Deseo pagar a mis obreros más de lo que vale para mí su trabajo? No. Deseo vender mis productos a un precio menor al que mis clientes están dispuestos a pagar? No. Deseo venderlos a pérdida o desvalorizándolos? No. Si esto está mal, hagan lo que quieran conmigo, según las normas que prefieran.
Me niego a considerar detestable el hecho de trabajar mejor que otra gente, realizar un producto de mayor valor que el de mis vecinos y ver que hay personas dispuestas a pagarme más que a ellos. Me niego a pedir perdón por mi idoneidad, por mi éxito, o por el dinero que gano.
La culpa es nuestra. Si nosotros, los que actuamos, los que aprovisionamos y beneficiamos a la humanidad, hemos permitido que el sello del mal quede estampado sobre nuestro ser y silenciosamente soportamos el castigo de nuestras propias virtudes.
Cuando se actúa sobre la base de la compasión y contra la justicia, es a los buenos que se castiga en aras de los malos; cuando se salva del sufrimiento a un culpable, es a los inocentes a quienes se obliga a sufrir…si el culpable no paga, lo hará el inocente.
Tal es el horror que Robin Hood inmortalizó como ideal de justicia….practicando la caridad con la riqueza de la que no era dueño, regalando bienes que él no había producido y haciendo pagar a otros el lujo de su piedad. Es el símbolo de la idea de que la necesidad, y no el logro, es la fuente de todo derecho; de que no tenemos que producir, sino solo necesitar; de que no es lo ganado lo que nos pertenece, sino aquello que no hemos ganado.
La moral de esa gente es la de los secuestradores. Utilizan nuestro amor a la virtud como rehén. Saben que lo soportaremos todo con el fin de trabajar y producir, porque a nuestro modo de ver, el logro es el más alto propósito moral del ser humano.
No existe medio más seguro para destruir a un hombre que ponerlo en una situación en la que no solo no desee mejorar, sino que, además, día tras día se esfuerce por cumplir peor con sus obligaciones.
Siempre fueron los atributos bestiales, no los humanos, los que la humanidad adoró; el ídolo del instinto y el de la fuerza, los místicos y los reyes. Los místicos que anhelaban una conciencia irresponsable y gobernaron proclamando que sus oscuras emociones eran superiores a la razón…y los reyes, que gobernaron por medio de sus garras y sus músculos.
…proponen un plan para destruirme, que trabaje a pérdida aunque cada tonelada que consiga me cueste más de lo que sacaré de ella; que mande al diablo mi riqueza, hasta que todos juntos nos muramos de hambre. Semejante irresponsabilidad no es posible en ningún hombre, ni siquiera en un saqueador.
Pensó en todas las especies vivientes que adiestran a sus crías en el arte de sobrevivir, en los gatos que enseñan a sus cachorros a cazar. Sin embargo, el humano, cuya herramienta de supervivencia es el cerebro, no solo fracasa en enseñar al niño a pensar, sino que dedica su educación al propósito de destruir su mente, de convencerlo de que el pensamiento es inútil y malo, antes incluso que haya comenzado a pensar.
Todo lo que es conveniente para la vida de un ser racional es bueno; todo lo que la destruye es malo.
El hombre no puede sobrevivir excepto mediante la adquisición de conocimiento, y la razón es su única manera de obtenerlo. La razón es la facultad que percibe, identifica e integra el material provisto por los sentidos.
La verdad es el reconocimiento de la realidad; la razón, el único instrumento de conocimiento del hombre, es su único parámetro de verdad.
No importa cuan vasto sea tu conocimiento, ó cuan modesto, es tu propia mente la que debe adquirirlo. Sólo se puede actuar en base al conocimiento propio. Tu mente es tu único juez de la verdad…y si otros disienten de tu veredicto, la realidad es la única corte de apelación.
Un proceso racional es un proceso moral.
La única virtud básica del hombre es el pensamiento. Y tu vicio básico, la fuente de todos tus males, es ese acto innombrable que algunos practican pero que no desean admitir; el acto de dejar la mente en blanco, la voluntaria suspensión de la propia conciencia, la negación a pensar. No pensar es un acto de aniquilación, un deseo de negar la existencia, un intento de borrar la realidad.
Al suspender tu juicio, niegas tu persona. Eso, a cada hora y en cada asunto, es tu elección moral básica; pensar o no pensar, existir o no existir.
Para vivir, el hombre debe considerar tres cosas como los valores supremos que rigen su vida: razón, propósito y autoestima. La Razón como su única herramienta para el conocimiento. El Propósito, como su elección de la felicidad que esa herramienta procederá a lograr. Autoestima, como la inviolable certeza de que su mente es competente para pensar y de que su persona es digna de ser feliz.
Racionalidad es el reconocimiento del hecho de que la existencia existe, de que nada puede alterar la verdad y que nada puede ser más importante que el acto de percibirla, osea pensar.
Integridad es el reconocimiento de que no se puede falsificar la propia conciencia.
Honestidad es el reconocimiento de que lo irreal es irreal y no puede tener ningún valor.
Justicia es el reconocimiento de que se debe juzgar a los hombres mediante un proceso puro y racional.
Productividad es el proceso mediante el cual nuestra conciencia controla nuestra existencia, un proceso constante de adquisición de conocimientos, de que todo trabajo es creativo si es realizado por una mente pensante.
Orgullo es el reconocimiento de que uno es su mayor valor y que, como todos los valores del hombre, debe ser ganado.
El único propósito moral del hombre es su felicidad, pero sólo se puede alcanzar mediante la propia virtud.
El símbolo de todas las relaciones entre esos hombres, el símbolo moral del respeto por los seres humanos, es el comerciante. Nosotros los que vivimos según valores, no saqueos, somos comerciantes, tanto en lo material, como en lo espiritual. Un comerciante es alguien que gana lo que obtiene y no da ni toma lo inmerecido.
Los parásitos místicos que a través las épocas han denigrado a los comerciantes y los han mantenido en el aprobio, al tiempo que brindaban honores a los pordioseros y saqueadores, siempre tuvieron claro el motivo de sus burlas: un comerciante es la entidad a la que temen: un hombre justo.
Te preguntas qué obligación moral tengo hacia mis semejantes? Ninguna. Sólo tengo obligación hacia mí mismo, hacia los objetos materiales, y hacia todo lo que existe: la racionalidad. No busco ni deseo nada de ellos, excepto aquellas relaciones que ellos quieran iniciar por su propia y voluntaria elección. Cuando estoy en desacuerdo con un hombre racional, dejo que la realidad sea nuestro arbitro final; si yo estoy en lo cierto, él aprenderá; si yo estoy equivocado, seré yo quien aprenda; uno de los dos ganará, pero los dos nos beneficiaremos.
Mientras los hombres deseen vivir en conjunto, ningún hombre puede iniciar el uso de la fuerza física contra otros.
Cuando alguien pretende tratar conmigo por la fuerza, le contesto con la fuerza.
El bien, dicen los místicos del espíritu, es Dios, un ser cuya única definición es que está más allá de los poderes de comprensión del hombre; tal definición invalida la conciencia humana y anula sus conceptos de existencia. El bien, dicen los místicos del músculo, es la Sociedad, una cosa a la que definen como un organismo que no posee forma física. La mente del hombre, dicen los místicos del espíritu, debe estar subordinada a la voluntad de Dios. La mente del hombre, dicen los místicos del músculo, debe ser subordinada a la voluntad de la Sociedad.
El egoísmo – dicen ambos- es el mal del hombre. El bien del hombre – dicen ambos- es renunciar a sus deseos personales, negarse a si mismo, rendirse; el bien del hombre es negar la vida que vive. El sacrificio – sostienen los dos – es la esencia de la moral, la mayor virtud que el hombre debe alcanzar.
Sacrificio es la renuncia a lo que uno valora a favor de lo que desprecia. Si poseemos una botella de leche y se la damos a nuestro hijo hambriento, no es un sacrificio; si se la damos al hijo del vecino y dejamos que el nuestro muera, si lo es. Si damos dinero para ayudar a un amigo, no es un sacrificio; si se lo damos a un desconocido que no nos importa, sí lo es.
El credo del sacrificio es una moral para el inmoral.
Es tu mente lo que quieren que entregues todos los que predican el credo del sacrificio.
Bajo una moral de sacrificio, el primer valor que sacrificas es la moralidad; el siguiente es la autoestima.
Amar es valorar. Quien diga que es posible valorar sin valores, amar a quienes consideramos despreciables, también sostendrá que es posible hacerse rico consumiendo sin producir y que el papel moneda es tan valioso como el oro.
Qué permite a un mendigo insolente exhibir sus lacras ante el rostro de los mejores y solicitar ayuda en tono de amenaza?
Hasta que no aprendas a tratar conmigo como comerciante, entregando valor por valor, deberás existir sin mí, como yo existiré sin ti.
La época infame a la que llamas Oscurantismo fue una era de inteligencia en huelga cuando los hombres capaces pasaron a la clandestinidad y vivieron ocultos, estudiando en secreto, y al morir se llevaron con ellos el trabajo de sus mentes.
Todo periodo regido por místicos fue una época de estancamiento y carencias, en que la mayoría de los hombres estuvieron en huelga contra la existencia, trabajando lo indispensable para sobrevivir, sin dejar más que migajas como botín para sus gobernantes les robaran.
El camino de la historia humana ha sido una cadena de tramos estériles erosionados por la fe y la fuerza, con una pocas y breves apariciones de un rayo de sol, cuando la energía liberada de los hombres de mente realizó las maravillas que admiraste e inmediatamente extinguiste.
Rechazas tu herramienta de percepción – tu mente – y luego te quejas de que el universo es un misterio.
El hombre que se niega a juzgar, que no acepta ni rechaza, que declara que no hay absolutos y que cree que escapa de la responsabilidad es el responsable de toda la sangre que se está derramando hoy en el mundo.
La perfección moral es tener una racionalidad inquebrantable, no importa el grado de inteligencia, sino el uso pleno implacable de la mente.
Acepta el hecho de que el único propósito moral de tu vida es alcanzar tu felicidad.
Como medida básica de autoestima, asume que cualquier exigencia de ayuda es la señal de un caníbal. Con su demanda afirma que tu vida es su propiedad; y más despreciable aún es tu consentimiento. Preguntas si es correcto ayudar siempre a otro hombre? No, si el reclama tu ayuda como un derecho y tu deber moral. Es correcto, en cambio, si ese es tu deseo personal, basado en tu propio placer egoísta, teniendo en cuenta el valor de su persona y de su lucha.
El origen de los derechos de propiedad es la ley de la causalidad. Toda propiedad y toda forma de riqueza son producidas por la mente y el trabajo del hombre. Pero no se puede obligar a la inteligencia a trabajar.
Los modernos místicos del músculo, que ofrecen la alternativa fraudulenta de los derechos humanos versus derechos de propiedad, como si unos pudieran existir sin los otros, están haciendo un último y grotesco intento de revivir la doctrina del alma versus el cuerpo. Sólo un esclavo puede trabajar sin derecho al producto de su esfuerzo.
Las únicas funciones apropiadas de un gobierno son: la policía para protegerte de los criminales; el ejército para protegerte de invasores extranjeros, y los tribunales para proteger tu propiedad.
Cuando trabajas en una fábrica moderna, se te paga, no solo por tu labor, sino por todo el genio productivo que ha hecho posible dicha fabrica; por el trabajo del industrial que la construyó, por el trabajo del inversor que ahorró el dinero y lo arriesgó después en lo nuevo y lo no probado; por el trabajo del ingeniero que diseñó las máquinas cuyas palancas tu mueves; el trabajo del inventor que creó el producto que fabricas; el trabajo del científico que descubrió las leyes que permiten elaborar dicho producto; el trabajo del filósofo que enseñó a los hombres a pensar y al que te pasas denunciando.
Si hubieras trabajado como herrero en la mística Edad Media, el resultado de toda tu capacidad productiva habría sido una barra de hierro hecha a mano, tras días y días de esfuerzo. Todo lo que tus músculos valen es el nivel de vida de aquel herrero; el resto es un regalo de Hank Rearden.
El hombre que está situado en la cúspide de la pirámide intelectual aporta el máximo a todos los que están debajo de él, pero no recibe más que el pago material, no obtiene ningún beneficio intelectual de los demás que añada algo al valor de su tiempo. El hombre en la base, quien abandonado a su suerte moriría de hambre por su total ineptitud, no contribuye con aquellos que están por encima de él, pero recibe el beneficio derivado de todas sus mentes.
No intentaste competir en base a tu inteligencia, y ahora lo haces en base a tu brutalidad. No quisiste permitir que las recompensas fueran ganadas por la producción y ahora estas corriendo una carrera en la que las recompensas se ganan a través del robo. Calificaste de egoísta y cruel el intercambio de valor por valor, y ahora has creado una sociedad en la que se intercambia extorsión por extorsión.
Tu sistema es una guerra civil legalizada, donde los hombres se juntan en bandas que luchan unas contra otras por la posesión de la ley que utilizan luego como un garrote contra sus rivales, hasta que otra banda se las arrebata por la fuerza, y la utiliza a su vez en su contra, mientras todos claman hallarse al servicio de un ignoto y nunca especificado bien común.
Nadie podrá obtener ningún valor de los demás recurriendo a la fuerza física. Todo hombre se mantendrá ó caerá, vivirá ó morirá, según su juicio racional.
No olvides que el estado natural del hombre es una postura erguida, una mente intransigente y un paso vivaz capaz de recorrer caminos ilimitados.
Juro por mi vida y mi amor por ella, que jamás viviré para nadie, ni exigiré que nadie viva para mí.
15 de diciembre de 2008
11 de octubre de 2008
Lider
Líder es aquel que ha acumulado y experimentado tanta más información que sus compañeros, que le es posible ver diferentes caminos que los demás no ven, y además puede atreverse a escoger y recorrer el mejor de ellos, mientras los demás sólo sienten temor e inseguridad y se aferran a lo ya establecido.
30 de agosto de 2008
A touch of generosity
A touch of generosity
Aug 14th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Touch can inspire munificence towards those you trust
PEOPLE touch each other a lot, even strangers. We shake hands, slap backs, kiss and caress. Such behaviour can increase co-operation, which is good from an evolutionary point of view. It has even been shown that waitresses who touch patrons tend to be tipped more generously.
It is known that stroking rats can raise the level of oxytocin, a hormone active in the brain and implicated in various social interactions, such as maternal attachment. In humans higher oxytocin levels have been linked to physiological phenomena like contractions during childbirth, or orgasm. But the link to physical contact is so far unclear. Interestingly, the level of hormone appears to rise in people who are trusted. And more of it seems to inspire greater generosity towards strangers.
This prompted Vera Morhenn of the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues, to examine the physiological mechanism underlying this and to see whether munificence towards strangers could be manipulated through touch. In their experiment, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, they split 96 male and female graduate students into three groups. The first and second received a professional massage but the third did not. Then the first and third group took part in a “trust game”.
Participants were paired at random and seated in front of a computer, physically removed from their anonymous partner. Each also got $10 in cash, supposedly for showing up. The rules stipulated that for each pair, one person, the giver, could cede a part of their money to the other, the trustee. This amount would then be tripled and credited to the trustee, who was subsequently prompted by the computer to sacrifice a part of his stash by returning some to the giver.
Standard game theory predicts that in an anonymous one-off exchange like this the trustee ought to keep the gift and not reciprocate. The giver, too, ought to refrain from donating, since his sacrifice is bound to remain unrequited. Yet that is not what tends to happen with real people. Givers often give and trustees frequently return the favour. (Studies of identical and non-identical twins suggest that co-operative behaviour in trust games is heritable.) In effect, the giver’s donation reflects his confidence in the trustee’s willingness to reciprocate. In other words, it signals trust.
To test the physiology, Dr Morhenn took blood samples at the start and end of each game and looked for changes in oxytocin levels. She found no effect in the massaged group who did not participate in the game, implying that trust does indeed act as some sort of trigger. But in the players the hormone rose in those who were massaged and fell slightly in those who were not.
Despite receiving statistically identical trust signals from givers, the massaged trustees with their higher oxytocin levels returned a whopping 243% more than their unrubbed counterparts. A clue to why evolution might favour such a double-trigger mechanism may come from the other finding that women appear more susceptible than men to tactile manipulation. Perhaps that is to ensure maternal care of their own brood. If so, such effects seem to extend beyond the mother’s bosom.
Aug 14th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Touch can inspire munificence towards those you trust
PEOPLE touch each other a lot, even strangers. We shake hands, slap backs, kiss and caress. Such behaviour can increase co-operation, which is good from an evolutionary point of view. It has even been shown that waitresses who touch patrons tend to be tipped more generously.
It is known that stroking rats can raise the level of oxytocin, a hormone active in the brain and implicated in various social interactions, such as maternal attachment. In humans higher oxytocin levels have been linked to physiological phenomena like contractions during childbirth, or orgasm. But the link to physical contact is so far unclear. Interestingly, the level of hormone appears to rise in people who are trusted. And more of it seems to inspire greater generosity towards strangers.
This prompted Vera Morhenn of the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues, to examine the physiological mechanism underlying this and to see whether munificence towards strangers could be manipulated through touch. In their experiment, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, they split 96 male and female graduate students into three groups. The first and second received a professional massage but the third did not. Then the first and third group took part in a “trust game”.
Participants were paired at random and seated in front of a computer, physically removed from their anonymous partner. Each also got $10 in cash, supposedly for showing up. The rules stipulated that for each pair, one person, the giver, could cede a part of their money to the other, the trustee. This amount would then be tripled and credited to the trustee, who was subsequently prompted by the computer to sacrifice a part of his stash by returning some to the giver.
Standard game theory predicts that in an anonymous one-off exchange like this the trustee ought to keep the gift and not reciprocate. The giver, too, ought to refrain from donating, since his sacrifice is bound to remain unrequited. Yet that is not what tends to happen with real people. Givers often give and trustees frequently return the favour. (Studies of identical and non-identical twins suggest that co-operative behaviour in trust games is heritable.) In effect, the giver’s donation reflects his confidence in the trustee’s willingness to reciprocate. In other words, it signals trust.
To test the physiology, Dr Morhenn took blood samples at the start and end of each game and looked for changes in oxytocin levels. She found no effect in the massaged group who did not participate in the game, implying that trust does indeed act as some sort of trigger. But in the players the hormone rose in those who were massaged and fell slightly in those who were not.
Despite receiving statistically identical trust signals from givers, the massaged trustees with their higher oxytocin levels returned a whopping 243% more than their unrubbed counterparts. A clue to why evolution might favour such a double-trigger mechanism may come from the other finding that women appear more susceptible than men to tactile manipulation. Perhaps that is to ensure maternal care of their own brood. If so, such effects seem to extend beyond the mother’s bosom.
