entreprenergy

[entreprenergy]

Ignore Everybody – by Hugh MacLeod

Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted.

Good ideas come with a heavy burden, which is why so few people execute them. So few people can handle it.

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.

Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.

3. Put the hours in.

If somebody in your industry is more successful than you, it’s probably because he works harder at it than you do.

4. Good ideas have lonely childhoods.

5. If your business plan depends on suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

6. You are responsible for your own experience.

7. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

8. Keep your day job.

The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task at hand covers both bases, but not often.

It’s balancing the need to make a good living while still maintaining one’s creative sovereignty.

The young writer who has to wait tables to pay the bills, in spite of her writing appearing in all the cool and hip magazines… who dreams of one day not having her life divided so harshly. Well, over time the “harshly” bit might go away, but not the “divided.” This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended. And nobody is immune. Not the struggling waiter, nor the movie star. As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster.

9. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

10. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb. You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don’t make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

11. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.

A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind. Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macintosh computers.

Successful people, artists and nonartists alike, are very good at spotting pillars. They’re very good at doing without them. Even more important, once they’ve spotted a pillar, they’re very good at quickly getting rid of it. Good pillar management is one of the most valuable talents you can have on the planet.

Keep asking the question, “Is this a pillar?” about every aspect of our business, our craft, our reason for being alive, and go from there. The more we ask, the better we get at spotting pillars, the more quickly the pillars vanish.

12. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

13. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

You’re better off doing something on the assumption that you will not be rewarded for it, that it will not receive the recognition it deserves, that it will not be worth the time and effort invested in it. The obvious advantage to this angle is, of course, if anything good comes of it, then it’s an added bonus. The second, more subtle and profound advantage is that by scuppering all hope of worldly and social betterment from the creative act, you are finally left with only one question to answer: Do you make this damn thing exist or not?

14. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.

The more you practice your craft, the less you confuse worldly rewards with spiritual rewards, and vice versa.

Never sell something you love. Otherwise, you may as well be selling your children.

15. Dying young is overrated.

Every kid underestimates his competition, and overestimates his chances. Every kid is a sucker for the idea that there’s a way to make it without having to do the actual hard work.

The bars of West Hollywood, London, and New York are awash with people throwing their lives away in the desperate hope of finding a shortcut, any shortcut. Meanwhile the competition is at home, working their asses off.

16. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do from what you are not.

It is this red line that demarcates your sovereignty; that defines your own private creative domain. What crap you are willing to take, and what crap you’re not. What you are willing to relinquish control over, and what you aren’t. What price you are willing to pay, and what price you aren’t.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.

When I see somebody “suffering for their art,” it’s usually a case of their not knowing where that red line is.

17. The world is changing.

If you want to be able to afford groceries in five years, I’d recommend listening closely to the (people who push change) and avoiding the (people who resist change).

In order to navigate the New Realities you have to be creative – not just within your particular profession, but in everything. Your way of looking at the world will need to become ever more fertile and original.

The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries.

They’re easy enough to find if you make the effort, if you’ve got something worthwhile to offer in return.

Avoid the folk who play it safe. They can’t help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct; they are extinction.

18. Merit can be bought. Passion can’t. The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.

Part of understanding the creative urge is understanding that it’s primal.

We think we’re “Providing a superior integrated logistic system” or “Helping America to really taste Freshness.” In fact we’re just pissed off and want to get the hell out of the cave and kill the woolly mammoth.

19. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.

20. Sing in your own voice.

The really good artists, the really successful entrepreneurs, figure out how to circumvent their limitations, figure out how to turn their strengths into weaknesses.

Had Bob Dylan been more of a technical virtuoso, he might not have felt the need to give his song lyrics such power and resonance.

21. The choice of media is irrelevant.

My cartooning MO was and still is to just have a normal life, be a regular schmoe, with a terrific hobby on the side. It’s not exactly rocket science. This attitude seemed fairly alien to the Art Majors I met. Their chosen art form seemed more like a religion to them. It was serious. It was important. It was a big part of their identity, and it almost seemed to them that humanity’s very existence totally depended on their being able to pursue their dream as a handsomely rewarded profession.

22. Selling out is harder than it looks.

Diluting your product to make it more “commercial” will just make people like it less.

23. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

24. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.

It’s not about whether Tom Clancy sells truckloads of books or a Nobel Prize winner sells diddly-squat. Those are just ciphers, external distractions. To me, it’s about what you are going to do with the short time you have left on this earth. Different criteria altogether. Frankly, how a person nurtures and develops his or her own “creative sovereignty,” with or without the help of the world at large, is in my opinion a much more interesting subject.

25. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.

Find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long.

Writer’s block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something.

Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough.

26. You have to find your own shtick.

Jackson Pollock discovering splatter paint. Or Robert Ryman discovering all-white canvases. Andy Warhol discovering silk-screen. Hunter S. Thompson discovering gonzo journalism. Duchamp discovering the found object. Jasper Johns discovering the American flag. Hemingway discovering brevity. James Joyce discovering stream-of-consciousness prose.

Somehow while playing around with something new, suddenly they found they were able to put their entire selves into it.

27. Write from the heart.

28. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

29. Power is never given. Power is taken.

The minute you become ready is the minute you stop dreaming. Suddenly it’s no longer about “becoming.” Suddenly it’s about “doing.”

You didn’t go in there, asking the editor to give you power. You went in there and politely informed the editor that you already have the power. That’s what being “ready” means. That’s what “taking power” means. Not needing anything from another person in order to be the best in the world.

30. Whatever choice you make, the Devil gets his due eventually.

31. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

32. Remain frugal.

Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom. That includes freedom from avarice.

33. Allow your work to age with you. You become older faster than you think. Be ready for it when it happens.

34. Being Poor Sucks. The biggest mistake young people make is underestimating how competitive the world is out there.

35. Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.

James Gold-Smith once quipped, “When a man marries his mistress, he immediately creates a vacancy.” What’s true in philanderers is also true in life.

“Before, this man had a job and a hobby. Now suddenly, he’s just got the job, but no hobby anymore. But a man needs both, you see. And now what does this man, who’s always had a hobby, do with his time?” My friend held up his glass. “Answer: Drink.”

36. Savor obscurity while it lasts. Once you “make it,” your work is never the same.

if they were still “eating dog food” after a few decades, I doubt if they’d be waxing so lyrically. But as long as you can progress from it eventually, it’s a time to be savored. A time when your work is still new to you, a time when the world doesn’t need to be fed,

37. Start blogging.

38. Meaning scales

The post Ignore Everybody – by Hugh MacLeod appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Ignore Everybody – by Hugh MacLeod

[entreprenergy]

Tribes – by Seth Godin

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.

A group needs only two things to be a tribe : a shared interest and a way to communicate.

Tribes need leadership. People want connection and growth and something new. They want change.

Humans can’t help it : we need to belong. One of the most powerful of our survival mechanisms is to be part of a tribe, to contribute to (and take from) a group of like-minded people. We are drawn to leaders and to their ideas, and we can’t resist the rush of belonging and the thrill of the new.

Some tribes are stuck. They embrace the status quo and drown out any tribe member who dares to question authority and the accepted order. Big charities, tiny clubs, struggling corporations – they’re tribes and they’re stuck. I’m not so interested in those tribes. They create little of value and they’re sort of boring. Every one of those tribes, though, is a movement waiting to happen – a group of people just waiting to be energized and transformed.

A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.

Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.

Here’s what’s changed : some people admire the new and stylish far more than they respect the proven state of affairs. More often than not, these fad-focused early adopters are the people who buy and the people who talk. As a result, new ways of doing things, new jobs, new opportunities, and new faces become ever more important.

Marketing, the verb, changed the market. The market is now a lot less impressed with average stuff for average people, and the market is a lot less impressed with loud and flashy and expensive advertising. Today, the market wants change.

Jack, an “occasional restaurant” run by Danielle Sucher and Dave Turner in Brooklyn. They open the restaurant only about 20 times a year, on Saturday nights. By appointment. Go online and you can see the menu in advance. Then, you book and pay if you want to go. Instead of seeking diners for their dishes, they get to create dishes for their diners. Instead of serving anonymous patrons, they throw a party. Danielle is the food columnist for the popular Gothamist website, and she and Dave run the food blog Habeas Brûlée. That means they already interact with the tribe. It means that once the restaurant is up and running, it becomes the central clearinghouse, the place to hang out with the other tribe members.

