Elon Musk’s daily schedule is incredibly demanding, but he ensures that everything gets done by scheduling everything in 5-minute time blocks. This technique is called time boxing. The first three minutes of this video are instructive. Don’t bother with the rest.
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USA. History
Another brief history of the United States. Much simplfication. But that’s always the case with summaries.
Plan a wedding in a week
It is said that American couples take 500 hours and 12 to 18 months to plan their wedding. But what if they shrunk that down to one week?
USA. Immigration.
A state-by-state look at the history of U.S. immigration, showing the leading country of origin for newcomers in each territory, by decade. Fascinating !
Short-Term Thinking Is Poisoning American Business
New York Times. December 2019. Free-market capitalism won’t survive unless it makes structural changes toward long-term investing.
We live in an economy increasingly at odds with this truth. Short-term business practices are polluting our environment and harming our health and well-being for the sake of quick payouts.
Short-Term Thinking
New York Times. 2015. From Wall Street to Washington and in the towers of academia, people are buzzing about what some say is the pernicious focus in corporate America on short-term profits.
To understand the debate, it helps to understand the various forces that contribute to the pressures on companies to focus on short-term financial results. Those pressures are not just a product of one bad actor. It turns out that nearly everyone in the investment world plays a role in creating the challenges companies face in setting their sights on the far horizon.
U.S. History 2.5 mil views, not bad
A parody with video style and presentation inspired by Bill Wurtz.
Did Short-Term Thinking Harm the Long-Term Success of U.S. Workers?
Aspen Institute. 2015. While the immediate value of reducing these costs is easily seen on the company balance sheet, the lost revenue of reduced worker performance goes uncounted. What’s worse, all of these practices create arms-length relationships between employers and workers, weakening trust and dampening enthusiasm for the work.
This in turn reduces the likelihood that businesses will invest in productivity-enhancing training of the workforce. Recent research bears this out, noting that an “easy hire, easy fire” policy leads to diminished worker productivity and innovation.
Yes, Short-Termism Really Is a Problem
Harvard Business Review. 2015. Thirty years ago, no less a business guru than Peter Drucker weighed in, skewering short-termism in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
“Everyone who has worked with American management can testify that the need to satisfy the pension fund manager’s quest for higher earnings next quarter, together with the panicky fear of the raider, constantly pushes top managements toward decisions they know to be costly, if not suicidal, mistakes,” he wrote.
How to Stop Short-Term Thinking at America’s Companies
The Atlantic. 2016. There was a time, half a century ago, when what was good for many American corporations tended to also be good for America. Companies invested in their workers and new technologies, and as a result, they prospered and their employees did too.
Now, a growing group of business leaders is worried that companies are too concerned with short-term profits, focused only on making money for shareholders. As a result, they’re not investing in their workers, in research, or in technology—short-term costs that would reduce profits temporarily. And this, the business leaders say, may be creating long-term problems for the nation.