The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.slideshare.net
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.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
TEACH/LANG-David Crystal: English as a "global" language?-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.macmillanglobal.com
Source: www.macmillanglobal.com
St Patrick's Day
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Google Doodle celebrates St Patrick's Day as world turns green
Majid Mohamed, Paul Bignell
Sunday, 17 March 2013
Millions will be raising a pint in celebration of all things Irish today to celebrate the cultural and religious holiday.
The annual celebration on March 17 is in honor of Ireland's patron saint, Saint Patrick.
The search engine giant celebrated the holiday with an animated Google Doodle featuring six Irish stepdancers performing the traditional jig. Each of the figures also beared the six letters making up Google's name.
The Irish have observed this day as a religious holiday for over 1,000 years.
As usual, in celebration of the Celtic saint's day, fans will be dressing in as much green as they can lay their hands on.
This year, in celebration of St Patrick's Day, more than 40 international landmarks are being lit in green. From the pyramids and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to the Sydney Opera House and South Africa's Table Mountain: some of the most recognised man-made and geographical attractions will join a host of British landmarks to "go green".
Source: www.independent.co.uk
Google Doodle celebrates St Patrick's Day as world turns green
Majid Mohamed, Paul Bignell
Sunday, 17 March 2013
Millions will be raising a pint in celebration of all things Irish today to celebrate the cultural and religious holiday.
The annual celebration on March 17 is in honor of Ireland's patron saint, Saint Patrick.
The search engine giant celebrated the holiday with an animated Google Doodle featuring six Irish stepdancers performing the traditional jig. Each of the figures also beared the six letters making up Google's name.
The Irish have observed this day as a religious holiday for over 1,000 years.
As usual, in celebration of the Celtic saint's day, fans will be dressing in as much green as they can lay their hands on.
This year, in celebration of St Patrick's Day, more than 40 international landmarks are being lit in green. From the pyramids and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to the Sydney Opera House and South Africa's Table Mountain: some of the most recognised man-made and geographical attractions will join a host of British landmarks to "go green".
Source: www.independent.co.uk
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina elected pope, takes name Pope Francis
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina elected pope, takes name Pope Francis
By Jason Horowitz and Anthony Faiola, Wednesday, March 13,
VATICAN CITY — The cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church broke Europe’s long stranglehold on the papacy Wednesday, electing Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the 266th pope.
The choice, on the second day of deliberations by a papal conclave, opened a direct connection to the Southern Hemisphere at a critical juncture when secularism and competing faiths are depleting the church’s ranks around the world and dysfunction is eroding its authority in Rome.
“The duty of the conclave was to appoint a bishop of Rome,” said Bergoglio, who took the name Francis, the first pope in history to do so. “And it seems to me that my brother cardinals went to fetch him at the end of the world. But here I am.”
Bergoglio is widely believed to have been the runner-up in the 2005 conclave, which yielded Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Last month, Benedict became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign.
Shortly after his election, Francis called Benedict, now known as pope emeritus, with whom he will meet in the coming days. As the third non-Italian pope after the Polish John Paul II and the German Benedict, Francis seems to have ended the era of Italian dominance of the papacy.
Francis I is a pope of firsts. He chose a name never before used in the church’s 2,000 -year history, signaling to Vatican analysts that he wants a new beginning for the faith.
“It’s a genius move,” Marco Politi, a papal biographer and veteran Vatican watcher, said of the choice of Bergoglio. “It’s a non-Italian, non-European, not a man of the Roman government. It’s an opening to the Third World, a moderate. By taking the name Francis, it means a completely new beginning.”
“It’s highly significant for what Francis means,” said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman. “It means that he is here to serve.”
But for many, Bergoglio’s country of origin is the first that matters most for the church. “We know how longed-for this was by the Catholics in Latin America,” said Lombardi. “This is a great response to this anticipation.”
That reaction was palpable in St. Peter’s Square as Bergoglio came to the balcony and, in his Argentine-accented Italian, addressed the crowd, which greeted him with cheers of “Viva il papa!”
“It’s the first pope from Latin America!” said Horacio Pintos, from Uruguay, who held his daughter on his shoulders. “It’s an opening to a continent that is full of faithful that has been ignored,” interrupted Carlos Becerril, 35, from Mexico. “We will now all be heard more strongly.”
President Obama extended warm wishes to Pope Francis I on behalf of the American people, noting his trail-blazing status as the first pontiff from the New World.
“As a champion of the poor and the most vulnerable among us, he carries forth the message of love and compassion that has inspired the world for more than two thousand years — that in each other we see the face of God,” Obama said in a statement. “As the first pope from the Americas, his selection also speaks to the strength and vitality of a region that is increasingly shaping our world, and alongside millions of Hispanic Americans, those of us in the United States share the joy of this historic day.”
Obama said he looks forward to working with the new pope “to advance peace, security and dignity for our fellow human beings, regardless of their faith.”
Bergoglio’s election was announced by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the church’s most senior cardinal in the order of deacons, or the proto-deacon, who declared “habemus papam” and spoke the name of the new pope. But his words were barely audible, and there was initial confusion over the identity of the new leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Bergoglio, 76, the first Jesuit pope, spent nearly his entire career at home in Argentina, overseeing churches and shoe-leather priests, the Associated Press reported. He has long specialized in the kind of pastoral work considered an essential skill for the next pope.
In St. Peter’s Square, the election elicited exultation from Latin Americans. But many of the faithful seemed unfamiliar with their new leader.
“We don’t know a lot about him,” said Silvia Napolitano, 62, as she walked out of St. Peter’s Square with a friend. “It seems he has a very direct connection with the people. He seems simple. And we like Argentines; they’re open and sociable. You can tell from the way he speaks with that soft Italian accent.”
Gabriel Lopez-Betanzos, 29, an American seminarian in Rome, also knew little about the new pope and reserved any conclusions. “I’m a scientist,” he said. “I need more data.”
White smoke rose over the Sistine Chapel earlier Wednesday evening, signaling that the 115 voting cardinals had made their choice.
Crowds erupted in joy in St. Peter’s Square and waited anxiously for the presentation of the then-undisclosed new pope.
Bergoglio subsequently was revealed to the world on the balcony after entering the so-called room of tears, donning white papal vestments and praying with the cardinals who elected him.
As they awaited the announcement, thousands of people ran up the Via della Conciliazione, the broad avenue leading to St. Peter’s Square, holding umbrellas above their heads. A line of Polish nuns in white clasped each other’s hands. Clusters of students jumped up and down, and roars of joy passed over the sea of people like waves.
“Huge emotions,” said Claudio Santini, a lawyer from Rome who stood in a bowler hat in the square. “It’s not important where the pope is from, just that he can travel into people’s hearts.”
A marching band and lines of Swiss Guards flying the white and yellow Vatican colors proceeded up the basilica steps in front of the cheering crowds.
Standing at attention in front of the basilica, the band played the Italian national anthem as many in the crowd sang along — a sign of the close relationship between the Vatican and Italy.
The papal seal on the Vatican Web site, which had been cloaked under an umbrella during the interregnum following Benedict’s retirement, or sede vacante, now again displayed the papal tiara under the title “Habemus Papam.”
The white smoke, accompanied by the pealing of bells to eliminate any confusion, billowed from a flue on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, prompting the huge crowd gathered in the square to erupt in applause and cheers.
The election apparently came during the fifth round of balloting, after one vote Tuesday, two rounds in a morning session Wednesday and one in the early afternoon.
To be chosen, a candidate had to win the support of at least two-thirds of the 115 voting-age cardinals. Reported front-runners included Cardinals Angelo Scola of Italy, Marc Ouellet of Canada, and Odilo Pedro Scherer of Brazil.
Because no one bloc of cardinals — organized around passport or priorities — was large enough on its own to generate the requisite 77 votes, a candidate needed to consolidate support from a cross-section of electors.
But since consensus apparently remained elusive, the cardinals looked to the less familiar names in their college, which is what happened when John Paul II was chosen in 1978.
“Today is the fundamental day,” Politi, a papal biographer and a veteran Vatican watcher with the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, said before the new pope was announced. “It is a referendum on Scola and whether the papacy will go back to an Italian or cross the Atlantic. For the first time there is a real possibility to have a pope from the Americas.”
The Rev. Frederico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, told reporters the cardinals returned to their quarters at Casa Santa Marta shortly before noon, after two morning votes did not result in a papal selection.
During a lunch and rest break that lasted nearly five hours, they were permitted to smoke, drink wine and — more importantly given their ongoing deliberations — talk and visit one another’s rooms.
“This is an extremely beautiful and intense moment,” Lombardi told reporters after the morning session ended, emphasizing that no pope since Pius XII has been chosen before the fourth ballot. “This is very normal. This is not indicative of any division among the cardinals.”
Benedict, now pope emeritus, spent much of Tuesday watching the pre-conclave proceedings on television and secluded in prayer, Lombardi said.
In St. Peter’s Square, faithful from many nations sang hymns and glanced frequently toward the six-foot chimney. Some clothed themselves in their national flags, cheerleading for the cardinals from their countries.
“Having a Brazilian pope would be better than winning the World Cup,” said Bruno Smania, a 15-year-old high school student from the Brazilian state of Parana, where Scherer spent part of his childhood. “It would be so important us, a sign that Brazil has really arrived.”
The sense that the next pope could revitalize the faith in whatever country he hails from was widely held here. Adam Potter, a Pittsburgh-born seminarian and former assistant to Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, was camping out with a group of American and British student priests. He said he’d support any pope, but he hoped for an American.
“It’s easy for Americans to feel disconnected from the church,” Potter said. “But if we see [Cardinal Timothy] Dolan or Cardinal Sean O’Malley become pope, I know there would be a powerful feeling of joy in the United States, and I feel that’s exactly what we need.”
Conclaves are officially open-ended, but for nearly 200 years, none has lasted more than five days, and most have taken only two or three days.
Initially Tuesday when the conclave began, the focus was on a small group of papabili, or possible popes. In addition to the front-runners, other possibilities were Dolan of New York and O’Malley of Boston, either of whom, if elected, would have emerged as the first “superpower” pope.
Among those who gathered in the square Wednesday morning to await word of a new pontiff was Angela Troilo, 77. She stood by the obelisk in the center of the square, surrounded by puddles and looking up at the chimney.
“The church used to do so much!” Troilo said, describing herself as a poor working woman who had been let down by her country and needed her church. “The Italian government is dead and buried. We need someone with energy, who can command!”
Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Nigeria, in an interview before the conclave, said the next pope, like any individual, “will come with his own baggage, his own background, competence, training, spiritual attitudes” — and will find that guiding the church can be more complicated than governing a single country.
“As a nation, the church is a universal association,” Onaiyekan said. “The church is spread all over the world. . . . And each distinct part of the church, according to God’s will, is headed by bishops whose job it is to face the realities around them and use them to defend the principles of the church and move the church forward.”
Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster agreed. “The challenges are in some ways quite startling,” he said. “There is such cultural change going on around the world, and such shifts of paradigm.”
Before their first journey Tuesday to the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals celebrated a Mass dedicated to the pope’s election. Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, delivered the homily, emphasizing the need for a good pastor and a strong commitment to evangelization.
“In the wake of this service of love toward the church and toward all of humanity, the last popes have been builders of so many good initiatives for people and for the international community, tirelessly promoting justice and peace,” said Sodano, who is past 80 and therefore not eligible to participate in the conclave. “Let us pray that the future pope may continue this unceasing work on the world level. . . . Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a pontiff who will embrace this noble mission with a generous heart.”
William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina elected pope, takes name Pope Francis
By Jason Horowitz and Anthony Faiola, Wednesday, March 13,
VATICAN CITY — The cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church broke Europe’s long stranglehold on the papacy Wednesday, electing Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the 266th pope.
The choice, on the second day of deliberations by a papal conclave, opened a direct connection to the Southern Hemisphere at a critical juncture when secularism and competing faiths are depleting the church’s ranks around the world and dysfunction is eroding its authority in Rome.
“The duty of the conclave was to appoint a bishop of Rome,” said Bergoglio, who took the name Francis, the first pope in history to do so. “And it seems to me that my brother cardinals went to fetch him at the end of the world. But here I am.”
Bergoglio is widely believed to have been the runner-up in the 2005 conclave, which yielded Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Last month, Benedict became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign.
Shortly after his election, Francis called Benedict, now known as pope emeritus, with whom he will meet in the coming days. As the third non-Italian pope after the Polish John Paul II and the German Benedict, Francis seems to have ended the era of Italian dominance of the papacy.
Francis I is a pope of firsts. He chose a name never before used in the church’s 2,000 -year history, signaling to Vatican analysts that he wants a new beginning for the faith.
“It’s a genius move,” Marco Politi, a papal biographer and veteran Vatican watcher, said of the choice of Bergoglio. “It’s a non-Italian, non-European, not a man of the Roman government. It’s an opening to the Third World, a moderate. By taking the name Francis, it means a completely new beginning.”
“It’s highly significant for what Francis means,” said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman. “It means that he is here to serve.”
But for many, Bergoglio’s country of origin is the first that matters most for the church. “We know how longed-for this was by the Catholics in Latin America,” said Lombardi. “This is a great response to this anticipation.”
That reaction was palpable in St. Peter’s Square as Bergoglio came to the balcony and, in his Argentine-accented Italian, addressed the crowd, which greeted him with cheers of “Viva il papa!”
“It’s the first pope from Latin America!” said Horacio Pintos, from Uruguay, who held his daughter on his shoulders. “It’s an opening to a continent that is full of faithful that has been ignored,” interrupted Carlos Becerril, 35, from Mexico. “We will now all be heard more strongly.”
President Obama extended warm wishes to Pope Francis I on behalf of the American people, noting his trail-blazing status as the first pontiff from the New World.
“As a champion of the poor and the most vulnerable among us, he carries forth the message of love and compassion that has inspired the world for more than two thousand years — that in each other we see the face of God,” Obama said in a statement. “As the first pope from the Americas, his selection also speaks to the strength and vitality of a region that is increasingly shaping our world, and alongside millions of Hispanic Americans, those of us in the United States share the joy of this historic day.”
Obama said he looks forward to working with the new pope “to advance peace, security and dignity for our fellow human beings, regardless of their faith.”
Bergoglio’s election was announced by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the church’s most senior cardinal in the order of deacons, or the proto-deacon, who declared “habemus papam” and spoke the name of the new pope. But his words were barely audible, and there was initial confusion over the identity of the new leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Bergoglio, 76, the first Jesuit pope, spent nearly his entire career at home in Argentina, overseeing churches and shoe-leather priests, the Associated Press reported. He has long specialized in the kind of pastoral work considered an essential skill for the next pope.
In St. Peter’s Square, the election elicited exultation from Latin Americans. But many of the faithful seemed unfamiliar with their new leader.
“We don’t know a lot about him,” said Silvia Napolitano, 62, as she walked out of St. Peter’s Square with a friend. “It seems he has a very direct connection with the people. He seems simple. And we like Argentines; they’re open and sociable. You can tell from the way he speaks with that soft Italian accent.”
Gabriel Lopez-Betanzos, 29, an American seminarian in Rome, also knew little about the new pope and reserved any conclusions. “I’m a scientist,” he said. “I need more data.”
White smoke rose over the Sistine Chapel earlier Wednesday evening, signaling that the 115 voting cardinals had made their choice.
Crowds erupted in joy in St. Peter’s Square and waited anxiously for the presentation of the then-undisclosed new pope.
Bergoglio subsequently was revealed to the world on the balcony after entering the so-called room of tears, donning white papal vestments and praying with the cardinals who elected him.
