Chinese Officials Rush to Sell Luxury Homes Amid Corruption Crackdown - Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/articles/chinese-officials-fearing-scrutiny-amid-a-crackdown-on-graft-rush-to-sell-luxury-homes-1408316680?mod=e2fb

By 

ESTHER FUNG and 

ALYSSA ABKOWITZ 

Aug. 17, 2014 7:04 p.m. ET

Cai Bin, center, whom social-media users dubbed 'Uncle House,' was convicted on graft charges.Imaginechina/Associated Press

China's corruption crackdown has already taken a bite out of the hospitality sector in China with its ban on lavish banquets and is now starting to make waves in another corner of the economy, as officials afraid of government scrutiny are dumping apartments.

In one case late last year, an Inner Mongolia political leader named Wu Zhizhong was convicted of corruption, accepting bribes and embezzling public funds. Investigators said Mr. Wu owned 33 properties in China and one house in Canada. Xinhua, China's official news agency, said the keys to all of his homes could fill up an entire handbag.

Cai Bin, a former Guangzhou official dubbed "Uncle House" on social media, was also convicted last year for accepting bribes. Investigators said he and his family owned more than 20 homes.

Those cases, and others like them, have raised alarm bells among local government leaders.

According to roughly a dozen property agents interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, officials are now afraid to buy luxury pads, and several are trying to offload properties that might raise red flags.

"Officials are focused on selling their homes quickly, so they are willing to sell at 5% to 10% cheaper than the average prices of comparable homes," says Zhang Yan, a manager at Shanghai Centaline Property Consultants, who says he sells three to four homes to officials every quarter on average. Party members usually find a buyer within two weeks, he said, while most other sellers find buyers in about a month, waiting for a higher price.

The impact of the corruption crackdown on the overall market is difficult to measure, in part because there is no national property registration system in China. While there are limitations on how many homes a person can buy, some people have relatives or surrogates purchase homes for them.

The dumping of properties is the latest iteration of fear that has spread through the Chinese government at all levels as President Xi Jinping's anticorruption campaign rolls on. Already, government officials have toned down lavish banquets, gift-giving and travel.

And it comes at a bad time for China's property market, which is facing a slump that many economists say poses the greatest risk to the country's economy. Housing sales in the first seven months this year fell 10.5%, according to official data issued last week.

According to real-estate agents, government officials make up as much as 20% of owners in the luxury housing market, and the agents say they simply aren't buying much anymore.

"A major way to corrupt an official is to give him a house as a gift," says Yan Jirong, a professor at the Peking University School of Government. "The anticorruption campaign is sending a signal" that such tactics should be stopped, he said.

Housing corruption is rampant in China. In June, the authorities in Guangxi Autonomous Region issued a statement warning civil servants "in possession of excess homes" to turn them in, though it left vague where and how to surrender such property.

The Central Military Committee, which controls China's armed forces, says it wants military personnel to annually declare the property they own, and has threatened to punish officers who hide or falsify their declarations.

In June, one government official offered a two million yuan ($325,000) discount on his apartment in Beijing's downtown Chaoyang district, originally priced at 22.5 million yuan, according to the real-estate agent selling the home. An advertisement for the four-bedroom home was titled "Distressed sale!!!"

Mr. Zhang said he sold an apartment in Shanghai's high-end Gubei district for an official last year for around 11 million yuan. Comparable homes sold for at least 12 million yuan at that time, he said.

"It was a three-bedroom apartment in a good location, and the home he lived in was actually humbler," Mr. Zhang says. "He was exceedingly discreet."

According to a recent survey of investors and property developers in China conducted by the Urban Land Institute, a think tank, only 23% of the respondents expected to invest more in luxury residential real estate, one of the lowest percentages recorded in the survey. That compares with 44% who expect to increase their investment in the midmarket housing sector.

In Hangzhou, sales of high-end homes plunged 54% in the first half the year, according to data tracker China Real Estate Index System. Gao Yuansheng, research director of the firm's Hangzhou office, attributed the fall mainly to expectations for slower price appreciation, but said it could be partly due to the anticorruption measures.

Another drag on the real-estate market: Beijing is paving the way for a nationwide system to tax and register property, which would make it much easier to identify modestly paid government officials who buy multiple homes. However, draft rules on a property-registration system issued Friday indicated the public would have only limited access to such a registry.

In a study from the University of Pennsylvania, economists found that Chinese government officials buy larger and more lavish homes than nonbureaucrats, despite earning typically 14% less in monthly income. Some officials also receive a price discount of nearly 4%, according to the study, which said that the size of the discount appears related to the power the official wields among local developers.

Bureaucrats in the study accounted for 7.1% of buyers—a much higher percentage compared with the 0.86% proportion of bureaucrats in China's total population.

Many officials mask their homeownership by using the IDs of their chauffeurs, relatives or surrogate buyers, according to real-estate agents.

One agent in Beijing said a client was in the process of unloading a home when the client was arrested last year. "I didn't realize he was an official until I saw his picture online when he was arrested," the agent said.

—Lilian Lin contributed to this article.

5 Often Quoted Tips for Powerful Presentations - TIME

http://www.inc.com/john-treace/5-often-quoted-tips-for-powerful-presentations.html?cid=readmore

BY JOHN TREACE

It is more important than ever for business leaders to bring their messages to audiences. Here are five timeless tips for better presentations.