Leaders don’t care very much for organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them.

There’s a difference between telling people what to do, and inciting a movement. The movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing.

Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them.

IMPROVING A TRIBE: It only takes two things to turn a group of people into a tribe:

A shared interest

A way to communicate

The communication can be:

leader to tribe

tribe to leader

tribe member to tribe member

tribe member to outsider

So a leader can help increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members by:

transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change

providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications

leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members

At SxSW, Scott Beale was tired of waiting in line to get into the Google party, so he walked down the street, found a deserted bar, grabbed some tables in the back, and used Twitter to announce, “Alta Vista Party at Ginger Man”. Within minutes, 8 people showed up. Then 50, then a line out the door.

Organizations are more important than ever. It’s the factories we don’t need.

Organizations give us the ability to create complex products. They provide the muscle and consistency necessary to get things to market and to back them up. Most important, organizations have the scale to care for large tribes.

Organizations of the future are filled with smart, fast, flexible people on a mission. Thing is, that requires leadership.

We choose not to be remarkable because we’re worried about criticism. We’re worried, deep down, that someone will hate it and call us on it.

Watch a few people get criticized for being innovative and it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that the very same thing will happen to you if you’re not careful.

How can I create something that critics will criticize?

All great leaders are generous – they enable the tribe to thrive.

The most powerful way to enable is to be statue-worthy : by getting out front, by making a point, by challenging convention, and by speaking up.

It’s easy to hesitate when confronted with the feeling that maybe you’re getting too much attention. Great leaders are able to reflect the light onto their teams, their tribes. Great leaders don’t want the attention, but they use it to unite the tribe and to reinforce its sense of purpose.

When you abuse the attention, you are taking something from the tribe. When a CEO starts acting like a selfish monarch, he’s no longer leading. He’s taking.

TIGHTER:

The first thing a leader can focus on is the act of tightening the tribe. It’s tempting to make the tribe bigger, to get more members, to spread the word. This pales, however, when juxtaposed with the effects of a tighter tribe. A tribe that communicates more quickly, with alacrity and emotion, is a tribe that thrives.

A tighter tribe is one that is more likely to hear its leader, and more likely still to coordinate action and ideas across the members of the tribe.

This tightening can happen without technology, and it can happen when there’s no profit motive. Keith Ferrazzi leads a tribe of smart celebrities and opinion leaders – from Meg Ryan to Ben Zander – and he leads this unleadable group merely by tightening the tribe. He introduces people. He invites them to dinner. He finds areas of common interest then gets out of the way.

DISCOMFORT IS WHERE THE LEADER IS NEEDED:

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers. It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail. It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo. It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle. When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed. If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

FOLLOWERS / MICRO-LEADERSHIP:

Blind sheep do nothing but mindlessly follow instructions. They don’t do the local leadership required when tribe members interact. They’re not going to do a very good job of recruiting new members. Evangelism requires leadership.

People eagerly engage when they want something to improve. This micro-leadership is essential. It’s the micro-leaders in the trenches and their enthusiastic followers who make the difference, not the honcho who is ostensibly running the group.

Leaders work hard to generate movement that can transform a group into a tribe.

The posture of leaning in is rare and valuable.

When looking to hire – I set up a private Facebook group for the applicants and invited each one to participate. 60 of them joined immediately. No tribe existed yet – just 60 strangers. Within hours, a few had taken the lead, posting topics, starting discussions, leaning in and leading. They called on their peers to contribute and participate. And the rest? They lurked.

Whom would you hire?

Not all leadership involves getting in the face of the tribe. It takes just as much effort to successfully get out of the way. Jimmy Wales leads Wikipedia not by inciting, but by enabling others to fill the vacuum.

The one path that never works is the most common one : doing nothing at all.

The difference between backing off and doing nothing may appear subtle, but it’s not. A leader who backs off is making a commitment to the power of the tribe, and is alert to the right moment to step back in. Someone who is doing nothing is merely hiding.

Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing. Lean in, back off, but don’t do nothing.

Others will scoff and move on, wondering what the obsession is all about. That’s what makes a tribe, of course. There are insiders and outsiders.

Curious is the key word. It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. Leaders are curious because they can’t wait to find out what the group is going to do next. The changes in the tribe are what are interesting, and curiosity drives them.

In order to lead a tribe, all you need to do is motivate people who choose to follow you.

KEEPING IT SMALL:

Imagine two classrooms with similar teachers. One has 15 students, the other, 32. Which group gets a better education? The smaller class – because the teacher has more time to spend customizing the lesson to each student. She has fewer students, hence fewer disruptions as well.

Great leaders don’t try to please everyone. Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.

Some tribes do better when they’re smaller. More exclusive. Harder to get into. Some tribes thrive precisely because they’re small. Push to make one of these tribes bigger and you might just ruin the entire thing. “No one goes there anymore – it’s too popular.”

Leaders who set out to give are more productive than leaders who set out to get.

The tribes can sniff out why someone is asking for their attention.

FAITH VS RELIGION:

If you watch kids learning dyno (rock climbing) you’ll see that the secret to developing the skill isn’t about building their muscles or learning some exotic technique. It’s merely about developing the faith that it’ll work. Without faith, the leap never works.

There are countless religions in our lives. The religion of Broadway determines what a musical is supposed to look and feel like. The religion of the MBA standard curriculum and perceptions of what is successful.

Religion gives our faith a little support when it needs it.

Religion at its best is a sort of mantra, a subtle but consistent reminder that belief is OK, and that faith is the way to get where you’re going.

Religion at its worst reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of our faith.

Sticking, without variation, to principles prevented them from turning it into a new better kind of experience.

Heretics challenge a given religion, but do it from a very strong foundation of faith. In order to lead, you must challenge the status quo of the religion you’re living under.

Successful heretics create their own religion. New group of friends, new supporters, new rituals.

Recognize the need for faith in your idea. Find the tribe you need to support you and create a new religion around your faith.

When you fall in love with a system, you lose the ability to grow.

STATUS QUO vs BEING FIRST:

Leadership almost always involves thinking and acting like the underdog. That’s because leaders work to change things, and the people who are winning rarely do.

Leaders go first. Initiating : see something others are ignoring and jump on it. Cause the events that others have to react to. Make change.

Everyone believes that what they’ve got is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change.

At first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin. Soon enough, the new thing will be better than the old thing. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late.

This isn’t about having a great idea. The great ideas are out there, for free, on your neighborhood blog. This is about taking initiative and making things happen.

Getting out first and staking out the new territory almost always pays off.

When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff.

The biggest step comes from anyone who teachers or hires. Embrace non-sheep behavior. Reward and cherish it.

MICRO-MOVEMENT KEY ELEMENTS:

1. Publish a manifesto. Give it away and make it easy for the manifesto to spread far and wide. It doesn’t have to be printed or even written. Bit it’s a mantra and a motto and a way of looking at the world. It unites your tribe members and gives them a structure.

2. Make it easy for your followers to connect with you. It could be as simple as visiting you or emailing you or watching you on TV. Or it could be as rich and complex as interacting with you on Facebook or Ning.

3. Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another. There’s that little nod that one restaurant regular gives to another recognized regular. Or the shared drink in an airport lounge. Even better is the camradarie developed by volunteers on a political campaign or insiders involved in a new product launch. Great leaders figure out how to make these interactions happen.

4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement. Money exists merely to enable it. The moment you try to cash out is the moment you stunt the growth of your movement.

5. Track your progress. Do it publicly and create pathways for your followers to contribute to that progress.

PRINCIPLES:

1. Transparency really is your only option. Every failed televangelist has learned this the hard way. The people who follow you aren’t stupid. You might go down in scandal or more likely from ennui. People can smell subterfuge from a mile away.

2. Your movement needs to be bigger than you. An author and his book, for example, don’t constitute a movement. Changing the way people applly to college does.

3. Movements that grow, thrive. Every day they get better and more powerful. You’ll get there soon enough. Don’t mortgage today just because you’re in a hurry.

4. Movements are made most clear when compared to the status quo or to movements that work to push the other direction. Movements do less well when compared to other movements with similar goals. Instead of beating them, join them.