As they awaited the announcement, thousands of people ran up the Via della Conciliazione, the broad avenue leading to St. Peter’s Square, holding umbrellas above their heads. A line of Polish nuns in white clasped each other’s hands. Clusters of students jumped up and down, and roars of joy passed over the sea of people like waves.
“Huge emotions,” said Claudio Santini, a lawyer from Rome who stood in a bowler hat in the square. “It’s not important where the pope is from, just that he can travel into people’s hearts.”
A marching band and lines of Swiss Guards flying the white and yellow Vatican colors proceeded up the basilica steps in front of the cheering crowds.
Standing at attention in front of the basilica, the band played the Italian national anthem as many in the crowd sang along — a sign of the close relationship between the Vatican and Italy.
The papal seal on the Vatican Web site, which had been cloaked under an umbrella during the interregnum following Benedict’s retirement, or sede vacante, now again displayed the papal tiara under the title “Habemus Papam.”
The white smoke, accompanied by the pealing of bells to eliminate any confusion, billowed from a flue on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, prompting the huge crowd gathered in the square to erupt in applause and cheers.
The election apparently came during the fifth round of balloting, after one vote Tuesday, two rounds in a morning session Wednesday and one in the early afternoon.
To be chosen, a candidate had to win the support of at least two-thirds of the 115 voting-age cardinals. Reported front-runners included Cardinals Angelo Scola of Italy, Marc Ouellet of Canada, and Odilo Pedro Scherer of Brazil.
Because no one bloc of cardinals — organized around passport or priorities — was large enough on its own to generate the requisite 77 votes, a candidate needed to consolidate support from a cross-section of electors.
But since consensus apparently remained elusive, the cardinals looked to the less familiar names in their college, which is what happened when John Paul II was chosen in 1978.
“Today is the fundamental day,” Politi, a papal biographer and a veteran Vatican watcher with the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, said before the new pope was announced. “It is a referendum on Scola and whether the papacy will go back to an Italian or cross the Atlantic. For the first time there is a real possibility to have a pope from the Americas.”
The Rev. Frederico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, told reporters the cardinals returned to their quarters at Casa Santa Marta shortly before noon, after two morning votes did not result in a papal selection.
During a lunch and rest break that lasted nearly five hours, they were permitted to smoke, drink wine and — more importantly given their ongoing deliberations — talk and visit one another’s rooms.
“This is an extremely beautiful and intense moment,” Lombardi told reporters after the morning session ended, emphasizing that no pope since Pius XII has been chosen before the fourth ballot. “This is very normal. This is not indicative of any division among the cardinals.”
Benedict, now pope emeritus, spent much of Tuesday watching the pre-conclave proceedings on television and secluded in prayer, Lombardi said.
In St. Peter’s Square, faithful from many nations sang hymns and glanced frequently toward the six-foot chimney. Some clothed themselves in their national flags, cheerleading for the cardinals from their countries.
“Having a Brazilian pope would be better than winning the World Cup,” said Bruno Smania, a 15-year-old high school student from the Brazilian state of Parana, where Scherer spent part of his childhood. “It would be so important us, a sign that Brazil has really arrived.”
The sense that the next pope could revitalize the faith in whatever country he hails from was widely held here. Adam Potter, a Pittsburgh-born seminarian and former assistant to Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, was camping out with a group of American and British student priests. He said he’d support any pope, but he hoped for an American.
“It’s easy for Americans to feel disconnected from the church,” Potter said. “But if we see [Cardinal Timothy] Dolan or Cardinal Sean O’Malley become pope, I know there would be a powerful feeling of joy in the United States, and I feel that’s exactly what we need.”
Conclaves are officially open-ended, but for nearly 200 years, none has lasted more than five days, and most have taken only two or three days.
Initially Tuesday when the conclave began, the focus was on a small group of papabili, or possible popes. In addition to the front-runners, other possibilities were Dolan of New York and O’Malley of Boston, either of whom, if elected, would have emerged as the first “superpower” pope.
Among those who gathered in the square Wednesday morning to await word of a new pontiff was Angela Troilo, 77. She stood by the obelisk in the center of the square, surrounded by puddles and looking up at the chimney.
“The church used to do so much!” Troilo said, describing herself as a poor working woman who had been let down by her country and needed her church. “The Italian government is dead and buried. We need someone with energy, who can command!”
Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Nigeria, in an interview before the conclave, said the next pope, like any individual, “will come with his own baggage, his own background, competence, training, spiritual attitudes” — and will find that guiding the church can be more complicated than governing a single country.
“As a nation, the church is a universal association,” Onaiyekan said. “The church is spread all over the world. . . . And each distinct part of the church, according to God’s will, is headed by bishops whose job it is to face the realities around them and use them to defend the principles of the church and move the church forward.”
Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster agreed. “The challenges are in some ways quite startling,” he said. “There is such cultural change going on around the world, and such shifts of paradigm.”
Before their first journey Tuesday to the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals celebrated a Mass dedicated to the pope’s election. Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, delivered the homily, emphasizing the need for a good pastor and a strong commitment to evangelization.
“In the wake of this service of love toward the church and toward all of humanity, the last popes have been builders of so many good initiatives for people and for the international community, tirelessly promoting justice and peace,” said Sodano, who is past 80 and therefore not eligible to participate in the conclave. “Let us pray that the future pope may continue this unceasing work on the world level. . . . Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a pontiff who will embrace this noble mission with a generous heart.”
William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Saturday, March 9, 2013
WR (Sp)-500 Conectores gramaticales
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.es.scribd.com
500 Conectores gramaticales by occision
Source: www.es.scribd.com
DER-Modelo de Acta Constitutiva de Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.es.scribd.com
Modelo de Acta Constitutiva de Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable(2) by arazelii69
Source: www.es.scribd.com
TESTING-English Language Placement Test w/Key
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.es.scribd.com
English Language Placement Test by Bookwarm2009
Source: www.es.scribd.com
BM/BA-Successful Business Planning
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.es.scribd.com
Successful Business Planning by saidberdouz
Source: www.es.scribd.com
ECON-Economics for Financial Markets
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.es.scribd.com
Economics for Financial Markets by saidberdouz
Source: www.es.scribd.com
Friday, March 8, 2013
March 8th, International Women´s Day/Celebrating Working Women
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source:www.youtube.com
Source:www.youtube.com
Thursday, March 7, 2013
EDUC-TED Talks-Dave Eggers: Once upon a School
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Thank you so much everyone from TED, and Chris and Amy in particular.I cannot believe I'm here.I have not slept in weeks.Neil and I were sitting there comparing how little we've sleptin anticipation for this. I've never been so nervous --and I do this when I'm nervous, I just realized. (Laughter)So, I'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organizationcalled 826 Valencia, and then I'm going to talkabout how we all might join in and do similar things.
Back in about 2000, I was living in Brooklyn,I was trying to finish my first book,I was wandering around dazed every daybecause I wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m.So I would walk around in a daze during the day.I had no mental acuity to speak of during the day, but I had flexible hours.In the Brooklyn neighborhood that I lived in, Park Slope,there are a lot of writers --it's like a very high per capita ratioof writers to normal people.Meanwhile, I had grown up around a lot of teachers.My mom was a teacher, my sister became a teacherand after college so many of my friends went into teaching.And so I was always hearing them talk about their livesand how inspiring they were,and they were really sort of the most hard-workingand constantly inspiring people I knew.
But I knew so many of the things they were up against,so many of the struggles they were dealing with.And one of them was that so many of my friendsthat were teaching in city schools were having troublewith their students keeping up at grade level,in their reading and writing in particular.Now, so many of these students had come from householdswhere English isn't spoken in the home,where a lot of them have different special needs,learning disabilities. And of course they're working in schoolswhich sometimes and very often are under-funded.And so they would talk to me about this and say,"You know, what we really need is just more people,more bodies, more one-on-one attention,more hours, more expertise from peoplethat have skills in English and can work with these students one-on-one."
Now, I would say, "Well, why don't you just work with them one-on-one?"And they would say, "Well, we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each.This can lead up to 150, 180, 200 students a day.How can we possibly give each studenteven one hour a week of one-on-one attention?"You'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers.And so we started talking about this.And at the same time,I thought about this massive group of people I knew:writers, editors, journalists, graduate students,assistant professors, you name it.All these people that had sort of flexible daily hoursand an interest in the English word --I hope to have an interest in the English language,but I'm not speaking it well right now. (Laughter)I'm trying. That clock has got me.But everyone that I knew had an interest in the primacy of the written wordin terms of nurturing a democracy, nurturing an enlightened life.And so they had, you know, their timeand their interest, but at the same timethere wasn't a conduit that I knew of in my communityto bring these two communities together.
So when I moved back to San Francisco, we rented this building.And the idea was to put McSweeney's --McSweeney's Quarterly, that we published twice or three times a year,and a few other magazines --we were going to move it into an office for the first time.It used to be in my kitchen in Brooklyn.We were going to move it into an office,and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center.So we thought, "We'll have all these writers and editors and everybody --sort of a writing community -- coming into the office every day anyway,why don't we just open upthe front of the building for students to come in there after school,get extra help on their written homework,so you have basically no border between these two communities?"So the idea was that we would beworking on whatever we're working on,at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you're doing,or you trade, or you work a little bit later or whatever it is.You give those hours in the afternoonto the students in the neighborhood.
So, we had this place, we rented it,the landlord was all for it. We did this mural,that's a Chris Ware mural, that basically explains the entire historyof the printed word, in mural form -- it takes a long timeto digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road.So we rented this space.And everything was great except the landlord said,"Well, the space is zoned for retail; you have to come up with something.You've gotta sell something.You can't just have a tutoring center."So we thought, "Ha ha! Really!"And we couldn't think of anything necessarily to sell,but we did all the necessary research.It used to be a weight room, so there were rubber floors below,acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights.We took all that down, and we found beautiful wooden floors,whitewashed beams and it had the look --while we were renovating this place, somebody said,"You know, it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship."And we looked around and somebody else said,"Well, you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer." (Laughter)
And so this is what we did. So it made everybody laugh,and we said, "There's a point to that.Let's sell pirate supplies." This is the pirate supply store.You see, this is sort of a sketch I did on a napkin.A great carpenter built all this stuff and you see,we made it look sort of pirate supply-like.Here you see planks sold by the footand we have supplies to combat scurvy.We have the peg legs there, that are all handmade and fitted to you.Up at the top, you see the eyepatch display,which is the black column there for everyday usefor your eyepatch, and then you have the pasteland other colors for stepping out at night --special occasions, bar mitzvahs and whatever.
So we opened this place. And this is a vatthat we fill with treasures that students dig in.This is replacement eyes in case you lose one.These are some signs that we have all over the place:"Practical Joking with Pirates."While you're reading the sign, we pull a rope behind the counterand eight mop heads drop on your head.That was just my one thing -- I said we had to have something that drops on people's heads.It became mop heads. And this is the fish theater,which is just a saltwater tank with three seats,and then right behind it we set up this space,which was the tutoring center.So right there is the tutoring center,and then behind the curtain were the McSweeney's offices,where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that.
The kids would come in --or we thought they would come in. I should back up.We set the place up, we opened up, we spent months and monthsrenovating this place.We had tables, chairs, computers, everything.I went to a dot-com auction at a Holiday Inn in Palo Altoand I bought 11 G4s with a stroke of a paddle.Anyway, we bought 'em, we set everything up and then we waited.It was started with about 12 of my friends,people that I had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood.And we sat. And at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalkand it just said, "Free Tutoring for Your English-Relatedand Writing-Related Needs -- Just Come In, It's All Free."And we thought, "Oh, they're going to storm the gates,they're gonna love it." And they didn't.And so we waited, we sat at the tables, we waited and waited.And everybody was becoming very discouragedbecause it was weeks and weeks that we waited, really, where nobody came in.
And then somebody alerted us to the factthat maybe there was a trust gap,because we were operating behind a pirate supply store. (Laughter)We never put it together, you know?And so then, around that time, I persuaded a woman named Nineveh Caligari,a longtime San Francisco educator --she was teaching in Mexico City,she had all the experience necessary,knew everything about education,was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood --I convinced her to move up from Mexico City where she was teaching.She took over as executive director.Immediately, she made the inroads with the teachersand the parents and the students and everything,and so suddenly it was actually full every day.
And what we were trying to offer every daywas one-on-one attention.The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.You know, it's been proventhat 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention,a student can get one grade level higher.And so most of these students, English is not spoken in the home.They come there, many times their parents --you can't see it, but there's a church pewthat I bought in a Berkeley auction right there --the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored.So that was the basis of it,was one-on-one attention.And we found ourselves full every day with kids.If you're on Valencia Street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m.,2:30 p.m., you will get run over, often,by the kids and their big backpacks, or whatever, actually running to this space,
which is very strange, because it's school, in a way.But there was something psychological happening therethat was just a little bit different.And the other thing was, there was no stigma.Kids weren't going into the "Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help,"or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.First of all, it was a pirate supply store, which is insane.And then secondly, there's a publishing company in the back.And so our interns were actually workingat the same tables very often,and shoulder-to-shoulder, computer-next-to-computer with the students.
And so it became a tutoring center --publishing center, is what we called it --and a writing center.They go in, and they might be working with a high school studentactually working on a novel -- because we had very gifted kids, too.So there's no stigma.They're all working next to each other. It's all a creative endeavor.They're seeing adults. They're modeling their behavior.These adults, they're working in their field.They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adultsand it all sort of feeds on each other.There's a lot of cross-pollination. The only problem,especially for the adults working at McSweeney'swho hadn't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up,was that there was just the one bathroom. (Laughter)With like 60 kids a day, this is a problem.
But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homeworkin a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention --they go home, they're finished. They don't stall.They don't do their homework in front of the TV.They're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m., enjoy their family,enjoy other hobbies, get outside, play.And that makes a happy family.A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community.A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world.So the key to it all is homework! (Laughter) (Applause)There you have it, you know -- one-on-one attention.
So we started off with about 12 volunteers,and then we had about 50,and then a couple hundred.And we now have 1,400 volunteers on our roster.And we make it incredibly easy to volunteer.The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month,those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder,next to one student, concentrated attention,shining this beam of light on their work,on their thoughts and their self-expression,is going to be absolutely transformative,because so many of the students have not had that ever before.So we said, "Even if you have two hours one Sunday every six months,it doesn't matter. That's going to be enough."So that's partly why the tutor corps grew so fast.
Then we said, "Well, what are wegoing to do with the space during the day,because it has to be used before 2:30 p.m.?"So we started bringing in classes during the day.So every day, there's a field trip where they together create a book --you can see it being typed up above.This is one of the classes getting way too excited about writing.You just point a camera at a class,and it always looks like this.So this is one of the books that they do.Notice the title of the book,"The Book That Was Never Checked Out: Titanic."And the first line of that book is, "Once there was a book named Cindythat was about the Titanic."So, meanwhile, there's an adult in the back typing this up,taking it completely seriously, which blows their mind.
So then we still had more tutors to use.This is a shot of just some of the tutors during one of the events.The teachers that we work with --and everything is different to teachers -- they tell us what to do.We went in there thinking,"We're ultimately, completely malleable. You're going to tell us.The neighborhood's going to tell us, the parents are going to tell us.The teachers are going to tell us how we're most useful."