23 de agosto de 2008
Facing the truth
Physiognomy
Facing the truth
Aug 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition
The shape of your face betrays how aggressive you are—if you are a man
PHYSIOGNOMY, the art or science of predicting inward character from outward form, has had its ups and downs over the years. A century ago, the idea that a person’s character could be seen in his face was more or less taken as given. It then fell out of favour, along with the idea that behaviour is genetically determined, as Marxist ideas of the pliability and perfectibility of mankind became fashionable. Now, it is undergoing something of a revival. It has been found, for example, that women can predict a man’s interest in infant children from his face. Trustworthiness also shows up, as does social dominance. The latest example comes from a paper just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Justin Carré and Cheryl McCormick, of Brock University in Ontario, Canada. This suggests that in men, at least, it is also possible to look at someone’s face and read his predisposition to aggression.
The thesis developed by Mr Carré and Dr McCormick is that aggressiveness is predictable from the ratio between the width of a person’s face and its height. Their reason for suspecting this is that this ratio differs systematically between men and women (men have wider faces) and that the difference arises during puberty, when sex hormones are reshaping people’s bodies. The cause seems to be exposure to testosterone, which is also known to make people aggressive. It seems reasonable, therefore, to predict a correlation between aggression and face shape.
To test their thesis, Mr Carré and Dr McCormick looked at the fine, old Canadian sport of ice hockey. This is, famously, not a gentle game. It is also a game in which the rules provide a plausible proxy for aggressiveness, namely the amount of time a player spends off the ice in the penalty box for such infringements as knocking his opponent’s teeth out with a well-aimed stick.
The two researchers obtained photographs of several university and professional ice-hockey teams, and measured the facial ratios of the players. They also obtained those players’ penalty records. Just as they expected, the wider a player’s face, the more time he spent in the cooler.
Ice hockey, though, is mostly a man’s game (women might argue that they are too sensible to get involved, although the Canadian ladies did win a gold medal at the last winter Olympics). To find out whether the theory was true for females as well, Mr Carré and Dr McCormick turned to that stock experimental subject, the university undergraduate. They recruited several dozen of both sexes and got them to play a game against what they thought was a person in another room but was actually a computer. Various measures of aggression taken during this game suggest that men are the same everywhere, be they students or sportsmen. Aggression was not, however, predictable in women students—or, at least, not from the shapes of their faces.
It seems, therefore, that facial ratio in men is a biologically honest signal of aggressiveness. Honest signals are those, such as luxuriantly feathered tails, that cannot be mimicked by individuals who would like the benefits without the costs. In the case of aggressiveness, the benefit to the aggressive individual is, paradoxically, that he will not have to get into fights in order to prove the point. The fear induced by his face should be enough by itself. At least, that is the hypothesis. The experiment to prove it has yet to be done.
Facing the truth
Aug 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition
The shape of your face betrays how aggressive you are—if you are a man
PHYSIOGNOMY, the art or science of predicting inward character from outward form, has had its ups and downs over the years. A century ago, the idea that a person’s character could be seen in his face was more or less taken as given. It then fell out of favour, along with the idea that behaviour is genetically determined, as Marxist ideas of the pliability and perfectibility of mankind became fashionable. Now, it is undergoing something of a revival. It has been found, for example, that women can predict a man’s interest in infant children from his face. Trustworthiness also shows up, as does social dominance. The latest example comes from a paper just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Justin Carré and Cheryl McCormick, of Brock University in Ontario, Canada. This suggests that in men, at least, it is also possible to look at someone’s face and read his predisposition to aggression.
The thesis developed by Mr Carré and Dr McCormick is that aggressiveness is predictable from the ratio between the width of a person’s face and its height. Their reason for suspecting this is that this ratio differs systematically between men and women (men have wider faces) and that the difference arises during puberty, when sex hormones are reshaping people’s bodies. The cause seems to be exposure to testosterone, which is also known to make people aggressive. It seems reasonable, therefore, to predict a correlation between aggression and face shape.
To test their thesis, Mr Carré and Dr McCormick looked at the fine, old Canadian sport of ice hockey. This is, famously, not a gentle game. It is also a game in which the rules provide a plausible proxy for aggressiveness, namely the amount of time a player spends off the ice in the penalty box for such infringements as knocking his opponent’s teeth out with a well-aimed stick.
The two researchers obtained photographs of several university and professional ice-hockey teams, and measured the facial ratios of the players. They also obtained those players’ penalty records. Just as they expected, the wider a player’s face, the more time he spent in the cooler.
Ice hockey, though, is mostly a man’s game (women might argue that they are too sensible to get involved, although the Canadian ladies did win a gold medal at the last winter Olympics). To find out whether the theory was true for females as well, Mr Carré and Dr McCormick turned to that stock experimental subject, the university undergraduate. They recruited several dozen of both sexes and got them to play a game against what they thought was a person in another room but was actually a computer. Various measures of aggression taken during this game suggest that men are the same everywhere, be they students or sportsmen. Aggression was not, however, predictable in women students—or, at least, not from the shapes of their faces.
It seems, therefore, that facial ratio in men is a biologically honest signal of aggressiveness. Honest signals are those, such as luxuriantly feathered tails, that cannot be mimicked by individuals who would like the benefits without the costs. In the case of aggressiveness, the benefit to the aggressive individual is, paradoxically, that he will not have to get into fights in order to prove the point. The fear induced by his face should be enough by itself. At least, that is the hypothesis. The experiment to prove it has yet to be done.
Helicobacter Pylori
Symbiosis
The twists and turns of fate
Aug 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Helicobacter pylori has a reputation for causing ulcers and cancer. Hunting it to extinction, however, may be a mistake
Science Photo Library
MOST people feel a twinge of regret at reports that an animal or plant is becoming rare. Should they feel the same pangs for a bacterium? With Helicobacter pylori, so-called because of its twisty-turny shape, and famous for causing stomach ulcers and gastric cancer, the reaction would probably be “good riddance”. And H. pylori is, indeed, endangered in many parts of the planet. It is fast vanishing from the rich world, thanks to antibiotics and improved hygiene. Yet, as conservationists of larger organisms are quick to remind you, extinctions can have unexpected consequences. And that may prove to be the case with H. pylori.
Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at the New York University School of Medicine, and his team have already linked the bug’s disappearance with increased levels of obesity and with the rise of cancer of the oesophagus. Last month they added asthma to the list by publishing a study showing that children who had not been infected by H. pylori were more likely to suffer from the condition than those who had.
It is a mistake, according to Dr Blaser, to think of H. pylori as just another pathogen. He reckons that it is better perceived as a symbiont that is sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful. The evidence suggests that its relatives have been living in mammalian stomachs since the mammals began, some 150m years ago. It, itself, has been around for at least 60,000 years and until about 50 years ago it infected 70-80% of the human population. Now, as a consequence of the routine use of antibiotics for such things as ear infections, only 5% of American children have it. That change, he thinks, is having consequences.
Give and take
Dr Blaser has discovered, for example, that H. pylori helps to regulate stomach-acid levels in a way that is usually helpful to both itself and its host. If the human side of the loop gets too strong, and the stomach becomes too acid, the bug may produce a substance called cag. The intended effect of this, Dr Blaser thinks, is to say “turn down the acid level”. However, cag also has a side-effect. It is toxic to the stomach lining, and it is this toxicity that provokes the ulcers and cancers for which H. pylori is notorious.
The obvious medical temptation—and, indeed, what has happened in practice—is to annihilate the bacterium with antibiotics. That works as an anti-ulcer treatment, but when H. pylori goes its homeostatic effect goes with it, allowing the strength of the stomach acid to rise chronically. This acid has a tendency to spill out of the top of the stomach and into the oesophagus. That has unpleasant consequences. In fact the recent drop in H. pylori infections has almost exactly matched the rise in gastroesophageal reflux disease (which feels like bad heartburn). Over time, the damage the excess acid does to the walls of the oesophagus may cause cancer.
The link with asthma has a different mechanism. When Dr Blaser and his colleague Yu Chen analysed a health and nutrition database called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, they found that American children between the ages of three and 13 who are infected with H. pylori are 60% less likely to have asthma than their uninfected contemporaries. They believe this is because H. pylori makes the immune system more robust. The lack of it lowers the threshold for responding to a foreign protein that might come from a pathogen. As a result, things like pollen and mites trigger responses even though they are not, actually, dangerous. This idea is similar to the “hygiene hypothesis” that the super-clean environment of the modern world fails to challenge children’s immune systems enough for their own good, and thus opens the way for conditions such as asthma. It differs, however, in that Dr Blaser thinks humanity has co-evolved with the bugs that prime the immune system, rather than picking them up at random.
Moreover, even the link between H. pylori and gastric cancer and ulcers is complicated. Just having the bacterium does not automatically mean you will get an ulcer. In the past, most people were infected with H. pylori from their childhoods until they died. Ulcers, however, generally emerge when a patient is in his 30s or 40s. In addition, they are three times more common in men than in women. H. pylori-infection rates, however, are the same in both sexes.
H. pylori also has an effect on two of the hormones that control appetite—ghrelin, which makes you feel hungry, and leptin, which does the opposite. People without H. pylori produce more ghrelin than those with. Though the connection has not been established for sure, Dr Blaser suspects the bacterium’s disappearance could thus be contributing to the epidemic of obesity that is sweeping the rich world.
What all this suggests is that rather than trying to eradicate H. pylori, a better strategy would be to manage its relationship with humanity in a more sophisticated way. Some people are, genetically, more susceptible to ulcers and gastric cancer than others. For these unfortunates eradication may be the best option. However, if your genes predispose you to asthma or obesity, eradication may be unwise.
Moreover, people are not born with H. pylori in their stomachs. Rather, they get infected when they are young. That means a parent or doctor could choose which strain of the bacterium a child ends up carrying, rather than leaving the matter to chance. H. pylori is genetically variable (not all strains, for example, make cag). Dr Blaser envisages a future in which doctors run routine checks on babies’ genes to find out their susceptibilities, and then colonise those babies’ stomachs with the strain or strains that are best for them. If that happens, H. pylori can come off the endangered species list for good.
The twists and turns of fate
Aug 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Helicobacter pylori has a reputation for causing ulcers and cancer. Hunting it to extinction, however, may be a mistake
Science Photo Library
MOST people feel a twinge of regret at reports that an animal or plant is becoming rare. Should they feel the same pangs for a bacterium? With Helicobacter pylori, so-called because of its twisty-turny shape, and famous for causing stomach ulcers and gastric cancer, the reaction would probably be “good riddance”. And H. pylori is, indeed, endangered in many parts of the planet. It is fast vanishing from the rich world, thanks to antibiotics and improved hygiene. Yet, as conservationists of larger organisms are quick to remind you, extinctions can have unexpected consequences. And that may prove to be the case with H. pylori.
Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at the New York University School of Medicine, and his team have already linked the bug’s disappearance with increased levels of obesity and with the rise of cancer of the oesophagus. Last month they added asthma to the list by publishing a study showing that children who had not been infected by H. pylori were more likely to suffer from the condition than those who had.
It is a mistake, according to Dr Blaser, to think of H. pylori as just another pathogen. He reckons that it is better perceived as a symbiont that is sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful. The evidence suggests that its relatives have been living in mammalian stomachs since the mammals began, some 150m years ago. It, itself, has been around for at least 60,000 years and until about 50 years ago it infected 70-80% of the human population. Now, as a consequence of the routine use of antibiotics for such things as ear infections, only 5% of American children have it. That change, he thinks, is having consequences.
Give and take
Dr Blaser has discovered, for example, that H. pylori helps to regulate stomach-acid levels in a way that is usually helpful to both itself and its host. If the human side of the loop gets too strong, and the stomach becomes too acid, the bug may produce a substance called cag. The intended effect of this, Dr Blaser thinks, is to say “turn down the acid level”. However, cag also has a side-effect. It is toxic to the stomach lining, and it is this toxicity that provokes the ulcers and cancers for which H. pylori is notorious.
The obvious medical temptation—and, indeed, what has happened in practice—is to annihilate the bacterium with antibiotics. That works as an anti-ulcer treatment, but when H. pylori goes its homeostatic effect goes with it, allowing the strength of the stomach acid to rise chronically. This acid has a tendency to spill out of the top of the stomach and into the oesophagus. That has unpleasant consequences. In fact the recent drop in H. pylori infections has almost exactly matched the rise in gastroesophageal reflux disease (which feels like bad heartburn). Over time, the damage the excess acid does to the walls of the oesophagus may cause cancer.
The link with asthma has a different mechanism. When Dr Blaser and his colleague Yu Chen analysed a health and nutrition database called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, they found that American children between the ages of three and 13 who are infected with H. pylori are 60% less likely to have asthma than their uninfected contemporaries. They believe this is because H. pylori makes the immune system more robust. The lack of it lowers the threshold for responding to a foreign protein that might come from a pathogen. As a result, things like pollen and mites trigger responses even though they are not, actually, dangerous. This idea is similar to the “hygiene hypothesis” that the super-clean environment of the modern world fails to challenge children’s immune systems enough for their own good, and thus opens the way for conditions such as asthma. It differs, however, in that Dr Blaser thinks humanity has co-evolved with the bugs that prime the immune system, rather than picking them up at random.
Moreover, even the link between H. pylori and gastric cancer and ulcers is complicated. Just having the bacterium does not automatically mean you will get an ulcer. In the past, most people were infected with H. pylori from their childhoods until they died. Ulcers, however, generally emerge when a patient is in his 30s or 40s. In addition, they are three times more common in men than in women. H. pylori-infection rates, however, are the same in both sexes.
H. pylori also has an effect on two of the hormones that control appetite—ghrelin, which makes you feel hungry, and leptin, which does the opposite. People without H. pylori produce more ghrelin than those with. Though the connection has not been established for sure, Dr Blaser suspects the bacterium’s disappearance could thus be contributing to the epidemic of obesity that is sweeping the rich world.
What all this suggests is that rather than trying to eradicate H. pylori, a better strategy would be to manage its relationship with humanity in a more sophisticated way. Some people are, genetically, more susceptible to ulcers and gastric cancer than others. For these unfortunates eradication may be the best option. However, if your genes predispose you to asthma or obesity, eradication may be unwise.
Moreover, people are not born with H. pylori in their stomachs. Rather, they get infected when they are young. That means a parent or doctor could choose which strain of the bacterium a child ends up carrying, rather than leaving the matter to chance. H. pylori is genetically variable (not all strains, for example, make cag). Dr Blaser envisages a future in which doctors run routine checks on babies’ genes to find out their susceptibilities, and then colonise those babies’ stomachs with the strain or strains that are best for them. If that happens, H. pylori can come off the endangered species list for good.
19 de mayo de 2008
Albert Hofmann - LSD
Albert Hofmann
May 8th 2008From The Economist print edition
Albert Hofmann, chemist, died on April 29th, aged 102
Reuters
HIS first experience was “rather agreeable”. As he worked in the Sandoz research laboratory in Basel in Switzerland on April 16th 1943, isolating and synthesising the unstable alkaloids of the ergot fungus, Albert Hofmann began to feel a slight lightheadedness. He could not think why. His lab was shared with two other chemists; frugality and company had taught him careful habits. And this was a man whose doctoral thesis had revolved around the gastrointestinal juices of the vineyard snail.
Perhaps, he supposed, he had inhaled the fumes of the solvent he was using. In any event, he took himself home and lay down on the sofa. There the world exploded, dissolving into a kaleidoscope of colours, shapes, spirals and light. It seemed to have something to do with lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD-25, the substance he had been working on. He had synthesised it five years before, but had found it “uninteresting” and stopped. Now, like some prince in faery, he had got the stuff on his fingertips, rubbed it into his eyes and seen the secrets of the universe.
The next Monday, ever the good scientist, he deliberately took 0.25 milligrams of LSD diluted with 10cc of water. It tasted of nothing. But by 5 o'clock the lab was distorting, and his limbs were stiffening. The last words he managed to scrawl in his lab journal were “desire to laugh”. That desire soon left him. As he cycled home with a companion, perhaps the most famous bike ride in history, he had no idea he was moving. But in his house the furniture was ghoulishly mutating and spinning, and the neighbour who brought him milk as an antidote was “a witch with a coloured mask”. He realised now that LSD was the devil he couldn't shake off, though in his senseless body he screamed and writhed on the sofa, certain that he was dying.
After six hours it left him. The last hour was wonderful again, with images “opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains.” Each sound made colours. His doctor found nothing physically wrong with him, except for extremely dilated pupils. The substance evidently left the body quickly, and caused no hangover. But the mind it flung apart, reassembled and profoundly changed, leaving him the next morning as fresh as a newborn child.
Over the next decades, Mr Hofmann took an awful lot of LSD. He ingested it listening to Mozart and looking at red roses. He learned not to take it when tired, or with amphetamines (a very bad trip). As head of the natural products division at Sandoz, he revelled in its potential for psychiatry. Though he also developed derivatives of ergot that helped circulation and respiration, and had a drawerful of useful pharmaceuticals to his name, it was LSD that filled him with “the joy of fatherhood”. And the sense it had given him, of union with nature and of the spiritual basis of all creation, convinced him that he had found a sacrament for the modern age: the antidote to the ennui caused by consumerism, industrialisation and the vanishing of the divine from human life.
Yellow and purple and green
It proved disastrous for him that Timothy Leary at Harvard had the same idea. When the professor told his students in the 1960s that LSD was the route to the divine, the true self and (not least) great sex, use of the drug became an epidemic. People ingested it, in impure forms, from sugar cubes and blotting paper. They blamed it for accidents, murders and wild attempts to fly. The media flowered in psychedelic shades of orange, purple, yellow and green, and in the melting shapes and dizzying circles of a world gone almost mad. Mr Hofmann in 1971 met Leary in the snack bar at Lausanne station; he found him a charmer, but because of his carelessness LSD had by then been banned in most countries, and production and research had been stopped. They never resumed.
Mr Hofmann turned his chemist's attention to other things: the Mexican magic mushroom, whose active compounds he synthesised into little white pills, and the LSD-like properties of the seeds of the blue morning-glory flower. He continued his self-experiments with both of them—noting that on his mushroom trip his very German doctor became an Aztec priest who seemed about to slice his chest open with an obsidian knife. He loved his work, but still mourned the disappearance of his “problem child”. LSD, treated with respect, could have powerfully instructed men and women in the glories of the spiritual dimension of life. But they had abused it, so it had given them terrors instead.
Without it, however, Mr Hofmann knew it was still possible to get to the same place. As a child, wandering in May on a forest path above Baden in a year he had forgotten, he had suddenly been filled with such a sense of the radiance and oneness of creation that he thought the vision would last for ever. “Miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality” had ambushed him elsewhere, too: the wind in a field of yellow chrysanthemums, leaves in the sunlit garden after a shower of rain. When he had drunk LSD in solution on that fateful April afternoon he had recovered those insights, but had not surpassed them. His advice to would-be trippers, therefore, was simple. “Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!”