5. Exclude outsiders. Exclusion is an extremely powerful force for loyalty and attention. Who isn’t part of your movement matters almost as much as who is.

6. Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up.

The customer service staff shows up and follows the handbook and treats every customer the same, then can’t figure out why they’re being disrespected in return.

Be willing to be wrong. Realize that wrong isn’t fatal.

The secret of leadership : paint a picture of the future. Go there.

It’s OK to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s OK to say, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.”

You can build a bigger, faster, cheaper tribe than you used to be able to. Transaction costs are falling while the costs of formal organizations (offices, benefits, management) keep increasing.

Many big organizations are getting bigger as a way of fighting off the power of the tribes. Hoping that formal nature of their bigness will somehow successfully fight off flexible, fast, and sometimes free power of the tribe. (Very unlikely.)

If you hear my idea but don’t believe it, that’s not your fault – it’s mine. If you are a student in my class and you don’t learn what I’m teaching, I’ve let you down.

It’s really easy to insist that people read the manual. It’s really easy to blame the user/student/customer for not trying hard, for being too stupid to get it, for not caring enough to pay attention. It’s tempting to blame those in your tribe who aren’t working as hard at following as you are at leading. But none of this is helpful.

If no one cares, then you have no tribe. If you don’t care – really and deeply care – then you can’t possibly lead.

Leaders create a culture around their goal and involve others in that culture.

People want to be sure you heard what they said. They’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said. Listen. Really listen. Then decide and move on.

Find one person who trusts you and sell him a copy. Does he love it? Is he excited about it? Excited enough to tell 10 friends because it helps them, not because it helps you?

Tribes grow when people recruit other people. That’s how ideas spread as well. The tribe doesn’t do it for you, of course. They do it for each other.

A big part of leadership is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another – so they follow.

People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. Then often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do : give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change.

The post Tribes – by Seth Godin appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Tribes – by Seth Godin

[entreprenergy]

Brain Rules – by John Medina

RULE #1 : Exercise boosts brain power.

The human brain evolved under conditions of almost constant motion. From this, one might predict that the optimal environment for processing information would include motion. That is exactly what one finds. Indeed, the best business meeting would have everyone walking at about 1.8 miles per hour.

Researchers studied two elderly populations that had led different lifestyles, one sedentary and one active. Cognitive scores were profoundly influenced. Exercise positively affected executive function, spatial tasks, reaction times and quantitative skills.

So researchers asked: If the sedentary populations become active, will their cognitive scores go up? Yes, it turns out, if the exercise is aerobic. In four months, executive functions vastly improve; longer, and memory scores improve as well.

Exercise improves cognition for two reasons: – Exercise increases oxygen flow into the brain, which reduces brain-bound free radicals. One of the most interesting findings of the past few decades is that an increase in oxygen is always accompanied by an uptick in mental sharpness. – Exercise acts directly on the molecular machinery of the brain itself. It increases neurons’ creation, survival, and resistance to damage and stress.

RULE #2 : The human brain evolved, too.

The brain is a survival organ. It is designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival.

The strongest brains survive, not the strongest bodies. Our ability to solve problems, learn from mistakes, and create alliances with other people helps us survive. We took over the world by learning to cooperate and forming teams with our neighbors.

Our ability to understand each other is our chief survival tool. Relationships helped us survive in the jungle and are critical to surviving at work and school today.

If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not perform as well. If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.

There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle.

RULE #3 : Every brain is wired differently.

What YOU do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like – it literally rewires it. We used to think there were just 7 categories of intelligence. But categories of intelligence may number more than 7 billion — roughly the population of the world.

No two people have the same brain, not even twins. Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently.

You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education ignores it by having grade structures based on age. Businesses such as Amazon are catching on to mass customization (the Amazon homepage and the products you see are tailored to your recent purchases).

Regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people. The brains of school children are just as unevenly developed as their bodies. Our school system ignores the fact that every brain is wired differently. We wrongly assume every brain is the same.

Most of us have a “Jennifer Aniston” neuron (a neuron lurking in your head that is stimulated only when Jennifer Aniston is in the room).

Theory of Mind : The ability to understand the interior motivations of someone else, and the ability to construct a predictable “theory of how their mind works” based on that knowledge. We try to see our entire world in terms of motivations, ascribing motivations to our pets and even to inanimate objects. The skill is useful for selecting a mate, navigating the day-to-day issues surrounding living together, for parenting. We have it like no other creature. It is as close to mind reading as we are likely to get.

People with advanced Theory of Mind skills possess the single most important ingredient for becoming effective communicators of information.

If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, they may not be able to perform as well.

If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.

RULE #4 : We don’t pay attention to boring things.

What we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by memory. Our previous experience predicts where we should pay attention. Culture matters too. Whether in school or in business, these differences can greatly effect how an audience perceives a given presentation.

We pay attention to things like emotions, threats and sex. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before?

The brain is not capable of multi-tasking. We can talk and breathe, but when it comes to higher level tasks, we just can’t do it.

Driving while talking on a cell phone is like driving drunk. The brain is a sequential processor and large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. This is why cell-phone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes and get in more wrecks.

Workplaces and schools actually encourage this type of multi-tasking. Walk into any office and you’ll see people sending e-mail, answering their phones, Instant Messaging, and on MySpace — all at the same time. Research shows your error rate goes up 50% and it takes you twice as long to do things.

When you’re always online you’re always distracted. So the always online organization is the always unproductive organization.

If a teacher can’t hold a student’s interest, knowledge will not be richly encoded in the brain’s database.

Brains in wild animals are 15%-30% larger than tame, domestic counterparts. The cold, hard world forced the wild animals into constant learning mode. It is the same with humans. The more activity you do, the larger and more complex it can become.

The brain cannot multi-task. It is a myth. The brain focuses attention on concepts sequentially, one at a time. Switching takes time.

RULE #5 : Repeat to remember.

The human brain can only hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds! Which means, your brain can only handle a 7-digit phone number. If you want to extend the 30 seconds to a few minutes or even an hour or two, you will need to consistently re-expose yourself to the information. Memories are so volatile that you have to repeat to remember.

Improve your memory by elaborately encoding it during its initial moments. Many of us have trouble remembering names. If at a party you need help remembering Mary, it helps to repeat internally more information about her. “Mary is wearing a blue dress and my favorite color is blue.” It may seem counter-intuitive at first but study after study shows it improves your memory.

Brain Rules in the classroom. In partnership with the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University, Medina tested this Brain Rule in real classrooms of 3rd graders. They were asked to repeat their multiplication tables in the afternoons. The classrooms in the study did significantly better than the classrooms that did not have the repetition. If brain scientists get together with teachers and do research, we may be able to eliminate need for homework since learning would take place at school, instead of the home.

The first few seconds of encoding new information is crucial in determining whether something that is initially perceived will be remembered.

The more elaborately we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory. When encoding is elaborate and deep, the memory that forms is much more robust than when encoding is partial and cursory.

The neural pathways initially used to process new information end up becoming the permanent pathways the brain reuses to store the information. (Like the college professor that made no sidewalks in the new campus. He waited to see where students would walk anyway, then later paved the paths.)

The more a learning focuses on the meaning of the processed information, the more elaborately the encoding is processed.

When you are trying to drive a piece of information into your brain’s memory, make sure you understand exactly what that information means. If you are trying to drive information into someone else’s brain, make sure they understand what it means.

Don’t try to memorize by rote and pray the meaning will reveal itself!

The more repetition cycles a memory experienced, the more likely it is to persist in your mind. The space between repetitions is the critical component for transforming temporary memories into more persistent forms.

Spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning.

Deliberately re-expose yourself to information *more elaborately*, in fixed spaced intervals, to make retrieval the most vivid it can be.

Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than jammed in all at once.

Physically, “student” neurons need to get the same information from the “teacher” neuron within 90 minutes, or its excitement will vanish. The cell will literally reset itself to zero and act as if nothing happened.

Information must be repeated after a period of time has elapsed. If the information is repeatedly pulsed in discretely timed intervals, the relationship between teacher and student neuron begins to change, so increasingly smaller and smaller inputs from the teacher are required to elicit increasingly stronger and stronger outputs from the student.

Forgetting allows us to prioritize events. Events irrelevant to our survival will take up wasteful cognitive space if we assign them the same priority as events critical to our survival. So we don’t.