So then they said, "Why don't you come into the schools?Because what about the students that wouldn't come to you,necessarily, who don't have really active parents that are bringing them in,or aren't close enough?" So then we started saying,"Well, we've got 1,400 people on our tutor roster.Let's just put out the word." A teacher will say,"I need 12 tutors for the next five Sundays.We're working on our college essays. Send them in."So we put that out on the wire: 1,400 tutors.Whoever can make it signs up. They go in about a half an hour before the class.The teacher tells them what to do,how to do it, what their training is, what their project is so far.They work under the teacher's guide,and it's all in one big room.And that's actually the brunt of what we do is,people going straight from their workplace, straight from home,straight into the classroom andworking directly with the students.So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands of more students.Then another school said, "Well, what if wejust give you a classroom and you can staff it all day?"
So this is the Everett Middle School Writers' Room,where we decorated it in buccaneer style.It's right off the library. And there we serveall 529 kids in this middle school.This is their newspaper, the "Straight-Up News,"that has an ongoing column from Mayor Gavin Newsomin both languages -- English and Spanish.So then one day Isabel Allende wrote to us and said,"Hey, why don't you assign a book with high school students?I want them to write about how to achieve peace in a violent world."And so we went into Thurgood Marshall High School,which is a school that we had worked with on some other things,and we gave that assignment to the students.And we said, "Isabel Allende is going to read all your essays at the end.She's going to publish them in a book.She's going to sponsor the printing of this book in paperback form.It's going to be available in all the bookstores in the Bay Areaand throughout the world, on Amazon and you name it."So these kids worked harderthan they've ever worked on anything in their lives,because there was that outside audience,there was Isabel Allende on the other end.I think we had about 170 tutors that worked on this book with themand so this worked out incredibly well.We had a big party at the end.This is a book that you can find anywhere. So that led to a series of these.You can see Amy Tan sponsored the next one,"I Might Get Somewhere."And this became an ongoing thing. More and more books.
Now we're sort of addicted to the book thing.The kids will work harder than they've ever worked in their lifeif they know it's going to be permanent,know it's going to be on a shelf,know that nobody can diminish what they've thought and said,that we've honored their words, honored their thoughtswith hundreds of hours of five drafts, six drafts --all this attention that we give to their thoughts.And once they achieve that level, once they've written at that level,they can never go back.It's absolutely transformative.And so then they're all sold in the store. This is near the planks.We sell all the student books.Where else would you put them, right?So we sell 'em, and then something weird had been happeningwith the stores. The store, actually --even though we started out as just a gag -- the store actually made money.So it was paying the rent.And maybe this is just a San Francisco thing --I don't know, I don't want to judge.But people would come in --and this was before the pirate movies and everything!It was making a lot of money. Not a lot of money,but it was paying the rent, paying a full-time staff member there.There's the ocean maps you can see on the left.
And it became a gateway to the community.People would come in and say, "What the --?What is this?" I don't want to swear on the web. (Laughter)Is that a rule? I don't know.They would say, "What is this?"And people would come in and learn more about it.And then right beyond -- there's usually a little chain there --right beyond, they would see the kids being tutored.This is a field trip going on. And so they would be shopping,and they might be more likely to buy some lard,or millet for their parrot, or, you know, a hook,or hook protector for nighttime, all of these things we sell.So the store actually did really well.But it brought in so many people --teachers, donors, volunteers, everybody --because it was street level. It was open to the public.It wasn't a non-profit buried, you know, on the 30th floorof some building downtown. It was right in the neighborhoodthat it was serving, and it was open all the time to the public.So, it became this sort of weird, happy accident.
So all the people I used to know in Brooklyn, they said,"Well, why don't we have a place like that here?"And a lot of them had been former educatorsor would-be educators, so they combinedwith a lot of local designers, local writers,and they just took the idea independentlyand they did their own thing.They didn't want to sell pirate supplies.They didn't think that that was going to work there.So, knowing the crime-fighting community in New York,they opened the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company.This is Sam Potts' great design that did this.And this was to make it look sort of like one of thosekeysmith's shops that has to have every servicethey've ever offered, you know, all over there.So they opened this place. Inside, it's like a Costcofor superheroes -- all the supplies in kind of basic form.These are all handmade.These are all sort of repurposed other products, or whatever.All the packaging is done by Sam Potts.
So then you have the villain containment unit,where kids put their parents. You have the office.This is a little vault -- you have to put your product in there,it goes up an electric liftand then the guy behind the counter tells youthat you have to recite the vow of heroism,which you do, if you want to buy anything. And it limits, really, their sales.Personally, I think it's a problem.Because they have to do it hand on heart and everything.These are some of the products. These are all handmade.This is a secret identity kit.If you want to take on the identity of Sharon Boone,one American female marketing executivefrom Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a full dossieron everything you would need to know about Sharon Boone.So, this is the capery where you get fitted for your cape,and then you walk up these three steel-graded stepsand then we turn on three hydraulic fansfrom every side and then you can see the cape in action.There's nothing worse than, you know,getting up there and the cape is bunching up or something like that.So then, the secret door --this is one of the shelves you don't seewhen you walk in, but it slowly opens.You can see it there in the middle next to all the grappling hooks.It opens and then this is the tutoring center in the back. (Applause)So you can see the full effect!
But this is -- I just want to emphasize --locally funded, locally built.All the designers, all of the builders,everybody was local, all the time was pro-bono.I just came and visited and said, "Yes, you guys are doing great,"or whatever. That was it. You can see the timein all five boroughs of New York in the back. (Laughter) (Applause)So this is the space during tutoring hours.It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention,complete devotion to the students' workand a boundless optimism and sort of a possibilityof creativity and ideas.And this switch is flicked in their headswhen they walk through those 18 feet of this bizarre store, right?So it's school, but it's not school.It's clearly not school, even thoughthey're working shoulder-to-shoulder on tables, pencils and papers, whatever.
This is one of the students, Khaled Hamdan.You can read this quote.Addicted to video games and TV. Couldn't concentrate at home.Came in. Got this concentrated attention.And he couldn't escape it.So, soon enough, he was writing. He would finish his homework early --got really addicted to finishing his homework early.It's an addictive thing to sort of be done with it,and to have it checked, and to know he's going to achievethe next thing and be prepared for school the next day.So he got hooked on that, and then he started doing other things.He's now been published in five books.He co-wrote a mockumentary about failed superheroescalled "Super-Has-Beens."He wrote a series on "Penguin Balboa,"which is a fighting -- a boxing -- penguin.And then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to 500 people at Symphony Space,at a benefit for 826 New York. So he's there every day.He's evangelical about it. He brings his cousins in now.There's four family members that come in every day.
So, I'll go through really quickly.This is L.A., The Echo Park Time Travel Mart:"Whenever You Are, We're Already Then." (Laughter)This is sort of a 7-Eleven for time travelers.So you see everything: it's exactly as a 7-Eleven would be.Leeches. Mammoth chunks. They even have their own Slurpee machine:"Out of Order. Come Back Yesterday." (Laughter) (Applause)
Anyway. So I'm going to jump ahead.These are spaces that are only affiliated with us,doing this same thing: Word St. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts;Ink Spot in Cincinnati; Youth Speaks, San Francisco, California,which inspired us; Studio St. Louis in St. Louis;Austin Bat Cave in Austin;Fighting Words in Dublin, Ireland, started by Roddy Doyle,this will be open in April.Now I'm going to the TED Wish -- is that okay?
All right, I've got a minute. So, the TED Wish:I wish that you -- you personally and every creative individualand organization you know -- will find a wayto directly engage with a public school in your areaand that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved,so that within a year we have a thousand examples --a thousand! -- of transformative partnerships.Profound leaps forward!And these can be things that maybe you're already doing.I know that so many people in this roomare already doing really interesting things.I know that for a fact. So, tell us these stories and inspire others on the website.
We created a website.I'm going to switch to "we," and not "I," hope:We hope that the attendees of this conference will usher ina new era of participation in our public schools.We hope that you will take the leadin partnering your innovative spirit and expertisewith that of innovative educators in your community.Always let the teachers lead the way.They will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you'll step in and help out.There are a million ways.You can walk up to your local schooland consult with the teachers. They'll always tell you how to help.So, this is with Hot Studio in San Francisco,they did this phenomenal job.This website is already up, it's already got a bunch of stories,a lot of ideas. It's called "Once Upon a School,"which is a great title, I think.This site will document every story, every project that comesout of this conference and around the world. So you go to the website,you see a bunch of ideas you can be inspired byand then you add your own projects once you get started.Hot Studio did a great job in a very tight deadline. So, visit the site.If you have any questions, you can ask this guy,who's our director of national programs. He'll be on the phone.You email him, he'll answer any question you possibly want.And he'll get you inspired and get you goingand guide you through the process so that you can affect change.
And it can be fun! That's the point of this talk --it needn't be sterile. It needn't be bureaucratically untenable.You can do and use the skills that you have.The schools need you. The teachers need you.Students and parents need you. They need your actual person:your physical personhood and your open mindsand open ears and boundless compassion,sitting next to them, listening and noddingand asking questions for hours at a time.Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are:how smart and how much they have to say.You can tell them. You can shine that light on them,one human interaction at a time. So we hope you'll join us.Thank you so much.
Transcript:
Thank you so much everyone from TED, and Chris and Amy in particular.I cannot believe I'm here.I have not slept in weeks.Neil and I were sitting there comparing how little we've sleptin anticipation for this. I've never been so nervous --and I do this when I'm nervous, I just realized. (Laughter)So, I'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organizationcalled 826 Valencia, and then I'm going to talkabout how we all might join in and do similar things.
Back in about 2000, I was living in Brooklyn,I was trying to finish my first book,I was wandering around dazed every daybecause I wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m.So I would walk around in a daze during the day.I had no mental acuity to speak of during the day, but I had flexible hours.In the Brooklyn neighborhood that I lived in, Park Slope,there are a lot of writers --it's like a very high per capita ratioof writers to normal people.Meanwhile, I had grown up around a lot of teachers.My mom was a teacher, my sister became a teacherand after college so many of my friends went into teaching.And so I was always hearing them talk about their livesand how inspiring they were,and they were really sort of the most hard-workingand constantly inspiring people I knew.
But I knew so many of the things they were up against,so many of the struggles they were dealing with.And one of them was that so many of my friendsthat were teaching in city schools were having troublewith their students keeping up at grade level,in their reading and writing in particular.Now, so many of these students had come from householdswhere English isn't spoken in the home,where a lot of them have different special needs,learning disabilities. And of course they're working in schoolswhich sometimes and very often are under-funded.And so they would talk to me about this and say,"You know, what we really need is just more people,more bodies, more one-on-one attention,more hours, more expertise from peoplethat have skills in English and can work with these students one-on-one."
Now, I would say, "Well, why don't you just work with them one-on-one?"And they would say, "Well, we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each.This can lead up to 150, 180, 200 students a day.How can we possibly give each studenteven one hour a week of one-on-one attention?"You'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers.And so we started talking about this.And at the same time,I thought about this massive group of people I knew:writers, editors, journalists, graduate students,assistant professors, you name it.All these people that had sort of flexible daily hoursand an interest in the English word --I hope to have an interest in the English language,but I'm not speaking it well right now. (Laughter)I'm trying. That clock has got me.But everyone that I knew had an interest in the primacy of the written wordin terms of nurturing a democracy, nurturing an enlightened life.And so they had, you know, their timeand their interest, but at the same timethere wasn't a conduit that I knew of in my communityto bring these two communities together.
So when I moved back to San Francisco, we rented this building.And the idea was to put McSweeney's --McSweeney's Quarterly, that we published twice or three times a year,and a few other magazines --we were going to move it into an office for the first time.It used to be in my kitchen in Brooklyn.We were going to move it into an office,and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center.So we thought, "We'll have all these writers and editors and everybody --sort of a writing community -- coming into the office every day anyway,why don't we just open upthe front of the building for students to come in there after school,get extra help on their written homework,so you have basically no border between these two communities?"So the idea was that we would beworking on whatever we're working on,at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you're doing,or you trade, or you work a little bit later or whatever it is.You give those hours in the afternoonto the students in the neighborhood.
So, we had this place, we rented it,the landlord was all for it. We did this mural,that's a Chris Ware mural, that basically explains the entire historyof the printed word, in mural form -- it takes a long timeto digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road.So we rented this space.And everything was great except the landlord said,"Well, the space is zoned for retail; you have to come up with something.You've gotta sell something.You can't just have a tutoring center."So we thought, "Ha ha! Really!"And we couldn't think of anything necessarily to sell,but we did all the necessary research.It used to be a weight room, so there were rubber floors below,acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights.We took all that down, and we found beautiful wooden floors,whitewashed beams and it had the look --while we were renovating this place, somebody said,"You know, it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship."And we looked around and somebody else said,"Well, you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer." (Laughter)
And so this is what we did. So it made everybody laugh,and we said, "There's a point to that.Let's sell pirate supplies." This is the pirate supply store.You see, this is sort of a sketch I did on a napkin.A great carpenter built all this stuff and you see,we made it look sort of pirate supply-like.Here you see planks sold by the footand we have supplies to combat scurvy.We have the peg legs there, that are all handmade and fitted to you.Up at the top, you see the eyepatch display,which is the black column there for everyday usefor your eyepatch, and then you have the pasteland other colors for stepping out at night --special occasions, bar mitzvahs and whatever.
So we opened this place. And this is a vatthat we fill with treasures that students dig in.This is replacement eyes in case you lose one.These are some signs that we have all over the place:"Practical Joking with Pirates."While you're reading the sign, we pull a rope behind the counterand eight mop heads drop on your head.That was just my one thing -- I said we had to have something that drops on people's heads.It became mop heads. And this is the fish theater,which is just a saltwater tank with three seats,and then right behind it we set up this space,which was the tutoring center.So right there is the tutoring center,and then behind the curtain were the McSweeney's offices,where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that.
The kids would come in --or we thought they would come in. I should back up.We set the place up, we opened up, we spent months and monthsrenovating this place.We had tables, chairs, computers, everything.I went to a dot-com auction at a Holiday Inn in Palo Altoand I bought 11 G4s with a stroke of a paddle.Anyway, we bought 'em, we set everything up and then we waited.It was started with about 12 of my friends,people that I had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood.And we sat. And at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalkand it just said, "Free Tutoring for Your English-Relatedand Writing-Related Needs -- Just Come In, It's All Free."And we thought, "Oh, they're going to storm the gates,they're gonna love it." And they didn't.And so we waited, we sat at the tables, we waited and waited.And everybody was becoming very discouragedbecause it was weeks and weeks that we waited, really, where nobody came in.
And then somebody alerted us to the factthat maybe there was a trust gap,because we were operating behind a pirate supply store. (Laughter)We never put it together, you know?And so then, around that time, I persuaded a woman named Nineveh Caligari,a longtime San Francisco educator --she was teaching in Mexico City,she had all the experience necessary,knew everything about education,was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood --I convinced her to move up from Mexico City where she was teaching.She took over as executive director.Immediately, she made the inroads with the teachersand the parents and the students and everything,and so suddenly it was actually full every day.
And what we were trying to offer every daywas one-on-one attention.The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.You know, it's been proventhat 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention,a student can get one grade level higher.And so most of these students, English is not spoken in the home.They come there, many times their parents --you can't see it, but there's a church pewthat I bought in a Berkeley auction right there --the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored.So that was the basis of it,was one-on-one attention.And we found ourselves full every day with kids.If you're on Valencia Street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m.,2:30 p.m., you will get run over, often,by the kids and their big backpacks, or whatever, actually running to this space,
which is very strange, because it's school, in a way.But there was something psychological happening therethat was just a little bit different.And the other thing was, there was no stigma.Kids weren't going into the "Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help,"or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.First of all, it was a pirate supply store, which is insane.And then secondly, there's a publishing company in the back.And so our interns were actually workingat the same tables very often,and shoulder-to-shoulder, computer-next-to-computer with the students.
