually make the periphery more competitive. But for the ECB to deliver on its potential, Germany must resolve not to get in the way.
It must allow for an expansion of the ECB's innovative rescue measures and accept German inflation of three to four percent.
Over the past year, unfortunately, German financial leaders have sent mixed signals. The big question of 1992 – how far would Germany go for the sake of European solidarity? -- has not been clearly answered. And so Europe's future remains cloudy.
THE PATH OUT
Germany's leaders are correct that the countries in crisis must earn their own recoveries; the ECB cannot save them on its own. In particular, they must improve the administration of public finances, cracking down on tax evasion and wasteful spending, and remove product and labor-market regulations that undermine competitiveness. But these reforms tend to pay off in the long term. In the short term, slashing budgets will shrink demand and quell growth, while some labor-market reforms that make it easier to fire workers may initially drive up unemployment, undermine consumer confidence, and reduce growth further. The most urgent complements to the ECB's response therefore lie elsewhere -- and they demand initiative from Germany. Germany first needs to recalibrate its attitude toward public finances in the periphery. Thus far, the German strategy has emphasized deficit reduction, on the theory that countries that borrow less will accumulate less debt in the long run. But because deficit reduction keeps an economy from growing, it may defeat its own purpose.
Over the past year, the eurozone has indeed cut deficits sharply, but the debt-to-GDP ratio has worsened. Germany needs to accept that aggressive austerity programs are neither politically sustainable nor economically wise. To get its debt under control, a country must attack its debt stock directly.
If Europe's leaders had mounted a forceful response earlier in the crisis, they could have imposed a meaningful debt reduction on private creditors across the continent. But by now, most private creditors have sold out, transferring their debt to the International Monetary Fund, the ECB, and other official creditors. (To be sure, private European banks hold large portfolios of European government bonds. But since the public sector stands ready to bail out these banks, they are not true private creditors.) Last year's restructuring of Greece's debt illustrated the problem. Almost two years into the Greek crisis, the country's private creditors were forced to accept a reduction of about 65 percent in the value of their claims. But at that point, most private creditors had already shed their government debt, so the resulting debt relief for Greece was far short of what the country needed to fix its finances.
Given that governments in the surplus countries and multilateral lenders have become significant creditors to the crisis countries, debt relief has to involve leniency on their part. This is unlikely to take the form of an explicit reduction in debt claims: the credibility of the International Monetary Fund and the ECB would suffer too much from an admission that their loans can be defaulted on. Nor is it likely to involve taxpayers in Europe's core explicitly paying off debts owed by the periphery: that would be politically explosive. The most plausible route to debt reduction is to create a eurozone bond, so that part of the debt of the crisis countries can be replaced by debt issued by the whole region. The German government's economic advisers have put forward a plan that would achieve this goal; now, the government needs to embrace it.
In addition to tackling governments' debt overhangs, Europe's leaders need to shore up the continent's banking system, which has been plagued by a surfeit of bad loans and, until recently at least, a deficit of honesty about them. Until the banks confess that loans to unemployed homeowners or ailing businesses won't be repaid on time, and until they set aside capital to cover their losses, their unacknowledged frailty will inhibit their lending: too few individuals and businesses will be able to borrow money, and growth will remain anemic. Moreover, the banks' return to health is a precondition for restoring confidence in the market, since the possibility of costly bank failures casts a shadow over the crisis countries. For the moment, the ECB's generous financing has guaranteed the banks' liquidity, inoculating them against the lending strike they have suffered in the private bond markets. But if millions of depositors begin to desert the banks at once, the ECB's liquidity may not be enough, and no amount of liquidity can address the banks' solvency. Unless banks keep more capital on hand, they risk collapse. Private investors are unlikely to provide these funds, and the governments of the crisis countries are too stretched to do the job alone. Some of the money will therefore have to come from stronger European governments.
GERMANY'S CHOICE
In 1992, Germany prioritized managing its own economy over supporting European integration. It then seemed to show remorse and came around to supporting the creation of a common European currency. Despite the clear risks in binding disparate economies to a single monetary policy, the political drive to unite Europe won out. "The history of the European monetary unification is characterized by slow, but steady, progress in the face of constant skepticism and predictions of catastrophes," Otmar Issing, a German member of the ECB's executive board, proclaimed in 2001.
"The launch of the single monetary policy was a resounding success."
Yet despite Issing's triumphalism, Germany today seems confused about which way it wants to go. The weight of blood and history argues in favor of keeping Europe together, and Germany's industrial captains understand that their success as exporters would be choked off by a return to a strong national currency. At the same time, however, Germany's leaders resist even modest inflation and are understandably wary of backing up other countries' debt or rescuing their banking systems. Germany is of course free to choose whichever path it wants. But if it replays 1992, the "resounding success" of the euro will go down in history as a resounding failure.
Source: Copyright © 2002-2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
July/August 2012
COMMENT
Europe's Optional Catastrophe
The Fate of the Monetary Union Lies in Germany’s Hands
Sebastian Mallaby
SEBASTIAN MALLABY is Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.
Two decades ago, when the European currency system was last on the brink of collapse, the ultimate question was how much Germany, the continent's economic powerhouse, would do to save it. The peripheral economies were hurting, weighed down by a monetary policy that was appropriate for Germany but too austere for weaker European countries. Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, had to make a choice. It could continue to set high interest rates, thus upholding its commitment to stable prices. Or it could cut rates and accept modest inflation -- and so save the rest of Europe from a prolonged recession.
We know which option Germany chose then. The Bundesbank brushed off suggestions that it should risk inflation for the sake of European solidarity; speculators correctly concluded that this made a common monetary policy intolerable for the weaker economies of Europe; and in September 1992, the continent's Exchange Rate Mechanism, a precursor of today's euro, shattered under the pressure of attacks from hedge funds. Almost 20 years later, the world is waiting for a new answer to the same question. How far will Germany go to keep Europe together?
The economist Rudiger Dornbusch observed that in economics, crises take longer to come to a head than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. By the time you read this, the eurozone may have splintered. But whether or not that has happened, or soon will, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of the crisis, Germany has had the power to save the monetary union if it wanted to. The union's disintegration would be an optional catastrophe.
SUPERMAN CENTRAL BANKERS
To see why the euro's failure could be averted, one must first grasp the awesome power of today's central banks. Until World War I, the advanced economies were tethered to the gold standard, meaning that central banks could not print money in unlimited quantities. Likewise, for almost all the years since World War II, the power of the printing press has been checked, first by a diluted version of the gold standard and then by the fear of inflation. But the combination of fiat currencies and economies that are in a slump changes the game. Money, no longer tied to gold or any other firm anchor, can be created instantly, in infinite quantities, on the technocrats' say so. And so long as factories have spare capacity and unemployment keeps wages in check, there is unlikely to be any significant penalty from inflation.
Of course, central banks had this same power in the 1930s, when the world was in a depression and the gold standard had been abandoned. But they hesitated to use it, a decision documented and lamented by monetary historians from Milton Friedman to Ben Bernanke (the current chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve). Since 2008, by contrast, central bankers have been determined to prove that they understand history's lessons. Appearing on Capitol Hill shortly after the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in 2008, Bernanke himself informed Barney Frank, then chair of the House Financial Services Committee, that the Federal Reserve would stabilize the insurer AIG at a cost of more than $80 billion. "Do you have $80 billion?" Frank asked. "We have $800 billion," Bernanke responded. In fact, by December 2008, the Fed had extended fully $1.5 trillion in emergency financing to markets, dwarfing the $700 billion bailout fund authorized by Congress through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Central banks on the other side of the Atlantic have acted with equal resolve.
For much of 2011, Europe's political leadership bickered about the details of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), a TARP-like bailout fund with an intended firepower of 440 billion euros. Then, one day last December, the European Central Bank provided 489 billion euros to the continent's ailing banks, and in February 2012, it repeated this stunt, effectively conjuring the equivalent of two EFSFs out of thin air through the magic of the printing press. Since the start of 2007, the ECB has purchased financial assets totaling 1.7 trillion euros, expanding its portfolio from 13 percent to over 30 percent of the eurozone's GDP. That means that the ECB has printed enough money to increase its paper wealth by an amount exceeding the value of eight years of Greek output.
This superman act has, at least as of this writing, saved the euro system from breaking up. Without the central bank's extraordinary support, private banks across the eurozone would have struggled to raise money and would have collapsed. Private firms, unable to take out bank loans, would also have gone under. The debtor countries would not have been able to rely on banks to purchase their government bonds and thus would have defaulted, in turn devastating the private banks that already held their bonds. The ECB's printing of money duly improved sentiment in the market. The interest rate on Italy's ten-year bonds, for example, tumbled, from around seven percent to about 5.5 percent, although it has since risen.
The ECB will eventually use up its room for maneuver. Some observers fear that the sheer volume of freshly minted euros is bound to lead to serious inflation, either when money begins to circulate faster or when the mere prospect of that event creates self-fulfilling inflationary expectations. But the best bet is that, with growth flat and unemployment over ten percent, the threat of inflation spiking across the continent is remote: with plenty of spare capacity on hand, any rise in demand will be met with increases in supply rather than with higher prices. For the foreseeable future, therefore, the ECB can keep on printing money to prop up banks. It can expand its modest direct purchases of government securities to ensure that finance ministries can raise money at less than punitive interest rates. It could even extend its support to nonfinancial firms, for example, by announcing that it stands ready to hold loans to small businesses on its own balance sheet. Most obviously, the ECB can help manage the crisis by keeping short-term interest rates low.
Increasing the money supply is sometimes dismissed as a mere palliative. But in addition to propping up banks, businesses, and governments, easy money can facilitate structural adjustment. If the ECB prints enough money to hit its target of two percent inflation across the continent, this is likely to mean zero inflation in the crisis countries, where unemployment is high, and three to four percent inflation in Europe's strong economies, where workers are confident enough to demand wage increases. By delivering on its inflation target, in other words, the ECB can help Italy and Spain compete against Germany and the Netherlands, gradually eroding the gap in labor costs that lies at the heart of Europe's troubles. At the same time, a determined and sustained period of monetary easing would probably weaken the euro. That would boost the competitiveness of the crisis economies against the rest of the
world, further increasing the odds of an export-led recovery.
In short, the ECB has real power. It can avert a market meltdown and at the same time gradually make the periphery more competitive. But for the ECB to deliver on its potential, Germany must resolve not to get in the way.
It must allow for an expansion of the ECB's innovative rescue measures and accept German inflation of three to four percent.
Over the past year, unfortunately, German financial leaders have sent mixed signals. The big question of 1992 – how far would Germany go for the sake of European solidarity? -- has not been clearly answered. And so Europe's future remains cloudy.
THE PATH OUT
Germany's leaders are correct that the countries in crisis must earn their own recoveries; the ECB cannot save them on its own. In particular, they must improve the administration of public finances, cracking down on tax evasion and wasteful spending, and remove product and labor-market regulations that undermine competitiveness. But these reforms tend to pay off in the long term. In the short term, slashing budgets will shrink demand and quell growth, while some labor-market reforms that make it easier to fire workers may initially drive up unemployment, undermine consumer confidence, and reduce growth further. The most urgent complements to the ECB's response therefore lie elsewhere -- and they demand initiative from Germany. Germany first needs to recalibrate its attitude toward public finances in the periphery. Thus far, the German strategy has emphasized deficit reduction, on the theory that countries that borrow less will accumulate less debt in the long run. But because deficit reduction keeps an economy from growing, it may defeat its own purpose.
Over the past year, the eurozone has indeed cut deficits sharply, but the debt-to-GDP ratio has worsened. Germany needs to accept that aggressive austerity programs are neither politically sustainable nor economically wise. To get its debt under control, a country must attack its debt stock directly.
If Europe's leaders had mounted a forceful response earlier in the crisis, they could have imposed a meaningful debt reduction on private creditors across the continent. But by now, most private creditors have sold out, transferring their debt to the International Monetary Fund, the ECB, and other official creditors. (To be sure, private European banks hold large portfolios of European government bonds. But since the public sector stands ready to bail out these banks, they are not true private creditors.) Last year's restructuring of Greece's debt illustrated the problem. Almost two years into the Greek crisis, the country's private creditors were forced to accept a reduction of about 65 percent in the value of their claims. But at that point, most private creditors had already shed their government debt, so the resulting debt relief for Greece was far short of what the country needed to fix its finances.
Given that governments in the surplus countries and multilateral lenders have become significant creditors to the crisis countries, debt relief has to involve leniency on their part. This is unlikely to take the form of an explicit reduction in debt claims: the credibility of the International Monetary Fund and the ECB would suffer too much from an admission that their loans can be defaulted on. Nor is it likely to involve taxpayers in Europe's core explicitly paying off debts owed by the periphery: that would be politically explosive. The most plausible route to debt reduction is to create a eurozone bond, so that part of the debt of the crisis countries can be replaced by debt issued by the whole region. The German government's economic advisers have put forward a plan that would achieve this goal; now, the government needs to embrace it.
In addition to tackling governments' debt overhangs, Europe's leaders need to shore up the continent's banking system, which has been plagued by a surfeit of bad loans and, until recently at least, a deficit of honesty about them. Until the banks confess that loans to unemployed homeowners or ailing businesses won't be repaid on time, and until they set aside capital to cover their losses, their unacknowledged frailty will inhibit their lending: too few individuals and businesses will be able to borrow money, and growth will remain anemic. Moreover, the banks' return to health is a precondition for restoring confidence in the market, since the possibility of costly bank failures casts a shadow over the crisis countries. For the moment, the ECB's generous financing has guaranteed the banks' liquidity, inoculating them against the lending strike they have suffered in the private bond markets. But if millions of depositors begin to desert the banks at once, the ECB's liquidity may not be enough, and no amount of liquidity can address the banks' solvency. Unless banks keep more capital on hand, they risk collapse. Private investors are unlikely to provide these funds, and the governments of the crisis countries are too stretched to do the job alone. Some of the money will therefore have to come from stronger European governments.
GERMANY'S CHOICE
In 1992, Germany prioritized managing its own economy over supporting European integration. It then seemed to show remorse and came around to supporting the creation of a common European currency. Despite the clear risks in binding disparate economies to a single monetary policy, the political drive to unite Europe won out. "The history of the European monetary unification is characterized by slow, but steady, progress in the face of constant skepticism and predictions of catastrophes," Otmar Issing, a German member of the ECB's executive board, proclaimed in 2001.
"The launch of the single monetary policy was a resounding success."
Yet despite Issing's triumphalism, Germany today seems confused about which way it wants to go. The weight of blood and history argues in favor of keeping Europe together, and Germany's industrial captains understand that their success as exporters would be choked off by a return to a strong national currency. At the same time, however, Germany's leaders resist even modest inflation and are understandably wary of backing up other countries' debt or rescuing their banking systems. Germany is of course free to choose whichever path it wants. But if it replays 1992, the "resounding success" of the euro will go down in history as a resounding failure.
Source: Copyright © 2002-2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Idiomas en extinción
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Un arca de Noé para los idiomas en extinción
Fiel a su misión corporativa de organizar la información mundial y hacerla universalmente accesible y útil, Google acaba de lanzar "Proyecto de Lenguas en Peligro de Extinción", un sitio Web diseñado para facilitar la preservación de las lenguas en peligro de extinción.
POR Andrés Hax
Los expertos calculan que en 2100 solo se hablará el 50% de las lenguas que siguen vivas en la actualidad.
Vivimos en un tiempo de extinciones. Un reciente informe de la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza presentada en la Cumbre de Río informó que casi un tercio de las especies de nuestro planeta está en riesgo de extinción. Esté fenómeno se expande también al campo de las lenguas humanas. Según la UNESCO, entre los 6000 idiomas que se hablan hoy sobre la superficie de la tierra, el 50% no sobrevivirá hacia el fin del siglo.
El mundo, entonces, es como una casa en llamas. Lo menos que podemos hacer es salvar algunas cosas del cataclismo. Ahí es cuando entra Google con un impresionante nuevo proyecto llamado El Proyecto de lenguas en peligro de extinción que se lanzó mundialmente en colaboración con la Alianza para la diversidad lingüística.
El Proyecto Lenguas en Peligro es un espacio online diseñado para hablantes de lenguas en peligro y para quienes tengan un fuerte compromiso con su preservación. La clave del proyecto y del sitio es su rigor académico y también su carácter participativo: tiene la opción de subir videos, audios, documentos y compartir conocimiento y experiencias; y los contenidos serán moderados por editores internos para garantizar la calidad de las muestras.
De las lenguas que se hablan en Argentina, forman parte de este proyecto las siguientes: Teushen, Quechua, Ñandeva, Mocoví, Vilela, Tehuelche, Ona, Pilagá, Wichí, Chorote y Nivaclé, las cuales reflejan las conclusiones preliminares del Proyecto Catálogo de Lengas en Peligro, de la Universidad de Hawai en Manoa y del Instituto de la Lengua y las Tecnologías de la Información de la Universidad de Eastern Michigan.
