The Boston brewer defied the odds in creating the Samuel Adams brand, nurturing the U.S. craft beer industry in the process. Forty years ago, the legacy of five brewing generations seemed a dead end for Jim Koch. His father, whose roots reach back to Germany, had been squeezed out of the business as small local breweries throughout the United States were closing their doors and the industry's largest players focused on mass-produced, light beer. The
future of craft beer appeared bleak. So Koch (pronounced Cook) enrolled in Harvard. After graduating, he worked for Outward Bound, coaching participants through new challenges, before returning to Harvard to earn advanced degrees in business and law. Then working as a corporate consultant, he noticed the most successful executives
followed their passions. In 1984, he decided to buck the industry trend and...
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More than 600 CEOs rated states on a wide range of criteria from taxation and regulation to workforce quality and living environment, in our sixth annual special report.
In Chief Executive's annual survey of best and worst states for business, conducted in late January of this year, 651 CEOs across the U.S. again gave Texas top honors, closely followed by North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. They gave the booby prize for worst state to California, with New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts
filling out the bottom five-a line-up virtually unchanged from last year. Florida and Georgia each dropped three places in the ranking, but remain in the top 10. Utah jumped six positions this year to sneak into the top 10 at No. 9. The business leaders were asked to draw upon their direct experience to rate each state in three general
categories: taxation and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment. Within each category respondents graded states in five subcategories, as well as...
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The recession is no excuse for ignoring, misusing, or demeaning talent. But hey, if that's what you really want to do, follow these suggestions.
The last time I checked, the U.S. led the world in productivity per employee. That's the good news. The bad news is that much, if not all, of that boost in productivity has come on the backs of workers, especially salaried types viewed by too many management teams as infinitely elastic resources. As one management consultant told me: "The
average company takes better care of its copiers than it does its talent." Many chief executives use the tough competitive environment as a handy excuse to put off salary increases, tighten the screws on performance, and generally drop any pretense of creating a human-centered workplace. But the tough-economy picture has two sides. Only
those companies that make the effort to keep their employees productive by treating them decently can expect to see continued productivity gains. Much of the workforce has tuned out, waiting for...
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How to Stop Multitasking The benefits of NOT multitasking are many and important to your productivity.
Doing too many things at once is like giving up ten IQ points-and a bunch of other scary stuff, warns Peter Bregman.
During a conference call with the executive committee of a nonprofit board on which I sit I decided to send an email to a client. I know, I know. You'd think I'd have learned. Last week I wrote about the dangers of using a cell phone while driving. Multitasking is dangerous. And so I proposed a way to stop. But when I sent that email, I
wasn't in a car. I was safe at my desk. What could go wrong? Well, I sent the client the message. Then I had to send him another one, this time with the attachment I had forgotten to append. Finally, my third email to him explained why that attachment wasn't what he was expecting. When I eventually refocused on the call, I realized I
hadn't heard a question the Chair of the Board had asked me. I swear I wasn't smoking anything. But I might as well have been...
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Companies fear the proposed rule will trigger more audits.
If you’re reading this article sitting down-the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day-stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down? These symptoms are all normal, and they’re
not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you’re doing-sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion:...
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The recession forced many chief executives to find new ways to run their business-and many are relying on those changes to help fuel growth and cost savings in the recovery.
During the slump, Regus PLC, a provider of outsourced office space, launched more lower-priced services after customers cut spending. A Bayer AG division sought new business in alternative energy when its traditional car and construction markets dried up. Duke Energy Corp. solicited employee ideas for cost cuts when demand for energy
fell. Now, all of those initiatives are outlasting the recession, executives say. "They're not going back to the old way," says Harold Sirkin, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group. Regus, which has over 400 locations in the U.S. and others in Europe, hoped at the beginning of the recession that corporate clients would use more of
its office space and video-conferencing facilities as firms slashed travel budgets and downsized their own offices. But that strategy didn't pan out...
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Divide notes into three categories and keep those requiring work in a ''to-do'' folder.