And so it became a tutoring center --publishing center, is what we called it --and a writing center.They go in, and they might be working with a high school studentactually working on a novel -- because we had very gifted kids, too.So there's no stigma.They're all working next to each other. It's all a creative endeavor.They're seeing adults. They're modeling their behavior.These adults, they're working in their field.They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adultsand it all sort of feeds on each other.There's a lot of cross-pollination. The only problem,especially for the adults working at McSweeney'swho hadn't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up,was that there was just the one bathroom. (Laughter)With like 60 kids a day, this is a problem.
But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homeworkin a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention --they go home, they're finished. They don't stall.They don't do their homework in front of the TV.They're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m., enjoy their family,enjoy other hobbies, get outside, play.And that makes a happy family.A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community.A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world.So the key to it all is homework! (Laughter) (Applause)There you have it, you know -- one-on-one attention.
So we started off with about 12 volunteers,and then we had about 50,and then a couple hundred.And we now have 1,400 volunteers on our roster.And we make it incredibly easy to volunteer.The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month,those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder,next to one student, concentrated attention,shining this beam of light on their work,on their thoughts and their self-expression,is going to be absolutely transformative,because so many of the students have not had that ever before.So we said, "Even if you have two hours one Sunday every six months,it doesn't matter. That's going to be enough."So that's partly why the tutor corps grew so fast.
Then we said, "Well, what are wegoing to do with the space during the day,because it has to be used before 2:30 p.m.?"So we started bringing in classes during the day.So every day, there's a field trip where they together create a book --you can see it being typed up above.This is one of the classes getting way too excited about writing.You just point a camera at a class,and it always looks like this.So this is one of the books that they do.Notice the title of the book,"The Book That Was Never Checked Out: Titanic."And the first line of that book is, "Once there was a book named Cindythat was about the Titanic."So, meanwhile, there's an adult in the back typing this up,taking it completely seriously, which blows their mind.
So then we still had more tutors to use.This is a shot of just some of the tutors during one of the events.The teachers that we work with --and everything is different to teachers -- they tell us what to do.We went in there thinking,"We're ultimately, completely malleable. You're going to tell us.The neighborhood's going to tell us, the parents are going to tell us.The teachers are going to tell us how we're most useful."
So then they said, "Why don't you come into the schools?Because what about the students that wouldn't come to you,necessarily, who don't have really active parents that are bringing them in,or aren't close enough?" So then we started saying,"Well, we've got 1,400 people on our tutor roster.Let's just put out the word." A teacher will say,"I need 12 tutors for the next five Sundays.We're working on our college essays. Send them in."So we put that out on the wire: 1,400 tutors.Whoever can make it signs up. They go in about a half an hour before the class.The teacher tells them what to do,how to do it, what their training is, what their project is so far.They work under the teacher's guide,and it's all in one big room.And that's actually the brunt of what we do is,people going straight from their workplace, straight from home,straight into the classroom andworking directly with the students.So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands of more students.Then another school said, "Well, what if wejust give you a classroom and you can staff it all day?"
So this is the Everett Middle School Writers' Room,where we decorated it in buccaneer style.It's right off the library. And there we serveall 529 kids in this middle school.This is their newspaper, the "Straight-Up News,"that has an ongoing column from Mayor Gavin Newsomin both languages -- English and Spanish.So then one day Isabel Allende wrote to us and said,"Hey, why don't you assign a book with high school students?I want them to write about how to achieve peace in a violent world."And so we went into Thurgood Marshall High School,which is a school that we had worked with on some other things,and we gave that assignment to the students.And we said, "Isabel Allende is going to read all your essays at the end.She's going to publish them in a book.She's going to sponsor the printing of this book in paperback form.It's going to be available in all the bookstores in the Bay Areaand throughout the world, on Amazon and you name it."So these kids worked harderthan they've ever worked on anything in their lives,because there was that outside audience,there was Isabel Allende on the other end.I think we had about 170 tutors that worked on this book with themand so this worked out incredibly well.We had a big party at the end.This is a book that you can find anywhere. So that led to a series of these.You can see Amy Tan sponsored the next one,"I Might Get Somewhere."And this became an ongoing thing. More and more books.
Now we're sort of addicted to the book thing.The kids will work harder than they've ever worked in their lifeif they know it's going to be permanent,know it's going to be on a shelf,know that nobody can diminish what they've thought and said,that we've honored their words, honored their thoughtswith hundreds of hours of five drafts, six drafts --all this attention that we give to their thoughts.And once they achieve that level, once they've written at that level,they can never go back.It's absolutely transformative.And so then they're all sold in the store. This is near the planks.We sell all the student books.Where else would you put them, right?So we sell 'em, and then something weird had been happeningwith the stores. The store, actually --even though we started out as just a gag -- the store actually made money.So it was paying the rent.And maybe this is just a San Francisco thing --I don't know, I don't want to judge.But people would come in --and this was before the pirate movies and everything!It was making a lot of money. Not a lot of money,but it was paying the rent, paying a full-time staff member there.There's the ocean maps you can see on the left.
And it became a gateway to the community.People would come in and say, "What the --?What is this?" I don't want to swear on the web. (Laughter)Is that a rule? I don't know.They would say, "What is this?"And people would come in and learn more about it.And then right beyond -- there's usually a little chain there --right beyond, they would see the kids being tutored.This is a field trip going on. And so they would be shopping,and they might be more likely to buy some lard,or millet for their parrot, or, you know, a hook,or hook protector for nighttime, all of these things we sell.So the store actually did really well.But it brought in so many people --teachers, donors, volunteers, everybody --because it was street level. It was open to the public.It wasn't a non-profit buried, you know, on the 30th floorof some building downtown. It was right in the neighborhoodthat it was serving, and it was open all the time to the public.So, it became this sort of weird, happy accident.
So all the people I used to know in Brooklyn, they said,"Well, why don't we have a place like that here?"And a lot of them had been former educatorsor would-be educators, so they combinedwith a lot of local designers, local writers,and they just took the idea independentlyand they did their own thing.They didn't want to sell pirate supplies.They didn't think that that was going to work there.So, knowing the crime-fighting community in New York,they opened the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company.This is Sam Potts' great design that did this.And this was to make it look sort of like one of thosekeysmith's shops that has to have every servicethey've ever offered, you know, all over there.So they opened this place. Inside, it's like a Costcofor superheroes -- all the supplies in kind of basic form.These are all handmade.These are all sort of repurposed other products, or whatever.All the packaging is done by Sam Potts.
So then you have the villain containment unit,where kids put their parents. You have the office.This is a little vault -- you have to put your product in there,it goes up an electric liftand then the guy behind the counter tells youthat you have to recite the vow of heroism,which you do, if you want to buy anything. And it limits, really, their sales.Personally, I think it's a problem.Because they have to do it hand on heart and everything.These are some of the products. These are all handmade.This is a secret identity kit.If you want to take on the identity of Sharon Boone,one American female marketing executivefrom Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a full dossieron everything you would need to know about Sharon Boone.So, this is the capery where you get fitted for your cape,and then you walk up these three steel-graded stepsand then we turn on three hydraulic fansfrom every side and then you can see the cape in action.There's nothing worse than, you know,getting up there and the cape is bunching up or something like that.So then, the secret door --this is one of the shelves you don't seewhen you walk in, but it slowly opens.You can see it there in the middle next to all the grappling hooks.It opens and then this is the tutoring center in the back. (Applause)So you can see the full effect!
But this is -- I just want to emphasize --locally funded, locally built.All the designers, all of the builders,everybody was local, all the time was pro-bono.I just came and visited and said, "Yes, you guys are doing great,"or whatever. That was it. You can see the timein all five boroughs of New York in the back. (Laughter) (Applause)So this is the space during tutoring hours.It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention,complete devotion to the students' workand a boundless optimism and sort of a possibilityof creativity and ideas.And this switch is flicked in their headswhen they walk through those 18 feet of this bizarre store, right?So it's school, but it's not school.It's clearly not school, even thoughthey're working shoulder-to-shoulder on tables, pencils and papers, whatever.
This is one of the students, Khaled Hamdan.You can read this quote.Addicted to video games and TV. Couldn't concentrate at home.Came in. Got this concentrated attention.And he couldn't escape it.So, soon enough, he was writing. He would finish his homework early --got really addicted to finishing his homework early.It's an addictive thing to sort of be done with it,and to have it checked, and to know he's going to achievethe next thing and be prepared for school the next day.So he got hooked on that, and then he started doing other things.He's now been published in five books.He co-wrote a mockumentary about failed superheroescalled "Super-Has-Beens."He wrote a series on "Penguin Balboa,"which is a fighting -- a boxing -- penguin.And then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to 500 people at Symphony Space,at a benefit for 826 New York. So he's there every day.He's evangelical about it. He brings his cousins in now.There's four family members that come in every day.
So, I'll go through really quickly.This is L.A., The Echo Park Time Travel Mart:"Whenever You Are, We're Already Then." (Laughter)This is sort of a 7-Eleven for time travelers.So you see everything: it's exactly as a 7-Eleven would be.Leeches. Mammoth chunks. They even have their own Slurpee machine:"Out of Order. Come Back Yesterday." (Laughter) (Applause)
Anyway. So I'm going to jump ahead.These are spaces that are only affiliated with us,doing this same thing: Word St. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts;Ink Spot in Cincinnati; Youth Speaks, San Francisco, California,which inspired us; Studio St. Louis in St. Louis;Austin Bat Cave in Austin;Fighting Words in Dublin, Ireland, started by Roddy Doyle,this will be open in April.Now I'm going to the TED Wish -- is that okay?
All right, I've got a minute. So, the TED Wish:I wish that you -- you personally and every creative individualand organization you know -- will find a wayto directly engage with a public school in your areaand that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved,so that within a year we have a thousand examples --a thousand! -- of transformative partnerships.Profound leaps forward!And these can be things that maybe you're already doing.I know that so many people in this roomare already doing really interesting things.I know that for a fact. So, tell us these stories and inspire others on the website.
We created a website.I'm going to switch to "we," and not "I," hope:We hope that the attendees of this conference will usher ina new era of participation in our public schools.We hope that you will take the leadin partnering your innovative spirit and expertisewith that of innovative educators in your community.Always let the teachers lead the way.They will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you'll step in and help out.There are a million ways.You can walk up to your local schooland consult with the teachers. They'll always tell you how to help.So, this is with Hot Studio in San Francisco,they did this phenomenal job.This website is already up, it's already got a bunch of stories,a lot of ideas. It's called "Once Upon a School,"which is a great title, I think.This site will document every story, every project that comesout of this conference and around the world. So you go to the website,you see a bunch of ideas you can be inspired byand then you add your own projects once you get started.Hot Studio did a great job in a very tight deadline. So, visit the site.If you have any questions, you can ask this guy,who's our director of national programs. He'll be on the phone.You email him, he'll answer any question you possibly want.And he'll get you inspired and get you goingand guide you through the process so that you can affect change.
And it can be fun! That's the point of this talk --it needn't be sterile. It needn't be bureaucratically untenable.You can do and use the skills that you have.The schools need you. The teachers need you.Students and parents need you. They need your actual person:your physical personhood and your open mindsand open ears and boundless compassion,sitting next to them, listening and noddingand asking questions for hours at a time.Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are:how smart and how much they have to say.You can tell them. You can shine that light on them,one human interaction at a time. So we hope you'll join us.Thank you so much.
BM/BA-From BP to Boeing, Supplier Safety Is the CEO's Problem
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
From BP to Boeing, Supplier Safety Is the CEO's Problem
by Ben W. Heineman, Jr. | March 4, 2013
The current front-page sub-contractor controversies surrounding BP's liability for the gulf explosion and Boeing's grounding of its 787 Dreamliner should not obscure an ultimate take-away for corporate leaders: companies must take operational responsibility for ensuring that products and services provided to them by third party suppliers are safe, effective and of high quality.
In this era of complex supply chains and the hiring of expert sub-contractors, taking such responsibility is crucial for preventing events with the potential to adversely affect the corporation and its reputation. Business leaders must establish robust processes not just for qualifying third party vendors, but for making sure that there is integration of those suppliers in a strong safety culture with close company oversight of safety management and processes. This fundamental lesson may be lost on business leaders amidst the high profile excavation of past supplier controversies currently besetting BP and Boeing.
BP is, of course, currently in the eye of a media and legal hurricane as the Justice Department and other plaintiffs begin the trial on penalties under the Clean Water Act. These penalties can be as high as $17-$18 billion if BP is found grossly negligent (legally defined as egregious conduct beyond reasonable care with foreseeable adverse consequences) or to have engaged in willful misconduct (defined as intentional acts with adverse consequences). There are myriad legal issues in the BP case as it seeks to show that it was merely negligent and that its key contractors, Transocean (rig owner) and Haliburton (well cementer), were also responsible.
Boeing has been a huge business story this year due to the grounding of its new 787 Dreamliner for fires in ion-lithium batteries made by the Japanese company, GS Yuasa. For Boeing, the questions at the moment are urgent but primarily technical: what caused the fires and how (and how soon) can the new plane become airworthy again. Backed up orders, lost revenue, angry customers, reputational injury and the success of the innovative 787 all turn on resolution of this dramatic problem.
In structuring relationships with third party suppliers, there can often be complex negotiations, and complexly worded documents, apportioning legal and economic risk. BP, for example, has itself sued Transocean and Haliburton seeking to spread the huge costs of the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig and the oil spill in the Gulf. But the judge in the current case last year ruled that BP had agreed to a clause indemnifying both sub-contractors for compensatory damages, while leaving open whether BP could collect from Transocean or Haliburton for fines, penalties or punitive damages imposed on BP.
But for all the effort to structure legal and economic issues after a disaster occurs, it is far, far better to address critical operational issues — relating to safety culture, process and management — to prevent one. BP, or any other primary operator, must treat subs as if they were virtually part of the parent company and must take operational responsibility. Doing this right helps to avoid the endless, expensive, time-consuming and debilitating after-the-fact fights about who was at fault.
BP has admitted as much in its now long-forgotten report on the Gulf explosion. As to events and causes, the report was, of course, one sided, admitting some fault but spreading the blame to others. In a little-noticed section on recommendations, BP effectively admitted, however, that it had not supervised key contractors properly. In this section (at p.181), BP said it should be responsible for:
•Developing better, clearer standards and processes for a range of activities in deep-sea drilling from cementing, to testing for leakages, to well control and general risk management.
•Significantly improving education and training of BP personnel to enhance capability and competency.
•Implementing much greater oversight of contractors' current practices relating to cementing, well control, rig process safety and blow-out preventer design and safety.
•Requiring contractors to develop and implement audit-able safety processes, including identification of key indicators — processes which BP can review.
•
This point was underscored by Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson in his testimony before the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Following its issues with the Exxon-Valdez tanker spill, Exxon Mobile has the reputation for developing the best safety culture relating to oil and gas operations through what it calls the Operations Integrity Management System (OIMS). Said Tillerson:
And I want to stress that the contractors that we work with are embedded within our OIMS processes as well. We expect our contractors to be as knowledgeable and conversant with our OIMS processes as our own employees. Not every company has this expectation, but we have found that when everyone in the workplace speaks the same language of safety — employees and contractors alike — everyone can work collaboratively, safely and effectively.
