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Friday, March 27, 2015

Effective leaders inspire with stories



A CEO’s character can change a company’s culture, the way it operates, and its performance.
A Culture of Personality


Leaders who can tell the story of an enterprise and communicate how employees working together make a difference will succeed in engaging their staff.
However, storytelling in a business context is not without its risks. So says Steve Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling and consultant for clients such as GE, IBM and Netflix. “Stories are powerful tools,” he says. “And like all powerful tools, they are quite dangerous. A story will reveal much more clearly what is going on. So, if a firm has a bad goal – perhaps to make money for the boss and enable him to make his bonus for the year – then the story will unfailingly reveal this and have the opposite effect from what the executive might have hoped
Effective leaders inspire with stories
Our social and political life is awash in unconsciously held Christian ideas broken from the theology that gave them meaning, and it’s hungry for the identification of sinners—the better to prove the virtue of the accusers and, perhaps especially, to demonstrate the sociopolitical power of the accusers.
That is from Joseph Bottum



People and companies charged with tax fraud or tax evasion should be granted the presumption of innocence in court, according to a parliamentary inquiry that pushes the federal government to radically overhaul current rules.
Committee calls for rethink on ATO powers to fight tax evasion A copy of the Report can be found here. The ATO statement responding to the Report can be found here. 

Hundreds of thousands of stressed-out people across France have recently taken to an unlikely means of relaxation. 
Coloring Books for Existential Angst


Keepbo is an anti-loss wireless button that can track valuables in real-time

This is from his Polemics book:
43. In point of truth, the headscarf law expresses only one thing: fear.  Westerners in general, and the French in particular, are no more than a bunch of shivering cowards.  What are they afraid of?  Barbarians, as usual.  Barbarians both at home, the ‘suburban youths’, and abroad the ‘Islamic terrorists’.  Why are they afraid?  Because they are guilty, but claim to be innocent.  Guilty from the 1980s onward of having renounced and tried to dismantle every politics of emancipation, every revolutionary form of reason, every true assertion of something other than what is.  Guilty of clinging to their miserable privileges.  Guilty of being no more than grown-up kids who play with their many purchases.  Yes, indeed, ‘after a long childhood, they have been made to grow up’.  They are thus afraid of whatever is a little less old than they are, such as, for example, a stubborn young lady.
44. But most of all, Westerners in general, and the French in particular, are afraid of death.  They can no longer even imagine that an idea is something worth taking risks for.  ‘Zero deaths’ is their most important desire.  Well, they see millions of people throughout the world who have no reason to be afraid of death.  And among them, many die for an idea nearly every day.  For the ‘civilized’, that is a source of intimate terror.