 There's a plethora of books and articles out there on how to give a great presentation.

In today's business environment, how to persuade and entertain an audience seems to be a perennial concern, so let's take a look at five classic techniques and tips for powerful presentations.

Follow these and you'll be on your way.

1. Pick the right time.

Research shows that the best time of day for presentations is around 10:30 a.m. In the midmorning, both morning and afternoon types will be alert. If at all possible, avoid presenting right before or after lunch, or in the late afternoon, especially within the final hour of the workday. You don't want to fight the restlessness of a hungry stomach or the lethargy of a full one, nor do you want to struggle against the afternoon energy slump. Of course, the timing of your presentation isn't always up to you. If you get stuck with a bad time, the next four tips become all the more important.

2. Keep it short.

Never add content to lengthen a program when it isn't necessary. If you do, people will get bored fast. They can tell when you're feeding them fluff. You never want them leaving a presentation thinking, "Man, he could've said that in 15 minutes but instead he wasted an hour of my time." Keep it on point and your audience will be happy.

3. Involve the audience.

It's difficult to hold people's attention for over 20 minutes. One solution is to keep the audience involved. Try injecting humor to get a laugh, or asking a few questions. When I'm speaking to audiences about the importance of selecting a stable company for employment, I always say, "Let me see a show of hands if you ever knew someone who lost their job because their company was poorly managed and went bankrupt." Hands always shoot up in the audience. This technique gets people thinking about how the content I'm delivering relates to their own lives, and helps them get engaged with my talk.

4. Make an emotional connection.

Connect an emotion to your message and it will be remembered. When I speak to audiences about the importance of having the right job, I often try to motivate and engage them by rousing their emotions: "You should see your job as enjoyable. If you're not happy, find a job where you are. Life is not a dress rehearsal. We only get to go around once. Don't end up on your death bed feeling like you wasted your life." When you use emotions and mental pictures, people internalize the message, and it stays in their minds.

5. Use visuals.

Research shows that some of us favor auditory learning while others are visual or kinesthetic learners. That means that some portion of your audience is always going to learn better through seeing or doing. You'll help the kinesthetic learners somewhat by involving them in your presentation (see point 3), but you can also include the visual learners by enhancing your words with helpful graphics. These will also improve learning and attention for all kinds of learners. One caveat, though: Don't over-rely on your visual aids. PowerPoint and Keynote are great applications, but don't read the slides. Speak to what they show. You want your audience focused on your message, not just on the slides.

There they are: Five timeless tips for better presentations. I'll even throw in a bonus tip--an idea that's often repeated, but that I still find to be a helpful reminder. Start your presentations with a summary of your talk and then end with a short review of what has been covered. We can shorten this concept thusly: "Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em; tell 'em; and then tell 'em what you told 'em." Repetition equals retention.

Now that you've had a refresher, get out there and start presenting.

JOHN TREACE has more than 30 years' experience as a sales executive in the medical products industry. He spent more than 10 years specializing in the restructuring of sales departments. His new book is Nuts & Bolts of Sales Management: How to Build a High-Velocity Sales Organization.

7 Ways to Become Your Boss’ Dream Employee - TIME

http://time.com/3111069/friend-your-boss/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• The Muse
 

Aug. 14, 2014

 Become a pet in just a few steps

By Lea McLeod, M.A.

When my client Angela needed help sorting out a number of career-related issues, her relationship with her manager was at the top of the list.

Frankly, it was in shambles. Their working relationship was terrible, they couldn’t get along, and Angela even admitted she thought her boss regretted hiring her.

While I’m sure Angela’s boss had his own faults, I began to realize that Angela had forgotten the fundamental rule of employment: You are there to make your manager successful. Angela was contentious and argumentative, and I could see how her boss might not consider her someone who made his life any easier. (Related: How to play nice with a boss you hate)

On the other hand, when I look back at the best staff I had as a manager, they were the ones doing whatever was needed—and with a great attitude—so that we could all be successful together. In short, they made my life easier.

The good news is, aiming to do the same doesn’t just help your boss out. When your goal is to make your manager more successful—rather than just yourself—you’ll grow as an individual performer, as a professional, and as a part of the team. You’ll learn a lot about what it takes to be a leader, expand your empathic skills, and develop your capacity for leadership. Plus, your boss will likely become your mentor and advocate—which will put many more opportunities within your reach.

It’s not complicated; it just requires a decision and commitment on your part to make it happen. Here are some starter tips for making your manager’s life—and job—easier on a daily basis.

1. Get to Know Your Manager

You can’t make your boss’ life easier if you don’t understand how he fundamentally operates. So, your first step is to figure out what he needs from you—and how you should deliver it.

Does he prefer updates delivered in written form or verbally? Spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides? Does he want information conveyed via email, during a team meeting, or on a voicemail?

Getting to know your manager and his preferences will help youdeliver the information he needs, the way he needs it. And who doesn’t appreciate that?

2. Know Your Boss’ Goals

As an employee, you may be so focused on your own goals that you forget that you’re actually there to support your manager achieving her goals. So, make it your job to understand the goals, numbers, projects, and other deliverables your boss is accountable for.

It’s as simple as asking your manager as part of your one-on-one meetings, “If I’m aware of your goals and priorities, I can better support you in achieving them. Can you share these with me, so that I can help you succeed?” Once you understand her goals, you’ll be able to produce deliverables that support her success.

