By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Aug 26, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Innovators leap across learning curves exploring new ways to deliver value the way Tarzan swung from vine to vine across the jungle. Innovators thrive on the steepest part of the learning curve where the changing rate of learning is the greatest. Watch how innovators manage their careers and lives. They always put themselves on a steep learning curve. I know I always have. Staying on a steep learning curve is the most important decision criterion for any career decision an innovator makes. Along the way innovators make many career moves none of which are primarily about titles, offices, number of direct reports, or money. Innovators believe those things are more likely to happen if they keep themselves on steep learning curves. Every choice to take a new tack or direction is about the next learning curve. Innovators are self aware enough to know they do their best work while learning at a rapid rate and are bored to tears when they aren’t. Steep learning curves matter most.
I have known many people who sacrificed learning curves for money and other extrinsic rewards and in the long run most ended up unhappy. In my experience innovators who follow their passions and are in it for the learning always end up happier and making more money anyway.
 The tricky part for innovators is to know when to leap from one learning curve to the next the way Tarzan traversed vines to move through the jungle. Innovators get restless when any curve starts to flatten out. Instead of enjoying the flat part of the curve where it takes less effort to produce more output, innovators get bored and want to find new learning curves where they can benefit from a rapidly changing rate of learning. If the goal for innovators is to get better faster the only way to accomplish it is to live on the edge where the knowledge flows are the richest. It isn’t the most comfortable place to be. It’s understandable most suffer the pain of the steep part of the learning curve, not for the kick of learning, but to finally reach the flat part of the curve. No urgency to move to another curve once the plateau is reached. It is comfortable on the flat part of the curve where the workload lessens and rewards are only available to those that have paid their dues and put in the time to climb up the curve. Yet innovators seem to extract what they need from the steep part of the curve and leap off to do it again moving on to the steep part of the next curve just when the effort required to further climb the current curve gets easier.
Innovators are less interested in climbing further up learning curves than jumping from curve to curve. They are like Tarzan (no loin cloth jokes please) traveling through the forest by jumping from vine to vine. Innovators learn from each curve and cross-pollinate other curves with their interdisciplinary experiences. Innovators are disruptive to those clinging to a single learning curve. Picture the disruption caused while hanging on to a vine for dear life when Tarzan gives his bone jarring animalistic jungle cry before jumping on and swinging across the jungle leaping to the next vine. That’s how disruption works. Ideas from each learning curve are combined and recombined to create new ways to deliver value and solve problems. Hanging around on a single curve as the rate of learning slows down is no way to get through the jungle. Innovators with the benefit of leaping across learning curves will enable disruption and get through the forest faster. Maybe an innovator’s jungle cry like Tarzan’s would help speed the innovation process.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Aug 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I feel sometimes like I don’t post enough pictures of food I am about to eat.
Frankly, I don’t eat many meals that are that interesting or that others would probably want to know about.
But I want to fit in and had a friend of a friend send me a picture of a meal he found on Facebook recently of something someone somewhere was about to eat.
 He wasn’t sure of the entire backstory — only that someone was hungry and took a picture—but was able to download it and send to me to share so I could hit my food pic quota this month on Facebook.
By Michael Steele, on Fri Aug 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Last summer when the Supreme Court delivered its surprising affirmation of the Patient Protection and Affordable CareAct (a.k.a “Obamacare”), liberals rejoiced and sang the praises of the very court they had, up until then, vilified; and conservatives scratched their heads at the perceived betrayal by Chief Justice John Roberts and renewed their call to “repeal and replace” the law after the November elections.
But Obama won, Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate and Republicans lost 8 seats in the House.
We’ve come a long way since those heady days. And still, the news on Obamacare has not been all that great.
Recently, one of the architects of the legislation, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), actually admitted that the Affordable Care Act “is beyond comprehension”; while another, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) called it a “train wreck.” But it was Henry Chao, Obama’s chief technical officer in charge of putting in place the insurance exchanges mandated by the law, who caused heads to turn when he said “I’m pretty nervous . . . Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” With supporters like that…
Certainly, actions taken by the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leading up to implementing the convoluted law have not helped assuage the perceptions of members of Congress, let alone the American people. Forced to suspend the employer mandate to offer insurance to employees, the Administration finds itself in a mad scramble to play down the administrative SNAFU by playing up lower premiums for all while blaming those pesky Republicans for putting the administration in this situation in the first place.
