I was hoping for interviews with some of the workers that were photographed. It'd be interesting to hear their opinions about their job and employer, and learn more about their experience going through the apprenticeship program.
Konrad Lorez, one of the founders of the field of animal behavior and a Nobel laurete, did a lot of his research on jackdaws, which are a close relative of the crow. His book King Solomon's Ring is a really enjoyable read into his insights about their intelligence and social life.
There is some pretty misleading writing in this article. Take the sentence below:
"Some years, international comparisons of GDP per hours worked have found, workers in Norway, Ireland, Denmark and even France, with their 30 days of paid vacation every year, their café culture, their generous paid family leave policies, their short work hours mandated by law and their new directive forbidding some employers from expecting workers to check work-related texts and emails after hours, beat us by a mile."
In other words,
In some years (not others), the GDP per hour worked is higher in countries where employees work fewer hours per year.
If people work 20% less and are 10% more productive per hour when they do work, they're still less productive in total than if they didn't reduce their hours.
Why does a company care if their salaried employees are more productive per hour? They just want that employee to maximize productivity over the employee's lifetime with the company.
If the article has only historical anecdotes to demonstrate that employees are more productive in absolute terms if they work fewer hours, that's not very persuasive toward the point the author is trying to make, that major industries and large companies should change because they get more value out of having employees work fewer hours.
I'm not saying I disagree with the author's point, only that they are using misleading evidence to try to support it.
This is a really interesting idea. I wonder if there's anyone who's been extremely successful in their work who would object to it.
My instinct is that if you're smart about your time investments, you can get pretty far on most those burners without out a lot of time invested.
For example, for me, health is a non-negotiable. But I can maintain it with only 4-5 hours a week of investment vs. 0 hours if I abandon it. I just have 3 rules: get enough sleep, eat only healthy things, exercise at least once a week.
If you are running your own company and you can't sleep enough, I think you are either not prioritizing it or you're doing something wrong. You're unsustainably stressed or not managing your company's execution well enough. Not enough sleep affects your performance and ability to think as much as your health, so I really don't see any benefit to being chronically sleep deprived.
Eating healthy doesn't take much more time than eating unhealthy. It means buying groceries, and knowing what's open around you that's cheap and healthy (Most Chinese take-out vegetable stir fry is a good option). The groceries come from Amazon Fresh, and mean 2-3 hours more per week cooking than you would if you got fast food.
And exercise takes no more than 2 hours a week. The goal here is not to be athletic, it's just to be healthy.
I think that whatever your main burner is, you can usually maintain the other burners adequately with 4-5 hours per week, and no more unless something unusual is going on.
The key word here is adequate - it's not the main dimension of your success, and you may just be ok at it. But I don't think you need to fail at it in order to succeed at the thing you're focusing on.
And if you can hit adequacy, you still have more than enough time for your main burner. If other burners combined take 15 hours per week, you very likely still have at least 80 hours a week left for your main focus.
The specific numbers I hypothesize here applies only if you don't have kids, which I imagine skews your family number significantly.
Very few articles about airborne mutation seem to bring up that ebola is an RNA-based virus, which means that it mutates at a faster rate and is less genetically stable than DNA-based viruses, bacteria, or most other pathogens. I wrote an explanation about the significance of RNA here: http://www.thinkhardly.com/think-hardly/ebola-for-entreprene...
Wasn't there strong circumstantial evidence that the Ebola Reston strain was spreading without any bodily contact? It was discovered in lab monkeys in Virgina and spread from room to room of monkeys without any direct contact between the monkeys. It's possible caretakers were spreading it, but it seemed more likely that the strain had gone airborne.
The number of subscribers seems to be a total apples to oranges comparison, given the extremely different channels Netflix and HBO get customers.
If I could pay Netflix prices for HBO Go, I would do it in a heartbeat. But there's no way I'm going to buy a TV and pay +$100/month for cable to become an HBO subscriber.
Because of their different business models, you'd think that the only metric they should be measured on is revenue vs. revenue. To compare subscribers seems like sensationalism and poor logic.
I actually wear both contacts and glasses, and my insurance is enough to cover the contacts or the glasses, but not both; I end up paying for the glasses out of pocket. I wrote this post after being really frustrated with the experience I had at the local optician.
If you go to the last sentence of the post, you can probably tell I meant to write a follow-up post about the competitive landscape and do some sort of SWOT analysis. I ended up just moving on to another topic, but that would have been a good sequel to this post.
Yikes, yeah, maybe I was being too bold there for the sake of humor. But Subscribe & Save is actually very cost competitive, as long as you have Amazon Prime. I just took a few minutes to look up Charmin Ultra Strong Bath Tissue on Amazon vs. the Wegmans in Princeton, NJ and Amazon is $0.84/roll vs. Wegman's $0.83/roll. It's not really disruptive by itself, but more an example of a disruptive business model (Amazon) increasing selection, which was the point I think I meant to make.
That's a fair criticism. I came this article it from a strategy perspective, and would actually like to know more about their operations.
I agree about Zenni Optical and Coastal Contacts --- they are basically pure price plays, while WP is aiming at a very specific customer segment and brand image/personality that's backed up by every interaction you have with them.
"If the fundamentals of your business are good, believe in the data even when investors don't recognize its value. Eventually, they will."