May 8th 2008From The Economist print edition
Albert Hofmann, chemist, died on April 29th, aged 102
Reuters
HIS first experience was “rather agreeable”. As he worked in the Sandoz research laboratory in Basel in Switzerland on April 16th 1943, isolating and synthesising the unstable alkaloids of the ergot fungus, Albert Hofmann began to feel a slight lightheadedness. He could not think why. His lab was shared with two other chemists; frugality and company had taught him careful habits. And this was a man whose doctoral thesis had revolved around the gastrointestinal juices of the vineyard snail.
Perhaps, he supposed, he had inhaled the fumes of the solvent he was using. In any event, he took himself home and lay down on the sofa. There the world exploded, dissolving into a kaleidoscope of colours, shapes, spirals and light. It seemed to have something to do with lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD-25, the substance he had been working on. He had synthesised it five years before, but had found it “uninteresting” and stopped. Now, like some prince in faery, he had got the stuff on his fingertips, rubbed it into his eyes and seen the secrets of the universe.
The next Monday, ever the good scientist, he deliberately took 0.25 milligrams of LSD diluted with 10cc of water. It tasted of nothing. But by 5 o'clock the lab was distorting, and his limbs were stiffening. The last words he managed to scrawl in his lab journal were “desire to laugh”. That desire soon left him. As he cycled home with a companion, perhaps the most famous bike ride in history, he had no idea he was moving. But in his house the furniture was ghoulishly mutating and spinning, and the neighbour who brought him milk as an antidote was “a witch with a coloured mask”. He realised now that LSD was the devil he couldn't shake off, though in his senseless body he screamed and writhed on the sofa, certain that he was dying.
After six hours it left him. The last hour was wonderful again, with images “opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains.” Each sound made colours. His doctor found nothing physically wrong with him, except for extremely dilated pupils. The substance evidently left the body quickly, and caused no hangover. But the mind it flung apart, reassembled and profoundly changed, leaving him the next morning as fresh as a newborn child.
Over the next decades, Mr Hofmann took an awful lot of LSD. He ingested it listening to Mozart and looking at red roses. He learned not to take it when tired, or with amphetamines (a very bad trip). As head of the natural products division at Sandoz, he revelled in its potential for psychiatry. Though he also developed derivatives of ergot that helped circulation and respiration, and had a drawerful of useful pharmaceuticals to his name, it was LSD that filled him with “the joy of fatherhood”. And the sense it had given him, of union with nature and of the spiritual basis of all creation, convinced him that he had found a sacrament for the modern age: the antidote to the ennui caused by consumerism, industrialisation and the vanishing of the divine from human life.
Yellow and purple and green
It proved disastrous for him that Timothy Leary at Harvard had the same idea. When the professor told his students in the 1960s that LSD was the route to the divine, the true self and (not least) great sex, use of the drug became an epidemic. People ingested it, in impure forms, from sugar cubes and blotting paper. They blamed it for accidents, murders and wild attempts to fly. The media flowered in psychedelic shades of orange, purple, yellow and green, and in the melting shapes and dizzying circles of a world gone almost mad. Mr Hofmann in 1971 met Leary in the snack bar at Lausanne station; he found him a charmer, but because of his carelessness LSD had by then been banned in most countries, and production and research had been stopped. They never resumed.
Mr Hofmann turned his chemist's attention to other things: the Mexican magic mushroom, whose active compounds he synthesised into little white pills, and the LSD-like properties of the seeds of the blue morning-glory flower. He continued his self-experiments with both of them—noting that on his mushroom trip his very German doctor became an Aztec priest who seemed about to slice his chest open with an obsidian knife. He loved his work, but still mourned the disappearance of his “problem child”. LSD, treated with respect, could have powerfully instructed men and women in the glories of the spiritual dimension of life. But they had abused it, so it had given them terrors instead.
Without it, however, Mr Hofmann knew it was still possible to get to the same place. As a child, wandering in May on a forest path above Baden in a year he had forgotten, he had suddenly been filled with such a sense of the radiance and oneness of creation that he thought the vision would last for ever. “Miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality” had ambushed him elsewhere, too: the wind in a field of yellow chrysanthemums, leaves in the sunlit garden after a shower of rain. When he had drunk LSD in solution on that fateful April afternoon he had recovered those insights, but had not surpassed them. His advice to would-be trippers, therefore, was simple. “Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!”
8 de mayo de 2008
About innovation: Interview with Brad Bird
Interview
Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird
What does stimulating the creativity of animators have in common with developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs? A lot.
Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb
April 2008
If there’s one thing successful innovators have shown over the years, it’s that great ideas come from unexpected places. Who could have predicted that bicycle mechanics would develop the airplane or that the US Department of Defense would give rise to a freewheeling communications platform like the Internet?
Senior executives looking for ideas about how to make their companies more innovative can also seek inspiration in surprising sources. Exhibit One: Brad Bird, Pixar’s two-time Oscar-winning director. Bird’s hands-on approach to fostering creativity among animators holds powerful lessons for any executive hoping to nurture innovation in teams and organizations.
Bird joined Pixar in 2000, when the company was riding high following its release of the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and the subsequent hits A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. Concerned about complacency, senior executives Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter asked Bird, whose body of work included The Iron Giant and The Simpsons, to join the company and shake things up. The veteran of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, and FOX delivered—winning Academy Awards (best animated feature) for two groundbreaking movies, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
Ten days before Ratatouille won its Oscar, we sat down with Bird at the Emeryville, California, campus of Pixar, which is now a subsidiary of Disney.1 Bird discussed the importance, in his work, of pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent, and building morale. He also explained the value of “black sheep”—restless contributors with unconventional ideas. Although stimulating the creativity of animators might seem very different from developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs, Bird’s anecdotes should stir the imagination of innovation-minded executives in any industry.
The Quarterly: What attracted you to Pixar?
Brad Bird: One thing that was unbelievably different about this company was that they were worried about becoming complacent. When I came here, they had made three movies—Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2—that had all been big hits. I was coming off a film called The Iron Giant that was a highly regarded financial failure.
Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter said, in effect, “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, but if you can convince us, we’ll do things a different way.” For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, “Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up”—when do you run into that?
The Quarterly: How did your first project at Pixar—The Incredibles—shake things up?
Brad Bird: The Incredibles was everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing. It had human characters, it had hair, it had water, it had fire, it had a massive number of sets. The creative heads were excited about the idea of the film, but once I showed story reels of exactly what I wanted, the technical teams turned white. They took one look and thought, “This will take ten years and cost $500 million. How are we possibly going to do this?”
So I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well.
We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here. For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas.
The Quarterly: What sorts of things did you do differently?
Brad Bird: There are purists in computer graphics who are brilliant but don’t have the urgency about budgets and scheduling that responsible filmmakers do. I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen if they took too long to achieve it in the computer. I’d say, “Look, I don’t have to do the water through a computer simulation program. If we can’t get a program to work, I’m perfectly content to film a splash in a swimming pool and just composite the water in.” This absolutely horrified them. Or I’d say, “You can build a flying saucer, or you can take a pie plate and fling it across the screen. If the audience only sees the pie plate very briefly and you throw it just right, they will buy it as a flying saucer.”
I never did film the pool splash or throw the pie plate, but talking this way helped everyone understand that we didn’t have to make something that would work from every angle. Not all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.
We also made superelaborate storyboards. We even emulated camera movement in them, so everyone knew that “We only need to make things work between here and there.” Once I was able to commit to the camera angles, we could be very specific about how we built things. Something would look beautiful from one position, but if you moved five feet to the right, the image would disintegrate. I gave up the flexibility to move within a set, but in exchange I bought size and scope.
The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation? Can you be innovative and also happy?
Brad Bird: I would say that involved people make for better innovation. Passionate involvement can make you happy, sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.
The Quarterly: How important is team dynamics to innovation and creativity?
Brad Bird: Making a film, you have all these different departments, and what you’re trying to do is find a way to get them to put forth their creativity in a harmonious way. Otherwise, it’s like you have an orchestra where everybody’s playing their own music. Each individual piece might be beautiful, but together they’re crazy.
The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team that collaborates in the way you’re describing?
Brad Bird: When I directed The Iron Giant, I inherited a team that was totally broken—a bunch of miserable people who had just gone through a horrific experience on a previous film that had bombed. When the time came for animators to start showing me their work, I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person.
For my reviews, I got a video projector and had an animator’s scenes projected onto a dry-erase board. I could freeze a frame and take a marker and show where I thought things should be versus where they were. I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together. If there is a solution, I want everyone to hear the solution, so everyone adds it to their tool kit. I’m going to take my shot at what I think will improve a scene, but if you see something different, go ahead and disagree. I don’t know all the answers.”
So I started in: “I think the elbow needs to come up higher here so that we feel the thrust of this action.” “I’m not seeing the thought process on the character here.” “Does anybody disagree? Come on, speak up.” The room was silent because with the previous director, anyone who dared to say anything got their head chopped off.
For two months, I pushed and analyzed each person’s work in front of everybody. And they didn’t speak up. One day, I did my thing, and one of the guys sighed. I shouted, “What was that?” And he said, “Nothing man, it’s OK.” And I said, “No, you sighed. Clearly, you disagree with something I did there. Show me what you’re thinking. I might not have it right. You might. Show me.” So he came up, and I handed him the dry-erase marker. He erased what I did. Then he did something different and explained why he thought it ought to be that way. I said, “That’s better than what I did. Great.” Everybody saw that he didn’t get his head chopped off. And our learning curve went straight up. By the end of the film, that animation team was much stronger than at the beginning, because we had all learned from each other’s strengths. But it took two months for people to feel safe enough to speak up.
The Quarterly: How does your experience with that team compare with your work leading creative teams at Pixar?
Brad Bird: When Pixar asked me to take over Ratatouille, the project had been in development for five years but was not in any shape to produce as a movie. There was a moment, at the very beginning of my involvement, when I was in a room full of about 30 people. At this stage, the rats in the movie had been articulated. Articulation is where they design how the muscles and controls work on the characters. Because people were worried about the audience’s reaction to rats, all of them were designed to walk on two legs.
I thought that was a mistake. I knew it would be an expensive use of resources, at that point in the process, to rearticulate the rats, but I said, “We have to get them so that they walk on all fours. And Remy, the protagonist rat, has to be able to walk not only on all fours but up on two legs.” Everybody said, “Ugh!” because they had spent a year making the rats look good walking on two legs. If you simply took those models, bent them over, and put them on all fours, their hips didn’t work and things just looked wrong. They were designed to be upright.
One of the guys challenged me. He said, “I want to know why you’re doing this.” Now, I had gone into this film reluctantly. It’s not what I was looking to do after The Incredibles. And there was a part of me that wanted to say, “Because I’m the director, that’s why. Do you want to take this problematic thing over?”
But I stopped and thought for a second. I thought, these guys have been sent down blind alleys for a couple of years. They want to know that I’m not doing anything lightly and that if I’m going to make them do a bunch more work, it’s for a reason. So I said, “This movie is about a rat who wants to enter the human world. We have to make that a visual choice for the character. If you have all of the rats walking on two legs, there’s no separation between him and the other rats. If we have this separation as a visual device, we can see the character make his transformation and choose to be on two legs, and he can become more or less ratty, depending on his emotional state. That brings the audience into the character’s mind.”
I spent six minutes saying all this and the guy was initially scowling. But gradually the scowl went away, and he said, “OK.” Once I gave that answer, everyone felt, “OK, we’re on this ship and we’re going toward a definite destination.”
The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.
Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.
The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?
Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. There was a point during the making of The Incredibles where we had a company meeting. We have them about twice a year, and anybody can bring up concerns. Somebody raised their hand and said, “Is The Incredibles too ambitious?” Ed Catmull said, “I don’t know” and looked over at me. I just said, “No! If there’s one studio that needs to be doing stuff that is ‘too ambitious,’ it’s this one. You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”
The Quarterly: If you ask most companies how they innovate, they’ll say, “Know your customer. Find out what your customer really wants you to do.” It sounds like you think about innovation differently.
Brad Bird: Our goal is different because if you say you’re making a movie for “them,” that automatically puts you on an unsteady footing. The implication is, you’re making it for a group that you are not a member of—and there is something very insincere in that. If you’re dealing with a storytelling medium, which is a mechanized means of producing and presenting a dream that you’re inviting people to share, you’d better believe your dream or else it’s going to come off as patronizing.
So my goal is to make a movie I want to see. If I do it sincerely enough and well enough—if I’m hard on myself and not completely off base, not completely different from the rest of humanity—other people will also get engaged and find the film entertaining.
The Quarterly: What does Pixar do to stimulate a creative culture?
Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii. Steve Jobs initially didn’t like this idea, but John Lasseter said, “We’ve got to let it go a little crazy where the animators are.” John believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.
Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.
The Quarterly: Is there anything else you’d highlight that contributes to creativity around here?
Brad Bird: One thing Pixar does—which is a knockoff of old-school, Walt-era 1940s Disney—is to have all kinds of optional classes. They call it “PU,” or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. Sometimes, people even move from one area to another.
The Quarterly: On the one hand, you are a leader here. On the other hand, you sound like a bit of a subversive. How do you do both things?
Brad Bird: I think the best leaders are somewhat subversive, because they see something a different way. And I’m not leading by myself. My producer, John Walker, and I are famous for fighting openly, because he’s got to get it done and I’ve got to make it as good as it can be before it gets done. If you look at the extra materials on The Incredibles DVD, there’s a moment where we’re fighting about something, and John says, “Look, I’m just trying to get us across the line.” And I say, “I’m trying to get us across the line in first place.”
I don’t want him to tell me, “Whatever you want, Brad,” and then we run out of resources. I want him to tell me, “If you do X, we’re not going to be able to do Y.” I’ll fight, but I’ll have to make the choice. I love working with John because he’ll give me the bad news straight to my face. Ultimately, we both win. If you ask within Pixar, we are known as being efficient. Our movies aren’t cheap, but the money gets on the screen because we’re open in our conflict. Nothing is hidden.
The Quarterly: We’ve been talking a lot about how you promote innovation. What undermines it?
Brad Bird: Passive-aggressive people—people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.
The Quarterly: What kinds of leaders inhibit innovation?
Brad Bird: When I first started at Disney, the old master animators were slowly leaving, and there was an animator in his 40s starting to direct films there; management was sort of grooming him to take over animation at the studio. Anyway, he had taken over a film and had a bunch of us meet in his office. The first thing that came out of his mouth was, “I’m here to teach you. I’m satisfied with what I do.” In that opening statement, he lost me because I had already worked with the old Disney masters—and they were never satisfied.
It’s surreal to think about now, but my first real, formal teachers in animation were the best animators in the world. I’d started a film when I was 11, and a friend of the family knew the composer of the Disney films, who took me into the studio. I met a lot of the great old master animators. Their worst animation was 1,000 times better than this new director’s best, yet they would get to the end of a film and say, “I just started to feel like I was understanding the character, and I want to go back and do the whole thing over. Can’t wait for next time!” They were masters of the form, but they had the attitude of a student. This guy taking over the studio had only done a few pieces of pretty good animation, and he was totally satisfied. Could not have been less inspiring.
The Quarterly: How would you compare the Disney of your early career with Pixar today?
Brad Bird: When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain. It was this amazing machine that was beautiful but old and getting a little decrepit. Still, they had the best system on earth at that time. They had the best talent. The movies were still well executed, if uninspired.
But Disney at this time was pared down. They were making one film every three years rather than a film every year or year and a half, as they had at Disney’s height. Walt had been gone for more than a decade, and the old guys were leaving. The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”
Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.
Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.
About the Authors
Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton are both professors at Stanford University, where Rao is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business and Sutton is a professor of management science and engineering in the School of Engineering. Allen Webb is a member of The McKinsey Quarterly’s board of editors.
Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird
What does stimulating the creativity of animators have in common with developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs? A lot.
Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb
April 2008
If there’s one thing successful innovators have shown over the years, it’s that great ideas come from unexpected places. Who could have predicted that bicycle mechanics would develop the airplane or that the US Department of Defense would give rise to a freewheeling communications platform like the Internet?
Senior executives looking for ideas about how to make their companies more innovative can also seek inspiration in surprising sources. Exhibit One: Brad Bird, Pixar’s two-time Oscar-winning director. Bird’s hands-on approach to fostering creativity among animators holds powerful lessons for any executive hoping to nurture innovation in teams and organizations.
Bird joined Pixar in 2000, when the company was riding high following its release of the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and the subsequent hits A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. Concerned about complacency, senior executives Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter asked Bird, whose body of work included The Iron Giant and The Simpsons, to join the company and shake things up. The veteran of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, and FOX delivered—winning Academy Awards (best animated feature) for two groundbreaking movies, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
Ten days before Ratatouille won its Oscar, we sat down with Bird at the Emeryville, California, campus of Pixar, which is now a subsidiary of Disney.1 Bird discussed the importance, in his work, of pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent, and building morale. He also explained the value of “black sheep”—restless contributors with unconventional ideas. Although stimulating the creativity of animators might seem very different from developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs, Bird’s anecdotes should stir the imagination of innovation-minded executives in any industry.
The Quarterly: What attracted you to Pixar?
Brad Bird: One thing that was unbelievably different about this company was that they were worried about becoming complacent. When I came here, they had made three movies—Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2—that had all been big hits. I was coming off a film called The Iron Giant that was a highly regarded financial failure.
Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter said, in effect, “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, but if you can convince us, we’ll do things a different way.” For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, “Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up”—when do you run into that?
The Quarterly: How did your first project at Pixar—The Incredibles—shake things up?
Brad Bird: The Incredibles was everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing. It had human characters, it had hair, it had water, it had fire, it had a massive number of sets. The creative heads were excited about the idea of the film, but once I showed story reels of exactly what I wanted, the technical teams turned white. They took one look and thought, “This will take ten years and cost $500 million. How are we possibly going to do this?”
So I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well.
We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here. For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas.
The Quarterly: What sorts of things did you do differently?
Brad Bird: There are purists in computer graphics who are brilliant but don’t have the urgency about budgets and scheduling that responsible filmmakers do. I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen if they took too long to achieve it in the computer. I’d say, “Look, I don’t have to do the water through a computer simulation program. If we can’t get a program to work, I’m perfectly content to film a splash in a swimming pool and just composite the water in.” This absolutely horrified them. Or I’d say, “You can build a flying saucer, or you can take a pie plate and fling it across the screen. If the audience only sees the pie plate very briefly and you throw it just right, they will buy it as a flying saucer.”
I never did film the pool splash or throw the pie plate, but talking this way helped everyone understand that we didn’t have to make something that would work from every angle. Not all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.
