The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Reconocimiento
Premio Comunidad al esfuerzo por mejorar la calidad educativa
Se entregó el galardón 2013 y se lanzó la convocatoria para este año
En un encuentro realizado en el auditorio de La Nacion, en Vicente López, se reconoció a los ganadores de la edición 2013 del Premio Comunidad a la Educación y se lanzó la convocatoria a la octava edición. El foco del premio, organizado junto con el Banco Galicia y la Fundación Osde con el apoyo de LAN Argentina, Cimientos, Educar 2050 y Arte Vivo, es reconocer las iniciativas de escuelas y jardines de infantes de todo el país tendientes a mejorar el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje de alumnos que se encuentran en situación de vulnerabilidad socioeconómica.
La ceremonia, de la que participaron docentes, directivos y alumnos de las escuelas premiadas, se realizó el viernes pasado y comenzó con unas palabras de Florencia Saguier, directora ejecutiva de la Fundación La Nación: "Este concurso tiene como objetivo apoyar los esfuerzos y logros de aquellos equipos docentes que, con creatividad y compromiso, desarrollan proyectos para mejorar la calidad educativa en contextos vulnerables. Invitamos a todas las escuelas a que participen".
A continuación, recibieron sus distinciones los docentes responsables de los tres proyectos ganadores: "Reciclar, un paso importante para cuidar nuestro planeta", del Jardín N° 30 Ruca Pichiche, de Junín de los Andes (Neuquén); "Agregando valor se satisfacen necesidades", de la Escuela Mario C. Videla, de San Justo (Santa Fe), y "Educación Integral de adolescentes y jóvenes", un proyecto del Taller Protegido Anexo Escuela de Educación Especial y Formación Laboral Alfredo Fortabat, de Concepción (San Juan).
Después de ver un video elaborado por Arte Vivo sobre las prácticas premiadas y escuchar cómo cada docente o directivo explicaba cómo en contextos vulnerables conseguían, gracias al esfuerzo y el amor por su tarea, enseñar a los alumnos mientras mejoran algún aspecto de su comunidad, fue el momento de las cuatro escuelas que recibieron una mención por sus interesantes proyectos.
Por último, se lanzó la octava edición del premio, que lleva el lema "Docentes que enseñan, alumnos que aprenden y comunidad que acompaña", a la que se sumaron Telefé y Enseña x Argentina. La convocatoria se encuentra abierta hasta el 1° de agosto de 2014. Entre las escuelas participantes se seleccionarán tres ganadoras, que recibirán $ 50.000 para el fortalecimiento del proyecto y además contarán con la difusión de la iniciativa galardonada en medios publicitarios y periodísticos, en especial en LA NACION. El premio consistirá también en la realización de un video-documental para cada una de las tres prácticas ganadoras y en una capacitación docente.
Para presentar la candidatura al premio, las instituciones deberán completar todos los datos requeridos en la ficha de postulación de proyecto, disponible en www.premio.fundacionlanacion.org.ar. Los proyectos postulados deberán estar en ejecución al momento de su presentación y tener proyectada su continuidad.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
TECH/BUS/GralInt-Grow fast or die slow
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Grow fast or die slow
Software and online-services companies can quickly become billion-dollar giants, but the recipe for sustained growth remains elusive.
April 2014 | by Eric Kutcher, Olivia Nottebohm, and Kara Sprague
Software and online services are in a period of dizzying growth. Year-old companies are turning down billion-dollar buyouts in the hopes of multibillions in a few months. But we have seen similar industry phases before, and they have often ended with growth and valuations fizzling out. The industry’s booms and busts make growth, an essential ingredient in value creation, difficult to understand. To date, little empirical work has been done on the importance of revenue growth for software and Internet-services companies or how to find new sources of growth when old ones run out.
In our new research, we analyzed the life cycles of about 3,000 software and online-services companies from around the globe between 1980 and 2012. We also surveyed executives representing more than 70 companies and developed detailed case studies of companies that grew quickly and others whose growth stalled. The research produced three main findings.
Growth trumps all. Three pieces of evidence attest to the paramount importance of growth. First, growth yields greater returns. High-growth companies offer a return to shareholders five times greater than medium-growth companies. Second, growth predicts long-term success. “Supergrowers”—companies whose growth was greater than 60 percent when they reached $100 million in revenues—were eight times more likely to reach $1 billion in revenues than those growing less than 20 percent. Additionally, growth matters more than margin or cost structure. Increases in revenue growth rates drive twice as much market-capitalization gain as margin improvements for companies with less than $4 billion in revenues. Further, we observed no correlation between cost structure and growth rates.
Sustaining growth is really hard. Two facts emerged from the research. Companies have only a small probability of making it big. Just 28 percent of the software and Internet-services companies in our database reached $100 million in revenue, and 3 percent reached $1 billion. Of the approximately 3,000 companies we analyzed, only 17 achieved $4 billion in revenue as independent companies. Moreover, success is fleeting. Approximately 85 percent of supergrowers were unable to maintain their growth rates, and once lost, less than a quarter were able to recapture them. Those companies that did regain their historical growth rate had market capitalizations 53 percent lower than those that maintained supergrowth throughout.
There is a recipe for sustained growth. While every company’s circumstances are unique, the research found four principles that are essential to sustaining growth and from which every company can benefit. First, growth happens in phases: from start-up to billion-dollar giant, growth stories typically unfold as a prelude, act one, and act two. In act one, there are five critical enablers of growth: market, monetization model, rapid adoption, stealth, and incentives. A third principle is that the drivers for growth in act two are different. Successful strategies in act two include expanding the act-one offer to new geographies or channels, extending the act-one success to a new product market, or transforming the act-one offer into a platform. Finally, successful companies master the transition from one act to the next. Pitfalls include transitioning at the wrong time and selecting the wrong strategy for the next act.
Company leaders can use these insights to understand their growth trajectory and determine whether their current products and strategy are sufficient to reach their aspiration. If not, the research can help them determine the right time to make the transition to a second act that can sustain their growth and avoid some common pitfalls that have derailed several such transitions.
Growth trumps all
It’s no secret that growth matters for any company and that software and online-services companies 1 grow faster than those in other sectors. Classical corporate-finance theory holds that value creation stems from only two sources, growth and return on invested capital. In software and services, one of these matters more than the other. While returns on capital are often strong in mature companies, it is growth that matters most in the early stages of a company’s life.
But few executives can say precisely how important growth is to these companies, or how it is achieved. The rules of the road in other industries do not apply here. If a health-care company grew at 20 percent annually, its managers and investors would be happy. If a software company grows at that rate, it has a 92 percent chance of ceasing to exist within a few years. Even if a software company is growing at 60 percent annually, its chances of becoming a multibillion-dollar giant are no better than a coin flip.
In this section, we will explore the unique physics of growth in these industries—the principles that underlie revenue expansion in software and online services.
We created two samples of companies: those with between $100 million and $200 million in annual sales, and those with between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. We then divided these into three rates of annual growth: supergrowers (greater than 60 percent two-year compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, at the time they reach $100 million in sales and greater than 40 percent at $1 billion), growers (CAGR between 20 and 60 percent at $100 million and between 10 and 40 percent at $1 billion), and stallers (CAGR of less than 20 percent at the first threshold and less than 10 percent at the second). Note that these stallers underperformed only in the context of their sector; on average, they achieved growth rates that would be the envy of companies in most industries.
We found that only a small fraction were supergrowers: 10 percent and 15 percent, respectively (Exhibit 1). That’s a big drop-off from the period before they reached $100 million in sales, when 50 percent of our sample grew at more than 60 percent annually.
Exhibit 1
Only a small fraction of companies achieve the highest rates of growth.
Growth yields greater returns
Using this same segmentation, we studied the impact of growth rates on total returns to shareholders. We found that at the first threshold, supergrowers generated five times more shareholder returns than growers did; at the second, they produced twice as much. The stallers, with growth rates below 20 percent, actually produced negative returns to shareholders, between –10 and –18 percent depending on company size.
Growth predicts long-term success
Perhaps even more important, our research revealed that higher growth rates portend sustained success. In fact, supergrowers were eight times more likely than stallers to grow from $100 million to $1 billion and three times more likely to do so than growers.
Growth matters more than margin or cost structure
So, growth is essential to value creation. But is it more important than other factors, such as cost control and operating excellence? We analyzed the relationship of cost structure to growth and found little or no correlation. In every major cost category—cost of goods sold, R&D, marketing and sales, and overhead—there is little or no correlation between the level of expense or investment and growth rate. Fast-growing companies can spend a lot or a little on these categories; it doesn’t seem to matter.
As expected, in the software and online-services industries, with their outsize returns on capital, we found that changes in top-line growth deliver twice the valuation gain that margin improvements make. Exhibit 2 lays out the two routes of improvement for a software or online-services company.
Exhibit 2
Growing faster has twice as much impact on share price as improving margins.
Companies with earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization (EBITA) margins below 10 percent and growth rates below 20 percent have seen their market capitalization grow 14 percentage points more slowly than the market average. The data suggest that they can drive nearly twice as much value by pushing growth rates over 20 percent as they can by pushing EBITA margins above 10 percent. Companies with EBITA already in excess of 10 percent but top-line growth below 20 percent achieve a similar market-capitalization improvement by boosting their top-line growth above 20 percent.
There is, however, one notable exception to the idea that growth is all-important. When companies reach $4 billion in revenues or more margins become more important to value multiples.
Sustaining growth is really hard
As would be expected, if growth is especially important to achieve in software and online services, then sustaining it is especially difficult. Our research produced two critical findings about the difficulty of sustaining growth.
Small probability of making it big
In an industry that sees an extraordinary number of start-ups, very few go on to become giants. Of the nearly 3,000 companies that we studied, only 28 percent reached $100 million in annual revenues; 3 percent went on to log $1 billion in annual sales, and just 0.6 percent—17 companies in total—grew beyond $4 billion (Exhibit 3).
Exhibit 3
Very few software companies grow beyond $1 billion in revenues.
Success is fleeting
As mentioned, high rates of growth are a predictor of long-term success. We analyzed the 96 companies that reached $1 billion in annual sales and found that fully 85 percent were in the top two categories of growth (supergrowers and growers) when the companies were smaller. Forty-five percent stayed in those categories—they kept their growth rate consistent—and when they reached $1 billion in sales, the prize for this growth was not only survival, but also thriving performance, as evidenced by a much higher market capitalization/revenue multiple than the companies that took a slower route to $1 billion in revenue. Most interesting to us, companies whose growth rate fell off and then recovered created less than a quarter of the value of the companies that maintained growth—despite similar rates of growth at the $1 billion threshold. Taking their foot off the pedal for even a short stint had dramatic long-term consequences. Bankers call this the “humpty dumpty” problem: once growth is broken, it is impossible to put back together again.
That pattern of slowdown and recovery is unusual and attests to the importance of consistent growth. Many companies experience a slowdown in growth: 217 of the companies in the top two categories slipped one notch within three years after reaching $100 million in revenue. Only about one-third were able to climb back to the fastest rates of growth.
A recipe for sustained growth
Given the importance of growth and the very real difficulty of sustaining the highest rates of growth, we wondered if there were any common practices or standards applied by successful growers. Through case-study research and interviews and surveys of senior executives in more than 70 software and online-services companies, we uncovered four principles for sustaining growth. While every company’s situation is unique, these principles seem to be universal. Following them will not guarantee growth but will certainly give a company a better chance at finding and sustaining growth.
Growth happens in phases
Our first conclusion is the importance of approaching growth as an episodic phenomenon. We found three critical phases, which we call the prelude, act one, and act two. In the prelude, companies test the fit between product and market, typically through bespoke or one-off solutions for initial customers. The prelude is all about finding an offer and business model that appeal to a broad customer set. This is a vital phase, of course, but has been well studied.
We are more interested in the two phases that follow. In act one, companies narrow their focus to an offer that truly scales, both with regard to serving many customers and consistently delivering revenues. It is with this first scaling offer that software and Internet-services companies prove their first business model and typically ride to tens or hundreds of millions (or even, on rare occasions, billions) of dollars in revenues. Importantly, at this point most companies that experience this kind of supergrower success turn to the public markets for growth capital through an IPO.
A capital infusion may help sustain growth for a time as a company expands its act-one offer to new customer segments or geographies. But in most cases the adoption curve will reach its natural conclusion, and act one will no longer offer a sufficient growth engine. For companies to sustain growth, they must typically identify their second act—a second offer that scales.
Five critical enablers of growth in act one
For act one, we identified five critical steps to drive growth, some well understood and others less obvious. The first is to pick the right market, ideally a “limitless” market with millions of end points (that is, users or devices). Google’s addressable market, for example, is every Internet user on the planet—some 2.4 billion people—and the approximately $500 billion (and growing) worldwide spending on advertising. Similarly, LinkedIn addresses a market that includes any professional and anyone looking to hire a professional.
Next is to define a monetization model that enables the company to capture demand without stifling it and thus to scale up successfully. Figuring out the best way to capture the value created by a company’s offering is critical since it essentially defines a company’s business model and is difficult to change later. For example, one popular software company tied monetization of its act-one product to a physical construct, processors. The company later tried to introduce a different pricing model that was more directly tied to the usage of the product. Even though the model change benefited a large majority of customers, the customers who it didn’t benefit were so vocal that the company had to revert to the original model.
Third is to focus on rapid adoption. This approach protects a company from becoming caught up in the demands of serving a particular customer set. Our interviews and case studies revealed numerous instances of companies becoming lost in the pursuit of the “lighthouse” customer. These companies made major concessions across product and pricing to win over a large account. Though in some instances this resulted in a major reference customer, it hindered the development of a product designed for mass use, or of a streamlined operational capability (for example, “zero-cost provisioning”).
The fourth factor is stealth. Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, famously spoke of paranoia as a virtue. Given the pace at which the barriers to entry are falling in this industry, maintaining a low profile while alpha and beta products are developed is vital. In several of our interviews, CEOs discussed the weak intellectual-property protection provided by patents as a prime example of these low barriers.
The fifth and final enabling action is to create proper incentives for the leadership team to remain committed to the company, through act one and beyond. Both in their culture and in their incentive structure (for example, change of control agreements), many start-ups give little thought to life beyond the IPO. Instead, companies and their executives should be focused on building $1 billion companies—with respect to revenue and not market capitalization.
The drivers of growth for act two are different
Act two presents new challenges. Having achieved a foothold (or more) in the marketplace, what next? How can executives keep their software or online-services company growing? Our research established that, in the span between $100 million and $1 billion in annual revenues, many companies run up against either natural market-size or market-share limits to their core product or service. Those companies able to grow successfully to $1 billion and beyond used at least one of three viable growth strategies to get past these boundaries.
First, a fortunate few built robust enough act-one business models that they could simply expand for their second act. These companies opened new geographies (as Facebook did, focusing on Anglophone markets), new outlets (as Google did with Gmail), or new categories (as Amazon did in expanding its e-commerce engine to new retail categories). This approach is only viable for those companies whose act one addresses a target market that is so sizable and fast growing it can support multiple phases of growth.
Second, some companies extend their proven business model into adjacent markets. For example, Microsoft replicated its success in desktop operating systems when it moved into server operating systems and eventually enterprise applications (such as Dynamics and SharePoint). Many companies using this strategy made sizable acquisitions a key component of their growth story, buying footholds in adjacent markets and overcoming the difficulties of integration. Oracle built out its portfolio of enterprise applications primarily via large acquisitions (for example, BEA Systems, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Taleo). Adobe, SAP, and Symantec also used M&A in this way, acquiring large segments in adjacent markets and excelling in postmerger integration.
Third, some companies successfully grow when they transform their core product into a platform, around which an “ecosystem” of complementary products and services can arise. Microsoft successfully used this strategy when it parlayed its leadership in PC operating systems to commensurate success in PC productivity software (that is, Microsoft Office, built on top of Microsoft Windows). Salesforce.com followed a similar playbook with its Force.com platform, which encourages developers to create new tools using its application programming interfaces and provides Salesforce.com with valuable insight into future product areas.