Boeing is, of course, a far different situation — with efforts directed now at understanding and remedying the technical problems. But the Boeing case raises similar important questions about quality and safety, even if many, many facts are not yet known. Boeing itself has said that it made a mistake in outsourcing so much of the 787 because it caused coordination issues and delay. But clearly such fragmented outsourcing can also cause unintended and unseen safety and quality issues, despite the high standards to which air frame manufacturers are held.
Moreover, much of this outsourcing relates to suppliers in different nations with large airlines who may purchase the new plane. Although new aircraft have initial bugs which need to be worked out, the question raised by the battery fires is whether Boeing involved the Japanese manufacturer deeply enough in Boeings own safety culture, processes and management, and whether it devoted enough time for proper oversight. Certainly, just the simple fact of the problem, which will cause a multi-month grounding of the plane, suggests that something was amiss in Boeing's contractor oversight somewhere in the design, manufacturing, assembling and testing processes.
It is unclear at this point what the resolution of the riveting, high visibility BP and Boeing controversies will be. But business leaders should nonetheless act on a core lesson from both examples: they must ensure that their corporations take full operational responsibility and accountability for the safety and quality of the goods and services provided not just by them, but also by third party suppliers.
Ben W. Heineman, Jr.
Ben Heineman has held senior positions in business, law, and government, is a senior fellow at Harvard's Law and Kennedy Schools, and is author of High Performance With High Integrity (Harvard Business Press, 2008).
Source: www.hbr.org
From BP to Boeing, Supplier Safety Is the CEO's Problem
by Ben W. Heineman, Jr. | March 4, 2013
The current front-page sub-contractor controversies surrounding BP's liability for the gulf explosion and Boeing's grounding of its 787 Dreamliner should not obscure an ultimate take-away for corporate leaders: companies must take operational responsibility for ensuring that products and services provided to them by third party suppliers are safe, effective and of high quality.
In this era of complex supply chains and the hiring of expert sub-contractors, taking such responsibility is crucial for preventing events with the potential to adversely affect the corporation and its reputation. Business leaders must establish robust processes not just for qualifying third party vendors, but for making sure that there is integration of those suppliers in a strong safety culture with close company oversight of safety management and processes. This fundamental lesson may be lost on business leaders amidst the high profile excavation of past supplier controversies currently besetting BP and Boeing.
BP is, of course, currently in the eye of a media and legal hurricane as the Justice Department and other plaintiffs begin the trial on penalties under the Clean Water Act. These penalties can be as high as $17-$18 billion if BP is found grossly negligent (legally defined as egregious conduct beyond reasonable care with foreseeable adverse consequences) or to have engaged in willful misconduct (defined as intentional acts with adverse consequences). There are myriad legal issues in the BP case as it seeks to show that it was merely negligent and that its key contractors, Transocean (rig owner) and Haliburton (well cementer), were also responsible.
Boeing has been a huge business story this year due to the grounding of its new 787 Dreamliner for fires in ion-lithium batteries made by the Japanese company, GS Yuasa. For Boeing, the questions at the moment are urgent but primarily technical: what caused the fires and how (and how soon) can the new plane become airworthy again. Backed up orders, lost revenue, angry customers, reputational injury and the success of the innovative 787 all turn on resolution of this dramatic problem.
In structuring relationships with third party suppliers, there can often be complex negotiations, and complexly worded documents, apportioning legal and economic risk. BP, for example, has itself sued Transocean and Haliburton seeking to spread the huge costs of the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig and the oil spill in the Gulf. But the judge in the current case last year ruled that BP had agreed to a clause indemnifying both sub-contractors for compensatory damages, while leaving open whether BP could collect from Transocean or Haliburton for fines, penalties or punitive damages imposed on BP.
But for all the effort to structure legal and economic issues after a disaster occurs, it is far, far better to address critical operational issues — relating to safety culture, process and management — to prevent one. BP, or any other primary operator, must treat subs as if they were virtually part of the parent company and must take operational responsibility. Doing this right helps to avoid the endless, expensive, time-consuming and debilitating after-the-fact fights about who was at fault.
BP has admitted as much in its now long-forgotten report on the Gulf explosion. As to events and causes, the report was, of course, one sided, admitting some fault but spreading the blame to others. In a little-noticed section on recommendations, BP effectively admitted, however, that it had not supervised key contractors properly. In this section (at p.181), BP said it should be responsible for:
•Developing better, clearer standards and processes for a range of activities in deep-sea drilling from cementing, to testing for leakages, to well control and general risk management.
•Significantly improving education and training of BP personnel to enhance capability and competency.
•Implementing much greater oversight of contractors' current practices relating to cementing, well control, rig process safety and blow-out preventer design and safety.
•Requiring contractors to develop and implement audit-able safety processes, including identification of key indicators — processes which BP can review.
•
This point was underscored by Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson in his testimony before the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Following its issues with the Exxon-Valdez tanker spill, Exxon Mobile has the reputation for developing the best safety culture relating to oil and gas operations through what it calls the Operations Integrity Management System (OIMS). Said Tillerson:
And I want to stress that the contractors that we work with are embedded within our OIMS processes as well. We expect our contractors to be as knowledgeable and conversant with our OIMS processes as our own employees. Not every company has this expectation, but we have found that when everyone in the workplace speaks the same language of safety — employees and contractors alike — everyone can work collaboratively, safely and effectively.
Boeing is, of course, a far different situation — with efforts directed now at understanding and remedying the technical problems. But the Boeing case raises similar important questions about quality and safety, even if many, many facts are not yet known. Boeing itself has said that it made a mistake in outsourcing so much of the 787 because it caused coordination issues and delay. But clearly such fragmented outsourcing can also cause unintended and unseen safety and quality issues, despite the high standards to which air frame manufacturers are held.
Moreover, much of this outsourcing relates to suppliers in different nations with large airlines who may purchase the new plane. Although new aircraft have initial bugs which need to be worked out, the question raised by the battery fires is whether Boeing involved the Japanese manufacturer deeply enough in Boeings own safety culture, processes and management, and whether it devoted enough time for proper oversight. Certainly, just the simple fact of the problem, which will cause a multi-month grounding of the plane, suggests that something was amiss in Boeing's contractor oversight somewhere in the design, manufacturing, assembling and testing processes.
It is unclear at this point what the resolution of the riveting, high visibility BP and Boeing controversies will be. But business leaders should nonetheless act on a core lesson from both examples: they must ensure that their corporations take full operational responsibility and accountability for the safety and quality of the goods and services provided not just by them, but also by third party suppliers.
Ben W. Heineman, Jr.
Ben Heineman has held senior positions in business, law, and government, is a senior fellow at Harvard's Law and Kennedy Schools, and is author of High Performance With High Integrity (Harvard Business Press, 2008).
Source: www.hbr.org
Good Grammar Should Be Everyone's Business
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Good Grammar Should Be Everyone's Business
by Brad Hoover | March 4, 2013
Today is National Grammar Day, a reminder that good grammar is instrumental in conveying ideas with clarity, professionalism, and precision. Even so, the informality of e-mail, texting, and tweeting has crept deep into company communications. It is not uncommon to hear a coworker make a grammatical faux pas such as "There's new people you should meet." Even former Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang was known for ignoring capital letters in his e-mails.
Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, wrote in a blog post for HBR that he refuses to hire people who use poor grammar. He asserted that good grammar is a sign of professional credibility, attention to detail, and learning ability. In the process, he started a nearly 4,000-comment debate (on this website alone) about the audaciousness of his stance. Some people criticized Mr. Wiens for his hiring approach, accusing him of being harsh or even elitist. Ultimately, this was a debate that had no data and reached no conclusion.
In an effort to add evidence to the commenters' anecdotes, my company, Grammarly, reviewed 100 LinkedIn profiles of native English-speakers in the consumer packaged goods industry. Each professional had worked for no more than three employers over the first 10 years of his or her career. Half were promoted to director level or above within those 10 years, and the other half were not.
Here's what we found:
Professionals with fewer grammar errors in their profiles achieved higher positions. Those who failed to progress to a director-level position within the first 10 years of their careers made 2.5 times as many grammar mistakes as their director-level colleagues.
Fewer grammar errors correlate with more promotions. Professionals with one to four promotions over their 10-year careers made 45% more grammar errors than those with six to nine promotions in the same time frame.
Fewer grammar errors associate with frequent job changes. Those who remained at the same company for more than 10 years made 20% more grammar mistakes than those who held six jobs in the same period. This could be explained in a couple of ways: People with better grammar may be more ambitious in their search for promising career opportunities, or job-hoppers may simply recheck their résumés between jobs.
Granted, this is a relatively small sample size. We do not know whether the relationship is causal or if good grammar merely correlates with career success. It is also possible that professionals who were promoted to director level started their careers with poor grammar skills. If so, they significantly improved their skills over the past 10 years, and it is unlikely that all their progress occurred after they became directors. Perhaps follow-up studies can fill these holes in the analysis.
What we can say is that this data set clearly supports the hypothesis that good grammar is a predictor of professional success. The results are not surprising. As Wiens would argue, grammar skills may indicate several valuable traits, such as:
•Attention to detail: People who care about their writing demonstrate credibility, professionalism, and accuracy in their work.
•Critical thinking: Knowing how to structure a grammatically correct sentence is a sign that you can analyze and explain complex problems.
•Intellectual aptitude: If you are a native English-speaker and never learned the difference between "it's" and "its," especially given access to Google, an employer might wonder: What else have you failed to learn that might be useful?
Interestingly, there were virtually no spelling mistakes in the 100 LinkedIn profiles we analyzed. This is probably because of the prevalence of spell check, which performs a relatively simple computer recall task. By contrast, grammar analysis is very complex, requiring a deep understanding of the relationships between words. For this reason, grammar provides a better window into a job applicant's abilities.
Companies looking to hire top talent should consider grammar as one predictor of a candidate's aptitude and success. Good grammar is simply good business.
Brad Hoover is the CEO of Grammarly, a software suite improving communication among the world’s two billion English writers. Follow Grammarly on Facebook.
Source: www.hbr.org
Good Grammar Should Be Everyone's Business
by Brad Hoover | March 4, 2013
Today is National Grammar Day, a reminder that good grammar is instrumental in conveying ideas with clarity, professionalism, and precision. Even so, the informality of e-mail, texting, and tweeting has crept deep into company communications. It is not uncommon to hear a coworker make a grammatical faux pas such as "There's new people you should meet." Even former Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang was known for ignoring capital letters in his e-mails.
Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, wrote in a blog post for HBR that he refuses to hire people who use poor grammar. He asserted that good grammar is a sign of professional credibility, attention to detail, and learning ability. In the process, he started a nearly 4,000-comment debate (on this website alone) about the audaciousness of his stance. Some people criticized Mr. Wiens for his hiring approach, accusing him of being harsh or even elitist. Ultimately, this was a debate that had no data and reached no conclusion.
In an effort to add evidence to the commenters' anecdotes, my company, Grammarly, reviewed 100 LinkedIn profiles of native English-speakers in the consumer packaged goods industry. Each professional had worked for no more than three employers over the first 10 years of his or her career. Half were promoted to director level or above within those 10 years, and the other half were not.
Here's what we found:
Professionals with fewer grammar errors in their profiles achieved higher positions. Those who failed to progress to a director-level position within the first 10 years of their careers made 2.5 times as many grammar mistakes as their director-level colleagues.
Fewer grammar errors correlate with more promotions. Professionals with one to four promotions over their 10-year careers made 45% more grammar errors than those with six to nine promotions in the same time frame.
Fewer grammar errors associate with frequent job changes. Those who remained at the same company for more than 10 years made 20% more grammar mistakes than those who held six jobs in the same period. This could be explained in a couple of ways: People with better grammar may be more ambitious in their search for promising career opportunities, or job-hoppers may simply recheck their résumés between jobs.
Granted, this is a relatively small sample size. We do not know whether the relationship is causal or if good grammar merely correlates with career success. It is also possible that professionals who were promoted to director level started their careers with poor grammar skills. If so, they significantly improved their skills over the past 10 years, and it is unlikely that all their progress occurred after they became directors. Perhaps follow-up studies can fill these holes in the analysis.
What we can say is that this data set clearly supports the hypothesis that good grammar is a predictor of professional success. The results are not surprising. As Wiens would argue, grammar skills may indicate several valuable traits, such as:
•Attention to detail: People who care about their writing demonstrate credibility, professionalism, and accuracy in their work.
•Critical thinking: Knowing how to structure a grammatically correct sentence is a sign that you can analyze and explain complex problems.
•Intellectual aptitude: If you are a native English-speaker and never learned the difference between "it's" and "its," especially given access to Google, an employer might wonder: What else have you failed to learn that might be useful?
Interestingly, there were virtually no spelling mistakes in the 100 LinkedIn profiles we analyzed. This is probably because of the prevalence of spell check, which performs a relatively simple computer recall task. By contrast, grammar analysis is very complex, requiring a deep understanding of the relationships between words. For this reason, grammar provides a better window into a job applicant's abilities.
Companies looking to hire top talent should consider grammar as one predictor of a candidate's aptitude and success. Good grammar is simply good business.
Brad Hoover is the CEO of Grammarly, a software suite improving communication among the world’s two billion English writers. Follow Grammarly on Facebook.
Source: www.hbr.org
BIOL-To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology
by Rafe Sagarin | March 5, 2013
Remember when Apple's stock traded at $7 a share? I do, because that's when I sold my shares. Tech experts' sage predictions had convinced me that the Mac would never make a dent in the PC market. As it turned out, the Mac didn't need to make a dent, because Apple mutated its cute computer DNA into cute music players and phones that fit massive unfilled niches. Yet even the genius architect of this turnaround made faulty predictions sometimes. Remember the invention Steve Jobs said was going to be "bigger than the PC"? You may have seen a mall cop riding one recently.
Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future. That's too bad, because our world is full of risk that we'd love to avoid and opportunity that we'd love to seize.
Fortunately, there's a rich source of lessons on how to thrive in an unpredictable world, and it has been cranking out success stories for 3.5 billion years. It's called biology.
All of Earth's successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one. They haven't held "planning exercises" or created "predictive frameworks." Instead, they've adapted. Adaptability is the power to detect and respond to change in the world, no matter how surprising or inconvenient it may be.
While there's much chatter in the management world about the need to be adaptable, only a few creative companies and innovative managers have probed the natural world for its adaptability secrets. But when they have, they've been remarkably successful. A study of nature offers straightforward guidance through four key practices of adaptable systems.
Decentralization. The most successful biological organisms are structured or organized in such a way as to eschew centralized control in favor of allowing multiple agents to independently sense and quickly respond to change. An octopus, despite its surprisingly intelligent brain, doesn't order each arm to change a certain color when it needs to hide quickly. Rather, individual skin cells across its body sense and respond to change and give the octopus a collective camouflage.
CEOs and shareholders needn't fear this kind of organization. The independent sensors of adaptable organisms are not anarchists. They rely on the resources and follow the overall direction that the body gives them. But decentralized organization yields faster, cheaper, and more effective solutions to complex problems — think Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica, DARPA Grand Challenges versus Department of Defense single-source contracts, or Google Flu Trends (which uses the power of billions of users independently searching for flu-related terms on Google to identify flu outbreaks) versus the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu reports (which can give you the same results, two weeks later).
