Four Innovation Lessons from Anheuser-Busch – Scott Anthony – Harvard Business Review
Refreshingly simple, clear, and concise.
Adapting to your business and executing well. That’s the hard part.
Four Innovation Lessons from a Beer Company
Lifelong Learning
The Contingent Workforce – a $425 Billion Market
You’re Hired. At Least for Now. – Kiplinger.com
The job is not a timeless fact of human existence. It is a social artifact.
William Bridges wrote these words over 15 years ago. We need to fully understand this concept and decide what kind of future we want for ourselves. Do you want to be in or out? Nearly four years ago I started my business on a part-time basis. One year ago, I became 100% self-employed. If you are an underwriter, the time to be an independent for hire has never been better.
If you’re in underwriting management your options for creating the right hybrid model to fit your needs has never been better. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
I have a mortgage, two kids in college, and a small fleet of cars to support. Hire me please.
Attack of the Giant Killer Squid – Update 2/2/10
SOA Report – Automated Life Underwriting
Research Project – Automated Life Underwriting
The link takes you to the SOA website page where the full report can be downloaded.
Read a Book a Week – 2009 Results
1.0 per week in 2009.
Experience matters. Now I know why from the following NYT article.
Better pattern recognition, significance recognition, and faster solutions.
I hope you kept some of your older underwriters on the payroll.
Adult Learning – Neuroscience – How to Train the Aging Brain – NYTimes.com
Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.
What Matters? A Thought For The Decade
A Life That Matters
Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.
So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won’t matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end. It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.
So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave. What will matter is not your success, but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example. What will matter is not your competence, but your character. What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone. What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.
Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice. Choose to live a life that matters. It really matters!
Michael Josephson
A New Paradigm for Education
Reining in College Costs – BusinessWeek
In the “learning” paradigm, the teacher is not the expert provider of knowledge, but rather a guide who first specifies what students are expected to learn and then lays out pathways they can follow to meet the learning goals. The teacher becomes a supporter, a collaborator, and a coach for students as they learn to evaluate and gather information, test ideas, and explore their application to different issues and problems. Students begin to learn how to develop and pose their own questions and to explore alternative ways of finding and framing answers. So instead of working only to master the subject matter of a course, students are developing the skills to learn on their own. They no longer wait to be taught—they come to realize that, if they are to succeed, they must take a good deal of responsibility for their own learning.
Read this article written by Michael Bassis, President of Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. We need to rethink corporate training methods if you agree with Mr. Bassis’ paradigm shift assessment.
Read a Book a Week – Change Your Brain Structure
Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain ‘Highways’ : NPR
Intensive reading programs can produce measurable changes in the structure of a child’s brain, according to a study in the journal Neuron. The study found that several different programs improved the integrity of fibers that carry information from one part of the brain to another.
How to Be Happy
How Adults Achieve Happiness – BusinessWeek
Our findings were in many cases unexpected but clear-cut. There is an incredibly high correlation between people’s happiness and meaning at work and at home. In other words, those who experience happiness and meaning at work tend also to experience them outside of work. Those who are miserable on the job are usually miserable at home.
The implication is unmistakable. Since work and home are very different environments, our experience of happiness and meaning in life appears to have more to do with who we are than where we are. Rather than blaming our jobs, our managers, and our customers—or our friends, family members, and communities—for our negative worklife experience, we might be better served by looking in the mirror.
CRP as Risk Factor for CHD
Conclusion: Strong evidence indicates that CRP is associated with CHD events. Moderate, consistent evidence suggests that adding CRP to risk prediction models among initially intermediate-risk persons improves risk stratification. However, sufficient evidence that reducing CRP levels prevents CHD events is lacking.
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