Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. So, if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me. What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it. I find as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call, or send off the first e-mail message, or whatever it is that we’re going to do to start to address that situation — even if it’s not solved — the mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So, stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring, I think, in large part. So, stress doesn’t come — people get stress wrong all the time in my opinion. Stress doesn’t come from hard work, for example. You know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it, and, likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that. And, likewise, if you use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you’re out of work but you’re going through a disciplined approach, a series of job interviews and so on, and working to remedy that situation, you are going to be a lot less stressed than if you’re just worrying about it and doing nothing.

Read the entire interview here: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-5

The very successful Bengali translations of these epics (the Ramayana and the Mahabharata) owed much to the efforts of the Muslim Pathans kings of Bengal. Dinesh Chandra Sen’s authoritative account of the history of Bengali literature describes the events thus:

The Pathans occupied Bengal early in the thirteenth century.. The Pathan Emperors learned Bengali and lived in close touch with the teeming Hindu population.. The Emperors heard of the far-reaching fame of the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and observed the wonderful influence they exercised in molding the religious and domestic lives of the Hindus, and they naturally felt the desire to be acquainted with the contents of those poems.. They appointed scholars to translate the works into Bengali which they now spoke and understood. The first Bengali translation of the Mahabharata of which we hear was undertaken at the order of Nasira Saha, the Emperor of Gauda [in Bengal] who ruled for 4 years till 1325 A.D…

One troubling recent phenomenon is the push for everyone to be innovators. Many things we buy and use never work in the way we’re promised, which suggests there are opportunities in merely being good: Much of what’s made falls short of that mark.

From my studies of the history of business innovation, I’m convinced you can beat competitors and even dominate markets without fancy tricks.

While we’re fond of trumpeting the praises of Apple, whose iPod revolutionized music, we forget how dismal the competition was. It was not a field of masterpieces; it was a motley crew of ugly, clunky, painfully hard-to-use devices. Apple applied basic design sense to an immature field at a time when the world was ready for something better.

Google was launched a decade after the invention of search engines; Amazon was not the first online bookstore. But they were both the first to do a good job at selling their good services for a good profit. In retrospect, their successes seem amazing, but at the time, the goals were simple and the objective humble and clear: Be good, or at least better than the other guys. For they knew that alone was hard enough.

Executives and consultants throw it (the word ‘innovation’) around like magic dust, hoping to cover their ignorance of why products and companies have done well or failed. But it’s clear most companies fail not because of their lack of inventiveness; it’s their lack of basic competence.

Innovation, in the simplest definition, means new or novel, to take an approach others have not seen before. But by this definition, the iPod and Firefox barely qualify.

In all cases, these are entrants into fields of established players. Their creators borrowed parts and ideas from other products and even from other companies. Their success or failure is driven less by revolutionary ideas or radical disruptive breakthrough thinking and more by a focus on making solid, reliable, simple, good products that solve real needs people have.

All things being equal, in a battle between a good product and an innovative one, the good one will usually win. Those obsessed with innovation contract the disease of hubris, ignoring many good ideas because they have been used before. They forget that an old idea cleverly reused, or borrowed from a different field, will be new to the world.

If you insist on doing something new, take this advice: Start with the important problems your customers, or your competitors’ customers, have and try to solve them. If conventional approaches fail, you’ll be forced to invent and be creative as a side effect of your goal. If you ask the creators of so-called breakthrough ideas, this is a common reason they found those breakthroughs in the first place.

Making better things is difficult enough. Learn to do that well, and when you’re done, and your customers and stockholders love you, the label “innovator” will magically land next to your name.

Link to the story: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2010/id20100222_506858.htm

The article begins – “Until two centuries ago, ice was just an unfortunate side effect of winter. But in the early 1800s, one man saw dollar signs in frozen ponds. Frederic Tudor not only introduced the world to cold glasses of water on hot summer days, he created a thirst people never realized they had.”

Given below are the excerpts:

In 1805, two wealthy brothers from Boston were at a family picnic, enjoying the rare luxuries of cold beverages and ice cream. They joked about how their chilled refreshments would be the envy of all the colonists sweating in the West Indies. It was a passing remark, but it stuck with one of the brothers. His name was Frederic Tudor, and 30 years later, he would ship nearly 200 tons of ice halfway around the globe to become the “Ice King.”

Frederic convinced William to join him in a scheme to ship ice from frozen ponds in New England to the Caribbean. Tudor reasoned that once people tried it, they’d never want to live without it.

…No one believed the idea would work. In fact, no ship in Boston would agree to transport the unusual cargo, so Frederic spent nearly $5,000 .. buying a ship of his own.

…Although the ice arrived in Martinique in perfect condition, no one wanted to buy it. Tudor desperately explained how the cold blocks of ice could be used in the stifling Caribbean heat, but islanders weren’t convinced.