Successful companies master the transition from one act to the next
Figuring out the right time to begin the transition to act two is a nontrivial management decision. Moving too soon could prevent a company from reaping all of act one’s market potential and could enable competitors to gain share. Moving too late and letting growth slow results in lower valuations, and ultimately in the loss of market relevance, as the research shows.
Consequently, knowing when to transition is critical. From our work, we have seen several leading indicators of a coming stall: slowing acquisition of customers due to market saturation, declining lifetime value of new customers, decreasing participation of ecosystem partners (developers or channel resellers), and market disruption from new entrants. A final barometer of impending slowdown is the loss of key talent from sales, presales, or engineering.
When the moment is right, companies should pressure-test their act-two strategy and be aware of a couple of common pitfalls. First, some companies select the wrong market or product offering for their second act. This failure can be attributed to insufficient diligence in assessing the new market or not having the right capabilities in-house to design and build that next major offering. Companies can also underinvest in the resources or budget required to make the act-two offering a success. One can find many examples among defunct software companies. Borland and VisiCorp (creators of VisiCalc) both fall into this category, as they failed to grow significantly on their own and were instead acquired for very little.
The growth powering a company’s first act will eventually run into natural limits. In our view, every CEO should be continually asking these five questions to evaluate when and how to maintain or accelerate their growth trajectory:
•How much growth do we need, and how quickly do we need it?
• How much growth is left in our core markets?
• How secure are we in our core markets?
• What opportunities do we have to expand our current businesses and to generate more cash to invest in growth?
• What new opportunities do we see that might present us with a great next act, and when do we move?
About the authors
Eric Kutcher is a director in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, where Olivia Nottebohm is a principal; Kara Sprague is a principal in the San Francisco office.
The authors thank Philipp Bolt, Ted Callahan, Alex Ince-Cushman, James Manyika, Darren Noy, and Akiko Yamada for their substantial contributions to this paper.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
Grow fast or die slow
Software and online-services companies can quickly become billion-dollar giants, but the recipe for sustained growth remains elusive.
April 2014 | by Eric Kutcher, Olivia Nottebohm, and Kara Sprague
Software and online services are in a period of dizzying growth. Year-old companies are turning down billion-dollar buyouts in the hopes of multibillions in a few months. But we have seen similar industry phases before, and they have often ended with growth and valuations fizzling out. The industry’s booms and busts make growth, an essential ingredient in value creation, difficult to understand. To date, little empirical work has been done on the importance of revenue growth for software and Internet-services companies or how to find new sources of growth when old ones run out.
In our new research, we analyzed the life cycles of about 3,000 software and online-services companies from around the globe between 1980 and 2012. We also surveyed executives representing more than 70 companies and developed detailed case studies of companies that grew quickly and others whose growth stalled. The research produced three main findings.
Growth trumps all. Three pieces of evidence attest to the paramount importance of growth. First, growth yields greater returns. High-growth companies offer a return to shareholders five times greater than medium-growth companies. Second, growth predicts long-term success. “Supergrowers”—companies whose growth was greater than 60 percent when they reached $100 million in revenues—were eight times more likely to reach $1 billion in revenues than those growing less than 20 percent. Additionally, growth matters more than margin or cost structure. Increases in revenue growth rates drive twice as much market-capitalization gain as margin improvements for companies with less than $4 billion in revenues. Further, we observed no correlation between cost structure and growth rates.
Sustaining growth is really hard. Two facts emerged from the research. Companies have only a small probability of making it big. Just 28 percent of the software and Internet-services companies in our database reached $100 million in revenue, and 3 percent reached $1 billion. Of the approximately 3,000 companies we analyzed, only 17 achieved $4 billion in revenue as independent companies. Moreover, success is fleeting. Approximately 85 percent of supergrowers were unable to maintain their growth rates, and once lost, less than a quarter were able to recapture them. Those companies that did regain their historical growth rate had market capitalizations 53 percent lower than those that maintained supergrowth throughout.
There is a recipe for sustained growth. While every company’s circumstances are unique, the research found four principles that are essential to sustaining growth and from which every company can benefit. First, growth happens in phases: from start-up to billion-dollar giant, growth stories typically unfold as a prelude, act one, and act two. In act one, there are five critical enablers of growth: market, monetization model, rapid adoption, stealth, and incentives. A third principle is that the drivers for growth in act two are different. Successful strategies in act two include expanding the act-one offer to new geographies or channels, extending the act-one success to a new product market, or transforming the act-one offer into a platform. Finally, successful companies master the transition from one act to the next. Pitfalls include transitioning at the wrong time and selecting the wrong strategy for the next act.
Company leaders can use these insights to understand their growth trajectory and determine whether their current products and strategy are sufficient to reach their aspiration. If not, the research can help them determine the right time to make the transition to a second act that can sustain their growth and avoid some common pitfalls that have derailed several such transitions.
Growth trumps all
It’s no secret that growth matters for any company and that software and online-services companies 1 grow faster than those in other sectors. Classical corporate-finance theory holds that value creation stems from only two sources, growth and return on invested capital. In software and services, one of these matters more than the other. While returns on capital are often strong in mature companies, it is growth that matters most in the early stages of a company’s life.
But few executives can say precisely how important growth is to these companies, or how it is achieved. The rules of the road in other industries do not apply here. If a health-care company grew at 20 percent annually, its managers and investors would be happy. If a software company grows at that rate, it has a 92 percent chance of ceasing to exist within a few years. Even if a software company is growing at 60 percent annually, its chances of becoming a multibillion-dollar giant are no better than a coin flip.
In this section, we will explore the unique physics of growth in these industries—the principles that underlie revenue expansion in software and online services.
We created two samples of companies: those with between $100 million and $200 million in annual sales, and those with between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. We then divided these into three rates of annual growth: supergrowers (greater than 60 percent two-year compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, at the time they reach $100 million in sales and greater than 40 percent at $1 billion), growers (CAGR between 20 and 60 percent at $100 million and between 10 and 40 percent at $1 billion), and stallers (CAGR of less than 20 percent at the first threshold and less than 10 percent at the second). Note that these stallers underperformed only in the context of their sector; on average, they achieved growth rates that would be the envy of companies in most industries.
We found that only a small fraction were supergrowers: 10 percent and 15 percent, respectively (Exhibit 1). That’s a big drop-off from the period before they reached $100 million in sales, when 50 percent of our sample grew at more than 60 percent annually.
Exhibit 1
Only a small fraction of companies achieve the highest rates of growth.
Growth yields greater returns
Using this same segmentation, we studied the impact of growth rates on total returns to shareholders. We found that at the first threshold, supergrowers generated five times more shareholder returns than growers did; at the second, they produced twice as much. The stallers, with growth rates below 20 percent, actually produced negative returns to shareholders, between –10 and –18 percent depending on company size.
Growth predicts long-term success
Perhaps even more important, our research revealed that higher growth rates portend sustained success. In fact, supergrowers were eight times more likely than stallers to grow from $100 million to $1 billion and three times more likely to do so than growers.
Growth matters more than margin or cost structure
So, growth is essential to value creation. But is it more important than other factors, such as cost control and operating excellence? We analyzed the relationship of cost structure to growth and found little or no correlation. In every major cost category—cost of goods sold, R&D, marketing and sales, and overhead—there is little or no correlation between the level of expense or investment and growth rate. Fast-growing companies can spend a lot or a little on these categories; it doesn’t seem to matter.
As expected, in the software and online-services industries, with their outsize returns on capital, we found that changes in top-line growth deliver twice the valuation gain that margin improvements make. Exhibit 2 lays out the two routes of improvement for a software or online-services company.
Exhibit 2
Growing faster has twice as much impact on share price as improving margins.
Companies with earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization (EBITA) margins below 10 percent and growth rates below 20 percent have seen their market capitalization grow 14 percentage points more slowly than the market average. The data suggest that they can drive nearly twice as much value by pushing growth rates over 20 percent as they can by pushing EBITA margins above 10 percent. Companies with EBITA already in excess of 10 percent but top-line growth below 20 percent achieve a similar market-capitalization improvement by boosting their top-line growth above 20 percent.
There is, however, one notable exception to the idea that growth is all-important. When companies reach $4 billion in revenues or more margins become more important to value multiples.
Sustaining growth is really hard
As would be expected, if growth is especially important to achieve in software and online services, then sustaining it is especially difficult. Our research produced two critical findings about the difficulty of sustaining growth.
Small probability of making it big
In an industry that sees an extraordinary number of start-ups, very few go on to become giants. Of the nearly 3,000 companies that we studied, only 28 percent reached $100 million in annual revenues; 3 percent went on to log $1 billion in annual sales, and just 0.6 percent—17 companies in total—grew beyond $4 billion (Exhibit 3).
Exhibit 3
Very few software companies grow beyond $1 billion in revenues.
Success is fleeting
As mentioned, high rates of growth are a predictor of long-term success. We analyzed the 96 companies that reached $1 billion in annual sales and found that fully 85 percent were in the top two categories of growth (supergrowers and growers) when the companies were smaller. Forty-five percent stayed in those categories—they kept their growth rate consistent—and when they reached $1 billion in sales, the prize for this growth was not only survival, but also thriving performance, as evidenced by a much higher market capitalization/revenue multiple than the companies that took a slower route to $1 billion in revenue. Most interesting to us, companies whose growth rate fell off and then recovered created less than a quarter of the value of the companies that maintained growth—despite similar rates of growth at the $1 billion threshold. Taking their foot off the pedal for even a short stint had dramatic long-term consequences. Bankers call this the “humpty dumpty” problem: once growth is broken, it is impossible to put back together again.
That pattern of slowdown and recovery is unusual and attests to the importance of consistent growth. Many companies experience a slowdown in growth: 217 of the companies in the top two categories slipped one notch within three years after reaching $100 million in revenue. Only about one-third were able to climb back to the fastest rates of growth.
A recipe for sustained growth
Given the importance of growth and the very real difficulty of sustaining the highest rates of growth, we wondered if there were any common practices or standards applied by successful growers. Through case-study research and interviews and surveys of senior executives in more than 70 software and online-services companies, we uncovered four principles for sustaining growth. While every company’s situation is unique, these principles seem to be universal. Following them will not guarantee growth but will certainly give a company a better chance at finding and sustaining growth.
Growth happens in phases
Our first conclusion is the importance of approaching growth as an episodic phenomenon. We found three critical phases, which we call the prelude, act one, and act two. In the prelude, companies test the fit between product and market, typically through bespoke or one-off solutions for initial customers. The prelude is all about finding an offer and business model that appeal to a broad customer set. This is a vital phase, of course, but has been well studied.
We are more interested in the two phases that follow. In act one, companies narrow their focus to an offer that truly scales, both with regard to serving many customers and consistently delivering revenues. It is with this first scaling offer that software and Internet-services companies prove their first business model and typically ride to tens or hundreds of millions (or even, on rare occasions, billions) of dollars in revenues. Importantly, at this point most companies that experience this kind of supergrower success turn to the public markets for growth capital through an IPO.
A capital infusion may help sustain growth for a time as a company expands its act-one offer to new customer segments or geographies. But in most cases the adoption curve will reach its natural conclusion, and act one will no longer offer a sufficient growth engine. For companies to sustain growth, they must typically identify their second act—a second offer that scales.
Five critical enablers of growth in act one
For act one, we identified five critical steps to drive growth, some well understood and others less obvious. The first is to pick the right market, ideally a “limitless” market with millions of end points (that is, users or devices). Google’s addressable market, for example, is every Internet user on the planet—some 2.4 billion people—and the approximately $500 billion (and growing) worldwide spending on advertising. Similarly, LinkedIn addresses a market that includes any professional and anyone looking to hire a professional.
Next is to define a monetization model that enables the company to capture demand without stifling it and thus to scale up successfully. Figuring out the best way to capture the value created by a company’s offering is critical since it essentially defines a company’s business model and is difficult to change later. For example, one popular software company tied monetization of its act-one product to a physical construct, processors. The company later tried to introduce a different pricing model that was more directly tied to the usage of the product. Even though the model change benefited a large majority of customers, the customers who it didn’t benefit were so vocal that the company had to revert to the original model.
Third is to focus on rapid adoption. This approach protects a company from becoming caught up in the demands of serving a particular customer set. Our interviews and case studies revealed numerous instances of companies becoming lost in the pursuit of the “lighthouse” customer. These companies made major concessions across product and pricing to win over a large account. Though in some instances this resulted in a major reference customer, it hindered the development of a product designed for mass use, or of a streamlined operational capability (for example, “zero-cost provisioning”).
The fourth factor is stealth. Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, famously spoke of paranoia as a virtue. Given the pace at which the barriers to entry are falling in this industry, maintaining a low profile while alpha and beta products are developed is vital. In several of our interviews, CEOs discussed the weak intellectual-property protection provided by patents as a prime example of these low barriers.
The fifth and final enabling action is to create proper incentives for the leadership team to remain committed to the company, through act one and beyond. Both in their culture and in their incentive structure (for example, change of control agreements), many start-ups give little thought to life beyond the IPO. Instead, companies and their executives should be focused on building $1 billion companies—with respect to revenue and not market capitalization.
The drivers of growth for act two are different
Act two presents new challenges. Having achieved a foothold (or more) in the marketplace, what next? How can executives keep their software or online-services company growing? Our research established that, in the span between $100 million and $1 billion in annual revenues, many companies run up against either natural market-size or market-share limits to their core product or service. Those companies able to grow successfully to $1 billion and beyond used at least one of three viable growth strategies to get past these boundaries.
First, a fortunate few built robust enough act-one business models that they could simply expand for their second act. These companies opened new geographies (as Facebook did, focusing on Anglophone markets), new outlets (as Google did with Gmail), or new categories (as Amazon did in expanding its e-commerce engine to new retail categories). This approach is only viable for those companies whose act one addresses a target market that is so sizable and fast growing it can support multiple phases of growth.
Second, some companies extend their proven business model into adjacent markets. For example, Microsoft replicated its success in desktop operating systems when it moved into server operating systems and eventually enterprise applications (such as Dynamics and SharePoint). Many companies using this strategy made sizable acquisitions a key component of their growth story, buying footholds in adjacent markets and overcoming the difficulties of integration. Oracle built out its portfolio of enterprise applications primarily via large acquisitions (for example, BEA Systems, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Taleo). Adobe, SAP, and Symantec also used M&A in this way, acquiring large segments in adjacent markets and excelling in postmerger integration.
Third, some companies successfully grow when they transform their core product into a platform, around which an “ecosystem” of complementary products and services can arise. Microsoft successfully used this strategy when it parlayed its leadership in PC operating systems to commensurate success in PC productivity software (that is, Microsoft Office, built on top of Microsoft Windows). Salesforce.com followed a similar playbook with its Force.com platform, which encourages developers to create new tools using its application programming interfaces and provides Salesforce.com with valuable insight into future product areas.
Successful companies master the transition from one act to the next
Figuring out the right time to begin the transition to act two is a nontrivial management decision. Moving too soon could prevent a company from reaping all of act one’s market potential and could enable competitors to gain share. Moving too late and letting growth slow results in lower valuations, and ultimately in the loss of market relevance, as the research shows.
Consequently, knowing when to transition is critical. From our work, we have seen several leading indicators of a coming stall: slowing acquisition of customers due to market saturation, declining lifetime value of new customers, decreasing participation of ecosystem partners (developers or channel resellers), and market disruption from new entrants. A final barometer of impending slowdown is the loss of key talent from sales, presales, or engineering.
When the moment is right, companies should pressure-test their act-two strategy and be aware of a couple of common pitfalls. First, some companies select the wrong market or product offering for their second act. This failure can be attributed to insufficient diligence in assessing the new market or not having the right capabilities in-house to design and build that next major offering. Companies can also underinvest in the resources or budget required to make the act-two offering a success. One can find many examples among defunct software companies. Borland and VisiCorp (creators of VisiCalc) both fall into this category, as they failed to grow significantly on their own and were instead acquired for very little.
The growth powering a company’s first act will eventually run into natural limits. In our view, every CEO should be continually asking these five questions to evaluate when and how to maintain or accelerate their growth trajectory:
•How much growth do we need, and how quickly do we need it?
• How much growth is left in our core markets?
• How secure are we in our core markets?
• What opportunities do we have to expand our current businesses and to generate more cash to invest in growth?
