Thought of the Day

From FT Lucy Kellaway

Every modern management expert will tell you that CEOs who are arseholes no longer survive. The most successful leaders are supposed to be the humble ones, who listen and take people with them. Mr Armstrong is living proof that this is nonsense. If you enrich your shareholders — which you tend to do if you are hell-bent on succeeding — you can be as nice or as nasty as you like.

Of course assholes can win. In fact these days it doesn't matter if you are a jerk to your internal staff. If you are a jerk for the public that might hurt your image and the brand of your company.

But as Lucy Kellaway said you have to deliver results and in this world in many businesses people are easily replaced. The power of the employee is coming down big time. The automation and the excess supply of people make it easy to replace anyone.

The only way to be treated decently is to be unique and to be unique you can't be easily replaced.

4 tips

1.Know something no one knows

2.Know a lot about something vs a bit of everything

3.study everyday forever

4.Be a people person, these are the most difficult to replace

From the Economist

Highly skilled work, on the other hand, has become increasingly concentrated in jobs requiring complex cognitive or interpersonal tasks: managing a business, developing a new product or advising patients. As non-routine work has become more prized, supply and demand in the labour market have become increasingly unbalanced. Many cognitively complex jobs are beyond the abilities even of people with reasonable qualifications. The wage premium for college graduates has held steady in recent decades, but that is mainly because of the rising premium earned by holders of advanced degrees. The resulting competition for lower-level work has depressed wage growth, leading to stagnant pay for typical workers.Technology has created a growing reservoir of less-skilled labour while simultaneously expanding the range of tasks that can be automated. Most workers are therefore being forced into competition both against each other and against machines. No wonder their share of the economic pie has got smaller, in developing economies as well as in the rich world.

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621160-labour-steadily-losing-out-capital-those-have-shall-be-given

Vibrant, multi-hued painting from Pablo Picasso set a world record for artwork at auction, selling for $179.4 million on Monday night, and a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti set a record for most expensive sculpture, at $141.3 million.
Picasso's "Women of Algiers (Version O)" and Giacometti's life-size "Pointing Man" were among dozens of masterpieces from the 20th century Christie's offered in a curated sale titled "Looking Forward to the Past."
The Picasso price, $179,365,000, and the Giacometti price, $141,285,000, included the auction house's premium. The buyers elected to remain anonymous.

I have 4 explanations?

1.Money is cheap
2.Art it's a good way to store a lot of money
3.Art is a good way to pay someone and that someone is not taxed. Zero!
4.Big Get bigger, everybody wants to have the best, the only one. In history there was never a better period to be the nº1

From the FT

Mr Krugman was equally relentless in predicting that austerity would lead to recession; indeed, he insisted that the UK’s economic performance would be worse than during the Great Depression. In April 2012 he warned darkly that Britain would “continue on a death spiral of self-defeating austerity”.
It was, he lamented, a “policy disaster” that would cause a double-dip recession and “cripple the UK economy for many years to come”.
In fact, there was no double-dip recession. The UK had the best performing of the G7 economies last year, with a real gross domestic product growth rate of 2.6 per cent. In 2009, the last full year of Labour government, the figure was minus 4.3 per cent. Moreover, far from being in depression, the UK economy has generated more than 1.9m jobs since May 2010. UK unemployment is now 5.6 per cent, roughly half the rates in Italy and France. Weekly earnings are up by more than 8 per cent; in the private sector, the figure is above 10 per cent. Inflation is below 2 per cent and falling.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9dd9c7ee-f71c-11e4-99aa-00144feab7de.html#axzz3ZqJlH7vT

In my country the right government was unable to do a right wing policy. Instead they had to raise taxes because expenses are fixed (The law doesn't let you to cut salaries or pensions) Probably they will lose the next election.

When the left loses their hope is to prevent the right to do their stuff, if they do what they should do they will have results. Communism always leads to poverty. It could take time but it's a sure thing.

From FT,

Siemens plans to cut a further 4,500 jobs to help turn round its power and gas division and other underperforming businesses that contributed to a mixed start to 2015 for the German engineering conglomerate.

The cuts are equivalent to slightly more than 1 per cent of its global workforce and come on top of some 7,800 administrative redundancies announced in February.

From Bloomberg,

Zynga Inc. founder Mark Pincus is cutting 18 percent of the casual-games company’s work force, less than a month after retaking the reins as chief executive officer.
The firings, amounting to 364 jobs, are part of a cost-reduction plan that will save $100 million annually, the company said Wednesday in a statement.

In many cases, jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society.

John Sculley

In many cases the biggest cost a company has is Labor. So if you want to cut costs you have to cut labor. Automation is a way to do it. I expect more and more people become without job.

what will people do?

Some people will do R&D. Study for life. They will be well paid. They will program the computers, they will invent the Future..
Lot's of people will have cheap jobs serving tables, cleaning, driving, delivering, babysitting, etc...
The rest will engage in sports and other activities to spend their time, some will be depressed of course.
many will figure out that they paid for an education that is worthless

The government will pay people to survive. That is the big trend.

With this scenario it's obvious that the owners of the companies and the r&D workers that i mentioned before will make almost all the money. The rest will survive.

The left parties will win more & more. Their policies will not work of course.

I forgot, the sport Stars like CR7 and Leo Messi will make more & more money. Idle people will pay a lot to spend their time watching their stars.

How many lumbers can this machine replace? more than 100 !

Mind control is the stuff of pure science fiction, but today reading data from your brain has never been more accurate, and that opens the way to, for example, controlling machines.
A recent drone flight from an airfield outside Lisbon may prove to be historic. Its flight was remotely controlled by the pilot’s mind. It’s an impressive result delivered by a European research project to develop technology to transform the lives of disabled people.
“It’s the first time we’ve done a public demonstration of a real flight, that’s completely unprecedented,” says the Tekever Brainflight project’s co-ordinator Ricardo Mendes
Like most drones, the unmanned plane receives radio commands from the ground. But instead of using a joystick and buttons, the pilot just thinks of the direction the plane should take.
“We’re switching from normal control to the “brain flight”. From this moment, it will be flown by the brainwaves of the pilot,” says Mendes.
The researcher at the controls focuses his attention on the screen with the parameters of the flight. It takes some mental effort to steer the drone in the required direction, keeping it within the designated area.

http://www.euronews.com/2015/04/20/portuguese-researchers-discover-the-secret-of-mind-control/

Some notes on this:

1.I didn't think this kind of research was possible to happen in my country! Portugal. I thought you would need an extended team that our country can't fund. Obviously i was wrong.

2.If we are developing a technology to read what the brain is thinking and then airwave it to a machine with the translated orders i guess one day we can reverse the process and guess what someone is thinking!!!!

3.I have the view that everything that Physically possible to be invented is going to be invented very soon. This a step in that direction.