We also made superelaborate storyboards. We even emulated camera movement in them, so everyone knew that “We only need to make things work between here and there.” Once I was able to commit to the camera angles, we could be very specific about how we built things. Something would look beautiful from one position, but if you moved five feet to the right, the image would disintegrate. I gave up the flexibility to move within a set, but in exchange I bought size and scope.
The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation? Can you be innovative and also happy?
Brad Bird: I would say that involved people make for better innovation. Passionate involvement can make you happy, sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.
The Quarterly: How important is team dynamics to innovation and creativity?
Brad Bird: Making a film, you have all these different departments, and what you’re trying to do is find a way to get them to put forth their creativity in a harmonious way. Otherwise, it’s like you have an orchestra where everybody’s playing their own music. Each individual piece might be beautiful, but together they’re crazy.
The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team that collaborates in the way you’re describing?
Brad Bird: When I directed The Iron Giant, I inherited a team that was totally broken—a bunch of miserable people who had just gone through a horrific experience on a previous film that had bombed. When the time came for animators to start showing me their work, I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person.
For my reviews, I got a video projector and had an animator’s scenes projected onto a dry-erase board. I could freeze a frame and take a marker and show where I thought things should be versus where they were. I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together. If there is a solution, I want everyone to hear the solution, so everyone adds it to their tool kit. I’m going to take my shot at what I think will improve a scene, but if you see something different, go ahead and disagree. I don’t know all the answers.”
So I started in: “I think the elbow needs to come up higher here so that we feel the thrust of this action.” “I’m not seeing the thought process on the character here.” “Does anybody disagree? Come on, speak up.” The room was silent because with the previous director, anyone who dared to say anything got their head chopped off.
For two months, I pushed and analyzed each person’s work in front of everybody. And they didn’t speak up. One day, I did my thing, and one of the guys sighed. I shouted, “What was that?” And he said, “Nothing man, it’s OK.” And I said, “No, you sighed. Clearly, you disagree with something I did there. Show me what you’re thinking. I might not have it right. You might. Show me.” So he came up, and I handed him the dry-erase marker. He erased what I did. Then he did something different and explained why he thought it ought to be that way. I said, “That’s better than what I did. Great.” Everybody saw that he didn’t get his head chopped off. And our learning curve went straight up. By the end of the film, that animation team was much stronger than at the beginning, because we had all learned from each other’s strengths. But it took two months for people to feel safe enough to speak up.
The Quarterly: How does your experience with that team compare with your work leading creative teams at Pixar?
Brad Bird: When Pixar asked me to take over Ratatouille, the project had been in development for five years but was not in any shape to produce as a movie. There was a moment, at the very beginning of my involvement, when I was in a room full of about 30 people. At this stage, the rats in the movie had been articulated. Articulation is where they design how the muscles and controls work on the characters. Because people were worried about the audience’s reaction to rats, all of them were designed to walk on two legs.
I thought that was a mistake. I knew it would be an expensive use of resources, at that point in the process, to rearticulate the rats, but I said, “We have to get them so that they walk on all fours. And Remy, the protagonist rat, has to be able to walk not only on all fours but up on two legs.” Everybody said, “Ugh!” because they had spent a year making the rats look good walking on two legs. If you simply took those models, bent them over, and put them on all fours, their hips didn’t work and things just looked wrong. They were designed to be upright.
One of the guys challenged me. He said, “I want to know why you’re doing this.” Now, I had gone into this film reluctantly. It’s not what I was looking to do after The Incredibles. And there was a part of me that wanted to say, “Because I’m the director, that’s why. Do you want to take this problematic thing over?”
But I stopped and thought for a second. I thought, these guys have been sent down blind alleys for a couple of years. They want to know that I’m not doing anything lightly and that if I’m going to make them do a bunch more work, it’s for a reason. So I said, “This movie is about a rat who wants to enter the human world. We have to make that a visual choice for the character. If you have all of the rats walking on two legs, there’s no separation between him and the other rats. If we have this separation as a visual device, we can see the character make his transformation and choose to be on two legs, and he can become more or less ratty, depending on his emotional state. That brings the audience into the character’s mind.”
I spent six minutes saying all this and the guy was initially scowling. But gradually the scowl went away, and he said, “OK.” Once I gave that answer, everyone felt, “OK, we’re on this ship and we’re going toward a definite destination.”
The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.
Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.
The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?
Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. There was a point during the making of The Incredibles where we had a company meeting. We have them about twice a year, and anybody can bring up concerns. Somebody raised their hand and said, “Is The Incredibles too ambitious?” Ed Catmull said, “I don’t know” and looked over at me. I just said, “No! If there’s one studio that needs to be doing stuff that is ‘too ambitious,’ it’s this one. You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”
The Quarterly: If you ask most companies how they innovate, they’ll say, “Know your customer. Find out what your customer really wants you to do.” It sounds like you think about innovation differently.
Brad Bird: Our goal is different because if you say you’re making a movie for “them,” that automatically puts you on an unsteady footing. The implication is, you’re making it for a group that you are not a member of—and there is something very insincere in that. If you’re dealing with a storytelling medium, which is a mechanized means of producing and presenting a dream that you’re inviting people to share, you’d better believe your dream or else it’s going to come off as patronizing.
So my goal is to make a movie I want to see. If I do it sincerely enough and well enough—if I’m hard on myself and not completely off base, not completely different from the rest of humanity—other people will also get engaged and find the film entertaining.
The Quarterly: What does Pixar do to stimulate a creative culture?
Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii. Steve Jobs initially didn’t like this idea, but John Lasseter said, “We’ve got to let it go a little crazy where the animators are.” John believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.
Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.
The Quarterly: Is there anything else you’d highlight that contributes to creativity around here?
Brad Bird: One thing Pixar does—which is a knockoff of old-school, Walt-era 1940s Disney—is to have all kinds of optional classes. They call it “PU,” or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. Sometimes, people even move from one area to another.
The Quarterly: On the one hand, you are a leader here. On the other hand, you sound like a bit of a subversive. How do you do both things?
Brad Bird: I think the best leaders are somewhat subversive, because they see something a different way. And I’m not leading by myself. My producer, John Walker, and I are famous for fighting openly, because he’s got to get it done and I’ve got to make it as good as it can be before it gets done. If you look at the extra materials on The Incredibles DVD, there’s a moment where we’re fighting about something, and John says, “Look, I’m just trying to get us across the line.” And I say, “I’m trying to get us across the line in first place.”
I don’t want him to tell me, “Whatever you want, Brad,” and then we run out of resources. I want him to tell me, “If you do X, we’re not going to be able to do Y.” I’ll fight, but I’ll have to make the choice. I love working with John because he’ll give me the bad news straight to my face. Ultimately, we both win. If you ask within Pixar, we are known as being efficient. Our movies aren’t cheap, but the money gets on the screen because we’re open in our conflict. Nothing is hidden.
The Quarterly: We’ve been talking a lot about how you promote innovation. What undermines it?
Brad Bird: Passive-aggressive people—people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.
The Quarterly: What kinds of leaders inhibit innovation?
Brad Bird: When I first started at Disney, the old master animators were slowly leaving, and there was an animator in his 40s starting to direct films there; management was sort of grooming him to take over animation at the studio. Anyway, he had taken over a film and had a bunch of us meet in his office. The first thing that came out of his mouth was, “I’m here to teach you. I’m satisfied with what I do.” In that opening statement, he lost me because I had already worked with the old Disney masters—and they were never satisfied.
It’s surreal to think about now, but my first real, formal teachers in animation were the best animators in the world. I’d started a film when I was 11, and a friend of the family knew the composer of the Disney films, who took me into the studio. I met a lot of the great old master animators. Their worst animation was 1,000 times better than this new director’s best, yet they would get to the end of a film and say, “I just started to feel like I was understanding the character, and I want to go back and do the whole thing over. Can’t wait for next time!” They were masters of the form, but they had the attitude of a student. This guy taking over the studio had only done a few pieces of pretty good animation, and he was totally satisfied. Could not have been less inspiring.
The Quarterly: How would you compare the Disney of your early career with Pixar today?
Brad Bird: When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain. It was this amazing machine that was beautiful but old and getting a little decrepit. Still, they had the best system on earth at that time. They had the best talent. The movies were still well executed, if uninspired.
But Disney at this time was pared down. They were making one film every three years rather than a film every year or year and a half, as they had at Disney’s height. Walt had been gone for more than a decade, and the old guys were leaving. The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”
Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.
Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.
About the Authors
Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton are both professors at Stanford University, where Rao is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business and Sutton is a professor of management science and engineering in the School of Engineering. Allen Webb is a member of The McKinsey Quarterly’s board of editors.
29 de abril de 2008
Sugar and spice
Human reproduction
Sugar and spice...
Apr 24th 2008From The Economist print edition
Skip breakfast for a daughter, eat up your cereals for a son
THERE are numerous old wives' tales about how a couple can increase their chances of having a boy or a girl. For a son, make love only on odd days of the month, eat plenty of meat and be sure the father keeps his genitals cool by wearing boxer shorts and loose-fitting trousers; for a daughter, put a wooden spoon under the bed and eat plenty of yogurt.
Although a child's sex is genetically determined by the father, mothers can influence the development of one sex rather than another. Studies in animals and humans suggest that there are links between the sex of a child and the mother's diet and her levels of stress. Although the mechanisms are not well understood, this appears to have evolutionary roots which favour greater reproductive success. Hence in hard times when food might be scarce, daughters were more valuable because their chances of providing offspring would have been greater than sons, who might get killed or fail to find a mate. But in good times sons were a better bet because they could father more children.
Those same evolutionary influences persist in modern life. New research shows a clear link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons—especially by mothers who eat cereals for breakfast.
The study, by a team of researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, looked at the eating habits of 740 British mothers expecting their first child. The overall sex ratio of their children was close to 50:50. But when split into three groups according to the number of calories the mothers consumed around the time of conception, the picture changed. Of those with the highest energy intake, 56% had sons, against 45% in the group with the lowest calorie intake. Moreover, besides consuming more calories the women with sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and range of nutrients, especially breakfast cereals.
This could help to explain why there has been a small but consistent decline over the past 40 years in the proportion of boys being born in relatively well-off industrialised countries, says Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter, the lead author of the group's paper, which was published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Big dietary changes have taken place in developed countries. Yet despite rising levels of obesity and a decline in physical activity, the group could find no evidence of a link between the body-mass index of a mother and the sex of her child. But worries about weight have led many women to eat low-calorie diets. Moreover, says Dr Mathews, skipping breakfast has become far more common.
So what could be happening? It is known from in vitro fertilisation research that high levels of glucose can enhance the growth and development of male embryos but inhibit female ones. Skipping breakfast extends the normal period of nocturnal fasting and depresses glucose levels, which the group thinks could be interpreted by the body as indicative of hard times. So, prospective parents now know what to do first thing in the morning.
Sugar and spice...
Apr 24th 2008From The Economist print edition
Skip breakfast for a daughter, eat up your cereals for a son
THERE are numerous old wives' tales about how a couple can increase their chances of having a boy or a girl. For a son, make love only on odd days of the month, eat plenty of meat and be sure the father keeps his genitals cool by wearing boxer shorts and loose-fitting trousers; for a daughter, put a wooden spoon under the bed and eat plenty of yogurt.
Although a child's sex is genetically determined by the father, mothers can influence the development of one sex rather than another. Studies in animals and humans suggest that there are links between the sex of a child and the mother's diet and her levels of stress. Although the mechanisms are not well understood, this appears to have evolutionary roots which favour greater reproductive success. Hence in hard times when food might be scarce, daughters were more valuable because their chances of providing offspring would have been greater than sons, who might get killed or fail to find a mate. But in good times sons were a better bet because they could father more children.
Those same evolutionary influences persist in modern life. New research shows a clear link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons—especially by mothers who eat cereals for breakfast.
The study, by a team of researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, looked at the eating habits of 740 British mothers expecting their first child. The overall sex ratio of their children was close to 50:50. But when split into three groups according to the number of calories the mothers consumed around the time of conception, the picture changed. Of those with the highest energy intake, 56% had sons, against 45% in the group with the lowest calorie intake. Moreover, besides consuming more calories the women with sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and range of nutrients, especially breakfast cereals.
This could help to explain why there has been a small but consistent decline over the past 40 years in the proportion of boys being born in relatively well-off industrialised countries, says Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter, the lead author of the group's paper, which was published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Big dietary changes have taken place in developed countries. Yet despite rising levels of obesity and a decline in physical activity, the group could find no evidence of a link between the body-mass index of a mother and the sex of her child. But worries about weight have led many women to eat low-calorie diets. Moreover, says Dr Mathews, skipping breakfast has become far more common.
So what could be happening? It is known from in vitro fertilisation research that high levels of glucose can enhance the growth and development of male embryos but inhibit female ones. Skipping breakfast extends the normal period of nocturnal fasting and depresses glucose levels, which the group thinks could be interpreted by the body as indicative of hard times. So, prospective parents now know what to do first thing in the morning.
17 de abril de 2008
Los santos padres
:: Los santos padres (II) - Andres Bedoya
Para quienes no leyeron mi artículo del jueves pasado, les reproduzco la “plegaria” que Benedicto XVI –en una noche de insomnio o pesadillas– ha dado a luz para ser formulada en las celebraciones litúrgicas de la Semana Santa Pasada, y dice así: “Recemos por los judíos. Que Dios Nuestro Señor ilumine sus corazones para que reconozcan a Jesucristo, Salvador de todos los hombres. Dios omnipotente y eterno, tú que quieres que todos los hombres se salven y lleguen al conocimiento de la verdad, concede, propicio, que, entrando la plenitud de los pueblos en tu Iglesia, todo Israel sea salvado.” ¡Es decir! ¡Eso sí es empaque, caparazón, raza y concha! ¡Para que los judíos se salven tienen que hacerse católicos! ¡Cojonudo! ¡Tiene la desvergüenza y frescura de darle consejos a Dios para la mejor forma de que el pueblo de Israel se salve! Te tengo una novedad, Benedicto: ni tú ni tus seguidores tienen pase libre al Paraíso, sin interesar cuántos colgandijos, cucuruchos báculos, oropeles y demás huevadas lleves en tu ataúd. Cuando mueras, igual que Cristo, volverás al polvo. Memento homo quia pulvis est et in púlverem reverteris. Jesucristo murió hace dos mil años y se fue al cielo, creyéndose judío de corazón. Si el nazareno volviese a la tierra, lo primero que haría es preguntar por la sinagoga más próxima, sin tener idea de lo que hicieron los pendejos de sus apóstoles. De enterarse, él mismo se crucifica de nuevo. ¡Por la metagalaxia! Este Papa no sólo quiere llevarnos de vuelta a la Santa Inquisición, sino directamente a Las Cruzadas. Se ha convertido en una suerte de matoncito de barrio. Y, más grave aún, su famosa “plegaria” se refiere exclusivamente al pueblo judío. Agradece ¡Oh Santísimo Padre! que Israel necesita del Vaticano como una suerte de contrapeso al Islam. De no ser así, ya te habría enviado al Mossad... sino a sus bombarderos. ¿Por qué no pergeñas otra “oración” dirigida al pueblo musulmán? ¿A ver, a ver? ¿Te atreverías? No lo creo. Al día siguiente se aparece por ahí un “musulmán bomba” en una de tus ceremonias públicas y te convierte la misa en un ají de gallina. Dice Julio María Sanguinetti, abogado, periodista y ex presidente del Uruguay acerca del horror que aquí comentamos: “La persecución racial, la intolerancia religiosa son males endémicos que aún debemos combatir. No es razonable, por lo mismo, que una iglesia vaticana, que venía evolucionando hacia el diálogo y la convivencia, dé este paso atrás. Grande o pequeño, no interesa. La cuestión es que la mentalidad que está en la raíz de esta decisión no se compadece con los esfuerzos de los últimos Papas y vuelve a sembrar una semilla de intolerancia que no deberíamos observar con indiferencia”. ¿Bien por don Julio María! ¡El sí se merece todo mi respeto! Hasta más vernos.
Para quienes no leyeron mi artículo del jueves pasado, les reproduzco la “plegaria” que Benedicto XVI –en una noche de insomnio o pesadillas– ha dado a luz para ser formulada en las celebraciones litúrgicas de la Semana Santa Pasada, y dice así: “Recemos por los judíos. Que Dios Nuestro Señor ilumine sus corazones para que reconozcan a Jesucristo, Salvador de todos los hombres. Dios omnipotente y eterno, tú que quieres que todos los hombres se salven y lleguen al conocimiento de la verdad, concede, propicio, que, entrando la plenitud de los pueblos en tu Iglesia, todo Israel sea salvado.” ¡Es decir! ¡Eso sí es empaque, caparazón, raza y concha! ¡Para que los judíos se salven tienen que hacerse católicos! ¡Cojonudo! ¡Tiene la desvergüenza y frescura de darle consejos a Dios para la mejor forma de que el pueblo de Israel se salve! Te tengo una novedad, Benedicto: ni tú ni tus seguidores tienen pase libre al Paraíso, sin interesar cuántos colgandijos, cucuruchos báculos, oropeles y demás huevadas lleves en tu ataúd. Cuando mueras, igual que Cristo, volverás al polvo. Memento homo quia pulvis est et in púlverem reverteris. Jesucristo murió hace dos mil años y se fue al cielo, creyéndose judío de corazón. Si el nazareno volviese a la tierra, lo primero que haría es preguntar por la sinagoga más próxima, sin tener idea de lo que hicieron los pendejos de sus apóstoles. De enterarse, él mismo se crucifica de nuevo. ¡Por la metagalaxia! Este Papa no sólo quiere llevarnos de vuelta a la Santa Inquisición, sino directamente a Las Cruzadas. Se ha convertido en una suerte de matoncito de barrio. Y, más grave aún, su famosa “plegaria” se refiere exclusivamente al pueblo judío. Agradece ¡Oh Santísimo Padre! que Israel necesita del Vaticano como una suerte de contrapeso al Islam. De no ser así, ya te habría enviado al Mossad... sino a sus bombarderos. ¿Por qué no pergeñas otra “oración” dirigida al pueblo musulmán? ¿A ver, a ver? ¿Te atreverías? No lo creo. Al día siguiente se aparece por ahí un “musulmán bomba” en una de tus ceremonias públicas y te convierte la misa en un ají de gallina. Dice Julio María Sanguinetti, abogado, periodista y ex presidente del Uruguay acerca del horror que aquí comentamos: “La persecución racial, la intolerancia religiosa son males endémicos que aún debemos combatir. No es razonable, por lo mismo, que una iglesia vaticana, que venía evolucionando hacia el diálogo y la convivencia, dé este paso atrás. Grande o pequeño, no interesa. La cuestión es que la mentalidad que está en la raíz de esta decisión no se compadece con los esfuerzos de los últimos Papas y vuelve a sembrar una semilla de intolerancia que no deberíamos observar con indiferencia”. ¿Bien por don Julio María! ¡El sí se merece todo mi respeto! Hasta más vernos.