Redundancy. Adaptable systems make multiple copies of everything and modify the copies to hedge against uncertainty. Redundancy is not efficient, but it does help you solve a wide range of unexpected problems. A CEO I know who uses biological principles to run a manufacturing firm that has never been unprofitable or laid off an employee in 30 years keeps a massive warehouse full of multiple copies of every part he's ever made. This cache of inventory and wasted real estate violates all the norms of just-in-time manufacturing, but when a 20-year-old helicopter is grounded and needs to fly now, he is the only one who has the part. Customers that have been bailed out by him go back to him. He has turned commodity parts into a proprietary service, just as nature turns the massive redundancy of just four DNA bases into a dazzling array of unique ways to deal with risk and uncertainty.
Symbiotic relationships. All organisms use these to extend their own adaptability. Symbioses occur between the most unlikely of pairs, such as small scavenging fish and large predatory sharks — sometimes even between former adversaries. The effects can be profound. Tiny bacteria that live in the roots of legume plants and convert nitrogen into a useful form have literally changed the face of the entire planet.
Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, a company known for its strong brand following and commitment to donating profits to social causes, would seem an unlikely match for Unilever, a food and beauty-products conglomerate with fairly anodyne brands. But each company had problems to solve. Ben and Jerry's needed to grow after years of flat and declining sales, so that through profit sharing it could do more social good. Unilever needed to capture more niches in "boutique" food brands. When Unilever bought Ben and Jerry's, the larger organization adapted more than the smaller one to make the symbiosis work. Unilever allowed casual dress for its Ben and Jerry's executives, maintained the brand's charitable giving, and expanded its commitments to sustainability by incorporating aspects of Ben and Jerry's DNA throughout its corporate practice.
Recursive processes. Adaptability in nature continually builds off of its own successes. The one turtle out of a hundred that survives from its infancy to adulthood is the only turtle that's important to turtle evolution.
The business literature is unfortunately rife with advice to "learn from failures." One HBR article from the 1990s held up BP as an exemplar of learning from failure. Certainly BP has learned a lot from the failures of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but is killing 11 people, crippling a huge ecosystem, and absorbing a $4.5 billion fine how you want to run your business? In nature, failure is literally a dead end — you don't reproduce and you don't pass on your genes. Learning from failure may make your business more prepared for the disaster that has already happened, but it does nothing to prevent the disaster in the first place. Identifying even small successes out of a larger operational failure can be the most important way to improve performance in the future.
The practical way to start becoming adaptable is easy: Stop giving orders and start issuing challenges. Any organization of any size can develop faster, more effective, cheaper solutions to problems by challenging its people. 3M (hardly a nimble startup) used challenges to massively reduce its environmental footprint. Rather than having the CEO order all employees to recycle more, the company challenged employees to produce solutions. The result was more than 8,000 environmentally and financially beneficial changes, each developed out of individuals' particular expertise: Administrative assistants knew best how to reduce paper waste, and chemists knew best how to reduce chemical waste.
The U.S. Department of Defense now uses challenges to develop better weapons systems. Rather than paying single contractors billions over budget for products that arrive years too late and don't solve the initial problems, the DoD typically offers a paltry million-dollar reward and typically gets results even faster than it expects. I've taken to ripping up the syllabus on the first day of my university classes and instead challenging students to create and deliver the content of my courses on the basis of what they want to learn. The classes become far more engaging for the students, far more adaptable to the rapidly changing state of scientific knowledge, and, as a bonus, far less work for me. For more on how challenges work, see my website.
But in a deeper sense, awakening to the power of adaptability requires taking your eyes off the computer screen and your mind out of the boardroom long enough to appreciate the wonder and the lessons of the rain forest, the DNA helix, and the skin of the octopus.
Rafe Sagarin
Rafe Sagarin is a research scientist and ecologist at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease and other books.
Source: www.hbr.org
To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology
by Rafe Sagarin | March 5, 2013
Remember when Apple's stock traded at $7 a share? I do, because that's when I sold my shares. Tech experts' sage predictions had convinced me that the Mac would never make a dent in the PC market. As it turned out, the Mac didn't need to make a dent, because Apple mutated its cute computer DNA into cute music players and phones that fit massive unfilled niches. Yet even the genius architect of this turnaround made faulty predictions sometimes. Remember the invention Steve Jobs said was going to be "bigger than the PC"? You may have seen a mall cop riding one recently.
Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future. That's too bad, because our world is full of risk that we'd love to avoid and opportunity that we'd love to seize.
Fortunately, there's a rich source of lessons on how to thrive in an unpredictable world, and it has been cranking out success stories for 3.5 billion years. It's called biology.
All of Earth's successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one. They haven't held "planning exercises" or created "predictive frameworks." Instead, they've adapted. Adaptability is the power to detect and respond to change in the world, no matter how surprising or inconvenient it may be.
While there's much chatter in the management world about the need to be adaptable, only a few creative companies and innovative managers have probed the natural world for its adaptability secrets. But when they have, they've been remarkably successful. A study of nature offers straightforward guidance through four key practices of adaptable systems.
Decentralization. The most successful biological organisms are structured or organized in such a way as to eschew centralized control in favor of allowing multiple agents to independently sense and quickly respond to change. An octopus, despite its surprisingly intelligent brain, doesn't order each arm to change a certain color when it needs to hide quickly. Rather, individual skin cells across its body sense and respond to change and give the octopus a collective camouflage.
CEOs and shareholders needn't fear this kind of organization. The independent sensors of adaptable organisms are not anarchists. They rely on the resources and follow the overall direction that the body gives them. But decentralized organization yields faster, cheaper, and more effective solutions to complex problems — think Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica, DARPA Grand Challenges versus Department of Defense single-source contracts, or Google Flu Trends (which uses the power of billions of users independently searching for flu-related terms on Google to identify flu outbreaks) versus the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu reports (which can give you the same results, two weeks later).
Redundancy. Adaptable systems make multiple copies of everything and modify the copies to hedge against uncertainty. Redundancy is not efficient, but it does help you solve a wide range of unexpected problems. A CEO I know who uses biological principles to run a manufacturing firm that has never been unprofitable or laid off an employee in 30 years keeps a massive warehouse full of multiple copies of every part he's ever made. This cache of inventory and wasted real estate violates all the norms of just-in-time manufacturing, but when a 20-year-old helicopter is grounded and needs to fly now, he is the only one who has the part. Customers that have been bailed out by him go back to him. He has turned commodity parts into a proprietary service, just as nature turns the massive redundancy of just four DNA bases into a dazzling array of unique ways to deal with risk and uncertainty.
Symbiotic relationships. All organisms use these to extend their own adaptability. Symbioses occur between the most unlikely of pairs, such as small scavenging fish and large predatory sharks — sometimes even between former adversaries. The effects can be profound. Tiny bacteria that live in the roots of legume plants and convert nitrogen into a useful form have literally changed the face of the entire planet.
Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, a company known for its strong brand following and commitment to donating profits to social causes, would seem an unlikely match for Unilever, a food and beauty-products conglomerate with fairly anodyne brands. But each company had problems to solve. Ben and Jerry's needed to grow after years of flat and declining sales, so that through profit sharing it could do more social good. Unilever needed to capture more niches in "boutique" food brands. When Unilever bought Ben and Jerry's, the larger organization adapted more than the smaller one to make the symbiosis work. Unilever allowed casual dress for its Ben and Jerry's executives, maintained the brand's charitable giving, and expanded its commitments to sustainability by incorporating aspects of Ben and Jerry's DNA throughout its corporate practice.
Recursive processes. Adaptability in nature continually builds off of its own successes. The one turtle out of a hundred that survives from its infancy to adulthood is the only turtle that's important to turtle evolution.
The business literature is unfortunately rife with advice to "learn from failures." One HBR article from the 1990s held up BP as an exemplar of learning from failure. Certainly BP has learned a lot from the failures of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but is killing 11 people, crippling a huge ecosystem, and absorbing a $4.5 billion fine how you want to run your business? In nature, failure is literally a dead end — you don't reproduce and you don't pass on your genes. Learning from failure may make your business more prepared for the disaster that has already happened, but it does nothing to prevent the disaster in the first place. Identifying even small successes out of a larger operational failure can be the most important way to improve performance in the future.
The practical way to start becoming adaptable is easy: Stop giving orders and start issuing challenges. Any organization of any size can develop faster, more effective, cheaper solutions to problems by challenging its people. 3M (hardly a nimble startup) used challenges to massively reduce its environmental footprint. Rather than having the CEO order all employees to recycle more, the company challenged employees to produce solutions. The result was more than 8,000 environmentally and financially beneficial changes, each developed out of individuals' particular expertise: Administrative assistants knew best how to reduce paper waste, and chemists knew best how to reduce chemical waste.
The U.S. Department of Defense now uses challenges to develop better weapons systems. Rather than paying single contractors billions over budget for products that arrive years too late and don't solve the initial problems, the DoD typically offers a paltry million-dollar reward and typically gets results even faster than it expects. I've taken to ripping up the syllabus on the first day of my university classes and instead challenging students to create and deliver the content of my courses on the basis of what they want to learn. The classes become far more engaging for the students, far more adaptable to the rapidly changing state of scientific knowledge, and, as a bonus, far less work for me. For more on how challenges work, see my website.
But in a deeper sense, awakening to the power of adaptability requires taking your eyes off the computer screen and your mind out of the boardroom long enough to appreciate the wonder and the lessons of the rain forest, the DNA helix, and the skin of the octopus.
Rafe Sagarin
Rafe Sagarin is a research scientist and ecologist at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease and other books.
Source: www.hbr.org
Salman Khan-Interview at Harvard Business School
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.hbs.edu
Source: www.hbs.edu
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
IT-Driving the top line with technology: An interview with the CIO of Coca-Cola
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Driving the top line with technology: An interview with the CIO of Coca-Cola
Ed Steinike is reshaping his CIO role as The Coca-Cola Company accelerates its use of technology innovations in operations, marketing, and sales.
MARCH 2013 • Robert Levin
Source: Business Technology Office
Ed Steinike, vice president and CIO of The Coca-Cola Company, has set his mind on being what he calls a “revenue-generator CIO.” In this interview, he talks about his department’s journey from back-office function to business partner and how it uses technology to cultivate direct relationships with customers and to develop a demand-driven supply chain. Finally, Steinike describes a fledgling innovation that integrates most of the technology-driven trends in the consumer-packaged-goods industry.
Ed Steinike biography
Ed SteinikeVital statistics Lives in Atlanta, Georgia
Married, with 2 children
Education Received a BS in electrical engineering from Marquette University
Career highlights The Coca-Cola Company (2002–07, 2010–present)
Vice president and CIO, The Coca-Cola Company (2010–present)Chief development officer and CIO, Coca-Cola North America (2004–07)Chief technology officer, The Coca-Cola Company (2002–04)ING Insurance
Executive vice president and CIO (2007–10)General Electric
Various leadership roles in manufacturing, service, engineering, and IT (1976–2002)Fast facts Member of various CIO associations; serves on the board of advisers for the Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Information Technology at Georgia Southern University
McKinsey: How is the role of IT changing at Coca-Cola, and, with it, your role as CIO?
Ed Steinike: IT and marketing are very close partners at Coca-Cola today—more so, I think, than at most other companies—and that’s the way it should be. Coke is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on digital marketing, and that number will, no doubt, continue to rise. Almost all of that spending is IT-related. This development calls for a broader CIO role. It’s not enough to be an operational back-office CIO running the systems. It’s also not enough to be a process CIO reinventing the supply chain and transforming support functions. Important as those two roles are, they need to be complemented by what I call the revenue-generator CIO or business-level CIO.
McKinsey: What were the beginnings of the strategic partnership between marketing and IT at Coca-Cola?
Ed Steinike: Our marketers started to think more seriously about digital channels five years ago or so. As mobile adoption expanded, they started to build a direct connection with our customers by pushing mobile applications for social-media sites and our loyalty programs, such as My Coke Rewards.
Marketing was driving a lot of it through its own advertising and digital agencies while IT, at the time, was struggling to be relevant. We were viewed as a back-office function, not as one of the strategic leaders and partners in our digital-marketing efforts. I believed we should be bringing ideas to marketing instead of marketing coming to us for creative solutions and more often than not getting the answer, “Sorry. We don’t have the people to do these things.”
Our first step was simply to offer traditional operating, hosting, and security for the sites and platforms the agencies were building. We did that quite well and now have over 600 consumer sites hosted in one platform environment with great data protection.
McKinsey: What did it take to get to the level of business partner, to get to the point, for example, where you were coming up with cool mobile apps and connecting them with consumer-relationship programs?
Ed Steinike: It’s all about people. Just like Coca-Cola’s marketing organization, which hired some really smart people in the field of digital and interactive marketing, we started to recruit talented IT people who were more entrepreneurial, a little more strategic in their thinking, and who connected better with what marketing was trying to achieve. As one example, my enterprise architect is based in Silicon Valley with his team—closer to where the solutions are likely to come from.
That said, we still have some way to go when it comes to getting young people with a different kind of mind-set. We used to bring in 35 IT interns each year, but we hired none of them despite the great work they did, because our focus was on seasoned hires, for example, business and systems analysts and project managers. We certainly must have experienced people for big systems applications and the like, but for application-development work using software as a service, an entry-level hire may be just fine.
We’re now hiring five of our interns each year, and it’s amazing what they can do. They look at the world differently, and they come up with new answers. They help us build a new culture in which IT is a better business partner. It will take years to complete this cultural shift, but it will only happen if we address the people side of it.
McKinsey: What is the IT department doing today to cultivate direct consumer relationships?
Ed Steinike: Recently, for the 2012 Summer Olympics, we created mobile applications tailored for over 100 countries and available in the Android and iPhone stores, in order to create a digital-marketing event around the globe that boosted our impact well beyond our traditional sponsorship and television advertising channels. The IT department built some of the applications and managed others created by external agencies or our consumers. When content comes from thousands and thousands of sources, it requires a complete ecosystem. We’re now running content-management systems, digital-rights-management systems, digital-access-management systems, and mobile-distribution systems. Packaging content and distributing it around the world is a very big area for us right now. Today, digital marketing is a joint activity in our company, with marketing in many cases looking directly to us for better ways to reach our customers.
McKinsey: Having demand-driven supply-chain systems is a trend in consumer packaged goods. What is Coca-Cola doing in this field?
Ed Steinike: It’s a very important area for Coca-Cola. We’ve been working hard the last couple of years to integrate our plant and distribution systems to make it possible for us to see exactly what’s happening with our products as they move through the supply chain. One critical benefit is to ensure that we can minimize out-of-stocks. Imagine that we direct our Facebook fans to a local outlet with a targeted promotion and the product isn’t available. We’ve lost a sale and had a negative impact on relationships with our consumers. The inventory at the back of a store is pretty visible, but we lose track at the shelf point and the cooler point. We’re experimenting with some interesting methods to fill that gap, such as radio-frequency identification and electronic tagging of our products.
Interestingly, we have a pretty cool solution to this in the United Kingdom, where we have merchandisers take pictures of our shelves and coolers when they come into stores to talk about orders, promotions, and so on. We spent a lot of time trying to automate the processing of information found in the photographs, but it turned out that a better solution was to send the photos to a company in India: its staff studies the shots and in less than a minute gets back to us with stock counts of each product. It’s a nice blend of technology and human process. Is there a better solution? We’re still experimenting.
McKinsey: What is the best example of IT’s new role at Coca-Cola?
Ed Steinike: Coca-Cola Freestyle, our revolutionary fountain dispenser, integrates most of what the IT department is up to and also points the way toward a technology-driven future for beverages that might be quite different from the present landscape. Earlier fountains were basically mechanical machines. Coca-Cola Freestyle is effectively a complex and sensitive enterprise-resource-planning environment. A computer embedded in the new fountain machine calculates with surgical precision the ingredients of over 100 different beverage brands. To begin, consumers experiment a bit with various brands until they find one they really like. When they do, we find that they come back to our fountains for that particular drink and this leads to increased same-store sales.