3. Never Let Your Manager Be Blindsided

One rule I always asked my teams to abide by was to never let me be blindsided. In short: No surprises.

So, if you suspect that one of your customers is getting really ticked off and is about to escalate over you—and over your boss—to the VP of customer service, you need to let your manager know. Otherwise, she’ll be completely blindsided by the situation, unprepared to handle it, and likely, not too happy with you.

A blindside creates frustration and chaos that usually ends up in a major time-wasting fire drill. Avoid it, and believe me, your manager will thank you.

4. Don’t Expect Your Boss to Spoon-Feed You

It may sound harsh, but no manager wants to babysit an employee. So if you have questions about health insurance, where to find the pencils, or how to file an expense report, find a colleague who can help you get your answers.

Save one-on-one time with your boss for work-related matters that require collaboration; issues that allow you to flex your intellectual muscles and prove your worth as an employee.

5. Meet (or Beat!) Your Deadlines

When you get an assignment from your manager, enthusiastically commit to the deadline (this means “I’m on it!” not, “I’ll see what I can do”). Then, aim to deliver it at least a day early.

This gives your boss time to flex and adapt in case something comes up—and it always does—rather than sweating it out for you to deliver something at the very last minute.

6. Offer Solutions, Not Problems

Your job is not to constantly point out problems that arise, but rather, to proactively start thinking about what solutions could help address those challenges.

For example, you should never walk into your boss’ office to complain about how the shipping department can never get anything out on time. Instead, you should first go to the shipping department, have a conversation about what can be done to improve the situation, and see what you can do to help.

Then, when you do go to your boss about it, you’ll be able to let him or her know the action you’ve already taken to start solving the problem.

7. Do What You Say; Say What You Do

If you say you’ll finish a report by Friday for the team update, but you come in Friday morning unprepared because “other things came up,”people will probably complain to your manager.

And if that’s not enough, if your manager was counting on that report to take the next steps on a project or to present to the executive team, it will inconvenience (read: annoy) him or her even further.

People who are accountable for their actions and follow up on their commitments are dream employees—and their bosses know they can count on them, no matter what.

Employees who work to make their managers successful are golden. Your manager has a tough job—the stress and pressure of which may not be abundantly evident to you. So, help your manager out and develop your own skills at the same time, by doing everything you can to make your boss’ job easier. When you’re a manager, you’ll appreciate the same.

How the Pope Is Transforming the Vatican Now - Fortune Magazine

http://time.com/3111088/pope-francis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Fortune
 

Aug. 14, 2014

    

Pope Francis

By Shawn Tully

The new pope wanted to talk about money. That was the message that went out to a group of seven prominent financiers—major Catholics all—from around the world in the summer of 2013. Barely five months after the shocking resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis had summoned them to assemble at the seat of holy power, the Vatican. They knew their general assignment: to create a plan to restructure the Vatican’s scandal-plagued finances. And like Catholics everywhere, they knew that Francis had already signaled that he was a new kind of pontiff, a “people’s pope” who championed charity and tolerance over dogma. Still, they didn’t know what to expect when they arrived at the Vatican for a meeting with the pope on the first Saturday in August. How interested was he in finance, really? And how serious was he about changing business as usual inside the Vatican?

A major hint came from a change in tradition upon their arrival: The visitors didn’t report to the Apostolic Palace, the Renaissance showplace where for centuries past popes had received visitors in high style. Instead they entered Vatican City on the other side of the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square and took a 150-yard stroll through the hilly enclave to the new pope’s place of business—Casa Santa Marta, a five-story limestone guesthouse that could be mistaken for a newish hotel. There they were ushered into a nondescript meeting room on the first floor with no paintings or religious ornaments and took their seats around a conference table. The members—including Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, ex-chief of asset-management giant Invesco in Europe; Jochen Messemer, a top executive at ERGO, a large German insurer; and George Yeo, former foreign minister of Singapore—chatted nervously as they waited.

After 15 minutes, Pope Francis entered the room—and got right down to business. Attired in a simple white cassock and plain metal cross, he took his place standing at the head of the table. With little preamble, he began outlining his strategic vision, in an approach described by one participant as “highly managerial.” Speaking in fluent Italian and taking frequent pauses while a translator repeated his words in English, the pope explained to the group that for his spiritual message to be credible, the Vatican’s finances must be credible as well. After centuries of secrecy and intrigue, it was time to open the books to the faithful. Strict rules and protocols must be adopted to end the cycle of scandals that had plagued the Vatican in recent years.

How Bitcoins Could Put Your Finances at Risk - TIME

http://time.com/3104130/bitcoin-cfpb-virtual-currency/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

Virtual currencies could cause you to lose "real" money, according to a new report

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau released a report Monday concluding that virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin, offer less protection than regular currencies and can be vulnerable to outrageous mark-ups, online scams and hackers.

In addition to publishing the report, the bureau has also added a virtual currency section to their complaint page where people who have run into problems with Bitcoin or other similar currencies can register their issues.

According to Bitcoin.com, there are more than 13 million units of virtual currency around the world.