But House Republicans (like Senate Democrats) only get to vote up or down on legislation. It is the agencies and departments of government (run and managed by the administration) that must implement the law. And for this administration, the hit parade of problems continue to mount. For example, while most Americans were enjoying their 4th of July holiday and not paying attention, HHS sheepishly announced, in a “final ruling” it will not attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies. Instead it will rely on individuals “self-reported eligibility”. So I get to tell HHS I’m eligible and they write a check subsidizing my insurance? I can’t think of a more sublime invitation to massive fraud.
Read the rest of…
Michael Steele: How Republicans should fix Obamacare
By Julie Rath, on Fri Aug 23, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
Sure, women are affected by what you’re wearing, but whether or not they swoon over you is about much more than that. Whether you’re new to the dating scene and ready to turn heads, or you’re in a relationship and want to show your partner the best version of yourself, read on for 8 tips on taking your attractiveness to the next level.
1) Don’t overdo the cologne. A small spritz on one or both wrists then a dab, wrist to neck, will do the trick. Also, make sure the scent you use works with your body chemistry. You can do this by testing it at the store then seeing if you still like the way it smells on you after half an hour or so. And if you wear aftershave, remember that has a scent too. It should not be overpowering, especially in combination with your cologne.
2) Everyone looks better when they smile. In order to make your smile as attractive as possible, it’s imperative that you take good care of your teeth. Have them whitened professionally or use an at-home system. Consider a retainer or Invisalign for crooked teeth.
3) Trim the hair around your eyebrows and ears as needed. Keep the rest of your body hair in check, including having the back of your neck cleaned up between haircuts.
4) Keep your nails clean and trim. Chewed up fingernails will make you look nervous, and dirty nails are just plain unappetizing.
5) Use a tongue cleaner and mouth wash to combat bad breath and carry breath strips or altoids when out on a date.
6) Be chivalrous. This one’s common sense, but it’s often neglected. It’s simple: hold the door for her, open her car door, and tell her she looks nice (in a non-slimy way).
7) I have a new client who mentioned that he has a flip phone. I’m not saying you need to have the latest and greatest of everything, but make sure you at least stay current with technology. An extremely outdated phone is not a good look!
8) Be confident in your appearance. When you look good (and you know it), you’ll naturally feel better about yourself. As a result, you’ll radiate effortless, positive energy and confidence, which becomes contagious and magnetic, and therefore others will respond to you with the same positivity that you reflect.
Do any of these tips resonate? In the comments below, let me know what strategy you’re going to try first and what tips you have to make yourself attractive.
By Jeff Smith, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 1:00 PM ET From Buzzfeed:
Jenji Kohan, the creator of Netflix’s new hit series Orange Is The New Black, had to grapple with a pretty serious conundrum: How do you make a compulsively watchable series about a milieu whose defining characteristic is boredom? And yet, the show’s writers have pulled it off.
Of course, they have had to take some liberties; the series is based on Piper Kerman’s memoir but is highly fictionalized. So what did they get right about prison life, and what did they miss?
Though my year in federal prison was quite unlike Piper Kerman’s — largely on account of the differences between men’s and women’s prisons — here’s my assessment of where Orange nailed it and where it missed the mark.
Here’s what they get right:
Small things can have outsize consequences — in positive and negative ways.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I am 50 years old now and yes, I will, on occassion, when my wardrode is limited and it is the weekend, throw on plaid shorts and a plaid short-sleeve button down shirt.
I am 50. And it just doesn’t matter that much.
OK. That’s not the truth. It is not my age and limited wardrobe thay is to blame.
I will admit it, a few years ago when I was in Hawaii I saw some young surfer dudes wearing plaid and plaid and it worked for them–even though I knew it wasn’t supposed to.
While in Hawaii I didn’t buy any of those plaid shirts or plaid shorts (I already had some at home), but did buy the surfer dude casual shoes that looked ragged and pre-worn but seemed to help make the plaid on plaid scheme work.
And that is the real reason I have recently tried wearing this plaid ensemble.
I thought with the shoes and the right youthful attitude I could oull it off. But I got a good look at myself in the mirror over the weekend and relaized that instead of looking like a slightly aging former surfer dude I instead looked like a 50 year old guy with bad plaid clothes who went to Hawaii a few years ago and bought some surfer dude shoes because he thought he could wear them with his plaid clothes back home and look like a slightly aging former surfer dude.
And was sorely mistaken and no one has had the heart to tell him.