Despite financial woes, Frederic persisted, and his ice business finally turned a profit in 1810. But a series of circumstances—including war, weather, and relatives needing bailouts—kept him from staying in the black for too long. Between 1809 and 1813, he landed in debtors’ prison three times and spent the rest of the time hiding from the sheriff.

… but Tudor was obsessed with the idea that ice would make him rich. During the next decade, he developed clever new techniques to convince people that they actually needed ice, including a “first one’s free” pitch. While living in a South Carolina boarding house in 1819, Tudor made a habit of bringing a cooler of chilled beverages to the dinner table. His fellow boarders always scoffed at the sight, but after a sip or two, they’d inevitably fall in love with his ice. Tudor travelled around the country and convinced barkeepers to offer chilled drinks at the same price as regular drinks—to see which would become more popular. He also taught restaurants how to make ice cream, and reached out to doctors and hospitals to convince them that ice was the perfect way to cool feverish patients. The truth is that people never knew they needed ice until Tudor made them try it. Once they did, they couldn’t live without it.

Tudor’s reputation solidified in 1833 when he shipped 180 tons of ice halfway across the world to British colonists in Calcutta. The venture was so successful that it reopened trade routes between India and Boston.

As American society grew more accustomed to fresh meats, milk, and fruit, the ice industry expanded into one of the most powerful industries in the nation. At the turn of the 20th century, nearly every family, grocer, and barkeep in America had an icebox. But ironically, America’s dependence on ice created the very technology that would lead to the decline of the ice empire—electric freezers and refrigerators. Today, the ice industry pulls in $2.5 billion a year.

The next time you put your lips to a slushie, or an iced tea, or a chilled martini, or a cold beer on a hot day, take a moment to thank the crazy Yankee who had the vision to turn water into money.

Link to the story:  http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20311

In 2003, Frank Rijsberman, then the head of the International Water Management Institute, had expressed his concern: “If present trends continue, the livelihoods of one-third of the world’s population will be affected by water scarcity by 2025. We could be facing annual losses equivalent to the entire grain crops of India and the US combined.”

But what about ideas for systemic changes? How can things be done differently?  An ingenious system in Oman that is the legacy of their forefathers, brilliantly balances out commercial and social aspects of fair water usage. Maybe it could inspire systemic change and lead to more efficiency in water usage in the future:

In Oman, farmers draw from a 4,500-year-old water system that is still functioning. Once the water arrives at a village, from underground sources and mountain springs, channeled over many kilometers, all villagers, guests, and travelers get free access to the drinking water they need. The canal then goes to the mosque: water is also free for ceremonial washing, and some is set aside and sold to finance the mosque and the school. After that, the water becomes private property in defined shares, days, hours, or minutes of rights to use it for irrigation. The rights are inherited and, even more important, tradable. In frequent auctions, parts of the water rights can be sold and purchased or leased within the village community. If a farmer does not need water temporarily, he leases it to another farmer who has additional land available to grow a crop. If a farmer wants to invest in more efficient irrigation, he can finance this investment by selling water rights permanently. Thus, water gets a market price set by those who know best: the farmers. This is an extremely strong incentive to use water efficiently. Since the market price varies over the year, this is a much smarter approach to efficiency than, for example, so-called water footprint calculations. And since farmers trade among themselves, the price places no additional financial burden on them.

The above information has been extracted from an interview with the chairman of Nestle, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, in the McKinsey Quarterly.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Water_as_a_scarce_resource_An_interview_with_Nestles_chairman_2482

In its 1980s heyday, the band (Van Halen) became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true — confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself — and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception.

Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted …

A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Like Roth, none of us has the time and energy to dig into every aspect of our businesses. But, if we’re smart, we won’t need to. What if we could rig up a system where problems would announce themselves before they arrived? That may sound like wishful thinking, but notice that it’s exactly what Roth achieved. Surely, you won’t be outwitted by the guy who sang “Hot for Teacher.”

Where’s the brown M&M in your business?

Read the entire article at: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/143/made-to-stick-the-telltale-brown-mampm.html

(Article – Business advice from Van Halen, Authors – Dan & Chip Heath, Fastcompany.com)

I think of myself as wildly ambitious and unapologetically lazy. Though we’ve all heard about the good things that come from ambition, laziness gets a bad rap. That’s unfortunate. I can attribute a healthy chunk of my success to the positive returns of laziness. Laziness has the best ROI in the business. Let’s start at the beginning. I launched my first real company, a Web design company called Spinfree, in 1996. It was a solo show: just me, a desk in my apartment, and some self-taught mediocre Web design skills. But it was all I needed. The jobs rolled in, and my clients were happy. I could pay the bills, stash away some savings, and work when and where I wanted. But I wasn’t happy. Rather than building confidence, I was accumulating doubt. As my business expanded, I grew nervous and self-conscious. I began to feel as if my accomplishments weren’t enough, that I had to take things to “the next level.” I thought if I didn’t get there fast enough, I’d be bowled over by the competition. When I bid on projects against larger design firms, I started saying “we” instead of “I” in an attempt to sound bigger. The proposals submitted by my rivals were long and shiny, so mine had to be longer and shinier. I even began badmouthing the competition — people I’d never met. That’s ugly. The thing is, I didn’t need to do any of these things. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I was inventing problems. I was making things hard on myself. How did I figure this out? Laziness. I got tired and let down my guard and wound up learning something important about myself: I love work, just not hard work. I think hard work is overrated. My goal is to do less hard work. And what’s hard? Acting like someone else, writing elaborate proposals I don’t believe in, and flinging mud at the competition. That’s hard and horrible work. So I put my laziness to work for me. Instead of long proposals, I wrote short ones. Instead of worrying about competitors, I ignored them. And here’s what happened: My company got more work. I found better clients. I slept better. I woke up better. I was happier. And, most of all, running a business became a lot easier.

