sam says

Several social scientists, in examining “healthy marriages,” have identified a number of traits, qualities and skills of people who had been able to maintain successful, satisfying relationships.

Several social scientists, in examining “healthy marriages,” have identified a number of traits, qualities and skills of people who had been able to maintain successful, satisfying relationships.

Several social scientists, in examining “healthy marriages,” have identified a number of traits, qualities and skills of people who had been able to maintain successful, satisfying relationships.

Several social scientists, in examining “healthy marriages,” have identified a number of traits, qualities and skills of people who had been able to maintain successful, satisfying relationships.

continue reading »

Marriage builds wealth

According to Marriage Brings Wealth, Divorce Steals It by LiveScience Staff a 2006 study confirms what any divorced person probably suspected: Scrapping a marriage robs you of wealth. But the misfortune is more severe than merely divvying up the goods. The study of about 9,000 people found divorce reduces a person's wealth by 77 percent compared to that of a single person.

"Divorce causes a decrease in wealth that is larger than just splitting a couple's assets in half," said Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State University.

Likewise, getting married makes people richer by more than just adding their assets together.

• Each married person, on average, sees his or her wealth nearly double.
• Married people increased their wealth about 4 percent per year just as a result of being married, with other factors removed from the equation.

"If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married," Zagorsky said. "On the other hand, divorce can devastate your wealth." The study relied on surveys of a group of people between 1985 and 2000. They were all between 21 and 28 years old in 1985. The findings are detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Sociology. After divorce, men had 2.5 times the wealth of women, but this seemingly large disparity worked out to only about $5,100, on average. For those who got divorced, wealth began to decline about four years before divorce and bottomed out the year prior to divorce.

continue reading »

All about HeroCamp

HeroCamp ("Good apples come from good barrels.") is a gathering of heroes wanting to make ... more heroes. Over a period of 4 days in Houston, from October 23-26, 2008, a group of people who dedicate their lives to making the world a little better everyday will gather to launch a project that answers the question: "How do we inspire others to be heroes?"

In order to narrow down the question, the organiser have chosen to focus on ways of creating this program for school kids.

An outline schedule is as follows:

• Day 1: Intros and brainstorming: Introductions, presentation of everyone's ideas, whiteboarding, setting goals, boiling things down to a really great basic planning. Evening: BBQ and Beer.
• Day 2: Fleshing out the ideas: More whiteboarding, brainstorming and figuring out exactly what we are doing. Nailing down 'the plan'. Evening: Tacos and Tequila.
• Day 3: Getting down to brass tacks: Execution, building a website, designing a brochure, making the message and the program clear enough for anyone to pick it up and run with it. Evening: Fancier dinner somewhere that we can dress up for.
• Day 4: Spit and Polish: Finishing up on Day 3's execution, making certain we've covered most angles, setting out a promotional plan, etc. Evening: Collapse in elation.

Organiser Tara Hunt explains it better than I can.

continue reading »

Rise of the mindful consumer

Rajesh Setty's excellent Life Beyond Code blog brought to my attention this new book from Tim Sanders entitled Saving the World at Work: What Companies and Individuals Can Do to Go Beyond Making a Profit to Making a Difference.

Sanders, a former Chief Software Officer at Yahoo argues that what he calls a 'Responsibility Revolution' is underway. Both consumers and employers have turned away from price consciousness to demand that companies make a difference to society through their products, manufacturing methods, environmental efforts and community outreach.

According to the author, casual consumers now represent the minority; mindful consumers have brought in a new value system, paying as much attention to a company's environmental and social policies as to its pricing structures. Companies that do not clean up their acts will be left in the dust, losing customers who want their money to go toward good causes and employees who place more importance on green factors and job satisfaction than pay scale.

Through success stories like Horst Rechelbacher, the brains behind the ecologically sound cosmetics company Aveda, and Lee Scott's greening of Wal-Mart in 2004, Sanders makes a compelling argument for the necessity for businesses to appeal to their customers' hearts as well as their wallets.