"La documentación de más de 3.000 lenguas que están al borde de la extinción es un paso importante para preservar la diversidad cultural, honrar la sabiduría de nuestros ancianos y dar poder a los jóvenes", argumentó Google. "La tecnología puede apoyar estos esfuerzos para ayudar a la gente a crear grabaciones de buena calidad de sus mayores, a menudo los últimos hablantes de su lengua, contactar con comunidades dispares en las redes sociales, y facilitar el aprendizaje de idiomas", agregó.
A futuro, Google informó que transferirá la gestión del sitio a un laboratorio universitario, el Instituto de Tecnología e Información de Lenguas de la Universidad del Este de Michigan y al Consejo cultural de los pueblos originarios. Además, informó que el proyecto recibió fondos de su división filantrópica, Google.org, e invitó a otras organizaciones a sumarse al esfuerzo.
Fuente: www.revistaenie.clarin.com
Un arca de Noé para los idiomas en extinción
Fiel a su misión corporativa de organizar la información mundial y hacerla universalmente accesible y útil, Google acaba de lanzar "Proyecto de Lenguas en Peligro de Extinción", un sitio Web diseñado para facilitar la preservación de las lenguas en peligro de extinción.
POR Andrés Hax
Los expertos calculan que en 2100 solo se hablará el 50% de las lenguas que siguen vivas en la actualidad.
Vivimos en un tiempo de extinciones. Un reciente informe de la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza presentada en la Cumbre de Río informó que casi un tercio de las especies de nuestro planeta está en riesgo de extinción. Esté fenómeno se expande también al campo de las lenguas humanas. Según la UNESCO, entre los 6000 idiomas que se hablan hoy sobre la superficie de la tierra, el 50% no sobrevivirá hacia el fin del siglo.
El mundo, entonces, es como una casa en llamas. Lo menos que podemos hacer es salvar algunas cosas del cataclismo. Ahí es cuando entra Google con un impresionante nuevo proyecto llamado El Proyecto de lenguas en peligro de extinción que se lanzó mundialmente en colaboración con la Alianza para la diversidad lingüística.
El Proyecto Lenguas en Peligro es un espacio online diseñado para hablantes de lenguas en peligro y para quienes tengan un fuerte compromiso con su preservación. La clave del proyecto y del sitio es su rigor académico y también su carácter participativo: tiene la opción de subir videos, audios, documentos y compartir conocimiento y experiencias; y los contenidos serán moderados por editores internos para garantizar la calidad de las muestras.
De las lenguas que se hablan en Argentina, forman parte de este proyecto las siguientes: Teushen, Quechua, Ñandeva, Mocoví, Vilela, Tehuelche, Ona, Pilagá, Wichí, Chorote y Nivaclé, las cuales reflejan las conclusiones preliminares del Proyecto Catálogo de Lengas en Peligro, de la Universidad de Hawai en Manoa y del Instituto de la Lengua y las Tecnologías de la Información de la Universidad de Eastern Michigan.
"La documentación de más de 3.000 lenguas que están al borde de la extinción es un paso importante para preservar la diversidad cultural, honrar la sabiduría de nuestros ancianos y dar poder a los jóvenes", argumentó Google. "La tecnología puede apoyar estos esfuerzos para ayudar a la gente a crear grabaciones de buena calidad de sus mayores, a menudo los últimos hablantes de su lengua, contactar con comunidades dispares en las redes sociales, y facilitar el aprendizaje de idiomas", agregó.
A futuro, Google informó que transferirá la gestión del sitio a un laboratorio universitario, el Instituto de Tecnología e Información de Lenguas de la Universidad del Este de Michigan y al Consejo cultural de los pueblos originarios. Además, informó que el proyecto recibió fondos de su división filantrópica, Google.org, e invitó a otras organizaciones a sumarse al esfuerzo.
Fuente: www.revistaenie.clarin.com
Emprendedores argentinos: Cazadores de ideas
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Emprendedores argentinos: Cazadores de ideas
Son empresarios exitosos y empezaron por su cuenta. Ahora te cuentan como hicieron para convertir su sueño en realidad
Florencia Gagliardi
Especial para ConexiónBrando
Desde que tenía seis años, Andy Freire supo que quería montar su propio negocio, y ni bien pudo, lo hizo. No fue una utopía ni un deseo pasajero. A los 24 años, sin temor al fracaso y guiado por la convicción de que lo iba a lograr, renunció a un puesto en Procter&Gamble, y lanzó junto a Santiago Bilinkis, una de las mayores empresas de venta de artículos de oficina por Internet: OfficeNet.
Quien apostó al proyecto casi a ciegas fue el padre de una amiga de una ex novia, dueño de una importante empresa de botellones de agua, que le facilitó medio millón de dólares para comenzar a rodar la iniciativa. "Lo fui a ver diciéndole que quería entender cómo era ser empresario y él lo que me dijo fue que tenía que pensar una vieja idea y ejecutarla mejor que los demás", cuenta Freire en una charla distendida de bar.
Andy es hijo de una profesora de inglés y de un médico traumatólogo. De esas raíces que poco y nada tienen que ver con el mundo emprendedor, surgieron él y su pasión por innovar y crear. Hoy, a los 40 años y con una vasta trayectoria que incluye experiencias como OfficeNet, Axialent y la más reciente Restorando, está convencido de que en Argentina abundan las oportunidades y las ideas por capturar.
Para Freire la pasión, la determinación y la inteligencia emocional son algunas de las capacidades que deben guiar a todo aquel entusiasta dispuesto a correr el riesgo de crear un proyecto nuevo. "La diferencia entre los buenos emprendedores y los malos no es la cantidad de desafíos que emprenden sino la capacidad de responder a esos desafíos de una manera distinta", señala el empresario, que además revela su intención de armar en el transcurso de este año una compañía de e-commerce en el país, junto a su mano derecha Santiago Bilinkis.
"El verdadero secreto de un buen emprendedor es seguir su pasión, no salir a ganar plata. Ganar plata es la consecuencia inevitable de hacer las cosas bien y de abocar su pasión en algo que termine cambiándole la vida a la gente", dice, y esboza la idea de que el fracaso de los que no llegan a concretar sus proyectos tal vez sea consecuencia de emprender por necesidad y no por convicción.
Hace diez años atrás nadie hablaba de emprendedores, ni de startups, ni de buenas ideas llevadas a la práctica, pero hoy, después de varias experiencias exitosas, esto cambió, y la cultura de los emprendedores está creciendo a pasos agigantados. Prueba de ello es que la Argentina se ubica como uno los 20 países con más emprendedores a escala mundial. "Hoy en día el mundo está abierto a que cualquier persona pueda capturarlo. La tecnología lo que hizo fue ecualizar y romper las barreras para que eso pase", resalta Freire. En este sentido, su deseo es dejar de ser CEO de compañías para ayudar a promover el emprendedorismo en el país.
La creatividad, el talento y la perseverancia, son tres cualidades que no pueden escasear si se quiere llegar a la meta. Dentro del universo de los que se animaron y creyeron en su proyecto está Tomás Pando, creador junto con Francisco Piasentini y Francisco Murray, de las alpargatas Paez Shoes. Pando tiene 30 años y es licenciado de administración de empresas. Es de Corrientes y mientras toma un café cuenta que su pasión por innovar viene de familia, con un bisabuelo que instaló la industria del tabaco en Goya.
En el 2004, todavía estudiante, armó con sus hermanos y un conocido su primer emprendimiento relacionado al turismo de caza y pesca. El proyecto no prosperó, pero la experiencia sirvió de base para lo que en un futuro sería Paez. Se recibió y a su regreso de un viaje por Europa se echó a probar suerte. "Tenía 25 años, había mucho por explorar y el costo de fracasar era bajo", comenta al tiempo que confiesa que fue uno de los libros de Freire, Pasión por emprender, su motivo de inspiración. "Me hizo entender que ese tipo de vida era la que yo quería seguir", dice.
Después de investigar y tomar contacto con varios emprendedores, un día de 2007, nació la idea de darle vida a algo que en Argentina estaba olvidado: las alpargatas. Así fue como, después de hablar con Pancho Murray, su compañero de colegio y facultad, invirtieron 20.000 pesos de base y arrancaron con las Paez Shoes. Compraron la tela, la mandaron a un fabricante y armaron el sitio. Los resultados fueron óptimos y en muy poco tiempo empezaron a llegar pedidos desde Italia, España, Colombia y Chile, entre otros países.
Hoy en día, con un equipo de casi 50 personas y después de haber pasado por altas y bajas, el negocio se diversificó y las Paez, no sólo se fabrican a nivel local en Argentina y Chile, sino también desde hace un año se elaboran en Asia, desde donde se distribuyen a todo el mundo. Uno de los próximos objetivos a concretar es poner un pie firme en Brasil, y continuar creciendo. "Quiero crear una empresa lo más grande posible, que dé la mayor cantidad de trabajo y que genere el mayor impacto en la Argentina: esa es mi misión", explica Pando, mientras le brillan los ojos de entusiasmo. Para él no hay una receta exacta para lanzarse a emprender. "Es la pasión de uno por hacer algo y creer en su proyecto", dice, y a ello agrega que el equipo y la perseverancia son fundamentales para tener éxito.
Pablo Orlando, creador de Good People, es otro ejemplo de que querer es poder. Su voz sedosa llega al teléfono desde una oficina ubicada en San Francisco, en California, tierra de los deportes extremos. Cuenta que el proyecto empezó en el 2008 armando tablas de skate y longboard en un garaje como hobby y al ver que había una oportunidad de negocio, con su socio Daniel Jejcic, decidieron montar una página de Internet.
Con el foro surgió la comunidad y con la comunidad los encuentros, y así nació Good People, una empresa de tecnología inmersa en los deportes extremos. "En ese momento en la Argentina no estaba bien integrada la comunidad de los deportes extremos y nosotros lentamente a través de página web empezamos a juntar a la gente y a organizar eventos", cuenta Pablo, que desde principio de año reside en San Francisco, con el objetivo de lanzar el sitio a nivel mundial en un cálculo aproximado de tres meses.
Empezaron con sus ahorros, luego hicieron una ronda de inversión entre familiares y amigos, y más tarde otra con inversores ángeles argentinos. Hoy por hoy están con una serie A en Silicon Valley, la cuna del Social Media y las Community Platforms, es decir de las plataformas que nuclean a los deportes extremos, lo cual en términos de crecimiento significa un gran logro. "Consideramos que somos los deportes extremos del futuro y queremos vincular todo lo que pasa offline en el mundo online", destaca Pablo.
Hace 2 meses fueron aceptados en RocketSpace, una de las aceleradoras más importantes de San Francisco. Además ganaron varios premios a nivel estatal, como el Buenos Aires Emprende (2010), o la Competencia NAVES (2011). Sin embargo, el gran salto fue haberse convertido en emprendedores Endeavor. "Eso a nivel internacional es un cambio radical: ser emprendedor Endeavor es lo más grande a lo que un emprendedor puede aspirar", admite este joven de 28 años.
Habla de la perseverancia, de la preparación y de la motivación. También señala la importancia de armarse un buen equipo, una red de mentores y por sobre todo de escuchar la opinión de los clientes. Todos arriban a una misma conclusión, y es que emprender, innovar y crear son parte de un mismo camino que se construye con espíritu de aprendiz, con tenacidad y constancia, se trata de una maratón intensa a la que se llega con esfuerzo y pasión y, como bien reflexiona Andy Freire, "hay que estar preparado para hacerlo".
Fuente: www.conexionbrando.com
Emprendedores argentinos: Cazadores de ideas
Son empresarios exitosos y empezaron por su cuenta. Ahora te cuentan como hicieron para convertir su sueño en realidad
Florencia Gagliardi
Especial para ConexiónBrando
Desde que tenía seis años, Andy Freire supo que quería montar su propio negocio, y ni bien pudo, lo hizo. No fue una utopía ni un deseo pasajero. A los 24 años, sin temor al fracaso y guiado por la convicción de que lo iba a lograr, renunció a un puesto en Procter&Gamble, y lanzó junto a Santiago Bilinkis, una de las mayores empresas de venta de artículos de oficina por Internet: OfficeNet.
Quien apostó al proyecto casi a ciegas fue el padre de una amiga de una ex novia, dueño de una importante empresa de botellones de agua, que le facilitó medio millón de dólares para comenzar a rodar la iniciativa. "Lo fui a ver diciéndole que quería entender cómo era ser empresario y él lo que me dijo fue que tenía que pensar una vieja idea y ejecutarla mejor que los demás", cuenta Freire en una charla distendida de bar.
Andy es hijo de una profesora de inglés y de un médico traumatólogo. De esas raíces que poco y nada tienen que ver con el mundo emprendedor, surgieron él y su pasión por innovar y crear. Hoy, a los 40 años y con una vasta trayectoria que incluye experiencias como OfficeNet, Axialent y la más reciente Restorando, está convencido de que en Argentina abundan las oportunidades y las ideas por capturar.
Para Freire la pasión, la determinación y la inteligencia emocional son algunas de las capacidades que deben guiar a todo aquel entusiasta dispuesto a correr el riesgo de crear un proyecto nuevo. "La diferencia entre los buenos emprendedores y los malos no es la cantidad de desafíos que emprenden sino la capacidad de responder a esos desafíos de una manera distinta", señala el empresario, que además revela su intención de armar en el transcurso de este año una compañía de e-commerce en el país, junto a su mano derecha Santiago Bilinkis.
"El verdadero secreto de un buen emprendedor es seguir su pasión, no salir a ganar plata. Ganar plata es la consecuencia inevitable de hacer las cosas bien y de abocar su pasión en algo que termine cambiándole la vida a la gente", dice, y esboza la idea de que el fracaso de los que no llegan a concretar sus proyectos tal vez sea consecuencia de emprender por necesidad y no por convicción.
Hace diez años atrás nadie hablaba de emprendedores, ni de startups, ni de buenas ideas llevadas a la práctica, pero hoy, después de varias experiencias exitosas, esto cambió, y la cultura de los emprendedores está creciendo a pasos agigantados. Prueba de ello es que la Argentina se ubica como uno los 20 países con más emprendedores a escala mundial. "Hoy en día el mundo está abierto a que cualquier persona pueda capturarlo. La tecnología lo que hizo fue ecualizar y romper las barreras para que eso pase", resalta Freire. En este sentido, su deseo es dejar de ser CEO de compañías para ayudar a promover el emprendedorismo en el país.
La creatividad, el talento y la perseverancia, son tres cualidades que no pueden escasear si se quiere llegar a la meta. Dentro del universo de los que se animaron y creyeron en su proyecto está Tomás Pando, creador junto con Francisco Piasentini y Francisco Murray, de las alpargatas Paez Shoes. Pando tiene 30 años y es licenciado de administración de empresas. Es de Corrientes y mientras toma un café cuenta que su pasión por innovar viene de familia, con un bisabuelo que instaló la industria del tabaco en Goya.
En el 2004, todavía estudiante, armó con sus hermanos y un conocido su primer emprendimiento relacionado al turismo de caza y pesca. El proyecto no prosperó, pero la experiencia sirvió de base para lo que en un futuro sería Paez. Se recibió y a su regreso de un viaje por Europa se echó a probar suerte. "Tenía 25 años, había mucho por explorar y el costo de fracasar era bajo", comenta al tiempo que confiesa que fue uno de los libros de Freire, Pasión por emprender, su motivo de inspiración. "Me hizo entender que ese tipo de vida era la que yo quería seguir", dice.
Después de investigar y tomar contacto con varios emprendedores, un día de 2007, nació la idea de darle vida a algo que en Argentina estaba olvidado: las alpargatas. Así fue como, después de hablar con Pancho Murray, su compañero de colegio y facultad, invirtieron 20.000 pesos de base y arrancaron con las Paez Shoes. Compraron la tela, la mandaron a un fabricante y armaron el sitio. Los resultados fueron óptimos y en muy poco tiempo empezaron a llegar pedidos desde Italia, España, Colombia y Chile, entre otros países.
Hoy en día, con un equipo de casi 50 personas y después de haber pasado por altas y bajas, el negocio se diversificó y las Paez, no sólo se fabrican a nivel local en Argentina y Chile, sino también desde hace un año se elaboran en Asia, desde donde se distribuyen a todo el mundo. Uno de los próximos objetivos a concretar es poner un pie firme en Brasil, y continuar creciendo. "Quiero crear una empresa lo más grande posible, que dé la mayor cantidad de trabajo y que genere el mayor impacto en la Argentina: esa es mi misión", explica Pando, mientras le brillan los ojos de entusiasmo. Para él no hay una receta exacta para lanzarse a emprender. "Es la pasión de uno por hacer algo y creer en su proyecto", dice, y a ello agrega que el equipo y la perseverancia son fundamentales para tener éxito.