By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET To the extent there is a species of Republican the very left leaning blogosphere approves of, it usually sounds something like this: pro immigration reform and eager to take to task the xenophobic strands of the anti immigration argument; libertarian on gay marriage; skeptical of the Tea Party influence on the modern right; dismissive of government shutdown threats; and independent enough to call out a conservative favorite like Rand Paul when he puts a secessionist sympathizer on the federal payroll.
That happens to also be a point by point account of the opinions of the Washington Post’s Republican blogger Jennifer Rubin, and it explains why she has taken her share of shots from the right (Erick Erickson has famously said that she has “nothing in common with conservatives other than hating terrorists”). But the fact that she is something of a punching bag within the left’s online community is a mystery to me and I suspect a lot of others who actually read her work. And the broadside she just absorbed from the Post’s former ombudsman is even more bizarre, when its principal claim is that she is a serial recycler of “every silly right wing theory to come down the pike.”
An odd charge, given her relatively centrist views, and the frequency with which she expresses them: albeit a common one based on any random perusal of the comments on her blog. Putting the ex ombudsman aside (there is no politics like intra office politics) the “Rubin is far right” charge seems to typify one of two scenarios: either a classic case of the messenger overwhelming the message or, alternatively, a pretty fair reading of the abuse any card carrying conservative faces in the volleying that passes for ideological debate circa the Obama era.
Given that most of Rubin’s online critics probably could not pick her out of a lineup (her only steady television presence is the lightly watched MSNBC roundtable Chuck Todd hosts) and allowing that the author of a three year old column is hardly a long-running bête noire of the left, I’ll opt for theory 2: whatever the precise shade of her ideology, Rubin still wears the c-label as opposed to branding herself a moderate, occupies the most prominent online conservative niche in a liberal leaning paper, and those red flags alone have made her a target. So much so that no matter how many times she deviates from right wing orthodoxy, the credit has been sparse from people who make a habit of dismissing that orthodoxy and claim to value “adults” who break ranks with it.
And that’s the most salient aspect of why a blog dustup over a nationally unknown pundit is worthy of examination: it’s a smallish but telling piece of evidence of how liberalism circa 2013 practices its own form of insularity and narrowness, and how the left exists within the same kind of ideological bubble the right is alleged to live inside. The result is a sense of mission about liberal causes that makes it hard to see conservatism in any form as a serious intellectual rival or a sensibility worth understanding. How can it be, when the left assumes that to be a conservative is to be a one percent coddling, gay hating, war on women waging, vote suppressing, science denying kind of clown.
Never mind that the supposedly monolithic right is almost Baptist like in its proliferation of rival doctrinal camps. Never mind that George W. Bush tightened more financial regulations than Bill Clinton; that even an eloquent gay advocate like Frank Bruni initially questioned the wisdom of a federal judicial overturn of traditional marriage laws; that the GOP social issue de jour, banning of abortions after 20 weeks, is the position a growing plurality of Americans hold. Never mind that a liberal icon named John Paul Stevens blessed voter ID laws during his Supreme Court tenure, or that the fact of human influenced climate change can be accepted without co-signing the Obama Administration’s aggressiveness on regulating carbon emissions.
Notwithstanding any of those stubborn facts, the left’s vision of right and wrong (and smart and dumb) thoroughly monopolizes the mainstream press, and the lion’s share of social media. Its dominance, of course, has generated a parallel universe on the Fox News Channel, with its own convictions and suspicions about the other side. But the presence of a Fox does not change the reality that in the most credentialed and prestigious media circles, denigrating conservatism is the last socially acceptable prejudice; and the rightwing counter to that contempt is still confined to one TV channel and a shrinking pool of radio stations.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: What the Mini War on Jennifer Rubin Reveals
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET We are so very proud that our resident personal fitness guru, Josh Bowen, has been named one the top 10 finalists in the 2013 Personal Trainers to Watch competition by Life Fitness. From their press release:
 SCHILLER PARK, Ill., AUGUST 21, 2013 – Life Fitness, a global leader in fitness equipment manufacturing, announces the top 10 finalists in the 2013 Personal Trainers to Watch competition, a program recognizing personal trainers around the world who demonstrate exceptional leadership, client support, motivation and inspiration. The 2013 competition generated more than 1,500 entries from 43 countries, from which emerged 10 elite finalists who will compete at Nuffield Health Fitness & Wellbeing Centre St. Albans outside of London on Sept. 27th to win the title of the world’s best Personal Trainer to Watch.