A customer review on Amazon's US website is worth reading in full. Here's a flavour:

"Sanders' use of the words "revolution" and "revolutionary" are not hyperbolic. He wants to help achieve what Clayton Christensen characterizes as "movements punctuated with disruptive innovations that either create new markets or reshape existing markets." These movements will change, radically, how companies do business.

"These disruptive movements occur in five phases and Sanders devotes a separate chapter to each: First, a major change of circumstances that dramatically impacts how we think about the business landscape, creating in Phase Two a new set of values prior to the arrival of the innovators in Phase Three; then, "as the new values reach a tipping point of mass popularity, the fourth, and most extreme, phase of a business revolution occurs: disruption.

"In Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel describes it this way: "First, the revolutionaries will take your markets and your customers. Next they'll take your best employees. Finally, they'll take your assets. The barbarians are no longer banging on the gates, they are eating off your best china."

"During the final phase, what Sanders calls The New Order, companies develop proficiency in service to new markets, innovators become more sophisticated, and customers become more demanding. 'Eventually, surviving companies will satisfy the new market needs and the competition will then turn to who does it best.' The process of natural selection continues as new 'infectious revolutionaries' appear, disrupting the terms of engagement in what continues to be a Responsibility Revolution."

continue reading »

Start-ups: momentum and more

Insighful presentation by Jason Fried of 37Signals to the recent Web 2.0 Expo conference. Here's a sample:

Momentum - It has as its hands in just about everything and is incredibly important. Especially for morale. Most typical projects are really exciting at the beginning and then people tend to lose interest and fade out. Long projects eat at you and you’re not even looking to do good stuff you just want to finish things and they don’t turn out well. Create a situation where projects are short and there’s excitement and it’s a short 2 week project and it leaves people in excited mode. Break big projects into as many small projects. 2 week rule.

Here's another quote:

Planning is Vastly Overrated - 37signals doesn’t do road maps, specs, projections. They have rough ideas internally but these aren’t shared externally. Even internally they’re not set in stone or written down. Think about what’s being done now and maybe what’s next. You set expectations too soon and things changed. Don’t want to be boxed into decisions you made 18 years ago. They don’t do design docs and functional specs ‘artifacts’ that don’t push back enough. A spec doc contains 1000 yes’es. Leads to an illusion of agreement. Everyone can read the same paragraph and think you agree. Don’t do projections like financial projections.

And a third one:

Follow the Chefs - Lagasse, Batali, Flay, Child, Oliver. What they do is they out teach, out share, and out contribute their competitors. They’re out there saying “hey look, I’m a chef, I’m going to give you all my secrets, here they are.” Not afraid to put their ideas out there and let people learn from them. Not afraid that people will take their ideas and build a restaurant right beside of them. Think about “what’s your cookbook?” For 37signals it was all about “Getting Real”. In the business world people ask “why would you want to give this away, won’t your competitors use it?” Give the idea away and get the message out. Company is lucky if it has customers, very lucky if it has fans, incredibly lucky if it has an audience that comes back to hear what you have to say every day

Read the full presentation here.

continue reading »

Nationalised: cars and marriage

"A decade without quality control" is how the 1960s were once described by US journalist PJ O'Rourke. But if you're searching for an era in recent history when some less than entirely sensible ideas took hold in the minds of the powerful, you'd need to skip forward a decade later to the 1970s. In Britain, two particularly daft events stand out: the nationalisation of marriage in 1973 and the nationalisation two years later of the car industry.

Yesterday's Sunday Times features a review of Downing Street Diary: Volume Two: With James Callaghan in No 10. Author Bernard Donoughue was then head of Prime Minister James Callaghan's No 10 Policy Unit, and so had an insider's view of life at the top.