Pablo Orlando, creador de Good People, es otro ejemplo de que querer es poder. Su voz sedosa llega al teléfono desde una oficina ubicada en San Francisco, en California, tierra de los deportes extremos. Cuenta que el proyecto empezó en el 2008 armando tablas de skate y longboard en un garaje como hobby y al ver que había una oportunidad de negocio, con su socio Daniel Jejcic, decidieron montar una página de Internet.
Con el foro surgió la comunidad y con la comunidad los encuentros, y así nació Good People, una empresa de tecnología inmersa en los deportes extremos. "En ese momento en la Argentina no estaba bien integrada la comunidad de los deportes extremos y nosotros lentamente a través de página web empezamos a juntar a la gente y a organizar eventos", cuenta Pablo, que desde principio de año reside en San Francisco, con el objetivo de lanzar el sitio a nivel mundial en un cálculo aproximado de tres meses.
Empezaron con sus ahorros, luego hicieron una ronda de inversión entre familiares y amigos, y más tarde otra con inversores ángeles argentinos. Hoy por hoy están con una serie A en Silicon Valley, la cuna del Social Media y las Community Platforms, es decir de las plataformas que nuclean a los deportes extremos, lo cual en términos de crecimiento significa un gran logro. "Consideramos que somos los deportes extremos del futuro y queremos vincular todo lo que pasa offline en el mundo online", destaca Pablo.
Hace 2 meses fueron aceptados en RocketSpace, una de las aceleradoras más importantes de San Francisco. Además ganaron varios premios a nivel estatal, como el Buenos Aires Emprende (2010), o la Competencia NAVES (2011). Sin embargo, el gran salto fue haberse convertido en emprendedores Endeavor. "Eso a nivel internacional es un cambio radical: ser emprendedor Endeavor es lo más grande a lo que un emprendedor puede aspirar", admite este joven de 28 años.
Habla de la perseverancia, de la preparación y de la motivación. También señala la importancia de armarse un buen equipo, una red de mentores y por sobre todo de escuchar la opinión de los clientes. Todos arriban a una misma conclusión, y es que emprender, innovar y crear son parte de un mismo camino que se construye con espíritu de aprendiz, con tenacidad y constancia, se trata de una maratón intensa a la que se llega con esfuerzo y pasión y, como bien reflexiona Andy Freire, "hay que estar preparado para hacerlo".
Fuente: www.conexionbrando.com
Repensar la escuela media
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Repensar la escuela media
El proceso de deterioro del nivel secundario requerirá un renovado compromiso de autoridades, docentes y padres
Replantear la escolaridad media de acuerdo con las actuales demandas supone encarar la compleja realidad de hoy, con sus vacíos y desigualdades, que denuncian severas fallas del sistema educativo que se vienen acentuando desde hace décadas.
La responsabilidad de esta declinación concierne principalmente al Estado nacional, pero ello no exime a los Estados provinciales, aunque haya que señalar una vez más que el federalismo educativo imperante en la práctica está condicionado a las decisiones políticas y financieras del poder central. Por otra parte, debe remarcarse la función de la familia como primer agente natural de la educación de los hijos.
Si bien los crecientes problemas de desorganización doméstica y carencia de recursos económicos, típicos efectos de los avances de una pobreza estructural, afectaron gravemente el deber formador de los padres, esto no debiera ser excusa para desentenderse de este deber y aligerar su responsabilidad. Debería servir, en cambio, para reflexionar sobre lo contrario, esto es, el rol protagónico que hoy deben jugar no sólo preocupándose de la educación media de sus hijos, sino ocupándose activamente y demandando calidad educativa, resultados y esfuerzo.
De otra forma, si la familia decae en su cometido, quienes padecen las consecuencias serán los hijos de una sociedad argentina que verá comprometido su porvenir como nación. Por lo tanto, en un balance crítico de nuestra enseñanza secundaria, desde mediados del siglo XX hasta hoy, los problemas se han agudizado, aunque corresponda contar también aciertos parciales, como lo ha sido la ley de financiamiento educativo. De modo breve, yendo a cuestiones centrales que reclaman otras propuestas de solución, se pueden citar:
El alto porcentaje de deserción en la escuela media. Entre la matriculación al final del nivel primario y al término del secundario la diferencia es del 48%.
El promedio de rendimientos con bajas calificaciones que, en Matemática, afecta al 44,7% en el orden nacional, según el Ministerio de Educación de la Nación.
Los jóvenes que no trabajan y estudian sin rezagos: 3.017.349; que estudian con rezago: 749.002.
Los jóvenes que no trabajan ni estudian: 992.680; son pobres: 438.703, son indigentes: 174.418, según la Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, Indec 2011
Los bajos rendimientos, la repitencia y la deserción que denotan un descenso de calidad confirmado por las pruebas de evaluación internacional PISA, pues nuestro país descendió notoriamente en el ranking elaborado en la primera década de este siglo. Los alumnos de 15 años encontraron las mayores dificultades para resolver cálculos matemáticos y de comprensión de textos.
Este conjunto de elocuentes datos se une a otros, relativos a las desigualdades existentes entre las jurisdicciones educativas en cuanto a recursos materiales y financieros, cuyas limitaciones reducen las posibilidades de la escuela para proveer materiales y medios de estudio. Tampoco se han generalizado servicios indispensables, como los de orientación escolar, vocacional y ocupacional.
Hay mucho por hacer y rehacer en nuestra escuela media a fin de motivar al alumno adolescente en el proceso de aprender y estudiar. Sobre todo, cuando recordamos que luego, de no afianzarse los estudios secundarios, sus consecuencias se advierten duramente en el nivel superior. Un reciente informe, realizado por QS World University, señaló que ninguna universidad argentina figuraba entre las diez primeras en América latina -la de San Pablo fue considerada, otra vez, la mejor, y la UBA descendió del octavo al undécimo puesto- y las que figuraban habían retrocedido algunos puestos. Otra consecuencia, advertida por los expertos argentinos en educación, es que cada vez egresan menos estudiantes de nuestras universidades.
Este bosquejo de una crisis educativa que tanto nos duele convoca a todos los argentinos, sean autoridades, docentes, padres y ciudadanos, a renovar el compromiso y deberes con la escuela media si se aspira seriamente a revertir ese proceso de deterioro.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Repensar la escuela media
El proceso de deterioro del nivel secundario requerirá un renovado compromiso de autoridades, docentes y padres
Replantear la escolaridad media de acuerdo con las actuales demandas supone encarar la compleja realidad de hoy, con sus vacíos y desigualdades, que denuncian severas fallas del sistema educativo que se vienen acentuando desde hace décadas.
La responsabilidad de esta declinación concierne principalmente al Estado nacional, pero ello no exime a los Estados provinciales, aunque haya que señalar una vez más que el federalismo educativo imperante en la práctica está condicionado a las decisiones políticas y financieras del poder central. Por otra parte, debe remarcarse la función de la familia como primer agente natural de la educación de los hijos.
Si bien los crecientes problemas de desorganización doméstica y carencia de recursos económicos, típicos efectos de los avances de una pobreza estructural, afectaron gravemente el deber formador de los padres, esto no debiera ser excusa para desentenderse de este deber y aligerar su responsabilidad. Debería servir, en cambio, para reflexionar sobre lo contrario, esto es, el rol protagónico que hoy deben jugar no sólo preocupándose de la educación media de sus hijos, sino ocupándose activamente y demandando calidad educativa, resultados y esfuerzo.
De otra forma, si la familia decae en su cometido, quienes padecen las consecuencias serán los hijos de una sociedad argentina que verá comprometido su porvenir como nación. Por lo tanto, en un balance crítico de nuestra enseñanza secundaria, desde mediados del siglo XX hasta hoy, los problemas se han agudizado, aunque corresponda contar también aciertos parciales, como lo ha sido la ley de financiamiento educativo. De modo breve, yendo a cuestiones centrales que reclaman otras propuestas de solución, se pueden citar:
El alto porcentaje de deserción en la escuela media. Entre la matriculación al final del nivel primario y al término del secundario la diferencia es del 48%.
El promedio de rendimientos con bajas calificaciones que, en Matemática, afecta al 44,7% en el orden nacional, según el Ministerio de Educación de la Nación.
Los jóvenes que no trabajan y estudian sin rezagos: 3.017.349; que estudian con rezago: 749.002.
Los jóvenes que no trabajan ni estudian: 992.680; son pobres: 438.703, son indigentes: 174.418, según la Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, Indec 2011
Los bajos rendimientos, la repitencia y la deserción que denotan un descenso de calidad confirmado por las pruebas de evaluación internacional PISA, pues nuestro país descendió notoriamente en el ranking elaborado en la primera década de este siglo. Los alumnos de 15 años encontraron las mayores dificultades para resolver cálculos matemáticos y de comprensión de textos.
Este conjunto de elocuentes datos se une a otros, relativos a las desigualdades existentes entre las jurisdicciones educativas en cuanto a recursos materiales y financieros, cuyas limitaciones reducen las posibilidades de la escuela para proveer materiales y medios de estudio. Tampoco se han generalizado servicios indispensables, como los de orientación escolar, vocacional y ocupacional.
Hay mucho por hacer y rehacer en nuestra escuela media a fin de motivar al alumno adolescente en el proceso de aprender y estudiar. Sobre todo, cuando recordamos que luego, de no afianzarse los estudios secundarios, sus consecuencias se advierten duramente en el nivel superior. Un reciente informe, realizado por QS World University, señaló que ninguna universidad argentina figuraba entre las diez primeras en América latina -la de San Pablo fue considerada, otra vez, la mejor, y la UBA descendió del octavo al undécimo puesto- y las que figuraban habían retrocedido algunos puestos. Otra consecuencia, advertida por los expertos argentinos en educación, es que cada vez egresan menos estudiantes de nuestras universidades.
Este bosquejo de una crisis educativa que tanto nos duele convoca a todos los argentinos, sean autoridades, docentes, padres y ciudadanos, a renovar el compromiso y deberes con la escuela media si se aspira seriamente a revertir ese proceso de deterioro.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
No al dominio .patagonia
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
No al dominio .patagonia: defender lo que es nuestro también en Internet
Por Lucas Vall | Para LA NACION
La Icann, organismo encargado de asignar los nombres de dominio de los sitios de Internet, lanzó un programa para permitir nuevas extensiones web. Son, por ejemplo: .com, .ar o .cl. Hasta el lanzamiento de este programa, las extensiones estaban limitadas a pocas genéricas (por ejemplo, .com, .net, .org) y a las extensiones para países (.ar, .cl, .br o .jp).
Gracias a este programa, se ha dado a las empresas la posibilidad de aplicar para muchas otras extensiones. Esto no es de por sí malo. De hecho, abre un nuevo mundo de posibilidades en Internet: .shop, .abogados, .app y muchas otras nuevas extensiones están por venir. También vendrán nuevas para las marcas que lo deseen: .google, .ford o .ibm. La lista de aplicaciones se puede ver esta aquí.
La Patagonia es nuestra, la Patagonia física, pero la Patagonia virtual estará en manos de una empresa, para siempre
Muchas nuevas extensiones tal vez no sean de su interés, o del mío, pero yo quiero concentrarme en una en particular: .patagonia. Esta nueva extensión ha sido propuesta por Patagonia, Inc, una empresa estadounidense de ropa que sin duda ha tomado su nombre del de nuestra región. Incluso uno de sus logos muestra una imagen de la Patagonia.
¿Por qué es esto relevante? Si a Patagonia, Inc le es otorgado el derecho de administrar la extensión .patagonia, la gente de la Patagonia nunca podrá registrar ese dominio.
En otras palabras, la Patagonia es nuestra, la Patagonia física, pero la Patagonia virtual estará en manos de una empresa, para siempre. Mucha gente pensará que esto no tiene importancia. Es justamente en esos momentos de debilidad que cedemos nuestros derechos. Para cuando la mayoría se dé cuenta, será muy tarde.
Que no se malinterprete, la empresa no es mala, y "patagonia" es una marca registrada de la empresa. La empresa no intenta ser diabólica, simplemente hace negocio: intenta tomar una parte de Internet antes que nadie, calladita.
Debemos actuar antes de que se reviertan los roles Internet
Pero la Patagonia es nuestra, y por encima de la marca Patagonia, está la región Patagonia. Debemos actuar antes de que se reviertan los roles Internet.
La realidad es que hay pocas posibilidades legales. La primera, sin embargo, es que Argentina y Chile, y sus representantes en Icann, tomen las medidas adecuadas, incluyendo un mensaje de alerta a Patagonia, Inc. El mensaje sería bien claro: "Patagonia" es el nombre de una región geográfica y los nombres geográficos tienen un peso importante (en especial sobre las marcas), más cuando la región es del tamaño e importancia de la Patagonia. Estamos encaminados en este respecto.
Otra alternativa, adicional, es objetar a la aplicación en público usando métodos desarrollados especialmente por la Icann para estos casos. Sin embargo, y aunque necesitamos más análisis, la empresa tiene suficientes argumentos para sustentar su aplicación ya que la extensión no tiene como objetivo la Patagonia (la región) sino la empresa.
Finalmente, y un recurso que no detiene la aplicación directamente (no es un recurso legal), pero que tiene impacto en las relaciones públicas de la empresa, es hacerle saber a la empresa que nosotros no estamos de acuerdo con que se adueñen de la Patagonia en Internet y que deben renunciar a sus intenciones. Para esto he creado un grupo en Facebook para sumar gente y mostrarle a la empresa que no soy solo yo sino que somos todos.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
No al dominio .patagonia: defender lo que es nuestro también en Internet
Por Lucas Vall | Para LA NACION
La Icann, organismo encargado de asignar los nombres de dominio de los sitios de Internet, lanzó un programa para permitir nuevas extensiones web. Son, por ejemplo: .com, .ar o .cl. Hasta el lanzamiento de este programa, las extensiones estaban limitadas a pocas genéricas (por ejemplo, .com, .net, .org) y a las extensiones para países (.ar, .cl, .br o .jp).
Gracias a este programa, se ha dado a las empresas la posibilidad de aplicar para muchas otras extensiones. Esto no es de por sí malo. De hecho, abre un nuevo mundo de posibilidades en Internet: .shop, .abogados, .app y muchas otras nuevas extensiones están por venir. También vendrán nuevas para las marcas que lo deseen: .google, .ford o .ibm. La lista de aplicaciones se puede ver esta aquí.
La Patagonia es nuestra, la Patagonia física, pero la Patagonia virtual estará en manos de una empresa, para siempre
Muchas nuevas extensiones tal vez no sean de su interés, o del mío, pero yo quiero concentrarme en una en particular: .patagonia. Esta nueva extensión ha sido propuesta por Patagonia, Inc, una empresa estadounidense de ropa que sin duda ha tomado su nombre del de nuestra región. Incluso uno de sus logos muestra una imagen de la Patagonia.
¿Por qué es esto relevante? Si a Patagonia, Inc le es otorgado el derecho de administrar la extensión .patagonia, la gente de la Patagonia nunca podrá registrar ese dominio.
En otras palabras, la Patagonia es nuestra, la Patagonia física, pero la Patagonia virtual estará en manos de una empresa, para siempre. Mucha gente pensará que esto no tiene importancia. Es justamente en esos momentos de debilidad que cedemos nuestros derechos. Para cuando la mayoría se dé cuenta, será muy tarde.
Que no se malinterprete, la empresa no es mala, y "patagonia" es una marca registrada de la empresa. La empresa no intenta ser diabólica, simplemente hace negocio: intenta tomar una parte de Internet antes que nadie, calladita.
Debemos actuar antes de que se reviertan los roles Internet
Pero la Patagonia es nuestra, y por encima de la marca Patagonia, está la región Patagonia. Debemos actuar antes de que se reviertan los roles Internet.
La realidad es que hay pocas posibilidades legales. La primera, sin embargo, es que Argentina y Chile, y sus representantes en Icann, tomen las medidas adecuadas, incluyendo un mensaje de alerta a Patagonia, Inc. El mensaje sería bien claro: "Patagonia" es el nombre de una región geográfica y los nombres geográficos tienen un peso importante (en especial sobre las marcas), más cuando la región es del tamaño e importancia de la Patagonia. Estamos encaminados en este respecto.
Otra alternativa, adicional, es objetar a la aplicación en público usando métodos desarrollados especialmente por la Icann para estos casos. Sin embargo, y aunque necesitamos más análisis, la empresa tiene suficientes argumentos para sustentar su aplicación ya que la extensión no tiene como objetivo la Patagonia (la región) sino la empresa.