In school, every 3rd or 4th day would be reserved for reviewing the facts delivered in the previous 3-4 days. Previous information would be presented in compressed fashion. Inspect notes, comparing with what the teacher was saying in the review. That would result in a greater elaboration of the information. A formalized exercise in error-checking.

RULE #6 : Remember to repeat.

It takes years to consolidate a memory. Not minutes, hours, or days but years. What you learn in first grade is not completely formed until your sophomore year in high school.

Medina’s dream school is one that repeats what was learned, not at home, but during the school day, 90-120 minutes after the initial learning occurred. Our schools are currently designed so that most real learning has to occur at home.

How do you remember better? Repeated exposure to information / in specifically timed intervals / provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain.

Forgetting allows us to prioritize events. But if you want to remember, remember to repeat.

RULE #7 : Sleep well, think well.

When we’re asleep, the brain is not resting at all. It is almost unbelievably active! It’s possible that the reason we need to sleep is so that we can learn.

Sleep must be important because we spend 1/3 of our lives doing it! Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

We still don’t know how much we need! It changes with age, gender, pregnancy, puberty, and so much more.

Napping is normal. Ever feel tired in the afternoon? That’s because your brain really wants to take a nap. There’s a battle raging in your head between two armies. Each army is made of legions of brain cells and biochemicals –- one desperately trying to keep you awake, the other desperately trying to force you to sleep. Around 3 p.m., 12 hours after the midpoint of your sleep, all your brain wants to do is nap.

Taking a nap might make you more productive. In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent.

Don’t schedule important meetings at 3 p.m. It just doesn’t make sense.

Students given a series of math problems that all had a shortcut that was not revealed to them. Only 20% found the shortcut if answers had to be given same-day. But if asked after sleep, 60% found the shortcut. No matter how many times the experiment is run, the sleep group consistently outperforms the non-sleep group about to 3 to 1.

RULE #8 : Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.

You brain is built to deal with stress that lasts about 30 seconds. The brain is not designed for long term stress when you feel like you have no control. The saber-toothed tiger ate you or you ran away but it was all over in less than a minute. If you have a bad boss, the saber-toothed tiger can be at your door for years, and you begin to deregulate. If you are in a bad marriage, the saber-toothed tiger can be in your bed for years, and the same thing occurs. You can actually watch the brain shrink.

Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.

The emotional stability of the home is the single greatest predictor of academic success. If you want your kid to get into Harvard, go home and love your spouse.

You have one brain. The same brain you have at home is the same brain you have at work or school. The stress you are experiencing at home will affect your performance at work, and vice versa.

RULE #9 : Stimulate more of the senses.

Our senses work together so it is important to stimulate them! Your head crackles with the perceptions of the whole world, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, energetic as a frat party.

Smell is unusually effective at evoking memory. If you’re tested on the details of a movie while the smell of popcorn is wafted into the air, you’ll remember 10-50% more.

Smell is really important to business. When you walk into Starbucks, the first thing you smell is coffee. They have done a number of things over the years to make sure that’s the case.

The learning link. Those in multi-sensory environments always do better than those in uni-sensory environments. They have more recall with better resolution that lasts longer, evident even 20 years later.

– students learn better from words and pictures than words alone – students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously – students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each on the page or screen – students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included – students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text

RULE #10 : Vision trumps all other senses.

We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%.

Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.

Why is vision such a big deal to us? Perhaps because it’s how we’ve always apprehended major threats, food supplies and reproductive opportunity.

Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It’s text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones.

RULE #11 : Male and female brains are different.

What’s different? Mental health professionals have known for years about sex-based differences in the type and severity of psychiatric disorders. Males are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia than females. By more than 2 to 1, women are more likely to get depressed than men, a figure that shows up just after puberty and remains stable for the next 50 years. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Females have more anxiety. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male. Most anorexics are female.

Men and women handle acute stress differently. When researcher Larry Cahill showed them slasher films, men fired up the amygdale in their brain’s right hemisphere, which is responsible for the gist of an event. Their left was comparatively silent. Women lit up their left amygdale, the one responsible for details. Having a team that simultaneously understood the gist and details of a given stressful situation helped us conquer the world.

Men and women process certain emotions differently. Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention. These differences are a product of complex interactions between nature and nurture.

RULE #12 : We are powerful and natural explorers.

The desire to explore never leaves us despite the classrooms and cubicles we are stuffed into. Babies are the model of how we learn—not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Babies methodically do experiments on objects, for example, to see what they will do.

Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go. The proof is in the bottom line: fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from “20 percent time.”

The post Brain Rules – by John Medina appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Brain Rules – by John Medina

[entreprenergy]

You, Inc – The Art of Selling Yourself – by Harry Beckwith

COMMUNICATING:

We assume the first rule of communication is, “Communicate so that you are understood.” It’s not. The first rule is, “Communicate so that you cannot be misunderstood.”

The first 15 words are as important as the next 1500. Give listeners a compelling reason to listen, but without giving away your ending. Like audiences for movies, listeners lose interest in a story when they know its ending.

Once you open with a strong lead and provide some detail, you need to jump-start it with the next lead. Reclaim their attention. (“But wait – there’s more!” “But the best part is what happened next…”) This prompts the audience to rise up and ask, “Now what?”

Most impressions used to be made face-to-face. Now with email, your communication skills are like your appearance. Clarity becomes more important as time has become more valuable. Ambiguity is expensive. Power comes from the words of the communicator, and the most potent words are those that are expressed succinctly and vividly. Those who can express themselves in words that cannot be misunderstood have more power and more value.

Make yourself clearer and people will think you are an expert.

All good stories have a hero, and two other key elements: 1. A serious challenge. 2. A hero dealing with the challenge and learning something as a result. But make sure you put the audience, not you, in the hero’s shoes. People identify with themselves. They want solutions to their problems. They are interested in making their own lives better.

Simplify. What we want is certainty and simplification gives us that. Less options.

Constantly edit your story.

Find your message, keep it simple, and repeat it often.

Whatever you write, read it aloud. Edit. Revise every memo and revise it again.

Advance just one strong argument. You cannot say too little. Get your listener’s attention first with that one argument, then wait for them to ask more.

Don’t say “solutions”. That’s plural. People want one.

Your friend tells you an unfunny joke. You laugh anyway. That’s natural. You’re being kind. Same thing happens when you send someone a clever self-promotion, encouraged by the people who laugh out of manners. So you keep trying the gimmick. Same thing happens when you tell a joke in a presentation. False consensus effect: assuming others agree with us when they do not. Many people feel uncomfortable with your implication: that they lack sophistication, are easily fooled, and may even be frivolous. A gimmick also makes it appear that you have nothing important to say, so you are relying on bad puns, word play, and tricks instead.

LISTENING AND SPEAKING:

When you listen to someone, pause a full second before replying. It signals that you have listened. If you start immediately, it gives the impression you’ve just been waiting for them to stop, so you could get to the important part : your words, your thoughts.

A great presentation must be motivational.

A poor teacher describes. A good teacher explains. An excellent teacher demonstrates. A great teacher inspires.

Slide presentations with bullet points strip all emotional context. Imagine MLK speech: 1. HAVE A DREAM a. better life b. racial equality c. can see promised land Would Lincoln at Gettysburg have fared better if he had visual aids?

You know you gave a great presentation when people say, “I wish he would have spoken longer.” Leaving a group wanting to hear more, and you have sold something : a second audience with them.

RELATING:

Top law firm in Minneapolis got to the top because they do something amazing : they say, “If your problem falls outside our specialty, we’ll help you find the best firm for that issue.” Position yourself as the solution to almost everything, and everyone will see you as the solution for nothing. People want specialists. But you can offer something valuable in this age of so many choices, so many people, so many possible solutions : you can be a source. You can be seen as someone who can solve the problem – or find someone who can. Be the person who has just what they need – or knows who does. Get to know all the top people.

Be consistent in your hours, habits, and behaviors. We are most comfortable with people whose behavior we can predict.

OTHER:

Don’t think outside the box – (most people can’t) – just grow your box. Bring new things in. Tinker with your box. Buy an orange sport coat and red suede shoes. See what changes. Study different cultures.

Education does more than prepare us for careers. It enlarges our world – the number of people with whom we can connect. The more you learn, the more people you can engage.