Conventional business wisdom breeds paranoia. If you don’t get big fast, you lose. If you don’t obsess about the competition, you will be crushed. If you don’t make long-term plans, you’ll be staggering in the dark. Come on. Conventional wisdom is tired, upset, groggy, scared, and a pain in the ass to work with. It doesn’t have to be like this. Instead of spending your time worrying about what could, might, or may happen, spend your time on what matters now. Are your customers thrilled with your service today? Is your inbox flooded with word-of-mouth referrals today? Do your employees love their jobs today? Be honest with yourself. If the answers aren’t satisfactory, then I’d suggest that you truly have something to worry about — no matter how beautiful and comprehensive your business plan is. Tomorrow. Eventually. Next quarter. Next year. Five years from now. Exit strategy. Throw these words away. They don’t matter. Today is all you have in business. Tomorrow is just today again. Next week? Seven todays in a row. A month isn’t 30 days. It’s 30 todays. I’m not suggesting you stop thinking about the future. I’m telling you to stop stressing about it. Go on, get lazy.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100401/driven-to-distraction.html

Your business has a big problem. You’ve thought about it, but you can’t seem to crack it. So you consult your colleagues ‐‐ to no avail. Then you turn to the big guns ‐‐ your industry’s top experts. They’ve got nothing. (Well, to be precise, they’ve got 40 PowerPoint slides worth of nothing, and you’ve got $225,000 less of something.) Now what? You might take some inspiration from Pete Foley, associate director of the cognitive science group at Procter & Gamble, who was looking for an inspired solution to challenges faced by P&G’s feminine‐care business unit. Its R&D staff had pursued several approaches, but none of them offered the breakthrough that Foley craved. So he did the next logical thing: He took his team to the San Diego Zoo.

The zoo is developing a specialty in biomimicry, a discipline that tries to solve problems by imitating the ingenious and sustainable answers provided by nature. In a working session with the company, the zoo’s biomimicry experts made an unexpected connection between P&G’s problem and the physiology of a gecko. Other ideas came quickly, inspired by flower petals, armadillos, squirrels, and anteaters. By the end of the day, the working group had generated eight fresh approaches to the challenge.

Let’s say you’re looking to create a detergent that works superbly in cold temperatures. This would seem to be a Chemical Engineering Problem. But, as the zoo’s scientists tell us, it’s also an Antarctic Icefish Problem. When the icefish eats other fish, it has to digest the oils of its prey, and this process is remarkably similar to what happens in the wash with the oily taco stains on your T‐shirt. Furthermore, the icefish typically dines in water as cold as ‐‐ 2 degrees Celsius. So, thanks to this cold fish, you have a working model for an ultra‐low‐temperature detergent ‐‐ and it’s a solution that would have never occurred to an expert. The model also suggests that the world’s auto‐safety leaders ought to be studying cockroaches, which routinely walk away from newspaper swats that must be the equivalent of dropping the city of Cleveland on your Corolla.

Most of us don’t solve problems this way. We start by tapping the local knowledge, and if it’s insufficient, we go looking for specialists. But what if we’re following the wrong protocol? We should stop looking for experts and start looking for analogues. It’s a big world: Chances are someone has solved your problem already. And she might be an anteater. Why is it counterintuitive to look outside our own turf for answers? “If you’ve spent five or six years getting a PhD, or 5 to 10 years in the field itself, you’re a domain expert,” says Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies innovation. “You can’t imagine that someone else may have a different perspective. But problems that are difficult in one domain may be trivial to solve from the perspective of a different domain.”

But while the hunt may not be easy, it’s not random either. It’s about pattern matching. Ask yourself who might have solved a problem similar to yours. For instance, health‐care advocates trying to reduce medical errors have learned from total‐quality‐management experts in the manufacturing world who obsess about ways to reduce product‐defect rates. Olympic swimwear designers, intent on reducing the water’s drag on swimmers, have enlisted help from NASA engineers who make aircraft more aerodynamic.

The biggest barrier to the idea hunt, in fact, may be you. It may never occur to you to start searching because we all commonly keep our thinking penned up within our company or industry.