• What new opportunities do we see that might present us with a great next act, and when do we move?
About the authors
Eric Kutcher is a director in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, where Olivia Nottebohm is a principal; Kara Sprague is a principal in the San Francisco office.
The authors thank Philipp Bolt, Ted Callahan, Alex Ince-Cushman, James Manyika, Darren Noy, and Akiko Yamada for their substantial contributions to this paper.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
GralInt-Un perturbador mundo de adultos en miniatura
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Desde el margen
Un perturbador mundo de adultos en miniatura
Por Fernanda Sández | Para LA NACION
Tiene -¿tendrá?- doce o trece años. Imposible saberlo con toda esta gente, con este ruido a tren tapándole la voz. Tiene un bebé en pañal clavado en la cadera. Reparte chicles por todo el vagón; chancleteando va, chancleteando viene. Al rato viene otra. Otra nena con bebé en la cadera. Y otra, y otra más. Serán, al cabo de un viaje de 32 minutos hasta Constitución, seis chicas con seis bebés a upa. Nenas y niños trabajando. Ninguno tiene ya la mirada nueva. Ninguno tiene lugar en ninguna estadística confiable. Pero ahí están.
Para la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT), niñez y trabajo no pueden cruzarse. Sin embargo ya, ahora mismo, hay en el mundo 168 millones de niños arando, cosechando, pescando, vendiendo chicles de menta. De ellos, 85 millones realizan tareas peligrosas, como los niños pescadores del lago Volta, o como las niñas víctimas del comercio sexual en el norte de Brasil. O en Pompeya, donde el Ministerio Público tutelar se ha cansado de alertar sobre la explotación de nenes y nenas.
En la Argentina la ley prohíbe que los chicos trabajen. Y, desde marzo del año pasado, el artículo 148 bis del Código Penal prevé penas de hasta 4 años para quien emplee mano de obra infantil. Pero ahí afuera hay una realidad que desmiente las normas a fuerza de golosinas, flores, malabares. Muertes, incluso, como cuando los chicos trabajan en el campo y a destajo, y quedan expuestos a la intoxicación por agroquímicos.
Tiene trece años, se llama Henry Apaza, es de Bolivia y hace algunos meses saltó a la fama por haberse opuesto al tratamiento de una ley que busca fijar en 14 años la edad mínima para trabajar. Logró reunirse con el presidente. "No debe prohibirse el trabajo infantil", dijo luego Evo Morales. Y algo perturbador quedó vibrando en el aire. Porque el niño que trabaja no puede jugar, ni estudiar. Por eso niñez y trabajo son excluyentes: porque el niño que trabaja deja de serlo. Pasa a ser un grande en miniatura.
Preguntarle entonces a un chico pobre si quiere trabajar no es una torpeza: es cinismo químicamente puro. Henry, los obreritos del ladrillo de todo el mundo (los prefieren de cinco o seis años porque pesan poco y pueden caminar sobre los bloques sin aplastarlos), los que buscan "lágrimas verdes" en las minas de esmeraldas de Colombia no están, en realidad, eligiendo nada. Están siendo forzados a optar entre lo espantoso y lo fatal.
Tiene doce años, se llama Iqbal. Sus padres lo vendieron a los 4 años, y por 12 dólares, a un taller de alfombras. Trabajó por años en jornadas de quince horas, encadenado a su telar. Creció esclavo, y se le nota: mide apenas un metro y medio. Y, sin embargo, un día escapó de la cárcel de telares y denunció no ya a su explotador, sino al sistema entero que esclavizaba a miles de niños en su país, Pakistán. Su historia cruzó las fronteras, y todo el mundo quiso conocer a Iqbal Masih. En Estados Unidos le dieron un premio. En Suecia, otro. "No compren estas alfombras, están tejidas con sangre de niños", denunció.
Cuando volvió a su país, lo estaban esperando. Lo mataron mientras paseaba en bicicleta con sus primos. Hace once días se cumplió un nuevo aniversario de su muerte. Desde entonces, cada 16 de abril se conmemora como el Día Internacional de Lucha contra la Esclavitud Infantil. Desde ese día, también, a todos los demás los matan. Sólo que no con tiros, sino convirtiéndolos en lo que no son. Y hasta convenciéndolos de pelear por su derecho a ser explotados, en vez de por su derecho -su fugaz derecho- a seguir siendo chicos.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Desde el margen
Un perturbador mundo de adultos en miniatura
Por Fernanda Sández | Para LA NACION
Tiene -¿tendrá?- doce o trece años. Imposible saberlo con toda esta gente, con este ruido a tren tapándole la voz. Tiene un bebé en pañal clavado en la cadera. Reparte chicles por todo el vagón; chancleteando va, chancleteando viene. Al rato viene otra. Otra nena con bebé en la cadera. Y otra, y otra más. Serán, al cabo de un viaje de 32 minutos hasta Constitución, seis chicas con seis bebés a upa. Nenas y niños trabajando. Ninguno tiene ya la mirada nueva. Ninguno tiene lugar en ninguna estadística confiable. Pero ahí están.
Para la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT), niñez y trabajo no pueden cruzarse. Sin embargo ya, ahora mismo, hay en el mundo 168 millones de niños arando, cosechando, pescando, vendiendo chicles de menta. De ellos, 85 millones realizan tareas peligrosas, como los niños pescadores del lago Volta, o como las niñas víctimas del comercio sexual en el norte de Brasil. O en Pompeya, donde el Ministerio Público tutelar se ha cansado de alertar sobre la explotación de nenes y nenas.
En la Argentina la ley prohíbe que los chicos trabajen. Y, desde marzo del año pasado, el artículo 148 bis del Código Penal prevé penas de hasta 4 años para quien emplee mano de obra infantil. Pero ahí afuera hay una realidad que desmiente las normas a fuerza de golosinas, flores, malabares. Muertes, incluso, como cuando los chicos trabajan en el campo y a destajo, y quedan expuestos a la intoxicación por agroquímicos.
Tiene trece años, se llama Henry Apaza, es de Bolivia y hace algunos meses saltó a la fama por haberse opuesto al tratamiento de una ley que busca fijar en 14 años la edad mínima para trabajar. Logró reunirse con el presidente. "No debe prohibirse el trabajo infantil", dijo luego Evo Morales. Y algo perturbador quedó vibrando en el aire. Porque el niño que trabaja no puede jugar, ni estudiar. Por eso niñez y trabajo son excluyentes: porque el niño que trabaja deja de serlo. Pasa a ser un grande en miniatura.
Preguntarle entonces a un chico pobre si quiere trabajar no es una torpeza: es cinismo químicamente puro. Henry, los obreritos del ladrillo de todo el mundo (los prefieren de cinco o seis años porque pesan poco y pueden caminar sobre los bloques sin aplastarlos), los que buscan "lágrimas verdes" en las minas de esmeraldas de Colombia no están, en realidad, eligiendo nada. Están siendo forzados a optar entre lo espantoso y lo fatal.
Tiene doce años, se llama Iqbal. Sus padres lo vendieron a los 4 años, y por 12 dólares, a un taller de alfombras. Trabajó por años en jornadas de quince horas, encadenado a su telar. Creció esclavo, y se le nota: mide apenas un metro y medio. Y, sin embargo, un día escapó de la cárcel de telares y denunció no ya a su explotador, sino al sistema entero que esclavizaba a miles de niños en su país, Pakistán. Su historia cruzó las fronteras, y todo el mundo quiso conocer a Iqbal Masih. En Estados Unidos le dieron un premio. En Suecia, otro. "No compren estas alfombras, están tejidas con sangre de niños", denunció.
Cuando volvió a su país, lo estaban esperando. Lo mataron mientras paseaba en bicicleta con sus primos. Hace once días se cumplió un nuevo aniversario de su muerte. Desde entonces, cada 16 de abril se conmemora como el Día Internacional de Lucha contra la Esclavitud Infantil. Desde ese día, también, a todos los demás los matan. Sólo que no con tiros, sino convirtiéndolos en lo que no son. Y hasta convenciéndolos de pelear por su derecho a ser explotados, en vez de por su derecho -su fugaz derecho- a seguir siendo chicos.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
HEALTH/SAL/GralInt-Avance local contra el VIH/sida
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Martes 29 de abril de 2014
Salud
Avance local contra el VIH/sida
Foto: Archivo
Un estudio argentino demostró que usando dos drogas contra el VIH/sida se pueden obtener resultados equivalentes a los que se logran con el tradicional cóctel de tres drogas. El trabajo, realizado por la Fundación Huésped, se había presentado en octubre del año último en el Congreso Europeo de Sida, en Bruselas, donde ya había recibido reconocimiento internacional. Ayer se publicó en la importante revista científica británica The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Utilizar sólo dos drogas en lugar de tres permite tener una alternativa más simple, más económica y con menos efectos colaterales para los pacientes . El trabajo multicéntrico internacional, diseñado por la Fundación Huésped y dirigido por su equipo de investigaciones clínicas, reclutó a 535 pacientes de 27 centros de la Argentina, España, EE.UU., Chile, México y Perú. Contó con apoyo de la industria farmacéutica y de contribuyentes individuales que apoyan la tarea científica y de difusión de la Fundación.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Martes 29 de abril de 2014
Salud
Avance local contra el VIH/sida
Foto: Archivo
Un estudio argentino demostró que usando dos drogas contra el VIH/sida se pueden obtener resultados equivalentes a los que se logran con el tradicional cóctel de tres drogas. El trabajo, realizado por la Fundación Huésped, se había presentado en octubre del año último en el Congreso Europeo de Sida, en Bruselas, donde ya había recibido reconocimiento internacional. Ayer se publicó en la importante revista científica británica The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Utilizar sólo dos drogas en lugar de tres permite tener una alternativa más simple, más económica y con menos efectos colaterales para los pacientes . El trabajo multicéntrico internacional, diseñado por la Fundación Huésped y dirigido por su equipo de investigaciones clínicas, reclutó a 535 pacientes de 27 centros de la Argentina, España, EE.UU., Chile, México y Perú. Contó con apoyo de la industria farmacéutica y de contribuyentes individuales que apoyan la tarea científica y de difusión de la Fundación.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
GralInt-¿Usted sabe realmente qué es la felicidad?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
¿Usted sabe realmente qué es la felicidad?
Por Umberto Eco FILOSOFO Y ESCRITOR ITALIANO
27/04/14
A veces me pregunto si muchos de los problemas que nos aquejan hoy -nuestra crisis colectiva de valores, nuestra tentación por la publicidad, nuestro insaciable deseo de aparecer en televisión, nuestra pérdida de perspectiva histórica- no podrían atribuirse a un malhadado fragmento de la Declaración de Independencia de Estados Unidos. Ese documento establece que “todos los hombres son creados iguales y están dotados por su Creador con ciertos derechos inalienables, entre los cuales están el derecho a la vida, la libertad y la búsqueda de la felicidad”.
Se han escrito incontables volúmenes sobre la felicidad, pero me parece que nadie puede decir qué es realmente la felicidad.
Si nos referimos a un estado permanente – la idea de que una persona pueda ser feliz a lo largo de toda su vida, sin experimentar jamás duda, sufrimiento o crisis-, una vida tal sólo podría ser la de una idiota o la de alguien que vive aislado del resto del mundo.
El hecho es que la felicidad -esa sensación de plenitud absoluta, de alborozo, de estar en las nubes- es efímera, episódica y breve. Es la alegría que sentimos por el nacimiento de un hijo, al descubrir que nuestros sentimientos de amor son correspondidos, al tener el billete ganador de la lotería o alcanzar una meta por mucho tiempo acariciada: ganar un Oscar o el trofeo de la Copa Mundial. Puede ser provocada incluso por algo tan simple como un paseo por un lugar hermoso. Pero todos estos son momentos transitorios, después de los cuales vendrán momentos de miedo, de dolor y de angustia.
Tendemos a pensar en la felicidad en términos individuales, no colectivos. De hecho, muchos no parecen estar muy interesados en la felicidad de nadie más, tan absortos están en la agotadora búsqueda de la propia. Consideremos, por ejemplo, la felicidad que sentimos al estar enamorados: con frecuencia coincide con la desdicha de alguien que fue desdeñado, pero nos preocupamos muy poco por la decepción de esa persona pues nos sentimos absolutamente realizados por nuestra propia conquista.
La idea de la felicidad individual impregna la publicidad y el consumo.
Rara vez pensamos en la felicidad cuando votamos o mandamos a nuestros hijos a la escuela, pero casi siempre la tenemos en mente cuando compramos cosas inútiles.
Al comprarlas, pensamos que estamos disfrutando de nuestro derecho a buscar la felicidad.
Pero, a final de cuentas, no somos bestias desalmadas. En algún momento nos vamos a interesar por la felicidad de los otros.
A veces eso sucede cuando los medios nos muestran la desgracia en su extremo: niños que mueren de hambre, pueblos enteros devastados por enfermedades incurables o barridos por enormes marejadas.
Ahí no sólo pensamos en la desgracia de los demás, sino que podemos sentirnos impulsados a ayudar.
Quizá la declaración de independencia debió decir que todos los hombres tienen el derecho y el deber de reducir la infelicidad del mundo, la propia y la ajena.
Copyright Umberto Eco / L’Espresso, 2014.
Fuente: www.clarin.com
¿Usted sabe realmente qué es la felicidad?
Por Umberto Eco FILOSOFO Y ESCRITOR ITALIANO
27/04/14
A veces me pregunto si muchos de los problemas que nos aquejan hoy -nuestra crisis colectiva de valores, nuestra tentación por la publicidad, nuestro insaciable deseo de aparecer en televisión, nuestra pérdida de perspectiva histórica- no podrían atribuirse a un malhadado fragmento de la Declaración de Independencia de Estados Unidos. Ese documento establece que “todos los hombres son creados iguales y están dotados por su Creador con ciertos derechos inalienables, entre los cuales están el derecho a la vida, la libertad y la búsqueda de la felicidad”.
Se han escrito incontables volúmenes sobre la felicidad, pero me parece que nadie puede decir qué es realmente la felicidad.
Si nos referimos a un estado permanente – la idea de que una persona pueda ser feliz a lo largo de toda su vida, sin experimentar jamás duda, sufrimiento o crisis-, una vida tal sólo podría ser la de una idiota o la de alguien que vive aislado del resto del mundo.
El hecho es que la felicidad -esa sensación de plenitud absoluta, de alborozo, de estar en las nubes- es efímera, episódica y breve. Es la alegría que sentimos por el nacimiento de un hijo, al descubrir que nuestros sentimientos de amor son correspondidos, al tener el billete ganador de la lotería o alcanzar una meta por mucho tiempo acariciada: ganar un Oscar o el trofeo de la Copa Mundial. Puede ser provocada incluso por algo tan simple como un paseo por un lugar hermoso. Pero todos estos son momentos transitorios, después de los cuales vendrán momentos de miedo, de dolor y de angustia.
Tendemos a pensar en la felicidad en términos individuales, no colectivos. De hecho, muchos no parecen estar muy interesados en la felicidad de nadie más, tan absortos están en la agotadora búsqueda de la propia. Consideremos, por ejemplo, la felicidad que sentimos al estar enamorados: con frecuencia coincide con la desdicha de alguien que fue desdeñado, pero nos preocupamos muy poco por la decepción de esa persona pues nos sentimos absolutamente realizados por nuestra propia conquista.
La idea de la felicidad individual impregna la publicidad y el consumo.
Rara vez pensamos en la felicidad cuando votamos o mandamos a nuestros hijos a la escuela, pero casi siempre la tenemos en mente cuando compramos cosas inútiles.
Al comprarlas, pensamos que estamos disfrutando de nuestro derecho a buscar la felicidad.
Pero, a final de cuentas, no somos bestias desalmadas. En algún momento nos vamos a interesar por la felicidad de los otros.
A veces eso sucede cuando los medios nos muestran la desgracia en su extremo: niños que mueren de hambre, pueblos enteros devastados por enfermedades incurables o barridos por enormes marejadas.
Ahí no sólo pensamos en la desgracia de los demás, sino que podemos sentirnos impulsados a ayudar.
Quizá la declaración de independencia debió decir que todos los hombres tienen el derecho y el deber de reducir la infelicidad del mundo, la propia y la ajena.