Do what you love. The money may follow and please you. The money may follow but pleases you less than you expected. The money may follow but pleases you only briefly. (Maslow said humans are only capable of temporary satisfaction. Once something satisfies us, we move on to our next unsatisfied desire.) The money may not follow, which might disappoint you. But if you’re doing what you love, you will have loved what you’ve been doing. That will satisfy you so deeply that the result must either be called success or recognized as something even more enriching.

If an idea doesn’t make you at least a little uncomfortable, it’s not an idea.

A little discomfort is a good thing. A lot usually proves to be even better.

No one gets out of here alive. There is a term for those who live vitally, with passion and humor : élan. Italians give special praise on people who ignore the weight of life’s burdens, and live with its lightness. sprezzatura http://bit.ly/1daQEWd (roughly translated as nonchalance) Sprezzatura is the signal trait of successful people.

Comparing yourself to others is a waste of time. When you see someone else, you only see the part of the iceberg above the water.

A financial planner raised his fees by 40%. The first year following that increase, his income increased 65%. Today it’s up 150%. A Canadian decorator charged $75/hr for years. Raised her fee to $125/hr, and the effect was immediate. Inquiries increased, from people eager to work with the region’s “premier interior decorator”. Her conversion rates improved. Once prospects believed they were dealing with the area’s best decorator – the conclusion they came to from her fee – they were more apt to say, “When can we start?” Sales took less time. The fee increase also meant her more affluent clientele paid faster, more willingly, and without fail.

The post You, Inc – The Art of Selling Yourself – by Harry Beckwith appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from You, Inc – The Art of Selling Yourself – by Harry Beckwith

[entreprenergy]

The Wisdom of Crowds – by James Surowiecki

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision.

When our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent.

We assume that the key to solving problems or making good decisions is finding that one right person who will have the answer. The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd instead. Chances are, it knows. (Crowd includes the geniuses as well as everyone else.)

The best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

Chapter 1

In general, the bigger the crowd the better.

If you run 10 different jelly-bean-counting experiments, it’s likely that each time one or two students will outperform the group. But they will not be the same students each time. Over 10 experiments, the group’s performance will almost certainly be the best possible. The simplest way to get reliably good answers is just to ask the group each time.

The 4 conditions that characterize wise crowds: 1. Diversity of opinion 2. Independence 3. Decentralization 4. Aggregation

If you ask 100 people to run a 100-meter race, the average time will not be better than the time of the fastest runners. It will be worse – a mediocre time. But ask 100 people to answer a question or solve a problem, and the average number will often be as least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision making, it’s often excellence.

Chapter 2

(About product innovation or small companies:) What makes a system successful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off. Sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest.

Generating a diverse set of possible solutions isn’t enough. The crowd also has to be able to distinguish the good solutions from the bad.

The simple fact of making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving.

Grouping only smart people together doesn’t work that well, because the smart people tend to resemble each other in what they can do. The group knows less than it otherwise might. Adding in a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the group’s performance.

Groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less to the table. They spend too much time exploiting, and not enough time exploring.

The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert’s. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you’re better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.

A large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled “decision maker”.

Seer-sucker theory : No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.

If a group is so unintelligent that it will flounder without the right expert, it’s not clear why the group would be intelligent enough to recognize an expert when it found him.

[When one person realizes they are clearly a non-conformer in a group of conformers, they tend to conform. But…] having even one other person in the group who felt as they did made the subjects happy to announce their thoughts and the rate of conformity plummeted.

Chapter 3

The smartest groups are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.

You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you’re independent, you won’t make the group any dumber.

The more influence a group’s members exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the less likely it is that the group’s decisions will be wise ones. We could become individually smarter but collectively dumber.

“Social proof” : the tendency to assume that if lots of people are doing something or believe something, there must be a good reason why.

That’s why the crowd becomes more influential as it becomes bigger : every additional person is proof that something important is happening.

Following the group is a reasonable strategy, but if too many people adopt that strategy, it stops being sensible and the group stops being smart.

(Fads/Crazes:) Everyone thinks that people are making decisions based on what they know, when in fact people are making decisions based on what they think the people who came before them knew. Instead of aggregating all the information individuals have, the cascade becomes a sequence of uninformed choices, so that collectively the group ends up making a bad decision.

People are, in general, overconfident. They overestimate their ability, level of knowledge, and decision-making prowess. More overconfident when facing big problems than easy ones.

The more important a decision, the less likely a cascade (fad/craze) is to take hold. The more important the decision, the more likely it is that the groups’ collective verdict will be right.

Encouraging people to make incorrect guesses actually made the group as a whole smarter.

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.

Chapter 4

Decentralization : power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner.

It fosters and is fed by specialization.

The closer a person is to a problem, the more likely he or she is to have a good solution to it.

Decentralization’s great weakness is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated.

A decentralized system can only produce genuinely intelligent results if there’s a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system.

Chapter 5

Convention explains why: – companies rarely cut wages in a recession (it violates workers’ expectations and hurts moral), preferring instead to lay people off – every major car company releases its new models in September, (even though there would be less competition if each company released its cars in different months) – clothing retailers apply a simple 50% markup, then discount like mad if the items don’t sell – it costs you as much to see a “total limping dog” movie in its last week of release as it does a hugely popular film on opening night

About organization and coordination: Next time you go to the supermarket looking for orange juice, it’ll be there waiting, even though you didn’t tell the grocer you were coming. There will be as much orange juice in the freezer as the store’s customers want over the next few days, even though none of them told the grocer they were coming. The juice you buy will have been packaged days earlier, after it was made from oranges picked weeks earlier, by people who don’t even know you exist. The players in that chain – shopper, grocer, wholesaler, packager, grower – are not acting on formal rules, but they are using local knowledge and making decisions not on the basis of what’s good for everyone, but rather on the basis of what’s good for themselves. And yet, without anyone leading them or directing them, people are able to coordinate their economic activities.

In the 50 years since Vernon Smith did his first experiment in [wisdom of crowds] and published the results, they have been replicated thousands of times in ever more complex variations. But the essential conclusion of those early tests has not been challenged : that, under the right conditions, imperfect humans can produce near-perfect results.

Chapter 6

To solve cooperation problems – like keeping the sidewalk free of snow, paying taxes, and curbing pollution – the members of a society need to do more. They need to adopt a broader definition of self-interest than the myopic one that maximizing profits in the short-term demands. And they need to trust those around them, because in the absence of trust the pursuit of myopic self-interest is the only strategy that makes sense.

“Ultimatum game” : behavioral economics : 2 people given $10 to divide between them. One person decides what the split should be, then makes take-it-or-leave-it offer to the other person. That person can either accept the offer, in which case both players pocket their respective shares of the cash, or reject it, in which case both players walk away empty-handed. If both players are purely rational, the proposer will keep $9 and offer $1, and the responder will take it, since if he accepts he gets $1, and rejects gets none. In practice, though, this rarely happens. Instead, low-ball offers, anything below $2, are routinely rejected. Think about what this means : people would rather have nothing than let the other person walk away with too much of the loot. They will give up free money to punish what they perceive as greedy or selfish behavior.

People think, in an ideal world, everyone would end up with the amount of money they deserved.

An interesting version of the Ultimatum game, instead of assigning the proposer role randomly, the researchers made it seem as if the proposers had earned their positions by doing better on a test. In those experiments, the proposers offered significantly less money, yet not a single offer was rejected. People apparently thought that a proposer who merited his position deserved to keep more of the wealth.

In America, the people whom inequality bothers most are the rich. Americans are far more likely to believe that wealth is the result of initiative and skill, while Europeans are more likely to attribute it to luck.

The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship. Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other.

Successful cooperation requires that people start off by being nice, willing to cooperate, but have to be willing to punish non-cooperative behavior as soon as it appears. The best approach is to be “nice, forgiving, and retaliatory”.

We have learned that trade and exchange are games in which everyone can end up gaining.

The benefits of being trusting and of being trustworthy are potentially immense, because a successful market system teaches people to recognize those benefits.

Merchant guilds – most notably the German Hanseatic League – protected their members against the unfair treatment from city-states by imposing collective trade embargoes against cities that seized merchant property.

Previously, trust had been the product primarily of a personal or in-group relationship. Modern capitalism made the idea of trusting people with whom you had no personal ties seem reasonable, if only by demonstrating that strangers would not, as a matter of course, betray you. Buying and selling no longer required a personal connection. It’s driven instead by the benefits of mutual exchange.