The computer records all the data involved in every single pour. Each fountain knows when it’s running low on certain products. We are also using automated ordering in many Coca-Cola Freestyle locations whereby the fountain can build its own orders for supplies and place them directly into the system. It would even optimize the order so that you pay the lowest possible delivered cost. There are other things we can do with the operational data, such as working with the owner of the fountain location to talk about, for example, what drinks are moving at certain times of the day and, as a result, potential opportunities to adjust pricing and promotions. Broader marketing data represent another area. Is there, for example, a particular drink that happens to be selling really well in a particular region, country, or city?
We have visions of how we will use the data as we deploy thousands and thousands of the machines in locations such as restaurant chains, entertainment venues, and retail stores. Consumers who pay at the counter with their phone can simply go to the fountain, hold their phone up, and the machine pours the drink. When they’re done, the name and formula of that drink is downloaded to their phone and a button comes up on the phone for posting it on Facebook, where their friends can see it. Friends who “like” it will get that formula to their phone and can then simply walk into a Coca-Cola Freestyle location, pay at the counter with their phone, step up to the machine, and hold up their phone for the pour. We’ve got 50 million–plus fans on Facebook. We’ve got some 18 million people on My Coke Rewards. If we could bring these audiences together around Coca-Cola Freestyle, we could learn some really cool things.
McKinsey: A final question, what’s your advice to a CIO starting out in the consumer-packaged-goods industry?
Ed Steinike: My advice is that there’s an interesting shift going on in the world of consumer packaged goods, and IT has to stay very close to the new trends if it wants to be relevant. If you’re comfortable being an operational CIO you’ll still be needed, but I don’t think you’re going to help your company grow as fast as it could.
About the Author
Robert Levin is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Boston office.
Source: www.mckinseyquarterly.com
Driving the top line with technology: An interview with the CIO of Coca-Cola
Ed Steinike is reshaping his CIO role as The Coca-Cola Company accelerates its use of technology innovations in operations, marketing, and sales.
MARCH 2013 • Robert Levin
Source: Business Technology Office
Ed Steinike, vice president and CIO of The Coca-Cola Company, has set his mind on being what he calls a “revenue-generator CIO.” In this interview, he talks about his department’s journey from back-office function to business partner and how it uses technology to cultivate direct relationships with customers and to develop a demand-driven supply chain. Finally, Steinike describes a fledgling innovation that integrates most of the technology-driven trends in the consumer-packaged-goods industry.
Ed Steinike biography
Ed SteinikeVital statistics Lives in Atlanta, Georgia
Married, with 2 children
Education Received a BS in electrical engineering from Marquette University
Career highlights The Coca-Cola Company (2002–07, 2010–present)
Vice president and CIO, The Coca-Cola Company (2010–present)Chief development officer and CIO, Coca-Cola North America (2004–07)Chief technology officer, The Coca-Cola Company (2002–04)ING Insurance
Executive vice president and CIO (2007–10)General Electric
Various leadership roles in manufacturing, service, engineering, and IT (1976–2002)Fast facts Member of various CIO associations; serves on the board of advisers for the Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Information Technology at Georgia Southern University
McKinsey: How is the role of IT changing at Coca-Cola, and, with it, your role as CIO?
Ed Steinike: IT and marketing are very close partners at Coca-Cola today—more so, I think, than at most other companies—and that’s the way it should be. Coke is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on digital marketing, and that number will, no doubt, continue to rise. Almost all of that spending is IT-related. This development calls for a broader CIO role. It’s not enough to be an operational back-office CIO running the systems. It’s also not enough to be a process CIO reinventing the supply chain and transforming support functions. Important as those two roles are, they need to be complemented by what I call the revenue-generator CIO or business-level CIO.
McKinsey: What were the beginnings of the strategic partnership between marketing and IT at Coca-Cola?
Ed Steinike: Our marketers started to think more seriously about digital channels five years ago or so. As mobile adoption expanded, they started to build a direct connection with our customers by pushing mobile applications for social-media sites and our loyalty programs, such as My Coke Rewards.
Marketing was driving a lot of it through its own advertising and digital agencies while IT, at the time, was struggling to be relevant. We were viewed as a back-office function, not as one of the strategic leaders and partners in our digital-marketing efforts. I believed we should be bringing ideas to marketing instead of marketing coming to us for creative solutions and more often than not getting the answer, “Sorry. We don’t have the people to do these things.”
Our first step was simply to offer traditional operating, hosting, and security for the sites and platforms the agencies were building. We did that quite well and now have over 600 consumer sites hosted in one platform environment with great data protection.
McKinsey: What did it take to get to the level of business partner, to get to the point, for example, where you were coming up with cool mobile apps and connecting them with consumer-relationship programs?
Ed Steinike: It’s all about people. Just like Coca-Cola’s marketing organization, which hired some really smart people in the field of digital and interactive marketing, we started to recruit talented IT people who were more entrepreneurial, a little more strategic in their thinking, and who connected better with what marketing was trying to achieve. As one example, my enterprise architect is based in Silicon Valley with his team—closer to where the solutions are likely to come from.
That said, we still have some way to go when it comes to getting young people with a different kind of mind-set. We used to bring in 35 IT interns each year, but we hired none of them despite the great work they did, because our focus was on seasoned hires, for example, business and systems analysts and project managers. We certainly must have experienced people for big systems applications and the like, but for application-development work using software as a service, an entry-level hire may be just fine.
We’re now hiring five of our interns each year, and it’s amazing what they can do. They look at the world differently, and they come up with new answers. They help us build a new culture in which IT is a better business partner. It will take years to complete this cultural shift, but it will only happen if we address the people side of it.
McKinsey: What is the IT department doing today to cultivate direct consumer relationships?
Ed Steinike: Recently, for the 2012 Summer Olympics, we created mobile applications tailored for over 100 countries and available in the Android and iPhone stores, in order to create a digital-marketing event around the globe that boosted our impact well beyond our traditional sponsorship and television advertising channels. The IT department built some of the applications and managed others created by external agencies or our consumers. When content comes from thousands and thousands of sources, it requires a complete ecosystem. We’re now running content-management systems, digital-rights-management systems, digital-access-management systems, and mobile-distribution systems. Packaging content and distributing it around the world is a very big area for us right now. Today, digital marketing is a joint activity in our company, with marketing in many cases looking directly to us for better ways to reach our customers.
McKinsey: Having demand-driven supply-chain systems is a trend in consumer packaged goods. What is Coca-Cola doing in this field?
Ed Steinike: It’s a very important area for Coca-Cola. We’ve been working hard the last couple of years to integrate our plant and distribution systems to make it possible for us to see exactly what’s happening with our products as they move through the supply chain. One critical benefit is to ensure that we can minimize out-of-stocks. Imagine that we direct our Facebook fans to a local outlet with a targeted promotion and the product isn’t available. We’ve lost a sale and had a negative impact on relationships with our consumers. The inventory at the back of a store is pretty visible, but we lose track at the shelf point and the cooler point. We’re experimenting with some interesting methods to fill that gap, such as radio-frequency identification and electronic tagging of our products.
Interestingly, we have a pretty cool solution to this in the United Kingdom, where we have merchandisers take pictures of our shelves and coolers when they come into stores to talk about orders, promotions, and so on. We spent a lot of time trying to automate the processing of information found in the photographs, but it turned out that a better solution was to send the photos to a company in India: its staff studies the shots and in less than a minute gets back to us with stock counts of each product. It’s a nice blend of technology and human process. Is there a better solution? We’re still experimenting.
McKinsey: What is the best example of IT’s new role at Coca-Cola?
Ed Steinike: Coca-Cola Freestyle, our revolutionary fountain dispenser, integrates most of what the IT department is up to and also points the way toward a technology-driven future for beverages that might be quite different from the present landscape. Earlier fountains were basically mechanical machines. Coca-Cola Freestyle is effectively a complex and sensitive enterprise-resource-planning environment. A computer embedded in the new fountain machine calculates with surgical precision the ingredients of over 100 different beverage brands. To begin, consumers experiment a bit with various brands until they find one they really like. When they do, we find that they come back to our fountains for that particular drink and this leads to increased same-store sales.
The computer records all the data involved in every single pour. Each fountain knows when it’s running low on certain products. We are also using automated ordering in many Coca-Cola Freestyle locations whereby the fountain can build its own orders for supplies and place them directly into the system. It would even optimize the order so that you pay the lowest possible delivered cost. There are other things we can do with the operational data, such as working with the owner of the fountain location to talk about, for example, what drinks are moving at certain times of the day and, as a result, potential opportunities to adjust pricing and promotions. Broader marketing data represent another area. Is there, for example, a particular drink that happens to be selling really well in a particular region, country, or city?
We have visions of how we will use the data as we deploy thousands and thousands of the machines in locations such as restaurant chains, entertainment venues, and retail stores. Consumers who pay at the counter with their phone can simply go to the fountain, hold their phone up, and the machine pours the drink. When they’re done, the name and formula of that drink is downloaded to their phone and a button comes up on the phone for posting it on Facebook, where their friends can see it. Friends who “like” it will get that formula to their phone and can then simply walk into a Coca-Cola Freestyle location, pay at the counter with their phone, step up to the machine, and hold up their phone for the pour. We’ve got 50 million–plus fans on Facebook. We’ve got some 18 million people on My Coke Rewards. If we could bring these audiences together around Coca-Cola Freestyle, we could learn some really cool things.
McKinsey: A final question, what’s your advice to a CIO starting out in the consumer-packaged-goods industry?
Ed Steinike: My advice is that there’s an interesting shift going on in the world of consumer packaged goods, and IT has to stay very close to the new trends if it wants to be relevant. If you’re comfortable being an operational CIO you’ll still be needed, but I don’t think you’re going to help your company grow as fast as it could.
About the Author
Robert Levin is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Boston office.
Source: www.mckinseyquarterly.com
Sunday, March 3, 2013
GRALINT/HHRR-TED Talks-Amy Cuddy: Body language shapes who you are
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
So I want to start by offering you a freeno-tech life hack,and all it requires of you is this:that you change your posture for two minutes.But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right nowdo a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body.So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller?Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs,maybe wrapping your ankles.Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this.Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter)I see you. (Laughter)So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now.We're going to come back to that in a few minutes,and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit,it could significantly change the way your life unfolds.
So, we're really fascinated with body language,and we're particularly interestedin other people's body language.You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) —an awkward interaction, or a smile,or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink,or maybe even something like a handshake.
Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10, and look at thislucky policeman gets to shake hands with the Presidentof the United States. Oh, and here comesthe Prime Minister of the — ? No. (Laughter) (Applause)(Laughter) (Applause)
Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake,can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks.Even the BBC and The New York Times.So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior,or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists --it's language, so we think about communication.When we think about communication, we think about interactions.So what is your body language communicating to me?What's mine communicating to you?
And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a validway to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lotof time looking at the effects of our body language,or other people's body language, on judgments.And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language.And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomeslike who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University,shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clipsof real physician-patient interactions,their judgments of the physician's nicenesspredict whether or not that physician will be sued.So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or notthat physician was incompetent, but do we like that personand how they interacted?Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shownus that judgments of political candidates' facesin just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senateand gubernatorial race outcomes,and even, let's go digital,emoticons used well in online negotiationscan lead to you claim more value from that negotiation.If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judgeothers, how they judge us and what the outcomes are.We tend to forget, though, the other audiencethat's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.
We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughtsand our feelings and our physiology.So what nonverbals am I talking about?I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice,and I teach at a competitive business school,so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics.I became especially interested in nonverbal expressionsof power and dominance.
And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance?Well, this is what they are.So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding.So you make yourself big, you stretch out,you take up space, you're basically opening up.It's about opening up. And this is trueacross the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates.And humans do the same thing. (Laughter)So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically,and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment.And this one is especially interesting because it really shows ushow universal and old these expressions of power are.This expression, which is known as pride,Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows thatpeople who are born with sightand people who are congenitally blind do thiswhen they win at a physical competition.So when they cross the finish line and they've won,it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it.They do this.So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactlythe opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up.We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us.So again, both animals and humans do the same thing.And this is what happens when you put together highand low power. So what we tend to dowhen it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals.So if someone is being really powerful with us,we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them.We do the opposite of them.
So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom,and what do I notice? I notice that MBA studentsreally exhibit the full range of power nonverbals.So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas,really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the roombefore class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.When they sit down, they're sort of spread out.They raise their hands like this.You have other people who are virtually collapsingwhen they come in. As soon they come in, you see it.You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sitin their chair and they make themselves tiny,and they go like this when they raise their hand.I notice a couple of things about this.One, you're not going to be surprised.It seems to be related to gender.So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men.Women feel chronically less powerful than men,so this is not surprising. But the other thing I noticed is thatit also seemed to be related to the extent to whichthe students were participating, and how well they were participating.And this is really important in the MBA classroom,because participation counts for half the grade.
So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap.You get these equally qualified women and men coming inand then you get these differences in grades,and it seems to be partly attributable to participation.So I started to wonder, you know, okay,so you have these people coming in like this, and they'reparticipating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake itand would it lead them to participate more?
So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley,and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it?Like, can you do this just for a little while and actuallyexperience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful?So we know that our nonverbals govern how other peoplethink and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence.But our question really was, do our nonverbalsgovern how we think and feel about ourselves?
There's some evidence that they do.So, for example, we smile when we feel happy,but also, when we're forced to smileby holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy.So it goes both ways. When it comes to power,it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful,you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible thatwhen you pretend to be powerful, you are more likelyto actually feel powerful.
So the second question really was, you know,so we know that our minds change our bodies,but is it also true that our bodies change our minds?And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful,what am I talking about?So I'm talking about thoughts and feelingsand the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings,and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones.So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerlesslook like?So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly,more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.They actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance.They also tend to be able to think more abstractly.So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks.There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.Physiologically, there also are differences on twokey hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone,and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.So what we find is thathigh-power alpha males in primate hierarchieshave high testosterone and low cortisol,and powerful and effective leaders also havehigh testosterone and low cortisol.So what does that mean? When you think about power,people tended to think only about testosterone,because that was about dominance.But really, power is also about how you react to stress.So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant,high on testosterone, but really stress reactive?Probably not, right? You want the personwho's powerful and assertive and dominant,but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.
So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alphaneeds to take over, if an individual needs to take overan alpha role sort of suddenly,within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone upsignificantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly.So we have this evidence, both that the body can shapethe mind, at least at the facial level,and also that role changes can shape the mind.So what happens, okay, you take a role change,what happens if you do that at a really minimal level,like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention?"For two minutes," you say, "I want you to stand like this,and it's going to make you feel more powerful."
So this is what we did. We decided to bring peopleinto the lab and run a little experiment, and these peopleadopted, for two minutes, either high-power posesor low-power poses, and I'm just going to show youfive of the poses, although they took on only two.So here's one.A couple more.This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman"by the media.Here are a couple more.So you can be standing or you can be sitting.And here are the low-power poses.So you're folding up, you're making yourself small.This one is very low-power.When you're touching your neck,you're really protecting yourself.So this is what happens. They come in,they spit into a vial,we for two minutes say, "You need to do this or this."They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime themwith a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power,right? So two minutes they do this.We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items,and then we give them an opportunity to gamble,and then we take another saliva sample.That's it. That's the whole experiment.