XS,XS
:: ¡XS, XS, XS, XS! Andres Bedoya
El título de esta nota es el sonido que hacemos para que un perro ataque o para que dos peleen entre sí. Me ha provocado gritar ¡xs, xs, xs! para inyectar sangre en los ojos a un par de canes humanos: monseñor Juan Luis Cardenal Cipriani (muy religioso él) y su opuesto (pero no menos religioso), el ex congresista huevera (“caviar” se queda para los comunistas de apellido compuesto) y hoy compañero mío columnista en este mismo diario, Rolando Breña Pantoja. No soy quién para defender a Cipriani. Después de todo, la organización a la que pertenece, El Vaticano S.A., se asienta en la más grandotototototota de las mentiras que registra la historia de la humanidad: la divinidad de Jesús de Nazaret, inventada en el año 300 d.C. (más o menos) por el emperador romano Constantino e impuesta por la fuerza a todos los obispos de la época (los que votaron en contra fueron exiliados del imperio). Pero sí me revienta que quien critica a la Iglesia católica, recordando a Bruno, Servet, Copérnico y los ejemplitos de siempre, y a “genocidas y dictadores como Franco, Hitler, Pinochet y Fujimori”, tenga la concha de abanico, la raza, el empaque y la papa, de olvidarse de otros personajillos como Stalin (él solito ordenó la muerte de más de 20 millones de campesinos), Lenin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, todos los gobiernos títeres de los países satélites, y los chiquitos: el cobarde de Fidel Castro que sólo mataba por la espalda y el incapaz del “Che” Guevara, que fue espichado de su cargo por bruto, por órdenes de la Unión Soviética, y cuyo hobby era fusilar a víctimas debidamente maniatadas. Sí, mi querido Rolando, tienes razón: el marxismo no se vende. Son ustedes quienes se venden, infestan instituciones sanas y se cobijan bajo las polleras de las oenegés, con el único objetivo de impedir el progreso de un país y convertirlo en hacienda particular y privada para el enriquecimiento y poder de colonias de comunistas que sólo pueden triunfar económicamente esclavizando a los demás. El marxismo es una religión más que, como tal y como todas las religiones de la historia, sólo produce fanatismo, intolerancia, sangre y muerte. Y ustedes creen en ella a pesar de las pruebas en contra de su absoluta inoperancia. Marx, Engels, Lenin y Stalin son su particular “Santísima Cuatrinidad”, sus cuatro evangelistas. Y al igual que el cristianismo, también tuvieron su “reforma” y se dividieron en moscovitas, albaneses, maoístas, trosquistas, presidentegonzalistas, idea suche y cuanto hay. Si también usaran cucuruchos, báculos y polleritas, hace tiempo que habrían dejado sin trabajo a todos los payasos del planeta. Y todos nos mataríamos de la risa si no fueran tan peligrosos. Recuerda tus matemáticas: el marxismo (o comunismo o socialismo o como quieras llamarlo) ha causado ya la muerte de más de cien millones de personas... y la cuenta sigue corriendo, así que déjate de cojudeces. Hasta más vernos.
El título de esta nota es el sonido que hacemos para que un perro ataque o para que dos peleen entre sí. Me ha provocado gritar ¡xs, xs, xs! para inyectar sangre en los ojos a un par de canes humanos: monseñor Juan Luis Cardenal Cipriani (muy religioso él) y su opuesto (pero no menos religioso), el ex congresista huevera (“caviar” se queda para los comunistas de apellido compuesto) y hoy compañero mío columnista en este mismo diario, Rolando Breña Pantoja. No soy quién para defender a Cipriani. Después de todo, la organización a la que pertenece, El Vaticano S.A., se asienta en la más grandotototototota de las mentiras que registra la historia de la humanidad: la divinidad de Jesús de Nazaret, inventada en el año 300 d.C. (más o menos) por el emperador romano Constantino e impuesta por la fuerza a todos los obispos de la época (los que votaron en contra fueron exiliados del imperio). Pero sí me revienta que quien critica a la Iglesia católica, recordando a Bruno, Servet, Copérnico y los ejemplitos de siempre, y a “genocidas y dictadores como Franco, Hitler, Pinochet y Fujimori”, tenga la concha de abanico, la raza, el empaque y la papa, de olvidarse de otros personajillos como Stalin (él solito ordenó la muerte de más de 20 millones de campesinos), Lenin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, todos los gobiernos títeres de los países satélites, y los chiquitos: el cobarde de Fidel Castro que sólo mataba por la espalda y el incapaz del “Che” Guevara, que fue espichado de su cargo por bruto, por órdenes de la Unión Soviética, y cuyo hobby era fusilar a víctimas debidamente maniatadas. Sí, mi querido Rolando, tienes razón: el marxismo no se vende. Son ustedes quienes se venden, infestan instituciones sanas y se cobijan bajo las polleras de las oenegés, con el único objetivo de impedir el progreso de un país y convertirlo en hacienda particular y privada para el enriquecimiento y poder de colonias de comunistas que sólo pueden triunfar económicamente esclavizando a los demás. El marxismo es una religión más que, como tal y como todas las religiones de la historia, sólo produce fanatismo, intolerancia, sangre y muerte. Y ustedes creen en ella a pesar de las pruebas en contra de su absoluta inoperancia. Marx, Engels, Lenin y Stalin son su particular “Santísima Cuatrinidad”, sus cuatro evangelistas. Y al igual que el cristianismo, también tuvieron su “reforma” y se dividieron en moscovitas, albaneses, maoístas, trosquistas, presidentegonzalistas, idea suche y cuanto hay. Si también usaran cucuruchos, báculos y polleritas, hace tiempo que habrían dejado sin trabajo a todos los payasos del planeta. Y todos nos mataríamos de la risa si no fueran tan peligrosos. Recuerda tus matemáticas: el marxismo (o comunismo o socialismo o como quieras llamarlo) ha causado ya la muerte de más de cien millones de personas... y la cuenta sigue corriendo, así que déjate de cojudeces. Hasta más vernos.
24 de febrero de 2008
Moral thinking
Moral thinking
Feb 21st 2008 BOSTONFrom The Economist print edition
Biology invades a field philosophers thought was safely theirs
WHENCE morality? That is a question which has troubled philosophers since their subject was invented. Two and a half millennia of debate have, however, failed to produce a satisfactory answer. So now it is time for someone else to have a go. And at a panel discussion at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, a group of biologists did just that.
Mark Hauser, of Harvard University, opened the batting by asking whether morality is more than just the refined application of the emotions. He thinks that it is. Human brains, he believes, have a separate morality module. Brain-scanning experiments show that when a volunteer is faced with a moral dilemma (such as a runaway railway trolley approaching a set of points, with dire consequences whichever way he throws those points) his emotional centres are not involved in the decision. Such “trolleyology”, as it has waggishly been dubbed, also suggests that reason is not part of the process. Different ways of killing the same number of people with a runaway trolley produce systematically different answers.
That does not mean all moral decisions have to be the same in everyone (though in trolleyology they often are). Instead, Dr Hauser uses the analogy of language. All healthy humans have, in the words of his Harvard colleague Steven Pinker, a “language instinct” which incorporates the idea of nouns, verbs, adjectives and how these all fit together. Exactly which language you learn, though, depends on your upbringing.
David Sloan Wilson, of Binghamton University, in New York state, agrees with that point, but reckons the actual moral sense an individual acquires is not arbitrary, as a language is, but is functionally adapted to circumstances. He and his colleague Ingrid Storm looked at liberals and conservatives (in the American senses of the words). Each group has a package of values it sees as moral, while viewing many of the beliefs of the other side as immoral. Dr Wilson and Dr Storm restricted their study to white, Protestant teenagers, in order to eliminate confounding variables. However, their volunteers came from two different traditions—Pentecostal, which tends to the conservative, and Episcopalian, which tends to the liberal.
The researchers conducted the study by giving each volunteer a beeper that went off every two hours or so. When it beeped, the volunteer answered a questionnaire about what he was doing at that moment, and how he felt about it.
Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals were equally bored by their own company and that of others. Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.
Dr Wilson suspects that the liberal package of individualism and confrontation is the appropriate response to survival in a stable environment in which there is leisure for learning and reflection, and the consequences for a group's stability of such dissent are low. The conservative package of collectivism and conformity, by contrast, works in an unstable environment where joint action, and thus obedience to their group, are at a premium. It is an interesting suggestion, and it is one that plays into the question of how morality actually evolved.
That was addressed by Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. An important feature of moral behaviour is altruism. Normally, biologists explain this as being either nepotism or you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours. But Dr Bowles believes people do perform acts which cost them more than they gain. To explain this, he invokes an idea that went out of fashion in the 1960s: group selection. This says that the winnowing of the gene pool, which drives evolution, can favour or destroy entire social groups as single entities, as well as working at the level of individual organisms.
No one ever claimed group selection is impossible, but it looks mathematically unlikely. Dr Bowles, however, thinks that the virtues of human collaboration are so great that groups composed of genuine, self-sacrificing altruists would outcompete others.
His best example of such self-sacrifice is warfare, an activity in which morality and immorality intersect in ways that have always been puzzling—and where liberals and conservatives often draw opposite conclusions about what is right and wrong. Paradoxically, that clash of views suggests that Dr Bowles and Dr Wilson really are on to something with the idea of functional morality. Perhaps they and their colleagues can eventually do what philosophers have never managed, and explain moral behaviour in an intellectually satisfying way.
Feb 21st 2008 BOSTONFrom The Economist print edition
Biology invades a field philosophers thought was safely theirs
WHENCE morality? That is a question which has troubled philosophers since their subject was invented. Two and a half millennia of debate have, however, failed to produce a satisfactory answer. So now it is time for someone else to have a go. And at a panel discussion at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, a group of biologists did just that.
Mark Hauser, of Harvard University, opened the batting by asking whether morality is more than just the refined application of the emotions. He thinks that it is. Human brains, he believes, have a separate morality module. Brain-scanning experiments show that when a volunteer is faced with a moral dilemma (such as a runaway railway trolley approaching a set of points, with dire consequences whichever way he throws those points) his emotional centres are not involved in the decision. Such “trolleyology”, as it has waggishly been dubbed, also suggests that reason is not part of the process. Different ways of killing the same number of people with a runaway trolley produce systematically different answers.
That does not mean all moral decisions have to be the same in everyone (though in trolleyology they often are). Instead, Dr Hauser uses the analogy of language. All healthy humans have, in the words of his Harvard colleague Steven Pinker, a “language instinct” which incorporates the idea of nouns, verbs, adjectives and how these all fit together. Exactly which language you learn, though, depends on your upbringing.
David Sloan Wilson, of Binghamton University, in New York state, agrees with that point, but reckons the actual moral sense an individual acquires is not arbitrary, as a language is, but is functionally adapted to circumstances. He and his colleague Ingrid Storm looked at liberals and conservatives (in the American senses of the words). Each group has a package of values it sees as moral, while viewing many of the beliefs of the other side as immoral. Dr Wilson and Dr Storm restricted their study to white, Protestant teenagers, in order to eliminate confounding variables. However, their volunteers came from two different traditions—Pentecostal, which tends to the conservative, and Episcopalian, which tends to the liberal.
The researchers conducted the study by giving each volunteer a beeper that went off every two hours or so. When it beeped, the volunteer answered a questionnaire about what he was doing at that moment, and how he felt about it.
Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals were equally bored by their own company and that of others. Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.
Dr Wilson suspects that the liberal package of individualism and confrontation is the appropriate response to survival in a stable environment in which there is leisure for learning and reflection, and the consequences for a group's stability of such dissent are low. The conservative package of collectivism and conformity, by contrast, works in an unstable environment where joint action, and thus obedience to their group, are at a premium. It is an interesting suggestion, and it is one that plays into the question of how morality actually evolved.
That was addressed by Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. An important feature of moral behaviour is altruism. Normally, biologists explain this as being either nepotism or you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours. But Dr Bowles believes people do perform acts which cost them more than they gain. To explain this, he invokes an idea that went out of fashion in the 1960s: group selection. This says that the winnowing of the gene pool, which drives evolution, can favour or destroy entire social groups as single entities, as well as working at the level of individual organisms.
No one ever claimed group selection is impossible, but it looks mathematically unlikely. Dr Bowles, however, thinks that the virtues of human collaboration are so great that groups composed of genuine, self-sacrificing altruists would outcompete others.
His best example of such self-sacrifice is warfare, an activity in which morality and immorality intersect in ways that have always been puzzling—and where liberals and conservatives often draw opposite conclusions about what is right and wrong. Paradoxically, that clash of views suggests that Dr Bowles and Dr Wilson really are on to something with the idea of functional morality. Perhaps they and their colleagues can eventually do what philosophers have never managed, and explain moral behaviour in an intellectually satisfying way.
13 de enero de 2008
The accidental innovator
Business
Face value
The accidental innovator
Dec 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter, epitomises Silicon Valley's right brain
Sara Morishige
AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights. First, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known; and third, that good ideas seem obvious in retrospect. So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious.
Of his previous successes, Blogger is today the best-known. It came about in the late 1990s when Mr Williams and his team struggled to build a complex software tool to let people collaborate. To keep each other abreast of the project, they kept a simple internal diary. Since that seemed to be the only thing working well, they joked that it, not the original project, should become their product. Thus was born Blogger, a web service that lets anybody create a blog with a few clicks. At the time, almost nobody understood what a blog was, or why anybody would want one. But in 2003 Google bought the company, and both blogs and Blogger are today part of the internet's mainstream.
By transferring to Google, however, Mr Williams, with his intuitive right-brain approach, was moving to Silicon Valley's analytical left brain. Shy and taciturn, he discreetly lets on that he hated every minute of his time at what was already an internet superpower in the making. Google trumpets its innovative nature, but its genius is for attacking known problems (web search, e-mail, calendars, etc) with brute force—weapons of mass computing and mathematical algorithms. Mr Williams's passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways. Google values official brains—the credentialled, academic sort—whereas Mr Williams dropped out of university in Nebraska because he found the concept somewhat silly. He left Google after less than a year.
His next idea, he now realises, was flawed by being obvious not in retrospect, but from the start—itself an important lesson. When podcasts emerged as the audio analogue of blogs, Mr Williams used his Google money to invest in a firm called Odeo that aimed to make listening to podcasts easier. Yet such a tool was so vital that Apple did the job with iTunes, its popular music-library software, thus eliminating the need for Odeo.
So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?
Thinking with the left brain, most reasonable people seem to agree that this idea is hare-brained, frivolous, banal and ridiculous. Indeed it is. And millions of people absolutely love it, twittering away throughout the day. Like all new and cool things, says Mr Williams, it's “experiential”. So it turns out that mums love to be notified on their mobile phones that their teenager is “eating an orange”. Colleagues appreciate that you are “running late” as they wait in the meeting room. Friends seeing that you are “having an espresso at Starbucks” might stop by. And a lot of people simply feel more connected by scavenging for conversational scraps from their friends.
All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question—one that Mr Williams is intellectually curious about, though it has not exactly been his main concern in the past. He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious (though they all sit in the same snazzy San Francisco loft), and is looking for new talent.
The pursuit of accidents
The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.
For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software. He chooses still to be frustrated by it, saying that he would like to create some sort of “better to-do list”, a cross between a calendar, a wiki and other things. Ultimately, that is not the point, of course. The point is to try to do one thing, in the hope of losing discipline and focus at the first opportunity. “We have an itch that we scratch,” he says, “and that becomes the thing.” Silicon Valley is what it is because it has a few firms like Google—and lots of people like Evan Williams.
Face value
The accidental innovator
Dec 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter, epitomises Silicon Valley's right brain
Sara Morishige
AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights. First, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known; and third, that good ideas seem obvious in retrospect. So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious.
Of his previous successes, Blogger is today the best-known. It came about in the late 1990s when Mr Williams and his team struggled to build a complex software tool to let people collaborate. To keep each other abreast of the project, they kept a simple internal diary. Since that seemed to be the only thing working well, they joked that it, not the original project, should become their product. Thus was born Blogger, a web service that lets anybody create a blog with a few clicks. At the time, almost nobody understood what a blog was, or why anybody would want one. But in 2003 Google bought the company, and both blogs and Blogger are today part of the internet's mainstream.
By transferring to Google, however, Mr Williams, with his intuitive right-brain approach, was moving to Silicon Valley's analytical left brain. Shy and taciturn, he discreetly lets on that he hated every minute of his time at what was already an internet superpower in the making. Google trumpets its innovative nature, but its genius is for attacking known problems (web search, e-mail, calendars, etc) with brute force—weapons of mass computing and mathematical algorithms. Mr Williams's passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways. Google values official brains—the credentialled, academic sort—whereas Mr Williams dropped out of university in Nebraska because he found the concept somewhat silly. He left Google after less than a year.
His next idea, he now realises, was flawed by being obvious not in retrospect, but from the start—itself an important lesson. When podcasts emerged as the audio analogue of blogs, Mr Williams used his Google money to invest in a firm called Odeo that aimed to make listening to podcasts easier. Yet such a tool was so vital that Apple did the job with iTunes, its popular music-library software, thus eliminating the need for Odeo.
So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?
Thinking with the left brain, most reasonable people seem to agree that this idea is hare-brained, frivolous, banal and ridiculous. Indeed it is. And millions of people absolutely love it, twittering away throughout the day. Like all new and cool things, says Mr Williams, it's “experiential”. So it turns out that mums love to be notified on their mobile phones that their teenager is “eating an orange”. Colleagues appreciate that you are “running late” as they wait in the meeting room. Friends seeing that you are “having an espresso at Starbucks” might stop by. And a lot of people simply feel more connected by scavenging for conversational scraps from their friends.
All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question—one that Mr Williams is intellectually curious about, though it has not exactly been his main concern in the past. He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious (though they all sit in the same snazzy San Francisco loft), and is looking for new talent.
The pursuit of accidents
The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.
For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software. He chooses still to be frustrated by it, saying that he would like to create some sort of “better to-do list”, a cross between a calendar, a wiki and other things. Ultimately, that is not the point, of course. The point is to try to do one thing, in the hope of losing discipline and focus at the first opportunity. “We have an itch that we scratch,” he says, “and that becomes the thing.” Silicon Valley is what it is because it has a few firms like Google—and lots of people like Evan Williams.
In praise of nerds
American kids
In praise of nerds
Jan 10th 2008From The Economist print edition
“AND then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” That typically nifty passage comes from Dr Seuss's “If I Ran the Zoo”. The book was published in 1950 and contains the first use of the word “nerd”. How very unfortunate that Dr Seuss, whose verbal pyrotechnics have given so much pleasure to so many children, should also have given them, however innocently, the ghastly label “nerd”.