I can walk into a store somewhere far from home and buy an item that was made across the world, and it will probably work well. This is true even though I may never walk in that store again. We take the reliability of the store and manufacturer for granted. But in fact, they’re remarkable achievements.

Capitalism is healthiest when people believe the long-term benefits of fair dealing outweigh the short-term benefits of sharp dealing.

Collective action like political rallies : for the individual it would make more sense to let someone else do the work. Everyone has an incentive to sit on their hands, wait for someone else to do something, and free ride. Since everyone wants to be a free-rider, nothing gets done. ((But since people do get involved, like paying taxes for example, it shows that other emotions are at work.))

Part 2 : EXAMPLES

(Scientists:) The quest for recognition ensures a steady infusion of diverse thought, since no one becomes famous for restating what’s already known.

If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked, but they are listened to.

Group decisions are not inherently inefficient. This suggests that deliberation can be valuable when done well, even if after a certain point its marginal benefits are outweighed by the costs.

There is no point in making small groups part of a leadership structure if you do not give the group a method of aggregating the opinions of its members. If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has : namely, collective wisdom.

Chapter 10 : The Company

You do not need consensus in order to tap into the wisdom of a crowd. The search for consensus encourages tepid lowest-common-denominator solutions which offend no one rather than exciting everyone.

Even those companies that tried to make the decision-making process more democratic thought democracy meant endless discussion rather than a wider distribution of decision-making power.

Attempting to run an entire company by command and control is a futile task. It’s too costly in terms of time and requires far too much information that top executives should not be bothering with.

What gets in the way of the exchange of real information is a deep-rooted hostility on the part of the bosses to opposition from subordinates. This is the real cost of top-down approach to decision making : it confers the illusion of perfectibility upon the decision makers and encourages everyone else simply to play along.

Companies tend to pay people based on whether they do what they’re expected to do. In a market, people get paid simply on what they do! Ideally, the same would be true inside a company.

This is an essential part of what markets do : encourage people to find new valuable information and then let everyone else know about it. This too is what corporations should be looking for : ways to provide their employees with the incentive to uncover and act on private information.

Even small option grants seem to instill a sense of ownership, and we know that owners are, in general, more likely to take good care of their property than renters are.

Far more important than stock options would be the elimination of rigid managerial hierarchies and the wider distribution of real decision-making power.

The more responsibility people have for their own environments the more engaged they will be.

Allowing people to make decisions about their own working conditions makes a material difference in how they perform.

Decentralized markets work exceptionally well because the people and companies in those markets are getting constant feedback from customers. Companies that aren’t doing a good job or are spending too much learn to adjust or else they go out of business.

Some academics suggest that CEOs have, at best, a minor impact on corporate performance.

The more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.

Use methods of aggregating collective wisdom.

The anonymity of the markets and the fact that they yield a relatively clear solution, while giving individuals an unmistakable incentive to uncover and act on good information, means that their potential value is genuinely hard to overestimate.

The more important the decision, the more important it is that it not be left in the hands of a single person.

Chapter 11 : Stock Market

The measure of the stock market’s success is not whether stock prices are rising. It’s whether stock prices are right. It’s harder for the market to get prices right when there is so little money on the short side.

The psychology of investors: – sometimes herd, preferring the safety of the company of others to make independent decisions. – too much credence to recent and high-profile news while underestimating the longer-lasting trends or less dramatic events – (in the same way people worry about being killed in a plane crash while not paying attention to their high cholesterol) – fooled by randomness, believing money managers who have had a few good quarters have figured out the trick of beating the market – find losses twice as painful as they find gains pleasurable, so hold on to stocks longer than they should, believing as long as they haven’t sold it, they haven’t suffered any losses – above all, overconfident, which means they trade more than they should and end up costing themselves money as a result – (from 1991-1996 the market returned 17.9%. active investors earned just 11.4%. They would have done better had they just sat on their hands.)

Individual irrationality can add up to collective rationality.

People want to save, and do not need a massive push to do so. What they do need is a way to make saving easier and spending harder. One way of doing this is to make enrollment in retirement plans automatic, rather than asking people to sign up for them. If people have to take action to opt out of a retirement plan rather than having to take action to opt in, they are significantly more likely to stay in the plan and more likely to save. Inertia is a powerful tool.

The idea of the wisdom of crowds is not that a group will always give you the right answer, but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual could provide. That’s why the fact that only a fraction of investors consistently do better than the market remains the most powerful piece of evidence that the market is efficient.

The healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time. Any time you sell a stock, the person who’s buying it thinks differently about the future prospects of that stock. You think it’s going down, he thinks it’s going up. One of you will be right, but the important thing is that it’s only through the interaction of those differing attitudes that the market is able to do a good job of allocating capital.

In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent – independence, diversity, private judgement – disappear.

The price of TVs doesn’t suddenly double overnight only to crash a few months later. You never end up with a situation where the fact that prices are rising makes people more interested in buying (which is what happens in a bubble). The more expensive a TV gets, the less interested people are in buying it.

(bubbles:) The kind of diversity of opinion that a healthy market depends on was replaced by a sort of single-mindedness.

Everyone was convinced the greater fool was out there.

If groups on the whole are relatively intelligent (as we know they are), there’s a good chance that a stock price is actually right. Problem is that once everyone starts piggybacking on the wisdom of the group, then no one is doing anything to add to the wisdom of the group.

News reporters tend to overplay the importance of any particular piece of information. The best way to disclose public information is without hype or commentary from people in the positions of power. (Like the way the Federal Reserve announces its interest-rate hikes.)

A mob in the middle of a riot appears to be a single organism, acting with one mind.

Chapter 12 : Government

Government kept getting bigger, since everyone had an individual interest in getting a little more from the state, and no one was looking out for the collective interest, entered into cozy arrangements with the businesses it was regulating, and that allowed economic policy to be run in the interests of powerful groups instead of the interests of the public as a whole.

Though everyone may say they are into the common good, to different individuals and groups, the common good is bound to mean different things.

AFTERWORD:

One of the key lessons of the Wisdom of Crowds is that we don’t always know where good information is. That’s why, in general, it’s smarter to cast as wide a net as possible, rather than wasting time figuring out who should be in the group and who should not. This idea is well suited to the internet.

The more information a group has, the better its collective judgement will be, so you want as many people with good information in a group as possible.

The Wisdom of Crowds is not an argument against experts, but against our excessive faith in the single individual decision maker.

If a group is smart enough to know whether an individual is a genuine decision-making prodigy, then the group is smart enough to not need that individual.

Even brilliant experts have biases and blind spots, so they can make mistakes. What’s troubling is that, in general, they don’t know when they’re making those mistakes. Experts don’t know when they don’t know something.

That’s why it’s worthwhile to cast a wider net and why relying on a crowd of decision makers improves (though doesn’t guarantee) your chances of reaching a good decision.

Be careful to keep the group diverse, and careful to prevent people from influencing one another too much.

The crowd’s judgement is going to give us the best chance of making the right decision, and in the face of that knowledge, traditional notions of power and leadership should begin to pale. I am cautiously hopeful that they will, allowing us to begin to trust individual leaders less and ourselves more.

———– Wisdom of crowds works on problems where there’s a true answer, or when some choices are better than other in some Platonic sense. The reason this works is that people are operating on private info, which may be bad or fragmented.

The opinions are diverse — not consensus but disagreements.

People don’t know much about what others are betting on or guessing — not a lot of interpersonal interaction.

The post The Wisdom of Crowds – by James Surowiecki appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from The Wisdom of Crowds – by James Surowiecki

[entreprenergy]

The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge – Berytech Confrence

Berytech our Entrepreneurship Partner at the Entreprenergy Summit is organizing a private Conference titled: The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge

The conference will take place on Saturday October 31st; 3:00-4:00 PM during the Entreprenergy Summit, at “Palais des Congrés” Dbaye, welcoming an expert keynote guest & featuring:

Ashot Minasyan: Co-founder & CTO at Bitlis-MEN – Check their website

George Abboud: Co-Founder Earth Technologies – Listen to his podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Tarek Safwan: Branch Marketing Engineer National Instruments – Check his LinkedIn Profile.