Finalmente, y un recurso que no detiene la aplicación directamente (no es un recurso legal), pero que tiene impacto en las relaciones públicas de la empresa, es hacerle saber a la empresa que nosotros no estamos de acuerdo con que se adueñen de la Patagonia en Internet y que deben renunciar a sus intenciones. Para esto he creado un grupo en Facebook para sumar gente y mostrarle a la empresa que no soy solo yo sino que somos todos.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Pricing Lessons From the London Olympics
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Pricing Lessons From the London Olympics
by Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville | June 19, 2012
The committee organizing the London 2012 Olympic Games faced an extraordinary business challenge: How to price 8 million tickets in a way that allows equitable access to 26 sporting events, meets revenue and attendance targets, and adheres to the explicit social objective of making the Olympiad "Everybody's Games."
To accomplish this, the committee took what we call a shared-value approach to pricing. Traditional pricing strategy is by definition antagonistic, but it needs to become a more socially conscious, collaborative exercise. Businesses should look beyond the dry mechanics of "running the numbers" — still relevant but no longer sufficient — and recognize that humanizing the way they generate revenue can open up opportunities to create additional value. That means viewing customers as partners in value creation — a collaboration that increases customers' engagement and taps their insights about the value they seek and how firms could deliver it. The result is benefits for firms and customers alike.
By studying the 2012 Games and the committee's multiyear pricing process, we determined five pricing principles that every business, whether it has a shared-value mission or not, could profitably adopt. Here are the five principles and how the organizing committee applied them:
Focus on relationships, not on transactions
The committee understood early on that it was in various relationships — with the British government, with the British public, with the International Olympic Committee, and so on — and that ticketing was the most visible aspect of those relationships. As one committee member put it, tickets account for 20% of the Games' revenue but when done wrong result in 80% of an organizer's headaches.
The solution was to value customers more than their money. First, the committee increased the number of pricing tiers for many sports, which kept some ticket prices low while still hitting revenue targets. Second, it offered a pay-your-age pricing plan for young customers and discounted tickets to those over 60. Third, for the opening ceremony it chose high and low price points — £20.12 and £2,012, respectively — whose symbolic rationale everyone understood. Finally, it instituted a strict policy of no free tickets, avoiding the public outrage free tickets had provoked at previous Olympics. To many, these actions said, "We are looking out for you."
Be proactive
Consider the committee's decision not to bundle tickets to a more popular sport (swimming, say) with those to a less popular sport (tae kwon do, for instance), a tactic sometimes used in previous Olympics to increase ticket sales and boost attendance at the less popular events. While bundling can increase revenues, it can also add costs for consumers and doesn't necessarily fill seats. Indeed, past experience with bundling suggested that many who purchased the bundle let the tickets to the secondary event go to waste.
To avoid this problem, the committee let the ticketing of every sport stand on its own, creating 26 different pricing plans detailing how tickets should be promoted and sold to the appropriate target markets. Interestingly, however, the committee did bundle public transportation into the ticket price, recognizing the opportunity to reduce traffic congestion in and around the venues. By pricing proactively in this way, the committee discouraged one type of behavior (not attending events) and encouraged another (using public transportation), benefiting both spectators and the Games.
Put a premium on flexibility
The committee had to price all events more than a year and a half in advance of the Games, before it had a clear understanding of demand. To manage the uncertainty, the committee increased the number of price tiers across events, as mentioned, but did not assign a fixed number of seats to each tier. It did, however, promise that someone paying more would have a better view of the event than someone paying less. In the spring of 2011, fans placed requests for tickets through an online ballot, thereby revealing how much they were willing to pay for various events. This allowed the committee to gauge demand at each price point and reallocate some seats accordingly. By not predetermining the number of seats in each tier, the committee had the flexibility to better satisfy actual rather than anticipated demand, which resulted in more seats sold and happier customers.
Promote transparency
This being England, the committee knew its actions would be subject to intense public scrutiny, especially in the British tabloids. One of the explicit goals in pricing the Games was to limit negative media attention. From very early on, therefore, the committee issued a continuous flow of information to consumers and the media about the rationale and process of ticketing, the major dates in the ticketing time line, the price tiers for each sport, the number of tickets available, and the distribution of tickets to corporate sponsors and the general public. To date, the efforts have been largely successful, with the media's attempts to stir controversy largely falling on deaf ears.
Manage the market's standards for fairness
Ask Londoners about the Olympic Games, and many say that they deserve to attend the most desirable events at reasonable prices. After all, they financed and endured the construction. But not everyone who wants to attend a particular event will be able to obtain a ticket, and some tickets may seem unreasonably priced.
The committee took two important steps to manage these and other expectations: First, from the moment the ticketing process began, the committee heavily communicated the pay-your-age and senior discounts and the percentage of tickets that would be sold at £20, at or below £30, and so on. Yes, there would be some very expensive tickets, and the British press would surely comment on that fact, but the committee wanted the general public to realize that without the expensive tickets there would be fewer inexpensive ones. Second, the committee rejected any suggestion to auction the tickets in highest demand or to allow secondary exchanges above face value. Instead, ticket allocation was carried out through a simple lottery, reinforcing the fact that there was no preferential treatment.
The committee's challenge is not unique; it's the same one most firms face but writ large and executed in a highly compressed time frame under intense public scrutiny. While few firms have been as explicit as the Organising Committee in stating a shared-value mission, most can nonetheless learn from the multiyear process used to devise the Games' pricing.
The Olympics' pricing scheme will probably experience some glitches. Shared-value pricing is a nascent and evolving strategy, and some experiments will surely fail. But given the fundamental shifts in consumers' power and expectations, customers will have dwindling patience for antagonistic pricing. And considering the benefits to be gained by increasing the pool of value in the marketplace and sharing it with customers, any firm that is not evaluating its pricing through a shared-value lens should ask whether it can afford not to.
This blog post was excerpted from Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville's article "Pricing to Create Shared Value" in the June issue of the magazine.
Source: www.hbr.org
Pricing Lessons From the London Olympics
by Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville | June 19, 2012
The committee organizing the London 2012 Olympic Games faced an extraordinary business challenge: How to price 8 million tickets in a way that allows equitable access to 26 sporting events, meets revenue and attendance targets, and adheres to the explicit social objective of making the Olympiad "Everybody's Games."
To accomplish this, the committee took what we call a shared-value approach to pricing. Traditional pricing strategy is by definition antagonistic, but it needs to become a more socially conscious, collaborative exercise. Businesses should look beyond the dry mechanics of "running the numbers" — still relevant but no longer sufficient — and recognize that humanizing the way they generate revenue can open up opportunities to create additional value. That means viewing customers as partners in value creation — a collaboration that increases customers' engagement and taps their insights about the value they seek and how firms could deliver it. The result is benefits for firms and customers alike.
By studying the 2012 Games and the committee's multiyear pricing process, we determined five pricing principles that every business, whether it has a shared-value mission or not, could profitably adopt. Here are the five principles and how the organizing committee applied them:
Focus on relationships, not on transactions
The committee understood early on that it was in various relationships — with the British government, with the British public, with the International Olympic Committee, and so on — and that ticketing was the most visible aspect of those relationships. As one committee member put it, tickets account for 20% of the Games' revenue but when done wrong result in 80% of an organizer's headaches.
The solution was to value customers more than their money. First, the committee increased the number of pricing tiers for many sports, which kept some ticket prices low while still hitting revenue targets. Second, it offered a pay-your-age pricing plan for young customers and discounted tickets to those over 60. Third, for the opening ceremony it chose high and low price points — £20.12 and £2,012, respectively — whose symbolic rationale everyone understood. Finally, it instituted a strict policy of no free tickets, avoiding the public outrage free tickets had provoked at previous Olympics. To many, these actions said, "We are looking out for you."
Be proactive
Consider the committee's decision not to bundle tickets to a more popular sport (swimming, say) with those to a less popular sport (tae kwon do, for instance), a tactic sometimes used in previous Olympics to increase ticket sales and boost attendance at the less popular events. While bundling can increase revenues, it can also add costs for consumers and doesn't necessarily fill seats. Indeed, past experience with bundling suggested that many who purchased the bundle let the tickets to the secondary event go to waste.
To avoid this problem, the committee let the ticketing of every sport stand on its own, creating 26 different pricing plans detailing how tickets should be promoted and sold to the appropriate target markets. Interestingly, however, the committee did bundle public transportation into the ticket price, recognizing the opportunity to reduce traffic congestion in and around the venues. By pricing proactively in this way, the committee discouraged one type of behavior (not attending events) and encouraged another (using public transportation), benefiting both spectators and the Games.
Put a premium on flexibility
The committee had to price all events more than a year and a half in advance of the Games, before it had a clear understanding of demand. To manage the uncertainty, the committee increased the number of price tiers across events, as mentioned, but did not assign a fixed number of seats to each tier. It did, however, promise that someone paying more would have a better view of the event than someone paying less. In the spring of 2011, fans placed requests for tickets through an online ballot, thereby revealing how much they were willing to pay for various events. This allowed the committee to gauge demand at each price point and reallocate some seats accordingly. By not predetermining the number of seats in each tier, the committee had the flexibility to better satisfy actual rather than anticipated demand, which resulted in more seats sold and happier customers.
Promote transparency
This being England, the committee knew its actions would be subject to intense public scrutiny, especially in the British tabloids. One of the explicit goals in pricing the Games was to limit negative media attention. From very early on, therefore, the committee issued a continuous flow of information to consumers and the media about the rationale and process of ticketing, the major dates in the ticketing time line, the price tiers for each sport, the number of tickets available, and the distribution of tickets to corporate sponsors and the general public. To date, the efforts have been largely successful, with the media's attempts to stir controversy largely falling on deaf ears.
Manage the market's standards for fairness
Ask Londoners about the Olympic Games, and many say that they deserve to attend the most desirable events at reasonable prices. After all, they financed and endured the construction. But not everyone who wants to attend a particular event will be able to obtain a ticket, and some tickets may seem unreasonably priced.
The committee took two important steps to manage these and other expectations: First, from the moment the ticketing process began, the committee heavily communicated the pay-your-age and senior discounts and the percentage of tickets that would be sold at £20, at or below £30, and so on. Yes, there would be some very expensive tickets, and the British press would surely comment on that fact, but the committee wanted the general public to realize that without the expensive tickets there would be fewer inexpensive ones. Second, the committee rejected any suggestion to auction the tickets in highest demand or to allow secondary exchanges above face value. Instead, ticket allocation was carried out through a simple lottery, reinforcing the fact that there was no preferential treatment.
The committee's challenge is not unique; it's the same one most firms face but writ large and executed in a highly compressed time frame under intense public scrutiny. While few firms have been as explicit as the Organising Committee in stating a shared-value mission, most can nonetheless learn from the multiyear process used to devise the Games' pricing.
The Olympics' pricing scheme will probably experience some glitches. Shared-value pricing is a nascent and evolving strategy, and some experiments will surely fail. But given the fundamental shifts in consumers' power and expectations, customers will have dwindling patience for antagonistic pricing. And considering the benefits to be gained by increasing the pool of value in the marketplace and sharing it with customers, any firm that is not evaluating its pricing through a shared-value lens should ask whether it can afford not to.
This blog post was excerpted from Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville's article "Pricing to Create Shared Value" in the June issue of the magazine.
Source: www.hbr.org
Managing Yourself: The Paradox of Excellence
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Managing Yourself: The Paradox of Excellence
by Thomas J. DeLong and Sara DeLong
Why is it that so many smart, ambitious professionals are less productive and satisfied than they should or could be? Why do so many of them find their upward trajectories flattening into a plateau? In our experience—Tom’s as a business school professor and consultant and Sara’s as a psychiatrist—high achievers often let anxiety about their performance compromise their progress. Because they’re used to having things come easily to them, they tend to shy away from assignments that will truly test them and require them to learn new skills. They have successful images to preserve, so instead of embracing risk, they hunker down and lock themselves into routines—at the expense of personal growth.
We’ve seen this time and again with the executives and managers we’ve counseled—between us, some 600 professionals over a combined 35 years. Many high performers would rather do the wrong thing well than do the right thing poorly. And when they do find themselves in over their head, they’re often unwilling to admit it, even to themselves, and refuse to ask for the help they need.
Consider Ted, a highly successful sales executive at a major enterprise software firm. He excelled at the huge deals that were the revenue engine for the company. He knew the product inside and out, understood the pain points of his customers, and could unerringly sniff out and connect with the real decision maker in a deal. After years of praise and enormous commission checks, Ted began to sense that something was off. The company had expanded in a new direction, shifting to a software-as-a-service business model. Though the majority of revenue was still coming from the legacy products, all the innovation and energy were focused on the subscription offerings. At first, Ted was contemptuous—selling software as a service was all about small transactions and high volume. “Just get some telemarketers for that nickel-and-dime stuff,” he’d say. “I’ll handle the big boys.” Soon, though, he began to see the writing on the wall: He was becoming increasingly marginalized in the company—and in the industry. But he was paralyzed by fear and self-doubt. His professional identity and self-esteem were wrapped up in his success as a salesman.
Consider, too, Kurt, a lawyer known for his trial skills and intellectual heft; he was a natural in the courtroom and a skilled writer with a keen sense of nuance. When he was assigned a case that required combing through thousands of technical documents, he believed it would just be a matter of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. But early on, he realized he didn’t have enough content expertise and couldn’t make sense of the casework his associates delivered. He began to find himself alone in his office, late at night and on weekends, wading through and deciphering the facts. It wasn’t until almost the eve of a trial that Kurt finally asked for help—which didn’t endear him to colleagues who suddenly found themselves joining him in the office after hours.
Of course, leaders within organizations bear some of the blame for this mind-set. They don’t always want to hear that somebody’s struggling, nor do they necessarily reward new ways of doing things, despite the lip service they might pay to innovation and prudent risk taking. As one executive we worked with pointed out, “My boss wants innovation as long as it’s done perfectly the first time.” Another confided, “We tell our people over and over again that we will support their professional development, but if a new project doesn’t work out immediately, we basically push them over the cliff.”
However, it’s possible to break this cycle and make the next move toward professional growth. First, you have to take a hard look at yourself and identify the forces that escalate your anxieties and cause you to turn to unproductive behaviors for relief. (See the sidebar, “The Curse of Being a High Achiever.”) Then you must adopt counterintuitive practices that give you the courage to step out of your comfort zone. This won’t happen overnight. It requires acknowledging vulnerability, something that driven professionals don’t like to do and that runs counter to their obsession with managing their image at all costs.
The Curse of Being a High Achiever
Some behaviors that help you succeed can also get in your way. The classic high achiever is:
Driven to get results. Achievers don’t let anything stop them. But they can get so caught up in tasks that providing transparency to colleagues or helping others feels like a waste of valuable time.
A doer. Achievers believe, often rightly, that nobody can do it as well as they can. That can make them poor delegators—or micromanagers.
Highly motivated. Achievers take all aspects of their jobs seriously. But that means they often fail to distinguish between the urgent and the merely important.
Craving of positive feedback. Achievers care intensely about how others view their work—but they tend to ignore positive feedback and obsess over criticism.
Competitive. An appetite for competition is healthy, but achievers obsessively compare themselves with others, which can lead to a chronic sense of insufficiency, false calibrations, and ultimately career missteps.
Passionate about work. Intense highs can give way to crippling lows. For achievers, it’s a fine line between triumph and agony.
A safe risk taker. Achievers aren’t likely to recklessly bet the company on a risky move, but they may shy away from the unknown.
Guilt-ridden. Achievers are driven to produce, but no matter how much they accomplish, they feel like they aren’t doing enough.
To achieve continued success, you must open yourself up to new learning experiences that may make you feel uncertain at best and incompetent at worst. Remember that those feelings are temporary and a prelude to greater professional ability.
Let’s look at steps you can take to get past self-imposed limitations.
Thomas J. DeLong is the Philip J. Stomberg Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School and the author of Flying Without a Net (Harvard Business Press, 2011).
His daughter Sara DeLong is a psychiatrist in private practice and community mental health in San Francisco and an assistant clinical professor at UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry.
Source: www.hbr.org
Managing Yourself: The Paradox of Excellence
by Thomas J. DeLong and Sara DeLong
Why is it that so many smart, ambitious professionals are less productive and satisfied than they should or could be? Why do so many of them find their upward trajectories flattening into a plateau? In our experience—Tom’s as a business school professor and consultant and Sara’s as a psychiatrist—high achievers often let anxiety about their performance compromise their progress. Because they’re used to having things come easily to them, they tend to shy away from assignments that will truly test them and require them to learn new skills. They have successful images to preserve, so instead of embracing risk, they hunker down and lock themselves into routines—at the expense of personal growth.
We’ve seen this time and again with the executives and managers we’ve counseled—between us, some 600 professionals over a combined 35 years. Many high performers would rather do the wrong thing well than do the right thing poorly. And when they do find themselves in over their head, they’re often unwilling to admit it, even to themselves, and refuse to ask for the help they need.