The precise meaning of the word (in its post-Seuss sense) is hard to pin down, as David Anderegg, a child psychologist and academic, argues in this thoughtful and warmly sympathetic book. It denotes a bundle of different qualities: “some combination of school success, interest in precision, unselfconsciousness, closeness to adults and interest in fantasy.”
But the word is no less powerful for its vagueness. Children intuitively understand what a nerd is, with terrible clarity. The bottom line, Mr Anderegg reckons, is that American kids grow up knowing that “nerds are bad and jocks are good”. (His focus is exclusively American: in many other countries academically high-achieving children are revered by their peers.) And this matters because these stereotypes become the basis for choices that children make about their identity and future.
Striving to do badly
Mr Anderegg draws on scores of interviews with his young patients to show what being called a nerd can do to a child. Some are driven to despair or suicide. But most cope by bending to peer pressure. “The kids who will really be hurt by the nerd/geek stereotypes are the kids who will shut down parts of themselves in order to fit in.” When these bright children start switching off their own lights to avoid being branded nerds, it is bad news for everyone—and for the economy. Mr Anderegg points to declining school performance and college enrolment in science subjects in America, and to the fact that employers in certain fields are now having to look abroad to find the best graduates.
Parents are partly to blame. Jockish parents may teach their children jockish ways. But nerdish parents are often just as culpable. Their indifference or high-mindedness can inadvertently bring misery on their children. Mr Anderegg tells a funny and moving story of one of his patients, a 13-year-old boy whose head-in-the-clouds parents sent him off to school every day in tracksuit bottoms, even though all the other children wore jeans. As a result he was ridiculed as a nerd. Mr Anderegg recalls how difficult it was to persuade the parents to consider buying their son a pair of jeans. Why should we, they scoffed. We love him as he is. Do we want to teach him that if other kids make fun of your appearance, you should change it? In the end, they were glad to be proved wrong. The boy got his jeans and the bullying stopped.
Mr Anderegg concludes with some practical tips for parents. The best he can offer by way of consolation is to point out that things usually get easier for nerdish children as they get older. Eventually, most of us work out that nerdiness tends to go hand-in-hand with higher-than-average levels of curiosity, creativity and enthusiasm. As such, nerds are not merely admirable but attractive. Nerds are cool.
In praise of nerds
Jan 10th 2008From The Economist print edition
“AND then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” That typically nifty passage comes from Dr Seuss's “If I Ran the Zoo”. The book was published in 1950 and contains the first use of the word “nerd”. How very unfortunate that Dr Seuss, whose verbal pyrotechnics have given so much pleasure to so many children, should also have given them, however innocently, the ghastly label “nerd”.
The precise meaning of the word (in its post-Seuss sense) is hard to pin down, as David Anderegg, a child psychologist and academic, argues in this thoughtful and warmly sympathetic book. It denotes a bundle of different qualities: “some combination of school success, interest in precision, unselfconsciousness, closeness to adults and interest in fantasy.”
But the word is no less powerful for its vagueness. Children intuitively understand what a nerd is, with terrible clarity. The bottom line, Mr Anderegg reckons, is that American kids grow up knowing that “nerds are bad and jocks are good”. (His focus is exclusively American: in many other countries academically high-achieving children are revered by their peers.) And this matters because these stereotypes become the basis for choices that children make about their identity and future.
Striving to do badly
Mr Anderegg draws on scores of interviews with his young patients to show what being called a nerd can do to a child. Some are driven to despair or suicide. But most cope by bending to peer pressure. “The kids who will really be hurt by the nerd/geek stereotypes are the kids who will shut down parts of themselves in order to fit in.” When these bright children start switching off their own lights to avoid being branded nerds, it is bad news for everyone—and for the economy. Mr Anderegg points to declining school performance and college enrolment in science subjects in America, and to the fact that employers in certain fields are now having to look abroad to find the best graduates.
Parents are partly to blame. Jockish parents may teach their children jockish ways. But nerdish parents are often just as culpable. Their indifference or high-mindedness can inadvertently bring misery on their children. Mr Anderegg tells a funny and moving story of one of his patients, a 13-year-old boy whose head-in-the-clouds parents sent him off to school every day in tracksuit bottoms, even though all the other children wore jeans. As a result he was ridiculed as a nerd. Mr Anderegg recalls how difficult it was to persuade the parents to consider buying their son a pair of jeans. Why should we, they scoffed. We love him as he is. Do we want to teach him that if other kids make fun of your appearance, you should change it? In the end, they were glad to be proved wrong. The boy got his jeans and the bullying stopped.
Mr Anderegg concludes with some practical tips for parents. The best he can offer by way of consolation is to point out that things usually get easier for nerdish children as they get older. Eventually, most of us work out that nerdiness tends to go hand-in-hand with higher-than-average levels of curiosity, creativity and enthusiasm. As such, nerds are not merely admirable but attractive. Nerds are cool.
The scent of a woman
How to find a mate
The scent of a woman (and a man)
Jan 10th 2008From The Economist print edition
A new kind of dating agency relies on matching people by their body odour
ONE of life's little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other—or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too.
ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.
In his original study Dr Wedekind recruited female volunteers to sniff men's three-day-old T-shirts and rate them for attractiveness. He then analysed the men's and women's DNA, looking in particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice, that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness. It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates. What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.
It did. Women preferred T-shirts from men whose MHC was most different from their own. What was more, women with similar MHCs favoured the use of similar commercial perfumes. This suggests that the role of such perfumes may be to flag up the underlying body scent rather than mask it, as a more traditional view of the aesthetics of body odour might suggest.
That makes evolutionary sense. The children of couples with a wide range of MHC genes, and thus of immune responses, will be better protected from disease. As the previous article suggests, that could be particularly important in a collaborative, group-living species such as humanity. Moreover, comparing MHCs could be a proxy for comparing kinship, and thus help to prevent inbreeding.
The promise of an MHC-based match is not only that your partner's old laundry will smell better but all sorts of other benefits too. The biological compatibility created by complementary immune systems apparently promises better orgasms, a lower likelihood of cuckoldry, more happiness and so on. Nor are heterosexuals the only ones who can benefit. Gay men and women respond as strongly to MHC-derived smells as straight people do—though, as might be expected, their response is to the smell of people of the same sex, rather than the opposite one.
Indeed, the only people for whom MHC matching might not be expected to work are women on the Pill. Chemical contraception, which mimics pregnancy, messes up the system because of an intriguing twist. When women are pregnant, they prefer the smell of MHCs that are similar to their own. This means they are happier in the company of their relatives, which may, as the previous article also suggests, bring evolutionary benefits of its own.
ScientificMatch.com does not rely entirely on the MHC. Besides sending off a swab taken from the inside of their cheek and a cheque for $1,995, hopeful singles have to answer the usual questionnaire about income, background and details such as whether they would prefer a skiing holiday to one spent sketching. They are not, however, asked whether they wear their T-shirts for three days on the trot.
The scent of a woman (and a man)
Jan 10th 2008From The Economist print edition
A new kind of dating agency relies on matching people by their body odour
ONE of life's little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other—or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too.
ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.
In his original study Dr Wedekind recruited female volunteers to sniff men's three-day-old T-shirts and rate them for attractiveness. He then analysed the men's and women's DNA, looking in particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice, that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness. It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates. What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.
It did. Women preferred T-shirts from men whose MHC was most different from their own. What was more, women with similar MHCs favoured the use of similar commercial perfumes. This suggests that the role of such perfumes may be to flag up the underlying body scent rather than mask it, as a more traditional view of the aesthetics of body odour might suggest.
That makes evolutionary sense. The children of couples with a wide range of MHC genes, and thus of immune responses, will be better protected from disease. As the previous article suggests, that could be particularly important in a collaborative, group-living species such as humanity. Moreover, comparing MHCs could be a proxy for comparing kinship, and thus help to prevent inbreeding.
The promise of an MHC-based match is not only that your partner's old laundry will smell better but all sorts of other benefits too. The biological compatibility created by complementary immune systems apparently promises better orgasms, a lower likelihood of cuckoldry, more happiness and so on. Nor are heterosexuals the only ones who can benefit. Gay men and women respond as strongly to MHC-derived smells as straight people do—though, as might be expected, their response is to the smell of people of the same sex, rather than the opposite one.
Indeed, the only people for whom MHC matching might not be expected to work are women on the Pill. Chemical contraception, which mimics pregnancy, messes up the system because of an intriguing twist. When women are pregnant, they prefer the smell of MHCs that are similar to their own. This means they are happier in the company of their relatives, which may, as the previous article also suggests, bring evolutionary benefits of its own.
ScientificMatch.com does not rely entirely on the MHC. Besides sending off a swab taken from the inside of their cheek and a cheque for $1,995, hopeful singles have to answer the usual questionnaire about income, background and details such as whether they would prefer a skiing holiday to one spent sketching. They are not, however, asked whether they wear their T-shirts for three days on the trot.
Osho; Autobiografía de un místico espiritualmente incorrecto
Osho; Autobiografía de un místico espiritualmente incorrecto ene2008
“-En la aldea no había escuela. Eso es muy importante porque, durante mis primeros nueve años, que son los formativos, no recibí educación. Después, aunque lo intenten, ya no te pueden educar.
-Obligar a un niño indefenso a seguir tus creencias es muy propio de los humanos; pero él no cayó en la tentación.
-Nadie debería mentir, por lo menos a un niño…Les puedes mentir muy fácilmente, ellos confiarán en ti. Si eres su padre a su madre, creerán que serás sincero. Por eso, toda la humanidad vive en la corrupción, en un lodo muy espeso y resbaladizo, en el lodo de todas las mentiras dichas a los niños durante siglos.
-Tener amor con libertad es como ser un rey o una reina. El amor te da las raíces en la tierra y la libertad te da las alas.
-…utilizo las palabras para crear intervalos de silencio…de modo que puedo decir cualquier cosa contradictoria, cualquier cosa absurda…porque mi propósito es sólo crear intervalos.
-La existencia no tiene una moralidad como tal; es amoral. Para la existencia no hay nada equivocado, ni nada correcto. Sólo hay una cosa correcta, que estés alerta y seas conciente. Entonces serás dichoso.
-Por ejemplo, puedes escuchar a los pájaros; de repente se detienen, de repente empiezan. Escucha…no existe razón para que ese cuervo emita sonidos y luego se detenga. Te está dando una oportunidad.
-Y para mí fue una sorpresa que, según vas entrando en el silencio, según te vas haciendo conciente, más alerta, empiezan a cambiar tus actos; pero no viceversa. Pueden cambiar tus actos, pero eso no te hará más conciente. Vuélvete más conciente y tus actos cambiarán, es sencillo y absolutamente científico. Es simplemente tu conciencia, tu silencio, tu paz, lo que te hace parecer tan alejado y estar tan profundamente implicado en todo lo que haces. No puedes hacerle daño a nadie; no puedes ser violento, no puedes enfadarte, no puedes ser avaro, no puedes ser ambicioso. Tu conciencia te ha dado tanta dicha…
-La meditación es un esfuerzo por poner luz, traer alegría, traer silencio, traer dicha, y partiendo de este mundo de la meditación es imposible que hagas algo malo.
-El orgasmo sexual te da el primer atisbo de la meditación, porque la mente se detiene, el tiempo se para.
-La verdad no puede ser dicha, pero puedes ser conducido hasta el punto donde la puedas ver.
-Cuando te ríes de verdad, de repente, la mente desaparece….la risa es una de las puertas más hermosas para conseguirlo. Si bailas de verdad, el pensamiento se detiene…dejando que la danza te posea; si eres poseído por la danza, la mente se detiene.
-Y convertirte en un individuo es conocer todo lo que merece la pena ser conocido, es experimentar todo lo que merece la pena experimentarse. Ser un individuo es ser libre, es estar iluminado.
-Jesús no fue cristiano, Buda no fue budista. La gente auténticamente religiosa ha sido simplemente religiosa; no ha sido dogmática.
-Adinatha fue el primero de los 24 maestros del jainismo, y este fue el primer salto cuántico; se deshizo de dios…pero no consigue colocar a la meditación en su lugar. Por el contrario, creó el ascetismo….pero dejó un vacío, y Buda lo llenó con la meditación.
Es un viaje interno para alcanzar el centro de tu conciencia, y el centro de tu conciencia es el centro de toda la existencia.
-La meditación no es otra cosa que retirar todas las barreras-pensamientos, emociones, sentimientos- que levantan un muro entre tú y la existencia. En el momento en que caen, de repente, te encuentras en armonía con la totalidad.
-Estas 3 grandes religiones hindúes nacieron de la prosperidad; por eso, Occidente inevitablemente va a sentirse atraído por las religiones orientales.
-Todo lo que es hermoso y todo lo que es grande en la historia de la humanidad ha sucedido sólo a través de unas pocas personas que han aunado sus energías para la exploración interna.
-Me gustaría que te prepararas cuanto antes para que podamos sentarnos simplemente en silencio, escuchando a los pájaros y a sus cantos, ó escuchando el latido de tu corazón, simplemente estando aquí, sin hacer nada…
-No seas codicioso, porque la codicia te lleva al futuro; no seas posesivo, porque el afán de posesión te hace aferrarte al pasado. Un hombre que quiere vivir en el presente tiene que estar libre de la codicia, del afán de posesión, de la ambición, de los deseos. Y eso es lo que yo llamo el arte de la meditación.
-…sólo las personas más mezquinas del mundo son atraídas por la política.
-Permanece en silencio, cierra los ojos, siente que todo tu cuerpo está totalmente congelado. Ahora mira dentro de ti, reúne toda tu conciencia, como si fuera una flecha yendo hacia el centro. En el centro eres un buda.
Profundo, cada vez más profundo, porque cuanto más profundo vayas, mayor será tu experiencia de la realidad eterna. Empezarán a derramarse flores sobre ti, la existencia entera se regocijará con tu silencio.
Cuando regreses, tráete al buda contigo. Tienes que exteriorizar el buda en tu vida cotidiana.
“-En la aldea no había escuela. Eso es muy importante porque, durante mis primeros nueve años, que son los formativos, no recibí educación. Después, aunque lo intenten, ya no te pueden educar.
-Obligar a un niño indefenso a seguir tus creencias es muy propio de los humanos; pero él no cayó en la tentación.
-Nadie debería mentir, por lo menos a un niño…Les puedes mentir muy fácilmente, ellos confiarán en ti. Si eres su padre a su madre, creerán que serás sincero. Por eso, toda la humanidad vive en la corrupción, en un lodo muy espeso y resbaladizo, en el lodo de todas las mentiras dichas a los niños durante siglos.
-Tener amor con libertad es como ser un rey o una reina. El amor te da las raíces en la tierra y la libertad te da las alas.
-…utilizo las palabras para crear intervalos de silencio…de modo que puedo decir cualquier cosa contradictoria, cualquier cosa absurda…porque mi propósito es sólo crear intervalos.
-La existencia no tiene una moralidad como tal; es amoral. Para la existencia no hay nada equivocado, ni nada correcto. Sólo hay una cosa correcta, que estés alerta y seas conciente. Entonces serás dichoso.
-Por ejemplo, puedes escuchar a los pájaros; de repente se detienen, de repente empiezan. Escucha…no existe razón para que ese cuervo emita sonidos y luego se detenga. Te está dando una oportunidad.
-Y para mí fue una sorpresa que, según vas entrando en el silencio, según te vas haciendo conciente, más alerta, empiezan a cambiar tus actos; pero no viceversa. Pueden cambiar tus actos, pero eso no te hará más conciente. Vuélvete más conciente y tus actos cambiarán, es sencillo y absolutamente científico. Es simplemente tu conciencia, tu silencio, tu paz, lo que te hace parecer tan alejado y estar tan profundamente implicado en todo lo que haces. No puedes hacerle daño a nadie; no puedes ser violento, no puedes enfadarte, no puedes ser avaro, no puedes ser ambicioso. Tu conciencia te ha dado tanta dicha…
-La meditación es un esfuerzo por poner luz, traer alegría, traer silencio, traer dicha, y partiendo de este mundo de la meditación es imposible que hagas algo malo.
-El orgasmo sexual te da el primer atisbo de la meditación, porque la mente se detiene, el tiempo se para.
-La verdad no puede ser dicha, pero puedes ser conducido hasta el punto donde la puedas ver.
-Cuando te ríes de verdad, de repente, la mente desaparece….la risa es una de las puertas más hermosas para conseguirlo. Si bailas de verdad, el pensamiento se detiene…dejando que la danza te posea; si eres poseído por la danza, la mente se detiene.
-Y convertirte en un individuo es conocer todo lo que merece la pena ser conocido, es experimentar todo lo que merece la pena experimentarse. Ser un individuo es ser libre, es estar iluminado.
-Jesús no fue cristiano, Buda no fue budista. La gente auténticamente religiosa ha sido simplemente religiosa; no ha sido dogmática.
-Adinatha fue el primero de los 24 maestros del jainismo, y este fue el primer salto cuántico; se deshizo de dios…pero no consigue colocar a la meditación en su lugar. Por el contrario, creó el ascetismo….pero dejó un vacío, y Buda lo llenó con la meditación.
Es un viaje interno para alcanzar el centro de tu conciencia, y el centro de tu conciencia es el centro de toda la existencia.
-La meditación no es otra cosa que retirar todas las barreras-pensamientos, emociones, sentimientos- que levantan un muro entre tú y la existencia. En el momento en que caen, de repente, te encuentras en armonía con la totalidad.
-Estas 3 grandes religiones hindúes nacieron de la prosperidad; por eso, Occidente inevitablemente va a sentirse atraído por las religiones orientales.
-Todo lo que es hermoso y todo lo que es grande en la historia de la humanidad ha sucedido sólo a través de unas pocas personas que han aunado sus energías para la exploración interna.
-Me gustaría que te prepararas cuanto antes para que podamos sentarnos simplemente en silencio, escuchando a los pájaros y a sus cantos, ó escuchando el latido de tu corazón, simplemente estando aquí, sin hacer nada…
-No seas codicioso, porque la codicia te lleva al futuro; no seas posesivo, porque el afán de posesión te hace aferrarte al pasado. Un hombre que quiere vivir en el presente tiene que estar libre de la codicia, del afán de posesión, de la ambición, de los deseos. Y eso es lo que yo llamo el arte de la meditación.
-…sólo las personas más mezquinas del mundo son atraídas por la política.
-Permanece en silencio, cierra los ojos, siente que todo tu cuerpo está totalmente congelado. Ahora mira dentro de ti, reúne toda tu conciencia, como si fuera una flecha yendo hacia el centro. En el centro eres un buda.
Profundo, cada vez más profundo, porque cuanto más profundo vayas, mayor será tu experiencia de la realidad eterna. Empezarán a derramarse flores sobre ti, la existencia entera se regocijará con tu silencio.