Moderator: Krystel Khalil: Head of Communication & Outreach Berytech – Check her LinkedIn Profile.

Topics to be covered include the following:

IoT in the Digital Energy Revolution

Latest Tech Trends for Solar Energy Field

Success Story: A Business Startup in the Energy Industry

The Kick-off of the “Digital Energy Challenge” offering exciting opportunities for innovations and startups in the renewable energy field.

Attend this Conference to have the opportunity to network with key people in this industry.

Get your ticket and read more details on the Entreprenergy Summit page.

  The post The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge – Berytech Confrence appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge – Berytech Confrence

[entreprenergy]

Digitizing the Event World – ArabNet Panel

ArabNet is hosting a panel titled “Digitizing the Event World” at the Entreprenergy Summit.

The panel is featuring Entrepreneurs involved in the Event Industry:

Randa Farah: Co-Founder Lebtivity – Check her profile on the website.

Sami Tueni: Co-Founder Ihjoz – Check his LinkedIn profile.

Wassim Hakim: Founder Sociatag – Check his LinkedIn profile.

Moderator: Racha Ghamlouch: Speakers & Entrepreneurship Manager at ArabNet – Check her LinkedIn profile.

Attend this Panel to have the opportunity to ask your questions to these Entrepreneurs.

Get your ticket and read more details on the Entreprenergy Summit page.

The post Digitizing the Event World – ArabNet Panel appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Digitizing the Event World – ArabNet Panel

[entreprenergy]

Opening Interview – Abdulaziz F. Aljouf and Tarek Sadi

An exclusive interview at the Entreprenergy Summit with Abdulaziz F. Aljouf, Founder PayTabs, hosted by Tarek Sadi, Managing Director at Endeavor Lebanon.

Know more about Abdulaziz and Tarek by reading their biography on our Summit website.

This will be the Opening Interview, and it will start at 10:10am so be there on time.

Get your ticket and read more details on Entreprenergy Summit Ihjoz Event page.

The post Opening Interview – Abdulaziz F. Aljouf and Tarek Sadi appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Opening Interview – Abdulaziz F. Aljouf and Tarek Sadi

[entreprenergy]

Steve Wozniak and Tony Fadell are coming to Lebanon…

Did you know that Steve Wozniak and Tony Fadell are coming to Lebanon?

  I don’t have to really introduce those 2 legends and successful business icons.

You may join the BDL Accelerate next week on 3,4,5 November, to meet with them and many foreign entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders on the stages on this big event.

Get your ticket it’s for Free and we may meet there.

But did you know that on 18,19 November we have our Entreprenergy Summit, where you will meet with 60+ Lebanese Entrepreneurs, Business Leaders, Investors, and Decision Makers.

Let’s list 30 of the Lebanese Heroes here, who will be answering all your questions, and ready to meet with you during the break/lunch, because they came for support, and spreading the Energy among all participants: (alphabetical order)

Ahmad Khattab Co-Founder Cedar Rehab

Amin Younes CEO Cafe Younes

Anthony Rahayel Founder No Garlic No Onion

Ayman Itani Founder Think Media Labs

Fares Kikano Co-Founder SMG-Energy

Fares Saad Founder Healthy Lifestyle

Fouad Fattal Co-Founder Krimston

George Abboud Co-Owner Earth Technologies

Ghassan Chahine ‎DPE Lead At Microsoft Corporation

Hassan Harajli Project Manager UNDP-CEDRO

Jad Atallah CEO Mobigates SAL

Joanna Khoury Agile & Scrum Coach at Scrum Arabia

Joey Zeenny CEO Jellyfish

Maher Mezher Founder Innovators League

Marc Dfouni Co-Founder at Eastline Marketing

Mazen Farah Founder Heed

Mohammad Sabouneh Co-Founder Moodfit

Nadim Bou Yazbeck Founder Triangle Mena

Nathalie Jeha Founder Better’fly

Nicolas Sehnaoui Former Minister Of Telecom, Chairman Of UK Lebanon Tech Hub

Rami Nassar Founder Forward Fins

Randa Farah Co-Founder Of Lebtivity

Rany Sader Managing Partner at Sader & Associates

Roger Khater Chairman Bubleik SAL

Salloum Al Dahdah Co-Founder ITWorksMe

Samer Sfeir Founder Mommy Made Lebanon

Sami Abou Saab CEO Speed@BDD

Sami Saab Founder Phenomena

Walid Hanna Founder Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP)

Yorgui Teyrouz Founder Donner Sang Compter

As you can see, our Summit is not focused on Digital and Technology, we also have Social Entrepreneurship, Fitness, Food & Beverage, Retail, Legal, Events, Green Energy, Creativity, Consulting, and Manufacturing Entrepreneurs… (much more to be announced soon)

Last year, everyone was really engaged and got the Value they are looking for, here is one testimonial from Tarek Hassan “Attending this wonderful conference was similar to gaining no less than 5 years of startup experience within a single day!”

Imagine the value and experience you will get from TWO DAYS.

If we want to summarize the feedback of the participants last year, it goes within this sentence: “We were able to ask and receive answers from Successful People who lived at the same country, faced the same struggles, learned the lessons, and transferred the practical knowledge that will be beneficial to any entrepreneur’s journey, and will help wantrepreneurs to avoid common mistakes and start by avoiding the failures mentioned by the panelists, in addition to the valuable insights.”

This year we have beside the interactive Panels, Workshops, and Meet the Expert sessions, so get ready to ask your questions and join the Entreprenergy Summit.

By reading this article, you gift yourself a 50% discount on your ticket, use the code: woz on Ihjoz, our Lebanese Ticketing Partner.

See you on 18-19 November, and of course on 3,4,5 November too.

Share this article with all your friends who might benefit from both events.

The post Steve Wozniak and Tony Fadell are coming to Lebanon… appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Steve Wozniak and Tony Fadell are coming to Lebanon…

[entreprenergy]

Entreprenergy Plus is LIVE

You know Entreprenergy as the Arab podcast interviewing successful entrepreneurs, in addition to our Energy Boost events and the yearly Summit.

We launched “Entreprenergy Plus” a membership platform where you get private access to:

Monthly Exclusive Interview:

You choose the questions to be asked during the video interview with one of our Successful Entrepreneurs. (VALUE: +20$)

Monthly Exclusive Training:

You vote for the topic and we record a video training with a Business Leader, an Expert or a Trainer to provide you with the value you are looking for. (VALUE: +20$)

Attend the ENERGY Boost events for FREE in addition to watching the panels video inside the membership area. (VALUE: 10$)

Weekly special offers from our Entrepreneurs and Partners (VALUE: +50$)

Weekly Hangouts “What’s working Now” to introduce you to tools and techniques used by successful startups and businesses to increase productivity and much more benefits… (VALUE: +40$)

the Matching Area:

Find your Co-Founder, Technical Partner, Designer, Developer, Marketer… (VALUE: +100$)

Check our offering on the landing page here.

  The post Entreprenergy Plus is LIVE appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Entreprenergy Plus is LIVE

[entreprenergy]

10 Last Minute Gifts for an Entrepreneur

Are you stuck with a Last Minute decision for some gifts?

Maybe today is your last day gift shopping, or you still have couple days, yet you want some ideas for an Entrepreneur on your list.

It all started with a question on my Facebook profile: “According to you, what is the best gift to an Entrepreneur?”

Here is a summary of the best answers:

1- Book:

If you know that your Entrepreneur likes to read physical books, you may consider these recommendations:

Zero to One – recommended by Gary Zambakjian

Think and Grow Rich – recommended by Manal Atik

The E-Myth Revisited – recommended by Jad Jreijiri

Fadi Abbas recommended: The Founder’s Dilemmas, The Lean Startup, The Innovator’s Dilemma

Mohammad A.Baydoun recommended 10 keys for ultimate success by Ibrahim Fekhi

Perla Keyrouz suggested any book for Brian Tracy

2- Diary, Journal or Notebook with a pen:

You may look for a lot of applications to increase your productivity, but the most effective combination is a pen and a notebook.

A Moleskin and a good pen are must-have items in every entrepreneur’s toolkit.

Mohammed Rasbin suggested the Diary and Hussein Shokr, Rami Keichour, and Jad Jreijiri suggested a pen.