The top 10 Personal Trainers to Watch finalists are:
- Josh Bowen, Kentucky, USA
- Simone Campbell, Towradgi, Australia
- Melissa diLeonardo, Illinois, USA
- Cate Grace, Christchurch, New Zealand
- Stephen Holt, Maryland, USA
- Kim Ingleby, Bristol, England
- Mish McCormack, Wellington, New Zealand
- Epsilon Wong, Hong Kong, China
- Blake Robinson, Utah, USA
- Jean Mary Scott, Christchurch, New Zealand
“These finalists change their clients’ lives with their unbridled passion and commitment to healthy living and fitness,” said Chris Clawson, president of Life Fitness. “Their nominations were an inspiration to our judges. We look forward to bringing together these elite trainers and evaluating them first-hand as they share best practices and develop course material that can be used on our cutting-edge Synrgy360 functional training system.”
Finalists were selected based on personal values, innovative training philosophies, education and experience. Judges included experts from Life Fitness and its educational arm, Life Fitness Academy, as well as the American Council on Exercise (ACE), the International Confederation of Registers for Exercise Professionals (ICREPs), the European Health & Fitness Association (EHFA), and past competition winners, Joanne Blackerby and Nicole Nichols.
The top 10 finalists will compete in the program’s first live judging event on Sept. 27, 2013, where they will be judged on their ability to motivate, praise and collaborate with a client, as well as enhance the workout experience and correct exercise performance on the Synrgy360 system. The winner will be announced immediately following, and the entire day will be streaming live on www.lifefitness.com/personaltrainers.html.
The World’s Top 10 Personal Trainers
Josh Bowen, Kentucky, USA
Bowen is a personal trainer at Fitness Plus 2 located in Nicholasville, Ky., and is a quality control director of personal training at Compel Fitness, where he oversees the education of more than 100 trainers in five states. Bowen received a Bachelor of Science degree in exercise science from the University of Kentucky and has been a National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) certified personal trainer for more than nine years. Bowen believes that all things are possible through fitness and motivates his clients to feel the same.
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About Life Fitness
Life Fitness is the global leader in commercial fitness equipment manufacturing. The company manufactures and sells strength and cardiovascular equipment under the brand names Life Fitness and Hammer Strength and distributes its equipment in more than 120 countries. Headquartered outside Chicago, in Schiller Park, Ill., Life Fitness is a division of Brunswick Corporation (NYSE: BC).
About Nuffield Health
Nuffield Health provides expert, joined-up healthcare defined by and created for UK health consumers. We are the largest healthcare charity in the UK, providing health services for over 50 years. We are independent of Government, have no shareholders and reinvest our surplus to improve our facilities or provide public health education. We provide access to 15,000 health experts through our 31 hospitals, 65 fitness & wellbeing centres, 200 corporate facilities and 20 medical clinics to help people get healthy, and stay healthy. Nuffield Health is an award-winning not-for-profit, having won Health Investor Social Enterprise of the Year in 2010 and Private Hospital Group of the Year in 2011. We provide fitness and wellbeing services in England and Scotland. We have 65 clubs open to the public and nearly 200,000 members. We hold more than 650 Meet Our Experts free events for the public each year, have more than 1,000 personal trainers to support and motivate our clients and offer each member clinical advice through
our 12-point Health MOT. Last year we provided more than 95,000 of our Health MOTs and found that nearly two-thirds of our members reduced their cholesterol, three-quarters improved their blood pressure, and around two thirds lost more than three per cent of their body weight. For more information about Nuffield Health, visit www.nuffieldhealth.com
About ICREPs
The International Confederation of Registers of Exercise Professionals (ICREPs) is an international partnership between registration bodies around the world that register exercise professionals. ICREPs members operate over four continents, in seven countries, and collectively register over 60,000 individual exercise professionals.
About EHFA
The European Health & Fitness Association (EHFA) is an independent and nonprofit organisation based in Brussels representing the European health and fitness sector at the EU level. EHFA sees its objective to get “More People, More Active, More Often” as a triple-win for European citizens, the EU and the European health and fitness sector.
The EHFA Standards Council is responsible for the direction and strategic thinking for the developing regulatory framework, which underpins public confidence in the work and development of the European Health and Fitness industry. The European Register of Exercise Professionals (EREPS) is regulated by the EHFA Standards Council, serving as an independent body for the registration of fitness professionals who meet the qualifications established by the Standards Council. For further information, visit www.EHFA.eu.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Aug 21, 2013 at 2:30 PM ET  From Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union for Reform Judaism:
Ethan Kadish is a 13-year-old boy in great need of the Reform Jewish community’s help.