Consider Ted, a highly successful sales executive at a major enterprise software firm. He excelled at the huge deals that were the revenue engine for the company. He knew the product inside and out, understood the pain points of his customers, and could unerringly sniff out and connect with the real decision maker in a deal. After years of praise and enormous commission checks, Ted began to sense that something was off. The company had expanded in a new direction, shifting to a software-as-a-service business model. Though the majority of revenue was still coming from the legacy products, all the innovation and energy were focused on the subscription offerings. At first, Ted was contemptuous—selling software as a service was all about small transactions and high volume. “Just get some telemarketers for that nickel-and-dime stuff,” he’d say. “I’ll handle the big boys.” Soon, though, he began to see the writing on the wall: He was becoming increasingly marginalized in the company—and in the industry. But he was paralyzed by fear and self-doubt. His professional identity and self-esteem were wrapped up in his success as a salesman.
Consider, too, Kurt, a lawyer known for his trial skills and intellectual heft; he was a natural in the courtroom and a skilled writer with a keen sense of nuance. When he was assigned a case that required combing through thousands of technical documents, he believed it would just be a matter of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. But early on, he realized he didn’t have enough content expertise and couldn’t make sense of the casework his associates delivered. He began to find himself alone in his office, late at night and on weekends, wading through and deciphering the facts. It wasn’t until almost the eve of a trial that Kurt finally asked for help—which didn’t endear him to colleagues who suddenly found themselves joining him in the office after hours.
Of course, leaders within organizations bear some of the blame for this mind-set. They don’t always want to hear that somebody’s struggling, nor do they necessarily reward new ways of doing things, despite the lip service they might pay to innovation and prudent risk taking. As one executive we worked with pointed out, “My boss wants innovation as long as it’s done perfectly the first time.” Another confided, “We tell our people over and over again that we will support their professional development, but if a new project doesn’t work out immediately, we basically push them over the cliff.”
However, it’s possible to break this cycle and make the next move toward professional growth. First, you have to take a hard look at yourself and identify the forces that escalate your anxieties and cause you to turn to unproductive behaviors for relief. (See the sidebar, “The Curse of Being a High Achiever.”) Then you must adopt counterintuitive practices that give you the courage to step out of your comfort zone. This won’t happen overnight. It requires acknowledging vulnerability, something that driven professionals don’t like to do and that runs counter to their obsession with managing their image at all costs.
The Curse of Being a High Achiever
Some behaviors that help you succeed can also get in your way. The classic high achiever is:
Driven to get results. Achievers don’t let anything stop them. But they can get so caught up in tasks that providing transparency to colleagues or helping others feels like a waste of valuable time.
A doer. Achievers believe, often rightly, that nobody can do it as well as they can. That can make them poor delegators—or micromanagers.
Highly motivated. Achievers take all aspects of their jobs seriously. But that means they often fail to distinguish between the urgent and the merely important.
Craving of positive feedback. Achievers care intensely about how others view their work—but they tend to ignore positive feedback and obsess over criticism.
Competitive. An appetite for competition is healthy, but achievers obsessively compare themselves with others, which can lead to a chronic sense of insufficiency, false calibrations, and ultimately career missteps.
Passionate about work. Intense highs can give way to crippling lows. For achievers, it’s a fine line between triumph and agony.
A safe risk taker. Achievers aren’t likely to recklessly bet the company on a risky move, but they may shy away from the unknown.
Guilt-ridden. Achievers are driven to produce, but no matter how much they accomplish, they feel like they aren’t doing enough.
To achieve continued success, you must open yourself up to new learning experiences that may make you feel uncertain at best and incompetent at worst. Remember that those feelings are temporary and a prelude to greater professional ability.
Let’s look at steps you can take to get past self-imposed limitations.
Thomas J. DeLong is the Philip J. Stomberg Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School and the author of Flying Without a Net (Harvard Business Press, 2011).
His daughter Sara DeLong is a psychiatrist in private practice and community mental health in San Francisco and an assistant clinical professor at UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry.
Source: www.hbr.org
Better Students and Teachers with the Breakthrough Collaborative
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Farish Sawyer Inspires Better Students and Teachers with the Breakthrough Collaborative
January 11, 2011
“Breakthrough Collaborative was listed as one of the top 10 internships in the country along with the White House and MTV. You will work harder than you ever have, but I guarantee that you will take the connections that you make with other teachers and students with you for the rest of your life.”
All middle school students are not created equal. Enter the Breakthrough Collaborative, a national organization that gives 6th, 7th and 8th graders around the country the opportunity to improve their education and reach their dreams. Farish Sawyer, a senior program director of Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia, talked with Knowledge@Wharton High School about enriching the lives of young students, while also mentoring high school and college students to become excellent teachers.
An edited transcript of the conversation is below.
Knowledge@Wharton High School: We are here today with Farish Sawyer, senior program director of Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia, an organization that provides a path for low-income, high-achieving, middle school students to succeed and gives high school and college students the opportunity to get involved through education and leadership. Farish, what is Breakthrough Collaborative and what are some of its goals?
Farish Sawyer: Breakthrough Collaborative is a national organization with about 29 sites around the country. We work to encourage low-income, high-achieving middle school students to reach their goals of going to college and being the doctors and lawyers that they dream of becoming. We provide a path of academic enrichment and mentorship starting in 6th grade all the way through 12th grade. We have a dual mission of not only inspiring and encouraging our middle school students to be successful, but also encouraging talented and bright high school and college students to go into the field of education through summer internships and school-year volunteer positions around the country.
KWHS:: How have the opportunities that Breakthrough provides changed its participants’ futures? Where are some of the participants now?
Sawyer: About 85% of our middle school students go on to college. In terms of coming from public schools that are low performing, this is a huge success rate compared to most of their peers. In Philadelphia, 95% of our students go on to selective magnet high schools, whether that’s independent parochial schools or some of the more competitive high schools in the area. The vast majority of our teachers also go on to careers in the field of education. We are being successful at both of our goals of getting people — excellent people, talented people — into the field of education, while also getting our middle school students where they want to go.
KWHS: During the summer the program really comes alive when high school and college students apply to teach their own classes. How does the summer program operate?
Sawyer: The summer program is similar around the country. Philadelphia teachers commit to eight weeks. The first is a week of orientation that involves a crash course in education — everything you can imagine from lesson planning to classroom management. The students are then with us for six intense weeks, every day from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. They take four core academic subjects, which include social studies, science, math and a class called “Writing Through Literature.” In the afternoon they take electives, which are put on by the teachers. In the evenings the teachers are responsible for attending staff meetings and committee meetings. They must also write their lesson plans with the support of mentor-teachers — professional teachers from the district and from the area who coach and support our young teachers to make them excellent in their classroom. This ensures that our middle school students are getting the best education possible throughout the summer, while also giving our new teachers a real chance to develop in that role as a teacher in the classroom. The eighth week is a final wrap-up week for our teachers where we debrief and talk about the experience we have been through. Like you said, it is definitely a high-energy, high-spirit, hard-work environment for everybody involved. The students and teachers alike get a lot out of it both academically and in terms of spirit and energy.
KWHS: How can high school students get involved? Is it a good preparation for a career in teaching?
Sawyer: We have about 30 Breakthrough sites around the country. You apply for the summer program through our national website at breakthroughcollaborative.org. You can link on to the national application and select any one of up to four of the 30 sites that you are interested in teaching at and complete the application. Those applications are sent directly to the sites for consideration. It is easy to apply online. If you are interested in getting involved during the school-year program, you should contact the site that is closest to you. Again, all of the sites are listed on the national website at breakthroughcollaborative.org.
In terms of the valuable [teaching] experience that our high school and college students get, you really are thrown into the classroom. It’s not just a tutoring experience. You actually have your own class, you are doing your own lesson plans and you are gaining invaluable experience. By no means do you have to think that you want to be a teacher to become part of the program. You can and that’s great, but you don’t have to say, “Oh, I’m going to be a teacher and this is what I am going to do.” We have college students with all different majors. We have students in high school who are exploring different career paths.
Our teachers are passionate and committed to the young people in their community and are interested in getting involved and engaged. Breakthrough Collaborative was listed as one of the top 10 internships in the country along with the White House and MTV. If you think about that in terms of rankings, in terms of experience and in terms of gaining a lot of background that is going to look valuable on your resume regardless of the field you go into, it is a great experience for you. You will work harder than you ever have, but I guarantee that you will take the connections that you make with other teachers and students with you for the rest of your life.
I was a [Breakthrough] teacher when I was in college at McGill University in Montreal, where I majored in psychology and sociology. That’s how I got involved with the organization. After doing some other work for a few years, I came back to the organization because it’s something that I feel so passionate about on both of its goals — working with the middle school students as well as inspiring high school and college students to go into teaching.
KWHS: What classes have student teachers taught?
Sawyer: It varies by site across the country. As I mentioned, Philadelphia teachers teach “Writing Through Literature.” They teach social studies; our 7th grade social studies curriculum focuses on domestic issues. Our 8th grade curriculum is Model United Nations. We teach science; our 7th grade curriculum is biology and our 8th grade is physics. We also do math; 7th grade is pre-algebra and 8th grade is algebra. Those are the core subjects we offer. We place teachers in those different areas based on their interests and their skill levels. In the afternoon teachers get to develop their own classes, which we call electives. That is something that the teacher is passionate about and really wants to share with our young people in the program. It includes everything from chess to hip-hop dance to African dance to soccer.
One of the big differences is that our classes are small. All of our classes have six to eight students in them. Imagine what you can do with six to eight kids in a class compared to what a regular teacher in the district might do with 30 students. It’s an ideal environment to try out teaching the subjects that you think you may want to teach in the future.
KWHS: Breakthrough Collaborative runs year-round in cities around the country and in Hong Kong. Are aspects of Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia different from those in other cities? Are student teachers from the Philadelphia chapter ever in contact with those in other cities?
Sawyer: They are both good questions. One of the things that makes Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia unique is that we are one of the larger programs, with three sites within Philadelphia. We run one program at Germantown Friends School and recruit from middle schools in the Germantown area. We run a site at St. Joseph’s University and recruit from middle schools in the West Philadelphia area. And we also run a site at Grover Washington Junior Middle School and recruit from students in the middle schools in the Olney area. Philadelphia and Miami are the only two programs that have multiple sites.
Overall, I would say that all the sites across the country have the same expectations for our students in terms of reaching their goals of going to college. Sometimes how we do that can be a little bit different, but it is a similar structure in terms of the teachers, mentor-teachers and students. The Philadelphia teachers are in contact with each other even though they might be teaching at different sites over the summer. In terms of being in communication with other teachers across the Collaborative, the national office, which is based out of San Francisco, has started to do a few different online networking things for some of the teachers. There is something on Facebook where the different teachers communicate with each other and there is a blog where teachers from around the country can share their experiences and communicate with each other. The national office wants to encourage networking between the young teachers participating in the internships every summer.
On the staff side, we get together at national conferences every year and talk to each other about our experiences and also learn and grow from best practices going on at other sites. [In October] we are heading to Denver, Colorado for our conference, so we will get a chance to hear about everybody’s summer.
KWHS: How does Breakthrough, a non-profit, receive funding?
Sawyer: Different Breakthrough sites across the country have different funding patterns. Breakthrough in Philadelphia is an independent 501(c)(3), meaning that we are an organization that receives our money through foundations as well as through individual donors. We write a lot of grants. Our staff consists of two people who are responsible for fundraising, without which the organization wouldn’t stay afloat. We are also very fortunate to receive a lot of in-kind donations. Penn Charter in Philadelphia, which hosts our high school program, as well as St. Joseph’s University, Germantown Friends School and Grover Washington Junior Middle School, all give us the space that we use during the summer and for the after-school program completely free. If it weren’t for that kind of generosity, as well as the generosity of individuals and foundations, it wouldn’t be possible for us to stay afloat. We also received a city grant last year in Philadelphia. One of the city’s big goals is to significantly decrease the dropout rate and increase the number of Philadelphia residents with college degrees. In order to do that, they have started giving out money for out-of-school-time programming. It is great to be working toward those initiatives that the city has established.
KWHS: As senior program director, what have you learned about management through working with Breakthrough Collaborative?
Sawyer: A lot. I have been in different roles. I started off as a site director in Philadelphia and then about a year ago I transitioned into my role as senior program director. Both of the roles are about relationship building and maintaining relationships both with the staff that you are supervising, as well as with partners across the community. The biggest thing that I’ve learned is to be flexible and not take anything too seriously or freak out about anything, especially when you are working with kids and college students. Things happen. You need to be able to roll with the punches and think on your feet.
In most fields you have to be able to adjust to the situation that is being thrown at you. The biggest thing in terms of management is being a good listener. Right now my staff of site directors and high school services directors has different needs and different wants. I have to make sure that they are upholding the expectations that I have for them and the expectations of the organization, while also making sure that I support them in the ways that they need to be supported as individuals. It’s the same approach when you’re working with high school students and college students. Everybody is unique and different in terms of what they need to be successful at their job.
KWHS: Are aspects of education changing that have resulted in changes to Breakthrough’s structure?
Sawyer: Since I’ve been involved in Breakthrough, there has always been a group of students that has needed extra support. Breakthrough started in the 1970s in San Francisco and has always had the same mission of working with students who aren’t provided the same educational opportunities as their middle and upper-middle class peers. Unfortunately, I think until we are in a society where everybody is provided with equal opportunities, an organization like Breakthrough is going to have to exist.
My old executive director used to say that Breakthrough is an organization that we don’t want to have to exist. But until things are more on a level playing field, we have to be there to support the people who aren’t getting that support otherwise. Students who are part of our program have these dreams when we recruit them in 6th grade. They have goals. But, unfortunately, the structure isn’t there to get them to reach [those goals]. I feel very honored to be part of an organization that has a path to get the students there.
Source: www.kwhs.wharton.upenn.edu
For more information visit: www.breakthroughcollaborative.org
Audio of interview available upon request.
Farish Sawyer Inspires Better Students and Teachers with the Breakthrough Collaborative
January 11, 2011
“Breakthrough Collaborative was listed as one of the top 10 internships in the country along with the White House and MTV. You will work harder than you ever have, but I guarantee that you will take the connections that you make with other teachers and students with you for the rest of your life.”
All middle school students are not created equal. Enter the Breakthrough Collaborative, a national organization that gives 6th, 7th and 8th graders around the country the opportunity to improve their education and reach their dreams. Farish Sawyer, a senior program director of Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia, talked with Knowledge@Wharton High School about enriching the lives of young students, while also mentoring high school and college students to become excellent teachers.
An edited transcript of the conversation is below.
Knowledge@Wharton High School: We are here today with Farish Sawyer, senior program director of Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia, an organization that provides a path for low-income, high-achieving, middle school students to succeed and gives high school and college students the opportunity to get involved through education and leadership. Farish, what is Breakthrough Collaborative and what are some of its goals?
Farish Sawyer: Breakthrough Collaborative is a national organization with about 29 sites around the country. We work to encourage low-income, high-achieving middle school students to reach their goals of going to college and being the doctors and lawyers that they dream of becoming. We provide a path of academic enrichment and mentorship starting in 6th grade all the way through 12th grade. We have a dual mission of not only inspiring and encouraging our middle school students to be successful, but also encouraging talented and bright high school and college students to go into the field of education through summer internships and school-year volunteer positions around the country.
KWHS:: How have the opportunities that Breakthrough provides changed its participants’ futures? Where are some of the participants now?
Sawyer: About 85% of our middle school students go on to college. In terms of coming from public schools that are low performing, this is a huge success rate compared to most of their peers. In Philadelphia, 95% of our students go on to selective magnet high schools, whether that’s independent parochial schools or some of the more competitive high schools in the area. The vast majority of our teachers also go on to careers in the field of education. We are being successful at both of our goals of getting people — excellent people, talented people — into the field of education, while also getting our middle school students where they want to go.
KWHS: During the summer the program really comes alive when high school and college students apply to teach their own classes. How does the summer program operate?
Sawyer: The summer program is similar around the country. Philadelphia teachers commit to eight weeks. The first is a week of orientation that involves a crash course in education — everything you can imagine from lesson planning to classroom management. The students are then with us for six intense weeks, every day from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. They take four core academic subjects, which include social studies, science, math and a class called “Writing Through Literature.” In the afternoon they take electives, which are put on by the teachers. In the evenings the teachers are responsible for attending staff meetings and committee meetings. They must also write their lesson plans with the support of mentor-teachers — professional teachers from the district and from the area who coach and support our young teachers to make them excellent in their classroom. This ensures that our middle school students are getting the best education possible throughout the summer, while also giving our new teachers a real chance to develop in that role as a teacher in the classroom. The eighth week is a final wrap-up week for our teachers where we debrief and talk about the experience we have been through. Like you said, it is definitely a high-energy, high-spirit, hard-work environment for everybody involved. The students and teachers alike get a lot out of it both academically and in terms of spirit and energy.
KWHS: How can high school students get involved? Is it a good preparation for a career in teaching?