Copyright Umberto Eco / L’Espresso, 2014.
Fuente: www.clarin.com
EDUC/GralInt-La escuela sola no puede frenar la inequidad y el delito
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Martes 29 de abril de 2014
Miedo ciudadano
La escuela sola no puede frenar la inequidad y el delito
La exclusión social y su impacto en la inseguridad ponen a la educación en el centro de los reclamos, pero no alcanza con las aulas; se necesita construir una sociedad más justa para todos
Por Guillermina Tiramonti | Para LA NACION
Desde fines de los años 80, las sociedades capitalistas resignaron la pretensión de integrar a través del trabajo al conjunto de sus miembros y optaron por un tipo de desarrollo que produce y reproduce, constantemente, una población que queda fuera de la relación laboral y, con ello, del mecanismo que organiza los intercambios sociales. A pesar de este posicionamiento, el sector de los relegados se ha constituido en un agente con gran capacidad de transformar tanto las instituciones como las prácticas sociales y políticas con las que la sociedad de los integrados se propone sostener el orden instituido.
"Los de afuera" proyectan una sombra de temor sobre el resto de la sociedad y es ese miedo el que contiene un gran potencial transformador. Marcola, jefe de una organización criminal brasilera ,en una entrevista realizada en la cárcel expresó magistralmente esta situación: "Soy una señal de los nuevos tiempos. Yo era pobre e invisible. Ustedes nunca me observaron... Ahora somos ricos con la multinacional del polvo [cocaína] y ustedes están muriendo de miedo. Nosotros somos el inicio tardío de su conciencia social".
El fantasma de la "vacancia social de los jóvenes" atraviesa las sociedades contemporáneas. Fuera de la escuela, ¿en dónde y con quiénes aprenderán las definiciones socialmente aceptadas del bien y del mal. Sin anclaje, ¿qué caminos elegirán para transitar su futuro? ¿Qué distancias se generarán entre ellos y nosotros?
En este contexto se construye el problema de los "ni ni", los que no estudian ni trabajan y amenazan con subsanar su vacancia anclándose en las redes delictivas. Frente a esto, ya que la política está compelida a procurar la seguridad pública y pareciera que le es imposible parar la máquina de generar exclusión, se echa mano a la escolarización bajo el supuesto de que así se neutralizará el peligro. Se ha repetido más de una vez que es necesario hacer escuelas para evitar hacer más cárceles. Una frase que desnuda el origen del propósito de poner a todos los chicos en la escuela.
La escolarización de los jóvenes se ha constituido en un discurso cuya legitimidad no presenta fisuras. Hay una sacralización de lo escolar derivada de la permanencia de las promesas incumplidas de la educación, que no han dejado de tener vigencia en el sentido común de la población. Y, tal vez, por eso son permanentemente reactualizadas desde diferentes tribunas.
Se puede invocar a la educación con la pretensión de solucionar con ella los problemas del trabajo en una economía que no produce empleo o para transformar en equitativa una sociedad profundamente desigual o para evitar la pobreza o para producir una ciudadanía honesta y respetuosa de la ley en una sociedad anómica que premia la corrupción, y así hasta el infinito.
Paradójicamente, esta reactualización del valor de la escuela moderna se produce en el marco de un fuerte cuestionamiento a la relevancia cultural de esta institución. En los últimos cuarenta años se ha acumulado una serie de cambios científicos, epistemológicos, tecnológicos y subjetivos que ponen en cuestión las referencias que en estos campos tiene la escuela tradicional. En la Argentina, y en casi todos los países de la región, las políticas educativas de renovación cultural se han limitado a la distribución de computadoras a las que se las considera suficientes portadoras del cambio.
Que las escuelas estén al borde del anacronismo cultural no pareciera ser una amenaza fuerte para nuestras sociedades. Lo que moviliza la acción en materia educativa es la amenaza sobre la seguridad. Desde ese temor, se recrean las promesas de la escuela moderna y se desarrollan las políticas para el sector: unas, destinadas a incorporar a los grupos que han estado tradicionalmente excluidos -o que han sido expulsados de las instituciones regulares- de nivel medio o superior; otras, para sostener dentro de la escuela a un alumnado que tiende a desertar y, finalmente, un conjunto de programas sociales que atan el subsidio a la concreción de la escolarización.
Es así como se ha fundado una serie de nuevas universidades públicas: nueve desde 2003, siete de las cuales están ubicadas en el conurbano. Se ha creado, además, una heterogénea cantidad de instituciones de nivel medio que, en términos generales, flexibilizan las exigencias de los cursos tradicionales a los que se agregan clases de apoyo y tutorías destinadas a sostener las trayectorias de los alumnos. Estos suplementos están también presentes en programas especiales que, con el mismo propósito, se aplican en las escuelas comunes que atienden a sectores vulnerables.
Se trata de propuestas que desarman las rigideces de las escuelas e interpelan a la voluntad docente para que adapten sus prácticas al tipo de población que atienden, definida por su condición de vulnerabilidad. En estas interpelaciones hay una insistencia voluntarista que instala en la escuela un cuidado tutelar, hasta ahora no presente, cuyo impacto en las subjetividades de los alumnos es importante atender.
Si bien estas creaciones introducen algunas innovaciones interesantes para pensar el conjunto del sistema (no la de los vínculos tutelares), ninguno de los cambios van en la dirección de generar instituciones (escuelas o universidades) acordes con la cultura contemporánea. Por el contrario, son las escuelas de siempre pero flexibilizadas. Se trata de una recreación de las instituciones con las que la sociedad de la primera mitad del siglo XX se propuso educar y disciplinar, pero aplicadas en un contexto distinto que demanda creatividad y autonomía.
Aún así, cabe preguntarse: ¿qué otras inclusiones permite la finalización de los estudios secundarios o universitarios? ¿Cuánto de la promesa de integración al mundo del trabajo se materializa a través de los estudios medios y superiores para los jóvenes de los sectores más pobres?
Recientes mediciones realizadas sobre la base de los datos de la Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (Indec) muestran que la tasa de desempleo de los más pobres es independiente del nivel educativo que hayan alcanzado. Según estas estadísticas, los chicos de clase media que no terminaron la secundaria están desocupados en un porcentaje del 8,3%; en cambio, los que pertenecen al sector de ingresos más bajos y terminaron la escuela secundaria están en situación de desocupación en un porcentaje del 16,2%, y si completaron la universidad el porcentaje se eleva al 17,2%.
De las investigaciones resulta que quienes egresan de estas escuelas, si bien no logran dar el salto y arribar al mundo de los integrados y siguen conviviendo con la incertidumbre del trabajo precario, han pasado por una experiencia que valoran como positiva ya que mejora su autoestima y la valoración de los demás. En este aspecto estas escuelas tienen cierto éxito en su función civilizatoria, y sospecho que también en la de preparar sujetos aptos para negociar su subsistencia en un mercado de tutelas menos peligrosas que la de Marcola.
Sin embargo, se está desperdiciando una oportunidad valiosísima. Si la crisis de la exclusión social y su impacto en la inseguridad vuelven a poner a la educación como última frontera, como la esperanza blanca ante el miedo ciudadano por el avance del delito, sería esperable que la escuela aproveche este impulso para dar el salto cualitativo que la coloque definitivamente en el siglo XXI. Se podría convocar a la imaginación pedagógica para crear, junto con estos jóvenes, las instituciones educativas que requiere la sociedad contemporánea. Para ello es necesario dejar de pensarlos como "pobres" y "necesitados" y asociarlos al proyecto de idear la escuela del mañana.
La escolarización puede ayudar a contener el problema social de los jóvenes sin horizontes de inclusión, pero no puede ser usada para que el Estado se desentienda de su obligación de desarrollar políticas tendientes a proporcionar al conjunto de los jóvenes una efectiva inserción en el proceso de producción de bienes y servicios. La integración de las nuevas generaciones requiere transformar la escuela, sí, pero también modificar las restricciones del mercado laboral y generar condiciones sociales más justas. Con la escuela sola no alcanza.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Martes 29 de abril de 2014
Miedo ciudadano
La escuela sola no puede frenar la inequidad y el delito
La exclusión social y su impacto en la inseguridad ponen a la educación en el centro de los reclamos, pero no alcanza con las aulas; se necesita construir una sociedad más justa para todos
Por Guillermina Tiramonti | Para LA NACION
Desde fines de los años 80, las sociedades capitalistas resignaron la pretensión de integrar a través del trabajo al conjunto de sus miembros y optaron por un tipo de desarrollo que produce y reproduce, constantemente, una población que queda fuera de la relación laboral y, con ello, del mecanismo que organiza los intercambios sociales. A pesar de este posicionamiento, el sector de los relegados se ha constituido en un agente con gran capacidad de transformar tanto las instituciones como las prácticas sociales y políticas con las que la sociedad de los integrados se propone sostener el orden instituido.
"Los de afuera" proyectan una sombra de temor sobre el resto de la sociedad y es ese miedo el que contiene un gran potencial transformador. Marcola, jefe de una organización criminal brasilera ,en una entrevista realizada en la cárcel expresó magistralmente esta situación: "Soy una señal de los nuevos tiempos. Yo era pobre e invisible. Ustedes nunca me observaron... Ahora somos ricos con la multinacional del polvo [cocaína] y ustedes están muriendo de miedo. Nosotros somos el inicio tardío de su conciencia social".
El fantasma de la "vacancia social de los jóvenes" atraviesa las sociedades contemporáneas. Fuera de la escuela, ¿en dónde y con quiénes aprenderán las definiciones socialmente aceptadas del bien y del mal. Sin anclaje, ¿qué caminos elegirán para transitar su futuro? ¿Qué distancias se generarán entre ellos y nosotros?
En este contexto se construye el problema de los "ni ni", los que no estudian ni trabajan y amenazan con subsanar su vacancia anclándose en las redes delictivas. Frente a esto, ya que la política está compelida a procurar la seguridad pública y pareciera que le es imposible parar la máquina de generar exclusión, se echa mano a la escolarización bajo el supuesto de que así se neutralizará el peligro. Se ha repetido más de una vez que es necesario hacer escuelas para evitar hacer más cárceles. Una frase que desnuda el origen del propósito de poner a todos los chicos en la escuela.
La escolarización de los jóvenes se ha constituido en un discurso cuya legitimidad no presenta fisuras. Hay una sacralización de lo escolar derivada de la permanencia de las promesas incumplidas de la educación, que no han dejado de tener vigencia en el sentido común de la población. Y, tal vez, por eso son permanentemente reactualizadas desde diferentes tribunas.
Se puede invocar a la educación con la pretensión de solucionar con ella los problemas del trabajo en una economía que no produce empleo o para transformar en equitativa una sociedad profundamente desigual o para evitar la pobreza o para producir una ciudadanía honesta y respetuosa de la ley en una sociedad anómica que premia la corrupción, y así hasta el infinito.
Paradójicamente, esta reactualización del valor de la escuela moderna se produce en el marco de un fuerte cuestionamiento a la relevancia cultural de esta institución. En los últimos cuarenta años se ha acumulado una serie de cambios científicos, epistemológicos, tecnológicos y subjetivos que ponen en cuestión las referencias que en estos campos tiene la escuela tradicional. En la Argentina, y en casi todos los países de la región, las políticas educativas de renovación cultural se han limitado a la distribución de computadoras a las que se las considera suficientes portadoras del cambio.
Que las escuelas estén al borde del anacronismo cultural no pareciera ser una amenaza fuerte para nuestras sociedades. Lo que moviliza la acción en materia educativa es la amenaza sobre la seguridad. Desde ese temor, se recrean las promesas de la escuela moderna y se desarrollan las políticas para el sector: unas, destinadas a incorporar a los grupos que han estado tradicionalmente excluidos -o que han sido expulsados de las instituciones regulares- de nivel medio o superior; otras, para sostener dentro de la escuela a un alumnado que tiende a desertar y, finalmente, un conjunto de programas sociales que atan el subsidio a la concreción de la escolarización.
Es así como se ha fundado una serie de nuevas universidades públicas: nueve desde 2003, siete de las cuales están ubicadas en el conurbano. Se ha creado, además, una heterogénea cantidad de instituciones de nivel medio que, en términos generales, flexibilizan las exigencias de los cursos tradicionales a los que se agregan clases de apoyo y tutorías destinadas a sostener las trayectorias de los alumnos. Estos suplementos están también presentes en programas especiales que, con el mismo propósito, se aplican en las escuelas comunes que atienden a sectores vulnerables.
Se trata de propuestas que desarman las rigideces de las escuelas e interpelan a la voluntad docente para que adapten sus prácticas al tipo de población que atienden, definida por su condición de vulnerabilidad. En estas interpelaciones hay una insistencia voluntarista que instala en la escuela un cuidado tutelar, hasta ahora no presente, cuyo impacto en las subjetividades de los alumnos es importante atender.
Si bien estas creaciones introducen algunas innovaciones interesantes para pensar el conjunto del sistema (no la de los vínculos tutelares), ninguno de los cambios van en la dirección de generar instituciones (escuelas o universidades) acordes con la cultura contemporánea. Por el contrario, son las escuelas de siempre pero flexibilizadas. Se trata de una recreación de las instituciones con las que la sociedad de la primera mitad del siglo XX se propuso educar y disciplinar, pero aplicadas en un contexto distinto que demanda creatividad y autonomía.
Aún así, cabe preguntarse: ¿qué otras inclusiones permite la finalización de los estudios secundarios o universitarios? ¿Cuánto de la promesa de integración al mundo del trabajo se materializa a través de los estudios medios y superiores para los jóvenes de los sectores más pobres?
Recientes mediciones realizadas sobre la base de los datos de la Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (Indec) muestran que la tasa de desempleo de los más pobres es independiente del nivel educativo que hayan alcanzado. Según estas estadísticas, los chicos de clase media que no terminaron la secundaria están desocupados en un porcentaje del 8,3%; en cambio, los que pertenecen al sector de ingresos más bajos y terminaron la escuela secundaria están en situación de desocupación en un porcentaje del 16,2%, y si completaron la universidad el porcentaje se eleva al 17,2%.
De las investigaciones resulta que quienes egresan de estas escuelas, si bien no logran dar el salto y arribar al mundo de los integrados y siguen conviviendo con la incertidumbre del trabajo precario, han pasado por una experiencia que valoran como positiva ya que mejora su autoestima y la valoración de los demás. En este aspecto estas escuelas tienen cierto éxito en su función civilizatoria, y sospecho que también en la de preparar sujetos aptos para negociar su subsistencia en un mercado de tutelas menos peligrosas que la de Marcola.
Sin embargo, se está desperdiciando una oportunidad valiosísima. Si la crisis de la exclusión social y su impacto en la inseguridad vuelven a poner a la educación como última frontera, como la esperanza blanca ante el miedo ciudadano por el avance del delito, sería esperable que la escuela aproveche este impulso para dar el salto cualitativo que la coloque definitivamente en el siglo XXI. Se podría convocar a la imaginación pedagógica para crear, junto con estos jóvenes, las instituciones educativas que requiere la sociedad contemporánea. Para ello es necesario dejar de pensarlos como "pobres" y "necesitados" y asociarlos al proyecto de idear la escuela del mañana.
La escolarización puede ayudar a contener el problema social de los jóvenes sin horizontes de inclusión, pero no puede ser usada para que el Estado se desentienda de su obligación de desarrollar políticas tendientes a proporcionar al conjunto de los jóvenes una efectiva inserción en el proceso de producción de bienes y servicios. La integración de las nuevas generaciones requiere transformar la escuela, sí, pero también modificar las restricciones del mercado laboral y generar condiciones sociales más justas. Con la escuela sola no alcanza.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Monday, April 28, 2014
ENER/GralInt-TED Talks-Michel Laberge: How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Michel Laberge:
How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion
TED2014 · 12:50 · Filmed Mar 2014
Our energy future depends on nuclear fusion, says Michel Laberge. The plasma physicist runs a small company with a big idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that could produce clean, cheap energy. His secret recipe? High speeds, scorching temperatures and crushing pressure. In this hopeful talk, he explains how nuclear fusion might be just around the corner.