I love e-mail. I love its efficiency, its clarity and the fact that it creates a detailed, searchable record. E-mail also makes me a little nuts. If I'm away from it for a couple of hours, messages pile up. When I confront more than 50, I feel a combination of depression, weariness and low-grade panic, until I make that "unread" number
disappear.My method: Scan the pile for urgent notes from bosses, sources, friends or family, attending to the most important first. Then I go through the rest quickly, starting from the bottom. I delete junk. When I need to answer, I do so right away. If my response requires time, I make a note on my to-do list for later. This strategy works
fine, but I figured there must be someone who knows better than I how to handle the e-mail inbox, which many workers describe as their greatest obstacle to efficiency on the job. So I turned to an e-mail expert, Mark Hurst, 37, business consultant and author of the book
Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-Mail Overload...
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The meltdowns of 1987 and May 6's flash crash might never have happened if he'd succeeded in getting Congress to listen. "In my judgment, a very high percentage, probably at least 95% and more likely much higher, of the activity generated by these contracts will be strictly gambling in nature."
--Warren Buffett to Hon. John Dingell, March 5, 1982. The history of the volatile stock market, Wall Street's obscene profits and the risks of a systemic financial breakdown might have been radically altered if Warren Buffett, then a successful but not widely recognized investor, had succeeded in convincing Congress not to approve
the first derivative contract, for the most widely used stock market index, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Forbes has obtained a copy of Buffett's March 5, 1982, letter to Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., laying out the risks to the nation that were, of course, largely ignored. In the letter Buffett modestly refers to...
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As the economy improves, anxiety about workforce loyalty and retention grows. The concern is justified--but it shouldn't be new.
The world was in a recession the year I graduated from college with a liberal arts degree, so I got a terrible job. For that I am forever grateful. I accepted what had to be the last management training position in the history of the American textile industry, working for about six months at Cannon Mills in the Time-Life Building in New York
City. My training consisted primarily of folding towels in the showroom. Folding towels all day wasn't the worst of it. The real problem: Cannon became Fieldcrest-Cannon shortly after I joined, and at age 22 I suddenly found myself at Ground Zero of the post-merger downsizing of a perfectly nice group of middle-aged managers, all men,
who had thought until that moment that they had jobs for life...
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To be an effective leader you must acknowledge political reality.
In the office the word politics makes many of us think of favoritism, back-stabbing and self-promotion at its worst. But workplace politics is present in all organizations and probably always will be. Avoiding or ignoring it limits you and your organization. To be an effective leader you must acknowledge political reality in your organization
and develop your political skill. Politics, at its core, is neutral. There is good political skill, which most people appreciate, and there is bad political skill, which causes a lot of dissension. People who think badly of politics often associate it with negative personal experiences. Someone got a raise that didn't seem justified or a
promotion for which better candidates were bypassed. When politics works to a person's advantage, however, they are more likely to see it as a justified result of skill and hard work. What is political skill? We define it, based on...
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It takes a lifetime to build and can vanish in a moment.
I imagine every one of us has done something we wish we hadn't, at some time or another. Often it's just an embarrassing moment. It can be a learning experience from which we move on as a better person, particularly when we're young and expected to learn by doing and make course corrections along the way. That's just part of growing
up. As we progress through our lives and into adulthood, however, we develop patterns that follow us. We become known for who we are and what we stand for, for what we do and what we don't do. We develop a reputation that can make us flattered and admired or can close doors and limit our options. The word "reputation" is defined by
Webster's as "a commonly held opinion of a person or group's character."... [Good reputations, however, don't always last forever. They can vanish in a flash. We see it...]
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Why is Business Writing so Awful? Here are a few examples of good writing that brings in the right customers at the start instead of the bland everyday standards for the masses.
Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal? What's bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing. If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying. One of my favorite phrases in the business world is full-service solutions
provider. A quick search on Google finds at least 47,000 companies using that one. That's full-service generic. There's more. Cost effective end-to-end solutions brings you about 95,000 results. Provider of value-added services nets you more than 600,000 matches. Exactly which services are sold as not adding value? Who writes this
stuff? Worse, who reads it and approves it? What does it say when...
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