Aug., 12, 2014

A Global Financial Guru Who Predicted the Crisis of 2008 Says More Turmoil May Be Coming - TIME

http://time.com/3099587/india-central-bank-raghuram-rajan-global-finance-world-economy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Michael Schuman / Mumbai @MichaelSchuman
 

Aug. 11, 2014

    

Raghuram Rajan, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, speaks during a news conference at the central bank's headquarters in Mumbai on August 5, 2014Bloomberg/Getty Images

Raghuram Rajan, the governor of India's central bank, fears supereasy money from the world’s central banks is inflating assets and encouraging bad investments

Back in 2005, Raghuram Rajan, then economic counselor at the International Monetary Fund, stood up in front of the annual meeting of prominent economists and bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyo., and gave a presentationthat his listeners could never have expected. The U.S. investor community was reveling in the high growth and stable financial conditions then prevalent around the world, but Rajan had examined global financial markets and come to a very different opinion. He argued that increasingly complex markets, which spewed out complicated instruments like credit-default swaps and mortgage-backed securities in ever greater quantities, had made the global financial system a riskier place, not less so as many believed. Such comments were considered near blasphemy at the time, and Rajan’s audience didn’t take him very seriously.

Three years later in 2008, however, his views proved prophetic. Rajan had generally predicted the sources of the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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Today, Rajan, now governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, is worried again. This time, he’s fretting about the impact of the superloose monetary policies pursued by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks to combat the financial crisis and resulting recession. Long-term low interest rates and unorthodox programs to stimulate economies — like quantitative easing, or QE — could be laying the groundwork for more turmoil in financial markets, he argues.

“My sense is that monetary policy can only do so much and beyond a certain point if you try to use monetary policy it does more damage than good,” Rajan tells TIME in his Mumbai office. “A number of years over which we, as central bankers, have convinced markets that we continuously come to their rescue and that we will keep rates really low for long — that we do all kinds of ways of infusing liquidity into the markets — has created markets that tend to push asset prices probably significantly beyond fundamentals, in some cases, and make markets much more vulnerable to adverse news. My worry is that, with inflation not being strong, this can continue for some time until things are so stretched that any signs of inflation, and a rise in interest rates, could precipitate a fairly strong market reaction. Certainly that volatility hurts across the world.”

Rajan, 51, would not pinpoint specifically where the most dangerous spots in global finance may be, but he did say that he believed assets of all sorts have become inflated. “I don’t know what the right level of the market is,” he says. “But I do know that, when I look at my portfolio and try to figure out where to invest, I can’t think of what I think is fairly valued.”

On top of his worries about market volatility, Rajan is also concerned that supereasy money is causing the misallocation of capital in the global economy, with potentially huge consequences down the road. “My greater worry is that by altering the price of capital for a substantial period of time, are we also, in a sense, distorting investment decisions and the nature of the economy we will have,” Rajan says. “Have we artificially kept the real rate of interest somehow below what should be the appropriate natural rate of interest today and created bad investment that is not the most appropriate for the economy?”

Still, Rajan agrees with Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen in her policy of slowly withdrawing stimulus measures and reintroducing higher interest rates. “We’re in the hole we are in. To reverse it by changing abruptly would create substantial amounts of damage. So I’m with Fed officials in saying that as we get out of this, let’s get out of this in a predictable and careful way, rather than in one go,” Rajan says.

Rajan has had to confront fallout from Fed policy personally. When he took the helm at India’s central bank in 2013, India was suffering as one of the “fragile five” — the emerging markets deemed most vulnerable to the winding down of Fed stimulus. India’s currency, the rupee, tumbled in value as investors fled, fearful that the curtailing of dollars in the world economy would strain the country’s ability to finance its large current-account deficit. In a series of deft and quick steps, Rajan stabilized the currency and wooed back investors, earning him breathless praise in the Indian media. Newspapers dubbed him a rock-star banker and even compared him to James Bond.

Now India, he says, is “absolutely” out of the “fragile five” stage. With narrowing fiscal and current account deficits, falling inflation and rising currency reserves, India’s fundamentals, he argues, are much improved and the country is less vulnerable. However, he sees the turmoil India experienced as part of a larger problem: a lack of coordination between the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world. The actions the Fed takes are based mainly on U.S. domestic economic factors, but because of the unique position of the U.S. in the world economy, those decisions ripple through dollar-dominated financial markets in ways the Fed leadership does not take into account.

The results, Rajan argues, can ultimately be detrimental to the world economy. He points to a rise in increase in reserves in India and other emerging markets – built up as a cushion against potential fallout from the Fed’s tapering of stimulus – as one of those negatives. By topping up reserves, these emerging markets are in effect decreasing their demand for goods from the U.S. and elsewhere, and that is in the end bad for global growth.

“The U.S. should recognize that the actions we have to take to protect ourselves long run come back to effect the U.S.,” he says. “Therefore there is room for greater dialogue on how these policies should be conducted, not just to be nice, but because in the medium run it is in [America’s] own self-interest. If you are not careful about the volatility you are creating, the others have to respond and everybody is worse off.”

Ironically, Rajan has faced some criticism at home for doing just the opposite of the Fed — keeping interest rates high. Unlike most of the world, where bankers worry about low inflation or even deflation, India has been an outpost where inflation has been running too high, and Rajan took steps to bring the rate down — with some success. Some critics, however, complained that Rajan’s high-rate policy was acting as a drag on growth, and there was much press speculation when newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in May that Rajan would come under pressure to cut rates to aid the administration’s promise to get the Indian economy back on track.

