"Do these things right, and you have a chance to reach business nirvana ...INNOVATION" - Google Chair

This is how google works: 

How Google Works - by Schmidt and Rosenberg (click for more SLIDES)

Good ideas aren’t restricted to the people with the most experience or seniority. In fact, some of the best ones come from unexpected places. The smartest thing a leader can do when it comes to idea generation is adopt as open a posture as possible. This means encouraging people across the company to speak up with suggestions and build demos of projects they think should be supported. It also means making it easy for people who use your product to send feedback and taking it seriously when you receive it. - (SOURCE) Jonathan Rosenberg, co-author with Eric Schmidt of How Google Works

My comments: COMPANY CULTURE MATTERS
BUSINESS-SCHOOL WISDOM IS OFTEN NONSENSE
CAPITALISM LIKES OPTIMISM AND AUDACIOUSNESS

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What is poverty?

This clip always makes me cry.   

But can we end poverty, quickly, throughout the world? 

Yes.  If we focus.

April 2014: The BBC's Michelle Fleury talks to World Bank president Jim Yong Kim about attempts to reduce extreme poverty.  Click to watch, and to see the original article.
Economic growth is "not enough" to end global poverty, the World Bank has said.
It has urged developing countries to allocate more resources to their extreme poor, including through bigger welfare programmes.
The bank, which last year set itself the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, said such measures would increase productivity and growth.
But the impact on poverty of growth alone has its limits, the bank said.
"Even if all countries grow at the same rates as over the past 20 years, and if the income distribution remains unchanged, world poverty will only fall by 10% by 2030, from 17.7% in 2010," said World Bank president Jim Yong Kim.
"This is simply not enough, and we need a laser-like focus on making growth more inclusive and targeting more programmes to assist the poor directly if we're going to end extreme poverty."
 To achieve its 2030 target, the bank estimates the extreme poor - those earning less than $1.25 (74p) a day - will have to decrease by 50 million people each year until 2030.
That is the equivalent of a million people each week for the next 16 years.
"This will be extraordinarily difficult, but I believe we can do it," said Mr Kim, at the start of the bank's spring meeting.
"This can be the generation that ends extreme poverty."
The highest levels of extreme poverty are in Africa, the World Bank said.
The country with the biggest extreme poverty is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 88% of the population is below the poverty line.
It is followed by Liberia, where 84% of people are in extreme poverty, and Burundi and Madagascar, where the figure is 81%.

Do you really want to live forever?

Five Tales from Crazy California

1

"I have no intention of dying"
- Sumner Redstone.
Billionaire Redstone, now 91, has made no secret of his longevity regime. It begins with a breakfast of goji berries, "Green Machine" smoothies and tomato juice — followed by a fish dinner and a shot of vodka for its "wonderful" antioxidant properties. The mogul also says he exercises 90 minutes a day.

 2

"It's not even a hypothesis; it's just obvious: The human body is a machine.  Like any other machine, it can be subjected to preventative maintenance that will keep it going indefinitely by removing and replacing parts, just the way we do for a car." 

- Aubrey de Grey, head of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation, and author of Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime.

 3

"Our goal is to move to a preventative medicine paradigm versus treating diseases after they occur.  This is the start of the future of human medicine."
- J. Craig Venter, geneticist and owner of Human Longevity Inc., which will sequence 100,000 genomes annually for paying customers.

 4

"There are a lot of people out there saying, 'We can sell you good health if you pay attention to what we do,' which is genome sequencing, but I have yet to see them actually make an impact."   

- Dr. Dennis Slamon, chief of UCLA's hematology-oncology division.

 5

The urban legend that Walt Disney had his body frozen after death is not true, but it is an option today. 
Most recently, the body of famed computer coder Hal Finney was flown to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., shortly after he died Aug. 28 of ALS. 
That night, his fluids were replaced with a proprietary chemical solution called M-22. 
His body then was chilled to -320ºF and placed in an aluminum pod suspended within a 450-liter tank filled with liquid nitrogen.
There, Finney will remain in suspended animation, or biostasis, until he can be revived.
(Full-body cryopreservation costs $200,000, but one can preserve one's brain for a mere $80,000.)  
Exactly how or when that might be achieved is unclear, but according to the Alcor website, the key lies in nanotechnology, by which molecule-sized devices could "recover any preserved person in which the basic brain structures encoding memory and personality remain intact."

Source: How to Live Forever: The (Mad?) Science Hollywood Is Using to "Cure" Death
by Seth Abramovitch for The Hollywood Reporter, 10th September 2014

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