Cuando regreses, tráete al buda contigo. Tienes que exteriorizar el buda en tu vida cotidiana.
3 de enero de 2008
Examen médico para renovar brevete 2ene2008
El policía del aeropuerto me hizo notar hace varios meses que mi brevete había caducado. Me salvó contar con una licencia boliviana y mi residencia en ese país. Pocos días antes de fin de año, una redada en el peaje al sur nos recordó a Carmen y a mí que ya debíamos renovar brevete.
Fue una pena utilizar las vacaciones del 2 de enero para estos siempre antipáticos trámites, pero emprendimos la aventura tratando de mantener una artificial alegría, pensando en que siempre algo debemos aprender hasta de las peores tareas.
El pago de la tarifa de renovación en el Banco de la Nación cercano al Museo de la Nación fue increíblemente rápido. Dos colas bien organizadas y atendidas por muchas ventanillas. El banco ordenado y pulcro, los ventanilleros amables y bien vestidos. Todo excelente, como si estuviésemos en Suiza…
Con dificultad encontramos en tres paralelas al norte de la Javier Prado, a un par de cuadras del Sanjón, la clínica con nombre de santo que hace la evaluación medica previa a la emisión del brevete.
Gran sorpresa… en la puerta un señor pequeño nos abordó y nos dijo exactamente qué debíamos hacer y nos colocó en la ventanilla de recepción. Como Carmen no tenía las 2 fotos requeridas, él en segundos la fotografió con su cámara digital manual contra el muro de un pasillo.
Con una velocidad escalofriante recorrimos los diferentes y muy completos exámenes en diversas y pequeñas salitas con diferentes médicos: Historia clínica, vista, oído, examen escrito psicotécnico y psicológico, casi sin tiempos muertos y cruzándonos con muchos otras personas que sorprendidas hacían lo mismo. Sentí un sistema que había sido excelentemente bien organizado hasta en sus menores detalles, con gente motivada para dar el mejor servicio sin desperdiciar un minuto de los clientes. Creo que se trata de algo único en su género a nivel internacional y que puede servir de ejemplo para cualquier empresa de servicios aquí y en cualquier lugar de este planeta. Me sentí emocionado y feliz con sólo saber que esto existe y en Lima.
Con el documento en la mano que me declaró apto para renovar el brevete, busqué al responsable de esta maravilla de la humanidad y lo felicité casi con lágrimas en los ojos…
Fue una pena utilizar las vacaciones del 2 de enero para estos siempre antipáticos trámites, pero emprendimos la aventura tratando de mantener una artificial alegría, pensando en que siempre algo debemos aprender hasta de las peores tareas.
El pago de la tarifa de renovación en el Banco de la Nación cercano al Museo de la Nación fue increíblemente rápido. Dos colas bien organizadas y atendidas por muchas ventanillas. El banco ordenado y pulcro, los ventanilleros amables y bien vestidos. Todo excelente, como si estuviésemos en Suiza…
Con dificultad encontramos en tres paralelas al norte de la Javier Prado, a un par de cuadras del Sanjón, la clínica con nombre de santo que hace la evaluación medica previa a la emisión del brevete.
Gran sorpresa… en la puerta un señor pequeño nos abordó y nos dijo exactamente qué debíamos hacer y nos colocó en la ventanilla de recepción. Como Carmen no tenía las 2 fotos requeridas, él en segundos la fotografió con su cámara digital manual contra el muro de un pasillo.
Con una velocidad escalofriante recorrimos los diferentes y muy completos exámenes en diversas y pequeñas salitas con diferentes médicos: Historia clínica, vista, oído, examen escrito psicotécnico y psicológico, casi sin tiempos muertos y cruzándonos con muchos otras personas que sorprendidas hacían lo mismo. Sentí un sistema que había sido excelentemente bien organizado hasta en sus menores detalles, con gente motivada para dar el mejor servicio sin desperdiciar un minuto de los clientes. Creo que se trata de algo único en su género a nivel internacional y que puede servir de ejemplo para cualquier empresa de servicios aquí y en cualquier lugar de este planeta. Me sentí emocionado y feliz con sólo saber que esto existe y en Lima.
Con el documento en la mano que me declaró apto para renovar el brevete, busqué al responsable de esta maravilla de la humanidad y lo felicité casi con lágrimas en los ojos…
Fiesta de año nuevo 31dic2007
Fuimos a la fiesta para recibir el año nuevo en Playa Blanca y fue una grata sorpresa encontrar en nuestra mesa a un para mí desconocido pariente bastante cercano Álvaro García, quien forma parte mi familia de Arequipa. Resultó un placer saber que habíamos 2 arequipeños formando parte del grupo que se reunía para recibir el año nuevo. También estaba con nosotros un conde español nacido en Filipinas, un norteamericano y su esposa de origen griego, Duccio y su esposa Ángela y el minero Raúl y Lucia.
Luego de identificarnos con los nombres de nuestros padres, supe que nuestros abuelos fueron hermanos y que compartíamos varias tías muy cercanas, simpáticas y populares.
Ambos habíamos abandonado nuestra Arequipa para hacer estudios en universidades de Lima, y para mi fue una sorpresa reconocer que yo había hecho este viaje 4 años antes que él, quién me había parecido algunos años mayor que yo. Aclarando nuestras edades tuve que aceptar con pena y frustración que yo era hasta 5 años mayor que mi primo y sentí una satisfacción al sentirme menor que él. Esto fue corroborado por Duccio, uno de nuestros más cercanos amigos en el grupo, quién para mi alegría nos aseguró que yo me veía menor.
La fiesta no alcanzó toda la euforia que merecía el recibimiento del nuevo año, y alrededor de las 4 AM, ya cansados, decidimos retirarnos sin aviso para irnos sin las incomodas resistencias tribales.
Al salir como a bailar, atravesando con dificultad a todo lo ancho la pista de baile, y luego la gran área separada para los más jóvenes, me dio mucha pena ver a todos estos muchachos y muchachas haciendo grandes esfuerzos por emborracharse. Supongo que buscan así reducir las barreras interpersonales que la vida moderna les ha impuesto, les urge conocerse e intimar, y no encuentran una forma mejor.
Luego de identificarnos con los nombres de nuestros padres, supe que nuestros abuelos fueron hermanos y que compartíamos varias tías muy cercanas, simpáticas y populares.
Ambos habíamos abandonado nuestra Arequipa para hacer estudios en universidades de Lima, y para mi fue una sorpresa reconocer que yo había hecho este viaje 4 años antes que él, quién me había parecido algunos años mayor que yo. Aclarando nuestras edades tuve que aceptar con pena y frustración que yo era hasta 5 años mayor que mi primo y sentí una satisfacción al sentirme menor que él. Esto fue corroborado por Duccio, uno de nuestros más cercanos amigos en el grupo, quién para mi alegría nos aseguró que yo me veía menor.
La fiesta no alcanzó toda la euforia que merecía el recibimiento del nuevo año, y alrededor de las 4 AM, ya cansados, decidimos retirarnos sin aviso para irnos sin las incomodas resistencias tribales.
Al salir como a bailar, atravesando con dificultad a todo lo ancho la pista de baile, y luego la gran área separada para los más jóvenes, me dio mucha pena ver a todos estos muchachos y muchachas haciendo grandes esfuerzos por emborracharse. Supongo que buscan así reducir las barreras interpersonales que la vida moderna les ha impuesto, les urge conocerse e intimar, y no encuentran una forma mejor.
Jack Welsch; Winning
Jack Welsch; Winning, Dic2007
"La gente dice lo que piensa porque es más fácil.
Las personas con iniciativa, perspicacia y agallas son consideradas problemáticas…o algo peor.
Las compañías triunfan cuando sus directores hacen una distinción clara y significativa entre las personas y los negocios de alto y bajo rendimiento, cuando alientan a los fuertes y los distinguen de los débiles.
Una empresa tiene una cantidad limitada de tiempo y dinero. Los buenos líderes invierten donde los beneficios son más elevados y reducen pérdidas en los otros sectores.
En General Electric “fuerte” implicaba que un negocio ocupaba el primer o segundo puesto del mercado. Si no era así los directores debían modificarlo, venderlo, ó por ultimo recurso, cerrarlo.
Únicamente invierten su tiempo y su dinero en negocios ó líneas de productos que prometen un aumento de las ventas de dos dígitos. O solo invierten en negocios o líneas de productos con una tasa de rentabilidad neta descontada del 15% o más.
El proceso requiere que los directores evalúen a sus empleados y los dividan en 3 categorías según su rendimiento: una superior que engloba al 20% de los empleados; otra media, que incluye al 70% de ellos y una inferior con el 10% restante. Al 20% superior se le colma de primas y opciones. En una compañía que diferencia, esta claro quiénes son las estrellas. El 70% es el mayor desafío, mantenerlo comprometido y motivado. El 10% inferior tiene que marcharse. Cuando se le comunica su posición, suelen preferir marcharse antes que se lo pidan.
Las personas integras dicen la verdad y mantienen su palabra, se hacen responsables de sus acciones pasadas, admiten los errores y los solucionan, conocen las leyes de su país, de su industria y de su empresa y las cumplen.
Una persona debe tener gran curiosidad intelectual y una amplitud de conocimientos.
Los líderes no pueden tener una pizca de falsedad y deben tener una visión y la capacidad de predecir el futuro. Deben tender a rodearse de personas más inteligentes y mejores. Todos los líderes cometen errores, se tambalean y se caen. La cuestión es si el líder consigue aprender de sus errores, recuperarse y seguir adelante con energía renovada, convicción y confianza.
Sale a cuenta apostar por grandes potenciales.
Elevar los recursos humanos a una posición de poder y primacía dentro de la organización: Utilizar una evaluación estricta, crear mecanismos efectivos para motivar y retener al personal, afrontar directamente las relaciones problemáticas, diseñar el organigrama lo más llano posible.
El mejor personal de recursos humanos tiene una parte de confesor, que escucha todos los pecados y quejas sin recriminar, y otra de padre que da cariño y protección, pero también hace saber, sin rodeos, cuando se va por mal camino.
Los criterios para medir al personal han de ser cuantitativos (fundamentados en el rendimiento de la persona en relación a ciertos objetivos) y cualitativos (basados en el rendimiento en relación a conductas deseadas). Es deseable obtener de ellos los nombres de 2 ó 3 personas que puedan reemplazarlos en caso de ascenso.
Los sindicatos solo surgen cuando cuándo una fabrica ó un departamento concreto están dirigidos por alguien abusivo, distante o indiferente.
Las compañías deben hacerse un 50% más horizontales de lo que se considera normal. Los directores han de tener como mínimo 10 subordinados directos y de un 30 a 50% más si cuentan con experiencia.
Los directores necesitan aceptar que los despidos no deben evitarse, ni relegarse a recursos humanos, ni llevarse a cabo rápidamente mirando hacia otro lado. Son por el contrario un proceso del que deben encargarse por completo.
Su trabajo es saber cuanto más mejor y transmitirlo a los empleados con la mayor frecuencia y claridad posible. De esta forma, si se producen despidos, el personal está algo preparado.
Todo empleado que se va continúa representado a su empresa. Durante 5, 10 ó 15 años siguientes puede criticarla o alabarla.
Un buen proceso de evaluación del rendimiento informa y prepara al personal de la forma más limpia y clara posible. Si la persona sabe donde se encuentra, en realidad el despido nunca llega a producirse. Cuando las cosas no funcionan, finalmente se produce el mutuo acuerdo de tomar caminos separados.
Cambiar es imprescindible y mejor hacerlo antes de verse obligado a ello.
La gente adora lo conocido y los patrones. Se aferra a ellos. El fenómeno está tan arraigado que sólo puede atribuirse a la naturaleza humana.
Vincular cada cambio o iniciativa a un propósito u objetivo. Contratar y promocionar sólo a los que crean sinceramente en el cambio y a los que estén dispuestos a sumirlo. Identificar y apartar a los que se resisten al cambio, aunque su rendimiento sea bueno. Prestar atención a los desastres.
La gente asiente en las reuniones y acepta sin problemas que, considerando los datos, el cambio parezca necesario. Acto seguido, vuelve a sus puestos para seguir haciendo las cosas de siempre. Si la empresa ya ha pasado por varios programas de cambio, los empleados nos considerarán como una indigestión: seremos historia si tienen paciencia de esperar.
Los verdaderos agentes del cambio suman menos del 10% de todos los profesionales del sector empresarial. Una mayoría significativa (alrededor del 70 al 80%) quizá no lidere el cambio, pero una vez de que se le convence de que este es necesario, se muestra dispuesta a asumirlo. Los demás son reticentes.
Afortunadamente, los agentes del cambio suelen darse a conocer. Estas personas tienen valor, cierta audacia hacia lo desconocido.
Los que se oponen al avance son cada vez más intransigentes y, sus seguidores, cada vez más pertinaces. Su presencia es nociva para el cambio y es preferible librarse de ellos cuanto antes.
Las crisis exigen de los líderes un ejercicio de equilibrio realmente intimidatorio: por un lado, deben centrar todos sus recursos en intentar comprenderlas y resolverlas….al mismo tiempo deben aislar dicha actividad en un compartimiento estanco y seguir adelante como si nada sucediera.
Primero, asumir que el problema es peor de lo que parece. Segundo, asumir que en el mundo no hay secretos y que, tarde o temprano, todos se enterarán de lo que sucede. Tercero, asumir que la gestión de la crisis, tanto nuestra como de la organización, se describirá de la peor forma posible (debemos definir nuestra posición cuanto antes y las veces que sea necesario). Cuarto, asumir que se producirán cambios en los procesos y las personas. Quinto, asumir que la organización sobrevivirá y será más fuerte a consecuencia de lo sucedido.
Buscar inmunidad: Controles estrictos, buenos procesos internos y cultura de integridad.
Hay que asegurarse que lo que se dice es sólo la verdad, sin matices.
Cuanto más abiertamente se hable del problema, sus causas y sus soluciones, más confianza obtendrá de todos, tanto dentro como fuera de la organización, Y durante una crisis, lo que más se necesita es esa confianza.
No obstante, durante una crisis todas las puertas están cerradas. El director y su organización saldrán tan mal parados que no van a reconocerse.
Nuestra ausencia se interpretará como una admisión de culpa.
Si pretende triunfar en lo que a estrategia se refiere, hay que reflexionar menos y hacer más.
Primero, encontrar una gran idea para el negocio: un modo realista, inteligente y relativamente rápido de obtener una ventaja competitiva sostenible. Segundo: colocar a las personas adecuadas en el trabajo adecuado para sacar esta gran idea adelante. Tercero: buscar incesantemente las mejores prácticas, sea dentro o fuera de la empresa; adaptarlas y mejorarlas en forma continuada.
Cuando se elimina toda la paja, eso es lo que queda. Estrategia significa tomar decisiones claras sobre cómo competir.
Sabía que General Electric debía mantenerse lo más alejada posible de cualquier negocio que oliese a commodity y acercarse, en la medida de lo posible, al otro extremo del espectro.
Cuatro programas para reforzar nuestra estrategia: Globalización, Complementos a los servicios, Seis Sigma y la utilización de tecnologías digitales.
Dos férreos principios subyacentes: los productos de consumo no interesan y las personas lo son todo.
Hay que pensar en innovación, tecnología, procesos internos, complemento a servicios…todo aquello que sea único. Si se hace correctamente, incluso pueden cometerse algunos errores y ganar de todos modos.
La estrategia es una tarea del director general o el jefe del equipo y sus subordinados más directos. Estas personas pueden ver la organización en sus partes diferentes e independientes; conocen a su personal, asícomo a sus fuentes de ideas e innovación y pueden determinar dónde residen las oportunidades más interesantes. Con voluntad debería completarse en un plazo comprendido entre los dos días y un mes.
El método de las 5 diapositivas: Cuál es el terreno de juego? Los movimientos de la competencia. Nuestros movimientos. Qué hay a la vuelta de la esquina? Cuál es nuestra jugada para ganar?
Los negocios tenían que definir su mercado de tal modo que su cuota en cualquier mercado en que estuviesen no podía superar el 10%. Con esta restricción, el personal se vio forzado a asumir una nueva mentalidad y, de pronto, las oportunidades de expansión surgieron por todas partes.
La estrategia correcta asume que la competencia es muy buena, como mínimo, tan buena como la propia empresa, y que se mueve tan ó más rápido que nosotros.
Cualquier estrategia, por muy audaz e inteligente que sea, está muerta antes de empezar a menos que la empresa le dé vida con personas, las personas adecuadas. De nada sirven los discursos, son sólo palabrería. La organización sabe quiénes son las personas importantes: la nueva estrategia únicamente despegará si estas son las personas elegidas para liderarla.
Elegir el trabajo adecuado para cada persona.
El tercer paso de la estrategia consiste en hallar las mejores prácticas, adaptarlas y mejorarlas de forma continuada.
Las empresas que hacen de las mejores prácticas una prioridad son organizaciones prósperas, inquietas, dispuestas a aprender. Consideran que todos deberían siempre buscar una mejor forma de hacer las cosas; son empresas llenas de energía, curiosidad y espíritu de actividad.
En nuestra reunión trimestral de líderes de la empresa, pedíamos a estos que presentaran una mejor práctica que los otros pudieran utilizar.
La mejor ventaja de comprar en grandes cantidades (en otras palabras, de añadir cadenas y sucursales) es compartir conocimientos; por lo demás, el tamaño es un estorbo.
El proceso del presupuesto es, en muchas compañías, la práctica más ineficiente de la dirección. Absorbe la energía, el tiempo, la diversión y los grandes sueños de cualquier organización. Oculta las oportunidades y atrofia el crecimiento.
…usar el proceso presupuestario para descubrir todas las posibles oportunidades de expansión, identificar los obstáculos reales del entorno e idear un plan para hacer los sueños realidad…. Se centra en dos preguntas: Como podemos mejorar la actuación del año pasado? Qué hace nuestra competencia y cómo podemos superarlos?
…plan operativo para el año próximo, lleno de aspiraciones, principalmente direccional y que contiene cifras que ambas partes entienden como objetivos o, en otras palabras, cifras que podrían denominarse “los mejores esfuerzos”
…un plan operativo puede cambiar, tal como cambian las condiciones. Una división ó un negocio pueden tener dos ó tres planes operativos a lo largo del año, ajustados según se requiera, mediante un dialogo realista sobre los desafíos del negocio.
La compensación, tanto para los individuos, como para los negocios, no está unida al rendimiento determinado por el presupuesto, sino al rendimiento determinado por el rendimiento del año anterior y por la competencia; asimismo, tiene en cuenta las oportunidades estratégicas y los obstáculos.
Alejar nuestros negocios de unos presupuestos rígidos e inamovibles pata convertirlos en planes operativos con objetivos flexibles.