Sawyer: We have about 30 Breakthrough sites around the country. You apply for the summer program through our national website at breakthroughcollaborative.org. You can link on to the national application and select any one of up to four of the 30 sites that you are interested in teaching at and complete the application. Those applications are sent directly to the sites for consideration. It is easy to apply online. If you are interested in getting involved during the school-year program, you should contact the site that is closest to you. Again, all of the sites are listed on the national website at breakthroughcollaborative.org.
In terms of the valuable [teaching] experience that our high school and college students get, you really are thrown into the classroom. It’s not just a tutoring experience. You actually have your own class, you are doing your own lesson plans and you are gaining invaluable experience. By no means do you have to think that you want to be a teacher to become part of the program. You can and that’s great, but you don’t have to say, “Oh, I’m going to be a teacher and this is what I am going to do.” We have college students with all different majors. We have students in high school who are exploring different career paths.
Our teachers are passionate and committed to the young people in their community and are interested in getting involved and engaged. Breakthrough Collaborative was listed as one of the top 10 internships in the country along with the White House and MTV. If you think about that in terms of rankings, in terms of experience and in terms of gaining a lot of background that is going to look valuable on your resume regardless of the field you go into, it is a great experience for you. You will work harder than you ever have, but I guarantee that you will take the connections that you make with other teachers and students with you for the rest of your life.
I was a [Breakthrough] teacher when I was in college at McGill University in Montreal, where I majored in psychology and sociology. That’s how I got involved with the organization. After doing some other work for a few years, I came back to the organization because it’s something that I feel so passionate about on both of its goals — working with the middle school students as well as inspiring high school and college students to go into teaching.
KWHS: What classes have student teachers taught?
Sawyer: It varies by site across the country. As I mentioned, Philadelphia teachers teach “Writing Through Literature.” They teach social studies; our 7th grade social studies curriculum focuses on domestic issues. Our 8th grade curriculum is Model United Nations. We teach science; our 7th grade curriculum is biology and our 8th grade is physics. We also do math; 7th grade is pre-algebra and 8th grade is algebra. Those are the core subjects we offer. We place teachers in those different areas based on their interests and their skill levels. In the afternoon teachers get to develop their own classes, which we call electives. That is something that the teacher is passionate about and really wants to share with our young people in the program. It includes everything from chess to hip-hop dance to African dance to soccer.
One of the big differences is that our classes are small. All of our classes have six to eight students in them. Imagine what you can do with six to eight kids in a class compared to what a regular teacher in the district might do with 30 students. It’s an ideal environment to try out teaching the subjects that you think you may want to teach in the future.
KWHS: Breakthrough Collaborative runs year-round in cities around the country and in Hong Kong. Are aspects of Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia different from those in other cities? Are student teachers from the Philadelphia chapter ever in contact with those in other cities?
Sawyer: They are both good questions. One of the things that makes Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia unique is that we are one of the larger programs, with three sites within Philadelphia. We run one program at Germantown Friends School and recruit from middle schools in the Germantown area. We run a site at St. Joseph’s University and recruit from middle schools in the West Philadelphia area. And we also run a site at Grover Washington Junior Middle School and recruit from students in the middle schools in the Olney area. Philadelphia and Miami are the only two programs that have multiple sites.
Overall, I would say that all the sites across the country have the same expectations for our students in terms of reaching their goals of going to college. Sometimes how we do that can be a little bit different, but it is a similar structure in terms of the teachers, mentor-teachers and students. The Philadelphia teachers are in contact with each other even though they might be teaching at different sites over the summer. In terms of being in communication with other teachers across the Collaborative, the national office, which is based out of San Francisco, has started to do a few different online networking things for some of the teachers. There is something on Facebook where the different teachers communicate with each other and there is a blog where teachers from around the country can share their experiences and communicate with each other. The national office wants to encourage networking between the young teachers participating in the internships every summer.
On the staff side, we get together at national conferences every year and talk to each other about our experiences and also learn and grow from best practices going on at other sites. [In October] we are heading to Denver, Colorado for our conference, so we will get a chance to hear about everybody’s summer.
KWHS: How does Breakthrough, a non-profit, receive funding?
Sawyer: Different Breakthrough sites across the country have different funding patterns. Breakthrough in Philadelphia is an independent 501(c)(3), meaning that we are an organization that receives our money through foundations as well as through individual donors. We write a lot of grants. Our staff consists of two people who are responsible for fundraising, without which the organization wouldn’t stay afloat. We are also very fortunate to receive a lot of in-kind donations. Penn Charter in Philadelphia, which hosts our high school program, as well as St. Joseph’s University, Germantown Friends School and Grover Washington Junior Middle School, all give us the space that we use during the summer and for the after-school program completely free. If it weren’t for that kind of generosity, as well as the generosity of individuals and foundations, it wouldn’t be possible for us to stay afloat. We also received a city grant last year in Philadelphia. One of the city’s big goals is to significantly decrease the dropout rate and increase the number of Philadelphia residents with college degrees. In order to do that, they have started giving out money for out-of-school-time programming. It is great to be working toward those initiatives that the city has established.
KWHS: As senior program director, what have you learned about management through working with Breakthrough Collaborative?
Sawyer: A lot. I have been in different roles. I started off as a site director in Philadelphia and then about a year ago I transitioned into my role as senior program director. Both of the roles are about relationship building and maintaining relationships both with the staff that you are supervising, as well as with partners across the community. The biggest thing that I’ve learned is to be flexible and not take anything too seriously or freak out about anything, especially when you are working with kids and college students. Things happen. You need to be able to roll with the punches and think on your feet.
In most fields you have to be able to adjust to the situation that is being thrown at you. The biggest thing in terms of management is being a good listener. Right now my staff of site directors and high school services directors has different needs and different wants. I have to make sure that they are upholding the expectations that I have for them and the expectations of the organization, while also making sure that I support them in the ways that they need to be supported as individuals. It’s the same approach when you’re working with high school students and college students. Everybody is unique and different in terms of what they need to be successful at their job.
KWHS: Are aspects of education changing that have resulted in changes to Breakthrough’s structure?
Sawyer: Since I’ve been involved in Breakthrough, there has always been a group of students that has needed extra support. Breakthrough started in the 1970s in San Francisco and has always had the same mission of working with students who aren’t provided the same educational opportunities as their middle and upper-middle class peers. Unfortunately, I think until we are in a society where everybody is provided with equal opportunities, an organization like Breakthrough is going to have to exist.
My old executive director used to say that Breakthrough is an organization that we don’t want to have to exist. But until things are more on a level playing field, we have to be there to support the people who aren’t getting that support otherwise. Students who are part of our program have these dreams when we recruit them in 6th grade. They have goals. But, unfortunately, the structure isn’t there to get them to reach [those goals]. I feel very honored to be part of an organization that has a path to get the students there.
Source: www.kwhs.wharton.upenn.edu
For more information visit: www.breakthroughcollaborative.org
Audio of interview available upon request.
MKTG-Brand Awareness-Video & text
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Marketing Student Margot Stern on Pizza, Gatorade and ‘Legit’ Brand Awareness
November 16, 2011
Margot Stern is a Wharton MBA student. During a recent class on consumer behavior, she called on the expertise of high school students in and around Philadelphia for their insight about how best to position the national running shoe brand, Saucony. Stern spoke with Knowledge@Wharton High School about her interest in marketing, focus groups and why she is impressed by high school students’ authenticity.
“If Nike advertises a really cool sneaker, [high school students] are going to be excited about that sneaker. But that doesn't mean that all they care about is branding and marketing and messaging. They also care about their friends.”
An edited version of the transcript appears below.
Knowledge@Wharton High School: Tell us about yourself and the Wharton class you took on consumer behavior.
Margot Stern: I’m from Philadelphia. I went to a high school called Germantown Friends School, and I’ve lived in Philly most of my life. I’ve traveled a little bit internationally and studied abroad, and I’m actually in the Wharton and Lauder MBA and Masters Program in International Studies. I’m particularly interested in marketing and marketing across different cultures and different consumer groups. I decided to take a class with professor Americus Reed on consumer behavior because I was really interested in the cross section between psychology and branding and marketing. In a traditional class, you might go to class and have different lectures about topics and learn things by textbooks. But in this class, we actually worked with a real professional client, a national running shoe brand. They wanted us to take their product, which was running shoes, and find a way to market it more effectively to high school students. For the entire semester, we worked with the professor and with this company and actually interviewed and worked with a lot of high school students to try to figure out how to position this shoe brand to appeal to a younger market, to high schoolers.
KWHS: The brand [you worked with] was Saucony. How did you go about finding high school students to offer feedback about the Saucony brand?
Stern: We reached out to students in a number of different ways. We tried to use some of our personal relationships to get in touch with parents, either Wharton parents who were Wharton professors or people whom we knew, and we reached out to high schools. Sometimes we reached out to the athletic departments. Wharton [also] has a program where they work with high schools in West Philly, and so, we were able to work with some high school students here. We were able to get a great variety of students from all around Philadelphia, from both private schools and public schools.
KWHS: Did the students respond well to your brand-related questions? Tell us about how the process went.
Stern: We always offered students pizza and Gatorade, because we’ve done a little bit of research and we thought that was the best way to get to students. At one point, the company made some gift certificates available, some discount cards for their sneaker brand. We would bring a bunch of different sneakers along with us. Some were this particular company’s brand, and we brought along some other brands of shoes — like Nike, [brands] that high schoolers have heard of.
Usually we would start by talking to the [high schoolers] about the importance of what we were doing. We said that when a company looks to market a shoe directly to a high schooler, they want to learn from that high schooler. So they want to learn not just about what kind of shoes that high schooler wears, but what is called a psychographic profile. For a high school or scholastic athlete, a psychographic profile would be: What are their interests? What kind of music do they listen to? What kind of rituals do they do to get ready for big games? What do they do if they win? How do they celebrate? What do they do if they lose?
The high schoolers were definitely animated and interested in telling us their own personal stories, and we found that it was very specific. There were some things that, as a team, people did together, and there were some things that [individual] high schoolers did – [like listen to] their favorite song [as a way to] get psyched up or to focus before the big game. [Some] things were individual for each high schooler, and [other] things were more of a group activity.
Later, we would move into asking them questions that were associative — what kind of a feeling or attitude or type of personality do you associate with this sneaker? We might give them a Nike sneaker and say, “What does this make you think of? If you have to describe the personality of the person who wears this shoe, what’s the person [like]?” They often [gave] very specific answers. Nike was a person who was athletic and cool and dominant. New Balance — and I’m sorry to say this – [was] the grandfather taking long walks with the dog. It was really interesting because the high schoolers had specific ideas of what different brands meant to them. Without realizing it, they were talking about brand personalities and brand identities. It was definitely interesting. The high schoolers had a lot of really good insights.
KWHS: This basically constituted a focus group, right? Can you talk a little about the use of focus groups in consumer awareness, brand identity and brand awareness?
Stern: Sure. Usually when a company is trying to create a brand or understand how their brand is received, pictured or understood in the market place, they will pick a particular cross section of people. In some cases, it’s a specific group. In this case, it was people between the ages of 15 to 18 who were athletes — co-ed. But it could be anything. It could be mothers of children who are between the ages of 2 and 4. It all depends on what the product is and what the company wants to learn about the group. In this case, the company wanted to learn about what high schoolers thought about their product. A focus group is one of [several] different ways to do that. Other ways might be [by] doing a written survey [that you] send out to many different people. You ask questions and people answer those questions according to different feelings they have about brands.
What makes a focus group special is that sometimes there are insights or ideas that come out of people talking to each other. A one-on-one interview is a great way to get an expert’s opinion. Maybe if you were marketing a drug, you would ask a doctor his opinion of the drug. And if you wanted to know if people preferred Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi, you could send a survey out to thousands of people. But in this case, when you want to get a little deeper insights and you want to understand how people function as a group, then you do a focus group, which is usually around six to 10 people. There are certain ideas or opinions that [come] from people bouncing ideas off each other. We would hold a sneaker up and say, “What do you guys think of this?” One person would say, “Well, this color is cool, I like this.” And another person would say, “Yeah, but look, the treads on the bottom of that sneaker are too big and this isn’t a legitimate running shoe.” You learn that way how people’s ideas about brands are not just individual, but are influenced by each other.
KWHS: What did you learn about the appeal of the Saucony brand to high school students? What were some of their key insights?
Stern: Honestly, the high schoolers didn’t know a whole lot about the running shoe, which was not a surprise because what we understood about it when we began the project is that this shoe is very popular and well respected among elite and fitness runners. An elite runner would be somebody who competes regularly as a runner, and a fitness runner would be somebody who is out there three, four times a week, running regularly and cares about what kind of gear they use — pays attention to different brands in terms of their functionality. Saucony’s already a well-respected shoe and very popular in that segment, but we found that a lot of the high schoolers we talked to didn’t have a very specific idea about it. They didn’t necessarily have specific associations about [Saucony’s] brand personality. Keep in mind, though, that we talked to high school athletes who represented a cross section — football players, soccer players, basketball players. Usually the one percent or two people in the group who were runners had heard of Saucony. Maybe they had run with [the brand]. They had a quiet respect for understanding it was a good running shoe. But there definitely wasn’t any sort of enthusiasm or excitement about the shoe.
KWHS: What do high school students want most from their brand messages? What did you take away from this?
Stern: That’s a really interesting question. It wasn’t necessarily what we expected. When we first talked to the high school students about brands and what brands were popular, we got a lot of response about Nike and Under Armour. There were two very different appeals. Nike was popular because it’s cool, the advertisements are really cool and the high schoolers were really specific about Nike ads. They could quote or imitate an ad that they had recently seen. And they really responded positively to that. They would also talk about the experience of walking into [a Modell’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods] and saying, “There’s a tiny little section over here for a smaller brand, and then the whole wall is Nike and there’s so much variety.” Variety was a really big deal to them. [Having] lots of different options for colors and styles captured their attention.
What surprised us was that we thought high schoolers would be a little suspicious of a big brand like Nike. But when it came to Nike, they were impressed by its largeness and popularity, and being big and powerful was actually positive. That was really interesting.
Under Armour was perhaps one of the most interesting insights. High schoolers felt like if somebody was wearing Under Armour, it made them “legit.” There was something about the importance of authenticity in athletes. If you showed up to a basketball game, and the opposing team walked on and they [were] all wearing suits, [you think], “They’re here to play, they’re serious, they’re legit.” It was the same thing with Under Armour. Athletes who wore it were considered legit, and that was something that really resonated with high school students.
We took that back to Saucony. We said, “Look, you’re a company that isn’t super well known among high schoolers. You’re not going to be a Nike, and you don’t necessarily want to be a Nike because if you were, then all of the elite runners who respect you because you’re this authentic running shoe company are going to start thinking that you’re a mass-produced brand. So why not take the message of legitimacy and try to work with that, work with what you already are.” We knew that high schoolers really responded to this idea of legitimacy and authenticity and we thought, “Try to create a brand message around what it means to be an athlete who’s legit.” If you really want kids to start paying attention to running shoes, then maybe the way to do that is to create a message and a brand around how running is a legitimate part of being an athlete, or [how] being in physical running condition somehow makes you more legit as an athlete.
KWHS: All this knowledge you’re gaining about brands and consumerism as a student, where do you hope to take this in your own future?
Stern: The best part of this project for me, honestly, was talking to the students. I really enjoyed it. I liked that their opinions were different than mine. I liked that they surprised me. I liked that I didn’t always know what they were going to say. One of the things that really surprised me, for example, was [who actually inspired these young athletes]. You look at top athletes who are really popular, in commercials, with sponsorships, and you assume that a high-school-age male is going to respond to those athletes, is going to idolize them. One of the questions we asked in the focus groups was, “What athletes inspire you? Who are the athletes who really motivate you; when you aspire to be like someone, who is it?” In more than one focus group, kids who did not know each other mentioned the same baseball player. And they mentioned it in the same exact context, which was, “This is a baseball player who I look up to because he’s this particular position and he’s kind of short [in] stature. I don’t think I’m necessarily going to be the next Babe Ruth or I don’t think I’m necessarily going to be the next famous basketball player, but here’s an athlete who I can relate to. If I work really hard, I might be able to aspire to that.” That was so cool because you had two different kids that didn’t know each other saying the same thing about an athlete who is popular, but somewhat of an underdog.
It was so cool to see that these high schoolers had really done their research; they were knowledgeable about these sports, and they were relating to people because they felt a personal connection. Another answer [to our question about what athletes motivated them] was even more heartwarming. A lot of them mentioned fellow athletes, teammates. They said, “If I have a teammate who plays basketball and I play soccer, but he’s really good at basketball, I go watch his games,” or “Just my friends who play really well, they inspire me.” [We got this] answer from kids across the board. Kids at different schools with different backgrounds, playing different sports, they all said the same thing. Here’s a group of people that, yes, respond to big companies like Nike – yes, advertising is effective on them. If Nike advertises a really cool sneaker, [high school students] are going to be excited about that sneaker. But that doesn’t mean that all they care about is branding and marketing and messaging. They also care about their friends. There is a level of integrity and authenticity among high school students that is really impressive. At such a young age, all of these athletes were focused on what’s real to them, not just this picture of what’s in the media.