Rajan, though, says the central bank and the Modi Administration “are completely on the same page” when it comes to fighting inflation. “I have said repeatedly that the way to sustainable growth is to bring down inflation to much more reasonable levels,” Rajan explains. “That message is something the government is completely on board with. Once we do bring it down then we will have the opportunity to cut interest rates.”

Rajan also seems to be on the same page as Modi on economic reform. He expressed confidence that the new government is taking the initial steps necessary to set the sluggish Indian economy on its way to recovery. Growth rates can be restored to 6% to 7%, from current levels under 5%, Rajan believes, by making the government more efficient in implementing policies — unlocking badly needed but stalled investments in the process.

“Those are the things that are really needed to get the economy back to reasonable growth,” Rajan says. “This government has set about the implementation in a steady way and I am hopeful that we will see the fruits of that in the months to come.” Maybe Rajan will prove prescient this time around too.

This Is Why ‘Follow Your Passion’ Is Terrible Advice - TIME

http://time.com/3099152/dont-follow-your-passion/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• The Muse
 

Aug. 11, 2014

    

Peter Dressel—Brand X/Getty Images

Just don't do it

This post is in partnership with The Muse. The article below was originally published on The Muse.

By Nathaniel Koloc

There are volumes of writing to be found online and in self-help circles that advises folks who are stuck to “follow your bliss,” or “do what you’re passionate about.”

But the passion mantra is actually not so helpful for two reasons.

First, it’s very unclear how to actually do it.

These instructions are essential pieces, but far from the complete puzzle—it’s like being told that if you want to become a movie star, you should move to Hollywood (and believe in yourself!). Even if you know what your “passion” is (as if there is just one thing you can be passionate about), there are so many other factors that matter. For example:

Can you earn a living doing it?

Would it still be your passion if you had to do it every day to make money?

Is the thing you’re passionate about related to a skill that you have, that you want to develop, and that’s needed in the market?

The point here is not that you need to have firm answers to all of these questions before you even get started. But in a world where bills must be paid, vast sums of student loans must be paid off, and competition is fierce, to neglect the more subtle nuances and practical implications of setting out to get paid to do what you love is dangerous advice.

Secondly, and more importantly, “follow your passion” is not helpful because it makes it sound so easy. And that is a very insidious thing, because finding meaningful work is anything but easy.

It’s hard, it takes time, and it takes serious dedication to the cause.

It means many late nights battling fear and anxiety, doubting yourself, and wondering if you’re crazy or naive or unrealistic for pursuing the path you’ve chosen.

It often means having dangerously low bank accounts for much longer than you’d hoped, until you figure out how to get the income piece to work. (Related: 3 financial mistakes to avoid when you are changing careers.)

The truth is that finding and holding onto meaningful work is a more complicated endeavor than most career coaches and bloggers will articulate. So, beyond following your passion, what does it really take?

Here is some elaboration on what the pieces of the puzzle are, based on our experience and research building a business that was founded on the desire to help people find meaningful work.

First, you have to understand legacy: what you care about, what you are driven by, and what change you want to create in the world, for others and for future generations.

This goes far beyond locking yourself in a room with a journal and pen. It involves deep introspection to be sure, but also a lot of conversations, fact-finding, and systematically testing your assumptions about what will allow you to work with a deep and personal sense of purpose.

Understanding your legacy starts with the understanding that you will probably never arrive at a singular answer as to what is meaningful to you (if you do, it won’t last forever).

But you can reach progressive levels of clarity that will lead you to more fulfilling opportunities—which will in turn influence and alter your vision of meaningful work. It’s a never-ending cycle of self-discovery and self-creation.

Second, you need to seek mastery by understanding what skills are valued by the market you want to be working in, what skills you can and want to become excellent at relative to your competition, and how you can align the two.

Third, you need to seek freedom: cultivating and exchanging the value your mastery provides in such a way that you progressively gain the ability to do work that is in alignment with your legacy, on your own terms.

Freedom can mean working less, working remotely, working with influencers and leaders, or working on projects with greater creativity and autonomy and impact. What freedom (or impact, for that matter) means to you is for you to discover and decide.

All told, finding meaningful work is a complicated and continually unfolding process; not an event or a box you can check off and not have to think about again.

It’s also not all fun and games. Because in the midst of it all, you’re also dealing with the inevitable conflicts and messiness of life—co-workers you don’t get along with, terrible bosses, the usual hardships in life, love, family, and career.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you won’t have days where you can’t seem to get yourself to do your work, or that you won’t have doubts and confusion about your next steps, or that you can avoid the human conflicts that drive people crazy in any work environment. In real life, meaningful work is not as sexy as your Facebook feed makes it out to be. It doesn’t (necessarily) mean working from bed, or working only two hours a day, or making easy money.

But despite the obstacles, it is absolutely worth it.

It is worth it to not have to divide yourself into a 9-to-5 self and a nights-and-weekends self—to be someone who shows up to work as if showing up to play, and to experience profound personal growth (not just professional growth) consistently through your work.

It is worth it to have your Mondays and Tuesdays feel as exciting and worthwhile and freeing as your Saturdays.

It is worth it to have new projects and jobs feel more like excursions to new foreign countries than assignments.

Pursuing meaningful work means knowing that your daily struggles, highs, and lows, are not in vain—that they are contributing to a worthwhile cause, something deserving of your time and efforts.

