Jack Welch: An Oral History

Check out this Business Week article on Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, as a people leader. He has an incredibly motivating style. I admire him. (Thanks, Claire)

Kat Cole – President, Cinnabon Inc

Neat story -- I bet none of you will guess her first job. Read more in the Little Pink Book. (Thanks, Tom)

When the Work-Life Scales Are Unequal

Neat gender-neutral article on balancing family responsibilities and how that impacts others at work (with families and without). Read more in the NYT. (Thanks, Tom)

The 3 Habits of Happiness

A short and deceptively simple list of practices to bring more happiness and meaning into our lives:

• Practice gratitude - write all the big things and little things that you're grateful for. Sometimes, it takes five minutes.. other days you may want to write for an hour or more!  Our minds are hard wired for ingratitude. It was a survival mechanism that was valuable thousands of years ago when we lived out on the savanna, but it no longer serves us right now.  We know to be successful in business and successful in life – is about spotting possibilities where others are looking for problems.
• Remember to savor -  When you’re drinking a cup of coffee, don’t just drink a cup of coffee while you’re thinking about your emails. Drink a cup of coffee and actually savor, savor the flavor. Savor the coffee. Savor your environment. If you start to go through life and you savor the breeze, the car drive, your teammates or your children at home, life starts to take on a much richer context.
• Find work that matters or even more importantly, find meaning in your work - A job is only just a job if you chose to see it as a job. All work is a chance to be of service. All work is a chance to express your gifts and talents. All work is a chance to be helpful to other human beings. All work is a chance to change the world. It’s up to you to find meaning in your work so that everyday you feel like you’re on a mission!

Adapted from this article on happiness. (Thanks Joanna!)

HBR Daily Stat: Ex-East Germans Retain Strong Egalitarian Views on Gender Roles

People from the former East Germany are 28 percentage points more likely than former West Germans to believe that it's good for children to have working mothers, and 22 percentage points more likely to disagree that wives should stay home, say Stefan Bauernschuster and Helmut Rainer of the University of Munich. The findings show that decades after reunification, socialism-inspired attitudes about sex roles strongly persist among former East Germans and that the gap in egalitarian beliefs between East and West has only widened, the researchers say.

Read the full research paper.

Goose named Maria in Love

(Thanks, Mom!)

It's not the miles, it's how you live them

This commercial made me so happy!

It's not what you say, but how you say it

(Thanks, Lucy)

The World's Least-Popular Four-Digit PIN: 8068

Research suggests thieves can guess one in five PINs by trying just three combinations.

•  Three most popular combinations—"1234," "1111," and "0000"—account for close to 20 percent of all four-digit passwords
•  Also quite common are MM/DD combinations—those in which the first two digits are between "01" and "12" and the last two are between "01" and "31."
•  The 17th-most popular 10-digit password is "3141592654." (ha, so nerdy!!)

Read more at Slate. (Thanks, Tom)

HBR Tip of the Day: Out of Time? Give Some Away

"It's counterintuitive but true: Spending time helping others leaves you feeling as if you have more time, not less. Research shows that giving to others can make you feel more "time affluent" and less time-constrained than if you choose to waste your extra time or spend it on yourself. Next time you need a break from a busy day, don't do something mindless like surf the web. Sure, you might enjoy it, but it won't make you feel any less pressured. Instead, pick an activity that helps someone else: Bring your co-worker a cup of coffee or edit your daughter's school essay. What's even better is that duration doesn't matter. Whether you give away 10 minutes or an hour, you still end up feeling less constrained."

Great mindset shift! Read more at HBR.

Taylor Santos, Texas High School Student, Left 'Burned And Blistered' After Male Vice Principal Spanked Her

How is corporate punishment still permissible in today's school system? Read more in the HuffPo. (Thanks, Tom)

Feel More Confident And Powerful In 60 Seconds (Body Language)

When was the last time you used a power pose? Read the full article at Women 2.0. (Thanks, Emily and Grace)

HBR Daily Stat: Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice.

In a series of psychological experiments conducted in Vancouver, Canada, participants revealed that they considered atheists to be less trustworthy than a number of groups often considered to be outliers, including Muslims, gay men, and feminists, and only as trustworthy as rapists, according to a team led by Will M. Gervais of the University of British Columbia. The lack of trust in atheists may reflect people's assumption that individuals tend to behave more ethically if they believe they are being monitored by a higher power, the researchers suggest.

Read more at the US National Library of Medicine. (Thanks, Tom)

Why Fathers Really Matter

This section was fascinating:

...THAT food and poison change us is not all that surprising, even if it is surprising how far down the change goes. What is unexpected are the psychological dimensions of epigenetics. To learn more about these, I visited the Mount Sinai Medical Center laboratory of Dr. Eric Nestler, a psychiatrist who did a discomfiting study on male mice and what he calls “social defeat.” His researchers put small normal field mice in cages with big, nasty retired breeders, and let the big mice attack the smaller mice for about five minutes a day. 

If a mean mouse and a little mouse were pried apart by means of a screen, the torturer would claw at the screen, trying to get at his victim. All this subjected the field mouse to “a horrendous level of stress,” Dr. Nestler told me. This process was repeated for 10 days, with a different tormentor placed in each cage every day. By the time the torture stopped, about two-thirds of the field mice exhibited permanent and quantifiable symptoms of the mouse equivalents of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The researchers then bred these unhappy mice with normal females. When their pups grew up, they tended to overreact to social stress, becoming so anxious and depressed that they wouldn’t even drink sugar water. They avoided other mice as much as they could...

Read more in the NYT.  (Thanks, Alessia)

Driving Russia’s Revived Golden Ring

I lived in Vladimir, Russia and the Golden Ring for a couple months 8 years ago. Exciting to see the NYT give it media coverage. It's a lovely part of the world.

Hot Cheetos & Takis

(Thanks, Nina)