Source: www.kwhs.wharton.upenn.edu
Marketing Student Margot Stern on Pizza, Gatorade and ‘Legit’ Brand Awareness
November 16, 2011
Margot Stern is a Wharton MBA student. During a recent class on consumer behavior, she called on the expertise of high school students in and around Philadelphia for their insight about how best to position the national running shoe brand, Saucony. Stern spoke with Knowledge@Wharton High School about her interest in marketing, focus groups and why she is impressed by high school students’ authenticity.
“If Nike advertises a really cool sneaker, [high school students] are going to be excited about that sneaker. But that doesn't mean that all they care about is branding and marketing and messaging. They also care about their friends.”
An edited version of the transcript appears below.
Knowledge@Wharton High School: Tell us about yourself and the Wharton class you took on consumer behavior.
Margot Stern: I’m from Philadelphia. I went to a high school called Germantown Friends School, and I’ve lived in Philly most of my life. I’ve traveled a little bit internationally and studied abroad, and I’m actually in the Wharton and Lauder MBA and Masters Program in International Studies. I’m particularly interested in marketing and marketing across different cultures and different consumer groups. I decided to take a class with professor Americus Reed on consumer behavior because I was really interested in the cross section between psychology and branding and marketing. In a traditional class, you might go to class and have different lectures about topics and learn things by textbooks. But in this class, we actually worked with a real professional client, a national running shoe brand. They wanted us to take their product, which was running shoes, and find a way to market it more effectively to high school students. For the entire semester, we worked with the professor and with this company and actually interviewed and worked with a lot of high school students to try to figure out how to position this shoe brand to appeal to a younger market, to high schoolers.
KWHS: The brand [you worked with] was Saucony. How did you go about finding high school students to offer feedback about the Saucony brand?
Stern: We reached out to students in a number of different ways. We tried to use some of our personal relationships to get in touch with parents, either Wharton parents who were Wharton professors or people whom we knew, and we reached out to high schools. Sometimes we reached out to the athletic departments. Wharton [also] has a program where they work with high schools in West Philly, and so, we were able to work with some high school students here. We were able to get a great variety of students from all around Philadelphia, from both private schools and public schools.
KWHS: Did the students respond well to your brand-related questions? Tell us about how the process went.
Stern: We always offered students pizza and Gatorade, because we’ve done a little bit of research and we thought that was the best way to get to students. At one point, the company made some gift certificates available, some discount cards for their sneaker brand. We would bring a bunch of different sneakers along with us. Some were this particular company’s brand, and we brought along some other brands of shoes — like Nike, [brands] that high schoolers have heard of.
Usually we would start by talking to the [high schoolers] about the importance of what we were doing. We said that when a company looks to market a shoe directly to a high schooler, they want to learn from that high schooler. So they want to learn not just about what kind of shoes that high schooler wears, but what is called a psychographic profile. For a high school or scholastic athlete, a psychographic profile would be: What are their interests? What kind of music do they listen to? What kind of rituals do they do to get ready for big games? What do they do if they win? How do they celebrate? What do they do if they lose?
The high schoolers were definitely animated and interested in telling us their own personal stories, and we found that it was very specific. There were some things that, as a team, people did together, and there were some things that [individual] high schoolers did – [like listen to] their favorite song [as a way to] get psyched up or to focus before the big game. [Some] things were individual for each high schooler, and [other] things were more of a group activity.
Later, we would move into asking them questions that were associative — what kind of a feeling or attitude or type of personality do you associate with this sneaker? We might give them a Nike sneaker and say, “What does this make you think of? If you have to describe the personality of the person who wears this shoe, what’s the person [like]?” They often [gave] very specific answers. Nike was a person who was athletic and cool and dominant. New Balance — and I’m sorry to say this – [was] the grandfather taking long walks with the dog. It was really interesting because the high schoolers had specific ideas of what different brands meant to them. Without realizing it, they were talking about brand personalities and brand identities. It was definitely interesting. The high schoolers had a lot of really good insights.
KWHS: This basically constituted a focus group, right? Can you talk a little about the use of focus groups in consumer awareness, brand identity and brand awareness?
Stern: Sure. Usually when a company is trying to create a brand or understand how their brand is received, pictured or understood in the market place, they will pick a particular cross section of people. In some cases, it’s a specific group. In this case, it was people between the ages of 15 to 18 who were athletes — co-ed. But it could be anything. It could be mothers of children who are between the ages of 2 and 4. It all depends on what the product is and what the company wants to learn about the group. In this case, the company wanted to learn about what high schoolers thought about their product. A focus group is one of [several] different ways to do that. Other ways might be [by] doing a written survey [that you] send out to many different people. You ask questions and people answer those questions according to different feelings they have about brands.
What makes a focus group special is that sometimes there are insights or ideas that come out of people talking to each other. A one-on-one interview is a great way to get an expert’s opinion. Maybe if you were marketing a drug, you would ask a doctor his opinion of the drug. And if you wanted to know if people preferred Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi, you could send a survey out to thousands of people. But in this case, when you want to get a little deeper insights and you want to understand how people function as a group, then you do a focus group, which is usually around six to 10 people. There are certain ideas or opinions that [come] from people bouncing ideas off each other. We would hold a sneaker up and say, “What do you guys think of this?” One person would say, “Well, this color is cool, I like this.” And another person would say, “Yeah, but look, the treads on the bottom of that sneaker are too big and this isn’t a legitimate running shoe.” You learn that way how people’s ideas about brands are not just individual, but are influenced by each other.
KWHS: What did you learn about the appeal of the Saucony brand to high school students? What were some of their key insights?
Stern: Honestly, the high schoolers didn’t know a whole lot about the running shoe, which was not a surprise because what we understood about it when we began the project is that this shoe is very popular and well respected among elite and fitness runners. An elite runner would be somebody who competes regularly as a runner, and a fitness runner would be somebody who is out there three, four times a week, running regularly and cares about what kind of gear they use — pays attention to different brands in terms of their functionality. Saucony’s already a well-respected shoe and very popular in that segment, but we found that a lot of the high schoolers we talked to didn’t have a very specific idea about it. They didn’t necessarily have specific associations about [Saucony’s] brand personality. Keep in mind, though, that we talked to high school athletes who represented a cross section — football players, soccer players, basketball players. Usually the one percent or two people in the group who were runners had heard of Saucony. Maybe they had run with [the brand]. They had a quiet respect for understanding it was a good running shoe. But there definitely wasn’t any sort of enthusiasm or excitement about the shoe.
KWHS: What do high school students want most from their brand messages? What did you take away from this?
Stern: That’s a really interesting question. It wasn’t necessarily what we expected. When we first talked to the high school students about brands and what brands were popular, we got a lot of response about Nike and Under Armour. There were two very different appeals. Nike was popular because it’s cool, the advertisements are really cool and the high schoolers were really specific about Nike ads. They could quote or imitate an ad that they had recently seen. And they really responded positively to that. They would also talk about the experience of walking into [a Modell’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods] and saying, “There’s a tiny little section over here for a smaller brand, and then the whole wall is Nike and there’s so much variety.” Variety was a really big deal to them. [Having] lots of different options for colors and styles captured their attention.
What surprised us was that we thought high schoolers would be a little suspicious of a big brand like Nike. But when it came to Nike, they were impressed by its largeness and popularity, and being big and powerful was actually positive. That was really interesting.
Under Armour was perhaps one of the most interesting insights. High schoolers felt like if somebody was wearing Under Armour, it made them “legit.” There was something about the importance of authenticity in athletes. If you showed up to a basketball game, and the opposing team walked on and they [were] all wearing suits, [you think], “They’re here to play, they’re serious, they’re legit.” It was the same thing with Under Armour. Athletes who wore it were considered legit, and that was something that really resonated with high school students.
We took that back to Saucony. We said, “Look, you’re a company that isn’t super well known among high schoolers. You’re not going to be a Nike, and you don’t necessarily want to be a Nike because if you were, then all of the elite runners who respect you because you’re this authentic running shoe company are going to start thinking that you’re a mass-produced brand. So why not take the message of legitimacy and try to work with that, work with what you already are.” We knew that high schoolers really responded to this idea of legitimacy and authenticity and we thought, “Try to create a brand message around what it means to be an athlete who’s legit.” If you really want kids to start paying attention to running shoes, then maybe the way to do that is to create a message and a brand around how running is a legitimate part of being an athlete, or [how] being in physical running condition somehow makes you more legit as an athlete.
KWHS: All this knowledge you’re gaining about brands and consumerism as a student, where do you hope to take this in your own future?
Stern: The best part of this project for me, honestly, was talking to the students. I really enjoyed it. I liked that their opinions were different than mine. I liked that they surprised me. I liked that I didn’t always know what they were going to say. One of the things that really surprised me, for example, was [who actually inspired these young athletes]. You look at top athletes who are really popular, in commercials, with sponsorships, and you assume that a high-school-age male is going to respond to those athletes, is going to idolize them. One of the questions we asked in the focus groups was, “What athletes inspire you? Who are the athletes who really motivate you; when you aspire to be like someone, who is it?” In more than one focus group, kids who did not know each other mentioned the same baseball player. And they mentioned it in the same exact context, which was, “This is a baseball player who I look up to because he’s this particular position and he’s kind of short [in] stature. I don’t think I’m necessarily going to be the next Babe Ruth or I don’t think I’m necessarily going to be the next famous basketball player, but here’s an athlete who I can relate to. If I work really hard, I might be able to aspire to that.” That was so cool because you had two different kids that didn’t know each other saying the same thing about an athlete who is popular, but somewhat of an underdog.
It was so cool to see that these high schoolers had really done their research; they were knowledgeable about these sports, and they were relating to people because they felt a personal connection. Another answer [to our question about what athletes motivated them] was even more heartwarming. A lot of them mentioned fellow athletes, teammates. They said, “If I have a teammate who plays basketball and I play soccer, but he’s really good at basketball, I go watch his games,” or “Just my friends who play really well, they inspire me.” [We got this] answer from kids across the board. Kids at different schools with different backgrounds, playing different sports, they all said the same thing. Here’s a group of people that, yes, respond to big companies like Nike – yes, advertising is effective on them. If Nike advertises a really cool sneaker, [high school students] are going to be excited about that sneaker. But that doesn’t mean that all they care about is branding and marketing and messaging. They also care about their friends. There is a level of integrity and authenticity among high school students that is really impressive. At such a young age, all of these athletes were focused on what’s real to them, not just this picture of what’s in the media.
Source: www.kwhs.wharton.upenn.edu
Sunday, June 17, 2012
The Huffington Post-Versión en Español
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Arianna Huffington: "Esta es una era dorada del periodismo"
La fundadora del diario digital más popular del mundo acaba de lanzar la versión española
Por Adrián Sack | Para LA NACION
Arianna Huffington. Foto: NYT
MADRID.- Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington encontró fácilmente la receta para transformar miles de blogs dispersos en Internet en un medio masivo, atractivo y exitoso: le bastó con ordenarlos, clasificarlos y darle a todo ese contenido la novedosa forma de un diario digital de "periodismo ciudadano".
El procedimiento, análogo al utilizado en YouTube con los videos, o Facebook con los datos e inquietudes de los internautas, hizo de The Huffington Post un suceso de los nuevos medios, y a ella, multimillonaria y famosa en todo el territorio de los Estados Unidos, donde hasta aquel iniciático 2005 sólo era conocida por haber sido la esposa del congresista republicano Michael Huffington.
Hoy, 15 años después de divorciarse, apenas conserva de su ex marido el apellido, del que jamás podrá -ni querría- desprenderse. El destino ya no parece capaz de separar lo que los buenos negocios unieron: The Huffington Post, que ya tiene un premio Pulitzer en su vitrina, alcanzó el tercer puesto entre los medios digitales más seguidos del mundo, cuenta con cerca de 26 millones de usuarios mensuales y dejó una huella indeleble tras siete años de crecimiento sostenido.
Nada de esto fue ignorado por el mercado, y mucho menos por Arianna, que el año pasado vendió el diario digital más popular de la historia en 315 millones de dólares a AOL, el gigante norteamericano de la Web. Pero la venta del periódico lejos estuvo de marcar el final de la influencia y ambición de esta ateniense de 61 años. En su paso por Madrid, donde conversó con La Nacion, Huffington reveló que el periódico bloguero, donde continúa como editora en jefe, tiene aún una importante misión que cumplir. "Estamos en pleno proceso de expansión internacional, esta es ahora nuestra manera de seguir haciendo de este diario una empresa exitosa", afirmó.
Y su visita a la capital española no es para nada anecdótica. Nombrada miembro del consejo de administración del diario El País hace poco más de un año, Arianna abrió la semana pasada en este periódico, el primero en ventas en España, la sucursal local de su publicación. Con el nombre de El Huffington Post, Arianna dio un paso más en su estrategia de hacer pie en diferentes mercados del mundo, tal como hizo recientemente en Francia, al abrir Le Huffington Post con el apoyo del prestigioso diario Le Monde, o en el Reino Unido, donde también tiene su versión local.
Aunque España, para ella, tiene un incentivo especial en términos periodísticos: es el lugar indicado para una filial y, también, el momento justo. "Este país tiene hoy miles de historias que necesitan ser contadas, y cuyo interés trasciende las fronteras. Por eso nuestro objetivo es contar desde muchas perspectivas diferentes el carácter humano de esta crisis, que va mucho más allá de la agotada dicotomía ideológica de derecha-izquierda. Porque no hay nada de izquierda o de derecha acerca de interesarse y contar que el 24% de los españoles, y la mitad de sus jóvenes, sufren hoy el desempleo", señaló.
Huffington también pone acento en la juventud cuando trata de explicar el "ingrediente x" de su medio, que pese a ser innovador por definición, acude a las raíces del periodismo moderno, al reclutar blogueros que no necesariamente son periodistas profesionales, sino especialistas -abogados, médicos, científicos y técnicos- o simples y noveles opinadores. "Si hay algo que caracteriza al Huffington Post, es que une el periodismo tradicional con una plataforma que permite dar a conocer las historias de las personas cuyas voces necesitan ser amplificadas", dijo, en relación a los autores de blogs (o "agregadores" de contenidos) que nutren de vida al portal y no cobran por subir allí sus trabajos.
Este último y polémico rasgo de su medio es, para ella, una bisagra en la evolución del periodismo en el acceso a las herramientas de difusión de información. "Todo lo que está pasando [con el diario] sólo puede ser bueno, porque esas voces que antes no se oían ahora sí pueden hacerse oír. Ya no hay que ser empleado de un medio para tener voz. Con tener un mensaje importante, una historia buena e interesante para contar, en nuestro medio ya podrás ser escuchado", afirmó.
Su fe en el tipo particular de periódico que conduce y la ascendente popularidad de las redes sociales la lleva a ver este nuevo medio y este nuevo tiempo como una etapa superadora en la historia de la profesión. "En la actualidad hay que tener muy en claro lo que realmente te apasiona, las historias que uno quiere contar. Ese es el criterio. Y, además, existen muchas maneras para contarlas, ya sea a través de textos, videos, redes sociales. En ese sentido, podemos decir que estamos frente a una era dorada del periodismo", señaló.
Sin embargo, Huffington descree en quienes profetizan el final de los medios de comunicación tradicionales, aunque, desde su punto de vista, las grandes empresas periodísticas deberán hacer cambios para sobrevivir. "Aún hay mucha gente que lee los diarios y revistas tal como los conocemos, pero, al mismo tiempo, tanto la producción como el consumo de contenidos online ha crecido sustancialmente. Y esto, sumado a que la gente está participando más que nunca antes en el debate público de todas las cuestiones de interés, va a obligar, tarde o temprano, a que los antiguos modelos de medios se adapten al nuevo escenario", concluyó.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Arianna Huffington: "Esta es una era dorada del periodismo"
La fundadora del diario digital más popular del mundo acaba de lanzar la versión española
Por Adrián Sack | Para LA NACION
Arianna Huffington. Foto: NYT
MADRID.- Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington encontró fácilmente la receta para transformar miles de blogs dispersos en Internet en un medio masivo, atractivo y exitoso: le bastó con ordenarlos, clasificarlos y darle a todo ese contenido la novedosa forma de un diario digital de "periodismo ciudadano".
El procedimiento, análogo al utilizado en YouTube con los videos, o Facebook con los datos e inquietudes de los internautas, hizo de The Huffington Post un suceso de los nuevos medios, y a ella, multimillonaria y famosa en todo el territorio de los Estados Unidos, donde hasta aquel iniciático 2005 sólo era conocida por haber sido la esposa del congresista republicano Michael Huffington.