Tres directivas para hacer del crecimiento orgánico una propuesta ganadora. Invertir mucho inicialmente y situar a los mejores y más entusiastas en los puestos de responsabilidad. Armar un exagerado revuelo sobre el potencial y la importancia del nuevo negocio. Si hay que pecar de algo, que sea de conceder un exceso de libertad; hay que intentar no entrometerse en el camino del nuevo negocio.
Los que empiezan necesitan apoyo constante y evidente. Por ejemplo, los nuevos negocios deben rendir cuentas al menos dos escalafones por encima del que justificarían sus ventas. Si es posible, deberían estar directamente subordinados al director general.
La humildad es muy útil ante los colegas; tarde o temprano necesitaremos su apoyo.
Nada hay tan ameno y emocionante como empezar algo nuevo, sobre todo desde el interior de algo antiguo.
Las fusiones permiten de forma instantánea que una empresa mejore su plantilla: de pronto cuenta con el doble de personas para formar un equipo.
El primer error es pensar que puede darse una fusión entre iguales. El segundo es centrarse tanto en el encaje estratégico que se olvide el encaje cultural. El tercero es entrar en una situación de rehén a la inversa. El cuarto es integrarse con excesiva timidez. El quinto es el síndrome del conquistador. El sexto es pagar demasiado y el séptimo es la resistencia.
…lo que debe demostrarse si se desea sobrevivir a una fusión: entusiasmo, optimismo y apoyo meditado.
La consultoría McKinsey se la conoce por contratar a los mejores ejecutivos del mundo en inteligencia y entusiasmo.
…si se desea encontrar un trabajo fabuloso, debe elegirse algo que nos guste hacer, asegurarnos de que estamos con personas de nuestro agrado y luego darle todo lo que tenemos.
….la falta de sinceridad….no me refiero a mentir propiamente, sino a la tendencia a ocultar a otros la información. Es una conducta muy extendida que frustra en grado sumo tanto a los equipos como a los superiores.
…no debe obligarse a nuestro superior a formular la pregunta perfecta para sacarnos información.
La excesiva ambición personal….se muestra al difamar a los que nos rodean...ocultar los errores…intentar culpar de ellos a otra persona…acaparar reuniones, asumir mérito desproporcionado por los exitos del equipo…
…un mal jefe consigue matar esa parte de nuestra alma de donde provienen la energía positiva, el compromiso y la esperanza.
La principal prioridad del jefe es la competitividad. Lo quiere todo de sus empleados: el cerebro, el cuerpo, la energía y el compromiso….dicha ofensiva es hacer el trabajo tan emocionante y divertido que la gente no quiera volver a casa para cenar.
…describiría el verdadero equilibrio entre vida personal y laboral como el anticuado sistema de puntos. Las personas con un gran rendimiento acumulan puntos que pueden canjear por flexibilidad. Cuantos más puntos tienen, mayores son también las opciones de trabajar cuándo y dónde se desee.
… por lo general no es necesario rechazar un ascenso para conseguir el equilibrio deseado. Basta con rechazar temas de menor importancia, como una petición para unirse a otra junta sin ánimo de lucro, dirigir otro equipo deportivo infantil y asuntos similares. Si acepta todo, no se consigue el equilibrio, sino el desequilibrio.
…lo mejor que puede hacerse es ofrecer resultados excepcionales, tratar a los subordinados con el mismo cuidado con que se trata al jefe, hacerse visible mediante el apoyo temprano a iniciativas importantes, atesorar la sabiduría de numerosos mentores y siempre, siempre, tener un planteamiento positivo y lleno de energía tanto en la vida como en el trabajo. Al mismo tiempo, no debemos obligar a nuestro superior a que utilice su capital político para defendernos, ni permitir que los reveses nos hundan.
…el liderazgo consiste en ayudar a otros a crecer y tener éxito."
"La gente dice lo que piensa porque es más fácil.
Las personas con iniciativa, perspicacia y agallas son consideradas problemáticas…o algo peor.
Las compañías triunfan cuando sus directores hacen una distinción clara y significativa entre las personas y los negocios de alto y bajo rendimiento, cuando alientan a los fuertes y los distinguen de los débiles.
Una empresa tiene una cantidad limitada de tiempo y dinero. Los buenos líderes invierten donde los beneficios son más elevados y reducen pérdidas en los otros sectores.
En General Electric “fuerte” implicaba que un negocio ocupaba el primer o segundo puesto del mercado. Si no era así los directores debían modificarlo, venderlo, ó por ultimo recurso, cerrarlo.
Únicamente invierten su tiempo y su dinero en negocios ó líneas de productos que prometen un aumento de las ventas de dos dígitos. O solo invierten en negocios o líneas de productos con una tasa de rentabilidad neta descontada del 15% o más.
El proceso requiere que los directores evalúen a sus empleados y los dividan en 3 categorías según su rendimiento: una superior que engloba al 20% de los empleados; otra media, que incluye al 70% de ellos y una inferior con el 10% restante. Al 20% superior se le colma de primas y opciones. En una compañía que diferencia, esta claro quiénes son las estrellas. El 70% es el mayor desafío, mantenerlo comprometido y motivado. El 10% inferior tiene que marcharse. Cuando se le comunica su posición, suelen preferir marcharse antes que se lo pidan.
Las personas integras dicen la verdad y mantienen su palabra, se hacen responsables de sus acciones pasadas, admiten los errores y los solucionan, conocen las leyes de su país, de su industria y de su empresa y las cumplen.
Una persona debe tener gran curiosidad intelectual y una amplitud de conocimientos.
Los líderes no pueden tener una pizca de falsedad y deben tener una visión y la capacidad de predecir el futuro. Deben tender a rodearse de personas más inteligentes y mejores. Todos los líderes cometen errores, se tambalean y se caen. La cuestión es si el líder consigue aprender de sus errores, recuperarse y seguir adelante con energía renovada, convicción y confianza.
Sale a cuenta apostar por grandes potenciales.
Elevar los recursos humanos a una posición de poder y primacía dentro de la organización: Utilizar una evaluación estricta, crear mecanismos efectivos para motivar y retener al personal, afrontar directamente las relaciones problemáticas, diseñar el organigrama lo más llano posible.
El mejor personal de recursos humanos tiene una parte de confesor, que escucha todos los pecados y quejas sin recriminar, y otra de padre que da cariño y protección, pero también hace saber, sin rodeos, cuando se va por mal camino.
Los criterios para medir al personal han de ser cuantitativos (fundamentados en el rendimiento de la persona en relación a ciertos objetivos) y cualitativos (basados en el rendimiento en relación a conductas deseadas). Es deseable obtener de ellos los nombres de 2 ó 3 personas que puedan reemplazarlos en caso de ascenso.
Los sindicatos solo surgen cuando cuándo una fabrica ó un departamento concreto están dirigidos por alguien abusivo, distante o indiferente.
Las compañías deben hacerse un 50% más horizontales de lo que se considera normal. Los directores han de tener como mínimo 10 subordinados directos y de un 30 a 50% más si cuentan con experiencia.
Los directores necesitan aceptar que los despidos no deben evitarse, ni relegarse a recursos humanos, ni llevarse a cabo rápidamente mirando hacia otro lado. Son por el contrario un proceso del que deben encargarse por completo.
Su trabajo es saber cuanto más mejor y transmitirlo a los empleados con la mayor frecuencia y claridad posible. De esta forma, si se producen despidos, el personal está algo preparado.
Todo empleado que se va continúa representado a su empresa. Durante 5, 10 ó 15 años siguientes puede criticarla o alabarla.
Un buen proceso de evaluación del rendimiento informa y prepara al personal de la forma más limpia y clara posible. Si la persona sabe donde se encuentra, en realidad el despido nunca llega a producirse. Cuando las cosas no funcionan, finalmente se produce el mutuo acuerdo de tomar caminos separados.
Cambiar es imprescindible y mejor hacerlo antes de verse obligado a ello.
La gente adora lo conocido y los patrones. Se aferra a ellos. El fenómeno está tan arraigado que sólo puede atribuirse a la naturaleza humana.
Vincular cada cambio o iniciativa a un propósito u objetivo. Contratar y promocionar sólo a los que crean sinceramente en el cambio y a los que estén dispuestos a sumirlo. Identificar y apartar a los que se resisten al cambio, aunque su rendimiento sea bueno. Prestar atención a los desastres.
La gente asiente en las reuniones y acepta sin problemas que, considerando los datos, el cambio parezca necesario. Acto seguido, vuelve a sus puestos para seguir haciendo las cosas de siempre. Si la empresa ya ha pasado por varios programas de cambio, los empleados nos considerarán como una indigestión: seremos historia si tienen paciencia de esperar.
Los verdaderos agentes del cambio suman menos del 10% de todos los profesionales del sector empresarial. Una mayoría significativa (alrededor del 70 al 80%) quizá no lidere el cambio, pero una vez de que se le convence de que este es necesario, se muestra dispuesta a asumirlo. Los demás son reticentes.
Afortunadamente, los agentes del cambio suelen darse a conocer. Estas personas tienen valor, cierta audacia hacia lo desconocido.
Los que se oponen al avance son cada vez más intransigentes y, sus seguidores, cada vez más pertinaces. Su presencia es nociva para el cambio y es preferible librarse de ellos cuanto antes.
Las crisis exigen de los líderes un ejercicio de equilibrio realmente intimidatorio: por un lado, deben centrar todos sus recursos en intentar comprenderlas y resolverlas….al mismo tiempo deben aislar dicha actividad en un compartimiento estanco y seguir adelante como si nada sucediera.
Primero, asumir que el problema es peor de lo que parece. Segundo, asumir que en el mundo no hay secretos y que, tarde o temprano, todos se enterarán de lo que sucede. Tercero, asumir que la gestión de la crisis, tanto nuestra como de la organización, se describirá de la peor forma posible (debemos definir nuestra posición cuanto antes y las veces que sea necesario). Cuarto, asumir que se producirán cambios en los procesos y las personas. Quinto, asumir que la organización sobrevivirá y será más fuerte a consecuencia de lo sucedido.
Buscar inmunidad: Controles estrictos, buenos procesos internos y cultura de integridad.
Hay que asegurarse que lo que se dice es sólo la verdad, sin matices.
Cuanto más abiertamente se hable del problema, sus causas y sus soluciones, más confianza obtendrá de todos, tanto dentro como fuera de la organización, Y durante una crisis, lo que más se necesita es esa confianza.
No obstante, durante una crisis todas las puertas están cerradas. El director y su organización saldrán tan mal parados que no van a reconocerse.
Nuestra ausencia se interpretará como una admisión de culpa.
Si pretende triunfar en lo que a estrategia se refiere, hay que reflexionar menos y hacer más.
Primero, encontrar una gran idea para el negocio: un modo realista, inteligente y relativamente rápido de obtener una ventaja competitiva sostenible. Segundo: colocar a las personas adecuadas en el trabajo adecuado para sacar esta gran idea adelante. Tercero: buscar incesantemente las mejores prácticas, sea dentro o fuera de la empresa; adaptarlas y mejorarlas en forma continuada.
Cuando se elimina toda la paja, eso es lo que queda. Estrategia significa tomar decisiones claras sobre cómo competir.
Sabía que General Electric debía mantenerse lo más alejada posible de cualquier negocio que oliese a commodity y acercarse, en la medida de lo posible, al otro extremo del espectro.
Cuatro programas para reforzar nuestra estrategia: Globalización, Complementos a los servicios, Seis Sigma y la utilización de tecnologías digitales.
Dos férreos principios subyacentes: los productos de consumo no interesan y las personas lo son todo.
Hay que pensar en innovación, tecnología, procesos internos, complemento a servicios…todo aquello que sea único. Si se hace correctamente, incluso pueden cometerse algunos errores y ganar de todos modos.
La estrategia es una tarea del director general o el jefe del equipo y sus subordinados más directos. Estas personas pueden ver la organización en sus partes diferentes e independientes; conocen a su personal, asícomo a sus fuentes de ideas e innovación y pueden determinar dónde residen las oportunidades más interesantes. Con voluntad debería completarse en un plazo comprendido entre los dos días y un mes.
El método de las 5 diapositivas: Cuál es el terreno de juego? Los movimientos de la competencia. Nuestros movimientos. Qué hay a la vuelta de la esquina? Cuál es nuestra jugada para ganar?
Los negocios tenían que definir su mercado de tal modo que su cuota en cualquier mercado en que estuviesen no podía superar el 10%. Con esta restricción, el personal se vio forzado a asumir una nueva mentalidad y, de pronto, las oportunidades de expansión surgieron por todas partes.
La estrategia correcta asume que la competencia es muy buena, como mínimo, tan buena como la propia empresa, y que se mueve tan ó más rápido que nosotros.
Cualquier estrategia, por muy audaz e inteligente que sea, está muerta antes de empezar a menos que la empresa le dé vida con personas, las personas adecuadas. De nada sirven los discursos, son sólo palabrería. La organización sabe quiénes son las personas importantes: la nueva estrategia únicamente despegará si estas son las personas elegidas para liderarla.
Elegir el trabajo adecuado para cada persona.
El tercer paso de la estrategia consiste en hallar las mejores prácticas, adaptarlas y mejorarlas de forma continuada.
Las empresas que hacen de las mejores prácticas una prioridad son organizaciones prósperas, inquietas, dispuestas a aprender. Consideran que todos deberían siempre buscar una mejor forma de hacer las cosas; son empresas llenas de energía, curiosidad y espíritu de actividad.
En nuestra reunión trimestral de líderes de la empresa, pedíamos a estos que presentaran una mejor práctica que los otros pudieran utilizar.
La mejor ventaja de comprar en grandes cantidades (en otras palabras, de añadir cadenas y sucursales) es compartir conocimientos; por lo demás, el tamaño es un estorbo.
El proceso del presupuesto es, en muchas compañías, la práctica más ineficiente de la dirección. Absorbe la energía, el tiempo, la diversión y los grandes sueños de cualquier organización. Oculta las oportunidades y atrofia el crecimiento.
…usar el proceso presupuestario para descubrir todas las posibles oportunidades de expansión, identificar los obstáculos reales del entorno e idear un plan para hacer los sueños realidad…. Se centra en dos preguntas: Como podemos mejorar la actuación del año pasado? Qué hace nuestra competencia y cómo podemos superarlos?
…plan operativo para el año próximo, lleno de aspiraciones, principalmente direccional y que contiene cifras que ambas partes entienden como objetivos o, en otras palabras, cifras que podrían denominarse “los mejores esfuerzos”
…un plan operativo puede cambiar, tal como cambian las condiciones. Una división ó un negocio pueden tener dos ó tres planes operativos a lo largo del año, ajustados según se requiera, mediante un dialogo realista sobre los desafíos del negocio.
La compensación, tanto para los individuos, como para los negocios, no está unida al rendimiento determinado por el presupuesto, sino al rendimiento determinado por el rendimiento del año anterior y por la competencia; asimismo, tiene en cuenta las oportunidades estratégicas y los obstáculos.
Alejar nuestros negocios de unos presupuestos rígidos e inamovibles pata convertirlos en planes operativos con objetivos flexibles.
Tres directivas para hacer del crecimiento orgánico una propuesta ganadora. Invertir mucho inicialmente y situar a los mejores y más entusiastas en los puestos de responsabilidad. Armar un exagerado revuelo sobre el potencial y la importancia del nuevo negocio. Si hay que pecar de algo, que sea de conceder un exceso de libertad; hay que intentar no entrometerse en el camino del nuevo negocio.
Los que empiezan necesitan apoyo constante y evidente. Por ejemplo, los nuevos negocios deben rendir cuentas al menos dos escalafones por encima del que justificarían sus ventas. Si es posible, deberían estar directamente subordinados al director general.
La humildad es muy útil ante los colegas; tarde o temprano necesitaremos su apoyo.
Nada hay tan ameno y emocionante como empezar algo nuevo, sobre todo desde el interior de algo antiguo.
Las fusiones permiten de forma instantánea que una empresa mejore su plantilla: de pronto cuenta con el doble de personas para formar un equipo.
El primer error es pensar que puede darse una fusión entre iguales. El segundo es centrarse tanto en el encaje estratégico que se olvide el encaje cultural. El tercero es entrar en una situación de rehén a la inversa. El cuarto es integrarse con excesiva timidez. El quinto es el síndrome del conquistador. El sexto es pagar demasiado y el séptimo es la resistencia.
…lo que debe demostrarse si se desea sobrevivir a una fusión: entusiasmo, optimismo y apoyo meditado.
La consultoría McKinsey se la conoce por contratar a los mejores ejecutivos del mundo en inteligencia y entusiasmo.
…si se desea encontrar un trabajo fabuloso, debe elegirse algo que nos guste hacer, asegurarnos de que estamos con personas de nuestro agrado y luego darle todo lo que tenemos.
….la falta de sinceridad….no me refiero a mentir propiamente, sino a la tendencia a ocultar a otros la información. Es una conducta muy extendida que frustra en grado sumo tanto a los equipos como a los superiores.
…no debe obligarse a nuestro superior a formular la pregunta perfecta para sacarnos información.
La excesiva ambición personal….se muestra al difamar a los que nos rodean...ocultar los errores…intentar culpar de ellos a otra persona…acaparar reuniones, asumir mérito desproporcionado por los exitos del equipo…
…un mal jefe consigue matar esa parte de nuestra alma de donde provienen la energía positiva, el compromiso y la esperanza.
La principal prioridad del jefe es la competitividad. Lo quiere todo de sus empleados: el cerebro, el cuerpo, la energía y el compromiso….dicha ofensiva es hacer el trabajo tan emocionante y divertido que la gente no quiera volver a casa para cenar.
…describiría el verdadero equilibrio entre vida personal y laboral como el anticuado sistema de puntos. Las personas con un gran rendimiento acumulan puntos que pueden canjear por flexibilidad. Cuantos más puntos tienen, mayores son también las opciones de trabajar cuándo y dónde se desee.
… por lo general no es necesario rechazar un ascenso para conseguir el equilibrio deseado. Basta con rechazar temas de menor importancia, como una petición para unirse a otra junta sin ánimo de lucro, dirigir otro equipo deportivo infantil y asuntos similares. Si acepta todo, no se consigue el equilibrio, sino el desequilibrio.
…lo mejor que puede hacerse es ofrecer resultados excepcionales, tratar a los subordinados con el mismo cuidado con que se trata al jefe, hacerse visible mediante el apoyo temprano a iniciativas importantes, atesorar la sabiduría de numerosos mentores y siempre, siempre, tener un planteamiento positivo y lleno de energía tanto en la vida como en el trabajo. Al mismo tiempo, no debemos obligar a nuestro superior a que utilice su capital político para defendernos, ni permitir que los reveses nos hundan.
…el liderazgo consiste en ayudar a otros a crecer y tener éxito."
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