On June 29, 2013, the afternoon peace of Shabbat at URJ Goldman Union Camp Institute(GUCI) in Zionsville, IN, was shattered by a lightning strike that left three campers unresponsive on the athletic field. Thanks to the skill, courage, and quick thinking of the GUCI staff, all three campers made it to the hospital and survived this unimaginable tragedy.
This heartrending incident tested the GUCI family, the URJ camp community, and the entire Reform Movement, but none more than the families of the injured campers. Their strength has been nothing short of inspirational. Two of those families’ children, thankfully, recovered and returned home; one even returned to camp. The third camper, Ethan Kadish, remains hospitalized in Cincinnati, OH.
To date, Ethan’s recovery has included a series of successes that began with his survival and includes milestones like opening his eyes, breathing independently, and responding to stimuli. Ethan is in the care of a fantastic medical team and undergoes several hours of intense physical therapy every day. His family looks forward to the day he will return home, but they recognize, too, that even once he’s home, his challenges will continue. Ethan will require regular therapy and constant medical care, which, once he leaves the hospital, likely will not be covered by insurance. Ethan and his family face a long, hard, and, yes, expensive road ahead.
The Kadish family’s remarkable strength comes largely from their faith – faith in the healing power of God, faith in the skill and wisdom of Ethan’s physicians, and faith in the support of the URJ and GUCI communities. We are pledged to maintain that support, ensuring that throughout the challenges ahead, their faith in our communities will not waver.
This week – the week before Ethan was to have celebrated his bar mitzvah – a fundraising campaign in his honor has been launched with HelpHOPELive, a nonprofit organization that assists the transplant community and those who have sustained catastrophic injury. The funds will help Ethan’s family meet immense financial challenges associated with uninsured therapies, home modifications, and other injury-related expenses. All contributions made in Ethan’s honor will be administered by HelpHOPELive, specifically and solely for his injury-related expenses.
Our tradition teaches that Kol Yisrael arevim zeh b’zeh (all Jews are responsible one for the other). Indeed, together with HelpHOPELive, the Reform Jewish family can honor Ethan and his family, sending a strong message that we stand together with all of them during this time of need.
To make a charitable contribution by credit card, please call 800.642.8399 or visit Ethan’s page at helphopelive.org.
To make a donation by check, make checks payable to: HelpHOPELive and include this notation in the memo section: In honor of Ethan Kadish. Mail to:
HelpHOPELive
2 Radnor Corporate Center
100 Matsonford Road, Suite 100
Radnor, PA 19087
Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by the law. This campaign is being administered by HelpHOPELive – a 501(c)(3) nonprofit providing fundraising assistance to transplant and catastrophic injury patients – which will hold all funds raised in honor of Ethan in its Great Lakes Catastrophic Injury Fund.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Aug 21, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET  Click here to order Since I was recently part of a book on dealing effectively with crisis, this piece caught my attention.
AOL CEO brashly and brazenly fired an employee on a conference call last week. An audio of the firing was released to the internet embarrassing the CEO. He today apologized to everyone on the call (1000 employees) via email.
That is a start. But struck me as more of a CYA response than a genuine and heartfelt apology.
He may have had good reason for firing this individual. I don’t know. But if he truly wanted to apologize he should do so on the same (or more personal) medium where the behavior occurred. In this case, a conference call.
An email is just slightly more personal than a text message.
Or classified ad making a declaration.
If Mr. Armstrong truly wanted to make a real apology that his employees could trust and use to reconsider their thoughts about last weeks’ inflammatory firing incident he could have dug a little deeper, been a little less public, and a little more personal than a blast email with a stock mea culpa.
Just my two cents.
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The Recovering Politician Bookstore
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The tricky part for innovators is to know when to leap from one learning curve to the next the way Tarzan traversed vines to move through the jungle. Innovators get restless when any curve starts to flatten out. Instead of enjoying the flat part of the curve where it takes less effort to produce more output, innovators get bored and want to find new learning curves where they can benefit from a rapidly changing rate of learning. If the goal for innovators is to get better faster the only way to accomplish it is to live on the edge where the knowledge flows are the richest. It isn’t the most comfortable place to be. It’s understandable most suffer the pain of the steep part of the learning curve, not for the kick of learning, but to finally reach the flat part of the curve. No urgency to move to another curve once the plateau is reached. It is comfortable on the flat part of the curve where the workload lessens and rewards are only available to those that have paid their dues and put in the time to climb up the curve. Yet innovators seem to extract what they need from the steep part of the curve and leap off to do it again moving on to the steep part of the next curve just when the effort required to further climb the current curve gets easier.