Hoy, 15 años después de divorciarse, apenas conserva de su ex marido el apellido, del que jamás podrá -ni querría- desprenderse. El destino ya no parece capaz de separar lo que los buenos negocios unieron: The Huffington Post, que ya tiene un premio Pulitzer en su vitrina, alcanzó el tercer puesto entre los medios digitales más seguidos del mundo, cuenta con cerca de 26 millones de usuarios mensuales y dejó una huella indeleble tras siete años de crecimiento sostenido.
Nada de esto fue ignorado por el mercado, y mucho menos por Arianna, que el año pasado vendió el diario digital más popular de la historia en 315 millones de dólares a AOL, el gigante norteamericano de la Web. Pero la venta del periódico lejos estuvo de marcar el final de la influencia y ambición de esta ateniense de 61 años. En su paso por Madrid, donde conversó con La Nacion, Huffington reveló que el periódico bloguero, donde continúa como editora en jefe, tiene aún una importante misión que cumplir. "Estamos en pleno proceso de expansión internacional, esta es ahora nuestra manera de seguir haciendo de este diario una empresa exitosa", afirmó.
Y su visita a la capital española no es para nada anecdótica. Nombrada miembro del consejo de administración del diario El País hace poco más de un año, Arianna abrió la semana pasada en este periódico, el primero en ventas en España, la sucursal local de su publicación. Con el nombre de El Huffington Post, Arianna dio un paso más en su estrategia de hacer pie en diferentes mercados del mundo, tal como hizo recientemente en Francia, al abrir Le Huffington Post con el apoyo del prestigioso diario Le Monde, o en el Reino Unido, donde también tiene su versión local.
Aunque España, para ella, tiene un incentivo especial en términos periodísticos: es el lugar indicado para una filial y, también, el momento justo. "Este país tiene hoy miles de historias que necesitan ser contadas, y cuyo interés trasciende las fronteras. Por eso nuestro objetivo es contar desde muchas perspectivas diferentes el carácter humano de esta crisis, que va mucho más allá de la agotada dicotomía ideológica de derecha-izquierda. Porque no hay nada de izquierda o de derecha acerca de interesarse y contar que el 24% de los españoles, y la mitad de sus jóvenes, sufren hoy el desempleo", señaló.
Huffington también pone acento en la juventud cuando trata de explicar el "ingrediente x" de su medio, que pese a ser innovador por definición, acude a las raíces del periodismo moderno, al reclutar blogueros que no necesariamente son periodistas profesionales, sino especialistas -abogados, médicos, científicos y técnicos- o simples y noveles opinadores. "Si hay algo que caracteriza al Huffington Post, es que une el periodismo tradicional con una plataforma que permite dar a conocer las historias de las personas cuyas voces necesitan ser amplificadas", dijo, en relación a los autores de blogs (o "agregadores" de contenidos) que nutren de vida al portal y no cobran por subir allí sus trabajos.
Este último y polémico rasgo de su medio es, para ella, una bisagra en la evolución del periodismo en el acceso a las herramientas de difusión de información. "Todo lo que está pasando [con el diario] sólo puede ser bueno, porque esas voces que antes no se oían ahora sí pueden hacerse oír. Ya no hay que ser empleado de un medio para tener voz. Con tener un mensaje importante, una historia buena e interesante para contar, en nuestro medio ya podrás ser escuchado", afirmó.
Su fe en el tipo particular de periódico que conduce y la ascendente popularidad de las redes sociales la lleva a ver este nuevo medio y este nuevo tiempo como una etapa superadora en la historia de la profesión. "En la actualidad hay que tener muy en claro lo que realmente te apasiona, las historias que uno quiere contar. Ese es el criterio. Y, además, existen muchas maneras para contarlas, ya sea a través de textos, videos, redes sociales. En ese sentido, podemos decir que estamos frente a una era dorada del periodismo", señaló.
Sin embargo, Huffington descree en quienes profetizan el final de los medios de comunicación tradicionales, aunque, desde su punto de vista, las grandes empresas periodísticas deberán hacer cambios para sobrevivir. "Aún hay mucha gente que lee los diarios y revistas tal como los conocemos, pero, al mismo tiempo, tanto la producción como el consumo de contenidos online ha crecido sustancialmente. Y esto, sumado a que la gente está participando más que nunca antes en el debate público de todas las cuestiones de interés, va a obligar, tarde o temprano, a que los antiguos modelos de medios se adapten al nuevo escenario", concluyó.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
FELIZ DÍA DEL PADRE!!!/HAPPY FATHER´S DAY!!!!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Daddy don´t cry-Lyrics
Don't Cry Daddy Lyrics
Performed by Elvis Presley
(words & music by Scott Davis)
Today I stumbled from my bed
With thunder crashing in my head
And my pillow still wet
From last night's tears
And as I think of giving up
A voice inside my coffee-cup
Kept crying out
Ringing in my ears
Don't cry daddy
Daddy, please don't cry
Daddy, you've still got me and little Tommy
Together we'll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh, daddy, please don't cry
Why are children always first
To feel the pain and hurt the worst
It's cruel but somehow
It just don't seem right
'Cause ev'ry time I cry I know
It hurts my little children so
And I wonder will it be the same tonight
Don't cry daddy
Daddy, please don't cry
Daddy, you've still got me and little Tommy
Together we'll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh, daddy, please don't cry
Oh, daddy, please don't cry
JOHNNY CASH
"Daddy Sang Bass"
I remember when I was a lad,
times were hard and things were bad.
But there's a silver lining behind every cloud.
Just poor people, that's all we were.
Trying to make a living out of black land dirt.
We'd get together in a family circle singing loud.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
Singing seems to help a troubled soul.
One of these days and it won't be long.
I'll rejoin them in a song.
I'm gonna join the family circle at the Throne.
No, the circle won't be broken.
By and by, Lord, by and by.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
Now I remember after work,
Mama would call in all of us.
You could hear us singing for a country mile.
Now little brother has done gone on.
But, I'll rejoin him in a song.
We'll be together again up yonder in a little while.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
Cause singing seems to help a troubled soul.
One of these days and it won't be long,
I'll rejoin them in a song.
I'm gonna join the family circle at the Throne.
Oh, no the circle won't be broken.
By and by, Lord, by and by.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
MADONNA
"Papa Don't Preach"
Papa I know you're going to be upset
'Cause I was always your little girl
But you should know by now
I'm not a baby
You always taught me right from wrong
I need your help, daddy please be strong
I may be young at heart
But I know what I'm saying
The one you warned me all about
The one you said I could do without
We're in an awful mess, and I don't mean maybe - please
[Chorus:]
Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep
Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep
But I made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby, oh
I'm gonna keep my baby, mmm...
He says that he's going to marry me
We can raise a little family
Maybe we'll be all right
It's a sacrifice
But my friends keep telling me to give it up
Saying I'm too young, I ought to live it up
What I need right now is some good advice, please
[chorus]
Daddy, daddy if you could only see
Just how good he's been treating me
You'd give us your blessing right now
'Cause we are in love, we are in love, so please
[chorus]
Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep
Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep
[repeat]
Oh, I'm gonna keep my baby, ooh
Don't you stop loving me daddy
I know, I'm keeping my baby
The Temptations-"Papa Was A Rolling Stone"
It was the third of September
That day I'll always remember, yes I will
Cause that was the day, that my daddy died
I never got a chance to see him
Never heard nothin' but bad things about him
Momma I'm depending on you, to tell me the truth
Momma just hung her head and said, son
[Chorus: x2]
Papa was a rolling stone, (my son)
Where ever he laid his hat was his home
and when he died, all he left us was alone
Hey Momma!
Is it true what they say that Papa never worked a day, in his life
And Momma, some bad talk goin' round town sayin' that
Papa had three outside children
And another wife, and that ain't right
Heard them talking Papa doing some store front preachin'
Talking about saving souls and all the time leechin'
Dealing in dirt, and stealing in the name of the Lord
Momma just hung her head and said
[Chorus: x2]
Hey Momma,
I heard Papa called himself a jack of all trades
Tell me is that what sent Papa to an early grave
Folks say Papa would beg, borrow, steal
To pay his bills
Hey Momma,
Folks say Papa never was much on thinking
Spent most of his time chasing women and drinking
Momma I'm depending on you, to tell me the truth
Momma looked up with a tear in her eye and said, son
[Chorus: x4]
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs
A.D.R.B. (En Busca Eterna) lyrics
Songwriters: FERNANDEZ-CAPELLO, GABRIEL JULIO
Raro es el vacio que has dejado en mi
Viento, si te busco hay solo viento
Y se ha quedado aqui
Niebla vieja, trompo sin fin
Puerta muerta, cancin de abril
Viento que se lleva los recuerdos
Que me nubla hasta tu cara
Y al final no queda nada
Ni la nostalgia ya de poderte recordar.
El cielo perdono pero fue sabio y cruel
Me dejo tumbado y como muerto
En la vereda y fue
Tan severo me hizo crecer
El tiempo injusto se fue con l
Cielo que se lleva los recuerdos
Que me nubla hasta tu cara
Y al final no queda nada
Ni la nostalgia esta de poderte recordar
No existe nada
Solo el anhelo de soar
Verte a vos
Y saber como hacer
Para quedarme siempre alli
Y nunca mas volver
No existe nada
Solo el anhelo de soar
Verte a vos
Y saber como hacer
Para quedarme siempre alli
No despertarme mas
Rara es la esperanza que has dejado en mi
Rara y como eterna me condena
A esperar hasta el fin
Si mis ojos vieran lejos
Y pudiera yo encontrarte
Aunque fuera en un instante
Descansaria ya de tanto caminar
[ Lyrics from:
Moris-"El oso"
Yo vivía en el bosque muy contento,
caminaba caminaba sin cesar, las mañanas y
las tardes eran mías, a la noche me tiraba
a descansar, pero un día vino el hombre con
sus jaulas, me encerró y me llevó a
la ciudad, en el circo me enseñaron las
piruetas y yo así perdí mi amada
libertad.
Conformate , me decía un tigre viejo -
nunca el techo y la comida han de faltar, solo
exigen que hagamos las piruetas, que a los
niños podamos alegrar.
Han pasado cuatro años de esta vida, con
el circo recorrí el mundo así, pero
nunca pude olvidarme de todo, de mis bosques, de
mis tardes, ni de mi.
En un pueblito alejado, alguien no cerró
el candado, era noche sin luna, y yo dejé
la ciudad. Ahora piso yo el suelo de mi bosque,
otra vez el verde de la libertad, estoy viejo,
pero las tardes son mías, vuelvo al bosque,
estoy contento de verdad.
Fuente: www.lanación.com.ar/www.rollingstone.com.ar
Daddy don´t cry-Lyrics
Don't Cry Daddy Lyrics
Performed by Elvis Presley
(words & music by Scott Davis)
Today I stumbled from my bed
With thunder crashing in my head
And my pillow still wet
From last night's tears
And as I think of giving up
A voice inside my coffee-cup
Kept crying out
Ringing in my ears
Don't cry daddy
Daddy, please don't cry
Daddy, you've still got me and little Tommy
Together we'll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh, daddy, please don't cry
Why are children always first
To feel the pain and hurt the worst
It's cruel but somehow
It just don't seem right
'Cause ev'ry time I cry I know
It hurts my little children so
And I wonder will it be the same tonight
Don't cry daddy
Daddy, please don't cry
Daddy, you've still got me and little Tommy
Together we'll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh, daddy, please don't cry
Oh, daddy, please don't cry
JOHNNY CASH
"Daddy Sang Bass"
I remember when I was a lad,
times were hard and things were bad.
But there's a silver lining behind every cloud.
Just poor people, that's all we were.
Trying to make a living out of black land dirt.
We'd get together in a family circle singing loud.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
Singing seems to help a troubled soul.
One of these days and it won't be long.
I'll rejoin them in a song.
I'm gonna join the family circle at the Throne.
No, the circle won't be broken.
By and by, Lord, by and by.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
Now I remember after work,
Mama would call in all of us.
You could hear us singing for a country mile.
Now little brother has done gone on.
But, I'll rejoin him in a song.
We'll be together again up yonder in a little while.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
Cause singing seems to help a troubled soul.
One of these days and it won't be long,
I'll rejoin them in a song.
I'm gonna join the family circle at the Throne.
Oh, no the circle won't be broken.
By and by, Lord, by and by.
Daddy sang bass,
Mama sang tenor.
Me and little brother would join right in there.
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
MADONNA
"Papa Don't Preach"
Papa I know you're going to be upset
'Cause I was always your little girl
But you should know by now
I'm not a baby
You always taught me right from wrong
I need your help, daddy please be strong
I may be young at heart
But I know what I'm saying
The one you warned me all about
The one you said I could do without
We're in an awful mess, and I don't mean maybe - please
[Chorus:]
Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep
Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep
But I made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby, oh
I'm gonna keep my baby, mmm...
He says that he's going to marry me
We can raise a little family
Maybe we'll be all right
It's a sacrifice
But my friends keep telling me to give it up
Saying I'm too young, I ought to live it up
What I need right now is some good advice, please
[chorus]
Daddy, daddy if you could only see
Just how good he's been treating me
You'd give us your blessing right now
'Cause we are in love, we are in love, so please
[chorus]
Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep
Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep
[repeat]
Oh, I'm gonna keep my baby, ooh
Don't you stop loving me daddy
I know, I'm keeping my baby
The Temptations-"Papa Was A Rolling Stone"
It was the third of September
That day I'll always remember, yes I will
Cause that was the day, that my daddy died
I never got a chance to see him
Never heard nothin' but bad things about him
Momma I'm depending on you, to tell me the truth
Momma just hung her head and said, son
[Chorus: x2]
Papa was a rolling stone, (my son)
Where ever he laid his hat was his home
and when he died, all he left us was alone
Hey Momma!
Is it true what they say that Papa never worked a day, in his life
And Momma, some bad talk goin' round town sayin' that
Papa had three outside children
And another wife, and that ain't right
Heard them talking Papa doing some store front preachin'
Talking about saving souls and all the time leechin'
Dealing in dirt, and stealing in the name of the Lord
Momma just hung her head and said
[Chorus: x2]
Hey Momma,
I heard Papa called himself a jack of all trades
Tell me is that what sent Papa to an early grave
Folks say Papa would beg, borrow, steal
To pay his bills
Hey Momma,
Folks say Papa never was much on thinking
Spent most of his time chasing women and drinking
Momma I'm depending on you, to tell me the truth
Momma looked up with a tear in her eye and said, son
[Chorus: x4]
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs
A.D.R.B. (En Busca Eterna) lyrics
Songwriters: FERNANDEZ-CAPELLO, GABRIEL JULIO
Raro es el vacio que has dejado en mi
Viento, si te busco hay solo viento
Y se ha quedado aqui
Niebla vieja, trompo sin fin
Puerta muerta, cancin de abril
Viento que se lleva los recuerdos
Que me nubla hasta tu cara
Y al final no queda nada
Ni la nostalgia ya de poderte recordar.
El cielo perdono pero fue sabio y cruel
Me dejo tumbado y como muerto
En la vereda y fue
Tan severo me hizo crecer
El tiempo injusto se fue con l
Cielo que se lleva los recuerdos
Que me nubla hasta tu cara
Y al final no queda nada
Ni la nostalgia esta de poderte recordar
No existe nada
Solo el anhelo de soar
Verte a vos
Y saber como hacer
Para quedarme siempre alli
Y nunca mas volver
No existe nada
Solo el anhelo de soar
Verte a vos
Y saber como hacer
Para quedarme siempre alli
No despertarme mas
Rara es la esperanza que has dejado en mi
Rara y como eterna me condena
A esperar hasta el fin
Si mis ojos vieran lejos
Y pudiera yo encontrarte
Aunque fuera en un instante
Descansaria ya de tanto caminar
[ Lyrics from:
Moris-"El oso"
Yo vivía en el bosque muy contento,
caminaba caminaba sin cesar, las mañanas y
las tardes eran mías, a la noche me tiraba
a descansar, pero un día vino el hombre con
sus jaulas, me encerró y me llevó a
la ciudad, en el circo me enseñaron las
piruetas y yo así perdí mi amada
libertad.
Conformate , me decía un tigre viejo -
nunca el techo y la comida han de faltar, solo
exigen que hagamos las piruetas, que a los
niños podamos alegrar.
Han pasado cuatro años de esta vida, con
el circo recorrí el mundo así, pero
nunca pude olvidarme de todo, de mis bosques, de
mis tardes, ni de mi.
En un pueblito alejado, alguien no cerró
el candado, era noche sin luna, y yo dejé
la ciudad. Ahora piso yo el suelo de mi bosque,
otra vez el verde de la libertad, estoy viejo,
pero las tardes son mías, vuelvo al bosque,
estoy contento de verdad.
Fuente: www.lanación.com.ar/www.rollingstone.com.ar
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