Transcript:
Wow, this is bright. It must use a lot of power. Well, flying you all in here must have cost a bit of energy too. So the whole planet needs a lot of energy, and so far we've been running mostly on fossil fuel. We've been burning gas. It's been a good run. It got us to where we are, but we have to stop. We can't do that anymore.
So we are trying different types of energy now, alternative energy, but it proved quite difficult to find something that's as convenient and as cost-effective as oil, gas and coal. My personal favorite is nuclear energy. Now, it's very energy-dense, it produces solid, reliable power, and it doesn't make any CO2.
Now we know of two ways of making nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Now in fission, you take a big nucleus, you break it in part, in two, and it makes lots of energy, and this is how the nuclear reactor today works. It works pretty good. And then there's fusion. Now, I like fusion. Fusion's much better. So you take two small nuclei, you put it together, and you make helium, and that's very nice. It makes lots of energy. This is nature's way of producing energy. The sun and all the stars in the universe run on fusion. Now, a fusion plant would actually be quite cost-effective and it also would be quite safe. It only produces short term radioactive waste, and it cannot melt down. Now, the fuel from fusion comes from the ocean. In the ocean, you can extract the fuel for about one thousandth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, so that's very, very cheap. And if the whole planet would run on fusion, we could extract the fuel from the ocean. It would run for billions and billions of years.
Now, if fusion is so great, why don't we have it? Where is it? Well, there's always a bit of a catch. Fusion is really, really hard to do. So the problem is, those two nuclei, they are both positively charged, so they don't want to fuse. They go like this. They go like that. So in order to make them fuse, you have to throw them at each other with great speed, and if they have enough speed, they will go against the repulsion, they will touch, and they will make energy. Now, the particle speed is a measure of the temperature. So the temperature required for fusion is 150 billion degrees C. This is rather warm, and this is why fusion is so hard to do.
Now, I caught my little fusion bug when I did my Ph.D. here at the University of British Columbia, and then I got a big job in a laser printer place making printing for the printing industry. I worked there for 10 years, and I got a little bit bored, and then I was 40, and I got a mid-life crisis, you know, the usual thing: Who am I? What should I do? What should I do? What can I do? And then I was looking at my good work, and what I was doing is I was cutting the forests around here in B.C. and burying you, all of you, in millions of tons of junk mail. Now, that was not very satisfactory. So some people buy a Porsche. Others get a mistress. But I've decided to get my bit to solve global warming and make fusion happen.
Now, so the first thing I did is I looked into the literature and I see, how does fusion work? So the physicists have been working on fusion for a while, and one of the ways they do it is with something called a tokamak. It's a big ring of magnetic coil, superconducting coil, and it makes a magnetic field in a ring like this, and the hot gas in the middle, which is called a plasma, is trapped. The particles go round and round and round the circle at the wall. Then they throw a huge amount of heat in there to try to cook that to fusion temperature. So this is the inside of one of those donuts, and on the right side you can see the fusion plasma in there.
Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hotter, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one billionth of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the center.
Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a curve of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the fabled Moore's Law that defined the amount of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we started. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big laser machine in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more fusion energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good.
Now this is ITER, pronounced in French: EE-tairh. So this is a big collaboration of different countries that are building a huge magnetic donut in the south of France, and this machine, when it's finished, will produce 500 megawatts of fusion power with only 50 megawatts to make it. So this one is the real one. It's going to work. That's the kind of machine that makes energy.
Now if you look at the graph, you will notice that those two dots are a little bit on the right of the curve. We kind of have fallen off the progress. Actually, the science to make those machines was really in time to produce fusion during that curve. However, there has been a bit of politics going on, and the will to do it was not there, so it drifted to the right. ITER, for example, could have been built in 2000 or 2005, but because it's a big international collaboration, the politics got in and it delayed it a bit. For example, it took them about three years to decide where to put it.
Now, fusion is often criticized for being a little too expensive. Yes, it did cost a billion dollars or two billion dollars a year to make this progress. But you have to compare that to the cost of making Moore's Law. That cost way more than that. The result of Moore's Law is this cell phone here in my pocket. This cell phone, and the Internet behind it, cost about one trillion dollars, just so I can take a selfie and put it on Facebook. Then when my dad sees that, he'll be very proud. We also spend about 650 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil and gas and renewable energy. Now, we spend one half of a percent of that on fusion. So me, personally, I don't think it's too expensive. I think it's actually been shortchanged, considering it can solve all our energy problems cleanly for the next couple of billions of years.
Now I can say that, but I'm a little bit biased, because I started a fusion company and I don't even have a Facebook account. So when I started this fusion company in 2002, I knew I couldn't fight with the big lads. They had much more resources than me. So I decided I would need to find a solution that is cheaper and faster.
Now magnetic and laser fusion are pretty good machines. They are awesome pieces of technology, wonderful machines, and they have shown that fusion can be done. However, as a power plant, I don't think they're very good. They're way too big, way too complicated, way too expensive, and also, they don't deal very much with the fusion energy. When you make fusion, the energy comes out as neutrons, fast neutrons comes out of the plasma. Those neutrons hit the wall of the machine. It damages it. And also, you have to catch the heat from those neutrons and run some steam to spin a turbine somewhere, and on those machines, it was all a bit of an afterthought. So I decided that surely there is a better way of doing that.
So back to the literature, and I read about the fusion everywhere. One way in particular attracted my attention, and it's called magnetized target fusion, or MTF for short. Now, in MTF, what you want to do is you take a big vat and you fill that with liquid metal, and you spin the liquid metal to open a vortex in the center, a bit like your sink. When you pull the plug on a sink, it makes a vortex. And then you have some pistons driven by pressure that goes on the outside, and this compresses the liquid metal around the plasma, and it compresses it, it gets hotter, like a laser, and then it makes fusion. So it's a bit of a mix between a magnetized fusion and the laser fusion. So those have a couple of very good advantages. The liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons and no neutrons hit the wall, and therefore there's no damage to the machine. The liquid metal gets hot, so you can pump that in a heat exchanger, make some steam, spin a turbine. So that's a very convenient way of doing this part of the process. And finally, all the energy to make the fusion happen comes from steam-powered pistons, which is way cheaper than lasers or superconducting coils.
Now, this was all very good except for the problem that it didn't quite work. (Laughter) There's always a catch. So when you compress that, the plasma cools down faster than the compression speed, so you're trying to compress it, but the plasma cooled down and cooled down and cooled down and then it did absolutely nothing.
So when I saw that, I said, well, this is such a shame, because it's a very, very good idea. So hopefully I can improve on that. So I thought about it for a minute, and I said, okay, how can we make that work better? So then I thought about impact. What about if we use a big hammer and we swing it and we hit the nail like this, in the place of putting the hammer on the nail and pushing and try to put it in? That won't work. So what the idea is is to use the idea of an impact. So we accelerate the pistons with steam, that takes a little bit of time, but then, bang! you hit the piston, and, baff!, all the energy is done instantly, down instantly to the liquid, and that compresses the plasma much faster. So I decided, okay, this is good, let's make that.
So we built this machine in this garage here. We made a small machine that we managed to squeeze a little bit of neutrons out of that, and those are my marketing neutrons, and with those marketing neutrons, then I raised about 50 million dollars, and I hired 65 people. That's my team here. And this is what we want to build. So it's going to be a big machine, about three meters in diameter, liquid lead spinning around, big vortex in the center, put the plasma on the top and on the bottom, piston hits on the side, bang!, it compresses it, and it will make some energy, and the neutron will come out in the liquid metal, going to go in a steam engine and make the turbine, and some of the steam will go back to fire the piston. We're going to run that about one time per second, and it will produce 100 megawatts of electricity.
Okay, we also built this injector, so this injector makes the plasma to start with. It makes the plasma at about a lukewarm temperature of three million degrees C. Unfortunately, it doesn't last quite long enough, so we need to extend the life of the plasma a little bit, but last month it got a lot better, so I think we have the plasma compressing now. Then we built a small sphere, about this big, 14 pistons around it, and this will compress the liquid. However, plasma is difficult to compress. When you compress it, it tends to go a little bit crooked like that, so you need the timing of the piston to be very good, and for that we use several control systems, which was not possible in 1970, but we now can do that with nice, new electronics.
So finally, most people think that fusion is in the future and will never happen, but as a matter of fact, fusion is getting very close. We are almost there. The big labs have shown that fusion is doable, and now there are small companies that are thinking about that, and they say, it's not that it cannot be done, but it's how to make it cost-effectively. General Fusion is one of those small companies, and hopefully, very soon, somebody, someone, will crack that nut, and perhaps it will be General Fusion.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Michel Laberge:
How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion
TED2014 · 12:50 · Filmed Mar 2014
Our energy future depends on nuclear fusion, says Michel Laberge. The plasma physicist runs a small company with a big idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that could produce clean, cheap energy. His secret recipe? High speeds, scorching temperatures and crushing pressure. In this hopeful talk, he explains how nuclear fusion might be just around the corner.
Transcript:
Wow, this is bright. It must use a lot of power. Well, flying you all in here must have cost a bit of energy too. So the whole planet needs a lot of energy, and so far we've been running mostly on fossil fuel. We've been burning gas. It's been a good run. It got us to where we are, but we have to stop. We can't do that anymore.
So we are trying different types of energy now, alternative energy, but it proved quite difficult to find something that's as convenient and as cost-effective as oil, gas and coal. My personal favorite is nuclear energy. Now, it's very energy-dense, it produces solid, reliable power, and it doesn't make any CO2.
Now we know of two ways of making nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Now in fission, you take a big nucleus, you break it in part, in two, and it makes lots of energy, and this is how the nuclear reactor today works. It works pretty good. And then there's fusion. Now, I like fusion. Fusion's much better. So you take two small nuclei, you put it together, and you make helium, and that's very nice. It makes lots of energy. This is nature's way of producing energy. The sun and all the stars in the universe run on fusion. Now, a fusion plant would actually be quite cost-effective and it also would be quite safe. It only produces short term radioactive waste, and it cannot melt down. Now, the fuel from fusion comes from the ocean. In the ocean, you can extract the fuel for about one thousandth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, so that's very, very cheap. And if the whole planet would run on fusion, we could extract the fuel from the ocean. It would run for billions and billions of years.
Now, if fusion is so great, why don't we have it? Where is it? Well, there's always a bit of a catch. Fusion is really, really hard to do. So the problem is, those two nuclei, they are both positively charged, so they don't want to fuse. They go like this. They go like that. So in order to make them fuse, you have to throw them at each other with great speed, and if they have enough speed, they will go against the repulsion, they will touch, and they will make energy. Now, the particle speed is a measure of the temperature. So the temperature required for fusion is 150 billion degrees C. This is rather warm, and this is why fusion is so hard to do.
Now, I caught my little fusion bug when I did my Ph.D. here at the University of British Columbia, and then I got a big job in a laser printer place making printing for the printing industry. I worked there for 10 years, and I got a little bit bored, and then I was 40, and I got a mid-life crisis, you know, the usual thing: Who am I? What should I do? What should I do? What can I do? And then I was looking at my good work, and what I was doing is I was cutting the forests around here in B.C. and burying you, all of you, in millions of tons of junk mail. Now, that was not very satisfactory. So some people buy a Porsche. Others get a mistress. But I've decided to get my bit to solve global warming and make fusion happen.
Now, so the first thing I did is I looked into the literature and I see, how does fusion work? So the physicists have been working on fusion for a while, and one of the ways they do it is with something called a tokamak. It's a big ring of magnetic coil, superconducting coil, and it makes a magnetic field in a ring like this, and the hot gas in the middle, which is called a plasma, is trapped. The particles go round and round and round the circle at the wall. Then they throw a huge amount of heat in there to try to cook that to fusion temperature. So this is the inside of one of those donuts, and on the right side you can see the fusion plasma in there.
Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hotter, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one billionth of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the center.
Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a curve of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the fabled Moore's Law that defined the amount of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we started. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big laser machine in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more fusion energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good.
Now this is ITER, pronounced in French: EE-tairh. So this is a big collaboration of different countries that are building a huge magnetic donut in the south of France, and this machine, when it's finished, will produce 500 megawatts of fusion power with only 50 megawatts to make it. So this one is the real one. It's going to work. That's the kind of machine that makes energy.
Now if you look at the graph, you will notice that those two dots are a little bit on the right of the curve. We kind of have fallen off the progress. Actually, the science to make those machines was really in time to produce fusion during that curve. However, there has been a bit of politics going on, and the will to do it was not there, so it drifted to the right. ITER, for example, could have been built in 2000 or 2005, but because it's a big international collaboration, the politics got in and it delayed it a bit. For example, it took them about three years to decide where to put it.
Now, fusion is often criticized for being a little too expensive. Yes, it did cost a billion dollars or two billion dollars a year to make this progress. But you have to compare that to the cost of making Moore's Law. That cost way more than that. The result of Moore's Law is this cell phone here in my pocket. This cell phone, and the Internet behind it, cost about one trillion dollars, just so I can take a selfie and put it on Facebook. Then when my dad sees that, he'll be very proud. We also spend about 650 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil and gas and renewable energy. Now, we spend one half of a percent of that on fusion. So me, personally, I don't think it's too expensive. I think it's actually been shortchanged, considering it can solve all our energy problems cleanly for the next couple of billions of years.
Now I can say that, but I'm a little bit biased, because I started a fusion company and I don't even have a Facebook account. So when I started this fusion company in 2002, I knew I couldn't fight with the big lads. They had much more resources than me. So I decided I would need to find a solution that is cheaper and faster.
Now magnetic and laser fusion are pretty good machines. They are awesome pieces of technology, wonderful machines, and they have shown that fusion can be done. However, as a power plant, I don't think they're very good. They're way too big, way too complicated, way too expensive, and also, they don't deal very much with the fusion energy. When you make fusion, the energy comes out as neutrons, fast neutrons comes out of the plasma. Those neutrons hit the wall of the machine. It damages it. And also, you have to catch the heat from those neutrons and run some steam to spin a turbine somewhere, and on those machines, it was all a bit of an afterthought. So I decided that surely there is a better way of doing that.
So back to the literature, and I read about the fusion everywhere. One way in particular attracted my attention, and it's called magnetized target fusion, or MTF for short. Now, in MTF, what you want to do is you take a big vat and you fill that with liquid metal, and you spin the liquid metal to open a vortex in the center, a bit like your sink. When you pull the plug on a sink, it makes a vortex. And then you have some pistons driven by pressure that goes on the outside, and this compresses the liquid metal around the plasma, and it compresses it, it gets hotter, like a laser, and then it makes fusion. So it's a bit of a mix between a magnetized fusion and the laser fusion. So those have a couple of very good advantages. The liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons and no neutrons hit the wall, and therefore there's no damage to the machine. The liquid metal gets hot, so you can pump that in a heat exchanger, make some steam, spin a turbine. So that's a very convenient way of doing this part of the process. And finally, all the energy to make the fusion happen comes from steam-powered pistons, which is way cheaper than lasers or superconducting coils.
Now, this was all very good except for the problem that it didn't quite work. (Laughter) There's always a catch. So when you compress that, the plasma cools down faster than the compression speed, so you're trying to compress it, but the plasma cooled down and cooled down and cooled down and then it did absolutely nothing.
So when I saw that, I said, well, this is such a shame, because it's a very, very good idea. So hopefully I can improve on that. So I thought about it for a minute, and I said, okay, how can we make that work better? So then I thought about impact. What about if we use a big hammer and we swing it and we hit the nail like this, in the place of putting the hammer on the nail and pushing and try to put it in? That won't work. So what the idea is is to use the idea of an impact. So we accelerate the pistons with steam, that takes a little bit of time, but then, bang! you hit the piston, and, baff!, all the energy is done instantly, down instantly to the liquid, and that compresses the plasma much faster. So I decided, okay, this is good, let's make that.
So we built this machine in this garage here. We made a small machine that we managed to squeeze a little bit of neutrons out of that, and those are my marketing neutrons, and with those marketing neutrons, then I raised about 50 million dollars, and I hired 65 people. That's my team here. And this is what we want to build. So it's going to be a big machine, about three meters in diameter, liquid lead spinning around, big vortex in the center, put the plasma on the top and on the bottom, piston hits on the side, bang!, it compresses it, and it will make some energy, and the neutron will come out in the liquid metal, going to go in a steam engine and make the turbine, and some of the steam will go back to fire the piston. We're going to run that about one time per second, and it will produce 100 megawatts of electricity.