These are the reasons that ReWork exists. We spend too much time at our jobs and working on our careers to not have those precious hours be a source of joy, growth, and fulfillment.

It may not be as easy as quitting your job one day and living in eternal bliss the next—but the things we value most in life tend to be the things we fought hardest for anyway. So, let’s drop the “follow your passion!” mindset and get to work.

On the Internet, What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You -TIME

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• Saul Kaplan
 
• Nicha Ratana
 

Aug. 6, 2014

    

How the myth of connectivity hurts us all

Ethan Zuckerman’s job is to see the Internet for what it is.

As the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and the author ofRewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, Zuckerman studies civic engagement within digital infrastructures. He has made the case that we are not as connected as we appear to be.

Zuckerman’s research explodes what he calls the “myth of connectivity.” As he claims, “The world is more global. Our problems and economics are global. And though we are inundated with content, the media is getting less global.”

He believes it is important to expose and rectify this fallacy; after all, “this leads not only to shocking ignorance about the world, but also to missed opportunities for marketing and collaboration.”

As it turns out, Zuckerman says, “What you don’t know can hurt you.”

+++

“Atoms are more accessible than bits in many occasions,” Zuckerman says. “Fijian water is easy to access, but Fijian culture is not.”

He attributes the myth of connectivity to a lack of demand rather than too much supply. With the explosion of personal publishing and the “read-write web,” the issue isn’t so much the lack of stories told from other parts of the world, but rather, that these stories have been filtered out by the American attention span.

One of the problems of “free market journalism,” Zuckerman says, is that it relies on user behavior to recommend content. This filtering mechanism is deeply susceptible to what he calls “homophily.” Meaning “love of the same,” the concept is also known by the truism “birds of a feather flock together.”

Homophily explains the tendency of news coverage to cater to the lowest common denominator, or, speaking within the realms of Zuckerman’s research, of the disappearance of international or investigative reporting.

“What we need are new systems to help us stumble over things, to jog us out of ordinary reality,” Zuckerman says.

Zuckerman claims the key to integrating international or hard-hitting perspectives into domestic discourse is to provide relevant context. Fundamentally, he says, “What’s most important to you, is ‘you’ and ‘yours.’ If we’re not giving people some way in which they can interact with content, we’ll be missing giant opportunities.”

He forecasts that content recommendations of the future will be able to determine an audience’s interest and the “information rut” that they’re stuck in, before bridging that gap by suggesting novel, yet unexpectedly useful content. For instance, “following your interest in US mobile phones, you might find yourself reading about Chinese phone technologies, or about how much disposable income the mobile market captures in East Africa,” he explains.

+++

“I was never in love with the narrative of the Internet startup,” Zuckerman says.

“Dot com” entrepreneurism did not excite him as much as the question of the Internet’s potential to transform the world.

Yet, for all his reluctance to view enterprises as one-stop fix-its for society’s ills, Zuckerman looks forward to returning to speak at the Collaborative Innovation Summit hosted annually by the nonprofit Business Innovation Factory (BIF) in Providence, RI.

At the Summit, Zuckerman intends engage the BIF community — which he knows to be composed of unconventional tinkerers and seasoned social entrepreneurs — with a critical question he has been wrestling with: how to innovate journalism.

The BIF Summit has been a site of meaningful connections for Zuckerman in the past. He recalls meeting his MIT colleague Neri Oxman there, and marveling, from her talk about her first encounter with snow, Oxman’s intuitive thought process as a materials scientist.

“What I value so much about BIF is this notion that you’re not there to give a presentation, but to tell a story,” Zuckerman says, “With stories, the interesting motivations are never completely rational. That irrationality, that underlying passion, is to me what’s fascinating about anybody who’s trying to change the world.”

He believes that in BIF’s passionate community, he will find a receptive audience. “Storytelling is hugely underrated as a form of human communication,” he says, “It’s really hard to make money while doing good, investigative journalism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”

“Ultimately, I think we need to be having a deeper conversation about what public goods we should be willing to pay for, that the market isn’t good at provisioning,” Zuckerman says. He recognizes, “Those tend to be fighting words in the United States, but I think this notion of having really high-quality information is something that we’re not talking seriously enough about.”

The BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit combines 30 brilliant storytellers with more than 400 innovation junkies in a two-day storytelling jam, featuring tales of personal discovery and transformation that spark real connection and “random collisions of unusual suspects.”

Saul Kaplan is the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory. He is the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) in Providence and blogs regularly at It’s Saul Connected. Follow him on Twitter at @skap5. Nicha Ratana is a senior pursuing a degree in English Nonfiction Writing at Brown University and an intern at The Business Innovation Factory. Follow her on Twitter at @nicharatana.

How a Dutch Firm Plans to Find MH370 in Seabeds Less Mapped Than Mars - TIME

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• Jack Linshi @jacklinshi
 

Aug. 6, 2014

    

In this map released on July 31, 2014, by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, details are presented in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean.AP/Joint Agency Coordination Centre

Australia said Wednesday that Fugro has won the bid to relaunch MH370's search

A Dutch firm is attempting to crack one of aviation’s greatest unsolved mysteries: howMalaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people, vanished in an age of surveillance and technology.