3- AD on Lebtivity:

A good way to boost an Entrepreneur’ startup is to help him market it.

Randa Farah the co-founder of Lebtivity, suggested an AD on their website, where thousands of visitors surf it every day looking for activities and events in Lebanon.

Offer your Entrepreneur a 15% discount on any AD package by just mentioning “Entreprenergy” to the Lebtivity Team.

4- Apple TV:

For the Apple fanatic in your life, if they did not have it already, just surprise them with this gift immersing them in a world full of Apple(s).

Nadim Nemer suggested this gift as it never gets obsolete. (until Apple decides to )

5- Subscription in Audible:

Perfect for the holidays season, when almost everyone is stuck in traffic, add more value to your Entrepreneur’s ride with some Audio books, I enjoy a new book every month, for only 14.95$/m.

Thank you Jumana N. F. Hassan for recommending this gift.

6- External HD or a tablet:

Just mentioned Audio Books, so why not compile them, add some motivational videos, and give them on an External Hard Drive or a Tablet…

Good idea, thanks to Imad Hteit and Lara Al Nasabi.

7- Virtual Office Bundle:

When he knew that I am writing this blog post, Roger Khater, founder of Bubleik, offered a 20% discount on the Virtual Office Bundle for Entrepreneurs referred by Entreprenergy.

If the startup cost is a hurdle for your entrepreneur, just consider lowering the expenses with a Virtual Office Bundle, which comes with a Business Address, Telephone Answering, and Meeting Room. Enjoy the special offer on yearly packages, just mention Entreprenergy.

8- Massage, Salon or Day Spa Services:

Entrepreneurs don’t spend a lot of time pampering themselves. A gift card for their favorite salon or spa or for one or more massage therapy services is a great way to encourage them to refresh and recharge their own batteries.

By the way, a Beirut Circle Card can give you a lot of options with buy 2 for the price of one. (Listen to the Founder’s interview Maher Nassar)

Thank you Jad Jreijiri for this option, actually it came after I had my own Massage gift, a day before this post so I highly advise that.

9- Nice Desk Clock:

Yes I know that we have a watch in our hand or the clock in our mobile phone, or the Apple Watch, or the one on the wall, yet after Thomas Oshana suggested this gift, I thought of its emotional value when put on your Entrepreneur’s desk. I will let you think of its meanings, remember Time is precious and spending good time with our dear friends and family members is very important, so let this be a reminder from you.

10- Entreprenergy Plus Membership:

Robert Tabet commented with: “a premium membership to a podcast that interviews successful business owners.” and this made me smile with an appreciation to my dear friend promoting the Entreprenergy Plus membership platform, knowing that he is from the early adopters who got his yearly membership.

Thanks to Bisher Tarazi also recommending a yearly membership as a gift to an Entrepreneur, where he can enjoy and benefit from the following: Monthly Exclusive Interviews, Monthly Exclusive Training, Attend the ENERGY Boost events for FREE, Weekly special offers, Weekly Hangouts “What’s working Now”, and the Matching Area.

Read more about it here.

Right now is the perfect time to drum up a truly thoughtful gift for the entrepreneur in your life. What you gift her/him can make a huge impact on the year to come. Plus, every time s/he uses the gift, s/he’ll think of you – and that’s it! These are our 10 last minute gifts for an entrepreneur in 2015.

Now it’s your turn. Comment below with any idea you think we should check out.

The post 10 Last Minute Gifts for an Entrepreneur appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from 10 Last Minute Gifts for an Entrepreneur

[entreprenergy]

Entreprenergy Summit – Partners

The post Entreprenergy Summit – Partners appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Entreprenergy Summit – Partners

[entreprenergy]

Entrepreneurship at the Service of the City – Wamda Panel

Wamda is hosting a panel titled “Entrepreneurship at the Service of the City” at the Entreprenergy Summit.

The panel is featuring Entrepreneurs who are leading a journey of innovation around the service of the city:

Johnny Frem: Founder Asset Peak Performance – Listen to his podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Rami Khawandi: C0-Founder Tari’ak – Check his LinkedIn profile.

Ziad Abi Chaker: Founder and CEO Cedar Environmental – Listen to his podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Moderator: Stephanie Nour Prince: Senior Community Manager Wamda – Check her Twitter profile.

Attend this Panel to have the opportunity to ask your questions to these Entrepreneurs.

Get your ticket and read more details on the Entreprenergy Summit page.

The post Entrepreneurship at the Service of the City – Wamda Panel appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Entrepreneurship at the Service of the City – Wamda Panel

[entreprenergy]

Lebanese League for Women in Business Panel

LLWB is hosting a panel titled “Lebanese League for Women in Business” at the Entreprenergy Summit.

The panel is featuring Lebanese Women in Business:

Leila Khauli Hanna: Lecturer at AUB – Check her profile on AUB website.

Mona Itani: Lecturer at AUB – Check her LinkedIn profile.

Nathalie Fallaha: Founder vit-e – Listen to his podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Rana El Chemaitelly: Founder of The Little Engineer – Check her LinkedIn profile.

Moderator: Rania Chehayeb: Principal Facilitator / Speaker – Check his LinkedIn profile.

Attend this Panel to have the opportunity to ask your questions to these Women Leaders.

Get your ticket and read more details on the Entreprenergy Summit page.

The post Lebanese League for Women in Business Panel appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Lebanese League for Women in Business Panel

[entreprenergy]

Online World Entrepreneurs – AltCity Panel

  AltCity is hosting a panel titled “Online World Entrepreneurs” at the Entreprenergy Summit.

The panel is featuring Entrepreneurs who started different businesses within the Web and Online Industry:

Nathalie Jeha: Founder Betterfly – Listen to her podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Ronald Sayegh: Serial Entrepreneur and Co-founder HobbyGulf.com – Listen to his podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Wadee Bitar: Founder SWS Web Solutions – Listen to his podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Moderator: Samer Azar: Cofounder & CFO AltCity – Check his LinkedIn profile.

Attend this Panel to have the opportunity to ask your questions to these Entrepreneurs.

Get your ticket and read more details on the Entreprenergy Summit page.

The post Online World Entrepreneurs – AltCity Panel appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Online World Entrepreneurs – AltCity Panel

[entreprenergy]

The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge – Berytech Confrence

Berytech our Entrepreneurship Partner at the Entreprenergy Summit is organizing a private Conference titled: The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge

The conference will take place on Saturday October 31st; 3:00-4:00 PM during the Entreprenergy Summit, at “Palais des Congrés” Dbaye, welcoming an expert keynote guest & featuring:

Ashot Minasyan: Co-founder & CTO at Bitlis-MEN – Check their website

George Abboud: Co-Founder Earth Technologies – Listen to his podcast interview on Entreprenergy.

Tarek Safwan: Branch Marketing Engineer National Instruments – Check his LinkedIn Profile.

Moderator: Krystel Khalil: Head of Communication & Outreach Berytech – Check her LinkedIn Profile.

Topics to be covered include the following:

IoT in the Digital Energy Revolution

Latest Tech Trends for Solar Energy Field

Success Story: A Business Startup in the Energy Industry

The Kick-off of the “Digital Energy Challenge” offering exciting opportunities for innovations and startups in the renewable energy field.

Attend this Conference to have the opportunity to network with key people in this industry.

Get your ticket and read more details on the Entreprenergy Summit page.

  The post The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge – Berytech Confrence appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from The Digital Energy Revolution Conference & Challenge – Berytech Confrence

[entreprenergy]

Digitizing the Event World – ArabNet Panel

ArabNet is hosting a panel titled “Digitizing the Event World” at the Entreprenergy Summit.

The panel is featuring Entrepreneurs involved in the Event Industry:

Randa Farah: Co-Founder Lebtivity – Check her profile on the website.

Sami Tueni: Co-Founder Ihjoz – Check his LinkedIn profile.

Wassim Hakim: Founder Sociatag – Check his LinkedIn profile.

Moderator: Racha Ghamlouch: Speakers & Entrepreneurship Manager at ArabNet – Check her LinkedIn profile.

Attend this Panel to have the opportunity to ask your questions to these Entrepreneurs.

Get your ticket and read more details on the Entreprenergy Summit page.

The post Digitizing the Event World – ArabNet Panel appeared first on Entreprenergy.

from Digitizing the Event World – ArabNet Panel