Okay, we also built this injector, so this injector makes the plasma to start with. It makes the plasma at about a lukewarm temperature of three million degrees C. Unfortunately, it doesn't last quite long enough, so we need to extend the life of the plasma a little bit, but last month it got a lot better, so I think we have the plasma compressing now. Then we built a small sphere, about this big, 14 pistons around it, and this will compress the liquid. However, plasma is difficult to compress. When you compress it, it tends to go a little bit crooked like that, so you need the timing of the piston to be very good, and for that we use several control systems, which was not possible in 1970, but we now can do that with nice, new electronics.
So finally, most people think that fusion is in the future and will never happen, but as a matter of fact, fusion is getting very close. We are almost there. The big labs have shown that fusion is doable, and now there are small companies that are thinking about that, and they say, it's not that it cannot be done, but it's how to make it cost-effectively. General Fusion is one of those small companies, and hopefully, very soon, somebody, someone, will crack that nut, and perhaps it will be General Fusion.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
SUC/CREAT/GralInt-TED Talks-Elizabeth Gilbert:Success, failure and the drive to keep creating
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Elizabeth Gilbert:
Success, failure and the drive to keep creating
TED2014 · Filmed Mar 2014
Elizabeth Gilbert was once an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.
Transcript:
So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads.
The taller one, who is like up here, she comes marching up to me, and she goes, "Honey, I gotta ask you something. You got something to do with that whole 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing that's been going on lately?"
And I said, "Yes, I did."
And she smacks her friend and she goes, "See, I told you, I said, that's that girl. That's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie." (Laughter)
So that's who I am. And believe me, I'm extremely grateful to be that person, because that whole "Eat, Pray, Love" thing was a huge break for me. But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody, because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn't going to be "Eat, Pray, Love," and all of those people who had hated "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived. So I knew that I had no way to win, and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis. But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, I would have lost my beloved vocation, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. In other words, I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure.
So just to back up and explain, the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. After college, I got a job as a diner waitress, kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published, and failing at it. I failed at getting published for almost six years. So for almost six years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way, by saying, "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home."
And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it.
But the weird thing is that 20 years later, during the crazy ride of "Eat, Pray, Love," I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, and feeling like I was her again, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different. She had failed constantly. I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation. We had nothing in common. Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again?
And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success. So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche.
But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.
For me, that home has always been writing. So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with "Eat, Pray, Love," I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love." And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.
Look, I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself. Something worthy, by the way, so addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live. Right? The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don't budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it's all going to be okay. Thank you. (Applause)
Elizabeth Gilbert:
Success, failure and the drive to keep creating
TED2014 · Filmed Mar 2014
Elizabeth Gilbert was once an "unpublished diner waitress," devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.
Transcript:
So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads.
The taller one, who is like up here, she comes marching up to me, and she goes, "Honey, I gotta ask you something. You got something to do with that whole 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing that's been going on lately?"
And I said, "Yes, I did."
And she smacks her friend and she goes, "See, I told you, I said, that's that girl. That's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie." (Laughter)
So that's who I am. And believe me, I'm extremely grateful to be that person, because that whole "Eat, Pray, Love" thing was a huge break for me. But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody, because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn't going to be "Eat, Pray, Love," and all of those people who had hated "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived. So I knew that I had no way to win, and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis. But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, I would have lost my beloved vocation, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. In other words, I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure.
So just to back up and explain, the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. After college, I got a job as a diner waitress, kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published, and failing at it. I failed at getting published for almost six years. So for almost six years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way, by saying, "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home."
And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it.
But the weird thing is that 20 years later, during the crazy ride of "Eat, Pray, Love," I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, and feeling like I was her again, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different. She had failed constantly. I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation. We had nothing in common. Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again?
And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success. So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche.
But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.
For me, that home has always been writing. So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with "Eat, Pray, Love," I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love." And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.
Look, I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself. Something worthy, by the way, so addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live. Right? The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don't budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it's all going to be okay. Thank you. (Applause)
BUS/LEAD/GralInt-Richard Edelman on how leaders can regain the public’s trust (unedited version)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Interview
Richard Edelman on how leaders can regain the public’s trust
Trust in public institutions is at record lows—yet people want greater regulation of many industries. According to Edelman president and CEO Richard Edelman, that’s because business leaders must do more to earn the public’s respect.
April 2014
The chief engagement officer Trust in government is at record lows in the developed world, according to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, yet citizens want greater regulation of many industries. Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the world’s largest independently owned public-relations firm, explains how businesses should respond to this contradiction and why it requires a different approach to leadership. This interview was conducted by McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland. An edited transcript of Edelman’s remarks follows. Interview transcript Now, the headline for this year’s trust barometer has to be the fundamental reshaping of the landscape of trust. Because it used to be that business had to be intertwined with government in order to have trust. Now, today, we believe that business has to set the context for change—that business has to lead, but it has to lead differently. Not calling for self-regulation, but actually establishing why and how, not just what. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer Trust in the US government now is in the mid-30s. That’s the lowest we’ve seen. And then on top of that, numbers we’re seeing in Italy, Spain, and France are in the teens for trust in government. So it’s really a complete “throw the bums out” and watch for what might happen in the European parliament elections this summer. I do see the threat of populism. I see it in very low numbers, again, in Western Europe for banks in the general population. Again, we’re talking about 20 percent trust in Germany, which is quite a robust economy for trust in banking. So the potential for populism, for being against free trade, for being very nativist, is very real. In the developing markets, trust in business couldn’t be more robust—in China, Indonesia. But in the West, what’s happened is, since the 2008–09 collapse, business has gradually been building up. But what we now see is a plateau. It’s not going up anymore. It’s sort of run its course. But what you’re left with, though, is a vast gap in trust between business and government. So, in the United States, it’s 21 points, again, the largest we’ve ever seen. In markets like Brazil, it’s 35 points; in South Africa, it’s 45 points. So the natural inclination of business would be to say, “Well, we’re back to the good times; let’s deregulate.” And that would be exactly the wrong conclusion to draw. Because, again, our data shows clearly that in financial services, food, and energy—by a four-to-one margin—people want more regulation. You may say, “Well, that’s contradictory.” But in fact, people, in their cerebral cortex, still remember ’08, ’09. They don’t like government, but they don’t trust business enough to do it on their own, to self-regulate. The chief engagement officer I think the new role for the CEO is to be the “chief engagement officer,” if you’re going to actually ascend the bully pulpit, to quote Teddy Roosevelt. And that’s a job that traditionally has been done by government: “Here’s the rules and here’s the playing field.” Business has to do that now. And that means business has to talk to audiences it’s not traditionally accustomed to. A CEO is going to have to go and meet the community and have an open community meeting and actually make relationships personally and listen. And not just go and formulate policy, but listen first and participate in the community—only then be an advocate. And, play the outside game, not the inside game. Business: 65 percent of people say that big business has too much political influence. That is a clear sign that we’ve got to stop playing the inside game—in Brussels and London and Beijing. We’ve got to start playing the outside game. And talking to people in a real conversation, and changing policy when necessary. And only then being an advocate. We actually have looked carefully at the most respected companies, and others, and we’ve come up with our own group of 16 factors. What we find is that the most important criteria is no longer—this is since 2008. It used to be, “Do you have great operations?,” and “Do you have a great new product machine?” Those were the things that really drove trust. Well, since 2008, operations has actually moved down the list of importance. Companies still do it well, and they still make money, they still have respected CEOs. But the new gold is actually in engagement and integrity. So you look at a company like PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi: her ability to treat employees well, to put value on a sustainable product array, to persuade people behind her to follow on this idea of “better for you” foods and recasting the portfolio—not just soda and chips but oatmeal and other things. This is the gold. So in fact, then, the key things are: pay the right amount of tax, do right by your employees, run a responsible supply chain, and engage—communicate frequently. Those are the new normal for a chief executive. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer surveyed 27,000 general-public and 6,000 informed-public respondents aged 25 to 64 across 27 countries. For more information, visit edelman.com. About the authors Richard Edelman is the president and CEO of Edelman. This interview was conducted by Rik Kirkland, senior managing editor of McKinsey Publishing, who is based in McKinsey’s New York office. Source: www.mckinsey.com
Interview
Richard Edelman on how leaders can regain the public’s trust
Trust in public institutions is at record lows—yet people want greater regulation of many industries. According to Edelman president and CEO Richard Edelman, that’s because business leaders must do more to earn the public’s respect.
April 2014
The chief engagement officer Trust in government is at record lows in the developed world, according to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, yet citizens want greater regulation of many industries. Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the world’s largest independently owned public-relations firm, explains how businesses should respond to this contradiction and why it requires a different approach to leadership. This interview was conducted by McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland. An edited transcript of Edelman’s remarks follows. Interview transcript Now, the headline for this year’s trust barometer has to be the fundamental reshaping of the landscape of trust. Because it used to be that business had to be intertwined with government in order to have trust. Now, today, we believe that business has to set the context for change—that business has to lead, but it has to lead differently. Not calling for self-regulation, but actually establishing why and how, not just what. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer Trust in the US government now is in the mid-30s. That’s the lowest we’ve seen. And then on top of that, numbers we’re seeing in Italy, Spain, and France are in the teens for trust in government. So it’s really a complete “throw the bums out” and watch for what might happen in the European parliament elections this summer. I do see the threat of populism. I see it in very low numbers, again, in Western Europe for banks in the general population. Again, we’re talking about 20 percent trust in Germany, which is quite a robust economy for trust in banking. So the potential for populism, for being against free trade, for being very nativist, is very real. In the developing markets, trust in business couldn’t be more robust—in China, Indonesia. But in the West, what’s happened is, since the 2008–09 collapse, business has gradually been building up. But what we now see is a plateau. It’s not going up anymore. It’s sort of run its course. But what you’re left with, though, is a vast gap in trust between business and government. So, in the United States, it’s 21 points, again, the largest we’ve ever seen. In markets like Brazil, it’s 35 points; in South Africa, it’s 45 points. So the natural inclination of business would be to say, “Well, we’re back to the good times; let’s deregulate.” And that would be exactly the wrong conclusion to draw. Because, again, our data shows clearly that in financial services, food, and energy—by a four-to-one margin—people want more regulation. You may say, “Well, that’s contradictory.” But in fact, people, in their cerebral cortex, still remember ’08, ’09. They don’t like government, but they don’t trust business enough to do it on their own, to self-regulate. The chief engagement officer I think the new role for the CEO is to be the “chief engagement officer,” if you’re going to actually ascend the bully pulpit, to quote Teddy Roosevelt. And that’s a job that traditionally has been done by government: “Here’s the rules and here’s the playing field.” Business has to do that now. And that means business has to talk to audiences it’s not traditionally accustomed to. A CEO is going to have to go and meet the community and have an open community meeting and actually make relationships personally and listen. And not just go and formulate policy, but listen first and participate in the community—only then be an advocate. And, play the outside game, not the inside game. Business: 65 percent of people say that big business has too much political influence. That is a clear sign that we’ve got to stop playing the inside game—in Brussels and London and Beijing. We’ve got to start playing the outside game. And talking to people in a real conversation, and changing policy when necessary. And only then being an advocate. We actually have looked carefully at the most respected companies, and others, and we’ve come up with our own group of 16 factors. What we find is that the most important criteria is no longer—this is since 2008. It used to be, “Do you have great operations?,” and “Do you have a great new product machine?” Those were the things that really drove trust. Well, since 2008, operations has actually moved down the list of importance. Companies still do it well, and they still make money, they still have respected CEOs. But the new gold is actually in engagement and integrity. So you look at a company like PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi: her ability to treat employees well, to put value on a sustainable product array, to persuade people behind her to follow on this idea of “better for you” foods and recasting the portfolio—not just soda and chips but oatmeal and other things. This is the gold. So in fact, then, the key things are: pay the right amount of tax, do right by your employees, run a responsible supply chain, and engage—communicate frequently. Those are the new normal for a chief executive. The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer surveyed 27,000 general-public and 6,000 informed-public respondents aged 25 to 64 across 27 countries. For more information, visit edelman.com. About the authors Richard Edelman is the president and CEO of Edelman. This interview was conducted by Rik Kirkland, senior managing editor of McKinsey Publishing, who is based in McKinsey’s New York office. Source: www.mckinsey.com
Sunday, April 27, 2014
TOEFLiBT/EXAM/LEARN/GralInt-TOEFL iBT NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES-4 slides
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
TOEFL iBT NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES
Source: www.slideshare.net
TOEFL iBT NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES
Source: www.slideshare.net
SOC/GralInt-Lograr el bien ajeno, la clave para el éxito en los negocios
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Human Camp
Lograr el bien ajeno, la clave para el éxito en los negocios
Una jornada de reflexión donde se hizo hincapié en que dar, más que recibir, lleva a crecer en el trabajo
Por Paula Urien | LA NACION
Juan José Campanella: el cineasta habló sobre la necesidad de contar con colaboradores entusiastas, pero no insistentes, y de su interés en participar en lo que pasa en el país.
Una nueva edición del Human Camp, el miércoles último, invitó a cientos de referentes del mundo empresarial y de los recursos humanos a participar de manera gratuita en este evento que ya es un clásico. La consigna es pensar de manera diferente, liberarse de estructuras y dar vuelo a la creatividad. Se define como el espacio ideal para que los líderes intercambien experiencias y participen de debates en sintonía con los nuevos paradigmas del siglo XXI. También se pudo ver, por primera vez vía streaming, con el soporte de ZonaJobs.
En una cita a la que convoca Clara Pazos desde hace 11 años, el profesor de Innovación de la Escuela de Negocios de la Universidad Di Tella, Estanislao Bachrach, acostumbrado a exponer en este tipo de encuentros, fue moderador junto al publicista Carlos Pérez, de BBDO Argentina. "Estoy saliendo de mi zona de confort", dijo a LA NACION en una breve charla este neurocientífico que hoy es muy buscado en el ámbito del management.
Una idea sobrevoló prácticamente todas las ponencias: en la medida en que les va bien a quienes nos rodean, logran cumplir con sus sueños y expectativas, y contribuimos a que eso suceda; podremos cumplir con nuestros propios sueños tanto personales como laborales.
El primer orador, con traje y corbata, fue el maestro budista norteamericano Michael Roach, quien estudió en el Tíbet por más de 20 años. Graduado con honores en la Universidad de Princeton, participó en la creación de Andin International Diamond Corporation, que fue vendida a Warren Buffet's Richline Group en 2009.
Su libro sobre cómo tener éxito en los negocios y en lo personal a través de la generosidad es un best seller llamado El tallador de diamantes. "En el Tíbet está la idea de que en realidad no conocemos lo suficiente como para saber qué sueño tenemos que soñar para nosotros mismos. Uno no puede imaginarse en qué se puede convertir. Allí un lama es un maestro de sueños."
Encontrar al maestro, al mentor, al guía adecuado puede ser uno de los grandes desafíos, pero también puede estar mucho más cerca de lo que parece. Es cuestión de prestar atención. "Hay que encontrar a una persona que sea parecida a lo que querés ser y que te ayude", dijo. Otro consejo de Roach es ponerse en el papel de la persona a la que se aspira ser. "Vestite como el presidente de la compañía si esa es tu meta", dice.
Y un tercer consejo, quizás el más importante, "hay que poner todo esto en marcha para alguien. Ayudar a otra persona para que cumpla su sueño, esto es karma".
En esta línea, el filósofo Alejandro Rozitchner dijo: "Tu proyecto va a ser exitoso si lográs que los proyectos de tus socios sean exitosos. Es interesante el foco puesto en el éxito ajeno". Ser buena persona es "sentir placer en ver que el otro crece, y uno se realiza en ese crecimiento". Y terminó con una cita de Rilke, en Cartas a un joven poeta: "Si su vida cotidiana le parece pobre, cúlpese a sí mismo o reconozca que no es lo suficientemente poeta para encontrar sus riquezas".