As reviewer Dominic Lawson puts it: "Sometimes an entire era can be summed up in a single anecdote. It is September 1978, and the private office of prime minister James Callaghan decides that his official cars need replacing. Naturally they must be supplied by the state-owned car manufacturer." In Donoughue's own words, here is what happened next:

"Two cars were ordered specially from British Leyland. They took a long time to arrive. When they finally came they were found to have THIRTY-FOUR mechanical faults and had to be sent back to be repaired and made safe. Then they were sent to be converted to the PM's special safety needs - bombproof, bulletproof etc. This all cost a vast sum of money. When they returned, the PM went for a trip in one. He decided to open the window for some fresh air and pressed the button which does this electronically. The result was that the window immediately fell in on his lap. The PM has now said that he does not wish to see the new cars again ... we have the problem of what to do with two large expensive cars with a quarter of million pounds' worth of security extras.”

Reviewer Dominic Lawson continues: "In this one paragraph of Donoughue's diary of his three years as Callaghan's chief policy advisor we learn all we need to know about the state of Britain 30 years ago. The incompetent strike-ridden car company was so confident that it could continue leeching the taxpayer, it was content to deliver a pile of junk to the man who was actually signing off the subsidies."

"Thirty years on, there is no longer any British-owned car mass-manufacturer. An Indian firm now owns Jaguar; but their windows don't fall into the laps of their customers ... So when you read articles comparing the current state of the British economy with the 1970s, be reassured: nothing, absolutely nothing, in the British industrial economy is run as badly as it was 30 years ago."

Well, nothing except the state marriage system, that is. Two years before it became the majority shareholder in British Leyland the UK government, through The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, became the dominant partner in every marriage contract. As Labour MP Nigel Spearing expressed it in 1996:

There are three partners in marriage … I refer to the two people concerned and to the state .. society or the community as a whole. The House of Commons is the centre of law-making for that community. It is, therefore, a triangular arrangement and not just one between two people.”

Britain's car industry limped along for 30 years after its nationalisation in 1975, the final end coming in 2005 when MG Rover went into administration with huge debts. How long will state marriage survive? Based on current trends this article in the Independent predicts that the last state marriage will be celebrated in 2033. Sometime in that year the 1970s-nationalised, state marriage system will have its final British Leyland moment.

continue reading »

Wrong kind of lawyers on the track

According to Wikipedia the phrase "the wrong kind of snow" was coined by the British media in 1991 after severe weather caused disruption to many of British Rail's train services.

Everyone's favourite and always-accurate encyclopaedia continues:"People who did not realise that there are different kinds of snow saw the reference as nonsensical; in the United Kingdom, the phrase became a byword for euphemistic and lame excuses."

This webpage from BBC News offers a collection of similar, railway-related excuses, including:

• "Thameslink is sorry to announce the cancellation of the 8.16 to Bedford. This is due to slippery rain."
• "We apologise for the late running of this service. This was due to excessive heat on the tracks between Bedford and Luton."
• "The train now arriving on platform one is on fire. Passengers are advised not to board this train."
• "The conductor apologised by saying that the overcrowding was caused by too many passengers.
• "We apologise for the delay to customers on platform one. This is due to a delay in the actual service."

I found myself reminded of the "wrong kind of" phrase today when I came across a newspaper photograph showing a person described in the caption beneath as "divorce lawyer". Nothing unusual about that, really. There's a lot of them about.

But then I begin to wonder: why have I never heard or seen someone, anyone, referred to as "marriage lawyer". As in: "Meet Joan, she's a marriage lawyer from Bristol. And a first-class bridge-player too!" Or perhaps: "Local hotel succeeds in bid to host national conference of marriage lawyers." Or even: "Irish marriage lawyer scoops Lotto jackpot". Marriage lawyers: there seems to be very few of them about.

A quick search on Google reveals the wide gulf between the two flavours of lawyers, with the divorce kind of lawyers (about 1,290,000 of them) outnumbering the marriage kind of lawyers (about 5,540) by a ratio of 233:1.

Moreover, almost all the "marriage lawyers" appear to be focused on the marriage-termination rather than marriage-formation end of the market.

This makes no sense.

At some stage and in some circumstances, most of us will encounter lawyers as we journey along life's railway tracks. When it comes to marriage, why not involve lawyers at the beginning rather than have them arrive at the end? In fact, having a really good "marriage lawyer" at the start might well mean never meeting the other, wrong kind of lawyer at all.

Enjoy your journey :-)

continue reading »