So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling,what we find is that when you're in the high-powerpose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble.When you're in the low-power pose condition,only 60 percent, and that's a pretty whopping significant difference.Here's what we find on testosterone.From their baseline when they come in, high-power peopleexperience about a 20-percent increase,and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease.So again, two minutes, and you get these changes.Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power peopleexperience about a 25-percent decrease, andthe low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase.So two minutes lead to these hormonal changesthat configure your brain to basically be eitherassertive, confident and comfortable,or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feelingsort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right?So it seems that our nonverbals do governhow we think and feel about ourselves,so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves.Also, our bodies change our minds.
But the next question, of course, iscan power posing for a few minutesreally change your life in meaningful ways?So this is in the lab. It's this little task, you know,it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actuallyapply this? Which we cared about, of course.And so we think it's really, what matters, I mean,where you want to use this is evaluative situationslike social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated,either by your friends? Like for teenagers it's at the lunchroom table.It could be, you know, for some people it's speakingat a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitchor giving a talk like thisor doing a job interview.We decided that the one that most people could relate tobecause most people had been throughwas the job interview.
So we published these findings, and the mediaare all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you dowhen you go in for the job interview, right? (Laughter)You know, so we were of course horrified, and said,Oh my God, no, no, no, that's not what we meant at all.For numerous reasons, no, no, no, don't do that.Again, this is not about you talking to other people.It's you talking to yourself. What do you dobefore you go into a job interview? You do this.Right? You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone --or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out.You are, you know, you're looking at your notes,you're hunching up, making yourself small,when really what you should be doing maybe is this,like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes.So that's what we want to test. Okay?So we bring people into a lab, andthey do either high- or low-power poses again,they go through a very stressful job interview.It's five minutes long. They are being recorded.They're being judged also, and the judgesare trained to give no nonverbal feedback,so they look like this. Like, imaginethis is the person interviewing you.So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled.People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls"standing in social quicksand."So this really spikes your cortisol.So this is the job interview we put them through,because we really wanted to see what happened.We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them.They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions.They have no idea who's been posing in what pose,and they end up looking at these sets of tapes,and they say, "Oh, we want to hire these people," --all the high-power posers -- "we don't want to hire these people.We also evaluate these people much more positively overall."But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech.It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech.We also, because we rate them on all these variablesrelated to competence, like, how well-structuredis the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications?No effect on those things. This is what's affected.These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves,basically. They're bringing themselves.They bring their ideas, but as themselves,with no, you know, residue over them.So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect.
So when I tell people about this,that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior,and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me,"I don't -- It feels fake." Right?So I said, fake it till you make it. I don't -- It's not me.I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud.I don't want to feel like an impostor.I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here.And that really resonated with me,because I want to tell you a little story aboutbeing an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here.
When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident.I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times.I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injuryrehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college,and I learned that my I.Q. had dropped by two standard deviations,which was very traumatic.I knew my I.Q. because I had identified with being smart,and I had been called gifted as a child.So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back.They say, "You're not going to finish college.Just, you know, there are other things for you to do,but that's not going to work out for you."So I really struggled with this, and I have to say,having your identity taken from you, your core identity,and for me it was being smart,having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that.So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked and worked,and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.
Eventually I graduated from college.It took me four years longer than my peers,and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske,to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton,and I was like, I am not supposed to be here.I am an impostor.And the night before my first-year talk,and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talkto 20 people. That's it.I was so afraid of being found out the next daythat I called her and said, "I'm quitting."She was like, "You are not quitting,because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying.You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do.You are going to fake it.You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do.You're just going to do it and do it and do it,even if you're terrified and just paralyzedand having an out-of-body experience, until you havethis moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it.Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'"So that's what I did. Five years in grad school,a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern,I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not reallythinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking,"Not supposed to be here. Not supposed to be here."
So at the end of my first year at Harvard,a student who had not talked in class the entire semester,who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail,"came into my office. I really didn't know her at all.And she said, she came in totally defeated, and she said,"I'm not supposed to be here."And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened.One was that I realized,oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. You know.I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling.And the second was, she is supposed to be here!Like, she can fake it, she can become it.So I was like, "Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here!And tomorrow you're going to fake it,you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know,you're gonna — " (Applause)(Applause)"And you're going to go into the classroom,and you are going to give the best comment ever."You know? And she gave the best comment ever,and people turned around and they were like,oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there, you know? (Laughter)
She comes back to me months later, and I realizedthat she had not just faked it till she made it,she had actually faked it till she became it.So she had changed.And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it.Fake it till you become it. You know? It's not —Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.
The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this.Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.So this is two minutes.Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation,for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator,in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors.That's what you want to do. Configure your brainto cope the best in that situation.Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down.Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am.Leave that situation feeling like, oh, I really feel likeI got to say who I am and show who I am.
So I want to ask you first, you know,both to try power posing,and also I want to ask youto share the science, because this is simple.I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter)Give it away. Share it with people,because the people who can use it the most are the oneswith no resources and no technologyand no status and no power. Give it to thembecause they can do it in private.They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes,and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)
Transcript:
So I want to start by offering you a freeno-tech life hack,and all it requires of you is this:that you change your posture for two minutes.But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right nowdo a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body.So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller?Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs,maybe wrapping your ankles.Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this.Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter)I see you. (Laughter)So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now.We're going to come back to that in a few minutes,and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit,it could significantly change the way your life unfolds.
So, we're really fascinated with body language,and we're particularly interestedin other people's body language.You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) —an awkward interaction, or a smile,or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink,or maybe even something like a handshake.
Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10, and look at thislucky policeman gets to shake hands with the Presidentof the United States. Oh, and here comesthe Prime Minister of the — ? No. (Laughter) (Applause)(Laughter) (Applause)
Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake,can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks.Even the BBC and The New York Times.So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior,or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists --it's language, so we think about communication.When we think about communication, we think about interactions.So what is your body language communicating to me?What's mine communicating to you?
And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a validway to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lotof time looking at the effects of our body language,or other people's body language, on judgments.And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language.And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomeslike who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University,shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clipsof real physician-patient interactions,their judgments of the physician's nicenesspredict whether or not that physician will be sued.So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or notthat physician was incompetent, but do we like that personand how they interacted?Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shownus that judgments of political candidates' facesin just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senateand gubernatorial race outcomes,and even, let's go digital,emoticons used well in online negotiationscan lead to you claim more value from that negotiation.If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judgeothers, how they judge us and what the outcomes are.We tend to forget, though, the other audiencethat's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.
We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughtsand our feelings and our physiology.So what nonverbals am I talking about?I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice,and I teach at a competitive business school,so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics.I became especially interested in nonverbal expressionsof power and dominance.
And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance?Well, this is what they are.So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding.So you make yourself big, you stretch out,you take up space, you're basically opening up.It's about opening up. And this is trueacross the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates.And humans do the same thing. (Laughter)So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically,and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment.And this one is especially interesting because it really shows ushow universal and old these expressions of power are.This expression, which is known as pride,Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows thatpeople who are born with sightand people who are congenitally blind do thiswhen they win at a physical competition.So when they cross the finish line and they've won,it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it.They do this.So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactlythe opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up.We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us.So again, both animals and humans do the same thing.And this is what happens when you put together highand low power. So what we tend to dowhen it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals.So if someone is being really powerful with us,we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them.We do the opposite of them.
So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom,and what do I notice? I notice that MBA studentsreally exhibit the full range of power nonverbals.So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas,really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the roombefore class even starts, like they really want to occupy space.When they sit down, they're sort of spread out.They raise their hands like this.You have other people who are virtually collapsingwhen they come in. As soon they come in, you see it.You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sitin their chair and they make themselves tiny,and they go like this when they raise their hand.I notice a couple of things about this.One, you're not going to be surprised.It seems to be related to gender.So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men.Women feel chronically less powerful than men,so this is not surprising. But the other thing I noticed is thatit also seemed to be related to the extent to whichthe students were participating, and how well they were participating.And this is really important in the MBA classroom,because participation counts for half the grade.
So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap.You get these equally qualified women and men coming inand then you get these differences in grades,and it seems to be partly attributable to participation.So I started to wonder, you know, okay,so you have these people coming in like this, and they'reparticipating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake itand would it lead them to participate more?
So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley,and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it?Like, can you do this just for a little while and actuallyexperience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful?So we know that our nonverbals govern how other peoplethink and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence.But our question really was, do our nonverbalsgovern how we think and feel about ourselves?
There's some evidence that they do.So, for example, we smile when we feel happy,but also, when we're forced to smileby holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy.So it goes both ways. When it comes to power,it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful,you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible thatwhen you pretend to be powerful, you are more likelyto actually feel powerful.
So the second question really was, you know,so we know that our minds change our bodies,but is it also true that our bodies change our minds?And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful,what am I talking about?So I'm talking about thoughts and feelingsand the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings,and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones.So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerlesslook like?So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly,more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.They actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance.They also tend to be able to think more abstractly.So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks.There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.Physiologically, there also are differences on twokey hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone,and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.So what we find is thathigh-power alpha males in primate hierarchieshave high testosterone and low cortisol,and powerful and effective leaders also havehigh testosterone and low cortisol.So what does that mean? When you think about power,people tended to think only about testosterone,because that was about dominance.But really, power is also about how you react to stress.So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant,high on testosterone, but really stress reactive?Probably not, right? You want the personwho's powerful and assertive and dominant,but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.
So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alphaneeds to take over, if an individual needs to take overan alpha role sort of suddenly,within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone upsignificantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly.So we have this evidence, both that the body can shapethe mind, at least at the facial level,and also that role changes can shape the mind.So what happens, okay, you take a role change,what happens if you do that at a really minimal level,like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention?"For two minutes," you say, "I want you to stand like this,and it's going to make you feel more powerful."
So this is what we did. We decided to bring peopleinto the lab and run a little experiment, and these peopleadopted, for two minutes, either high-power posesor low-power poses, and I'm just going to show youfive of the poses, although they took on only two.So here's one.A couple more.This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman"by the media.Here are a couple more.So you can be standing or you can be sitting.And here are the low-power poses.So you're folding up, you're making yourself small.This one is very low-power.When you're touching your neck,you're really protecting yourself.So this is what happens. They come in,they spit into a vial,we for two minutes say, "You need to do this or this."They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime themwith a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power,right? So two minutes they do this.We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items,and then we give them an opportunity to gamble,and then we take another saliva sample.That's it. That's the whole experiment.
So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling,what we find is that when you're in the high-powerpose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble.When you're in the low-power pose condition,only 60 percent, and that's a pretty whopping significant difference.Here's what we find on testosterone.From their baseline when they come in, high-power peopleexperience about a 20-percent increase,and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease.So again, two minutes, and you get these changes.Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power peopleexperience about a 25-percent decrease, andthe low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase.So two minutes lead to these hormonal changesthat configure your brain to basically be eitherassertive, confident and comfortable,or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feelingsort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right?So it seems that our nonverbals do governhow we think and feel about ourselves,so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves.Also, our bodies change our minds.
But the next question, of course, iscan power posing for a few minutesreally change your life in meaningful ways?So this is in the lab. It's this little task, you know,it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actuallyapply this? Which we cared about, of course.And so we think it's really, what matters, I mean,where you want to use this is evaluative situationslike social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated,either by your friends? Like for teenagers it's at the lunchroom table.It could be, you know, for some people it's speakingat a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitchor giving a talk like thisor doing a job interview.We decided that the one that most people could relate tobecause most people had been throughwas the job interview.
So we published these findings, and the mediaare all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you dowhen you go in for the job interview, right? (Laughter)You know, so we were of course horrified, and said,Oh my God, no, no, no, that's not what we meant at all.For numerous reasons, no, no, no, don't do that.Again, this is not about you talking to other people.It's you talking to yourself. What do you dobefore you go into a job interview? You do this.Right? You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone --or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out.You are, you know, you're looking at your notes,you're hunching up, making yourself small,when really what you should be doing maybe is this,like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes.So that's what we want to test. Okay?So we bring people into a lab, andthey do either high- or low-power poses again,they go through a very stressful job interview.It's five minutes long. They are being recorded.They're being judged also, and the judgesare trained to give no nonverbal feedback,so they look like this. Like, imaginethis is the person interviewing you.So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled.People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls"standing in social quicksand."So this really spikes your cortisol.So this is the job interview we put them through,because we really wanted to see what happened.We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them.They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions.They have no idea who's been posing in what pose,and they end up looking at these sets of tapes,and they say, "Oh, we want to hire these people," --all the high-power posers -- "we don't want to hire these people.We also evaluate these people much more positively overall."But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech.It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech.We also, because we rate them on all these variablesrelated to competence, like, how well-structuredis the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications?No effect on those things. This is what's affected.These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves,basically. They're bringing themselves.They bring their ideas, but as themselves,with no, you know, residue over them.So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect.
So when I tell people about this,that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior,and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me,"I don't -- It feels fake." Right?So I said, fake it till you make it. I don't -- It's not me.I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud.I don't want to feel like an impostor.I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here.And that really resonated with me,because I want to tell you a little story aboutbeing an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here.
When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident.I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times.I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injuryrehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college,and I learned that my I.Q. had dropped by two standard deviations,which was very traumatic.I knew my I.Q. because I had identified with being smart,and I had been called gifted as a child.So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back.They say, "You're not going to finish college.Just, you know, there are other things for you to do,but that's not going to work out for you."So I really struggled with this, and I have to say,having your identity taken from you, your core identity,and for me it was being smart,having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that.So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked and worked,and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.
Eventually I graduated from college.It took me four years longer than my peers,and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske,to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton,and I was like, I am not supposed to be here.I am an impostor.And the night before my first-year talk,and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talkto 20 people. That's it.I was so afraid of being found out the next daythat I called her and said, "I'm quitting."She was like, "You are not quitting,because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying.You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do.You are going to fake it.You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do.You're just going to do it and do it and do it,even if you're terrified and just paralyzedand having an out-of-body experience, until you havethis moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it.Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'"So that's what I did. Five years in grad school,a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern,I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not reallythinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking,"Not supposed to be here. Not supposed to be here."
So at the end of my first year at Harvard,a student who had not talked in class the entire semester,who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail,"came into my office. I really didn't know her at all.And she said, she came in totally defeated, and she said,"I'm not supposed to be here."And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened.One was that I realized,oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. You know.I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling.And the second was, she is supposed to be here!Like, she can fake it, she can become it.So I was like, "Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here!And tomorrow you're going to fake it,you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know,you're gonna — " (Applause)(Applause)"And you're going to go into the classroom,and you are going to give the best comment ever."You know? And she gave the best comment ever,and people turned around and they were like,oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there, you know? (Laughter)
She comes back to me months later, and I realizedthat she had not just faked it till she made it,she had actually faked it till she became it.So she had changed.And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it.Fake it till you become it. You know? It's not —Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.
The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this.Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.So this is two minutes.Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation,for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator,in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors.That's what you want to do. Configure your brainto cope the best in that situation.Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down.Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am.Leave that situation feeling like, oh, I really feel likeI got to say who I am and show who I am.
So I want to ask you first, you know,both to try power posing,and also I want to ask youto share the science, because this is simple.I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter)Give it away. Share it with people,because the people who can use it the most are the oneswith no resources and no technologyand no status and no power. Give it to thembecause they can do it in private.They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes,and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)