Conmovida, Gabriela Campodónico, gerente de Desarrollo y Cultura Organizacional del Grupo Telecom, contó cómo, a partir de la muerte de una muy querida amiga y compañera de trabajo, pusieron en marcha un taller de duelo y acompañamiento en la empresa, muy valorado por los empleados. "Es posible integrar los sentimientos a la organización. La palabra que nos dijeron cuando terminó el taller fue gracias. No nos había pasado nunca."
El poder de las ideas
Isela Costantini, presidenta y directora de GM para Argentina, Uruguay y Paraguay, recordó una pregunta que le hizo su padre cuando era muy chica: "¿Qué huella vas a dejar en la humanidad?"
Sin embargo, esta enorme responsabilidad no la amedrentó y fue capaz de mostrar un impresionante currículum, donde fue sorteando obstáculos a la manera de un atleta, cosa que efectivamente fue. Uno de sus secretos fue pegar un papelito en su notebook con las siglas PADH, que quieren decir Pensá Antes De Hablar. "Nunca me achiqué para defender una idea", dijo esta madre de dos hijos que hoy es una de las 50 mujeres más poderosas del mundo, según la revista Fortune.
Dos casos locales de éxito también fueron parte de las charlas sobre el escenario. Por un lado, Marcos Galperín, cofundador, presidente y CEO de Mercado Libre, que invitó a ser emprendedores como ciudadanos. Por otro, Marcelo Salas Martínez, socio y director de Café Martínez. "Mis abuelos ayudaban a su comunidad española a desarrollar su negocios", dijo, en línea general con el eje de la jornada. "Si no crecen las personas, no crecen las empresas. Podés trabajar con tu proveedor y ayudarlo a tener éxito."
El fin de la jornada lo protagonizó el cineasta Juan José Campanella, quien con un enorme sentido del humor habló sobre su trabajo.
"Hay que dejar un margen a la experimentación. Es muy importante porque si no, estás anulando a las personas. Una película necesita de las ideas del equipo. Ahora, a veces la persona que tira una idea es demasiado avasalladora, y algunas veces tuve que decir por favor, no me repitas más la idea porque no es lo que quiero contar. De cualquier manera prefiero rodearme de esos efusivos que de aquellos que no proponen.
"Hay que seguir el sueño de uno. Soy de una generación donde había sólo unas cinco carreras y si no seguías una de ellas te mataban." Y continúa con humor: "Yo era feliz en la sala de montaje. Quise ser director simplemente para que alguien me respetara las ideas". Campanella también hizo referencia a su interés por la Argentina. "Estoy tratando de participar de lo que pasa en el país. Creo que el Estado... con que no nos joda, es suficiente."
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Human Camp
Lograr el bien ajeno, la clave para el éxito en los negocios
Una jornada de reflexión donde se hizo hincapié en que dar, más que recibir, lleva a crecer en el trabajo
Por Paula Urien | LA NACION
Juan José Campanella: el cineasta habló sobre la necesidad de contar con colaboradores entusiastas, pero no insistentes, y de su interés en participar en lo que pasa en el país.
Una nueva edición del Human Camp, el miércoles último, invitó a cientos de referentes del mundo empresarial y de los recursos humanos a participar de manera gratuita en este evento que ya es un clásico. La consigna es pensar de manera diferente, liberarse de estructuras y dar vuelo a la creatividad. Se define como el espacio ideal para que los líderes intercambien experiencias y participen de debates en sintonía con los nuevos paradigmas del siglo XXI. También se pudo ver, por primera vez vía streaming, con el soporte de ZonaJobs.
En una cita a la que convoca Clara Pazos desde hace 11 años, el profesor de Innovación de la Escuela de Negocios de la Universidad Di Tella, Estanislao Bachrach, acostumbrado a exponer en este tipo de encuentros, fue moderador junto al publicista Carlos Pérez, de BBDO Argentina. "Estoy saliendo de mi zona de confort", dijo a LA NACION en una breve charla este neurocientífico que hoy es muy buscado en el ámbito del management.
Una idea sobrevoló prácticamente todas las ponencias: en la medida en que les va bien a quienes nos rodean, logran cumplir con sus sueños y expectativas, y contribuimos a que eso suceda; podremos cumplir con nuestros propios sueños tanto personales como laborales.
El primer orador, con traje y corbata, fue el maestro budista norteamericano Michael Roach, quien estudió en el Tíbet por más de 20 años. Graduado con honores en la Universidad de Princeton, participó en la creación de Andin International Diamond Corporation, que fue vendida a Warren Buffet's Richline Group en 2009.
Su libro sobre cómo tener éxito en los negocios y en lo personal a través de la generosidad es un best seller llamado El tallador de diamantes. "En el Tíbet está la idea de que en realidad no conocemos lo suficiente como para saber qué sueño tenemos que soñar para nosotros mismos. Uno no puede imaginarse en qué se puede convertir. Allí un lama es un maestro de sueños."
Encontrar al maestro, al mentor, al guía adecuado puede ser uno de los grandes desafíos, pero también puede estar mucho más cerca de lo que parece. Es cuestión de prestar atención. "Hay que encontrar a una persona que sea parecida a lo que querés ser y que te ayude", dijo. Otro consejo de Roach es ponerse en el papel de la persona a la que se aspira ser. "Vestite como el presidente de la compañía si esa es tu meta", dice.
Y un tercer consejo, quizás el más importante, "hay que poner todo esto en marcha para alguien. Ayudar a otra persona para que cumpla su sueño, esto es karma".
En esta línea, el filósofo Alejandro Rozitchner dijo: "Tu proyecto va a ser exitoso si lográs que los proyectos de tus socios sean exitosos. Es interesante el foco puesto en el éxito ajeno". Ser buena persona es "sentir placer en ver que el otro crece, y uno se realiza en ese crecimiento". Y terminó con una cita de Rilke, en Cartas a un joven poeta: "Si su vida cotidiana le parece pobre, cúlpese a sí mismo o reconozca que no es lo suficientemente poeta para encontrar sus riquezas".
Conmovida, Gabriela Campodónico, gerente de Desarrollo y Cultura Organizacional del Grupo Telecom, contó cómo, a partir de la muerte de una muy querida amiga y compañera de trabajo, pusieron en marcha un taller de duelo y acompañamiento en la empresa, muy valorado por los empleados. "Es posible integrar los sentimientos a la organización. La palabra que nos dijeron cuando terminó el taller fue gracias. No nos había pasado nunca."
El poder de las ideas
Isela Costantini, presidenta y directora de GM para Argentina, Uruguay y Paraguay, recordó una pregunta que le hizo su padre cuando era muy chica: "¿Qué huella vas a dejar en la humanidad?"
Sin embargo, esta enorme responsabilidad no la amedrentó y fue capaz de mostrar un impresionante currículum, donde fue sorteando obstáculos a la manera de un atleta, cosa que efectivamente fue. Uno de sus secretos fue pegar un papelito en su notebook con las siglas PADH, que quieren decir Pensá Antes De Hablar. "Nunca me achiqué para defender una idea", dijo esta madre de dos hijos que hoy es una de las 50 mujeres más poderosas del mundo, según la revista Fortune.
Dos casos locales de éxito también fueron parte de las charlas sobre el escenario. Por un lado, Marcos Galperín, cofundador, presidente y CEO de Mercado Libre, que invitó a ser emprendedores como ciudadanos. Por otro, Marcelo Salas Martínez, socio y director de Café Martínez. "Mis abuelos ayudaban a su comunidad española a desarrollar su negocios", dijo, en línea general con el eje de la jornada. "Si no crecen las personas, no crecen las empresas. Podés trabajar con tu proveedor y ayudarlo a tener éxito."
El fin de la jornada lo protagonizó el cineasta Juan José Campanella, quien con un enorme sentido del humor habló sobre su trabajo.
"Hay que dejar un margen a la experimentación. Es muy importante porque si no, estás anulando a las personas. Una película necesita de las ideas del equipo. Ahora, a veces la persona que tira una idea es demasiado avasalladora, y algunas veces tuve que decir por favor, no me repitas más la idea porque no es lo que quiero contar. De cualquier manera prefiero rodearme de esos efusivos que de aquellos que no proponen.
"Hay que seguir el sueño de uno. Soy de una generación donde había sólo unas cinco carreras y si no seguías una de ellas te mataban." Y continúa con humor: "Yo era feliz en la sala de montaje. Quise ser director simplemente para que alguien me respetara las ideas". Campanella también hizo referencia a su interés por la Argentina. "Estoy tratando de participar de lo que pasa en el país. Creo que el Estado... con que no nos joda, es suficiente."
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
MIND/HEALTH/GralInt-Calidad de vida¿Qué es la inteligencia multifocal?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Calidad de vida
¿Qué es la inteligencia multifocal?
¿Se puede entrenar la mente para sentirnos mejor? Charlamos con Augusto Cury, el creador de la teoría que puede ayudarnos a bajar un cambio.
Foto: Natalia Zaidman
Por Carolina Cattaneo
A todas nos pasa: nuestra mente muchas veces nos enrosca hasta el infinito, nos mete de lleno en laberintos donde la crítica, los miedos y las preocupaciones nos atrapan en un loop del que creemos que no vamos a poder salir jamás. Pero ¡pará! No desesperes. Porque la ciencia está cada vez más preocupada por entender cómo funciona exactamente la mente y cómo podemos gestionar nuestros pensamientos. Parece imposible, ¿no? Pero el psiquiatra y psicoterapeuta Augusto Cury, uno de los autores más leídos de Brasil en esta década, trabaja para encontrar herramientas prácticas que nos ayuden a aliviar el exceso de información de la era en que vivimos. En su visita a Buenos Aires, charló con nosotras y nos contó los secretos de la inteligencia multifocal.
En definitiva, ¿de qué se trata?
Esta teoría tiene cinco grandes áreas de estudio. La primera es la construcción del "yo" como autor de nuestra propia historia. La segunda son los papeles conscientes e inconscientes de la memoria. La tercera, la transformación y la educación de la emoción. La cuarta, que es la última frontera de la ciencia, son los procesos de construcción del pensamiento. Y la quinta, los de formación de pensadores. Es una teoría que desarrolla múltiples herramientas para prevenir trastornos psíquicos, la tiranía de la belleza, la anorexia, la bulimia, los miedos, la baja autoestima, la timidez e, incluso, la depresión y las enfermedades psicosomáticas.
Los "actores" de la mente
La inteligencia multifocal estudia las variables y los fenómenos universales conscientes e inconscientes -por eso recibe el nombre de "multifocal"- que están en la base de la construcción de los pensamientos. Cury postula que el 'yo' es el actor principal, pero que hay otros actores secundarios que investigan y leen "ventanas" del cerebro y producen el mundo de los pensamientos y de las emociones.
¿Cómo contribuyen estas ideas a la calidad de vida?
La calidad de vida no es apenas un bienestar, una tranquilidad momentánea o un estado de placer intenso. Es una historia existencial, una historia emocional. Para desarrollarla, es fundamental gestionar los pensamientos. Si no cuestionamos, impugnamos y criticamos los pensamientos perturbadores, las emociones angustiantes, los sufrimientos por anticipación, en los primeros cinco segundos dan lugar a un fenómeno llamado registro automático de la memoria (RAM), que hace que queden registrados por el córtex cerebral y ahí abren una ventana traumática, o "ventana killer", como yo las llamo. Estas ventanas no pueden ser borradas de nuestra mente y, poco a poco, lo que hay allí se convierte en basura psíquica.
¿Cómo es el proceso de reflexionar sobre lo que pensamos, cuando a veces no somos conscientes de eso?
La técnica se llama "mesa redonda del yo". Nuestro "yo" va a reunirse con nuestros fantasmas emocionales, las falsas creencias o la capacidad de autosabotear nuestra felicidad y timidez. Usa el arte de la duda, que es el principio de la sabiduría. En el silencio mental, a través de preguntar, de cuestionar cómo surgió, cómo se construyó esa falsa creencia o ese sentimiento de culpa, una persona va "domesticando" los fantasmas. Si no lo hace, la "ventana killer" se ve retroalimentada y la experiencia traumática va aumentando.
Lavarnos los dientes, mapear los fantasmas
La buena noticia es que podemos "reeditar" nuestros archivos traumáticos, aunque no borrarlos. La propuesta es que hagamos un mapeo de nuestras dificultades y conflictos, que entremos dentro de nosotras mismas y nos preguntemos qué cosas nos bloquean y nos perturban. Por ejemplo, "¿por qué soy tímida?", "¿por qué no puedo hablar en público?", "¿por qué no me siento linda?". Cury explica que es un trabajo consciente aplicar el arte de la duda, casi como un hábito más. Con la misma regularidad con que nos lavamos los dientes cada día, deberíamos poder dedicar al menos un minuto, o treinta segundos, para confrontar nuestros pensamientos.
¿Entonces hay manera de pararlos?
Podemos cambiarlos, manejarlos, gestionarlos, pero no podemos interrumpirlos. ¿Por qué? Porque la tentativa de la interrupción ya es un pensamiento. El fenómeno del autoflujo lee nuestra memoria miles de veces por día, para producir la mayor fuente de entretenimiento, placer, ánimo y motivación. Pero nosotros sobreexcitamos ese fenómeno y producimos el "síndrome del pensamiento acelerado" (SPA).
¿Qué es el SPA y cómo impacta en la calidad de vida?
En el pasado, la cantidad de información se duplicaba cada 200 años. Hoy, se duplica cada un año. Un niño de 7 años tiene más información que la que tenía un emperador romano en el pasado. La hiperproducción del pensamiento genera síntomas: fatiga, dolor de cabeza, ansiedad, desconcentración y déficit de memoria. Por eso, debemos entrenar la mente para desacelerar los pensamientos, conquistar eso que el dinero no compra y contemplar lo bello todos los días. Es pensamiento inteligente contra pensamiento perturbador.
¿Cómo desacelerar la mente?
Relajate durante lapsos de corta duración a lo largo del día, por uno o dos minutos, para rescatar experiencias placenteras y proyectos.
Disfrutá de pequeños estímulos cotidianos: abrazos, caricias, elogios, las flores o los atardeceres.
Motivá a los niños para que lean, aprendan arte y música o siembren flores.
Invertí en sueños que te inspiren, que sean rentables para las emociones.
Considerá el sueño como un momento inviolable. Si es posible, dormí más de ocho horas al día los sábados y domingos.
Los fines de semana son un tiempo sagrado. No los utilices jamás como una extensión del trabajo.
No sufras por adelantado ni te angusties por cosas que todavía no pasaron. No organices un "velorio" antes de tiempo.
Usá el arte de la crítica en contra de cada pensamiento perturbador, cada preocupación paralizante y cada idea aterradora.
Salí de vacaciones con regularidad; lo ideal serían dos períodos de 15 días (uno cada semestre), en lugar de un mes entero cada año.
El libro
En Mentes brillantes, mentes entrenadas, Cury plantea que el futuro de la humanidad dependerá de que logremos incorporar todas las funciones de la inteligencia. ¿Cuáles son? El arte de la interiorización, de la observación, de la protección de las emociones, de la gestión de los pensamientos y de la contemplación de lo bello, entre otras.
Más info: www.augustocury.com.brwww.psicologiamultifocal.com.brl
Fuente: www.revistaohlala.com
Calidad de vida
¿Qué es la inteligencia multifocal?
¿Se puede entrenar la mente para sentirnos mejor? Charlamos con Augusto Cury, el creador de la teoría que puede ayudarnos a bajar un cambio.
Foto: Natalia Zaidman
Por Carolina Cattaneo
A todas nos pasa: nuestra mente muchas veces nos enrosca hasta el infinito, nos mete de lleno en laberintos donde la crítica, los miedos y las preocupaciones nos atrapan en un loop del que creemos que no vamos a poder salir jamás. Pero ¡pará! No desesperes. Porque la ciencia está cada vez más preocupada por entender cómo funciona exactamente la mente y cómo podemos gestionar nuestros pensamientos. Parece imposible, ¿no? Pero el psiquiatra y psicoterapeuta Augusto Cury, uno de los autores más leídos de Brasil en esta década, trabaja para encontrar herramientas prácticas que nos ayuden a aliviar el exceso de información de la era en que vivimos. En su visita a Buenos Aires, charló con nosotras y nos contó los secretos de la inteligencia multifocal.