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The Australian Transportation Safety Board (ATSB) said Wednesday it selected the Dutch technical consultancy Fugro to relaunch the search for MH370 after a month-long tender process that solicited bids the world’s most advanced deep sea searchers, according to the firm’s statement.

Unlike some of its fellow bidders, Fugro historically hasn’t focused on deep-sea recovery, but rather on geotechnical services like underwater mapping for off-shore oil and gas clients. Other bidders like the UK-based Blue Water Recoveries and the Odyssey Marine Exploration specialize in recovering modern shipwrecks or search-and-recovery in deep ocean exploration.

Fugro, which has pursued some underwater search missions in European waters, attributes its win not to advanced technology, but instead to a calculated balance.

“In the initial phases of the search, a number of companies deployed very accurate and very sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicles. The advantage of such technology is that it’s very accurate, but the bad side is that it takes a lot of time to cover a square meter,” Rob Luijnenburg, Fugro’s director of corporate strategy, told TIME. “What we’re doing now is a combination of sufficient resolution and the capability to survey a reasonably large seabed in a relatively short time.”

Fugro had previously worked in conjunction with Bluefin Robotics to develop the Bluefin-21 vehicle used in search efforts during April and May. At that time, officials had suspected the plane’s pinger had run out of battery, and swapped in the Bluefin-21 for the Towed Pinger Locator. Other Fugro missions devoted to search-and-recovery have involved partnerships with the UK to recover helicopters downed over water, and ship recoveries near the Netherlands.

Fugro has already been directly involved in the MH370 search, too. Since June, one of Fugro’s ships, the Fugro Equator, has been working with a Chinese ship to conduct preliminary bathymetric surveys (i.e. underwater mapping of the terrain) around the target area. While radars mounted on the two ships have already mapped nearly 60,000 sq. km—much of that area is in the designated search area—Fugro’s AUS 60 million contracted mission involve only the Fugro Equator and another of Fugro’s ships, the Fugro Discovery. The two ships will each tow sonar scans near the seabed to produce higher resolution maps and possibly locate debris.

“Previous estimates [of the seabed] are very, very rough. The resolution is not good enough to find little bits of pieces of aircraft—that we do with the [towed] sonar equipment,” Luijnenburg said.

The designated search area, about 600 miles south of the previous phase’s area, was decided in June by Inmarsat scientists after re-analyzing satellite data. The area, roughly double the size of Massachusetts, is the latest patch of ocean in what’s been a hopscotch around the largely uncharted South Pacific. Estimates indicate that existing maps of this territory are about 250 times less accurate than surveys of Mars and Venus.

To navigate such difficult underwater terrain, further complicated by treacherous weather conditions, Fugro has connected with experts including Donald Hussong, a sonar guru. Hussong, who was brought out of partial retirement to assist Fugro’s sonar towing logistics, said the two vessels will each be equipped with 9 or 10 km. of cable that will tow scanners about 100 to 150 m. above the sea floor. The existing maps, while crude approximations, will be enough to prevent the sonar from impacting the ocean floor, which could dislodge the equipment.

Hussong estimates that the relaunched search over 60,000 square km. will span approximately 9 to 10 months—a heartbeat compared to the nearly 2 years it took locate Air France Flight 447’s debris, a mere 6.5 km from the center of the search. If the Dutch firm’s towed sonars locate debris, then the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which aided in locating the Titanic’s wreckage in 1985, will contribute two autonomous underwater vehicles.

But thus far, absolutely nothing—not even a suitcase, life vest, or crumpled paper—has turned up. Fugro is hopeful that the wreckage will be located, but the Dutch firm acknowledged that there’s a chance the massive search might yet again emerge fruitless.

“If we have contrast between the hard surfaces of debris and sediments naturally on the bottom [of the ocean], then we should find it.” Hussong told TIME. “If it’s some place on a rocky bottom or the side of a cliff, it’ll be difficult.”

Inmarsat, however, the agency that dictates the search area alongside Australian and Malaysian authorities, remains more than cautiously optimistic that Fugro will solve MH370’s mystery.

“We remain highly confident in the analyses conducted,” an Inmarsat spokesperson told TIME in an e-mail, adding that the scale of the task shouldn’t be underestimated. “The next phase of the search is being handled by those trained in this sort of work and we are hopeful that evidence will be found.”

How Watching TV Can Make You Poorer - TIME

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• Dan Kadlec @dankadlec
 

Aug. 8, 2014

    

Jim Cramer on the "500th Episode" of CNBC'S "MAD MONEY."Giovanni Rufino—© CNBC

Financial TV is entertainment, not enlightenment, say two TV pundits in a new book. Here's the real story about market gurus.

You cannot listen to the steady barrage of confident yet conflicting opinion on financial TV programs today without wondering which, if any of them, are getting it right. It’s been this way since the incomparable Louis Rukeyser launched the weekly PBS program Wall Street Week in 1970.

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The pioneering cable station Financial News Network, which CNBC later bought, upped the ante in 1981 with daily money programming. That set the foundation for three decades of growth in the market for folks who could talk convincingly about the direction of stocks. This period made stars of analysts who often got it wrong—from Joe Granville and Robert Prechter in the 1980s to Henry Blodget and Jim Cramer in more recent times.

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Yet as the voices of market gurus have grown louder and more numerous, the advice hasn’t got any better. The poor individual investor—stripped of his pension guarantees and wanting little more than to manage his 401(k) in a sound manner—has been left dizzy from the noise. This, at least, is the basic premise of Clash of the Financial Pundits, a book by financial commentators that takes aim at financial commentators.