En definitiva, ¿de qué se trata?
Esta teoría tiene cinco grandes áreas de estudio. La primera es la construcción del "yo" como autor de nuestra propia historia. La segunda son los papeles conscientes e inconscientes de la memoria. La tercera, la transformación y la educación de la emoción. La cuarta, que es la última frontera de la ciencia, son los procesos de construcción del pensamiento. Y la quinta, los de formación de pensadores. Es una teoría que desarrolla múltiples herramientas para prevenir trastornos psíquicos, la tiranía de la belleza, la anorexia, la bulimia, los miedos, la baja autoestima, la timidez e, incluso, la depresión y las enfermedades psicosomáticas.
Los "actores" de la mente
La inteligencia multifocal estudia las variables y los fenómenos universales conscientes e inconscientes -por eso recibe el nombre de "multifocal"- que están en la base de la construcción de los pensamientos. Cury postula que el 'yo' es el actor principal, pero que hay otros actores secundarios que investigan y leen "ventanas" del cerebro y producen el mundo de los pensamientos y de las emociones.
¿Cómo contribuyen estas ideas a la calidad de vida?
La calidad de vida no es apenas un bienestar, una tranquilidad momentánea o un estado de placer intenso. Es una historia existencial, una historia emocional. Para desarrollarla, es fundamental gestionar los pensamientos. Si no cuestionamos, impugnamos y criticamos los pensamientos perturbadores, las emociones angustiantes, los sufrimientos por anticipación, en los primeros cinco segundos dan lugar a un fenómeno llamado registro automático de la memoria (RAM), que hace que queden registrados por el córtex cerebral y ahí abren una ventana traumática, o "ventana killer", como yo las llamo. Estas ventanas no pueden ser borradas de nuestra mente y, poco a poco, lo que hay allí se convierte en basura psíquica.
¿Cómo es el proceso de reflexionar sobre lo que pensamos, cuando a veces no somos conscientes de eso?
La técnica se llama "mesa redonda del yo". Nuestro "yo" va a reunirse con nuestros fantasmas emocionales, las falsas creencias o la capacidad de autosabotear nuestra felicidad y timidez. Usa el arte de la duda, que es el principio de la sabiduría. En el silencio mental, a través de preguntar, de cuestionar cómo surgió, cómo se construyó esa falsa creencia o ese sentimiento de culpa, una persona va "domesticando" los fantasmas. Si no lo hace, la "ventana killer" se ve retroalimentada y la experiencia traumática va aumentando.
Lavarnos los dientes, mapear los fantasmas
La buena noticia es que podemos "reeditar" nuestros archivos traumáticos, aunque no borrarlos. La propuesta es que hagamos un mapeo de nuestras dificultades y conflictos, que entremos dentro de nosotras mismas y nos preguntemos qué cosas nos bloquean y nos perturban. Por ejemplo, "¿por qué soy tímida?", "¿por qué no puedo hablar en público?", "¿por qué no me siento linda?". Cury explica que es un trabajo consciente aplicar el arte de la duda, casi como un hábito más. Con la misma regularidad con que nos lavamos los dientes cada día, deberíamos poder dedicar al menos un minuto, o treinta segundos, para confrontar nuestros pensamientos.
¿Entonces hay manera de pararlos?
Podemos cambiarlos, manejarlos, gestionarlos, pero no podemos interrumpirlos. ¿Por qué? Porque la tentativa de la interrupción ya es un pensamiento. El fenómeno del autoflujo lee nuestra memoria miles de veces por día, para producir la mayor fuente de entretenimiento, placer, ánimo y motivación. Pero nosotros sobreexcitamos ese fenómeno y producimos el "síndrome del pensamiento acelerado" (SPA).
¿Qué es el SPA y cómo impacta en la calidad de vida?
En el pasado, la cantidad de información se duplicaba cada 200 años. Hoy, se duplica cada un año. Un niño de 7 años tiene más información que la que tenía un emperador romano en el pasado. La hiperproducción del pensamiento genera síntomas: fatiga, dolor de cabeza, ansiedad, desconcentración y déficit de memoria. Por eso, debemos entrenar la mente para desacelerar los pensamientos, conquistar eso que el dinero no compra y contemplar lo bello todos los días. Es pensamiento inteligente contra pensamiento perturbador.
¿Cómo desacelerar la mente?
Relajate durante lapsos de corta duración a lo largo del día, por uno o dos minutos, para rescatar experiencias placenteras y proyectos.
Disfrutá de pequeños estímulos cotidianos: abrazos, caricias, elogios, las flores o los atardeceres.
Motivá a los niños para que lean, aprendan arte y música o siembren flores.
Invertí en sueños que te inspiren, que sean rentables para las emociones.
Considerá el sueño como un momento inviolable. Si es posible, dormí más de ocho horas al día los sábados y domingos.
Los fines de semana son un tiempo sagrado. No los utilices jamás como una extensión del trabajo.
No sufras por adelantado ni te angusties por cosas que todavía no pasaron. No organices un "velorio" antes de tiempo.
Usá el arte de la crítica en contra de cada pensamiento perturbador, cada preocupación paralizante y cada idea aterradora.
Salí de vacaciones con regularidad; lo ideal serían dos períodos de 15 días (uno cada semestre), en lugar de un mes entero cada año.
El libro
En Mentes brillantes, mentes entrenadas, Cury plantea que el futuro de la humanidad dependerá de que logremos incorporar todas las funciones de la inteligencia. ¿Cuáles son? El arte de la interiorización, de la observación, de la protección de las emociones, de la gestión de los pensamientos y de la contemplación de lo bello, entre otras.
Más info: www.augustocury.com.brwww.psicologiamultifocal.com.brl
Fuente: www.revistaohlala.com
TOEFL iBT-EDUC/EXAM/LEARN/GralInt-The Official TOEFL iBT Guide-3rd Ed-464 slides
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Friday, April 25, 2014
EDUC/GralInt-Educación y ciudadanía
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Educación y ciudadanía
Por Iván Petrella | Para LA NACION
Twitter: @ipetrella
El debate sobre la calidad educativa de nuestro país llegó para quedarse. Los exámenes PISA son una referencia casi ineludible para hablar del tema, a tal punto que la baja performance de los alumnos argentinos en su última edición dio lugar a importantes controversias. Por un lado, están quienes resaltan que el bajo rendimiento en los exámenes augura un futuro de baja competitividad económica. Otro grupo minimiza los resultados argumentando que PISA es limitado en sus mediciones, ya que no tiene en cuenta el esfuerzo, el contexto socioeconómico de los chicos, los valores y otros elementos importantes que también forman parte del aprendizaje. Es difícil olvidar las declaraciones de nuestro ministro de Educación, Alberto Sileoni, diciendo que "debería haber un ranking de esfuerzo también".
Desde mi punto de vista, la situación de la Argentina podría ser más seria de lo que estas posturas perciben. PISA mide una cualidad que, sugiero, engloba las preocupaciones de ambos grupos y que se podría denominar "capacidad ciudadana": la capacidad de un individuo de desarrollar su particular proyecto de vida en comunidad. ¿Cómo lo haría?
El examen tiene dos partes. La primera se centra en lengua, ciencia y matemática. Pero lo fundamental para entender es que PISA no busca evaluar la acumulación de conocimiento, aunque claramente es una base útil para destacarse en el examen. Más bien, como argumenta la periodista Amanda Ripley en su excelente libro The Smartest Kids in the Room and How they Got that Way (Los chicos más inteligentes del mundo, y cómo llegaron a serlo), "PISA no es solamente un examen sobres datos, examina la capacidad de hacer algo útil con datos".
El examen está diseñado para evaluar en los estudiantes su capacidad de análisis, de razonamiento crítico, de síntesis y de resolución de situaciones complejas. Todas estas son cualidades directamente relacionadas con la "capacidad ciudadana".
No sorprende entonces que Ripley, después de sentarse a tomar el examen como parte de la investigación de su libro, haya llegado a la conclusión de que "parecía más una prueba que evaluaba habilidades para la vida que para el colegio".
No es solamente por una falta de competitividad económica futura que tiene que preocuparnos el hecho de que hace una década que nuestros resultados están estancados mientras nos superan países como Chile, Brasil y Uruguay.
Que nos vaya mal significa que nuestros chicos no tienen las herramientas fundamentales para, en un futuro, desarrollar sus vidas de manera exitosa
Más aun, la segunda parte de PISA mide precisamente el esfuerzo, la dedicación, la responsabilidad y solidaridad de los alumnos que pregona el ministro Sileoni y que también son parte esencial de la capacidad ciudadana. Lo hace a través de un cuestionario "de contexto" que responden alumnos y docentes. Los docentes describen la situación de la escuela, el clima de enseñanza, la disciplina en las aulas y la calidad de los recursos humanos y materiales de los que disponen. A los chicos se les pregunta sobre sus familias y el contexto socioeconómico, sus actitudes hacia el aprendizaje, sus hábitos y vida dentro de la escuela.
Lo interesante acá es que analistas de la educación encontraron una correlación entre la calidad de estas respuestas y el puntaje obtenido en la evaluación formal. La minuciosidad, el trabajo que se tomaron los alumnos para responder las preguntas referidas, resultó predictivo de los puntajes de los países, superando otros factores como el estatus socioeconómico. Nuevamente, no deberíamos sorprendernos: si bien se trata de un cuestionario sin respuestas correctas, su contestación o no, y la forma en que estas respuestas son elaboradas, sirven para conocer cuán responsables y dedicados son los alumnos de cada país.
En las pruebas de 2006, la Argentina fue el país con mayor proporción de alumnos que llegaron tarde a los exámenes y uno de los que tuvo más respuestas en blanco. En 2012, tuvimos el mayor porcentaje de estudiantes que reportaron haber faltado a clase en las semanas previas a los exámenes: 66%. Parece casi increíble que en la edición anterior, en 2009, la Argentina había registrado sólo 9%. La encuesta a los docentes argentinos reveló que el clima de nuestras aulas es el más crítico entre los 65 países. Son las aulas donde los alumnos menos escuchan a los profesores, en las que hay más ruido y donde se debe esperar más tiempo para lograr centrarse en el aprendizaje. Esto constituye otra muestra de la falta de disciplina, pero también de la falta de solidaridad, tanto para con los docentes, incapaces de realizar su trabajo, como para los pares, que deben aprender en un contexto aún más desafiante. Estos parámetros pueden utilizarse como indicadores del esfuerzo, la dedicación, el sentido de la responsabilidad y la disciplina, todas cualidades necesarias para desarrollar de manera exitosa un proyecto de vida en comunidad.
Como decía el poeta irlandés William Butler Yeats, "la educación no es llenar un balde, sino encender una mecha". La calidad educativa, como demuestra PISA, no está dada por la acumulación de contenidos, sino por el desarrollo de la capacidad ciudadana de sus individuos. Aquí radica la importancia de PISA: que nos vaya mal significa que nuestros chicos no tienen las herramientas fundamentales para, en un futuro, desarrollar sus vidas de manera exitosa.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Educación y ciudadanía
Por Iván Petrella | Para LA NACION
Twitter: @ipetrella
El debate sobre la calidad educativa de nuestro país llegó para quedarse. Los exámenes PISA son una referencia casi ineludible para hablar del tema, a tal punto que la baja performance de los alumnos argentinos en su última edición dio lugar a importantes controversias. Por un lado, están quienes resaltan que el bajo rendimiento en los exámenes augura un futuro de baja competitividad económica. Otro grupo minimiza los resultados argumentando que PISA es limitado en sus mediciones, ya que no tiene en cuenta el esfuerzo, el contexto socioeconómico de los chicos, los valores y otros elementos importantes que también forman parte del aprendizaje. Es difícil olvidar las declaraciones de nuestro ministro de Educación, Alberto Sileoni, diciendo que "debería haber un ranking de esfuerzo también".
Desde mi punto de vista, la situación de la Argentina podría ser más seria de lo que estas posturas perciben. PISA mide una cualidad que, sugiero, engloba las preocupaciones de ambos grupos y que se podría denominar "capacidad ciudadana": la capacidad de un individuo de desarrollar su particular proyecto de vida en comunidad. ¿Cómo lo haría?
El examen tiene dos partes. La primera se centra en lengua, ciencia y matemática. Pero lo fundamental para entender es que PISA no busca evaluar la acumulación de conocimiento, aunque claramente es una base útil para destacarse en el examen. Más bien, como argumenta la periodista Amanda Ripley en su excelente libro The Smartest Kids in the Room and How they Got that Way (Los chicos más inteligentes del mundo, y cómo llegaron a serlo), "PISA no es solamente un examen sobres datos, examina la capacidad de hacer algo útil con datos".
El examen está diseñado para evaluar en los estudiantes su capacidad de análisis, de razonamiento crítico, de síntesis y de resolución de situaciones complejas. Todas estas son cualidades directamente relacionadas con la "capacidad ciudadana".
No sorprende entonces que Ripley, después de sentarse a tomar el examen como parte de la investigación de su libro, haya llegado a la conclusión de que "parecía más una prueba que evaluaba habilidades para la vida que para el colegio".
No es solamente por una falta de competitividad económica futura que tiene que preocuparnos el hecho de que hace una década que nuestros resultados están estancados mientras nos superan países como Chile, Brasil y Uruguay.
Que nos vaya mal significa que nuestros chicos no tienen las herramientas fundamentales para, en un futuro, desarrollar sus vidas de manera exitosa
Más aun, la segunda parte de PISA mide precisamente el esfuerzo, la dedicación, la responsabilidad y solidaridad de los alumnos que pregona el ministro Sileoni y que también son parte esencial de la capacidad ciudadana. Lo hace a través de un cuestionario "de contexto" que responden alumnos y docentes. Los docentes describen la situación de la escuela, el clima de enseñanza, la disciplina en las aulas y la calidad de los recursos humanos y materiales de los que disponen. A los chicos se les pregunta sobre sus familias y el contexto socioeconómico, sus actitudes hacia el aprendizaje, sus hábitos y vida dentro de la escuela.
Lo interesante acá es que analistas de la educación encontraron una correlación entre la calidad de estas respuestas y el puntaje obtenido en la evaluación formal. La minuciosidad, el trabajo que se tomaron los alumnos para responder las preguntas referidas, resultó predictivo de los puntajes de los países, superando otros factores como el estatus socioeconómico. Nuevamente, no deberíamos sorprendernos: si bien se trata de un cuestionario sin respuestas correctas, su contestación o no, y la forma en que estas respuestas son elaboradas, sirven para conocer cuán responsables y dedicados son los alumnos de cada país.
En las pruebas de 2006, la Argentina fue el país con mayor proporción de alumnos que llegaron tarde a los exámenes y uno de los que tuvo más respuestas en blanco. En 2012, tuvimos el mayor porcentaje de estudiantes que reportaron haber faltado a clase en las semanas previas a los exámenes: 66%. Parece casi increíble que en la edición anterior, en 2009, la Argentina había registrado sólo 9%. La encuesta a los docentes argentinos reveló que el clima de nuestras aulas es el más crítico entre los 65 países. Son las aulas donde los alumnos menos escuchan a los profesores, en las que hay más ruido y donde se debe esperar más tiempo para lograr centrarse en el aprendizaje. Esto constituye otra muestra de la falta de disciplina, pero también de la falta de solidaridad, tanto para con los docentes, incapaces de realizar su trabajo, como para los pares, que deben aprender en un contexto aún más desafiante. Estos parámetros pueden utilizarse como indicadores del esfuerzo, la dedicación, el sentido de la responsabilidad y la disciplina, todas cualidades necesarias para desarrollar de manera exitosa un proyecto de vida en comunidad.
Como decía el poeta irlandés William Butler Yeats, "la educación no es llenar un balde, sino encender una mecha". La calidad educativa, como demuestra PISA, no está dada por la acumulación de contenidos, sino por el desarrollo de la capacidad ciudadana de sus individuos. Aquí radica la importancia de PISA: que nos vaya mal significa que nuestros chicos no tienen las herramientas fundamentales para, en un futuro, desarrollar sus vidas de manera exitosa.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
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