The authors are former CNBC personality Jeff Macke and current contributor Joshua M. Brown, co-founder of Ritholtz Wealth Management. They write mostly in the voice of Macke, who during the depths of the financial crisis grew disillusioned with his role onFast Money and disappeared—though not before an epic on-camerameltdown that can only be described as must-see TV. In some ways, this book reads like a cathartic undertaking meant to exorcise Macke’s demons. He is now host of the financial show Breakout, which appears on Yahoo Finance. I wonder if he realizes that by dredging up the memory of his public implosion five years ago more people will see it on YouTube than saw it live.

Clash is a stroll down memory lane for anyone that has been around the financial markets a while. It recounts bubbles past, starting with the South Sea Co. in the early 1700s when Sir Isaac Newton lost a fortune. The authors recount the rise and fall of “Calamity Joe” Granville, the spectacularly wrong Harry S. Dent, and the absurd Dow 36,000 prediction from journalist James K. Glassman and economist Kevin A. Hassett. Other names that pop up along the way include Ben Stein, Jim Rogers, Carl Icahn, James Altucher, Martin Zweig and more.

Brown and Macke give credit where it is due: Zweig’s real-time call of the 1987 crash on Wall Street Week, Cramer’s October 2008 sell-it-all message delivered on The Today Show, Blodget’s almost comical prediction in 1998 that Amazon.com would hit $400, which it did in just two months. But the whole point is to also note their miscalls and downfalls. Blodget, for example, was banned from the industry for life in 2002 after privately advising certain investors to sell stocks that he was publicly bullish on. Cramer took a beating on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show for being bullish on the soon-to-collapse Bear Stearns.

Being right and wrong is all part of the forecasting business, the authors point out, which is why it’s foolish to invest solely on one pundit’s view at any given moment. “At a certain point, the folly of forecasting becomes obvious,” the authors write. “It is at the dawning of this realization that we begin to grow as investors.”

As a young financial writer at USA Today, I watched the market for market punditry explode in the 1980s and 1990s. I was the first mainstream reporter to cover the annual “10 Surprises” list that helped elevate Morgan Stanley’s Byron Wien. Brown and Macke note that Wien’s innovation, which other forecasters soon picked up on, was a clever way to make a predication that could easily be dismissed if it did not come true. After all, who could be surprised if a surprise didn’t happen?

I worked next to Dan Dorfman, possibly journalism’s first $1 million investing columnist. In the 1980s, Dorfman wrote three times a week for USA Today and was on TV at least that often. His comments routinely moved stock prices and inspired other writers to try their hand at the market-moving game: Gene Marcial at Business Week, John Crudele at the New York Post, Herb Greenberg at the San Francisco Chronicle, to name three.

But Dorfman, who is not mentioned in Clash, had all but cornered this market. Ultimately, he got spread too thin and just couldn’t sustain the pressure to keep moving stocks. He was thought to be tied to a stock promoter and lost his job in 1996 when he refused to disclose his sources to his editor. (Full disclosure: Dorfman was working for Money magazine at the time.) At one point, venerable Coca-Cola responded to a Dorfman report with this statement: “Dan Dorfman does not have a clue.”

I’ve had my own brushes with TV punditry and seen firsthand how bookers, under pressure to get a warm body on camera, often don’t understand the topic to be discussed. They just want someone out there who will have an opinion and be entertaining. Once a booker asked me to go on air and talk about CEO pay. I had spent a week researching the subject and written a column about it. I was ready. On air, the host introduced the topic as Wall Street pay—which is a very different subject. I had almost nothing to contribute and was never invited back.

Macke and Brown explore this theme throughout and conclude that a successful pundit’s key attribute is the willingness to speak confidently on any topic, whether or not they understand it. Writing about Granville, whose “early warning” calls moved the market in the 1980s, they note that what he “had lacked in breadth and depth, he made up for with sheer personality and moxie. He had figured out the secret to all punditry, market or otherwise: certitude.”

The question underlying all of this is simple: Should you believe any financial forecaster and adjust your investments accordingly? The authors say no. They cite a 2005 study that looked at 27,000 forecasts by hundreds of experts over 15 years and concluded, “The experts’ forecasts were no more accurate than those of dart-throwing chimpanzees.”

That doesn’t mean expert opinion has no value. But the value is in the experts’ rationale and supporting arguments and how those jibe with your own considered view—not in blind loyalty to their advice. Key questions to ask include:

• Who are the experts and what do they get for having an opinion?
• Is their time frame the same as yours?
• How many investment ideas do they generate each day or week? Is that realistic?
• Why am I watching in the first place? Entertainment—or genuine need for this kind of information?

I didn’t expect to like this book. Pundits pontificating on the art of pontification feels light. Besides, even the pros know you should buy an index fund and head to the beach. The daily clatter is for traders and possibly ordinary people who just want to be entertained and try to understand how the market works.

But, like the punditry the authors explore, the material in Clash is entertaining. The book is built around engaging Q&A sessions and includes historical perspective that makes it useful in a big-picture kind of way. If you didn’t already know that the vast majority of talking heads are experts in name only, Clash will beat you over the head with examples until you are enlightened. As Cramer says in this book: “In the end it is just TV.”